Shazam! (2019)

Shazam! (2019): Shazam (aka Captain Marvel) created by Bill Parker and C.C. Beck; written by Henry Gayden and Darren Lemke; directed by David F. Sandberg; starring Zachary Levi (Shazam), Mark Strong (Sivana), Asher Angel (Billy Batson), Jack Dylan Grazer (Freddy Freeman), and Djimon Honsou (Wizard): 

Shockingly enjoyable movie about the original Fawcett Comics Captain Marvel (ie. THE Captain Marvel), moved to the present day and made somewhat goofier than the great 1940's version whose adventures were no worse than second-best in terms of superheroes in the 1940's (Jack Cole's Plastic Man was first; Will Eisner's Spirit didn't have super-powers).

Shazam is an acronym for Solomon (Wisdom), Hercules (Strength), Atlas (Stamina), Zeus (Power), Achilles (Invulnerability), and Mercury (Speed). Well, when it comes to Captain Marvel (now Shazam), anyway -- Mary Marvel and Black Adam, to name two, have the same acronym but different names from mythology.

The whole thing is a 'low-budget' by superhero standards ($90 million) movie aimed solidly at mid-teens. Billy Batson is invested by the wizard Shazam with the powers of, well, Shazam because DC gave up on using 'Captain Marvel' because they didn't trademark it back in the 1950's or 1960's. Shazam is now Earth's defense against magical menaces, sort of a jollier Dr. Strange. 

Billy Batson, a sort-of orphan, has to learn to accept his supportive new foster family led by Freddy Freeman, once a disabled newsboy in the 1940's and now, not working, just as Billy no longer works as a radio host. Child labour laws, am I right, guys?

Zachary Levi is the result of Billy saying 'Shazam.' In the comics, he was generally written as a sort of adult version of Billy with super-powers -- they didn't share a consciousness. Taking a cue from Big, Shazam now possesses Billy's 13-year-old consciousness in a super-powered adult body. Hijinks ensue as Billy and Freddy test out the beer-buying powers of Shazam, among other things.

Much revisionism is heaped on the villain of this piece, Sivana, originally a diminutive mad scientist and now a large, imposing Mark Strong wielding magical powers derived from long-time Shazam foes The Seven Deadly Sins. And I don't mean the Traveling Wilburys song! But Strong always makes an, um, strong villain. 

I'm not a huge fan of all the revisionism heaped on Captain Mar... er, Shazam... in the recent Shazam miniseries by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank. And all of those revisions seem to get info-dumped into this movie, especially over the last 45 minutes. Oh, well. Things play a lot jollier here than in that miniseries, and Billy is much more likable.

The whole thing is nonetheless light and entertaining and often quite visually inventive. It's clearly marked throughout as part of the DC Movie Universe, and the end credits foreground this. Superman does cameo in the live-action stuff, but not Henry Cavill either because he refused or because DC is pivoting away from the dark days of David Goyer and Zack Snyder's DC movies to something more earnest and light. 

Hopefully being freed of the demands of an origin story will allow a second Shazam movie to soar and not crash. There's also a brief (unnamed) reference to the 'first,' fallen Shazam champion, Egypt's Black Adam. Dwayne Johnson has been attached to a Black Adam movie for years; the box-office success of Shazam! seems to have jump-started that movie, or at least a Black Adam role in the next Shazam! film. Recommended.

Venom (2018)

Venom (2018): Venom created by David Michelinie and Todd MacFarlane; written by Jeff Pinkner, Scott Rosenberg, and Kelly Marcel; directed by Ruben Fleischer; starring Tom Hardy (Eddie Brock/Venom), Michelle Williams (Anne), and Riz Ahmed (Carlton Drake/Riot):

I guess it's good that the current superhero glut can result in even marginally offbeat projects based on Marvel and DC characters. Venom isn't a good movie, but it's intermittently fun, and the goopy creature effects are a far cry from most normal Marvel and DC movie fare.

In the comics, Venom was what happened when Spider-man's black-and-white alien symbiote costume he acquired in the Secret Wars event in the mid-1980's acquired a new host because it was driving Spidey crazy and he got rid of it. You may remember events like this from Spider-man 3. Yes, Venom has appeared in a movie before, its host Eddie Brock played then by Topher Grace.

Now Eddie Brock is a formerly heroic, now down-on-his-luck journalist in San Francisco who acquires the symbiote (or is acquired by the symbiote) while trying to resurrect his career by blowing the whistle on Riz Ahmed's mad billionaire scientist. Ahmed barely registers as an evil version of Elon Musk. Well, more evil. He torpedoed Brock's career because Brock discovered he was doing some crazy experiments on people who subsequently died.

The symbiote gives Eddie a wide, ill-defined range of superpowers along with a blobby covering that looks a lot like Spider-man because, well, Venom was a Spider-man suit in the comics. The suit likes eating human heads and Tater Tots. What larks, Pip!

Our lumpy, lumpen anti-hero eventually learns the value of human life and saves the world from some stuff. It seems like about 20 minutes of story has been cut that showed Venom's progress from head-eater to Earth-lover. Oh, well.

Tom Hardy is hilarious doing some insanely bad accent that's supposed to be... Brooklynese? I have no idea. Venom sounds like Tom Hardy doing a Keith David impersonation. Michelle Williams looks absolutely lost in a CGI-laden action movie. And Riz Ahmed, as noted, is barely there. 

This is not a good movie, but it's oddly charming and enjoyable enough to waste time with. And as it's technically part of the Spider-verse Sony still has rights to despite their NuX2 Spider-man movies now being part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.... well, that astronaut is the son of J. Jonah Jameson, who in the comics became the werewolf Man-Wolf after visiting the Moon. I hope that happens in a subsequent Venom movie!!! Lightly recommended.

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

Avengers: Endgame (2019): written by everybody; directed by Anthony and Hoe Russo; starring everybody: 

Basically the most expensive Season Finale in TV history, blown up by steroids, super-soldier serum, and Gamma Rays to the size of a Behemoth. 

There's no point watching it unless you've seen (and enjoyed) at least 15 or 16 of the previous Marvel films. It pretty much sticks the landing without giving the audience much in the way of a sense of wonder or the Sublime. It's the $300 million blockbuster as basic comfort food, enjoyable and mostly bland. Recommended.

Nightflyers (1987) by George R.R. Martin

When bad covers happen...

Nightflyers (1987) by George RR Martin, containing the following stories:

• Nightflyers (1980): Martin's acclaimed novella of horror and first contact was badly mangled by the recent SyFy Channel series, mercifully canceled after one season. Set thousands of years in the future, "Nightflyers" follows the efforts of an interstellar archaeology team to make First Contact with the mysterious Volcryn. The Volcryn fly between the stars at normal spatial velocities, avoiding star systems and faster-than-light travel. Why? And why have they been doing it for at least tens of thousands of years, flying outwards from the Galactic Core? Martin balances cosmic horror, a bit of grue, a sense of wonder, and a keen sense of irony once the final revelations arrive.
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• Override (1973): Enjoyable, minor Corpse-handler story. Martin's walking dead do so with artificial brains in their heads, all under the control of that handler. Yuck!
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• Weekend in a War Zone (1977): Dystopic, bleak satire of corporate outings. Would make a good half-hour Twilight Zone episode if they still made such a thing.
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• And Seven Times Never Kill Man (1975): Another story set in the Thousand Worlds universe shows us aliens vs. humans. And not just any humans, but the horrible sect of humans who are Martin's parody of/commentary on Gordon Dickson's militaristic Dorsai.
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• Nor the Many-Coloured Fires of a Star Ring (1976): The Star Ring was an FTL gateway created by dumping massive amounts of power into a pre-existing spatial rift. But in this story, the rift seems to open on a parallel universe.
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• A Song for Lya (1974): One of Martin's cleverest, most affecting stories. Again set in the Thousand Worlds universe, "A Song for Lya" follows the efforts of a telepathic duo to discover the secrets of a planet of aliens that has lived in peaceful cultural stasis for thousands of years -- and whose attractions now seem to be wooing humans to have brain-eating blobs put on their heads. Yes, it's the most melancholy episode of Futurama ever!!!

Once upon a time, George R.R. Martin was a writer of terrific short stories and novellas. His first novel, written with Lisa Tuttle, was a fix-up of previously published stories, as was a later novel, Tuf Voyaging. 

These stories all come from about two decades or more before Game of Thrones hit the book-stands. Some of them are from different universes Martin created -- the Star Ring universe, the Corpse-handler universe, and the Thousand Worlds of humanity thousands of years in the future. They all make for fine reading. Highly recommended.

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991)

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) by David Simon: Once upon a time, a Baltimore crime reporter managed to get a year 'embedded' with Baltimore's Homicide detectives. The year was 1988, the reporter was David Simon, and the result wasn't just this terrific book -- ultimately, the result was David Simon's entry into the entertainment industry, resulting in the TV shows Homicide: Life on the Street, The Corner, The Wire, and so much more.

For those like myself coming to the non-fiction book after the assorted TV series about crime in Baltimore, some of the fun is spotting things that would appear in somewhat different form on TV. The murder that inspired the haunting Adena Watson story-line on Homicide: Life on the Street is here, heart-rending and awful. So too a number of other homicides. I'll leave you to play spot the crime. And spot the detectives who inspired Simon and Company's fictional detectives!

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets is a terrific, gripping, moving book. It's also a corrective to any number of cop-show cliches and misrepresentations. Simon also lays out the departmental and city politics that provided the background to any number of episodes of Homicide and The Wire, and the foreground too.

But it's probably the characterization of the homicide detectives and their highers-up that makes Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets so memorable. These are men as interesting as any of Simon's fictional creations. We see how different detectives detect differently. We see some of them become obsessed by unsolvable cases. We definitely see the coarse, obscene badinage that marks most homicide detectives. In the face of death, a certain measure of dark levity is often necessary.

Amongst all the horror, there's even a weird sort of comedy in one case involving insurance scams and a lot of dead bodies. The case as it plays out is both grim and so outlandish that it seems impossible to fictionalize -- no one would believe it. In all, this is a truly great piece of non-fiction, as gripping as any novel or any of Simon's fictional work. Highly recommended.

Kagemusha (1980)

Kagemusha (1980): written by Masato Ide and Akira Kurosawa; directed by Akira Kurosawa; starring Tatsuya Nakadai (Shingen Takeda/ Kagemusha), Tsutomu Yamazaki (Nobukado Takeda), Ken'ichi Hagiwara (Katsuyori Takeda), and Jinpachi Nezu (Sohachiro Tsuchiya):  

Kagemusha occurs in 16th-century feudal Japan, with financing to complete the film arranged by George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola.  Kagemusha literally means 'double' or 'shadow warrior.' It tells the tale of a thief who replaces the first-injured and then-deceased Lord Shingen Takeda so as to keep the Lord's many enemies convinced that this military genius still lives.

The American financing came about because of the scale of the final battle sequence, though even that sequence surprises us in how all that money is deployed on the screen. Akira Kurosawa was a master of surprise, among many other things. The cinematography is terrific throughout, whether for that doom-laden final battle or for an eerie dream sequence experienced by the thief or for the shadows-and-silhouettes used to indicate battle throughout.

Kurosawa also pulls off the difficult feat of giving us a movie with only one truly likable character, the thief -- and even he is a flawed creature. There's a certain elegiac quality to the proceedings as we see the warfare of the Middle Ages give way to gunpowder and cannons. But Kurosawa undercuts his elegy with both the brutal realities of combat and with the characterization of those lords and retainers still committed to the old ways: in the end, they are deluded and, in their conduct towards the thief, an ungrateful lot of upper-class pricks.

Of Kurosawa's many films involving pre-20th-century Samurai culture, this may be the least. It's certainly the most intimate, despite that giant battle sequence. Even if the least, it's Kurosawa, which beats the best of most everyone else. Kagemusha haunts one in a more mundane way than the supernaturally tinged Throne of Blood, in a less spectacular way than Ran or Seven Samurai. But it definitely haunts, especially in its last tragic, absurd shot. Highly recommended.

The Equalizer 2 (2018)

The Equalizer 2 (2018): based on the TV series created by Michael Sloan and Richard Lindheim; written by Richard Wenk; directed by Antoine Fuqua; starring Denzel Washington (Robert McCall), Pedro Pascal (Dave York), Ashton Sanders (Miles), and Melissa Leo (Susan Plummer): 

Denzel Washington's Robert McCall  is more like a Golden Age superhero than anyone in a superhero movie in The Equalizer movies. He's like the Spectre reconfigured as a hardware-store Batman, or maybe Steve Ditko's The Question (or Watchmen's Question stand-in, Rorschach) without a cool mask.

There's not as much crazed hardware-store action involving Washington killing evildoers with nail-guns and improvised pipe bombs as in the first movie. Oh well. The film also suffers from a slightly underwhelming antagonist for Washington's character. An extended set-piece set in a deserted town as a hurricane descends is nicely staged. And the running 'gag' that McCall works as a Uber driver is sort of hilarious. Recommended.