Five Cool Things and Idiots

Hello and welcome to an all-new (almost) all-book edition of Five Cool Things, the biweekly article where I talk about all the interesting, fabulous, and yes, cool things I’ve discovered since the last time.

DTF St. Louis

This HBO series stars Jason Bateman as Clark Forest, a St. Louis weatherman who has grown bored with his suburban life, and David Harbour as Floyd Smernitch, Clark’s best friend and an ASL interpreter. Floyd’s marriage to Carol (Linda Cardellini) has grown a bit stale, and they are struggling with bad debts, and her son from another marriage has emotional difficulties. Clark discovers an app called DTF St. Louis, which is basically a way to find sexual hookups without any strings attached. Clark figures that sounds fun, and he talks Floyd into it as well.

Before the end of the first episode, one of them is dead. Enter Donoghue Homer (Richard Jenkins), a very good, but old and tired, county detective, and Jodie Plumb (Joy Sunday) a much younger and therefore more connected to modern sexual norms, local special crimes officer.

It is a deeply weird show that pulls back the layers of seeming normality in the suburbs and reveals neurosis, depression, and sexual kink. It is the type of show that after the first episode you think you have a handle on it. And then the second episode will show some of the same scenes, but from a different angle or slightly elongated, and that thing you thought you knew wasn’t it at all. Then the next episode will do the same thing. It is constantly pulling the rug out from under you, throwing all sorts of twists at the audience. After about the third episode, I wondered if it could keep that up, but it mostly did.

I’m not sure if it quite sticks the landing, but I was always interested in where it was going. The cast is all very good but David Harbour is amazing. He infuses Floyd with an inherent goodness, and loveability, and yet a deep sadness. He’s never been better.

The Amazing Spider-Man – “Kraven’s Last Hunt”

I never got into comics while I was growing up. My cousin Jon loved them, and I liked the idea of comics, but there were just so many of them I could never find a starting point.

Buy Spider-Man: Kraven’s Last Hunt

Every summer, my parents would drag me and my sibling to East Tennessee, where my dad grew up, to visit his family. There was never much to do, and I was always bored. One day, my mom took me to Piggly Wiggly to buy something or other, and I bided my time looking at the comic-book rack. I talked her into buying me a Spider-Man issue.

I took it home and devoured it. The next day we went back to the grocery store, and I found the next issue of that comic. I had no idea how comics worked back then. I didn’t have a clue as to how often each issue came out, but I begged my mom to take me back each day, hoping to find the next one. I think I managed to find the first five issues of this six-part saga.

When we got home, I read the final issue and thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever read. I tried to pick up the next story, but it involved characters I didn’t know, and it was a completely different scenario, and I just couldn’t get into it.

It would be another decade or so before I really got into reading comics. Once I did, I often thought of that Spider-Man story, but my memories were too vague to be able to find it again. I knew the villain was some kind of hunter. I was pretty sure it took place in some rural area, a forest maybe, or a cabin in the woods. And I remembered the last panel had the villain committing suicide with a shotgun next to a bathtub (which he’d fall into once the deed was done).

Google searches with that information turned up nothing. Periodically, I’d go through online issues hunting for it, but I wasn’t really sure when it came out. Sometime in the late 1980s was my guess, but there were hundreds of issues to go through.

A couple of weeks ago I was browsing the comics section of Barnes and Noble, and what did I come across? My long lost Spider-Man. I instantly recognized the cover with a strong man in a lion skin vest holding onto Spider-Man’s suit. I quickly turned to the back to make sure it was the right story. I knew it was if the last panel was that bathtub suicide.

Well, I was partially correct. He does kill himself with a shotgun, but it is a coffin he’s standing next to, not a tub. I guess my mind somehow scrambled those two similar-looking things. And none of it takes place in a forest, but chunks of it exist in a lonely old mansion. None of this matters. I’d found it.

The story is called “Kraven’s Last Hunt”. It came out in November of 1987 (so we must have been visiting the grandparents over Thanksgiving break, not in the summer). It is now included as the main story in one of Marvel’s Epic Collections.

The rest of the collection is pretty good, but that Kraven story is still fantastic. I’m so glad I found it after all these years and that it is as good as I remembered it being.

Batman – Shadows of the Bat: House of Gotham

This Batman comic focuses not so much on the Dark Knight but on what would normally be a periphery character. A young boy’s parents are killed by the Joker. He only survives because he was hiding in a closet, and just before the Joker finds him, Batman arrives.

Buy Batman – Shadows of the Bat: House of Gotham

With no other family and no money for support, he’s sent to Arkham Asylum. Later, he’ll get a job with the Penguin, and become friends with Clayface. Periodically, Batman tries to help, but he’s Batman, and this is Gotham, so there are a lot of distractions.

The story takes place over about a ten-year period. In the background, we’ll see famous stories like Knightfall and No Man’s Land, but here the focus is on this unnamed boy and how he completely falls through the cracks. The boy will eventually find ways to help others like him, even if that means teaming up with some folks Batman might prefer to scrap with rather than assist.

I love stories like this where characters who would normally be in the background get front stage, and then the big stories we already know about are in the periphery. The writing by Matthew Rosenberg is good, and the artwork from Fernando Blanco and Jordie Bellaire is excellent.

The Running Man by Richard Bachman (Stephen King)

Stephen King is nothing if not prolific. In the 52 years since he first published his first novel, Carrie, he has written some 64 novels and over 200 short stories plus numerous screenplays and non-fiction stories. In his early days, the prevailing wisdom from his publisher was that you shouldn’t release more than one book per year. To publish more often would dilute your brand. But King was writing way more than one book a year, and so he convinced them to let him release some under a pseudonym, Richard Bachman.

Buy The Running Man by Richard Bachman

There was probably also a bit of ego there, as he was already so famous that anything he published was a bestseller. He probably wondered if something released under a different name would sell as well or be as beloved. The Bachman books tend to be shorter than the normal King novels and grittier, nastier, and more cynical. The Running Man falls well into that category.

It was made into an Arnold Schwarzenegger action film in 1987. It barely has anything to do with the book outside the very basic concept. Edgar Wright recently adapted it into a film that follows the book’s plot a lot more closely, but it still takes quite a few liberties.

King’s book is pretty raw and ragged. It eschews his usual, deep character development for a harsh, dark social critique. In the near future, the gulf between the haves and the have-nots is massive. Most people live in extreme poverty with little access to good jobs or healthcare. The rich sedate the masses with ultra-violent game shows where every night contestants can win large sums of cash by playing crazy games that will most likely kill them. The most popular game is called “The Running Man,” where a few contestants are given a head start and then hunted by professional killers. The longer you live, the more money your family will receive.

Ben Richards, who has struggled to keep a job, whose wife has turned to prostitution to make ends meet, and whose young daughter is very sick, becomes a Running Man. Turns out he’s quite good at it. Fighting for his family means he’s willing to do just about anything to survive for as long as he can. He’ll even kill. But he also meets people who have started an underground movement. Revolutionaries who want to wake up the everyday citizen to what their government is doing to them.

King’s writing is terse and tough. The story is dark. It is not my favorite King book by far, but it is gripping and page turning.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

God, I love the 1980s. Studios were willing to take chances. They would spend gobs of money on some of the craziest ideas and hope it would be a hit.

Buy The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller) is an adventurer, surgeon, rock musician, and all-around cool guy who invents a way to pass through solid matter. While riding his jet car through a mountain, he passes through another dimension, and when he returns, some kind of alien goo is attached to his auto. This alerts interdimensional aliens that humans have advanced in technology, and they invade.

Meanwhile, Banzai’s former partner, Dr. Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow), who helped invent the device that takes you into the 8th dimension and was the first to use it (it drove him completely insane), escapes the asylum in order to steal the device.

It gets weirder from there. It has a great cast, including Ellen Barkin, Christopher Lloyd (as one of the aliens), and Jeff Goldblum (dressed like Howdy Doody for some reason.). The plot is just bonkers. You just know everyone involved had to be ingesting an insane amount of drugs at the time. But it’s got this insane energy that makes it so much fun to watch.

Idiots

Ever since I saw him in Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin, I’ve been a fan of Macon Blair. He’s a great actor, writer, and director. This film, which he wrote and directed, stars Dave Franco, O’Shea Jackson, Peter Dinklage, and Kiernan Shipka. It is about a couple of, well, idiots who are hired by a shady transport service to escort a rich teen to rehab. No doubt complications will ensue. The trailer looks like a blast.