Boxoffice Pro has just put out its projection for this coming weekend--and along with the usual projection for three-day Friday-to-Sunday period, also one for the five-day Friday-to Tuesday period created by the long holiday weekend we will get as a result of Independence Day falling on a Tuesday this year.
Of course, the big story here is what Indiana Jones 5 will make. As it happens the range for the weekend now stands at $60-$77 million--which means that the ceiling for the film is now below the floor in Boxoffice Pro's first tracking-based projection four weeks ago ($81-$111 million), which itself had reflected expectations none too high to begin with.*
Their best guess seems to be that the movie will take in something in the middle of that range--$70 million, with all that implies for the Solo-caliber or worse catastrophe scenario I have been discussing here for quite some time.* (And of course, should the prediction of a $70 million gross prove overoptimistic as it just did for The Flash, well, the consequences of that need no enlargement here.)
Is there any hope at all for Indiana Jones 5 avoiding that outcome? I see little--but not nothing. One possible glimmer of hope is that as more critics have seen the film the overall response has become a bit more favorable--the Rotten Tomatoes score risen from 50 to 66 percent. Admittedly that is still not very impressive, with the more favorable later reviews possibly just a matter of people saying "Well, it's not that bad." But it is something a little more positive than what we heard before, especially should it betoken audiences proving a little more generous, and maybe good word-of-mouth bringing more viewers in subsequent weeks--and the film having sufficiently decent legs to make the film's final take merely a disappointment rather than a disaster. Still, I have to admit that, especially given what is known about the content of the movie itself (The Super Mario Bros. Movie defied the critics to become a mega-hit, but this just does not look like that kind of crowd-pleaser), and the way in which the summer has been going, I would not expect too much.
* In real terms even $70 million is half of what Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull pulled in back in 2008 (about $140 million in May 2023 dollars).
Thursday, June 29, 2023
The Little Mermaid: Box Office Gross: The Fifth Weekend--and the Upcoming Sixth
During the run of The Little Mermaid some analysts found it useful to compare the film's domestic run to that of 2019's Aladdin--the next-to-last of Disney's animated-classic-to-live-action adaptations, which likewise came out Memorial Day, and I have tended to use the comparison (in current, not real, dollars) as part of my basis for making calculations about the film's likely gross.
As it happened The Little Mermaid opened a little stronger--with $95.6 million taken in in its first three days, and $118.8 million in its first four, as against $91.5 million and $116.8 million in the case of Aladdin. The result was the hope that, if the movie was already falling short of expectations domestically (to say nothing of internationally) it could overtop, or at least match, Aladdin's $356 million gross--which, even with the dollar worth a fifth less than it had been in 2019, would not look too shabby.
Alas, the gap between the two movies (again, without bothering with inflation) has steadily widened--and not in the new film's favor. Where The Little Mermaid was running almost 4.5 percent ahead of Aladdin at the end of the first three days, my extrapolations from the data have its lead down to 0.8 percent by the second weekend and turning increasingly negative afterward--1.5 percent lower by the third weekend, 4.2 percent by the fourth, and 6.4 percent by the fifth, when it had $270 million grossed, as against Aladdin's nearly $289 million.
In short, the film's opening a little bigger (even if it was just in current dollars) has been more than offset by its faster fade at the box office, which seems likely to continue this weekend. Boxoffice Pro anticipates the movie making a mere $4.4 million over the Friday-to-Sunday period, which would leave it with just under $280 million banked--as against the almost $307 million Aladdin had, widening the gap from 6.4 to 8.7 percent.
Previously considering the film my guess had been that its final gross would be in the range of $300-$350 million. At the current rate I still expect it to break past $300 million, but the faster fade makes its getting anywhere near $350 million a long shot now. Instead I think even $325 million out of reach, the lower half of the $300-$350 million range where it will end up.*
Meanwhile the international markets continue to offer little succor--the $230 million taken there to date amounting to just 46 percent of the global gross. Getting it past the half billion dollar mark (and thus into the $500-$700 million range I earlier anticipated), I would guess that if this does not improve the film's final take will be in the $550-$600 million range. Even by the lowered standard of a month ago it is not the happiest outcome that could have been anticipated for the film.
* Aladdin made 86 percent of its money by the sixth weekend. Should The Little Mermaid be at the same point in its trajectory after taking in $280 million as of Sunday one could expect $325 million when it finishes up--but the faster fade means one should assume it to have pulled in more than Aladdin had at the same point.
As it happened The Little Mermaid opened a little stronger--with $95.6 million taken in in its first three days, and $118.8 million in its first four, as against $91.5 million and $116.8 million in the case of Aladdin. The result was the hope that, if the movie was already falling short of expectations domestically (to say nothing of internationally) it could overtop, or at least match, Aladdin's $356 million gross--which, even with the dollar worth a fifth less than it had been in 2019, would not look too shabby.
Alas, the gap between the two movies (again, without bothering with inflation) has steadily widened--and not in the new film's favor. Where The Little Mermaid was running almost 4.5 percent ahead of Aladdin at the end of the first three days, my extrapolations from the data have its lead down to 0.8 percent by the second weekend and turning increasingly negative afterward--1.5 percent lower by the third weekend, 4.2 percent by the fourth, and 6.4 percent by the fifth, when it had $270 million grossed, as against Aladdin's nearly $289 million.
In short, the film's opening a little bigger (even if it was just in current dollars) has been more than offset by its faster fade at the box office, which seems likely to continue this weekend. Boxoffice Pro anticipates the movie making a mere $4.4 million over the Friday-to-Sunday period, which would leave it with just under $280 million banked--as against the almost $307 million Aladdin had, widening the gap from 6.4 to 8.7 percent.
Previously considering the film my guess had been that its final gross would be in the range of $300-$350 million. At the current rate I still expect it to break past $300 million, but the faster fade makes its getting anywhere near $350 million a long shot now. Instead I think even $325 million out of reach, the lower half of the $300-$350 million range where it will end up.*
Meanwhile the international markets continue to offer little succor--the $230 million taken there to date amounting to just 46 percent of the global gross. Getting it past the half billion dollar mark (and thus into the $500-$700 million range I earlier anticipated), I would guess that if this does not improve the film's final take will be in the $550-$600 million range. Even by the lowered standard of a month ago it is not the happiest outcome that could have been anticipated for the film.
* Aladdin made 86 percent of its money by the sixth weekend. Should The Little Mermaid be at the same point in its trajectory after taking in $280 million as of Sunday one could expect $325 million when it finishes up--but the faster fade means one should assume it to have pulled in more than Aladdin had at the same point.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse vs. Guardians of the Galaxy 3: After the Fourth Weekend, and Into the Fifth
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is proving a rare instance these days of a sequel significantly outdoing its predecessor--performing, as one observer had it, more like a regular, live-action superhero movie with a comparison of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 making the point. Spider-Man opened a little bigger--with a gross of almost $121 million to Guardians of the Galaxy 3's $118 million--and afterward actually widened its lead, such that it has in the subsequent three weekends generally stayed 5 percent ahead of where the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel was at the same point in its trajectory. (Thus as of last weekend Spider-Man had $317 million grossed, against the $300 million that Guardians of the Galaxy had managed as of its own fourth weekend.)
Moreover, going by Boxoffice Pro's projection--the movie's taking in $340 million by Sunday--would mean this continuing, the movie still about 5 percent ahead of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 in its fifth weekend (by which it had grossed just $323 million). The fact that the weekend is another holiday weekend would seem likely to add to its edge, boosting its gross to $346.5 million by its 34th day in release (as against Guardians' $326 million at the same point), working out to a 6 percent margin of difference.
All that being the case, even with Guardians of the Galaxy 3 benefiting from surprisingly strong holds late in its run (which will see it triple its opening weekend gross this weekend, and finish up in the vicinity of $360 million) it still seems easy to picture Spider-Man edging it out at the end. Given that Guardians of the Galaxy 3 seems likely to be the highest-grossing live-action superhero movie of the year (especially given the debacle The Flash proved to be, and the questionable prospects of Captain Marvel 2 and Aquaman) I still expect the animated Spider-Man film to be the highest-grossing superhero movie of 2023 domestically. (The global winner in the stakes is another matter, given that Spider-Man, if doing better than its predecessor internationally, has just not caught on abroad the same way--though I will be revisiting that matter in an upcoming post.)
Moreover, going by Boxoffice Pro's projection--the movie's taking in $340 million by Sunday--would mean this continuing, the movie still about 5 percent ahead of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 in its fifth weekend (by which it had grossed just $323 million). The fact that the weekend is another holiday weekend would seem likely to add to its edge, boosting its gross to $346.5 million by its 34th day in release (as against Guardians' $326 million at the same point), working out to a 6 percent margin of difference.
All that being the case, even with Guardians of the Galaxy 3 benefiting from surprisingly strong holds late in its run (which will see it triple its opening weekend gross this weekend, and finish up in the vicinity of $360 million) it still seems easy to picture Spider-Man edging it out at the end. Given that Guardians of the Galaxy 3 seems likely to be the highest-grossing live-action superhero movie of the year (especially given the debacle The Flash proved to be, and the questionable prospects of Captain Marvel 2 and Aquaman) I still expect the animated Spider-Man film to be the highest-grossing superhero movie of 2023 domestically. (The global winner in the stakes is another matter, given that Spider-Man, if doing better than its predecessor internationally, has just not caught on abroad the same way--though I will be revisiting that matter in an upcoming post.)
Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: Opening Weekend Expectations, Domestic and Global
Last week did not see Boxoffice Pro's already low and falling expectations for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny's domestic opening change much. All that happened was a slight shift of the ceiling downward, as the floor remained constant, the projected range now $68-$95 million (while Boxoffice Pro's long-range projections were unchanged from $211-$325 million, which would only make sense on the basis of the optimistic expectation of the movie having legs at least as good as those of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and better than tripling the opening weekend take). However, we now have a projection for the global opening--of some $140 million. That is to say that the film is expected to make globally on its debut more or less what it made in North America alone--back when the dollar was worth forty percent more than it is now (and the $100 million debut of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull back in May 2008 was equal to about $140 million today).
This is not a great vote of confidence in the movie's foreign performance--which matters greatly. The last two Indiana Jones movies took in about one-and-a-half times their domestic income internationally, which would, on the basis of Boxoffice Pro's (admittedly optimistic) figures, work out to between $300 and $500 million above its domestic take, and a global total in the $530-$810 million range--the high end of which, if still a disappointment, would not necessarily be disastrous. (Indeed, there would be some hope of the movie not just breaking even but turning a profit by the time the income from home entertainment, etc., is in.) However, should, as seems possible if one sticks with the $140 million opening weekend (in which the movie at best matches its domestic gross, and maybe does less well than that) as a basis for the longer run projection, we would be looking at a lot less money taken in, and certainly the "Solo or worse" scenarios I have been discussing here since April that, especially since the colossal misfire of the Cannes premiere, have moved from being the outlier to the baseline.
Simply consider the math. With an opening weekend take of $140+ million, and the film doing well to triple that (the way Guardians of the Galaxy 3 has been doing), the movie would still end up in the range of $420-$450 million--which is markedly lower than the $475 million that Solo's gross would be when adjusting the figure ($393 million) for today's prices. Meanwhile, should the movie really fall flat (should its opening weekend be followed by collapse domestically, and its overseas gross be no better than its domestic) it could do a lot worse than Solo even in current dollar terms. (Doubling a $68 million take domestically, matching that overseas, works out to a gross of not much more than $270 million--so that there would be plenty of room to do better than this and still fail to match Solo's gross in current, never mind real, terms.)
Still, grim as the prospects looks, a possibility of the movie's at least triumphing over the worst-case scenarios cannot be completed ruled out. And this Friday moviegoers all across America, and around the world, will get their say, and we will once more see speculation give way to historical fact as the theaters and the studios total up the cold hard cash paid by the ticket-buyers--and Lucasfilm weighs it against the outlays that led up to this moment.
Simply consider the math. With an opening weekend take of $140+ million, and the film doing well to triple that (the way Guardians of the Galaxy 3 has been doing), the movie would still end up in the range of $420-$450 million--which is markedly lower than the $475 million that Solo's gross would be when adjusting the figure ($393 million) for today's prices. Meanwhile, should the movie really fall flat (should its opening weekend be followed by collapse domestically, and its overseas gross be no better than its domestic) it could do a lot worse than Solo even in current dollar terms. (Doubling a $68 million take domestically, matching that overseas, works out to a gross of not much more than $270 million--so that there would be plenty of room to do better than this and still fail to match Solo's gross in current, never mind real, terms.)
Still, grim as the prospects looks, a possibility of the movie's at least triumphing over the worst-case scenarios cannot be completed ruled out. And this Friday moviegoers all across America, and around the world, will get their say, and we will once more see speculation give way to historical fact as the theaters and the studios total up the cold hard cash paid by the ticket-buyers--and Lucasfilm weighs it against the outlays that led up to this moment.
The Flash's Second Weekend Box Office Gross: Worse Than Ant-Man 3, Again
The opening weekend gross of the much-hyped DCEU film The Flash is a now notorious disappointment. Where a month earlier the projection that it would make no more than a "mere" $140 million in its opening weekend was received with dismay it actually picked up just $55 million in its first three days in release--just two-fifths of that "disappointing" figure.
Meanwhile it seems there were few expectations that the film would prove to have the kind of legs that would ameliorate the disappointment. Before the weekend Boxoffice Pro projected the film's seeing a severe 69 percent weekend-to-weekend drop. The reality was actually worse--73 percent, which left the film with a mere $15 million added and $87.5 million grossed overall (as against the $90 million+ Boxoffice Pro expected).
By contrast Ant-Man 3, which had a $106 million take in its first three days, saw a drop of just 70 percent (leaving it with $32 million added in the second weekend for a total of $167 million). The result is that The Flash not only opened with about half of what Ant-Man 3 did, but is also fading faster. Given that Ant-Man 3 did not do much more than double its opening weekend take over the course of its run (finishing up with $214.5 million), The Flash may be thought likely to do no better. The result would be the film's finishing with not just under $150 million over the entire run, but perhaps even under $110 million--less than what Ant-Man 3 made over the long holiday weekend of its release, and what, in view of the hype about The Flash, would have been regarded as, again, a disappointing opening weekend (never mind overall run). Meanwhile there is little sign of extraordinary success for the film in the international market. Thus far the film, which came out or had come out in all the major overseas markets (the big Asian and European markets--China, Japan, South Korea, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, etc.) by the week that it did in North America, has made 58.5 percent of its income abroad (taking in $123 million internationally). Should that remain the case with the movie having pulled in $110 million domestically, not just the $400 million mark, but even the $300 million mark, will be beyond it. The result is that the movie, which has for weeks seemed likely to lose money for its studio, is likely to leave that much bigger a hole in their books--quite plausibly in the vicinity of $150 million or more even after taking in revenue from video, TV, streaming to go by the pattern seen in recent years.**
* Ant-Man 3's $167 million after ten days worked out to 78 percent of its total gross. Should The Flash (which, again, is fading faster) do no better, it will have $112 million at the end of its run.
** Assume, given the reported $200 million budget, final outlays of $400-$600 million on production, distribution and promotion. With $270 million grossed globally and rentals equal to half of that the movie would end up with $130 million or so banked, while perhaps matching this from the other, later revenue streams--working out to $250 million taken in a pessimistic scenario, against the bigger outlays.
Meanwhile it seems there were few expectations that the film would prove to have the kind of legs that would ameliorate the disappointment. Before the weekend Boxoffice Pro projected the film's seeing a severe 69 percent weekend-to-weekend drop. The reality was actually worse--73 percent, which left the film with a mere $15 million added and $87.5 million grossed overall (as against the $90 million+ Boxoffice Pro expected).
By contrast Ant-Man 3, which had a $106 million take in its first three days, saw a drop of just 70 percent (leaving it with $32 million added in the second weekend for a total of $167 million). The result is that The Flash not only opened with about half of what Ant-Man 3 did, but is also fading faster. Given that Ant-Man 3 did not do much more than double its opening weekend take over the course of its run (finishing up with $214.5 million), The Flash may be thought likely to do no better. The result would be the film's finishing with not just under $150 million over the entire run, but perhaps even under $110 million--less than what Ant-Man 3 made over the long holiday weekend of its release, and what, in view of the hype about The Flash, would have been regarded as, again, a disappointing opening weekend (never mind overall run). Meanwhile there is little sign of extraordinary success for the film in the international market. Thus far the film, which came out or had come out in all the major overseas markets (the big Asian and European markets--China, Japan, South Korea, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, etc.) by the week that it did in North America, has made 58.5 percent of its income abroad (taking in $123 million internationally). Should that remain the case with the movie having pulled in $110 million domestically, not just the $400 million mark, but even the $300 million mark, will be beyond it. The result is that the movie, which has for weeks seemed likely to lose money for its studio, is likely to leave that much bigger a hole in their books--quite plausibly in the vicinity of $150 million or more even after taking in revenue from video, TV, streaming to go by the pattern seen in recent years.**
* Ant-Man 3's $167 million after ten days worked out to 78 percent of its total gross. Should The Flash (which, again, is fading faster) do no better, it will have $112 million at the end of its run.
** Assume, given the reported $200 million budget, final outlays of $400-$600 million on production, distribution and promotion. With $270 million grossed globally and rentals equal to half of that the movie would end up with $130 million or so banked, while perhaps matching this from the other, later revenue streams--working out to $250 million taken in a pessimistic scenario, against the bigger outlays.
Tuesday, June 27, 2023
The James Bond Continuation Novels: In Lieu of a Guide
Listed below are the James Bond continuation novels--specifically the twenty-seven authorized, non-novelization James Bond continuation novels by Kingsley Amis, John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffrey Deaver, William Boyd and Anthony Horowitz.
At this point reviews of nearly every one of them have been posted on this web site. Those for which such reviews have been posted may be accessed via the hyperlinks in the titles which take you to the relevant page.
Kingsley Amis
Colonel Sun (1968)
John Gardner
Licence Renewed (1981)
For Special Services (1982)
Icebreaker (1983)
Role of Honor (1984)
Nobody Lives Forever (1986)
No Deals, Mr. Bond (1987)
Scorpius (1988)
Win, Lose or Die (1989)
Brokenclaw (1990)
The Man From Barbarossa (1991)
Death is Forever (1992)
Never Send Flowers (1993)
SeaFire (1994)
Cold Fall (Alternatively, COLD) (1996)
Raymond Benson
Zero Minus Ten (1996)
The Facts of Death (1997)
High Time to Kill (1998)
DoubleShot (2000)
Never Dream of Dying (2001)
The Man With the Red Tattoo (2002)
Sebastian Faulks
Devil May Care (2008)
Jeffrey Deaver
Carte Blanche (2011)
William Boyd
Solo (2013)
Anthony Horowitz
Trigger Mortis (2015)
Forever and a Day (2018)
With a Mind to Kill (2022)
At this point reviews of nearly every one of them have been posted on this web site. Those for which such reviews have been posted may be accessed via the hyperlinks in the titles which take you to the relevant page.
Kingsley Amis
Colonel Sun (1968)
John Gardner
Licence Renewed (1981)
For Special Services (1982)
Icebreaker (1983)
Role of Honor (1984)
Nobody Lives Forever (1986)
No Deals, Mr. Bond (1987)
Scorpius (1988)
Win, Lose or Die (1989)
Brokenclaw (1990)
The Man From Barbarossa (1991)
Death is Forever (1992)
Never Send Flowers (1993)
SeaFire (1994)
Cold Fall (Alternatively, COLD) (1996)
Raymond Benson
Zero Minus Ten (1996)
The Facts of Death (1997)
High Time to Kill (1998)
DoubleShot (2000)
Never Dream of Dying (2001)
The Man With the Red Tattoo (2002)
Sebastian Faulks
Devil May Care (2008)
Jeffrey Deaver
Carte Blanche (2011)
William Boyd
Solo (2013)
Anthony Horowitz
Trigger Mortis (2015)
Forever and a Day (2018)
With a Mind to Kill (2022)
Monday, June 26, 2023
Review: Never Send Flowers, by John Gardner
While there was always an important element of continuity between James Bond's adventures in Ian Fleming's novels (the Soviets' desire for revenge for prior battles in From Russia, with Love, the aftermath of those events in Dr. No, etc.), Fleming got more ambitious in his later books. His last five novels--Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, You Only Live Twice and The Man with the Golden Gun--can be read as a single saga of a run-down 007 struggling against previously accumulated damage, and a succession of personal disasters, through and after his battle with his most famous enemy, Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
Likewise John Gardner's last books--specifically his final three novels, Never Send Flowers, SeaFire and Cold Fall--form a more thoroughly interconnected story. This time around Bond's real or alleged decay is not an issue, and the novels do not have him fighting a single great villain. Instead it is M's aging that is more prominent, the Old Man on his way out, amid a larger reorganization of the Service for the post-Cold War--changes which see Bond, whose administrative role had previously been vague at best, become entangled with government committees in SeaFire, and Cold Fall closing with Bond on his way to meet Sir Miles Messervy's replacement for the first time.
However, as in Fleming's later novels Bond again copes with love and loss, albeit in a different fashion. One can even see hints of a political theme--just hints, less fully realized or worked out than Fleming's, but worth mentioning all the same. Those last five books, and especially You Only Live Twice and The Man With the Golden Gun, saw a declining, weary Bond sorely tested (not least, by his assignment to assassinate Dr. Shatterhand in Japan), and, after hitting what seems like rock bottom (Bond captured by the Soviets in an amnesiac state, brainwashed into an assassination attempt against M himself), redeeming himself (by taking down Francisco Scaramanga). Through him, Britain and its traditional elite were symbolically tested and redeemed as well (Tiger Tanaka making this quite explicit in Twice).
What happens here in the way of this is hinted at in the preceding book, Death is Forever. There the CIA that in the Bond novels conventionally provided the cash and technology and sheer muscle while the Brits provided the skills, was looking a good deal less flush than it used to do, while Bond comes to the rescue not of those less helpful Americans but the EU, such that it could seem as if Bond's future, and Britain's, lay in partnership not with the Cousins, but the Continentals. And certainly that is how it comes to look in Never Send Flowers. Fittingly Bond is, more than ever before (even in Scorpius), more local cop than international man of mystery in a story more than usually attentive to bureaucratic gamesmanship. Bond's story proper actually begins with a visit to the Secret Service by a pair of senior functionaries from the "Security Service" responsible for domestic intelligence (MI 5)--specifically the Terrorist Intelligence section chief who informs M and Bond that the chief's deputy, one Laura March, has turned up dead in Switzerland. And so they want Bond to go talk to the Swiss police, find out what they have learned in their investigation, and bring the body home. Bond does just that, and learns that Laura had skeletons in her closet, not least an unknown elder brother who just so happened to be a serial killer. It seemed he was dead--but of course "seemed" and "was" are two different things, and in fact big brother March was still very much alive, and still very much going about his gruesome business.
Of course, serial killers had in the past been henchmen within the Bond novels (Red Grant, certainly, was such), but hardly the stuff of the series' primary villains, and it would seem that just as Win, Lose or Die was about capitalizing on the fashion for Top Gun and Tom Clancyesque military techno-thrillers, Never Send Flowers was about doing the same with the popularity of serial killers as villains after the commercial and critical success of The Silence of the Lambs, as so many others did in those years.
To his credit Gardner displays some originality (and some care to not simply give us a cookie-cutter cop-hunts-serial killer-story) as he tries riding the wave. Thus he blends together the figures of the serial killer and the political assassin in his image of an assassination-obsessed thrill-killer (who just so happens to be a celebrated actor much admired for having both a "thousand faces" and a "glass head" that lets the audience see right into the mind behind each and every one of those faces) who gets his high not from preying on society's most vulnerable, but pursuing the most difficult of targets in some of the highest profile figures in the world--a celebrated treader of the boards giving his greatest performance on the world stage. In doing so Gardner blends the antiseptic world of the criminal profiler and the modern mental institution with Gothic horror, with its monstrous children and evil twins and madmen in the attic and incest and religious fanatacisms and even a Rhineland castle standing as a monument to its murderous owner's insanity.
Still, clever as this all sounds the actual effect is disappointingly flat. Dragonpol is a far cry from even Gardner's more memorable Bond villains (an Anton Murik, a Brokenclaw), never mind the villains he created outside this franchise (like his hugely entertaining take on that other James of thriller fiction, James Moriarty). All this is the more problematic given the scenario's ruling out the usual Bondian mechanics (the large organizations and their grandiose agendas, the legions of heavily armed cannon fodder they put into the field, the big finale in the enemy fortress out of the question when the enemy is not a SPECTRE-type organization, but just a single thrill-killer).
It seems to me the execution (no pun intended) was to blame, with a sign of this the triteness toward which Gardner too often tended here. Considering this I find myself coming back to an early passage where he describes an Italian Air Force General who is one of Dragonpol's first targets. Gardner refers to the man as, following his aerial heroics in the Gulf War, having become a household name by writing an international nonfiction bestseller about "the dust-dry stuff of strategy" as "a subtle cross between Tom Clancy and John le Carrè." As one who has read, with very close attention, a very great deal of strategy, and of both Clancy and le Carrè, I find the description confusing rather than illuminating as I have literally no idea what such a piece of writing would look like; how all these prose forms would mix, subtly or in any other way. (Simply concerning ourselves with Clancy and le Carrè, the former is inclined to plain, straightforward, information-heavy writing oriented to the big picture, le Carrè toward a far more Literary, oblique, "Show-don't-tell" approach centered on the characters--and for all its merits from the standpoint of storytelling, utterly unsuited toward a "strategic treatise.") I suspect Gardner had no idea how all this could mix either, that in this instance he was simply stringing together words to produce something that would sound impressive to a reader who had heard of these things without actually knowing about them, or at least did not make a habit of actually thinking about what they actually read on the page.
Alas, it seemed such failings were not solely on the surface here, Gardner generally showing less concern for consistency than usual in his handling of his material. If Bond's Gardner suddenly became an expert on the theater mainly for the reason that Gardner was, and was interested in bringing the element into the books, here he becomes a veritable encyclopedia on the subject--indeed, a "drama geek," in the middle of a briefing at headquarters suddenly expounding tangentially on the satirical intent of a Cole Porter lyric and being reprimanded by M for it; and relying on minute recollection of a prior Dragonpol stage performance to advance the investigation. Similarly out of character is Bond's relationship with the Swiss operative with whom he works, Fredericka "Flicka" Von Grusse, a far cry from Bond's prior taste in women, physically and other ways. (Gardner tells us that her face is "long . . . nose slightly crooked . . . jaw a shade square. Not beautiful by any standard," but "full of character," while career-wise and in other ways, down to her Anglo-Swiss heritage, she seems to have been conceived as a female 007--hardly the sort of thing that usually endeared women to Bond's sense of romantic fantasy, even after Gardner's long eliding of Bond's once well-known attitudes in these matters.)
One might add that their time together was, unlike the sort of dramatic experience that made Bond decide to marry in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (or even his thoughts of a deeper involvement with Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever), far from life-changing. Yet Bond falls for her so hard that he becomes a one-woman man. Meanwhile M is happy to have a foreign operative no longer in good standing with her own agency come to work for him, while even nudging Bond toward marrying her. (I cannot but contrast it with M back in Diamonds Are Forever telling Bond that making it official with Tiffany Case would mean the kind of "mixed marriage" that the old Victorian was sure could never work--scarcely removed from Anthony Trollope's Roger Carbury, likewise probably imagining "all American women as . . . loud, masculine and atheistical" in The Way We Live Now. To Gardner's credit Bond himself is surprised, while less to Gardner's credit M suggests that he is "really just a sentimental old matchmaker.") Meanwhile Bond-the-man-who-couldn't-stand-the-office became a player in the Service's post-Cold War reorganization. (I might add that tonally the Security Service's spying on Bond in Britain, and the final confrontation in EuroDisnyeland--a choice of setting for the climax that recalled the decision to make Markus Bismaquer an ice cream tycoon--also felt out of place, even by Gardner's standards.)
Altogether the result means that the deviation from the usual Bondian expectations is uncompensated by what Gardner does differently. Still, the book has a particular relevance nonetheless as an apparent foundation for the series' post-Cold War shape, with the changes in Bond's personal life, and his professional life, very much at the heart of the next book, SeaFire.
For the full listing of the James Bond continuation novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog), click here.
What happens here in the way of this is hinted at in the preceding book, Death is Forever. There the CIA that in the Bond novels conventionally provided the cash and technology and sheer muscle while the Brits provided the skills, was looking a good deal less flush than it used to do, while Bond comes to the rescue not of those less helpful Americans but the EU, such that it could seem as if Bond's future, and Britain's, lay in partnership not with the Cousins, but the Continentals. And certainly that is how it comes to look in Never Send Flowers. Fittingly Bond is, more than ever before (even in Scorpius), more local cop than international man of mystery in a story more than usually attentive to bureaucratic gamesmanship. Bond's story proper actually begins with a visit to the Secret Service by a pair of senior functionaries from the "Security Service" responsible for domestic intelligence (MI 5)--specifically the Terrorist Intelligence section chief who informs M and Bond that the chief's deputy, one Laura March, has turned up dead in Switzerland. And so they want Bond to go talk to the Swiss police, find out what they have learned in their investigation, and bring the body home. Bond does just that, and learns that Laura had skeletons in her closet, not least an unknown elder brother who just so happened to be a serial killer. It seemed he was dead--but of course "seemed" and "was" are two different things, and in fact big brother March was still very much alive, and still very much going about his gruesome business.
To his credit Gardner displays some originality (and some care to not simply give us a cookie-cutter cop-hunts-serial killer-story) as he tries riding the wave. Thus he blends together the figures of the serial killer and the political assassin in his image of an assassination-obsessed thrill-killer (who just so happens to be a celebrated actor much admired for having both a "thousand faces" and a "glass head" that lets the audience see right into the mind behind each and every one of those faces) who gets his high not from preying on society's most vulnerable, but pursuing the most difficult of targets in some of the highest profile figures in the world--a celebrated treader of the boards giving his greatest performance on the world stage. In doing so Gardner blends the antiseptic world of the criminal profiler and the modern mental institution with Gothic horror, with its monstrous children and evil twins and madmen in the attic and incest and religious fanatacisms and even a Rhineland castle standing as a monument to its murderous owner's insanity.
Still, clever as this all sounds the actual effect is disappointingly flat. Dragonpol is a far cry from even Gardner's more memorable Bond villains (an Anton Murik, a Brokenclaw), never mind the villains he created outside this franchise (like his hugely entertaining take on that other James of thriller fiction, James Moriarty). All this is the more problematic given the scenario's ruling out the usual Bondian mechanics (the large organizations and their grandiose agendas, the legions of heavily armed cannon fodder they put into the field, the big finale in the enemy fortress out of the question when the enemy is not a SPECTRE-type organization, but just a single thrill-killer).
Altogether the result means that the deviation from the usual Bondian expectations is uncompensated by what Gardner does differently. Still, the book has a particular relevance nonetheless as an apparent foundation for the series' post-Cold War shape, with the changes in Bond's personal life, and his professional life, very much at the heart of the next book, SeaFire.
For the full listing of the James Bond continuation novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog), click here.
Sunday, June 25, 2023
Why No Wildstorm Cinematic Universe?
We have reports of a movie about the Authority possibly in the making, apparently as part of the bigger DC reboot being overseen by James Gunn.
The Authority, of course, was not originally a DC creation in the manner of the Justice League, but part of the Wildstorm Press comics "universe" that DC later bought up--which included, besides the Authority, such titles as WildCATs, Stormwatch and DV8.
In this age in which Hollywood seems obsessed with superheroes, and shared universes, Wildstorm's universe could seem a natural--with it perhaps appearing a surprise that with all the "Marvel envy" out there no one seized on the Wildstorm universe to make a screen universe out of it before. However, a moment's thought past that makes it seem all too predictable given how much "brand name" means these days when only the easiest high concept "sells" will do, the more in as the budgets regarded as required (even a $100 million is too puny for a tentpole these days) make the investments so large. Wildstorm's heyday was a long time ago, and even then its properties far less well-known to the general audience than the first-stringers, or even third-stringers, of DC and Marvel. Indeed, even younger comics fans probably have never heard of many of the associated series'. (Name recognition-wise, John Lynch is a long way from Nick Fury or Charles Xavier.)
I might add that the work I remember from the brand's '90s heyday may not have much to commend it to the audience. Much of it was derivative, if often in a knowing way (with the aforementioned John Lynch we see a man become father figure to a team of super-powered young mutants who all live together while having adventures--wait, I've seen this somewhere before); and where it was not derivative, as with a lot of Warren Ellis' or Alan Moore's work, it was more oriented to grown-up, hardcore readers (as with Ellis' deeply metafictional Planetary saga, or Moore's America's Best Comics work); while in innumerable ways, even the lighter stuff, from the ironies of the stories to the style of the art work, were very, very much of the '90s.
Speaking for myself I have enjoyed a great deal of Wildstorm's stuff over the years. But I know that this stuff is a tough sell to the general audience next to the kinds of things put out by Marvel Studios--while much simply would not survive contemporary handling given the current cultural moment. The result is that even if an Authority movie does come to pass the odds of a bigger on-screen Wildstormverse seem to me slight indeed.
The Authority, of course, was not originally a DC creation in the manner of the Justice League, but part of the Wildstorm Press comics "universe" that DC later bought up--which included, besides the Authority, such titles as WildCATs, Stormwatch and DV8.
In this age in which Hollywood seems obsessed with superheroes, and shared universes, Wildstorm's universe could seem a natural--with it perhaps appearing a surprise that with all the "Marvel envy" out there no one seized on the Wildstorm universe to make a screen universe out of it before. However, a moment's thought past that makes it seem all too predictable given how much "brand name" means these days when only the easiest high concept "sells" will do, the more in as the budgets regarded as required (even a $100 million is too puny for a tentpole these days) make the investments so large. Wildstorm's heyday was a long time ago, and even then its properties far less well-known to the general audience than the first-stringers, or even third-stringers, of DC and Marvel. Indeed, even younger comics fans probably have never heard of many of the associated series'. (Name recognition-wise, John Lynch is a long way from Nick Fury or Charles Xavier.)
I might add that the work I remember from the brand's '90s heyday may not have much to commend it to the audience. Much of it was derivative, if often in a knowing way (with the aforementioned John Lynch we see a man become father figure to a team of super-powered young mutants who all live together while having adventures--wait, I've seen this somewhere before); and where it was not derivative, as with a lot of Warren Ellis' or Alan Moore's work, it was more oriented to grown-up, hardcore readers (as with Ellis' deeply metafictional Planetary saga, or Moore's America's Best Comics work); while in innumerable ways, even the lighter stuff, from the ironies of the stories to the style of the art work, were very, very much of the '90s.
Speaking for myself I have enjoyed a great deal of Wildstorm's stuff over the years. But I know that this stuff is a tough sell to the general audience next to the kinds of things put out by Marvel Studios--while much simply would not survive contemporary handling given the current cultural moment. The result is that even if an Authority movie does come to pass the odds of a bigger on-screen Wildstormverse seem to me slight indeed.
Married . . . With Children . . . In Animated Form?
I was recently surprised to hear of plans for a revival of Married . . . With Children in animated form.
Even by today's remake-mad Hollywood's standards the idea is questionable. The show was very much of its time, and practically impossible to present today because of how the sensitivities of the public (or at least its opinion-leaders) have changed. The air of crudity, the toilet humor in this answer to the upper middle class gentility of the sitcoms of the era of The Cosby Show and Growing Pains that caused a moral panic back in the '80s seem tame in the era of Shameless--while other aspects are today regarded as completely unforgivable. (In the era of the alt-right Al's leading an avowedly anti-feminist organization is apt to be taken very differently indeed.) Indeed, not one of the four members of the Bundy family would be allowed on screen today as they were then--and the degree of adaptation likely required to make them acceptable sure to leave the Bundy family unrecognizable, with the neighbors not much more likely to survive handling.
My expectation is that the altered version will produce an Internet tempest in a teacup, be promptly canceled, and then, as is usually the case with such tempests and their causes, be quickly (and deservedly) forgotten--a risible little footnote in the history of Married . . . With Children and its pop cultural legacy.
Even by today's remake-mad Hollywood's standards the idea is questionable. The show was very much of its time, and practically impossible to present today because of how the sensitivities of the public (or at least its opinion-leaders) have changed. The air of crudity, the toilet humor in this answer to the upper middle class gentility of the sitcoms of the era of The Cosby Show and Growing Pains that caused a moral panic back in the '80s seem tame in the era of Shameless--while other aspects are today regarded as completely unforgivable. (In the era of the alt-right Al's leading an avowedly anti-feminist organization is apt to be taken very differently indeed.) Indeed, not one of the four members of the Bundy family would be allowed on screen today as they were then--and the degree of adaptation likely required to make them acceptable sure to leave the Bundy family unrecognizable, with the neighbors not much more likely to survive handling.
My expectation is that the altered version will produce an Internet tempest in a teacup, be promptly canceled, and then, as is usually the case with such tempests and their causes, be quickly (and deservedly) forgotten--a risible little footnote in the history of Married . . . With Children and its pop cultural legacy.
Clive Cussler's 1993 in Dragon
From quite early on Clive Cussler got in the habit of setting his Dirk Pitt novels a few years ahead into the future, so as to offer some latitude for the political and technological changes without which his scenarios would not be as plausible, especially in the case of novels like Night Probe! (1981)--or Dragon (1990). Part I of the latter novel incorporates in Cussler's version of 1993 undersea mining stations 16,000 feet down with all their apparatus and vehicles, and satellites with sensors which can render the oceans effectively transparent to investigators, with these things not merely interesting gimmicks but indispensable to the unfolding of the plot--while the technology gets only more exotic from there, not least where the robotics are concerned.
Of course, not only did we not have that stuff in 1993, we do not have it in 2023, and at this much later date are unsure that we ever will. (This applies even to another technology critical to the unfolding of the plot of Dragon, autonomous cars.)
Considering the fact it seems to me reflective of the line between "techno-thriller" and "science fiction" having been thinner for '70s-era techno-thriller writers like himself, or his contemporary Martin Caidin (who like Cussler, was fond of writing in not just imaginary technology but cryptohistory and cryptoarchaeology, as seen in The Messiah Stone, or the third of his Steve Austin novels, High Crystal).
The differentiation of the two genres also seems to have gone with the techno-thriller writers becoming more intent on persuading the reader that their fiction was in fact well-grounded. A Tom Clancy, for example, who did read Clive Cussler, and in some cases seemed to follow his footsteps (I suspect Cussler's influence when I look at Debt of Honor), never expected his readers to take seriously anything like Dragon's undersea mining station, or presented his spy satellites as able to peer through the sea that way--and while some of what he envisioned has since come to seem science fiction-al (as with his conception of anti-missile defenses in The Cardinal of the Kremlin), these were lapses, in this case a product of the wildly overblown '80s-era hype about them by which Clancy was taken in, even as he generally strove to "get the details right" to a much greater degree than Cussler did. (Clancy generally purported to write about real technologies, while Cussler, especially in his earlier books, did not hesitate to make things up even when he did not have to do so. Thus in Deep Six an "F/A-21" fighter plane launched "laser-guided" anti-ship missiles at a key part of the narrative. The U.S. did not have, even on the drawing board, F/A-21 fighter planes or laser-guided anti-ship missiles that would have been launched from such, and such would never have appeared in a Clancy novel.)
However, it seems to me there may be more than the care to "keep things grounded" and "get the details right" differentiating them--especially from the standpoint of a reader looking back. They might scoff at Cussler's seaQuest-like undersea mining station, or the advanced robotics of the tale, but such stations were supposed to be a near-term possibility when Cussler began writing his books, while there was a lot of hype about robotics, and the artificial intelligence controlling them, back in the '80s, and especially what Japan was supposed to be accomplishing in that field. (Remember, fifth-generation computing was going to change the world!) Expectations in both these areas (like the expectations in regard to anti-missile defense) have become more modest as we became habituated to the generally lowered expectations of an era of technological stagnation in which the "techno" became less thrilling than it seemed just a short time earlier.
Of course, not only did we not have that stuff in 1993, we do not have it in 2023, and at this much later date are unsure that we ever will. (This applies even to another technology critical to the unfolding of the plot of Dragon, autonomous cars.)
Considering the fact it seems to me reflective of the line between "techno-thriller" and "science fiction" having been thinner for '70s-era techno-thriller writers like himself, or his contemporary Martin Caidin (who like Cussler, was fond of writing in not just imaginary technology but cryptohistory and cryptoarchaeology, as seen in The Messiah Stone, or the third of his Steve Austin novels, High Crystal).
Characterizations and Prose in the Popular Thriller: Clive Cussler's Dragon
Recently reviewing Clive Cussler's Dragon I considered the book as a Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt novel from the period I associate with his best. Thus I had much to say of the book's structure and incidents, pacing and action, focus and flow (which had me concluding that even if other entries in the series were stronger in various ways, the book as a whole works, in cases quite impressively).
I did not raise the matter of literary qualities such as characterization and prose--which were pretty much as expected for Cussler novels, and for popular thrillers generally.
That is to say--they were, are, pretty bad in certain specific ways that were outside my concerns as a reviewer at that time, but of which something may be worth saying.
One may as well start with the most conventional of expectations, as laid out by that most conventional of critics, James Wood. Far from the author's "maintain[ing] an unsentimental composure and know[ing] how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary" as Wood says, such that the "author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible," in the Dirk Pitt novels Cussler's voice erupts into the narrative so often and blatantly and melodramatically (for instance, to hint at some doom the characters did not yet expect) one could be forgiven for thinking that they were reading a Victorian-era book for a not particularly sophisticated audience. Thus it is not enough that almost everyone is a superhuman Gary Stu, but we are beaten over the head with the fact by the chunky character sketch he presents at each introduction of one of his principal dramatis personae. The artlessness of the presentation annoys me less than the triteness and falsity of what was being presented, affirming innumerable, quite stupid social prejudices. Still, the artlessness reflects a broader and very frequent tendency to overdescribe that constantly undercuts what Cussler is actually achieving by pouring out more words past the point at which he ought to have stopped. (Pursuing villains Pitt believes have kidnapped his longtime girlfriend Cussler tells us that "if they harmed her, they would die, [Pitt] vowed ruthlessly." Was there an un-ruthless way to vow that?) Quite naturally, this is the kind of novel where characters "shake their heads" every time they utter a negative (perhaps not so much as in Larry Bond's books, but not much less either, this quirk popping up scores of times in Dragon). The narration is also replete with comparisons that use up a good many words in distracting and confusing rather than enlightening. (We are told that the villain's dining hall recalled those of "the most palatial castles of Europe" and then almost immediately told that almost everything in the chamber was "distinctly Japanese," from the paper lantern lighting, to the bamboo carpet, to the paintings by Japanese masters on the walls. So, basically, it bore no resemblance whatsoever to its counterparts in European castles.)
I find myself more sensitive to such failings all the time, which do not improve the reading experience. Nevertheless, grating as they could be the story did more than survive them--much more. It is a reminder that those aspects of literary craftsmanship that middlebrow critics tend to emphasize are only part of writing, not the whole of it, and that like all writers and works which excel according to one measure or another they do so not because they get everything right, but because what they got right mattered more than what they got wrong.
I did not raise the matter of literary qualities such as characterization and prose--which were pretty much as expected for Cussler novels, and for popular thrillers generally.
That is to say--they were, are, pretty bad in certain specific ways that were outside my concerns as a reviewer at that time, but of which something may be worth saying.
One may as well start with the most conventional of expectations, as laid out by that most conventional of critics, James Wood. Far from the author's "maintain[ing] an unsentimental composure and know[ing] how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary" as Wood says, such that the "author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible," in the Dirk Pitt novels Cussler's voice erupts into the narrative so often and blatantly and melodramatically (for instance, to hint at some doom the characters did not yet expect) one could be forgiven for thinking that they were reading a Victorian-era book for a not particularly sophisticated audience. Thus it is not enough that almost everyone is a superhuman Gary Stu, but we are beaten over the head with the fact by the chunky character sketch he presents at each introduction of one of his principal dramatis personae. The artlessness of the presentation annoys me less than the triteness and falsity of what was being presented, affirming innumerable, quite stupid social prejudices. Still, the artlessness reflects a broader and very frequent tendency to overdescribe that constantly undercuts what Cussler is actually achieving by pouring out more words past the point at which he ought to have stopped. (Pursuing villains Pitt believes have kidnapped his longtime girlfriend Cussler tells us that "if they harmed her, they would die, [Pitt] vowed ruthlessly." Was there an un-ruthless way to vow that?) Quite naturally, this is the kind of novel where characters "shake their heads" every time they utter a negative (perhaps not so much as in Larry Bond's books, but not much less either, this quirk popping up scores of times in Dragon). The narration is also replete with comparisons that use up a good many words in distracting and confusing rather than enlightening. (We are told that the villain's dining hall recalled those of "the most palatial castles of Europe" and then almost immediately told that almost everything in the chamber was "distinctly Japanese," from the paper lantern lighting, to the bamboo carpet, to the paintings by Japanese masters on the walls. So, basically, it bore no resemblance whatsoever to its counterparts in European castles.)
I find myself more sensitive to such failings all the time, which do not improve the reading experience. Nevertheless, grating as they could be the story did more than survive them--much more. It is a reminder that those aspects of literary craftsmanship that middlebrow critics tend to emphasize are only part of writing, not the whole of it, and that like all writers and works which excel according to one measure or another they do so not because they get everything right, but because what they got right mattered more than what they got wrong.
Clive Cussler's Dragon as a Novel of the '90s
Rather than merely choosing enemies for his hero according to those politics and then getting on with the story, Cussler is quite emphatic about the view that the economic challenge from Japan, and the Japanese, characterizing Japan as engaged in economic warfare against a United States whose leaders and people consistently failed to see that they were in fact in a war and act accordingly. Indeed, in a piece of particularly striking symbolism (not a word one uses often when discussing Dirk Pitt novels) the villains use as a critical component of their scheme for blackmailing the United States into political and economic submission Japanese-made cars imported into the U.S.--American commentators at the time regarding such vehicles as key symbols of Japanese industrial success and American decline.1 Similarly pointed is the reference Cussler makes to Japanese theft of American aerospace secrets, another then-significant but long since forgotten fear, as the furor over the FSX fighter program demonstrated--which program, incidentally, Cussler references more than once (on one occasion, informing them that a squadron of FSX fighters escort the villain's aircraft back to his home country). Meanwhile all these acts lead up to the villains' proceeding beyond economic warfare to the other kind, with their superiority in robotics becoming a key basis for their subjecting the U.S. to a latterday equivalent of the "Twenty-One Demands" the Japanese government attempted to impose on China during World War I.2 However, long before that point Cussler repeatedly made his view explicit in the remarks of the good guys, be it Pitt's longtime girlfriend Senator Loren Smith grilling a Japanese financier in committee, or the normally cool Pitt's own uncharacteristic political rant when they are alone together that prompts from her the joking suggestion that he follow his father, and her, into the U.S. Senate.
In the process, as was customary in Japan-themed thrillers of the early ‘90s like this one, Cussler retailed the stereotypical and simplistic cultural comment about Japanese society of the approved, "Establishment," experts to whom the mainstream media loves giving a vast platform, and then never calls out when they prove disastrously wrong. Thus we read here plenty about how the Japanese have always been and always will be a closed, culturally homogeneous, individuality-stifling society of ultra-conformists who "know their place"; follow harder, more ruthless leaders who brook no nonsense about rights, egalitarianism and democracy; and cheerfully sacrifice themselves on demand at their leaders' behest; in contrast with open, free-wheeling, diverse, tolerant, liberal, democratic America--such that many an American conservative, if deeming the Japanese irreconcilably Other and threatening, still seems to deep down envy them their model. (Thus does Pitt's rant at one point accuse Americans of "overconsuming" and preferring the "fast buck" over the foundations of prosperity and sovereignty as against the Japanese opposite--with the implication that some fault of the American culture evident in its people as a whole is the cause of the matter, and elite interests had nothing to do with the "fast buck" mentality and the supposed overconsumption. Thus does a different character, surveying a fully robotized Japanese workplace, think to himself of the "workers" operating "twenty-four hours a day without coffee breaks, lunch, or sick leave," and gratuitously add the cheap shot that such a setup would be "inconceivable to an American union leader"--implicitly endorsing the right-wing scapegoating of the '80s that held the "coddling" of the American workers whose unions were at that time being squashed to be what was holding the country back.)
It was a less than one-dimensional view of Japan that (a few token remarks about the villains not representing their country's people aside) overlooked the reality that all societies are complex, divided, conflicted, with Japan's no exception--as the "experts" should have better appreciated at the time, and would have appreciated at the time, had they bothered even to pay attention to the (Japanese) cartoons and (Japanese) video games their own children and grandchildren were growing up on. Now it all looks still more foolish. (After all, what a far cry this image of a hyper-dynamic but overcrowded superpower intent on acquiring Pacific Rim Lebensraum is from our contemporary image of a stagnating country in danger of being unable to keep itself peopled, as its supposedly ultra-conformist young people are now derided as NEETs, hikikomori, "parasite singles" in what the more prominent social commentators belatedly realized was not a purely Japanese trend!)
Cussler's espousal of these ideas to the point of building a thriller around them can seem the more significant in that, if Japanaphobia had been a theme of American popular culture for years (with Black Rain a hit and a grown-up Marty McFly being fired by his caricature of a Japanese boss the year before Dragon hit bookshelves), Cussler was still probably ahead of the curve, his book preceding by years other bestsellers emergent from that mood such as Michael Crichton's Rising Sun or Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor, and so not just a sign of the times, but a likely influence on them. Indeed, I got the feeling that Clancy (whose applause for Cussler's novels I see in the front matter of my paperback copy of this book) not only read this one, but was considerably influenced by it as he wrote Debt of Honor--in the care he took to dissociate the villains from the Japanese government and the people, behind whose backs they for the most part operate; the attempt at nuclear blackmail in defense of the country's economic position; the Japanese-American intelligence agent key to exposing the villains' plans; and even the assault by vengeful Japanese villains on American legislators (the kidnap of Congressman Mike Diaz and Senator Loren Smith, perhaps, the germ of the idea for Debt's finale).
These days any attempt to make a movie of Dragon seems unlikely in the extreme--given how Hollywood has twice attempted to launch a Pitt franchise, and each time seen it end in very costly failure, while I suspect that, addicted as the studios are to sequels and prequels, reboots and remakes, Hollywood these days is less prone than before to adapt material that has appeared in book than in other forms (for the simple reason that fewer and fewer people read books these days, the interest of yesteryear's bestselling thrillers have a short half-life, and the Pitt franchise being rather a less hot "property" than it was in the early 2000s).3 Still, we are hearing reports of plans for a Debt of Honor movie.
I suspect that if such reports have any substance to them, and the movie actually gets made, it will bear no resemblance to that book in this respect, not least given the present attitude toward Japan in the U.S. press. Cussler's book is heavy on evocations of Japan's wartime aggression and atrocities; of the fact that that Japanese Establishment responsible for them never lost power (war criminals' remaining in power, and seeing their descendants follow them to the same high places) or ceased to defend its crimes; and of the equally factual reality that that Establishment hypocritically attacks Western racism and colonialism while denying its own racism and insisting on the "uplifting" character of its colonialism. By contrast today the American press can seem more eager to see Japan rearm than the Japanese people themselves, with that people's anti-militarism leaving American commentators scratching their heads--ever obtuse toward how people actually feel in Japan, and the neighboring countries, where memories of the war do not line up neatly with what seems convenient to American neoconservatives.
1. One might add that Cussler and his characters repeatedly compare the brown paint job of the cars in question to the color of "fertilizer," and at at least one point, more directly compare it to the substance “fertilizer” is intended to evoke.
2. As it did of China, Japan demands of the U.S. concessions of strategic territory it regards as particularly significant to its interests and ambitions (outright cession of not just Hawaii but California, just as Japan had demanded the cession of the Fukien province on the opposite side of the Strait of Formosa); and cession of control over government finances and the direction of its economy, not least by demanding accept Japanese administrators in key government positions. As Cussler makes no reference to the 1915 demands I have no idea whether they were a model for him here or not. (Cussler displays little interest in Japan's imperialism prior to World War II, and is all too reflective of the kind of comment available to most Americans at the time in that the experts tended in general to have no knowledge or interest in Japanese history, about which little was available in English--as many an anime fan learns when their interest is stoked in, say, the Shinsengumi and tries to read up on them.)
3. Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels had been around for three decades in the early 2000s, but this particular action-adventure series, like Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels, weathered the end of the Cold War and the broader collapse of the action-adventure fiction market rather better than most of the competition. Moreover, the coincidence of its release with one of the twenty-first century's most catastrophic events would seem to have helped make 2001's Pitt novel, Valhalla Rising, a stronger than usual seller; while the success of Doug Liman's adaptation of The Bourne Identity seems to have strengthened the interest of Hollywood in the rights to comparable thriller series (like Stephen Hunter's Bob Lee Swagger series, which got a movie version in 2007, and the Pitt novels, which got their second crack at the big screen in 2005's Sahara). No such inducements to Hollywood's giving Pitt another chance have been seen since.
Review: Dragon, by Clive Cussler
MILD SPOILERS AHEAD
As a reader of Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels I have long felt that Cussler hit his peak with his early 500-pagers--his first cracks at what book critics in the '70s were, in the wake of bestsellers like those of Frederick Forsyth and Robert Ludlum and Jack Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed, calling "super-thrillers." Those books were specifically 1986's Cyclops, 1988's Treasure, 1990's Dragon, and 1992's Sahara.
Of the four I have tended to think Dragon the weakest. In fact, where I read the other three straight through, cover to cover, on first picking them up, I remember skimming long stretches of Dragon--and only recently picked it up again.
I think I still like the other three better. But my impression of this one is more favorable than before--even if looking at the book again I am reminded of what I did not like about it so much. If there is vigor, briskness and ingenuity here, Cussler had also been very productive for two decades at the time he wrote this one and, like most writers at that stage of things, was reusing significant elements of his older work. The derelict ship in the book's opening sequence, the associated marine disaster, the involvement of Asian shipping in it, very obviously recall the plot of Deep Six. So does the structure of what follows--not least in its failings. The opening incident has a very great deal to commend it--a robust combination of suspense, action and gadgetry that includes the book's finest "set piece," with the manner of Pitt's involvement in the disaster giving a stronger than usual dramatic edge to his desire to get the culprits (it isn't just "Someone killed my favorite second cousin" this time), while also laying key groundwork for the finale. Still, at bottom the kind of thing that in a Bond film would probably be packed into the few minutes of the pre-credits scene, here it takes up almost a quarter of the book before the investigation and associated adventure properly begins. Moreover that adventure has a comparatively disjointed feel. An early display of self-assertion on Pitt's part apart, the book consists of a weary Pitt time and again being told to take a long flight out to some scene to perform some incredibly unlikely and hazardous task by government officials previously unknown to us who are the ones actually managing the crisis and solving the mystery as they send Pitt off after this clue or to perform that task. (Indeed, I could not think of any prior Pitt adventure which was not only so scattershot--a quality epitomized for me by the junket to Germany--but in which Pitt was so passive.)
Moreover, where such disjointedness in thrillers of this type is so often a matter of a writer trying to cram in more action than the frame of the narrative can hold, the book, while offering plenty of adventure, danger and violence, is relatively light on "action," if one thinks of this as physical confrontation, and especially interpersonal combat, between hero and villain. The good guys have their first proper brushes with the enemy only a third of the way in, and Pitt his first contact with enemy agents after page 200 of my 542 page paperback edition, after which there is still less than we tend to get in the bigger Pitt books. The principal car chase has Pitt pursuing a vehicle with no human inside it, while there is just one proper shootout, and that shoehorned in that action-cramming way (the villains electing to send what feels like a platoon of ninjas to take Pitt out, just because he seems "a threat," resulting in a set piece that could have been easily excised without doing the slightest damage to the narrative). Indeed, if Pitt's personal motive for "getting to the bottom of things" are stronger than usual, the way in which things play out mean that there is no final face-to-face confrontation with any of the villains, these in the end destroyed impersonally or left to others with which to deal. (The final fate of the figure set up as "the big bad" is very anticlimactic, particularly given that Cussler gives us a suitably Bond movie-like capture-the-hero-and-then-chat-with-him-over-a-luxurious-dinner scene before that.)
From the standpoint of flow and of focus the result is a far cry from what we got in, for example, Sahara, once the Calliope gets upriver. Still, if it does not work in every way on the whole it tends to work very well indeed. Disjointed as the narrative was, I still kept turning the pages, in part because Cussler keeps the pace brisk (helped in this by the frequent changes of scene the structure allows), while if feeling like a collection of bits the bits, even the shoehorned bits, tend to be very good (as with that shootout with the ninjas), such that the reuse of old elements is often to superior results (Dragon never dragging the way Deep Six often did). If that still does not quite put it on a level with favorites like Sahara, Treasure or Cyclops, it pleasantly surprised me again and again by reminding me just how good these adventures were at their very best, and still beats just about anything else in the Dirk Pitt series for sheer entertainment.
Of the four I have tended to think Dragon the weakest. In fact, where I read the other three straight through, cover to cover, on first picking them up, I remember skimming long stretches of Dragon--and only recently picked it up again.
Moreover, where such disjointedness in thrillers of this type is so often a matter of a writer trying to cram in more action than the frame of the narrative can hold, the book, while offering plenty of adventure, danger and violence, is relatively light on "action," if one thinks of this as physical confrontation, and especially interpersonal combat, between hero and villain. The good guys have their first proper brushes with the enemy only a third of the way in, and Pitt his first contact with enemy agents after page 200 of my 542 page paperback edition, after which there is still less than we tend to get in the bigger Pitt books. The principal car chase has Pitt pursuing a vehicle with no human inside it, while there is just one proper shootout, and that shoehorned in that action-cramming way (the villains electing to send what feels like a platoon of ninjas to take Pitt out, just because he seems "a threat," resulting in a set piece that could have been easily excised without doing the slightest damage to the narrative). Indeed, if Pitt's personal motive for "getting to the bottom of things" are stronger than usual, the way in which things play out mean that there is no final face-to-face confrontation with any of the villains, these in the end destroyed impersonally or left to others with which to deal. (The final fate of the figure set up as "the big bad" is very anticlimactic, particularly given that Cussler gives us a suitably Bond movie-like capture-the-hero-and-then-chat-with-him-over-a-luxurious-dinner scene before that.)
From the standpoint of flow and of focus the result is a far cry from what we got in, for example, Sahara, once the Calliope gets upriver. Still, if it does not work in every way on the whole it tends to work very well indeed. Disjointed as the narrative was, I still kept turning the pages, in part because Cussler keeps the pace brisk (helped in this by the frequent changes of scene the structure allows), while if feeling like a collection of bits the bits, even the shoehorned bits, tend to be very good (as with that shootout with the ninjas), such that the reuse of old elements is often to superior results (Dragon never dragging the way Deep Six often did). If that still does not quite put it on a level with favorites like Sahara, Treasure or Cyclops, it pleasantly surprised me again and again by reminding me just how good these adventures were at their very best, and still beats just about anything else in the Dirk Pitt series for sheer entertainment.
Conan the Barbarian on the Screen: Reflections
These past few years there was talk of bringing Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian back to the screen--but then there always is (live-action and animation, film and television, etc., etc.), with nothing much usually coming of it. So it seems to have gone with the latest plans for a TV series.
It may be just as well, since I doubt that anything they are likely to make would be very satisfying to fans of the franchise--with the 2011 film exemplary. I recall looking forward to it more than I usually did to revisitations of such material because I had recently read my way through the entirety of Howard, and in the process found out just how much John Milius' film differed from it. The stuff about Conan's childhood and upbringing, the rambling about "will" recycled from Milius' Apocalypse Now script (Why does no one ever notice this?), the use of Thulsa Doom (a Kull the Conqueror character rather than a Conan the Barbarian one), the whiff of '70s/'80s action movie formula I was later to discuss in my book on paramilitary action-adventure--made clear to me that, much as I liked the 1982 movie, and have tended to groan at the thought of new takes on old classics, there actually was room for such a take here.*
Alas, the makers of the later film decided to remake the 1982 movie rather than go back to Howard and do something with that, and the result fell pretty flat.
Taken as a simple action movie I remember it working well enough. Still, I didn't care to see more of Conan's childhood. (Indeed, I don't usually care to see action heroes "before you knew them," with this going especially for Conan, to the point that even though after finishing the Howard originals I was eager to read more, knowing that L. Sprague de Camp's tales turned in exactly that direction made me lose all interest in them. And they spent a quarter of the movie on exactly that.) Meanwhile, the vigor, the barbaric splendor, the epic feel that were for all the departures from the original true to Howard (and characteristically Milius) were gone, leaving something much more generic, much less memorable (with, I think, those who think the replacement of the "tangible aesthetic . . . and practical effects" right about this costing the film something).
So does it often go with remakes, which in eliding aspects of the old fail to come up with anything as compelling--the attainment of contemporaneity coming at the price of distinction, underlining the artistic pointlessness and commercial crassness that are hallmarks of the all too common enterprise. And certainly to go by what we have heard of recent remake attempts, it is hard to imagine material less likely to survive contemporary handling than Conan.
* Ironically, 1997's Kull the Conqueror actually used more of the Conan material, drawing heavily on the plot of the one novel Howard wrote, The Hour of the Dragon--to its benefit, though I would not credit it with doing that book justice. (I have said it before many a time but will say it again--for all their flaws the pulp adventures of old were way, way more satisfying reads than today's bloated pop fiction.)
Taken as a simple action movie I remember it working well enough. Still, I didn't care to see more of Conan's childhood. (Indeed, I don't usually care to see action heroes "before you knew them," with this going especially for Conan, to the point that even though after finishing the Howard originals I was eager to read more, knowing that L. Sprague de Camp's tales turned in exactly that direction made me lose all interest in them. And they spent a quarter of the movie on exactly that.) Meanwhile, the vigor, the barbaric splendor, the epic feel that were for all the departures from the original true to Howard (and characteristically Milius) were gone, leaving something much more generic, much less memorable (with, I think, those who think the replacement of the "tangible aesthetic . . . and practical effects" right about this costing the film something).
So does it often go with remakes, which in eliding aspects of the old fail to come up with anything as compelling--the attainment of contemporaneity coming at the price of distinction, underlining the artistic pointlessness and commercial crassness that are hallmarks of the all too common enterprise. And certainly to go by what we have heard of recent remake attempts, it is hard to imagine material less likely to survive contemporary handling than Conan.
* Ironically, 1997's Kull the Conqueror actually used more of the Conan material, drawing heavily on the plot of the one novel Howard wrote, The Hour of the Dragon--to its benefit, though I would not credit it with doing that book justice. (I have said it before many a time but will say it again--for all their flaws the pulp adventures of old were way, way more satisfying reads than today's bloated pop fiction.)
Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin, Masters of the Novelized Wargame
Some may think that when I write of Bond as writing a novelized wargame I say this derisively. I do not. The books' emphasis on the "big picture," on the unfolding of their scenario and the movement of the "pieces," was for me their great virtue. In contrast with some of their colleagues the author(s) had no pretense to being Flaubert--and wasted little time trying to interest me in characters who were simply not all that interesting, or impress us with stylistic flourishes (apart from occasional awkward attempts to dramatize reactions by having characters theatrically "shake their heads" or frown in the middle of a train of thought). Bond was astute enough to start his stories with a bang, and get the shooting going in a big way a third of the way in, with the narrative ranging from the councils of government to the skullduggery of spies and commandos and coup plotters, and later, from the frontlines of mechanized battles to dogfights in the air to the bridges of warships, and even events on the "home front" as well. The generally brief scenes changed quickly, and as the above suggests, the techno-military action was plentiful and varied, while the authors made a point of keeping us apprised of the larger situation, adding up to a satisfyingly comprehensive view. In the course of those books I was unlikely to encounter anything quite so over-the-top exciting as, for example, Dale Brown offered at his best, but the Bond-Larkin books were, for me at least, the most consistently and broadly engaging; books that were easy to get into, and which tended to proceed relatively smoothly afterward, avoiding clunkiness and turgidity even as they ran to over five hundred pages in hardcover.
Certainly this characterizes the first of those books. As the title's evocation of Red Storm Rising suggests, this is the most Red Storm Rising-like of the books, with U.S. and South Korean forces battling an invasion of the South by the Soviet-backed North, and the novel offering a wide-field view of the action by land, sea and air as seen through a long list of "dramatis personae" (the authors' own term, in the listing of them he offers at the front of his book). In considering that scenario I think it worth noting that while scenarios of conflict on the Korean peninsula were to become very well-worn, they were still comparatively fresh at the time of his book's release (much more so than Soviet tank armies rolling through the Fulda Gap, or Soviet moves on the Persian Gulf). The scenarios, if never very plausible, was also more so than it would later be, when the North Koreans lost Soviet backing and saw their economy wither, while the South grew only richer, more politically stable, and stronger (one of the world's most industrialized and wealthiest countries, facing off against one of the world's poorest). One result is that as a Red Storm Rising-in-miniature (a major regional conflict rather than a world war-level conflict) it is competently executed, and even comes with a twist ending. Indeed, the comparative ease of following events along, perhaps not unrelated to the more manageable scale of the scenario (recalling Red Storm Rising I realize I understood things at sea and on Iceland well enough, but generally had just a vague idea of things on the ground in Germany as I read my way through), and its relative novelty, meant that even if it did not reach the heights of the big book from 1986 (what here could compare with that earlier novel's Battle of the Atlantic?), I actually liked it better overall.
Still, I find the other two books the Bond-Larkin team produced the more original and striking in their ways. In opting for the rarely utilized setting of southern Africa, Vortex did not simply relocate the familiar U.S.-Soviet clash to a new region, but went for something a bit less familiar and a bit more complex. Here apartheid is on its way out in South Africa, but a senior hardliner, Karl Vorster, schemes his way to a seizure of power he uses to try and turn back the clock, complete with a reconquest of newly independent Namibia. Cuba's Fidel Castro, just as he did when South Africa previously attacked its neighbors, responded by intervening militarily, sending his armed forces to help the Namibians resist the invasion--and drawing Soviet support in after him. This sets in motion what, due to the unwillingness of the U.S. to either back the new South African government, or side with the Cubans in stopping it, becomes a complex, multi-sided game in which the United States aims to prevent both Vorster's victory, and the Soviet bloc's getting the upper hand in the region. Moreover, the novelty and intricacy were complemented by a greater than usual plausibility for the genre (and indeed, probably these authors' best-grounded scenario thus far). At the same time, if I did not usually read Bond's books for their characters, there was a bit more than the usual of such interest here. Vorster and his clique made more than usually memorable villains, while along with the well-wrought geopolitical maneuvering and military action I found myself looking forward to catching up with foreign correspondent Ian Sherfield as he pursued his story on the ground.
The third book, Cauldron, was not quite so original--at least at first glance. It was a fairly straightforward collision of two sides, with the U.S. fighting a plain and simple war to stop an invasion of an ally--or in this case, allies. That the enemy, in this case, was a Franco-German-led "European Confederation" ("Eurcon") may also seem fairly typical of the early '90s, with anxiety about U.S. industrial decline, German reunification, the apparent consolidation of the European Union, and questions about the cohesion of the Western alliance amid the collapse of the Soviet Union and fears of a turn from free trade to neomercantilist trading blocs leading to a spate of U.S. vs. Germany techno-thrillers.
It has to be admitted that the scenario looks rather strained today. Still, apart from displaying their usual competence in handling the techno-military side of things, Bond-Larkin were more sophisticated than any of their colleagues about laying the groundwork. (Indeed, I found myself wondering whether he had not been looking at theories of international politics not normally associated with the genre--the sort of stuff that uses words like "imperialism.") Here the West Europeans, particularly a France and Germany whose going their own way precipitates the collapse of the NATO alliance, turn the newly ex-Communist states of Eastern Europe into semi-colonies, an unstable, uncomfortable arrangement in a situation of deepening trade war, and deepening global economic downturn, which in turn contributes to an influx of refugees from the global South. Callous and exploitative mishandling of the refugee crisis by EurCon triggers a revolt in Hungary against their client government, prompting aggressive military intervention by French forces that soon has them more broadly fighting the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and then staging an outright invasion of those nations to keep them under Confederation control. The U.S., with what remain to it of its European allies, intervenes to stop their aggression, while EurCon strikes up a deal with Russia (weakened, unstable, but still very heavily armed), raising the risk of things getting even uglier, fast . . .
Of course, things (fortunately) did not work out quite the way laid out in the novel. Still, Bond's greater than usual sensitivity to some of the forces that drive international politics gives the book a greater than usual interest almost thirty years later, especially with a heavily industrialized Germany treating its European "partners" as a periphery, imposing unpopular economic terms from above, and even rearming for the sake of a greater "world role," while trade war resurges and the ultra-right is on the march everywhere.
Afterward, quite naturally, I looked forward to Bond's next book offering something similar, the more so as by that point I had read pretty much all of the books of the '80s and early '90s that had looked promising, and there was not much new material of the type coming out. (In the mid-1990s Stephen Coonts and Harold Coyle were on hiatus, at least where this genre was concerned; Payne Harrison seemed to have moved on; etcetera, etcetera.) However, like their colleagues, Bond and Larkin changed tacks at this point, with the next (and last) two books Bond would write with Larkin (or with anyone for the next decade), following a more conventional course in The Enemy Within.
The Enemy Within was undistinguished by any great originality of premise, or sophistication in establishing it, such as had been so much an asset in the last two books. What it boiled down to was that the Iranians (in spite of what seemed a change of government holding out the hope of better U.S.-Iranian relations) were after control of the Gulf, pure and simple--a well-worn cliché years earlier. And they were contriving to narrow the U.S. edge by tying up American forces at home so as to give them a window of opportunity in which to make their move. (As it happened, Bond's former cowriter Clancy would have a story identical in these details out the same year, Executive Orders, even if the precise means the Iranians used to achieve the end were different.) And by tale's end it proved to be not Red Phoenix-Vortex-Cauldron stuff, but more conventional spies-and-commandos stuff, with an implausible load of melodrama, with the hero and villain having a history culminating in treachery and mortal conflict, and a love story prominent in the narrative's unfolding, and the hero going rogue at the eleventh hour to stop the bad guy who used to be his friend as in so many '80s action movies. Not what I hoped for from Bond and company, it was still a brisk enough read that I was not unentertained, and quickly polished it off, but looked ahead to the next one in the hopes that it would offer a return to the older approach.
Alas, it was a sequel to The Enemy Within, continuing the adventures of that book's heroes, Peter Thorn and Helen Gray, with a scenario that was still more thoroughly standard B-movie, down to the heroes having to go rogue, and stop the villains all by their lonesome, in a raid on the enemy facility in which they go in guns blazing against vastly superior opposition but somehow mow down lots and lots of enemies with their guns as that enemy for some reason can't shoot straight to save their lives (literally). I was not, of course, entirely averse to such, but, again, it was not what I had been hoping for, the more in as this kind of fare was already so much more commonplace than what the Bond-Larkin team used to do, and a Clive Cussler, or Matthew Reilly, did it with more flair, too. Along with the fact that my enthusiasm for the techno-thriller was on the wane, I am not sure that I would have rushed out to pick up Bond's next afterward--but as it was Bond, like so many of his colleagues before him, went on hiatus too. He did not produce another collaboration with Larkin, and indeed, nothing at all for six years. The next novel to appear under Bond's name was the Jim DeFelice-coauthored First Team series, which debuted in 2004, after which Bond began to produce the Jerry Mitchell submarine novels as well (2005). Indeed, the body of Bond-authored or coauthored work in the twenty-first century was, in fact, to become quite considerable (17 novels in 2004-2018, over one a year on average). One was even a sequel to Red Phoenix, 2015's Red Phoenix Burning. They did, undeniably, find readers. Yet, as with so much else in the twenty-first history of the print techno-thriller, in regard to originality, flair, commercial weight and pop cultural impact, it was a mere epilogue to the genre's resurgence in the 1970s, boom in the 1980s, and bust in the 1990s.
The Decline and Fall of the Gag Comedy Film
What ever happened to the gag comedy? It seems to me that the genre had a golden age in the '70s, evident in such hits as the Mel Brooks and ZAZ (Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker) had in that period (Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, Airplane!). Both remained productive even after, of course (Brooks at least having cult hits with History of the World, Part I (1981) and Spaceballs (1987), ZAZ bigger films like The Naked Gun), while others got in on the action, like Carl Reiner with The Man With Two Brains (1983), and Keenan Ivory Wayans in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka (1988).
Still, by the '90s the genre was looking tired--in part, one supposes, of the approach having been exploited for so long, in the main by the same filmmakers (even if here and there you saw someone have some success, as Mike Myers did with Wayne's World (1992) and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)). The genre had a bit of a revival with Wayans' Scary Movie (1999) by the end of the decade, but so far as I know no one seems to think the next wave of movies could really be compared with the first, with, quite the contrary, the most conspicuous producers of such film, the Jason Friedburg and Aaron Seltzer team, not getting a particularly favorable treatment by the entertainment press. (Indeed, at the time of this writing the first sentence of the Wikipedia article regarding their critical reception reads: "The critical reception of Friedberg and Seltzer's films has been overwhelmingly negative.") The movies still get made, of course--but you are far more likely to find them on streaming than at "a theater near you."
What happened? Apart from the way the genre ran down, or particular "bad movies" turning the public off of the form, I think the culture changed. Gag comedies tended to be structured around a parodic narrative spoofing some well-known cinematic genre. In doing so Brooks and ZAZ had the benefit of an audience they could assume to share a longer pop cultural memory, all as pop culture continued to churn out material that, on some level, at least had some claim to novelty, enough of it to launch if not a new genre then a new wave of films that would make its own clichés off of which to play rather than reusing those of another era. Thus Brooks and ZAZ offered parodies of the Western, Universal Studios-style horror, the old-time historical epic, the post-Star Wars space movie boom, exploitation films, the Airport-style disaster movie, and so on (while in 1980 ZAZ could expect an appreciable number of their viewers to remember who Ethel Merman was). By contrast Friedberg and Seltzer, limiting themselves to what they could expect a relatively young audience to personally recall, in a time in which pop culture has become more fragmentary, and more ephemeral, and tended to rework the old rather than coming up with the new (arguably to diminishing returns), leaving them that much less to work with--just grab-bags of recent pop cultural material they often ended up merely referencing rather than mining for comedy, probably because no more could be done with it.
As that pop culture changed it may have not only deprived gag comedy-makers of material, but also obviated their approach, because now, in at least some degree, everything was a parody, everything was a gag comedy--to the point that the deadly serious Daniel Craig Bond films brought in a new Q who quipped that they don't make the old-style gadgets anymore, while Star Wars: Episode VIII was a long exercise in flippancy toward the saga. Listening to the throne-room dialogue I imagine a good many people must have thought: "This isn't Star Wars. This is Spaceballs!" And how do you make a Spaceballs out of a movie that is already Spaceballs? Would it be worth bothering to do so even if you could?
One may say that not just the niche that gag comedies had occupied disappeared, but so had the whole pop cultural ecosystem of which they were a part.
NOTE: This item is a follow-up to my earlier post about "The Rise of the Gag Comedy."
Still, by the '90s the genre was looking tired--in part, one supposes, of the approach having been exploited for so long, in the main by the same filmmakers (even if here and there you saw someone have some success, as Mike Myers did with Wayne's World (1992) and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)). The genre had a bit of a revival with Wayans' Scary Movie (1999) by the end of the decade, but so far as I know no one seems to think the next wave of movies could really be compared with the first, with, quite the contrary, the most conspicuous producers of such film, the Jason Friedburg and Aaron Seltzer team, not getting a particularly favorable treatment by the entertainment press. (Indeed, at the time of this writing the first sentence of the Wikipedia article regarding their critical reception reads: "The critical reception of Friedberg and Seltzer's films has been overwhelmingly negative.") The movies still get made, of course--but you are far more likely to find them on streaming than at "a theater near you."
What happened? Apart from the way the genre ran down, or particular "bad movies" turning the public off of the form, I think the culture changed. Gag comedies tended to be structured around a parodic narrative spoofing some well-known cinematic genre. In doing so Brooks and ZAZ had the benefit of an audience they could assume to share a longer pop cultural memory, all as pop culture continued to churn out material that, on some level, at least had some claim to novelty, enough of it to launch if not a new genre then a new wave of films that would make its own clichés off of which to play rather than reusing those of another era. Thus Brooks and ZAZ offered parodies of the Western, Universal Studios-style horror, the old-time historical epic, the post-Star Wars space movie boom, exploitation films, the Airport-style disaster movie, and so on (while in 1980 ZAZ could expect an appreciable number of their viewers to remember who Ethel Merman was). By contrast Friedberg and Seltzer, limiting themselves to what they could expect a relatively young audience to personally recall, in a time in which pop culture has become more fragmentary, and more ephemeral, and tended to rework the old rather than coming up with the new (arguably to diminishing returns), leaving them that much less to work with--just grab-bags of recent pop cultural material they often ended up merely referencing rather than mining for comedy, probably because no more could be done with it.
As that pop culture changed it may have not only deprived gag comedy-makers of material, but also obviated their approach, because now, in at least some degree, everything was a parody, everything was a gag comedy--to the point that the deadly serious Daniel Craig Bond films brought in a new Q who quipped that they don't make the old-style gadgets anymore, while Star Wars: Episode VIII was a long exercise in flippancy toward the saga. Listening to the throne-room dialogue I imagine a good many people must have thought: "This isn't Star Wars. This is Spaceballs!" And how do you make a Spaceballs out of a movie that is already Spaceballs? Would it be worth bothering to do so even if you could?
One may say that not just the niche that gag comedies had occupied disappeared, but so had the whole pop cultural ecosystem of which they were a part.
NOTE: This item is a follow-up to my earlier post about "The Rise of the Gag Comedy."
The Rise of the Gag Comedy Film
Such thinking, one might imagine, may have also made it seem the more natural for Hollywood to emphasize spoofing of the Bond series so much in trying to capitalize on its popularity--with the ultimate expression of that how Charles K. Feldman's Casino Royale, at one point conceived as a tough noir helmed by The Big Sleep director Howard Hawks, ended up the biggest and silliest of such comedies, and itself a key moment (though none but myself and Robert von Dassanowsky seem to think so) in the development of the gag comedy form.
Just as with the innovators who made the action movie what it is today it is not the kind of place in film history in which the middlebrow are apt to take an interest, but it is a place nonetheless meriting some attention.
* Of course, others were involved--like Richard Lester in his films with the Beatles, and Monty Python, especially as they moved their work from the small screen to the large, but the focus here is on Hollywood's own offerings.
The Scientist in Balzac's Human Comedy: David Sechard in Lost Illusions
As I remarked not too long ago Balzac was an admirer of scientists and inventors, and a supporter of technological progress--with this, in fact, making him more critical rather than less of a money-dominated society, as we see in Lost Illusions. In Part III, "The Sufferings of Inventors," printer David Sechard, in an era where the demand for printed matter, and the material on which it is to be printed, are exploding, pursues the development of a new technique of paper-making.
Sechard's efforts are ultimately successful, but circumstances compel him to sell his innovation to richer businessmen prepared to destroy him to have control of the technology, such that they have the principal benefit of the development--all as Sechard's "discovery . . . [is] assimilated by the French manufacturing world, as food is assimilated by a living body," his development a tributary stream into a broad Mississippi of technological progress rather than a singlehandedly epoch-making occurrence. And after the hardships he had put himself and his wife through he gives up invention, "bidd[ing] farewell for ever to glory," and occupying himself with other pursuits.
In all that, as in so much else, Balzac's thinking is far, far truer to the history, and sociology, of science and technology than the conventional view prevailing at present, which desires to reduce that whole history to nothing but a series of Edisonades where inventors are invariably rewarded with demi-god-like glory and riches in this life, and eternal remembrance in a Pantheon of All-Time Greats after.
Sechard's efforts are ultimately successful, but circumstances compel him to sell his innovation to richer businessmen prepared to destroy him to have control of the technology, such that they have the principal benefit of the development--all as Sechard's "discovery . . . [is] assimilated by the French manufacturing world, as food is assimilated by a living body," his development a tributary stream into a broad Mississippi of technological progress rather than a singlehandedly epoch-making occurrence. And after the hardships he had put himself and his wife through he gives up invention, "bidd[ing] farewell for ever to glory," and occupying himself with other pursuits.
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