BLACK WIDOW (2021)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

"The best part of my life was fake"-- Yelena Belova, Natasha Romanoff's fake sister.

At the time that BLACK WIDOW was released, some critics caviled against its implicit "girl power" theme. But as I watched the film again in 2024, WIDOW seems like a model of nuanced subtlety next to a bore-fest like last year's MARVELS.

That said, I agree that WIDOW was extremely compromised, though not for any reason of gender politics. I've long been baffled by the decision of the MCU show-runners to kill off Natasha in AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR. It served no purpose save to add an extra beat to the evolving Hawkeye story, though his descent into vigilantism was predicating on losing not Natasha but his nuclear family. Nevertheless, the Black Widow's only feature film was doomed to be sandwiched in between the events of CAPTAIN AMERICA CIVIL WAR and AVENGERS INFINITY WAR. 

WIDOW is like the better MCU films of the previous Phases: an admixture of weaknesses and strengths. One of the biggest narrative weaknesses involved the assertion by previous MCU films that Natasha gained her skills from a Soviet training program devoted to subject young orphan girls to rigorous training, so that they became perfect spies and assassins. I don't remember why the original comic book continuity concentrated the program only upon young girls. But whether the comic book came up with a good justification or not, WIDOW needed one. Without such a rationale, there seems no good reason for the Soviets not to train male children as well-- except that credited screenwriter Eric Pearson wanted to focus on female disempowerment. 

And yet, WIDOW actually validates the structure of the American nuclear family, which is usually an object of mockery by writers on the extreme Left. This is one of the movie's strengths, since, as the above quote suggests, even a fake family is better than no family.

In 1995, four Russia agents infiltrate suburban America for three years, pretending to be a regular family while stealing secrets from the U.S.'s spy-organization SHIELD. "Mom" is Melina (Rachel Weicz), an older Black Widow assassin, trained in the Soviet "Red Room." "Dad" is Alexei (David Harbour), whose previous distinction was not for being an undercover agent (which one might think a requirement for a deep-cover mission), but for being The Red Guardian, Russia's imitation of the then-missing Captain America. "The kids" are little Natasha and Yelena, both orphans inducted into a spy-program, though not yet into the aforementioned Red Room. However, SHIELD tumbles to the illicit espionage. The four spies are forced to flee to Cuba, and Melina is wounded, with the result that she's believed, falsely, to be dead. The spy-team's grateful director Dreykov (Ray Winstone) rewards the escapees by sentencing the girls to become Black Widows and sending Alexei to prison for no clear reason.

Following this prelude, the action proper begins. Natasha (Scarlet Johansson) is on the run after having defied the American government over the Sokovia Accords. She goes into hiding but is contacted by a letter from fake sister Yelena (Florence Pugh). Yelena has somehow come across a chemical that can reverse the brainwashing tech used upon the Black Widows. (When did Natasha escape said brainwashing? No MCU ever addressed the matter, probably because the tech was a belated retcon.) Natasha contacts Yelena in Budapest, where the two of them are assailed by the forces of Dreykov, who objects to their interference with the Red Room program. He even has his own costumed agent, a skull-masked individual named The Taskmaster. 

Natasha and Yelena want to find the Red Room to free all the enslaved females, but they don't know where it is. They break their former "dad" Alexei out of a Siberian prison, but he doesn't know where Dreykov is. Unlike the two "daughters," though, he knows that Melina survived her injuries and where to find her. (I guess if the two "sisters" had known all that, they would have left "Dad" in prison.) All of these coincidences serve to unite the fake family, and the four Russian agents are obliged to deal with their feelings toward one another-- easily the best part of the film, though not without flaws. Tensions aside, the foursome unite (albeit with some glitches along the way) to take down Dreykov and free the other Widows-- none of which sustains much emotional interest. (How much does it mean that the female agents break their programming, given that they're still stuck in Mother Russia?) Natasha reaches the end of her emotional journey and leaves to synch up with her actions in AVENGERS INFINITY WAR. A post-credits sequence, taking place after Natasha's passing, sets up a story-beat for Yelena to participate in the forthcoming HAWKEYE teleseries.

Director Cate Shortland had only made three previous indie films, so that probably explains the unexceptional, mechanical feel of all the action-scenes. She probably just turned all that stuff over to the FX technicians. But she probably deserves some credit for the better dramatic scenes, and possibly for some of the humor that works (though, not surprisingly, a lot of the jokes don't land). Of the four main characters, Melina is the least successful. While her "daughters" are serving the Soviet state as assasins, their "mom" works for Dreykov, and she only rebels against him when the other three members of her family give her a chance to fight back without risking her own death.

I also didn't think Alexei's character was injected just to make men look bad, though I don't doubt that Pearson was partly recycling a trope from his previous outing on THOR RAGNAROK, which was a "toxic female" MCU movie. Alexei becomes the Red Guardian out of loyalty to his country, and he doesn't quite realize that his superiors have made him into a show-pony, much as the American authorities did with Captain America during WWII, according to THE FIRST AVENGER film. He's got fatter in prison, and that was certainly for some lame comedy, but he remains a stand-up guy for the most part, in contrast to the deceptive Dreykov. And though he never gets to fight his opposite number Captain America, Pearson gives his version of the Taskmaster a Captain-like shield, so that when Red Guardian fights Taskmaster, this battle indirectly fulfills Alexei's desire to serve as the Champion of Russia. He has some good lines and is much more likable than "Mother" Melina-- all of which I attribute to the writer's desire to validate "family values" against those of a ruthless and unfeeling state. (Just try to find a negative characterization of modern Russia in any MCU film released after WIDOW.) I wish this flick had been more stylish and colorful, but I respect the basic intent of the story if not all aspects of its execution.  

THE CROW (1994)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

It's axiomatic that adventurous stories of vengeance give rise to more measured dramas about the problematic nature of revenge. Euripides' CHILDREN OF HERACLES wrought social commentary out of the violent myths of the Son of Zeus, while Shakespeare's HAMLET undermined the uncomplicated revenge-plot of the medieval "Amlethus" tale. 

THE CROW, based on James O'Barr's underground comic book, is not the same kind of serious drama as those older works. But both as comic and as movie, it counterpoints the violent action with intense sentiment about what it means to lose friends or family members to the specter of death.

The Detroit of the film is practically a "city of dreadful night," with few signs of life or light. Gangs of murderous thugs rule the city, committing theft and murder as they please, with the broad implication that the Detroit PD has been paid to look the other way. Yet a few good people still persist. An ersatz family-feeling arises between rock musician Eric Draven (Brandon Lee), his girlfriend Shelley (Sofia Shinas), and a little girl, Sarah (Rochelle Davis), whom the couple watch over in the absence of her cocaine-addicted mother. Good cop Albrecht (Ernie Hudson) becomes loosely allied to the trio under tragic circumstances, investigating the case when a gang ruled by the evil Top Dollar (Michael Wincott) has Eric and Shelley killed.

One year later, on "Devil's Night" (the night before Halloween), Sarah still lives with her addict-mother but mourns for her lost family by visiting the graves of Eric and Shelley. When she leaves, a mysterious crow lands on Eric's headstone. Eric breaks out of his own grave, fully restored to a quasi-living being. Confused, he returns to his deserted loft, and there he dons black clothes and his only "superhero mask," white clown-makeup with black markings. He finds that he has an empathic link with the crow, from whom he divines his mission: to wreak divine vengeance upon Top Dollar and his gang.

Director Alex Proyas brings a fine sense of style to the battle-scenes, in which Eric, now immune to permanent physical harm, takes out various freakish gangbangers as the avenger works his way up to the leader. But THE CROW is most distinguished by its displays of honest sentiment, as both Sarah and Albrecht become aware that the dead man they knew has come back to life. Moreover, Eric's powers are not limited to violence. After killing the gangbanger with whom Sarah's mother is entangled, Eric purges the woman of her addiction, making it possible for her to be a mother to Sarah again. That said, the main villain gets the chance to undermine his undead foe's advantage. Top Dollar's skanky sister Myca (Bai Ling) has noticed the presence of the crow that accompanies Eric during his crusades, and so finds the hero's Achilles heel. Yet Eric triumphs in the end, in part by using his emphathic power in reverse, infusing the villain with the same drug-agonies he removed from Sara's mother. The undead hero survives to fight again, although the first film was the only one to do justice to the concept's dramatic themes.

Eric was the role of a lifetime for the son of Bruce Lee, who had only played a handful of roles before landing this part-- and unfortunately, his lifetime was cut short by the mishandling of a prop gun during filming. (Strangely, on a DVD voiceover for the film, the two speakers barely address the subject of Brandon's on-set demise.) Hudson and Davis are excellent, but Wincott scores as one of the best villains of the nineties, in that he's not motivated by mere gain, but by a Sadea desire to wreak chaos. But for the most part, later adventure-films, with or without costumes, made few if any attempts to emulate the mordant poetry of THE CROW.

KICK-ASS (2010)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

I don't have much more to say about the movie KICK-ASS than I did about the original Mark Millar graphic novel. Millar presented a very schematic idea-- that of an ordinary high school boy who decides to play superhero-- and director/co-scripter Matthew Vaughn followed the schema very faithfully, only riffing a few new scenes along the way.

Though KICK-ASS is replete with the same sort of bloody ultraviolence one might find in a hardboiled adventure movie, the movie like the comic book has enough wry humor thrown into the mix that I judge it to be a comedy. It's one of the most visceral comedies ever made, but it is not, as one ad claimed, "black humor." Black humor is the domain of the irony, the literary locus where most if not all nobility has vanished. There's considerable absurdity to be found in the green-clad Kick-Ass (Aaron Johnson) and his more skillful comrades, Big Daddy (Nicholas Cage) and Hit-Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz). But at base, their desire to fight back against the forces of organized crime remains admirable.

In keeping with Millar's design, Kick-Ass is only to function as an amateur crusader because an accident screws up his nervous system, so that he doesn't feel much pain, and replacement of many of his bones with metal rods makes him somewhat more resilient than the average human. Big Daddy, who has a vendetta against a New York drug-dealer, raises his daughter Mindy, eleven years old as the film begins, to become a prodigy in terms of martial combat and weapons-use. The sight of a pint-sized girl-child as a superhero was naturally formulated by Millar to undercut the usual image of heroes who were either teenagers or adults, and Vaughn delivers the combination of bloody action and absurd excess with great elan. 

Johnson and Moretz are the key players and accordingly deliver the best performances. Cage's depiction of Big Daddy seems somewhat off, as if he wasn't all that involved in the character. Most of the support-characters, both high-school teens and ruthless gangsters, are as underwritten here as they were in the graphic novel.

Like the graphic novel, the film is a decently executed formula-work, memorable mostly for Moretz's energetic embodiment of Hit-Girl.

INVASION OF THE NEPTUNE MEN (1961)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Despite NEPTUNE being on many "worst film" lists, it's not quite bad enough to deserve that dishonor. It's not good, but it's bad in a fairly pedestrian way, and it has just a couple of moments that keep it from being a total waste of time.

To be sure, though I probably saw the MST3K version, which used an English dub of the Japanese film, this review is based on a subtitled version found on streaming, which probably removes a few of the more absurd moments. That said, the only scenes I liked a little were in the first half hour.

The film opens at a Japanese elementary school, with a bunch of boys talking about an impending satellite launch, apparently by the Russians (the dubbed version changed the launch to one from the U.S.) One of the kids happens to be the nephew of a Doctor Tanigawa, who's a consultant on the spaceflight, and the kids enthuse about the possibility that Japan may someday have its own space program. Their teacher Tachibana (Sonny Chiba in a very early film-role) approves of their enthusiasm and sends the boys out for recess.

The kids start fantasizing about what it would be like to have their own superhero, who would be much cooler than staid Mister Tachibana. They christen their imaginary hero Iron Sharp (usually pronounced "Ion Shawp.") Then they see a strange airship and run to investigate. In a nearby field, a spaceship has landed, and when the kids get closer, aliens with pointy helmets attack them. But conveniently enough, a flying car descends, and out jumps-- Iron Sharp! He kicks the aliens around a little and they retreat. The hero (a masked Chiba) converses with the kids a little and takes off, but not a single boy wonders how the hero they just made up has manifested out of nothing.

Clearly the writers were having a little fun here. They knew they were writing a story aimed at small kids, so why not give the kids in the audience the pleasure of seeing their fictional peers conjure up their own superhero? But having tossed out that metafictional touch, the script then devolves to a standard low-budget alien invasion flick, recycling a fair amount of footage from a Japanese WWII movie. In between the stock footage there's lots of talk about the invasion but not much real action. The aforementioned Doctor Tanigawa comes up with a force-field barrier against the "Neptune Men" (not sure I heard them called that, or anything). The invaders counterattack, in part by infiltrating the Japanese military forces with their own men, who look like Japanese guys wearing heavy makeup. Iron Sharp shows up a couple more times and finally sends the ETs packing. 

Since Chiba was a genuine martial artist, I have to assume the unexciting action-scenes were the result of a disinterested director or some other similar factor. Aside from the mildly precocious setup scenes, NEPTUNE is just an ordinary bore and doesn't deserve to be deemed "so bad it's good."

   

THE SPIRIT (2008)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I've long put off reviewing THE SPIRIT, because it's difficult to talk about the process by which a Good Artist seeks to adapt the work of another Good Artist and ends up producing Bad Art.

When the movie debuted in 2008, most of the fan-reaction was negative. Will Eisner's SPIRIT-- a specialized type of comic book that ran for a little over ten years, from the early forties to the early fifties-- had started out as a straightforward adventure-strip about a domino-masked vigilante in the pre-war period. But what most SPIRIT fans favored was Eisner's so-called post-war period, when Eisner began utilizing his formidable gifts to focus on the literary forms of drama and comedy. 

In contrast, Miller hit the big time in the later eighties and the rest of the nineties with a variety of works-- DAREDEVIL, 300, SIN CITY, and two major Batman projects-- which all fit the form of adventure. (Elsewhere I've argued that ELEKTRA ASSASSIN best fits the form of the irony.) Miller often stated his admiration for Eisner, and the two artists were friends up until Eisner's passing in 2005. Because of these factors, I believe that Eisner-fans expected that Miller, when he wrote the SPIRIT film, would seek to emulate some aspects of the drama-and-comedy stories that the fans had esteemed. 

This was, to put the matter mildly, a false expectation; there was no way that Frank Miller, master of comic-book ultraviolence, was going to follow the sort of low-key SPIRIT-stories those fans wanted. Yet, all that said, I found my own experience of the 2008 movie left me less than enthused with the result.

The problem I see in Miller's adaptation is that since 2001-- the year that he came out with a fifteen-years-later sequel to THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS-- the artist became increasingly fascinated with the form of irony, which stresses a type of dark, potentially nihilistic humor. This YouTube video by one Salazar Knight puts forth a detailed analysis of 2001's THE DARK KNIGHT STRIKES AGAIN in which he argues that this limited series hugely disappointed Batman-fans because Miller delivered not a respectful take on the Bat-mythos, as had the 1986 KNIGHT, but a wild and confused parody of the superhero genre as it had developed in the 1990s (at least partly in response to Miller's influence). I won't pursue Salazar's argument in detail, but I believe that Miller had analogous motives in his approach to adapting Will Eisner's SPIRIT.

By 2008 Miller had accrued great Hollywood repute thanks to the successful 2005 adaptation of his 1990s SIN CITY stories. These stories, while not without moments of acerbic humor, were dominantly adventurous film noir narratives. Miller thus got the nod to write and direct THE SPIRIT on the strength of the SIN CITY movie's success. However, since 2001 Miller's creative priorities had changed.

If my terms for literary forms might seem a bit abstruse, I might also cite some better-known terms for the differing ways that Eisner and Miller treated humor. Eisner's SPIRIT hews closest to what film studies call "the screwball comedy," where the humor's very light and sprightly. But Miller's SPIRIT piles on overbaked noir-tropes so heavily that he creates a self-aware burlesque of the genre. When the film starts out with the hero (Gabriel Macht) leaping about the rooftops of Central City, fantasizing that to him the city is like a "good mother" that does not paint itself like a gaudy hooker (I forget the exact wording), clearly Miller's head is in a different place.

Technically Miller keeps the skeletal of a dramatic Eisner plot, from an early 1950s storyline in which the crimefighter met a long-vanished girlfriend, Sand Saref (Eva Mendes in the film), who showed up in Central City as a part of a new crime-scheme, thus setting up the conflict of the two former lovers. Miller had used elements of the "Sand" story for his "origin of Elektra" tale, and so it was perhaps natural enough that he would choose the same narrative for the SPIRIT film. And to the extent that the movie even comes close to an Eisner original, Miller's script is moderately faithful.

However, everything else is Looney Tunes. In the Eisner story, Sand came to the city seeking to sell a germ-warfare weapon, and something similar happens in the film's first half-hour. However, the Spirit is alerted that his frequent enemy the Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) has some scheme going on. So when the hero shows up at Sand's entry-point, he's attacked by Octopus, who engages Spirit in a furious battle that culminates in the villain slamming an old toilet over the hero's head.

How does the hero survive? Well, Eisner frequently showed his vigilante protagonist getting the tar beat out of him, but in a loosely realistic manner. But Miller was hugely invested in ultraviolence, so he reworked both Spirit and Octopus into Wolverine-like beings able to heal rapidly from massive injuries. This rewriting was also Miller's way of justifying the hero's reason for calling himself "The Spirit," because he literally died but came back to life due to a super-serum. He even talks to a death-spirit named Lorelei (Jamie King), whose voice is heard only by "sailors and cops," and who continually bids him to return to her "cold embrace."

Octopus fails to get the item Sand brings to Central City, despite being aided by Doctor Silken Floss (Scarlet Johansson) and her crew of identical goofball clones. (The "Silken Floss" in the comics was not a villain, incidentally.) But I'll give away what the movie doesn't reveal until the last hour: Sand hasn't smuggled in a germplasm, but "The Blood of Heracles," which is supposedly the genuine blood of the Greek demigod. Octopus-- who seems to be the only person interested in this prize-- thinks that if he drinks this substance, it will transform him into a god who can conquer the world.

Yes, we're a long way from film noir here. And to keep up the Looney Tunes mood, Miller constantly gives almost every character bizarre lines, ranging from Floss making some comment about drugs that make people's "teeth turn into graham crackers" to Octopus frequently ranting about "eggs" for unknown reason. Next to some of these gems, the hero's soliloquy to the city almost sounds rational.

While the Spirit chases around trying to track down both Sand and Octopus, he's frequently waylaid by such beautiful women, where they're femmes fatales like Sand and the dancer "Plaster of Paris," or relatively good girls like Ellen Dolan (Sarah Paulson). In the comic she's the hero's faithful girlfriend, and here she's upgraded to a doctor who constantly cares for his wounds but is no less motivated to hogtie the vigilante to her alone. In fact, one of the few worthwhile things about Miller's version of the Spirit is that the crimefighter can't seem to turn off the charm when in the presence of hot women. Certainly, the hero's sex appeal works better than any of his exaggerated athletics.

Macht is decent in the role despite its problematic concept, and most of the actors deliver what Miller wanted of them. But Samuel L. Jackson is awful from start to finish. Perhaps he justified his wild histrionics with the idea that he had to be "the over-reactor" to Macht's "under-reactor," but he unlike other performers seems to relish all of Miller's absurd dialogue.

It's amusing that Miller somewhat name-checks his own creation by having a lady cop claim that Sand Saref suffers from an "Electra complex." However, the Spirit would seem to suffer from the opposing Oedipus complex, for instead of choosing any single female with whom he might "settle down" and protect, he devotes his existence, both at the opening and closing, to the Great Mother of the City. Some of these loose insights are what makes Miller's SPIRIT into "bad art," and not just your average "bad movie."

ASTRO BOY (2009)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

As of this date, the 2009 ASTRO BOY stands as the only attempt to translate the charms of Osamu Tezuka's most famous creation into a feature film. ASTRO was a notorious flop in most markets, but it's far from a bad film. In addition to showing respect to Tezuka's original story, the filmmaker added a handful of interesting myth-tropes. The main objection to the film is that it simply wasn't the work of a genius.

I confess I've only read a handful of the manga stories, but I enjoyed the dubbed ASTRO BOY animated series in the sixties. As an adult, I esteem the great visual inventiveness of the cartoon, and I even have more tolerance for some of the show's corny humor than I did as a kid. My impression of the anime show is that, even while the robot-hero encountered assorted menaces, Tezuka had a recurrent trope that gave this kids' cartoon an adult theme: the realization that bad treatment of robots by humans is immoral despite the artificial nature of the entities being so treated.

The 2009 film is very forthright, even transparent, in putting forth this trope. While the Tezuka origin takes place in a standard future-city where the use of robots has become routine, the filmmakers set Metro City in the clouds, far above the polluted surface of the Earth. The Earth is still inhabited by people, implicitly those not wealthy enough to escape to the city. But the denizens of Metro City treat the surface-domain like a garbage-heap, disposing of their junk by tossing it below-- particularly the parts of non-functional robots. This stratification between high and low appeared in many previous SF-works, ranging from Fritz Lang's film METROPOLIS (which loosely inspired a Tezuka work of the same title) to "The Cloud Minders," an episode of Classic STAR TREK. The specific setup of Metro City most resembles a similar scenario in the 1990s cyberpunk-manga BATTLE ANGEL ALITA, though of course there's no way to prove any influence.

Another new element involves humankind's temptation with a stone of Good and Evil. Said stone is a meteor that falls to Earth and is harvested by the leading scientific institute in Metro City, headed by Doctor Tenma (Nicholas Cage) and the huge-nosed Doctor Elefun (Bill Nighy). Analysis reveals that there are two disparate elements within the meteor, both of which might be used as possible power sources for the betterment of mankind. Yet one element, the red one, is "evil" in the sense that it stimulates aggression in human and robotic entities, while the blue element stimulates healing. Elefun preaches that these power sources might even restore the ruined Earth to its former glories.

But President Stone (is he President of the country over which Metro City hovers?) is an ambitious political hack running for re-election. He wants to launch a war with the people on Earth's surface to make himself look like a decisive leader, and he pays the institute's bills as part of military research. The scientists have constructed a giant battle-robot, the ironically named "Peacekeeper," which Stone hopes to use to prosecute his needless war. The President forces the scientists to experiment with powering the robot with the red element. Result: the battle-robot goes berserk, and before it can be turned off, it kills young Toby, son of Doctor Tenma.

Tenma is so distraught at losing his only child that he steals the blue element and uses it to power a robot replacement for Toby, into which he downloads Toby's memories. For a time, Tenma convinces the robot-boy (Freddie Highmore) that he is Toby, but little things ruin the illusion, like the fact that "Toby" can fly using jets built into his feet. (The script's fuzzy on why Tenma installed weapons systems in this copy of his son.) However, even without "Toby's" input, Tenma comes to believe he made a big mistake, and he rejects his robot son. Further, when the soldiers in employ of Stone come looking for the missing blue element, Tenma allows them to take his creation away. Using his powers, the robot boy escapes the soldiers but falls to Earth, one more robot in the junk-pile.

Through contact with a group of feisty kids, the boy takes on a new name, Astro, and tries to conceal his true nature. However, he's outed by Hamegg (Nathan Lane), a Fagin-type who scrounges the remains of robot toss-offs to construct fighter-robots for a death-match tournament, to entertain the locals. Hamegg recognizes Astro as a robot and seeks to make him into an arena-fighter, semi-rechristened "Astro Boy." But in the resulting tournament, Astro learns the true extent of his powers, which end up benefiting him against the forces unleashed by the evil President.

The main characters from the manga-- Astro, Elefun, and Tenma-- are all reasonably well handled in terms of humor and drama. The villains, though, prove disappointment. Hamegg, though based on a Tezuka original (one named "Cacchiatore" in the dubbed anime), is remodeled so that he looks less fiendish, while original creation President Stone is flat and uninteresting. The Earth-kids are all bland cute-types, and though some of the support-character robots are amusing, none of them are as well designed as Tezuka's wild creations. But at least the character of Astro Boy has a combination of innocence and determination that does credit to Tezuka's template. 

AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM (2023)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

In many ways KINGDOM is just a reversal on the events of the successful 2018 AQUAMAN. Both had two of the credited writers in common (including director James Wan) and just as the first film concerned the Sea King looking for an ancient trident to signify his lordship of Atlantis, KINGDOM concerns a trident as well. The "Black Trident" incarnates the malefic magic power of Necrus, the titular lost kingdom, which had formerly been a member-state of Atlantis until its people embraced forbidden arts. It comes out in the end that the ancient king of Necrus, Kordax, is acting through the trident, possessing Aquaman's foremost enemy Black Manta to carry out a world-destroying agenda.

In the 2018 film, Aquaman (Jason Momoa) partnered with Mera (Amber Heard) to prove his right to the Atlantean throne. Four years later, the two of them are married and have an infant son, Arthur Jr. However, possibly because of adverse publicity given actress Amber, the character of Mera is sidelined for most of the movie. This time out, the Sea King needs to set a fiend to catch a fiend, setting free his half-brother Ocean Master, former rival for the throne and for the hand of Mera (though that potential conflict goes unexplored in KINGDOM).

The interplay of Aquaman and Ocean Master is never more than adequate, and the visual effects of the undersea dominions are uninspired this time out. There's lots of climate change rhetoric ladled into the mix, but it's rendered nugatory given that the actual threat is, after all, that of an evil magical subsea kingdom. The strongest action-scene was the climactic battle of Aquaman, Mera and Ocean Master against the hyper-powered Black Manta, but this too just seemed rather rote. The puppet master Kordax doesn't seem to have any real reason to destroy the world with climate change, so he lacks any deeper resonance.

KINGDOM didn't do as well as its predecessor, though it wasn't such a bomb that the live-action franchise was destroyed. Allegedly Momoa wants to play the character again, so this sophomore effort doesn't necessarily prevent the franchise from "graduating" to a higher level.

AQUAMAN, KING OF ATLANTIS (2021)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

I was sure there was no way this 3-part HBO Max series-- edited into a movie for the DVD market-- would be even passably good. The last time I saw this sort of "extreme bigfoot" animation, it was in the 2020 teleseries THUNDERCATS ROAR, which turned the THUNDERCATS franchise into low farce, apparently in a lame attempt to emulate Cartoon Network's popular TEEN TITANS GO.

To my surprise, KING is actually a reasonably well-done comedy-adventure despite all the silly humor-- which is all the more remarkable in that three of the four credited KING writers worked on THUNDERCATS ROAR. Possibly someone-- DC Comics, or James Wan, who produced the series-- told the scribes not to go overboard with the jokes and maybe ruin the movie franchise, given that Wan had enjoyed financial success with the 2018 live-action Aqua-movie and planned to direct the sequel. 

KING takes place some time after the events of the 2018 movie but is not strictly bound by its continuity, nor does its story play into the two-years-later Aqua-sequel. All that essentially matters is that Aquaman reigns in Atlantis and apparently has had some heavy dates with Mera, though the two are not yet married as they would be in the official sequel. But Aquaman is much more of a dweeb (with unexplained sea-green hair), and Mera is extremely pugnacious, constantly advocating that the two of them should punch their way out of problems. Yet, even though the comics character is more traditionally feminine, somehow the schtick of feisty Mera and the more reserved Sea King works pretty well. Also an unexpected plus: changing the support-character of Vulko-- a grave older man in the comics and in the live-action film (played by Willem Dafoe) -- into an anally retentive young guy.

The three episodes are plotted so that they seem like installments of the same story, largely because the first one starts with the hero and his squeeze investigating a missing Atlantean city. This leads them into battle with a Russian evildoer named Mortikov, who disappears in Episode 2, which focuses upon a classic Aqua-villain, The Fisherman, and then Mortikov returns in the third part, taking on a revised version of a very obscure Aqua-foe, The Scavenger. And as a bonus, the script works in the hero's vexatious half-brother Ocean Master. Further, when the writers worked in a couple of very minor "assistant menaces" who were and are ultra-obscure-- "The Fire Trolls" from the comic book, and "Mirror Men" from the Aqua-cartoon of the sixties-- I suspected the scribes were instructed to try winning over old comics-fogeys (like me) with nods to very old continuity-fodder.

But the use of "moldy oldies" didn't sell me on KING; I just liked the fact that a fair number of the jokes landed. A few were driven into the ground-- really, is the Atlanteans inability to understand how baseball works all that amusing? But others work reasonably well, particularly with regard to slapstick violence. When Mera tries to punch out Scavenger, the villain uses Aquaman as a shield, so that Mera ends up simultaneously hitting her boyfriend and apologizing for the hits.

Despite my positive comments, I think it's just as well this experiment was confined (thus far) to just these three outings.

KNIGHTS OF THE ZODIAC (2023)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

I don't envy the American writers who tried to translate an extremely complicated manga series from 1985-1990, one probably only remembered by older fans of either the manga ST SEIYA or its dubbed American anime adaptation, KNIGHTS OF THE ZODIAC. I have certainly seen worse, though I'd still have to judge the 2023 ZODIAC as somewhat pedestrian.

I should note that I only have nodding familiarity with the dubbed anime TV show, and that I never became intimately acquainted with the "Seiya" universe. So I'll take it for granted that the basic setup in the movie at least loosely resembles that of the manga.

Though there's only one de facto knight in the film, the use of the term is not abstract: the knights of the zodiac (there are five in the manga) are pledged to defend a monarch-like figure. The movie seems to take place roughly in contemporary times, while the manga depicts a world with a very involved tournament for possession of the magical armor of long vanished gods. Both suggest that one goddess of ancient times, Athena, became incarnate in the body of a young woman, Sienna (Madison Iseman), and she's destined to be protected by the Pegasus Knight.

At movie's start, Seiya (Mackenyu, son of Sonny Chiba) is a street kid who competes in underground fights while seeking his missing sister Patricia. Two rival factions seek Seiya because both suspect he possesses a god-derived power, "Cosmo," power which can transform Seiya into the Pegasus Knight. As in many similar boys' manga, the protagonist is destined to take on the duty of serving a royal figure, and to his dubious fortune, he's first contacted by Alman (Sean Bean), adoptive father of Sienna. This leads to a lengthy segment in which he's given tough martial arts training by a masked woman, Marin (Caitlyn Hutson).

Seiya's motive for going along with this farrago is the suggestion that Alman may help Seiya find his lost sister, though by movie's end this possibility remains up in the air. But he also likes Sienna, and there's some nice "poor boy-rich girl" tension, for all that it's not certain whether the two have any romantic interest in one another. Seiya definitely does not like any of the persons associated with Alman's enemy Guraad (Famke Janssen), who are trying to capture Sienna to tap into her Athena-powers, which are much more dangerous than the "Cosmo" possessed by aspiring knights.

The script most drops the ball by its casual mention of the fact that Guraad is actually Sienna's adoptive mother, and that she lost her arms from one of the Sienna-baby's power-tantrums. Since Guraad has both arms, one assumes they're supposed to be artificial ones, but this too is remarkably underplayed. Guraad's motivations remain unclear from start to finish, as if the writers couldn't quite decide what they wanted to do with her-- or what if anything to use from the source material.

The training sequences, rife with lots of expensive CGI, are the most interesting scenes, more watchable than the predictable pyrotechnics when Seiya finally "knights up" to battle Guraad's minions. Mackenyu and Iseman have some pleasant interactions, but ZODIAC as a whole is just ordinary-- not least because the casual viewer won't get just what the whole "zodiac" thing is about. ZODIAC was a box office bomb and as a result this particular manga series probably won't see further live action iterations.

GOTHAM SEASON FIVE (2019)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Season Five improves somewhat on the shitshow of Season Four in three respects. There are fewer episodes, so there's less gratuitous slaughter. For the same reason, the writers didn't have time to introduce any waste-of-space new characters like Sofia Falcone, though they can't be bothered to do much with the villains already in play and so glut Gotham City with their ramshackle versions of Bane, Nyssa Al Ghul, Magpie and The Ventriloquist. Thirdly, the scribes shook up the routine of urban adventure somewhat with a very compressed version of a nineties comic-book arc about Gotham being turned into an isolated, resource-deprived "No Man's Land."

There are a few other improvements resulting from the writers' desire to tie things up. Though they shunt Mister Freeze and Firefly off stage, never to be seen again, and make only cursory use of Scarecrow and Mad Hatter, they finally get some actual use out of Poison Ivy. In the last episodes of Season Four, Maybe-Joker Velasca shoots Selina merely to twist Bruce Wayne's tail, and Selina's doctors tell Bruce that his girlfriend will probably remain crippled. Ivy provides some handy plant-magic that heals Selina's injuries and makes her into something of a preternatural badass, out to gain revenge on Maybe-Joker. 

Similarly, Tabitha, though left alive at the end of Season Four, is quickly dispatched by Penguin in Five's first episode. This stratagem at least gives Barbara Kean a slightly more coherent storyline-- that of vengeance on Penguin-- than the idiotic arc from Season Four, with her aspiring to take over the League of Shadows. She's not any better as a character, though, and she's in no way improved by the far-fetched notion that she inveigles Jim Gordon into sleeping with her. This results in Psycho Barbara becoming a brand-new Baby Mama, thus driving a new wedge between Gordon and Lee Tompkins-- who suddenly have decided that they're back to having feelings for one another. 

Other plotlines are about the same. Riddler's dopey split personality arc gets finessed into an equally dopey one about his committing mass murder thanks to Hugo Strange. Penguin plans to leave the ruined, depleted city at first-- and Selina and Riddler both plan to join him, at least in theory-- but all three change their minds for cockamamie reasons. 

I commented earlier that whatever inspiration Bruce Wayne takes from Ra's Al Ghul in this series is at least an improvement on Christopher Nolan's wretched take on their relationship in BATMAN BEGINS. In the case of Nyssa Al Ghul, she's no better or worse than Nolan's Talia Al Ghul in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, out to avenge the slaying of Ra's by Bruce and Barbara. Maybe-Joker lacks any of the impact he had in earlier seasons, despite an attempt to align him with Real-Joker with a sort of "secondary origin story." But neither that, nor the injection of a "Definitely Not Harley Quinn," yields any strong moments.

The only arc in Season Five that works reasonably well is the one between Bruce and Selina, which leads me to believe that for the writing-staff this was the "true north" around which all the nonsense coalesced. During a plotline in which Ivy enthralls Bruce and makes him do her bidding, Selina thinks the boy billionaire plans to leave destitute Gotham of his own accord. Thus, she whales the tar out of him, thinking he means to leave her behind. Though Bruce comes back to his senses in that scene, Selina's suspicions turn out to be prophetic, for in the next to last episode, Bruce does leave Gotham, and her, behind. Ten years later, during which time Gordon has become commissioner and is thinking about retiring, Bruce comes back as the Dark Knight, having presumably honed his skills enough to be Gotham's foremost protector. A rooftop scene between Selina and the newly forged Batman establishes the dynamic of her scofflaw ethics and his dedication to duty for the Bat-mythos that is to come.

At one point I loosely compared GOTHAM to SMALLVILLE, but I should have specified that this was only in terms of the final episode of both serials, where the costumed hero comes on stage for the final moments of the final episode. But SMALLVILLE was a show whose creators wanted the readers to be invested in the characters' lives. Too often, the writers of GOTHAM seem like Hugo Strange, performing sadistic experiments on the subjects of their narrative experiment.

The fact that the writers managed to keep the Bruce-Selina relationship reasonably intact for five seasons recalls a similar storytelling strategy in another series: LOST, which, for all its chaotic revelations held true to a central plotline regarding the fate of Jack Shepherd. Now, the stories of LOST frequently wrote philosophical checks that the writers' intellectual accounts could not cover. But at least there was an attempt to find some significance in the lives of the LOST characters, however unlikeable some of them were. I don't think the showrunners of GOTHAM ever had that much investment in the Bat-mythos. GOTHAM can be lauded for having provided a lot of fine actors with the chance to strut their stuff on a Bat-stage-- even if the stories signified, if not nothing, far less than the lowly funnybooks on which they were based.

EIGHT MAN AFTER (1993)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

From what I've been able to learn, EIGHT MAN AFTER was created by a different production team than the previous year's EIGHT MAN.EIGHT MAN. But even though AFTER was an animated project, consisting of four OVA episodes later compiled into a feature, the creators seem to have decided to stick with the somewhat noirish feel of the live-action movie, grounding the hero's adventures in the mean streets of the city, instead of having him fight exotic supervillains.

The anime's story rings in a change in the status quo. At some point in the past, Sachiko-- former girlfriend of the slain man whose intelligence infused the robot body of Eight Man-- finds out that Azuma, the P.I. for whom she's provided secretarial duties, was the speedy superhero. Eight Man, for unclear reasons, simply runs off, and remains absent for years.

During that time, the criminal underworld begins dealing in cyborg-tech that can enhance ordinary humans, be they rogue punks or players in professional sports. Whatever their profession, the users have to also employ drugs to make the enhancements function, and the drugs tend to make people go batshit crazy.

Eight Man appears on the scene, but he seems a much more brutal figure. He shows up when a gang, including an augmented member, are harassing citizens, and the super-fast robot not only takes down the thugs, he rips the artificial arm off the one gangbanger. It turns out that there's a reason, albeit convoluted, for this bizarre behavior, because some nebulous thing happened to the artificial man in his absence. Someone deleted the personality of Detective Azuma, and thus that of the cop Yokoda as well. In the place of this persona, a new persona, a second detective named Hazama, has usurped the guiding intelligence of Eight Man.

The script introduces this major twist and then fails to follow through with any revelations that might have made it meaningful. There's some nugatory subplot in which the underworld killed the original Hazama's sister, and maybe that contributes to his rage problems as a "hero." But the villains are just bargain-basement a-holes, so they don't evoke a great desire for rough justice. It almost feels as if the writers wanted to come up with the greatest amount of emotional torment for Sachiko, the only legacy character from the original series. Perhaps she's a stand-in for the writers' rejection of the original light-hearted heroics. It's almost as if the scribes thought they were the Japanese equivalents of Alan Moore, out to tarnish old idols in the name of realism.

In any event, though there's more super-action here, the film's depressing and ugly, and not worth a second screening.

EIGHT MAN (1992)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

I've never read any of the 1960s EIGHT MAN manga, but I followed the dubbed anime series of that same decade. I don't know how similar the two were, but I suspect that they were pretty close in tone and content. Both media-serials were originally directed at a kid-audience that tended to want maximum excitement, with lots of flashy sci-fi concepts. 

Most reviews take issue with some of the advertising for this 1992 production, apparently touting the movie's kinetic action sequences. It's true that EIGHT MAN doesn't have many strong battle-scenes. But I liked the way the movie saw the cyborg-superhero through a film noir lens, just as the contemporaneous Tim Burton Bat-films did. It might not be stunningly original, but it has some honest emotion in its melodramatic story-- hence its noir-ish Japanese subtitle, "For All the Lonely Nights."

Sometime in the past, a cop named Yokoda was killed in the line of duty. His superior officer somehow commandeered the body and took it to his scientist friend Doctor Tani (Jo Shishido). Tani happened to be working on a project involving a super-powered robot, dubbed Eight Man, and the scientist downloaded Yokoda's mind into the robot. The result is a mechanical man-- not really a true cyborg despite the advertising-- with human intelligence and emotions, even if Eight Man doesn't precisely remember his old life.'

Unlike the anime hero, who was constantly encountering supercriminals with names like "Doctor Spectra," Eight Man seems to have been used to fight street-level crooks like drug dealers. He assumes a human identity, private detective Azuma (Kai Shishido, son of the actor playing the scientist). Not only does the detective work intermittently with Yokoda's old police-partner, Azuma also engages a secretary who just happens to be Sachiko, the former girlfriend of deceased Yokoda.

While Azuma deals with recrudescent memories of his former humanity, he gets an "opposite number" type of villain in Ken (Osamu Ohtomo). Before creating Eight Man, Tani had another working model. His real-life son Ken, a hellraiser-type, killed himself in a car-crash, so Tani transplanted Ken's brain into "Seven Man." Unfortunately, Ken became unstable, and he hates being a human robot so much that he starts killing people. 

I fully admit that, even though Ken and Eight Man have some spiffy powers, they don't have a big super-fight toward the end. But then, the climactic battle of the two BLADE RUNNER opponents succeeds less by overblown kinetics than by emotional tone. The fact that these foes are "brothers" by virtue of their shared history-- even though one is a stone killer and the other is comparatively sane-- makes EIGHT MAN a solid melodrama. Oh, and the Eight Man costume makes Shishido one of the better-looking live-action superheroes of nineties cinema.

GOTHAM SEASON FOUR (2017-18)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

At the end of my review of GOTHAM SEASON THREE, I said:

My recollection is that the next two seasons maintain this same overheated level of storytelling. 

 What an understatement that was!

I gave the first three season "fair" mythicity ratings, but Season Four is an unholy mess in all respects. I don't intend to check, but it feels as if there was some huge staff upheaval behind the scenes, and all the writers could do was to tread water.

The trope that served GOTHAM best in the second and third seasons was that of "the madhouse taking over normal life." In addition to the villains of the show's subordinate ensemble-- Penguin, Riddler, and Catwoman-- those seasons introduced a half-dozen of well-known comics characters: Mister Freeze, Firefly, Poison Ivy (technically in Season 1 but in a non-villainous role), The Mad Hatter, a new version of Scarecrow, and the delightfully evil Hugo Strange. Even if Gotham's "normalcy" was a token thing at best, it was certainly more fun to see these weirdos romping about, compared to mobsters shafting one another or killing innocents with no reprisal. Back in the day I wasn't sure that these characters might not get some decent development.

However, in all likelihood the writers were told to build up only the three ensemble-fiends, so that none of the six lesser subordinates got much attention. Poison Ivy, who as I said had been tangentially introduced in the first season, finally mutates into a plant-woman in Season 4, but she just kills a few people, fights a little with Catwoman, and disappears with no closure-- while the other five are confined to "stooge roles." This is also partly due to an emphasis on "Maybe-Joker" Velasca, who had some good Ledger-esque scenes in previous seasons and here becomes a uniting force for most of the weirdies. Cameron Monaghan still does well with the scenes he's given but there's a strong sense of running in place, especially when Maybe-Joker turns out to have a twin brother whom he can torment and then transform into his own likeness. Penguin and Riddler also get a lot of scenes but they're usually spinning their wheels, Riddler because he falls in love with Jim Gordon's former flame Lee and Penguin because he thinks his crime-rule threatened by the daughter of crime-boss Carmine Falcone. Penguin also has a couple of episodes during which he's forced to serve time in the same asylum bossed by Valesca, and though it's a dubious pairing, at least Taylor and Monaghan strike the right sparks.

A couple of other comics-villains debut as well-- versions of Professor Pyg and Solomon Grundy-- but all are overshadowed by the badness of Sofia Falcone (Crystal Reed). She leaves her father's palatial estate with some plan to take over Gotham's underworld from Penguin. But the scripts never really tell us what motivates her. Does she just have daddy issues, trying to imitate her notorious father? The first day she meets Jim Gordon, she initiates a booty call. But is she actually attracted to him, as it sometimes seems, or does she intend to avenge the brother whom Gordon slew? She gratuitously maims Lee's hand: is this just business, or was she jealous of Lee and Gordon? It's a relief when she gets knocked off. This stands in contrast to Ra's Al Ghul, who finally reveals his true interest in Bruce Wayne-- the young man being the only person able to end the mastermind's immortal life-- except that for various reasons, he comes back from the dead to spin some more wheels. 

Not much better are the Three Little Ho's: crazy Barbara Kean, stoic Tabitha Galavan, and capricious Selina Kyle. They're given leave to operate under Penguin's rule-- in which, BTW, criminals can be licensed to steal if they get Penguin's approval. But wait; didn't Tabitha kill Penguin's mother? Why does he seem to forget about that until the season's final episode? And why does Penguin's calculated vengeance upon Tabitha hinge upon an event he could not possibly have foreseen-- namely, the recrudescence of the dead gangster Butch into the form of Solomon Grundy? Barbara, for her part, gets uncomfortably shoehorned into the Ra's Al Ghul plot, and since the scripts give actress Erin Richards nothing but stupid lines, she delivers them by shouting most of the time.

The heroes get little better treatment. Gordon, Bullock and Alfred have little to do but react to the latest ploys of Ra's and Maybe-Joker. Bruce is given a potentially decent arc in that he almost committed murder under the control of Ra's, and in reaction to his guilt, he begins to act like an entitled douche, particularly toward Selina. He eventually gets his head on straight, and the scenes between Mazouz and Bicondova are close to being the only interactions with any emotional nuance.  

I assume that by Season Four the bloom was off the rating-rose, because the final season gets just 12 episodes. I do have two or three favorable memories of Season Five-- which is more than I did of Four-- but it's unlikely that in just a dozen installments, the showrunners managed to up their game back to the previous "fair" level.

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM (2023)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

Well, if this piece of Seth Rogen-written MAYHEM has nothing else to recommend it, it does end up making his GREEN HORNET movie look way better.

As I've probably mentioned in other reviews, I was never a Ninja Turtles fan. I never read the comics and even the best movies and TV shows are just mildly enjoyable in my book. But MAYHEM made me offended on behalf of the breakthrough success of the Turtles' creators, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. 

The comic book certainly had its moments of comedy, being partly a spoof of Frank Miller's ninja-filled DAREDEVIL narrative, and when the teen-terrapins were transformed into kid-friendly cartoons, most adults were most familiar with the turtles' love of pizza and skateboarding.

Yet, at base the Turtles are adventure-heroes in the same vein as other ground-level crimefighters like Daredevil and Batman. In every other iteration, the Turtles have practiced their ninja moves, with their specialized weapons. for most of their young lives under the tutelage of the rat-mutant Splinter. They might not be the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree, but they're always peerless fighters.

But that didn't fit the joke-happy priorities of Rogen and his collaborators. So the first time these Turtles take arm against a sea of scurrilous scumbags, they almost get their clocks cleaned because it's their first fight.

Rogen stated that he wanted to emphasize the "teenage" part of the mutants, so what we get is a cross between a normative Turtles adventure and frequent teen-comedy tropes. Therefore, Splinter isn't a wise old rat-ninja, but a cranky old rodent who hates human beings, and is voiced by Jackie Chan. (Why, Jackie? You're rich, you don't HAVE to do crap!) April O'Neil isn't an adult reporter allowed to share the secrets of the Turtles, but a high schooler who wants to be a journalist but tends to puke when she's upset. The more prominent villains are elided in favor of a character loosely based on Baxter Stockman-- that is, a human mutated into a fly-creature-- but who is a real fly-man, created by the same chemicals that altered the turtles and their mentor. His name is of course "Superfly," which I also consider an offense against the 1970s movie-- even though I wasn't a big fan of that either.

Sadly, this witless, unfunny travesty made more than twice its budget at the box office, which once again proves the old saw that there's no accounting for taste.

YOU DON'T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN (2008)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Once upon a time, there was a western movie-- or maybe more like 411,557 western movies-- in which an Eastern city slicker went out West and conned the noble White settlers into fighting the noble Red tribes, so that the con man could buy up their land once the two groups had killed one another.

Now what has that trope got to do with the almost-a-century-long Middle East conflict between Israelis and Arabs? Beats me, but the trope proved useful in resolving an insoluble conflict set up by the premise of ZOHAN. I think it safe to assume that, given the difficulty of using said conflict for comedy, this was probably the same "out" employed by writers Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow and by writer-star Adam Sandler when the three of them completed the first draft of ZOHAN's script in 2000. In any case, that was the basic trope behind the final script when the movie was released to theaters in 2008.

So in the Sandlerverse, the prolonged struggle between the denizens of Israel and Palestine (other Arabs are not mentioned) has one important difference from our world: each side has one, and apparently only one, superhuman agent. Israel has "Zohan" Dvir (Sandler), while Palestine has Fatoush, nicknamed "Phantom" (John Turturro). There's no explanation as to why these super-agents can perform great feats of strength or resist gunfire, and it's probably just as well the writers didn't try. But Zohan becomes tired of the never- ending battles, and he wants to emigrate to the U.S. so that he can live his dream of becoming a great hairdresser. In the pursuance of this goal, Zohan allows the world to think that Phantom has slain him, and then smuggles his way into America. (Since his illegal status is never mentioned, presumably his secret agent skills, or his espionage contacts, help him pass as a naturalized citizen.)

Zohan takes up lodging in a New York borough that just happens to be evenly divided between Israeli-Americans and Palestinian-Americans. Zohan makes a few friends, but because of his lack of experience he can't get a job doing "dos." However, the cute owner of a Palestinian hair salon (Emmanuelle Chiriqui) gives Zohan a menial cleaning job. Inevitably he gets to show his stuff, and he becomes incredibly popular.

This chain of events has two negative consequences. While the salon's business picks up and the owner is able to pay her extremely inflated rent, a block-busting landlord decides to use violent techniques to get rid of anyone not already turned out by his high rental rates. In addition, a Palestinian recognizes the hairdresser as the counter-terrorist Zohan, and he lets Phantom know about his enemy's location.

Like most Sandler movies, ZOHAN has some funny bits mixed in with various tedious indulgences. The basic idea of the agents of two warring powers coming to a rapprochement, even if their countries don't, is laudable. But because the script has no idea as to how to make things work out for a happy ending, they resort to the idea that the landlord, who's allied with White supremacies for some reason, serve the function of the evil city slickers fostering conflict for profit.

There's just barely enough superhero-style combat between Zohan and Phantom to justify calling this a combative comedy. 

THE REINCARNATION OF ISABEL (1973)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

Renato Polselli must have enjoyed working with the three principal actors of 1972's DELIRIUM-- Mickey Hargitay, Rita Calderoni, and Christa Barrymore-- because they're all back in this subsequent flick. Barrymore, though, gets the short end of the stick, for she's just one of various female victims knocked off to facilitate "the reincarnation" of a long dead witch.

Whatever minor virtues were present in DELIRIUM, though, were left behind when Polselli concocted this dumb farrago of murders and Satanism. As in the 1972 film, the story's driven by the murder of nubile women, whose blood is used in a witch-cult's attempt to revive the corpse of Isabel (Calderoni). For some reason none of the lesser girls work until the cultists come across the actual reincarnation of Isabel. Young Laureen (also Calderoni) fortuitously shows up, along with her uncle (Hargitay), at the very castle where the Satanists are conducting their experiment. And so a bad time is had by all.

ISABEL is so disjointed, I could easily believe everyone making the movie was on drugs. The only memorable bit of goofiness is when one of the witches announces that he's actually Count Dracula-- and then, absolutely nothing more is said about the matter!

DORORO (2019)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Since I rated the mythicity of the live-action DORORO as more concrescent than that of the original 1967-69 manga series by Osamu Tezuka, I had some curiosity as to whether an anime series could achieve any similar feat. I had no access to the 1969 anime adaptation, but I did to this one from 2019-- which, from my partial readings, seems to have borrowed not only from Tezuka but also from a 2016 manga-reinterpreation of the original Tezuka material by another artist. I didn't attempt to re-read all of the manga iterations, but sampled bits and pieces from each series.

Because of that sampling, I noticed that the creators of the 2019  DORORO had a reasonably original take on the character of Hyakkimaru, the paraplegic samurai who shares top billing in the feature alongside his young (only apparently) male companion Dororo. As a child, Hyakkimaru's warlord-father Daigo sacrifices his own son to numerous demons in exchange for his realm's prosperity. Each demon takes a body part from the infant, leaving him no more than a lump of dying flesh. A highly skilled doctor not only saves the life of the discarded infant, he outfits Hyakkimaru with artificial limbs and trains him to use his psychic senses to perceive the world around him, in lieu of his lost sense-organs.

Now, when the two manga-artists depicted Hyakkimaru at the outset of each feature, the samurai is seen as being fully able to act the part of a normal human, despite having been deprived of his normal abilities. But the writers of 2019 correctly perceived that it should be almost impossible for a person lacking most of his senses to segue so easily into emulating the way normal humans interact. Thus, though the 2019 Hyakkimaru possesses the same motives as other versions--to slay all the demons who stole his body parts, in order to get them restored to his maimed body-- he shows so little affect as to make Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry seem like a bon vivant. The slow re-acquirement of his humanity from episode to episode is thus something that the acerbic Dororo can nurture while they ply their demon-hunting trade.

In addition to killing many diverse demons to restore his human attributes, Hyakkimaru is also drawn, little by little, into a conflict with the father who sacrificed him, and with the son whom Daigo did not sacrifice, Tahomaru. Tezuka's manga kills off the second son of Daigo in his only episode, so that the climactic confrontation is between Hyakkimaru and his father. The 2019 anime repeatedly pits the two brothers against one another until the climax and raises more ethical issues as a consequence. For instance, though Tahomaru is moral enough to realize that Daigo committed a terrible crime, that crime resulted in the prosperity of the warlord's realm, and thus Tahomaru feels that preserving the realm necessitates the slaying of the unfortunate sibling.

This series may be somewhat more organized than the original manga, but DORORO is still very episodic, and nearly none of the demons are memorable presences. One exception is a sprite who's capable of making humans speak and act in reverse of their actual intentions. This leads to some very welcome comedy when a young woman tries to talk Hyakkimaru into marrying her, and he, under the sprite's influence, agrees. Dororo, who's been crushing on her partner for some time (though she thinks he's been fooled by her boy-imposture), is of course enraged by this seeming betrayal.

In many ways, the demons' evil is eclipsed by that of humans. The lords and their samurai warriors are responsible for much suffering to protect their power, but people on the lower rungs of society are only intermittently more ethical. Tezuka's anti-war philosophy is conspicuous here, but I can't claim any of 2019's ruminations rise to the level of strong literary myths. The series' strongest trope relates to Hyakkimaru trying to retain his moral nature despite all the carnage he must wreak to regain his physical humanity. I can't say that these ethical moments ascended to a level I would call "mythic," just as the villainies of human beings are also fairly pedestrian. Still, the final episode of 2019 does give Dororo and Hyakkimaru a better closure than did the original Tezuka work. 

 

IRIA: ZEIRAM- THE ANIMATION (1994)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

I wrote in my review of the two ZEIRAM films that while I originally got some mild enjoyment out of them, they didn't hold up well to a repeated viewing. I don't remember if I had looked at this six-episode OVA series-- released the same year as the sequel-- but it's on the same level of unremarkableness.

IRIA is a prequel to both films, dealing with the early history of the titular female bounty hunter. In her space-opera world, she travels from world to world, apprenticed to her more experienced senior Gren. She calls him "brother" at times, but one line of dialogue suggests that their relationship may be adoptive. Iria is shown to be impulsive but determined in her quest to graduate to the ranks of fully professional bounty hunters, and though the OVA series doesn't take much advantage of its animated status, she's seen to be capable in hand-to-hand combat and with a ray-gun.

In addition to Gren, Iria also associates with a bounty-dispatcher named Bob. In the live-action films, he's seen only as a sentient computer; here he's shown to have been an organic life-form, killed by the vicious alien conqueror Zeiram and then transferred to a computer bank. A couple of other support-characters appear to help Iria in her endeavors, but they're not especially memorable.

Since the original ZEIRAM has Iria and Bob waiting on Earth for the advent of the monstrous alien, there's no absolute reason that the prequel needs to show that Iria encountered Zeiram-- or at least one of his species-- on a previous occasion. Possibly the creators thought that they needed both Iria and Zeiram in order to cross-pollinate with ZEIRAM 2. But since the live-action films didn't make me a fan of this irritable ET, I would have preferred seeing Iria test herself against some other opponent.

Even for just six episodes, IRIA is a lot lighter on characterization than the majority of SF-anime, and so proves of no more than modest entertainment value.

FIREBIRD 2015 A.D. (1981)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

"Poor little roadrunner, never bothers anyone,

"Just runnin' down the road's his idea of havin' fun!"

--TV's "Roadrunner Song"

I was surprised to find out that some "50 worst films" doc-- though not one associated with the infamous Medved books-- named FIREBIRD as one of its choices. It's a mediocre movie, but it's not without some decent ideas.

I don't know if it's just a coincidence that this Canadian production appeared two years after MAD MAX, which shared with FIREBIRD the idea that civilization had broken down for some reason, even though people with wild art-cars still found enough fuel to race around the wilderness. But where the loss of resources is just tossed off in MAD MAX, FIREBIRD-- the only well-known work of director David Robertson-- focuses on the politics of shortage. 

In 2015, an energy crisis has come round again, and the government has restricted public consumption of gasoline, and thus the usage of private vehicles. There's no clue as to how this has affected the big cities, because all of the action takes place out in what I assume is supposed to be the American Southwest. In those remote lands, adventurous types known as "Burners" still cobble together their own cars, manufacture their own fuel, and race one another for the pure joy of racing. They defy the law in part because they don't believe that the shortage is real; that the fuel crisis is manufactured so that elites can stay in power.

The Burners are continually menaced by the officers of the DVC, the Department of Vehicle Control. Here they're led by a commander named McVain (Doug McClure), but the officers are something of a law to themselves out in the wilds. The DVC's most elusive opponent is a man known only as Red (Darren McGavin), who drives a souped-up Pontiac Firebird. Red usually just avoids fighting with these "traffic cops" while indulging in his races with other Burners.

Two variables develop. Dolan, one of the DVC officers, goes around the bend after some unspecified assault by rednecks. He starts painting himself like an American Indian, whether he is one or not, and starts killing Burners. McVain doesn't want killings, but he's too weak to oppose his fanatical subordinate.  

The other variable is that Red's estranged son Cam leaves his former home with his mother and comes to stay at Red's garage. The young man slowly warms to his father's lawbreaking way of life, particularly when Cam encounters the nubile daughter of another Burner. The romantic interludes between Cam and the spirited Jill, an experienced driver and gearhead like her dad, are the film's highlight.

The variables collide with Dolan and his men track down Cam and Jill while the two are beginning to get friendly, beating down Cam and kidnapping Jill. This leads to a climactic confrontation in which Red and his fellow Burners raid the DVC compound to exact justice.

FIREBIRD's big problem is that the race scenes are just OK; they communicate the excitement of racing but are not really exciting themselves, least of all in the big climax. McGavin and McClure might have improved things by making their characters more intense oppositions of "scofflaw" and "cop," but they usually seem pretty laid-back at the worst of times. The film's no competition for George Miller in the car-racing sweepstakes-- but then, most of the MAD MAX imitators aren't, either. At least FIREBIRD has some identity of its own, however minor.