Dial 'K' for 'Ditko'

Rorschach

HBO's WATCHMEN series (which should really be called AFTER WATCHMEN) gives us a White Supremacist Group calling itself The Seventh Kavalry. That's a reference to Custer's doomed Cavalry. The change from 'C' to 'K' in 'Cavalry' is a reference to the Ku Klux Klan.

The Seventh Kavalry wears masks based on deceased original WATCHMEN hero Rorschach.

WATCHMEN creators Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons based Rorschach on a character created by Steve Ditko (himself creator of Spider-man, Dr. Strange, and many others). That character was The Question.

Rorschach's real name was Walter Joseph Kovacs. That 'K' was a nod to Ditko's love of K's.

A fairly astonishing number of Ditko creations had either a 'K' or the K sound created by a hard 'C' in their names. 

These characters include but are not limited to the following characters: Vic Sage (The Question, whom Rorschach parodies), Ted Kord (Silver Age Blue Beetle, whom Nite Owl parodies), Peter ParKer, Rac Shade, Mocker, Doctor Strange, Doctor Octopus, Mac Gargan (Scorpion), Electro, Doctor Spectro, Jack Ryder (Creeper), Chameleon, Clea, Clown, Curt Connors (Lizard), Hank Hall (Hawk), Tinkerer, Karcilius... OK, you get the idea. You'll note that the 'K' sound even lurks in The Question and Rorschach.

So the Seventh Kavalry is also a nod to the Ditko 'K.'

Hey, there's a 'K' in Ditko!

Imagine that!

Calypso (2018) by David Sedaris

Calypso (2018) by David Sedaris: Sedaris is an extraordinarily gifted comic writer whose observations about family, life, and the FitBit in this volume often move into an understated poignance that never becomes mawkish or overly flippant. The comic essays included here (no short stories this time around) appeared between 2016 and 2018.

The adventures of his family and himself go into some dark places here, including the suicide of a sister whom Sedaris and his siblings (there are six Sedaris children in total)  have been avoiding because of exhaustion for years... in David's case, eight. He never lets himself off the hook. He also never loses his almost-trademarked gift at portraying the absurd moments of almost any event, any person. 

Most notably himself. 

A sequence involving a snapping turtle, a beach house, and a non-cancerous fatty tumour on Sedaris' stomach really has to be read. Maybe with a bit of vomit coming up in one's mouth from time to time. Sedaris doesn't spare us his misadventures in stomach flu, falling off ladders on Christmas Day, and failing to interact in a meaningful way with his emotionally distant and physically and mentally declining nonagenarian father.

I think it's all pretty much dandy, the sort of humour that supplies catharsis and belly-laughs. It's not his finest collection of humourous essays -- that would probably be When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008). But it's a lot of sometimes serious fun. Calypso will certainly delight longtime readers of Sedaris, and it also serves as a fine introduction to his work. Highly recommended.

Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut (1979/2019):

Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut (2019): written by Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius, and Michael Herr; loosely based on the novella Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad; directed by Francis Ford Coppola; starring Martin Sheen (Willard), Marlon Brando (Kurtz), Laurence Fishburne (Mr. Clean), Harrison Ford (Lucas), Scott Glenn (Kurtz Convert Lt. Colby)), Robert Duvall (Kilgore), Sam Bottoms (Surfer Lance), Frederic Forrest (Chef), Albert Hall (Chief), Dennis Hopper (Photojournalist), G.D. Spradlin (General Corman), and [Uncredited] Joe Estevez (Stand-in/Partial Voice-over 'Stand-in' for brother Martin Sheen):

Hey, it's Apocalypse Now, so a chance to see it in any cut on a big screen was a treat. And it improves on Apocalypse Now Redux by omitting the dire, momentum-killing 'Crashed Playboy Bunnies' sequence!

However, it keeps the other major addition, the French Plantation sequence, to mixed effect: it's the one part of the film that plays as potentially supernatural, which is not really in keeping with the rest of the movie. However, there are also cues throughout the sequence that it might not really be happening at all -- not least of which is the sudden transition from Willard's opium scene to the boat back on the fog-saturated river. 

Brando is great, and on a big screen, almost life-sized! One of no more than a hundred of the greatest movies ever made, all done without CGI! Highly recommended, though you could replicate it by simply omitting a couple of scenes from Redux on a rewatch. The surfboard-stealing scene is also a hoot, though also in Redux. Highly recommended.

The Godfathers of Hardcore (2017)

The Godfathers of Hardcore (2017): written and directed by Ian McFarland, co-written by Tony Fernandez; featuring Roger Miret and Vinnie Stigma of Agnostic Front: Fascinating documentary on seminal New York Hardcore Punk band Agnostic Front, still touring and recording now after 35 years in the business. The film focuses on founding guitarist Vinnie Stigma and current (for at least 25 years) lead vocalist Roger Miret. 

Stigma is fascinating and outspoken. It's Miret who does all the stuff that keeps the band going in terms of bookings and financial work, however, and his self-imposed overwork seems to lead to a heart attack documented late in the film. 

But he keeps on going -- as the film notes, Agnostic Front had played over 400 shows between the completion of filming and the release of the movie, all this after Miret had a wireless heart monitor implanted to monitor his still undiagnosed heart problem. Makes a fine bookend to Crave's 2019 4-part PUNK miniseries. Recommended.

The War of the Worlds (1953)

The War of the Worlds (1953): Produced by George Pal; directed by Byron Haskin; based on the novel by H.G. Wells; [Cast and Crew]: For all its flaws, this adaptation of H.G. Wells' seminal novel of alien invasion is far superior to the Spielberg/Cruise film of a few years back. 

Producer George Pal was a great devotee of science fiction and fantasy, from the earlier Destination: Moon (1950) through The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964) all the way to his final production, Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (1975).

Visual effects technology circa 1953 pretty much ensured that the Martian ships would fly rather than walk as tripods, though they do have (mostly) invisible electromagnetic 'legs' that can be seen in a couple of scenes. The focus of action moved from turn-of-the-century England to the Western United States, with the invasion going on world-wide just as in the original.

The movie does an impressive job of ratcheting up the fear as the Martians shrug off all attempts to stop them and stomp all over humanity, and specifically the American war machine. The cast is solid. We even have Gene Barry as a scientist-hero and his love interest has an advanced degree in mathematics. Compare this to Tom Cruise as a lunkhead, deadbeat Dad and one weeps for humanity.

Scenes of a rioting Los Angeles, followed by a burning, depopulated LA, still work really well, as do most of the shots of those pesky Martians incinerating soldiers and weapons and even a trio of ordinary Americans waving a flag of peace. Burn, puny humans, burn!

The design of the aliens themselves is also superior to that in the Spielberg movie, though not faithful to Wells' octopus-like blancmanges. As in Spielberg's movie, the Martians' vampirism has been eliminated (yes, I know the Martians use people for fertilizer in the Cruise movie, but that's still not vampirism). This is a shame. Wells' novel was also an allegory of colonialism, with vampirism as a pretty transparent metaphor for what Europe was doing to all the non-European people of the Earth. Recommended.

A Bohemian Is Born

A Star Is Born (2018): Directed by and starring Bradley Cooper: [Cast and Crew]: Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga do a solid job of resurrecting this Hollywood chestnut in its fourth iteration. It's not the sort of movie I seek out, but I enjoyed it. And the songs by both Cooper's and Gaga's characters are excellent. An unrecognizable Andrew Dice Clay does nice work as Gaga's character's father. Sam Elliot is a hoot as always. Recommended.

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018): [Cast and Crew]: Mostly fictional band biography of Queen (and specifically Freddie Mercury) has an awfully familiar, homophobic sub-text which sometimes becomes blatant enough to just be text. Remember kids: gay sex is bad and gay men should just hold hands. Also, all the evidence suggests that Mercury actually was bisexual given his choice of partners throughout his life. Oh, well. Mr. Robot's Rami Malek is excellent as Mercury -- he and Freddie both deserved a better movie. Also, how the Hell does a Queen biopic leave out the Flash Gordon soundtrack? Weird. Not recommended.

Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019)

Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019): CAST AND CREDITS: The first post-Avengers: Endgame Marvel movie quickly skates over the ramifications of that movie's ending, which I think will soon be one of those 'Now let us never speak of those five years again!' things in upcoming Marvel joints. 

Tom Holland makes a good Peter Parker. Marvel has wisely emphasized Peter's mechanical and problem-solving genius, a welcome nod to Peter's status as a very clever fellow in the classic Steve Ditko/Stan Lee comics of the 1960's. Hey, that guy beat the Sandman with a goddam vacuum cleaner!!! 

Pretty much all the actors are charming, and Jake Gyllenhaal's Mysterio is a hoot. Even the tweaking of Mysterio's origin is funny yet convincing, though I sort of miss the idea of a character who was a visual and special effects movie guy. Maybe because he could have teamed up with Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's Stuntman. 

The whole thing plays like one of those Roger Moore James Bond movies where everything stays pretty light and jokey while Bond travels from country to country destroying priceless artifacts and occasionally landmarks. Recommended.

The Girl in the Spider's Web (2018)

The Girl in the Spider's Web (2018): CAST AND CREDITS: The first adaptation of the post-Stieg Larsson Lisbeth Salander novels is a competent, surprisingly bland thriller. Salander, played with competence but little spark by Claire Foy, is now basically Batman or The Equalizer, but with more hacking skills and lesbian sex. Would I have cast Stephen Merchant as a computer whiz? Mmm. No. He's fine, but I kept expecting Ricky Gervais to wander in at any minute. Which would probably have spiced things up! Lightly recommended as a time-filler.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): CAST AND CREDITS: Technically the third (!) film in a trilogy of Godzilla (2014) and Kong: Skull Island (2017) sees Godzilla once again playing hero against an invasive super-monster from outer space, the monster originally known as Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster in the old Toho Studios kaiju movies. 

I had a lot of fun. The tone remains fairly light throughout, striking a nice balance between the grimmer Godzilla (2014) and the light-as-hell Kong: Skull Island. The human characters are paper thin but generally not all that annoying. Mothra and Rodan also play major roles, while the movie also teases a King Kong/Godzilla buddy movie should a fourth film get made. Recommended.

The Front Runner (2018)

The Front Runner (2018): adapted by Matt Bai, Jay Carson, and Jason Reitman from the book All the Truth Is Out by Matt Bai; directed by Jason Reitman; starring Hugh Jackman (Gary Hart), Vera Farmiga (Lee Hart), J.K. Simmons (Hart Campaign Manager Bill Dixon), Alfred Molina (Ben Bradlee), Mamoudou Athie (AJ Parker), and Sara Paxton (Donna Rice):

Solid, enjoyable tour through The Fall of Gary Hart during the early Presidential campaigning season of 1987. Hugh Jackman is perfectly fine as the charismatic Hart, the Democratic Front Runner when we begin in 1987. His polling numbers suggested that he could beat presumptive Republican candidate George H.W. Bush. Well, we all know how that turned out.

Hart would become the first Presidential candidate whose campaign would be derailed by the sort of tabloid gossip previously, mostly, absent from Presidential campaigns. After him, the deluge! The accusations made against Hart now seem quaint in the Age of Trump. Well, quaint if one is a Republican. Democrats still savage their candidates over these and lesser outrages. The Republicans don't care.

The film-makers streamline the story of Hart somewhat, omitting a later, unsuccessful return to the Democratic race after his initial withdrawal. The story nonetheless still resonates, balancing the seeming puerility of the causes of Hart's political demise with characters who question Hart's decision-making abilities, his truthfulness, his ability to navigate political adversity, and the larger questions of male privilege and the inequality of power in certain 'relationships.'

In all, The Front Runner presents a sea change in how the media would cover politics and politicians. There's no small irony that Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee (played here by Alfred Molina) finally decides to go with the story, given that Bradlee spent the entire JFK Administration alternately covering up for, and partying with, JFK and friends. Recommended.

Searching (2018)

Searching (2018): written and directed by Aneesh Changanty with Sev Ohanian; starring John Cho (David Kim), Michelle La (Margot Kim), and Debra Messing (Detective Vick): Tight, innovative thriller plays out entirely on the computer screen through various applications and feeds. It works on a TV screen without causing eyestrain because the camera does zoom in on relevant material, unlike the Unfriended movies, which are best watched on a computer screen from 18 inches away.

John Cho plays a widower who discovers one day that he doesn't know what his teen-aged daughter has been doing in the months since her mother died. Cho's quest to find his daughter will play out on Facebook and in chat rooms, vlog posts and email and texts. Debra Messing plays the police detective assigned to the case, already more than 24 hours old by the time Cho realizes his daughter is missing.

Searching works in part because it remains intimately focused on Cho's grief and anger. It's also extremely clever in displaying all the ways we are watched in our day-to-day life, voluntarily and involuntarily. The film-makers also do a nice job of creating a twisty plot that plays fair with the audience with its investigative plot. All the evidence of what happened is there -- you just have to watch carefully. All this and several distinctively Hitchcockian tropes deployed in a thoroughly modern manner. Recommended.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007): written by Kelly Masterson; directed by Sidney Lumet; starring Philip Seymour Hoffman (Andy Hanson), Ethan Hawke (Hank Hanson), Marisa Tomei (Gina Hanson), Albert Finney (Charles Hanson), Rosemary Harris (Nanette Hanson), Aleksa Palladino (Chris), Michael Shannon (Dex), Amy Ryan (Martha), and Brian F. O'Byrne (Bobby): 

The great humanist director Sidney Lumet's final film is an acting showcase for everyone in it, as Lumet's films generally were. It feels like a great, lost Jim Thompson novel re-earthed -- a twisted tale of crime, incompetence, chance, and family. Philip Seymour Hoffman has a scene in a car that's an all-time great freak-out. 

Revealing much of the plot actually spoils the plot really quickly. Suffice to say, Hoffman and Ethan Hawke play desperate brothers, Marisa Tomei spends an ultimately unsettling amount of time topless, and Michael Shannon does an early version of his Unsettling Michael Shannon Character. 

Filmed in and around NYC, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is the last addition to Lumet's catalogue of urban, paranoid (melo) drama. The weirdest trivia about this movie is that it reunited Lumet and Albert Finney after more than 30 years. Lumet directed Finney as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot in the 1970's all-star film version of Murder on the Orient Express. The two movies -- and two Finney performances -- couldn't be much more different while still sharing a 'detective' arc for Finney's character in both movies. Highly recommended.

Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

Murder on the Orient Express (1974): adapted by Paul Dehn from the Agatha Christie novel; directed by Sidney Lumet; starring Albert Finney (Hercule Poirot), Lauren Bacall (Hubbard), Martin Balsam (Bianchi), Ingrid Bergman (Greta), Jacqueline Bisset (Countess Andrenyi), Sean Connery (Arbuthnot), John Gielgud (Beddoes), Wendy Hiller (Princess Dragomiroff), Anthony Perkins (McQueen), Vanessa Redgrave (Mary), Michael York (Count Andrenyi), Colin Blakeley (Hardman), Richard Widmark (Ratchett), Rachel Roberts (Hildegarde), and Jean Pierre Cassel (Pierre): 

The producers brought the 'so many stars in head-shot boxes on the poster!' approach normally used by Hollywood for disaster movies and historical epics at the time to this adaptation of one of Agatha Christie's most famous Hercule Poirot novels. With a twist!

Frankly, it's a bit... soporific in its first half, as various clues are laid out prior to the eponymous murder. And Albert Finney is a honking, sputtering, too-jolly-by-half Hercule Poirot. The high-powered cast goes through its paces, nabbing a sympathy Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Ingrid Bergman along the way (even though Bergman had already won two deserved Oscars and should have nabbed a third for Notorious). It's an interesting movie, and something of a departure for Sidney Lumet. Lightly recommended.

The Fog of War (2003)

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara (2003): directed by Errol Morris; starring Errol Morris and Robert McNamara as themselves: Errol Morris pretty much just puts a camera on Kennedy/LBJ Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and interviews him several times. It's fascinating stuff as McNamara wrestles with his failures in Viet Nam, excusing some by noting that LBJ wouldn't listen to him sometimes while owning others. 


We don't learn much about his private life (though Morris includes a scene in which McNamara discusses not discussing sensitive issues from his private life). We certainly learn about McNamara's theories on the rights and wrongs of war ('proportionality' is a key idea) as we survey his career, structured along those 11 lessons noted in the sub-title. Nor Morris' greatest documentary, but probably an essential one for anyone who wants to understand the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Highly recommended.

The Colorado Kid (2005) by Stephen King

Scene actually in novel, sort of

The Colorado Kid (2005) by Stephen King: Hard Case Crime recently reissued King's novel he wrote expressly for them when their line was launching back in 2005, complete with some new introductory material and illustrations. I think it's a dandy mystery. Is it a mystery? Well, you have to read it!

It's not the pulpy paperback material sometimes reprinted by Hard Case (God bless them), which makes the lurid covers of both this edition and the original comical rather than entirely representative of the tone of the novel. The Colorado Kid would form some of the inspiration for the TV series Haven, though Haven carried over just about nobody other than the eponymous Kid who, it's no mystery from the back cover blurb, is already dead when the novel begins. 

Nothing like this in novel

If the novel isn't quite a mystery, it is a novel ABOUT mystery. It's also a love letter to old-style journalism, old coots, and the fresh-faced enthusiasm of the young just starting out on their own. It's certainly the King novel that would work best with a David Lynch adaptation. Highly recommended.

A Confederacy of Dunces (1969/1980) by John Kennedy Toole

A Confederacy of Dunces (1969/1980) by John Kennedy Toole: If nothing else, A Confederacy of Dunces possesses one of the saddest origin stories in American publishing history. New Orleans writer and academic John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 in his early 30's. 

His mother persistently kept trying to get editors to read this novel for the next decade. As detailed in the introduction to this edition by Walker Percy, she finally got Percy to look at it in the late 1970's. Percy was suitably impressed. A Confederacy of Dunces would be published in 1980, to nigh-universal critical acclaim and tremendous sales.

The focus of the novel is one of the most comically grotesque of literary comic-grotesques, Ignatius J. Reilly. Morbidly obese, possessed of awesomely bad fashion sense, possessed of horrifyingly deficient personal hygiene... these are just a few of the 30ish man-child's attributes. 

He hates the modern world with a passion and longs for the reinstatement of medieval values. He masturbates while thinking of idyllic childhood days with his (now) dead dog. He gets violently ill while travelling in public transportation. He pontificates, prevaricates, and fantasizes about lashing his female enemies about the genitalia. He's homophobic, heterophobic, bigoted, and lazy almost beyond belief. He's a Mama's Boy who despises his mother.

One of the truly odd things about the novel is that while Reilly is a parody of certain academic "types" (his dissertation stalled out despite his averaging a paragraph a month), he's now weirdly appropriate for our Internet Outrage Era. He's immensely judgmental of everyone other than himself. His rage is never far from the surface. He's a coward and a bully. He even loves Batman. Jesus, would he have been a hoot while Game of Thrones was ending.

Reilly supplies much of the comic horror of the novel, though certainly not all of it. Major characters and minor struggle through a comically infernal New Orleans. Reilly's mother forces him to finally get a job after an auto-related disaster at the beginning of the novel. Reilly's voyage through the workplace supplies the plot thread; Reilly's desire to one-up his long-distance female nemesis/soul-mate Myrna Minkoff in sparking various political "revolutions" lays comic waste to everything around him. 

Set-pieces involving Reilly's time at a dilapidated clothing factory, his adventures at a run-down bar, his speaking engagement at a gay party, and his adventures selling hot dogs from a cart while dressed as some sort of pirate really need to be experienced rather than synopsized.

A Confederacy of Dunces has famously resisted movie adaptation for decades -- John Belushi and John Candy are only two of the notables attached to failed projects. I'm not sure if a faithful adaptation is possible. Covers for various editions generally try to make Reilly look cute or even cartoony. 

But while his appearance is indeed comical, it's also grotesque to the point that it would defeat audience sympathy to, for instance, depict Reilly sucking down hot dogs and then slurping his own face with his enormous tongue, all in the context of someone who does not seem to bathe, or believe in bathing. So Reilly would be turned into a wacky but lovable fat man, and the sharp edges of the novel sanded off. Reilly and his true nemesis, a kicky pyloric valve, should probably be left to the printed page, in all his ragged and horrible glory. Highly recommended.

Tuf Voyaging (1986) by George R.R. Martin

Tuf Voyaging (1986) by George R.R. Martin: A 'paste-up' novel of stories and novellas published over about a decade, Tuf Voyaging tells of several adventures of Haviland Tuf. Tuf lives several thousand years in the future, during George R.R. Martin's 'Thousand Worlds' universe in which humanity has spread out across the galaxy (that's the Thousand Worlds) after the collapse of its Federal Empire. 

Tuf starts off as a quirky but somewhat unsuccessful freighter captain. Personality-wise, Tuf sometimes seems like a first draft for Varys in A Song of Ice and Fire. However, circumstances detailed here put him in sole control of a 30-km-long seed ship, the last of its kind, built by that Federal Empire's Ecological Engineering Corps.

This seed ship, named Ark, can do just about anything biology-related. Thanks to vast libraries of genetic material, genetic manipulation machines, and other doodads, the Ark can unleash planet-destroying plagues, planet-saving biological miracles, or even a few telepathic cats. Tuf finally has a way to make money. And so he does.

This may be Martin's most traditionally Golden-Age science-fiction work. Tuf is quirky and a fairly solid judge of human character, and the stories themselves are the sort of 'science puzzle' stories made popular by writers that include Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. Martin seems to be having a lot of fun with the biological puzzles Haviland Tuf faces, and so too the reader.

Even the discovery of the Ark rests on a puzzle being solved -- and Tuf figuring out how to survive that finding. He will then be confronted by a variety of puzzles on different worlds. The puzzles and the solutions are ingenious. It's all breezy science-fiction fun with a few serious points about over-population, religious mania, and cruelty to animals along the way. And, of course, the dangers of invasive species. Especially when that invasive species is humanity. This would make a fine TV series. Come on, guys! Highly recommended.

X-men: Dark Phoenix (2019)

X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019): written and directed by Simon Kinberg; based on characters and situations created by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Len Wein, Dave Cockrum, Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and otrhers; starring James McAvoy (Professor X), Michael Fassbender (Magneto), Jennifer Lawrence (Raven), Nicholas Hoult (Beast), Sophie Turner (Jean Grey/ Phoenix), Tye Sheridan (Cyclops), Alexandra Shipp (Storm), Evan Peters (Quicksilver), Kodi Smit-McPhee (Nightcrawler), and Jesicca Chastain (Vuk):

X-Men: Dark Phoenix wasn't terrible. Certainly not enough for all the now-cliched Internet agita about it. Spoilers ahoy!

I wonder if it suffered at the box office in part because it uses Hollywood's ubiquitous Daddy-Daughter trope in a negative sense. Young Jean "Phoenix" Grey is abandoned by her father after Jean accidentally kills her mother because she hates the music Mom is playing on the car radio. Professor X chooses not to tell Jean that her father is still alive after the accident. This seems to me to be a good idea as Jean is only 8 and is traumatized. He slips up by never telling her as a teen or adult that her father is alive, but in his defense, Professor X is a busy man!

The main problem is that once Disney's acquisition of Fox was imminent, Disney clearly told Fox to change the ending of Dark Phoenix because it was similar to the ending of Captain Marvel -- Jean Grey was supposed to destroy a giant alien spaceship that had come to try to acquire the Phoenix Force for itself, saving the Earth and (seemingly) sacrificing herself in the process. This led to reshooting the climax a year after filming had originally ended.

The film-makers changed this woman vs. spaceship battle to a battle between the aliens on one side and the X-Men and human soldiers on the other side, all on a prison train. 

Because nothing says epic sci-fi confrontation more than a battle in and around the apex of 19th-century travel technology.

Of course, this led to an interesting plot hole. Is the spaceship still in orbit? Because the answer would seem to be 'Yes,' given that we saw the aliens come to Earth in the now obligatory meteorite-like landing pods.

So it goes.

Perhaps needless to note at this point, there's no Daddy-Daughter issues in the original comic book Dark Phoenix Saga. Jean's parents are loving and accepting of her mutant powers, and when she gains the Phoenix powers, the saga plays out as a cautionary tale about absolute power corrupting absolutely, along with self-sacrifice. Realizing that the Phoenix Force could never be controlled, Jean commits suicide. Or does she? That was a story for another day!

Lightly recommended.

Dreamsongs Volume 2 (2004) by George R. R. Martin

Dreamsongs Volume 2 (2004) by George R. R. Martin:

This collection is generous and generously gifted with lengthy, illuminating essays by George R.R. Martin. Originally released in one volume, breaking it up into two volumes definitely helps with actually reading it.

• "A Beast for Norn" (1976): The first tale of Haviland Tuf showcases his biological and ecological engineering skills thanks to the massive seedship Ark, along with his idiosyncratic personality and one of the more medieval-futuristic planets of the far-future Thousand Worlds universe. This version is the original, while that in Tuf Voyaging has been edited and expanded.
• "Guardians"  (1981): A Haviland Tuf story that riffs on how seemingly minor changes to an alien environment lead to catastrophic consequences for the human inhabitants of a watery world. Tuf's favourite animals, cats, play a key role in this one.
• "The Road Less Travelled" (Unproduced screenplay, Twilight Zone) (1986): A never-produced screenplay would still make a dandy TZ episode.
• "Doorways" (Unproduced version of pilot) (1993): A different, less-expensive version of this screenplay was made into a pilot that never made it to series. This would now be familiar to viewers thanks to shows like Sliders.
• "Shell Games" (1987): One of Martin's first heroes in the shared-universe superhero series Wild Cards was the amiable Great and Powerful Turtle. Fun stuff.
• "From the Journal of Xavier Desmond" (1988): Compiles the linking story from Wild Cards novel Aces Abroad, focusing on the Mayor of Jokertown, the elephant-trunked Desmond.
• "Under Siege" (1985): Time-travel story incorporates a story Martin wrote for a history class (that story appears early in Volume 1 of Dreamsongs).
• "The Skin Trade" (1988): Award-winning novella involves a city run by werewolves and a mysterious mirror.
• "Unsound Variations" (1982): Martin turns his college experiences with chess tournaments into an excellent time-travel story.
• "The Glass Flower" (1986): Melancholy farewell (for now and then) to Martin's Thousand Worlds universe.
• "The Hedge Knight" (1998): A story from the Game of Thrones universe, set roughly a generation before the events of the novel.
• "Portraits of His Children" (1985): Somewhat metafictional horror story about the lengths some writers go for inspiration.

Overall: Excellent overview of Martin's writing from the mid-1980's to 2003, with a few dips further into the past to suit both thematic divisions and series that ended in the 1980's. Highly recommended.

De Palmas

Body Double (1984): written by Brian De Palma and Robert J. Avrech; directed by Brian De Palma; starring Craig Wasson (Jake), Melanie Griffith (Holly), Gregg Henry (Sam), and Deborah Shelton (Gloria): 

It's hard to believe now that Body Double was condemned as immoral and horrible and all that jazz back in 1984, primarily because of a scene in which a woman is killed with a giant drill. Of course, De Palma shoots this scene so that we never see the drill go through the woman. People reacted to what they thought they saw, and to what was implied. People also reacted to the film's use of porn films in its narrative. Well, and the fact that Body Double is De Palma's love letter to all things Hitchcock, and Vertigo in particular. But the violence now looks quaint. Body Double is less violent than a typical episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.

It's also a love letter to Hollywood and movie-making and actors. Craig Wasson is perfectly cast as a somewhat nebbishy Every-actor who gets pulled into a murder investigation because of his voyeurism, and soon demonstrates that he might be The World's Greatest Detective. 

Melanie Griffith generated most of the positive buzz for the movie in her role as Holly Body, the porn star who soon becomes key to Wasson solving the mystery of who killed his neighbour (with the aforementioned drill), and why. Griffith is terrific -- it really was a star-making performance.

I don't know that this is De Palma's best movie, but it's his most purely enjoyable. Is it misogynistic? I don't know. Less so than Hollywood (or Western culture) was in 1984, probably. For the sake of comparison, Hitchcock killed two female characters in Vertigo in the late 1950's. De Palma kills one, and she actually gets avenged in the course of the movie. Radical. Highly recommended.

DePalma (2015): directed by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow; starring Brian De Palma as himself: A 100-minute interview with Brian De Palma takes the viewer on a survey of his life and film-making career. De Palma is a tremendously entertaining and opinionated film-maker. Even non-fans of his work might find this film fascinating. And if you do like De Palma's work, it's a gold-mine of opinions and anecdotes and observations. Highly recommended.

The Detective (1954)

The Detective (1954): adapted by Thelma Schnee, Robert Hamer, and Maurice Rapf from stories by G.K. Chesterton; directed by Robert Hamer; starring Alec Guinness (Father Brown), Joan Greenwood (Lady Warren), and Peter Finch (Flambeau): 

Alec Guinness makes a delightful Father Brown in this loose adaptation of one of G.K. Chesterton's stories. The villain will be partially familiar to viewers (like me) of the current Father Brown TV series, as will Brown's aristocratic female sidekick and police inspector Valentine. The movie is almost anti-dramatic, which is sometimes a good thing. Fun, whimsical, and short. Recommended.

The Monuments Men (2014)

The Monuments Men (2014): adapted by George Clooney and Grant Heslov from the book by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter; directed by George Clooney; starring George Clooney (Stokes), Matt Damon (Granger), Bill Murray (Campbell), Cate Blanchett (Claire), John Goodman (Garfield), Jean Dujardin (Jean-Claude), Hugh Bonneville (Donald), Bob Balaban (Savitz), and Dimitri Leonidas (Sam Epstein): 

A WWII movie so episodic that it seems as if it had been edited down from a 6-hour miniseries. The real-life concept is fascinating -- the Allies create a team to save art and literary treasures from the Nazis as World War Two draws to an end. The cast's main strength is its affability in a movie that lacks any real comedic or dramatic highs, a trait the movie shares with another George Clooney directorial effort, Leathernecks. A mild diversion, but nothing more. Lightly recommended.

The Highwaymen (2019)

The Highwaymen (2019): written by John Fusco; directed by John Lee Hancock; starring Kevin Costner (Frank Hamer), Woody Harrelson (Maney Gault), Kathy Bates (Ma Ferguson), and John Carroll Lynch (Lee Simmons): 

It's 1934 and Bonnie and Clyde cut a swath through Texas law enforcement. Enter retired Texas Rangers Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson, tasked with trying to bring the homicidal gang to justice. 

At their ages, Harrelson and Costner play off one another beautifully as what are basically old gunslingers on one last hunt. The landscapes are beautifully shot. There's also a nicely under-stated, droll sense of humour to some of the proceedings. But there are also moments of horror, just as there were in real life. 

As in Arthur Penn's landmark 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde, this film plays fast and loose with a few historical facts, though fewer than Penn's film, which romanticized the dangerous duo. Kathy Bates, John Carroll Lynch, and William Sadler offer strong support as secondary characters. Some may find this overlong; I found it elegiac. Recommended.

Dreamsongs Volume 1 (2004) by George R. R. Martin

Dreamsongs Volume 1 (2004) by George R. R. Martin:

This collection is generous and generously gifted with lengthy, illuminating essays by George R.R. Martin. Originally released in one volume in 2003, breaking it up into two volumes definitely helps with actually reading it without being crushed.

Volume 1 covers Martin's career from his days writing for the amateur press in the 1960's to the greatest days of his success as a writer of short stories and novellas in the mid-1980's. I think Martin was a better writer of predominantly science-fictional stories than he is a fantasy novelist, but your results may vary. In any event, this is a fine introduction to Martin's work for those who haven't read much beyond his A Song of Ice and Fire. 

The stories:

"Only Kids Are Afraid of the Dark (1967): Almost juvenilia. Superhero stuff for an amateur press.
"The Fortress" (1960s): A short story submitted as an essay in a history course. Interesting.
"And Death His Legacy" (1960s): Started life as the first in a projected series about a billionaire super-assassin before transforming into a cautionary tale about the limits of political violence.
"The Hero" (1971): Martin's first professional sale, a stinger about the future of warfare.
"The Exit to San Breta" (1972): Science fiction ghost story. Minor but enjoyable.
"The Second Kind of Loneliness" (1972): From Martin's short-lived "Star Ring" series, a meditation on isolation and madness.
"With Morning Comes Mistfall" (1973): An entry in Martin's loose-knit far-future history of humanity dubbed "A Thousand Worlds." Martin's first truly top-notch story.
"A Song for Lya" (1974): Martin's second top-notch sf story, also set in the Thousand Worlds universe, explores an alien religion and its strange attraction for some humans.
"This Tower of Ashes" (1976): More of a character piece set on yet another of the Thousand Worlds. Bad spiders!
"And Seven Times Never Kill Man" (1975): The title comes from Kipling; Martin's notes indicate that he parodies Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai series in specific (and militaristic sf in general) here. Thousand Worlds.
"The Stone City" (1977): A more Lovecraftian or Clark Ashton Smith-style take on the Thousand Worlds. Really a subtle piece of cosmic, science-fictional horror.
"Bitterblooms" (1977): A more fabulistic piece set on one of the more isolated Thousand Worlds of humanity.
"The Way of Cross and Dragon" (1979): Excellent sf story exploring religion and its mutations in the far future of the Thousand Worlds.
"The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr" (1976): Universe-hopping fantasy story was meant to start a series. It didn't, though Martin would re-use elements in his 1990's pilot "Doorways" (see Dreamsongs Volume 2).
"The Ice Dragon" (1980): Martin is pretty sure he created the idea of a literal ice dragon here. Not part of the Game of Thrones universe, though there are some similarities.
"In the Lost Lands" (1982: Another first piece in a never-continued series, set in a world that combines traditional sword-and-sorcery elements with post-apocalyptic settings.
"Meathouse Man" (1976): The most mournful and disturbing of Martin's three 'Corpse-Handler' sf stories is sometimes viewed as a precursor to Splatterpunk.
"Remembering Melody" (1981): Precise 'traditional' horror story.
"Sandkings" (1979): My favourite of Martin's stories, a terrific novella of science-fictional horror that features a thoroughly rotten protagonist and a fascinating alien species, the eponymous Sandkings. Also meant to be part of a series!
"Nightflyers" (1976/1980): Fine science-fictional horror novella set in the far-future Thousand Worlds timeline was thoroughly misused in both a 1980's movie and the recent SyFy Channel series.
"The Monkey Treatment" (1983): Somewhat traditional 'Be careful what you wish for' horror.
"The Pear-Shaped Man" (1987): Nice horror piece does not go quite where the reader fears it will. It goes someplace way more disturbing!

Overall: Highly recommended.

Rashomon (1950)

Rashomon (1950): adapted from stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa by Akira Kurosawa and Shinobu Hashimoto; directed by Akira Kurosawa; starring Toshiro Mifune (Tajomaru), Machiko Kyo (Masako Kanazawa), Masayuki Mori (Takehiro Kanazawa), Takashi Shimura (Woodcutter), Minoru Chiaki (Priest), and Kichijiro Ueda (Commoner):

The film that brought the attention of the world to writer-director Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon (named for the city gate beneath which its frame story occurs) remains a terse gem, expansive in its vision of humanity's faults and strengths. The structure is maybe the least interesting thing about it, and the structure is brilliant -- the same rape-and-murder incident told in four wildly different ways by four different voices. 

The incident takes place in the countryside of feudal Japan. The frame story, central to the full vision of Kurosawa's morality, takes place at a ruined temple where three travelers, including a Monk grown weary of humanity's moral failings, shelter from a torrential downpour.

Those four voices are that of the alleged rapist and murderer, the disgraced wife, the murdered husband (by way of a medium), and an eyewitness. I remember reading a review from the time in which the American reviewer tried to figure out which version was correct. That reviewer discarded the testimony of the husband because ghosts don't exist. This is what I call missing the point of a movie.

I can't think of anything bad to say about Rashomon. The performances are splendid, the shot composition deft and often haunting, and whatever the moral of the whole thing might be, it's far from simple. It's also Kurosawa's shortest great film, clocking in at about 90 minutes, less than half the length of Seven Samurai and more than an hour shorter than Kagemusha and Ran. So you've got time to watch it! Highly recommended.

Shazam! (2019)

Shazam! (2019): Shazam (aka Captain Marvel) created by Bill Parker and C.C. Beck; written by Henry Gayden and Darren Lemke; directed by David F. Sandberg; starring Zachary Levi (Shazam), Mark Strong (Sivana), Asher Angel (Billy Batson), Jack Dylan Grazer (Freddy Freeman), and Djimon Honsou (Wizard): 

Shockingly enjoyable movie about the original Fawcett Comics Captain Marvel (ie. THE Captain Marvel), moved to the present day and made somewhat goofier than the great 1940's version whose adventures were no worse than second-best in terms of superheroes in the 1940's (Jack Cole's Plastic Man was first; Will Eisner's Spirit didn't have super-powers).

Shazam is an acronym for Solomon (Wisdom), Hercules (Strength), Atlas (Stamina), Zeus (Power), Achilles (Invulnerability), and Mercury (Speed). Well, when it comes to Captain Marvel (now Shazam), anyway -- Mary Marvel and Black Adam, to name two, have the same acronym but different names from mythology.

The whole thing is a 'low-budget' by superhero standards ($90 million) movie aimed solidly at mid-teens. Billy Batson is invested by the wizard Shazam with the powers of, well, Shazam because DC gave up on using 'Captain Marvel' because they didn't trademark it back in the 1950's or 1960's. Shazam is now Earth's defense against magical menaces, sort of a jollier Dr. Strange. 

Billy Batson, a sort-of orphan, has to learn to accept his supportive new foster family led by Freddy Freeman, once a disabled newsboy in the 1940's and now, not working, just as Billy no longer works as a radio host. Child labour laws, am I right, guys?

Zachary Levi is the result of Billy saying 'Shazam.' In the comics, he was generally written as a sort of adult version of Billy with super-powers -- they didn't share a consciousness. Taking a cue from Big, Shazam now possesses Billy's 13-year-old consciousness in a super-powered adult body. Hijinks ensue as Billy and Freddy test out the beer-buying powers of Shazam, among other things.

Much revisionism is heaped on the villain of this piece, Sivana, originally a diminutive mad scientist and now a large, imposing Mark Strong wielding magical powers derived from long-time Shazam foes The Seven Deadly Sins. And I don't mean the Traveling Wilburys song! But Strong always makes an, um, strong villain. 

I'm not a huge fan of all the revisionism heaped on Captain Mar... er, Shazam... in the recent Shazam miniseries by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank. And all of those revisions seem to get info-dumped into this movie, especially over the last 45 minutes. Oh, well. Things play a lot jollier here than in that miniseries, and Billy is much more likable.

The whole thing is nonetheless light and entertaining and often quite visually inventive. It's clearly marked throughout as part of the DC Movie Universe, and the end credits foreground this. Superman does cameo in the live-action stuff, but not Henry Cavill either because he refused or because DC is pivoting away from the dark days of David Goyer and Zack Snyder's DC movies to something more earnest and light. 

Hopefully being freed of the demands of an origin story will allow a second Shazam movie to soar and not crash. There's also a brief (unnamed) reference to the 'first,' fallen Shazam champion, Egypt's Black Adam. Dwayne Johnson has been attached to a Black Adam movie for years; the box-office success of Shazam! seems to have jump-started that movie, or at least a Black Adam role in the next Shazam! film. Recommended.

Venom (2018)

Venom (2018): Venom created by David Michelinie and Todd MacFarlane; written by Jeff Pinkner, Scott Rosenberg, and Kelly Marcel; directed by Ruben Fleischer; starring Tom Hardy (Eddie Brock/Venom), Michelle Williams (Anne), and Riz Ahmed (Carlton Drake/Riot):

I guess it's good that the current superhero glut can result in even marginally offbeat projects based on Marvel and DC characters. Venom isn't a good movie, but it's intermittently fun, and the goopy creature effects are a far cry from most normal Marvel and DC movie fare.

In the comics, Venom was what happened when Spider-man's black-and-white alien symbiote costume he acquired in the Secret Wars event in the mid-1980's acquired a new host because it was driving Spidey crazy and he got rid of it. You may remember events like this from Spider-man 3. Yes, Venom has appeared in a movie before, its host Eddie Brock played then by Topher Grace.

Now Eddie Brock is a formerly heroic, now down-on-his-luck journalist in San Francisco who acquires the symbiote (or is acquired by the symbiote) while trying to resurrect his career by blowing the whistle on Riz Ahmed's mad billionaire scientist. Ahmed barely registers as an evil version of Elon Musk. Well, more evil. He torpedoed Brock's career because Brock discovered he was doing some crazy experiments on people who subsequently died.

The symbiote gives Eddie a wide, ill-defined range of superpowers along with a blobby covering that looks a lot like Spider-man because, well, Venom was a Spider-man suit in the comics. The suit likes eating human heads and Tater Tots. What larks, Pip!

Our lumpy, lumpen anti-hero eventually learns the value of human life and saves the world from some stuff. It seems like about 20 minutes of story has been cut that showed Venom's progress from head-eater to Earth-lover. Oh, well.

Tom Hardy is hilarious doing some insanely bad accent that's supposed to be... Brooklynese? I have no idea. Venom sounds like Tom Hardy doing a Keith David impersonation. Michelle Williams looks absolutely lost in a CGI-laden action movie. And Riz Ahmed, as noted, is barely there. 

This is not a good movie, but it's oddly charming and enjoyable enough to waste time with. And as it's technically part of the Spider-verse Sony still has rights to despite their NuX2 Spider-man movies now being part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.... well, that astronaut is the son of J. Jonah Jameson, who in the comics became the werewolf Man-Wolf after visiting the Moon. I hope that happens in a subsequent Venom movie!!! Lightly recommended.

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

Avengers: Endgame (2019): written by everybody; directed by Anthony and Hoe Russo; starring everybody: 

Basically the most expensive Season Finale in TV history, blown up by steroids, super-soldier serum, and Gamma Rays to the size of a Behemoth. 

There's no point watching it unless you've seen (and enjoyed) at least 15 or 16 of the previous Marvel films. It pretty much sticks the landing without giving the audience much in the way of a sense of wonder or the Sublime. It's the $300 million blockbuster as basic comfort food, enjoyable and mostly bland. Recommended.

Nightflyers (1987) by George R.R. Martin

When bad covers happen...

Nightflyers (1987) by George RR Martin, containing the following stories:

• Nightflyers (1980): Martin's acclaimed novella of horror and first contact was badly mangled by the recent SyFy Channel series, mercifully canceled after one season. Set thousands of years in the future, "Nightflyers" follows the efforts of an interstellar archaeology team to make First Contact with the mysterious Volcryn. The Volcryn fly between the stars at normal spatial velocities, avoiding star systems and faster-than-light travel. Why? And why have they been doing it for at least tens of thousands of years, flying outwards from the Galactic Core? Martin balances cosmic horror, a bit of grue, a sense of wonder, and a keen sense of irony once the final revelations arrive.
• 
  
• Override (1973): Enjoyable, minor Corpse-handler story. Martin's walking dead do so with artificial brains in their heads, all under the control of that handler. Yuck!
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• Weekend in a War Zone (1977): Dystopic, bleak satire of corporate outings. Would make a good half-hour Twilight Zone episode if they still made such a thing.
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• And Seven Times Never Kill Man (1975): Another story set in the Thousand Worlds universe shows us aliens vs. humans. And not just any humans, but the horrible sect of humans who are Martin's parody of/commentary on Gordon Dickson's militaristic Dorsai.
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• Nor the Many-Coloured Fires of a Star Ring (1976): The Star Ring was an FTL gateway created by dumping massive amounts of power into a pre-existing spatial rift. But in this story, the rift seems to open on a parallel universe.
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• A Song for Lya (1974): One of Martin's cleverest, most affecting stories. Again set in the Thousand Worlds universe, "A Song for Lya" follows the efforts of a telepathic duo to discover the secrets of a planet of aliens that has lived in peaceful cultural stasis for thousands of years -- and whose attractions now seem to be wooing humans to have brain-eating blobs put on their heads. Yes, it's the most melancholy episode of Futurama ever!!!

Once upon a time, George R.R. Martin was a writer of terrific short stories and novellas. His first novel, written with Lisa Tuttle, was a fix-up of previously published stories, as was a later novel, Tuf Voyaging. 

These stories all come from about two decades or more before Game of Thrones hit the book-stands. Some of them are from different universes Martin created -- the Star Ring universe, the Corpse-handler universe, and the Thousand Worlds of humanity thousands of years in the future. They all make for fine reading. Highly recommended.

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991)

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) by David Simon: Once upon a time, a Baltimore crime reporter managed to get a year 'embedded' with Baltimore's Homicide detectives. The year was 1988, the reporter was David Simon, and the result wasn't just this terrific book -- ultimately, the result was David Simon's entry into the entertainment industry, resulting in the TV shows Homicide: Life on the Street, The Corner, The Wire, and so much more.

For those like myself coming to the non-fiction book after the assorted TV series about crime in Baltimore, some of the fun is spotting things that would appear in somewhat different form on TV. The murder that inspired the haunting Adena Watson story-line on Homicide: Life on the Street is here, heart-rending and awful. So too a number of other homicides. I'll leave you to play spot the crime. And spot the detectives who inspired Simon and Company's fictional detectives!

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets is a terrific, gripping, moving book. It's also a corrective to any number of cop-show cliches and misrepresentations. Simon also lays out the departmental and city politics that provided the background to any number of episodes of Homicide and The Wire, and the foreground too.

But it's probably the characterization of the homicide detectives and their highers-up that makes Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets so memorable. These are men as interesting as any of Simon's fictional creations. We see how different detectives detect differently. We see some of them become obsessed by unsolvable cases. We definitely see the coarse, obscene badinage that marks most homicide detectives. In the face of death, a certain measure of dark levity is often necessary.

Amongst all the horror, there's even a weird sort of comedy in one case involving insurance scams and a lot of dead bodies. The case as it plays out is both grim and so outlandish that it seems impossible to fictionalize -- no one would believe it. In all, this is a truly great piece of non-fiction, as gripping as any novel or any of Simon's fictional work. Highly recommended.

Kagemusha (1980)

Kagemusha (1980): written by Masato Ide and Akira Kurosawa; directed by Akira Kurosawa; starring Tatsuya Nakadai (Shingen Takeda/ Kagemusha), Tsutomu Yamazaki (Nobukado Takeda), Ken'ichi Hagiwara (Katsuyori Takeda), and Jinpachi Nezu (Sohachiro Tsuchiya):  

Kagemusha occurs in 16th-century feudal Japan, with financing to complete the film arranged by George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola.  Kagemusha literally means 'double' or 'shadow warrior.' It tells the tale of a thief who replaces the first-injured and then-deceased Lord Shingen Takeda so as to keep the Lord's many enemies convinced that this military genius still lives.

The American financing came about because of the scale of the final battle sequence, though even that sequence surprises us in how all that money is deployed on the screen. Akira Kurosawa was a master of surprise, among many other things. The cinematography is terrific throughout, whether for that doom-laden final battle or for an eerie dream sequence experienced by the thief or for the shadows-and-silhouettes used to indicate battle throughout.

Kurosawa also pulls off the difficult feat of giving us a movie with only one truly likable character, the thief -- and even he is a flawed creature. There's a certain elegiac quality to the proceedings as we see the warfare of the Middle Ages give way to gunpowder and cannons. But Kurosawa undercuts his elegy with both the brutal realities of combat and with the characterization of those lords and retainers still committed to the old ways: in the end, they are deluded and, in their conduct towards the thief, an ungrateful lot of upper-class pricks.

Of Kurosawa's many films involving pre-20th-century Samurai culture, this may be the least. It's certainly the most intimate, despite that giant battle sequence. Even if the least, it's Kurosawa, which beats the best of most everyone else. Kagemusha haunts one in a more mundane way than the supernaturally tinged Throne of Blood, in a less spectacular way than Ran or Seven Samurai. But it definitely haunts, especially in its last tragic, absurd shot. Highly recommended.