A Maniac, Maniac On The Netflix Floor

At least Maniac tried.

Based on a Norwegian television series, this brave Netflix adaptation really deserves nothing but congratulations. It is anathema to challenge viewers these days with anything that isn't a family drama or biography about people being framed for crimes by lazy policemen.  And because it tried to be different, Maniac gets my respect. I just wish it had tried a wee bit harder.

Maniac is set in alternate present/future where technology gets its chief inspiration from the 1970s. Computers are large and chunky, and the design aesthetic  of all tech should come with its own Earth, Wind and Fire soundtrack. Advertising has metastasized to the point where living people follow you around telling you about products you should buy.  Hacking personal records isn't something done by shady operatives in dark rooms--you can have this done by going to seedy storefronts. Robots exist, but only to clean up dog shit.


In this world we meet Annie Landsberg (Emma Stone) and Owen Milgrim (Jonah Hill), who both sign up for a pharmaceutical test of a new therapeutic drug. Both have different reasons for doing so--Anna is addicted to one of the drugs associated with the test and needs a fix, and Owen needs to make some money. It's important to note that both suffer psychological issues: Anna is anti-social and grieving, while Owen is schizophrenic, has severe issues with determining what is real,  and is dealing with potentially harmful family drama.

Along with other testees, Owen and Anna undergo the effects of the new drug, which propel users into dream worlds to help deal with their issues. These dream worlds vary, from opulent decadence mystery nights, soul dead suburbia, all the way to third rate fantasy worlds.  Owen and Anna start meeting up in these worlds, which is thought to be impossible. As the tests continue, both Anna and Owen have to deal with the things they encounter, while outside the pharmaceutical company deals with a breakdown of its own.

Like The  Haunting of  Hill House, Maniac starts off telling one story and ends up finishing with another.

The world set forth in Maniac is fascinating. It's very much THE FUTURE as seen from the late Seventies. The little bits we see of it as Annie goes about trying to get more of the therapy drug shows a crass dystopia that feels very PKD. But whereas something like Blade Runner dealt with larger issues of their respective worlds, Maniac eschews the world it created to focus on the emotional journeys of Annie and Owen.

Unfortunately, only Annie's story felt interesting and felt tied to this world. Owen's story didn't need to be in a science fiction universe, and as such, feels unnecessary. Perhaps this is down to Emma Stone's performance, which at some points makes you laugh and at others makes your eyes do that weird watering thing, especially regarding the grief tearing her life apart. Hill's performance is much more subdued, for whatever reason. You feel sorry for Owen, but you feel for Annie.

As well, there is an unctuous subplot regarding the pharmaceutical company that should have been left on the cutting room floor. It veers like a drunken driver from scenery chewing hamminess to clumsy satire, if one understands satire to involve lots of shouting.

Maniac begins as an interesting science fiction story, wobbles around, shouts a bit, and finally ends as feel good drama about feelings. It's worth watching, especially for Emma Stone's performance and the world seen in the early episodes. Maniac made me think of The OA, which was a glorious, metal spewing car wreck, but it at least had the courage to be that glorious, metal spewing car wreck.

Maniac seems to lose its car wreck courage at the half way point. But at least it tried.

Kick Ass The New Girl

I always feel a bit guilty buying a Mark Millar comic. Partly it's because much of the work I've read from him relies heavily on shock value, and shouldn't I be above such things at my age? And partly it's because shouldn't I be supporting struggling creators and endeavours?  (Says the man who drops a small fortune on Marvel and DC Comics every month, ahem). 

Emotions and reasoning rarely walk hand in hand.

So I did lay down my hard earned cash and purchased this collection. And, unsurprisingly, I enjoyed it quite a bit.

This time around, Kick Ass is an ex-soldier called Patience Lee, who returns home from a tour of Afghanistan to find her life has gone to shit: her husband has left her for a bimbo, she has no child support and two kids to feed. She lands a job as a waitress and tries to get her degree, but it's a losing battle. So she decides to use her rather extensive military training to rob local criminals, dressing up as the hero Kick Ass.

Millar's script follows the safe path of a solid movie pitch. This version is extremely movie/ Netflix friendly, with none of the superhero parody of the first Kick-Ass series, focusing instead on Patience's vigilante actions and its consequences. As movies go, it's inexpensive. In fact, hearing that this may be the focus of the next Kick-Ass movie comes as no surprise to me. Kick-Ass: The New Girl feels to have been written to allay the fears of producers and money-men who quiver at the gazillion dollar budgets of Marvel blockbusters.

But that doesn't mean The New Girl is not an enjoyable comic. Patience is an interesting character in that at no point does she come across as a victim. In fact, she reminds me quite a bit of Jack Reacher in her ability to assess situations and formulate the proper response. This badassery is juxtaposed with scenes of her as a loving mother that oddly don't ring false. Patience is both a mother and mean fucking killing machine, a sort of New Mexico female version of Liam Neeson from the Taken films.

And yes, there is the expected Millar scenes of shock and extreme violence. Eyes don't fare very well in this series. And for a story that relies on a higher degree of realism to add weight to those shocks,I'm not sure just how many punches to the head a human being can take and still function.

My only real complaint with this series, though,  is that it ends rather too quickly. Millar and Romita apparently are not doing the second series, which is unfortunate. It would be interesting to see where Patience goes after the conclusion of this collection, but I'm not sure I want to see anyone else create it.

Thor, Goddess Of Thunder

The second greatest sin of both DC and Marvel Comics is their unfortunate fondness for stunts.

These often take the form of the deaths of popular characters, which alerts mainstream media that hey, someone is still making comic books and by God they're adult because there is murderizing.  Robins are very popular in this regard. But, this being Marvel or DC, the heart rending deaths only last a bit, the characters recover from mortality, and everyone looks away, whistling, pretending it didn't happen.

Then there is the gender swap of popular characters, as evidenced in this collection. Apparently, making a guy character a woman character infuriates a certain amount of the population, who one suspects sit around all day already in a seething froth of anger and this sort of thing is the last thing they need.

As stunts go, this is a win/win for the publisher. By making an iconic male character not be male anymore, they can smile and say how progressive they are. If the aforementioned rage addicts start filling the internet with expletives and exclamation marks, they can shake their head sadly, silently nodding about those people.

Creating female variations of popular male characters is nothing new. Currently, the Spider-Man franchise has several: Spider-Woman (of course), Spider-Gwen, and Silk, just off the top of my head. The Batman family has had two Robins (one of which died, of course, before getting better), Batgirl, and Batwoman. Flash has Jessie Quick. Mary Marvel has pride of place in the Shazam family. And of course in the Superman corner we have the -girl and -woman variations. But none of these replaced the main character, so apparently that's alright.

Personally, I don't care. I just want good stories. I tend to gravitate to female characters, so I have no issue with any of this. I am bothered, though, by how little courage publishers have when it comes to these characters. If a publisher is going to make a change, then stick with it. But they rarely do, be it character deaths or gender changes. Thus, stunts.

Which brings us to this collection.

The Goddess of Thunder collects the first five issues of the 2016 relaunch of Thor. In it, Thor loses his hammer Mjolnir, which no longer wants anything to do with him. Instead, the hammer cosies up to a mysterious woman who transforms into a female Thor when she grabs the mystic weapon.  Which is good, because a bunch of Frost Giants have invaded Earth, and the new Thor's first day on the job is saving the planet from their blue skinned rage.

There's a lot of fun things here, from Thor's cool costume (her helmet reminds me of the old Bulletman doll from the Seventies G.I.Joe line) to just how a normal person learns to speak in the 'thees' and 'thous' of Asgard speak.  The new Thor's joy at her new powers is very refreshing as well.
The story does link back to events before the book, which I hadn't read, but it doesn't really impact on the enjoyment of the story.

The art by Russell Dauterman for the first four issues is wonderful, with gorgeous colours by Matthew Wilson. Really good, eye popping stuff. Some of the sound affects are lost in the art, though, and Mjolnir's new powers sometimes make the panels look a little too busy. Jorge Molina does art and colours for the final issue, and he brings a much warmer feel to the pages. His use of light in a twilight battle in New York was very nice, as was his depiction of starlight in Asgard. Exemplary work.

Jason Aaron is one of my favourite writers, and he doesn't let me down here. When Thor meets an old Marvel villain, she is surprised that she's actually called Thor, and not 'She-Thor' or 'Lady Thunderstrike'. It was a nice moment.

So the new mysterious Thor is a cool character, with a cool costume and a refreshing take on an old classic character. So she's the new Thor, right?

No. This turned out to just be a temporary thing.  Again, stunts are one of the greatest sins the two major comic publishers commit. It's even more sad when the stunt has all the ingredients to have been a solid replacement and well founded continuation of a mythology.

See Doctor Who in two years for more evidence of this.

Bohemian Rhapsody

I was born in the Sixties, so of course I have a relationship with Queen. They provided the soundtrack to a few slow dances at high school, a few late night car rides through the back roads of Southwestern Ontario, and a few purchases at the record store. I had the cassette tape of Queen's Greatest Hits and I played it incessantly.

The song Bohemian Rhapsody freaked me out as a kid. It mentioned demons, which frightened me, and the song's story of a man destined for execution really stood out from the other Seventies offerings of undying love and ballroom blitzes. When I heard the song at night--I could never sleep because of nightmares, and listened to the radio instead--I would turn it off. Bohemian Rhapsody was a day time song. Too creepy at night in a darkened house.

Which brings us to the film Bohemian Rhapsody, which I saw last night. It's a film that demands a certain approach. If the producers were aiming to create a soft focus, crowd pleasing biography of Freddie Mercury, then they succeeded. If  you as a Queen fan were expecting a movie about the band, of how they created their albums and what life was like for them as they crawled from obscurity to performing at Live Aid, then you will be a little less pleased.

First, I will say that Rami Malek is superb as Freddie. He captures the swagger and charisma, as well as the underlying empathy. Yes, he's lip synching the songs, but he's lip synching his motherfucking heart out. It's a credit to Malek's performance and to the make up/costume designers that he owns the screen whenever he walks into a scene.

Second to Malek, the musical interludes are a joy. Hearing Queen being blasted across a theatre, seeing audience members smiling and clapping along to these classic songs, was an unexpected delight.

The movie itself, though, felt light. Aside from several veerings from reality, the story makes weird time jumps, leaping forward over events that we only hear about in lines of dialogue. It seems the band goes from fixing broken vans in the middle of nowhere to having had a first hit single in the blink of an eye. We get a montage of the recording of Bohemian Rhapsody, we get a montage of their first American tour, and we skip over albums that I would have appreciated even a slight nod towards. It's all very fast and general audience friendly, stopping only to show the occasional band dispute (slightly raised voices and threats to throw household appliances, all quickly defused) and Freddie beginning to understand his homosexuality.

Before you know it, the band has broken up (never happened), Freddie is in the depths of illness and rock star debauchery, and a gig at Live Aid offers up redemption for the band and Freddie himself.

As a result, so many plot lines are left dangling, blown away by the next musical number. Freddie's relationship with his family goes from rocky at the beginning of the film to forgiving at film's end, with nothing in between. Freddie's  relationship with Mary Austin also gets the same time jump gloss, with the two of them being engaged to being distant friends, yet still buying apartments across the street from one another. Their relationship is a movie in itself--how do two people who clearly love one another maintain ties with the challenges they face? Mercury left everything to Austin in his will--surely she should play a far larger role here? But no--after being an anchor for Mercury in the beginning of the film, Austin fades into the background, only to reappear to remind Freddie of what he lost when he embraced his homosexuality.

Which brings us to the treatment of homosexuality in this movie. Bearing in mind that this movie seems aimed at a general audience that has fond memories of Queen but maybe can't name an album or more than one song--(and may potentially have less than liberal ideas about LGBTQ people-)-Freddie's homosexuality seems tied inexorably to his decline. When he was involved in a straight relationship with Mary, we have scenes of them cuddling in a warm apartment or laying beside one another in a healing,  post-coital glow. But once Freddie takes male lovers, we have scenes of him leering at truckers in bathrooms, of rent boys being thrown out of hotel rooms, or Freddie eyeing up man candy in BDSM clubs. The message here is that if Freddie had only stayed with Mary, he'd still be happy. Being gay means losing all of that, replaced by social parasites and loneliness.

The film offers some course correction when Freddie meets up with Jim Hutton, with promises of a more healthy relationship, but it feels like a rushed afterthought suggested by a script doctor. Hutton appears very near the end of the film, and his inclusion at Live Aid seems unearned in terms of story. For all the time Bohemian Rhapsody spends showing us unhealthy gay relationships, it would have been nice to balance that out with something more than a late character inclusion and a note in the final credits.

And for a movie about Queen, it would have been nice to see more of the other three members. They seem to drift through time (and the movie) without aging, being affable and only slightly grouchy to Freddie's excesses, with wives and children popping up here and there. We see very little of Freddie's relationship with them outside of band related issues, aside from Freddie showing a time pressed Roger Taylor his new mansion.

But I think I'm looking for another film.  Bohemian Rhapsody is a crowd pleasing trip down memory lane with some great music and stellar acting from Rami Malek, not an analytical or hard look at one of the world's most popular bands. And perhaps a light, crowd pleasing spectacle is exactly what Freddie Mercury would have wanted.

Stumptown Or How I Learned To Forget Rockford Files And Embrace Dex Parios

I grew up in the Seventies, when every other show on network television was about a private investigator or cop. Cannon, Barretta, Police Woman, Mannix,  and of course the best of them all, The Rockford Files. This explains why I have an affection for these stories, even as I creak past my mid fifties. Which brings us to Stumptown.

Stumptown would have been a great Seventies PI show. All the components are there: a private investigator who is as quick with the quips as she is down on her luck. A vintage car. A heart of gold hidden beneath scars of cynicism and bad experiences. And, most important of all, the genetic ability to get into situations waaaay over her head and paygrade.

This volume, which covers The Case of The Girl Who Took Her Shampoo (But Left Her Mini), introduces us to Dexedrine Parios, a private investigator who likes to gamble a bit too much. In hock to a local casino, she is forced to take a job finding the granddaughter of the casino's boss. Of course, it isn't as easy as it may sound. Dex runs into a few complications, many of which leave contusions with  promises of more to come. What should have been a simple job quickly turns into a shit show, with Dex doing her best to survive it.

The true strength of crime fiction is character. Writer Greg Rucka excels at this, especially with Dex. Her lack of impulse control is an interesting twist on the trope of the private investigator, coupled with her need to protect and care for her family. Dex is no angel, but she's trying.

The supporting cast is briefly introduced here, including a challenged brother and various contacts on the police force. The hints of back story don't automatically qualify Dex for sainthood, let's say.

The core mystery itself is fine, a basic missing persons case that of course is more than that. It's a decent framework to hang the main impetus of this story, which is to introduce Dex to new readers. Rucka handles that well, showing us the world Dex careens around, from the quiet domesticity of her home, her comfort with seedy bars and glitzy casinos,  to the long hours spent in her aging Mustang, watching out her side window on stake outs. It's a comforting read, with Matthew Southworth's artwork capturing the dirty and sordid atmosphere quite well.

I love these types of stories, and Stumptown reminds me why.

Lovers In A Dangerous Time: Shards Of Honor

Having read this book, I can truthfully say I did not imagine any of the lead characters to look that way. I imagined Cordelia with a much more pronounced chin and thinner face, for example, and Vorkosigan to look more like a burly refrigerator.  I do like that space ship thing, though, because I have no clear idea how it works.

I've started reading the Vorkosigan Saga, starting here with Shards of Honor.  Debates exist that this may not be the proper place to start, but I'm going with publication order, so here we go.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect. At first glance, this book looked like a space age Harlequin romance. For some reason, I had forgotten how much I loved the only other Bujold book I've read: The Curse of Chalion. So while I was expecting a space romance, I wasn't surprised when Shards revealed itself to be that, but also so much more. It's Bujold, after all.

Shards of Honor is a love story playing out through a war, the romance generated by two people who genuinely care for one another.  It also focuses on the cost in human suffering the machinations of governments can create, the type of suffering that can go on for years, courtesy of events that happen in seconds, pain that will never be posted in history books or in the speeches of the victorious. The dead pay the cost for the egos of the living.

Yet for all that darkness, the relationship between Cordelia and Vorkosigan--two combatants on opposite sides of a war, of course, because if you're going to fall in love, make it as difficult as possible--shines in this story.

Shards of Honor looks like one sort of story, and it is, but it's much more than that.  And perhaps that's why I loved it so much.

Paperbacks From AWESOME You Mean

I recently finished a glorious tromp through this treasure trove of delights.

Grady Hendrix provides a guided tour through the screaming halls of 70s and 80s horror fiction that should not be missed. Paperbacks From Hell brought back so many memories. Memories of spinner racks, memories of Coles and W.H. Smith horror sections, of days when new novels seemed to overflow from the shelves every week.

The world was different then, before the advent of the internet, social media and decaying attention spans. Publishers would throw anything at the wall in hopes that it would stick the way King did.  So we received stories about demon children, homicidal frogs, evil dolls with knives, and vengeful Indian spirits. Put together in this collection, it all feels like the best guitar solo from the best Alice Cooper inspired rock and roll band that never was.

These days, with the death of the B-list, you'll find the children of these books languishing on Kindle Unlimited, hoping to be noticed, praying to the dark gods to be read. The horror section of my local Chapters is one and a half shelves, with three quarters of it being taken up by King and Koontz. It's clear Hendrix is chronicling an era that will never come again, an era that we were too entranced with Jordache jeans and feathered hair to notice how wonderful it all was.