Happy Thursday, everyone! As fall (semi) officially starts today (really, it starts in the Northern Hemisphere on September 1st), it's gloomy as hell here in Chicago. Baseball is winding down, football is winding up and we're only a few weeks away from basketball and hockey. But enough of sports, let's get into my finds! Weird wine, Superman in the real world, Jackie Chan gets Canadian and David Bowie's best movie!
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I'm an absolute sucker for the well-crafted short story. Gimme a Harlan Ellison or a Mike Resnick or Joyce Carol Oates or a Connie Willis...but a lot of the time I go back to Ray Bradbury. Now this novel is not short stories, but a weirdly constructed novel that feels like short stories that have been strung together for a narrative. It shouldn't work at all but totally does, the tale of Douglas Spaulding as he navigates a world he's inhabiting with his own imagination. Bradbury has been gone for 9 years now and I don't think he's had the best record in adaptations, which is a shame, so let's enjoy Rachel Bloom's tribute to him (one of the things that got her a lot of attention and both led to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and also got her a Hugo nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form). Oh, and incredibly NSFW.
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Absolute confession: there's an HBO show on right now of Scenes From A Marriage, their take on an Ingmar Bergman movie. For some weird reason, I confused it with Fanny & Alexander, his TV mini-series that he also adapted as a feature film, I've never seen either except for one scene and frankly, this one scene from Fanny makes me think I really need to buckle down and watch the whole thing. But first, check this box set presentation out. I mean, seriously, the Criterion graphic design people know their brand.
So let's look at that one scene I've seen, which is so amazing.
I don't even know the context and I don't care.
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For quite a while, DC comics did what they called Elseworlds, a series of what-if comics that put their established characters into new situations. What if Batman had emerged in late-19th century Gotham? What if Superman had landed in the Ukraine instead of Kansas and was raised as the Soviet Superman (Superman: Red Son, a book that's absolutely worth your time). But this...this is something special. This is the story of Clark Kent, normal kid of normal parents in Kansas who had a terrible sense of humor and named him Clark at birth.
And then he wakes up one night on a solo camping trip...and he's floating. He's a teenager with the powers of Superman in a world where Superman is a fictional character, and has to figure out where he's going with this. Does he declare himself to the world? Stay hidden and worry about shadowy government forces? Just take his powers out for a spin once in a while?
I so love this book. I for years owned issues 1, 2 and 4 and for some reason had never picked up the 3rd section. 1 is him as a teenager, 2 is him as a young adult working as a features writer at a Village Voice type place, 4 is him as an older adult; but finally picking up this whole collection, I see how 3, which is about the birth of his children, just absolutely seals the whole deal. I don't tend to do the whole praising people on Twitter thing, but finally reading the whole story I had to seek out Kurt Busiek and tell him how much I appreciated this great work about a man who is both that, man and Superman.
Also, this series has the love of his love being a Lois who gets set up with him on a stupid joke and I'm 100% sure this happens to people named Lois and Clark all the time.
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I thought I might feature this, since The Queen's Gambit did so well at the Emmys this week, and I didn't realize how this is a Superman parallel. After all, Clark is absolutely the ultimate Man Who Fell To Earth. But this is about a different type of alien, one who isn't here to save our world but here to save his own. It is, if nothing else, a perfect use of David Bowie's...androgny? Alienness? Just plain beauty?
Walter Tevis wrote five novels in his lifetime, almost all of which have been adapted so far. The Hustler, Color Of Money, and The Man Who Fell Who Fell To Earth have been made into very good films. The Queen's Gambit was a very successful miniseries from last year. So far unadapted have been The Steps of the Sun (which I've never read) and Mockingbird, which is one of the finest geniak dystopian novels I've ever run across. I think he was a fantastic novelist and apparently an actual pool shark and I hope we get that Mockingbird miniseries someday.
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SCHLOCK TIME! I found a collection of the USA-era Jackie Chan and hoooooooooooo yeah I'm here for this. Gimme that movie that he made in Vancouver and it's supposedly set in the Bronx even though you can clearly see the Vancouver mountains. Also, how he berates a street gang and shames them into being better people. God, I love a good goofy Chan movie.
You know what? That trailer is boring. Check this fight scene out.
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