Thor: Ragnarok (2017): based on characters and stories by Jack Kirby, Walt Simonson, Sal Buscema, Larry Lieber, Stan Lee, and others; written by Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle, and Christopher Yost; directed by Taika Waititi; starring Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Cate Blanchett (Hela), Idris Elba (Heimdall), Mark Ruffalo (Banner/Hulk), Tessa Thompson (Valkyrie), Jeff Goldblum (Grandmaster), Anthony Hopkins (Odin), Taika Waititi (Korg), Benedict Cumberbatch (Dr. Strange), Clancy Brown (Surtur), and Karl Urban (Skurge the Executioner):
See also
The off-beat jolliness and humour of this Marvel entry only grows on a small screen. One wishes Joss Whedon had the leeway to make as jolly a superhero movie. Chris Hemsworth is a comic revelation, closely followed by Mark Ruffalo himself as Bruce Banner and in motion-capture CGI as Banner's Hulkish alter ego. All that and so much design work based on Jack Kirby's art, right down to Hela's head-dress and all those weird circuit diagrams painted on every wall. Highly recommended.
Black Panther (2018): based on characters and concepts created by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Don McGregor, Billy Graham, and others; written by Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole; directed by Ryan Coogler; starring Chadwick Boseman (Black Panther/ T'Challa), Michael B. Jordan (Erik 'Killmonger' Stevenson), Lupita Nyong'o (Nakia), Danal Gurira (Okoye), Martin Freeman (Everett Ross), Daniel Kaluuya (W'Kabi), Letitia Wright (Shuri), Winston Duke (M'Baku), Angela Bassett (Ramonda), Forest Whitaker (Zuri), and Andy Serkis (Ulysses Klaue):
Marvel's epic about its first African superhero is obviously a crowd-pleaser, based on its stunning box-office success. It's an enjoyable piece of work. Ryan Coogler and company do about as well as one can in these things when it comes to superhero characterization, and some of the early fight sequences are nicely staged without too many quick edits, especially a battle in a Korean casino.
We also get a good look at the high-tech kingdom of Wakanda in all its utopian, Afro-futuristic glory. Much of the visual design for the capital of Wakanda is thoroughly grounded in the work of writer-artist Jack Kirby, who co-created the Black Panther with Stan Lee in the pages of the Fantastic Four in the 1960's. Given the success of Black Panther and the even-more-Kirbyesque Thor: Ragnarok, Kirby's art still has some power to awe and delight.
I have my usual quibbles, some of them anyway. The final battle goes on forever and occurs on too many fronts to be dramatically satisfying. And changing the last name of sound- and vibranium-obsessed villain Ulysses Klaw (a spirited Andy Serkis, probably glad to be out of the motion-capture suit for once) to 'Klaue' is a hilarious moment in micro-managing "verisimilitude" in superhero movies.
For a rare moment, Marvel has a movie villain whose motivations make psychological sense in a serious way in Michael B. Jordan's inspired turn as Erik "Killmonger." He's about one personality change away from being a hero, which is what makes him so involving (well, that and Jordan's charismatic performance). He's almost a tragic hero, to the extent that one roots for him to "turn good."
Chadwick Boseman is terrific in the difficult role of the mostly saintly Black Panther. An all-star cast of women does great work as Black Panther/T'Challa's female honour guard, his teen-genius sister, his ex (a fun and funny Lupita Nyong'o) , and his mother, a regal Angela Bassett. Coogler and company even manage to navigate the potentially offensive Black Panther character known as Man-Ape, in part by never mentioning him by that name and instead making he and his people something other than antagonists.
The tribal leader formerly known as Man-Ape (played by a solid Winston Duke) even gets some comic moments as he punctures the assumptions of Caucasian second-banana Bilbo, I mean, CIA agent Martin Freeman. Now that's good film-making! Highly recommended.
Spider-man: Homecoming (2017): based on characters and situations created by Steve Ditko, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, and Don Heck; written by Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Erik Sommers, Chris McKenna, Christopher Ford, and Jon Watts; starring Tom Holland (Peter Parker/ Spider-man), Michael Keaton (Adrian Toomes/ Vulture), Robert Downey Jr. (Tony Stark/ Iron Man), Marisa Tomei (May Parker), Jon Favreau (Happy Hogan), Zendaya (Michelle), Jacob Batalon (Ned), Laura Harrier (Liz), and Chris Evans (Captain America):
Spider-man: Homecoming because Spider-man: Prom lacked the metaphoric level of Spider-man's 'homecoming' to the Marvel Cinematic Universe after five movies in his own playground at Sony.
The movie is surprisingly funny and light on its feet. Spider-man: Homecoming gets Peter Parker's urgent need to save people just right. It also does the right thing by having Peter be an underclassman in high school.
Tying Spider-man so thoroughly to Tony Stark/Avengers is a bit of a bummer, though. We're told repeatedly by assorted characters that Peter is "the smartest kid" they know. But the elements that made this true in the comics only remain in Peter's creation of his web-slinging fluid and web-shooters. And Tony Stark even improves on them. Peter doesn't have to create the finished version of the iconic costume, the Spider-Beacon, the Spider-tracer.... oh, well. The whole thing almost acts as metacommentary on Spider-man now being part of a vast, shared, corporate movie universe.
Tom Holland is good, as are most of the actors. As Spidey's newly minted best pal Ned, Jacob Batalon steals the show on several occasions while also demonstrating why maybe superheroes need to preserve their secret identities. He's definitely a plus.
Peter Parker isn't the socially ostracized misfit of the comics, though, and that was always part of the point of Peter's high-school experiences: Spider-man is willing to help people who treat him badly. Here, socially awkward Peter has trouble asking a Senior girl to go to the Prom... sorry, Homecoming... but it turns out she has a huge crush on him! The angst and awkwardness of Peter Parker has been mostly muffled. It seems like Marvel missed a chance to use Spider-man to address issues of bullying et al. Spider-man's miserable high-school existence has been defanged.
So too his reciprocal, self-sacrificing pas de deux with Aunt May, who is now Marisa Tomei, her hotness much commented upon, her elderly comic-book nature replaced by a sort of hippie Earth Mother. I'm not sure Aunt May should turn out to be Stacy's Mom!
Still, it's a genial movie. Michael Keaton's Vulture is surprisingly low-key -- he's supposed to be a working-class joe who moved into high-tech after being screwed over on a contract he had to clean up some alien debris lying around after the Avengers' battle with the Chitauri invasion of New York that occurred at the end of Avengers (2012). As motivations go, it dovetails with the movie's treatment of Spider-man as a working-class hero who needs to give up his desire to join the Avengers full-time and save "the little people." Oh, those little people. Recommended.
Limelight (1951): written and directed by Charles Chaplin; starring Charles Chaplin (Calvero), Claire Bloom (Thereza), Sydney Chaplin (Neville), Nigel Bruce (Postant), Buster Keaton (Cameo), and Norman Lloyd (Bodalink): Limelight won Charlie Chaplin an Oscar for Best Score 22 years after its release because Oscar rules at the time stated that a movie cannot be nominated for an Oscar unless it plays for at least one week in a theatre in Los Angeles. Chaplin had been exiled from America by the time of Limelight, alleged to be both a Communist and a statutory rapist several times over.
Boy, though, Limelight is a sentimental, speechifying, melodramatic, self-indulgent bore. The great Chaplin dragged his heels when it came to making full-sound pictures -- The Great Dictator (1940) was his first film with dialogue throughout. Chaplin with sound is... well, increasingly dire. The Great Dictator comes to a screeching halt as it concludes with what only feels like a 9-hour speech from Chaplin's character about world peace and all that stuff. And that speech would look like a high point of Chaplin's sound career once his later sound films came out.
Autobiographically, though, Limelight fascinates me: Chaplin's lead character really seems like an idealized version of Chaplin's music-hall comedian father, absent for much of Chaplin's childhood. Claire Bloom's depressed ballet dancer seems like a love letter from Chaplin to his music-hall singer mother, whose career was cut short by children and mental illness.
But oh, the speeches, delivered by Chaplin again and again. The pithy aphorisms. The pearls of wisdom. The music-hall comedy routines of Chaplin, none of them funny, none of them playing on Chaplin's gift for physical comedy but instead playing on unfunny song and patter.
And so, so, so long.
The only onscreen pairing of Chaplin and Buster Keaton is wasted in a piano/patter routine which at least supplies the one big laugh of the movie -- a piece of physical comedy that concludes the Chaplin/Keaton bit and, thankfully, results in the death of the Chaplin character by slapstick.
If you saw only this Chaplin movie, you'd be puzzled by how this guy became the world's biggest movie star, not just then but perhaps of all time. So don't watch this movie. Not recommended.
Nelvana of the Northern Lights (1940-1947/ This edition 2014): edited by Hope Nicholson and Rachel Richey; story and art credited to Adrian Dingle: War-time importation restrictions left Canada without American comic books for six years. In their place rose "the Canadian whites," mostly black-and-white comic books that offered the same sort of superheroes and action heroes seen in the American comics of the time.
The "Whites" would die off quickly once American comics returned to post-war Canada, killed by economies of scale. But Nelvana would live on in the memory of some, to the extent that the Canadian animation studio founded in the late 1970's took its name from her.
Who is Nelvana of the Northern Lights? Well, the daughter of a god of the Inuit, loosely based on actual myth. For an Inuit goddess, she looks a lot like a Caucasian movie star of the 1940's. Her brother looks even more Caucasian, even Aryan, and his ability to transform into a magical Great Dane seems mighty peculiar for the Canadian North. What, no Husky?
Nelvana predates Wonder Woman as a female superhero and post-dates some forgotten American female costume crimefighters. When the series begins, Nelvana protects the interests of the Inuit from a mythical invading nation that seems to be an odd combination of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Change came quickly to all superheroes in the 1940's, Canadian or American. Soon, Nelvana fights the Axis along Canadian soldiers and RCMP officers.
But she also fights lost civilizations hidden beneath the Arctic Ice and, once the war is over, an invasion of Radio-men from the Ether. And there the stories end.
Adrian Dingle was certainly the equal of most American superhero chroniclers of his time, and superior to many. There's a pleasing touch of Noel Sickles and Milton Caniff to his art, and the stories themselves move at breakneck speed. They have to. They're generally less than 10 pages long. Nelvana mostly handles things herself with an ever-changing array of powers, her male companions mostly forgettable.
Hope Nicholson and Rachel Richey should be thanked for bringing back the complete adventures of Nelvana in this labour of love. A Table of Contents that cited the specific issues and publication dates for each story would improve the volume, but that's mainly an academic quibble. Kudos. Highly recommended.
Greg Rucka's Wonder Woman Volume 2 (2004-2005/ Collected 2017): written by Greg Rucka; illustrated by Drew Johnson, Rags Morales, and others: Greg Rucka is one of Wonder Woman's three or four best writers. His early oughts work on WW gave us an Amazon who fought mythical monsters, talked to the animals, and acted as the Ambassador of the Amazon Nation of Themyscira to the United Nations.
While several long arcs continue all the way through this volume of a year's worth of Wonder Woman, there are also satisfying short arcs and single-issue stories here as well. The volume begins with the revenge of Medusa and the Gorgons against Diana and ends with Wonder Woman descending into Hades to bring Hermes back from the dead. It's all fun and engaging, with solid and occasionally inspired art from Drew Johnson and Rags Morales.
A successful Olympian coup of the major female Greek gods over Zeus and his brothers Poseidon and Hades drives the overall mythical arc -- as Athena's Champion, WW is drafted into the conflict. Wonder Woman's on-going battle with a shadowy, high-tech and deep-pocketed enemy on Earth continues into and through its second year. Highly recommended.
Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol Volume 2 (1990-1991/ Collected 2016): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Richard Case, Vince Giarrano, Malcolm Jones III, Mike Dringenberg, Doug Hazlewood, Steve Yeowell, and others: Grant Morrison's early foray into American superhero comics after about a decade writing for UK publications remains its brazen, pomo self all these years later. C-List early 1960's DC superhero team The Doom Patrol offered Morrison the chance to play fast-and-loose with superhero conventions for both comic and dramatic effect.
Original Doom Patrol member Cliff "Robot-man" Steele remains mostly unchanged, except for his professed level of angst about being a brain in a robot body. And team leader The Chief is still here, wheelchair-bound and pre-emptory as ever. Tempest remains from the brief late-1970's revival of Doom Patrol, but he mostly confines himself to being team medic. Negative Man is now a hermaphroditic hybrid of man, woman, and negative-energy being that calls itself Rebis. Little Dorothy struggles to control her ability to make her dreams becomes true, or at least solid. And Crazy Jane juggles 64 personalities, all of them with different superpowers. But she's integrating them!
This volume introduces Charles Atlas-comic-strip-based superhero Flex Mentallo ("The Man of Muscle Mystery!"), a creation of satiric wonder invested with a poignance based on the ephemeral nature of childhood dreams and visions. A loose plot thread from Paul Kupperberg's previous run on the title is tied up in weird, space-opera fashion.
The Sex Men, the Men from NOWHERE, the Shadowy Mr. Evans, and the Brotherhood of Dada threaten our heroes. The Chief goes solo against The Beard-Killer in Morrison's hilarious parody of macho comic-book heroes like Wolverine and the Punisher and the sadistic macho monologues of pretty much any hero written by Frank Miller. The volume ends on a bit of a cliffhanger -- the Brotherhood of Dada shows up, but the battle awaits in the first couple of issues collected in Volume 3. Onwards, Absurdist Soldiers. Highly recommended.
