The Post (2017)

The Post (2017): written by Josh Singer and Liz Hannah; directed by Steven Spielberg; starring Meryl Streep (Kay Graham), Tom Hanks (Ben Bradlee), Sarah Paulson (Tony Bradlee), Bob Odenkirk (Ben Bagdikian), Bradley Whitford (Arthur Parsons), Bruce Greenwood (Robert McNamara), Matthew Rhys (Daniel Ellsberg), Alison Brie (Lally Graham), and Carrie Coon (Meg Greenfield): 

Steven Spielberg pays homage to the specific (All the President's Men) and the general (the look and feel and film stock of 1970's films) in this solid, occasionally inspired take on the release of the Pentagon Papers by first the New York Times and then the Washington Post. Spielberg has also fashioned a paean to investigative journalism that is as timely as it is inspiring. 

The cast ticks along nicely, though I don't think Tom Hanks has quite the brash, Kennedy-style machismo of the real Ben Bradlee. Meryl Streep is terrific as Post owner Katherine Graham, finding her way and her voice in a world of mostly dismissive old white men. The film does a nice job of laying out the relevance of Daniel Ellsberg's release of what were soon dubbed The Pentagon Papers, the malignity of the Nixon White House, and the rumpled majesty of 1970's investigative journalists, especially Bob Odenkirk. It's not a great movie, but it is a good one. Recommended.

Ready Player One (2018)

Ready Player One (2018): adapted from the Ernest Cline novel by Zak Penn and Ernest Cline; directed by Steven Spielberg; starring Tye Sheridan (Wade/ Parzival), Olivia Cooke (Samantha/ Atr3mis), Ben Mendelsohn (Forgettable Corporate Villain), Lena Waithe (Helen/ Aech), T.J. Miller (I-R0k), Mark Rylance (Halliday), and Simon Pegg (Ogden Morrow): 

Steven Spielberg's latest is also the latest in a now never-ending stream of movies to Break the Internet, Ready Player One is an enjoyable, slight adventure that improves upon the novel by virtue of being able to show some of the adventures inside virtual reality. 

Our boilerplate young hero, aged-up to 18 from high-school age and made slim because God forbid some goddamned fat kid should be the hero of a $175 million movie, wanders the virtual reality Oasis in a dystopic, corporate-controlled future. 

He's on a quest to find three Easter Eggs left in the Oasis by its late creator (Mark Rylance, game as ever but woefully too old for the role). He teams up with four other freedom-fighting young whippersnappers online and then in the real world to find the Eggs and gain control of the Oasis before nightmarish corporation IOI wins the hunt and puts ads everywhere. I guess. Net neutrality forever!

A sequence set 'inside' Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is the showstopper, after which things seem to go on forever to rapidly decreasing effect. That Spielberg and company added a gratuitous, lengthy, real-world car chase intercut with the virtual climax of the movie isn't so much gilding the lily as it is covering it in lead. 

Ben Mendlesohn is about as forgettable a corporate villain as one can imagine, which seems to be the point. That his online avatar appears to be the Berni Wrightson-designed Captain Sternn from the Heavy Metal movie just seems baffling. Due to rights issues, the entire film takes place in an alternate future in which Disney, Marvel, and Star Wars never existed. Lightly recommended.

The War of the Worlds (2005)

The War of the Worlds (2005): adapted by David Koepp and Josh Friedman from the novel by H.G. Wells; directed by Steven Spielberg; starring Tom Cruise (Ray Ferrier), Dakota Fanning (Rachel Ferrier), Justin Chatwin (Robbie Ferrier), Tim Robbins (Harlan Ogilvy), and Miranda Otto (Mary Ann): 

Spielberg and company's so-so, 9/11-inflected update of H.G. Wells' seminal tale of alien invasion has some nice moments between about the 20- and 80-minute mark. Unfortunately, the movie features two of the most annoying offspring in film history for Tom Cruise to bond with during an alien invasion because alien invasions just aren't interesting unless they involve Steven Spielberg's go-to trope, The Absent Father.

It's important for Spielberg, as Old Hollywood's last air-bending Avatar, to remind us that even when billions of humans are literally getting dusted, as in 'turned to dust,' FAMILY IS THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS. 

And what a family! They're so great that the kids' grandparents live on the only street in Boston that doesn't get destroyed by marauding alien tripods who thirst for human blood to... fertilize their plants? I think Wells really nailed the concept of 'Keep it simple, stupid'  by having the Martians suck human blood out of people for their own dining pleasure, and not to feed their high-fructose corn crop. 

The tripods look nice. The redesign of the tentacled creatures of Wells' novel sucks, though. They look like teddy-bear versions of the aliens from Independence Day. Tim Robbins is wasted playing a guy who's somehow found safe haven in the basement of a house located about three feet from a major battle between aliens and the U.S. military. 

Tom Cruise plays Tom Cruise. He's supposed to be an unlikeable cad who LEARNS BETTER, but he mainly seems justified in his animosity towards his annoying children. He also turns out to be the most competent man in the world, single-handedly taking down an invulnerable tripod with a hand grenade, among other things. Yet he doesn't know his ten-year-old daughter is allergic to peanuts! Ha ha! Absent Dad, you are such a card.

With about 30 minutes to go, the film-makers seem to lose interest in their story, sticking us in that basement with Tim Robbins for an eternity before rushing through the last 15 minutes of the film like holiday travelers with a plane to catch. Oh, well. The ferry scene is pretty swell, as are the early city scenes with the tripods rising out of the ground. Lightly recommended.

Spielberg (2017)

Spielberg (2017): directed by Susan Lacy: Earnest HBO hagiography of Steven Spielberg dishes almost no dirt, almost no critiques of his work, and almost no mentions of the writers who wrote many of his finest movies. Welcome to Hollywood Auteurism 101. 

It's nonetheless an often engaging film, especially as it lays out Spielberg's childhood and the increasingly strained and then broken relationship of his mother and father that led to Spielberg being estranged from his father for more than a decade. Don't look for a discussion of Always, though. Lightly recommended.

Close Encounters of the Cthulhu Kind

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: written by Paul Schrader and Steven Spielberg; directed by Steven Spielberg; starring Richard Dreyfus (Roy Neary), Francois Truffaut (Lacombe), Melinda Dillon (Jillian Guiler), Bob Balaban (Laughlin), and Teri Garr (Ronnie Neary( (1977): It's amazing how much Close Encounters of the Third Kind plays like a horror movie for much of its length -- indeed, like an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu." The film moves from location to location to show various strange events and mysteries that occur across the planet. There's a documentary feel to the location work and the narrative structure, as mysterious U.N. investigators led by Francois Truffaut and Bob Balaban travel the Earth to investigate UFO-related incidents. 

In the purposefully mundane domestic sequences that focus on dissatisfied husband and father Richard Dreyfus and single mother Melinda Dillon, we see Spielberg and uncredited screenwriter Paul Schrader ground the movie in the day-to-day life of working-class Americans. And then the UFO's show up and gradually change everything. And as with many of the characters in "The Call of Cthulhu," Dillon and Dreyfus are tormented by nightmares and visions as the alien arrival on Earth approaches.

I don't know that either Schrader or Spielberg ever read "The Call of Cthulhu." It has such a sturdy narrative approach to the creation of globe-spanning cosmic horror that it's more of a surprise that more film-makers haven't stumbled upon the approach before. The main difference here being that the story is ultimately about the arrival on Earth of friendly aliens and not all-conquering alien monsters. But the aliens do enough odd things along the way that a certain measure of fear recurs throughout the movie, most notably when aliens kidnap Dillon's young son for reasons that are as murky as anything else when it comes to possible alien motivation.

The arrival of the UFO's at the conclusion of the film stands as a high point of practical, non-CGI visual effects. It's a showcase of model work, cloud tanks, mattes, and an assortment of other 'tricks' honed to near-perfection during the non-CGI years. It's also a beautiful-looking climax, with its glowing alien spacecraft set off against the night sky and the looming stump of the mountainous Devil's Tower.

The Lovecraftian melding of documentary-style attention to detail and the unfolding of revelations to increasingly weirded-out protagonists serve Spielberg's vision well. The acting is solid throughout and, in the case of Truffaut's visionary, quite charming. What the aliens are doing doesn't necessarily make much sense, and there are some groaners in the dialogue towards the end (an exchange about Einstein is especially dumb). But overall, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is still a splendid movie, and one that probably would never be made in today's marketplace. Highly recommended.

The Call of Cthulhu: adapted by Sean Branney from the story by H.P. Lovecraft; directed by Andrew Leman; starring Matt Foyer (Narrator), Ralph Lucas (Professor Angell), Patrick O'Day (Johansen), and David Mersault (Inspector Legrasse) (2005): The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS)'s first long-form foray into film-making is now 10 years old and still dandy. An amateur film made for a pittance, it outshines most professional horror movies with far larger budgets both in its faithfulness to its source material and in its aesthetic pleasures.

Lovecraft's seminal Cthulhu Mythos novella saw publication in 1926. HPLHS adapted the novella under the conceit that it had been adapted for film in its publication year. Thus, The Call of Cthulhu is a silent movie that looks and acts like a silent movie, right down to the occasional defects in the viewing experience (dig that hair on the lens in the early going!). 

We do get an excellent musical score, so one can either assume that one is in a 1926 film theatre with live music or that The Call of Cthulhu has had a score added for its 'modern' release. Whatever suspends your disbelief. But The Call of Cthulhu isn't simply an homage to the film-making tropes of the late Silent Era: it's a compelling horror movie in its own right. 

Clever visual riffs on Van Gogh and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari seem appropriate to the subject matter; the stop-motion Cthulhu we see towards the end of the film is a terrific use of period-appropriate visual effects that actually manages to be disquieting as it lurches across the screen. Model and prop work are also beautiful throughout the movie, with a couple of different yet equally disquieting Cthulhu idols and a terrific approximation of Cthulhu's home/prison R'lyeh, risen from the waves for a brief moment.

It's a worthwhile expenditure of an hour to watch The Call of Cthulhu. Would that big-budget horror and fantasy movies showed this level of skill and artistry. Highly recommended.

That's Entertainment 2.0

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (2011): This YA, nominally science-fictional novel by Ernest Cline screamed 'Adapt me, Hollywood!' as soon as it came out. And indeed Hollywood came, and Spielberg directs for a 2017 release. It's a shame, I think, that Spielberg choice -- Edgar Wright could probably make a movie better than the book by putting a noticeable spin of satire on things. He could certainly match or exceed its manic, mindless metafictionality.

We start in Oklahoma City in the 2040's, in an America gone to ground in the ruins of its apathy and decayed infrastructure. Pretty much everyone, rich and poor, spends a lot of time inside the OASIS, a Massively Multiplayer Online Everything created by a reclusive and now deceased billionaire genius. Upon his death, that genius created a contest. Whoever wins the contest wins his company and his fortune, the latter somewhere in the mid-100 billions. Years go by, the contest unsolved. And then, one day, our orphaned, poor, plucky protagonist figures out the first stage of the contest. And we're off.

Because the billionaire obsessed over the pop culture of his childhood, everyone who's anyone is now an expert on pop culture from the 1960's to the 1980's, from video games to types of sugary breakfast cereal, from Japan and the United States and Great Britain, from Family Ties to Ultraman. They have to be experts. A detailed knowledge of the band Rush may be vital to winning the contest.*

Ready Player One has its charms. It's relentlessly entertaining and tightly plotted within its extraordinarily familiar plot outlines. The pop-culture references are sometimes fun. Some of the near-future, dystopian world-building is inspired. The world has burned itself out, and no one even bothers trying any more. When one can escape into a candy-coloured Matrix of near-infinite entertainment, the world outside can go to hell. A gifted science-fiction writer could do a lot with a world in which the Real has disintegrated while the Unreal has flourished. Cline isn't that gifted a writer. And besides, he wants you to have FUN.

Oh, FUN. This is indeed a novel of endless entertainment. Its own plot beats and characterization are almost doubly Meta: everyone in the novel knows about Star Wars and Dungeon and Dragons and Harry Potter and The Matrix. That our orphaned protagonist is a cross between Luke Skywalker and Neo and Harry Potter can't really be complained about in a novel that acknowledges all those influences throughout. Or can it?

Well, entertainment! Our protagonist Wade (or his online avatar Parsival, if you prefer) exists in a flattened-out world of popular though often geek-centric entertainment. You're not going to get any high-culture references here. Well, you get one Shakespeare quote, but that's because the play and the game share the same name of [The] Tempest. There are a lot of giant robots, and giant robots are cool. There's a lengthy section devoted to Rush's 2112 with nary a mention of Ayn Rand. There's a lengthy section devoted to Blade Runner which pays lip service to the idea that the genius recluse's favourite novelist was Philip K. Dick, but there's no trace of Dick's novels or short stories, much less his sensibilities, in the novel.

This is a Fun Machine. Welcome to it. There's a brief moment towards the end when what had begun to seem to me to be the best possible climax for the novel seems to manifest itself. But then it doesn't. This is exactly the sort of genre work driven by David Langford's Plot Coupons and the search for them that we've seen a million times before. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But there's nothing here of meaning. There's nothing aesthetically challenging. There's nothing Sublime. Ready Player One is all Cracker and no Jack.

The real-world sections are William-Gibson-lite; the OASIS sections are so saturated with pop culture that by the end, you may feel a need to read or watch something difficult, whether that's a Bergman movie or a stretch of writing by James Joyce, just to reconnect with the idea that there's more to art than entertainment. The novel even makes Monty Python unsubversive. Ready Player One could be one of the disturbingly simplistic, perfectly immersive melodramas that humanity drowns the best part of itself within, in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. It's exhaustive. It's exhausting. But by God, you will bloody well be entertained. Recommended.


*Spoiler Alert: It is.

Shaper of Worlds

He is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson (2009), edited by Christopher Conlon with an Introduction by Ramsey Campbell, containing the following stories:

Throttle by Joe Hill and Stephen King
Recalled by F. Paul Wilson
I Am Legend, Too by Mick Garris
Two Shots from Fly's Photo Gallery by John Shirley
The Diary of Louise Carey by Thomas F. Monteleone
She Screech Like Me by Michael A. Arnzen
Everything of Beauty Taken from You in This Life Remains Forever by Gary A. Braunbeck
The Case of Peggy Ann Lister by John Maclay
Zachry Revisited by William F. Nolan
Comeback by Ed Gorman
An Island Unto Himself by Barry Hoffman
Venturi by Richard Christian Matheson
Quarry by Joe R. Lansdale
Return to Hell House by Nancy A. Collins
Cloud Rider by Whitley Strieber 

Award-winning, enjoyable anthology celebrating the late, great Richard Matheson, whose horror and suspense work in print, in movies, and on TV helped define horror and suspense for two generations of readers and viewers.  Duel; The Shrinking Man; Hell House; I Am Legend; What Dreams May Come; Stir of Echoes; Somewhere in Time; episodes of The Twilight Zone, including the William Shatner-on-a-plane "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" remade with John Lithgow in The Twilight Zone movie; adaptations of Poe for Roger Corman's film studio: these are just some of Matheson's contributions to pop culture. 

The stories include homages, sequels, revisionist takes, and riffs on Mathesonian ideas. "Cloud Rider" by Whitley Strieber is the wildest riff in the anthology, inspired as it is by Matheson's entire Collected Stories. The other stories are a bit more specific.

Standouts include Nancy Collins' novella-length prequel to Hell House, that inspired haunted-house story of the 1960's. Collins shows us the events that preceded those in Matheson's novel, to good effect. Mick Garris also offers a prequel in "I Am Legend, Too," and it also offers a revisionist take on the original Matheson novel's vampire-fighting protagonist from the POV of his vampiric next-door neighbour. "She Screech Like Me" by Michael A. Arnzen effectively extends Matheson's stunning debut story, "Born of Man and Woman," while "The Diary of Louise Carey" by Thomas F. Monteleone retells The Shrinking Man from the viewpoint of his increasingly beleaguered, non-shrinking wife.

The venerable William F. Nolan offers a short, brutal sequel to another Matheson horror story, while Joe Lansdale presents a sequel/sidequel to Matheson's "Prey" -- a.k.a. the Matheson story adapted for the TV movie Trilogy of Terror, in which Karen Black does battle with a tiny, violent, highly animated African fetish doll in her own apartment. And Stephen King and son Joe Hill (King) collaborate on a story for the first time, a riff on "Duel" that involves a motorcycle gang and a transport truck instead of the original's station-wagon-driving salesman and a monster of a truck.

Overall, this is a fittingly strong anthology to honour such a major figure in the modern history of fantasy. As Ramsey Campbell notes in his introduction, Matheson helped move horror out of Gothic castles and into suburban bedrooms and America's endless blacktop highways. And because Matheson worked in television and movies so much after 1960, his works reached much larger audiences than those generally afforded writers of prose. Recommended.

Truck Monster

Duel: adapted by Richard Matheson from his novella; directed by Steven Spielberg; starring Dennis Weaver (David Mann) (1971): The late, great Richard Matheson adapted his own novella for this television movie, one of the first (and best) things ever directed by Steven Spielberg. Hitched to a great script, the young Spielberg pretty much shoots out the lights in this gripping, terse tale of Man vs. Truck(driver). David Mann vs. Truck(driver), actually.

Dennis 'McCloud' Weaver plays David Mann, a frustrated California travelling salesman driving through California's scrub brush and deserts to make an appointment. He's having problems at home, centered around his wife's perception of him as something of a nebbish. Then he innocently passes a slow-moving truck. All hell follows.

You can view this a great thriller with a sub-text that deals with a modern man's battle with his own feelings of inadequacy and emasculation. You can view this as a thriller of paranoia and terror, as the early stages of Mann's battle with the truck-driver (never fully glimpsed at any point during the movie) repeatedly put Mann in situations in which no one believes that he's in a duel to the death with a crazy person.

Weaver is flat-out terrific, sympathetic and squirmy. Screenwriters aspiring or otherwise should look at this film as a model of how to effectively use voiceover narration in a movie. We're privy to Mann's internal dialogue at points, and it's beautifully done. The scenery is suitably deserted. The truck, as much a character as Weaver, is about as sinister a vehicle as one could want, grimy and menacing and way, way too fast for its weight class.

Duel taps into very specific fears related to driving, and driving around large trucks. But it's also rich and wide-ranging in its use of fear and suspense. There are moments that have the quality of a nightmare, and suspense scenes that Spielberg would never surpass in all his later years of film-making.

In a way, this is a companion piece to two of Matheson's great 1950's novels that were adapted into movies, The Shrinking Man and I am Legend. Both dealt with self-doubting masculinity left virtually alone to confront some mounting horror. Taken together, they form a triptych, though I am Legend has never received a satisfactory film adaptation in the way the other two have. Highly recommended.

Short Rounds

Ten Tales Calculated to Give you Shudders (1972): edited by Ross Olney containing the following stories: Sweets to the Sweet (1947) by Robert Bloch; The Waxwork (1931) by A. M. Burrage; Used Car (1932) by H. Russell Wakefield; The Inexperienced Ghost (1896) by H. G. Wells; The Whistling Room (1910) by William Hope Hodgson; The Last Drive (1933) by Carl Jacobi; The Monkey's Paw (1902) by W. W. Jacobs; Second Night Out (1933) by Frank Belknap Long; The Hills Beyond Furcy (1966) by Robert G. Anderson; and Floral Tribute (1949) by Robert Bloch.

This little reprint anthology was a staple of my childhood, and probably the childhood of a lot of other Americans and Canadians, given that it was a Whitman book for older kids, or 'Young Adults' as the publishing industry now names them.

And it's a very good ten-story assortment, though the inclusion of two Robert Bloch stories, the second one a bit of Bradburyian supernatural nostalgia that won't make anyone shudder, seems odd. Maybe Olney and Bloch were buddies. Other than that oddity, the selection can stand beside that of pretty much any decades-spanning anthology I can think of. It's certainly still relevant today. I wonder if Wakefield's story is the first haunted used-car story? Recommended.

　

Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks (1987) by Richard Christian Matheson containing the following stories: Third Wind; The Good Always Comes Back; Sentences; Unknown Drives; Timed Exposure; Obsolete; Red; Beholder; Dead End; Commuters; Graduation; Conversation Piece; Echoes; Incorporation; Hell; Break-Up; Mr. Right; Cancelled; Mugger; The Dark Ones; Holiday; Vampire; Intruder; Dust; Goosebumps; Mobius; Where There's a Will; and Magic Saturday.

Horror and fantasy great Richard Matheson's son Richard Christian Matheson is no slouch either, having carved out a prominent career for himself in television, movies, and short stories by the time he was 30.

Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks is the younger Matheson's first collection of short stories (and one teleplay for Amazing Stories). As he pretty much specialized in very short stories, there's quite a range of stories included here, with supernatural horror, realistic horror, science fiction, and gentle whimsy all showing up. And one disturbing narrative that doubles as a poem ("Vampire").

The impact of such short stories requires a certain type of writer: terse and concise in his style, imaginative and unusual in the subjects he deals with and the POV he uses to view those subjects. Matheson is astonishingly good at these things at a very young age, an engaging mutation from the schools of O. Henry and Dennis Etchison (who provides one of the two glowing-with-praise forewords, the other coming from a similarly enthusiastic Stephen King). Recommended.

Lincoln Tempermental

Lincoln: written by Tony Kushner, based partially on Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin; directed by Steven Spielberg; starring Daniel Day Lewis (Abraham Lincoln), Sally Field (Mary Todd Lincoln), David Straitharn (William Seward), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Robert Lincoln), James Spader (W.N. Bilbo), Tommy Lee Jones (Thaddeus Stevens) and Hal Holbrook (Preston Blair) (2012): Spielberg and Kushner put together a movie that would have made Stanley Kramer (Judgement at Nuremberg, Inherit the Wind) proud, as it engages history in a most Kramerian way: it deploys an all-star cast playing real, or at least based-on-real, people; and the movie positively bristles with lengthy, literate speeches in the service of explaining historical events, political gamesmanship, and ideological viewpoints.

Lincoln focuses on a couple of months towards the end of the American Civil War, as Lincoln jockeys to get the anti-slavery 13th Amendment passed by Congress before the war ends, and brings dozens of pro-slavery Southern congressmen back into the U.S. government. To do so requires pretty much every political trick available to Lincoln, most notably the appointment of out-going Democratic congressmen to governmental patronage jobs in exchange for their 'Yes' votes. With the November elections over, but the new congressmen not slated to take over their seats until March, much of Lincoln's strategy relies on these lame-duck political opponents.

Lincoln also knows that the war is all but over: the industrial North has begun to overwhelm the South. And a diplomatic party of Rebel politicians is on its way to negotiate a peace settlement. And so the need for speed and expediency increases, as does the need for political shenanigans in the service of a greater good.

Lincoln does a fine job of laying out the various factions in this fight. The radical abolitionists of the North want more than just the 13th Amendment, and they want it now. But trying for more will almost undoubted cause the anti-slavery movement to lose everything. And so Lincoln has to create a temporary voting coalition from disparate parts.

I think this is a very good movie about the pragmatic idealism of Lincoln and, by extension, other great politicians. Daniel Day-Lewis disappears into the role, his Lincoln a somewhat high-voiced man who slouches a lot because he's taller than everyone around him. The other actors, especially Tommy Lee Jones as a radical abolitionist whose influence is needed and Sally Field as the distressed and vitriolic Mary Todd Lincoln, deliver fine performances.

Spielberg keeps his showiness to a minimum in service to the story: the chief stylistic device here is the abundance of low-lighting scenes that show just how physically dark the mid-19th century was after the sun went down. Metaphorically speaking, the characters are all submerged not only in the fog of war, but in the crepuscular world of political manuevering, a world where the sun never rises or sets completely.

One of the interesting things that comes out, in terms of parallels to today's politics, is that small land-owning farmers were often against slavery because the slave plantations were the original Factory Farms. Their cheap labour allowed them to steamroll small farmers. It's funny how circumstances change and remain the same in certain areas. Well, not funny 'Ha ha.' Recommended.