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.
Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. (2007): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Stuart Immonen and Wade Grawbadger: Warren Ellis' brilliant, fractured satire of all things superhero somehow got 12 issues from Marvel in 2007, possibly because Ellis was and is such a popular, ostensibly sort-of mainstream writer of superheroes.
With Stuart Immonen on art, best known for fine work on Superman and other DC characters, Ellis crafts a Marvel book that feels more like a revisionist DC book -- Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol most specifically, from the late 1980's and early 1990's. Nextwave is a bit more Juvenalian in its satire, though -- the heroes are pissier and the metacommentary doesn't show much love for the weirdness of the characters it lampoons.
A lot of those weird characters -- Machine Man, Fin Fang Foom, Devil Dinosaur -- are oddballs from one of Jack Kirby's stints at Marvel. Some are riffs on 'real' Marvel characters from the pages of Dr. Strange. H.A.T.E. parodies S.H.I.E.L.D.. Ellis even brings characters previously seen only in the pages of Marvel's short-lived superhero parody comic Not Brand Ecch! on stage, with ridiculous results.
The Nextwave team itself consists of has-beens and never-weres, most prominently Monica Rambeau, Marvel's second Captain Marvel, then Photon, now just going by her real name. Machine Man also now goes by his civilian name. The Captain is one or another or possibly all of those lesser-known characters who used 'Captain' in their superhero monikers. There's a minor X-Men/X-Force superheroine with a major shop-lifting habit and the ability to make things explode by pointing at them. And there's Lady Bloodstone, daughter of a really minor 1970's Marvel monster-hunter and Doc Savage knock off.
It's funny and nasty if you know all the characters and situations Ellis chooses to pummel. It's hilarious if you don't. As Ellis pummels many of his own superhero writing tics, it all seems fair among the figurative and literal blood-letting. Immonen is an able collaborator, looser and more cartoony than I remember him, shining especially in stretches that parody the art styles of others and in a series of two-page action spreads that are both dynamic and completely ridiculous. Tik tik tik BOOM! Highly recommended.
Spider-Man 3 (2007): based on characters created by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee; written by Sam Raimi, Ivan Raimi, and Alvin Sargent; directed by Sam Raimi; starring Tobey Maguire (Peter Parker/ Spider-Man), Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane Watson), James Franco (Harry Osborne), Thomas Haden Church (Flint Marko/ Sandman), Topher Grace (Eddie Brock/ Venom), Bryce Dallas Howard (Gwen Stacy), James Cromwell (Captain Stacy), Dylan Baker (Dr. Curt Connors), Rosemary Harris (Aunt May), and J.K. Simmons (J. Jonah Jameson):
11 more years of superhero movies have made Spider-Man 3 seem a lot more charming now than it did at the time. The studio forced director/co-writer Sam Raimi to shoehorn 1980's Spider-Man villain Venom into a story that already had Sandman and Harry Osborn as antagonists for Peter Parker's spidery alter ego. And oh boy, what a clumsy shoehorn it is!
The result does strongly suggest that Sam Raimi pretty much said 'To hell with you!' at this point, forced to give us a tale of Peter Parker briefly 'going bad' under the influence of the alien symbiote/black costume. While he's bad, Peter Parker looks and acts like a sort of Emo Beatnik. He dances. He snaps his fingers. He plays the piano. Wow!
Sam Raimi's desire to be done with superhero movies also seems to be in full evidence. Spider-Man 3 opens and closes with a musical number. The motivations of villain Sandman are murky. A retcon of the murder of Peter's Uncle Ben has been inserted because everything has to be personal for superheroes. The Sandman himself generally looks and acts a lot like the sandstorms in the first two Brendan Fraser Mummy movies.
Oh, well. Tobey Maguire is still mopey and perky as Peter and Spidey. Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane is now a thankless wet blanket of a role. James Franco just looks stoned all the time as Harry Osborn. As in Spider-Man 2, the action climax ends on a note of forgiveness rather than all-out punchiness. In today's superhero world, that last choice still seems fresh and important, and the makers of Spider-Man: Homecoming seem to have realized that with the ending of their NuSpider-man movie. In all, lightly recommended yet almost incongruously entertaining.
The Deceased (1999) by Tom Piccirilli: The late and much-lamented Tom Piccirilli's early horror novels were uniquely strange. Strange events, strange creatures, strange protagonists. The simplest of plot-lines could suddenly stop dead for disturbingly violent and/or sexual set-pieces. Characters might spend pages immersed in their own poetic maladjustment. The prose would push the limits of the purple and the florid, sometimes going way, way beyond the red-line. And it all worked as the expression of someone who wanted more out of the horror novel than simply plain prose and A-Z plotting.
The Deceased embodies Piccirilli's approach to horror. Indeed, there's almost no point describing it in all its pulpy, poetic, weird glory. It's about a young horror writer wrestling with the demons of his terrible past. Some of those demons are deceased members of his own family. There's pathetic fallacy and incest and tips on writing (seriously). There are strange things in the forest surrounding the ancestral home. There's that ancestral home with its weird construction and hideous facade. There are ghosts and monsters and voices from the past.
To borrow a phrase from somebody, it's all a bravura frenzy. It's also the sort of writing that seems to drive a certain type of reader, one looking for the straightforward and the plain style, completely nuts. You're watching a gifted writer assemble and disassemble himself simultaneously. It may not always be pretty, coherent, or even 'good' in a traditional sense, but it's compelling and very human. Recommended.
The Midnight Road (2007) by Tom Piccirilli: 40ish Flynn is a case-worker for New York City's Child Protective Services. He's a broken soul due to childhood tragedy. But he's also dogged and committed to child welfare. And a huge fan of film noir. So of course he gets involved in a noirish case with hints of (possible) supernatural horror.
The late Tom Piccirilli wrote a string of noirish thrillers beginning in the early oughts. This is one of them. It lacks the exuberant stylistic flourishes of some of his earlier horror works, but it's plotted beautifully, with twists that are difficult to see coming.
Flynn is very much the damaged would-be knight of noir and hard-boiled detective stories, emotionally stunted but heroically struggling against demons inside and outside. The character's own investment in noir makes for a sort of running meta-commentary on the action, as Flynn notes ways in which his own story does or does not resemble the noir films he loves so much.
Piccirilli tamps down his stylistic flourishes for, I assume, reasons of commercial viability: a person has to eat. But they also suit the noir and hard-boiled genres he's working with. Stylistic outliers like James Ellroy exist, but for the most part the hard-boiled heroes and anti-heroes and straight-out villains of Piccirilli's genre antecedents work within a world of flavourful but not wildly experimental or impressionistic prose.
The result is that old chestnut, a page-turner, one which doesn't end until Flynn has dealt with his internal demons. The identities of the antagonists come as a shock, but a fair one. Flynn, sympathetic and self-lacerating, makes for a fine protagonist. And touches of the absurd -- Flynn finds himself haunted by the talking ghost of a French bulldog, probably the result of slight brain damage incurred early in the novel. In all, a very satisfying ride on The Midnight Road. Recommended.
The Imago Sequence and Other Stories by Laird Barron (Collected 2007) containing the following stories: Old Virginia (2003); Shiva, Open Your Eye (2001); Procession of the Black Sloth (2007); Bulldozer (2004); Proboscis (2005); Hallucigenia (2006); Parallax (2005); The Royal Zoo is Closed (2006); and The Imago Sequence (2005):
Not the first, not the second, but the third time I've read this collection in the last four years. So I guess I like it. I'll add only that the third reading allowed the connections among the stories to stand out more in my mind.
And Barron's generally-doomed tough-guy protagonists sometimes bring to mind some of Jim Thompson's characters along the same lines, though Thompson's characters didn't have to deal with screamingly awful occult menaces. I sort of wish Barron would write a story in which one of his tough, morally dubious protagonists beats a Shoggoth to death with a shovel. That would be awesome. Highly recommended.
