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: 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): 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:
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.
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): 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): 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): 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.
