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.

Deadpool 2 (2018)

Deadpool 2 (2018): written by Paul Wernick and Rhett Rheese and Ryan Reynolds; based on characters created by Fabian Nicieza, Rob Liefeld, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Len Wein, David Cockrum, Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, and others; directed by David Leitch; starring Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson /Deadpool, Josh Brolin as Nathan Summers /Cable, Zazie Beetz as Neena Thurman /Domino, T.J. Miller as Jack "Weasel" Hammer, Brianna Hildebrand as Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Stefan Kapičić as Colossus (voice), Julian Dennison as Rusty Collins /Fire Fist, Morena Baccarin as Vanessa Carlyle, Shiori Kutsuna as Yoiki, and Terry Crews as Bedlam:

Deadpool 2 pretty much picks up where Deadpool left off, sarcastically and metafictionally trashing superheroes in general and the X-Men in particular as it follows the adventures of super-assassin Deadpool. The X-Men's Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead are back, along with characters familiar to comics fans and unknown to the general public from the time-travelling Cable (Josh Brolin, relaxing after playing Thanos) to such early 1990's Marvel superhero duds as Bedlam and Shatterstar. 

Is it better than Deadpool? Probably, at least for people acquainted with much of the source material. It's still desperately sentimental when it comes to the love story involving Deadpool and Vanessa despite all the sex-toy jokes. On the other hand, it makes better use of time travel than most movies, though all the really good use comes in the credits sequences at the end of the movie. 

The whole project suits the ineffable weightlessness of Ryan Reynolds. Atlanta's Zazie Beetz makes a nice impression as the super-lucky Domino, while a mostly CGI Juggernaut helps us forget the terrible use of that iconic comic-book villain in X-Men: The Last Stand, in which Vinnie Jones played a Juggernaut in a goofy foam helmet. Recommended.

Three Strikes

X-Men: Apocalypse (2016): based on characters and stories by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Len Wein, Dave Cockrum, Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Walt Simonson, Louise Simonson, and many others; written by Simon Kinberg, Bryan Singer, Michael Dougherty, and Dan Harris; directed by Bryan Singer; starring James McAvoy (Professor Charles Xavier), Michael Fassbender (Magneto), Jennifer Lawrence (Raven/ Mystique), and Oscar Isaac (Apocalypse): Once you've got more than five X-Men in a movie, maybe you should make a miniseries instead. The bloat of X-Men: Apocalypse didn't affect me because I watched it over three nights on TV, thus making it into a CW superhero four-parter with a really high production budget. But it is bloated. And while Oscar Isaac's decision to underplay Apocalypse makes for an interesting arch-villain, it doesn't make for a very exciting arch-villain.

The acting from everyone who didn't date Aaron Rodgers is fine, and some of the visual effects are really lovely and sublime, though there are so many of them by the end that all effect is lost. Certainly not the 'bomb' that some critics suggested it was, however. Lightly recommended.

Light's Out (2016): adapted by Eric Heisserer from a short film by David F. Sanberg; directed by David F. Sandberg; starring Teresa Palmer (Rebecca), Gabriel Bateman (Martin), Alexander DiPersia (Bret), Billy Burke (Paul), and Maria Bello (Sophie): Short, taut, and to-the-point supernatural thriller pits a family against a ghost-thing that only comes out at night. Or at at least when the lights are out. I'd have liked a scene in which the main characters hit a hardware store to buy every portable light source imaginable from flashlights to glow sticks. They do have enough sense to pick up a crank-flashlight, given that the ghost-thing can affect utilities and batteries, so Kudos! Recommended.

Patrick Dennehy

Disgraced (2017): directed by Pat Kondelis: Marvelously assembled Showtime documentary on the 2003 Baylor University basketball scandal that started with the murder of Patrick Dennehy, the team's best player, and then became a horrifying story of American university athletics spun entirely out of control, aided and abetted by a local legal system stacked with Baylor grads. Then-Baylor coach Dave Bliss, secure in some false sense of untouchability, is actually stupid enough to be interviewed by the film-makers in the present day. It's gratifying to learn that once the documentary aired, he was fired from his then-current job as coach at another 'Christian' university. Highly recommended.

Whatever Happened to the Wolverine?

LOGAN (2017)

Sequels, Blockbusters, and Brain Trauma

Star Trek Beyond (2016):  written by Simon Pegg, Doug Jung, Roberto Orci, Patrick McKay, and John D. Payne; directed by Justin Lin; starring Chris Pine (Kirk), Zachary Quinto (Spock), Karl Urban (McCoy), Zoe Saldana (Uhura), Simon Pegg (Scotty), John Cho (Sulu), Anton Yelchin (Chekov), Idris Elba (Krall), and Sofia Boutella (Jaylah): The jolliest, most Trek-like of the reboot movies -- which probably explains why it's lagging behind the first two in box office, given its relative lack of sturm-und-drang. The NuTrek cast is in fine form and the script gets in a lot of zingers and a certain amount of drama, along with the biggest Starbase we've ever seen. 

Director Justin Lin delivers a few too many Fast-and-Furious chasey moments, but otherwise does solid work. The movie misses its chance for a true Star Trek moment late in the game involving the villain, Krall, whom Idris Elba tries to invest with the menace the script mostly leaves out. Given Trek's normal box-office levels pre-reboot, Paramount really needs to find this series its own Harve Bennett before it prices itself out of existence: these need to be $100 million movies that look like $200 million movies, not the other way around. Recommended.

Concussion (2015): based on the Jeanne Marie Laskas article "Game Brain"; written and directed by Peter Landesman; starring Will Smith (Dr. Omalu), Alec Baldwin (Dr. Bates), Albert Brooks (Dr. Wecht), Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Prema), and David Morse (Mike Webster): Excellent, factually solid docudrama about the unlikely doctor behind the discovery of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) in former NFL players. Will Smith returns to actually acting as African-born forensic pathologist Dr. Bennett Omalu, who encounters a whole lot of resistance from the NFL as he attempts to find an explanation for the horrifying dementia of several deceased NFL players. It's a grim picture of football in America, perhaps never moreso than when it shows actual footage of six- and seven-year-old players engaged in full-contact games. Because you're never too young for chronic brain trauma. Recommended.

Avatar (2009): written and directed by James Cameron; starring Sam Worthington (Jake Sully), Zoe Saldana (Neytiri), Sigourney Weaver (Dr. Augustine), and Stephen Lang (Colonel Quaritch): Dumb as a post and lovely as a 1970's Roger Dean album cover. James Cameron understands pacing and editing to achieve dramatic effect, and he's always utterly invested in the ideology of his own movies, no matter how much they lift from other sources (Avatar is essentially a New Age version of John Carter of Mars). When a villainous Colonel tells someone to "Shut your pie-hole!', you know you're in the hands of a great writer of dialogue. Still visually stunning a whole seven years after its release, and at least possessed of a pro-environmentalist message, no matter how simplistic. Recommended.

Sinister 2 (2015): written and created by Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill; directed by Ciaran Foy; starring James Ransone (The Deputy), Shannyn Sossamon (Courtney Collins), Robert Sloan (Dylan Collins), and Dartanian Sloan (Zach Collins): Any and all name actors having been eradicated in the first movie (or in between the first and second movie in the case of Vincent D'Onofrio's literally phoned-in performance in Sinister), Sinister 2 comes across as comfortably anonymous. 

That's a good thing for some horror movies, this one included. Bughuul the demon still remains regrettably visualized from the neck down, the scary, half-glimpsed face of the early scenes of Sinister still burdened with a blazer-and-pants combo that suggest the Sumerian boogeyman just got off his yacht. But the performances by the kids are pretty good, Shannyn Sossamon has a sweet desperation to her character, and James Ransone brings a goofy charm to the hero of this one. Yet another stupid 'stinger' ending ruins some of my good feelings towards this movie. Stop it, horror movies. Stop it right now. In a demonstration of 'less is more' in horror, the scariest scene in the movie involves a ham radio. Recommended.

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014): adapted by Simon Kinberg, Matthew Vaughn, and Jane Goldman from the comic-book story by Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and Terry Austin; directed by Bryan Singer; starring Hugh Jackman (Wolverine), James McAvoy/Patrick Stewart (Charles Xavier), Michael Fassbender/Ian McKellan (Magneto), Jennifer Lawrence (Raven/Mystique), Ellen Page (Kitty Pryde), Peter Dinklage (Trask), Shawn Ashmore (Iceman), Halle Berry (Storm), Nicholas Hoult (Beast), Omar Sy (Bishop), Evan Peters (Quicksilver), Daniel Cudmore (Colossus), Bingbing Fan (Blink), Adan Canto (Sunspot), and Booboo Stewart (Warpath): Despite some flaws, this is the best X-Men movie, though its emotional beats will resonate a lot more if one has watched X-Men, X-Men 2, and the horrible Brett-Ratner-helmed X-Men: Last Stand. Bryan Singer keeps the acting low-key, which helps when delivering lines of sci-fi portentousness. Highly recommended.

Strange Origins

The Witch (2015): written and directed by Robert Eggers; starring Anya Taylor-Joy (Thomasin), Ralph Ineson (William), Kate Dickie (Katherine), Harvey Scrimshaw (Caleb), Ellie Grainger (Mercy), and Lucas Dawson (Jonas): Just about as dark as it gets for a horror movie. Robert Eggers riffs on everything from "Young Goodman Brown" to Kubrick's The Shining in this tale of dark Christianity, Satanic goings-on, and extreme isolation. 

Set in New England in 1630, The Witch begins with its family of protagonists being exiled from a Puritan settlement for their religious beliefs (which may be even more Calvinistic than the Puritans). We see the first steps in that exile subjectively, from teen-age girl Thomasin's point-of-view. Her POV will dominate what comes after, though there are scenes that she isn't witness to. Probably.

Eggers drew on folktales, witch-trial court documents, and period testimonials for his inspiration. The film itself can withstand multiple, sometimes contradictory readings. Is it a paean to feminism? Is it a straight-up piece of Satanic horror? Is it a tale of madness in the woods? Is it a commentary on Calvinism? Is it a light-hearted romp? Well, no. It's not a light-hearted romp. Unless you actually are a Satanist. OK, so it could be a light-hearted romp for a certain type of person.

Filmed in the dark and humanless woods of Mattawa, Ontario, The Witch is ultimately a disquieting and unnerving 100 minutes of film-making. That it got a major release in theatres is something of a miracle -- audiences expecting another Blumhouse boilerplate horror movie clearly didn't like The Witch. So it goes. I think it's a major work of art from a young film-maker I'll be watching. And Anya Taylor-Joy is superlative as the sympathetic, frustrated Thomasin. 

But the actors are all really good, from Ralph Ineson as the bumbling, weak but well-meaning patriarch and Kate Dickie as the increasingly paranoid (towards Thomasin) matriarch through Harvey Scrimshaw (what a last name!) as adolescent Caleb all the way to the two kids playing the unnervingly carefree, creepy young Jonas and Mercy. A black rabbit delivers a fine performance, as does a black goat. 

Blood and gore are minimal, but when they come, they shock. Even the minimal score is creepy. This is about as good a film as one could hope for, and one that will probably spark conversations for years to come. Highly recommended.

Deadpool (2016): written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick; Deadpool created by Rob Liefeld and Fabian Nicienza; directed by Tim Miller; starring Ryan Reynolds (Wade Wilson/ Deadpool), Stefan Kapicic (Voice of Colossus), Brianna Hildebrand (Negasonic Teenage Warhead), Ed Skrein (Ajax), T.J. Miller (Weasel), and Morena Baccarin (Vanessa): Deadpool's success suggests that people wanted funnier, raunchier, R-rated superhero movies. And can you blame them? Deadpool may not be as funny as it seems to think it is, but it's still pretty funny. 

It's also a perfect showcase for Ryan Reynolds' brand of smirky hunkiness. The script is still a bit too boilerplate for its own good -- the romance, the origin story, and the vengeance plot are all things we've seen before, though Deadpool's ongoing meta-commentary on everything that's going on keeps things lighter than the usual superhero movie: he's Bugs Bunny as Wolverine. It might be nice to see a bit less programmatic story for Deadpool 2, which looks like it's going to be Deadpool and Cable and not another revenge story. 

The supporting turns from CGI Colossus -- finally used to good effect in what is, technically, an X-Men movie -- and the hilarious, angsty Negasonic Teenage Warhead (thank Monster Magnet via Grant Morrison for that name) as unwilling sidekicks/frenemies to Deadpool are quite funny. And while this Fox-Marvel movie doesn't share the same universe as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it's also pretty funny to see a climax that really does seem to occur on, over, around, and ultimately under what looks an awful lot like a SHIELD helicarrier someone dumped in a junkyard. Recommended.

Heroes and Misfires

The Amazing Spider-man 2: based on comics by Stan Lee, Gerry Conway, Gil Kane, Steve Ditko, Ross Andru, and others; written by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Jeff Pinkner, and James Vanderbilt; directed by Marc Webb; starring Andrew Garfield (Spider-man/Peter Parker), Emma Stone (Gwen Stacy), Jamie Foxx (Electro/ Max Dillon), Dane DeHaan (Green Goblin/ Harry Osborn), Sally Field (Aunt May) and Chris Cooper (Norman Osborn) (2014): Not a complete misfire in the tradition of Batman and Robin or Ang Lee's Hulk, but also not a particularly good movie. 

Sony's desire to stuff in a whole bunch of crap about the Sinister Six didn't help things. Neither did trying to deal with both Electro and Harry Osborn's transformation into the Green Goblin into the same movie. Nor did all the ridiculous, exposition-heavy crap about Peter Parker's parents, their hidden Laboratory of Solitude, the Osborn family disease, Gwen Stacy's interview with Oxford University, and so on, and so forth. The whole goddamn thing ends up feeling like the second season of a TV series condensed into a sporadically draggy 2 1/2 hours.

You might want to watch it at home over two or three nights. You might also wonder why the film-makers turned C-list Spider-man villain Electro into a combination of Watchmen's Doctor Manhattan and Jim Carrey's version of the Riddler in Batman Forever. That's some nice borrowing, boys! Oh, and Gwen Stacy dies at the end. It was a bad idea in the comics in the early 1970's, and it's a bad idea now. God forbid superheroes just break up. Not really recommended.

X-Men: First Class: based on characters created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and others; written by Brian Singer, Sheldon Turner, Matthew Vaughn, Jane Goldman, Zack Stentz, and Ashley Miller; directed by Matthew Vaughn; starring James McAvoy (Professor X), Michael Fassbender (Magneto), Kevin Bacon (Sebastian Shaw), Rose Byrne (Moira MacTaggart), Jennifer Lawrence (Mystique), January Jones (Emma Frost), Nicholas Hoult (Beast), and a cast of thousands (2011): Competent, occasionally plodding origin story for the X-Men of the 1960's. That it didn't gross enough money is why we got X-Men: Days of Future Past and not X-Men: Freshman 15 or X-Men: Second Class. 

This isn't really a movie where one suspends one's disbelief to believe in superpowers. It's more of a movie where one suspends one's disbelief so as to believe that Michael Fassbender would age into Ian MacKellan, or James MacAvoy into Patrick Stewart. It's completely ridiculous, but we go with it, along with Rebecca Romjin starting off as Jennifer Lawrence, because one must do as one needs must when the Devil vomits in one's tea kettle.

The whole thing plays out as a counter-historical spy thriller set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, only with more mutants. A lot of the story's events rely on people with super-powers either not using them at all, or not using them against the people they should use them against. They stand around a lot, these mutants, or they move frenetically and with lots of noise. There's really no middle ground. And how the screenwriters, all four hundred of them, managed to turn Moira MacTaggart from a geneticist into a CIA agent must make one hell of a writers' room story. Lightly recommended.

Cuban Fury: written by Jon Brown and Nick Frost; directed by James Griffiths; starring Nick Frost (Bruce Garrett), Chris O'Dowd (Drew), Ian McShane (Ron Parfitt), Rashida Jones (Julia), Alexandra Roach (Helen), and Olivia Colman (Sam Garrett) (2014): Delightful romp from Nick Frost and company. Frost plays a former teen-aged salsa dancing prodigy whose love for the dance was destroyed by bullies. 25 years later, he gets a crush on his new boss (Rashida Jones), who turns out to be a salsa dancer herself. So Frost's character goes back into training.

It's all somewhat familiar in its plot beats, but Cuban Fury's subject matter (salsa dancing? in England? with Nick Frost?) makes the whole thing zing. The writers give the characters decent lines to say. And for all the focus on bullying, the movie views most people as benevolent. Having Ian McShane as the grumpy salsa instructor is some sort of casting genius. And having Chris O'Dowd play against type as a complete jerk also pays dividends. Recommended.

Despicable Me: written by Sergio Pablos, Ken Daurio, and Cinco Paul; directed by Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud; starring the voices of Steve Carell (Gru), Jason Segel (Vector), Russell Brand (Dr. Nefario), Julie Andrews (Gru's Mom), Will Arnett (Mr. Perkins), and Kristen Wiig (Miss Hattie) (2010): Jolly animated foray into the world of super-villains is far better than the vast majority of live-action superhero movies. And it makes about as much sense. Steve Carell's bizarrely accented super-villain Gru is hilarious, the three girls he adopts as part of his nefarious plan to steal the Moon are adorable, and Gru's seemingly infinite supply of yellow-skinned, semi-robotic minions are scene-stealers (which is probably why they'll soon have their own movie). Highly recommended.

Needs More Quicksilver

X-Men: Days of Future Past: adapted by Simon Kinberg, Matthew Vaughn, and Jane Goldman from the comic-book story by Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and Terry Austin; directed by Bryan Singer; starring Hugh Jackman (Wolverine), James McAvoy/Patrick Stewart (Charles Xavier), Michael Fassbender/Ian McKellan (Magneto), Jennifer Lawrence (Raven/Mystique), Ellen Page (Kitty Pryde), Peter Dinklage (Trask), Shawn Ashmore (Iceman), Halle Berry (Storm), Nicholas Hoult (Beast), Omar Sy (Bishop), Evan Peters (Quicksilver), Daniel Cudmore (Colossus), Bingbing Fan (Blink), Adan Canto (Sunspot), and Booboo Stewart (Warpath) (2014):

A relatively sprawling movie adapted from a 34-page comic-book story from the early 1980's which itself took its title from a Brian Eno album, X-Men: Days of Future Past follows up the good work done by X-Men: First Class in making X-Men movies enjoyable again after the debacle that was the Brett Ratner-directed X-Men: The Last Stand and the twin thuds of the solo Wolverine movies.

Brian Singer, who directed the first two X-Men movies that really kicked off the Marvel Movie Juggernaut starting in the year 2000, returns to the series with his limited colour palette and earnest tone. Well, mostly earnest. The best scene in the movie features some very funny super-heroics set to Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle."

It's the best scene from any Bryan Singer movie, ever, and so show-stopping that the rest of the movie seems somewhat workmanlike by comparison. If anyone had said before the movie's release that the mutant speedster Quicksilver would steal the movie in a good way, I think that person would have been committed. But he's great. The movie needs more of him. Hell, the X-Men needed more of him by the conclusion.

Time travel drives the plot here. The original comic-book story predated both Back to the Future and The Terminator movies, so save your comments on who's stealing from whom. Wolverine, everybody's favourite veiny Canadian mutant, must travel from the dystopic near-future to the early 1970's to save mutants and humanity alike from a dire fate at the hands of a bunch of levitating sand-crawlers that disgorge endless streams of killer robots. Once in the past, Wolverine teams up with the young versions of Professor X and Magneto; in the future, they stand together despite their differences in the past.

Jennifer Lawrence is given a lot to do this time, as the plot hinges on what her character. Mystique, decides about her path in life. Sometimes she's in her scaly blue body-suit and sometimes she looks like Jennifer Lawrence. So it goes. Much super-heroing and angsting ensues, all of it in the mode that Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and Dave Cockrum brought to those 1970's and early 1980's X-Men adventures.

Not everything works, and the plot could use about one fewer transAtlantic trip towards the end, but enough works to make things pretty enjoyable. Peter Dinklage is a bit wasted as a one-note villain, but he does what he can. And the design on the future Sentinels really is top-notch. They're actually scary. Recommended.

Wild Child of the Atom

The Wolverine: written by Mark Bomback and Scott Frank, based on the miniseries by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller; starring Hugh Jackman (Logan), Tao Okamoto (Mariko), Rila Fukushima (Yukio) and Svetlana Khodchenkova (Viper) (2013): As a case study in pitching Hollywood blockbusters to the Asian market, The Wolverine is terrific. Other than Australian Hugh Jackman as Canadian Logan/Wolverine, almost the entire cast is Japanese, and much of the film is set in Japan.

That's in keeping with the Chris Claremont-written, Frank Miller-illustrated 1982 comic-book miniseries that the film draws upon. I think the writers do something smart with that miniseries, which somewhat implausibly inserted an entire Japan-obsessed backstory into Wolverine's history.

Here, while Wolverine has previously been in Japan, he doesn't know much about its culture. I'd argue that makes way more sense, especially given Logan's eternal memory problems. Even if he was an expert once, he isn't any more. This also allows for exposition that isn't delivered, as in the miniseries, by Wolverine's narration.

Other than that cleverness and some nicely staged recreations of moments from the comic, though, this is awfully thin superhero gruel. As it's a set-up for the next X-Men movie, we get a lot of references to the last (and least) of the original three X-Men films. I don't think it's ever a good idea to make anyone think about director Brett Ratner's crappy third X-Men film.

We also get one good mutant, one bad mutant, and one mystery villain in a giant cybernetic suit of armor. Also a really draggy twenty minutes in the middle, characters hiding in the most obvious place available to them, and some inadvertantly hilarious 'footage' of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, which was apparently accomplished by a bomber flying 1000 feet above the ground at about 100 miles an hour.

Hugh Jackman is good as usual, and improbably ripped -- he looks like all 300 Spartans superimposed upon one another. But his Wolverine has been written as something of a bumbling boob when it comes to fighting strategy and tactics. It's a good thing the villains are so kindly disposed to keeping him alive and filling him in on their plans. Lightly recommended.

The Daredevil Inside (What a Feeling)

Daredevil: Lone Stranger: written by Ann Nocenti; illustrated by John Romita Jr. and Al Williamson (1989; collected 2011): Good old Marvel, putting together a reprint volume that begins with a story set in a much larger company-wide crossover (the 1989 X-Men Inferno storyline) and ends without resolution after teasing a somewhat bizarre and imminent crossover between Daredevil and the super-powered race of the Inhumans.

Ann Nocenti's writing is pretty sharp here, though one wonders whether she made the decision to pit super-acrobat and super-sensed blind (former) attorney Daredevil against supernatural menaces that don't really seem all that comfortable in the mean-streets world of Daredevil. Marvel's Lucifer, Mephisto, makes several appearances, along with the supernaturally transformed Manhattan of the Inferno storyline and another demonic presence whom Daredevil fights alongside longtime bud Spider-man.

Daredevil himself, fresh off some embarrassing screw-up or another, is in full mope mode here, wandering around the countryside for a few issues feeling sorry for himself, fighting a couple of mutant jerks (The Blob and Pyro) who now work for the U.S. government, and reluctantly helping an animal-rights activist dressed in Flashdance apparel liberate a bunch of animals from a factory farm. It was the 80's!!! Scientists genetically engineered chickens with larger wings and perfect women with larger boobs in the same laboratory all the time!!!

John Romita Jr.'s art is generally fine here, the action well-choreographed and his design for Mephisto genuinely weird and disturbing. Veteran Al Williamson does a fine job inking Romita Jr., giving the appropriate characters a lightness of line that makes some of the action sequences appear more balletic than the pencils might otherwise have shown. Lightly recommended.

Before the Fall

Marvel Masterworks: X-Men Volume 6, written by Arnold Drake, Roy Thomas and Denny O'Neil, illustrated by Neal Adams, Tom Palmer, Don Heck, Werner Roth and others (1968-69; collected 2001): Even soon-to-be-legendary comic-book artist Neal Adams couldn't quite save the X-Men when he drew several issues in the 1960's, though the sales results did bring the book back from cancellation and saw it turned into a reprint-only comic book until the mid-1970's. Nonetheless, the Adams-drawn X-Men looks like a template for the ultra-successful X-Men revival of the mid-1970's -- the one that would eventually make the X-Men the most successful comic-book franchise by the mid-1980's.

The writing, mostly by Roy Thomas, doesn't hold up so well -- it's too wordy and occasionally ridiculous. Not only does one villain gain his powers from a dinosaur bite, but he then chooses to name himself after Sauron from The Lord of the Rings. If only he'd been bitten by a giant white whale...

But it's the art that's the star. Adams was very much a work in progress at this early stage of his career, and it shows at times. His attempts to mix things up with diagonal panels and 'shattered-glass' layout miss as often as they hit. Nonetheless, the characters look great. Adams's hyper-realistic style was fully in place, and would be a key artistic influence on the artists that would appear in the 1970's.

His character design is also top-notch: he manages a much better looking costume for Angel than he'd had before, while the new hero Havoc has one of the niftiest looking costumes on the planet. Adams would soon go on to gorgeous, genre-redefining work on Batman and Green Lantern/Green Arrow, but the art here is also terrific and occasionally startling. Recommended.

Kirby!

Kirby! King of Comics, written by Mark Evanier, introduced by Neil Gaiman (2008): This loving, lovingly illustrated biography of comic-book writer/artist Jack Kirby -- creator or co-creator of Captain America, the Fantastic Four, the Silver Surfer, Doctor Doom, Galactus, Magneto, the original X-Men, Darkseid, the Mighty Thor, the Incredible Hulk, the Boy Commandos, the entire sub-genre of romance comic books, the Red Skull, Nick Fury, the Challengers of the Unknown, Professor X, Cyclops, the Beast, the Thing, Ice-man. Mr. Fantastic, the Mole-man, Machine Man, the Avengers, the Newsboy Legion, the Guardian, OMAC, Etrigan the Demon, Mister Miracle, Big Barda, the Cosmic Cube, the Negative Zone, the Boom Tube, the Forever People, the Source, the Omega Force, the Astro Force, and literally thousands of other heroes, villains, concepts and supporting characters -- is a joy to read. And it's a teaser for a much longer Evanier biography promised sometime in the next few years.

A limited business sense and the cut-throat nature of the comic-book business in the 1930's and onwards meant that Kirby never got adequately compensated for all the work he did, and that attention-grabbers like longtime writing collaborator Stan Lee got far more credit for their work with Kirby's than they merited. Kirby was there nearly at the beginnings of the American comic-book industry, and he was still occasionally drawing work when he died at the age of 77 in 1994.

Kirby's characters continue to form the backbone of the Marvel Comics Universe; his visual language is there in pretty much every superhero artist who ever lived, as early on Kirby pioneered techniques such as 'breaking' the panel, tilting the 'camera', one- and two-page spreads, and always action delivered by operatically enhanced heroes and villains. No one threw or took a punch like a Kirby character.

Evanier, who knew Kirby for more than 20 years, supplies both a broad historical context and a rich supply of anecdotes both by and about Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg in New York in 1917 -- he changed his name to Jack Kirby because he thought the name sounded more powerful and successful, and not because it was a Jewish name). The book is copiously illustrated with both the expected (comic book covers, panels, and character designs) and the unexpected (a sketch Kirby presented to Paul and Linda McCartney at a 1975 Wings concert in L.A., Kirby's sketch of what should have gone on the Pioneer and Voyager space probe plaques).

Kirby and wife Roz become vital characters; Kirby's treatment by the comic-book companies, and especially Marvel, could form the basis for a tragedy if it weren't for the fact that Kirby essentially refuted tragedy with his outlook, embodied by many of his heroic characters. Those writers, artists, editors, publishers and animation-studio executives who'd come to love him, sometimes only through his work, were able to supply something of a happy financial late Golden Age beginning in the late 1970's and continuing until Kirby's death.

As the American superhero-based comics industry sputters into oblivion, one notes how much it could use someone like Jack Kirby now -- and how little the beancounters and coat-tail-riders deserved him when they had him. Hail to the King, baby! Highly recommended.

Doom!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Showcase Presents Doom Patrol Volume 2, written by Arnold Drake, illustrated by Bruno Premiani and Bob Brown (1966-68; collected 2010): Ah, the Doom Patrol, DC Comics' weirdest and most Marvel-like superhero team of the 1960's. Like the X-Men, they had a leader in a wheelchair. Like the Fantastic Four, there were four of them, including an orange strongman, a super-genius, a person who could stretch, and a flying hero with energy powers. And yet the timeline for the creation of those three books makes plagiarism on anyone's part pretty much impossible -- though it has been suggested that a conversation on a golf course may have somehow influenced the rosters of those two Marvel and one DC super-teams. So it goes.

Commercially, Doom Patrol was either the second-most successful of those titles in the 1960's, behind The Fantastic Four but ahead of The X-Men, which somehow couldn't become popular enough to stay out of reprints even with Neal Adams drawing the book.

Of course, Doom Patrol got cancelled around the same time as X-Men went to reprints and pretty much stayed in reprints for six years until Giant-Size X-Men #1 reinvented the X-Men, who would then gradually become Marvel's most popular book over the course of the late 1970's and early 1980's. DC tried bringing the Doom Patrol back in the mid-1970's, but it wasn't until the late 1980's that yet another relaunch lasted longer than the original run, and gave us writer Grant Morrison at his early, weirdest best.

Like many of Marvel's super-teams and supergroups, the Doom Patrol (Robotman, Negative-man, Elasti-Girl and the Chief) squabbled a lot. Well, they did have a hero named Negative-man on their roster! They fought distinctive, and distinctively weird, super-villains: Monsieur Mallah, a super-intelligent, beret-wearing gorilla; the Brain, a brain in a jar; the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man (A-V-M-Man for short), a guy who could turn into pretty much anything; Garguax, an alien with an army of super-powered plastic robots; and a host of other freaky supernatural and superscientific menaces. The heroes were occasionally self-loathing, seeing themselves as freaks, though ultimately they became like a PSA about embracing one's own difference.

Quirky writer Arnold Drake and underappreciated artist Bruno Premiani wrote and drew pretty much every Doom Patrol adventure from their first appearance in the anthology title My Greatest Adventure (they don't make comic-book titles like that any more!) to the last issue of their own comic, which was actually just My Greatest Adventure with the title changed but the numbering intact.

Along the way, they picked up green, shape-changing teenager Beast Boy (later of the Teen Titans) and grumpy telekinetic millionaire Mento (the fresh-maker!) as auxiliary members. The focus remained pretty much on the four core members, though, in all their freaky and occasionally crabby glory. Grant Morrison pushed them into areas of previously untapped weirdness in the 1980's and early 1990's, but much of that weirdness is at least implicit here, and often explicit. All that and perhaps the most shocking final issue of a superhero comic book of the 1960's. What's not to love? Highly recommended.

Two out of Three are Bad

Book:

The 13th by John Everson (2009): Everson's first novel, Covenant, was an interesting horror novel with a bit too much sexual violence for my tastes. His second, Sacrifice, was something of a bollocks -- the characters were paper-thin and annoyingly giggly and coy at the most inappropriate points in the narrative, and it seemed like the only two constants in the novel were increasingly grotesque yet oddly perfunctory scenes of sexual atrocity, and the construction of protagonists who were as banal as they were incompetent. 'People who get hit in the head a lot' seems to be Everson's second-favorite trope, right after 'Every female character will get sexually assaulted.'

There were enough flashes of originality in the first two novels (and especially the first) that I figured I'd give Everson a chance when his next novel came out. And for the first 200 pages of this 320-page novel, it seemed like I'd made the right choice. Oh, the heightened level of sexual violence was still there, but it at least seemed to be hitched to an interesting story that justified the events, if not the lengthy descriptions of some of them. And then, around page 200, The 13th went off the rails as completely and spectacularly as any novel I can remember reading.

The 13th is a gobbledegooky, supposedly Babylonian ritual meant to incarnate the Babylonian god Ba'al in human form. To do so requires human sacrifice. A lot of human sacrifice involving mothers and babies. Fun stuff. 25 years before the main narrative of the novel, a cult in a small town tried and failed to complete the ritual. Now, the cult is back, kidnapping and impregnating women in order to try again. And only a callow, Olympic-level bicyclist and a plucky but inexperienced female cop can, maybe, stop the ritual.

What threat does a completed ritual pose to the world? I have no idea. The novel never lays out the stakes. I have a feeling that it may guarantee a good corn harvest, but beyond that, your guess is as good as mine. And I READ the fucking novel.

Everson's most annoying tics throughout his three novels are that no major female character can be anything less than spectacularly alluring, male protagonists have great difficulty controlling their libidos, and the heroes, perhaps in a nod to realism gone horribly wrong, generally prove to be amazingly incompetent by the time the novel ends. The 13th adds a new toy to Everson's toybox: the 120-page climax.

Yes, more than a third of this novel can justifiably be called the climax. That's a lot of climax. And almost all of it takes place in basement of the evil hotel where an evil stem-cell researcher is attempting to finish the ritual of the 13th with the help of the evil cult which turns out to comprise pretty much everyone in the stupid small town the novel is set in.

During those 120 pages, which take place over the course of about 6 hours, the heroes get knocked out and imprisoned at least twice; they pretty much fail to save any of the imprisoned women and babies from being tortured, mutilated and killed; and the disembodied gods Ba'al and Astarte show up to spout dialogue that sounds like rejected wacky-god dialogue from Season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And the heroes run around in circles a lot, in the nude (don't ask), getting sexually assaulted by incorporeal gods and demons, while various awful things are described at great length. But really, once you get to the third or fourth sacrifice scene, not only is the power to shock gone, but the whole megilla starts to feel more like an outsized parody of your typical torture horror film than it does like serious horror.

Everson also gives us another relatively new trope that I reflexively blame on Buffy, specifically Season 7 -- that's the obligatory Half-Assed Internet Search Scene. Certain horror stories once relied on forbidden occult knowledge that one at least had to go to a library to access. Unfortunately, the age of the Internet has brought us the scene in which a character learns everything he or she needs to know by typing in a few terms on Google. I realize that if The Necronomicon existed it would be available for download on Project Gutenberg, but the search scene here rivals Buffy's Season 7 Google of 'evil' for 'search least likely to yield the results you need without further clarification.' Give me a moldy set of the Revelations of Glaaki any day.

On the bright side, the hero now drinks a lot of Guinness. Everson's protagonists in his first two novels spent so much time ordering Miller Genuine Draft that I began to wonder of the Miller Brewing Company was a sponsor. So I guess that's a step up. Really, not recommended at all except as a study in how a horror novel can go horribly, horribly, horribly, horribly, horribly, horribly wrong.


Comics:

Essential Captain America Volume 2 by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Jim Steranko, Gene Colan, John Romita, Frank Giacoia, Joe Sinnott and others (1967-70): Captain America becomes increasingly Spider-man-ized in this second collection of his early post-1960's-resurrection adventures. Translation: he's plagued by various self-doubts and woefully hung up over a woman. Thankfully, he also has a number of cool adventures with great art by Kirby, Steranko and Colan, though if you're like me, you're starting to wish Modok and the Red Skull would take a vacation for several years, and that the Cosmic Cube, one of Marvel's all-time Ultimate Plot Devices, would never, ever, ever appear in a comic book again. No such luck. Fun, though occasionally a bit grating.


Onslaught: The Complete Epic Volume 4 (2nd edition) by everyone at Marvel and their dogs (1996): Onslaught was meant to be the Marvel crossover to end all crossovers (well, at least for a year), as a villain born in the X-Men books would ultimately threaten the entire Earth. Part of the editorial mandate of the crossover was to set up Marvel's 'Heroes Reborn' titles, with new adventures of non-X-men Marvel heroes to take place on a new Earth sans X-Men. Marvel's top-selling books (basically the Spider- and X-titles) would steam along on their own in the regular Marvel universe along with all those Marvel characters deemed too minor to reboot (hey, Dr. Strange!).

Sometimes one can only evaluate a megacrossover constructed as much by marketing and sales decisions as by artistic decisions the same way Samuel Johnson evaluated a dog that can walk on its hindlegs -- one isn't amazed that it does it well but that it does it at all. The plot mechanism that creates two different Marvel universes doesn't make a lot of sense, and has the added misfortune of setting up a final battle that would be completely incomprehensible without an awful lot of captions to explain what's going on.

Oh, yeah -- Onslaught is an evil psionic being created when Professor Xavier's evil impulses collide with Magneto's evil impulses. So he's sorta like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, only nigh-omnipotent. As ultimate comic-book villains go, he makes the Anti-Monitor look and sound like Milton's Satan. Not recommended.

'X' Hits the Spot

Comics:

New X-Men: 'E' is for Extinction; Imperial; New Worlds; Riot at Xavier's; Assault on Weapon Plus; Planet X; Here Comes Tomorrow: Written by Grant Morrison, Illustrated by Frank Quitely, Phil Jiminez, Chris Bachalo, Igor Kordey, Ethan Van Sciver, Marc Silvestri and others (2001-2004): Grant Morrison's early 21st-century run on New X-Men turned out to be one long, almost self-contained story, so I'm reviewing all 1,000 pages or so of it at once for my second time through it.

Morrison has often been portrayed as the mad, metatextual genius of the superhero comic book, but for all that, his runs on X-Men, Batman and JLA have been big sales successes with at least one eye on the past history of those books. His X-Men, premiering after the successful first X-Men movie, nods at least passingly to new readers more familiar with the movie than the comics, putting the X-men into leather outfits rather than their traditional superheroic garb. That done, Morrison takes off at a gallop through both classic characters and situations from the X-men's heyday of the late 1970's and early 1980's and newly introduced twists, turns and extrapolations of the all the familar tropes of the X-universe and of superhero comics.

And so the Phoenix returns, Magneto apparently dies, Cyclops has relationship issues, a lot of humans hate and fear mutants and vice versa, a former villain (in this case The White Queen) goes straight and joins the X-Men, Wolverine finds out stuff about his mysterious past, a group calling itself the U-Men kill mutants and harvest their organs so as to improve themselves, the weapons program that helped 'create' Wolverine is examined, the Shi'ar Empire shows up, Professor Xavier turns out to have an evil twin (sort of), the Beast's physical appearance changes again, new mutants enter the fold, old mutants die, the mutant nation of Genosha is destroyed in a massive act of anti-mutant terrorism, and a glimpse of the future finally reveals who the real master villain is, and how mutants and humans alike will become extinct if someone doesn't do something about It.

It's all a wild ride through X-history, and unlike many modern comics creators, Morrison manages to tell an epic tale that nonetheless leaves everything pretty much back at status quo when he leaves the book. Admittedly, that status quo would almost be where the X-books were when John Byrne left as artist back in the early 1980's, but as the Chris Claremont/John Byrne X-run was the greatest in the book's history, that's not so bad. All in all, this is probably the greatest long-form X-story ever told.