The Aniston Effect

The Switch, written by Allan Loeb, based on a story by Jeffrey Eugenides, directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck, starring Jennifer Aniston, Jason Bateman, Juliette Lewis, Jeff Goldblum and Patrick Wilson (2010): Jennifer Aniston can suck the air out of pretty much any movie at this point -- never has a TV star had such a capacity to negate everything else on screen when she's on it.

She's like some sort of anti-charisma generator.

Woefully miscast as the quirky love interest of quirky Jason Bateman, Aniston once again reveals that her bag of acting tricks is pretty much empty. The movie itself wouldn't have been great with someone better in Aniston's role, but as it is, Bateman and the child actor are still pretty good.

Aniston plays Bateman's best friend. She's single and decides to get pregnant with a personally solicited sperm sample from hunky, married college professor Patrick Wilson. And she decides to throw herself a wacky impregnation party at which she'll actually impregnate herself with Wilson's just-delivered sperm sample. Ha ha, those wacky New Yorkers! But Jason Bateman gets drunk, spills the sperm sample, and in a panic replaces it with one of his own. He doesn't tell her. Then Aniston moves out of New York back to Minnesota.

Seven years pass. She returns, six-year-old son in tow. The son acts like Bateman, who is in full-on, bordering-on-Asperger's neurotic mode here. Hilarity ensues. Well, not really, but it seems like hilarity was supposed to ensue. Bateman and the kid are very good in what is at best a middling script, and Wilson, along with Goldblum and Lewis, do yeoman's work. And then there's Aniston, the black hole of modern film comedy and drama. If she appeared in a movie with Katherine Heigl, the very prints of the film could very well vanish into some newly formed quantum singularity. Not recommended.

Shine

The Shining, written by Stephen King (1977): I've read this novel four times now, and didn't notice until this time around a somewhat hilarious piece of inexplicable business that I'm going to leave to you to figure out. It has nothing to do with the supernatural and everything to do with the logic of everyday life, and I'm pretty sure King kept the scene as-is because he needed several things to happen plot-wise and couldn't figure out a way to have them happen otherwise. Think of it as an Easter Egg.

The Shining was King's first foray into a ghost story at novel length, and its many strengths epitomize King's own strengths over the years, most especially the sympathetic characterization of his main characters and the verisimiltude of their reactions to supernatural phenomena. The basic set-up -- telepath (or 'sensitive') vs. haunted house -- comes directly from Shirley Jackson's classic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House, a novel King has his characters explicitly mention during the course of The Shining. Here, though, the telepathic character -- five-year-old Danny Torrance, gifted with the telepathic gifts similarly gifted hotel cook Dick Halloran calls 'The Shining' -- is able to contest the haunted house, and not be seduced by it as in Jackson's novel.

The Overlook Hotel, way up in the Rockies and apparently next door to Hell, is a great character in its own right, a malign entity with no clear origin for its evil (in the movie, the hotel's malignity is attributed to that old chestnut, the Indian burial ground; here, as in other King works like "The Monkey" and Christine, there is no clear cause for the malice of this particular inanimate object: it just is, a productive evocation of Ramsey Campbell's dictum for good horror, "Explanation is the death of horror."

King conjures up a terrible sympathy for failed writer Jack Torrance, plagued by alcoholism and the memories of his physically abusive father, and eventually tested to destruction by the hotel, eroded into a killing machine aimed at his own wife Wendy and son Danny. Our more recent knowledge of King's struggles with substance abuse until the 1990's lends extra poignance to the novel, even as one also notes that Torrance, with his somewhat unpractical writing aims (he's a playwright and high-end short story writer) and literary pretensions (he dismisses Edgar Allan Poe as "The Great American Hack") is most certainly not a King-surrogate. But this novel is also about Danny's courage, and the growth of his mother Wendy into someone who can oppose both the horribly undone Jack and the hotel itself.

The building of dread is this novel is skilfully accomplished, with some truly startling set-pieces of horror. King goes a bit over the top towards the end, though a lot of what happens can (as in Jackson's novel) be explained as malign hallucination rather than actual physical attack. In any event, this is one of King's novels that, warts and all, rewards multiple readings. Highly recommended.

Imaginary Gods in Real Gardens

Promethea Volume 2, written by Alan Moore, illustrated by J.H. Williams III, Jose Villarubbia, and Mick Gray (2000-2001): Moore's loopy, brain-twisting, gorgeously illustrated metasuperheroine series continues, as fictional god Promethea and her human host Sophie Bangs learn more about how magic works, and what the nebulous realm of the Immateria really is in relation to the material world.

The whole thing basically plays like Neil Gaiman's The Sandman on magic mushrooms...or maybe peyote...as written by someone who really does believe in, and practice, magic. After we finish our tour of Promethea's past incarnations, Moore takes us on a jaunt through the history and theory of magic, and the history and theory of Everything as represented by the 22 face cards of the Tarot deck. You don't have to believe this stuff to enjoy it.

Moore's probably the only comic-book writer alive who can make what amounts to a crazy-ass essay about the Tarot deck both enthralling and dramatically satisfying. Magician Jack the Faust gets fleshed out more (somewhat literally), looking for all the world like an extremely weathered Harvey Pekar. We also find out that the private parts of a goddess have sparkly stars floating around them. Good to know. You never can tell when knowledge like that can come in handy. Are those stars around your vagina or are you happy to see me? Boom! Highly recommended.

Golden Age Doctor Fate Archives Volume 1, written by Gardner F. Fox, illustrated by Howard Sherman and others (originally published 1940-44): Muscly superheroes and supervillains are often captains; magical superheroes and supervillains are often doctors: so goes the unwritten code of the Golden and Silver Age superhero comic book, with the necessary caveat that there are exceptions (Flash villain Captain Cold being one of those exceptions that prove the rule).

Doctor Fate has one of the great Golden Age, four-colour superhero costumes, all blue and yellow with the yellow standing in (we assume if we're grounded in representational four-colour coding) for gold. He begins life as a sort of science magician, using "lost secrets of the Chaldeans and Egyptians" that are really super-science to battle an array of quasi-supernatural foes.

Fate's golden, full-head helmet stays exclusively on for the first year-and-a-half of his adventures, only coming off when he finally reveals his secret origin to oddly named gal-pal Inza Carmer. The removal of the helmet does not bode well, as Fate quickly gains a new half-helmet (the top half, btw) and a much less interesting career as a two-fisted crime fighter whose primary opponents are gangster types who wouldn't be out of place in a Batman and Robin story from the same era.

Then Fate (real name: Kent Nelson) becomes a 'real' doctor, by which we mean medical doctor and not Ph.D., loses his cape somewhere, and slouches towards a 17-year hiatus from superheroing. The first third of the book, in which Fox exhibits his love of 1930's science fiction and horror, is terrifically entertaining; after that, only the appearances of Professor Hugo Strange-like Mr. Who are really interesting beyond a historical sense. One of the oddest things about early Fate is that nowhere in these stories is there much support for later characterizations of Doctor Fate as a sentient, god-like helmet with a person pretty much just along for the ride. There's the real mystery. Recommended.

Golden Age Plastic Man Archives Volume 2, written and illustrated by Jack Cole (1943-44): With all due respect to Will Eisner and company's The Spirit, Jack Cole's Plastic Man is the greatest superhero comic of the 1940's, and one of the ten best of all time. Maybe five best. Cole's talent was only matched by his life-long dissatisfaction with being a comic-book writer/artist, and once he made the "big time" of slick magazine cartoons and a syndicated comic strip, he would try to minimize his comic-book days in his CV.

But more than fifty years after his somewhat mysterious death, Cole's enduring legacy is that comic-book work on Plastic Man. It burns with the hard, gem-like, crazy-ass flame that denotes real art, absolutely serious in its committment to anarchy, hilarity, thrills, and the often untapped potential of the comic-book panel and comic-book page.

'Plastic' in this case comes from its original meaning -- fluid, changeable, protean -- and not how we understand the word now; Cole was originally going to go with 'India Rubber Man' until someone pointed out that this was the stupidest superhero name ever. Unlike later stretchable heroes that include the Fantastic Four's Mr. Fantastic and DC's risibly named Elongated Man, Plastic Man stretched and compacted to almost absurdist degrees -- he could compact himself to the size of a rubber ball, or alter his appearance.

Somewhat presciently, he was also the first superhero that I know of to work for a government agency (in this case, the FBI). His adventures had serious consequences, with murder and mayhem abounding, and yet it was all delivered with an anarchic, light-hearted flair: it's almost like one is looking at the model for much later pop culture confections such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which comedy and melodrama co-exist productively.

In any case, this is serious fun: it zips by, effortless to read, overstuffed with strange and comic images, a work of unduplicated genius from a genius who seemed to actually despise what he had created. As real-world Frankenstein stories go, it's a doozy. Highest recommendation.

Soft Monsters

DAW The Year's Best Horror Stories Series IX (1980), edited by Karl Edward Wagner (1981):

Introduction: The Year of the Anthology and Beyond by Karl Edward Wagner
The Monkey by Stephen King
The Gap by Ramsey Campbell
The Cats of Pere LaChaise by Neil Olonoff
The Propert Bequest by Basil A. Smith
On Call by Dennis Etchison
The Catacomb by Peter Shilston
Black Man with a Horn by T. E. D. Klein
The King by William Relling, Jr.
Footsteps by Harlan Ellison
Without Rhyme or Reason by Peter Valentine Timlett

As the introduction notes, 1980 was the year of the anthology in horror, with three 'one-off' original horror anthologies (Dark Forces, New Terrors and New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos) and the continuing Shadows series hitting the bookshelves. Wagner's selection here runs to some lengthy novelette-to-novella length entries (those by Klein, King and Smith) occupying about half the page length of this anthology.

King's "The Monkey" offers a King trope, childhood horror invading the world of the once-terrified child, in the titular toy, a cymbal-clashing mechanical monkey that causes people to die when those cymbals clash. It's a dandy. "The Propert Bequest," a posthumous appearance by Smith, manages a tricky feat -- expanding an M.R. Jamesian-style antiquarian ghost story to novella length -- and does so superbly (Peter Shilston's "The Catacomb" also walks in James's footsteps at less length but equal efficacy, as an English tourist makes an unfortunate unscheduled visit to a mysterious Italian church. France turns out to be even more unfortunate for an American in "The Cats of Pere Lachaise", while a visit to a medical clinic moves into undefined modern horrors in Dennis Ethison's piece.

The biggest gun here is T.E.D. Klein's "Black Man with a Horn", originally published in New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. In 1979, a (fictional) former associate of American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, returning from a disappointing horror convention in London, England, accidentally stumbles across a missionary who's returning to America from the Worst Missionary Posting Ever in Malaysia.

The narrator's realization that he's gradually being pulled into someone else's H.P. Lovecraft tale makes the story an occasionally sardonic delight, while Klein's careful delineation of the narrator's pervasive, systematic racism both makes cultural (the narrator was born in 1900) and narrative sense (Lovecraft was a notorious racist, and that racism informs certain aspects of his Cthulhu Mythos). And the black man with a horn -- not a man, and not actually carrying a horn -- is coming, stalking forth from a Lovecraft reference that the narrator had, until now, thought to be just another of Lovecraft's fictional creations. This story, and the anthology, highly recommended.

Amityville Horror All Right!

The Amityville Horror, written by Scott Kosar, based on the screenplay by Sandor Stern, based on the book by Jay Anson, based on material by George and Kathleen Lutz, directed by Andrew Douglas, starring Ryan Reynolds, Melissa George, Chloe Grace Moretz, Jesse James and Philip Baker Hall (2005): The original Amityville Horror (1979) was a financially successful, dramatically awful horror movie whose only greatness may lie in the Eddie Murphy comedy bit it spawned ("GET OUT!" "Too bad I gotta go!").


The "true story" it's based on has since turned out to be a hoax perpetrated by the Lutz family, though the original murders were tragically real. Subsequent residents of the house in question, in Suffolk County, New York, have reported nothing unusual about the house other than the hordes of tourists that stop by to look at it. Hoo ha!


This movie looks a lot better than the original, not much of a feat considering how crappily 70's the cinematography was in that original shitfuck. It's shorter, which pretty much eliminates any building of suspense. And it cuts the one scene I (and Stephen King in Danse Macabre) would cite as the first film's one moment of fully realized suburban terror, an incident in which the House appears to steal much needed money from George Lutz, cash needed to pay for a wedding. That was a good scene. So they don't even try to duplicate it.


So far as I can tell, the screenwriter realized how bad the original material was pretty early on and so decided to remake The Shining instead. I shit you not. So this is basically The Shining as written and directed by moronic hacks and produced by Michael Bay (seriously on that last one). Ryan Reynolds and Melissa George are spectacularly miscast as a young couple in the 1970's -- Reynolds's hairless hard-body alone pretty much erases all suspension of disbelief.


Philip Baker Hall struggles manfully with the underwritten priest part which caused Rod Steiger to devour the scenery in the original, and we don't even get the spectacularly bizarre bit involving Kathy Lutz's nun sister. Or the bit where the demon, its red eyes clearly light bulbs, perches at the window to glare at the Lutzes. Or the crazy part about the doorway to Hell in the basement.


Come to think of it, at least that godawful 1970's movie was sorta fun; this one is just sorta boring. The remake does have a terrific bit of fucked up continuity, though. At the end, Kathy Lutz spends all day at the Amityville library researching the house. When she returns home that night, George has turned into Mr. Cuckoobanana. What seems to be a real-time ten minutes of shenanigans ensues which ends with the family taking off in their motorboat...at which point the sun comes up. Because in Amityville, the nights are about 20 minutes long. Really not recommended.

Four!

Fantastic Four Visionaries: John Byrne Volume 1, written and illustrated by John Byrne (1981; collected 2005): Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear when pretty much every superhero comic book sold over 100,000 copies a month and stories didn't drag out over a year, or even years.

Byrne, artist and co-plotter for some of the X-Men's greatest 1970's and early 1980's storylines (most notably The Death of Phoenix and Days of Future Past) had by the early 1980's got tired of working with X-Men scribe Chris Claremont. So he eventually ended up taking over The Fantastic Four as both writer and penciller, his first extended stint as a writer on any series. He'd stay on the book for about five years in what most consider to this day to be the second-best FF run after Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's original 100+ issue stint.

Byrne has never had Stan Lee's oddball flair for combining melodrama with low-brow comedy -- the only real knock on his FF run is that it's mostly humourless. But he is one of the post-1970's superhero world's great synthesizers and extrapolators. He doesn't create a lot of new heroes and villains during his FF run, but he does make really good use of the ones he has (he even managed to make Wyatt Wingfoot interesting), and his version of The Thing, personality-wise, is the best the character's ever gotten in terms of the Thing's difficult mix of pathos and two-fisted directness.

This volume mainly consists of standalone stories (remember those, kids?) that, in total, resemble mid-period Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four comics in their mix of standalone stories with one-off villains and pivotal issues featuring major characters, the most enjoyable of the latter being the 20th anniversary issue battle with Dr. Doom and the exodus of the Inhumans from their Himalayan hiding place to a less air-polluted locale. These are comics that can profitably be read by both children and adults, something of a lost art in today's shrunken superhero comics marketplace. Highly recommended.

Magic and Loss

Promethea Volume 1, written by Alan Moore, illustrated by J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray (1999): Alan Moore's loopy, gorgeously illustrated meditation on the nature of stories and myth, told through the vehicle of a comic-book character whose roots extend back to the 5th century AD, when she was a real girl fleeing the early Christians who killed her magician father in Egypt.

Taken bodily by the amalgam god(s) Thoth-Hermes into the Immateria, the vast realm of human thought, dreams and stories, Promethea would show up in various forms over the centuries. Now, because of the interest of a young college essay writer, Promethea has a new avatar -- and apparently a mandate to end the world.

Moore has his mojo working here. Promethea has, at various points, been a (rough) analogue for such real-world creations as La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Wonder Woman, and Little Nemo in Slumberland. The protean nature of her/its appearances is part of the point, as Moore plays with the concept of archetypes, which may have different attributes to different people formed around a solid 'core' of universality. And of gods, which also change shape or bond together over time (Thoth-Hermes being the first example in this particular book).

The closest thing to this series is Neil Gaiman's Sandman, and I'd imagine if you liked one, you'd like the other. The art of J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray is astonishingly beautiful -- Williams really is one of the three or four best fantasy cartoonists to show up on the scene in the last 15 years, and he's equal to the often herculean drawing tasks Moore has created for him.

There are action sequences and deft characterization and wild and wooly fantasy creatures (including an oddly disturbing owl-headed demon), but the major attraction here is Moore's interest in the nature of stories themselves, how they grow into myths and legends and religions; how myths and legends and religions fall back into story over time; how everything thought-related works itself out with the spectre of armageddon hanging over both the Immateria and the Material World alike. Highest recommendation.

The Light-Darkness War, written by Tom Veitch, illustrated by Cam Kennedy (1987-88): Solid, offbeat science-fantasy adventure from Marvel's long defunct Epic Comics line, which offered at least marginally more adult, creator-owned fare during the 1980's and early 90's.

Veitch spins a tale of Viet Nam veterans dropped into another war in a galaxy far away, where the forces of darkness seek to overwhelm the forces of light. Or is this galaxy in our universe at all? Because the soldiers are, for the most part, already dead. So are Nicola Tesla and Leonardo da Vinci, who do weapons design for the forces of light. Cam Kennedy's painted art is solid and effective without being flashy. Recommended.