121/2553. Saturday Night (2024)
Just like Unfrosted, I very much enjoyed this obviously fictionalized semi-historical story, an "inspired by true events" tale of the first Saturday Night Live episode determined to squeeze in as much of the early show's lore as it can manage. Think of it as a worthwhile celebration of the founding of an American institution.

122/2554. The Willoughbys (2020)
A Netflix suggestion I'd never heard of. It has the feel of a film adapted from a children's book, though as I learned, the source is a YA novel, not an illustrated art book. It's cute.

123/2555. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
This story has exposition, rising action, and then the animated equivalent of an escape from Cloud City. I've often defended Empire Strikes Back as having the best world-building of any Star Wars film, but maybe I've been overly kind to its ending. This film has a similar structure (with a somewhat stupider set of villains), and I found the lack of any plot resolution very, very irritating.

124/2556. The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)
A triumph of style over substance, by which I specifically mean plot and art design over characterization. The entire human race faces extinction, and all the potential victims are kept at such arm's length from the audience, it's hard to give a shit that their pocket universe is set to be pruned by a purple giant who eats babies. It's a crime that FF are presented as icons, not the endearingly dysfunctional family of charismatic, relatable people that sold bunches of comics in the 1960s.

125/2557. 'G' Men (1935)
The film that gave FBI agents their nickname is worth watching only because Jimmy Cagney (as a former gangster turned federal policeman) is always worth watching.

126/2558. Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)
Friend James described this movie as "2% fight in a minivan in a forest and 98% not worth watching." I might adjust those odds slightly in the minivan's favor, but only slightly. It really is just a bunch of nostalgic fan service for preexisting Marvel stans. (And seriously, you'll never convince me that anyone has ever really liked Gambit.)

More to come.

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Movies are a great form of escapism even in the best of times.

49. (1703.) Black Panther (2018)
I admit it: I didn't love it, mainly because it was far too familiar. It's functionally a thin retread of the first Iron Man film in African masks. I think Marvel movies have become a brand I can live without (at least until the Fantastic Four yet another reboot).

50. (1704.) Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019)
Speaking of familiar, the latest Jay and Silent Bob knows it's just revisiting old material, and it leans in, essentially parodying itself. I found it delightful, but I'm a sucker for that sort of metatextural comedy, especially in service to a film franchise I have really enjoyed.

51. (1705.) Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache (2018)
This documentary of the first significant female movie director spends a great deal of time investigating why her contemporaries remain world famous but she slipped through the cracks of history. In two words, it looks a lot like jealousy and misogyny.

52. (1706.) After Office Hours (1935)
Clark Gable stars in this romantic comedy/murder mystery mash-up. In other words, it's the Great Depression equivalent of a Lifetime Mysteries movie.

53. (1707.) The New Gladiators (1984)
If The Running Man had been made in Italy and taken place in the Colosseum you'd have this, originally released in Italian as I guerrieri dell'anno 2072! There aren't a whole bunch of nice things to say about it, but sometimes that's the fun. (You know, The Running Man was made 3 years after this, so maybe The New Gladiators deserves credit as a rough rough draft.)

54. (1708.) The Pride of the Yankees (1942)
Some humble, naive son of immigrants named Lew Gerig was apparently a pretty good stickball player in the 1920s until he got old, lost his coordination, and stopped playing. Sometime fiction is stranger than truth.

More to come.

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Time to finish reviewing movies watched in November.

153. (1212.) Thunder Road (1958)
Robert Mitchum stars in this movie written and produced by Robert Mitchum! All kidding aside, it's pretty good until the rather abrupt ending. I was especially happy with Gene Barry's role as a Treasury agent seeing as he was television's Amos Burke.

154. (1213.) Minions (2015)
I really, really wanted this to suck. Dumb, evil-loving henchmen shouldn't work as cute protagonists. But they do. And this movie was made for fans of comic book super heroics (like me). Minions is a lot of fun.

155. (1214.) Fantastic Four (2015)
On the other hand, Fantastic Four was not made for fans of superhero comics. Or fans of movies. Think Chronicle meets I Am Number Four meets the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still but much, much worse. As with most terrible movies, studio interference is widely blamed for this mess, but it's hard to imagine how anyone could mangle the iconic characters created by Lee and Kirby that launched the Marvel Age of comics badly enough that any part of this script was ever green-lit for filming in the first place. (I'm not in favor of the much discussed merger between Disney and 20th Century Fox, but if it finally gets us a comics accurate Dr. Doom, at least there will be one good reason to let the House of Mouse become the new AT&T.)

156. (1215.) Impulse (1974)
Do you like William Shatner? I mean the real Shatner, the canned ham who pushes the other actors off camera with his over-the-top delivery of... every... line? Then stop reading this and go see Impulse. He plays a deranged con man slash playboy slash serial killer. He attacks a bunch of balloons. He makes sexual innuendos with a hot dog. He treats Goldfinger's Odd Job like a pinata. HE HAS A DEATH SCENE. Seriously. This movie is like mainlining pure Shatner, and it feels soooo good.

More to come.

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Yes, comic books can also be textbooks! Though it may not seem so at first, Reed Richards, the so-called "Mr. Fantastic" and self-described genius, is correctly using the word "myself" in the above panel.

According to my Unabridged Second Edition-Deluxe Color Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary (which surprisingly has color on only 16 of 2,305 pages), the word "myself" is defined "a form of the first person singular pronoun, used: (a) as an intensive; as I went myself; (b) as a reflexive; as I hurt myself; (c) as a quasi-noun meaning 'my real, true, or actual self'; I am not myself when I rage like that." While the Quicksilver may use the first example sentence and the Incredible Hulk the third, Mr. Fantastic is clearly interested in hurting himself, so to speak.

In Reed's sentence, "myself" is an intensive pronoun referring to the sentence subject, "person." If Reed had said "I have that qualification myself," there would be less confusion, but super geniuses just don't talk like common people. For the sake of clarification, consider the following sentence diagram (don't look at me like that; sentence diagramming is way more fun than Sudoku):

So there you have it: proof that repeating anything that Mr. Fantastic says is not only melodramatic fun, it's also grammatically correct. It really gives us all something to think about, doesn't it?

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While searching the internet for a serial killer referenced in Jack Webb's The Badge, my searches kept coming up with sites with online dating tips.

Turns out that Stephen Nash, a man convicted for the murder of a man and child (just two of the 11 he claimed to have killed; he withheld details of the other 9 victims in demand for payment which the state of California refused) in and around Los Angeles in 1956, shares his name with Stephen Nash, self-promoting dating coach and author.

My searches were waylaid by the fact that the advice of the modern Mr. Stephen Nash is apparently not nearly as hard to come by as the mythical girlfriend that he is promoting. A quick search indicates that his help can be provided through such sites as datingsecretsformen.com, eseduce.com, how-to-get-a-girlfriend.com, natural-pickup.com, seductiontuition.com, and thecompletetoolbox.com (which should really just drop the word "box" from it's name, as it compares its dating gurus to comic book super heroes, clearly indicating it's target audience: Me).

On thecompletetoolbox.com, Mr. Nash is compared to the X-Men member Iceman (who most X-Men fans will recognize as something of an immature, brat). However, if these people have to be compared to comic book characters, they should be compared not to heroes but to villains. You know, those that seek to dominate the world, but don't really have a very good plan for what they'd do with it once they've gotten it. They're like a super sexed-up Galactus, slathering themselves in industrial-strength hair product and Axe body-wash, "devouring" the Earth, and then dumping it via a text message while cruising galactic nightclubs looking for other planets to seduce.

These sites apparently represent the tip of the iceberg of the secretive alliance of PUAs. PUA stands for "Pick Up Artist," by the way. For some reason the "seduction community," or section of society that actively hunts female flesh in the same way that a Big Game Hunter (BGH) chases rhino horns, adores acronyms. Not that there's anything wrong with that, IMO.

And In case you were wondering, Google finally found that serial killer I was looking for here, in the Aug. 21, 1959, edition of the Eugene Register-Guard, among others in its newspaper archives. Thank you, Google.

P.S.: To be fair, one of those PUAs over on tehcompletetoolbox.com is compared to a villain: the Joker. Ah, to aspire to being a sociopathic mass-murderer. That should wow the ladies. I won't be surprised if that guy's name is found only after thorough holographic searches of archaic html documents in the year 2059.

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In the original Marvel Comics' Tales to Astonish stories featuring Ant-Man, bio-chemist Henry "Hank" Pym discovers a way to shrink himself to the size of an ant. In an attempt to keep real ants from killing him, Pym next invents a helmet that allows him to communicate telepathically with ants. What does he do with these two amazing bits of technology? He becomes a superhero, of course! Pym knows that shrinking to the size of an insect is a technology "far too dangerous to ever be used by a human again," so he keeps it to himself and immediately launches a crusade against Soviet spies.

I'd never really realized it before, but most of the signature characters of the Marvel Age were all grounded in the Cold War struggle against the U.S.S.R. The Fantastic Four had to beat the Soviets into space. A Soviet spy triggered the bomb test that birthed the Hulk. Iron Man was a casualty of the escalating "limited conflict" in southeast Asia that would become the Vietnam War. Spider-Man and Thor are notable exceptions: their careers triggered respectively by an accidental spider-bite and an alien invasion -- another common Marvel adventure even to this day. (In hindsight, it's probably not much of a coincidence that I lost interest in Marvel Comics about the time the Soviet Union collapsed.) For Pym, the battle against the Reds was personal: they killed his wife, an Hungarian freedom fighter. Sure, she'd given up fighting for freedom when well-to-do American biochemist Hank Pym came along, but she was really serious about it in college.

However, don't expect to see any of this lunacy in the long-rumored Ant-Man movie. If the thing is even made, they'll no doubt ignore the fact that Pym changes his superhero moniker from Ant-Man to Giant-Man mid-conversation if he changes his size. (Freud would have a field day with that.) Or the fact that he grafted biological wings and antenna into his female partner, the Wasp, but neglected to give her the ability to change her size without the aid of his size-changing gas or pills. (Pym kept for himself the cybernetic helmet that allowed him to change size at will. Dick.) Not to mention the fact that when Pym is ant-sized, he inexplicably maintains his full-size strength while growing stronger when he gets larger-than-life size. Or that his rogues' gallery consists primarily of such forgettable nutcases as Egghead, Human Top, Magician, Porcupine, or the scientist Garrett, who mixes eagle blood with horse blood to create a flying horse in order to exact revenge on Giant-Man. (They market these books to children and they wonder why Americans lag behind in science.)

No, they'll put Ant-Man in a black costume and pit him against the evil robot Ultron. Because mark my words, nothing ruins a computer like a bug. (Don't blame the messenger: it's just how Hollywood thinks.)

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I just returned from watching the Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer movie. The first thing that struck me about the film was that the title for the movie was on screen for about 5 seconds, barely giving me enough time to really look at it. Maybe I'm spoiled after all of those Batman films that really lingered on the bat symbol, but it seemed very quick. My brother pointed out that if I didn't know what film I was there to see, the brief view of the title was the least of my problems.

I wholeheartedly endorse the latest FF movie, by the way. It's all light action with spectacular jovial and often heartfelt interplay between the four teammates. It's exactly what has made the Four so popular in comic books. And the movie is drastically different from most other super hero films, except the TMNT feature released a few months back. Which, when you stop to consider that the heart of that movie is the interaction of the four ninja turtles, perhaps shouldn't be so surprising. In fact, this is likely the answer to the giant flaw in the recent Superman movie: more interaction with characters, fewer brooding loners. The old television Adventures of Superman is great fun to watch because of the actions of Clark, Lois, and Jimmy, with a touch of infallible, god-like Superman to save the day, not rain on their parade.

So make note, movie producers: we -- or at least I -- want to see enjoyable character interaction in my power-packed, comic-inspired films, not boring retreads of told-to-death origin stories where the heroes only obstacles are self-doubt, terribly poor self-discipline, lack of morality, and Kryptonite.

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Today I wore a Fantastic Four logo t-shirt with my Superboy leather jacket, and the sales staff at Best Buy, EB Games, and Kroger all gave me grief about wearing Marvel and DC trademarks together. I was impressed by the knowledge that these people had about comic book publishers and copyrights. Though they were admittedly all much, much younger than I am, each property had a movie in the past 2 years, so I shouldn't be too surprised, I suppose. In any event, long live comic books!

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What with an election coming up in a few days, I'm being bombarded by advertisements telling me how lousy all of my leaders are. Is this sort of negative, petty message, condoned by our collective social passive acceptance, really indicative of how Americans wish to interpret the world around us? My innate cynical response is, "yes, and we deserve it."

On a related note, I found the following panel in the Fantastic Four story "The Skrull Takes A Slave," originally published in issue #90 in 1969 while a "police action" was ongoing in Southeast Asia. I think it sums up a lot of what you see debated on CNN these days. (See? Comics can be topical, even prescient.)

How can you argue with a guy named Mr. Fantastic? If you like your messages well mixed, please note that the "savage"-ly interrogated Mole Man makes his escape just 3 pages later in that same issue once the powerful Thing stops paying attention. (Stan Lee always loved his morality in shades of gray.)

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Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's the Sun!

I think that if I were a religious person, I'd probably worship the Sun. Sure, the Sun provides the light energy that makes life possible on Earth, and it has been worshipped by humans for as long as we've been standing upright. Links between the Sun and Christianity (the religion of the "Son") are as well established as the date for Christmas. (Interestingly, the name of the Islamic god, "Allah," may have been derived for a pagan Arabic god of the Moon, the anti-Sun. But that's not today's point.) Despite all of this, the Sun's unique relationship to modern culture goes largely ignored. The Sun gave us superheroes.

The archetype of the modern costumed hero, Superman is powered directly by the Sun. The rays of the Earth's yellow sun charge Superman's amazing Kryptonian physique, allowing him the powers of flight, super sense, and invulnerability. Without the Sun, there's no Man of Steel. That makes the Sun directly responsible for Earth's greatest champion.

The anti-Superman, Batman, is also controlled by the Sun. Unlike Superman, Bruce Wayne has no alien physiology, and must limit his crime-fighting to survivable situations. He chose to adopt a demonic costume and fight in the dark, knowing that his training, combined with mankind's inherent fear of the unknown ("Things That Go Bump in the Dark") will give him an edge against the criminal element. The fictitious construct that is "The Batman" could not function in daylight, and only inspires fear in situations where the Sun is absent. (You can't have a Dark Knight without the dark night.) Again, the abilities and character of one of the archetypical heroes of modern culture, The Batman, is determined directly by the Sun.

As if those two weren't great enough examples of the Sun's influence on American popular culture in general and the superhero in specific, the modern archetype for the superheroic family/team, the Fantastic Four, gained their powers from Cosmic Rays, which by their very nature are generated by the Sun. The Sun's natural radiation must also be responsible for some of the X-Men's bizarre super-human mutations, such as those possessed by Sunspot and Dazzler.

If the Sun has provided all of these powerful and admirable superheroes with their reason for being, I can't think of anything better to devote to worshiping. It certainly makes more sense than Catholicism.

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