Category: Reviews

Box Office Democracy: Annabelle: Creation

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There’s a part of me that can’t help but admire the whole Conjuring franchise.  They have their main series movies directed by James Wan and starring Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, huge stars for mid-budget horror movies, and then in the off-years they can make these spin-off movies like the Annabelle movies or the two forthcoming spin-offs from The Conjuring 2 and just harvest money from their big ideas using lower budgets and less-known talent.  It’s brilliant.  It doesn’t make for a particularly good movie in this case, but I can’t knock the hustle.

Annabelle: Creation is supposed to be a prequel to explain the origins of the haunted doll from The Conjuring.  Interestingly, three years ago they released Annabelle which was also an attempt to tell the origin of the same haunted doll and it started with the titular doll being a mundane non-evil object.  They have to go a long way to make this movie work with the second one and I’m not sure why you would bother as you have an infinite amount of time in the future where you could set this film.  Worse, they set up an even further prequel suggesting that the origin of the demon nun from The Conjuring 2 lies even further in the past.  At this rate we’re sure to have a movie about how a demon-possessed rodent pooped out the seed that grew the tree from which Annabelle would one day be carved.

It’s hard to say what Annabelle: Creation brings to the horror table that wasn’t already there.  It’s a movie about a young girl targeted for possession by a terrible demon and I feel like I’ve seen that story 100 times in the last five years.  It’s a group of orphans in a haunted house this time, that feels new.  It does pose a lot of questions like “if this guy didn’t want to be nice to kids why did he invite six of them to live in his house?” There’s a nun living with them so there’s a more present clerical authority figure but they do seem to have found a nun that does not care at all if small children are screaming in the middle of the night, maybe the ghost is deafening her or something.  Other than that it’s fairly standard fare, people getting haunted, other people not believing that it’s happening, sudden escalation when the movie realizes it’s running out of film.  Wash, rinse, repeat— but this kind of error is mostly bloodless, so you don’t even need to pretreat.

There’s a reasonable sized subplot about a haunted scarecrow that is so out of place in this movie I wonder if it’s an artifact from a movie that ended up being scrapped.  It doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie or the franchise and doesn’t even interact with any of the main characters.  It’s like they paid for the effects work and never made a full-length scarecrow movie and plugged it in here to fill the run time.  A substantial part of the third act is spent with a supporting character running away from a demon scarecrow and it’s a character that isn’t even likable.  I suppose I didn’t want to see anyone killed by evil farm equipment but this was a character who spend most of the previous 80 minutes making life difficult for a girl with polio and her friend.  The strangest part was there were characters I cared much more about who were dealt with quickly and off-screen to make room for this other stuff.  I bet a demon scarecrow could kill all sorts of people.  Or even that a demon with vast telekinetic powers wouldn’t need to inhabit a body made of straw to do work.

The effects are maddeningly inconsistent.  There’s some great work with creeping shadows and some character design with the demon.  There is also an entire sequence that’s supposed to be scary that I believe was just done with a person standing under a sheet.  Having an unmoving doll show up in a lot of places like a creepier version of Droopy is somehow less impressive in a modern horror movie than it was in a 1940s cartoon.  The movie still gets scares in, but they’re more through atmosphere and score than through anything that feels innovative or fun.

It’s hard to come up with a context in which I would recommend anyone else see Annabelle: Creation.  Like, if you absolutely had to see a horror movie and it was the only one you had access to due to some combination of geographic circumstance and catastrophic internet outage it’s certainly a horror movie.  Or if you’re a Conjuring superfan and want to get all the references they’ll seed from this in to next year’s The Nun or whatever comes out after that.  Other than that it’s basically impossible.  You would have more fun with most of what you could drag up on Netflix or whatever comes out in a month, or just doing something else for two hours.

REVIEW: Riverdale The Complete First Season

Originally, Archie Andrews and his pals at Riverdale High reflected the codification of teenage life, as they had more leisure time and disposable income. Once it hit big, the comic series and its infinite number of spinoffs, became stuck in amber, barely trying to keep up with changing trends (other than fashion) or concerns for teens. By the 2000s, the entire company was on the ropes, increasingly irrelevant in a rapidly changing world.

In comics, they threw a Hail Mary, revamping the writing and art, making the characters look and act in contemporary ways. Thanks to Mark Waid, Adam Hughes, Chip Zdarsky, and a few others, the characters were suddenly cool once more. The company’s product mix suddenly had the classic digest reprints, the new look, some Zombie title and they were saved.

During all this, Greg Berlanti brought his magic touch, bringing the comic to the CW, working with Archie’s Chief Creative Officer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, to reimagine the gals and pals. What we got was the thirteen episode Riverdale series which twisted the classic figures beyond recognition as they largely avoided the real issues teens confront today in favor of the tried-and-true murder mystery arc.

I’ve taught sophomores so I can say with some assurance the 10th graders on the show do not look, speak, or act like the ones in my classroom. They are worried about grades, college, money, sports, social media, video games, and each other. On this show, the students apparently never have homework or test pressure nor did the looming PSATs cause a single one to break a sweat. The thread about the jocks’ notebook keeping score on the girls was good but its consequences never were seen.

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Also, the casting brings a new bevy of attractive men and women to the network, asking them to play teenagers and, like Smallville, it doesn’t work. KJ Apa is way too old to plausibly play a 15 year old. Most of his peers look younger and are (mostly) more believable.

It also must be a network rule that no one on the series can be older than 50 so you have an overly youthful faculty and administration – no variety and no wisdom to be shared. That, apparently, has to come from the parents and they’re a sorry, messy lot. Most grew up in Riverdale so the rivalries and unrequited loves remain simmering beneath the surface but with the exception of Fred Andrews (Luke Perry), not appear good at parenting.

Tonally, the series is flat without vibrant doses of teenage humor mixed in with the angst of puberty as they grow into their adult selves. Archie is the everyman, kind hearted and good-natured, but a royal klutz that you can’t help but adore. At least he’s like that in print.  Here, he’s a buff athlete with the heart of a songwriter, who eagerly engages in an affair with Miss Grundy (Sarah Habel), who, of course, was not really Miss Grundy.

riverdale-w710-h473-2x-e1502209647909-1048353Spoiled rich girl Veronica (Camila Mendes) arrives in Riverdale, our focal point to learn about her new home, but she’s out to reinvent herself as a better person. Thankfully, her steel hasn’t melted entirely as she comes to the aid of her new friends time and again. Along the way, she has bonded with Betty Cooper (Lili Reinhart), the girl next door. However, she’s on Adderall and under pressure to be perfect, being strangled by her over-protective mother (Mädchen Amick), who is petrified of losing her as she has lost her oldest girl, Polly (Tiera Skovbye), now in a “facility”.

Polly, it seems, had a romance with the now-dead Jason Blossom (Trevor Stines), something that shattered her, or so we’re told through most of the season. Who kiiled Jason? The investigation, which could have been used to shed a light on the underside of the town, is an intermittent thread with way too many other soap elements added. About the one person who seems aware of it all is Jughead Jones (Cole Sprouse), who has gone from hamburger munching slacker to budding novelist and professional cynic. Often it is Jughead who carries the meandering plots from one set of characters to another, leading Betty and then the gang on the investigation.

1200-e1502209679651-7567593The final two episodes wrap up the murder of poor, creepy Jason and shift to new threads, setting up the second season and then, because Berlanti can’t seem to help himself, ends on a cliffhanger with poor Fred shot.

It is not remotely similar to the comics – new or old – and seems designed to let Berlanti retread his first hits with Dawson’s Creek and Everwood. Now, those themes and issues from these shows are frozen in time, robbing Riverdale from being a successful adaptation of the comic or an updated look at today’s teens.

The three-disc set includes all thirteen episodes and most come with a handful of deleted scenes, some of which are missed from making the characters more interesting. There are a number of special features including the Riverdale: 2016 Comic-Con Panel; Riverdale: The New Normal, a chance for the producers to justify their choices; Riverdale: The Ultimate Sin, “I Got You” and “These Are Moments I Remember” musical videos; and a Gag Reel.

 

REVIEW: King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

There just may have been a real King Arthur in the sixth century of what is today England. Or, he may have been a legend the fractured country needed to help give it a cultural identity. Either way, that legendary figure of story and song would be horrified to see what Guy Ritchie has done in his name.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword was a troubled production, heavily promoted, and lengthily delayed until it opened to withering reviews and poor box office. Now available on home video from Warner Home Entertainment, it is a troubling view of Arthur.

Real or not, he was reinterpreted for the needs of the country (and later portions of Europe) across the centuries with characters coming and going, victories of varying degrees, and epic romances until there was just Arthur and Guinevere. As we have come to know the legend, he was a moral character, born a bastard, and the right man in the right place at the right time when England needed a savior. And when he died, he was carried off to Avalon to return when the country needed him once more.

Instead, writer/director Ritchie along with screenwriters Joby Harold and Lionel Wigram (from a story by David Dobkin and Harold), little is recognizable. The names are familiar but the trappings and arrangement of events bears no resemblance to any previous retelling of the legend. Instead of a story of love, betrayal, and uniting England, this is reduced to a good versus evil story.

King Uther (Eric Bana) is betrayed by his corrupt brother Vortigern (Jude Law), who usurps the throne, aware that the true heir, young Arthur, has escaped on a boat. Like Moses, he is found and raised by others and he grows to become a member of the Londinium lower class, uninterested in power or the throne. But Vortigern has insisted all men of age try to lift Excalibur from the stone and Arthur (Charlie Hannum) finds himself next in line. However, his two-fisted grip unleashes both power and unbearable nightmares, adding a psychological twist to the tale.

He is rescued from certain death by a band led by Sir Bedivere (Djimon Hounsou) and an outlaw mage (Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey). Bit by bit, Arthur is forced, pushed, and told he must confront his destiny, accept the sword and the power or Vortigern will destroy the world.

Vortigern does despicable things to people he loves but since they are merely window dressing we have no real emotional connection the heinous acts. None of the characters, really, come to life as none are explored in any depth, including Arthur himself who half the time appears to be a spectator rather than participant.

After that there’s plenty of energy hurled about, sword play, betrayal, and plenty of somber music. There’s just no joy amidst the cacophony or respect for the source material. The Arthur Ritchie wants us to accept is a reluctant hero, unwilling to do what he must until there is no choice left. Most of the trappings, from Merlin to Morgan le Fay, all absent as this was intended as the first in a cycle of films, which will now never be made given the utter failure of this one.

Ritchie’s signature touch is largely absent here, save for two exposition scenes that show more energy than the rest of the film. What should have been glorious and grand was reduced to look weak and ill-conceived.

The film has been released in the usual variety of formats and the high definition transfer at 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is perfectly acceptable if not spectacular. Sort of like the film itself. The Dolby Atmos track is equally capable.

The handful of special features careful avoids the legend and the massive changes made for this misfire of a fil. You have Arthur with Swagger (9:41); Sword from the Stone (18:49); Parry and Bleed (5:44); Building on the Past (14:00); Inside the Cut: The Action of King Arthur (6:08); Camelot in 93 Days (10:23); Legend of Excalibur (6:05); and, Scenic Scotland (5:33). These are perfunctory and not especially revelatory.

Box Office Democracy: The Dark Tower

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I wonder if it bothers Stephen King that his 54 novels and 200 short stories have produced exactly one great movie.  (Two if you count The Shining, and you probably shouldn’t, considering the very public feud between author and director.)  We have the greatest pulp author of a generation, perhaps of all time, and he just keeps sending his ideas off to Hollywood to die.  I don’t mean to turn the man in to too much of a martyr; he keeps cashing the checks, so he knows what this is.  But to see The Dark Tower, the sprawling thirty year epic he wrote threading through so much of his work, turn in to a pale reflection on the silver screen must sting worse than most.  The Dark Tower is probably the best attempt we’ll ever see to turn a 4,000 page story in to a 90 minute movie, but also maybe no one should ever try that again.  There just isn’t room for any nuance.

I’ve never read any of the Dark Tower novels and I’ve never felt particularly tempted.  I understand that this movie is a sequel of sorts to the books and also that it tries to tell a fair bit of the overarching plot of the novels in this 95 minute movie.  I don’t understand how both of those things can be true but there’s no possible way this is a reasonable adaptation of eight Stephen King novels, that man writes a dense book.  I appreciate that this isn’t anything like the Peter Jackson Hobbit movies and they didn’t turn this in to an endless stream of movies with endless amounts of exposition until I feel like I’ve been ground to dirt.  The Dark Tower, for all of its other faults, has a sense of tempo that is lost with books by directors that make movies like an overly defensive book report needing to prove they did the reading.  I always felt The Dark Tower wanted to get to the next scene and wanted to be entertaining.  It didn’t always succeed but it was trying.

Of course, I can’t tell you anything about what this movie was about.  There’s the eponymous tower and it’s good that it’s there but some bad guys who are basically all Vincent D’Onofrio from Men In Black are trying to use psychic children to destroy the tower.  The first half of the movie has a fairly compelling plot about family and trust but that just completely falls away.  It ends up just being a boy (Tom Taylor) hanging out with The Gunslinger (Idris Elba) in a barren dessert world that looks an awful lot like a studio backlot but according to the credits was South Africa.  Occasionally an evil sorcerer (Matthew McConaughey) will turn up and make everything interesting but they try to keep him as far away from the action as they can.  Probably because it’s all building to a confrontation that takes less than three minutes.

Matthew McConaughey seems like he was basically born to play a slick Stephen King villain.  He has the honeyed way of American speaking that I always tried to do in my head when someone was trying to talk someone in to giving up their soul for a trinket or whatever.  He’s playing a rather generic villain here, I presume because the intricacies of licensing made The Man in Black a little smaller than his literary equivalent (I don’t know how I know so much about this character despite never reading the books but here we are).  He shows up to be menacing and he backs up his bluster by being very mean to his subordinates and characters who are no longer useful.  He’s like a Saturday morning cartoon villain that can actually kill people.

Idris Elba is a talented actor given no chance to act.  The Gunslinger is every gruff hero you’ve ever seen in anything ever.  He doesn’t want to form emotional attachments and he doesn’t want to talk about why that is.  He’s very good at shooting things and there’s solid work given to showcasing that talent but it’s a waste of Idris Elba.  All they needed from Elba was a look and while he looks amazing (he’s a handsome man) there’s no there there.

I’ve seen something like 250 movies since I started reviewing them in 2012 and I’ve learned a little bit about good movies and a lot about bad movies.  The Dark Tower is a bad movie but it’s a great bad movie.  It isn’t excruciating to watch, it has the sense to be short, and there’s always something to pay attention to even if the story is bland nonsense.  They put a giant amusement park sign that said “Pennywise” and I was on edge for a whole scene that had literally no other content.  The Dark Tower is the kind of bad movie that you can walk out of feeling refreshed, remarking to yourself that it “wasn’t really as bad as people said” and while it might not be true it feels better than the movies where you can’t wait for the lights to come up.

Saga Volume Seven by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan

Trust is a tricky thing in stories: you have to trust the person telling the story will do a good job to keep rewarding that person with your attention.

Brian K. Vaughan had my trust and hugely lost it, in his Ex Machina  series with artist Tony Harris, and I’ve been giving each of his projects the side-eye since then, watching to see if the same thing would recur. That’s probably not fair, and it might have made my posts on the earlier Saga books — volumes one , two , three , four, five , and six — less useful than they could be.

But there’s an essential tension in a standalone, ongoing comic book: is this one story, or is it a series of stories? Most comics tell several stories in a row: sometimes simply, with a story in each issue, and sometimes complexly, across dozens of issues of dozens of titles for two months to then abruptly stop and pick back up with the next big crossover. But Spider-Man or JLA or Marvel as a whole is not a story — they’re walls made up of separate but interconnected stories.

Saga, though, has always presented itself as a story. A story told by a grown-up Hazel, some time in the future, which presumably explains how she can tell us things that happened in secret far away to other people. A story with a single through-line: how this family got through a galactic war and (we hope) found peace. So we’re expecting more than just twenty-some pages of action each month; it all has to add up to the story of this family.

And the longer a story goes on, the bigger the ending has to be to suit it. (Ask George R.R. Martin.) With the issues collected in this Volume Seven , Saga is now forty-two issues long — that might be half of the whole, or more, or less. We don’t know. The debt of that ending is continuing to grow, and will grow until we get to it.

Is it a good sign or a bad one that this volume collects a complete arc, with a definitive shape? (Does that make it a story, or a chapter?) This is some of the strongest work in Saga since the beginning, as if Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples cracked their knuckles and said “OK, we got the family back together — now it’s time to fuck shit up.” That’s a good sign, whichever way you fall on the story question.

In the end, I think I land on a slightly different set of questions: is Saga still compelling? is it still moving in the same direction? does it seem to have not just a vector but real velocity on its path? are these people still real and true to themselves?

And, from these issues — or this chapter, or this Volume Seven, call it what you will — the answer to all of those questions is still yes. So I’m still on board, though I would like to have a sense of how big the story will be overall. All stories have to end, even the good ones. Even this one. Stories that don’t end aren’t stories, they’re just things that happened.

And I want Saga to be a story. It has the potential to be a great one.

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Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Betty Boop by Roger Langridge and Gisele Lagace

I have no idea why someone said, in the year 2016, “Hey, what this world really needs is a Betty Boop comic book!” It seems like an odd and unlikely thing to say, even if one happened to work in licensing for an entity that happened to own the rights to Miss Boop.

But it must have happened, because that comic book did come out, in four issues, and they were duly collected under the simple and obvious title Betty Boop. (Because, even if this isn’t the first Boop comic ever in the history of the world — though it may well be, for all I know — there’s no possibility of confusion in the marketplace with all of the other Boop collections.)

Luckily, whoever the person who had the brain-spasm in re Betty had the good sense to hire Roger Langridge to write the Boop comic. Langridge has previously translated musical comedy into comics both in his own works (The Show Must Go On , for example) and licensed properties like The Muppets . Since I can’t think of anyone else who has even attempted musical comedy in comics form — most people think not being able to hear the music is an insuperable obstacle, which has never stopped Langridge — he was clearly the best and only choice for the job. The fact that he also has a love for old bits of popular culture, particularly cartoons and comics (see his work on Popeye for another example) is only lagniappe.

There may be people out there who can speak learnedly to the Boop milieu — who will know precisely how canonical her job as a waitress at the Oop-a-Doop club is; when her friends/co-workers Bimbo, Sal, and Koko the Clown first appeared; her tangled relationships with boss Mister Finkle and bandleader Scat Skellington and villain Lenny Lizardlips and her Grampy; what tunes the songs in this book are to be sung to and any relationship those songs have with the historical Betty Boop. I am not one of those people. So I’ll point and say that all that stuff is in this book.

(By the way, the cover is actually a variant from issue 1 by Howard Chaykin and doesn’t quite look like the Gisele Lagace art inside. It also implies a relationship between Betty and Koko that in no way appears in the book.)

I know Lagace’s work mostly from her sexy webcomic Menage a 3 , but others may have seen the work she’s done in comics (for Archie properties mostly, I think). Either way, she has a known expertise for drawing attractive girls, but she’s also just fine with the cartoonier aspects of Betty’s world — and, since this is a Depression-Era world, there’s a lot of cartoony elements. She also manages to keep Betty’s ridiculously oversized head look reasonable and consistent, possibly through secret black arts.

Again, I have no idea why anyone thought a Betty Boop comic would be a good idea, or if this one made more than ten cents total. But it’s a lot of fun, in a not-entirely retro style, and it has the feeling of those bouncing, singing old black-and-white cartoons on the page. It’s a massive success at something weird and unlikely and quirky, which is the kind of thing I like to celebrate.

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Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Box Office Democracy: Atomic Blonde

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It’s hard coming here to review Atomic Blonde after ripping in to Valerian last week.  I said Valerian was a gorgeous movie with well-executed action sequences that didn’t click for me because the script was a genuine chore to think about.  Atomic Blonde has a lot of the same problems, and at times looks like someone’s aesthetic Tumblr came to life on the condition that it had to recite a tired spy story to stay alive.  I’m not sure why, but it works for Atomic Blonde.  Maybe an overdone spy story is just more fun than an underdone science fiction story.  Maybe Charlize Theron and James McAvoy are just that much better than Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne.  It could be as simple as grey and neon and the fall of the Berlin Wall is a better mood than the promise of a fantastic science fiction world if you get beyond the bland corridors.

Atomic Blonde has the kind of story you swear you’ve seen a hundred times but can’t quite place any of them.  It’s kind of Skyfall meets The Usual Suspects if you only pulled the worst bits from the latter and the best bits from the former.  It’s set in 1989 just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a file containing the names of every agent from every country working in Berlin has fallen in to the wrong hands.  The list also contains the identity of a notorious double agent.  MI6 sends in Lorraine Broughton (Theron) to retrieve the list and rendezvous with David Percival (McAvoy) an agent who has been without supervision so long he has “gone native” which in this context seems to mean that he’s playing a Mad Max villain dialed down to 70%. The story has enough twists and turns to keep it interesting, but I never felt like anything made enough sense.  The combination of the unreliable narrator and the endless double crosses makes everything one or two degrees too muddled for me.  Not that this is a movie that wants to be remembered for its plot; it wants to be remembered for its action.

This is a movie directed by someone that started as a stunt coordinator who then hired a top notch crew of stunt and fight choreographers.  The action beats in this movie are completely nuts.  There’s a one-take continuous fight scene that travels through an entire building that is spellbinding.  Because movies have become so enamored with quick-cut action scenes this becomes instantly anti-cinematic and feels even more real.  A rejection of the Bourne model of fight scenes (ironically made by people who did work on fights in those movies) and a statement that this is a movie where fights are longer, more brutal, and have a more lasting effect. The other fights are also superb but they were also universally featured in the trailers, including the climactic fight scene, so it felt like I had seen everything else before I got there.  I know that the people who make the movie don’t cut the trailers but the marketing people did this movie a disservice by putting out so much of the good stuff for free.

I don’t tend to like movies that use grey as their primary color, and Atomic Blonde uses an awful lot of grey, but it works here because they use it exclusively to allow pops of other color.  Berlin is dreary and sedate in this film but none of the characters are.  Everyone has something about them that jumps off the screen be it hair, clothes, some kind of prop.  Lorraine gets all three.  The locations sometimes defy belief (there were neon pink lights in flop house hotels in 1989 Berlin?) but I like beyond belief if it lends itself to a better looking film.  Atomic Blonde is slick without being shiny and that’s worth a lot for a movie that’s supposed to be set in such a pivotal moment.  I would roll my eyes at any movie that wanted to end with the backdrop of fireworks, but if the Berlin Wall is falling and the fireworks look like the kind of thing you see from people in cities where fireworks are illegal it kind of makes it okay.

I would absolutely watch Atomic Blonde if I saw it on HBO, I might even buy the graphic novel to see if it makes the plot any easier to understand.  I appreciate that I seem like a hypocrite for praising this movie after slagging a movie with similar attributes a week ago, but I don’t care.  Cool counts.  Atomic Blonde is cool and catchy and sticks with you.  It pushes itself above mediocrity through grit, charisma, and gumption.

Bad Machinery, Vol. 7: The Case of the Forked Road by John Allison

The Mystery Tweens are solidly becoming Mystery Teens in The Case of the Forked Road , which means the boys have all seemingly lost 50 IQ points and keep punching each other for no reason. [1] So any mystery solving will be left to the girls, this time out.

Since this is a volume seven, before I go any further, there are two notes. First is that you don’t need to know anything going into this book. Well, OK: these are kids in a secondary school in Tackleford, the oddest town in England. You can pick that up from the book, and it’s all you need to know. Also, this is a collection of a webcomic , so you can always read as much of it as you want online.

But, if you do want to know more, let me direct you to my posts about Bad Machinery books one , two , three , four , five , and six . You may also be interested in the pre-Bad Machinery comic Scary Go Round , also set in Tackleford, which led to the comic-book format Giant Days, of which there have been several collections so far: one two three four .

The book version of The Case of the Forked Road, as usual, is slightly expanded from the webcomics version, with some pages redrawn a bit and others added to aid the flow. It also begins with a new page introducing the main characters and ends with several related old Scary Go Round pages — both of those introduced and narrated by Charlotte Grote, Allison’s current troublemaking smart-girl character (following a string of such in the past).

As usual, Allison is great at capturing speech patterns and the half-fascinated, half-oblivious attitude of teens — the girls discover a mystery this time, in the suspicious activities of a elderly lab assistant they call “Grumpaw.” But they have no idea what this guy’s name is, and have to go through convolutions just to get their investigation started.

They do, of course, and eventually find a fantastical explanation to the question of Grumpaw and the mysterious and strangely ignorant schoolboy Calvin. And the dangers they have to deal with this time out are directly related to the stupid violence of some male classmates. (Though the cover shows that it’s not the boy Mystery Teens; they stay offstage most of the time, and are useless when they’re on it.)

Allison writes smart stories that wander interestingly through his story-space and gives his characters very funny, real dialogue to say on every page. And I think his stories are best when he draws them himself: his line is just as puckish and true as his writing. That makes the Bad Machinery cases the very best Allison books coming out now.

One last point: if you’ve complained that previous Bad Machinery volumes — wide oblong shapes to show off the webcomic strips — were physically problematic, then you are in luck. The Case of the Forked Road is laid out like normal comic-book-style pages, just as these strips appeared online. So you no longer have that excuse, and must, by law, buy Forked Road immediately.

[1] If you think this is some kind of sexist nonsense, my currently sixteen-year-old son can tell you a story of some of his fellow students on his recent trip to Germany and Italy. These young men got into trouble because they were throwing some “hot rocks” around — as you do when you discover some rocks that are warmed by the sun, in a nice hotel in a foreign county — until, inevitably, windows got broken. There are boys who avoid the Enstupiding and Masculinizing Ray of Puberty, but they are few and beleaguered, and the general effects of the ray hugely debilitating.

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Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The Complete Peanuts, Vol. 26 by Charles M. Schulz

This time, it definitely is the end. The previous volume finished up reprinting the fifty-year [1] run of Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts in twenty-five volumes, two years in each book. (See my posts on nearly all of those books: 1957-1958 , 1959-1960 , 1961-1962 , 1963-1964 , 1965-1966 , 1967-1968, 1969-1970 , 1971-1972 , 1973-1974 , 1975-1976 , 1977-1978 , 1979-1980 , 1981-1982 , 1983-1984 , 1985-1986 , 1987-1988 , 1989-1990 , 1991-1992 , 1993-1994 , the flashback to 1950-1952 , 1995-1996 , 1997-1998 , and finally 1999-2000 .)

Vol. 26 does something slightly different: it collects related works. It has comic book pages and advertising art and gift-sized books (some of which could be called “graphic novels,” with only a tiny bit of squinting) and similar things — all featuring the Peanuts characters, all written and drawn by Schulz. Obviously, this was culled from a far larger mass of related Peanuts stuff — dozens of hours of TV specials, to begin with, plus major ad campaigns for many products over most of those fifty years, among other things — but Schulz managed and supervised and oversaw (or just licensed and approved) the vast majority of those.

This book has just the art and words that can be attributed cleanly to Schulz personally. Not all of it — there’s plenty of other spot illustrations, and a number of other small cash-grab gift books, that Fantagraphics could have included if they wanted to be comprehensive, but they didn’t. Instead, this is a book about the size of the others, that will sit next to them on a shelf and complement them.

Annoyingly, this very miscellaneous book avoids a table of contents — possibly because the previous books didn’t need one? — so you discover things one by one as you read it. It starts off with seventeen gag cartoons that Schulz sold to the Saturday Evening Post in the late ’40s, featuring kid characters much like the ones in L’il Folks and so somewhere in the parentage of Peanuts. Next up is seven comic-book format stories from the late ’50s that Jim Sasseville (from Schulz’s studio at the time) has identified as all-Schulz (among a much, much larger body of comic-book stories that I think were mostly by Sasseville). These are interesting, because they show Schulz with a larger palette (both physically and story-wise) than a four-panel comic strip — he still mostly keeps to a rigid grid, but there’s more energy in his layouts and he has room for better back-and-forth dialogue in multi-page stories.

Then there’s a section of advertising art, which begins with five pages of camera-themed strips that appeared in 1955’s The Brownie Book of Picture-Taking from Kodak but quickly turns into obvious ads for the Ford Falcon and Interstate Bakeries. The latter two groups are intermittently amusing, but mostly show that Peanuts characters were actively shilling for stuff a few decade before most of us realized it.

The book moves back into story-telling with three Christmas stories, which all originally appeared in women’s magazines from 1958 through 1968 (at precisely five-year intervals — what stopped the inevitable 1973 story?). The first one is two Sunday-comics-size pages; the others are a straight series of individual captioned pictures in order. After that comes four of the little gift books — two about Snoopy and the Red Baron, two about Snoopy and his literary career — which adapt and expand on gags and sequences from the main strip. (I recently tracked down and read the one about Snoopy’s magnum opus, which I still have a lot of fondness for.)

Two more little gift books follow, these more obviously cash-grabs: Things I Learned After It Was Too Late and it’s follow-up, from the early ’80s. These were cute-sayings books, with pseudo-profound thoughts each placed carefully on a small page with an appropriate drawing. Schulz’s pseudo-profound thoughts are as good as anyone’s, I suppose.

Last from Sparky are a series of drawings and gags about golf and tennis, the two sports most obviously important to him — we already knew that from the strip itself. The golf stuff is very much for players of the game, and possibly even more so for players of the game in the ’60s and ’70s, but at least some of the gags will hit for non-golfers several decades later. The tennis material is slightly newer, and slightly less insider-y, and so it has dated a little less.

The book is rounded out by a long afterword by Schulz’s widow, Jean Schulz. It provides a personal perspective, but takes up a lot of space and mostly serves to show that Jean loved and respected her husband. That’s entirely a positive thing, but I’m not 100% convinced it required twenty-four pages of type in a book of comics and drawings.

Vol. 26 is a book for those of us who bought the first twenty-five; no one is going to start here. And, for us, it’s a great collection of miscellaneous stuff. Some of us will like some of it better than others, but every Peanuts fan will find some things in here to really enjoy.

[1] OK, a few months shy of actually fifty years — it started in October 1950 and ended in February 2000. But that’s close enough for most purposes.

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Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Box Office Democracy: Valerian and the City of Thousand Planets

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I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a stunning chasm between the quality of the visuals of a movie and the dreadful script tying it together.  Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a gorgeous film with ambitious action sequences that can keep a frenetic pass without looking choppy or rushed.  It’s also got a plodding, boring script completely devoid of narrative or emotional nuance.  At its peak Valerian is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before— and in its valleys is like a Mad Libs version of Avatar and The Matrix.

The big action sequences in Valerian are stunning feats of direction.  There’s an action sequence where many of the characters involved are in multiple dimensions at once affecting what they can and can’t interact with.  There’s a suspense beat, a chase, and then several bits leading to another chase all in this multi-leveled reality bending circumstance.  Some characters integral to the operation don’t ever see or interact with the actual sequence.  It’s dizzying in all the best ways.  There’s also a chase scene that goes through all the different parts of this elaborate space station with dozens of alien races and their unique habitats that would have been the best sequence in every science fiction movie I loved as a child.  Luc Besson does an outstanding job framing these sequences and the effects team really outdoes themselves.  I don’t know how many of these alien races or habitats come from the source material, but it all looks tremendous.

It’s a struggle to praise the directing in Valerian when the acting is so terrible.  Dane DeHaan performs like he’s doing an impression of mid-90s Keanu Reeves and not a terribly flattering one.  He has the same flat delivery no matter what he’s trying to say.  He starts the movie with a declaration of love and it sounds like he’s barely awake trying to figure out what toppings he would like on a pizza.  I’ve never DeHaan impress me in a role and I’m starting to wonder what the casting directors of the world see in him that I don’t.  No one else in the cast is doing good work either.  Clive Owen is wooden, Rihanna was better in Home, and Cara Delevigne is acting like she can never remember the emotional tone of the last thing she said and has to guess for the next line at random.  It’s like everyone involved in the production was so invested in the effects they couldn’t be bothered to care about the people.

The script is also quite bad.  The story takes forever to get going and it always feels like key pieces of information are kept out of the characters hands not because it makes sense in the universe but because otherwise the whole thing would take 30 minutes to resolve.  The love story seems tacked on and only moves forward because they have Valerian and Laureline tell us it does and not because we see them do anything to move closer together.  I suppose I could accept that they’re going through a lot but this is their job, they must be in harrowing situations all the time.  There’s also a healthy dose of the kind of noble savage bullshit that I’m sure was all the rage in France in the 60s when this comic started publication but feels terribly tone deaf in 2017.  Even beside that the dialogue is 80% dry exposition delivered with the cadence of someone bored of being there.  Every time someone talks in Valerian the experience gets worse and worse.

It would be amazing to find out something like Valerian syncs up perfectly with a famous album or something because it would be nice to watch the movie again without having to listen to any of these characters talk.  I want people to see this film, it’s so fun to watch when it’s on top of its game.  Unfortunately it’s just as terrible when it isn’t.  Valerian is a film that should be watched in a theater, on a big screen, but only by people who paid to see another film and have sneaked in with good headphones and a podcast on or something.  This movie is a technical demo for what good effects people and cinematographers should do, and a cautionary tale for writers and actors.  Study hard, film students and drama majors— or else you could end up making a film like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and be trapped forever in pretty nonsense.

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