Here Comes the Boom: written by Kevin James, Allan Loeb, and Rock Reuben; directed by Frank Coraci; starring Kevin James (Scott Voss), Salma Hayek (Bella Flores), Henry Winkler (Marty Streb) and Bas Rutten (Niko) (2012): Pleasant movie comedy which also seems to be a 90-minute advertisement for Ultimate Fighting, with various UFC fighters, organizers, and promoters showing up throughout the film.
Kevin James is a less-schlubby-than-usual high school biology teacher who's lost his teaching mojo until the buget-cutting plight of fellow teacher Henry Winkler leads him to become a Mixed Martial Arts fighter to raise money to save the music program. I can't believe I just typed that.
James is very good at slapstick, and while this isn't a great comedy, it certainly isn't a terrible one. James really needs to hook up with a better movie production team than the guys at Happy Madison, though. He's always a lot better than his movies. Lightly recommended.
Behind the Candelabra: adapted by Richard LaGravenese from the non-fiction book by Alex Thorleifson and Scott Thorson; directed by Steven Soderbergh; starring Matt Damon (Scott Thorson), Michael Douglas (Liberace), Rob Lowe (Dr. Jack Startz), Dan Aykroyd (Seymour Heller), Scott Bakula (Bob Black) and Debbie Reynolds (Frances Liberace) (2013): Enjoyable but slight HBO outing by Soderbergh which features a fairly stunning bit of acting by Michael Douglas as Liberace. Soderbergh says he couldn't get funding for this picture from movie studios because it was too gay, hence its production by HBO.
But as even I only vaguely remember Liberace as a performer, probably from The Muppet Show in the 1970's, I wonder if the studio redlight on this production was also a result of executives wondering if anyone in the younger movie-going populace would have the faintest idea who Michael Douglas was playing. Brokeback Mountain this isn't. The love story here is pretty creepy, as Liberace gets Thorson to undergo plastic surgery so as to look more like a young Liberace. Eww.
Douglas pretty much nails Liberace's voice, though the pitch is a bit lower than I remember it. Damon is perfectly adequate as Liberace's late-in-life love Scott Thorson, whose book the movie is based on. I'm not sure why Soderbergh didn't do more with lighting values, as he's done on so many other films: this seems like a movie that needs to look much more stylized, but except for a few oversaturated scenes, it's actually about as conventionally photographed and edited as a movie of the week. As the film's major intertext is Sunset Blvd., black-and-white photography might have been nice. But I think we're supposed to feel much more sympathy for Liberace than we do for Norma Desmond, and I can't say as I felt it. It's like being asked to feel sorry for a Dick Tracy villain.
Rob Lowe, though. Holy Moley! His plastic surgeon character actually looked worse than the filmmakers have Lowe made up here. He looks like he got caught in a face-stretching machine from Brazil or possibly Star Trek: Insurrection. In any case, I'd guess that Douglas is a mortal lock for a least a best acting nomination in next year's Emmys. Recommended.
Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King containing the following works: "Dolan's Cadillac" (1988), "The End of the Whole Mess" (1986), "Suffer the Little Children" (1972), "The Night Flier (1988), "Popsy" (1987),"It Grows on You" (1982), "Chattery Teeth" (1992), "Dedication" (1988), "The Moving Finger" (1990), "Sneakers" (1988), "You Know They Got a Hell of a Band" (1992), "Home Delivery" (1989), "Rainy Season" (1989), "My Pretty Pony" (1988), "Sorry, Right Number" (1993), "The Ten O'Clock People" (1993), "Crouch End"(1980), "The House on Maple Street", "The Fifth Quarter" (1986), "The Doctor's Case" (1987), "Umney's Last Case" (1993), "Head Down" (1990), "Brooklyn August" (1971), and "The Beggar and the Diamond" (1993) (Collected 1993):
Nightmares and Dreamscapes is Stephen King's third and, to date, largest collection of short pieces by about 100,000 words. If it weren't for King forgetting that "The Cat from Hell" had not been collected, Nightmares and Dreamscapes would have completely cleared King's published back catalogue of stories he intended to collect.
Yes, Virginia, there are published King stories that have never been collected because King thought they sucked, from the 1960's to the 1980's. "The Cat from Hell" (adapted in Tales from the Darkside: The Movie) would finally appear in 2008's collection of otherwise recent stories, Just After Sunset. But other than that accidental omission, King's two collections after this one contain material published after 1993.
Besides being the longest of King's collections, this is also the broadest by about four genres and one non-fiction essay about King's son Owen's Little League baseball team. King was a much more nuanced writer by 1993 than he was earlier in his career, and that generally shows up in places like that excellent baseball essay, mainstream pieces that include "My Pretty Pony", straight-ahead suspense stories such as "Dolan's Cadillac," and homages to hardboiled detective fiction ("Umney's Last Case") and Sherlock Holmes ("The Doctor's Case"). There's also a nifty Cthulhu Mythos story from 1980, "Crouch End."
Where the collection falls down is in the area of horror. The best pure horror story here is the earliest story in the book -- "Suffer the Little Children", from the late 1960's, is a marvelously nasty story. "Chattery Teeth," from the 1990's, is a fun mirror-image of the much-superior "The Monkey" (collected in Skeleton Crew). "The Moving Finger" and "Rainy Season" are both enjoyable duds as horror, with concepts that are simply way too over-used, or that are much funnier than they are scary. "The Night Flier" and "Popsy" are both pretty terrible, vampire stories without any bite.
King's career really is interesting if one now takes completely seriously the concept that the gigantic 1986 horror novel It really did represent King's summation of his fictional concern with horror. There hasn't been much straight horror since, and much of what there has been has been awfully scattershot.
King's best post-It long work of horror fiction, The Library Policeman, is itself essentially a condensed retelling of It. He may always be a horror writer in the popular imagination, but I don't think King's best work has been in horror for decades. In any case, this is a solid collection. Maybe too solid. It's thick as a brick. Recommended.
The Great White Space by Basil Copper (1974): The recently deceased Basil Copper gives us a splendid homage to H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, with perhaps a smidgen of Moby Dick, in this tale of an expedition into a mysterious cave system located beneath mountains somewhere in Asia. The exact location is never given because the narrator doesn't want anyone to follow in his expedition's footsteps for reasons that become abundantly clear as the narrative progresses. He only is escaped alone to tell thee.
Narrated decades after the (thankfully fictional) attempt of the 1932 Great Northern Expedition to penetrate the mysteries of that cave system, The Great White Space goes not into the southern polar regions (as Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, Jules Verne's The Sphinx of the Ice, and Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym did) but beneath the Earth.
Copper devotes a lot of space and detail early in the text to explaining the technical and logistical preparations for the descent and then the long voyage to 'The Black Mountains', where the entry to the cave system exists. Along the way, two different and somewhat odd Asian tribes are met, and possible taboos about entering the caves encountered. The natives do not go in there, through an artificial cave mouth that stands several hundred feet high.
Once inside the system -- which is, to use a favourite Lovecraftian adjective, cyclopean, as in monstrously huge -- the expedition soon discovers that the entire cave system is artificial, carved or somehow otherwise scooped out of the rock through unknown technological means. Something lurks, of course, though much of the terror of the novel lies in what comes before the Big Reveal.
Unnerving details and an attention to both the squeamish and the Sublime build to the revelation of what waits in the region of The Great White Space, a region paradoxically located miles beneath the Earth. There are things in bottles, a library, and great forms glimpsed in the distance, coming closer. And there comes occasionally from far off the sound of enormous wings.
Some may find this brief novel a tad slow -- the horrors come on-stage fairly late in the game, and explanations are abandoned in favour of mystery and dread. I quite liked the modulation of this novel -- it's quiet and it demands concentration, but it's a page-turner nonetheless. Highly recommended.
Brave: written by Brenda Chapman, Mark Andrews, Steve Purcell, and Irene Mecchi; directed by Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman, and Steve Purcell; starring the voices of Kelly Macdonald (Merida), Billy Connolly (Fergus), and Emma Thompson (Elinor) (2012): I wanted to like Pixar's first foray into the long uncharted realms of a female protagonist. And the first 40 minutes or so of Brave are decent enough, though there are points where I became convinced that they created a female protagonist (Scottish teenager Merida) just to show off their increasing proficiency at CGI hair.
Merida has a lot of hair. And it looks pretty realistic. If you want to see what top-shelf CGI could do with hair just 15 years ago, take a look at Malebolgia in the live-action Spawn movie. See how terrible it looks? So we've mastered computer-generated hair. It's not a Mars colony or an end to world hunger, but it's something.
But Holy Moley -- did Pixar's first female protagonist have to get saddled with Mother issues that ultimately swallow the entire plot? And was the last 40 minutes of the movie even plotted out? Because everything in the second half of the movie revolves around two female characters accomplishing...a repair job on a tapestry. Specifically, repairing about a two-foot-long tear in a tapestry.
So a movie in which three of the four major speaking roles are for women has as its McGuffin...the ability to sew. Well, and forgive. It's as if Aladdin came down to whether or not a tinsmith could fix the Genie's lamp. And the amount of Idiot Plot running-around in those last 40 minutes is something to behold. It makes the chase sequence at the end of Star Trek: Into Darkness look like a model of narrative economy and plain good sense.
So hopefully Pixar will give a female protagonist a movie as good as the Toy Story films or Up or Wall*E. This one, muddled and burdened with voiceover homilies that don't seem to have any relation to what the film showed us, isn't it. Not recommended unless you're a scholar of CGI hair.
Star Trek: Into Darkness: written by Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof; based on characters created by Gene Roddenberry, Carey Wilber, Gene L. Coon, Harve Bennett, Jack B. Sowards, Samuel A. Peeples, Nicholas Meyer, and Ramon Sanchez; directed by J.J. Abrams; starring Chris Pine (Captain Kirk), Zachary Quinto (Mr. Spock), Zoe Saldana (Uhura), Karl Urban (McCoy), Simon Pegg (Scotty), John Cho (Sulu), Anton Yelchin (Chekov), Bruce Greenwood (Pike), Peter Weller (Admiral Marcus), Alice Eve (Carol Marcus) and Benedict Cumberbatch (John Harrison) (2013):
The Abrams et al. Star Trek reboot focuses on action to a much greater extent than anything in the original series, movies or television. It's a canny choice in today's action-blockbuster market, though it does render the movies occasionally somewhat unTrekkish. Something blows up every five minutes or so, and it's not just the control panels.
Here, the writing team goes where pretty much every iteration of Trek has gone before, into the realm of science-fiction-as-allegory for current political issues. The most obvious example of this sort of writing from the original series was probably "The Enterprise Incident", a fairly schematic take on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, only with Romulans and a cloaking device and the "Vulcan death grip."
Into Darkness goes broader and longer than that, squeezing in everything from 9/11 to the morality of drone strikes on U.S. citizens to the second Iraq War. The relentless plot machine keeps everything fairly light, despite the attempts to portray this as the Trek universe's version of The Dark Knight. It's also less politically toxic than the last two Nolan Batman films -- the superman here is something to be avoided, as are vengeance and secret political shenanigans for the greater good.
The cast is solid, and most of the actors portraying classic characters are given at least one acting set-piece to please the fans. Nonetheless, the film clearly belongs to Spock and Kirk -- as it usually does -- along with the somewhat manic Scotty of Simon Pegg and adversaries played by Peter Weller and Benedict Cumberbatch. Cumberbatch has a lot of fun enunciating and sneering and doing uncanny physical stuff, while Weller is convincingly wormy as a Starfleet Admiral with more than a touch of Dick Cheney about him.
Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto have become pretty adept at suggesting the original Shatner and Nimoy performances without imitating them. Kirk is suitably cocky at this point in his career, and Spock occasionally baffled by his captain's brash emotionality. There are several lovely action setpieces both on the ground and in space, and the day is won by cleverness and self-sacrifice, not by who has the biggest guns.
This isn't a great movie -- indeed, it could have slowed down and offered a bit more nuance at times, more compelling dialogue and argument. Cumberbatch, playing a classic Trek villain, is characterized much more harshly than that character was originally, making things a lot more clear-cut as to the character's pre-existing villainy (attempted genocide against humanity gets added to the character's resume, something not originally on the books for someone who was originally a warmonger, a tyrant, and a slaver). Oh, well. An action movie that comes out in favour of justice and due process is rare enough. Recommended.
Not After Nightfall by Basil Copper, containing the following stories: "The Spider", "Camera Obscura", "The Cave", "The Grey House", "Old Mrs. Cartwright", "Charon", "The Great Vore", and "The Janissaries of Emilion" (Collected 1967): Basil Copper, who just died in the past year, was a stand-out British writer of horror and detective stories (primarily the Solar Pons series of Sherlock Holmes pastiches in the latter category) for 50 years.
This is Copper's first collection, and it contains several stand-outs, though none of the stories moves particularly far into the neo-Lovecraftian cosmic horror he would practice later in his career that would lead to such indispensable works as The Great White Space and "Shaft Number 247." Instead, Copper's first collection reminds me of a variety of different writers at certain points, though it also establishes Copper's gift for building suspense and mystery through the patient and increasingly unnerving accumulation of detail.
"The Great Vore" gives us a Holmesian occult investigator, while "Old Mrs. Cartwright" nicely evokes the nasty horror shorts of Saki. The cool Copper tone is already evident, though later stories would seem more of a totality and less suggestive of homage ("Charon", for example, reads like a British version of a gentle Bradbury fantasy or even a Twilight Zone episode).
"The Great Vore" is tense and detail-packed as it follows Professor Kane's attempts to thwart the murderous operations of an occult cult in Great Britain some time in the middle of the 20th century. "The Grey House" is the story most reminiscent of LeFanu, while "The Cave" suggests some of Algernon Blackwood's traveller's horrors of wandering into dark places in Europe.
"Camera Obscura," an interesting fantasy of justice, was filmed for the 1960's TV show Night Gallery. "The Janissaries of Emilion" is reminiscent of some of Lord Dunsany's and Lovecraft's dream stories, but it achieves its own nasty bit of unsettling business through the patient accumulation of detail -- it's not 'dreamy' but rather very specifically described. Really a very fine first collection of stories. Recommended.
