Moby Dick, or, The Whale (1851/This edition 2001) by Herman Melville

Moby Dick... blasting off into space...

Moby Dick, or, The Whale (1851/This edition 2001) by Herman Melville; introduction by Nathaniel Philbrick: Moby Dick destroyed Herman Melville's ability to make a living as a writer when he was in his early 30's. Such was the power of the novel's mostly hostile literary reception. Over the decades, though, it would be rehabilitated canonically, first as a boy's adventure novel (the mind boggles!) and then as The Great American Novel.

Even without knowing which American novels were critically acclaimed in 1851, one can see why Moby Dick bombed: it's one of the two or three weirdest, most forward-thinking canonical English-language novels ever written. Calling it a workplace tragicomedy covers some of it. It's also an encyclopedia of whaling knowledge shot through with conspicuously Shakespearean stretches of dialogue. And musical stretches. And lengthy cosmic speculations. And the first novel to combine cosmic horror with detailed visceral horror.

Ah, horror. Stretches of Moby Dick anticipate H.P. Lovecraft and later horror writers in their alternating concerns with the vast and threatening cosmos and with the nuts and bolts of the rendering down of a physical body. Here, the men are the Conqueror Worms. One can see why generations of genre writers in horror have come back to Melville.

So too science-fiction writers, for Moby Dick's doomed quest narrative and for its pages upon pages of exposition on How Things Work. The whaling ship is an alien world to most people; Melville explains how everything works. There are a thousand thousand science-fiction novels that balance in some way a hurtling plot and reams of explanations of science and technology. 

Fantasy writers? Sure, in much the same way as science fiction. Moby Dick is an epic of world-building.

It's also probably the most supernatural novel in the American canon. Signs, portents, and the arcane workings of nemesis and fate. A prophecy of Captain Ahab's death that riffs on all those prophecies misinterpreted in Greek and Roman myth. Pip, the boy who haunted the house of his own mad body. The feeling that the whale may be leading the Pequod on to its fate, an echo of the Creature and Frankenstein in the North.

And generations of youngish readers have been paralyzed by all the references to 'sperm' in the novel. Moby Dick is a Sperm Whale, the wandering oil well of the 19th century. And he's got 'Dick' in his name! And there's even a section of the novel in which Ishmael rhapsodizes about being elbow-deep in sperm! OK, that is objectively hilarious.

Ah, our philosophical, ruminative narrator Ishmael, telling the story from some point decades after the main events of the story, with all his potential unreliability as to certain speeches and conversations he was not present for (and the electronic bug still a century away from invention). He seems to digress into philosophy and exposition, but he really does not. Everything feeds the main line of the plot, informs it.

There is of course Ahab, whose sin may be that he treats a brute beast as if it were a person, or may be that he takes up arms against a Sublime reality that cannot be beaten. Maybe it's hubris. He's the Shakespearean monologist, the doomed speechifier.

And Tashtego and Stubb and Flask and Starbuck, Queequeg and mad Pip. Very few female characters once we leave port. And Moby Dick doesn't leave port until about 20% of the way through its considerable length.

Melville, seemingly aware of the readerly challenge of that length, divvies things up into about 130 chapters, one ever five pages or so on average. I found the whole enterprise a lot less ponderous than reading Faulkner, Henry James, or David Foster Wallace, to name three other American literary luminaries. That may be because Melville writes in paragraphs that are generally less than several pages long. I've really grown to hate endless pages of paragraphs. That's just me.

Is it the Great American Novel? No, because there is no such beast. It's a great novel, containing multitudes, maybe weirder and more idiosyncratic now than when it first appeared nearly 170 years ago. Long may Moby Dick run. Highly recommended.

Dark Nights: Metal (2017-2018)

Dark Nights: Metal (2017-2018): written by Scott Snyder with James Tynion IV; illustrated by Greg Capullo, Mikel Janin, Alvaro Martinez, Jonathan Glapion, Raul Fernandez, and others: Metal writer Scott Snyder notes in his foreword that he wanted this Event Series to be a big event like the ones he remembered enjoying in his youth. And Snyder does manage lots of cosmic melodrama, dire moments, and seemingly doomed heroic final stands.

Metal may have the oddest set-up for a cosmic event comic ever. In the months prior to Metal, Batman had been investigating the origins of the weird metals of the DC Universe. That would include the resurrectional Electrum of his enemy The Court of Owls, the strange Nth metal of Hawkman's mace and wings, and even the protean shapeshifting of Plastic Man himself.

Against all advice, Batman -- who has probably been the cause of and solution to all of the Justice League's problems more than any other hero -- pursues his quest to the point of fulfilling an ancient prophecy that he thought he was working to forestall. Hoo ha!

To not give anything away, Batman's successful failure allows a whole lot of bad things to invade the DC Universe. It will be up to Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and all Earth's other heroes to rescue the multiverse from Batman's mistake. 

Snyder proves to have a strain of cosmic goofiness in him that I was not aware of. Metal evokes the original craziness of DC's 1950's and 1960's Silver Age while also playing at the edges of metafictionality as do the cosmic DC Comics of Grant Morrison. This is a story that is very explicitly about Story. Bringing Daniel, the 'new' Lord of Dreams (well, new since the conclusion of Neil Gaiman's Sandman back in 1995) into the fray serves to make the whole Story emphasis very, very emphatic.

It's not much of a stretch to note that essentially the DC Multiverse comes under fire from a whole lot of misguided pro revisionism and creepy fan fiction. I kid you not. 

It all works, somehow. Greg Capullo, who partnered with Snyder on a lengthy Batman run, channels his days drawing cosmic melodrama on Todd Macfarlane's Spawn to good effect. Things get a bit crowded with characters, not really a problem because that too is a nod to George Perez's meticulous, overcrowded work on the Nexus of all DC Comics Event Series, Crisis On Infinite Earths. Capullo does a nice job with all the punching and the kicking, the weird character designs for the invading villains, and the endless leagues of heroes and villains he must draw. 

Metal certainly isn't perfect. Like most Event Series, a number of story points briefly touched upon in the main narrative require the purchase of other comics in which those points are fleshed out more fully. Things get a little rushed at the end, to the extent that some confusion sets in as to who is doing what where, and what the heck is happening in some of the action sequences. This is not a problem peculiar to Metal. But in all, this is an enjoyable superhero comic that could probably be read by someone who's not fluent in the 80 year history of DC superheroes. Recommended.

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018): based on characters created by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and others; written by Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Paul Rudd, Andrew Barrer, and Gabriel Ferrari; directed by Peyton Reed; starring Paul Rudd (Scott Lang/Ant-Man), Evangeline Lilly (Hope Pym/The Wasp), Michael Pena (Luis), Michael Douglas (Original Ant-Man/Hank Pym), Laurence Fishburne (Bill Foster/Goliath), Michelle Pfeiffer (Original Wasp/Janet Van Dyne), and Hannah John-Kamen (Ava/Ghost):

Genial sequel to Ant-Man gives Evangeline Lilly's Wasp the first titular mention of a female superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Actually, it's a two-fer. Michelle Pfeiffer, playing Lilly's mother, was the first Wasp just as Michael Douglas was the first Ant-Man. And hey, the hero called Black Goliath in the 1970's comics, played here by Laurence Fishburne, also appears without the superhero name that had that adjective because that's how we did it with non-white superheroes in the 1960's and 1970's!

At about 105 minutes, this breezy caper-comedy of cosmic dimensions would be about perfect. It's 15 minutes too much, pretty much all of it devoted to a plot thread starring Walton Goggins as an annoying super-tech black-marketeer. I guess if it were the seventies, he'd be Black Marketeer, but only if he were played by Jim Brown.

The stakes are personal in this movie, a nice change from the universal stakes of the last Marvel Joint, Avengers: Infinity War. Michael Douglas wants to save Michelle Pfeiffer from The Quantum Realm. Paul Rudd just wants to make it through his house arrest for being a superhero in contravention of the Sokovia Accords so that he can have fun with his daughter and stuff somewhere other than his house. The deftly, hilariously used Michael Pena just wants to get the new security firm he and Rudd are running into the black. Ant-Man's daughter wants him to embrace his superherodom. Superheroness? Whatever.

So there's lots of shrinking and growing action. Ant-Man spends about as much time being Giant-Man as he does Ant-Man. Oddly, the Wasp never grows. If she does, does her superhero moniker change to the Hornet?

Walton Goggins, though, and his crew. Phew. Killjoys' Hannah John-Kamen plays Ghost, a villain who really isn't a villain because she's trying to cure herself of a bad case of reality cancer. The real villain is... who again? A rogue agent of some kind, in it for the money. There's some cosmic trippiness in the Quantum Realm. Michelle Pfeiffer looks great. Certain things seem to be set up for Avengers: Infinity War, as I assume Ant-Man will get to participate in that superhero slugfest. Here, Peyton Reed keeps things light and semi-jokey. There are zingers that are actually funny. And Pena gets an extended monologue in the same style as the first Ant-Man, and it's hilarious.

So too his (true!) observation that "Latinos love The Mozz!" The Mozz is Morrissey, formerly of The Smiths, btw, and Latinos and Latinas really do love him, though not for The Mozz's increasingly xenophobic politics. 

The ants continue to squeak and vocalize, which is impressive for creatures without lungs who communicate through smell. Nitpicking the science in this movie is pointless, unless you want to note that shrinking into the Quantum Realm while keeping one's mass would eventually cause a hero to turn into a miniature black hole. Where the Hell does the mass come and go from with these crazy Pym Particles? And can you make a Pimm's Cocktail with Pym Particles? I'm asking for a friend. Recommended.

Dark Days: The Road to Metal (2018)

Dark Days: The Road to Metal (2018): written by Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, Grant Morrison, and Tim Seeley; illustrated by Andy Kubert, Jim Lee, John Romita Jr., Doug Mahnke, J.G. Jones, Eddy Barrows, Chris Sprouse, Greg Capullo, and others:

Technically a hybrid collection consisting of the prologue to the Batman/JLA story Dark Days: Metal, that prologue being Dark Days: The Forge and Dark Days: The Casting, along with select stories that supply some background to Dark Days: Metal. In theory, this volume could have been about a gajillion pages long.

Why?

Because Dark Days: Metal attempts to create a Grand Unified Theory for the origin of a wide variety of the strange metals and substances that have been appearing in DC Comics since 1940, from the original Hawkman's anti-gravity Nth Metal to the resurrecting Lazarus Pit of Batman foe Ra's Al Ghul. And dozens more. And the theory brings in the origin of certain types of superpowers, the reason why the Joker never dies, and... well, a lot. 

Dark Days: Metal writer Scott Snyder is definitely better at this sort of continuity epic than most, in part because the prologue is structured as a detective story. Batman tries to unravel the mystery of a variety of signs and portents linked to the mysterious origins of a whole lot of weird stuff in the DC Universe. 

Not to pick a nit too much, but the volume could actually use one of those Who's Who encyclopedia-like stretches in which the various thingies we see and are occasionally informed about are simply listed in terms of name, appearance, that sort of thing. I know that the 'Nth metal' of Hawkman's wings dates back to his first appearance. I'm a little shakier on '8th metal.' I know the Lazarus Pit from 50 years of Batman stories. The Electrum Ring of the Court of Owls? Unh, no.

Or was Hawkman's mace made of Nth metal? See what I mean? 

But as a prologue, this is certainly enjoyable stuff with some nice art and an interesting selection of earlier stories that also seem to have been selected to force you to buy those stories in their entirety, as most are cliffhangers from longer story arcs. 

In order to create even more cliffhangers, I'd recommend a volume consisting of pages or even panels introducing various objects and substances, ripped without context from 80 years of DC Comics. Recommended for continuity hounds. Maybe not so much for people who don't know what Nth Metal, a Lazarus Pit, or Vandal Savage are.

The Prisoner of Zenda (1952)

The Prisoner of Zenda (1952): adapted by Edward Rose, Wells Root, Noel Langley, and John Balderston from the novel by Anthony Hope; directed by Richard Thorpe; starring Stewart Granger (Rudolf Rassendyll/ King Rudolf V), Deborah Kerr (Princess Flavia), Louis Calhern (Col. Zapt), Jane Greer (Antoinette de Mauban), Lewis Stone (The Cardinal), Robert Douglas (Michael), and James Mason (Rupert):

Stewart Granger had quite a run of box-office hits in the early 1950's, most notably King Solomon's Mines, Scaramouche, and this film. He's an amiable presence, though once one realizes how much like Bruce Campbell he looks, things can get a bit distracted.

Here he's both the crown prince of fictional European country Ruritania and that crown prince's identical cousin. Yep, identical cousin. When rivals of the prince kidnap him on the eve of his coronation, the cousin must imitate the prince until the prince is found and rescued. OK!

Things remain light throughout, and the film clocks in at a totally reasonable 96 minutes. It's a bit slow to begin with, as pretty much all the sword-fighting and derring-do occurs in the last half-hour. Granger had quite a year for lengthy cinematic sword fights -- the superior Scaramouche was also released in 1952. 

The Prisoner of Zenda is a genial, Technicolour-bright costume drama with winning performances from Granger, Louis Calhern, and a particularly oily James Mason as the mastermind behind the kidnapping and attempted coup d'etat.  Deborah Keer sparkles as the love interest, Princess Flavia. Recommended.

The Divided States of Hysteria (2017): written and illustrated by Howard Chaykin

The Divided States of Hysteria (2017): written and illustrated by Howard Chaykin: Legendary comic writer-artist Howard Chaykin stirred up controversy when The Divided States of Hysteria came out in single-issue form in 2017. 

Much of the flack came from the Left, an odd turn of events because Chaykin is vocally left-wing and has been for decades. But he's also been an expert at making readers uncomfortable for decades now. 

For example, he caused the late Harlan Ellison to have a world-class freak-out with his revisionist Shadow miniseries in the mid-1980's, a book which logically pointed out that the Shadow was a fascist sociopath and then ran with it all the way to awesomeness.

The Divided States of Hysteria is a near-future dystopia in which much of the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government died in a terrorist attack before the book's narrative begins. Rather than offer a bipartisan fantasy of a perfect President within this scenario, as Designated Survivor does, Chaykin instead offers more chaos, horror, incompetence, and a group of "heroes" who make the Dirty Dozen look about as scary as the goddam Goonies.

At the heart of a lot of complaints, I think, is Chaykin's ability to make violence and fascist tendencies look attractive. It's sort of the point -- as some wag once pointed out, a lot of comic-book superheroes are fascistic, anti-government sociopaths. Or would be, if they were real. But isn't fun to watch them solve things with punches and explosions?

At the heart, though, of those complaints is also the inability of many people, left or right, to separate the representation of something from advocacy of that same thing, along with a a pronounced and escalating ability to take offense at anything that isn't pablum. Bland, inoffensive pablum. You're mean, Early! How dare you draw the aftermath of a completely plausible 21st-century American lynching AND PUT IT ON YOUR COVER! 

Identity politics also requires that one of the two people closest to being a hero in The Divided States of Hysteria, as a trans woman, SHOULD NOT BE REPRESENTED BY A HETEROSEXUAL WHITE MALE CARTOONIST!!!

But she is a great character. And dead sexy.

At one point, female terrorists detonate dirty bombs they've had implanted in their wombs. This is not a pretty scenario. I imagine Tom Clancy vomiting with rage somewhere. So too someone on the Left. Chaykin has decided to find ways to horrify the reader, and the same old beheadings and IED attacks and marathon bombings have lost the power to shock. They're becoming background noise.

In order to stop America's enemies -- and redeem his own devastated reputation, and avenge the deaths of his mistress and wife and family in a terrorist attack  -- a disgraced CIA operative puts together a team of four convicted murderers. They're up against a cadre of terrorist leaders and a Russian operative and the incompetence of their own country's government. The President they're working for, a replacement from the Cabinet's lowest levels, is a compromised hack. 

So five misfits.... well, 'misfit' is a bit of a misnomer. Besides our CIA protagonist, our heroes are a trans man who killed three clients in self-defence, a mob hitman with a serial-killing hobby, a criminal accountant who murdered a couple of dozen rich people with poison, and an African-American serial-killing sniper who's a really good shot and loves shooting white civilians in the head.

The Challengers of the Unknown these are not. Challengers of the Unthinkable, maybe.

The violence is horrifying. The art is slick and gorgeous and horrifyingly clinical at atimes. The 'sound-design' from letterer Ken Bruzenak is fascinating enough that it gets its own 4-page explanatory essay at the back of the volume. Over it all hangs a question Chaykin has been asking and answering for a long time in his work -- are these the heroes you want? Because this is what they would really look like.

I mean, there are other questions. And the whole thing, complete with the cynical 'voice' of an omniscient narrator running along with the narrative, is a compelling action narrative, blood-soaked and morally dubious. But it's also a compelling examination of the heroism people love when it's sanitized in everything from James Bond movies to daily news reports of Seal Team 6 and Our Brave Black Ops Boys in Afghanistan. 

And I haven't even delved into the sexual and racial politics explored throughout! The Divided States of America delves into an America besotted with sex and violence, sometimes at the same time, sometimes as the same thing. 

Along with the narration comes a recurring series of images of death and horror from various American sites. The terrorist groups themselves are a mixed bag too -- an All-Star, Dream Team-up of White Supremacy and Black Power and Islamicism, coordinated by a Russian operative who's also a Hollywood movie producer. It's doom alone that counts, all moving towards a final attack on a telethon for a wounded America, complete with the President, to be destroyed by the same groups who are also the event's public donors.

It's not so much that the satire and the violence both blister. It's that the entire book seems entirely plausible. Chaykin's been examining the puritanical, pornographic nature of American culture for decades. The American love of violence as a solution, and the attendant separation of the world into Good and Evil, Us and Them. Now all accompanied by the eternal chatter of social media.

Bang bang, screw screw, shoot shoot. Highly recommended.

Captain Canuck Season 1: Aleph

Captain Canuck Season 1: Aleph (2015-2016): written by Kalman Andrasofszky with Jason Loo; illustrated by Kalman Andrasofszky, Leonard Kirk, Jason Loo, and Adam Gorham: Created by Richard Comely and Ron Leishman, Captain Canuck's first comic book appeared in 1975. This reboot's first issue arrived in 2015. 40 years!

The first storyline offers competent and sometimes inspired storytelling without throwing out the original series' idea that Canuck works for a non-partisan peace-keeping agency (here dubbed 'Equilibrium') or that Canuck tries to use non-lethal force when battling his foes. 

The comic also emphasizes the Captain's reliance on his team, with more focus on those coordinating things back at the Nunavut base and on fellow operative Kebec, now a female French-Canadian sharpshooter.

Kalman Andrasofszky offers a solid script and occasionally shaky but mostly solid art, with Leonard Kirk taking over art duties a couple of issues into the run. Kirk is also perfectly competent, though there are a few pages in which it's somewhat unclear what's happening in some panels, a problem that may lie at either the script or art level. I'd prefer sharper inking of both artists in the mode of classic X-Men Terry Austin on John Byrne. The story seems to cry out for a crisp line.

Many of the enjoyably wonky aspects of the original Captain Canuck return here, including super-villain Mr. Gold (now with vastly enhanced powers!) and the Captain's alien origin for his more-than-normal strength (a crashed UFO in the Arctic). This is still a comic of the moment, however, complete with an opening rescue mission/battle set in Alberta's tar sands.

Captain Canuck is his usual humble, hyper-competent self. His brother is now much more of a factor in the story, his motivations questionable for much of the book. Some of the back-and-forth between Canuck and the non-super-powered members of his tactical team recall Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.. And like Hellboy, Canuck really doesn't want to let people die, even his enemies. The Deadpool-like hilts on Cap's back aren't swords -- they're non-lethal Taser batons. Cap's major other power, besides enhanced but not ludicrous super-strength, is a personal force field. Yep. A CANADIAN SHIELD!!!

Well-played!

The back pages of the graphic collection reveal that Chapterhouse, the Captain's new publisher, has ambitious plans for him and a number of other Canadian superheroes new and old. None of these new books are out yet, however, though the creative teams for the books appear in the back of the volume. Too ambitious? We'll see. 

Shared universes are fine, but it's good to get the first book off the ground, and promptly, before plotting out a whole group of interconnected titles. While the second story-line (Season 2) of Captain Canuck has begun in the 'floppies.'* it has been two years between series and counting.

But I hope Captain Canuck, at least, is a success. Chapterhouse may be too ambitious, but at least it has a comic-book-loving Canadian celebrity as its front man (Jay Baruchel). Recommended.


* Traditional 32-page comic books.

Normal (2016) by Warren Ellis

Normal (2016) by Warren Ellis: In Normal Head, Oregon exists a recovery center for futurists who've gazed too long into the abyss of the future and gone mad. The center's population divides itself into camps of civilian and military predictive experts. Into this strange place is dropped Adam Dearden, who's worked both sides of the street and finally had a massive nervous breakdown.

Normal is a short, pithy novel about the Surveillance Earth we all live in now and the many repercussions physical and mental of always being observed and recorded. Ellis has his moments of satiric fun, especially with energy drinks (seriously). Normal's a dead-serious novel, though, populated with eccentric characters who seem less and less eccentric as the novel goes along.

A 'locked-room mystery' drives most of the plot, with Dearden the man who has to solve it --and why it happened. The explanation lies in whatever drove Dearden over the edge, an incident that Dearden can barely start to ponder without collapsing into a weeping wreck on the floor.

The futurists are a fascinating bunch. Ellis has spent a lot of time dealing with such forward-thinkers. Their (former) jobs here run the gamut from theories of water and waste management in the face of global warming to how best to deploy killer-drones in an urban environment. Along the way, one realizes that New York City will be destroyed by its own water and waste management problems should the city ever get hit with a hurricane above Category 1. And it will.

And the drone theories make perfect sense. They may already be in place, set there by governments and corporations and think tanks. Whee!

As is usual for Ellis, he's written something both funny and deeply disturbing. One may start longing for a personal EMP generator after reading it. Is there no escape from Brother Eye? Highly recommended.

Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. (2007)

Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. (2007): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Stuart Immonen and Wade Grawbadger: Warren Ellis' brilliant, fractured satire of all things superhero somehow got 12 issues from Marvel in 2007, possibly because Ellis was and is such a popular, ostensibly sort-of mainstream writer of superheroes.

With Stuart Immonen on art, best known for fine work on Superman and other DC characters, Ellis crafts a Marvel book that feels more like a revisionist DC book -- Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol most specifically, from the late 1980's and early 1990's. Nextwave is a bit more Juvenalian in its satire, though -- the heroes are pissier and the metacommentary doesn't show much love for the weirdness of the characters it lampoons.

A lot of those weird characters -- Machine Man, Fin Fang Foom, Devil Dinosaur -- are oddballs from one of Jack Kirby's stints at Marvel. Some are riffs on 'real' Marvel characters from the pages of Dr. Strange. H.A.T.E. parodies S.H.I.E.L.D.. Ellis even brings characters previously seen only in the pages of Marvel's short-lived superhero parody comic Not Brand Ecch! on stage, with ridiculous results.

The Nextwave team itself consists of has-beens and never-weres, most prominently Monica Rambeau, Marvel's second Captain Marvel, then Photon, now just going by her real name. Machine Man also now goes by his civilian name. The Captain is one or another or possibly all of those lesser-known characters who used 'Captain' in their superhero monikers. There's a minor X-Men/X-Force superheroine with a major shop-lifting habit and the ability to make things explode by pointing at them. And there's Lady Bloodstone, daughter of a really minor 1970's Marvel monster-hunter and Doc Savage knock off.

It's funny and nasty if you know all the characters and situations Ellis chooses to pummel. It's hilarious if you don't. As Ellis pummels many of his own superhero writing tics, it all seems fair among the figurative and literal blood-letting. Immonen is an able collaborator, looser and more cartoony than I remember him, shining especially in stretches that parody the art styles of others and in a series of two-page action spreads that are both dynamic and completely ridiculous. Tik tik tik BOOM! Highly recommended.

The Running Man (1982)

The Running Man (1982) by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman: Almost unrecognizable as the novel that spawned the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, The Running Man is a gritty, grimy, raw slice of action-dystopia. Poor people compete in a variety of televised game shows (my favourite is Swim With Crocodiles, actually). Our protagonist is a skinny malcontent. Definitely not Schwarzenegger material. He's way more interesting and heroic than that, hoping against hope that he can strike a heroic blow against the System. 

And thanks to one of the greatest coincidences in the history of Stephen King, maybe our Ben Richards, contestant on The Running Man, may get to be that heroic spanner in the works! A reality show in which contestants are hunted to death for the amusement of the masses seems more relevant today than in 1982. The ending is probably unfilmable. I'll leave you to discover why. Recommended.

Trips

The Trip (2010): written by Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon; directed by Michael Winterbottom: This hilarious fake-reality movie about British comic actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon playing themselves as they take a restaurant tour of the Lake District is a classic of partially improvised buddy movies. 

You'll quote, or at least try to quote, many moments of comic oneupsmanship in which Coogan and Brydon offer duelling versions of Michael Caine. Coogan will be a know-it-all. Brydon will memorize lines of poetry the night before they visit sites associated with Coleridge and Wordsworth. Coogan will bristle at the fact that Brydon is better-known than he is, despite Coogan's critical acclaim for characters that include Alan Partridge. 

The movie was boiled down from a 6-episode BBC miniseries, leaving about 20 minutes of further material out there for you to track down. As is, The Trip is one of the funniest dialogue-centered film comedies ever made, a definite Top 100 pick. And such great shots of gourmet food and scenery! You were only supposed to blow the doors off! Highly recommended.

The Trip To Spain (2017): written by Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon; directed by Michael Winterbottom: The third Trip movie (after The Trip (2010) and The Trip To Italy (2014)) finds British comedians and reluctant pals Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon touring restaurants in Spain for a week as part of both an article and Coogan's work on a memoir of his youthful sojourns through Spain. And such great scenery!

Things are a bit more melancholy this time around, with Coogan especially feeling the weight of age and Hollywood disappointment despite the critical and commercial success (including an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay) of Philomena, the Judi Dench movie he adapted and co-wrote and co-starred in prior to this film. As Brydon notes to Coogan's manager when she phones him to ask where Coogan has disappeared to at the end of the film, "Oh, he's probably found a nun and is telling her all about Judi Dench."

Despite that melancholy, there are still many moments of improvised comedy, dueling impressions of people that include Roger Moore and Mick Jagger, a reprise of their duelling Michael Caine bit from The Trip, some musings on dinosaurs and the Spanish Civil War, a call-back to Coogan's obsession with crampons, and a lot of shots of gourmet food and scenery. The last two minutes or so pay off as a riff on the biography of Miguel Cervantes, who has come up a lot in the movie because, you know, Spain. Highly recommended.

Roman J. Israel, Esq. (2017)

Roman J. Israel, Esq. (2017): written and directed by Dan Gilroy; starring Denzel Washington (Roman J. Israel), Colin Farrell (George Pierce), and Carmen Ejogo (Maya): Denzel Washington certainly deserved his Best Actor Oscar nomination for this film. The film itself is inconsistent and lacking a solid ending. It just sorta ends. It's also got the rhythms of a movie based on a true story, which it isn't. Even the underlying legal topic -- a constitutional challenge based on the inability of poor people to get adequate counsel in criminal cases -- seems like a true-to-life topic.

Washington plays the title character, a mildly autistic lawyer who's been doing backstage work for a practicing defense attorney for decades until the lawyer suffers a stroke that leaves him in a persistent vegetative state. The practice is shuttered by legal hotshot Colin Farrell as part of the comatose lawyer's instructions -- the firm had been running in the red for years.

Farrell offers Israel a job. Israel first declines and then, not finding other work, accepts. Israel has a keen legal mind and a near-photographic mind. He's been working for years on that constitutional challenge, but he's also outraged by injustice throughout the system. Alas, his outrage leads to problems for himself and the firm. 

Then, as you may or may not guess, he's basically tempted by the Devil (OK, not literally) to stop living his paycheck-to-paycheck life and start earning money and having fun. And buying new suits. And going on a date with Carmen Ejogo's idealistic community organizer.

The plot is somewhat boilerplate right up to the last five minutes, when the movie just sort of shrugs and ends. Farrell's character is a bit more nuanced than this sort of money-chaser usually is. Ejogo is good in a somewhat thankless Angel of the Conscience role. 

But it's Washington who commands the movie, not in least because he's in pretty much every scene. The autism seems a bit gimmicky, a bit too much of the moment, but Washington plays it well. He gets a couple of nice speeches. And a chance to play someone with archaic suits and an archaic haircut. He really elevates the film from Lightly Recommended to Recommended all on his own.