Hidden Figures (2016): adapted by Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi from the non-fiction book by Margot Lee Shetterly; directed by Theodore Melfi; starring Taraji P. Henson (Katherine Johnson/Goble), Octavia Spencer (Dorothy Vaughan), Janelle Monae (Mary Jackson), Kevin Costner (Al Harrison), Kirsten Dunst (Vivian Mitchell), Jim Parsons (Paul Stafford), and Glen Powell (John Glenn): How does Taraji P. Henson not get a nomination for this? Oscar noms for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer) and Best Adapted Screenplay have been given to this fine docudrama.
Does it play fast and loose with the facts, especially in compressing 15 years worth of events into two years? Well, yeah. So, too, so many other docudramas and biopics. It is a bit of a drag, though, to discover that with a wealth of real-life racist moments to draw upon, the film-makers chose to invent certain incidents and exaggerate others so as to get their desired response.
Hidden Figures presents the Space Race as a thrilling exercise in math, engineering, and race relations. How great is that? Less great is the hour or so devoted to boilerplate domestic melodrama. We can get boilerplate domestic melodrama from almost any Hollywood film. We can't get realistic space stuff. So it goes. A spoonful of sugar for the audience.
The acting is superb, from Kevin Costner's (composite) team leader of NASA Langley's mathematicians striving to put an American in space and in orbit to the aforementioned Henson as pioneering NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, the African-American mathematician who helped put Americans into orbit and on the Moon. Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae also do terrific work as an African-American computer-team leader and engineer, respectively. It's a movie about the thrill of intelligence and lofty aspirations, dominated by women. Recommended.
Wonder Woman (2017): based on characters created by William Moulton Marston, H.G. Peter, George Perez, and others; written by Allan Heinberg, Jason Fuchs, and Zack Snyder; directed by Patty Jenkins; starring Gal Gadot (Diana), Chris Pine (Steve Trevor), Connie Nielsen (Hippolyta), Robin Wright (Antiope), Danny Huston (Ludendorff), David Thewlis (Sir Patrick), and Elena Anaya (Dr. Poison):
Director Patty Jenkins and screenwriter Allan Heinberg go back to Richard Donner's first Superman movie for inspiration (among other sources). The result is a crowd-pleaser with a female superhero. It may go on just about one climax too many, but overall Wonder Woman is a delight, as is Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman. A relative unknown, she shows the star power and charm of that other relative unknown, Christopher Reeve. The film-makers even figured out how to make WW's boy-pal Steve Trevor interesting.
I do miss certain elements of the original (to comics) island of the Amazons, which possessed some pretty trippy 1940's attributes (high technology, invisible planes, giant riding kangaroos called Kangas). Superheroes should be rooted in the fantastic moreso than in the realistic or realistically imagined, though I realize I'm probably in the minority on this. These are children's characters. The more Wonder the better.
The BluRay has some pretty decent featurettes on it, though none on WW creator William Moulton Marston and unacknowledged (starting with the credit-hungry Marston himself) co-creator, artist H.G. Peter. Shame! Recommended.
The Bojeffries Saga: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Steve Parkhouse (1983-1991, 2013; Collected 2013): At less than 100 pages, The Bojeffries Saga is a short collection that's a lot of fun. The original series of short stories about the Bojeffries clan appeared in the early 1980's; it wasn't until this volume in 2013 that writer Alan Moore and artist Steve Parkhouse finished up these adventures with a final (for now) 24-page story. Parkhouse is a winning, droll cartoonist. He's perfectly suited to Alan Moore in satiric-comic mode, as he is here.
The Bojeffries are a very English riff on the Addams Family or the Munsters, a family of freaks and monsters living mostly unnoticed among normal people. Their ranks include a werewolf, a vampire, a nigh-omnipotent woman, and a Lovecraftian thing that used to be Grandpa living in a well in the backyard.
Moore was already experimenting with comics form in the early 1980's -- there's a 'musical' installment, and one structured as a series of photographs with captions. The humour is cutting when it comes to racial and social issues, but there's an essential sweetness to the proceedings, especially when it comes to the malaprop-spewing, poodle-devouring werewolf. Recommended.
Golden-Age Wonder Woman Archives Volume 6: written by William Moulton Marston, Joye Murchison, and Robert Kanigher; illustrated by Harry G. Peter (1945; collected 2010): The adventures of Wonder Woman in the 1940's were often whimsical fantasies with an edge and with barely disguised kinkiness. Wonder Woman tells us on more than one occasion in this volume that people need to submit to love. And there is of course a whole lotta bondage going on. So much bondage. So very much bondage.
Wonder Woman's creator, William Moulton Marston, was in increasingly poor health by the time of the stories in this volume, and he only writes a handful of stories. But the volume does bring us stories written by one of the first female writers in the history of the American comic book, Joye Murchison. And they're a lot of weird fun, immeasurably aided by the odd, almost Art Nouveau cartooning of WW co-creator Harry G. Peter. Peter was one of the most distinctive and original artists of Golden-Age American superhero comics, and his off-beat style made for a perfect fit with the off-beat writing.
Wonder Woman's mix of science fiction, fantasy, and war-time adventure continues in this volume. A grenade-tossing Nazi agent invades the world of Fairy and starts terrorizing the leprechauns. Killer plants stalk the streets of Washington. The garden of Eden waits beneath the ice of the North Pole. Mermen from Neptune invade the Earth. It's all fanciful, odd stuff, and a lot more interesting than the concurrent adventures of the male super-heroes of the Golden Age, with the exception of the equally fantastic and whimsical original Captain 'Shazam!' Marvel. Though Etta Candy, Wonder Woman's Jar Jar Binks, takes some getting used to. Recommended.
