X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

Directed by Bryan Singer

I remember as if it were yesterday reading my subscription copies of the original Uncanny X-Men #141 and 142, 'way back in 1980, only a few months after the shocking conclusion of The Dark Phoenix Saga in issue #137 and, unbeknownst to me, only an issue away from the break-up of the very best creative team ever to grace those pages. Writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne were at the top of their respective games at that point – in sharing co-plotting duties they created a whole that was considerably more than the sum of its parts – and I remained what I had been for the previous four or five years, a rabid “X-fan” during the only period of my life when I may well have been buying more Marvel comics than DC. My devotion to the franchise would slowly wane over the half-dozen or so years after the departure of John Byrne (his last issue was the tour-de-force #143), arrested only briefly during the tenure of Paul Smith (#165-175). Glee at the return of the “New” X-Men's inaugural artist from the mid-late 1970s, Dave Cockrum, with issue #145 quickly gave way to dismay that the artist whom I had long regarded as my absolute favorite had lost something in the interim – I found Cockrum's art much cruder this second go 'round, especially in contrast to the incredibly smooth, expressive draftsmanship of John Byrne.

One of the most homaged
covers ever

But as so often happens, I ramble on. The point is this: “Days of Future Past” (Uncanny X-Men #141) and “Mind Out of Time” (#142) – yes, it was a mere two issues, but in those days a typical issue of a comic book packed in as much story as a modern-day five- or six-issue story arc! – had an incredible impact on my late-teen-year-old self, and (I suspect) on others as well. Let's just say that in my opinion the commentary implicitly or explicitly attributing this new movie's time-travel plot – heroes in a dystopian future dominated by giant robots send one of their number into the past to change history and prevent the apocalypse (errr... Can I use that word?) – to Terminator have things as incredibly backward as those who ignorantly called John Carter [of Mars] a rip-off of a century of science-fiction cinema! I have believed that James Cameron had to have read Uncanny X-Men ever since I first saw Terminator in 1984. I've never seen that discussed, and I figure it's about as likely to be admitted as that Gladiator was a turn-of-the-century retread of 1964's The Fall of the Roman Empire.

Another of the most homaged
covers ever

… And there I go again....

Anyway, I have read and reread the original story many times – I have owned it in at least five different printings from the original issues (which I still have) to the most recent deluxe hardcover of the same title (X-Men: Days of Future Past) compiling the original story with thirty years of follow-up stories as Marvel could not resist going back to the “DOFP” well over and over again! I have been looking forward to this movie with my typical mix of anticipation and dread (my default attitude regarding upcoming comic-book movies) ever since it was announced during the unexpected success of X-Men: First Class several years ago. I began getting more excited about it a year ago almost exactly when I had the pleasure of hearing both Chris Claremont and Patrick Stewart express their own enthusiasm (which seemed genuine, but you can never tell how much is real and how much is just wanting to make sure their own paycheck is as big as possible) for the movie at Comicpalooza 2013 (LINK). As usual, the barrage of trailers and clips leading up to the big release this weekend looked good, but it's almost impossible to tell from those whether the final product will be an incomprehensible mess (a real danger with this type of movie compounded with the huge cast of characters brought into the story) or not. Nonetheless, this was a movie I had to see as quickly as possible.

And so, on its first day of release I was there for the very first afternoon showing. To cut to the chase, I really liked it. I don't consider it the best super-hero movie ever made, and probably not the best of the year, but it is without a doubt the best non-Marvel Studios effort at a Marvel Comics movie (don't get me started on the licensing issues) … and Marvel Studios is going to have a tough time living up to this film's achievement in one hilarious sequence where there is a unique licensing overlap between Marvel itself and 20^th-Century Fox! – they have been thoroughly one-upped in advance, I feel.  It is, of course, the best X-Men movie, and reconciles (for the most part) the differences between Bryan Singer's first two offerings and the reboot/prequel First Class, while simultaneously wiping the slate of the unfortunate story consequences of X-Men: The Last Stand and in no way invalidating that film – time travel and alternate universes can be extremely useful! I think the X-Men franchise is perfectly poised to go forward from here.

(And going forward from here there may well be SPOILERS...)

Toward the Gleam (2011)

A Novel by T. M. Doran

I have a fondness for novels featuring historical characters experiencing fantastic but fictional adventures. By this I mean not “historical novels” retelling historical events in the form of a novel, where the author strives to adhere as closely as possible to events as they actually happened while necessarily supplying dialogue, minor incidents, and even peripheral characters as necessary to create a dramatic narrative out of the facts as we know them (examples abound, but springing first to mind are Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series), or even fundamentally fictional stories featuring a fictional character set firmly within a historical context and events, interacting with historical persons (e.g., Max Allan Collins' Nathan Heller Mysteries [LINK]). No, I mean something more akin to Paul Malmont's novels, The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril and The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown [LINK], the former placing the 1930s writers of hero pulps in their own hair-raisingly pulpish adventures complete with reanimated corpses and the Yellow Peril, the latter similarly focusing on the 1940s pioneers of science fiction in a fantastic war-time plot to recover a Death Ray defense against the Axis. In fact, as I write this I realize that those latter two novels exemplify what I really find compelling, imagining the writers of fantastic fiction plunged into the midst of their own fantastic adventures.

A couple of months ago, I read (and reviewed) No Dawn For Men: A Novel of Ian Fleming, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Nazi Germany [LINK]. My assessment of it was somewhat mixed, both because of a rather pedestrian writing style that did not successfully emulate that of either author and because it did not succeed in imparting a necessary suspension of disbelief that these could indeed be “the real story” behind the authors and the creation of the the literary monuments for which they are known. Neither of those criticisms apply to this book, however, which was recommended to me by our parish priest, with whom I share a love for all things Tolkien, around the same time I had heard of and already ordered No Dawn For Men. The intriguing prospect of a mash-up of Tolkien and Fleming in a spy adventure on the eve of World War II had me read that book first, inadvertently saving the better for later. If No Dawn For Men is a simple pot-boiler thriller, Toward the Gleam rises to the level of literature – while remaining an edge-of-your seat thriller. Which is no mean accomplishment given how much discourse and dialogue is contained in these pages, working in a great deal of the changing philosophy and world-view of the early twentieth century. That latter feature, as well as the characters and literary connections posited, make it obvious why Ignatius Press, a relatively small Catholic publishing house specializing in orthodox theology and philosophy as well as fiction picked up this book [LINK]. (As with many other of its books, Ignatius' page for this book [LINK] site hosts a reading guide [LINK] as well as a great embedded Youtube “book trailer” [LINK].)

Before I get to a more spoiler-filled discussion of some particular elements of this book that struck me as noteworthy, here's a general overview of the plot: A young English scholar, recuperating from injuries suffered on the front-lines of the World War I, discovers a mysterious box containing an ancient manuscript bound in red, written in an unknown language. His linguistics training allows him to laboriously decipher over a decade and a half or so the lost tales of a long-departed age – but his obsessive quest to understand the historical context whence came the book brings him to the attention of a great enemy who demands the knowledge contained within the book for himself, toward the end of world domination. Much of this tale is a tense cat-and-mouse game in which we experience along with the scholar the dread of an approaching doom that seems almost a force of nature, tempered with the support of a close fellowship of academic colleagues as well as a loving family and clear-headed, eminently practical and down-to-earth wife, climaxing in a one-on-one confrontation within the hallowed halls of Oxford University itself.

The rest of this review contains spoilers which, while not giving away the overall story itself beyond the brief summary above, may well ruin a lot of the reading experience; if you've not yet read the book for yourself, I would suggest you do so before going any further....

Tales of Honor #2 (Image Comics-Top Cow, 2014)

Continuing a five-issue adaptation of On Basilisk Station, by David Weber.

There's not a whole lot I can say about this second issue that I didn't say about the first [LINK]. My overall assessment remains the same, that it holds up very well as a graphic novel adaptation of the introductory volume to David Weber's ever-expanding Honorverse, told through the memories of the main character, Honor Harrington, looking back on her first starship command from captivity and probable execution as a war criminal. I will emphasise that script-writer Matt Hawkins seems to know the Honorverse like the back of his hand and by this narrative device provides a unique perspective that makes this a refreshingly original version of a story I've read and reread in Weber's original prose. It is not simply a straight illustrated retelling of the original “tale of Honor,” but manages to be something that both contributes to this longtime aficionado’s appreciation of the Honorverse and is, in my opinion, accessible to someone unfamiliar with the world and characters. I hope there are comics fans who will be turned on to the novels by this new presentation, although I've seen no sales data and have no idea how these first couple of issues have done. My hope is, very well.

I Have Seen a Saint

NOLA.com

Today is Divine Mercy Sunday – a designation of the first Sunday after Easter by Polish-born Pope John Paul II in 2000 promoting the Divine Mercy devotions popularized by the early 20th-c. Polish seer and Saint Faustina Kowalski based on her mystical encounters with Our Lord. A bare five years later the Pope would die on the very eve of that new Feast.  It is appropriate that this Feast has today, nine years further on, seen the solemn canonization of the late Holy Father as Saint John Paul the Great, Pope and Confessor. (I'm presuming that last is how he will be styled.)

Which means that I can say, “I have seen a saint” – with my own eyes. Granted, I have probably seen a great many saints in the more general sense, those who are commemorated on the Feast of All Saints, 1 November each year, but never other than once in my life have I been even remotely in the presence of one who would eventually be formally recognized as such by the Church.

And “remotely” it was indeed, almost three decades ago, on Saturday 12 September 1987, when I stood amidst a crowd of about 130,000 around a huge outdoor pavilion altar erected near the University of New Orleans' Lakefront Arena, in sweltering heat and humidity and a beating sun punctuated by rain as the Pope offered Mass. Here is the rather sketchy account from the journal I was keeping quite intermittently at the time:

Solemn High Mass of Easter, Minor Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, Natchitoches, Louisiana

Rather unexpectedly – for me, at least (it is true what I say, I'm always the last to know – in this case even though I'm in the Chant Schola that provided music...) – the weekly 5 pm Sunday Mass in Latin at the Minor Basilica of the Immaculate Conception was for this Easter Sunday 2014 a full-blown Solemn High Mass, with several priests, deacons, and seminarians filling the various roles making a High Mass “Solemn.” It was the second Solemn High Mass within two months, a full fifty years after the last one previous. As was the one a few weeks ago during the Lenten Mission with Fr. John Zuhlsdorf [LINK], it was astoundingly beautiful. We are truly blessed here at the Basilica to have this wonderful, traditional form of worship available to us.  Here are a couple of pictures I took from the choir loft with my phone.

Typical attendance at the Traditional Latin Mass is from about twenty to over fifty.  It is the fourth Mass of the weekend, and has been offered on a regular basis only since the beginning of Advent last December.  I counted 35 in the congregation that I could see, but since the Baptists don't have a monopoly on the "Back Row" mentality and I know there are usually some people in the several back rows over which the choir loft extends, I would bet there were at least a few more than that.

Fr. Ryan Humphries, Rector, provided the homily [available here:  LINK - 20 April, Easter Sunday, TLM].

Christus resurrexit! Alleluia, Alleluia!

"Christ my hope is arisen...."

Christians, to the Paschal Victim

Offer your thankful praises!

A lamb the sheep redeemeth:

Christ, who only is sinless,

Reconcileth sinners to the Father.

Death and life have contended

In that combat stupendous:

The Prince of life, who died, reigns immortal.

Speak, Mary, declaring

What thou sawest wayfaring.

“The tomb of Christ, who is living.

The glory of Jesus' resurrection;

Bright angels attesting,

The shroud and napkin resting.

Yea, Christ my hope is arisen;

To Galilee he goes before you.”

Christ indeed from death is risen,

Our new life obtaining.

Have mercy, victor King, ever reigning!

Amen. Alleluia!

Victimae Paschali Laudes, ca. 1030

The Beginning of the Modern Titanomachy

Exactly one year ago I commemorated “The Birth of the Modern Mythology” on or about 18 April 1938 [LINK]. I based that date for the release of Action Comics #1 (June 1938) upon a flurry of other websites' and bloggers' celebrations that appeared then although, as I noted, my customary “go to” source for such historical data for DC Comics – Mike's Amazing World of DC Comics – cites 3 May as the “Approx. On Sale Date” for that epochal event [LINK]. Since “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (Ralph Waldon Emerson via my 9th-grade Algebra teacher Mr. Kemper), this year I am going with Mike's Amazing World for the 75^th anniversary of the second most important event in comics history, the appearance on newsstands of Detective Comics #27 (May 1939) [LINK] even though the “flurry of other websites' and bloggers' celebrations” appeared a couple of weeks ago, 'round about 30 March, e.g., at Bleeding Cool [LINK]. That latter posting does give the rationale for the earlier date, basing it upon an official catalogue of copyright entries, and I suspect the mid-April 1938 date for Action Comics #1 comes from a similar source. Bearing in mind what I said last year regarding the haphazard nature of newsstand distribution during the early years of comics publication, however – and based on my virtually nonexistent knowledge of how these things actually work – I imagine the earlier date is when a just-printed, hot-off-the-presses magazine would have been submitted to the copyright authorities and was just entering the distribution chain, which back then would take weeks to ripple copies out across the country. More than likely, however, by two to three weeks later – 18 April 1939 – most outlets would probably have gotten their copies, and grubby little fingers everywhere could be scrounging up dimes to find out about “The Amazing and Unique Adventures of The Batman!” The short story that they would find therein, Bill Finger's and Bob Kane's “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate,” was a barely-disguised rip-off from an adventure of the pulp juggernaut The Shadow of a couple of years before, November 1936's Partners in Peril [LINK], and frankly gave little hint of the greatness that would eventually come – but it's been reprinted many, many times and can be most easily read (for free) via Comixology [LINK]. There was little indication that as the Olympians overthrew the Titans of old, Batman would one day outstrip the previous year's Superman in popularity, although not (I would argue) in historical significance.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

Directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo

Okay, I'm not even going to answer the question, Did you like it? Anyone who knows me knows the answer. And this is not going to be a long, detailed review. I'm just going to throw some thoughts out there that came to me during and after seeing the movie.

Due to various things going on, I was afraid I wouldn't get to see it before next weekend, but I managed to get to the early-evening showing last night, thus on its third official day of US release. Although I'm not one for whom spoilers ruin a film experience, I had managed to avoid any real plot details beyond the most general or those known to anyone who read Ed Brubaker's great run almost a decade back now in one of the more recent “reboots” of the Captain America comic book series, the first 25 issues or so of which I have in a wonderful Omnibus edition the centerpiece of which is The Winter Soldier story arc that did the unthinkable – brought Bucky back from the dead. (It’s also available as a series of smaller trade paperback volumes.) So I was as close as possible for a comic book reader – and fan of the earlier Marvel Cinematic Universe offerings – to being a “blank slate.” Of course, the particular showing I attended would be in 3D, and I still agree with my son (who saw the movie the previous evening, but did not tell me anything other than he thought I'd like it – duh!) that 3D does not add much of anything to most movies, in fact seems to dull color and detail. It certainly did not ruin the experience for me, though. And I was anxious to see it, especially after belatedly, Friday night, finally watching the DVR'd episode of Agents of SHIELD from Tuesday, which ended with an “as-if-in-story” sequence directly from the movie, where the Winter Soldier takes on Nick Fury and his wonderful SUV – and had already seen such Internet headlines as, “So What The @#$% Happens to Marvel's AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D.? SPOILERS” on Newsarama, although I had not clicked the link [LINK] (I have now, and it has some good ideas), as well as various “leaks” that the rest of the season of that TV show will deal directly with the fallout from The Winter Soldier. And I am very glad I did – because nothing is the same anymore. I will say this, though – for the first time since the TV show debuted, I'm actually looking forward to the next episode. So far I'd been watching the series more out of a sense of duty, and enjoying it all right, but finding it disappointing – and (no less astonishing to me than anyone else, given my initial revulsion last year when it debuted) enjoying the second season of Arrow a lot more. Hopefully, The Winter Soldier is going to give SHIELD's ratings a big boost – although were I Marvel Studios I would have included a this-weekend-only after-scene basically flogging Tuesday night's episode. That is a lost opportunity.

This was a marvelously (pardon the pun, which believe it or not was totally unintentional) complex and textured film, driven largely by character, primarily Steve Rogers as a living relic of an earlier age when the world seemed a lot more black and white stuck in a modern world where issues seem much more complex. Are they really? That’s a question for another time. They definitely do a great job tapping into the current zeitgeist of societal fear centering on the ubiquity of information, how much the government knows about individuals, what it is doing or may do with that information – NSA spying, drone attacks, pre-emptive strikes, how much freedom we are willing to trade for secrecy. It’s what has made Person of Interest so compelling, bounding ever higher in the ratings, writ large and translated to perfection into the world of comic book movies.

The Ballad of the White Horse (1911)

By G. K. Chesterton, Methuen Press Illustrated 10^th Edition by Robert Austin (1928), Marygrove College Press Annotated Edition by Bernadette Sheridan, IHM (1993), Reprinted Ignatius Press (2011)

Before the gods that made the gods

Had seen their sunrise pass,

The White Horse of the White Horse Vale

Was cut out of the grass.

(Book 1, Lines 1-4)

The White Horse near Uffington,
historic Berkshire

So begins something I should have read long before now, for many different reasons. As hinted in the rather complex edition history delineated above, it is an Important Work of Literature. It is, indeed, usually regarded as the last great heroic epic poem in English. Although I frankly have always found reading poetry to be tough slogging, there is a certain charm in the narrative poems that are the foundation of so many national literatures – The Iliad and The Odyssey, Beowulf, and so forth. Typically products of a culture's pre-literate “heroic age,” a critical formative period in which the basic ethos of a people is being established, oral cycles of songs and poems – a distinction they did not necessarily make – eventually put into the written forms which come down to us, usually express most purely the fundamental characteristics that subsequent generations looked back to and strove to emulate. Sure, they are inevitably idealizations, but they nonetheless provide critical insight into what the bard and the audience considered of utmost importance. They are valuable historical resources – not to mention generally great stories if you can get into them. They're not called “epic” for nothing!

A Step Farther Out (2011)

By Jerry Pournelle

This is actually a somewhat annotated and updated reissuing of a book I remember reading many, many years ago, but thoroughly enjoyed revisiting. After at least thirty, probably closer to 35 years – it was first published in book form in 1979 according to the copyright page, and it is furthermore an edited compilation of monthly columns Pournelle initially presented in the pages of Galaxy magazine as early as 1974 – I had few specific memories of much of it. My clearest recollections, in fact, are of the section on “Building The Mote in God's Eye,” which novel I remember reading in high school (so, late 1970s), probably the second book by Jerry Pournelle (actually co-written with Larry Niven) (the first had been the novelization of Escape from the Planet of the Apes a few years earlier) that I read and the one that made me a life-long fan of his writings. I actually had the glow-in-the-dark "UFO" reissue of the plastic space-ship model Leif Ericson that Pournelle describes using as a template for designing the I.N.S.S. MacArthur, and I remember holding it and rereading parts of Mote with that visualization in mind.

Veronica Mars (2014)

Directed by Rob Thomas

Veronica Mars is one of my favorite TV series ever. Far too good for the fledgling UPN/CW network when it debuted ten years ago, it survived only three seasons, but in that time it built a small but devoted fan following. By all accounts the cast and crew were as devoted to it as the creator and the fans, which is reflected in the fact that most of them returned for this long-awaited follow-up motion picture which became a phenomenon in itself by breaking several records on the crowd-funding website Kickstarter last year, in rapid succession attaining its first $1-million in the shortest time, surpassing its initial goal of $2-million in a mere ten hours, continuing on to receive the most backers of any Kickstarter campaign ever, to eventually end as the largest single Kickstarter film-project ever with almost $6-million. All without me knowing anything about it until it was over and done with.... I doubtless would have thrown in something. Alas, all I can do now is thank all those who were on the ball and so generous with their support, and enjoy the fruits of their efforts.  And I could do so much sooner than I expected, because Veronica Mars achieved another "first" when Warner Brothers decided to release it simultaneously in theatres and home video.  I actually purchased and downloaded it through iTunes.

2014 Lenten Mission

Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

This is a bit belated, but I wanted to write something up anyway. Last week, Tuesday-Thursday 11-13 March we had the first, hopefully at least annual, Lenten Mission at the Minor Basilica of the Immaculate Conception. As a convert from Protestantism, the easiest way I know to define what a “mission” is in this sense is to call it a “Catholic Revival” – a speaker, often a guest, delivers a series of services on consecutive evenings. This year we were truly blessed to have Father John Zuhlsdorf, often called (for obvious reasons) “Father Z,” a Catholic commentator and blogger, and (in the words of Wikipedia), advocate “for reverent celebration of both the Ordinary Form and the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite liturgy of the Mass and the revival of the Sacrament of Penance” [LINK]. I had discovered his blog, at the time known as What Does the Prayer Really Say, now going by simply Father Z's Blog [LINK], a couple of years ago, and have followed it assiduously ever since. I was very excited to hear a few months ago that he was coming here, knowing that we were in for a treat – doubly so since I found out in the context of one of our Latin Schola practices and that Father Z was going to culminate the mission with a full on Solemn High Mass – the first celebrated here in Natchitoches for fifty years. A website I found for the Diocese of Trenton, New Jersey, best defines the three levels of celebration in the Traditional Latin Mass: “First, there is the Low Mass. This is a Mass where the priest says all the prayers without singing and is only assisted by one or two servers. … Second, there is High Mass also known as a Sung Mass (Missa Cantata) where the parts that are said aloud in the Low Mass are sung by the priest and the choir. [This is what we celebrate at the Basilica every Sunday evening at 17:00.] Lastly, there is the Solemn High Mass where the spoken parts are sung and the Celebrant is assisted by two other sacred ministers: the Deacon and the Subdeacon” [LINK; there are other good Q&A links there at left]. I can only hope and pray that I have the opportunity to experience such a beautiful Mass again before I die.