Stan Lee, Immortal Douchebag

Captain America: The First Avenger, created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, based on comic-book stories by Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Mark Gruenwald, Steve Engelhart, Steve Gerber, Jim Steranko and others, directed by Joe Johnston, starring Chris Evans (Captain America/Steve Rogers), Hayley Atwell (Peggy Carter), Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes), Hugo Weaving (Schmidt/The Red Skull), Dominic Cooper (Howard Stark), Stanley Tucci (Dr. Erskine), Toby Jones (Arnim Zola) and Tommy Lee Jones (Colonel Philips) (2011): Director Joe Johnston won an Oscar for his effects work on Raiders of the Lost Ark and directed the flawed but period-detail-rich superhero movie The Rocketeer; those two things seem to have informed this Marvel movie, which is flawed but rich in period detail, mostly old-fashioned in a good way, and possessed of a villain with a supernatural weapon that rivals the Ark of the Covenant. Raiders even gets alluded to early on in the movie.

Steve Rogers is a 4F orphan repeatedly rejected for U.S. military service in the early days of America's entry into WWII. He's idealistic, tough, and hopelessly weak of body, though strong and loyal of heart. Dr. Erskine, working on a U.S. supersoldier program to counteract Nazi Germany's super-scientific Hydra organization, picks Rogers to be the first of America's super-soldiers because Erskine, who escaped Nazi Germany after accidentally creating a super-soldier for Hitler, wants to see super-strength in the hands of someone with a good heart.

And after various complications, Captain America is born and unleashed on the world...to sell War Bonds and entertain the troops. There's only one super-soldier, and the military brass don't want him getting killed. As this isn't actually a subversive comedy, Cap soon demonstrates his astonishing combat and tactical abilities and, with a Nick-Furyless group of Howling Commandos, takes on Hydra so that the rest of the Allied military can concentrate on the parts of WWII that actually occurred in 'our' history. Given that Hydra actually seems to be at war with the Axis as well as the Allies, I'm assuming Victory-Europe Day in this universe involved everyone celebrating the defeat of Hydra.

The movie is actually fun, and some of the period (or pseudo-period) stuff is pretty neat -- we get a flying wing, and we get those destroyer-sized Hydra super-tanks that the villainous Red Skull loved so much in Marvel Comics of the 1960's. Hugo Weaving plays the ambitious Nazi super-soldier -- he's the Red Skull but never actually called that in the movie -- who basically declaares war on everybody in 1943 thanks to the occultish power source that resembles the Cosmic Cube of the comic books but is actually some sort of tie-in to the earlier Thor movie and the upcoming Avengers movie. Weaving is great, the supporting cast is solid, and Chris Evans surprises as Captain America. He's still not big enough to be Cap, but he does a good job with the earnest, straightforward heroics of the role.

Some have complained that Cap doesn't really fight Nazis in the movie, which is pretty much true -- Hydra goes rogue pretty early and operates as its own entity. In this, the movie parallels the Captain America comics of the 1960's, which had Hydra galore and in which Hitler generally seemed to be working for the Red Skull, rather than the more (vaguely) historical Cap comics of the 1940's, in which Captain America battled saboteurs, Nazis, Bundists, and the Japanese empire. And vampires and werewolves working for the Axis. Oh, real history, why are you so boring even when you're occuring?

Captain America was, of course, created by writer/artists Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, and not by some faceless monolith named Marvel or, even more egregiously, by Stan Lee, though Stan may have been sharpening pencils in the office when the first pages of Captain America showed up at the (then) Timely Comics. One of the great ironies of many iconic mainstream superheroes is that they fight for truth, justice and the little guy while themselves being concepts stolen from their actual creators to make enormous amounts of money for businessmen, gigantic corporations, and the apparently immortal Stan Lee, who cameos here as a general. Will Stan Lee ever die? How much life force did he steal from everyone who worked with him?

The script for this movie was assembled from the comics work of a lot of fine writers and artists, and I'm sure the screenwriters made more for cannibalizing those writers than all of those writers and artists made from their entire careers at Marvel. Welcome to the American Dream, True Believers! Excelsior! Nonetheless, recommended, though if you want to avoid shitting any more money into Marvel's coffers, by all means find a bootleg copy of the movie.

Before Westeros

Wild Cards: Card Sharks, created and edited by George R.R. Martin, written by Stephen Leigh, William F. Wu, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Michael Cassutt, Victor Milan, Roger Zelazny, Kevin Andrew Murphy and Laura J. Mixon (1993): George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards shared-universe series is a delight, a dark romp through a world forever altered by the introduction of an alien virus in 1946. The virus, a bioweapon meant to be tested on humanity by an alien race, does one of four things to humans who contract it: kills 90% of them, gives them major superpowers, gives them minor superpowers, or twists them into grotesques who also occasionally have superpowers.

In the vernacular of the series, the first group drew the Black Queen, the second group an Ace, the third group a Deuce and the fourth the Joker. Like anthrax, the wild card virus proliferates through spores and not direct human contact, so that over time Wild Cards are everywhere and not just in the New York area where the virus was first introduced. 'Normal' humans are disparagingly referred to as 'Nats' by Jokers, who themselves are ghettoized both literally and figuratively.

The first 12-book Wild Cards cycle followed world events from 1946 to the late 1980's, introducing such characters as Doctor "Tachyon", the alien scientist who tried to stop the virus's release; The Great and Powerful Turtle, a telekinetic ace who only appears in public inside a flying, heavily armored tank; The Sleeper, a wild card who gains a new power and new appearance after every hibernation/regeneration cycle; Captain Trips, a hippie with multiple personalities with their own bodies; and a host of other heroes, villains, and just plain folk.

This first book in the second Wild Cards 'cycle' sends Hannah Davis, a stubborn human fire investigator, on a trip through past events that suggest a massive conspiracy against Wild Cards since the virus first appeared -- a sustained attempt to find a way to kill every Wild Card on Earth by a cabal of the world's most powerful people. The conspiracy may have killed the Kennedys, caused the spread of AIDS, destroyed the early American space program, caused the failure of the Iran hostage rescue, and involved Marilyn Monroe, who in the Wild Card universe is still alive in the early 1990's.

Aided by the hunchbacked, time-and-mind-fractured Joker Quasiman and a number of other Aces, Jokers and Nats, Davis begins to uncover the current plans of the conspiracy (whose members call themselves 'Card Sharks'), inviting unwelcome attention. By the end of this volume, Davis has enlisted an ally whom readers of the previous cycle will find somewhat...worrying.

Basically, this is a very snazzy superhero book with a better explanation for its hero's wild powers than most traditional comic-book superheroes (the Wild Card virus is essentially telepathic and telekinetic in nature, and those it doesn't kill are generally empowered or twisted by some random trigger within that person's self-image or subconscious. Regardless, the powers themselves are telepathic and telekinetic in nature no matter how they appear -- super-strength and super-speed are both telekinetic in nature, as would be weather control, fire control, flying and a variety of others).

It's Heroes or Alphas, only with good writers who know what they're doing and have an unlimited special effects budget. And it gave us heroic, doomed Jetboy's poignant dying line, "I can't die yet. I haven't seen The Jolson Story!" Highly recommended, though one should read the earlier books first.

Vampire Juice

Dracula (World's Classics edition), written by Bram Stoker, edited and introduced by A.N. Wilson (1897; this edition 1983): Tom Wolfe told us that great pilots have "the Right Stuff." Great pitchers have that mysterious "stuff" that very good pitchers never have. Or so we've come to believe. And some writers have "stuff" too, though for the sake of variety, I'm going to call it "juice." Juice has absolutely nothing to do with technical proficiency -- if art and literature came into existence solely through the mastery of formal and techical matters, then university professors would be the greatest writers and artists of them all. They're not, and it doesn't.

Bram Stoker, late middle-aged when he came to write Dracula, had juice for this novel and very little else. But what a crazy novel! Out of previous vampire stories, a smattering of mostly wrong Eastern European history and myth, and his own personal interest in (mostly paid for) sex, Stoker formed one of the most influential novels of all time. It isn't even a very good novel -- but boy does it have juice! The story of British estate lawyer Jonathan Harker's encounter with Dracula still resonates today because it's great, juicy, tranformative pulp.

Formally speaking, Dracula is almost archaic for its own time, much less ours. It follows the epistolary format of many early English novels, telling its story through letters and journal entries and the occasional newspaper clipping. This is all done ostensibly to add verisimilitude to the proceedings, and a lot of great horror from Frankenstein to Paranormal Activity has adopted a faux-documentarian format as part of an attempt to suspend disbelief.

There had been vampire novels and stories in English before, and Stoker lifts elements from many of them. His genius lay in bringing a foreign vampire to England, and in wedding the near-pornographic to both violence and a melodramatic depiction of morality. One attempted vampiric seduction plays like a thinly veiled blowjob scene (as Stephen King and hundreds of other critics have noted); another seems to parody Catholic Communion. Virginal British womanhood appears to be Dracula's target once he reaches England, the sexual threat of the Other made manifest and deeply kinky. And in a parody of the marriage bed, one male character has to stake his transformed beloved, with copious gushings of fluid concluded by a chaste kiss. Meanwhile, Professor Van Helsing's whale-oil candle drips "sperm" all over a female vampire's tomb. Great GooglyMoogly!

And there are also almost endless numbers of scenes in which men and women weep in despair, or clutch hands and swear allegiance before God -- sentimental Victorian melodrama at its wooziest, not helped in the slightest by the modular interchangeability of the four main male characters.

Moments occur which stretch and even break credibility. The insect-eating madman Renfield sets a modern-day record for most escapes from a mental institution in one novel. Dracula, in one of the great bait-and-switches in literary history, goes almost entirely offstage after the first 60 pages, his presence made known almost entirely by the effect he has on others. Babies are fed to vampires, and grieving mothers to wolves. Heads are chopped off, the mouths stuffed with garlic. Dracula does his own dishes and searches for his own money and makes Jonathan Harker's meals. He really seems like a helluva guy. Too bad he stinks like a rotting corpse.

And the whole thing ends with a lengthy, continent-wide chase scene by ship, boat, rail and horse. It's all completely ridiculous, and ridiculously entertaining. Even the Dutch Professor Van Helsing's garbled English becomes almost hypnotic in its lack of resemblance to any English ever spoken or written by anyone in the history of the English language. But Stoker keeps throwing Van Helsing's comments in there, sometimes with the caveat that even the other characters have trouble understanding him. It's a decision born of mad confidence.

There are several truly riveting and horrifying sequences in the novel -- Harker's initial ride to Castle Dracula and his subsequent adventures there; the diary entries of the Captain of the doomed Demeter; and the references to the "bloofer lady" who preys on children being three of them. Elements of the adventure novel, the thriller, the romance, the Gothic...all get synthesized by Stoker's lurid, imitative imagination, which remains, 115 years later, a greater imagination than that of most of his best-selling vampire-loving, novel-writing brethren and sistren. Highly recommended.

Spirited

The Spirit: Femme Fatales, written and illustrated by Will Eisner and others (1940-1949; this collection 2008): I'm not always in the mood to read classic Spirit stories, but when I am, I read a lot of them in a row. They're always 7 pages long. And models of narrative economy and experimentation within a rigidly constrained format (those 7 pages).

The Spirit, blue of suit, red of tie, headquartered in Wildwood Cemetery in crime-ridden Central City, is more hard-boiled detective than superhero, his only concession to superheroics being a tiny mask. In that little domino mask and his blue suit, the Spirit always seemed embarrassed to nominally be considered a superhero. His primary attribute was an unrivalled ability to take punishment and bounce back up, which is a good thing given that no superhero has ever been hit on the head more often. I shudder to think what the Spirit's mental state would have been in later life.

The Will Eisner studio wrote and drew these gems during the 1940's and early 1950's with Eisner supervising more and more and writing and drawing less and less as time went by -- the studio produced a lot of work. But Eisner's innovative fingerprints (and his committment to experimenting with the embryonic rules of the comic-book page) are all over each story; very few of the writers and artists involved would ever reach such heights on their own.

Herein we get 23 stories about the Spirit's various female antagonists, all of them extremely va-va-voomish femme fatales, some of them entirely bad, some of them on the same side of the law as the Spirit. All the women and most of the men here have the half-joking, half-WTF names that Eisner handed out to all of his non-regular characters. We get the semi-heroic Sand Seref, the manipulative P'Gell, the tragic Plaster of Paris, the sinister Lorelei Vox, the homicidal Lorelei Vox, and so on, and so forth.

For what are formative, foundational texts in comic-book history, the Spirit's adventures remain remarkably fresh and engaging, and they're still studied by writers and artists today for their narrative and formal innovation and excellence. And their awesome splash pages. Highly recommended.

Underfinished

How Do You Know?, written and directed by James L. Brooks, starring Reese Witherspoon (Lisa), Paul Rudd (George), Owen Wilson (Matty), Jack Nicholson (Charles) and Kathryn Hahn (Annie) (2010): James L. Brooks, uber-TV producer (The Simpsons) and writer/director of such film hits as Broadcast News and As Good As It Gets, can pretty much do what he wants now. Apparently, with How Do You Know? he decided to make a movie from what really seems like a first draft.

This romantic comedy isn't bad the way most contemporary romantic comedies are bad. The characters are recognizably human and Matthew McConaughey is mercifully absent. But the script meanders along, losing one entire subplot for 20 minutes as if Brooks had forgotten how to cross-cut and generally taking forever to get to the point.

Witherspoon plays Lisa, a 31-year-old woman who's played softball for the US National team her entire life. But now she's been cut from the most recent squad and has no idea what to do with her life. Enter Matty, a loveable, narcissistic MLB pitcher played pitch-perfectly by Owen Wilson, and George, a depressed CEO being investigated for company crime actually committed by his weaselly father (Jack Nicholson).

Preston Sturges could probably have gotten 100 minutes of classic screwball comedy out of the collision of high finance and sports; Brooks instead goes for a slow burn. A really slow burn. So slow that Nicholson's appearance here is somewhat pointless -- he doesn't have much to do, and casting Jack Nicholson in a part that seems like a classic James Cromwell role really seems like overkill.

The love triangle lurches along slowly...very slowly. Wilson and Rudd supply a surprising number of laughs, and Witherspoon is still as cute as a button, whatever that means. There are nice touches throughout, from the collection of specially made sweatshirts and pants Matty keeps for his one-night-stands to wear home the next morning like some sort of parting gift, to Lisa's encyclopedic assortment of inspirational phrases Post-It-noted all over her mirror, to George's peculiarly formal mode of speaking. This isn't a great movie (though compared to most modern rom-coms it's a classic), but it's a perfectly cromulent time-filler. Lightly recommended.

Ratings Stunted

Network, written by Paddy Chayefsky, directed by Sidney Lumet, starring Faye Dunaway (Diana Christensen), William Holden (Max Schumacher), Peter Finch (Howard Beale), Robert Duvall (Frank Hackett), Ned Beatty (Arthur Jensen) and Beatrice Straight (Louise Schumacher) (1976): Of local interest is the fact that the control room and news studio scenes in this movie were filmed at CFTO-TV in Scarborough. Weird! Of historical interest, Beatrice Straight somehow won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for a role with only 5 minutes and 40 seconds of screen time -- the shortest in Oscar history for a winning performance of any kind.

Seen as a scathing satire of the changing face of network news when it came out in 1976, Network now seems prescient, almost creepily so. Our 24-hour-a-day news network world now delivers entertainment and scandal and blustery opinion far more than it delivers actual news. Reality TV has become the dominant mode of the dying networks. We watch people die 'live' on TV all the time.

Peter Finch, who would die of heart failure before he won the Best Actor Oscar for this movie, plays Howard Beale, a long-time newsman who's about to be fired from his anchorman position at moribund, fictional fourth-network UBS. So he loses it on-air, vowing to kill himself on his last broadcast. Allowed to apologize on-air for that stunt, he instead launches into an impassioned rant against the modern American world...and becomes a ratings hit.

So the network exploits him, shaping its new, news-free news hour around his increasingly bombastic, populist, apocalyptic rants. Veteran news producer Max Schumacher (an exhausted-looking William Holden) is appalled. So he's fired. Dunaway, as a new programming director, and Duvall, as the hatchet man for the multinational that's just purchased UBS, are delighted by Beale's ratings. A show that follows the real exploits of a homegrown terrorist group is greenlit by Dunaway, and also becomes a hit. Increasingly bleak hilarity ensues.

The world of Network is pretty much the world we now see on a lot of our TV channels -- Beale is Glenn Beck with a better writer (that writer being long-time, award-winning writer for stage, screen and TV Paddy Chayefsky). The performances shine; Lumet may have been the most gifted 'actor's director' of his generation. Ned Beatty even gets a lovely turn as a megalomaniacal, evangelical corporate boss whose speech about how there are no nations anymore, only corporations, sends Beale into his final rhetorical and mental downwards spiral. A terrific, bleak, funny film. Highly recommended.

Petrified and Ancient

The Petrified Forest, written by Charles Kenyon and Delmer Daves, based on the play of the same name by Robert E. Sherwood, directed by Archie Mayo, starring Leslie Howard (Alan Squier), Bette Davis (Gabrielle Maple) and Humphrey Bogart (Duke Mantee) (1936): Odd little film of ideas based on a play of ideas that's probably most notable for being Bogart's first big break, as he reprises his Broadway role as gangster Duke Mantee. Bette Davis is almost unbearably cute, and Leslie Howard is almost unbearably smarmy, though Howard gets bonus points for forcing the filmmakers to cast Bogart as Mantee, and not Edward G. Robinson, whom they preferred.

All the action takes place in and around a diner in the Arizona desert. Dissipated English drifter Howard wanders in, falls in reciprocated love with waitress Davis, and gets taken hostage along with several others by Mantee and his men. The gangsters are waiting to rendezvous with a second group that includes Mantee's lover. They've just pulled a big heist in Oklahoma, killing eight people in the process, and are trying to flee the country.

Written in the depths of the Great Depression, The Petrified Forest is somewhat of a piece with other left-leaning Warner Brothers agit-prop movies of the time. Social mores are questioned and discussed, and one African-American character even mocks what he sees as the Uncle-Tommish deference an African-American chauffeur shows to his white employers. The eponymous national landmark serves as a metaphor for the dying "old guard" of American thought, represented by pretty much everyone in the movie except Davis.

The whole thing's enjoyable. though the dialogue often comes across as pompous, helped in this by Howard's mannered performance as failed novelist Alan Squier. Bogart glowers menacingly and delivers lines with his signature Bogartian flair. Soon, he'd be a star, as would Davis. The set is fascinating because it looks so much like a stage set -- the diner has two walls made up almost entirely of windows so action around the pumps can be seen from inside. Director Mayo doesn't open up the action much, contributing to the feeling of stagey, ship-in-a-bottle theatrics. Lightly recommended.