Superman and the Justice League of America Volume 1 (1992/ Collected 2016): written by Dan Jurgens and Gerard Jones; illustrated by Dan Jurgens, Rick Burchett, Ron Randall, and others: From the months before 1992's Death of Superman event comes this collection of Justice League stories.
In the continuity of the time, Superman didn't help found the Justice League and had never really been a member. Until now! I have a feeling adding Superman to the roster was part of the set-up for the Death of Superman. And maybe an attempt to boost sales for the decidedly underpowered, underpopular Justice League of 1992.
After a double-sized special introducing the new Justice League (and reintroducing classic JLA foes The Royal Flush Gang!), the regular stories are written by Dan Jurgens and drawn by Jurgens and finisher Rick Burchett. Jurgens and Burchett deliver solid, meat-and-potatoes superhero storytelling.
That can often look like genius 25 years on when compared to today's often over-rendered, over-coloured, and poorly coordinated superhero comics. One can actually follow the action from panel to panel and page to page in Jurgens' work. Wow!
Jurgens and company do a good job with an underwhelming group of Justice League members and a bunch of sketchy super-villains. They manage to create a good storyline around better-left-forgotten JLA foe Starkiller. They manage to make C-list heroes that include Fire, Ice, Maxima, Booster Gold, and Blue Beetle interesting. They manage to make a satisfying mystery out of new hero Bloodwynd.
Through it all, Superman, also written in his own title by Jurgens at the time, is his usual decent, occasionally self-doubting self. You'd think he'd been a Justice League member before! Recommended.
Superman and the Justice League of America Volume 2 (1992-93/ Collected 2016): written by Dan Jurgens and Dan Mishkin; illustrated by Dan Jurgens, Dave Cockrum, Rick Burchett, Sal Velluto, and others: The Death of Superman arrives early in this volume, which reprints only the one issue of JLA that was part of that story arc. It's not like it's hard to find a copy of the Death of Superman story from 1992, so stop complaining!
Superman's brief leadership of the JLA comes to an end off-stage, then, after which we deal with the aftermath. Superman went into battle with his killer Doomsday after the mysterious juggernaut mopped the floor with the rest of the JLA. This reality has left the JLA feeling like a failure. Well, and Blue Beetle is in a coma after getting his head somewhat crushed by Doomsday. Booster Gold's power suit is also in dire, perhaps irreparable shape. Everyone is bummed.
Before the Death of Superman comes 1992's JLA Annual, a double-length story that's part of DC's title-wide Summer Crossover Event featuring Silver Age cult character Eclipso as the villain. While the story is obviously inconclusive and not really a standalone, it's notable for art by New X-Men great Dave Cockrum, who supplies some nifty visuals, especially of Superman.
In the issues After-Death, the JLA mopes a lot until being forced into what is a really strong four-parter dubbed Destiny's Hand. It's a great 'short-long' story arc that nods to the JLA's past without sacrificing sense or clarity to continuity. It really is a gem of a story. It also manages to nod to past JLA rosters that were in 1992 'out of continuity' without requiring the reader to be aware of this if that reader doesn't know those pre-1986 JLA rosters.
Destiny's Hand is sly. And it slyly uses long-time JLA villain Dr. Destiny. By 1992, Destiny was best-known by comic-book readers as the villain in the first arc of Neil Gaiman's Sandman. There's a nod to that as well in the storyline that doesn't require the reader to know Sandman. Does Destiny's time in the realm of Sandman allow him to remember JLA rosters that never 'existed' in this continuity? Good question!
As the collection ends, so too does Dan Jurgens' year-plus stint as writer and co-artist. It was a very good year. Well, really more like 18 months or so. Recommended.
I Am Bruce Lee (2012): written and directed by Pete McCormack: Enjoyable Spike TV documentary has way, way too many talking heads from MMA, specifically UFC. Nonetheless, Bruce Lee himself is dynamite, as is his story. As a bonus for Canadians, many of the interview clips of Lee in the early 1970's come from the same CBC interview show, hosted by Canadian legend Pierre Burton. It's a team-up for the ages! Lightly recommended.
T2 Trainspotting (2017): adapted by John Hodge from the Irvine Welsh novels Porno and Trainspotting; directed by Danny Boyle; starring Ewan McGregor (Renton/ Rent Boy), Robert Carlyle (Begbie/ Begbie's Father), Ewen Bremner (Spud), Jonny Lee Miller (Simon/ Sick Boy), and Anjela Nedyalkova (Veronika): If you haven't seen and loved the original Trainspotting, don't bother. T2 is as reliant on familiarity with another movie or movies as Infinity War.
Is it any good? Well, it takes a long time to get going. And Ewen Bremner's Sick Boy steals the show 20 years on. Jonny Lee Miller's Elementary-level of buffness seems completely anomalous in this context, and his Scottish accent comes and goes. Ewan McGregor is fine. The soundtrack, one of the original's super-high points, disappoints throughout.
Nonetheless, I felt a certain melancholy about the passing of time. Robert Carlyle's Begbie remains a marvel of seriocomic monstrosity. And a sequence in which McGregor and Miller invent a song on the fly for a hall full of Protestant Royalists is a comic gem. Lightly recommended.
Happy-Go-Lucky (2008): written and directed by Mike Leigh; starring Sally Hawkins (Poppy), Alexis Zegerman (Zoe), Andrea Riseborough (Dawn), Kate O'Flynn (Suzy), and Eddie Marsan (Scott): Sally Hawkins radiates a deceptively simple-seeming goodness in this Mike Leigh film.
Hawkins plays Poppy, a 30-something elementary school teacher in Chelsea, and we follow her life for about three weeks. There's no strong plot thread here -- this is three weeks in the life, and that's dramatic enough without necessarily offering a traditional level of closure at the end. Really, the driving engine of the plot is Poppy's decision to take driving lessons.
I'd bet serious money that Guilermo del Toro had Happy-Go-Lucky in mind when he cast Hawkins in The Shape of Water. If you're bored with traditional Hollywood narratives, give this one a try. All the actors are believable and charming, possibly because Leigh workshops these movies the way some plays are work-shopped, prior to filming anything.
Eddie Marsan is superb as the closest thing the movie has to an antagonist, with Leigh investing enough characterization in Marsan's driving instructor for us to feel flashes of sorrow and pity for him throughout. But his character also acts to show that Poppy is much smarter and more self-aware than her bubbly behaviour occasionally makes her seem. Highly recommended.
Manara Erotica Volume 1 (1982-2012/ Collected 2012): written and illustrated by Milo Manara; translation by Kim Thompson; containing Click!, "Fatal Rendezvous," and "Piercing."
A few years back, Marvel drew criticism for having Italian writer-artist Milo Manara draw an, um, controversial cover for Spider-woman. Clearly Marvel thought this was a good idea. And they can't have been ignorant of the fact that Manara's biggest claim to fame has lain in erotic comics with a satiric bent for about 40 years and counting.
Everyone got worked up. Nothing was solved. Interest in Spider-woman reached an all-time high, which was almost certainly Marvel's motivation for the whole thing.
Of course, that Spider-woman is kid's stuff compared to the sexual material in 'non-erotic' Manara works that include Indian Summer, much less explicitly erotic comics as are collected in this first of three Dark Horse volumes of translated Manara erotica. Or Manara porn, depending on how you feel about these sorts of things.
An honest review should probably read something like Kevin Nealon's SNL bit reviewing a porn movie -- "Not interested, not interested, interested, interested, very interested, VERY interested, not interested, and then I went to sleep."
Manara is certainly a master of a certain type of idealized female form. As these stories come from the 1980's, the women often even have pubic hair, which probably looks archaic to younger readers. What is that stuff?
The women may be idealized; the men run the gamut from idealized to comic grotesques. The story of the main graphic novel here, Click!, is an occasionally quease-inducing masterpiece of... something. The basic plot involves implanting a computer chip in a prudish female celebrity's brain.
The chip, controlled by a black box that moves through the possession of several people, causes the celebrity (also married to a much older, prudish, grotesque politician) to become a sex-crazed exhibitionist. OK!
Suffice to say, no one ever fixes the cable in these stories. Highly recommended.
Victoria & Abdul (2017): adapted from the Shrabani Basu non-fiction book by Lee Hall; directed by Stephen Frears; starring Judi Dench (Queen Victoria), Ali Fazal (Abdul Karim), Eddie Izzard (Bertie, Prince of Wales), Michael Gambon (Lord Salisbury), and Adeel Akhtar (Mohammed [Buksh]):
As the opening titles tell us, Victoria & Abdul is "mostly" based on true events. It's a feel-good story about racial harmony in a peculiar place, involving unlikely people -- senior-citizen Queen Victoria and Indian Muslim servant Abdul Karim.
Basically, this is a white cop/ black cop buddy movie. If only they'd given Victoria & Abdul a crime to solve! That would have been awesome.
Brought to England for Victoria's Golden Jubilee for a fictional reason (the real one being too mundane, I guess), Abdul becomes the Queen's trusted confidante and teacher in all things Indian (that part is true!) for more than a decade (also true). Everyone else in the palace really hates this (true) and once Victoria dies a couple of years after her Diamond Jubilee, Abdul is sent back to India and the story hushed up (true).
It's all very posh and life-affirming. It's also hard to believe that Victoria & Abdul was directed by Stephen Frears, or at least the Stephen Frears of Dangerous Liasons. That Frears would have gone with the reality that Abdul was something of an operator, as revealed in actual documents, when it came to getting some of the perks that the movie instead presents as if they dropped from Victoria's benevolent brow like the gentle rain from Heaven.
Because there's no edge here, Abdul becomes what in American movies is referred to as the Saintly Negro, an old trope and not an advance in racial relations. He's a dewy-eyed innocent in the Halls of the Martian Kings.
The characters around Abdul are all one-dimensional Talking Points. Abdul's Indian Muslim companion Mohammed, in reality an experienced servant in the Indian Raj for years, is here an amateur who dies from England's weather almost immediately after delivering an expletive-heavy speech about the horrors of colonialism to Bertie, Prince of Wales.
Queen Victoria, an operator herself in real life, stumbles into solutions to problems rather than pro-actively reasoning through her moves in relation to Abdul and his ascension in the palace hierarchy as she again and again did in real life. And so on, and so forth. Eddie Izzard's Bertie, heir to the throne, is an almost-literal mustache-twirling, blustery villain from a Charlie Chaplin short.
A scene in which Abdul ingratiates himself with Victoria by kissing her feet did not sit well with a lot of people. It also does not seem to have happened. Crikey!
It's an entertaining movie, I guess, at least in terms of Judi Dench's performance as Victoria in winter, lonely and cagey and surrounded by yes-men and yes-women who not-so-secretly hold her in contempt. And she did learn to speak and write Urdu from Abdul, which really is an impressive feat. Lightly recommended depending on your politics.
Geostorm (2017): written by Dean Devlin and Paul Guyot; directed by Dean Devlin; starring Gerard Butler (Jake Lawson), Jim Sturgess (Max Lawson), Abbie Cornish (Sarah Wilson), Alexandra Maria Lara (Ute Fassbinder), Daniel Wu (Cheng Long), Eugenio Derbez (Al), Adepero Oduye (Eni), Andy Garcia (President Palma), and Ed Harris (Dekkom):
Geostorm is awesomely dumb. The dumb casting can be summed up with 'Gerard Butler - World's Greatest Scientist and Engineer!' As a movie, Geostorm is a slurry of moments from other movies, many of them dumb as well. The science of the movie is gut-bustingly dumb. One wonders if the creators had a science advisor around so that they could do the exact opposite of everything he suggested.
Dean Devlin makes his feature-film directing debut here. You may remember him as the writer of such dumb movies as Independence Day, Independence Day: Resurgence, and the 1997 Godzilla. Truly he's a powerhouse.
In the mind-blowingly near future (as in, it seems like The Day After Tomorrow), humanity has built a giant orbital net of weather-control satellites in order to stave off the effects of global warming. Gerard Butler built it!
But he's a hothead, so he's relieved of his command just prior to the weather-control system being handed over to United Nations control. The weather-control system was dubbed 'Dutch Boy' because everyone in this universe really liked the story of the Dutch Boy and the Dike. OK.
So of course bad things start happening. Dogs and cats start to co-habitate. A town in Afghanistan gets flash-frozen. Hong Kong gets super-heated. Buenos Aires gets flash-frozen. Dubai gets hit with a tsunami. I'm not sure how that last one was managed. Does the weather machine also control plate tectonics? Is the weather machine simply malfunctioning?
Well, of course not. Sinister forces want to start a Geostorm, which is a really big storm that starts if you do wacky things with the weather machine in several specific locations in a specific sequence. Given that the weather-machine is perfectly capable of destroying hundreds of millions of lives without a Geostorm, I'm not entirely why a Geostorm is necessary. Oh well.
The magical weather machine can do pretty much anything instantaneously from blow up a stadium with lightning bolts (I have to assume in this instance the stadium was made of exploding wood) to throw armies of tornadoes at children and their dogs. It even has a giant fricking laser to light Moscow on fire!
Lots of stuff happens, thankfully none of it possible in a world governed by recognizable laws of physics. Gerard Butler and his estranged brother make up. A sassy African-American woman gets to be the go-to computer tech, which is I guess some sort of progress. Abbie Cornish is a complete blank. Richard Schiff, Ed Harris, and Andy Garcia collect paychecks without embarrassing themselves. It's all complete garbage, but it's fun in its stupidity, so I'd say Not Recommended but still better than Alien: Covenant and Tom Cruise's The Mummy.
Gorky Park (1983): adapted from the Martin Cruz Smith novel by Dennis Potter; directed by Michael Apted; starring William Hurt (Arkady Renko), Lee Marvin (Jack Osborne), Brian Dennehy (William Kirwill), Joanna Pacula (Irina Asanova), Richard Griffiths (Anton), and Ian Bannen (Iamskoy):
A perfectly respectable, big-budget adaptation of Martin Cruz Smith's first novel featuring morose Soviet detective Arkady Renko. William Hurt is physically miscast as Renko, but he does a good job with the pensive, morose part of the character.
The real problem is that as able a writer as adapter Michael Potter is (he of BBC standouts The Singing Detective and Pennies From Heaven, both made into problematic Hollywood adaptations themselves), he has to either jettison the lengthy descriptions of life in the late-Soviet-era Russia of the novel or use a voice-over. And the film-makers clearly decided against a voice-over. And Gorky Park really needed one. Without it, we're either shown stuff that requires context or told stuff in awkward expository sections.
Stripped of Cruz's detailed, pungent descriptions of life in late-1970's Moscow, Gorky Park becomes a generic detective thriller with an underwhelming MacGuffin. That MacGuffin was interesting in the novel; here it seems almost perfunctory, as does the identity of the killer. Yes, you will guess the identity of the killer quite easily because he's the most obvious suspect and because there really aren't any other suspects. Oh, well.
This certainly isn't a bad movie. And you do get to see a young Joanna Pacula's boobies and William Hurt's naked ass, depending on what sort of nudity spins your dial. And Brian Dennehy is so much fun as an American cop that he seems to have wandered in accidentally from the set of another, juicier movie. Lightly recommended.
The Snowman (2017): adapted from the Jo Nesbo novel by Peter Straughan, Hossein Amini, and Soren Sveistrup; directed by Tomas Alfreson; starring Michael Fassbender (Harry Hole), Rebecca Ferguson (Katrine Bratt), Charlotte Gainsbourg (Rakel), Jonas Karlsen (Mathias), Michael Yates (Oleg), J.K. Simmons (Arve Stop), and Val Kilmer (Rafto):
Or, How Not To Adapt A Best-Selling Thriller. There's a lot of talent to waste in this movie, from director Tomas Alfreson (the superb Let the Right One In) to Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, and Charlotte Gainsbourg in the cast. They also waste a perfectly good Norwegian thriller in the Jo Nesbo novel.
One problem is that everyone is miscast. Everyone. Val Kilmer was so miscast that his perceived problems speaking after treatment for tongue cancer caused the producers to dub his lines in what seems like an homage to some SCTV parody of bad dubbing. So that's distracting, as is Val Kilmer's obvious poor health. Rebecca Ferguson does her best with an underwritten sidekick to Michael Fassbender's colossally miscast Harry Hole.
One can note the attention to detail of the movie in its use of the detective's name, 'Harry Hole.' In Norwegian, 'Hole' is pronounced 'Hou-lay.' But a lot of Norwegians speak English and read English, so the hilarious English pronunciation of Harry's last name is a recurring irritant to the detective. In the movie, though... in the movie they just use the English pronunciation. It's distractingly hilarious every goddam time!
At points the movie keeps too much of the plot apparatus of Nesbo's densely packed novel. At others, the changes made range from dubious to completely infuriating (the murder of a character who doesn't die in the novel is the most infuriating of these moments). Pretty much all the detective work of the novel has been expunged. Also, the snowmen the killer leaves as clues aren't that scary. Neither is the killer when he appears. Who is the killer? All I'll say is that the nationality of the person playing the character seems like some sort of accidental clue.
The producers have also added this whole sub-plot with the Oslo police getting new laptops because... um... is this an advertisement for computers? What a mess. Not recommended because it's not funny enough often enough to be Fun-Bad. Though the suspension of disbelief required to accept that Michael Fassbender is a weathered, exhausted, alcoholic cop on the brink of suicide really is quite gigantic! But hey, at least they filmed in and around Oslo, albeit with an almost-all-non-Scandanavian cast for the major characters. Almost!
Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018): based on the series created by Bruce Geller; written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie; starring Tom Cruise (Ethan Hunt), Henry Cavill (Walker), Ving Rhames (Luther), Simon Pegg (Benji), Rebecca Ferguson (Ilsa Faust), Sean Harris (Solomon Lane), Angela Bassett (CIA Director Sloan), Vanessa Kirby (White Widow), and Alec Baldwin (Hunley):
Enjoyable sixth installment in the Tom Cruise action series once again features a lot of action sequences that seem to involve some actual real-world stunt work. And Tom Cruise running!
Tom Cruise's personal writer-director Christopher (The Usual Suspects screenwriter) McQuarrie writes and directs this installment as he did the last. He's very good -- the action sequences and chase scenes are choreographed so that one can actually follow what's going on! And there's not too much quick editing during fight scenes! A three-person battle in a Kubrickian White washroom is especially fun and brutal. A skydiving sequence and a final battle in, around, under, and over helicopters are also really nice pieces of action film-making.
Fallout follows Rogue Nation (see below) in using one villain and one heroine from that film, along with returning players Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg as Tom Cruise's trusted tech support team. Jeremy Renner was apparently off filming the next Avengers movie. Thankfully, Rebecca Ferguson returns from Rogue Nation as the hyper-competent British Intelligence agent who's Cruise's equal in motorcycle riding and fisticuffs.
This Mission: Impossible is self-deprecating and light on its feet, with a recurring jocularity that's reminiscent of the Original Series Star Trek movies. A character even gets the McCoy shout-out line, "I'm a doctor not an electrician!"
The plot is pretty much the plot of every M:I movie. Evil terrorists want to nuke something. The Impossible Mission Force has been at least partially discredited (apparently the IMF is kinda sorta a CIA Joint). A certain amount of fun is had at the IMF's use of astonishingly effective masks since the days of the 1960's TV series ("The IMF is Hallowe'en" scoffs one character).
Henry Cavill and his mighty facial hair are also on-board as a CIA assassin assigned to monitor the actions of the IMF and bring an end to their shenanigans if need be. Cavill is much better as an occasionally threatening jerk than he is as Superman. Go figure.
Critics seem to be so tired this summer of super-heroes that Fallout has been getting reviews that are perhaps a bit too gushing. But it's an enjoyable ride, and certainly better than the last James Bond movie. Cruise is starting to show his age in his face, though. Just saying. Recommended.
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015): based on the series created by Bruce Geller; written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie with Drew Pearce; starring Tom Cruise (Ethan Hunt), Jeremy Renner (Brandt), Ving Rhames (Luther), Simon Pegg (Benji), Rebecca Ferguson (Ilsa Faust), Sean Harris (Solomon Lane), and Alec Baldwin (Hunley): Fifth Mission: Impossible movie is solid, stream-lined entertainment. Adding Rebecca Ferguson to the recurring cast as a British Intelligence operative pays off big -- she's super, and a lot more interesting than the last dozen or so Bond girls, that's for sure.
Once again, Cruise's Ethan Hunt has been discredited and the IMF disbanded. It feels like this happens in every Mission: Impossible movie. I hope everyone still gets their pensions. Anyway, it's up to Cruise, tech-support Simon Pegg and Arby's spokeman Ving Rhames to save the day, perhaps with the help of Jeremy Renner, perhaps not. I think Jeremy Renner's character is the IMF's office manager but I'm not entirely sure. HR?
There are good action sequences here, along with one that becomes stupefyingly goofy by its end (it involves yet another insane computer room brought to you by the designers of the deathtrap engines in Galaxy Quest). A climactic chase around London, England is a bit too low-key for this franchise. The opening sequence involving Tom Cruise and a plane is terrific, though, as is an insane motorbike chase. Tom Cruise does some running too! Recommended.
