JLA Deluxe Edition Volume 3: written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Howard Porter, John Dell, and others (1998-99; collected 2010): Grant Morrison and Howard Porter's epic 1990's relaunch of the Justice League of America comic book gets the over-sized reprint treatment here, to good effect. Porter was very much in the tradition of slightly offbeat artists who made the JLA their own (Mike Sekowsky and Dick Dillin are two other good examples), aided by Morrison's cosmically bizarre scripts.
This is the thinnest of the four Deluxe Morrison volumes, as we check in with the DC One Million event and the ensuing Ultramarines stand-off; watch the team battle another, more sinister variation on their first foe, Starro the Conqueror; and team up with the Justice Society of America to battle threats from the past and the 5th dimension.
The Starro story-line is one of the high points of the Morrison/Porter run. Starro, that giant, hyper-intelligent, telepathic starfish from beyond the stars, now invades Earth through its dreams, necessitating a guest appearance by the (then) new Lord of Dreams, Daniel. The new Starro's sudden physical appearance in Hudson's Bay (which is to say, occupying ALL of Hudson's Bay) is a great moment as well, along with Orion's incredibly stupid attack on Starro, the growing role of fallen angel Zauriel as a productive member of the team, and the subtle meta-ness of the entire enterprise. Once upon a time, the JLA used quicklime to defeat Starro. That won't work this time.
The Justice League also has to deal with a rogue U.S. general who deploys the U.S. military's super-group against the JLA. Yes, it's General Eiling, who fares much better here than he did in his last appearance on The Flash TV show. To finish things up, we get what was once an annual occurrence -- a team-up between the Justice League and the Justice Society -- which this time around pulls the original Shazamy Captain Marvel and a forgotten hero of the early 1990's into the adventure.
It's all what was then being called 'wide-screen' comic-book action. There's nothing here as convoluted and nutty as the Rock of Ages story-line from the earlier volumes, though there are nods forward to the World War Three story-line coming in Deluxe Volume 4. Highly recommended.
The Troop by Nick Cutter (pen-name of Craig Davidson) (2014): Falstaff Island gets relocated from Nunavut to two miles off the coast of Prince Edward Island in this ambitious, uneven, but enjoyable Canadian horror novel.
An adult Scoutmaster and five Eagle Scouts in their early teens go to the uninhabited island every year for a camping trip. This will probably be the last trip for the troop as they're close to outgrowing Boy Scouts. Boy, will it be the last trip.
An emaciated stranger shows up at their cabin on the first night, skeletal and so all-consumingly hungry that he starts to eat the couch on which he sits. The Scoutmaster, a GP, realizes the man is sick. Indeed he is -- and about to become extremely infectious as mutated tapeworms large and small start erupting from pretty much everywhere inside and on his body.
The Troop quickly turns into a tale of survival horror, its menace a science-fictional one in the manner of John Wyndham that rapidly creates human monsters that riff on everything from zombies to JRR Tolkien's Gollum. There's also a governmental menace to be dealt with -- or not dealt with. Canadian naval ships and boats surround the island, black helicopters repeatedly fly over -- but help does not arrive.
The novel succeed in its sympathetic characterization of the boys of the troop, though Cutter does draw upon stereotypes for their basic configurations (the Alpha-Jock and the Nerd being the most notable). But some of those roles change over the course of the novel. One of the missteps, though, is Cutter's choice to make one of the boys a nascent serial killer. Certainly this ups the stakes, but the effects of the worms are so dire that there's no need to posit a psychopathic sadist. It's really a case of too much, especially once that character pretty much turns into a cross between Gollum and Monty Python's Mr. Creosote.
Cutter notes in his acknowledgements that he got the idea of including interpolated material from after the main events of the book from Stephen King's Carrie. The Troop similarly uses interviews and excerpts from newspaper and magazine articles to give background on the true origin of the worms. Suspense is also nodded to as the number of boys who will survive the main narrative appears in this interpolated material.
I'm not sure this structure is entirely successful, as sometimes in horror any information is too much information. Or as Ramsey Campbell once noted, "Explanation is the death of horror." That the stereotypes of the evil military commander and the mad, evil, super-intelligent misfit scientist appear mostly in these sections doesn't help the horror quotient either.
Nonetheless, The Troop is an enjoyable, fast-paced horror novel. The main characters are nicely fleshed out for the most part. Well, until they start losing that flesh to the parasitic worms. Recommended.
Grendel vs. The Shadow: written and illustrated by Matt Wagner (2014): Writer-artist Matt Wagner returns to his 35-year-old character Grendel for a story-line involving that master criminal's battle with pulp hero The Shadow in early 1930's New York.
Do people younger than 35 or so even remember Grendel? Dark Horse Comics has released four omnibus volumes of his adventures, and I can recommend at least the first two from first-hand experience, having read Grendel back in the day, that day being the late 1980's.
Of course, the Shadow is much older, a character created in the early 1930's. The battle between the two does seem like a natural, however -- both characters kill, and both characters have quasi-mystical abilities to go along with their physical and mental prowess. And this crossover is actually fun. The grimness of the Shadow plays off nicely against the deadly good humour of Grendel.
Wagner's art is smooth and illustrative, straightforward, though with a few stylistic flourishes as we proceed through the narrative. He uses multiple POV first-person narration to mostly good effect, though I wish someone doing a Shadow comic book would go back to the pulp novels (or even the DC comics of the 1970's) and realize that the Shadow works best as a supporting character in his own book.
The pulps (unlike the radio show) focused on the Shadow's various operatives working a case, with the Shadow dropping in and out of the story to administer justice or give orders. And as he's a nigh-omnipotent character, this is a pretty good idea -- especially as it leaves the reader wondering what is going on inside the Shadow's head.
Most modern comic-book Shadows, going back to Howard Chaykin's glorious revisionist take for DC Comics in the mid-1980's, also make the Shadow's romantic relationship with operative Margo Lane explicit in a way the pulps did not. Here, we get a B-plot about Margo Lane debating whether or not to leave the Shadow. It seems wildly out of place in an event crossover like this, and is the only real misstep in the book.
Overall, though, this is an entertaining visit with two old friends. Or fiends. And it was also an entertaining visit with Wagner as both writer and artist, his art gigs being much rarer than his writing gigs. He's streamlined his writing and drawing styles since the 1980's, mostly to good effect -- the occasional murkiness, clutter, and confusion of 1980's book like his Demon miniseries for DC isn't evident here. This may be the smoothest book he's ever done. Recommended.
Cottage Country: written by Jeremy Boxen; directed by Peter Wellington; starring Malin Akerman (Cammie Ryan), Tyler Labine (Todd Chipowski), Lucy Punch (Masha), Dan Petronijevic (Salinger Chipowski), Benjamin Ayres (Dov Rosenberg), and Kenneth Welsh (Earl Chipowski) (2013): Ontario's cottage country mostly plays itself in an amiable, occasionally blackly comic bit of horror-satire. Cast against type as a buttoned-down office drone, Tyler Labine is appealing. Malin Akerman, while about 1000 times too attractive for her role as Labine's obsessive girlfriend, also does solid work as an increasingly demented Bridezilla wannabe.
More gore and more laughs would be nice, but I've certainly spent 90 minutes with far worse movies with far bigger budgets. And there's a bit involving the extrication of an ax from someone killed with said ax that's both funny and weirdly authentic. Lightly recommended.
King Solomon's Mines: adapted by Helen Deutsch from the novel by H. Rider Haggard; directed by Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton; starring Stewart Granger (Allan Quatermain), Deborah Kerr (Elizabeth Curtis), Richard Carlson (John Goode), Kimursi (Khiva), and Siriaque (Umbopa) (1950): A surprisingly nuanced approach to both race and nature makes this 1950 adventure hold up better than most similar films of the time. Set in 1897, even though the novel was published in 1885, the film involves that prototype of Indiana Jones, Allan Quatermain, a British hunter and guide in Africa, played here by the stolid, likeable Stewart Granger in his first Hollywood role.
The studio added Deborah Kerr's character to the film as a love interest while also taking significant liberties with the plot, though mostly to fit events into a 100-minute film. Location filming at times gives the movie the feel of a National Geographic special, as we're treated to lengthy shots of natives dancing, various animals up to shenanigans, and an assortment of beautiful landscapes. Our heroes trek towards a possibly mythic diamond mine somewhere in south-central Africa in search of Kerr's lost husband, picking up mysterious warrior Umbopa along the way.
Aside from one of the world's most ridiculous-looking fake spiders, the menaces the group faces are drawn from life. A stampede on the grasslands impresses (and, obviously, hasn't been conjured up by CGI). And some of Quatermain's interactions with the natives must have shocked racists in 1950. I wonder if some scenes were edited in the American South. Recommended.
Lone Star: written and directed by John Sayles; starring Chris Cooper (Sam Deeds), Elizabeth Pena (Pilar), Kris Kristofferson (Charlie Wade), Matthew McConaughey (Buddy Deeds), Ron Canada (Otis), Joe Morton (Del), and Miriam Colon (Mercedes Cruz) (1995): Perhaps the most satisfying of all the films of writer-director John Sayles. While the backbone of its plot is a fairly traditional mystery, that mystery allows Sayles to move back and forth across a gulf of 40 years as Chris Cooper's Sheriff of a small Texas border town investigates a murder linked to his late father, the much beloved former sheriff of the town.
Sayles assembles a fine cast and gives them lots to work with. As in most of Sayles's films, there are very few villains -- in this case, exactly one, Kris Kristofferson's odious sheriff, seen in flashbacks to the late 1950's, when Chris Cooper's father was a young deputy played by Matthew McConaughey.
Several plots intertwine over the course of the movie, all of them tied into the murder plot because in this small town, everything is connected. And while Cooper tries to figure out this particular bit of the past, the larger history of Texas, particularly Texas in regards to race relations, also gets argued over in local politics and in a meeting of parents with the school over its "controversial" attempt to offer something other than a valedictory to white people during history classes. In all, it's a fine piece of writing, directing, and acting, true to its genre antecedents but also grasping at something larger than just the solution to a mystery. Highly recommended.
The Big Clock: adapted by Jonathan Latimer and Harold Goldman from the novel by Kenneth Fearing; directed by John Farrow; starring Ray Milland (George Stroud), Charles Laughton (Earl Janoth), Maureen O'Sullivan (Georgette Stroud), Rita Johnson (Pauline York), Elsa Lanchester (Louise Patterson), and George Macready (Steve Hagen) (1948): Enjoyable, occasionally quite quirky film noir/ 'Wrong Man' thriller starring Ray Milland as a crime-magazine editor who finds himself tracking himself as a wrongly accused murderer. Yes, it's an American noir with more than a hint of Borges in its DNA.
There are a lot of gratifyingly wacky supporting characters and off-beat situations, to the extent that one figures the Coen Brothers may have watched this movie at some point during their artistic evolution. Charles Laughton is a creepy, blustery hoot as a tyrannical, time-obsessed magazine publisher. Fun and under 100 minutes. Recommended.
The Sapphires: adapted by Tony Briggs and Keith Thompson from the stage play by Tony Briggs; directed by Wayne Blair; starring Deborah Mailman (Gail), Miranda Tapsell (Cynthia), Jessica Mauboy (Julie), Shari Sebbens (Kay), and Chris O'Dowd (Dave Lovelace) (2012): Based on a stage play that was based on a true story, The Sapphires tells the story of an Australian aboriginal girl group that ends up entertaining troops in Viet Nam in the late 1960's. Chris O'Dowd's Irish band manager seems to have been parachuted in from the realm of pure fiction in order to secure financing.
But while he's billed first, O'Dowd plays a supporting role to the four women. The movie may be fairly breezy and song-packed, but it does hit on some of the horrible truths of the Australian treatment of aboriginals in general and children in specific over the years. Nonetheless, this is more a celebration of the power of song (and songs are a key component of aboriginal culture and mythology) than it is a scathing historical drama. Recommended.
Bad Words: written by Andrew Dodge; directed by Jason Bateman; starring Jason Bateman (Guy Trilby), Kathryn Hahn (Jenny Widgeon), Rohan Chand (Chaitanya Chopra), Philip Baker Hall (Dr. Bowman), and Alison Janney (Dr. Deagan) (2014): Jason Bateman directs himself starring as a 40-year-old man who exploits a loophole in the rules for a U.S. spelling bee (based on the Scripps bee) so as to compete against 49 tweens for the $50,000 prize. He does so for reasons that become obvious about halfway through.
The movie and Bateman's character are both gratifyingly nasty throughout, though this isn't wholly a black comedy. Bateman's character's growing friendship with one outcast contestant -- cleverly played by Rohan Chand -- leads to some pretty funny, non-Hollywoodesque scenes of debauchery. So too Bateman's relationship with Kathryn Hahn's reporter, and Bateman's psychological gamesmanship with whatever tweens are unlucky enough to sit next to him during the activities. The movie could be funnier, but it's still pretty funny. Recommended.
The Big Book of Martyrs: written by John Wagner; illustrated by Colleen Doran, Frank Quitely, Win Mortimer, Dan Burr, Gahan Wilson, Rick Geary, Joe Staton, and others (1997): Slightly less irreverent than the other entries in Paradox/DC's "Big Book of..." series of comics anthologies from the 1990's, The Big Book of Martyrs is nonetheless a lot of fun even if you're just there for the pictures of terrible things being done to martyrs of the Roman Catholic Church.
John Wagner generally keeps his tongue out of his cheek, instead staying serious, at least when the various gruesome deaths are a matter of historical record. Of course, a lot of Roman Catholic saints are very close to being fictional characters (actually, some, like the much-beloved St. Christopher, are fictional characters; others, such as St. George, might as well be).
As a compendium of 'terrible things people do to other people,' The Big Book of Martyrs offers a pretty wide range of awfulness. People get thrown out of boats with anchors around their necks, get riddled with arrows, beaten to death with truncheons, immolated in a variety of ways, eaten by bears, eaten by lions, stabbed, poisoned, blown up, beheaded, drowned, immersed in boiling lead, slow-roasted over a fire, thrown down wells, and so on, and so forth.
Indeed, due to the on-again, off-again invulnerability exhibited by some saints like St. Sebastian or St. George, many of them have more than one of these usually fatal things done to them. A decent amount of relevant information comes along with the mayhem, as more than fifty different artists illustrate more than 50 different tales of martyrs singular and plural (though the story of the Mongols and the 11,000 virgins is almost certainly apocryphal).
You even find out which martyrs saw themselves purged from the liturgical calendar for being a little too fictional, along with the feast days of various saints and situations in which one invokes a patron saint. One of the bizarrely, blackly comic facts one starts to realize is that an awful lot of saints were made the patron saints of the things that killed them, including a patron saint of tanning who was himself skinned alive.
How are the saints supposed to feel about this sort of thing? Because based on this book, there are an awful lot of patron saints of arrows, including St. Sebastian, who you'd think would have dibs on that position. Recommended.
Still Mine: written and directed by Michael McGowan; starring James Cromwell (Craig Morrison), Genevieve Bujold (Irene Morrison), Campbell Scott (Gary Fulton), and George R. Robertson (Chester) (2012): Based on a true story of frustrating governmental bureaucracy in New Brunswick (Canada), Still Mine follows octogenarian James Cromwell's attempts to build a new, one-story home on his own property so as to make caring for his Alzheimer's-stricken wife (Genevieve Bujold) workable. If some of the bureaucratic stuff seems fictional, take note that the real-life struggle was actually more arduous.
Cromwell, a veteran character actor probably best known as the farmer in Babe and Zefrem Cochrane in Star Trek: First Contact, does marvelous work here. In an American movie with a big enough name director, it's the sort of acting that gets an Oscar nomination. Bujold is also excellent, underplaying her descent into greater and greater silence and confusion. In her case, she's not showy enough for an Oscar nomination.
The movie could have devoted a few more minutes to the specifics of the bureaucratic hoops Cromwell keeps getting forced to jump through -- this is a relatively rare case in which exposition would help the dramatic elements. Nonetheless, the film is beautifully shot in both its long looks at landscapes and beaches and the passing of the seasons, and in recurring extreme close-ups of things one doesn't generally see in Hollywood movies -- which is to say, old faces and old bodies.
The supporting cast, mostly unknown with the exception of Campbell Scott, is excellent, low-key, and real-looking. One doesn't realize how unreal the casts of even the most serious of American dramas look until one sees people who look real, whether in independent movies or even in Hollywood movies made prior to the 1990's, when our genetically engineered overlords seized control of most mass-market movies and TV shows. Highly recommended.
Maleficent: adapted by Linda Woolverton from previous material written by the Brothers Grimm, Milt Banta, Ralph Wright, Ted Sears, Bill Peet, Winston Hibler, Joe Rinaldi, Erdman Penner, and Charles Perrault; directed by Robert Stromberg; starring Angelina Jolie (Maleficent), Elle Fanning (Aurora), Sharlto Copley (Stefan), and Sam Riley (Diaval) (2014):
First-time director Stromberg was a production designer, and it shows: Maleficent's main charms lie in the design of its magical world. Well, that and the CGI flying sequences. Clearly we can now make a Hawkman or Hawkwoman movie a live-action reality. Somebody notify Time Warner.
Maleficent is a revisionist retelling of Sleeping Beauty -- specifically Walt Disney's 1959 animated Sleeping Beauty. Angelina Jolie is the evil witch (now Queen of the Fairies, I think) from that movie, only now she has an origin story and a change of heart. Sharlto Copley is the evil king who was once Maleficent's beloved but ultimately treacherous peasant boy. Elle Fanning barely registers as Princess Aurora, aka Sleeping Beauty.
Really, this movie stinks when it comes to plot, characterization, motivation, pacing... you know, all that old-fashioned stuff. Jolie is fine, I guess. And it's definitely progress that a big box-office hit (about $800 million world-wide) can be headlined by a female star. Now if we could just get our female stars some decently written and directed blockbusters, we might really be onto something. Male stars, too. Not recommended.
