The Ritual (2018): adapted by Joe Barton from the novel by Adam Nevill; directed by David Bruckner; starring Rafe Spall (Luke), Arsher Ali (Phil), Robert James Collier (Hutch), Sam Troughton (Dom), and Paul Reid (Robert): Tense and gripping horror movie follows four 30-something British friends on their annual holiday together, this time into the woods in Sweden.
Adapted from a much more sprawling Adam Nevill novel, The Ritual explores that novel's themes within the context of films that include Deliverance and Straw Dogs, as the action tests the "manhood" of its protagonist. Rafe Spall plays that protagonist, guilt-ridden over a recent event involving these friends and starkly realistic in his fear and indecision. The acting by the six principal actors is believable and the action tense. There is something of a slow build for the first 45 minutes.
Gratifyingly, The Ritual avoids the stereotypes of the genre of Bad Camping Horror Movies. Well, except for the one in which people take a shortcut. But that is explained in the context of the events of the movie. It also works as a riff on masculinity and competence, much as the sidelining of Burt Reynolds' macho man in Deliverance does -- the competent man is perhaps not as competent as he seems, or the less competent man must rise up. Take it as you will.
Adapters Joe Barton and David Bruckner eschew some of the movie's more baroque climactic moments, probably with good cause -- faithfully adapted, The Ritual would be six hours long and have an hour-long climax. The monster is kept mostly shrouded, though its appearance at the end is a triumph of weird-creature design. Prior to that, the film does a nice job of playing hide-and-seek with glimpses of the creature, which has a disconcerting ability to be 'in the shot' without the viewer immediately realizing it... much less the characters. Highly recommended.
mother! (2017): written and directed by Darren Aronofsky; starring Jennifer Lawrence (Mother), Javier Bardem (Him), Ed Harris (Man), and Michelle Pfeiffer (Woman):
Holy Moley. The most divisive movie of 2017 starts off weirdly and maybe even a touch soporifically. The last half-hour is a lot like being punched in the head. If you're looking for something weird, visually arresting, or even sort of awful, mother! is the movie for you. If your idea of Art Cinema is any movie without a superhero in it, you should probably stay away.
Writer-director Darren Aronofky and principal actors Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem have accomplished something here horrific and horrifying and possibly, depending on how much you buy into the allegory, hoary. Highly recommended yet not recommended at all.
The Twelve by Justin Cronin (2012): Cronin's first book in his epic-apocalyptic-science-fantasy-vampire trilogy, The Passage (2010), was an enjoyable mess that derailed about two-thirds of the way through as it suddenly transformed into a pitch for a Hollywood CGI spectacle. Cronin had won literary awards for his mainstream fiction, but The Passage was his first entry into genre work. I think a better editor could have really elevated that work, in part by cutting about a hundred pages. The Twelve is the second book in that trilogy.
The Twelve is a better book in pretty much every way, though the horror elements have all but disappeared, replaced by a greater focus on epic fantasy and survival fiction and even a well-imagined dystopia. The battle between North America's surviving humans and the vampire-like armies of The Twelve -- the twelve super-vampires created in a Black Ops science experiment gone awry in 2015 -- continues in the future one-hundred years from now, and (roughly) the present-day, and twenty years before the (sort of) contemporary future of the narrative. And there's a frame narrative that will remind people of The Handmaid's Tale, notes from an academic conference approximately 1000 years after the events of the novel. Man, that's a lot of timelines to keep track of.
One problem from the previous novel remains, while a new one rises in prominence. The returning problem lies with Cronin's decision to divide the narrative among those various timelines spanning 1000 years. This doesn't help narrative momentum. More importantly, it's become obvious by this point that the division exists so that Cronin can keep some vital information about the origins of the vampire plague hidden until the climactic pages of the third book. It's a clumsy way to create suspense, and I think a good editor could have fixed this. And because of the frame narrative, we know that things must have turned out OK. See what I mean about dramatic problems?
The (mostly) new narrative problem lies with God. The Lord of the Rings probably represents the ideal form of how to have an epic fantasy in which God (or a God-like being, in that case Eru or Iluvatar) has rigged the game so as to ensure the triumph of Good without this fact detracting from the dramatic tension or, indeed, being apparent to the reader without at least some critical consideration of the events of the novel. Good ultimately wins in Lord of the Rings because good people -- most importantly Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam -- were in the right place at the right time and made the right choices. In a world run by a benevolent God, this is not a coincidence. But it should probably look like one because if it doesn't, even the illusion of free will vanishes.
Now imagine if, instead of Sam and Frodo having a conversation on the steps of Cirith Ungol about the story of Beren and Luthien and their own inclusion in that story that never really ended, we instead had five pages of Sam and Frodo listing all the coincidences and chance meetings that had occurred up to that point in the novel before realizing that these couldn't all be coincidences and that, instead, some higher power was moving them around the chess board. Now imagine this same sort of conversation happening with every character in The Lord of the Rings, every 50 pages or so, just in case you hadn't had the point hammered home enough that there were no coincidences. Throw in some scenes from the afterlife, too, so that we know characters don't simply die.
All this God stuff really saps the drama from the narrative even as it also verges on the metafictional. This is a work of fiction, after all, and the characters are pretty much going where the author tells them to. See, he's sorta like a god! No wonder they keep having these fortunate chance meetings, and no wonder even things that initially seem bad often serve ultimately to advance the cause of Good! So metaphysics becomes metanarrative.
As Cronin is a talented writer, at least in the stylistic sense, I imagine at least some of these problems will work themselves out. Right now, because of the big book deal he signed for this trilogy, we're watching him work them out on the big stage with a big advance whereas other genre writers have at least been lucky enough, if they were being published, to figure these things out in paperback originals and rejected novels.
The novel does do a number of things well -- the characters are well-drawn, even the terrible ones: Guilder, the CIA agent whose secret project helped start this whole mess, comes across as a convincingly self-deluded tin-pot dictator whose "best intentions" have been polluted by his essential qualities of self-interest and self-pity. Cronin also manages some terse, tense action set-pieces, though things seem to go a bit too easily in the novel's concluding battle with the eleven remaining lieutenant Virals. The uber-Viral has yet to be seen in his/Its entirety.
In summation, I'm glad I've read the first two novels in this trilogy, flawed and occasionally annoying as they are. I'll be interested to see if Cronin remains a genre writer after the third novel, or if he returns to mainstream fiction, hopefully in either case with some lessons learned. Recommended.
Showcase Presents The Spectre Volume 1: written by Gardner Fox, Neal Adams, Steve Skeates, Michael Fleisher and others; illustrated by Murphy Anderson, Jerry Grandenetti, Neal Adams, Jim Aparo, Jim Starlin and others (1966-1983; collected 2012): The first collection of the Spectre's Silver- and Bronze-Age adventures at DC Comics is quite a bargain at over 600 pages for less than $20. It's also a bargain because of the 20-year period spanned by the collection. It's like a miniature cross-section of DC Comics in three different decades.
The Spectre was created in 1940 by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel and artist Bernard Baily. He began as a murdered detective -- Jim Corrigan -- who was brought back to a sort of un-life by a mysterious voice whom most writers have strongly hinted was God.
Charged by the voice with seeking revenge on evil, Corrigan found himself host to one of the odder-looking superheroes of any age of comics, the Spectre. He seems to be dressed in white with green trunks, cape, hood, and boots. He isn't. The white part is the Spectre's body colour, ectoplasm or dead white flesh, depending on the writer. Yeesh.
The Spectre started off as judge, jury, and often very creative executioner. But he wasn't all that popular, though I've always been a bit confused about how companies assessed popularity in the 1940's comic-book industry. The Spectre never had his own book, and his adventures were usually eight to ten page shorts published in the anthology book More Fun Comics. They don't title comics the way they used to!
In any case, the powers that be at the comic-book company that would eventually be known as DC Comics soon changed the tone of the Spectre's adventures and paired him with a comic sidekick who eventually became the lead in the strip, with the Spectre as a helpful ghost. It was quite a comedown. The Spectre continued to act more like his original self in the Justice Society's adventures, but the late 1940's and early 1950's would soon end the ghostly creature's adventures.
Then came the Silver Age, and two Earths of DC characters, one being established as the home of the Golden-Age versions of everyone from Superman to Green Arrow. And finally the Spectre returned in the mid-1960's, less vengeful and more cosmic, in what seemed to be an attempt to emulate Marvel's supernatural hero Dr. Strange. The literal-minded Murphy Anderson was mysteriously chosen for the first few adventures collected here, written by the high-speed human typewriter of DC's Silver Age, Gardner Fox. They're certainly interesting stories, though the Spectre is a bit off a stiff. And not in a good way.
Different artists and writers followed in relatively quick succession, all sticking to the Spectre's new role as lovable cosmic avenger. Only towards the end of the Spectre's short-lived 1960's series does the character's vengeful streak come out, resulting in the hero being reprimanded by that Voice again just prior to cancellation.
There's some splendid cosmic art here from Neal Adams, along with some weird stuff from Jerry Grandenetti, who seems to be channeling the art of Dr. Strange's Steve Ditko in some of his more outlandish character designs, and the spirit of unintelligibility in some of his weirder page and panel layouts. Grandenetti can't make undead Puritans scary but he gives it the old college try, God bless him.
Five years after that 1969 cancellation came the character's post-Golden-Age career highlight: ten adventures in Adventure Comics (briefly retitled Weird Adventure) written by Michael Fleisher with help from Russell Carey and mostly illustrated by perennial Batman artist Jim Aparo. Fleisher returned the Spectre to his violent roots, in the process getting away with a surprising amount of graphic violence for a 1970's comic book.
The Spectre turned people into wood and then buzz-sawed them into pieces. He reduced them to skeletons. He melted them into screaming pools of dying goo. He cut them in half with giant scissors. He chopped them up with flying cleavers, fed them to alligators, and had magically animated stuffed gorillas tear them limb from limb. It was awesome.
Aparo illustrated all this with a weirdly unsettling matter-of-fact style augmented by suggestion rather than illustration at certain points due to the censorious Comics Code Authority: scissors man, for instance, is shown as being cut in half at the waist, but curtains are wrapped around the character below that waist. The empty area where the legs were is just a deflated expanse of curtain. Fleisher also works around things by having a character turned to wood before being segmented into pancakes of flesh, though Showcase's B&W reprint eliminates the colouring that made the character woody in the original publication. Now he's just a pile of flapjacks made out of person. Mmm.
After Fleisher and Aparo's delightful run (also collected on its own, in colour), the Spectre returned to a slightly less violent form of himself, guarding the boundaries of the universe and playing nice with other superheroes. The character's recurring omnipotence and near-omnipotence always seems to make him a hard sell. Later attempts at Spectre solo books have run longer than the attempts here, but none of them for that long.
The character has been rebooted an astonishing number of times, with different characters (including Green Lantern Hal Jordan during his dead phase) acting as hosts for the Spectre. Different explanations have been given for the Spectre's role in the universe, and why he needs a human host in the first place (short explanation: the Spectre, God's second attempt at a cosmic spirit of vengeance, goes completely loopy without a human host to ground him). As of 2012, he seems to be back again as the deceased Jim Corrigan, and sorta pissed about it. At least he's not comic relief. Yet. Recommended.
Lucifer Volume 6: Mansions of the Silence, written by Mike Carey, illustrated by Peter Gross, Ryan Kelly, Dean Ormston and David Hahn (2003; collected 2004); Lucifer Volume 7: Exodus, written by Mike Carey, illustrated by Peter Gross and Ryan Kelly (2003-2004; collected 2005): Mike Carey's version of Lucifer, created by Neil Gaiman in his Sandman series, almost seems like a conscious upping of the ante with Gaiman's award-winning title about Dream of the Endless. Dream wasn't all that likeable. Indeed, he was something of a jerk. Indeed, the whole series was in part about Dream coming to terms with the fact that he was a jerk in the self-pitying Byronic mode.
And here we have Lucifer, who is even more of an anti-hero, though a fascinating and shaded one, and definitely not one to be burdened by guilt or self-pity. In such a situation, one's sympathies will be engaged not by the titular protagonist but by the supporting characters, though Lucifer occasionally comes across pretty well simply because so many of his opponents are such monsters and assholes by comparison.
Lucifer gave up his kingship of Hell fairly early in the Sandman series, wandering the Earth for awhile before opening a night-club (aptly named Lux) in Los Angeles. But his out-sized ambitions returned, and by the time of these volumes he's created his own universe, apparently hoping to learn from the mistakes of his Father -- that is, God, or the Presence as he is generally called herein.
Mansions of the Silence depicts Lucifer's repayment of a debt to the human/angel hybrid named Elaine Belloc, who saved Lucifer's life in a previous installment but whose soul was subsequently kidnapped and dragged off into the eponymous Mansions, a vast expanse inhabited by various supernatural beings who have no interest in living in any of the codified afterlifes of the spiritual universe.
Belloc's soul has been used to bait a trap for Lucifer; he despatches a ragtag group of allies into the Mansions both to reveal the extent of the threat and to preserve the integrity of this spiritual space, at least until he retrieves Elaine. Lucifer's power is too great for the Mansions to support his presence -- if he enters them, the entire realm will quickly disintegrate.
The quest is weird and wooly, with lots of mythical overtones, undertones, and shout-outs to a wide assortment of world religions. Exodus then follows Lucifer's subsequent moves, and the fall-out from God's big announcement at the beginning of Mansions. Lucifer plays the hero, to an extent, in both volumes, though always for his own reasons -- reasons which are not entirely revealed at the time. He's a right bastard, but less so than any of the gods (or God) we meet, and Lucifer's creation seems remarkably benign and pleasant under the circumstances.
Carey deftly combines humour and pathos and the epic throughout both these volumes -- a 'mini-arc' about an odd and very sympathetic demon who spins webs out of emotions he steals from human souls is the stand-out in Exodus, a weird little heart-warmer about families and friendship. The art by Peter Gross and others is crisp throughout, expressively managing to convey menace, the Sublime and a pleasing level of cartoony humour at the appropriate moments with equal skill. Recommended.
