The Dream Quest of Unknown Kubrick

Eyes Wide Shut: adapted by Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael from the novel Dream Story (1926) by Arthur Schnitzler; directed by Stanley Kubrick; starring Tom Cruise (Dr. William Harford), Nicole Kidman (Alice Harford), Sydney Pollack (Victor Ziegler), and Todd Field (Nick Nightingale) (1999): Stanley Kubrick's last film had an infamously long shooting schedule, one which some people view as being the deciding factor in the break-up of stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Kubrick handed in the final cut and then died less than a week later. Yikes!

Some critics at the time seemed to become more confused by the events of a movie based on a Freudian dream-journey of a novella than could really be explained. So I'll explain it. Kubrick was generally viewed as being a cool, emotionless film-maker constantly striving for some form of cinematic objectivity. He wasn't, but he was viewed this way by the critical hive-mind. Had the dreamily subterranean sub-conscious David Lynch released the exact same film, reviews would have been much different: we expect a mind-fuck from David Lynch. We expect the inexplicable and the subjective.

In the case of Eyes Wide Shut, the viewer's detective story could be summed up as a quest to understand what events in the film objectively 'happen' and what events are components of the Tom Cruise character's internal, dream-like, occasionally nightmarish voyage of self-discovery. And the answers to that quest I'll leave to you, the viewer. If answers are even needed. You could just strap in and feel the G's.

In many ways, this is Kubrick's most enjoyably absurd movie since Dr. Strangelove, if you let it be. Cruise's quest may take him into the bipolar dream realms of Eros and Thanatos, but Kubrick et al. offer mounting absurdities at every turn. An opener of the gateway named Nightingale. A comically sinister Eastern European provider of masquerade costumes and his nymphomaniac daughter. The much-maligned, endlessly loopy Secret Order of Rich Sex Perverts and their comically portentous sex games.

The comic parts curdle to nightmare, of course, with the various threads of Cruise's journey ending in rejection, illness, humiliation, death, and the contemplation of the abject, naked, dead body of what was earlier a sexualized object . The voyager into the dream world must be shocked back to the land of the real. And with the events set at Christmas, one can note, among other things, the importance of A Christmas Carol to understanding the proceedings. Though Dickens never gave us this much full-frontal nudity.

Kubrick's choice of then-reigning Hollywood Power Couple Cruise and Kidman makes perfect sense, as he wanted a pair who could play superficially pretty, seemingly bland people who would soon be revealed to contain hidden depths. I think they're both very good, especially Cruise, who gets to play a character who is both exactly his cinematic type on the surface, and a regret-plagued mess under the surface.

The supporting players are also fine, with the occasional wooden performances tending to be linked to characters who are there as adjuncts to Cruise's journey and not essential, emotional encounters. I wouldn't recommend watching it in one sitting. It's long, and there's a lot to think about. Highly recommended.

Planes, Trains, and Operating Systems

Non-Stop: written by John W. Richardson, Ryan Engle, and Christopher Roach; directed by Jaume Collet-Serra; starring Liam Neeson (Bill Marks) and Julianne Moore (Jen Summers) (2014): Competent, enjoyable thriller featuring Liam Neeson as an air marshal with a troubled past who needs to overcome his own character flaws to save a passenger plane from a terrorist. The movie plays pretty fair with its 'bottle-show' premise -- all the major action takes place on a passenger plane in flight.

Airplane movies tend to be scientifically loopy, and this one is no exception, but Neeson, Julianne Moore, and most of the rest of the cast keep things interesting while the writers and director keep things moving, though occasionally in the exact opposite way they should from the standpoint of physics or basic geography. Lightly recommended.

Her: written and directed by Spike Jonze; starring Joaquin Phoenix (Theodore), Chris Pratt (Paul), Rooney Mara (Catherine), Scarlett Johansson (Samantha), and Amy Adams (Amy) (2013): Really a brilliant piece of near-future science fiction from director Spike Jonze, who writes his own screenplay here for the first time. There are echoes of Philip K. Dick in the film's preoccupation with the question of what constitutes a human being, and in Joaquin Phoenix's lead character, a troubled, decent, normal human being still suffering in the aftermath of a failed marriage.

The filmmakers have done a marvellous job of building the future world through slightly skewed fashion, odd future jobs, and a host of other things. Science fiction is also often about the present-day regardless of its setting, and certainly the movie comments on all the mediated, tech-boosted interactions of modern human beings and their assortment of smart-phones, tablets, and gizmos.

Phoenix is wonderfully modulated and understated as the protagonist, while Amy Adams shines as his best friend. Scarlett Johansson voices the newly released artificial intelligence that Phoenix buys to coordinate all his gadgets (things are pretty integrated in the future). Released from her body, Johansson gives what may be her best performance.

While the movie deals extensively with relationships and connectedness, it also moves towards something more epic by the end of the film. What would intelligent beings capable of thinking a million times faster than humanity think of us? How fast would they evolve? And didn't any of the beta-testing reveal that the AI's were capable of theoretically infinite intellectual growth? Is that V'ger on my phone? Highly recommended.

Everybody Loves Kryptonite

Yes, the original is in here.

Showcase Presents World's Finest featuring Superman and Batman Volume 3: written by Edmond Hamilton, Jim Shooter, Leo Dorfman, Cary Bates, and Bill Finger; illustrated by Curt Swan, George Klein, and Al Plastino (1965-67; collected 2010): An often gloriously loopy example of DC's superheroes in the late Silver Age. Superman and Batman team up, often with Robin and Jimmy Olsen along, to face a variety of menaces that range from the sinister to the ridiculous.

The great Curt Swan, for many people The Superman Artist, draws all but one of the stories collected here, giving even the craziest of events a grounding in reality. Edmond Hamilton, a science-fiction writer who started his career in the 1930's but also wrote a ton of comics for DC in the 1950's and 1960's, writes about the first half of the book. It's Silver Agey super-science and sketchy characterization throughout. And comics were for kids, so that's fine.

Superman and Batman get a little more psychologically complex once the young, Marvelesque Jim Shooter starts contributing scripts, along with long-time-to-be Superman scribe Cary Bates and Leo Dorfman. The heroes show more doubt and have more problems, sometimes to a ridiculous extent. The final story in the volume features an astonishingly underwhelming villain who nonetheless figures out the location of the Bat-cave in about two minutes...and gets inside. It also features Batman and Superman telling a Q&A group what villains they most fear and why. Really? This is not a particularly good thing to get all carey and sharey about!

The 1950's and 1960's were also a period when everyone on the planet seemed to have several pounds of Kryptonite lying around the house. It's a good thing these were stories for children -- otherwise, Superman would have died a thousand times over. One can see by the rote use of Kryptonite by every bloody criminal on the planet why the editors tried to wipe the Kryptonian menace out during the soft Superman reboot of 1970.

Or John Byrne's hard Superman reboot of 1986, for that matter, which initially reduced the amount of Kryptonite on Earth to one fist-sized chunk. Having learned nothing from 63 years of Superman history, the producers of Smallville re-introduced Kryptonite in mass quantities and upped the ante by having it give human beings super-powers as well. Because as Bizarro-Superman (who also appears here) would say, Hollywood am smart!

In order to introduce non-Kryptonite-centric drama, the creators of World's Finest resorted several times in the three years spanned by this collection to two recurring story models. One is the 'Imaginary Story', in which out-of-continuity events such as Bruce Wayne being adopted by Jonathan and Martha Kent and being raised as Clark Kent's brother could occur. These Imaginary Stories often represented the best DC stories (for adult readers, anyway) of the 1950's and 1960's, as people could actually change and even die in them.

The other old stand-by involved the magical pair of transdimensional tricksters Mr. Mxyzptlk and Bat-Mite getting up to magical shenanigans to test the character of Superman and Batman. Because the effects of their magic -- up to and including mass death -- would cease to exist once they were banished back to their magical other-dimensional worlds, their stories could also involve a lot of danger and humiliation for the World's Finest team. Cartoonist Evan Dorkin took the Bat-Mite/Mxyzptlk stories to their logical conclusion in 2001's World's Funniest, which I thought was pretty funny.

All in all, this volume is a weird delight. Is it sophisticated graphic entertainment for adults? No. But it's more fun than a barrel of Kryptonite. And barrels of Kryptonite must be fun because everyone's got one! Also, King Arthur and his knights had super-powers in the DC Universe at this point! And the Superman of the 30th century can be brought low by... sea water, all of which is now deadly radioactive! Because Kryptonite wasn't pervasive enough! Highly recommended.

Problems in the Canadian Backwoods

Solo: written and directed by Isaac Cravit; starring Annie Clark (Gillian), Daniel Kash (Ray), Richard Clarkin (Fred), and Steven Love (Marty) (2013): Surprisingly competent straight-to-video cheapie filmed in the terrifying woodlands of Ontario, Canada. 17-year-old Gillian, nursing some tragedy that one knows will be revealed before the end credits, takes a job as a camp counselor somewhere in Ontario's cottage country. She knows nothing about camping.

Before the kiddies arrive, new counselors have to spend two nights alone on a small island to prove their camping ability. As all the counselors seem to be at the camp when this Solo occurs, I guess that either the camp never hires more than one new counselor a year, or the experienced counselors have a lot of down time before the kiddies arrive.

Anyway, 25 years earlier, a girl disappeared on that island, never to be seen again. Now, it has a reputation as being haunted. Man, this is the best summer job ever! So Gillian goes camping, and various things happen.

Annie Clark does a solid job as Gillian, and the rest of the acting is fine. The plot creaks a bit at times -- there's nothing really new here, but writer-director Isaac Cravit shows talent throughout. And at about 80 minutes, the movie certainly doesn't overstay its welcome. Lightly recommended.


The Name of the Game: written and illustrated by Will Eisner (2001): One of the American comic book's seminal giants, Eisner's career went from the late 1930's to the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. He's an unavoidable figure in comics.

This late-career graphic novel is a fine example of Eisner's strengths and weaknesses. It traces the fortunes of several Jewish-American families from the middle of the 19th century to the 1970's. The 'Game' of the title is marriage, arranged and otherwise, through which families rise and fall.

For most readers, The Name of the Game will be a historical primer on the Jewish experience in the United States, centred on the various nationalaties of the immigrants, and on the hierarchies within the overall Jewish community. How and why these hierarchies occur and then mutate slowly over time is one of the book's most fascinating and illuminating strengths.

Its other great strength is Eisner's consummate skill at propulsive story-telling. The art and the dialogue carry one through the story effortlessly. It's a testament to Eisner's control of the graphic medium and to his facility with simple, unadorned prose that a book with so much historical information nonetheless zips by. I read it in one sitting, and really wanted more when it was over.

The problem? As with pretty much all of Eisner's non-genre work, there's an essentially superficial, glib, and melodramatic approach that surfaces again and again. A couple of sequences cross so far into bathos that they become inadvertantly comic, making the death of one major character feel like the punchline to a really bad joke.

The bathetic elements don't detract from the fact that Eisner was a master of comics form and structure. He wasn't a deep thinker -- but he was a consummate model of storytelling and entertainment. Recommended.

When We Were Splatterpunk

Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror (1990): edited by Paul M. Sammon, containing the following stories and essays:  Night They Missed the Horror Show (1988) by Joe R. Lansdale; The Midnight Meat Train (1984) by Clive Barker; Film at Eleven (1988) by John Skipp; Red (1986) by Richard Christian Matheson; A Life in the Cinema (1988) by Mick Garris; Less Than Zombie (1989) by Douglas E. Winter; Rapid Transit (1985) by Wayne Allen Sallee; While She Was Out (1988) by Edward Bryant; Meathouse Man (1976) by George R. R. Martin; Reunion Moon (1990) by Rex Miller; I Spit in Your Face: Films That Bite (1989) essay by Chas. Balun; Freaktent (1988) by Nancy A. Collins; Crucifax Autumn: Chapter 18-The Censored Chapter (1988) by Ray Garton; Goosebumps (1987) by Richard Christian Matheson; Goodbye, Dark Love (1986) by Roberta Lannes; Full Throttle (1990) by Philip Nutman; City of Angels (1990) by Jay Russell; and Outlaws (1990) essay by Paul M. Sammon.

Flawed but immensely enjoyable anthology about the 'It' sub-genre of horror in the 1980's, splatterpunk, and the men and women who would define it. Released only four years after the term had been coined by David Schow in emulation of science fiction's cyberpunk, Splatterpunks sees Sammon attempting to define the sub-genre in several essays while also offering a selection of splatterpunk and proto-splatterpunk work. The basic definition of splatterpunk -- stories of extremely graphic horror with an 'outsider's' attitude -- gets stretched, folded, spindled, and mutilated herein, however, by the very people trying to define it.

The benefit of hindsight suggests that the greatest triumph of splatterpunk lay in how quickly it became mainstream. Indeed, Sammon views Clive Barker as being the formative, game-changing writer whose Books of Blood essentially started the sub-genre. And Clive Barker, thanks in part to that ubiquitous quote from Stephen King, "I have seen the future of horror and its name is Clive Barker", became a best-selling writer with great rapidity after the publication of Books of Blood in 1984.

Of course, therein lies the rub. Maybe several rubs. Thoughout the anthology, Sammon claims ground-level, outsider status for splatterpunk as a whole. Its two essential qualities are "enthusiasm" and "truthfulness." Like early punk as related to the rock-and-roll of the 1970's, it operates at the fringes of established horror.

However, Clive Barker, Sammon's pivotal writer, was a sales success almost overnight once he started publishing horror -- and that was with two giant volumes of short stories as his initial offering in horror, which is about as unusual as it gets in a publishing market centered around novels. By 1990, Barker had vectored almost completely out of horror writing, instead working on movies, comic books, and gigantic fantasy novels. And all along, Barker maintained he wasn't a splatterpunk.

Actually, pretty much everyone in this anthology whom Sammon asks to define themselves as splatterpunks refuses to do so. Some are willing to claim that some of their stories are splatterpunk. Others are not. And the person who coined the term? Well, while David Schow's excellent first short-story collection in the 1980's, Lost Angels, named him on the cover as the father of splatterpunk, none of the stories included therein could justifiably be viewed as splatterpunk (though Sammon tries really hard to make the case for Schow's award-winning "Red Light", a quiet horror story that Sammon tries to sell as splatterpunk because it's "enthusiastic" and "truthful.").

So it goes. But Barker's success with graphically violent supernatural and non-supernatural stories of sex and horror wasn't a one-off. By the early 1990's, splatterpunk had been absorbed into mainstream horror. Or perhaps re-absorbed. Bleak or blackly comic, ground-level gross-outs have been part of horror for just about forever, as Sammon very briefly gestures towards in one of his essays. But Sammon champions splatterpunk while dismissing the "quaint", "archaic" horrors of Poe and Lovecraft. But Poe wrote a lot of stories in which ridiculously bloody and grotesque things happened, with no moral in sight. Lovecraft, too, had his bodily horrors. So, too, so many others.

Sammon repeatedly tries to establish splatterpunk as the avant-garde, an impossible task given its rapid sales success and the existence of extremely popular antecedents. Sammon even cites James Herbert as an obvious proto-splatterpunk, and Herbert was Great Britain's best-selling native horror writer of the late 1970's and early 1980's. This is the gritty avant-garde?

Splatterpunk makes more sense as a reaction against the "quiet horrors" championed by American horror anthologist Charles L. Grant in the late 1970's and early 1980's in a variety of anthologies, most notably the Shadows series.  And there was definitely a literary feud going on there. Graphic short horror certainly began to become more prominent in horror anthologies, partially because self-defined splatterpunks such as Sammon, John Skipp, and Craig Spector started editing anthologies. And the splatter eventually got into everything, often mixing with the "archaic" types of horror that Sammon views condescendingly at points.

Sammon's book touches upon some of the real-world reasons for a new taste for sex and violence in the 1980's. A reaction against the hypocritical nostalgia of the Thatcher and Reagan regimes and their attendant censorship campaigns against 'Video nasties' and naughty song lyrics looms largest, aided by a gradual loosening of restrictions on what mainstream publishers would publish. And movies -- especially independently produced movies -- had been feeding an increasing appetite for gore since the late 1960's saw George Romero's Night of the Living Dead lumber onto the screen.

In any case, the anthology itself is a lot of fun, regardless of where one stands on the question of 'What is Splatterpunk?'. Joe Lansdale's "Night They Missed the Horror Show" still shocks the most, with its escalatingly brutal depiction of human horrors in a small Texas town.  Pieces by Mick Garris, Ray Garton, and Jay Russell all use babies or fetuses to horrific effect... hoo ha! Philip Nutman's "Full Throttle" may be the finest story in Splatterpunks, a kitchen-sink bit of social realism, telepathy, and graphic violence and sexuality that stings more with its social commentary, and its ability to arouse sympathy for a couple of self-pitying, unsympathetic teenagers, than with its moments of horrific physicality. Highly recommended.

The Desolation of Peter Jackson

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: adapted and directed by Peter Jackson with Phillipa Boyens, Fran Walsh, Guillermo del Toro, and the Hollywood Screenwriting App, based on The Hobbit and portions of the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, starring Martin Freeman (Bilbo Baggins), a bunch of people as Dwarves, and Rex Hamilton as Abraham Lincoln (2013): Oy.

There's about 45 minutes of decent material in this second of three movies based on The Hobbit. Smaug the Dragon looks pretty good, and the fact that he yaps away like Stephen Bloody Fry for 45 minutes pretty much necessitates CGI so that his lip movements look realistic. For a talking dragon, anyway.

So, you know, Smaug, who doesn't do nearly enough flying but does a lot of waddling around inside the Lonely Mountain's Dwarvish treasure caves where he's been asleep for the past few decades until being awoken by Bilbo Baggins, who at this point in the story should clearly be elected King of the Dwarves because of his much greater competency than any of the dwarves trying to get back their homeland. Home-mountain. Whatever.

So, you know, Smaug. And there's an interesting arm-wrestling match between Gandalf and Sauron. We learn that molten gold is mostly harmless in Middle-Earth, which begs the question of why the dwarves try to pour a lot of it on Smaug in the first place. I mean, everyone's standing around beside endless volcanic, oceanic amounts of the stuff without really breaking much of a sweat for lengthy periods of time. Why is this going to be trouble for a giant, nigh-invulnerable lizard who shoots fire out of his mouth? Middle-Earth molten metal once again appears to be room temperature.

So, you know, Smaug. There's a barrel race that seems to be a preview of a ride at the Hobbitland Amusement Park, opening in New Zealand in 2018. Orlando Bloom really looks a lot older than he did in the original trilogy. Given all the CGI thrown around, you'd think they could have fixed his face. Maybe Peter Jackson's elves age backwards, like Merlin in T.H. White.

So, you know, Smaug. Some dwarves crawl out of a toilet. What larks! The laws of physics are pretty much Looney Tunes at this point in Jackson's Middle-Earth. Almost all of the major emotional plot points have been lifted from The Lord of the Rings and stubbornly hammered on here. A reluctant king reclaiming his throne! A poisonous Morghul knife! A cliffhanger ending for part two! An elf and a dwarf making googly eyes at one another! Well, OK, is that last bit lifted? It's heterosexual googly eyes this time rather than repressed homosexual googly eyes. I don't know.

Apparently, the third movie will climax with 45 minutes of anal sex between Smaug and Shelob. Or a 45-minute battlefield sequence. I'm not sure which. Did I mention that Beorn looks like the love-child of Chewbacca and the Lorax? It's pretty rad, bitches.

Stubborn Angels

Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg (1978): Top-notch melding of the horror and hard-boiled detective genres by Hjortsberg, whose bibliography seems to contain more unproduced screenplays than anything else. He did adapt this novel into the 1987 movie Angel Heart (a.k.a. the movie with controversial nude sex scenes featuring The Cosby Show's Lisa Bonet playing a voodoo priestess), though there are significant differences between the two works. In terms of location, the novel stays pretty much in New York while the movie headed to New Orleans, I'd assume to make the voodoo action more... believeable?

Hjortsberg nails the cynical prose-poetry of the classic hard-boiled detective novel, with P.I. Harry Angel handling the world-weary, occasionally cruel but mostly well-meaning first-person narration. Angel repeatedly comes off as the world's oddest New York City tour guide as we move in and around the New York of the late 1950's.

A mysterious client hires Angel to track down a popular singer in the Frank Sinatra mode who was supposed to be in an upstate mental asylum after injuries sustained during World War Two left him mentally and physically disabled. The only problem is, the singer -- stage name Johnny Favorite -- isn't at the asylum, and hasn't been for years. And the trail is cold. But as Angel pursues Favorite, everything starts to heat up, and people start dying in increasingly horrible ways.

Variations are worked on the usual suspects and usual characters of hardboiled detective fiction and film, from shadowy businessmen through shady lawyers to jilted heiresses. As Angel's case proceeds, odder characters arise, and previously introduced characters get odder. There will be voodoo. There will be Satanism. There will be horoscopes and morphine addicts and one weird trip to the theatre.

Hjortsberg's period and genre-specific style works wonderfully throughout Falling Angel, falling always just on the serious side of near-parody. Angel's a tough customer with no friends and his own troubled past, but like all great hardboiled detectives, his essential quality is absolute stubbornness. He'll solve the case regardless of the cost. And what a cost! Highly recommended.