Film review: Jewel Robbery

William Powell is a dashing rogue jewelry thief bent on seducing and abducting bored baroness Kay Francis. When she tells him over dinner in his luxurious hideout that she wants to be forced to do things, he picks her up and throws her in bed, and at that moment I thought: I get it, it's a Harlequinn Romance ... Mommy Porn!

And it is. Look at the titles of most of the Kindle/Nook self-published books: The Billionaire's Mistress, The Billionaire's Secret Lover, Stuck on an Island with a Billionaire. Forgetting for a moment that the economy is in such a bad way that housewives are no longer interested in being whisked away by a lowly millionaire, all these books and Harlequin romances have one thing in common: Seduction at the hands of a Dashing Rogue! Women being forced to do things that deep down, they want to do.

This pre-code film gets some points for being racy. Francis is married after all, and some of the clothes she and her best friend wear are cut very low. It's kind of wasted though because both the actresses are disturbingly flat chested. It's like watching 12 year old girls at a pre-teen beauty dress-up pageant.

There's also some limp comedy around some peripheral characters getting giddy from smoking pot.

We'll see this plot in cinema again and again, the most obvious example being Hitchcock's "To Catch a Thief." Hitchcock had the right idea though, money was spent! Instead of a fake French Riviera, Hitchcock went to the real one. Whereas this film's Vienna is as phony as they come.

I also kept thinking of "The Thomas Crown Affair."

It starts with a lot of exposition about how bored Kay Francis is. Things pick up considerably when William Powell shows up, some 15 minutes into the film. And of course he's amazing as the dashing rogue.  It's all very short though, it needed a couple more heists perhaps, and a little more romance.

RIP: Carmine Infantino

Another childhood idol gone. I saw him at a comic convention in Philly. He was signing his book. Why in the world did I not pick up the book and get him to sign mine?

Oh well.

He had an interesting career. He drew for DC in the '40s, '50s, '60s, mostly the golden age Flash and various JSA members, then the silver age Flash and Batman. By the '70s, DC made him publisher. He wasn't drawing as much, but I enjoyed his reprints in the 100 Page Super Spectaculars.

In the mid-70s DC gave him the boot and replaced him with some woman in her 20s with no comic book or artistic experience at all. Talk about adding insult to injury.

Anyway, imagine my surprise later on when I instantly recognized his work on the cover of Nova, a Marvel book. Holy cow!  He also did the interiors and that was pretty much the only Marvel book I bought regularly. Then of course there was Star Wars and Spider-Woman.



Then the big surprise. He went back to DC for the Flash. Once again, for a comic geek like myself, this was nirvana. I spent hours comparing his '60s and '80s art. The style looser, but still dynamic. Characters seemed to jump off the page.

Pick up Justice League of America #200 for a real treat. Golden Age greats Infantino, Joe Kubert and Gil Kane return to draw the Flash, Elongated Man, Hawkman, Green Lantern and the Atom.

Review: Zatanna Shades of the Past TPB

Holy crap what a good read!

This is the exact opposite of everything I don't like about trade paperbacks:

It's a collection of (very clever or scary or funny) standalone stories, not a giant epic mess of retcon madness which is just a smaller part of a larger retcon madness.

The art is beautiful and consistent on every page, there's only one chapter that has more than one penciller.

A working knowledge of DC magic characters from the past helps the reader, but is not mandatory.

I would like to say no loose strings, but Brother Night pops up in the background, leading you to think he'll be there for the finish. He isn't, but it doesn't take away from the enjoyability of the book.

Some details:

This collects Zatanna 7-16

The stories: Shades by Adam Beechen and Chad Hardin. Magicians' relics come alive to cause trouble. Cool idea, very good art.

Pupaphobia by Paul Dini and Cliff Chiang. A multi-part thriller about a marionette who may or may not be evil. Twists and turns and the art goes from very good to beautiful.

Symmetry by Matthew Sturges and Stephane Roux. How freaking clever. Everyone knows Zatanna and Zatara cast their spells by speaking backwards, but in the 75 years of this conceit, writer Sturges was the first to ask, "How does this apply to palindromes?" Brilliant! Once again some sexy, compelling art and great facial expressions.

Brace Yourself by Adam Beechen and Jama Ingle. Zatanna gets the Li'l Archie treatment.  A story of Zatanna as an awkward tween. Really an homage to the great back-up stories from the 60s and 70s where a writer could take the heroes out of continuity and focus on character. I was thinking of The Private Life of Clark Kent stories from Superman and Action in the 70s, or the Elongated Man's mini-mysteries in the back of Detective. Great work by Igle.

The Cat with the Crystal Ball Eye by Dini and Igle. The book's lone non-standalone story. The Spectre, Brother Night, and Dale Colton all show up in  a story that finishes somewhere, but not in this volume. Take this chapter out and run it in a volume with that story.

Wingman by Beechen and Igle and Travis Moore. Cute story about a night out with Zatanna and her irresponsible cousin Zachary. I'm not crazy about changing pencillers in midstream, but there's no change in quality, just style. Igle's work is traditional with some good facial expressions, Moore's work is reminiscent of Gene Colan's (faces in shadows, simply drawn) (in a good way).

Witch Hunt by Derek Fridolfs and Igle. A pack of witch hunters hunts down Zatanna. The action starts on page 2 and doesn't let up til the last page. And a clever resolution to boot.

The Sorceress' Apprentice by Beechen and Victor Ibanez. More great art in a book full of great art. (check out the library!). Zatanna chases an extra-dimensional imp. Not heavy, but a lot of fun.

And then there's the painted covers by Adam Hughes. This artist is of course amazing. His women just define pin-up sexuality. The covers alone are worth the price of admission.

Finally, it occurred to me about half-way through why I was enjoying this book as much as I was. It was like the 70s all over again and I was reading - no, not reading - getting sucked into a DC 100 Page Super-Spetacular. In all my posts in which I complain about DC today, the underlying complaint is they don't make them like the used to. This is how they used to make them.

Book review: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

I've never seen The Office, I saw only a few minutes of the Mindy Kaling Project, but I picked up the book after reading some good reviews, and the reviewers were on target. It's a funny, funny book. A critic said it was like chatting with a very chatty girlfriend and he/she was right.

Coming so close on the heels of Tina Fey's "Bossypants," there's going to be some comparisons. It's pretty much laid out the same way: stories of an awkward childhood, breaking into comedy small time, breaking into comedy big time. But whereas Fey's book had a few serious moments, Kaling keeps things light through the whole book.

Favorite lines: Some people say living well is the best revenge, I say it's acid in the face!

There has ceased to be a difference between my awake clothes and my asleep clothes.

Hilarious stuff.

Pick it up, it's a lot of fun.

Book review: Schulz

A cartoonist plays out his mid-life crises in his cartoons. Every fight Linus or Charlie Brown had with Lucy turns out to mirror whatever disagreement he was having with his wife.

And then came the girlfriends, and then the new, younger wife, who was married when they met.

The book seems to skip the 80s. We get the marriage turmoil and remarriage of the late 60s, early 70s, and  next thing we know, he's on his death bed.

The writer tells us a lot about the skating rink Schulz built with his millions, but it never mentions if it's still in operation. Is it?

Otherwise, a good read about a man who only on the surface seems uncomplicated.

Film review "The Lonely Wives"

This isn't so much  a review as some random comments.

Edward Everett Horton plays a womanizer. I'll stop right there. This is the actor who invented the gay best friend role, so this was unusual for him. I was struck by how handsome he was as a young man though.

Anyway, it's a pre-code bedroom farce in which EEH uses a double to fill in for him so he can chase skirts and the double can stay home with the mother-in-law. Then, the wife shows up unexpectedly!

Shakespeare used lookalikes all the time and I'm sure the conceit preceded him by a few thousand years. I was just surprised to see it done (so well) in a film from 1931. It's a trick as old as film itself, long before Hayley Mills and Patty Duke were doing it. I wonder though, in this age of digital effects which film was the *last* to do it through film trickery.

It's all very stagey and for good reason, it was based on a play. It opens with a lot of clunky exposition. Most of the action takes place in the main living room where there are several doors, like in any stage farce. I look at films like this and think if I were to direct the remake, I'd take a couple scenes outside.

I also wonder if the script for the 30s play even exists anymore. Film historians have made a lot of noise about films that have been lost forever through disintegration of film stock. But what about Broadway scripts? What happens to them? Is there a big warehouse, or museum with scripts from the 1930s, once big hits, now forgotten?

Bottom line: It didn't age all that well, and a lot of the comedy was forced. Early in the film he's hitting on a secretary in his house, all the while the mother-in-law being in the next room. Everyone else knows she's going to walk in, why doesn't EEH?

The best line, the Margaret DuMontish mother-in-law upon seeing the maid kiss EEH: "I knew she was French, but I made allowances!"

Whom to cast in Westworld remake

Yul Bryner in "Magnificent Seven"

Yul Bryner in "Westworld"

When they made "Westworld" in the mid-70s, for the robot gunslinger they used Yul Bryner, who dressed like his character from "The Magnificent Seven." This would be shorthand casting, casting an iconic cowboy actor to play a cowboy robot. In the '70s, they had a few hundred cowboy actors to choose from. But, if they were to remake "Westworld" today, whom could they get to play the character? How many iconic Western actors do we have left?

Clint Eastwood springs to mind, but he might be getting a little old.
Kevin Coster has been in a couple westerns over the past 20 years.
Robert Duvall?
Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer?

Is that it?

It's amazing how a once-ubiquitous genre has all but disappeared.

There's always Arnold Schwarzenegger but that would be shorthand casting for a killer robot character.