7 Days in May | Attack the Block and Man-Thing

Attack the Block (2011)



Attack the Block has been on the rewatch pile for a while now. I love the movie, but David had never seen it and I knew he'd dig it, 'cause John Boyega and aliens. What's so remarkable about it to me is the way that it introduces Boyega and his friends as completely unsympathetic thugs, but gradually redeems them so that they're heroes at the end. That's a really hard job and the movie does it masterfully.

And that alien design is the best.

Dick Tracy's Dilemma (1947)



I've checked out some old Dick Tracy before and didn't especially enjoy it, but Dilemma is a treat. There's no real mystery to it, because the crime is presented onscreen and the movie's just about watching Tracy and Friends try to piece things together, but Jack Lambert is terrifying as The Claw, a low level thug who's just a little more crazy and ruthless than everyone else. There are some terrific, suspenseful moments throughout, so the movie's worth tracking down.

Zorro (1957-61)



Zorro is still in Monterey for some reason, but my interest is renewed by the introduction of Richard Anderson (Oscar Goldman from The Six Million Dollar Man) as a recurring foil for Don Diego. The two characters are old rivals and things get complicated when Señorita Verdugo (from earlier in the season) returns and both men like her.

I'm not usually crazy about these kinds of romance triangles where two people both like the third and the object of their affection refuses to make a choice. But it works in this case, because I feel like Verdugo actually has made a choice, but one of the men isn't paying attention. We'll see though. This storyline is still in progress and I don't know how it's going to turn out.

Whatever the case, Anderson adds a lot of fun to the cast. He'll eventually wear out his welcome, I suspect, because this plot can't go too much longer, but for now I'm enjoying him.

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992-93)



Watched a couple of episodes packaged together as The Phantom Train of Doom. Indy and his pal Remy have been transferred to Africa to fight Germans there, but have trouble joining their regiment and instead get pulled into a mission with some elderly, but feisty soldiers who are trying to track down a mysterious train with a giant cannon that's been troubling the Allies.

The story is light on education; it doesn't even go into why the war has spilled into Africa. But that may be why it's more exciting than most of the Young Indy series. It's not full-on pulp, but it gets closer than the series has so far.

Underground (2016-present)



We finished Season Two just in time to watch the finale live. It's not as strong an ending as the first season, which leaned more towards satisfying conclusions than teases for next year. This one is mostly teases. But they're good teases and I'm still very much hooked. Looking forward to watching live next season.

Zorro: The Complete Pulp Adventures, Vol. 1 by Johnston McCulley



Most of this collection is made up of The Curse of Capistrano, the original Zorro novel that I've already talked about. But there are two other Zorro stories by Johnston McCulley in it, so I read those, too. And I'm probably done with McCulley's Zorro stories. At least for a while.

The problem is that they're influenced by the Douglas Fairbanks movie. I love the movie, but it bugs me to see original versions of things I love transform themselves to be more like film versions. Like when Ian Fleming retroactively made James Bond a Scot so that he'd be closer to Sean Connery. Or changes in the looks of Marvel superheroes. It destroys the illusion that the story I'm reading is about real characters in a real place and I'm reminded that they're just "properties" (a term that - along with "franchise" - I try to avoid as much as possible when talking about characters and series).

The biggest change from Capistrano to the short stories that followed it is about Zorro's secret identity. Capistrano ends with the threat defeated and Don Diego's revealing that he was Zorro all along. We can't have that in continuing adventures, so "Zorro Saves a Friend" hits the reset button. I tried to make that story work as a prequel to Capistrano and was somewhat successful, but the other story in the collection, "Zorro Hunts a Jackal," makes it impossible. "Jackal" continues using characters from "Friend," but there's no way that it can take place before Capistrano.

McCulley also plays loose with Zorro's support system. In Capistrano, Zorro's servant Bernardo was deaf as well as mute, but that was changed in the Fairbanks movie so that Bernardo was mute only. McCulley copied that in the subsequent short stories, but I'm not sure what his reason is. Bernardo barely appears in Capistrano and - unlike the movie version - doesn't help Zorro at all. And even though he's able to hear in "Friend" and "Jackal," Bernardo still doesn't provide any assistance. For that, McCulley has created a whole new character, José of the Cocopahs, who's able to hear and speak. And frankly, he speaks too much, because he blabs Zorro's identity to several people. They're all trustworthy, it turns out, but it feels like half of LA knows who Zorro is in the short stories.

There are also a couple of essays in the collection and they're worth mentioning: Sandra R Curtis opens the book with a comparison of Zorro's California to the historical one; then Ed Hulse wraps things up with the story of how Curse of Capistrano was adapted for the cinema.

The Man-Thing by Steve Gerber: The Complete Collection, Vol. 1



"Whatever knows fear burns at the Man-Thing's touch!" The specificity of that strange super power has intrigued me for years, so when it came up again when I was reading Master of Kung Fu, I decided I needed to finally read some Man-Thing and figure out what that's all about.

I've been thinking a lot about fear as a motivation lately, especially during the last election, in which both major candidates used it as the basis of their campaigns. I wondered if Man-Thing had anything interesting to add. Why is this mindless swamp creature so opposed to fear? Is Man-Thing symbolic of something else that battles fear? If so, what? And what does burning have to do with it?

Sadly, if there's deeper meaning in these comics, I'm missing it. Like most serialized adventures that are passed from writer to writer (and that's the case here, even though Steve Gerber's name is in the title and he wrote most of the stories in the collection), ideas get introduced then dropped or changed as the story evolves.

Man-Thing started in a standalone story in Marvel's black-and-white anthology magazine, Strange Tales, where writers Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas gave the monster the ability to burn people with his touch. It's not explicitly connected to fear, though. Thomas kept the story going in a two-part adventure in Astonishing Tales, where Ka-Zar connects the Man-Thing's burning power with the emotion of fear, but it's still not explained why.

When the character got his own, ongoing feature in Adventure into Fear, Conway was back writing and added to the fear/burning connection the explanation that fear is an emotion that Man-Thing hates. When Gerber took over in the next issue, he just continued what Conway and Thomas had started, eventually adding the famous catch-phrase.

So I was disappointed in the lack of any deeper meaning to the connection between fear, burning, and this awesome-looking swamp creature. As far as I can tell, it wasn't the result of a creator's philosophy, but just random connections that developed over time.

And I was also disappointed at the willy-nilly plots that Gerber ended up laying over the character. It reads like Gerber was never sure what to do with Man-Thing. There are stories with social commentary about race and environmentalism and capitalism, but they're interspersed with goofy high fantasy and Tales from the Crypt-style horror. Some of these work really well, but some - especially the fantasy stuff - really don't.

The art is pretty great throughout the collection, though. Gray Morrow, John Buscema, and Mike Ploog are special favorites of mine, but there's also good stuff by Rich Buckler, Val Mayerik, Gil Kane, Neal Adams, Howard Chaykin, Jim Starlin, and Vicente Alcazar.

Jam of the Week: "Woman in Chains" by Tears for Fears, featuring Oleta Adams 

We saw Tears for Fears live last week, so that's still what I've been listening to. It's amazing to me how relevant "Shout" still is, with its call for people to speak out loudly about the things that upset them. And it's equally amazing - and heart-breaking - how relevant "Woman in Chains" still is as well.

7 Days in May | Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 2 and The Circle

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (2017)



I liked it better than the first one. It's just as funny and visually interesting and the music is just as cool, but it has a better villain and some really great (and truly touching) development for at least three characters. And awesome cameos.

The Circle (2017)



I'm going to spoil some things, but you shouldn't watch The Circle, so feel free to keep reading. This movie is so disappointing.

I love the cast and the concept is intriguing, but The Circle does a lousy job of making whatever point it's trying to communicate. There's one good scene that raises worthwhile questions about a) the relationship between truth and transparency, and b) the tension between those things and privacy. But I don't know what the rest of the movie is about.

It's not the thriller that the marketing wants you to think it is. Mae (Emma Watson) is never in any physical danger and the only stakes are that if she leaves her job then she also loses the awesome health insurance that's finally getting her dad (Bill Paxton) some help with his MS. That's okay, though. It's enough to put her in an interesting quandary. Should she stay with an employer that has a ridiculous lack of boundaries when it comes to employees' personal lives (and apparently no HR department at all)? The movie could have explored that more fully and I wouldn't have missed the lack of fights and chases. But it's not really about that, either.

I can't tell if Mae is ever skeptical about the Circle's participation policies. I assumed that she was and that her "yeah, yeah, no problem" attitude towards them was simply an attempt not to make waves in her cool, new job. But she never really puts up a fight; not even when senior employee Ty Kalden (John Boyega) decides to entrust her with some concerning information. And after that she's just one bad evening and a pep talk from Tom Hanks away from completely buying what the Circle is selling.

She says some truly stupid things in that section, too. She calls watching videos of other people's experiences "a basic human right," for instance. And says that it's selfish not to post experiences online for everyone to see. She hasn't just swallowed Eamon Bailey's (Tom Hanks) Kool-Aid; she's swallowed the pitcher itself and the entire soft drink aisle. I kept expecting that at some point she would reveal that she was faking it and was really working with Kalden the whole time, but that moment never came.

There's of course a confrontation between Mae and Bailey by the end, but there are two huge problems with it. First, the movie never reveals what it is exactly that Bailey is doing wrong. He's full of terrible, harmful ideas, but there's no explicit indication that he's actually planning to use his collected data for evil purposes. The potential is certainly there and I wanted to see him stopped, but his final unmasking is nothing more than a revelation that he has secrets just like everyone else. Nor does the movie care about telling what those are. So the climactic showdown between him and Mae doesn't have any punch, because it's never clear what would happen if Bailey won.

The second huge problem with the final confrontation is that Mae's ideas are now just as harmful as Bailey's. She still believes in total transparency. Her problem with Bailey is just that he wants to be exempt from it. So I'm not exactly rooting for her, either.

It's not wrong that the movie ends with no clear answers. What I don't like is the way it phrases the question. It presents two, horrible solutions and asks which is preferable. There's some discussion that can be had around that, but the discussion would be so much richer if the film took its dilemma seriously and offered a couple of actually reasonable perspectives for its viewers to contemplate.

Charlie Chan at the Olympics (1937)



I like Warner Oland's Charlie Chan movies, but this is a minor entry. All the detective work is loaded toward the front with as much passion as Law & Order. It's just trying to get through that as quickly as possible so that it can move on to the spy story that it really wants to tell. And sadly, even though it's set at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, it's not at all interested in the political situation at the time. There's never even a mention of Hitler or the Nazi party.

Zorro (1957-61)



A few more episodes into Season 2 and Zorro's still in Monterey. I had to look ahead at descriptions of future episodes to make sure he doesn't permanently relocate there. He doesn't, but it'll be a while before he gets home.

The excuse for now is that he needs to stay and deal with another rebel against oppression. Unlike the original novel and the 1920 Douglas Fairbanks film, the Californian government in the Disney show isn't depicted as completely corrupt. But the governor isn't as wise or careful as he should be either, so his underlings are often able to get away with cruel activities. When that starts to happen in Monterey, a hotheaded local named Joaquin Castenada rises up in defiance. But while Zorro appreciates the young man's passion, he disagrees with the brutality of his methods. It's an interesting conflict, but one that I hope is wrapped up soon.

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992-93)



The first of the two episodes I watched last week had Indy working as a motorcycle courier, running messages between the French military HQ and the front lines. It's a heavy-handed commentary on the disconnect between the fighting men and the leaders who command them, but it's good in that it puts some cracks in Indy's view of the war. He abandoned the Mexican Revolution when it became complicated, then avoided the Irish Revolution for similar reasons. Both times he set himself resolutely towards Europe to fight the Germans who had ruthlessly invaded Belgium to get to France. Seemed like an uncomplicated bad guy to fight, but as he learns in this episode, the cause of World War I is pitiful and extremely complicated. Unfortunately, it's too late for him to get out now.

In the second episode (written by Carrie Fisher!), Indy is given leave to visit a friend of his father in Paris. The friend is played by Ian McDiarmid, so there's a double Star Wars connection, but the episode is actually about Indy's hooking up with Mata Hari. It's about relationships, so I enjoyed it more than the previous one even though there's not much plot to it. It has some great insights on love and jealousy and the lies we tell early in romances.

Underground (2016-present)



After the big event of an entire episode about Harriet Tubman's speech, the next couple of episodes get back to the main story around Rosalee and Noah's plan to free Rosalee's family. Of course that doesn't go as planned and everything falls apart. But that's just in time for the last couple of episodes (the finale airs this week) to hopefully bring it back around. Hopefully.

I'm very invested in these characters and the way last season ended gives me encouragement that this one will go out on some kind of victory. But the show is nothing if not surprising.

Jam of the Week: "Shout" by Tears for Fears

I love these guys in a way that isn't healthy and I'm finally seeing them live this Thursday, so I've been all about them this past week. They have many excellent songs and I'd love to feature a deeper cut here, but there's no better song than "Shout." Probably by any band.

TV News Roundup: I Know You Know That Everybody Wants to Rule the World

Tears for Fears on Psych



Awesomely, the "American Duos" episode isn't the closest that Tears for Fears is going to get to the show. They're also doing a version of the theme song. Or Curt Smith is anyway. No Roland Orzabal apparently. Boo!

Watch the first episode of Rubicon



If you liked the trailer for AMC's new conspiracy thriller series, now you can check out the entire first episode.