Pornokitsch

Let's be clear, Batman vs Superman is not good.

It is too long, too ponderous and takes itself way too seriously. It has mediocre acting, macho ham-philosophy, a bad score and confusing action sequences. It is packed with 'easter eggs' that are largely meaningless, espouses terrible politics, devotes itself to building its own mythology, and is rife with visual decision-making that is, at best, suspect.

Which is to say, it is no worse than many, many other superhero movies. 

For controversy's sake, here are 25 recent-ish superhero films from the last 20 years that are just as bad - if not worse - than Batman vs Superman:

Some recent reads, old and new, fantasy and crime. Including Lin Carter's Discoveries in Fantasy, Day Keene's Dead Dolls Don't Talk, Brooke Magnanti's The Turning Tide, David Benioff's City of Thieves and the first two volumes of Thieves' World.

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Lin Carter's Discoveries in Fantasy (1974)

The Ballantine Adult Fantasy series - edited by Carter - is a pretty amazing body of work. Easily the closest thing I've seen to a 'Penguin Classics for fantasy'. The complete list is here, including the 'pre-cursors' and 'leftovers', and it includes an impressive combination of books now recognised as classic-classics as well as some curious unknowns. Carter clearly had delightfully far-reaching taste, and it is delightful to see authors like Cabell rubbing shoulders with the Deryni books and even Lovecraftian pastiche. 

That said, Discoveries is a pretty weak entry into the 'canon' (although one with an AMAZING cover, I mean, wow). It reads more like a sampler or a sales brochure than a holistic collection in its own right.

Carter's gathered short stories by Ernest Bramah, Donald Corley, Richard Garnett and Eden Phillpotts, and loosely united them with the twin themes of 'these guys should be more popular' and 'I'm going to be publishing them before long!'. Carter's introductions are similarly cursory, possibly because he was expecting to write more when he published the authors properly. Sadly, only Bramah made it into print before the series was canned.

From Photoplay (September 1981):

At last. At long last. A movie that brings back all those so-called old-fashioned values that made the cinema what it was but somehow got lost in the deluge of depressing pretentious rubbish that helped to close down cinemas. 

Raiders of the Lost Ark, for me, at least, brings back a Lost Art. The art of fun, escapism and pure hokum.

I never thought I'd see a film like this one again....

The Verdict:

If you enjoy your movies with lavish doses of terrifying thrills then this is what you've been waiting for. Raiders is a marvellous adventure romp reminiscent of those wonderful cliff-hanging serials served up as Saturday  morning pictures for kids. There's also plenty of action for the mums and dads to enjoy as well. Harrison Ford and Karen Allen will have you constantly on the edge of your seats, almost gasping for breath at the speed with which they have to cope with constant dangers. 

The effects, the sets, everything is stunningly put together. Ford emerges as a movie matinee of old, with a touch of the Errol Flynn's as he swaggers around complete with a bullwhip as his only weapon.

From the film's incredible exciting start set in an unbelievably trap-infested South American jungle - a sort of cheat death hurdle race - to its startling and quite horrifying climax, Raiders is an absolute cinematic joy.

The team of director Steven Spielberg (Jaws; Close Encounters of the Third Kind) and producer George Lucas (Star Wars; The Empire Strikes Back) pack their movie with a mighty punch. John Williams' music score underlines the action quite superbly.

Never a dull moment...

Another random famous person listicle, sorry! But this is an interesting list - Quentin Tarantino's twenty favourite Spaghetti Westerns. And the sort of thing that will keep Stark busy:

1. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)
2. For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965)
3. Django (Sergio Corbucci, 1966)
4. The Mercenary (Sergio Corbucci, 1966)
5. Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)
6. A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964)
7. Day of Anger (Tonino Valerii, 1967)
8. Death Rides a Horse (Giulio Petroni, 1967)
9. Navajo Joe (Sergio Corbucci, 1966)
10. The Return of Ringo (Duccio Tessar, 1965)
11. The Big Gundown (Sergio Sollima, 1966)
12. A Pistol for Ringo (Duccio Tessari, 1965)
13. The Dirty Outlaws (Franco Rossetti, 1967)
14. The Great Silence (Sergio Corbucci, 1968)
15. The Grand Duel (Giancarlo Santi, 1972)
16. Shoot the Living, Pray for the Dead (Giuseppe Vari, 1971)
17. Tepepa (Giulio Petroni, 1968)
18. The Ugly Ones (Eugenio Martin, 1966)
19. Viva Django! (Ferdinando Baldi, 1967)
20. Machine Gun Killers (Paolo Bianchini, 1968)

The playlist above contains the trailers for all 20. This comes via Open Culture, who picked it up via The Spaghetti Western Database (which doesn't seem to exist any more?). Open Culture have been stalking Tarantino's faves for some time, and have a recent post that does compares Tarantino's 2002 and 2012 'top 12' lists...

Can a superhero ever really stop being a superhero? Can they quit, or retire, or even escape the heavy burden of expectation and difference for a while? That question is maybe the most important one in the entire Extrahuman Union series.

The question of whether a superhero can quit is a complicated one. The reason is that there’s a piece of being a superhero that’s all about what you do, and another piece that’s about what you are.

Those two pieces seem very different at first, but maybe they’re more similar than we think.

When we first meet the character of Broken in the book that bears her name, she’s alone on the street. She’s no longer in the Extrahuman Union, which is less a voluntary organization of superheroes like the Avengers or the Justice League, and more a convenient prison to stash superpowered humans in so they won’t cause any trouble. And she didn’t just leave: she escaped.

"The Revenge of India" first aired August 3, 1946, on the series Lights Out.

Thoughts Before Listening

Not going to lie, the minute I saw this I was like OH MY GOD YOU HAVE TO. I am also scared and apprehensive that I, as an alleged Indian, will not be offended by this in the right way. I am also scared and apprehensive that by being offended I will be racist to white people in general so I am sorry for that in advance and also #notallwhitepeople and some of my best friends are white.

So, what do you do if you're a famously an infamously sexy vampire heroine with a werewolf boyfriend and a snooty butler looking to make a fresh start?You move to Los Angeles, rent an enormous gothic mansion (via an ad on CraigsList) and get yourself a whole new wardrobe.

That's the starting point for a new series of Vampirella, and the biggest change is the most obvious: the classic Trina Robbins-designed costume - famous from the walls of seedy comic shops the world over - is gone. As our heroine gets settled in to her new life and deals with unexpected intruders and internet infamy we also begin to discover a monstrous threat looming over a group of unsuspecting movie extras. The plot, as they say, thickens...

And on the subject of vampires in comics, we have a (lengthy) 3&1 segment on that very subject...

From A Month of Saturdays, a collection of essays from Dorothy Parker's New Yorker column (signed off as "Constant Reader", a ruse that fooled no one):

[Ernest Hemingway's] "The Killers," which seems to me one of the four great American short stories. (All you have to do is drop the nearest hat, and I'll tell you what I think the others are. They are Wilbur Daniel Steele's "Blue Murder," Sherwood Anderson's "I'm a Fool," and Ring Lardner's "Some Like Them Cold").

Other works that Parker praises include Sherwood Anderson's "Another Wife", Anne Parrish's All Kneeling and A Pocketful of Posies*, Max Beerbohm's Seven Men, Isadora Duncan's My Life, Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters, Ring Lardner's Round Up, Hemingway's Men Without Women, Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon  (also The Glass Key, in a somewhat backhanded way) and H.S. Ede's Savage Messiah.

This may seem like an exhaustive list, but it is far outnumbered by a (very diverse) list of books she doesn't like - including those by Upton Sinclair, A.A. Milne, Theodore Dreiser, Ford Madox Ford (reluctantly), Eleanor Glyn (hilariously), and a host of autobiographies, anthologies and even non-fictional works.

And, in the spirit of reciprocity, A Month of Saturdays is introduced by Lillian Hellman, who recommends "Big Blonde" as one of Parker's best.

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*Anne Parrish has two best-sellers, three Newbery finalists and praise from Parker. Also... she's completely out of print and impossible to find. But a self-published author with the same name is all over Amazon. 2016 is weird.

Jamie's back!

One of the ways in which comics can be defined is as a combining of words and pictures in order to form a narrative. But what happens when the words are taken away?

The following five comics are all ‘silent’, by which I mean without word balloons, narration or thought bubbles (sound effects are still allowed). Often used in tales where dislocation or surrealism are key elements, wordless comics can also focus on playing on strong emotional reactions as there’s one less thing intellectually separating the reader and the characters. With silent comics, the reader’s involvement becomes deeper and more active, as you have to bring so much more to putting together a story without the guiding hand that words provide.

If you’re looking for a ‘reading’ experience that’s a bit out of the ordinary and will flex parts of your brain you didn’t know you had - here are five examples of amazing silent comics.

This is a lovely idea - a service that puts books directly into kids' hands - at barbershops. You can back them here:

"One day, I was getting a haircut at the barbershop across the street from my school," Irby said. "One of my first-graders came inside, and he plopped down on the couch. He was staring out the window, looking bored. As I watched this all unfold, I was thinking to myself, 'he should really be practicing his reading right now.'"

Imagine though: Barbershops, doctors and dentists offices, DMV waiting rooms, post offices - everywhere that people (especially kids and parents) might be stuck... what if there was a sort of 'big box' of children's books that could be ordered for any one of those at cost (or less)? Including, I dunno, comics, The Phoenix, a couple classics, etc. Do these exist? If so, please share.