Tomorrowland!

Somewhat on a whim, my daughter and I went to see Tomorrowland, a movie about which I knew almost nothing save that it starred George Clooney and featured a bunch of robots. I guessed it was some attempt to monetize for the theater goer another part of the Disney park experience as the highly profitable Pirates of the Caribbean had done, but that's all I thought I knew.

So I was very pleased to find an engaging movie, well told with original characters doing a number of things I found most entertaining. There was Clooney, playing a reticent hero named "Frank Walker" who alongside a bright, troublesome, but charming teen named "Casey" (Britt Robertson) and an unusually wise little girl named properly "Athena" (Raffey Cassidy) have to find a way to save us all, and the cool part is that they get to use jet packs and rocket ships and savvy and wits and courage to do it. It's a banging good flick, which is thoroughly entertaining and surprisingly brutal at times (given its Disney heritage).

The movie's theme is one that cuts to the heart of a yokel my age (50's). When I was ten I was one of many millions who basked in the uplifting glory of putting a man on the Moon, a great achievement for any culture. But alas since that day, because of the sobering reality of the energy crisis, the faltering of an economy which more and more seems about today and not tomorrow, the society has turned its back on that promise so long ago. We have rejected the utopian notions of a better society, filled with wonders and instead given into a grimmer more dystopic view of the future. We have traded in the antic thrill of Flash Gordon for the cautionary ruminations of the The Terminator.

The future became less about what we could achieve and more about what we could preserve. Our society has given in, preferring to anticipate the collapse of society with a passivity that passes for realism, but which is actually fatalism. As Hugh Laurie's character "Nix" put it, a belief in a ultimate destruction of our world is an easy fit because that belief requires "nothing of us" to accept it. We can merely sit back, watch, and wait with the calm reassurance we were right all the time. It's a potent theme, which many I see call naive and even reactionary, but it's truth is hurtful.  

Since I've seen the movie, I've been reading reviews and many are lukewarm or negative. I don't agree, but one thing many point to is that the actual city of "Tomorrowland" is not thoroughly realized. I got it and I'm pretty dim, so I'm not sure what the rub is.

If you're in my age cohort then you will get a special thrill from a movie which showcases a number of the toys and daydreams of our youth. If you, like me prefer a future more like The Jetsons than like Thundarr the Barbarian, more like Tommy Tomorrow than like Kamnadi, then you'll love this movie.

Highly recommended.

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Man Hunt!

Took time a few weeks ago to watch Man Hunt, a 1941 film noir effort by director Fritz Lang, one with a fascinating premise. Walter Pidgeon plays a British subject named "Thorndyke" who is a world-famous African safari hunter. He finds himself on the European continent hunting and hiking when he comes across a villa inhabited by Adolph Hitler. This is just before the breaking out of hostilities outside the German border so despite the loathsome nature of the leader, Thorndyke seems torn as to what to do. He takes his rifle and pulls the trigger but his chamber is empty; next he loads a shell but guards stop him from firing the deadly shot. He is captured and tortured to sign a confession that he was in fact an assassin for his government, but refuses. Later he escapes the Nazi stronghold and makes his way to England where he discovers he is far from safe.

George Sanders plays an urbane but brutal Nazi and Joan Bennett is on hand as a feisty British dame (perhaps even a hooker, though the script is cagey on this point) who gives Thorndyke some essential help when he most needs it. John Carradine is on hand as a mysterious foreign agent who proves both somber and deadly. This movie does not end as I expected, but it is a rousing adventure with solid acting and some absolutely fantastic Fritz Lang imagery.

One reason I was eager to see this flick when it showed up on the Turner Classic schedule was that Joe Simon has stated it was an influence on the creation of his and Jack Kirby's "Manhunter" series for DC's Adventure Comics back in 1942. I cannot attribute the comment directly,  but it is reported here.

Of course Paul Kirk disappeared after his Golden Age career, only to be given new life in reprint form in the back pages of the twenty-five cent New Gods. These appearances apparently inspired the revival of the character (literally) as a back up feature in Detective Comics by Archie Goodwin and a young and upcoming talent Walt Simonson.

Having seen the movie Man Hunt now, it's odd how the ending of that movie did indeed put me in mind of the lonely mission of that great Bronze Age Manhunter as he battled the evil men who created him and threatened the peace of the world.

The flick is highly recommended.

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Night Moves!

When I stumbled across the movie Night Moves on Turner Classic the other day, I was mostly attracted by the fact it was a detective movie from the middle 70's which I'd never seen nor heard of. I had no idea this movie had any kind of reputation at all, but it turns out it does indeed. Classed as a "film noir" this movie does offer up a gang of characters who are hard to like and even more difficult to pity.

The plot is at once simple and confusing. In a nutshell a has-been footballer named Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) operates a failing one-man detective agency and gets the job to locate a runaway sixteen-year-old (Melanie Griffith) at about the same time he learns that his wife (Susan Clark) is cheating on him. He finds the girl in the Florida Keys but also finds some trouble and some romance with a lady named Paula (Jennifer Warren). Then things get even stickier and even more dangerous.

That's the sum total, but believe me it's an ambling journey to cover that territory. The problem with this movie is that the mystery doesn't seem to be the center of the interest either of the director nor the characters. It mostly functions as a device to throw a bunch of disillusioned characters together so they can mope and share out how disappointing their lives seem to be.

Director Arthur Penn seems to want to say something about the dissolute nature of modern society, and the script by Alan Sharp gives him ample opportunity. Sharp wrote the script for one of my favorite westerns, a Burt Lancaster vehicle titled Ulzana's Raid. I took a close look at that movie here. Night Moves seems also to be a movie which uses its genre trappings to offer up commentary on then modern society, and a bleak outlook it is indeed.

I cannot recommend this movie really. It's a little bit duller than it ought to be but I do think for anyone who might want to watch a period film with some real distinctive flavor this one fits the bill nicely. Here is some more on the character Harry Moseby and here is a fascinating article on the writer Alan Sharp.

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Pumpkinheads!

Spent several hours yesterday immersed in the lore of the 1988 monster flick Pumpkinhead. This is a movie I've known about forever, and I thought I'd seen it before, but now I realize I had not. I'd only seen a sequel, or part of one, and so I had a somewhat skewed impression. I'm not saying the movie is suddenly startling better than I'd always imagined, but it is somewhat elevated in my view.

The tale begins in 1957 when young Tom Harley has to witness the killing of a neighbor at the hands of an fog-shrouded demon. He grows up, has his own son, but must raise him alone when his wife dies. Trying his best he is forced to leave the boy alone when a group of motorcycle-riding teens accidentally kill the boy. Though not all of them are culpable, Harley nonetheless seeks vengeance on them all and seeks out an old witch who instructs him out to raise a demon called "Pumpkinhead". He does and the demon begins to seek out the teens and kill them one by one. But Harley soon realizes the error of what he has done and takes steps to stop the monsters he has himself unleashed.

The movie is unevenly acted and the story does suffer a bit from necessity with some limited regard to motivation. Characters do things which make limited sense in the moment, but which are needed to keep the story chugging along. But the theme of revenge is neatly kindled in a story which does evoke a real atmosphere. It's by no means scary, but it is diverting.

Lance Henrikson is pretty good as Tom Harley and his slow destruction is really the essence of the story. The teens are mostly props, but offer up enough of a distraction to keep the story standing. What this movie has in abundance is some (for the time and budget) pretty effective special effects which present a monster who is limited but in moments quite convincing. The director is Stan Winston, a guy who made his bones in special effects, so it's no surprise that base is covered. Older movies, pre-digital, offer up creatures who still require some imagination and this one is a decent example. 

I also got to see Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings, a straight-to-video sequel from 1994 and this is the one I'd seen part of before thinking it was the original. This is movie is inept, a cheapo repeat of the standard teenagers getting slashed efforts which dominated the horror scene for so long. But as the original focused our attention on the man who became a monster, this movie shifts its base around all the time and seems actually to have had two storylines which editing blended into one.

Back in 1958 a gang of teen thugs called "The Red Wings" attack and kill a deformed boy. Decades later a man returns to the town to become sheriff and brings along his wife and troublesome teen daughter. She quickly hooks up with the local troubled teens and they almost immediately (for reasons which make no sense ever besides an often re-gurgitated goal for "thrills") end up mixed up with the local witch who curses them as they dig up the body of the deformed boy who of course becomes the monster demon Pumpkinhead. Then confusingly the creature starts to kill off local men in the town, ignoring the teens, and eventually we learn he's taking vengeance on the gang who tormented and killed him long ago and who have since grown up and become in some instances pillars of the community. Later he starts to stalk the teens as the Sheriff suddenly remembers his own personal connection with the boy.

It's screamingly funny in places as the rattletrap storyline tumbles along doing what it needs to evoke a reaction. Characters become good and bad depending on the scene and the ultimate fate of most seem not to be related to their own sins, but those of the script writers. The movie also depends a lot on stunt casting using the daughter of Monkees drummer Mickey Dolenz and the brother of then-President Bill Clinton. The former is the lead and does a workmanlike job, but the latter is truly terrible and thankfully only in a few oddball scenes. Blaxploitation diva Gloria Hendry is along for the ride as the coroner and she does a weirdly bad job in a role which seemed to hint at a romance with the sheriff played Andy Robinson (Scorpio from Dirty Harry), but which never actually goes there. Like I said, the script seems either to have been rewritten greatly, or they were writing on the fly because a lot of stuff doesn't hang together too well.

I can recommend the original Pumpkinhead for its atmosphere and the bravura performance of Henrikson who rarely was given a chance to expand on his dour expression in most movies he's in. The second one is a nigh total loss save for someone looking to get a laugh at some remarkably jacked up movie-making.

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The Diana Prince Adventures - Part Three!

Diana Prince's adventures continue in this third volume of the series, collecting up a wide array of stories written and drawn (mostly) by Mike Sekowsky with (mostly) inks by Dick Giordano.

It begins with a trilogy of sorts, a fantasy adventure which sees Diana drawn into a fantastic conflict between barbarians and an evil queen's empire when she finds herself lost in another dimensional world. Captured by the evil queen's henchmen she finds an ally in a rugged barbarian and the duo fight to escape the arena in which they are to fight to the death for the entertainment of the masses. The story continues with a short frame story set in the barbarian's camp where Diana tells him of her origins giving the creators a chance to showcase two vintage tales from Wonder Woman's recent past. The saga concludes in the following issue when the barbarian hordes attacks and finally bring down the enemy. The final issue is a well-crafted all-battle issue.

What follows is a tasty hodge-podge of stories of different genres. Diana seeks how a deadly prankster who has some years before caused a number of people to die and some to exist in desperate comas. She finds herself in a foreign country and once mistaken for a beautiful princess becoming her double and defender, in a story which admits its debt to The Prisoner of Zenda. Next we find a beautifully rendered ghost story with Diana and Ching trying to stay alive along with several other guests in a haunted inn which offers up hospitality and death. This issue was inked by Wally Wood, a perfect choice to give Sekowsky's pencils a wonderfully restrained atmosphere.

The next tale is a team-up with Superman by Denny O'Neil and the art team of Dick Dillin and Joe Giella. The duo are fixed up on a date by a computer from the future who uses the device to warn them of an impending death which will have enormous consequences for the whole planet. Their struggle to save the Earth is met with limited success.

Finally we have a wild and not wholly satisfying yarn in which Diana is forced by circumstances to protect a foreign ambassador to the United States and finds that there are all sorts of agendas involved. This last story lacks the punch and elegance of Sekowsky's previous entries despite some great action sequences. This was his last outing on the character he'd helped revamp a few years before and had been at once editing, writing, and drawing since.

After his departure DC bought a little time with two reprint issues showcasing some of Diana's more recent experiences as the "New Wonder Woman".

See the covers below.

More next time as some new talents take over.

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Man Of Rock!

Man of Rock, the biography of Joe Kubert by Bill Schelly was written when Joe was still alive. That's a great thing and speaks to the influence of Kubert which came quietly and relentlessly upon the industry he thrived in all his long career.

We follow Joe Kubert from before his beginning when his father and mother come to the United States as so many Jews did, when Joe was but a baby. But unlike many of the Jewish artists who filled the bullpens which generated so many comic book pages in the Golden Age, Kubert's story is not one of angst and suffering and resentment, but one of confidence and success and friendship.

From his earliest days, not yet twelve when he was helping out in notorious art shop of Harry "A" Chesler, he talks of artists who were willing to impart advice to a youngster eager to learn. He says of Chesler that he was a major influence and help when so many stories of Chesler's parsimony resonate through most comics histories of the era.

We follow Joe as he grows up, makes fast friend such as Norman Maurier with whom he worked on the very first 3-D comics, a place where his signature character Tor was first created. After the collapse of the 3-D craze, Kubert is able to find work at DC where unlike so many of his peers, he was able to stay for many uninterrupted years working on all sorts of things such as a Hawkman revival and war books which eventually yielded Sgt. Rock created by his long time collaborator Robert Kanigher.

Not all of it worked. Hawkman was the least successful of the Golden Age revivals and grand creations such as Enemy Ace were only able to find a strident but small audience.

Then Kubert began work on a comic strip with a war theme, recommended for the job by a young Neal Adams who was himself then going into comics. Tales of the Green Beret was a mild sensation but in the face of the unpopularity of the Vietnam War not a long term success.

Returning to DC (he never actually left) Joe finds his friend Carmine Infantino in charge and himself elevated to editor and handed his dream assignment, Tarzan. This is where I first fell in love with the masculine and brawny work of Joe Kubert, on these stories which dynamically evoked the savagery of ERB's immortal creation. Alas the Tarzan work was a limited success and other comics work called.

That and the Kubert School which was a blockbuster event in the Bronze Age of comics and offering opportunity to talents like Tim Truman, Tom Yeates, Stephen Bissette, and many more. It still exists to this day as far as I know.

And finally we follow Kubert as he enters his fully mature period with works like Fax from Sarajevo and Yossel, "graphic novels" which allow Kubert to express his exuberance in all its magnetic glory.

All through the saga of his life, Schelly tells us of a man who is supremely confident in his skills and his ability to live life on his own terms. A man with a steady eye and a ferocious handshake who inspires confidence in those around him, including his large family.

Joe Kubert's life stands out as a stark contrast to the usual comics artist saga, which is often filled with anxiety, poverty, animus, and regret. Kubert was apart from that, and he was lucky. He knew it then and we know it now.

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100 Super Spectacular Pages!

I'm not a regular buyer of Back Issue from Twomorrows Publishing, but I had to have the most recent issue which focuses one hundred jam-packed pages onto DC's glorious 70's reprints, especially those mighty 100-Page Spectaculars which were instrumental in getting yours truly to fall in love with the DC Universe.

There are detailed checklists of all the 100-page books as well as the DC Super Giants and other reprint series such as Secret Origins and Wanted. While the changes in price structure are looked at today as one of the reasons DC lost its leadership role in the comics business to Marvel, it was for me one of the great attractions which drew over the great divide to follow Kirby and sample the DC material with gusto.

The 100-page books were like treasure chests full of material from the Golden and Silver Ages topped with a smattering of new stuff most often, a beautiful brew for a up and coming comics book fan. The 100-pagers were luxury itself for my eager soul.
 

Early next year there is a another Back Issue coming which focuses attention on Marvel's reprint efforts at this same time. Those books were also instrumental in making the whole of the great Marvel Universe available for cheap to those of us who wandered in a bit late for the majesty. looking forward to this one also.

When Twomorrows first started its publishing program in the late 90's the issues of The Jack Kirby Collector, Comic Book Artist, and Alter Ego were chock full, brimming with material. As the years have gone by each issue of Alter Ego and the others have become less essential. These two magazines hearken back to those days when Twomorrows was offering up rich zesty meals of info for the hungry comics fanboy.

Recommended highly.

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