Annie: based on the comic strip created by Harold Gray and adapted from the play written by Thomas Meehan by Will Gluck and Aline Brosh McKenna; directed by Will Gluck; starring Quvenzhane Wallis (Annie), Jamie Foxx (Will Stacks), Rose Byrne (Grace), Bobby Cannavale (Guy), David Zayas (Lou), and Cameron Diaz (Hannigan) (2014): Pleasantly diverting remake/reimagining of the musical. Quvenzhane Wallis is terrific as Annie, while the rest of the supporting cast is also good. Well, with the exception of Cameron Diaz, who seems both miscast in a role played by Carol Burnett in the original movie and lacks anything resembling a workable singing voice. This is the sort of musical in which the director doesn't film people's feet when they're dancing. Songs written especially for this version are forgettable, but the songs remaining from the original book -- especially "Hard-knock Life" -- are excellent. Lightly recommended.
Laura: adapted by Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, Betty Reinhardt, and Ring Lardner Jr. from the novel by Vera Caspary; directed by Otto Preminger; starring Gene Tierney (Laura Hunt), Dana Andrews (Lt. McPherson), Clifton Webb (Waldo Lydecker), Vincent Price (Shelby Carpenter), Judith Anderson (Ann Treadwell), and Dorothy Adams (Bessie) (1944): You can think of Laura as one of the major intertexts with Twin Peaks. You can think of it as a movie starring a man with what's normally a woman's first name and a woman with what's normally a man's name. In any case, it's a fine mystery-thriller-romance film in which the police lieutenant investigating the murder of a bright young ad agency employee falls in love with the dead woman over the course of the investigation, all of this staged in the ornamentally baroque and fussy apartments of the cultural elite of 1940's New York.
Clifton Webb drips acid as arch society columnist Waldo Lydecker, while Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews are both solid as the murder victim and the lieutenant. Vincent Price, looming over everyone with his tremendous height, is a little shaky as a smooth Southern boy-toy/cad. One of Hollywood's most psychologically perverse studies of romantic love and obsession. Recommended.
Ouija: based on the Hasbro board game; written by Juliet Snowden and Stiles White; directde by Stiles White; starring Olivia Cooke (Laine Morris), Ana Coto (Sarah Morris), Douglas Smith (Pete), and Daren Kagasoff (Trevor) (2014): This wouldn't be the worst horror movie in the world if it were the first horror movie someone ever saw. The scares are pretty tame and the 'twist' ending stereotypically lame, but the young actors are surprisingly good. The direction underplays everything, leading to a bit of dullness.
That Ouija is actually a licensed Hasbro board game is probably unknown to most people. What's surprising in a contemporary movie of this sort is that no one uses the Internet to research ghost-busting. What's divertingly stupid about this movie is that no one researches anything useful. One interesting tic of the script is that the teens are on their own in a world in which parents and helpful adults are almost as rare as in a Peanuts cartoon. As those ubiquitous Blumhouse horror joints go, far from the worst. Very lightly recommended.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (Introduction and Notes by Jeffrey Meyers) (1838 version/ This Modern Library Classics Edition 2007): Edgar Allan Poe's longest work doesn't really end. Poe gave up on trying to finish it, stopped writing, and tacked on an ending that is just this side of 'The dog ate my homework.' The ending anticipates many of the postmodern obsessions with closure, metatextuality, and self-reflexivity by more than a century. It's also a weirdly funny and somewhat off-putting.
Oh, Poe!
Narrative started life as a serialized novel, switched early on to pretending to be a true story (hence the 'Narrative' part of the title, which in the 1830's connoted a true story), and concluded with a fictional argument between Poe and Pym about the authenticity of the narrative. But while academics love the text's quirkiness, it's the horror that has captivated several generations of readers.
We first follow Pym on one short sailing disaster caused by a drunk friend at the helm. Then Pym stows away on that friend's father's cargo ship for adventure. And he really gets some crazy-ass adventure.
Poe's genius in the first two-thirds of the novel lies in his willingness to move from one carefully though sometimes purple-prose-depicted horror to the next, with little or no pause. Fear of drowning, fear of cannibalism, fear of being buried alive, fear of being attacked by an animal, fear of starving or dying from lack of water... Poe hits them all. Do terrible smells make you vomitous? They're here too. And terrible flavours in your mouth. And drunkenness that actually imperils your life. And sharks. And festering wounds. And painful, debilitating gastric distress caused by eating too many filberts.
Later writers, most notably H.P. Lovecraft, would learn from Poe to hit the reader with uncomfortable environmental details as quickly as possible, and repeatedly -- cold, wet, smells, claustrophobia, and so many others. Show the reader the terror of the environment, not just the terror of the circumstances.
Two-thirds of the way through the novel, Poe and his pocket Hercules companion Dirk Peters (!), a part-Native American who keeps saving our hero once they meet up, finally get rescued. So begins the final stretch of the novel that has been more influential than any other: the journey to the Southern polar regions. There, Pym, Peters, and the crew of the Jane Guy encounter an undiscovered tribe on an island called Tsalal, various environmental mysteries, and finally the mysteries of the pole itself.
It seems, per some speculation at the time, that the oceans empty in massive cataracts into some colossal abyss at the South Pole. And there, abruptly, the story ends. Pym and Peters make it home, we're told (indeed, we've known this from the beginning of the tale). But the final mysterious and haunting images are never explained or expanded upon. It's those images, however, and some of the events on the island of Tsalal, that fascinated Jules Verne and H.P. Lovecraft enough (to name just two) to write their own Pym-referencing tales of the South Pole.
The whole thing is dense but fast-moving -- the horrors race by. And Poe's interest in inversions and subversions make the later sections a fascinating study. Characters (Dirk Peters the "half-breed"), ships (the Jane Guy is a hermaphrodite, an actual type of ship melding two different and distinct ship designs), and even the weird water of Tsalal combine disparate characteristics. Whiteness becomes sinister, especially in the strange, frothing, white waste seas as one leaves Tsalal and moves farther South. There are strange white creatures with red teeth. There are giant humanoid figures looming out of the mist. There is a South Pole that is warmer than it should be.
It's a shame Poe never saw his way to truly finishing the novel. However, it's possible that the unanswered mysteries of the final pages have helped keep the work alive in the imaginations of both readers and the writers who have been inspired to follow in its path. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket achieves disparate moments of visceral horror and existential, cosmic mystery. Highly recommended.
The Treatment (Jack Caffery #2) by Mo Hayder (2001): DI Jack Caffery, London's up-and-coming police detective (that's Detective-Inspector to you), continues to sort through the accumulated trauma of his actions in the first Caffery novel, Birdman, while also sorting through 20 years of trauma caused by the abduction of his ten-year-old brother by a pedophile when Jack was eight. Caffery makes Inspector Morse look like the friendliest and most well-adjusted fictional English police officer in history.
Mo Hayder works the horror side of the street in this novel. The criminals Caffery tracks this time around are pedophiles, some believed to be involved with his brother's disappearance and one or more involved with a case he's working on now. A family in a working-class area of Brixton was imprisoned in their home for three days while terrible things happened. The son is missing as the novel begins, while the father is in a coma in the hospital and the mother knows nothing relevant, having been imprisoned inside an upstairs closet the whole time while mysterious things happened downstairs. And Caffery's almost certain that another family may already be prisoners in their own home.
The procedural aspects of the novel are very well-done, from hunches to lab work to the sort of tiny mistakes that can have major repercussions. Caffery's personal trauma makes him a darkly sympathetic figure, especially as his brother's disappearance seems more and more to have something to do with the present-day case. Most of the supporting characters are nicely drawn, from the horrible and damaged female pedophile/victim Tracey Lamb to Caffery's partner, the almost Falstaffian lesbian DCI Danni Souness.
Caffery's girlfriend Rebecca, a modern artist and rape survivor whom Caffery met in the previous novel, is a bit more of a problem. She's certainly wacky, tortured, and interesting. But Caffery and Rebecca's relationship problems draw the reader away from the twisty coils of the main plot and its interconnectedness with Caffery's own past. I ended up skimming some of the later sections dealing with Rebecca. Bad me.
Hayder does have a totalizing tendency to link everything together in this novel. It's understandable, though perhaps a bit too glib simply in a plotting sense. The interconnectness is justified by Caffery's thoughts early on about pedophiles being like some sort of malign slime mold, all part of an enormous organism. But it's still a bit too pat.
As noted, the novel in its entirety shades towards horror in its graphic depictions (and less graphic suggestiveness) of terrible human evil. There are moments that suggest some sort of supernatural connection between Caffery and his lost brother, though these can be explained away. The central antagonist, known in popular lore as a troll who haunts the regional park, is one hell of a creation. And the novel plays fair with its revelations and plot mechanisms. Recommended.
Ritual (Jack Caffery #3) by Moe Hayder (2008): Mo Hayder notes in the afterword to this novel that she had no intention of telling any more stories about tortured English DI Jack Caffery. But return she would eventually. This time around we've got a second lead (police diver Phoebe 'Flea' Marley) and a new location (Jack's moved to the Glastonbury area, having grown tired of London).
But the horror elements remain in this police procedural, as Jack and Flea track down whoever it was that dropped a human hand into the harbour. Then another hand turns up. They're from the same person, they're fresh, and both were severed while the victim was alive.
Jack's a little less tortured by his long-lost brother's disappearance this time around, though not by much. Flea has been tortured for two years by the deaths of her parents on a deep-diving trip in Africa, their bodies never recovered from 'Bushman's Hole' in the Kalahari. She also feels guilt that she and not her brother should have been on the dive. The brother survived, unable to stop his parents' sudden plunge into the abysmal depths; Flea believes she could have done something, despite the fact that all deep-diving protocols suggest that had she done so, she would have died too.
So the two work the case, initially separately and, in Flea's case, unofficially. Evidence begins to accumulate that the homeless and the drug-addicted are being harvested for body parts and blood, part of some mysterious underground traffic in the more disturbing elements of religions from specific parts of Africa. Some witnesses report seeing what looks like a demonic South African familiar. And something that Caffery never quite gets a glimpse of is following the detective.
Ritual is quite sensitive to issues of acculturation and cultural appropriation when it comes to Africa -- as one academic says to Jack near the end of the novel, Caffery needs to realize that the term "African black magic" is a demeaning simplification that doesn't take into account the great number of different religions and cults on that vast continent.
Ritual plays fair with its information, though it posits connections among every character in the novel that stretch credibility by the end to just about the breaking point. Flea Marley is nicely drawn, with her own problems, though her growing infatuation with Caffery may soon become an even bigger problem. Hayder pares down Caffery's personal life -- he's left the girlfriend of the previous novel and now frequents prostitutes rather than get emotionally involved with other human beings. But he also begins to forge an initially curious relationship with a homeless wanderer dubbed The Walking Man, a relationship that's perhaps too gimmicky by half but nonetheless fascinating. Recommended.
The Bojeffries Saga: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Steve Parkhouse (1983-1991, 2013; Collected 2013): At less than 100 pages, The Bojeffries Saga is a short collection that's a lot of fun. The original series of short stories about the Bojeffries clan appeared in the early 1980's; it wasn't until this volume in 2013 that writer Alan Moore and artist Steve Parkhouse finished up these adventures with a final (for now) 24-page story. Parkhouse is a winning, droll cartoonist. He's perfectly suited to Alan Moore in satiric-comic mode, as he is here.
The Bojeffries are a very English riff on the Addams Family or the Munsters, a family of freaks and monsters living mostly unnoticed among normal people. Their ranks include a werewolf, a vampire, a nigh-omnipotent woman, and a Lovecraftian thing that used to be Grandpa living in a well in the backyard.
Moore was already experimenting with comics form in the early 1980's -- there's a 'musical' installment, and one structured as a series of photographs with captions. The humour is cutting when it comes to racial and social issues, but there's an essential sweetness to the proceedings, especially when it comes to the malaprop-spewing, poodle-devouring werewolf. Recommended.
Golden-Age Wonder Woman Archives Volume 6: written by William Moulton Marston, Joye Murchison, and Robert Kanigher; illustrated by Harry G. Peter (1945; collected 2010): The adventures of Wonder Woman in the 1940's were often whimsical fantasies with an edge and with barely disguised kinkiness. Wonder Woman tells us on more than one occasion in this volume that people need to submit to love. And there is of course a whole lotta bondage going on. So much bondage. So very much bondage.
Wonder Woman's creator, William Moulton Marston, was in increasingly poor health by the time of the stories in this volume, and he only writes a handful of stories. But the volume does bring us stories written by one of the first female writers in the history of the American comic book, Joye Murchison. And they're a lot of weird fun, immeasurably aided by the odd, almost Art Nouveau cartooning of WW co-creator Harry G. Peter. Peter was one of the most distinctive and original artists of Golden-Age American superhero comics, and his off-beat style made for a perfect fit with the off-beat writing.
Wonder Woman's mix of science fiction, fantasy, and war-time adventure continues in this volume. A grenade-tossing Nazi agent invades the world of Fairy and starts terrorizing the leprechauns. Killer plants stalk the streets of Washington. The garden of Eden waits beneath the ice of the North Pole. Mermen from Neptune invade the Earth. It's all fanciful, odd stuff, and a lot more interesting than the concurrent adventures of the male super-heroes of the Golden Age, with the exception of the equally fantastic and whimsical original Captain 'Shazam!' Marvel. Though Etta Candy, Wonder Woman's Jar Jar Binks, takes some getting used to. Recommended.
Cyrus: written and directed by Jay and Mark Duplass; starring John C. Reilly (John), Jonah Hill (Cyrus), Marisa Tomei (Molly), and Catherine Keener (Jamie) (2010): Sad-sack John starts dating sad-sack Molly, only to encounter problems with her 22-year-old live-at-home son Cyrus. An enjoyable mumblecore comedy-drama got pitched for its brief theatrical run as a wacky comedy, which it assuredly is not. Indeed, the rhythms of many of the scenes featuring a fish-eyed Jonah Hill are those of horror and not comedy. Marisa Tomei is a lot more striking now that she's aged out of cuteness -- she projects an occasional tiredness of adulthood that's extremely affecting. John C. Reilly is also good as a guy with his own dependency issues, while Jonah Hill exudes menace and hostility hidden behind platitudes and false bonhomie right up to the final scenes. Recommended.
Kill Bill 1 and 2: written by Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman; directed by Quentin Tarantino; starring Uma Thurman (The Bride), David Carradine (Bill), Vivica Fox (Vernita Green), Lucy Liu (O-Ren Ishii), Michael Madsen (Budd), Daryl Hannah (Elle Driver), Sonny Chiba (Hattori Hanzo), and Gordon Liu (Johnny/ Pai Mei) (2003-2004): Quentin Tarantino was forced by Miramax to split Kill Bill into two movies, primarily because it was impossible to sell a 4-hour movie of any genre to theatre chains. This looked for a time like it would be Tarantino's Heaven's Gate -- filming went on forever, the budget kept rising, and Tarantino was forced because of budget issues to come up with a different final confrontation between the Bride and Bill than he originally intended. But the two movies ended up making a lot of money.
It's a fascinating movie (s). It's a triumph of synthetic style over substance; so many different film styles, so many different homages, so little substance. It's a piece of film entertainment that's ultimately about nothing but the indiscriminate love of movies and the cool things that happen in them, the cool way they can look and move. The cast is almost uniformly perfect, with Uma Thurman as the vengeful Bride (we only learn her real name towards the end of Volume 2) and David Carradine as the malign, soft-voiced Bill the stand-outs. It's a love letter to Kung Fu movies, spaghetti Westerns, different film stocks, and pulp of all types from a half-dozen countries. Highly recommended.
Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers: inspired by the non-fiction book by Donald Keyhoe and written for the screen by Curt Siodmak, George Worthing Yates, and Bernard Gordon; directed by Fred F. Sears; starring Hugh Marlowe (Dr. Marvin) and Joan Taylor (Carol Marvin) (1956): The looming inspiration for Tim Burton's Mars Attacks in both UFO design and anti-UFO weaponry (sound waves, albeit not those generated by the golden throat of Mr. Slim Whitman). The writing, direction and acting are competent, but the star is stop-motion guru Ray Harryhausen, whose UFOs look great and are generally very well integrated into the rest of the footage. Joan Taylor gets a much larger than normal role for a woman in this sort of movie. Recommended.
Trading Places: written by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod; directed by John Landis; starring Eddie Murphy (Billy Ray Valentine), Dan Aykroyd (Louis Winthorpe III), Denholm Elliott (Coleman), Ralph Bellamy (Randolph Duke), Don Ameche (Mortimer Duke), Jamie Lee Curtis (Ophelia), Paul Gleason (Clarence Beeks), and Jim Belushi (Harvey) (1983): Eddie Murphy's second movie was a comedy hit in 1983. It still shines today, though certain routines will make a person cringe. Originally intended to be a Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor vehicle, Trading Places is the only comedy I can think of that hinges on the commodities trading of frozen orange juice concentrate on the floor of the Stock Exchange. Murphy is young, thin, hilarious, and charismatic. Aykroyd is very good as an upper-class twit. The supporting cast is also good and fairly well-served. Jamie Lee Curtis, trying to change her image as the virginal good girl in slasher movies, does a couple of brief topless scenes. They appear to be real, and they're spectacular. Recommended.
The Game: written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris; directed by David Fincher; starring Michael Douglas (Nicholas Van Orton), Sean Penn (Conrad Van Orton), Deborah Kara Unger (Christine), James Rebhorn (Jim Feingold), Peter Donat (Samuel Sutherland), and Carroll Baker (Ilsa) (1997): A twisty and enjoyable 'What's reality?' plot derails towards the end for reasons I'll leave to you to discover. Still, it's fun getting there in what was director David Fincher's third feature film (after Alien 3 and Se7en). Michael Douglas is suitably flustered, though the character's anti-social tendencies and rigidity needed more development at the beginning to make the the ending work the way it seems to have been intended to work. This initial softening of the character helps make an improbable ending almost intolerable. Lightly recommended.
Hector and the Search for Happiness: adapted from the Francois Lelord novel by Maria von Heland, Peter Chelsom, and Tinker Lindsay; directed by Peter Chelsom; starring Simon Pegg (Hector), Rosamund Pike (Clara), Jean Reno (Diego Baresco), Ming Zhao (Ying Li), Christopher Plummer (Professor Coreman), Stellan Skarsgard (Edward), and Toni Collette (Agnes) (2014): Well, the whole thing is a bit gooey. Or perhaps mushy. But Simon Pegg is Simon Pegg, and much of the writing in this picaresque film is light enough to keep things from bogging down in First-World Problems.
The cast is first-rate throughout, though Pegg's character is somewhat unbelievable as a psychiatrist: just imagine he's the comic-book-shop employee/comic-book illustrator he played on Spaced and the whole movie makes way more sense. Funded by what seems to be about nineteen different countries, supplied with an international cast, and seemingly only released to about three theatres, the film almost seems to have been some sort of tax shelter scam. Oh, well. Recommended.
Unstoppable: written by Mark Bomback; directed by Tony Scott; starring Denzel Washington (Frank), Chris Pine (Will), Rosario Dawson (Connie), Ethan Suplee (Dewey), Kevin Dunn (Galvin), Kevin Corrigan (Werner), Kevin Chapman (Bunny), and T.J. Miller (Gilleece) (2010): Denzel Washington and the new Captain Kirk strive to stop a runaway train from blowing up half of Pennsylvania. This film was indeed inspired by real-life events which are crazy enough -- both reality and film involve a train on the same tracks chasing down the crewless runaway. The movie pumps things up with helicopters, explosions, and domestic drama for Captain Nu-Kirk.
Still, the late Tony Scott was in his wheelhouse for this action/chase movie. He keeps things tight and tense, brings the movie in under 100 minutes, and supplies the viewer with enough train technobabble and real-world stunts to make the whole thing an engaging, old-school diversion. One could imagine this movie being made almost verbatim in the 1950's, albeit with Humphrey Bogart in the Denzel Washington role and John Derek in Chris Pine's position. The supporting cast is surprisingly deep and well-served by the movie, with Rosario Dawson as a female lead who isn't required to fall in love with either of the male leads. I guess that's progress. Recommended.
Taboo Issue 4 (1990): edited by Stephen Bissette and Nancy O'Connor, containing the following comics: Text pieces, interviews, and bios by Steve Bissette with Jean-Marc Lofficier; Front cover by Moebius; Back cover by Brian Sendelbach; Frontispiece by Nancy O'Connor; "Dreaming And The Law" written and illustrated by Phillip Hester; "1963" illustrated by Dave Sim; Untitled written and illustrated by Charles Burns; "Babycakes" written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Michael Zulli; "Cholesterol" written and illustrated by D’Israeli"; "Davey’s Dream" written by Mark Askwith and illustrated by Rick Taylor; "Eyes Of The Cat aka Les Yeux Du Chat" written by Alejandro Jodorowsky and illustrated by Moebius (originally printed in France in 1978); "El Topo" written by Alejandro Jodorowsky and illustrated by Spain Rodriguez (originally printed in Europe in 1979); "Retinal Worm" written and illustrated by S. Clay Wilson; "La Fugue {The Escape}" written and illustrated by P. Foerster; "Blue Angel" written by Tim Lucas and illustrated by Steve White; "Morrigan Tales" written by Elaine Lee and illustrated by Charles Vess; "These Things Happen" written and illustrated by Rick Grimes; "Neither Seen Nor Heard" written by L. Roy Aiken and illustrated by Mike Hoffman; From Hell, Chapter Three: Blackmail or Mrs. Barrett written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Eddie Campbell; From Hell Pin-Up illustrated by Alan Moore.
The fourth oversized paperback issue of the late, much-lamented Taboo contains a wealth of great horror and weird comics material. The high point is a reprint of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius's 1978 collaboration "The Eyes of the Cat," a lengthy weird horror tale made up entirely of gorgeous and occasionally disturbing full-page panels by Moebius. Combined with interviews with the two, it makes for quite a treat. Spain Rodriquez's odd 'tie-in' to the Jodorowsky film El Topo completes this part of the package.
The rest of the anthology is excellent as well, from the third serialized chapter of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's epic graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, From Hell, to a horrifying bit of insect craziness from underground comix mainstay S. Clay Wilson. Elaine Lee writes a fascinating new-wave fairy tale illustrated by Charles Vess in his old-school, Hal Foster by way of N.C. Wyeth style. Most of the short pieces are genuinely horrific, and it's interesting to see relatively early, non-Sandman Neil Gaiman as illustrated by the fine, overlooked Michael Zulli, and very early Phil Hester writing and drawing. Taboo was very much cutting-edge horror for its time, and rewards reading now if one can find issues of it. Highly recommended.
The Big Book of the Unexplained: written by Doug Moench; illustrated by Russ Heath, Sergio Aragones, Brent Anderson, Joe Sacco, Steve Leialoha, and many others (1997): Another enjoyable entry in Paradox Press' 'Big Book of' series of single-author, multiple-artist comics anthologies from the 1990's. This foray into the world of UFO's, cryptids, and general all-around Fortean madness (indeed, a cartoon version of Charles Fort is our narrator) is fun stuff with a wide variety of artists working in a wide variety of styles to alternately creep the reader out and make the reader laugh while, perhaps, thinking a little, at least about the credulity of the human animal. Recommended.
