The Best Years of Our Lives: adapted by Robert E. Sherwood from the novel by MacKinlay Kantor; directed by William Wyler; starring Myrna Loy (Milly Stephenson), Dana Andrews (Fred Derry), Fredric March (Al Stephenson), Harold Russell (Homer Parrish), Virginia Mayo (Marie Derry), Teresa Wright (Peggy Stephenson), Hoagy Carmichael (Butch Engle) and Cathy O'Donnell (Wilma Cameron) (1946): Winner of multiple Oscars -- including a Best Supporting Actor nod and a Special Oscar for Harold Russell, the real wounded WWII veteran who does lovely work here.
The Best Years of Our Lives feels at once fresh and Golden Age Hollywood, with sharp performances and a pointed script centered around the difficulties faced by both veterans and their families upon the homecoming of American troops from World War Two. The three male leads, played by Dana Andrews, Fredric March, and Russell, face different problems: Andrews doesn't have a job available for him despite the fact that he's the highest ranking of the three; March is a banker who's suddenly and painfully aware of social and class issues; and Russell must cope with both the loss of his hands and people's reactions to that loss (including his own reactions to those reactions).
The stories of those three are woven together, along with those of their loved ones, into a bundle that may seem a bit too neat at the end, though it holds together better than a lot of contemporary studio films. It's a view into a foreign country of the past with the familiar of our time just beginning to surface (the chain drugstore that offers everything and has bought out the privately owned town drug store being one example of both the familiar and the long-lost, as the drug store still has a soda jerk). Post-traumatic stress disorder, a term that hadn't even been created yet, touches the lives of all three soldiers, as does their occasional resentment of those who didn't have to go to war.
But there's also the essential displacement felt by men who've been so long away -- March hasn't seen his wife or children in five years; Andrews has been away at war for far, far longer than he was at home with his married wife (Virginia Mayo) , the two of them having gotten married on the spur of the moment just before he shipped out, only a week after they'd met (!).
Russell's struggle is made especially poignant because it's obviously a real struggle; his work with his prosthetic hooks is so deft at times that one understands the surprise of many of the characters when they first see that deftness -- and Russell's character's desire to be treated like everybody else. There's an essential sweetness to him and to his story, as there is to all of the stories here.
William Wyler's direction concentrates on the performances -- there's nothing showy here, and Wyler prefers to keep the camera on his characters with little or no movement to highlight those performances. Myrna Loy does a lovely, warmly comic turn as March's wife. Teresa Wright is bright and earnest as March's now-grown-up daughter, and Mayo is shallow but understandably dissatisfied as Andrews' wife. Really a splendid, moving film. Highly recommended.
Dead Men Walk: written by Fred Myton; directed by Sam Newfield; starring George Zucco (Dr. Lloyd Clayton/ Dr. Elwyn Clayton), Mary Carlisle (Gayle Clayton), Nedrick Young (Dr. David Bentley) and Dwight Frye (Zolarr) (1943): Noticeably cheap B-movie from PRC, the bargain basement of 1940's film production, Dead Men Walk takes place on about five sets. Maybe four. One of them is a patch of 'forest' that is apparently exactly as wide as will fill the screen when it's filmed.
The oddly famous George Zucco plays the two main characters, good Dr. Lloyd Clayton and evil vampire Dr. Elwyn Clayton. You can tell them apart because Lloyd wears glasses except when he doesn't, which is on at least four occasions by my count.
There's nothing really good about this movie, though it does feature some of the most inept vampire-fighting ever put on screen and Zucco is competent in his dual role. A fiery climax is surprisingly realistic looking, making one wonder if someone accidentally set fire to the sets and the director said to Hell with it and just started filming.
The fact that the young male love interest for Lloyd's vampire-beset niece is named Dr. David Bentley will be funny to a lot of UWO English department graduates. Weirdly compelling and only 62 minutes long, though not exactly recommended.
Captain Britain: Jasper's Warp: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Alan Davis (1982-83; 2005): Alan Moore wrote one Marvel Comics character, and that was a character who at the time of the writing was almost exclusively only seen in Marvel's occasionally bizarre UK line: Captain Britain.
It's not Moore's first comic-book work, or even his first work on someone else's character. Nonetheless, this collection of Moore's Captain Britain work is fascinating both as a better-than-average early 1980's superhero story and as a foreshadowing of some of the themes and plot twists that would soon define Moore's career.
Moore picks up the narrative half-way through a story started by another writer, with Captain Britain and a ragtag bunch of friends and acquaintances trying to jump-start the development of a parallel Earth (Earth-238 to be exact; normal Marvel Earth is 616). Things rapidly go FUBAR.
As some of the pleasure of this volume lies in the plot twists, including the very early ones, that's really all I can say about the events of this volume. We do get some pretty wacky stuff -- the Captain Britains of all the parallel Earths essentially form a Captain Britain Corps charged with protecting the Omniverse from destruction. Of course, they're not really the Captain Britain Corps because not all of them are named Captain Britain: we meet Captain U.K., Captain Albion, Captain England, Captain Airstrip-One...and I'm not joking about that last one.
Moore seems more fully formed here than his artistic collaborator, Alan Davis, whose first major comic-book work this is. But the volume is worth looking at for Davis as well, and maybe moreso if one enjoys his pleasing, Neal Adams-influenced art (though Davis was and is a much better panel-to-panel storyteller than Adams ever was). Davis grows with astonishing rapidity here, and by the end of the volume he's recognizably entering his mature phase as an illustrator.
My one complaint...what the Hell went on with lettering in the Marvel UK line in the 1980's? This might actually be the worst lettered comic-book from a mainstream company I've ever read. Perhaps later editions fixed this problem with re-lettering. Boy, is it awful. Nonetheless, recommended.
Kraken: An Anatomy by China Mieville (2010): A wild romp from a writer who seems to have an IQ of about 200, Kraken is the best contemporary fantasy novel published in years. Allusive and metatextual, it also manages a thrilling plot, interesting characters, and some of the weirdest conspiracy theories ever floated. And the Church of Kraken Almighty, the decadent Chaos Nazis, the Londonmancers, the Gunfarmers, the London Embassy of the Sea, and two terrifyingly unpleasant guns-for-hire, the seemingly unkillable Goss and Subby.
Billy Harrow, a biologist working at the Darwin Centre at the British Museum in London, England, takes a regularly scheduled tour group into the centre's largest public-display preservation room to see the Centre's crown jewel -- a 40-foot-long giant squid preserved in a giant bottle (this is really there in our world, by the way, if you're in England and want to see a giant squid).
But the squid isn't there, bottle or otherwise. And then a dead body shows up impossibly jammed inside a smaller bottle. And then all Hell breaks loose. Or Heaven. Or Judgment Day. All of it revolving around that lost squid. For squids are baby gods. To the Church of Kraken Almighty, anyway. And with faiths and religions and beliefs overlapping and struggling for supremacy, the God in a Bottle becomes the McGuffin everyone is chasing.
Soon Billy is caught up in a struggle to either cause the End of the World or prevent it, depending on what side one is on. For London is the city of both gods and cults, with magic bubbling away just beneath the surface, a fragile ceasefire now broken as various groups -- including a special police division meant to deal with magical doings -- start to stake their claims on Doomsday. And everyone agrees that Billy Harrow has some major part to play.
Oh, and the familiars are on strike for better pay and working conditions, led by their ancient Egyptian union leader Wati, the spirit of an emancipated ancient Egyptian tomb-statue created to serve the mummified dead in the afterlife. And Wati's one of the more normal characters.
Mieville balances comedy with horror and drama here, one of the more difficult feats a writer can pull off. The result vaguely resembles a Douglas Adams novel, only much smarter and with actual emotional depth among the weirdness.
The allusions and references and intertexts come quickly and in great profusion throughout, adding to one's appreciation of Mieville's giant and eccentric brain (a late Phil Collins reference really kills). The precognitive mystics all agree -- if things go the wrong way, the universe will not only cease to exist: it will cease to have ever existed. Highly recommended.
The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2009-2010); The Unwritten: Inside Man: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2010):; The Unwritten: Dead Man's Knock: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2010); The Unwritten: Leviathan: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2010-2011); The Unwritten: On to Genesis: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2011); The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the War of Words: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2011-2012):
Carey and Gross's epic metafantasy pulls out a lead character modelled upon Christopher Milne and Harry Potter and throws the whole of fiction, poetry, myth, legend, and religion at him. Tom Taylor starts the narrative as the bored, drifting son of mysteriously vanished children's literary titan Wilson Taylor. Wilson seemingly modelled the hero of his incredibly popular series of children's books upon his own son, much as A.A. Milne did with Christopher Robin in Winnie the Pooh.
Well, at least his own son's name and general appearance. And then Wilson vanished, leaving Tom Taylor to make his own way in the world by attending various literary and fantasy conventions as the "real" Tommy Taylor. He signs memorabilia. Sometimes he gets lucky. Mostly he's bored.
But why did Wilson make Tommy memorize an encyclopedic array of knowledge related to "literary geography" -- both the places where works were written and the places where works took place? When Tommy gets kidnapped by an obsessed fan who seems to be an actual vampire modelled upon the literary Tommy Taylor's vampiric nemesis Count Ambrosio, things start to get weird. Especially when he's saved by a young woman named Lizzie Hexam, who knows more about the real Tom Taylor than he does, though less about herself than she's aware of. And all this is just in the first issue of the ongoing series.
The Unwritten is a lot of fun as a narrative, as a metanarrative, and as a fictional meditation on the nature and meaning not just of stories, but of Story itself. And as conspiracies are revealed, the nature of Story assumes geopolitical significance: control a society's narratives about itself and one controls the society.
A complex, funny, and scary piece of work, with lovely art on the stories themselves by Peter Gross and the occasional helper, and by Yuko Shimizu on the gorgeous covers. Highly recommended -- I'd guess there are maybe 20 issues to go before the whole thing wraps up.
Desperation: adapted by Stephen King from his novel of the same name; directed by Mick Garris; starring Tom Skerrit (John Edward Marinville), Steven Weber (Steve Ames), Annabeth Gish (Mary Jackson), Charles Durning (Tom Billingsley), Matt Frewer (Ralph Carver), Henry Thomas (Peter Jackson), Shane Haboucha (David Carver) and Ron Perlman (Collie Entragian) (2006): Surprisingly enjoyable television adaptation of King's novel about supernatural shenanigans in the Nevada desert. Another 40 minutes or so would have helped make things run smoother, but overall this is one of the better King TV movies, and better than a lot of theatrical horror movies King-derived or otherwise.
A crazy cop (cast and played perfectly by Ron Perlman) abducts people on the highway running by the small Nevada town of Desperation, killing most of them but imprisoning some in the lock-up at the police station. But the imprisoned soon band together to try to escape. However, the cop isn't just some nut-job: he's possessed by something unearthed from the giant pit-mine outside town. As are most of the domestic and wild animals around town.
King has noted in interviews that he wanted to have a horror novel in which the forces of Good are explicitly working for the Judeo-Christian God (as per, say, The Stand) and not the more nebulous forces of Good found in most of his novels. So be ready for some praying and some occasionally ham-handed theological discussions. Also a somewhat anomalous silent movie that seems to suggest that the Judeo-Christian God has an awfully strange sense of humour when it comes to explaining issues of cosmic importance.
Overall, the cast is solid, though Steven Weber seems awfully miscast as a former roadie. Tom Skerritt's haunted writer character really needs more development (as he had in the novel) -- it really does seem as Skerritt probably figured in the majority of scenes cut from this movie to wedge four hours of air-time into three (originally planned as a two-night, four-hour affair, Desperation instead aired in one three-hour block, which translates to 131 minutes of movie instead of around 160 minutes). Recommended.
Silent Hill: written by Roger Avary; based on the Konami videogame series; directed by Christophe Gans: starring Radha Mitchell (Rose), Sean Bean (Christopher), Laurie Holden (Cybil), and Alice Krige (Christabella) (2006): If you ignore the basic things that make a movie traditionally good such as plot, dialogue, and characterization, Silent Hill can be pretty enjoyable though somewhat killingly long for a movie of its type (over two hours, with half-an-hour of Sean Bean wandering around in a sub-plot that really needed to be cut except that it was added at the request of studio executives who wanted more male characters in the movie).
However, the set design, character design, and visual effects really do work marvelously, albeit in service to a movie that makes less and less sense the more characters explain what's going on. The filmmakers lifted elements from pretty much every Silent Hill game while also adding their own lunacies to the proceedings, most notably placing the abandoned town of Silent Hill, West Virginia above a burning subterranean coal field.
But Silent Hill is also in another dimension where the remaining residents are besieged by assorted demons and monsters, most of them quite inventive and unnerving in their design. This all has something to do with a cult of witch-hunters who basically ran Silent Hill until the coal fire forced its evacuation in 1974. Which seems awfully late for a witch-hunting cult to have run a town, especially a bustling coal town with the world's largest hotel at its center. And a bus route! And portions of the town are played by Brantford, Ontario!
But anyway, for a bustling mining town, or perhaps city, Silent Hill only had one dinky little two-lane road running into it. I'd have hated to be on that road during rush hour. But now there are things running around, at least when you jump dimensions or whatever, including a giant monster with a pyramid for a head and a giant sword for a hand. And a lot of jittery, burned bipedal creatures. Also what seems to be a permanent snowfall of ash. And a really unpleasant sub-plot featuring pedophiliac rape. Hoo ha! The fun never stops! Lightly recommended, but you might want to turn the sound off, and also be liberal with the fast-forward.
A Small Killing: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Oscar Zarate (1991): Oscar Zarate's art, lovely and grotesque and colourful, really adds layers to the this odd story of a successful designer of advertising campaigns and the demons that haunt him. Alan Moore works on a much smaller scale than he does in better-known works such as Watchmen or From Hell. This move away from the epic may explain why this sometimes seems to be Moore's least-discussed major work. No explosions, no heroes, no villains, and no real fantasy elements. Well, maybe.
An ex-patriate Englander in New York starts to see a mysterious little boy on the eve of his trip to Moscow to design an ad campaign for an American soda-pop's first foray into glasnost-era Russia. memories of past failures and betrayals begin to haunt him, always counterpointed with his own justifications and evasions -- we're shown the past and given the protagonist's often wildly off-base commentary upon it. And then, prior to travelling to Moscow, he returns to England to visit his parents.
The telling of the story is much more compliated than the above synopsis makes it, with flash-backs and flash-sideways, numinous 'normal' objects become mythic in memory, fragments of dialogue to sift through, panel composition and colouring to mull over. Zarate does some marvelous things as he moves back and forth from subjective to objective, from crowds to solitude, from the grotesque to the everyday. A fine piece of work that deserves more recognition. Maybe Moore should have stuck a superhero in it. Highly recommended.
