Review by Michaele Jordan: We’ll start with the credits, as all movies do (although the credits in this movie were so tiny, I could barely read them on a good-sized TV set). 3,000 Years of Longing was directed by George Miller, who also wrote the screenplay, together with Augusta Gore. They based it on “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” by A. S. Byatt. It premiered at the 75th Cannes Film Festival on May 20, 2022, where it received a six-minute standing ovation. What? You’ve never heard of a movie getting a standing ovation? Neither had I.
It starts with Alithea (Tilda Swinton) on her way to a conference in Istanbul, saying she’s happy. Even when she is accosted – twice – by persons who might be more supernatural emissaries than strictly human, she’s happy. After all, she’s independent – both emotionally and financially – and engaged in work she loves, the study of stories. Although she is usually quick to pick up on such details, she does not notice that she is, herself, launching into a classic fairy tale.
Visiting a curio shop she finds a bottle. It’s a pretty thing with blue stripes curling up around the sides. It looks like a bud vase, except for the stopper. We know it’s important, because the film zeroes in on it so intently, but it looks nothing at like the traditional brass lamp from the fairy tales. Perhaps it’s a red herring?
But, no, it’s THE bottle, as Alithea learns when she tries to wash it. Enormous plumes of black and red smoke snake around the bathroom. We know it’s the djinn, of course, but he’s so large that only small parts of him are visible in any given frame. It’s some while before we are able to confirm that the part is, as advertised, played by Idris Elba. (He gets smaller later on. As he says, “I try to fit in.”) [Beware spoilers from here on.]
He makes her the usual offer – three wishes – followed by the usual conditons – don’t wish for more wishes, etc. – but with one extra condition: the wish must be your heart’s desire. And there’s the rub. She doesn’t have a heart’s desire. She’s already happy. This dismays him hugely; he begs her to reconsider. Surely everybody wants something. But she can’t think of a thing, and she doesn’t understand whey he’s so upset. Why doesn’t he just go back to Djinn land and let her get on with her storytelling studies?
But he can’t. He needs her to want something. He can’t be free until she makes her wishes. He’s been imprisoned for 3,000 years, and is still waiting to grant somebody three wishes.
He started out a free djinn, visiting his half-djinn cousin the queen of Sheba, when Solomon came calling. Solomon did not like having a third wheel around. He stuck him in a brass lamp and told a bird to fling the lamp into the Red Sea.
Aamito Lagum as Sheba
He stayed in the sea a long time. He has, in fact, spent a lot more time in his lamp than out in the world. Eventually the lamp washed ashore, and was found by a palace concubine. She hid the magic lamp under a flagstone for safe keeping, and wished for love, which turned out be a bad idea. Her second wish was an even worse idea. When the palace politics got bloody, the djinn begged her to use her third wish to save herself. But she was too busy screaming. So then she was dead and in the absence of a third wish the djinn was back in the lamp.
Sultan Murad IV
He wanders (invisibly) around the palace for a century, trying to nudge several generations into looking under that flagstone. He is almost discovered by a little boy who grows up to become Sultan Murad IV. (In case you are a little weak on the details of 17th century Middle Eastern politics, Murad was a genuine historic personage, and not – so far as we remember today – unlike his portrayal here.) Little Murad was easily distracted by booze and bloodshed.
His kid brother Ibrahim also grew up to become sultan, and a remarkably bad one, at that. His main interest in life was the acquisition of fat concubines, and a variety of sexual stimulants necessary for maintaining the lifestyle. Ibrahim did not find the lamp under the flagstone, but Sugar Lump, one of his favorites, did. Unfortunately, she was so terrified by the giant and the smoke and all that she wished him back in his bottle at the bottom of the sea.
Sultan Ibrahim
Two hundred years crawl by before the Djinn comes into the possession of Zefir, the bored, lonely third wife of a merchant. Her first wish – and it is truly her heart’s desire – is for knowledge. Her second wish is for more knowledge.The Djinn is charmed, and falls in love. He showers her with books, and helps her build scientic apparatus. He encourages her to put off that third wish, so he can linger. He shows her things that normally only djinn can see.
But the more she learns, the more trapped she feels in her tiny world. She starts to resent him, even to blame him – as if, because he showed her the problem, he caused it. In a desperate attempt to reassure her, he creates a lovely little bottle (we’ve been wondering how he got from the lamp to the bottle) and retreats into it to prove he is not controlling her, to show her that she is in control of him. It works too well. She wishes she could forget she ever met him.
You must be wondering if I’m going to tell you the whole plot, committing spoiler after spoiler along the way. But I haven’t actually told you anything. Just what you already knew from the beginning: that there’s a djinn in the bottle, that djinns grant wishes, and that wishes are invariably dangerous. I promise these stories will still be fresh for you when you see them.
The movie is not about these intervening stories. They are just there because that’s how fairy tales always go. The movie is about how Alithea and the Djinn come together over these stories, about how stories bind humans (or even non-humans) together, and about how we must build on the stories we already know tbefore we can reach for anything new. The movie is about how we wish and what we wish for, and why so often that doesn’t work.
It’s also about how we take in more with our eyes than we can tell in any story. The visuals in this movie are amazing. (I meant to dazzle you with photos, but there are surprising few publicity stills out there available for common use.) It’s not gorgeous because of special effects, although there are those, but because of the focus on how much beauty is already out there, and how little it changes our minds. There’s a lot of action within the intervening tales, but the action doesn’t change anything either. But there is a new twist to the ending – not a change, just a different reflection on the unchanging bedrock of fairy tales. I found this movie to be very close to perfect.
Step right up ladies and gentlemen, and for the price of one thin dime, see the living, breathing human cyclops, born just the way you see him, like Polyphemus of old!
The eye of the cyclops; the image of the single, symmetrical, central eye, has pervaded popular culture since ancient times. Accounts of one-eyed people stretch from ancient myths and legends to modern fantasy fiction. Cyclopes (plural) have been a staple of science fiction and horror movies, comic books and cartoons, generally used as a metaphor for the strange, alien, and often, dangerous. On the light-hearted side, though, the live-action opening sequence of the syndicated TV series Monsters, (1988-1991) features a cyclopic mother and daughter watching their TV set, and cyclopes appear in such animated cartoons as Futurama (1999-2003), Monsters, Inc. (2001), and Minions (2015). The depictions are usually anatomically incorrect, with a large central eye in the forehead above the nose, or even as a single disembodied eye, as in Tolkien’s depiction of Sauron. Aside from myths, legends and fiction, there have even been reports in modern times of alleged human cyclopes living well past infancy, as we shall see.
One of the earliest examples is the single-eyed giant, Polyphemus, who threatens Odysseus in The Odyssey and its various retellings. Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer, (c 700 BCE) wrote of three cyclopic brothers who fashioned thunderbolts for Zeus.
It has been hypothesized that fossilized mammoth skulls, with a large nasal opening that resembles a large central eye socket, were, in part, an inspiration for these myths.
The Greek historian Herodotus (484-425 BCE) mentions a cyclopic race, called the Arimaspi, in northern Scythia, which was north of Iran and would correspond to parts of Russia and Ukraine today.
Herodotus recounts how the one-eyed Arimaspi were at war with the griffins, who guarded the gold of the region. He obtained the tale from a poem by the semi-legendary Greek poet Aristeas (circa 700 BCE), which only survives today as a few short fragments. Aristeas allegedly traveled north to the Issedones and was told by the people there that yet further north were the Arimaspi, the gold-hoarding griffins and finally the Hyperboreans, but according to Herodotus, Aristeas did not actually travel to these latter places.
Pliny the Elder, noted for his encyclopedic Natural History (77 CE), repeats this story along with descriptions of other rather imaginative races, such as the people with one central leg and a huge foot that they used as an umbrella.
In more recent times, the story of the Arimaspi and their war with the griffins was retold in the YA novel Beyond the North Wind (1993) by American author, Gillian Bradshaw, with Aristeas as the protagonist who endeavors to protect the griffins.
There is also an account of a one-eyed race in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, alongside descriptions of races of people with the one large umbrella foot, headless races with their faces in their chests, and other such oddities evidently derived from Pliny. The Mandeville book, once believed to be a genuine travelogue, was actually a hoax written in the 14th century by an unknown author. Modeled on such real travelogues as that of Marco Polo, the author, incorporating aspects of the Greek myths, relates, that on an unnamed island somewhere south of Java are a race of giants who have one eye “in the middle of the front” and eat raw flesh and fish.
Then are world-wide references in fairy tales, such as the Grimm’s tale about the three sisters, One-Eye, Two-Eyes, and Three-Eyes. Two-Eyes, like Cinderella, being the normal one, is constantly abused and demeaned by her freakish sisters.
In the modern era, in chapter one of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s second Barsoom novel, Gods of Mars (1913), John Carter encounters cyclopic Plant Men in the northern regions of Mars. They are described as having mouths in their hands, “a single eye,” a hole for a nose and no mouth. The titular gem in the unintentionally hilarous epic, The Eye of Argon, (1970) occupies the central eye socket of a religious idol.
More often, such one-eyed aliens have made their appearance in films and comic books.
Clever use is made of such an alien in a 1963 episode of The Outer Limits titled “O.B.I.T.”
This alien is bent on undermining our social fabric by introducing a machine that can enable people to spy on one another anywhere at any time. The alien’s single central eye can be seen as a metaphor for the all-seeing screen of the spy devices.
These various depictions suggest that belief in living human cyclopes has persisted in different forms over the centuries. Have such people ever existed? Where did the idea originate? Are mammoth skulls a sufficient explanation?
It is a medical fact that babies with one central eye have been born. The condition, called cyclopia, occurs in one out of every 100,000 births, but most are stillborn, or die shortly after birth. Could one occasionally survive?
One persistent account is the intriguing item, “The Child Cyclops,” in Robert L. Ripley’s first Believe It or Not book (1929). The illustration depicts a little girl with bangs and a hairdo framing a face with a single central eye above her nose. Ripley identifies her as the “famous Clement Child,” says she was born in 1793 in Tourcoing, France, was “perfectly normal in every other way,” and lived to the age of fifteen.
A bookplate from Buffon’s Natural History
Ripley boasted that he could prove every statement he made, and this story has been repeated as true in numerous sources in the years since. He cited volume two of Buffon’s Natural History, as his source. While majoring in biology, I located an edition of Buffon’s work in a campus library. It is a multi-volume encyclopedia representing the life work of the count Georges LeClerc Buffon, whose work in natural history was a major influence the science of biology for many generations to come. There have been various editions and reprints and the volume numbers are not always consistent with the original content, but there is a long section in an early volume entitled “de l’homme” (of mankind) including several pages subtitled “Sur les Monstres” (on monsters), in which he outlines a classification of “monstrous births.” Accompanying woodcuts illustrate a pair of conjoined twins, a piebald child, and, yes, a cyclopic child. However, the accompanying text, translated from the French, tells us that the female infant pictured was born in October, 1766 and lived only a few hours. In fact, the alleged Clement child’s birth in 1793 postdates Buffon’s death in 1788 by five years. Buffon’s work was continued after his death by others, but by scanning online digital versions of the work, I have found no evidence of any other accounts of cyclopic children added later. The posthumus additions to the work chiefly concern the natural history of fish and reptiles.
Babies born with cyclopia, as previously noted, are typically either stillborn or live only for a very short time, usually only a matter of hours, as in Buffon’s case. The condition is the result of a primary failure of the fetal forebrain to divide into right and left hemispheres. This undivided brain produces a single optic nerve rather than two, which forms a single central eyeball. The surrounding tissues of the head develop into one centrally placed eye socket, which blocks the formation of a nose and nasal cavity. This is a fatal blow to these infants, who are unable to breathe while feeding.
A replica of a fetal skull
In the extremely rare cases where the hemispheres fail to divide, but the face develops normally with two eyes, the child rarely may survive for a time, but such children are afflicted with microcephaly, profound mental deficiency, constant seizures, muscle spasticity, irregular breathing, and poor body temperature control. Some of this is due to the fact that midline defects in the brain interfere with the development of the hypothalamus, which has a critical role in, among other things, regulation of temperature, sleep, hunger and thirst.
Cyclopia can result from multiple causes including genetic and environmental factors. But whatever the cause, the development of the brain is severely compromised.
Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (1895), Gould and Pyle’s encyclopedic collection of examples of extreme human anomalies, does not list the Clement Child. The longest lived case of cyclopia they cite lived for only 73 hours.
More recent examples reported in medical journals include a baby born in 1960 who lived for eight days, and another one, with two adjacent central eyes and a single optic nerve, listed in the Opthalmic Registry, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, who lived for an incredible 28 days. No further information was available.
The usual depiction of a cyclops as seen in the Ripley cartoon, representations of Polyphemus, or the character Leela in the animated Futurama TV series, show the central eye above the bridge of the nose. In actual cyclopic fetuses and newborns, if there is a nose present, it is in the form of a non-functional tubular snout which forms above the eye. Slightly more realistic is Odilon Redon’s painting of Polyphemus, The Cyclops (circa 1914), which displays no nose at all.
It is likely that cyclopic fetuses were a primary inspiration behind such legends as the Arismaspi, which may, in turn, have influenced modern day science fiction and fantasy stories and films. That many mythical creatures bear a resemblance to birth defects is probably not coincidental. Thus, the two-faced god Janus resembles a type of conjoined twinning in which the heads are fused into one and there are two faces on opposite sides of the head. Mermaids resemble siren fetuses, another midline fetal defect in which the legs of the fetus fail to separate, resulting in a central limb resembling a fish’s tail. Legendary races of tailed men correspond to babies born with a vestigial tail. It seems likely, then, that legends of cyclopic races may have been influenced by the occasional birth of cyclopic fetuses.
It is safe to say that the girl depicted by Ripley could not have existed as pictured and could not have lived to the age of 15, let alone having been “perfectly normal in every other way.”
But I have never been able to find a single reference to this “famous” child predating the Ripley cartoon, and not for the lack of trying. Because Ripley claimed he could prove any statement he made, there must have been source material that was possibly somehow misinterpreted.
Ripley’s report of a living human cyclops is not unique. Other reports of such people have appeared occasionally and taken on a life of their own.
There is the tale of an adult cyclops, an African-American man, who allegedly worked as a logger in the turpentine forests of Louisiana. I first came across this story in William Lindsay Gresham’s book, Monster Midway (1953). According to Gresham, he was pursued by the sideshow entrepreneur, Slim Kelly, who wanted him as an attraction but was never able to catch up to the elusive man. While the idea of a human cyclops living to adulthood is totally implausible, a variation of the story appeared in Strange People (1961) by Frank Edwards, differing in some of the details, but obviously based on the same individual. In this version, the cyclopic African-American was living in a backwoods community in Mississippi and spent his life avoiding promoters and showmen. An acquaintance involved in sideshow lore told me he had read somewhere that the story had been made up by Kelly, himself, but was unable to remember where.
Some years later, I came across a photo of an ad in the book Circus and Carnival Ballyhoo (2010) by A.W. Stencell. The ad reads, ”Somewhere in the vicinity of Bogalusa [Louisiana] there exists a man with one eye in the middle of his forehead (believed to be a Negro.) Whoever finds him is entitled to a very sizable reward. Contact “Slim” Kelly ℅ Nature’s Mistakes. New York World’s Fair.” This referred to the 1939 New York World’s Fair and was obviously the source for Gresham’s and Edwards’s accounts.
A Slim Kelly ad from a 1940 newspaper.
I contacted Mr. Stencell, who, in turn, put me in touch with Bob Blackmar of the Sideshow Newsletter. Blackmar kindly emailed me an issue containing an article about Slim Kelly and his hunt for the cyclopic man. The article, an interview with Kelly, was reprinted from the October 11th, 1940 issue of Sideshow World. Kelly is quoted as saying “[the cyclops] was roaming through Louisiana with a bunch of roustabouts … he was kind of shy and some of his friends sort of sheltered him from the curious. I was right on his trail in Shreveport and a couple of other places, and then he disappeared somewhere near Bogalusa.”
Blackmar also sent along an interview with Kelly from the New York Daily Mirror August 6, 1940, which included a reproduction of the ad I had first seen in Stencell’s book. Under the ad, Kelly is quoted as saying “I ran this ad in a Louisiana paper … a lot of people down there swore this one-eyed man had been seen often, but he was shy and hard to find. You often find your best acts in the backwoods like that.”
Blackmar in a private communication referred to such interviews and press releases as” BS” and ”puffery.” This supported my initial correspondent’s idea that the story had been cooked up by Kelly, himself. At the time Kelly was co-owner of the “Nature’s Mistakes” show at the 1939 -1940 New York World’s Fair.
Somewhat more plausible-sounding were references in several textbooks on ophthalmology briefly alluding to a cyclopic child who lived to be ten years of age. I traced these references back to a 1908 German reference book (Graefe-Saemish Handbook of the Eye) and specifically to a paper in it by the noted German ophthalmologist Eugen von Hippel, a pioneer in corneal transplantation among other things. In “The Malformations and Congenital Defects of the Eye,” Dr. von Hippel makes the remarkable statement that while cyclopic infants tend to die in the perinatal period, there were cases that lived to the ages of 6 weeks, 18 months, and 10 years, respectively. He footnotes this to two sources, by Dr. Matthew Schon and Dr. P.L.Panum. I have, with the help of a German dictionary, and with acquaintances fluent in German, determined that neither of these sources contained such references.
I have been informed by friends fluent in German that von Hippel’s sentence is actually speculative in tone. A librarian friend translated it as “it is said that there were cases that lived to the ages of 6 weeks…etc.” It is not clear why he cited Schon and Panum’s papers.
The paper by Panum is mainly about conjoined twinning, and mentions, in passing, cases in which the heads are fused and there is a central eye between the normal eyes.
The title of Schon’s book, translated from the German, is Handbook of the Pathological Anatomy of the Human Eye (1828). The one relevant passage in it reads, “only one case is known where a cyclops of the male sex became ten months old.” That caught my attention, as no cyclopes to date have been documented as living more than a month. However, further searching revealed his source, Diseases of the Eyeball, (1769) by Jean-Joseph Guerin, which contains a note in Latin from the author Borrinchius in volume one of the Journal of Copenhagen. I was told by a librarian, who translated the note from the Latin, that age in Europe at that time was reckoned from conception rather than birth and a newborn infant was therefore considered to be nine or ten months old. I corresponded briefly with doctor specializing in medical genetics, who confirmed that it was referring to a newborn. Borrinchius describes the cyclopic newborn as “…a male infant about 10 months, it had no nose; & at the place where its root was to be, it had a round orbit which contained a well shaped eye…”
The cyclops man of Louisiana was evidently a deliberate hoax, and the medical journal account of the ten year old was likely the result of a misunderstanding. But what of Ripley’s “famous” Clement child? I had queried Edward Meyer, then archivist at Ripley International, and he told me that the material in the 1929 book was never sold to Ripley International when Ripley became syndicated by King Features and was likely lost to posterity.
Having discovered, while researching another project, that the oft-repeated cases of the “four-eyed man of Cricklade” and two-faced “Edward Mordake” both originated in an 1894 newspaper hoax, I reasoned that the Clement Child may have had a similar origin. Newspaper hoaxes were quite popular in the late 19th century.
The researcher who provided Ripley with much of his material was a man named Norbert Pearlroth who spent all day every day in the New York Public Library searching for odd facts for Ripley. I tried accessing the newspaper databases at New York Public Library, but to no avail. I even contacted Pearlroth’s grandson via email. He told me he had an old trunk in storage that had belonged to his grandfather. It sounded promising. However, when he checked the contents, it contained nothing relevant.
I decided to cross-check an equally unlikely Ripley story from the same volume. This one was about Jean-Baptiste Mouron, allegedly a French prisoner who was condemned to be a galley slave for 100 years and a day. When his ship was taken out of service, he was kept chained to his bench, in the ship’s bowels. He supposedly lived to be finally set free at the age of 117 years. The reader is referred to an autobiographical account by another Frenchman who was a galley slave during the same period for 17 years. There is no mention of M. Mouron. It occurred to me that the source was cited merely to verify that men were condemned to be galley slaves there at that time period. It then followed that Buffon’s encyclopedia was cited similarly to verify the fact that cyclopic children actually exist, albeit briefly
While the databases in New York turned up nothing, I gave it one more go with the databases in the Free Library of Philadelphia. I never found a reference to the Clement child, but I did turn up something equally interesting.
I discovered an article titled “A Human Curio” which appeared in the Pendleton East Oregonian and was copied by several papers including Chicago’s Daily Inter Ocean for November 27, 1889.
It reads: “Not long ago there was seen in Pendleton a human freak which knocks the spots off any living skeleton or Chinese giant as a natural curiosity. It was an Indian child of the Nez Perce tribe with but one eye, situated in the center of its forehead like those of the fabled Cyclops. The child was able to see with ease and ran about with as much freedom as any of its two-eyed companions.”
The article goes on to say that some local parties were about to negotiate to secure the child when the Indians left for the mountains on a hunting expedition. The mother of the child explained that she had looked at a “one-eyed cayuse” shortly before the infant’s birth.”
A distant cousin of the Clement child, perhaps? “Cayuse” is an archaic term for a small, low-quality horse. The mother (or rather the journalist) is invoking the now obsolete theory of “maternal impression;” that a pregnant woman’s experiences can “mark” a developing fetus. Thus, also in the 1880’s, the famed Elephant Man believed his condition was the result of his mother having been frightened by an elephant while pregnant. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, the news item was never followed up. Newspaper hoaxes rarely were.
Review by Michaele Jordan: I don’t usually write about the big-name stuff. There’s always plenty of people out there discussing the blockbusters. You don’t need yet another opinion (even if it’s mine). But there’s been surprisingly little buzz about the 2022 version of The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson, for all that it did well in the official reviews and in the theatres (85/87 on Rotten Tomatoes). Even here on File 770 its only mention is that two of its actors were nominated for Saturn awards in 2022.
So let me tell you about it. Believe me, it’s a strange bird. (Well, a strange winged creature). First and foremost it’s Matt Reeves’ baby – his adopted baby. Originally it was intended to be a Ben Affleck film. Not only was Mr. Affleck going to star in the movie, he was going to direct it, write it—together with Peter Craig, and produce it—together with Dylan Clark. But in 2017, he stepped down from the writing and directing, although he assured us he would still star in the film. Mr. Reeves was hired to replace him in production. And then, in 2019 (fairly last minute by film production standards), Mr. Affleck also quit as star, to be replaced by Robert Pattinson.
It’s difficult to resist speculating on those two years in between. We are told that as soon as he started directing, Mr. Reeves started rewriting. That actually makes sense. The words are there to communicate the vision. Change the vision, and the words will have to follow.
But those rewrites were extensive. Did they perhaps represent a change of vision completely odds with Mr. Affleck’s vision? Nobody likes being rewritten.
Or not – I am probably reveling in my own overactive and drama-hungry imagination. Mr. Affleck has repeatedly stated that he resigned due to the stresses of the disintegration of his marriage to Jennifer Garner and the nightmarish production issues Justice League was suffering. He has never complained that this was not the film he would have made.
Entertaining as the gossip may be, none of that is actually relevant here. A review deals with the finished product, and its impact on the viewer, regardless of what issues may or may not have steered its creation. So let’s talk about the finished film. For me, the biggest problem was that it didn’t feel like a Batman movie.
As a legend grows, it absorbs a great deal of material that was not merely invisible, but genuinely absent from the original. This does not actually mean that the original has been forgotten, just that it has been sublimated. The Batman legend started with a comic book.
I’ve read something of Mr. Reeves’ intent. He felt it was important to explore the psychological trauma that underlies Batman’s existence. Having taken such a realistic approach to the character, he was committed to a realistic presentation of both the re-examined character, and the world that character lives in.
He’s not wrong. Every Batman fan has wondered about those issues and argued about them with their friends. Everything that Mr. Reeves has put on the screen makes sense to us, and echoes many of our own questions. But what the fans argue about is one thing and what they expect to see on the screen is another. I believe that, whatever the clever nuances, they still expect to see some reflection of the canon.
This movie starts – very cleverly, I thought – on a rainy Halloween night, with busy streets thronged with so many costumed revelers that Batman could walk right through them entirely unnoticed. When the costumed Batman confronts his first evil-doer, the guy says, “Who are you supposed to be?”
It’s funny. It’s also a warning of things to come. Batman’s costume is practically the only survival of the original cast, since so much of that cast was defined by the exotic imagery in which it was presented. It’s not that the original characters have been deleted, but they have been rendered so realistic that they are almost unrecognizable.
There is a slinky woman lurking and snooping around the edges of the underworld, but if you didn’t happen to remember the name Selina, you probably wouldn’t identify her as the Catwoman. (Kudos to Zoë Kravitz, for her sensitive presentation of a damaged soul.) Colin Farrell plays a fat and unscrupulous saloon owner named Oz. We accept him as exactly that – until we hear that he really hates it when people call him Penguin.
We don’t really get a chance to decide if we would have recognized Bruce Wayne, since we first see him when the Batman unmasks. So instead of being uncertain, I, for one, was disappointed. I was madly in love with Bruce Wayne as a child – he was rich and beautiful and heroic. But Robert Pattinson is not beautiful. He’s rich, but the money hasn’t made him whole. He’s sallow and sunken-cheeked. He looks like he got beaten up a lot as a kid. He looks like a loser. And, of course, he is. Because he’s never recovered from the crippling emotional damage caused by his father’s violent death. If he weren’t the Batman, he wouldn’t be anything at all.
The only character that retains any semblance of the original conception is the Riddler (played wonderfully by Paul Dano). He doesn’t wear an emerald green leotard, but he does decorate his handiwork with large, bloody question marks, and send the Batman cryptic clues, fully expecting them to be solved. In fact, he’s utterly delighted (laughs and laughs!) when one clue actually goes over the Batman’s head. And because he’s a realistic Riddler, he takes being a psychopathic killer seriously, and becomes so much more evil than any mere cartoon.
I can almost hear some of you muttering to yourselves, “So what’s wrong with that? He brings in a little realism? Treats our beloved characters seriously? Doesn’t sound so awful to me. And it isn’t awful. Just the opposite, The Batman is a fine film. The performances are superb and the plotting is precise – as it has to be, to navigate this convoluted tale of a troubled vigilante pursuing a serial killer through a stew of political corruption. If Mr. Reeves had simply changed all the names, and altered the protagonist’s costume, it might well have been hailed as a neo-noir classic.
It just doesn’t happen to feel like a Batman movie
Guest Post by G.W. Thomas: Space opera in the 1950s found its home at Amazing Stories. For the nuts-and-bolts fan there was Astounding (not renamed Analog for another ten years). The literary reader had Fantasy & Science Fiction. The sophisticated fan had Galaxy. But if you wanted good old blasters and spaceships, after the death of Planet Stories in 1955 it was Amazing.
The Empire of Evil is a two-part space opera series by Robert Arnette that crossed that timeline. But these two stories pose questions. Arnette was a house name that belonged to the Ray A. Palmer Amazing Stories and was handed down to Howard Browne and later Paul W. Fairman when they edited the magazine.
The questions partly arise from the fact that these magazines were filled (during Browne and Fairman’s time anyway) by a stable of a dozen writers who produced 50,000 words a month for various magazines, which was purchased sight unseen. The editors didn’t bother to even read them so long as the quality didn’t slip too much. Writers like Milton Lesser, Henry Slesar, Robert Bloch, Randall Garrett, John Russell Fearn and others appeared every month as Alexander Blade, S. M. Tenneshaw, E. K. Jarvis and of course, Robert Arnette. Many of the stories’ creators are still unknown.
Robert Silverberg was one of these pseudonymous pulp-mill writers. In Other Spaces, Other Times, 2009, he remembers the creation of one story in particular:
In the 1950s magazine covers were printed well ahead of the interiors of the magazines, done in batches of, I think, four at a time. This was a matter of economics — using one large plate to print four covers at once was much cheaper than printing them one by one. But sometimes the practice created problems. For example, the April 1957 cover of Amazing Stories was printed in the fall of 1956 with a group of others, well ahead of its publication date, bearing this announcement above the name of the magazine: BEGINNING—COSMIC KILL—2-part serial of thundering impact.
“Cosmic Kill” was supposed to be a sequel to a short novel that Amazing had published six years before — “Empire of Evil,” by Robert Arnette. The readers had supposedly been clamoring for a follow-up to that great story all that time, and now, finally, it was going to be published.
According to Silverberg, the author of Empire of Evil was Paul W. Fairman, who had been promoted to editor after Browne left, and didn’t have time to pen the sequel. Unfortunately ISFDB lists Rog Phillips as author. I don’t know which of these men was “Robert Arnette” when the story appeared.
This space opera novelette concerns a band of raiders who live on Venus in the city of Venusia. They pillage Earth and other planets ruthlessly, stealing their women. (Sleaze was a big part of selling SF in 1951.) The pirates are led by a scientific genius named Darrien. He can get away with his raiding because he has built a giant force-field shield that destroys invaders. Our heroes, there will be two, are set to find and destroy the generator of the shield.
The story opens with the first of two Earth agents, Ron Kratnick, going to his boss, Blake Wentworth, for the suicide mission of trying to infiltrate the reavers. Wentworth warns him he may have sit idly by when he sees some pirate molesting an Earth woman. But Kratnick’s cover must not be blown if he is to find the generator and destroy it.
Also undercover is Agent Tanton, thought dead by the Earth brass, who works his way towards the shield machinery by a circuitous route. He makes an offer to a beauty named Margot, who is love slave to an ugly underworld figure known as Tza-Necros. Tanton plans to get Margot next to Lars Valcan, the officer in charge of the generator in exchange for taking her to Earth, away from Tza-Necros’s reach.
Tanton is jailed but eventually allowed to escape. He steals a slaver’s booty as cover to get to his meet with Valcan but is attacked by Kratnick, who has come from Earth in a slaver ship. He had been followed by agents and starts drinking at a cafe. Now the story becomes about both of the men.
Tanton flees to the Undercity with both the new agent and the beautiful woman-prize, named Glory Evans. Tanton has an appointment with Valcan so he sends Kratnick and Evans on alone. They don’t end up finding Margot but in the hands of the Undercity people, and their leader, Caliban. Kratnick’s only hope is Tanton. Unfortunately, he went to his meeting with Valcan, brought him to meet Margot and got caught by Tza-Necros. Tanton is in the same cell as the two new lovers.
Things look pretty bleak for the Earth agents. Valcan is killed by Tza-Necros and Margot is thrown into the cell with the others. Without her beauty drugs, she becomes an old crone and dies. Tanton has a plan. He charges up Caliban with news that Darrien has found the Undercity and will soon kill everyone in it with a lethal gas. He lies, saying Tza-Necros knows this. Caliban leads the under-people in a mad rebellion. Tanton also tells him the shield generator is the really the gas machine. In this way, Caliban takes the agents to the building where the shield machinery is guarded.
The generator building is heavily guarded. The mob can’t penetrate their defences. The Earth trio sneak in. Guards come to arrest them. Ron and Glory escape out the roof on floating grav disks. Tanton stays behind to destroy the ray generator. He does this by throwing himself off twenty stories and sacrificing himself. The story ends with Ron quitting the secret service because he will never be as good as Tanton. He decides to become a farmer. Glory is overjoyed to become a farmer’s wife.
The Space Opera of the 1950s had some sophistication over the 1930s version but in many respects it hadn’t changed much at all. Arnette supposes humans living on all the planets of the Solar System. (Leigh Brackett was still doing the same thing at Planet Stories, around this time too, so it wasn’t only in Amazing.) This is not the cutting edge SF of John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science-Fiction. Ray A. Palmer had made Amazing Stories into an adventure SF Pulp back in 1939 and it still remained such, aimed at the juvenile market.
The story was illustrated by Henry Sharp, who would return six years later to illustrate the sequel. The cover for Empire of Evil was painted by Robert Gibson Jones, showing women flying on anti-grav disks. These devices are in the story but women are not soldiers, only booty, to the Venusians.
The second tale, “Cosmic Kill”, appeared in the digest-sized Amazing Stories. The collapse of 1955 cleared a rather crowded field. Plenty of SF magazines died along with the Pulps. Amazing was one of the long-standing survivors, but one of the least prestigious magazines still around. But Space Opera survived despite the haters.
The introduction to the sequel to “Empire of Evil” reads:
“Empire of Evil” (Jan 1951) was one of the most popular novelettes ever published in Amazing Stories. Mr. Arnette has done a sequel, featuring the same fabulous characters, and charged with the same suspense and furious action.
Silverberg recalls having to write a 20,000 word novella in two days. Randall Garrett, Bob’s partner in their little fiction factory, helped him out by introducing him to speed:
…I went out of my way to mimic the style of the original story, using all sorts of substitutes for “he said” that were never part of my own style —”he snapped,”“he wheezed,”“she wailed” and peppering the pages with adverbial modifiers — “he continued inexorably,” “he said appreciatively,” “he remarked casually.”The next day I took the whole 80-page shebang down to Paul Fairman’s office and it went straight to the printer. It was just in time for serialization in the April and May, 1957 issues of Amazing, my one and only appearance under the byline of Robert Arnette. And on the seventh day I rested, you betcha.
Silverberg uses the same plot format as the first story. There will be two agents, a beauty belonging to a tyrant and a new virginal Earth girl/love interest. Silverberg picks up right after Fairman. Wentworth has a new agent in Lon Archman. Darrien escaped the bombing of Venusia and has fled to Mars. There he plots in secret. Lon’s assignment is to find and kill the evil genius. He will have to be careful of the simulacra Darrien uses as decoys. The assignment is illegal and Lon can expect no official help from Earth.
Hendrin is also an agent but not of Earth. He has been sent by the ruler of Mercury to discover all of Darrien’s secrets, the space mines, the robot doubles, etc. then to kill the evil scientist. He ingratiates himself by buying an Earth woman named Elissa Hall, stolen from an Earth outpost. Hendrin plans to sell her to Darrien and work his way into the upper escalations.
Lon Archman runs into him in the bar where he buys the girl. The agent follows him to the office of Dorvis Graal, the Viceroy of Canalopis, Darrien’s capitol on Mars. Graal allows the Mercurian to take his prize to the master. Darrien is smitten with the girl, buying her for two hundred credas and a captaincy. Meryola, Darrien’s mistress, is not pleased. Meryola is beautiful but aging, despite the youth drugs. She will not put up with any rival. Hendrin double-deals with her, saying he will steal her away to the dungeons.
Archman plays his own desperate game with Dorvis Graal and is imprisoned. He is placed in the same cell as Elissa. With her help, he escapes while she remains imprisoned. Running, he encounters Hendrin who has just had a disastrous moment with Meryola and Darrien. Visiting the mistress, the Mercurian is caught by Darrien. But the scientist isn’t jealous. He just wants his play-thing back. He tells Hendrin if he doesn’t produce the girl, he will die. Meryola tells him the opposite, if he doesn’t kill her, he dies.
The two agents team up (as Tanton and Ron did before) and rescue Elissa. Together they put Hendrin’s plan into action. He and Elissa will go to Darrien and tell him that Meryola planned to assassinate him. Meanwhile Lon goes to the mistress and tells her that Darrien plans to kill her. When Martians come to take her, she falls in with Archman. She reveals that the real Darrien is hiding in a secret room only she knows. She takes the Earthman to the real Darrien.
But Lon can’t shoot him dead because he has Elissa as a shield. Meryola is all for shooting them both but Archman won’t. Hendrin and one of the Darrien robots show up and in a scene worthy of Hamlet, Hendrin, Meryola and the imposter robot all die. Lon is left to shoot Darrien dead and win Elissa’s love.
The plot seems very familiar with Hendrin in place of Tanton, Meryola in place of Margot, Darrien for Tza-Necros, Lon for Ron, etc. Silverberg livens it up by having the objective to kill Darrien rather than destroy the shield generator.
Silverberg passes judgment on his old story:
The funny thing is that “Cosmic Kill” isn’t really so bad. I had to read it for the first time in 48 years for Tales from the Pulp Era, and I was impressed with the way it zips swiftly along from one dire situation to another without pausing for breath, exactly as its author did back there in December 1956. It is the one and only example of Silverberg writing a story on speed.
My judgment is a little less lenient. Silverberg cannibalizes the first story heavily, giving a largely repeat performance. He hasn’t added much except a finale for Darrien, which Fairman hadn’t provided in Empire of Evil.
As a fan of Space Opera, I quite enjoyed both tales for its different races, each distinct and largely evil. The action is simple but effective. (Like when Hendrin blows the head off a Plutonian by shoving a zam-gun into his large, fishy mouth.) This is not Hugo-winning stuff and it never was meant to be. The spirit of the Clayton Astounding to Buck Rogers lives here. Today it lies in Star Wars but back in the 1950s it could only be found in Amazing Stories.
BIO: G. W. Thomas has appeared in over 400 different magazines, books, podcasts and webzines including Writer’s Digest, The Armchair Detective and Pseudopod. His latest book is a collection of Space Westerns called Whispers of Ice and Sand. His blog is gwthomas.org.
By Warner Holme: The One Ring is a game with a strong pedigree. Released in 2011 to positive reviews, this new edition by Free League includes a nice Starter Set. Keeping with their work in the past the production values are excellent.
Like any of Free League’s RPG volumes, there is at least as much quality in it as an artbook rather than as a game. With The One Ring this was taken in the dual directions of detailed painted works as well as detailed color pieces.
The Starter Set includes three booklets with adventure starts, an abbreviated version of the rules, a few play aids as well as dice. Here the production values already show quite exceptionally with quality of the functional play aids is an enormous foldout map, featuring The Shire on one side and the greater part of the Ador region of Middle-Earth on the other. It is an excellently designed artistic piece which works well and is suitable as a game aid as well. The dice, in addition to serving their fictions as six-or-twelve sided randomizers are well designed with little additional markings which will seem both novel and attractive to Tolkien aficionados. The various reference cards each look nice and are functional, although nowhere near as easy to celebrate as the map.
There are character sheets for pre-existing figures from the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien, including Balin and Bilbo as well as a number of more minor figured who had little or no characterization in the original books themselves. The notable detail about these sheets comes instead on the back of the sheets as each has a statement by the character. For some this will be the first Middle Earth material they have read which did not originate from J.R.R. Tolkien or his son Christopher Tolkien (the latter by way of editing). They are entertaining, and certainly do not insult even if they don’t make one chomp at the bit for a novel by the same writer.
Of the included booklets the most substantial is the one titled The Shire at 52 pages. Within are very nicely written historical and cultural summaries for the region, as well as a few of the disturbing or threatening creatures encountered in the area throughout The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
It features a pair or gorgeous two-page painted images, as well as frequent smaller illustrations throughout the book. While a large list of individuals were credited with the creation of said art, the pieces hold together for quite a unified aesthetic for the different types of illustration.
The smaller illustrations are present in the other volumes as well, which include the summarized rules and a variety of adventures. While The Adventures sports one of these two-page illustrations, sadly The Rules features none. On the other hand The Rules features a delightful prologue written as a letter by Bilbo, helping to draw the reader in quite well conceptually.
The Adventures features a few ideas for entertaining but comparatively low stakes stories. Someone or something is typically in danger, and while the results one way or another will not be world shattering they can at the very least feel consequential for those looking at the story of the game. Further they build, serving to introduce one of the major characters after another and in the process.
While not an insurmountable and complicated read, the material within these books will require thought to enjoy as a game. Still for lovers of Tolkien it is certainly easy to recommend, with or without the game elements.
By Steve Vertlieb: King Kong premiered ninety years ago on March 2, 1933, opening simultaneously at both the Radio City Music Hall and Roxy Theaters in New York City, followed by an “official” March 23,1933, opening at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. I guess that I first saw the film as a ten year old, somewhere around 1956, on WCAU TV, Channel 10 in Philadelphia. I’d grown up hearing stories from my mom about being a young woman in the early 1930’s, and seeing a wonder-filled motion picture concerning a giant prehistoric ape in a lost world, escaping from captivity and carrying a woman to the top of the Empire State Building. I was so entranced by her stories that I often dreamt of Kong searching for me in the sometimes nightmarish realm of slumber, an enormous phantom stalking the streets of the city, peering through bedroom windows in menacing search of its prey. While I’d awaken from these dark fantasies screaming in the night, the imagery of the great gorilla both thrilled and mesmerized me, enticing this small impressionable boy into a surreal nether world of “beauties and beasts.”
I can remember my excitement when it was finally announced that “Kong” would make his long awaited debut on local television over WCAU TV, the then CBS affiliate. My mom had punished me for something that I either did or didn’t do, refusing to allow me to watch the film on our living room television set. I ran out the door in a panic, longing for an opportunity to finally see the movie that had tormented and tantalized my fertile imagination for so many desolate childhood years. I was swept from household to neighborhood household, visiting with each childhood friend until their moms summoned them to the kitchen table for dinner. I saw only scraps and isolated fragments of the film during that troubled afternoon but what I saw thrilled my thoughts and dreams beyond imagining.
The following Saturday afternoon I went innocently to The Benner Theater near my house to once more attend my fabled ritual of the weekly Saturday matinee. As the trailers to coming attractions unspooled, I suddenly felt a bolt of electricity surge through my little body, for there upon the magical movie screen came the black and white imagery of giant native doors slowly opening while a giant presence pushed his way to freedom on Skull Island. It was fate giving me a second chance, another opportunity to see King Kong at last, in the way that it was meant to be seen, upon the seemingly huge motion picture screen. I waited breathlessly for the days to expire and then, magically, it was Saturday once more. The majestic three notes that began and accompanied Max Steiner’s triumphant musical score filled my ears, and I was transported to another world … a land of strange, forbidding islands, dangerous coral reefs, and a majestic gate jealously guarding and concealing the wonder and power of the mighty KONG.
I’ve probably seen King Kong over three hundred times. I’ve never tired of the exhilaration and wonder that I felt when I first fell in love with the greatest, most revered “monster” movie ever conceived. As I approach relative maturity, I reached out to Bantam Books who had recently published a paperback version of the original novelization of the picture by Delos W. Lovelace. The editors of the publishing company were kind enough to provide me with a post office box by which I might contact the original creator of the story and subsequent motion picture, Merian C. Cooper. Although I never had an opportunity to meet this legendary adventurer and film maker, we conducted an intense correspondence over the last eight years of his life from 1965 until 1973. During those years there was rarely a week that went by when my mailbox wasn’t deluged with letters and special packages sent to me from this giant of the film industry, lovingly addressed to his youthful admirer and fan. Through mail, he introduced me to beloved animation genius Ray Harryhausen whose friendship, both through correspondence, telephone calls, and personal gatherings, endured for nearly fifty years. It was also through Merian Cooper’s posthumous introduction that I found an eagerly anticipated opportunity to meet and develop a relationship with his star, Fay Wray, at her apartment dwelling in Century City, California in 1980.
Acclaimed cinema journalist, and primary historian for American Cinematographer Magazine, George Turner, was scheduled to appear as a guest speaker at the official Sixtieth Anniversary King Kong birthday celebration at the historic Gateway Theater in Chicago during the Winter of 1993.
Optical Effects pioneer Linwood Dunn was booked with him as a guest speaker for the event. At the last moment, Dunn was unexpectedly called away for another important assignment, leaving the festival without one of its two special guests. Scott Holton with Varese Sarabande Records suggested that the vacancy should be filled by a little-known writer who had known Merian C. Cooper through intense correspondence, and who had written a series of articles about the making of King Kong for the premiere issues of The Monster Times (January 1972), as well as the lead chapter for Avon Books’ The Girl In The Hairy Paw in 1976.
Consequently, I was flown into Chicago and booked at the Chicago Hilton Hotel (several days following the departure of Harrison Ford, Tommy Lee Jones, and the cast and production crew for The Fugitive) and, along with George Turner, appeared on stage before an audience of 500 fans to talk about the making and production of the beloved fantasy film classic. It was an experience that I shall forever remember as a spectacular highlight of my own life and career.
Willis O’Brien creating Kong’s climbKong atop the Empire State Building
In the years since 1968 when my own byline first appeared in a published magazine, I began my own writing career, sweetly encompassing over half a century of essays, articles, and commentaries in genre related books and magazines, concerning the immortal films and film makers whose works and creations continue to inspire my dreams. What follows is a visual remembrance of just a few of the memories, publications, individually inscribed photographs, and personal communications that have elevated my dreams and remembrances to gratifying reality.
The premiere issue of America’s one and only bi-weekly monster tabloid, The Monster Times, published by Larry Brill and Les Waldstein from their corporate offices in New York City in 1972. The spectacular first issue, edited by the late Chuck McNaughton, featured my earliest professional gig as a published writer, offering my original series of articles on the making and production of Merian C. Cooper’s classic 1933 “King Kong.”
My work was later re-written, and re-structured, becoming the lead chapter for Avon Books’ legendary tribute to Kong…The Girl In The Hairy Paw, compiled and edited by Ronald Gottesman and Harry M. Geduld four years later in 1976.
My series of essays on the making and production of the original 1933 production of the greatest “Monster” movie of all time appeared initially in the 1972 premier issue of The Monster Times. Editors Ronald Gottesman and Harry M. Geduld approached me about using my articles as the lead, or opening chapter, of their forthcoming book about the film, The Girl In The Hairy Paw.
Scheduled to be published by Prentice Hall the following year, a change in management at the prestigious book company cancelled production, causing a delay of several more years. Avon Books in New York finally agreed to publish what would have become the very first volume ever printed about the iconic gorilla.
The Girl In The Hairy Paw became a long awaited, and eagerly anticipated reality in the Spring of 1976 and did, indeed, feature my revised and revisited look at the production and reception of the classic King Kong as its opening chapter. Its wonderful cover art by Dave Willardson is reproduced here on the 90th anniversary of the film’s “official world premiere” in Los Angeles on March 23rd, 1933.
In subsequent years my involvement and participation in the enduring legend of “King Kong” has continued to evolve. In 1981 I was invited by popular Philadelphia television host Gene London to appear with him on stage before a live audience at the city’s prestigious cultural institution, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, speaking for one hour on the cultural and historical significance of the original 1933 “King Kong.”
On August 11th, 1990, Gary and Sue Svehla’s popular “Fanex” Convention played host to Ray Harryhausen’s first major personal appearance in Baltimore, Maryland, and I was asked to host the well remembered event. Ray and I sat down on stage together for a two and a half hour discussion, before some five hundred fans and admirers, during which I interviewed him not only about his own fabulous film career, but about his love for 1933’s “King Kong,” and how it had inspired and influenced his own substantial stop-motion animation motion picture legacy.
Together with stop-motion pioneering genius Ray Harryhausen at the “Fanex” Convention in Baltimore, during late Summer 1990, following our in-person, on stage interview.
I had an opportunity in the Fall of 2021 to sit down with Host, Actor, Comedian, and Writer Ron MacCloskey for his Emmy Award Winning Public Television Series, “Classic Movies with Ron MacCloskey.”
Ron is the writer and producer of the new feature length documentary motion picture, Boris Karloff: The Man Behind The Monster, now playing in theaters all across the globe.
For this Halloween themed episode of the popular program, however, we explored the cultural significance, history, and legacy of the most famous “Monster” of them all … King Kong … and his ninety year influence on gorilla films of all shapes and sizes, as well as his career defining impact on the lives and reign of Stop Motion Animation legends, Willis H. O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen.
In 2022 I was invited by British producer/director Tom Grove to appear on camera for a thirty minute interview concerning my own lifelong involvement with Merian C. Cooper’s creation for the three part documentary motion picture, The Legend of King Kong, currently in release, featuring interviews with actor Jack O’Halloran, special effects pioneer Jack Polito, and myself among many others.
These personal involvements over a lifetime of adoration for the most enduring fantasy film in motion picture history, as well as the beloved collection of memories and mementos that follow, have enriched my life experience more than mere words can ever adequately define or express.
A rare, commissioned “King Kong” sculpture designed and built by the late Stop Motion animator, David Allen, sitting proudly in my “dining room.”
An impossibly precious, rare surviving “fin” from the back of the Stegosaurus model built for the original 1933 King Kong by Marcel Delgado that sits prominently in my home apartment.
A re-production of the original Grauman’s Theater premiere program, designed especially for the official opening of King Kong in Hollywood, with handwritten notes and observations by Merian C. Cooper, the co-director and creator of this motion picture fantasy masterpiece, and a variety of autographed stills signed by both General Cooper, and his exquisite heroine, the lovely Fay Wray.
The outer lobby of a movie theater in Australia, heralding the premiere of the now legendary RKO fantasy masterpiece.
Two photos of American Cinematographer Magazine featured journalist and special effects film scholar George Turner and I in the lobby of The Gateway Theater in Chicago, posing for publicity pictures, at the official sixtieth anniversary celebration and screening of King Kong.
The cover of Black Oracle magazine by artist Tim Johnson, published in the mid-Seventies, and highlighted by my review of the unfortunate remake of the early film, produced by Dino De Laurentis. Appropriately, echoing Robert Armstrong’s final line as Carl Denham in the 1933 motion picture … “Oh no … it wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast,” I titled my critique “Twas Dino Killed The Beast.”
An original 22 x 28 poster from the 1956 theatrical reissue of the original King Kong, hanging, proudly framed, upon my bedroom wall.
This special birthday cake, patterned from The Girl In The Hairy Paw cover art by Dave Willardson, was presented to me in Baltimore some years ago by friends Bruce and Ann Gearhart for my 70th birthday.
By Soon Lee: I first watched Everything Everywhere All at Once at an Auckland cinema on April 19, 2022 and it has been living in my head ever since. I saw it again on the big screen before its Auckland run ended. I have never done this before.
It is the most remarkable movie I have seen in years. It straddles multiple genres, Science Fiction, you can ‘Verse Jump’ to access the skills and abilities of alternate universe versions of yourself, Drama, exploring family relationships, Action, with spectacular martial arts fight sequences, lowbrow Comedy, with dildo and buttplug fights, all in a surprisingly cohesive whole. It is also a quintessential Chinese-American immigrant story. I can talk about its technical brilliance like its use of visual symbology, aspect ratios, or color palettes, and I will. But none of that brilliance matters without the core story. At heart Everything Everywhere All at Once is about finding meaning amongst the noise and chaos of modern life. It’s about the power of kindness. Everything Everywhere All at Once is the movie we didn’t know we needed in 2022.
If you haven’t already watched Everything Everywhere All at Once, I urge you to see it at your soonest convenience before proceeding. Be one of today’s Lucky 10,000. Spoilers follow.
Michelle Yeoh is Evelyn Wang who with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) live above their failing laundromat. Most of the movie unfolds over a single day. Evelyn is busy trying to cook breakfast for her disapproving father Gong Gong (James Hong) just arrived from China for Chinese New Year, while trying to get her taxes ready a meeting with IRS Auditor Deirdre (Jamie-Lee Curtis) later that morning. Auditor Deirdre has placed a lien on their laundromat. There are also last minute preparations for the Chinese New Year party the Wangs are hosting that evening. All this while also trying to run their laundromat. Evelyn’s daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) has just arrived with her girlfriend Becky (Tallie Medel). Evelyn has issues with Joy’s relationship with Becky and doesn’t want Gong Gong to know. Joy meanwhile provides an example of reverse nominative determinism: Joy is joyless. Evelyn’s relationship with her daughter Joy is dysfunctional, as is her relationship with her father Gong Gong. Her relationship with husband Waymond is not much better, thinking him flighty: he dances with laundromat customers, sticks googly eyes onto random items including laundry sacks. Evelyn’s life is frenetic and overwhelming. Everything it seems is happening all at once, none of it good.
An aside here. The Daniels (Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan) who co-wrote and co-directed Everything Everywhere All at Once have said that they delayed release of the movie (principal photography was completed just as lockdown began in 2020) so that it could be experienced on the big screen with an audience. Watching this on the big screen is qualitatively different. Everything Everywhere All at Once attempts to simulate the overwhelming informational firehose of online life constantly demanding our attention. It’s relentless. But if you were to watch it on your own device, you can pause anytime to take a breather, and/or rewind to catch something from the firehose you may have missed. That’s not possible when watching it on the big screen. You are on a rollercoaster ride trusting the implicit contract you have made with the makers of the movie will pay off, that you won’t be left confused.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is a lot, but the movie walks a fine line, almost overwhelming us without going over that line. We get a taste the chaos that is Evelyn’s life. But if we are confused, we don’t stay that way for long. Behind the chaos and noise projected at us underlies deep structure and purposeful storytelling. It uses both techniques of “show” and “tell”, and repetition. If you are confused, for example by how ‘Verse Jumping’ works (the method to access your alternate universe self and gain their abilities), that information is repeated in different ways, incluing those who missed the first time, while conveying additional information to those who got it the first time.
As Evelyn and Waymond ride the elevator to their IRS meeting, Alpha Waymond takes over and tells Evelyn that she is his hope to defeat Jobu Tupaki, a grave threat to the multiverse. All she has to do is to follow a set of instructions starting with turning right on exiting the elevator and going to the janitor’s closet instead of left to the auditor. The Call to Adventure is declined. But that doesn’t last long as Evelyn is drawn in and has to learn to Verse Jump in order to save herself. It turns out the threat to the multiverse Jobu Tupaki is a version of Evelyn’s daughter Joy. Too much Verse Jumping broke Joy so now she experiences everything everywhere all at once, gaining chaotic powers that she’s unleashing upon the multiverse. Evelyn has to learn to Verse Jump and level up sufficiently to be a match for Joy.
Yeoh, Quan and Hsu get to portray different multiverse versions of Evelyn, Waymond and Joy in a thrilling chaotic ride into multiple universes and multiple genres. We get thrown into different alternate universes as the story unfolds, but are rarely lost thanks largely to the technical brilliance of the production. The full filmmaker’s toolkit is used to great effect to delineate between the universes so that we are immediately oriented. Each universe has its own look and feel, from the pink pastels of the Hotdog Universe to the slow-mo effects of the Movie Universe reminiscent of Wong Kar-Wai’s “In the Mood for Love” (the Daniels wear their influences proudly). Color palettes, aspect ratios, set designs are all harnessed to make each universe distinct.
The visual elements not only allow us to distinguish between the multiverses, but they are also integral to another facet of the movie: this is a Chinese-American immigrant story and Chinese symbology is writ large. The circle is a consistent motif seen throughout. The movie opens with the family unit Evelyn, Waymond, and Joy seen in happier times reflected in a round mirror. The laundromat has many washing machines and driers, every one has a round door. The concepts of nihilism and optimism explored in Everything Everywhere All at Once are embodied by the symbols for Yin (darkness) and Yang (light) which together form a circle. In Everything Everywhere All at Once Yin and Yang, the Chinese concepts, are represented by Western objects. Yin is black with a white center (the Everything Bagel) while Yang is white with a black centre (the Googly Eye). At the climax of the movie, Evelyn fixes a Googly eye onto the middle of her forehead, opening a third eye and an awakened consciousness.
Writer Jacqueline Woodson says, “The more specific we are, the more universal something can become”. Everything Everywhere All at Once portrays the Chinese-American immigrant experience in detail, and by doing so makes it more easily relatable to everyone. Code switching is common in immigrant families, where you switch languages depending on who you are talking to, sometimes within the same sentence. How you communicate says a lot about your relationships. The Wang family speak English, Mandarin-Chinese, and Cantonese-Chinese. Evelyn speaks to her father Gong Gong in Cantonese-Chinese but to her husband Waymond in Mandarin-Chinese, indicating Evelyn and Waymond came from different backgrounds, which could have added to Gong Gong’s disapproval of Waymond. Joy speaks predominantly English, having only a few words of Mandarin, but apparently no Cantonese so when Joy tries to talk to Gong Gong it is Mandarin she attempts with. The few words of Mandarin I have were enough that I winced watching Joy try to formulate a sentence, try to contort the few basic words of Mandarin in her vocabulary to convey the desired meaning. Joy, in halting Mandarin asking Gong Gong how his flight was literally translates to “Your airplane, good or not?” Most viewers won’t speak Mandarin, but it didn’t matter. The awkwardness of that exchange is obvious. We can all understand trying to communicate and failing.
And character arcs? Evelyn and Joy have them and their relationship form the core of the story but with Waymond, Everything Everywhere All at Once performs filmic aikido. Waymond is a flighty, ineffectual husband and father when we first meet him but by the end is a warrior who fights with kindness, worthy to be partner to Evelyn’s Verse Jumping hero. But the character of Waymond hasn’t changed at all. The Waymond at the start of the movie is the same Waymond at the end. His character arc happens solely in our minds, in the way we perceive Waymond, because the way we see Waymond changes as the movie plays out, until we finally see him as he truly is.
The family drama plays out against a backdrop of multiple universes and much wackiness. I mean, can we talk about the fight sequences? An early high is the fannypack fight, which takes the Chinese Dad accessory to the next level. The inspiration is clearly Hong Kong action movies specifically the ones of Jackie Chan that typically feature the use of weapons improvised from everyday objects. And what is more everyday than a fannypack? Brothers Andy and Brian Le of Youtube channel @MartialClub are fight choreographers as well as performers, drawing inspiration from Hong Kong action movies. In Everything Everywhere All at Once they not only get to showcase their skills, but also get to fight in a scene with Michelle Yeoh who first came to prominence in the Hong Kong action movies they loved, thus completing the circle.
Everything Everywhere All at Once features a genuine ensemble cast, every actor is exceptional. Michelle Yeoh turns in a career defining performance showcasing her ability for comedy, action, and drama. Ke Huy Quan back after nearly two decades away from the screen is the heart of the story: “The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind especially when we don’t know what’s going on.” A simple message. But so powerful. Stephanie Hsu who I knew from “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” puts in a breakout performance as Joy/Jobu. Jamie-Lee Curtis as Deirdre the unlovable IRS auditor we come to love. And what more needs to be said about James Hong, who boasts over 400 actor credits spanning almost seven decades?
And THAT rock scene. If you had said that I would be laughing and crying at a scene featuring two rocks, with no sound save the blowing wind, I would have been incredulous. But that scene would not have worked without us having come to care deeply about Evelyn and Joy. The preceding scenes were filled with noise and mayhem, so by the time we come the rock scene with its quiet serenity, it is much needed relief. It is also the first time Evelyn and Joy aren’t fighting. For once they can just be rocks and “talk” to each other. Just be a rock.
This is a movie of contrasts. The movie’s deeper explorations of meaning are juxtaposed with the absurd. On one hand we are trying to find meaning when nothing matters, while on the other are fights involving buttplugs, and dildoes, not to mention a universe where humans have hotdogs for fingers, or a universe where a raccoon can manipulate a human like a puppet a la “Ratatouille”, to a scene with silent rocks filled with emotion. It shouldn’t work, but it somehow does, and that is a large part of its brilliance.
Though I loved EEAOO from my first watch, I wasn’t sure if it had mainstream appeal. As an immigrant of Chinese descent, who loves Science Fiction, who grew up watching Hong Kong action movies, it felt like Everything Everywhere All at Once was made especially for me. A multi-genre movie about Chinese-American immigrants encompassing Science Fiction, Drama, Action, Comedy, in a wacky, sprawling package from A24, an independent studio known for arthouse-style movies? That’s the sort of movie that becomes a cult classic, not a blockbuster. But Everything Everywhere All at Once has been the little movie that could: it has resonated with so many, its appeal surprisingly wide. Everything Everywhere All at Once has received critical accclaim and has attracted enough of an audience to become A24’s highest grossing movie. To my surprise and joy it has eleven nominations for the Academy Awards, and during this awards season has been raking in multiple nominations and wins. It would make me tremendously happy if Everything Everywhere All at Once won all the Oscars but that is unlikely. The Academy votership has traditionally preferred worthy dramas, typically bypassing genres like Science Fiction and Comedy which Everything Everywhere All at Once clearly is. Any Oscars it wins would be icing on the cake but really, it doesn’t need them. It is self-evident that Everything Everywhere All at Once is a highwater mark movie, in any genre. It is an instant classic will be studied in film schools for years to come. Everyone in the cast and crew who collaborated to create “Everything Everywhere All at Once” should be immensely proud of what they achieved with this movie. I’m going to watch this again.
By Danny Sichel: [Reprinted from the Winter 2021/2022 issue of WARP.]The latest Clarkesworld is out, and it includes “The Cold Calculations” by Aimee Ogden, most recent in a string of answer stories to Tom Godwin’s 1954 “The Cold Equations” – from “The Cold Solution” (Don Sakers, 1991), to “The Cold Crowdfunding Campaign” (Cora Buhlert, 2020), and many others with less obvious titles.
“The Cold Equations” — also known as the “throw the girl out the airlock” story — has long been criticized for multiple shortcomings, in both its themes and its content. The situation is contrived! The society is broken! The EDS is bad engineering! There are other things Barton could have thrown out! Many people have complained about this last one, incidentally. There are indeed items on board that could very well have been sacrificed (including, as in Sakers’ story, the legs of both the pilot and the stowaway, which Sakers’ pilot assumed could be re-grown); apparently Damon Knight came up with a whole list.
Lately, though, a far more common criticism has been that “The Cold Equations” isn’t the story that Tom Godwin wanted to write. When Godwin sold the story to John W. Campbell for publication in Astounding Science Fiction, Campbell sent the story back for rewrites three times, because — in the words of Joseph L. Green, who spent five days with Campbell in 1970 — “Godwin kept coming up with ingenious ways to save the girl!” The moral of the story is often seen as being “space is dangerous”. This may be the case, but as Campbell biographer Alec Nevala-Lee found in a letter Campbell wrote to a friend, the story was also written as a “gimmick on the proposition ‘Human sacrifice is absolutely unacceptable.’” The situation in “The Cold Equations” is intended to force the reader to agree that human sacrifice can be not just acceptable, but necessary. As a result, you can definitely see a lot of places where Campbell’s thumb is on the scale, and remnants of earlier versions.
There are a lot of things wrong with “The Cold Equations”, and therefore I choose my words very carefully when I say: Campbell’s interference made the story better, but not for the reasons he thought.
What makes “The Cold Equations” special, what makes it an enduring classic, is that it’s about failure. Given the grossly negligent environment in which Marilyn was able to stow away in the first place (per Richard Harter, “there is a word for pilots who short cut their preflight checklist. They are called dead.”), without which the story couldn’t have happened in the first place, and the complete lack of margin for error, and, really, all the other factors that Godwin-under-Campbell’s-guidance used to make the story possible… given all that, if Barton had been able to jettison the pilot’s chair, or whatever “ingenious” thing Godwin had originally intended as the basis for a happy ending, then today… no one would remember it. It would have been Just Another Puzzle Story.
It’s more than that, though. I first read “The Cold Equations” in the early ’90s, in the same general span of time that I read “The Old Man and the Sea”, which is also about failure in some very important ways, and which may have nudged my thinking in certain directions. As is typical, I was aghast by the story’s conclusion, especially because there were so many possibilities as to how it could have been resolved without a death. But, I thought, that was the whole point.
I saw “The Cold Equations” as a classic not because the tragedy was unavoidable, but because it wasn’t.
This is what makes literature, isn’t it? Characters who aren’t perfect. They have flaws. That’s why the whole concept of the “tragic flaw” exists.
Barton was in a puzzle story. A life was on the line. All the pieces of the solution were there. And… he didn’t put them together. He wasn’t insightful or creative or educated enough to see the solution. He wasn’t bold or confident or stubborn enough to go against regulations. The pressure was on… and he didn’t make the right decision at the right moment. He wasn’t good enough.
He wasn’t the hero. He was only the protagonist.
“I didn’t do anything,” Marilyn says at the end, as she goes out the airlock to die. “I didn’t do anything.”
And neither did Barton.
And that’s why, despite everything, the story works.
Danai Gurira and Angela Bassett in a scene from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, A (Spoiler Free) Review
By Chris M. Barkley: (Author’s Note: I wish to state for the record that I, like many others, would have preferred that the role of T’Challa, the King of Wakanda, had been recast for this film. Alas, he was not. But, we do have THIS film to review and I do so gladly and without (too much) bias or reservation. I hope you enjoy it.)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (4/4 stars) with Angela Bassett, Letitia Wright, Tenoch Huerta, Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Danai Gurira, Martin Freeman and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Screenplay by Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, Directed by Ryan Coogler.
Bechdel Test Rating: OFF THE CHARTS!
Since the turn of the current century, I can personally account for only a few films that have transcended being “only a movie” and have been genuine, world changing, cultural events. And most of them have been either genre, or genre-adjacent, films.
My own personal list includes Casino Royale (2006), The Dark Knight (2008), Avatar (2009), The Avengers (2012), Frozen (2013) Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), the Academy Award winning (for Best Original Screenplay) Get Out (2017) and Crazy Rich Asians (2018).
But the last culturally significant film on my list, Black Panther (also released in 2018), was also one of the best. Not only was it the very first superhero film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, it was also honored with six other nominations (and winning three, for Costume Design, Production Design and Original Score) and earned almost 1.35 billion dollars at the box office.
But, beyond its many accolades and numerous semi-trailers full of cash, it was a moment where the spotlight shone brightly on creative people of color in the motion picture industry.
And much of the success of Black Panther was due to the efforts of writer/director Ryan Coogler, screenwriter Joe Robert Cole and an astounding supporting cast featuring Andy Serkis, Forest Whitaker, Winston Duke, Dani Guriria, Daniel Kauuya, Angela Bassett, Letitia Wright, Lupita Nyong’o and Michael B. Jordan.
But above all the others, Black Panther was carried on the magnificent shoulders of the late Chadwick Boseman, who died of colon cancer in August of 2020.
The cast and crew of the film and the whole world at large mourned his passing.
Now Coogler and Cole had a big problem; how could they proceed with expanding the story of Wakanda without its emotional and charismatic north star.
But bravely, and with many, MANY trepidations between themselves and studio executives at Marvel and Disney, they did.
According to Ryan Coogler, the original plan was to have King T’Challa, who was dusted along with half the universe with Thanos’ snap (in Avengers: Infinity War) had returned to Wakanda, trying to make up for the lost time away from his kingdom for five years. Because while he was gone, a new threat had arisen…
In the opening moments of Wakanda Forever, King T’Challa’s absence is dealt in a swift and devastating manner; Shuri (Letitia Wright) is in her laboratory, fervently trying to come up with a treatment for her severely ailing brother. But moments later, her mother, the Sovereign Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), sadly announces that the King has joined the ancestors.
A year later, there is still no successor to T’Challa’s Black Panther to protect Wakanda. The Dora Milaje forces, headed up by General Okoye (Dani Gurira) are holding their own against powerful nations, including the United States, who are eager to obtain and exploit the mysterious extraterrestrial mineral vibranium, the source of Wakanda’s strength and security.
But it turn out that Wakanda is not the only nation state with vibranium; a mysterious flying stranger named Namor (Tenoch Heurta) appears before Ramonda and Shuri, demanding that they help him keep his underwater kingdom of Talokan a secret and their sworn fealty to assist him in case they engage in a war against the surface dwellers he hates and fears.
And, as he amply, and violently demonstrates throughout the film, Namor will do anything AND everything to protect his people…
Tenoch Heurta as Namor
Namor, also known as the Sub-Mariner of Atlantis to generations of comics fans, was created by writer/artist Bill Everett, appeared in Marvel Comics #1 in August of 1939, was THE first comic book anti-hero. “Namor’s goal wasn’t to rescue kittens or punch criminals — it was to lead an Atlantean army against the air-breathers of America,” stated veteran comics writer Mark Waid to the New York Times in 2019.
As such, Namor was the prototype of many of the conflicted villains that would be created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and a host of other Marvel writers and artist creators a generation later.
But Coogler and Cole have repurposed Namor’s origin and those of his people as descendants from the Yucatan region off the coast of Mexico instead of the mythic realm of Atlantis. His fears, of discovery and the threat of exploration and colonization by the surface dwellers, are highly relatable under the circumstances, even more so than Killmonger’s nationalistic motives were in Black Panther.
Of particular interest is the introduction of a new character in the MCU, Riri Willams (Dominique Thorne), an M.I.T. student and engineering genius who is a target of Namor’s attention. She’s paired with Shuri for a great deal of the film and although she seems to be in over her head most of the time, she handles herself well and her great chemistry in her scenes with Wright make her the perfect foil to Shuri’s all too sure scientist. (And, rest assured, Williams will be back in her own Disney + show next year!)
Also lurking along the edges of the action are Wakanda’s C.I.A. ally Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) who is saddled with his all too nosy boss, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a quasi-villainous character who was last seen recruiting disgraced the ex-Captain America/U.S. Agent John Walker (Wyatt Russell) for nefarious purposes in the Marvel +’s tv production of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. But this all too brief appearance by Fontaine is actually an easter egg that promises a MCU payoff somewhere down the line as well.
And, I can guarantee that there are a few other narrative surprises that will take your breath away.
But of all of the performances in Wakanda Forever, I would be very disappointed if Angela Bassett is not given any consideration by the Screen Actors Guild, the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards next year. Her dual portrait of a grief stricken mother and a political force to be reckoned with is a wonder to behold and should be rewarded as such. She is the heart of Wakanda Forever.
It is my belief that Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is not only the best MCU movie since the first Black Panther, it is also one of the outstanding and entertaining films of 2022.
I went in not knowing what to expect and came out not only pleasantly surprised but immensely pleased that this was not only a brilliant, stand alone sequel but a tearful and loving tribute to the memory of Chadwick Boseman as well.
This Marvel film has a single, mid-credits scene. And I am not exaggerating when I tell you that it is one of the most unexpected and touching things I have ever seen committed on film.
Excelsior, Marvel and movie fans.
Dedicated to the
Memory
of
Chadwick Aaron Boseman (November 29,1976 – August 28, 2020)
and
Kevin Conroy (November 30, 1955 – November 10, 2022)
By Steve Vertlieb: Very exciting news. The long awaited CD soundtrack release of 12 O’Clock High is now available for purchase through La-La Land Records and is a major restoration of precious original tracks from Quinn Martin’s beloved television series. Airing on ABC Television from September, 1964 until January, 1967, 12 O’Clock High was based upon the 1949 20th Century Fox classic starring Gregory Peck as General Frank Savage, a stern commanding officer demanding the best from his pilots during stressful encounters in the Second World War. The film co-starred Dean Jagger, and featured a brilliant musical score by composer Alfred Newman.
20th Century Fox Television and Quinn Martin Productions joined forces to present a realistic, faithful presentation and extension of the original story with a powerful recreation of the lead character in the performance of star Robert Lansing. Always among the most versatile and compelling lead actors in television, Lansing delivered a towering vision of General Frank Savage for the TV series which was every bit as powerful in its interpretation of the confidant, yet emotionally conflicted commanding officer, as was Gregory Peck in the original motion picture.
Robert Lansing
Sadly, the network decided that Lansing’s performance was, perhaps, entirely too realistic for television audiences and that a younger, less intense actor was needed to appeal to a wider television audience. Lansing was replaced in the second season by actor Paul Burke who had shone so brightly as the star of television’s long running Naked City New York police series. Burke tried valiantly to elevate the series to its original levels of brilliance but, unfortunately, was never able to capture the magnetism of Robert Lansing once the character of Frank Savage had been unceremoniously killed off at the beginning of season two.
The one element of the series that continued its excellence into subsequent seasons and episodes was the musical score by Dominic Frontiere that remains to this day among the finest examples of thematic scoring for episodic television in history. Frontiere was a skilled and gifted composer whose hauntingly reliable themes were utilized not only for this groundbreaking program but heard, as well, throughout the first season of ABC’s science fiction classic The Outer Limits (replaced by One Step Beyond composer Harry Lubin for the second year), The Invaders, and (along with primary composer Pete Rugolo) the original Quinn Martin, history making tv classic The Fugitive.
Now, for the first time, the classic scores and themes for 12 O’Clock High by composer Dominic Frontiere (1931-2017) have been released in a limited edition soundtrack CD of just 2,000 copies. For anyone who has ever hummed and cherished the familiar musical cues of this landmark television series, this is an historic release.
