TRUDGE MATCH

In theaters this weekend:

The Long Walk--In the late '70s and early '80s, the young and already prolific Stephen King, not wishing to glut the market with his name, published five pungently entertaining novels under the pseudonym "Richard Bachman." Only one of them, Thinner (1984), was a supernatural horror story; two of them were dystopian tales which seem disturbingly prescient in their anticipation of competitive "reality TV." One of these, The Running Man (1982), was filmed in 1987, and a remake is scheduled for release this November. The other, The Long Walk (1979), opens this weekend.

This harsh, bitter film looks like a period piece, set the '70s (it was filmed in Manitoba). But it's an alternative version of the '70s, in a shabby, impoverished America under the rule of "The Major" (Mark Hamill) a gravel-voiced and rather seedy-looking military dictator. It's unclear whether The Major is the ultimate power or just a regional tinpot, but he's the lord of the title competition, an odious annual death sport.

The event is simple: a cross-country walk down a rural road for young men--boys, really--accompanied by soldiers in vehicles. Participants must maintain a speed of three miles per hour; if they fall below this pace, they are given a series of warnings, and if they fail to keep moving after the third and final warning, they are shot dead. If they step off the course, they are shot without warning. Last man still walking wins a huge monetary prize, and the granting of an extravagant wish.

Our focus is on Ray (a fine everyman turn by Cooper Hoffman), a local favorite who gets dropped off by his anguished Mom (Judy Greer) like he's going to play high school football. Director Francis Lawrence, working from a generally faithful adaptation by JT Mollner, then keeps the movie on the literal straight and narrow; except for a very quick flashback or two, it's just Ray and his competitors, walking and talking, and occasionally getting their brains graphically blown out (we're also, in case you're wondering, shown how they manage their other bodily needs on the hoof).

Along the way, Ray bonds with Peter (David Jonsson, terrific here as he was as the guileless robot in Alien: Romulus) and they realize that they're true friends, not just allies of convenience. This is the emotional core of the film, and the intractable, ambiguous heart of its drama. The book, written in the shadow of the Vietnam war and its hideous squandering of young men, packed a punch; but it's possible the movie, despite its inevitable monotony and the morbid self-pity common to "young adult" fiction, is even more unsettling and troubling. The excellence and value of this ensemble cast adds to the weight of seeing the walkers senselessly slaughtered.

Most of the boys are supportive and encouraging of each other, despite the ultimate disadvantage of such behavior in the vile, survival-of-the-fittest nature of the competition. And even after years of Big Brother and Survivor providing non-lethal examples to the contrary, somehow I found this weird and generous-hearted esprit de corps believable, and touching. It's what makes The Long Walk not just horrific but genuinely tragic.

DISHING

The January issue of Phoenix Magazine...

...features this year's picks for "The 101 Best Dishes in the Valley." Your Humble Narrator is proud to have been one of the authors; see if you can guess my six contributions.

Below, for anyone who might remotely care, is the list of books I finished over this past year. It's an embarrassingly short list this time--not even a book a month!--and for a rather embarrassing reason: I found that my maturity level, already questionable, regressed this year, and I started devouring old comic books to a degree that cut into more substantive reading (I also lost most of a month due to an illness that left me unable to focus on reading, including a weeklong hospital stay in isolation with no reading material).

Still, there were some rich experiences; I finally got around to Babbitt, for instance, having come across an old Signet Classics copy in the take-a-book-leave-a-book shelf at a Rita's Italian Ice joint. What an extraordinary work, and later I came across a fascinating detail about the book's influence. Apparently J.R.R. Tolkien, of all freaking people, was among its admirers; he claimed that the word "Hobbit" derived from "Babbitt" because "Babbitt has the same bourgeois smugness that hobbits do. His world is the same limited place." 

Anyway, here's my limited reading list:

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

1922 by Stephen King

The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

The Son of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell

Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

The Gnomobile by Upton Sinclair

Calendar of Crime by Ellery Queen

Later by Stephen King

BIG FAT CARRIE DEAL

Happy Friday everybody! Check out Phoenix Magazine online for my review of Carrie: The Musical at Brelby Theatre Company in Glendale...

...and my "Friday Flicks" preview of Sedona Film Festival.

Have a great weekend!

IT'S JUST THE NEWNESS OF YEAR

Happy New Year everybody! Check out my Top Ten Movies for 2019.

Also, Happy January! Check out the January issue of Phoenix Magazine...

...for the Top 100 Restaurants in the Valley of the Sun, several of them selected by Your Humble Narrator.

Also, here's the list of books (embarrassingly short this year!) I read in 2019 (as always, it excludes short stories, articles, comic books, poems, blog posts, movie credits, rejection slips, banners towed by airplanes, fine print, etc):

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life by Richard Russo

The Alteration by Kingsley Amis

 

Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Prelude to Space by Arthur C. Clarke

Joyland by Stephen King

Chances Are by Richard Russo

 
The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

Lady, Be Bad by Brett Halliday

 
The Hawkline Monster by Richard Brautigan

SYSTEM OF A CLOWN

Happy Friday everybody! Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, online at Phoenix Magazine, with reviews of the harrowing documentary One Child Nation...

...the harrowing political thriller Official Secrets...

and It Chapter Two...

Also from the September issue of Phoenix Magazine...

...check out my "Four Corners" column on tasty eats for fall, whenever that longed-for season decides to show up here in the Valley; September is clearly too optimistic...

Have a great weekend!

TOME AFTER TOME

One more bit of 2018 business: As in years previous, Your Humble Narrator kept a list of the books I read this past year. So, for whoever might, for whatever earthly reason, be remotely interested, here it is:

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

How Town by Michael Nava

Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman

Chike and the River by Chinua Achebe

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

The Happy Man by Eric C. Higgs

Two by John D. MacDonald

Dead Ringer by Arthur Lyons

Tales of French Love and Passion by Guy de Maupassant

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

Mr. Bass’s Planetoid by Eleanor Cameron

The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You! by Harry Harrison

The Man Who Spoke Snakish by Andrus Kivirahk

The President is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson

Sargasso of Space by Andre Norton

Dirty Work by Gabriel Weston

So Move the Body by Carter Brown

The Master by Carter Brown

The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up by Liao Yiwu

The Great Los Angeles Fire by Edward Stewart

Planet of Judgment by Joe Haldeman

Get Carter (aka Jack’s Return Home) by Ted Lewis

Elevation by Stephen King

The Informer by Liam O’Flaherty

End of Watch by Stephen King

Mistrustful as I am of contemporary literature, I was startled to notice that the three books I found most mind-blowing this year, The Three-Body Problem, The Man Who Spoke Snakish and The Corpse Walker, were all of 21st-Century vintage. I was also fascinated by Stephen King's Elevation. It's one of his odder tales, a strangely conceptual variation on The Incredible Shrinking Man; it's dedicated to the memory of Richard Matheson and the hero's name is Scott Carey. King calls it a novel, and for most authors it would be, though at 146 pages it seems like flash fiction by King standards.

I greatly enjoyed, though I'm not sure it comes together exactly the way King wants it to, and it has an almost Capra-esque sentimentality to it. But it has great heart, and there are passages that are thrilling, in particular a long chapter about a footrace; an effortless, economical tour de force.

As usual, this list does not include individual articles, reviews, essays, interviews, comic books, blogs, poems, fortune cookies, Facebook posts, warning labels, bathroom walls, etc. etc. that I read last year. Or very short books; I was, for instance, given Whose Boat is This Boat? (by [Our Current President], "by Accident")...

 
...as a gift, read it, enjoyed it, and greatly appreciated that proceeds from its sale benefit hurricane victims. But I didn't list it, in no small part because I didn't wish to further disseminate the "author's" name.

DON'T FEED THE TROLL

Just because Comet TV is showing the film Saturday night, as part of a festival of cat-oriented scary flicks...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...this week's honoree is the coxcombed little troll from the third story in Cat's Eye...

...the 1985 movie anthology of Stephen King tales. It plans to suck the breath out of the young Drew Barrymore, but her valiant cat has other ideas...

A CLOWN WITHOUT PITY

Opening this weekend:

It—That short title serves one of Stephen King’s longest and most ambitious horror novels. It’s about a group of pre-teen misfits who take on a fear-eating entity that lives in the sewers beneath Derry, their small town in Maine. This being appears to Its victims in the form of whatever scares them most—movie monsters, manifestations of phobias—but seems to default to the guise of a circus clown.

The novel runs to well over a thousand pages. I read it and loved it when it first came out in 1986, and hadn’t read it since, but the names, and nicknames, of the characters came back to me easily: “Stuttering Bill” Denbrough, the alpha male of the “Loser’s Club”—bereaved and enraged over the loss of his brother George—and Bill’s outcast pals, sensitive obese kid Ben “Haystack” Hanscom, bespectacled wiseass Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier, sickly kid Eddie Kaspbrak, Jewish kid Stan Uris, black kid Mike Hanlon, and the sole girl, Beverly Marsh, who has a (false) bad reputation. And of course, the nightmare clown Itself: Pennywise.

The book was loaded with King’s perennial themes: Childhood loss and mortality and alienation from adults, friendship as its balm, small-town life with its bullies and bigotries and sinister secrets from which a supernatural menace seems almost like a logical extension. The book is loaded, period—King, never one for austerity, seemed in that one to have allowed himself to indulge in every digression and tangent that occurred to him, and to have cut nothing out, in an attempt at a broad-canvas, shaggy-dog magnum opus.

As a result, King’s It is a bit of a mess—exasperatingly dilatory, full of ideas that don’t quite come off, and, because of the build-up given to the title character as the Ultimate Horror, inevitably a little anticlimactic. Even granting all this, however, it’s wonderful, one of his warmest and most engaging tales, and I think this has more to do with its depiction of adolescent camaraderie than with its ghoulish side.

There was a TV miniseries adaptation in 1990 that I remember as fairly well-done. Now comes this feature version which, though it runs over two hours, is still obviously a drastic compression of the story. To begin with, the book was a two-tiered narrative, alternating scenes of the Loser’s Club as kids with their reunion in Derry as adults, 27 years later. The film, directed by the Argentine Andy Muschietti from a script by Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman, gives us only the kids’ story, presumably saving the adult side for a sequel.

The cultural references have also been readjusted. With the period pushed forward—the kids’ story now takes place in the ‘80s, when the adult story takes place in the novel—Pennywise no longer appears to his victims in Boomer-era shapes like the Wolf Man or the Creature of the Black Lagoon.

On the downside: Speaking as a confirmed wimp, I must say that I didn’t find this It very scary. There’s a scene or two—especially one involving a slide projector—with some chill factor, but overall the evil clown archetype, which King helped to develop with Pennywise, may have slipped over into cliché. I found Bill Skarsgard, who plays the role, skin-crawlingly repellent from our first glimpse of It—It’s evil bearing is impressive, but I saw no sense of wit or wonder that could draw a child in initially.

This may simply be because the use of the traditional clown by the horror genre over the last few decades has ended the era of Bozo and Clarabell. It may be that Ronald MacDonald is the last iconic old-school clown that can still unambiguously delight children—though the clock may be running for Ronald—and that even the Demon Clown is now overfamiliar.

On the upside: It is still quite entertaining, in the manner of an ‘80s-style youth adventure flick like The Goonies or Stand By Me or The Lost Boys. The young actors here are mostly first-rate, with charm and snappy comic timing, and Muschietti helps them to generate an ensemble hum in their group scenes. It’s oddly disorienting, in this virtual age, to see kids actually doing things in a movie—riding bikes, swimming, exploring—but it’s rather refreshing.

And, times being what they are, I doubt I’ll be the only person unable to resist a political reading of this It: A kid with a disability, a smartass kid, a fat kid, a Jewish kid, a black kid, a kid with health problems and a slut-shamed girl join forces against a clown who gains power from fear, and who grows stronger still when It’s able to divide them. Now more than ever, Losers: Unite Against The Clown!

CLOWN TO THE WIRE

With the new feature version of Stephen King's It opening tomorrow...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...our honoree is the towering "Jojo the Klownzilla..."

...from the 1988 Chiodo Brothers favorite Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

TOBE OR NOT TOBE

RIP to the brilliant Tobe Hooper, passed on at 74. Hooper directed 1974's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, one of the most harrowing of all horror movies. It was one of several films from around those years that helped to launch a new era of hardcore, high-intensity horror that I don't much care for or even entirely approve of, but the ugliness to which it led does not take away in the least from Hooper's cinematic skill, his pitch-black wit, even a certain grotesque poetry that comes through in that classic.

In Hooper's honor...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...this week let's acknowledge Barlow...

...the Nosferatu-esque vampire played by the ever-cadaverous Reggie Nalder in Hooper's TV-movie adaptation of Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot.

INALIENABLE WRIGHTSON

RIP to a true master of the macabre: the great horror and fantasy artist Berni Wrightson has passed on, at 68. Among many achievements, Wrightson is known for his superb illustrated edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1983) and as the creator (with writer Len Wein) of the DC Comics hero-monster Swamp Thing in 1972 (a character later brilliantly expanded upon by my fellow Erie-ite and pal John Totleben, in collaboration with Stephen Bissette and Alan Moore).

Obviously…

Monster-of-the-Week: …a Wrightson creation is in order, so how about…

…the lycanthrope from Cycle of the Werewolf, the Wrightson-illustrated Stephen King tale from 1983.

VOLUMES, VOLUMES, VOLUMES...

Here, so that you’ll have some idea of who to blame for my warped worldview, is my annual list of the books that kept my lips moving this past year (excluding as usual magazines and newspapers, individual shorts stories, essays, poems, blogs, etc.):

  Prehysterical Pogo (In Pandemonia) by Walt Kelly

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King

Blood and Kisses (Vampire Love Book 1) by J.T. Blackfriars

I Must Say: My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend by Martin Short

Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film by Patton Oswalt

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy

The Realms of Gold by Margaret Drabble

The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling 

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

The Runaway Robot by Lester Del Rey

Food: A Love Story by Jim Gaffigan 

Feral by Berton Roueché

Dr. Who and the Genesis of the Daleks by Terrance Dicks

 Clans of the Alphane Moon by Philip K. Dick

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman

The Martian by Andy Weir

The Gods Hate Kansas by Joseph Millard

A Feast of Freedom by Leonard Wibberly

  

Ratman’s Notebooks by Stephen Gilbert

That last selection was a real surprise. It’s the Irish novel on which the 1971 American film Willard and its 2003 remake were based. I had long been curious about it, but I wasn’t expecting it to be a real work of literature. It’s whimsical, witty and poignant, and the rats trained by the (unnamed) narrator of the title are vividly characterized. Both movie versions are pretty pedestrian by comparison.

Anyway… 

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week the nod goes to the tentacled horror from the wonderful cover art of another book on this list, Joseph Millard’s vintage sci-fi tale The Gods Hate Kansas:

Unexpectedly, this picture isn’t a cheat, or at least not too much of a cheat—no such attack on the spaceship takes place, but there are, at least, creatures answering this description in the tale. Better yet, it turns out [spoiler alert!] that they aren’t bad sorts, once you get to know them.

DIGITAL WATCH

My pal Stan sent me these appetizing studies of a finger injury he received last week while working with a lopper on the bushes outside his house.

So…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s acknowledge the title character from Stephen King’s 1990 short story “The Moving Finger.” Lots of horror writers and filmmakers have written about monstrous hands, but it took King to get it down to a finger.

It was also adapted for television for the series Monsters in 1991; you can watch it here.

HOLLY GODARKLY

Happy Valentine’s Day this Saturday everybody!

In observance of the day…

Monster-of-the-Week: …our choice this week is Holly, the vampiric central character of Blood and Kisses (Vampire Love Book 1) by J.T. Blackfriars. Available on Kindle, this short e-book—it’s Part One of a promised series—was recommended to me by my pal Barry, who has described it as “Perhaps the best vampire tale since ‘Salem’s Lot.”

Perhaps it is. I confess I dragged my feet a little on the recommendation—the vampire chick-lit genre isn’t a great favorite of mine—but when I finally dug into it, I found it a blast. Holly, who lives right here in a convincingly-depicted Phoenix, hides in plain sight, telling anyone who asks that she’s a vampire, and everyone accepts it, assuming that she’s into role playing. She sleeps in a coffin, works at a convenience store and has friends with benefits, the benefits on her end including both sex and blood donation.

Blackfrairs does a wonderful job of playing by the very traditional vampire rules. Holly has to be invited into a home, said invitation can be effectively revoked, she has to avoid sunlight and she can even shape-shift into a bat (though Blackfriars, like other authors and filmmakers, declines to explain what happens to her clothes during these transformations).

What makes it a Valentine’s choice, you ask? Simple—in the course of the story Holly falls in love, and her choice is about as star-crossed as a lover could get…

But I won’t spoil it. Suffice to say that I’m in fan-girl tizzy, on the edge of my seat for the next installment. At $2.99, the book is a real find.

HORNIER THAN THOU

Playing this week at Filmbar Phoenix:

Horns—Taken for granted as guilty in the murder of his adored girlfriend, young Ig Perrish wakes up one morning to find a pair of the title appendages growing out of his forehead. They have, in addition to a rather elegant, backward-curving look, a startling effect on the people Ig encounters around the Pacific Northwest lumber town where he lives, and is seen as a pariah—without invitation, they disclose to him their baser inner thoughts.

This is the set-up for this film version of the 2010 novel by Joe Hill (the son, as he is probably sick of reviewers pointing out, of Stephen King), directed by Alexandre Aja from a script by Keith Bunin. Ig (Daniel Radcliffe) decides to use his newfound ability to elicit candor to figure out who really killed his beloved. The killer isn’t that difficult to guess—I know this because I correctly guessed who it was—but there are nonetheless intriguing layers to the mystery, and the central premise, Ig’s plight and his response to it, is fascinating and amusingly handled.

The climax is a disappointingly standard gory grapple, and though he’s sympathetic as usual, Radcliffe’s performance here doesn’t get very far past haunted earnestness. But the film is still witty and well worth seeing.

RIP to the brilliant Mike Nichols, passed on suddenly this week at 83. Nichols is remembered for his early-‘60s sketch-comedy partnership with Elaine May, but he amassed a really diverse and lively collection of credits as a movie director, starting spectacularly with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate and Catch-22 and Carnal Knowledge, through ‘80s notables like Silkwood and Working Girl, through enjoyable later works like Primary Colors and The Birdcage and his underrated swansong Charlie Wilson’s War. For all his bright, snappy wit, he tended to serve the material rather than impose his personality on it, and while not all of his movies were great or even good, a bunch of them will endure.