Time After Time: adapted by Nicholas Meyer from the story by Karl Alexander and Steve Hayes; directed by Nicholas Meyer; starring Malcolm McDowell (H.G. Wells), Mary Steenburgen (Amy), and David Warner (Stevenson) (1979): It's 1893. After a 5-year absence, Jack the Ripper has returned. And only H.G. Wells can stop him!
In this charming, clever time-travel story, writer H.G. Wells is a scientist as well as a writer. And he's built a time machine. And Jack the Ripper steals the time machine to escape the police. Once the machine returns to Wells' basement on automatic pilot, Wells follows Jack the Ripper to the future. So it's now 1979. And we're in San Francisco.
Malcolm McDowell makes the most of one of his rare heroic roles, playing Holmes as alternately bewildered by the future and fascinated by it -- though with that fascination comes a mounting level of disgust at the violent world of 1979. Admittedly, in the real world, Victorian London was far more violent than 1970's San Francisco. But we'll leave that alone. In the real world, Wells didn't build a time machine, either.
Mary Steenburgen is charming in only her second major screen role, playing a bank employee who falls for Wells, as he does for her. David Warner completes the trio of actors who take up most of the screen time. He's Jack the Ripper, who in his 'normal' life was a physician and chess-playing friend of H.G. Wells.
Nicholas Meyer adapts and directs the movie. He's most famous for writing and directing Star Treks II and VI, and sharing screen-writing duties on Trek IV. Some of his interests, including Sherlock Holmes (he also wrote two well-regarded Holmes novels), show up in this film. As well, a paradoxical bit involving eye-glasses shows up both here and in Trek IV.
Time After Time is a fun, fairly tight movie with a nice mix of comedy and suspense. Warner makes a good antagonist, especially as he towers over Wells (McDowell and Steenburgen are both 5'8", Warner 6'2"). The 'fish out of water' bits that involve Holmes are hardy comedy perennials, especially a trip to McDonald's and a climactic bit of business that forces Wells to drive a car. Thank heaven it's an automatic. Recommended.
How Life Imitates the World Series by Thomas Boswell (1976-1981; collected 1982): Thomas Boswell became one of our two or three greatest regular chroniclers of baseball in the mid-1970s when he was about 30 and has continued as such ever since. He manages something extraordinarily rare in sports writing -- a mix of the poetic and the carefully observed normative.
He's also extremely but unfussily literate in these essays, most of them stories and columns for the Washington Post. And while he's a poetic fellow, he's also statistically inclined. One of the stories included herein has Boswell introduce one of the first new baseball stats in years at the time, Total Average, as a better indicator of baseball hitting greatness than the batting average, on-base percentage, or slugging percentage.
As these essays were written in the late 1970's and early 1980's, they at times shine a light on a baseball world that's still dominated by players that include Reggie Jackson and Pete Rose, and managers that include Earl Weaver. These and others are profiled sympathetically but occasionally critically by Boswell. So, too, owners, innovators, Cuban baseball, the enigmatic Steve Carlton, Boswell's own history in baseball, the vanishing adult hard-ball leagues which are being supplanted by softball leagues, the care and feeding of baseball bats, and many other topics. Boswell's style is a joy to read, and his subject matter never disappoints in the general or the specific. Highly recommended.
The Wild Night Company: Irish Tales of Terror (1971): edited by Peter Haining, containing the following stories:
A Wild Night in Galway (1959) by Ray Bradbury
'Hell Fire' [Section of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)] by James Joyce
Julia Cahill's Curse (1903) by George Moore
Legends of Witches, Fairies and Leprechauns (1919) by Lady Wilde
Teig O'Kane and the Corpse (1918) by Traditional
The Banshee's Warning (1862) by Charlotte Riddell
The Canterville Ghost (1887) by Oscar Wilde
The Coonian Ghost (1970) by Shane Leslie
The Crucifixion of the Outcast (1897) by William Butler Yeats
The Dead Smile (1899) by F. Marion Crawford
The Fairies' Revenge (1970) by Sinead de Valera
The Friendly Demon (1726) by Daniel Defoe
The Haunted Spinney (1904) by Elliott O'Donnell
The House Among the Laurels (1910) by William Hope Hodgson
The Legend of Finn M'Coul (1830) by William Carleton
The Man from Kilsheelan (1923) by A. E. Coppard
The Man Wolf (1970) by Giraldus Cambrensis
The Moon-Bog (1926) by H. P. Lovecraft
The Parracide's Tale (1820) [Section of Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)] by Charles Maturin
The Soul Cages (1825) by Thomas Crofton Croker
Wicked Captain Walshawe of Wauling (1864) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Witch Wood (1947) by Lord Dunsany
One of those many Peter Haining-edited anthologies with a fundamental problem in the title. These are tales by or about the Irish. Many feature the supernatural, though not all. But there's not a whole lot of terror involved. Throw that false claim away and enjoy instead a pretty enjoyable mixture of folk tales, excerpts from novels, and short stories.
Haining certainly gets bonus marks for including the terrifically horrifying sermon from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and a grimly jocular section from Charles Maturin's seminal 19th-century Gothic Melmoth the Wanderer. And if you know the Sting song "The Soul Cages," you'll be intrigued to discover a much less sinister Irish version of the story from folklore, recorded in the early 19th century, that nonetheless still involves the souls of dead sailors kept in lobster traps by a supernatural being. But it won't be "magical wine" that knocks the creature for a loop -- it will be Irish poteen. Oh, go look it up. I'll wait.
The anthology ranges from folklore to genre writers to the famous literary elite and back again. I can criticize Haining for his odd choices in titling, but I can't criticize his range as an anthologist or his enthusiasm as an essayist introducing the tales. The drollness of the Ray Bradbury story that concludes the anthology is something to behold. I'm pretty sure no other ostensive horror anthology selection has so hilariously undercut a brief spate of terror with the revelation that the story serves up as its epiphanic (or is it anti-epiphanic?) moment about just what a wild night in Galway entails. Recommended.
Fury: written and directed by David Ayer; starring Brad Pitt (Collier), Shia LaBeouf (Bible), Logan Lerman (Norman), Michael Pena (Gordo), and Jon Bernthal (Coon-Ass) (2014): Enjoyable WWII tank movie with new-school gore but old-fashioned morality: there are good guys and bad guys, and the job of the good guys is to kill the bad guys.
Our American heroes, led by Sergeant Brad Pitt and forced to train new addition Logan Lerman on the fly, staff a Sherman tank dubbed 'Fury' in the last month of WWII, somewhere in Germany. They're town-hopping prior to Victory-Europe Day, and things are bloody as all Hell.
The acting from everyone is solid and sympathetic, though maybe we could have used ten more minutes of characterization and ten fewer minutes of apocalyptic battlefield action. Some of the tactical goofs will make military buffs cringe. This is another version of the old story of Horatius at the Bridge. And that story is dramatically sound no matter what millennium one lives in.
The representation of tracer fire does make some battle sequences look like Star Wars. Especially good is a running battle between four American tanks and one ridiculously (and historically accurately) superior German tank. The final, 20-minute battle at the crossroads is about as apocalyptic as any battle involving only one tank can be. Recommended.
When Harry Met Sally: written by Nora Ephron; directed by Rob Reiner; starring Billy Crystal (Harry), Meg Ryan (Sally), Carrie Fisher (Marie), and Bruno Kirby (Jess) (1989): Nora Ephron penned this romantic comedy and Rob Reiner directed in style and structure as an homage to, or swipe from, a number of Woody Allen movies. It's gentler and less neurotic than a Woody Allen film would have been, however. Can men and women be friends without the sexual element creeping in? The movie actually seems to answer that question 'No.' Recommended.
Stir Crazy: written by Bruce Jay Friedman; directed by Sidney Poitier; starring Gene Wilder (Skip Donahue), Richard Pryor (Harry Monroe), Jo Beth Williams (Meredith), Georg Stanford Brown (Rory), Barry Corbin (Warden Beatty), Craig T. Nelson (Deputy Wilson), Miguel Angel Suarez (Ramirez), and Jonathan Banks (Graham) (1980): Imprisoned for a crime they didn't commit, New Yorkers Wilder and Pryor must escape from a Southern U.S. prison by using... a prison rodeo? OK!
Sloppy, funny, and occasionally thrilling buddy movie teams Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor at a point when Wilder was at his height as a box-office presence. You can tell the latter because he gets to sing the title song and gets the girl in a completely perfunctory romantic sub-plot.
Pryor does what he can, though his massive talents are massively under-served by the script. Sidney Poitier directs (!) in an amiable but occasionally sloppy style. And who doesn't love Grossburger? The great Jonathan 'Mike Ehrmantraut' Banks plays a fairly significant role. Good luck recognizing him, though -- he's 35 years younger and hiding behind a cowboy hat and sunglasses.
A remarkable-for-its-time sympathetic portrayal of a gay inmate gets undercut to some extent by an almost stereotypical confusion of 'gay' and 'transvestite.' I'm pretty sure this movie represents the first time I saw a naked woman's boobies on the big screen. Yay me! Recommended.
Doc Savage: The Polar Treasure by Lester Dent writing as Kenneth Robeson; restored and edited by Will Murray and others (1933/This edition from Nostalgia Ventures 2007): From the first year of the adventures of pulp superman (and partial inspiration for Superman) Doc Savage comes The Polar Treasure, a fairly bloody voyage into the North Polar regions in search of a lost ship and a buried treasure.
Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, was already a physical and mental marvel early in his career, as were his five compatriots. Doc's main chronicler, Lester Dent, had done a lot of research on polar exploration for other projects before penning this novel, and the research certainly came in handy: it's a compellingly eerie and dangerous landscape for a Doc Savage adventure.
These reprints from Nostalgia Ventures offer Doc's adventures in something close to their original magazine size of the 1930's, along with reproductions of covers from their original appearances and in some cases from the Bantam reprints that started in the early 1960's and ran until the early 1990's (!). Pulp Maester Will Murray and others also restore sections to the novels when there have substantive changes to Dent's manuscript dating all the way back to the original publication. Here, that adds about 1000 words to the novel. It's all good though occasionally racist fun, with Doc's violence not yet toned down by Dent. Also, Doc Savage beats up a polar bear. Recommended.
Doc Savage: The Pirate of the Pacific by Lester Dent writing as Kenneth Robeson; restored and edited by Will Murray and others (1933/This edition from Nostalgia Ventures 2007): Fairly bloody and somewhat racist Doc Savage adventure from Doc's first year of publication, lovingly restored and presented by the fine people at Nostalgia Ventures. Doc and his five merry pranksters foil the attempt of a modern-day pirate to stage a coup in a thinly disguised Philippines (here dubbed the 'Luzon Union').
All the stuff involving Mongols and 'half-castes' and 'yellow people' speaking pidgin English can be pretty tough sledding at times, and the narrative does get stuck on a ship (literally) for what seems like an interminable number of pages before we finally reach the Luzon Union. Maybe the weakest of the early Doc Savage novels, with an atypically un-weird super-villain behind everything. It really feels more like a job for the Shadow or Terry and the Pirates or those guys who fought Fu Manchu all those times. Lightly recommended.
Concrete Volume 2: Heights: written by Paul Chadwick; illustrated by Paul Chadwick, Jon Nyberg, and Jed Hotchkiss (1986-1995; collected 2006): My only caveat about this reprint format from Dark Horse is that it's too small (smaller than the original comic-book pages, that is) to do justice to some of writer-artist Paul Chadwick's work with the occasional tiny panel or series of tiny panels. But I also realize that this format is a commercial necessity. Volume 2 of the collected Concrete gives us issues 6-10 of Concrete's original title from the late 1980's, along with assorted short stories.
Concrete was infamously called by Harlan Ellison the best comic book on the racks in an Ellison article on comic books in a late 1980's issue of Playboy. It really, really wasn't. It was an enjoyable and, for a marketplace dominated by superheroes, somewhat offbeat take on what was really a super-hero trope.
Concrete the character was originally a U.S. political speechwriter. While on a camping trip with a friend, he was captured by aliens and had his brain placed in a 7-foot-tall, super-strong body that looked an awful lot like it was made of concrete (though it wasn't).
Concrete escaped, while his friend either died or was again taken prisoner by the aliens, who proceeded to leave Earth as rapidly as possible. After being studied by the U.S. government, Concrete was finally allowed to live his own life under government supervision, and with frequent evaluation and testing by scientist Maureen Vonnegut. His cover story was that he was the sole survivor of a mostly disastrous U.S. government cyborg program.
So Concrete, forever a creature of the mind, decides after his release to become at least partially a creature of action. He does have super-strength, super eyesight, a super-tough skin, and super healing abilities. He doesn't have a sense of touch or taste (he can eat rocks and stay healthy, for instance, and so he does), and while he can hear, he doesn't seem to have ears.
Also, no genitals.
In this second volume, the full-length stories show Concrete, Maureen, and his assistant Larry trying to help a rural family save their farm (Concrete accepts letters from people asking for various types of help); Concrete climbing Mount Everest; and Concrete dealing with the death of his mother (who believes him to be dead thanks to the government's desire to keep his original identity a secret) and a mysterious illness that no one can diagnose, given that his biology is completely alien to Dr. Vonnegut and the other scientists studying him.
Chadwick maintains a nice balance between the mundane and the dramatic throughout this volume. Concrete may be strong and tough, but that doesn't mean he never gets into tight spots. In its own way, Concrete is as much of an exploration of the real-world possibilities of a super-hero as were other late 1980's works that most notably include Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen. Concrete remains hopeful about human society in the face of the extraordinary, with a lot of qualifiers.
The art of Concrete is pleasing and low-key, free of the standard superhero sturm-und-drang even in the loudest moments. It's about as naturalistic and unmelodramatic a take on a superhero as one could want. Chadwick does occasionally slip into network-TV-style moralizing at the end of a story, a tendency that would fade over the years as Chadwick became a writer more sure of himself, though it never entirely disappeared. Nonetheless, it's a pleasure to reacquaint myself with Concrete and friends nearly 30 years after I first read these comics. It's a very warm and mostly gentle series, and there should be room in comic books for a series like that. Recommended.
Concrete Volume 3: Fragile Creature: written and illustrated by Paul Chadwick (1986-1995/collected 2006): Volume 3 of the collected Concrete offers a selection of short stories about everyone's favourite alien cyborg with a human brain and, as the eponymous main feature, a reprint of a 1991 miniseries about Concrete's adventures in the film business.
Fragile Creature draws upon Paul Chadwick's own adventures in the film business (among other things, he worked on Bob and Doug Mackenzie's Strange Brew!) as it shows Concrete accepting a job doing a wide variety of on-set special effects so as to get a movie based on a line of toys made without breaking the budget. Super-strength has its advantages. Problems arise, of course, thanks to some resentment of Concrete taking jobs away from the people who would otherwise have done such effects. There are various squabble on the film as well, primarily between the main actor and the director.
The whole thing works well as both a dramatic but low-key adventure for Concrete and as a primer on movie financing, production, and marketing. Concrete's personal life also undergoes some changes as his personal scientist Dr. Maureen Vonnegut starts a relationship with another scientist, to the perpetually lovestruck (and in his cyborg body, completely without genitals) Concrete. Recommended.
Concrete Volume 6: Strange Armor: written and illustrated by Paul Chadwick (1986-2006/collected 2006): Writer-artist Paul Chadwick reworks a screenplay he wrote for a never-produced Concrete movie into a 150-page comic-book narrative, to mixed results. It's interesting to see his 10-years-later take on Concrete's origins and first adventures. Unfortunately, Hollywoodizing the story of Concrete also meant adding a prominent 'action' plot involving a corrupt CIA agent to the mix.
The Hollywoodized portions of the narrative don't add anything positive. Indeed, they make for a jarring contrast with the normal tone and content of Concrete, which was always fairly normative (or non-sensational, perhaps), even when our hero was dealing with aliens or Eastern Bloc secret agents trying to kidnap him. The Hollywoodization also turns Maureen Vonnegut, Concrete's government-assigned scientist, into a sort of action-movie/romantic-comedy version of herself, abandoning the organic growth of Concrete and Maureen's platonic relationship. Lightly recommended.
Tales of Twilight and the Unseen by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1922) containing the following stories: The Great Keinplatz Experiment (1885); The Los Amigos Fiasco (1892); The Lift (1922); De Profundis(1892); Lot No. 249 (1892); How It Happened (1913); Playing with Fire (1900); B. 24 (1899); The Usher of Lea House School (1899); The Brown Hand (1899); The Ring of Thoth (1890); and A Literary Mosaic (1886).
This handsome reprint of a 1922 Arthur Conan "Sherlock Holmes" Doyle collection looks swell and, with large print and lavish line-spacing, is darned easy to read. And the stories themselves are mostly easy to read, even allowing for changes in general style and idiom over the last 100 years. Alas, the main problem is that Doyle's two best horror stories -- "The Parasite" and "The Horror of the Heights" -- aren't here. Neither is the suspenseful "The Brazilian Cat."
We do get "Lot No. 249," which besides possibly giving Thomas Pynchon an idea (and me an idea for a Thomas Pynchon novel about vengeful mummies and the U.S. Postal Service), also gives us a dangerous revived Egyptian mummy. Later Mummy movies would seem to draw upon the story, which is aces at build-up but not so great at a pay-off: I've seen people compare the story to M.R. James, but James would have given the world at least twice the scares at half the length.
Other stories operate as either light satire ("The Los Amigos Fiasco") or non-supernatural suspense ("The Lift"). The other notable tales of the supernatural don't really involve horror at all, though "Playing with Fire" does offer us an extremely angry supernatural unicorn (!). "The Brown Hand" and "The Ring of Thoth" are instead relatively gentle supernatural tales, devoid of threat or menace. Most of these stories were written before Doyle became a believer in the supernatural himself. Make of that what you may.
I certainly wasn't bored while reading the stories, but most of them were very effective at lulling me to sleep when read prior to nap-time. "A Literary Mosaic [a.k.a. "Cyprian Overbeck Wells") is the true outlier here, an amusing bit of play with the style and content of writers that include Daniel Defoe, Sir Walter Scott, and Jonathan Swift. People who want to sample the supernatural, non-Sherlockian works of Conan Doyle would be better served with a 'Best of' collection that includes "The Brazilian Cat," "The Horror of the Heights," and "The Parasite." Lightly recommended.
A fine writer and, for me, a welcome mainstay of virtually every horror anthology, new or reprint, published since the mid-1970's. Of the maybe 100 stories of hers I've read, I'd probably select "Elle Est Trois" (La Mort)" as the finest. She also wrote about a gajillion high and dark fantasy novels.
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