Mirror Mirror: written by Marc Klein, Jason Keller, and Melisa Wallack; directed by Tarsem Singh; starring Julia Roberts (The Queen), Lily Collins (Snow White), Armie Hammer (Prince Alcott), Nathan Lane (Brighton), and Sean Bean (The King) (2012): Mostly diverting action-comedy based on the Snow White story. Lily Collins (daughter of Phil) has some Abe Vigoda-esque eyebrows as Snow White, though.
The set design and costuming are pretty, and pretty impressive: Tarsem Singh loves making things look baroque. If the script were wittier, the whole thing might actually be a minor classic. It's certainly much lighter on its feet than the same year's other Snow White movie, the more epic Snow White and the Huntsman, and Collins is a much more charming presence than the other movie's Kristen Stewart. The movie's tone takes its cues from The Princess Bride, not Lord of the Rings.
Julia Roberts seems to be having fun being bad and doing a bad English accent. No one else even tries to do an accent. Unlike Snow White and the Huntsman, Mirror Mirror uses actual dwarves and not CGI-squashed actors. Armie Hammer is actually pretty funny as the Prince, and Nathan Lane gets about all the laughs out of his lines that he can.
Singh's visual inventiveness is mostly kept under control, though there's a fascinating sequence involving giant, homicidal marionettes that really is quite magical and odd. It's like something from a Guillermo del Toro movie. Lightly recommended.
Mrs. Miniver: based on the book by Jan Struther; written by Arthur Wimperis, George Froeschel, James Hilton, Claudine West, Paul Osborn, and R.C. Sheriff; directed by William Wyler; starring Greer Garson (Mrs. Miniver), Walter Pidgeon (Clem Miniver), Teresa Wright (Carol Beldon), Richard Ney (Vin Miniver), Henry Travers (Mr. Ballard) and Dame May Whitty (Lady Beldon) (1942): Multiple Oscar winner is almost a perfect example of Classic Hollywood Drama. Greer Garson became a big star thanks to her portrayal of middle-class British housewife Mrs. Miniver in a small town just outside of London during the first two years of World War Two for Great Britain. The movie itself was also a huge box-office hit and a rallying point for America as it entered World War Two.
This is Hollywood England, so we never find out why Miniver's husband, played by Canadian Walter Pidgeon, doesn't sound English, or how their son developed an almost parodic upper-class-twit accent, given that they're middle-class and neither of them sound remotely like him. American Teresa Wright also doesn't sound particularly English. Things never really change in Hollywood.
But anyway, much rallying of spirits occurs as Mrs. Miniver and the town endure war, Nazi bombing, fugitive Nazi airmen, Dunkirk (Mr. Miniver owns a boat and so is drafted into helping out with the evacuation), personal tragedy, a dogfight that seems to take place about three feet above the English countryside, and the annual Canterbury flower show.
That last is a major plot point, by the way. President Roosevelt loved the movie for its propaganda value as America itself finally entered the war. The final singing of "Onward, Christian Soldiers" may strike one as mildly disturbing -- the Nazis loved putting crosses on their military hardware, after all. Recommended.
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance: based on a character created by Gary Friedrich and Mike Ploog; written by Scott Gimple, Seth Hoffman, and David S. Goyer; directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor; starring Nicolas Cage (Ghost Rider/Johnny Blaze), Violante Placido (Nadya), Ciaran Hinds (Roarke), Idris Elba (Moreau), Johnny Whitworth (Ray Carrigan) and Fergus Rirodan (Danny) (2012): Wow. This is a truly terrible superhero movie. And it doesn't really synchronize with the first Ghost Rider. What is it with sequels that don't appear to have been written by people who've seen the previous film?
For some reason, I love the fact that the character played by Peter Fonda in the first movie is now played by Ciaran Hinds. Because if you're going to recast, don't go with people who look alike. But then, for no good reason, the filmmakers have Hinds do a weirdly amorphous, mush-mouthed American accent. I guess his normal voice would have confused people who thought he was Peter Fonda.
I gained a lot of respect for Idris Elba, though, who does his best with a stupid character. And Nicolas Cage isn't awful, though he looks depressed at times to be in such an awful movie. You'd think a film about a motorcycle-riding figure of vengeance with a flaming skull for a head would at least be fun, but this one really isn't. And Johnny Whitworth, as the secondary villain, delivers one of the worst Joker-riffs in the history of action movies. He's almost impossible to watch.
Given the scarcity of decent visual effects sequences, it's hard to believe that this movie really cost $57 million. Much of it has the production values of a SciFi Channel movie. Though at least the filmmakers were honest about shooting in Eastern Europe to save money, as the movie is set there and in Turkey. So, good on them. Not recommended.
Rotworld: written by Jeff Lemire, Scott Snyder, and others; illustrated by Yanick Paquette, Marco Rudy, Steve Pugh, Travel Foreman, and others (2011-2013): I'd imagine that DC will eventually package the entire Rotworld run of Swamp Thing, Animal Man, and several issues of Frankenstein: Agent of S.H.A.D.E. into one 1000-page omnibus volume. While only a handful of issues from each title bore the Rotworld banner, the entire story actually started with the rebooted Swamp Thing and Animal Man comic books back with their first issues in September 2011, and was really only resolved with issues 18 of those books this March.
The set-up was relatively simple: there are three great living kingdoms on Earth: the Green (Vegetation Kingdom), the Red (Animal Kingdom), and the Rot (well, guess). Swamp Thing is the living avatar of the Green, Animal Man is essentially the acting regent of the Red until his daughter comes of age, and long-time Swamp Thing villain Anton Arcane is the avatar of the Rot.
Normally the three powers live in an occasionally contested balance, but over the last 200 years, Arcane's stewardship of the Rot has led him to attempt to extinguish the other two forces in order to remake the Earth into a polluted, distorted kingdom for himself. And then he'll reach out for other planets.
So, over about 800 story pages, Swamp Thing and Animal Man and a number of allies battle the Rot in the past, present, and future of the Earth. Yes, time travel is involved. And as this is part of the 'soft' reboot of the DC Universe, Swamp Thing himself has been born again: it turns out he was never really Alec Holland, but he will be Alec Holland again. Animal Man also learns an assortment of things that fall squarely into the category of Everything You Knew Was Wrong. Long-time Swamp Thing paramour Abigail Arcane gets the biggest conceptual makeover, however: she, and not her evil Uncle, is supposed to be the avatar of the Rot.
Did this story need to cover so many issues? Well, no. The reversals of fortune become frustrating at points, and there are times throughout where one wishes they'd just get on with it. But Snyder and Lemire also do some nice word-smithing and character-building.
Animal Man and Swamp Thing really shine in the art department, especially in those issues drawn by Yanick Paquette or Steve Pugh. Paquette really goes all-out depicting the verdant yet often horrifying world of Swamp Thing: it's the best art Paquette has ever done. Pugh, who's been around the Animal Man book before, has a rare flair for the grotesque and the cloachal. Frankly, they could have gone off-schedule a bit more (or made both books 8-times-a-year, like in the oldey-timey days of comic books) so that Pugh and Paquette could have handled all the art chores. Oh, well.
As both books present new origins for their avatars, the whole storyline isn't a bad jumping-on point for new readers. Long-time readers will of course wonder where the Hell the Fungus Kingdom -- the Grey -- is for the duration. Matango! Recommended.
Neonomicon: written by Alan Moore with Antony Johnston; illustrated by Jacen Burroughs (2003, 2010-2011): Winner of the first-ever Bram Stoker Award for a Graphic Novel (from the Horror Writers' Association), Neonomicon is Alan Moore's dark valentine to the life and work of H.P. Lovecraft. 'Neonomicon' is a play on the title of Lovecraft's famous, imaginary volume of terrible knowledge, the Necronomicon.
All the sexual horrors that were vaguely implied in many of Lovecraft's stories are here made manifest, often in graphically disturbing fashion, all of them delineated in a razor-sharp quasi-realistic mode by Jacen Burroughs. It's a spectacular, and spectacularly disturbing, graphic novel that rewards multiple re-readings.
Burroughs's art complements the story beautifully, giving us a Cthulhu Mythos story with both the suggestiveness and the painful exactness necessary to certain sections. The relatively realistic nature of Burroughs's art may be seen as the equivalent of the faux-documentary stretches of many of Lovecraft's finest works, in which an accumulation of 'real' detail from interviews and newspaper articles served the construction of that awful Cthulhuian world.
This collected volume actually contains both the miniseries named Neonomicon and the earlier, shorter set-up, The Courtyard. On a slightly different alternate Earth where the major cities are domed so as to cut down on pollution and the telephones contain fax machines (!), three FBI agents at two different times try to seek out the origins of a strange rise in mass killings by people who seem totally unrelated.
While there are cloachal horrors and sexual horrors awaiting, there are also gratifyingly disturbing moments of weirdness that evoke the sort of cosmic horror Lovecraft strove for throughout his work, a breaking-down of existential categories, a collapse in causality. Moore's humour also plays out, sometimes in perfect harmony with the horror (as one cop says about a disturbing bit of graffitti/art, "I hope that's a tree." It isn't.).
The personal problems of the characters tie directly into the ideas Moore explores in the course of this dark odyssey: The Courtyard's protagonist is a hard-core racist, and his story plays out in the Red Hook district of New York, setting for Lovecraft's early, racist fear-of-miscegenation story, "The Horror at Red Hook." Neonomicon's protagonist is a female FBI agent whose career and personal problems with institutional sexism and exploitation will ultimately play a terrible role in the story's resolution. Lovecraft's stories didn't have female protagonists, and generally didn't have female characters with speaking roles.
This isn't a volume for everyone: it's vicious and boundary-pushing. But it's also an astonishing addition to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Highly recommended.
Just a Pilgrim: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Carlos Ezquerra (2001): Among Garth Ennis's brutal comic-book characters, the protagonist of this one -- known only as 'the Pilgrim' -- is one of the five or six most brutal. Which is saying a lot, given Ennis characters like Saint of Killers, Hitman, and Bill Butcher. Ezquerra, a standout on Judge Dredd for years and occasional collaborator with Ennis on other projects (including the Saint of Killers miniseries, if memory serves), is in fine form here in this bloody post-apocalyptic tale.
In a near-future world in which the Sun suddenly went into its Red Giant phase hundreds of millions of years early, a small group of survivors seek refuge on a trek across the floor of the former Atlantic Ocean. Set upon by pirates led by Castenado, a blind psychic buccaneer with two peg legs and two hook hands, they're rescued and eventually led by the mysterious Pilgrim, who quotes Bible verses and shoots dogs who "have the Devil in them."
However, the Pilgrim's violent efficiency causes most of the people, including the ten-year-old boy whose diary forms the narrative structure, to put their faith in the Pilgrim and God. Castenado won't give up his pursuit. So on a devastated, emptied seafloor filled with dangerous, mutated creatures, the small band will make their way toward a reckoning with Castenado. Along the way, the Pilgrim's origins in the pre-apocalyptic world will be revealed.
Like pretty much all of Ennis's comic-book output, this is NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH. It does have some troubling, fascinating points to make about faith and a reliance on heroes that play out in other, longer Ennis works. The relationship between the Pilgrim and the boy plays with expectations caused by similar relationships in famous Westerns that include Shane, Pale Rider, and True Grit. Are we being set up? Ezquerra really is one of Ennis's perfect collaborators, with an ease and skill at portraying action and the grotesque and the occasionally comic. Followed by at least one sequel. Recommended.
The Next Nexus: written by Mike Baron; illustrated by Steve Rude (1989): This compilation of the Nexus miniseries of the same name from 1989 arrives from a time when comics companies weren't entirely sure what to put in their 'graphic novel' collections for the American market -- or, frankly, what to charge for them. This First Comics album would be a couple of bucks more than the individual issues. Why? I don't entirely know.
It's an enjoyable story for someone who had followed writer Mike Baron and artist Steve Rude's Nexus superhero space-opera serial for the previous decade. But it's not really a standalone story, and it doesn't exactly have an ending. The miniseries should probably have simply been part of the normal run of Nexus, which Rude wasn't drawing at the time. Complications, complications.
So as it's out of print and not the greatest introduction to the Nexus series, I'm not sure how to review it. It's great fun, and Rude's art is really at its late-1980's peak here. We get a nice look at the societies of the far future. Baron's writing is sharp and observant. Rude's art mixes up the superheroic and the comedic with elan: there's really still no one quite like him in comc books, and Nexus gave him the broad canvas to shine in a way that normal superhero books never did and never have.
The 'real' Nexus isn't Nexus at this point in the narrative, which means we have the de rigeur scenes of former Nexus Horatio Hellpop moping around and being noble now that he's no longer in charge of executing mass murderers across the galaxy at the whim of a hyper-powerful alien known as The Merk. A number of sub-plots from the main series play through the miniseries, making me wonder if this really was supposed to be four issues of the main series. So it goes. Great Goulessarian! Recommended for Nexus readers.
