Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: ANGEL OF DEATH (2009); decent dvd commentaries and extras; Roald Dahl stories dramatized on BBC Radio 4

From Crackle: Edge

Crackle, which is apparently not quite a subsidiary of Sony/Columbia but acts pretty much like one, offers a number of film, television and web-series items in basically the same mode as Hulu and a few other streaming services...though Crackle's feature films aren't interrupted by advertising (at least, The Big Town wasn't). Among the web series they offer is this one, Angel of Death, based on Ed Brubaker's comic and written for the flatscreen by Brubaker as well, in ten roughly 6-7-minute webisodes, and will be worth the attention of those who like over-the-top hardboiled and who've missed it so far, though nothing about it will surprise anyone too much. It's very slickly done, featuring Zoe Bell as Eve, a hitwoman with no illusions about the nature of her job or her life, who, in a semi-botched job with complications, takes a non-lethal knife in the brain--but the neural scramble might or might not be the source of hallucinations and a lessening ability to kill in cold blood. Unhappily (or happily) for her (and the audience), there is no lack of folks who heat her blood up just fine, and Bell does a good job trading blows and bullets with her adversaries (apparently she was most prominently a primary stunt artist in Tarantino films before this production); an Australian, she's joined by such stalwarts of antipodean fistfight drama as Lucy Lawless and Ted Raimi in supporting parts, while Brian Poth does a decent job as Graham, her immediate boss/dispatcher and sex-buddy (neither, here's one of those non-surprises, is willing early on to admit that they are bit more than casually attached). It's surprisingly shy about nudity or particularly explicit sexual activity, but isn't afraid to show a victim's head being blown off (at a ?tasteful distance), and James Reasoner be warned--that bit, and one or two others, results in a character losing some lunch. But since the comic-book/cartoon edge of hb has certainly been exploited by any number of films over the last decade (and more than that if we include the Hong Kong films), there's nothing here that will freak out a contented viewer of Shoot 'Em Up, and a nicely gritty bit of storytelling awaits, even if a few bits, ranging from Eve trying to convince her former colleague in training that he should Just Walk Away from their life, or her standing in silhouette against a city skyline, that don't quite make the cut of ironically or mythically getting past their overfamiliarity. She kicks ass, and isn't interested in names; it has some wit about it, and only one pathetic martial artist showboating in such a manner as to leave himself open to easy destruction. Joe Bob would say, you can't beat the price.

I've been listening to a lot of dispirited and half-assed dvd commentary tracks over the last year or so, so it's a pleasure to note that in my recent purchases of several Diane Lane films for relatively cheap, at least two are shining exceptions to the trend. The rather bad if well-shot (and Lane's excellent in it) Unfaithful is full of decent extras, almost to the Criterion level of ladling on, including a career-spanning, if rather brief, interview with Lane alone. I will have to see the Chabrol film Unfaithful rips off sometime. The other, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, is also not a first-rate film by any means (if better in several ways than The Runaways, whose experience as an all-teen-girl punk-rock band both films are based on), but Lane (fifteen at time of the production) and co-star Laura Dern (13 and supposedly passing for 17 in part through being six feet tall) provide a commentary in the 2008 Rhino release that helps make it great fun to sit through again. The Big Town and A Walk on the Moon have no extras...which is a pity, but both of those films are good enough to stand on their own.

It's an irony of sorts that Kiss, Kiss, a selection of five stories from the Roald Dahl collection of that name, are being dramatized in fifteen-minute segments as part of BBC Radio 4's Women's Hour, given the rather broad streak of misogyny that ran through the man and much of his work...but at least the women characters get at least some of theirs back, as in the first in the series, "William and Mary," which will be audible at the link above for the next week, as the other four stories are made available with each successive day, also to be accessible for a week. The cast:
Storyteller (narrator)....Charles Dance
Mary.......Celia Imrie
William......John Rowe
Landy......Nigel Anthony
...is uniformly fine in the first, and Dance, at least, will be a unifying voice throughout. Very pleasant, brittle little nasties, indeed. ("Parson's Pleasure," "Royal Jelly," "Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel's Coat" and "The Landlady" are the other stories slated for adaptation.) It's been a while since I read these, and I'm not sorry to be reminded of them thus...though I have to wonder if they can quite match the power of "Royal Jelly" in straight prose...

FFBs: SCIENCE FICTION: THE ILLUSTRATED ENCYCLOPEDIA by John Clute (DK 1995); THE AGE OF ROCK edited by Jonathan Eisen (Random House/Vintage 1969)

Intellectual Approaches to Pop Culture: Special Topics: 1960s Rock and Pop, and Science Fiction Film Imagery, in Context (BLOG 301, 7-10:30p Tuesdays, 3 Credits)

I have been reacquainting myself with a number of the important nonfiction books of my youth (important to me, anyway...the best kind of important book) and will probably comment soon on the Peter Nicholls anthology of transcribed speeches, Science Fiction at Large, perhaps along with the earlier not dissimilar The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism by Bloch, Kornbluth, Heinlein and Bester (with an introduction by Basil Davenport, who is sometimes listed incorrectly as editor) and also with Kingsley Amis's also similar New Maps of Hell thrown in...and maybe on the Lupoff & Thompson anthology All in Color for a Dime...


But today I'm looking at the 1995 Dorling-Kindersley John Clute coffee-table gloss on the Peter Nicholls/David Langford/Brian Stableford/John Grant/John Clute production, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1995), a massive expansion of another massive work also edited by Nicholls, The Science Fiction Encyclopedia (1979)...all that to help distinguish these from all the other works of similar titles and ambitions, such as the rather good and pioneering Donald Tuck The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Advent: Publishers, Volume 1 published 1974), Brian Ash's well-illustrated but, aside from a long and detailed timeline section at the front of the book, jumbled The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1978), and Robert Holdstock's The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1983), among others since (George Mann's, Gary Westfahl's...).

All of these references, most of which don't have enough room to cover the breadth of their subjects sufficiently (the Tuck, which intentionally cut off coverage at 1968, and the two Nicholls books being the closest to having the necessary amplitude), are of course cursed with the other two primary problems of reference works about the arts: what to leave in and what to leave out, and the attempts to incorporate the facts with some critical sensibility, to help determine the importance and quality of the work in question (in references about the sciences, and other matters closer to objectivity, these two problems are more like one problem).

So, this book, produced for the Dorling Kindersley line of massively illustrated, usually coffee-table books (preferring photographs, as much as possible), was an interesting problem all around...how to produce a handsome, easy-reading, eye-catching gloss on the unillustrated 1993 Encyclopedia, that might supplement that work in a sense, as well as get across the flavor of the work in question...and follow in the better tradition of David Kyle's The Pictorial History of Science Fiction (one of my choices last week) and not the worse of Franz Rottensteiner's The Science Fiction Book or Ed Naha's The Science Fictionary...there's the rub. And while this volume picked up the 1996 Hugo Award for best nonfiction volume, it's not a complete success, though perhaps about as good as could be hope for given the restrictions on it.

It had to be colorful and, as noted, to feature as much photography as possible...this unfortunately lead to the selection of sometimes rather random film and other A/V still images, even to illustrate the short entries on the fiction writers whose work was adapted by the films the stills come from...the rather unfortunate makeup job on the character with a prosthetic face from the film adaptation of Algis Budrys's Who? thus dominates the entry on Budrys, a less goofy but still not altogether impressive image from the 1984 film of Dune dominates the entry on Frank Herbert, and so on. The proofreading, perhaps particularly on the captions, was not quite what it could've been...a citation for Asimov's SF Adventure Magazine, the shortlived space opera sibling of Asimov's Science Fiction, is given as having lasted one issue, when it actually ran for four quarterly issues...and in a volume which completely ignores Fantastic and any number of other magazines, making a point of mentioning ASFAM seems oddly random (even if it was to make the point that not all Asimov ventures had been moneymakers).

But it does present a lot of good visual art, and reasonable entries on the writers, themes and other matters covered (and while the timelines that run throughout the book are actually a step down from the quality of the timeline section in the Ash book, they are still helpful in providing some context, if a bit redundant at times when joined with the entries, such as the citations of R. A. Lafferty in both contexts). It is not and never should be considered a replacement for the 1993 (or 1979) Encyclopedia, which is getting a new edition, but it is an enjoyable book to page through, and like the Kyle it does pair some striking imagery with sensible text.


My copy of The Age of Rock just arrived yesterday, so I've barely had time to reacquaint myself with this, one of the first if not the first anthology of critical pieces to be published by a non-specialist publisher (perhaps by any), but the range of the writing assembled here, from the likes of Harry Shearer, Murray Kempton, Lenny Kaye, Sally Kempton, Paul Williams, Nat Hentoff, Ralph Gleason, and Richard Fariña on through Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion to Richard Meltzer, gives a sense of the attempt to be thorough within its compass (this 1969 book is subtitled "Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution" and it does favor the leftist press...though I suspect the rightwing press wasn't publishing too many critical appraisals of rock music, so much as condemnatory rants, in the '60s). Dave Marsh never liked it much, and it's missing any contribution from Lester Bangs (who really got going at the end of the decade), but it inspired some thoughts in me when I read it some thirty-plus years ago...Donald Wollheim's Very Slow Time Machine, our lives, hits home...

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: 5 April (the many obstacles edition)

Wishes for quick recuperation to Steve Lewis, Jerry House, and to Chuck Esola's near and dear. Jackie Kashian also was in a minor traffic accident this week. It pays to know me.
















Bill Crider: Undersea Kingdom
Eric Peterson: Living in Oblivion
George Kelley: Monty Python: (Almost) The Truth (The Lawyer's Cut)
James Reasoner: Black Lightning
John F. Norris: The Prowler
Kate Laity: Vision: From the Life of Hildegard of Bingen
Randy Johnson: Crime Doctor
Scott Cupp: When Worlds Collide
Todd Mason: The Big Town; Maigret Has Scruples

Of related interest:
Allan Mott: The Legend of the Lone Ranger
Chuck Esola: My Cinematic Alphabet
David Cramner: Archer
Jackie Kashian: Ed Brubaker and Kermit Apio
Patti Abbott: The Adjustment Bureau
Sara Gran: Peeping Tom (which those Med Show funsters pretend to think is mostly valuable as an antecedent to Brian DePalma's oeuvre...much as Olivier inspired Seagal)

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: THE BIG TOWN (1987); MAIGRET HAS SCRUPLES (2004)

The first of my films this week has probably been more overlooked by me than most of you who might be reading this...it popped up on the digital broadcast network This TV on Thursday night while I was eating a late supper, and while I was vaguely aware of its existence, I had never made an effort to see it...but as the ridiculously impressive cast credits rolled by, and even more impressively to me, the fact that it was an adaptation of a Clark Howard novel, The Arm, made it necessary to give it some attention. (That cast includes Matt Dillon, Suzy Amis, Diane Lane, Lee Grant, Bruce Dern, Tommy Lee Jones, Tom Skerritt, Cherry Jones, Del Close, and as Amis's character's young daughter, Sarah Polley. Ridiculous. The casting director, Nancy Klopper, deserves an award named after her...the other folks who haven't become as famous since, or weren't already, are as good.)


The second is part of a series of French/Belgian/Swiss (mostly French) telefilm adptations of Georges Simenon's novels, part of the rotation of International Crime Drama, Sundays and Tuesdays at 9pm ET/6pm PT on the small (about thirty affiliates nationwide) US public television network, MHz WorldView (and the oldest set in a "wheel" otherwise mostly devoted to such Scandinavian and Italian fare as the Swedish Wallander films, of late Irene Huss, and Montalbano...though some Tatort episodes, the German Law & Order equivalent, also make the cut). The late Bruno Cremer capped his career, moving from supporting roles to center stage with the role of Maigret. (Scruples will be repeated twice tonight on the network.)












I have never learned the rules of the gambling dice game craps, but that doesn't diminish the suspense built up around some of the games in the somewhat leisurely, but richly detailed and "lived-in" The Big Town, which involves a young Indiana man's coming to Chicago in 1957, after apprenticing as an "arm," a hotshot dice-thrower, with an old family friend who has connections with the Chicago craps underworld. Matt Dillon is good as the mildly sullen but guardedly openhearted young man, who soon finds himself involved with two "tainted" women: one an intelligent, thoughtful, and unwed mother (Amis), the other a stripper (Lane) who turns out to be married to the closest thing to a classic villain in the film, a dice-game proprietor (TL Jones) who takes an instant dislike to Dillon's JC. But even Jones's Cole isn't a complete bastard (if entirely too close for anyone's comfort), and that's one of the strengths of the film...even the most melodramatic aspects tend to be tempered by realism. The self-destructive tendencies of various characters are only infrequently going to put them in jail or in the ground, or they wouldn't've lasted as long as they have, even the young twenty-somethings at the heart of the drama. A decent soundtrack (even if the abridging of Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle and Roll" is annoying...then again, I hadn't ever let myself realize the origin of the titular metaphor of the song is out of dice gaming, even as most of the song is about rather earthier matters) of period music, and if Diane Lane at college age, her face fuller with baby fat, isn't quite as stunning as she would be in the next decade or so, she was already a veteran and capable of enlivening the closest to stereotyped role among those in the film...it's probably a pity Amis doesn't act much any longer (in her role as Queen of the World). Yet another Howard novel for me to read. This film is available on DVD, and I had an opportunity to watch the entirety, uncensored and un-cropped/panned and scanned (unfortunate sins of the This TV presentation), on the website Crackle.

And I certainly have enough Simenon to read; I don't know the other adaptations of the novels well at all (I've seen perhaps one of the ITV Michael Gambon adaptations and no one else's yet), but again the leisureliness of the Francophone co-productions, not dawdling, is welcome and adds to their verisimilitude. Cremer seems to be enjoying himself, while elegantly immersing himself in the role; the supporting casts in the several productions I've seen have been uniformly good. Maigret Has Scruples (or, more correctly, Les Scrupules de Maigret) is hardly the most perplexing fair-play mystery one is going to try to puzzle out, but it is well-done on every reasonable level, and the subtitles seem good to me as someone with perhaps twenty words and two sentences of French (though MHz WorldView, to appease sensitive affiliate stations still waiting for Obama Administration to call off the Bush Admin's FCC hound dogs, will rather [intentionally] blatantly replace a subtitle such as "Bitch!" with one of "Hag!"). Uncensored dvds are available, though only in Region 2 editions (unlike most of the wheel series, available directly from MHz WV in Region 1 which should play in all rather than most US machines these days--most machines are pretty universal whether they're supposed to be or not).

FFCTB: From the Coffee Table: OUR AMAZING WORLD OF NATURE; David Kyle's THE PICTORIAL HISTORY OF SCIENCE FICTION; THE ART OF JAIME HERNANDEZ

I've reviewed a number of coffee-table books over the course of the several years of Friday's "Forgotten"...but here are three which have made an impression that I'd not yet featured:

Our Amazing World of Nature, atypically for a Reader's Digest book, was not only not a collection of "condensed" essays, but was a big, handsome anthology with excellent photography accompanying a number of pop-science and natural history essays by the likes of Donald Culross Peattie...almost as if RD was saying to Time-Life, we can play your game, too. And the selections, which went from the most general essays on astronomy, geology and oceanography to rather specific entries on various species of animal, were nearly uniformly engaging...this is the first of my parents' books I remember reading from cover to cover, over the course of a number of bedtimes.

David Kyle's The Pictorial History of Science Fiction, which saw rather bad covers in both its US and UK editions (the latter above...you're tipped in part by the near-parity of UK to US magazine titles in this one) was one of the first references I paged through after catching the fiction-magazine bug full-on, and the illustrations and the rather sensible text were evocative, to say the least...the 1930s Expressionist covers for Amazing Stories alone were enough to give me an appreciation for what had been tried throughout the history of fiction-magazine publishing (I was certainly reading magazine fiction from as many eras as there were already, but one didn't find the back issues trailing that far back casually lying about):



Amazing in 1933 tried an interesting run of covers...






The rather more "realistic" covers of the past and future issues were at times striking, but I've always appreciated these.








Well, this captioning workaround seems to be slightly effective in separating the Firefox-view cover images...




While los Bros. Hernandez, Jaime and Gilbert and occasionally Mario, the perpetrators of Love and Rockets, the flagship title for the Fantagraphics comics line (along with their critical nonfiction magazine, The Comics Journal), were probably the greatest impetus for my beginning to read comics again fairly regularly as an adult, and thus to come across Wimmen's Comix and Twisted Sisters and Alan Moore's work and that of others who had been busily advancing the form...though I'd never given up on newspaper strips, and so knew of (introduction author) Alison Bechdel's work in the "alternative" press. I'd actually bought this for my friend Alice, who fell in profound love with Jaime Hernandez's two initially-young LA punk-rocker girl characters, Hopey (Esperanza) Glass and Margarita Luisa "Maggie" Chascarrillo (pictured on the cover) who individually and together tend to be the focus of JH's stories for the comic, at various stages of their lives over the the decades the title has been published (Gilbert Hernandez focuses on the characters living in a Central American town, Palomar, in the 1950s, and their often US-emigrated offspring). Whenever one reads of comics being compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one is probably happened upon a reference to L&R.








For more coffee-table (and other) books this week, please see host Patti Abbott's blog. And, goodness, does Blogspot suck. On Firefox at the moment, the Amazing covers overlap ridiculously; on IE, they are rather widely spaced. Let's see if I can fix that at all...well, somewhat.