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NEWS AND VIEWS - MARCH 2019
WRITING NEWS The Champions Weekly Kickstarter is now live! Check it out here, and spread the word! * * * * * * * * THE ROCKETEER: AN APPRECIATION The Rocketeer, directed by Joe Johnston, is a strong contender for my favorite movie of all time. It's certainly up there in my top five. Released in 1991, this solid, good-hearted little superhero flick, based on the late Dave Stevens's fantastic retro-style comics, was largely ignored by audiences at the time (grossing $46 million on a $35 million budget, according to Wikipedia), but it does absolutely everything right, and it's always been very appealing to me personally, for a variety of reasons. Like my own Signalverse books, The Rocketeer isn't trying to reinvent the wheel; it knows what it is and it knows what it wants to do: tell a fun, exciting superhero-adventure story. 
The movie takes place in Los Angeles in 1938, and is about a pilot, Cliff Secord (Bill Campbell), who discovers a stolen "rocket pack" designed by Howard Hughes. Hoping to use the rocket to make some money -- Cliff's racing plane having been destroyed in a shootout between the FBI and the crooks who stole the rocket from Hughes -- he's soon forced to use it to rescue a friend at an airshow. He becomes an overnight superhero sensation, but the crooks, led by gangster Eddie Valentine and famous Hollywood actor Neville Sinclair (secretly a Nazi spy) eventually figure out who he is, leading to all kinds of chases, shootouts, showdowns, and fistfights. Cliff's buddy Peevy (Alan Arkin) helps out, and of course his girlfriend Jenny (Jennifer Connelly) gets involved, too. I first saw The Rocketeer when it was in theaters, back in 1991 (I was eleven years old). I loved it then, but I love it even more now. The script, by Danny Bilson and Paul de Meo, is just about perfect. It's fast-paced, full of good ideas, and there's a real sweetness to it, a real earnestness. In one scene, Peevy dreamily reminisces about the last date he had, back in 1932, with one Flora Maxwell: "Wasn't no point in dating anyone after her," he says. There's no real reason for this little aside -- it doesn't contribute anything to the plot -- but it's a nice, quiet sort of character moment. Big action movies don't really slow down for moments like these anymore. 
Cliff and Peevy have a snappy repartee; in Dave Stevens's words, they're written like "pre-war mugs." This is precisely right, and it's refreshing. I read a lot of pulp; I like pre-war mugs. Casting? Bill Campbell is a terrific Cliff Secord; this guy should've been a legit star. Alan Arkin and Timothy Dalton (as Neville Sinclair) have a lot of fun with their roles; Paul Sorvino is great, too, and his unexpected good-guy turn at the end is one of the best moments in the movie. And Jennifer Connelly...oh, man. I like how Roger Ebert described her in his review: "Connelly is sweet and sexy as [Cliff's] girlfriend, and projects the same innocent sensuality of the classic B-movie sexpots -- an ability to seem totally unaware, for example, that she is wearing a low-cut dress." 
I love the setting; California in the 1930's was a paradise, and it's brought to life here beautifully. We get the Hollywood glamour, of course, at the South Seas Club, but we also get the dusty, Depression-era dirt roads, the orange groves, and the silly old-fashioned cafes shaped like bulldogs. Everything is bright and sun-kissed, and the colors really pop. James Horner's soundtrack is amazing. It's stirring, soaring, and wistful when it needs to be. And Melora Hardin's version of "Begin the Beguine" is great. There's lots of little things about this movie that make it really personally appealing to me, too: the gangsters are constantly blasting away with their Tommy guns (I love the Tommy gun, and its history; my character Sam Fortune is going to get his hands on one in the next book) and Howard Hughes drives away at the end in a Pierce-Arrow sedan. I'm a big fan of the old cars from this era, and the Pierce-Arrows were the best of the best. 
Disney was really banking on this movie (hoping to turn it into the next Indiana Jones, apparently), but it didn't do the business they wanted, so we never got a sequel. That's okay with me, though; I don't think the movie needed a sequel. It ends on a lovely, unambiguously happy note, which is another thing I like about it -- I'm a sucker for happy endings. It's a great movie. They just don't make 'em like this anymore. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M WATCHING Tokusatsu GaGaGa is a Japanese comedy series about a young woman obsessed with tokusatsu (those hyper Japanese kids shows where the heroes dress up in color-coded spandex and fight big puppet-looking villains; this is the genre that gave rise to the American Power Rangers). The woman, Kano, has an ordinary office-lady kind of job at a trading company and is desperate to keep her friends, her coworkers, and her overbearing mother from finding out she's huge geek for this toku stuff. Most of the comedy comes from Kano's attempts to conceal her geeky side. 
I like this show, and I like its message. As an (ostensible) adult who collects ThunderCats action figures, plays old video games, has a couple of framed comic books on his bedroom wall, and who writes superhero novels in his spare time, I can definitely identify with Kano's problem. She's passionate about something grown-up's aren't supposed to be passionate about. My own solution to this has been to just roll with it; I'd rather be a geek than a boring schlub who isn't passionate about anything. You just have to be realistic about your chances with the opposite sex. * * * * * * * * SPORTS CARDS! As a typical kid growing up in the late 80's and early 90's, I collected a lot of baseball, football, and basketball cards. I was never a huge collector -- I wasn't a gigantic sports fan to begin with, and there weren't any collectible-card shops around where I lived, so it was hard to get my hands on anything more than just a few years old -- but I bought packs of baseball cards at the local grocery store just about every time I went to town, and I eventually managed to assemble a little bit of a collection. My brother, meanwhile, had been buying football cards since the late 70's, so we had a lot of those around the house, too. After watching this video of the L.A. Beast allegedly finding a Michael Jordan rookie card in an unopened pack of 1986 Fleer basketball cards he bought on eBay for mucho dinero, I dug some of my own baseball/football/basketball cards out of the closet and started going through them, just for the heck of it. Unfortunately my brother and I were collecting cards during the period collectors now refer to as the "junk wax" era, from 1980-1998, when cards were overproduced and overcollected and are basically worth nothing now as a result. Even rare rookies of famous stars have to be in pristine, mint condition (graded "10" by the PSA) to be worth more than $5 or $10. Even worse, some of the players from this era, whose rookie cards might have otherwise had some real value, got caught up in steroid scandals which damaged their reputations (and affected the collectibility of their cards): Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds. I have rookie cards of all these guys. Topps, Donruss, Fleer. Some cards are still reasonably valuable: Jerry Rice's rookie card (sadly, we used to have one of these, but it went through the washing machine), Steve Young's rookie (never had one), and Frank Thomas's 1990 Topps rookie error-card without his name. I bought so damn many 1990 Topps baseball cards back in the day it's a miracle I never stumbled across one of these (I have three of these Frank Thomas rookie cards with the name), but whatever. The most valuable card I own? Hard to say. Maybe my Kirby Puckett rookie from 1984. |
