Joker

Attack Of The Clowns

Joker
Directed by Todd Phillips
2019 Canada/USA
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Minor spoilers about a subway scene here.

Cesar Romero did it better.

Heath Ledger did a pretty good job too but it’s kind of hard to compare the portrayals of the fair few actors who have played The Joker on screen over the years since they’ve mostly been written slightly differently for each incarnation and, certainly in the case of this new variant of the character played by Joaquin Phoenix, he’s a very different beast altogether.

Set in the 1980s, this new stand alone stab at an ‘origin’ film for The Joker is purported to be inspired by Alan Moore’s groundbreaking 80s graphic novella The Killing Joke but... I really don’t see that. In that comic the iconic character had more or less the same origin he had in the majority of the previous comics (and many of the big screen versions of the character) which is something this new iteration does absolutely nothing to parallel. It kinda makes you wonder why they bothered calling it Joker and tying it into DC in a way but, they do at least use the iconic make-up here and there are some other overlaps from the world of Batman in the movie.

I remember when I first heard about this project and I thought that it was kind of a bad idea. Back in the 1970s, DC had tried launching a stand alone comic of The Joker and it got cancelled after nine issues. Ironically and, presumably, to tie in with this new movie which also seems to be trying to distance itself as much as possible from the comic book version of the character, the company has recently released Issue 10 containing the artwork and story originally scheduled for that issue way back in the 1970s (I might review this short run of comics sometime soon on this blog, I think). So, the point I’m trying to make is that I wasn’t expecting a film about a super villain from DC to make much of a splash (even though I’m probably the only person in the world to like the Catwoman spin-off movie with Halle Berry) and I’m not the biggest fan of Phoenix either, although I’ve warmed to him of late due to his participation in You Were Never Really Here (reviewed by me here).

It’s interesting that Phoenix should follow that movie with this one because they both have a lot of echoes of Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver about them... although it’s even more blatant in the former movie. Critics who have cited Scorcese’s Taxi Driver and The King Of Comedy as major influences on Joker have been absolutely right to do so. You can see the mentally damaged Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver (not to mention some Gotham street scenes which could pass for Bickle’s nightmarish perception of New York in the 1970s) and there’s definitely a strong link to The King Of Comedy here, with Joker obsessed to an extent with a talk show host here which manifests itself in almost exactly the same way as they did in the Scorcese movie (flights of imagination presented as reality etc). Ironically though, it’s Robert De Niro himself, who had the obsession with the comedian played by Jerry Lewis in The King Of Comedy, who is the target of The Joker in this film so... what goes around comes around, I guess.

Joker itself is, I have to admit, a pretty good movie. I was very surprised at the quality of the narrative conviction shown in the performances here... Phoenix is great, as is Zazie Beetz, DeNiro and Frances Conroy as the older version of The Joker’s mother. Conroy also had a role in that Catwoman movie with Halle Berry too so, I’m glad this production was not cursed by her involvement in that one.

The film is also impressive in that it portrays a very small scale story (writ large with bigger implications) and it’s consistently, tonally, a downward spiral. A grinding, wearing depiction of down beats with a character who has no real grasp on reality and who is portrayed, for the most part, as a victim. I’ve already had a disagreement with somebody as to whether The Joker is depicted as evil in this film. I think not... he’s just mentally unhinged which, I suspect, takes away a person’s ability to make a choice between right and wrong and so, I think this is more of a monster... a human monster, for sure but, a monster nonetheless. Indeed, one could say the writer/director is even trying to illicit sympathy and empathy for the character with the way he portrays all of life’s ‘tough breaks’ as a force which finally flicks the switch in the title character’s head. In Bonnie And Clyde, Arthur Penn did this much more subtly using the language of film to win over the audience to the title characters by withholding establishing shots and long shots until the first crime is being committed. Here, Phillips and Phoenix are somewhat less subtle by piling on the despair and pathos of the character.

Indeed, the first set of murders The Joker commits are something the audience are really, I suspect, rooting to happen. He’s just been terrorised and beaten by a gang of rich, yuppie thugs who are the absolute opposite of sympathetic character types... you kind of want them to get their just dessert and  when they do it kind of puts you on his side when it happens. Later on, when he slashes someone’s throat before stabbing him in the eye, the damage is already done with the build up and framing of the character that, even though it’s a totally unjustified killing, you kind of shrug it off. In fact, in the audience I was with, in the aftermath of this very scene, when he lets a distraught character go free instead of murdering him because he was always nice to him in the past, I heard one of the ladies in the audience utter the words “Aww, so sweet.”, so, yeah, there’s empathy and identification going on with the title character in this for sure but, you know me, I’m not one to be on the side of censorship. Art is art and people will interpret it how they will, dependent on their psychological make up so, it’s good that this film can blur the lines between villain and ‘everyman’ character in some ways. At least it throws up the issue for discussion.

Another way in which the movie seems to ‘normalise’ the psychopathic killer, to some extent, is to make his laugh a psychological condition which the character even has to highlight to people by carrying a card around with him, explaining he’s not laughing at them it’s just a neurological malfunction. Gone, though, are the character's keen wits that allow him, in the comic, to be a master of crime. This film has much less in common with popular, lionised super villains of past literature and film such as the exploits of Fantomas and Fu Manchu and seems to be a much more willing spiritual cousin of those 1930s hoodlum and gangster pictures that Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson used to make. So not like the keen mind of the comics at all.

That being said, the film does take things from the long, comic book history but the biggest thing I think it takes is probably the ‘Cult Of The Batman’ which was at the forefront of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns... except it’s filched for The Joker instead. This ‘movement’ isn’t even something the character deliberately instigates or has any control over, although there’s a wonderful scene near the end of the film (which I think is where the film should have ended) where The Joker is confronted by his ‘children’, so to speak, and plays to them. It feels a lot like the end scene from Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes (reviewed here) and I think it’s quite effective.

Another thing from the comics, of course, is the Wayne family. There’s a nice set up to the idea that The Joker might actually be Batman’s step brother and, although it’s thrown out as the reality of the situation before the end, there’s also evidence within the film that this is just a cover story (take a look at the back of the photo of Arther Fleck aka The Joker and his mother and tell me whose initials they are). Similarly, the familiar old Batman origin story which gets done here, is portrayed as an indirect result of the actions of The Joker so, once again, we have the idea that the creation of The Batman was only possible with existence of The Joker. This yin and yang relationship about the two characters is pretty much the only thing I can really see as being taken directly from Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke although, I have to say, it’s probably been thirty years or more since I last read it so, that’s something I need to get into again.

There’s some beautiful cinematography here too. The many online critics of the use of orange and teal to light a scene will not be happy with this because the film is full of it... but it works well and I loved the way the colour pallette sometimes started out as one thing and then suddenly became a little schizophrenic, possibly as a visual metaphor for what is going on in Arthur’s head. For example, a shot bathed in orange where Arthur is sitting at a desk towards the other end of a long shot is suddenly changed when the camera slowly shifts slightly to the right, allowing the kitchen door and window space to come into view at an angle, which is completely lit in teal. Stuff like this make the movie fun to watch when, perhaps, the tone and content seem a little too bleak to be able to get anything positive out of it.

Whatever you make of it though, the film looks good, has some fantastic performances and has a nice score by Hildur Guðnadóttir, which is something I’ll definitely have to pick up on CD at some point soon. There’s also a nice undercurrent of reality versus what’s going on in the mind of Arthur Fleck and the ‘twist reveal’ actually caught me out for once... so that’s good. Admittedly, the film maybe goes on a little longer than it should and the final coda is a bit redundant but the very last shot revealing the probability that something very violent just went down 'off camera' is quite effective and it’s not a terrible ending... I just thought it was better ending up with The Joker playing to his cult following rather than give it almost a ‘crime doesn't pay’ undercurrent at the end. Not that The Joker, unlike his comic book and previous big screen counterparts, is interested in crime at all. Only with killing people, by this point. I do suspect that the ending has been added after either test screenings or studio interference to soften the tone somewhat... the location of the character makes no sense after what we’ve seen in the sequence prior to this (when he has so many admiring people in the crowd ready to help him).

If you have been sitting on the fence about Joker... I would urge you to give this one a go. It’s at the very least a really nice looking film and it’s very well put together. And, even if you don’t like the film, it’s simplistic approach to some very questionable viewpoints on this kind of character and his portrayal on cinema screens is perhaps something you’d like to have an opinion about. I know I really liked this film and though I wouldn’t see it again at the cinema, I would be happy to take another shot at it on Blu Ray next year and see what else I can spot in it. Definitely something I’d recommend you to go and see, if you get the chance to get to the cinema in the next week or two.

Aquaman

Curry On Sea Men

Aquaman
2018 Australia/USA
Directed by James Wan
UK cinema release print.

Okay... so this was nothing like what I was expecting this movie to be. I was assuming this would be, like most of the other recent DC movies in this particular cinematic strand of continuity... something of a mess. As it is, this is easily one of the most engaging and entertaining of the DC universe films, second only to Wonder Woman (reviewed here). That being said, I can’t imagine any other superhero movie ever coming close to Wonder Woman in my lifetime so, yeah, I guess you can say I thought a lot of the new Aquaman movie, even though he really isn’t the Aquaman I used to love as a kid.

Aquaman stars Jason Momoa as Arthur Curry, the title character, reprising his role from Batman Vs Superman - Dawn Of Justice (reviewed here) and Justice League (reviewed here). He bookends the narrative with voice-over narrative telling a big story of political battles in the undersea kingdom which threaten all the non-ocean dwellers on the planet but, he comes at it through the eyes of his personal story and... this is something which hooked me in right from the start... he tells it from the angle of a love story. A love story between his dad, Tom, played by Temuera Morrison (who you might remember as Bobba Fett’s father Jango Fett, plus a bunch of clones of his character, in the prequel Star Wars movies) and his mother, Atlanna, played by Nicole Kidman.

And it’s quite charming and heart warming and from this simple, fish out of water start where Tom rescues Atlanna and cares for her in his lighthouse, I was completely hooked. There’s a wonderful action scene in said lighthouse where Nicole Kidman goes full-on warrior and bashes up a load of Atlanteans and then sacrifices her freedom to return to the oceans, leaving Tom to raise their child... who we soon see has lots of cool, undersea powers from his mother.

From then on we get two parts of the villainous plot introduced... as Black Manta, a modern pirate played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, is left hating Aquaman for reasons I won’t go into here while regular James Wan collaborator Patrick Wilson, as Aquaman’s half-brother King Orm, tries to persuade and manipulate wise King Nerreus, played by Dolph Lundgren, to raise up Atlantis, unite all the armies of the kingdoms of the oceans and wage war on the surface dwellers who have been polluting their oceans for centuries. Meanwhile, over the years, we have Orm’s advisor Vulko, played by Willem Dafoe, who has been secretly training Aquaman in his fishy ways over the years and Mera, played by Johnny Depp’s nemesis Amber Heard, reprising her role from Justice League, who wants Arthur Curry to find an ancient trident which will give him power to gain the kingship of the ocean and defeat Orm’s attempt to be Ocean Master.

So, basically, what we have is an action spectacular with a kind of road movie treasure hunt involving Aquaman and Mera, who are trying to gain the trident and avert disaster and... you know what? It’s a real fun ride.

James Wan is somebody I usually only associate with low budget, fairly high quality horror films but, it looks like he can really knock out a good, large scale action blockbuster if he’s given enough money to play with. Like Wonder Woman, the big action is matched by a very overt, emotional, beating heart which gives the audience something to invest in when the battle scenes come and this really took me by surprise since, frankly, the Aquaman character didn’t really get much of a chance to shine in Justice League. So the writers have really thought about this one and Wan has managed to pull it all together to make a very confident looking, big screen spectacle.

This is not the blond, short back and sides version of Aquaman I grew up with... reading him in his appearances in titles such as Justice League Of America and The Super Friends. I used to love the little Comic Action Heroes figure from Mego I had as a kid, despite the fact that my Uncle had squeezed it too hard one day and Aquaman’s leg would fall off whenever he went into action after that. So I was not very happy about the look of the character they’ve brought to the screen here but I really mellowed to it once I saw how well the film works. Also, there are a fair few throwbacks to those original Aquaman strips... including those little circles they used to draw to symbolise him talking to the creatures of the ocean and also, in the endgame of the picture, his old, colourful orange and ‘green gauntlets’ costume which I used to like so much.

Now, there are a couple of problems with the movie so let me just cover those here...

It’s been quoted many times over the years that ‘continuity is the hobgoblin of the small minded’. Well then call me small minded but I think story arc continuity is an important and much valued building block when fashioning a cinematic universe (or in any other kind of story medium, to be fair) and I got the feeling that if I were to sit down and re-watch Justice League right now, I’d find a couple of glaring mis-matches. However, there’s very little shout out to the former film, although it clearly takes place some time after that one and... they kind of get away with certain differences, I think.

The other problem is that it’s just too long... it kinda slumps about two thirds of the way through and the action scenes towards the end could have done with a fair amount of trimming it seems to me. Also, a more lengthy and personal fight between Orm and Aquaman may have been a little more satisfying. That being said, it didn’t detract form the sheer impact and brilliance of the film overall and I think this is definitely one of the DC films from this period which will be remembered in a positive light, providing audiences are willing to go and see it after the not so great Justice League.

But it also has a lot going for it... great acting, great story, some well choreographed action in the middle of the film and a beautiful score by Rupert Gregson-Williams, who also did such a great job on Wonder Woman. Also, it’s easily the most surreal of the contemporary DC movies, with characters riding armoured battle sharks, giant crabs and militarised crustacean people... it’s like if Salvador Dali was allowed to design the extended underwater battle from the James Bond film Thunderball (reviewed here) and did his own thing with it. Which is never going to be a bad thing.

Also, it’s got some amazing transition scenes in the movie including flashbacks which take you completely by surprise and a lovely transformation from a shot of a snow globe to the next narrative point in the story, fairly early on in the film. There’s some really nice stuff in here and I think James Wan has done a truly remarkable job cramming in all this great stuff in a compelling, visual way.

So yeah, that’s my take on Aquaman. There’s a mid post-credits scene which gives you some insight into where they might be going with a sequel and, if it does the numbers I’m hoping it does at the box office, then we should be seeing that at some point in the future (fingers crossed). If you’re, like me, wondering why the hell DC have been getting everything wrong lately other than Wonder Woman... well, wonder no more. If you decide to go and see Aquaman then you’re in for an aquatic treat. Thoroughly enjoyed this although, a quick ‘heads up’ to say that, since I saw this, I’ve found out it’s been cut under advice from the BBFC in this country... which means I’ll definitely be importing the Blu Ray from the US when it comes out, rather than buy the truncated, vandalised English version.

Wonder Woman The Golden Age Vol 1

Ropes N’ Tropes

Wonder Woman
The Golden Age Vol 1
by William Moulton Marston
DC Comics 
ISBN: 978-1401274443

I’ll be the first to admit that I was never much interested in Wonder Woman as a kid growing up in, mostly, the 1970s. Sure I watched the Lynda Carter TV show from time to time, primarily because there were so very few live action superhero characters on television then that it was a huge novelty to get someone doing this kind of stuff on air (and even less so in the UK where we only got a few of the small selection of live action comic book characters that the US were putting out in shows and movies). So my primary experiences of Wonder Woman were when she used to show up in the odd issue of the 1970s Justice League of America comics, which I might find laying around at my Uncle’s place and, of course, in one of my favourite cartoon shows, The Superfriends (which was kind of an animated Justice League lite). Of course, Lynda Carter would return to my fantasy life just a few years later in the Wonder Woman costume but... err... yeah, that was purely for other reasons and perhaps it would be inappropriate to explore that here.

All that changed last year when I saw what is, to date, the greatest superhero movie of all time, Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman (reviewed here), starring Gal Gadot as the titular character. This film both moved me and caught my eye on almost every level and, coupled with the unbelievably brilliant biopic Professor Marston And The Wonder Women (reviewed here), it was obvious I was going to want to read more about this beloved comic icon and, what better way than to read these new reprints of her earliest days.

Wonder Woman The Golden Age is a generous tome and reprints all of the stories appearing in the first year or so of her existence from late 1941 and into 1942, covering her first appearance in All Star Comics, followed by a continuation of that origin story in Sensation Comics, followed by her features continuing in Sensation Comics and also in the issues of her own Wonder Woman comic, once the character was proven to be successful.

The artwork is pretty much what I was expecting from a 1940s comic book although, that being said, the drawings aren’t quite as crude as the early Superman comics from 1938, nor the various Timely (later Marvel) comic characters from 1939 such as The Human Torch and The Sub Mariner. I think by the time Wonder Woman was launched onto the scene, the comic book artists were starting to get the hang of the idea that comics were a big thing and a regular paying job, so the artwork by various artists was probably improving all the time (that’s my theory, anyway) so, while you can probably easily date the artwork in these issues to more or less the correct time period (not to mention the structure of the pages as a whole), they aren’t in any way flat or boring and are easier on the eye than you might expect.

It’s interesting to note that while the origin of the character (as told in a couple of different versions in this first year) is quite a bit different from the version in the latest movie - presumably it’s been much revised over DC’s lengthy history - there are also a lot of elements from the original early issues that did make it into the recent film version. Whether that’s Jenkin’s and her writers cobbling bits of Wonder Woman history together herself from the early days or if these are elements that have been picked up in various revisions of the comics over the years, is not something I am qualified to make a good guess at.

So, for example, the origin includes the theft of Queen Hypolyta’s girdle by Hercules who then enslaves all the amazons. When Aphrodite eventually sets them free and hides them on Paradise Island, they all still have to wear shackles/bracelets as a reminder of the nature of man (this is pretty good, feminist stuff for the early 1940s I reckon... at least it’s probably quite ahead of its time in terms of seeing publication in a popular print form for the period). Also, when Wonder Woman, aka Princess Diana, aka Diana Prince (her alter ego as a simultaneous Army Nurse and Secretary to Steve Trevor’s superior in the army) has shackles attached to those specific bracelets and they are put on by a man, she basically loses her powers until they are removed (this was one of the few equivalents to Superman's Kryptonite the character had at this stage).

However, the little things which did make their way into the film in one shape or form are clearly visible here. For instance, in one issue we have the villain as Dr. Poison, who is revealed at the end of the strip to be a woman (the character was played by Elena Anaya in the movie). Also, although the World War Two setting was relocated to World War One for the movie, the second Wonder Woman strip (the first to feature in Sensation Comics) also includes a storyline involving the villain's perfection of a new kind of gas that penetrates all known gas masks... another element from the recent motion picture.

There are also many things which wouldn’t have translated too well from page to screen, for sure. For instance, the fetishistic overtones of female domination and lezdom spanking, often seen in relation to Diana’s friend Etta Candy, was mostly edited from the movie. Etta herself was a completely different personality in the movie but they did get her trademark cry of “Woo! Woo!” into the film... albeit very subtly. Perhaps another thing that may have been a big mistep if the film version had gone into a more faithful adaptation, especially in the scenes on Themyscira where the Amazons are fighting the Germans, would be the fact that, rather than ride around on horses, the Amazons of Paradise Island tend to ride around on giant kangaroos. That's an idea possibly best left in the 1940s as regards to movie credibility, methinks.

There are also some subtle differences too.

Yes, Professor Marston was, along with his wife and live in mistress to them both, the real life inventor of the lie detector... and he does have a lie detector appearing in more than one issue in this first year. However, rather than being a specific ‘rope of truth’ as it came to be over the years, the golden lariat was actually a piece of equipment that compelled the wearer to do whatever the wielder commanded... unless the person giving the orders was a man, of course.

Due to the setting and the times, the comic has a lot of contemporaneous references and also, like many of the comics of the time (especially the early Superman strips, if memory serves), a lot of social messages about how the young readers should be living their lives in the face of corruption and, of course, the war. So, you will sometimes get stories devoted to fairer wages for the shop assistants in department stores or factories keeping the price of milk down for the people. And, naturally, the usual stuff about buying lots of War Bonds and helping the war effort. There are also referrals to things which, while not quite yet lost to the period in which they were written, were things I had to look up. Ignatz Mouse and Krazy Kat, for example, rang a vague bell but I had to research them before I was any the wiser.

That being said, one of the most problematic things with these early comics is the war itself. Since the character, like many of her costumed contemporaries, is all powerful, you wonder why she doesn’t just go over to Germany and deal with Hitler herself and end things in a few minutes. I don’t know exactly when DC wrote in the mystic powers of the infamous and, possibly, real life Spear Of Destiny into the strip, to keep superheroes from getting near Hitler but... it doesn’t seem to be much in evidence in these stories for sure.

One of the delights of these comics is the advancement of the form itself. Things in the artwork are evolving such as one page splash panels to start off the story or using bubble edges around panels which are flashbacks. It’s nice to see this evolution of the art of the comic strip although, it has to be said, when they flash back to her origin story (and change it slightly), you have the former versions of the story on hand so you can see how the colours have been changed on later versions of the back story. Deliberate ‘errors’ like this certainly keeps the readers on their toes and it makes things interesting. It’s also astonishing to see how far ahead of her time, in some ways, Diana was in the comics. Not just in terms of feminism but with fantasy ideas too. For example, she was having adventures on other worlds as the astral projection of her form two decades before Marvel’s Doctor Strange character was doing this more regularly. My guess would be that this was very much influenced by the ethereal transportation of John Carter to the planet of Barsoom (Mars) in the Martian tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs (alas, the film version of A Princess of Mars, called just John Carter, changed it to teleportation to make the concept more palatable to modern audiences). I’m sure they’re something Marston would have at least been a little familiar with, at any rate.

So that’s the first year of Wonder Woman read and I have to say, I really enjoyed these things... especially when you know a little of Marston’s history and kinks and see how they made their way into the strip in some subtle and, often, not so subtle ways. These reprint books from DC are really appreciated and much cheaper than the old DC Archives hardbacks from a number of decades ago. They bundle the appearances together chronologically from all the simultaneous titles, rather than just reprint the one title and leave you with references to other stories you’ve not read yet.. I’m definitely going to have to catch up with some more of these Wonder Woman reprints... and probably some of their other characters as well. I’ve already picked up the first volume of Batman and I’ll hopefully be able to get to that one sometime soon.

Wonder Woman Unbound

Lost And Bound

Wonder Woman Unbound
by Tim Hanley Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 978-1-61374-9098

Wonder Woman Unbound is the first of what will be, I’m sure, many books I’ll be reading for this site dealing with various aspects of, to quote this book’s subtitle, ‘The Curious History of the World’s Most Famous Heroine’, in the wake of last years truly great cinematic incarnation of the title character. I was given this at Christmas and, despite the bold cover, it looked a slight thing in terms of how much value it could bring to my understanding of the Amazon Diana and her heroic persona. However, looks can be deceiving and are not the best things to rush to judgement on and so it proved to be with this.

Tim Hanley’s book is a knockout and a gold mine of great information, much of which could only be researched in the wake of the availability of expensive duplicates of the early comics which were reprinted for the general public more recently than when some of the other tomes which have tried to look into Diana’s background were written. I truly learned a lot from this valuable book, which doesn’t just limit itself to looking at creator William Moulton Marston’s original take on the character but also brings us right up to date... or at least as up to date as 2014 when it was written.

After an introduction which touches upon some of the issues Hanley wants to cover in the book, he gets right into things with the first section, entitled The Golden Age. In this he recaps, for the less comic literate, the history of the medium and the various things that happened to the strips... such as a, surprisingly, balanced view of what Wertham was really saying when he sparked those comic book witch hunts with their grim fallout involving the creation of the Comics Code. Not to mention the slumps in sales and how the various strips and characters weathered these things through this and certain other periods of modern history.

Diana’s origins were slightly different from the current version of the character as portrayed in the movies.... with the amazons imprisoned by Hercules before escaping to Paradise Island where they fashioned bracelets from their chains to remind them of the world of men... although the idea that Diana was sculpted from clay by her mother and given life from the Gods was there too. However, the origin was revisited and changed a few times over the years... as it has been for a lot of comic book characters over the decades (especially DC characters) and this is perhaps due to the longevity of the Golden Age characters... when many other of the superpowered giants were refashioned (with some notable and legendary exceptions) as brand new characters with different origins... I might mention the Golden to Silver and Platinum Age transformations of such characters as Green Lantern, The Flash or The Human Torch (who originally wasn’t human at all), for example.

Another very good point that the author makes, and it’s not something I’d even thought of before, was that many of those Golden Age heroes were born from personal tragedy... Superman fleeing the destruction of his race, Bruce Wayne’s parents gunned down in front of him etc... whereas Wonder Woman was not. Her origins seem way more upbeat and optimistic in comparison and perhaps that’s why she tries to solve all the problems she faces from various villains with a sense of love and reformation rather than with overt antagonism (something which came over very well in the recent movie version of her character, reviewed by me here).

So, for example, it talks about how she would recognise the good traits of her enemies and use those to suggest alternate career paths and how she had set up ‘Reform Island’ to rehabilitate those foes who survived her attentions (something which I’m guessing may have been purloined from either Doc Savage’s Crime College or The Shadow’s similar reforming island.

It also talks about the gender role swap and compares Steve Trevor to Lois Lane in terms of being a 'damsel' to rescue. Batman’s Robin fulfilled a similar role but was, also, always quite useful to Batman whereas Steve Trevor seemed to be completely ineffectual against his enemies and would have to be bailed out by Wonder Woman time and time again. Hanley then looks at how alter ego Diana Prince fulfilled the same weak role in comparison to Steve Trevor, before transforming herself into Wonder Woman to save the day.

The author is also not afraid to take on all the issues of Marston’s personal psychology and how his much celebrated and still used to this day (if my understanding is correct) DISC theory was the underlying message of the propaganda living inside the strip and also points out the difference between this and the undeniable sexual kinks depicted metaphorically in the book... which are problematic not by their nature but by being somewhat contradictory in their gender representation to the underlying tenets of DISC.

He goes on to show various charts of his research to point out the high percentage of her time Wonder Woman spent in bondage or, most importantly, binding others compared to her nearest male rival in terms of ‘getting tied up’, Captain Marvel. Of course, the big red cheese’s* bondage content was often a necessity of the writers finding ways of incapacitating his alter ego, Billy Batson, so he could be gagged and unable to say the magic word SHAZAM!, which would bring Captain Marvel into the world... so it has the highest amount of bondage in any male oriented comic book. Wonder Woman had stacks more and the writer also looks at the different ways it was shown in relation to who was getting tied up (male or female) and if it was, perhaps, a disservice to Marston’s own theories of female dominance being depicted.

Hanley also talks about Marston's theory about the positivity of submission being at odds with the way it was portrayed in the strip but shows that other elements of the stories also supported the strong feminist ideal that the character was meant to represent. Also, that the strip was very much aimed at a male readership, as well as female readership and that, for the most part, the male readership was much higher. He does this very impressively by gleaning the amount of data to be found in the letters pages of the comic over the years and also by looking at the kinds of ads which were being pitched (mostly to boys) in the Wonder Woman comics.

The book goes on to cover the character in the wake of Marston’s death, looks at the various other important writers contributing to the strip (including other, very interesting features in the pages of the various comics starring Wonder Woman) and gives an overview of how ‘in touch’ they were with Marston’s principles... including the use of the phrase ‘Suffering Sappho’ and how the evidence from a lot of the comics is undeniable that Diana was, especially at the start, a lesbian... although I suspect what she became very quickly, in terms of her alter ego, was at least bisexual (something which I think is another element which the recent film makes as overt as possible for a family audience). Although the Amazons, as they stand in the movie, surely must have been created as bisexual because their original mission was to appease/calm down and ‘sexy up’ mankind, if I’m interpreting the movie version correctly.

Hanley explores the differences between the character and the silly plots of the Silver Age in the wake of the shake up after the EC comics years and the ‘Wertham effect’. How the women in the comics, including Diana, were injected with ideals of ‘female domesticity’ propaganda after the death of her creator (something which I don’t think would have necessarily have happened if he had lived longer).

It investigates and demonstrates these things by giving us a very welcome potted history and summary of various other characters in comics at the time... including the female characters. This shows that, in many ways, Diana at this time was even less independent than the title character of the ‘Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane’ comic book. Other DC female characters were far stronger in terms of their identities and roles in the DC line.

Thus, it shows how the women's liberation movement of the fifties and sixties totally passed Diana by. In fact, in a very interesting run of the comics, her superpowers were taken away from her, as was Steve Trevor, who dies as her motivation to become a kind of mentored, kung fu killing machine spy who was falling in love with every man she came across and who was as interested in wearing the right fashions as she was anything else. Actually, this run of the comics sounds fascinating and, although they completely destroyed Diana’s character, I would truly love to read these ones. Unfortunately, I don’t think they’ve been reprinted so it would take a lot of time scouring comic book shops for expensive back issues if I were to ever get that opportunity, methinks.

So after making the point that while women were rising up and claiming independence in real life, Wonder Woman was doing the exact opposite... it shows how Gloria Steinem reclaimed Wonder Woman in the 1970s by putting her front and centre on the cover of the first issue of her phenomenally successful Ms magazine - celebrating her inside the covers and engineering the restoration of her superpowers with a powerful friend at DC to tie in with this.

As Hanley covers the next four decades, bringing us to the somewhat sorry state of the character in 2014 (in terms of sales at least) it becomes increasingly clear that he knows a lot about the history of feminism in its many incarnations (many of them opposing)... including one based on theories of an all female genesis for our species through a process called parthenogenesis which, in all honesty, does nothing to make me take certain somewhat respected splinter groups of feminism in any way seriously. I mean... oops.

It’s a shame, in a way, Hanley didn’t wait another three or four years before he published this so he could see what a successful phenomenon Wonder Woman has become again, especially in terms of the film which has become probably one of the most successful DC superhero movies of all time (deservedly... it’s one of the great works of art in modern cinema). I suspect he might want to revisit the book at some point and revise it in light of what Diana has become to modern audiences and I would love to read what he makes of this recent chapter in her ongoing history.

That being said, though, Wonder Woman Unbound is a truly wonderful tome to have in one’s personal library and it certainly armoured me up with a lot more knowledge about the character than I was previously aware of. It’s concise but thorough and extremely well written... it also includes a number of interesting photos of key covers, adverts and other items of note from her history in a section about two thirds of the way through the book. Now, admittedly, I am a novice when it comes to this character so don’t know how this holds up to more knowledgable fans of Diana and her story but I can certainly recommend this as required reading for anyone who is a little in the dark about Wonder Woman’s place in comic book history. I had a really good time with this one... perhaps you will too.

* Arch enemy Dr. Sivana's name for Captain Marvel (played by Mark Strong in next year's movie version).

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

Shibari Boom-De-Ay

Professor Marston and
the Wonder Women
2017 USA Directed by Angela Robinson
London Film Festival Sunday 15th October

Okay, so this was my last film of this year’s London Film Festival and I couldn’t have picked a better one. Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is a truly joyful experience and, also, the timing couldn’t have been better for the producers in terms of following this year's big hit Wonder Woman (reviewed by me here). This is the story of the man who created that iconic character (under the pseudonym Charles Moulton), psychologist Professor William Moulton Marston and the two women in his (and each others) life... his wife, psychologist Elisabeth Marston and their live in lover Olive Byrne.

The film is damn near perfect too.

I knew the movie would have to tackle the Frederic Wertham stuff and it kinda does, in a way... or at least the growing sentiment in America that the relatively new comic book phenomenon was perverted, corrupting and harmful to the children of America (and presumably to the GI’s too since comics were popular with them also). Wertham would be the mascot boy for the terrifying anti-comics crusade to come and so he’s not specifically mentioned here as this movie ends roughly around the time of Marston’s death, which was just a few years early for the full horror of Wertham’s pseudo-psycho babble to take a grip on minds across the country.

However, the growing scare of sensationalist comic books is a perfect place to look back from and writer/director Angela Robinson kicks off the movie with kids collecting unwanted comics in carts as the credits play out before we see Marston looking on at everyone burning comic books and we see an issue of one of the early comics to feature Wonder Woman, perhaps Marston’s most enduring invention, burning up with the rest of them on a bonfire of four colour funnies. We then join Marston defending Wonder Woman to Josette Frank, who was appointed to help National Comics Publications, kinda, self certify before the real storm came later (soon after and decades before they made it official, National Comics branded themselves with the initials of their popular Batman title, Detective Comics, as the now more familiar DC). It’s from this scene, with Frank (played by Connie Britton) asking the hard questions and Marston remembering the relevant parts of this life, that we glimpse the majority of the film in flashback, with constant stops back to the early 1940s when this sequence is happening.

So we have Professor Marston played by Luke Evans and  Elisabeth played by Rebecca Hall (who I loved so much in The Awakening - reviewed here - that I thought she should have been heading up a franchise with the character from that movie) giving lectures in Marston’s new psychological theory DISC (which stands for Dominance, Influence, Submission, and Compliance) and taking on a new assistant whom they both, as it happens, want to sleep with... called Olive, played by Bella Heathcote. And we see their story through their personal lens as they build a loving relationship under the same household (mostly) and have various children and struggle with various problems of their specific lifestyle choices versus what is socially acceptable in the 1920s and beyond.

In addition to seeing them discover each other we also see them inventing and testing the lie detector (finally realising the missing ingredient of the ‘false positives’ they are getting by using their possible future (at this stage) relationship in conjunction with it to finally get the correct results. We also see the discovery of illegal pornography as a defining moment in their life and, specifically, Marston’s accidental introduction to the ‘underground’ S&M scene (we all call it BDSM nowadays) including an introduction to bondage via a demonstration the Professor gets set up in the back room of a shop which specialises in... ‘fantasy dress’, shall we say. The bondage demonstrated, first on a model and then on Olive in the showroom is not unlike what we would know a little better these days as ‘shibari’ rope bondage (although the term itself was not, I think, in more common practice, even in Japan, until the 1950s) and this kickstarts another important aspect of Marston and the gals ‘relationship identity’. This is something they already touched upon earlier in the film in a spanking scene in a College ritual and the photographs that Marston later buys to pique the girls’ interest are, he insists, visual representations of his DISC ideas rendered in just four pictures. This later helps give him the idea to inject the same theories into his Wonder Woman character, who would make her first appearance in an issue of All Star Comics before headlining her run in Sensation Comics.

Of course, much is made of the lie detector, the bondage rope and the costume that Olive wears at one point as the early ideas that sparked certain aspects of Wonder Woman (who gets rid of the false words of her enemies with her magic rope of truth and who is constantly getting tied up in the strip during that period). It’s a great story and it’s all laid out from A-Z with Marston finally selling his idea of Suprema The Wonder Woman and writing the stories himself after he and Elisabeth are both fired from their college jobs due to the nature of their relationship with Olive and their various children. This includes a brilliant turn from Oliver Platt as legendary comics publisher M. C. Gaines which is pretty good, with him dumping the name Suprema and going with just the character name which is more familiar to her fans today... Wonder Woman.

And this movie sparkles so much.

The style is quite leisurely with lots of either static or slow moving camera shots which are held for quite reasonable lengths of time to let the performances of the three brilliant leads shine through. The writing is unbelievably witty and sparkly too and it’s a bit like a quick fire 1930s romantic comedy in the way the actors deliver this immensely intelligent dialogue, which juxtaposes nicely with the slower visual style without it clashing - the two things just seem to complement each other perfectly and the movie sings along very quickly. It’s also very funny with some great one liners such as Elisabeth saying something along the lines of “You can’t keep using science to justify the whims of your cock.” That’s probably not the exact quote but it’s not far off and, like many of the humour beats that hit the mark throughout this movie, the audience at the screening I attended were highly appreciative.

The film also has some nice things going on in those shot compositions too. The sorority ritual scene where Marston and his wife get hot and bothered watching Olive spank another student is partially shot from in front of a set of bannisters which partly obscures their features while allowing you to easily glimpse the mood being put through in their performance and it’s a really nice moment. Another really great thing is the deep focus photography used on some of the shots of the rope where Elisabeth ties up Olive in the shop and the texture of the rope is sharp in places where everything else in the shot is blurred out like an old Hollywood, ‘vaseline on the lens’ shot. It’s stuff like this which really gets into your eyeballs, coupled with the dazzling script and the superb acting from all the leads here.

I was a bit worried that the movie wouldn’t be able to legally use images of Wonder Woman due to rights issues but there seems to be no such problems here and there’s even a montage sequence (or two) with various comic panels from the strip set to the music of the famous jazz standard Big Noise from Winnetka, which I suspect might have been inspired by a similar musically charged montage with the same piece from the film Comic Book Confidential. Wherever that idea came from, it works just fine here and this is not to undercut the brilliance of Tom Howe’s wonderful score for the movie either (which I shall be picking up on CD as soon as I can get my hands on it after the release date).

The film ends with the time honoured, various facts about ‘what happened next’ in the lives of the three central protagonists and then the credits roll with photos of the real life William, Elisabeth and Olive... which really hits home, actually, just how glamourous the movie versions of the characters are in comparison to the people that inspired it. Although that’s a discussion for a different time, methinks.

All in all, Professor Marston And The Wonder Women is easily one of the best movies of 2017 and I can’t wait to see this one again when it gets a November release in the UK (and also buy the Blu Ray when it comes out). Don’t be on the fence about this one if you like cinema and also like to see a good, romantic yarn with humour, sadness and poignancy in spades. As far as writer/director Angela Robinson goes with this movie, I shall quote another movie from this year taking everyone’s famous amazonian superhero as it’s subject matter and just say... “You should be very proud.”

DC Comics: Bombshells Vol 1

Bombinatrices

DC Comics: Bombshells Volume 1
by Marguerite Bennett and Marguerite Sauvage
DC Comics
ISBN: 978-1-4012-6132-0

It’s been many years since I read a superhero comic and longer than that since I read one where multiple super powered beings banded together to fight a common foe. When I first started buying the DC Bombshells merchandise a few years ago, in the form of a few travel pass holders and a deck of cards, I had no idea it was an actual comic book. As it transpires, though... it wasn’t. First manifesting itself as a series of popular prints and then progressing to statuettes of female superheroes re-imagined as 1940s examples of themselves (which almost makes no sense in terms of Wonder Woman) or, in some cases, popular male heroes re-imagined as women from that same era, this is a case of original artist Ant Lucia’s designs inspiring a retro fitted comic book series which faithfully works these creations into a 1940s wartime setting.

This first volume, with the subtitle, Enlisted, reprints the first six issues of this series. The various issues which make up this trade paperback reprint gives us some of the back story to these characters as it slowly reveals how they come to be thrown into this mess of a Second World War together and are recruited to form part of ‘The Bombshells’… a kind of US government headed, all female version of the Justice Society of America, if you will (not to be confused with the Justice League Of America, who were the Silver Age equivalent of that particular super-group).

The story starts off strong when the feminist subtext which shapes the central storyline kicks in and completely nullifies one of DC’s biggest hero characters. Instead of Bruce Wayne’s parents being shot in the street after they and young Bruce emerge from a movie theatre showing a Zorro flick, they are saved from those fatal bullets by the appearance of Batwoman, a masked vigilante who  presumably takes her name from the baseball bat she swings to brutally beat her evil foes. Thus Batman is never born in this version of the DC universe (at least not yet in these issues, anyway) and this strong, opening statement really is an overt sucker punch to those expecting some kind of Dark Knight storyline to this thing.

There are also some much more contemporary DC characters thrown back in time… ones who I am not all that familiar with in some cases…  such as Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy. They even manage to shoehorn some nice appearances from male characters in this one too… such as a couple of surprise panels of Swamp Thing raining down destruction on some soviet soldiers and Zatanna’s magic hat rabbit actually being a rodent version of John Constantine (who was played by Keanu Reeves in a terribly unfaithful but ultimately very fun movie version of that character).

The story is beautifully told and takes a fair few more twists and turns than you might reasonably expect from the material as it assembles its interesting cast. I say interesting because some characters such as Wonder Woman are already 1940s heroines to begin with and, although Diana’s origins are more or less what they always were, the story goes further with some characters in terms of its initial set up. Supergirl, for example, was rocketed to Earth and found in the Soviet Union, where she grows up with her half sister Starwoman before events take a more complicated turn.

There is some beautiful art and panel design over various sections of the comic which give it a nicely hotch potch feel in places. For instance, there’s an interesting splash panel introducing Moscow, September 1940 where the text boxes read down the panel but also take you across before going left on two of three vertical boxes which are housed within that main panel. So you read down and the third insert picture box is on the right of the panel which accompanies that text before you continue down where the text is illustrated back to the left on the second vertical insert box… which you have already, presumably, looked at as you are working your way through the text on the way to the right. Because the insert picture boxes are vertical and long, this doesn't actually spoil the flow of information as you might expect it to and it’s a pretty nice feat of visual narrative flow maintaining the sense of the story in as interesting a manner possible without popping you out of that story with its own cleverness. Although, it has to be said, there are some other, somewhat less successful spreads throughout the issues where the reading direction is less clear and I found myself reading down the left page with things not making a lot of sense before realising these pages were meant to be read across a landscape spread rather than going down… something which used to be considered a bit of a design flaw in the way comic panels are constructed (if the panels didn't automatically lead the eye so the reader didn't know where to look next) but… I dunno… maybe I’m just getting too old.

That aside, though, there are also some nice moments where different kinds of art styles are used to reflect the different tones in which the story is told. For instance, when Kara (Supergirl) tells her origin story, the art and colouring flattens more and it is presented  almost as a storybook fable in that simpler, less embellished lines are used and a texture is run into the background, underlying everything depicted in those pages and giving it an almost illustrated fairytale look… which was a nice touch, I thought.

The story itself isn’t simple, though… weaving in and out where characters start off as one kind of person before they end up as someone/thing completely different. There are hints of this even in the first six issues reprinted here and one of the problems of printing trade paperback collections (often confused with graphic novels by many film companies, for some strange reason) is that their continuous nature leaves the reader of such collections without a natural conclusion to the events which are put in motion at the beginning of what are, in the case of this one, looking to be fairly complex story arcs.

That being said, the six issues collected here do lead to a kind of natural “mini conclusion” of sorts and they could be viewed as… almost standalone. Although, to be honest, I get the strong feeling that the writers haven’t finished introducing the full cast of these comics by this point in.

In the old days, when I was reading such things more regularly, DC Bombshells would have been branded an Elseworlds story… which was the DC equivalent of the Marvel comics What If…? universe. Alas, the Elseworlds branding is nowhere in sight on this collection so I guess the concept of the comic might be a somewhat confusing prospect to people who might not know that this is not part of the regular DC canon and are trying to square this with the characters as they might remember them from years gone by or, for that matter, as recently depicted in various movie versions. However, I would certainly recommend this both to fans of comic books and also to those who are less inclined to normally pick up this sort of visual confection. It’s a nice idea inspired by some really cool artwork and it’s clearly taking that jumping on point seriously and not throwing those ideas away for a quick cash in. I’ll certainly be aiming to pick up the remaining volumes at some point.

Once Upon A Time In The Hex

Jonah Hex 2010 US

Directed by Jimmy Hayward

Screening at UK cinemas now

A fistful of spoilers beyond this point!

One of my fondest memories as a child growing up in the late sixties/early seventies is flicking through and endlessly rereading old issues of DC comics such as Superman, Batman and Shazam! (with one magic word...). And of course, just as much as the stories inside these well thumbed tomes would be all those marvellous adverts for products and services which were rarely available over here in the UK.

“Man are you skinny?” Lot’s of people my age knew that, if you were, then you’d need to send off for some books from Charlie Atlas... just as sure as we knew that “You get a big delight, With every Bite, of Hostess Fruit Twinkies”... even if we’d never tasted the damned things over here.

And then, of course, there were the adverts for comics which appeared a little less frequently at our local comic’s stand (dedicated comic shops like Dark They Were And Golden Eyed and Forbidden Planet were just around the corner but weren’t quite with us yet). Comics like The Shadow and Jonah Hex.

Now I’ve long laid to rest my debt to The Shadow having since read a few of the pulps (which I hold were much less intelligently and stylishly written than their nearest rival, Doc Savage), heard episodes of Orson Welle’s radio show, watched various serials and movie versions of varying quality... and of course read some of the comics which were actually quite well put together. But I’ve never read a Jonah Hex comic... that ghost is still to be laid to rest. So please bear that in mind when you read the following review... I can’t vouch for its authenticity as an adaptation of said comic.

That aside, I really wasn’t expecting much from this big screen version of Jonah Hex... simply because the reviews I’d skimmed were unanimously underwhelming. I’m pleased to say that this was maybe the best attitude to go in with because... well, I was very pleasantly surprised because I do like spaghetti westerns (and the odd revisionist western... the odder the better) and this is what the makers of Jonah Hex have produced here. So I was well pleased with the final product... although it does have its problems, which I’ll go into later.

From the start I was hooked... Jonah’s wife and child are burned alive in front of him by evil baddie John Malkovich, who then brands Hex’s face and leaves him to die or live as fate decides. Although not exactly the same in content, the mood for me was very evocative of what I remember from the opening of Death Rides A Horse, so score one for this movie right there.

Then the media immediately switches to stylised cartoon, presumably in homage to one of the past Jonah Hex artists, and it gets all the origin and back story out of the way in the first five minutes. Well done Mr. Screenwriter! At last we don’t have to have a long, drawn out origin story taking up two thirds of the film and ending with a denouement that ties in to said origin. This is a big weakness of comic book movies today. When you are watching old serials, do they ever waste time exploring the origins? Heck no. Batman and Robin just got in there and beat everyone up... they were crime fighters... ‘nuff said. The Shadow was The Shadow. He knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men... and that was enough. You know he knows, now get into the story. So unlike most modern day superhero movies where even the villains get origin stories... you get all you need to know about Mr. Hex’s supernatural powers from this short cartoon sequence. Now we can get on to it...

The sequence cuts back into photography after the title of the movie comes up with Hex, now a bounty killer (I’d say bounty hunter but in the spaghetti westerns this movie is trying so hard to stylishly emulate, they always called them bounty killers), trailing dead bodies of his recent “catches” behind his horse in much the same way as Klaus Kinski would have in the excellent The Great Silence. And this sequence is a real homage to the spaghetti westerns of the past. Hex wears a cavalry uniform so already he looks like iconic character Django (and it really wouldn’t surprise me if the original Jonah Hex comic wasn’t pretty much inspired by the Django character as played by Franco Nero). Then you get the whole Yojimbo/Clint Eastwood western confrontation model where the lone guy confronts several in a shoot out with a comment made about the number of coffins. And then you get the classic, spaghetti western legacy, I’ve-got-an-unexpected-hidden-piece-of-hardware-for-a-weapon-and-I’m-going-to-kill-you-all moment where this film takes great care to top Django while still paying homage to it. In the first (of many, many, many) of the Django movies, Franco Nero goes for the coffin he’s been dragging around with him and pulls out a big Gatling gun to mow down untold numbers of the enemy with (as Arnold Schwarzennegger’s character makes apt visual reference to in a scene towards the end of Terminator 3). Here Josh Brolin, who does an excellent if cliched performance as Jonah (and I’d say it needs to be cliched to make this larger than life stuff work), flips up two big Gatling guns from the side of his horse and starts blasting away... of course, the horse would be deaf but who cares, it’s a great sequence. Maybe they could do a sequel called Deaf Rides The Horse.

From here on in the film is set up right and the spaghetti/revisionist tone permeates the movie all the way through. Lots of in-yer-face, snarling close-ups, perhaps not as stylishly handled as Leone but the intent is there. More odd weapons... in the form of hand held pistol crossbows that fire sticks of dynamite! And some weird kind of “pseudo-cameos” by people who look like more famous spaghetti counterparts of old - most notably a weapons inventor (Jonah’s equivalent of Q in the Bond films) who gives the same presence as Woody Strode and a guard who’s done up to provide the same kind of “recognition hit” as Bud Spencer! Great stuff and a joy to watch these classic tropes of the genre being lovingly invoked in a modern film.

On the downside, the editing is a little too modern for the kind of movies the writing and visual design is trying to aspire to... but that’s just modern movies I guess. The soundtrack too is a little off. Not to complain too much because it’s excellent and you can hear it trying hard to be evocative of the great genre scores of composers like Morricone, Nicolai and Bacalov... but with it’s synthesiser and rock shadowing it feels a little more Young Guns than Seven Guns For the McGregors. Still it serves the movie quite well to a great extent... just would have been nice to have a more classic musical homage to lift it at those points when something happens that highlight the inherent machismo of the genre. Probably would have been rejected by the suits if it had though.

Another problem is Megan Fox. She’s excellent in her role but she’s hardly in it and her inclusion in the final sequence makes no sense. How does the bad guy's henchman (played Billy the Kid style by Michael Fassbender) even know of her existence to be able to kidnap her and use her against Hex? I think she’s only in about three scenes in the whole movie and needed to be in this a little more I think (regardless of the fact that the majority of spaghetti westerns did not have a strong female presence). The whole last quarter of an hour and its unsatisfying denouement smacks of mishandling and studio re-editing. I don’t know what the story is there but I suspect this is a highly tampered with film and it’s a shame because getting there has been great fun.

A third problem is a little over-explanation alluding to Jonah's origins on certain points in flashback from the main narrative which touch upon things we’ve already picked up from the cartoon sequence. But these explanations are mercifully brief and don’t jar against the flow of the movie.

All in all though I’d say, if you don’t mind a movie with a weak ending, then take a look at this nice piece of escapist movie making. And if you’re a fan of the spaghetti western in general... definitely ride on down to your local cineplex or DVD store to see it because, whether you love it or hate it, you need to have an opinion about it.

And if you don’t have an opinion of it... Duck, You Sucker!