Everything That Rises Must Converge

The Dark Knight Rises: written by Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan, and David S. Goyer; directed by Christopher Nolan; starring Christian Bale (Bruce Wayne/Batman), Tom Hardy (Bane), Michael Caine (Alfred), Gary Oldman (Commissioner Gordon), Anne Hathaway (Selina Kyle/The Cat), Marion Cotillard (Miranda), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (John Blake), and Morgan Freeman (Lucius Fox) (2012): Given the dire history of the third installments of superhero movies (Superman III, Blade III: Trinity, Spider-man 3, X-Men 3: The Last Stand, to name four stinkers), Christopher Nolan has done a remarkable thing in making a third Batman film that's actually a worthy finale to his vision of the Dark Knight.

The Dark Knight Rises is a bit draggy at the start, and its main villain, Tom Hardy's Bane, occasionally lapses into incoherence when speaking words of more than two syllables. But we also get a third movie that actually builds upon what the first two films created both in terms of story and in terms of characterization. And while it lacks the extreme highs of The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises nonetheless satisfies while giving its audience something more to think about than simply, 'Wow, the Hulk is actually funny!'

Some credit must go to what the Brothers Nolan and David S. Goyer pull from the comic books. This is easily the most intertextual of all Batman movies. Lines of dialogue from great comics that include Kingdom Come (created by Mark Waid and Alex Ross) pop up in the right places. Epochal Batman storylines that include The Dark Knight Returns, Knightfall, Batman: Year One, Batman RIP, and No Man's Land are used in ways both justifiable and, sometimes, offer an improvement on the original (Gotham's sudden geographic isolation makes much more sense here than in the near-endless, deeply stupid No Man's Land storyline, for instance).

The story itself also holds up. It chugs along like a well-oiled action machine, as much James Bond as it is Batman (though Bondaphiles Nolan et al. also take inspiration from the most James Bond-y incarnation of Batman, the globe-trotting Denny O'Neil/Neal Adams version). Some cuts would have been fortuitous, especially if accompanied by expansions in other areas -- the subplot involving fallen cop/administrator Matthew Modine goes nowhere and elicits nothing, while somewhat short shrift is given to both Michael Caine's Alfred and Morgan Freeman's Lucius Fox.

Nonetheless, this is a surprisingly generous and character-minded superhero film, with fine performances throughout from both the established principals -- Christian Bale is terrific, though his Bat-voice still grates -- and the newcomers -- Joseph Gordon-Levitt does nice work as a Gotham beat-cop, and Ann Hathaway shines as the movie's lightest character, the skin-tight-suited Cat (woman).

Several action sequences astound, though I wish they hadn't teased the football scene in the trailers. While there's nothing quite as thrilling as the lengthy chase in The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises does do a better job with understandable action choreography. I didn't get lost in some sequences the way I did in the previous film. The movie may be nearly three hours long, but it earns its length as a satisfying end to a trilogy. Highly recommended.

One-Way Ticket to Hell (and Back)

At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft (1931): When Frankenstein's Creature went bounding off into the Arctic wastes at the end of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in the early 1800's, ostensibly to commit suicide, he helped start a small but rewarding sub-genre of horror: the Sublime voyage into the Arctic (or Antarctic) wastes. Shelley's unnatural Creature was repeatedly associated in Shelley's novel with the great Romantic obsession, the Sublime in nature: he inexorably leads his creator on a chase after him into the Arctic, and he's repeatedly seen against the backdrop of the Swiss Alps, nimble as a goat but much, much, much larger.

One of the uses of the Sublime in literature and art of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was as a statement on the ephemerality of humanity's constructions. This use explains why there are so many paintings from that period featuring a ruined building of some sort with a mountain looming in the background. Seriously. You can look it up. And the first age of Arctic exploration was underway as the 19th century began, leading to an entire landscape of the Sublime, rather than just one looming mountain.

That a lot of these real expeditions suffered grievous losses while looking for things like the Northwest Passage just increased their literary appeal -- as did the gradual exploration of the Antarctic coast during the middle part of the century. Those first tentative forays into Antarctic exploration led to Edgar Allan Poe's Antarctic nightmare The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, as well as Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

Further Antarctic exploration would be one of the exploratory high points of the early 20th century, as would the seemingly Sisyphean race to climb Mount Everest. From these two contemporary Sublime enterprises -- and literary forebears that included Coleridge, Shelley, and Poe -- H.P. Lovecraft would forge his extraordinarily influential short novel, At the Mountains of Madness. The DNA of Lovecraft's creation would have many ancestors -- including the indifferent science fictional universe of H.G. Wells, in which humanity just isn't all that important -- but the final product would be something new and enduring.

Much of the pleasure of the novel lies in its gradual, vise-tightening approach to revelations both visceral and existential, accompanied by, and accomplished by, the accumulation of telling detail. Its bare bones would be in use soon after its mid-1930's magazine publication, in John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?", which would be adapted three times and counting into movies, always as The Thing. There, as in At the Mountains of Madness, an Antarctic expedition encounters something alien. Bad things happen. Very bad things.

Lovecraft deploys his signature documentary meticulousness here, as his narrator grinds through detailed descriptions of the foreboding landscape in order to build to the introduction of the fantastic. The details seem plausible even now, even the biological ones -- more plausible than, say, the similarly themed Prometheus. This is quite a feat for Lovecraft, as neither DNA nor the true timescale of the universe were known when he was writing. His narrative even goes all-in on plate tectonics, which in the 1930's was a theory held in contempt by mainstream geologists. So, like, score one for HPL's prescience.

At the Mountains of Madness really is a joy to read, perhaps Lovecraft's most sustained and modulated piece of horror writing. The final revelation may fall a bit flat, but I'm not sure it can do anything else, given the revelations already in play. Lovecraft's intrepid explorers find themselves not only dwarfed by a Sublime landscape -- they find themselves poised over a cyclopean Time Abyss which becomes more unsettling and unnerving the farther they physically travel into the unknown. In the end, only one revelation is comforting. And it's not that comforting.

Given how much of the novel is given over to description and exposition and people walking through tunnels looking at stuff, I'm not sure how Guillermo del Toro intended to adapt it as a movie. Like Moby Dick, which I'm pretty sure also brought some influence to bear on Lovecraft, this is an adventure novel of ideas and philosophical speculation. But what awaits at the literal and figurative bottom of the world is ultimately one step beyond rational explanation. Highly recommended.

The Worms Crawl In

The Croning by Laird Barron (2012): Laird Barron has fairly quickly made a name for himself in horror fiction with a unique blend of cosmic horror, graphic depictions of horrific violence, and a constant concern with masculinity and its discontents, satisfactions, and challenges when faced by maggot-like, child-eating horrors from beyond the rim of conventional space-time. Some of Barron's male protagonists (sort of) break even in their confrontations with gibbering, capering, nigh-omnipotent horrors, though generally only through escape or death. Most of them are either destroyed or subverted.

Many of Barron's stories share the same mythology, in which a race of cosmic horrors collectively known as the Children of Old Leech lurk in the lost places of the Earth, spiritually and physically feasting on humans while occasionally offering a small handful of people the "honour" of joining them. Technically speaking, the Leech are both endo- and exocolonists: they conquer from without and within, all in preparation for the day Old Leech itself wakes up hungry and devours the populations of whole planets. Which is what happened to the dinosaurs, among other lost Earth populations.

Yes, he's the feel-good writer of 2012!

The Croning is Barron's first novel, and it's a doozy. For the most part, the narrative follows hapless geologist Don Miller who, in the present day, is in his 80's and plagued by gaps in his memory that, when encountered, his mind scrambles to either explain or forget that such a discovery ever happened (he's even forgotten that he ever knew Spanish well enough to translate Spanish documents).

Don's uncannily young-looking wife of more than 50 years, Michelle Mock, has always pursued the anthropology and archaeology of "lost" tribes, periodically leaving Don for weeks or even months at a time. And as the narrative swings back and forth in time and space, we begin to see why Don's mind is so screwed up -- and why, despite his great love for Michelle, he also occasionally fears her.

The horrors here are indeed horrible, the worst coming from the failures of human morality when confronted by terrible tests. Barron weaves history and mythology and legend (including a crackerjack origin for the story of Rumplestiltskin) into this backwards-and-forwards-looking opus, presents the horrors of the flesh and the soul, and gives us scant light in the face of world-annihilating darkness. It's a brilliant debut, but not for the physically or philosophically squeamish. Highly recommended.

Hero of the Beach!

Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery: written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Frank Quitely (1996; collected 2012): Near the beginning of Grant Morrison's comic-writing career at DC, he created a character named Flex Mentallo in Doom Patrol. Mentallo's origin was basically a parody of the old Charles Atlas body-building print ad. A scrawny kid gets bullied and works out; eventually he becomes Hero of the Beach.

Flex turned out to be the comic-book creation of a kid named Wally Sage. He'd escaped into the real world. His powers stemmed from his total control of his muscles: flexing them could alter reality! And above Flex Mentallo's head would appear his Hero Halo, the giant glowing words 'Hero of the Beach!'

A few years later, Morrison and soon-to-be-superhot artist Frank Quitely did a Flex Mentallo miniseries set on another Earth. Then the lawyers for Charles Atlas threw a fit, and DC agreed not to reprint the miniseries for some undetermined length of time that, finally, has ended. Flex Mentallo is back! Just in time! The Dark Age is over!

This oversized hardback reprint collection has one major flaw: it doesn't reprint the two or three Flex Mentallo issues of Doom Patrol. I have a feeling another edition of Flex Mentallo will rectify this in a few years. DC is really good at endlessly repackaging material, as anyone who's tracked their shuffling and reshuffling of Alan Moore's DC Universe work well knows.

But other than that omission, this is an awesome piece of metafictional, optimistic, hopeful superhero work. Quitely's art is gorgeous -- the depraved and the heroic and the mundane are all beautifully, sharply rendered; the layout is innovative and non-traditional when it suits the story and straightforward when it suits the story.

And confined to about 100 pages, Morrison distills many of his obsessions in relation to superhero comic books down to an almost pure form. He'd explored these obsessions earlier in his career in Animal Man and Doom Patrol. He'd explore them later in everything from The Filth to Sea Guy to JLA. But here and now, we get the pure dope -- hope that you can cope.

On an Earth without superheroes, a musician in his early 20's talks on the phone to a suicide hotline. He's taken an overdose and he's waiting to die. While he waits to die, he wants to talk about comic books and superheroes.

On an Earth with one superhero -- Flex Mentallo, escaped from fictionality! -- doomsday looms for everything and everyone. Can the Man of Muscle Mystery follow the clues, unravel the mystery, find the other superheroes, and save the world?

How do these stories relate? Read the comic book. Order the workout package. Learn the secrets of muscle mystery! Because sometimes a guy just has to get out of his room and meet some girls! Highly recommended.

Ice, Guns, and Beer

Hitman Volume 5: Tommy's Heroes: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by John McCrea and Gary Leach (1998-99; collected 2012): Yay! DC Comics finally gets off its ass and finishes reprinting the brilliant Hitman series only...12 years after it finished. Volumes 6 and 7, both roughly phonebook-sized, will finish things off. First, though, there's Tommy's Heroes.

This trade reprints the so-so Hitman/SAS storyline that was previously published in a much shorter reprint volume several years ago (the last Hitman reprint volume, I believe). Super-powered (well, marginally super-powered -- X-Ray vision and limited telepathy) hitman Tommy Monaghan, to clean the stink of the SAS fiasco off himself, leaves Gotham with his best bud and fellow hitman to fight as a mercenary in a small African nation trying to stave off a revolutionary funded by drug money.

As the title of this story arc (and this volume) references acidhead WWII movie Kelly's Heroes, you can rest assured that things get weird and that the boys find a tank. And that things aren't quite what they seem.

Then it's back to Gotham for the award-winning standalone story "Of Thee I Sing," in which Tommy and Superman talk on a rooftop for most of 23 pages. Then a bizarre, company-mandated crossover with the DC One Million event. Then more harrowing stuff awaits as Tommy finds out more than he ever wanted to know about what really happened the night he was placed as a baby on the doorstep of a Catholic orphanage. Good times, good times.

Well, violent times anyway. I like John McCrea's gritty art anyway, but Gary Leach's inks polish it to a sinister, occasionally bleakly comic high sheen. All this and Superman remains noble because he's apparently the only superhero Garth Ennis actually likes. Highly recommended.

Armagideon Time for Mack the Knife

Excalibur, Orlando, Anti-Christ, and Mina Harker (l-r)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century (1910, 1969, 2009): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Kevin O'Neill (2009-2012): In the otherworld of Moore and O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (LOEG) series, our fiction plays out as that world's fact. Focused on the myths and stories of Great Britain, LOEG may or may not be Moore's last comic-book series. This volume is now done, but an earlier story mashing up Captain Nemo's daughter, the crew of the Nautilus, and H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness awaits.

Literary mash-ups aren't new, and LOEG has been compared to many of its forebears (Silverlock, the Harold Shea series by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, and the Wold Newton universe of Philip Jose Farmer are three prominent ancestors) and contemporaries (Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson's Astro City, Warren Ellis and John Cassaday's Planetary).

No one in my experience, however, has gone more metafictionally mashy to such bizarre and telling effect. This can be frustrating at times (who the hell are some of these characters?), but overall the effect has been thrilling -- indeed, more and more thrilling, at least in a intellectual sense, as the series has continued to become less interested in the bones of conventional superhero narrative and more interested in the nature of story itself, its care and feeding, its rises and falls.

At first, Century seems straightforward: the League of 1910 (now comprising Mina Harker, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Allan Quatermain, William Hope Hodgson's occult detective Carnacki the Ghost-finder, and British super-thief Raffles) seeks to stop sinister mystic Oliver Haddo from creating both a Moonchild and the Anti-Christ itself.

Subsequently, things go galloping off madly in all directions, including the direction of Bertholt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. There's a lot of singing in the three chapters. That Brecht's play was a major reference point for Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen probably shouldn't go uncommented. Andy Capp walks through several panels. Fictional characters crowd the background and foreground, most of them staring at the reader.

And there's 1969, and then there's 2009. Some of the major plot points are so weird and ultimately rewarding that there's no point in me spoiling them. The identity of the Anti-Christ manages to be hilarious, horrifying, and perfectly apt within this world of Great Britain's fictions, the narrative dream-time of an Empire's rise and fall. Meanwhile, in the United States, the Bartlet administration of The West Wing gives way to the Palmer administration of 24. Lost's Driveshaft releases a new album. The armies of different fictional Moon-dwellers clash on the Moon, observed by characters from The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street. Whew.

Back in 1969, a rejuvenated Allan Quatermain suddenly looks a whole lot like Moore's John Constantine. Back in 1910, revelations about the Jack the Ripper killings fly by, almost unnoticed. From Hell? So it goes. Boy, does Moore ever seem to hate James Bond. Highly recommended, though on-line annotation sites are also highly recommended.

Best Spoken Underwater

New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird: edited by Paula Guran (2012) containing the following stories:

"The Crevasse", Dale Bailey & Nathan Ballingrud; "Old Virginia", Laird Barron; "Shoggoths in Bloom", Elizabeth Bear; "Mongoose", Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette; "The Oram County Whoosit", Steve Duffy; "A Study in Emerald", Neil Gaiman; "Grinding Rock", Cody Goodfellow; "Pickman’s Other Model (1929)", Caitlin Kiernan; "The Disciple", David Barr Kirtley; "The Vicar of R'lyeh", Marc Laidlaw; "Mr. Gaunt", John Langan; "Take Me to the River", Paul McAuley; "The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft", Nick Mamatas & Tim Pratt; "Details", China Mieville; "Bringing Helena Back", Sarah Monette; "Another Fish Story", Kim Newman; "Lesser Demons", Norm Partridge; "Cold Water Survival", Holly Phillips; "Head Music", Lon Prater; "Bad Sushi", Cherie Priest; "The Fungal Stain", W.H. Pugmire; "Tsathoggua", Michael Shea; "Buried in the Sky", John Shirley; "Fair Exchange", Michael Marshall Smith; "The Essayist in the Wilderness", William Browning Spencer; "A Colder War", Charles Stross; "The Great White Bed", Don Webb.

Editor Paula Guran's mandate here is focused -- the best Lovecraftian stories of the first 11 years or so of the new millennium. If there's a disappointment here, it lies in something that's only going to be immediately apparent to a reader who buys a lot of Lovecraft-influenced anthologies and collections.

However, as I imagine a high percentage of people who read this sort of thing do just that, I'll note the disappointment: too many stories taken from the same original anthologies (eight of the stories herein appear in just three other original anthologies) and a fairly significant overlap (four stories) with the 2011 anthology The Book of Cthulhu, the mandate of which was to collect Lovecraft-influenced stories from the last thirty years or so.

In a pinch, I'd suggest going with The Book of Cthulhu. Its overall quality is higher, though that's obviously a factor of a longer span of time to choose from. Furthermore, choosing a lot of stories from other anthologies strikes me as somewhat problematic -- I've got several of these stories in three anthologies already, a pretty heavy load for a story published in, say, 2008 to be carrying. This may indicate taste rather than laziness, but it feels like laziness. And a couple of the multiple stories from other anthologies really sort of stink. Others are a stretch for the anthology, especially for one with a big picture of Cthulhu on the cover.

Nonetheless, there are some corkers here, both too often repeated ("The Oram County Whoosit" is a terrific tale -- so terrific I've now seen it in three different anthologies) and relatively new to this anthology (the offerings from old pros Michael Shea and John Shirley are especially gratifying). Shirley's almost reads like a Cthulhu Mythos story semi-sarcastically supercollided with a Young Adult novel. Shea's story about Clark Ashton Smith's blobby toad-god addition to the Lovecraft pantheon (subsequently described by HPL in At the Mountains of Madness) is squishy and, thankfully, not the over-anthologized, excellent "Fat Face".

Neil Gaiman impresses with a Sherlock Holmes/Cthulhu Mythos crossover, but not only was it in a fairly high print-run anthology, the story also appeared on Gaiman's website free of charge for several years. China Mieville's terrific "Details" also appeared in an anthology that, ten years later, remains in print.

There's a problem of overfishing the same ponds over and over again. Ponds filled with the Deep Ones. What is it with all the stories about people who identify with Lovecraft's Deep Ones? Yeuch. Alan Moore was on to something with Neonomicon. Lightly recommended.

Tainted Love with the King of the Vampires

John Constantine: Hellblazer: Tainted Love: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Steve Dillon (1993; collected 1998): Writer Garth Ennis made his name at DC with his violent, moody work on DC's horror flagship title John Constantine: Hellblazer prior to creating the popular and influential Preacher series with artist Steve Dillon.

Picking up where the Fear and Loathing storylineleft off, Tainted Love takes John Constantine about as low as he can go, homeless onto the streets of London where old enemies and new come to believe he can finally be finished off.

Constantine is in terrible emotional and physical trauma for much of this collection, in which we discover that his real super power is the ability to fight supernatural evil even while falling-down drunk. Will he pull out of it before the seemingly eternal King of the Vampires or Satan himself finally get their revenge on him? And what's going on with the archangel Gabriel? And how's former lover Kit doing back in Belfast? All will be revealed. Well, some anyway. Highly recommended.

　

Fear and Loathing in Heaven and Hell

John Constantine: Hellblazer: Fear and Loathing: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Steve Dillon (1992-93; collected 1997): Writer Garth Ennis made his name at DC with his violent, moody work on DC's horror flagship title John Constantine: Hellblazer prior to creating the popular and influential Preacher series with artist Steve Dillon.

Ennis is one of those writers who seems to have arrived fully formed, primarily because his early development took place in British comics that weren't readily available in North America in the early 1990's. By 1992, Ennis really was pretty much fully formed -- for good and ill (mostly good), his voice is as distinctive here as it is today.

As only the fourth person to write John Constantine (after co-creator Alan Moore and Rick Veitch in Swamp Thing and, on Constantine's own book, Jamie Delano for the first 40 issues), Ennis quickly put his stamp on the character, upping the violence and writing in a more direct, less poetic style than Moore and Delano. Constantine now seemed more of an aged punk and less of a dandyish mod -- he was straight out of Liverpool.

Ennis' peculiar and fairly rare (at least in the early 1990's) synthesis of ultraviolent splatterpunk with a detailed and increasingly harrowing portrayal of the supernatural still packs a punch in the stories collected in Fear and Loathing. The world is an awful one whether the violence is being perpetrated by monsters human or supernatural -- and even the highest of angels can be a monster in Constantine's world. Constantine works ceaselessly to thwart the plans of Heaven and Hell alike, because both Heaven and Hell seek control over the fragile, fallen human world.

In this collection, Constantine's personal life -- his rewarding relationship with Kit -- comes under fire even as he attempts to stop a British Neo-Nazi group from gaining favour with the archangel Gabriel. Constantine also celebrates his 40th birthday with a party involving most of DC's supernatural characters -- Hellblazer was still nominally part of the mainstream DC universe at this point, despite the fact that thematically this made absolutely no sense.

So we get such supernatural stalwarts as Zatanna, Swamp Thing, and the Phantom Stranger involved in a surprise birthday bash for the 40-year-old Liverpudlian (or Scouser). That issue is one of the few blessedly free of tension, and involves instead some of Ennis's funniest (and earliest) scenes taking the piss out of mainstream superhero characters. But damnation, as always, looms. Highly recommended.

Closing Time for the Human Race

The Time Machine: adapted by David Duncan from the novel by H.G. Wells; directed by George Pal; starring Rod Taylor (H. George Wells) and Yvette Mimeux (Weena) (1960): H.G. Wells didn't name the Time Traveller in his 1895 novel The Time Machine after himself -- that's a liberty this 1960 film adaptation takes, among many, with Wells' original story. Still, this is an enjoyable science-fiction movie, earnest and a bit dull at times but with some intellectual and emotional heft.

As in the novel, much of the story is told in flashback (which, as the traveller moves forward in time, is really a flashforward) to a group of men sitting around the traveller's house eating and drinking. The traveller tells them of his forward plunge through time, punctuated by stops at later points in the 20th century (the movie is set in January 1900) prior to a mad rush to the year 802, 701 A.D. where the main action of the film takes place.

Producer/director Pal keeps the bones of Wells' original story intact. The traveller meets the Eloi and the Morlocks, two vastly different permutations of evolved humanity. Wells' Eloi and Morlocks were parables of how he saw class division going: the Eloi are a child-like, waifish race of pleasure-seekers who lack knowledge, drive, and basic survival skills. They frolic in the sun while below, with the machines, the Morlocks keep things running, feed and clothe the Eloi -- and harvest them for food.

The film makes the Eloi more recognizably human, primarily so that the traveller can fall in love with one of them (Weena, a name derived from the book). The Morlocks are made more horrible. Perhaps most significantly, the film removes Wells' bleak ending, in which the traveller moves far enough into the future to see only a lone, giant crab scuttling across a beach lit by Earth's dying red sun.

The Time Machine works as an action-adventure movie, though Pal has stripped it of Wells' bleaker view of humanity as just another species within a gigantic, mechanical structure of evolution and entropy. Some of the stop-motion and optical effect are still quite impressive, though others look, well, a bit goofy. The acting is serviceable, though I've never understood the appeal of Rod Taylor, who is the most stolid and blocky of blockhead actors. Recommended.

Cthulhu Everlasting

Black Wings of Cthulhu: 21 Tales of Lovecraftian Horror: edited by S.T. Joshi (2011) containing:

"Pickman’s Other Model (1929)" by Caitlin R. Kiernan
"Desert Dreams" by Donald R. Burleson
"Engravings" by Joseph S. Pulver, Jr.
"Copping Squid" by Michael Shea
"Passing Spirits" by Sam Gafford
"The Broadsword" by Laird Barron
"Usurped" by William Browning Spencer
"Denker’s Book" by David J. Schow
"Inhabitants of Wraithwood" W.H. Pugmire
"The Dome" by Millie L. Burleson
"Rotterdam" by Nicholas Royle
"Tempting Providence" by Jonathan Thomas
"Howling in the Dark" by Darrell Schweitzer
"The Truth about Pickman" by Brian Stableford
"Tunnels" by Philip Haldeman
"The Correspondence of Cameron Thaddeus Nash" annotated by Ramsey Campbell
"Violence, Child of Trust" by Michael Cisco
"Lesser Demons" by Norman Partridge
"An Eldritch Matter" by Adam Niswander
"Substitution" by Michael Marshall Smith
"Susie" by Jason Van Hollander

An excellent anthology of all-new stories inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, edited by Lovecraft expert S.T. Joshi. Joshi wisely didn't limit his writers to the Cthulhu Mythos, or even to explicit references to Lovecraft's work. Instead, there's a more general mandate of the weird and the cosmic (or 'cosmicism') at work here, though the explicitly Cthulhuesque is also welcome.

There really isn't a bad story in the bunch, and there are a number of standouts. Laird Barron's "The Broadsword" works within Barron's own Children of Old Leech mythology of terrible doings behind the walls of our world. Norman Partridge serves up a monstrous invasion within a narrative that works within the hardboiled parameters of the novels of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson. Ramsey Campbell has some fun with Lovecraft's near-obsessive letter-writing, while the protagonist of Jonathan Thomas's "Tempting Providence" seems to meet the ghost of HPL...or is something much more cosmic and sinister going on? Oh, that three-lobed burning eye!

One of the interesting things about the collection is that three stories -- "Pickman’s Other Model (1929)" by Caitlin R. Kiernan, "Inhabitants of Wraithwood" W.H. Pugmire, and "The Truth about Pickman" by Brian Stableford -- all deal with Lovecraft's transitional-phase short story "Pickman's Model" in various ways. It's a story that was adapted in a mediocre fashion for Night Gallery, but it's also probably the Lovecraft story with the most-quoted final line. Hell, Joanna Russ turned that line into the title of a story!

HPL's original story is transitional in the sense that while it looks ahead to the Cthulhu universe in which horror is all around us, waiting to be discovered, it also uses beings -- Lovecraft's version of ghouls, to be specific -- which are treated in a somewhat more whimsical, less horrific fashion in Lovecraft's Dunsanian novel The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, in which they actually aid the narrator during his voyage through the Dream Lands. These stories offer radically different takes on the original material: the authors definitely don't think the same way about the stately ghouls of Boston.

In any case, Joshi offers a pip of an anthology here, complete with a useful introduction. At least five of these stories (by my count) have already been anthologized in various 'Best of' and Cthulhu compilation volumes, which is pretty good for a book that's barely a year old. And the cover of the paperback is sweet. Highly recommended.

Barney, Rubble

Barney's Version: adapted by Michael Konyves from the novel by Mordecai Richler; directed by Richard J. Lewis; starring Paul Giamatti (Barney Panofsky), Mark Addy (Detective O'Hearne), Scott Speedman (Boogie), Dustin Hoffman (Izzy Panofsky), Minnie Driver (The Second Mrs. Panofsky), and Rosamund Pike (Miriam Grant) (2011): Paul Giamatti is pretty much pitch perfect in this adaptation of Mordecai Richler's last novel. Even his awesome 'fro in the 1970's sequences seems perfect, hideous though it is.

Barney is a pretty typical Richlerian superschlub -- funny, screwed up, occasionally self-destructive, possessed of a core of mushy romanticism that only occasionally manifests itself, often in spectacularly inappropriate ways. Oh, and he loves hockey. Boy, does he love hockey. And cigars. And hard liquor.

Over the course of the movie, Barney goes through three wives and three careers. He is accused of, but never prosecuted for, the (assumed) murder of his disappeared best friend Boogie, whose ultimate fate seemed a lot more prominently displayed in the novel. The main frame of the film, set in 2007, when Barney is 64, looks back on Barney's life in a mostly linear manner. In 2007, Barney is the successful producer of a long-running soap on Radio-Canada about a Mountie (played knowingly by Paul Gross) and a French-Canadian nurse. But he's divorced and somewhat miserable. And then back we go.

Then performances are all pretty much top-notch -- Bruce Greenwood is great as an earnest neighbour whom Barney instantly dislikes, Rosamund Pike is lovely and understated as the Third Mrs. Panofsky, and Dustin Hoffman seems to have a hoot playing Barney's retired Montreal policeman father. I'm surprised that this movie doesn't clock in at about 4 hours. It really plows through a lot, maybe a bit too much. Recommended.

Rocky the Robot

Real Steel: adapted by John Gatins, Dan Gilroy, and Jeremy Leven from the short story "Steel" by Richard Matheson; directed by Shawn Levy; starring Hugh Jackman (Charlie Kenton), Dakota Goyo (Max Kenton), Evangeline Lilly), and Kevin Durand (Ricky) (2011): Surprisingly pleasant, oddly low-key CGI-laden movie about, um, robot boxing.

This one falls into the category of 'unannounced alternate history movie,' as by 2014 robot boxing technology was already capable of making the robot star of our film, Atom, and dropping him into an environment in which there was already some sort of robot boxing circuit. This seems unlikely to happen in the next 2 years.

Set some time in the 2020's, Real Steel is also Bradburyesque in that the one altered technological detail doesn't seem to have had any effect on anything else and, indeed, seems to have propelled history backwards to some occasionally bucolic 1950's America. Of course, there's also urban robot boxing and, at one point, robot boxing in an abandoned zoo inhabited by kinder, gentler extras from the Mad Max movies.

Anyway, washed-up real boxer Hugh Jackman is also washed up as a robot boxer. Then a former girlfriend dies. Jackman's 11-year-old son shows up. The kid's aunt and uncle want him. But the uncle doesn't want him until after their Italian holiday. Kid reluctantly goes with Hugh, who accepts money to relinquish all parental rights to the kid. Kid gets enthralled by robot boxing. Kid accidentally discovers a second-generation robot boxer, whom he names Atom, buried in a robot boxing junkyard.

Man, a lot of this alternate Earth's economy seems to be built on robot boxing!

Jackman and the kid learn some life lessons. Much robot boxing ensues.

In the manner of a lot of contemporary movies, Real Steel is too loud, too frenetic, and feels the need to hammer home every character moment with all the subtlety of a robot punch to the groin. I'd expect nothing less from Shawn Levy, director of the equally frenetic Night in the Museum movies. Really, several robot punches to the groin. Still, there's something weirdly charming about Hugh Jackman playing this dumb (his character makes Wolverine look like a brain surgeon) and a movie with this many effects having absolutely nothing to do with saving the world, the universe, or even a continent.

The whole thing is very loosely based on the early 1950's short story "Steel" by Richard Matheson, whom you may remember from other such recent loosely based films as The Box and I Am Legend, along with earlier, more faithfully adapted films that include The Incredible Shrinking Man (itself loosely re-adapted as The Incredible Shrinking Woman), The Legend of Hell House, and Spielberg's brilliant, ultra-faithful Duel. Of course, most of the faithful adaptations had screenplays written by Matheson.

For the record, Real Steel uses the idea of robot boxing and a down-on-his-luck robot trainer, and nothing else. The story was earlier adapted into an episode of The Twilight Zone. I'm starting to think Matheson's work may outsurvive almost everyone else's in one form or another. Lightly recommended.

Does a Bear Talk Too Much in the Woods?

Ted: written by Seth MacFarlane, Alec Sulkin, and Wellesley Wild; directed by Seth MacFarlane; starring Mark Wahlberg (John Bennett), Mila Kunis (Lori Collins), Seth MacFarlane (Voice of Ted), and Giovanni Ribisi (Donny) (2012): Seth MacFarlane doesn't explore much new territory here, but Ted really is quite funny. As I'm not a Family Guy fan (per the Family Guy calendar in one of the Futurama movies, "12 laughs a year!"), that's high praise.

A child's Christmas wish brings his teddy bear to life (the level of the kid's imagination being indicated by the name 'Ted', I guess -- this is not a film populated with smart people). After a brief spurt of celebrity for the bear, things settle down. And 28 years later, Ted, mostly unchanged (his voice has deepened but he's still anatomically neuter, though not philosophically so), still hangs out with John, played by Mark Wahlberg.

Most of the laughs come from the holy MacFarlane trinity of political uncorrectness, slapstick, and obsessively weird pop-culture riffs. I thought the extended structural reference to the 1980 movie Flash Gordon was pretty funny. You may not. Love him or hate him, MacFarlane just stays in there throwing and throwing and throwing. He doesn't test spaghetti by throwing it at a wall; he MAKES spaghetti by throwing it at a wall.

Ted demonstrates that MacFarlane is somewhat limited as a filmmaker. The film looks awful, as in early Kevin Smith awful. Both the direction and the cinematography wouldn't look good on TV, much less on a big screen. Besides those problems, a keener editor could have worked wonders. A subplot involving Giovanni Ribisi as a Ted-obsessed stalker goes nowhere, and expends about 20 eminently cuttable minutes doing so. The subplot also allows for a plethora of unfunny fat jokes directed at Ribisi's fat, young, obnoxious son. It's bottom-of-the-barrel time at House MacFarlane, and for no good reason -- at 106 minutes, the movie is ridiculously padded as it is.

However, Wahlberg and Kunis are game, though Kunis doesn't get a lot to work with -- she's pretty much stuck as generic unfunny girlfriend for all her aesthetic and thespic charms. Someone should write a romantic comedy just for her. MacFarlane voices Ted as MacFarlane Voice#1 -- basically Family Guy or American Dad with a Boston accent. It's funny stuff, though one wonders what a voice actor with greater range could do with the part. So it goes. Recommended.

Prometheus Unbound by Basic Logic

Prometheus: written by John Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, based on characters and concepts created by Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett, Walter Hill, and Ridley Scott; directed by Ridley Scott; starring Noomi Rapace (Liz Shaw), Michael Fassbender (David), Charlize Theron (Meredith Vickers), Idris Elba (Janek), Guy Pearce (Weyland), and Logan Marshall-Green (Charlie Holloway) (2012): The prequel to Alien (but only Alien and not the sequels or attendant Predator prequels), Prometheus looks fantastic and moves beautifully. I wasn't bored, and I didn't look at my watch for the whole two hours. Admittedly, that had something to do with the extremely comfortable theatre seats, but still...

On the other hand, Prometheus is a hilarious mess when it comes to science, character motivation, and basic plot logic. Somehow, this enriches the experience. You'll have a lot to talk about when you're done. Boy, howdy.

Billions of years ago, aliens start life on Earth. Well, maybe they start animal life on Earth because there's definitely vegetable life on Earth in the scenes we see. In truth, what they do makes no evolutionary sense, so I'm instead going to say that billions of years ago, an alien visiting Earth got drunk, passed out, and fell into Niagara Falls. Billions of years later and thousands of years ago, giant aliens left star maps all over the world pointing to a particular solar system.

And in the year 2091, a nefarious trillionaire named Peter Weyland (yes, the Weyland corporation, as of 2091 not yet joined with Yutani) sends a mission on the starship Prometheus to that star system for his own sinister purposes. The archaeologist who figured out the whole star map thing, Liz Shaw (Noomi Rapace), goes along, as does her partner/life-partner, a bunch of cannon fodder, an annoying business woman (Charlize Theron), a curious robot (Michael Fassbender), and an accordion-playing captain (The Wire's Idris Elba).

And in case you're wondering, the planet (well, technically a moon) they land on is not the planet from Alien. This is LV-223; that was LV-426. I note this to save you a lot of time trying to figure out how things ended up like they did for the beginning of Alien on this planet. It's not the same planet. Though if you want to believe they are the same planets to simulate our confused discussion at the end of the film, you'll have a good time coming up with scenarios that put the fossilized, gut-busted Pilot back in that funky space chair surrounded by giant eggs.

In any case, the Prometheus arrives at LV-223. Rather than survey the entire planet, it lands at the first visible structure. Against the Captain's warnings that sundown is coming (a warning that really only makes a huge amount of sense if the Captain's last mission was to the Planet of the Vampires), the scientists proceed to rush into the structure. Needless to say, shenanigans ensue, many of them caused by the simple fact that this is the dumbest crew of any Alien movie, dumber even than the crew in the godawful Alien Resurrection.

The pacing and visual design really carry this movie. It looks great. It moves like a rollercoaster. And Rapace (Lisbeth Salander in the original Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), Fassbender as curious robot David, and Elba as the Captain put in strong performances. Fassbender especially stands out, his character ultimately sympathetic despite the crappy things he does, or is ordered to do. There are clever character bits throughout related to David's fascination with Lawrence of Arabia and the Captain's interest in Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Theron is suitably icy playing, well, Paul Reiser in Aliens.

References and allusions are shovelled into the movie willynilly, and perhaps even higgily-piggily. Scott's own directorial efforts Alien (natch) and Blade Runner, Aliens, The Thing, several Doctor Who serials, the nightmarish Space: 1999 episode with the crazy-ass tentacle monster, David Cronenberg's The Fly, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, Quatermass and the Pit...it goes on.

Does anyone connected with the writing of this movie show the faintest understanding of how evolution works and how DNA develops? Hell, no. But to paraphrase a line from another Ridley Scott movie, I was entertained. Recommended.