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Author: Thomas Parker

Heroes and Humanity: Jack Kirby at the Skirball Center

Heroes and Humanity: Jack Kirby at the Skirball Center

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Last Friday, as an early Father’s Day gift, my wife arranged for us to spend the afternoon at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, which is hosting a wonderful new exhibition dedicated to the memory and achievement of a great American artist. Titled Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity and running until March 1, 2026, the show is a must-see for any admirer of the King of Comics.

Jack Kirby is arguably the most influential person in the history of mainstream American comic books; his work, more than that of any other artist or writer, defined the visual grammar of the superhero. Along with his partner Joe Simon, he created Captain America in the 1940’s, soldiered through the postwar superhero slump of the 1950’s doing work in all genres — science fiction, war, horror, western, and romance (it’s an often forgotten fact that Simon and two-fisted Jack Kirby created the romance comic book) until, in the 1960’s, when DC showed that there was a reawakening market for costumed heroes, he teamed up with Stan Lee to create the “Marvel Universe”, though they didn’t know that’s what they were doing when they did it.

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A Hand-Crafted World: Karel Zeman’s Invention for Destruction

A Hand-Crafted World: Karel Zeman’s Invention for Destruction

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Is there anything more dispiriting than the ceaseless quest for novelty, especially when it seems bound to end in disappointment? It’s something I feel just about every time I turn on the TV. We’ve never had so many viewing choices, but so often everything feels reheated, recycled; we’ve seen it all before. The genuinely different is so rare that when you do see it, you know it — and you never forget it.

Sometime in the 70’s I saw an old black-and-white movie on television; it was called The Fabulous World of Jules Verne and it was the most extraordinary-looking thing I had ever seen. Guess what? I never forgot it.

A few years later I saw a movie on the late-night tube about the world’s greatest liar, Baron Munchausen. This time I couldn’t say that I had never seen anything like it because there was one thing that it reminded me of — The Fabulous World of Jules Verne. It was only years later that I learned that both films were the work of the Czechoslovakian director, Karel Zeman.

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The Old-Fashioned Way: Tove Jansson’s Hobbit Illustrations

The Old-Fashioned Way: Tove Jansson’s Hobbit Illustrations

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Okay — close your eyes and visualize Middle-earth. I can’t be certain what you’re seeing behind your eyelids, but I think I have a good chance of guessing; five will get you ten that whatever you’re conjuring bears a strong resemblance to the Alan Lee Lord of the Rings book illustrations and to Tolkien’s world as envisioned in Peter Jackson’s films (on which Lee and John Howe did much of the production design).

The austere, rather chilly (once you’re out of the Shire, anyway) Lee/Howe template has become the default picture of Middle-earth for many — if not most — people, but there are other ways to view Tolkien’s realms and their inhabitants. I have already sworn my fealty to the first such visualization that I ever encountered: the beautiful Tim Kirk paintings that were featured in the 1975 Tolkien Calendar.

I am also partial to another version that’s not nearly well enough known, the gorgeous illustrations done by Michael Kaluta for the 1994 Tolkien Calendar. (Kaluta is probably best known for his comic book work, especially on the 1970’s Shadow for DC.)

One thing that makes both Kirk’s and Kaluta’s art so attractive to me is that its depiction of Middle-earth is just different from the one that has become the current standard. (Kaluta’s work is especially striking because it is so extravagantly colorful compared to Lee’s and Howe’s bleached-out work.)

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The Lost World

The Lost World

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You may have heard about the recent statements made by Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, a man who combines all the best qualities of Dr. Jack Kevorkian and Alaric the Goth in one natty package. As reported by Variety on April 28th, the streaming mogul declared that the precipitous decline in in-person movie attendance which began several years ago and has reached near-catastrophic proportions in the years following COVID is easily understandable; indeed, it communicates a clear message:

What does that say? What is the consumer trying to tell us? That they’d like to watch movies at home, thank you. The studios and the theaters are duking it out over trying to preserve this 45-day window that is completely out of step with the consumer experience of just loving a movie.

Relegating the theater experience that has defined the industry (to say nothing of wider American culture) for the past nine decades to the dustbin of history, Sarandos shined a dazzling light on our murky cultural landscape:

Folks grew up thinking, I want to make movies on a gigantic screen and have strangers watch them and to have them play in the theater for two months and people cry and sold-out shows… It’s an outdated concept.

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Writ in Water: V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

Writ in Water: V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

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How many times have you heard (or even repeated) the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for?” Of course it’s a cliché, a commonplace beloved of parents and primary school teachers the world over, but such chestnuts sometimes actually contain the distilled wisdom of the human race, and you ignore them at your peril, as is demonstrated (or not, maybe) in Victoria Elizabeth Schwab’s 2020 dark fantasy, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. It’s a spirited, stimulating read that gives you something to think about.

The story begins in a small French Village, Villon-sur-Sarthe, on a summer evening in 1714. A young woman named Addie LaRue is “running for her life.” Her family has affianced her to an inoffensive but crushingly dull young man. Addie, however, doesn’t want her life to be yet one more colorless copy of the bland existence that her mother (and her mother before her, and her mother before her, and her mother before her…) has led.

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Life Lessons from David Cronenberg

Life Lessons from David Cronenberg

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Let me begin with two assertions, each of which is, in the immortal words of Vincent Vega, “a bold statement.” First: David Cronenberg is one of our greatest directors, and there is nothing he has done that isn’t worth seeing. Second: I am the dumbest, most suicidally foolhardy person you will ever meet. The first statement is arguable, ultimately a matter of opinion, but the second is not, because I can prove it. In fact, I can use the first proposition to establish the validity of the second one.

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past fifty years, David Cronenberg is the Mutant King of body horror; in stomach-churning, Manson Family date movies like Rabid (an extremely icky form of vampirism), The Brood (nasty little “rage monsters” popping right out of poor Samantha Eggar), Scanners (you want exploding heads — you’ve got exploding heads), and Videodrome (I… I can’t even talk about it, and to this day, neither can James Woods) he set new standards in shockingly gross special effects and in the number of times he forced audience members to barf in their popcorn buckets or make panicked rushes to the restroom.

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Odd Old Indie: Night Tide

Odd Old Indie: Night Tide

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Growing up in Southern California in the 60’s and 70’s was a movie lover’s dream. Late night and weekend television in those days was almost completely given over to old movies, especially on the Los Angeles independent channels: KTLA channel 5, KHJ channel 9, KTTV channel 11, and KCOP channel 13.

The independent stations were especially prone to showing independent movies, small films that hadn’t cost much and hadn’t made much and could be acquired cheaply to occupy all the time that had to be filled until sign-off and the test pattern. Many of these movies were from the House of Corman (The Little Shop of Horrors, The Masque of the Red Death, Dementia 13), but most weren’t, and any night of the week you could watch a pulse-pounder like The Flesh Eaters, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, or Beast of Blood (once you had advanced — or descended — to Filipino horror movies you could consider yourself a schlock PHD.)

Most of these films were awful, of course (that’s how you wound up on channel 13 at two in the morning), but sometimes a (relative) diamond could be found among the ashes. One movie that I discovered during those years was Night Tide, an odd little indie that aimed a bit higher than the usual cheapie thriller. I was always happy when it popped up in the week’s TV Guide listings.

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The Eccentric’s Bookshelf: Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film

The Eccentric’s Bookshelf: Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film

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1983? Let me tell you how it was.

In a World Without the Internet, before Youtube, before Netflix, before Prime, before 4K UHD smart TVs, before social media or Substack or niche newsletters, before IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, before DVDs and Blu-rays, even before blogs (gasp!), you would find yourself sitting around late at night, channel surfing, listlessly flipping through TV Guide, restlessly looking for something to watch, and you would come across a movie like The Horror of Party Beach and you would think, “What the hell? Is this worth ninety minutes of my life?” And since you would likely have only once chance to see the thing, it was a decision fraught with import. (I’ve always wanted to use that phrase.)

In the absence of all of the resources and options we now take for granted, how did you decide what to do? I’ll tell you what I did — I reached for The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film.

The brainchild of Uber-Geek Michael Weldon and an offshoot of his Psychotronic Video magazine, the book is, according to the back cover, “The complete viewer’s guide to the weirdest movies of all time!” It’s a boast that the volume makes good on with one pseudopod tied behind its back.

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Movie of the Week Madness: Duel

Movie of the Week Madness: Duel

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Can anyone dispute Steven Spielberg’s title as the most successful motion picture director of all time? Not if you’re talking box office, you can’t. As of June, 2024, Spielberg’s films have grossed almost eleven billion dollars, putting him two billion ahead of his nearest competitor, James Cameron, and as Randy Newman sang, it’s money that matters. In Hollywood that’s probably truer than anywhere else in the world, and the profits generated by Spielberg’s many successes have more than made up for the losses incurred by his rare failures, making the suits very, very happy.

What about recognition from colleagues and critics? He has been nominated nine times for Best Director, winning twice (for Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan), and he received another Oscar as the producer of Schindler’s List when that film won Best Picture. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (you can step on him at 6801 Hollywood Boulevard), has won the Academy’s prestigious Irving Thalberg Award (are there any awards that aren’t prestigious?), and has received more honors from various cinematic guilds and organizations than can easily be counted.

This storied career had its humble beginning in television in 1969, when Spielberg directed an episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, and through the early 70’s he directed episodes of various other television shows, including the very first episode of Columbo, Murder by the Book. (And yes, I know about Prescription Murder and Ransom for a Dead Man, but technically those are stand-alone TV movies, not episodes of the series.)

And speaking of TV movies, Spielberg also directed three segments of the ABC Movie of the Week, one of which still stands as arguably the best made-for-TV movie ever. I’m talking, of course, about Duel.

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A Metaphysical Nightmare: Brian Moore’s Cold Heaven

A Metaphysical Nightmare: Brian Moore’s Cold Heaven

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The Irish writer Brian Moore, who died in 1999 (he pronounced his first name in the Irish fashion — Bree-an) was one of the most interesting novelists of his time, at least based on the four books of his that I’ve read, all of which deal with areas where the supernatural, the philosophical, and the theological intersect and blur into each other.

Catholics (1972) is set in the near future after a hypothetical Fourth Vatican Council has banned private confession, clerical garb, and the Latin mass, while the fictitious Pope of the novel is engaged in negotiating a formal merger of Roman Catholicism and Buddhism, radical changes that are resisted by a handful of monks living on a small island off the coast of Ireland. In The Great Victorian Collection (1975), a scholar dreams of a fabulous collection of Victorian artifacts, and when he wakes up, it has actually appeared in the parking lot outside his California motel room. Who will believe such a thing? Can he believe it himself? Black Robe (1985) is a painstakingly detailed — and bracingly unsentimental — historical novel about the material and spiritual struggles of a Jesuit missionary to the Hurons in seventeenth century Canada.

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