The Best Revenge…

Hunters on Amazon Prime.
TV Review by Kerey McKenna.

Amazon’s new original streaming series, Hunters, is a historical fiction pulp tale about a shadow war between Jews and Nazis in 1970s America. Odd that Amazon is going back to the Nazis in America angle so soon after putting their previous series The Man in the High Castle to bed, but hey, at least in this series we didn’t have to wait four seasons for those goose stepping goons to get their comeuppance.

I turned on the first episode on a whim and wound up binging the entire 10 episode season on its premiere weekend. During the binge I was captivated by the series and kept on hitting the next episode button. However once I reached the end I wondered if what I had just had was enjoyable but perhaps not good for me or even made for me. Like when I used to party crash at Hillel parties in college just to binge on latkes.

Not just set in 1970s America as a period piece, Hunters also takes over-the-top steps to callback to 1970s action movies like fantasy sequences resembling 1970s era game shows, PSAs, and Grindhouse movie trailers. In fact the whole project probably owes as much to the pulpy B-movies and sensational pulp fare like Madmen of Mandoras and The Damned as it does to more “serious” Nazi hunting classics like The Boys from Brazil and The Odessa File.

The audience point of view character, Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman), is a mild-mannered comic book nerd just trying to survive “The Summer of Sam,” hang out with his nerdy friends, and scrape together enough money for college and to help his only living relative, his Holocaust survivor grandmother Ruth (Jeannie Berlin), who raised him. Unfortunately his world is torn apart when his grandmother is murdered one night by a mysterious stranger at their door. Jonah would be the first to point out that he is just a few details removed from being Peter Parker. At the shiva, he is approached by wealthy pillar of the New York Jewish community, Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino). Offerman reveals to Jonah that Ruth, who like him was a survivor of a Nazi death camp, was killed by a Nazi war criminal they both knew from the camps. Not only that but for the past year Offerman and Ruth had been working on their own, independent of the US authorities, Mossad, or even The Simon Wiesenthal Center to track down escaped Nazi war criminals and dispense justice. Simon Wiesenthal himself (Judd Hirsch) at one point even makes an appearance to wag his finger and say that he does not approve of Meyer’s methods and definition of justice, chiefly executing the Nazis or arranging for “accidents” and death traps that mirror the atrocities they committed. Like in the first episode, when we see a former Nazi chemist (now a NASA scientist) discovering in her final moments that her shower has been rigged to dispense the same gas she developed for the death camps.

Of course, thirty years after the Holocaust, Meyer and Ruth were a bit long in the tooth, so they recruited a cadre of interested parties and mercenaries, “The Hunters,” to assist in the location and then the execution of the Nazis. Joining them on their crusade are B-list actor Leonard “Lonny Flash” Flazhenstien (Josh Radnor), Vietnam Veteran Joe Mizushima (Louise Ozawa), nun and (former?) MI6 agent Sister Harriet (Kate Mulvany), kick ass hood girl Roxy Jones (Tiffany Boon channeling classic Pam Grier), and fellow camp survivors Murray and Mindy Markowitz (Saul Rubinek and Carol Kane). Interesting fact: Jewish actor Saul Rubinek was actually born in a post-war refugee camp after his parents had successfully hidden for over two years in Nazi-occupied Poland.

While these are the titular “Hunters,” it would be fair to argue that the show is actually about three groups of hunters. The main conceit of the series is that not only did far too many Nazi war criminals escape the hangman’s noose, sometimes with the aid of the US government (as they did in real life), but that some of these Nazis are working together in secret to bring about a new Fourth Reich. So the Jews and the Nazis are hunting each other.

One such nasty Nazi was even able to completely reinvent himself as red-blooded American and Washington insider “Biff Simpson” (Dylan Baker) and turns out not only to be an adept master of disguise, but as dangerous as a rabid animal when cornered. When we first meet him his brilliant solution for preserving his cover after being outed at a family BBQ by a Holocaust survivor, is to gun her down, and his guests, and his own family.

While Biff has problems with impulse control, that is not so for the Nazis’ ringleader, the mysterious SS She Wolf known only as “The Colonel” (Lena Olin). As the terrorist mastermind behind the efforts to build a new Aryan America, she is not only keeping the old guard in line but raising new generations of blond-haired blue-eyed operatives, and radicalizing them with a twisted ideology in which Nazis are portrayed as the real persecuted minority.

The final point of this Axis of Evil is one of these young neo-Nazis, Travis Leich (Greg Austin). In a character arc that is a malicious mirror of the arc of the heroic Jonah, Travis struggles to prove himself among the more seasoned veterans of his faction. He always seems to be taking crap from the other Hitler youth, probably either because he likes contemporary musicals instead of the traditional Wagner, or because the Teutonic Tossers just don’t recognize a self-radicalized American as a true peer. Huh, I guess even OG Fascists hate Illinois Nazis.

Finally trying to make sense of the trail of murder and mayhem left behind by both groups is FBI agent Millie Morris (Jerrika Hinton). Poor Morris has the thankless task of being the Inspector Javert of the piece and having to do so as a “triple threat” minority in 1970s law enforcement.

Eventually the cat and mouse game leads to a grand shootout not just to find escaped Nazi war criminals, but to thwart their doomsday plot to ensure a Fourth Reich on American soil. Once the dust settles, and after setting up an “adventure continues” plot hook for the second season, the show reveals one hell of a final twist. Well it was clearly trying to set up two incredible twists for the finale but you can see the second one coming a mile away as soon as the caption “Argentina 1977” pops up.

As I said, I was captivated by the show as I watched it and I think its heart is in the right place, but sometimes the jarring gear shifts between a reflection on historical atrocities to cartoon shoot-em-up against cartoon villainy was a bit hard to reconcile. But maybe there is something in that. Late in the season the show’s soundtrack uses a song that had been running through my head since I heard the premise of the series: Tom Lehrer’s “tribute” to former Nazi rocket scientist, turned head NASA rocket scientist Wernher von Braun.

I had known the song for years (I had a hipster “classic” music satire phase as a teen). Yet by that point in the series, I was reflecting truly how dark the satire was. That maybe we should be more embarrassed that Von Braun built the space program. Frankly I was a little unsettled when I realized that von Braun had personally narrated a piece about space travel for Disney that I had enjoyed when I was young. Which ultimately is the point of good satire, not just to make us laugh but to challenge us.

As for the final verdict on Hunters? I enjoyed it. The maudlin parts were done well and I think I read its campy sensibilities as intended. But then again maybe I’m not the best person to decide of all that ham and cheese is “Kosher” for such subjects (Check out our follow-up post, "Flippant Entertainment," in which Nerds who Read Senior Editor Michael Isenberg weighs in on exactly that issue.).

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival, coming to Waltham MA May 9, 2020. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

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The Law of Club and Fang

The Call of the Wild by Jack London.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

Last night I saw the new movie version of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, starring Harrison Ford, which opens in theaters this weekend. It was good family entertainment. I was concerned, at first, to see so many children in the audience, but they behaved themselves, clearly enthralled by the various twists and turns. They gasped at the handful of instances of (very sanitized) violence and laughed at the far more numerous funny bits.

But this is Nerds who Read and we're all about the book. So today I will review the classic Call of the Wild novella, which first appeared as a serial in The Saturday Evening Post back in 1903. As it was not originally written for children, it features a lot more violence and a lot less humor than the movie.

The Call of the Wild is the biography of a dog, a St. Bernard/Scotch Shepherd mix named Buck. Although stories with animal protagonists go back to Aesop, for the most part they're fantastic and allegorical tales in which the animals are anthropomorphized, really just stand-ins for humans. They talk. They plan. They build advanced societies with written Constitutions.

But by the turn of the twentieth century, a new school of animal literature arose, a realist school, in which an animal was an animal, with all the limitations and glory that entailed. As Gerald Carson explains in his article “T.R. and the ‘nature fakers’,” these stories captured the imagination of “a generation just becoming aware of soil depletion, of the consequences of the unlimited harvesting of timber on the headwaters, the decimation of various species of wildlife, and the disappearance of the frontier.” Led by such writers as Ernest Thomas Seton, Charles G. D. Roberts, and William J. Long, and of course London himself, their works stirred bitter controversy as to just how realistic their animal realism was; the authors were attacked by no lesser luminaries of the conservation movement than John Burroughs and Teddy Roosevelt.

As The Call of the Wild opens, we find Buck living happily on the estate of one Judge Miller in the Santa Clara Valley, at the south end of San Francisco Bay:

Buck was neither house-dog nor kennel-dog. The whole realm was his. He plunged into the swimming tank or went hunting with the Judge’s sons; he escorted Mollie and Alice, the Judge’s daughters, on long twilight or early morning rambles; on wintry nights he lay at the Judge’s feet before the roaring library fire.

Alas, “because men had found a yellow metal in the North, and because Manuel was a gardener’s helper whose wages did not lap over the needs of his wife and divers small copies of himself,” Buck was not destined to remain in this idyllic life. “What a puppet thing life is.” It was 1897, the Klondike Gold Rush was in full swing, and sled dogs were in high demand. In order to fill the gap between his wages and his expenses, Manuel lured Buck away from the Miller estate on the pretext of taking him for a walk—and sold him. Buck is shipped north, first to Seattle where a man in a red sweater beats him with a club until he is broken to obedience. Only then is Buck fit to be sent to Alaska, where he begins his new life of servitude, a life governed by “The Law of Club and Fang.”

London himself—barely twenty years old at the time—had taken part in the Klondike Gold Rush, where he ended up with swollen gums and lost teeth from scurvy and a rich set of characters and experiences to draw upon for fiction. Buck changes hands several times and his masters cover the gamut of colorful characters London encountered in the Yukon. Some are strictly business, some genuinely loving. Some of the most vivid, although not particularly likable, are of a trio of newcomers to the Yukon: the pampered woman Mercedes, her husband Charles, and her brother Hal. Because of the excessive quantity of luxury items and canned goods they supplied themselves with, the dog team is unable to move the sled, so the trio “solve” this problem by adding more dogs.

And they were proud, too. They were doing the thing in style, with fourteen dogs. They had seen other sleds depart over the Pass for Dawson, or come in from Dawson, but never had they seen a sled with so many as fourteen dogs. In the nature of Arctic travel there was a reason why fourteen dogs should not drag one sled, and that was that one sled could not carry the food for fourteen dogs. But Charles and Hal did not know this. They had worked the trip out with a pencil, so much to a dog, so many dogs, so many days. Q.E.D. Mercedes looked over their shoulders and nodded comprehensively, it was all so very simple.

Reminds me of Michael Bloomberg talking about how simple farming is.

In any case, things go from bad to worse for the trio, and in one of the few humorous passages in the book, we learn,

The result was a beautiful and unending family quarrel. Starting from a dispute as to which should chop a few sticks for the fire (a dispute which concerned only Charles and Hal), presently would be lugged in the rest of the family, fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, people thousands of miles away, and some of them dead. That Hal’s views on art, or the sort of society plays his mother’s brother wrote, should have anything to do with the chopping of a few sticks of firewood, passes comprehension; nevertheless the quarrel was as likely to tend in the direction of Charles’s political prejudices. And that Charles’s sister’s tale-bearing tongue should be relevant to the building of a Yukon fire, was apparent only to Mercedes, who disburdened herself of copious opinions upon that topic, and incidentally upon a few other traits unpleasantly peculiar to her husband’s family. In the meantime the fire remained unbuilt, the camp half pitched, and the dogs unfed.

Needless to say, things end badly for them.

Of course those unfed dogs are the real heroes of the piece, and their personalities are as varied and memorable as the humans. Given my lifelong respect for dedication and hard work, I was especially partial to Dave and Sol-leks:

They were the new dogs, utterly transformed by the harness. All passiveness and unconcern had dropped from them. They were alert and active, anxious that the work should go well, and fiercely irritable with whatever, by delay or confusion, retarded the work. The toil of the traces seemed the supreme expression of their being, and all that they lived for and the only thing in which they took delight.

In a passage that brings tears to my eyes, Dave becomes ill and can no longer pull his weight on the sled team. The driver cuts him loose and allows him to run along behind the sleds.

With the last remnant of his strength he managed to stagger along behind till the train made another stop, when he floundered past the sleds to his own, where he stood alongside Sol-leks. His driver lingered a moment to get a light for his pipe from the man behind. Then he returned and started his dogs. They swung out on the trail with remarkable lack of exertion, turned their heads uneasily, and stopped in surprise. The driver was surprised, too; the sled had not moved. He called his comrades to witness the sight. Dave had bitten through both of Sol-lek’s traces, and was standing directly in front of the sled in his proper place. He pleaded with his eyes to remain there. The driver was perplexed. His comrades talked of how a dog could break its heart through being denied the work that killed it, and recalled instances they had known, where dogs, too old for the toil, or injured, had died because they were cut out of the traces. Also, they held it a mercy, since Dave was to die anyway, that he should die in the traces, heart-easy and content. So he was harnessed in again, and proudly he pulled of old, though more than once he cried out involuntarily from the bite of his inward hurt. Several times he fell down and was dragged in the traces, and once the sled ran upon him so that he limped thereafter in one of his hind legs. But he held out till camp was reached, when his driver made a place for him by the fire. Morning found him too weak to travel. At harness-up time he tried to crawl to his driver. By convulsive efforts he got on his feet, staggered, and fell. Then he wormed his way forward slowly toward where the harnesses were being put on his mates. He would advance his fore legs and drag up his body with a sort of hitching movement, when he would advance his fore legs and hitch ahead again for a few more inches. His strength left him, and the last his mates saw of him he lay gasping in the snow and yearning toward them. But they could hear him mournfully howling till they passed out of sight behind a belt of river timber. Here the train was halted. The Scotch half-breed slowing retraced his steps to the camp they had left. The men ceased talking. A revolver-shot rang out. The man came back hurriedly. The whips snapped, the bells tinkled merrily, the sleds churned along the trail; but Buck knew, and every dog knew, what had taken place behind the belt of river trees.

Ultimately, though, this is not Dave’s story—or Mercedes’s story or Charles’s story, or Hal’s story. It’s Buck’s story. Through all his many adventures, something stirs within this noble canine. Ancestral memories come flooding back, calling to him. Hence the title. What this means for Buck, and what that tells us about London’s view of nature—a view that’s very different from what you’ll get if you watch the new movie—will be the subject on Part II of this review.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read. Photo credit(s): Deseret, Wikipedia

Margot Robbie OWNS the Character

Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn.
The Boomer Review by Cecilia Calabrese.

I saw this movie in magnificent “XD” format. It was a feast for the senses…almost to the point of overload. If you like splashes of color and action on a gigantic screen, see Birds of Prey in XD!

Margot Robbie OWNS the character, Harley Quinn! Unlike the numerous actors who created the multiple iterations of “Mistah J”, Batman, and Robin, no one can credibly recreate the cartoon/comic book personality, Harley Quinn, like Margot Robbie. I suspect she would be willing to make as many Harley Quinn movies as the DC Universe can turn out because she clearly has fun in that role. And if she is not having fun, she is a better actor than I give her credit for.

Rounding out the ensemble cast: Rosie Perez (Renee Montoya), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Helena Bertinelli), Jurnee Smollett-Bell (Dinah Lance), and Ella Jay Basco (Cassandra Cain) mesh well. The interactions among these main characters feel genuine and left me guessing just where all this was going to end up.

Ewan McGregor lost himself as the sadistic Roman Sionis. I greatly appreciate when actors not only portray a character well, they seem to actually BECOME the character so well that I have to wait until the Cast Credits to find out who played that part.

The action revolves around Harley Quinn’s life after her final (?) break-up with the Joker, following the exploits in the movie Suicide Squad (For Harley’s exploits before Suicide Squad, check out “Truly Madly Deeply: The Definitive Origin of Harley Quinn” here on Nerds who Read). For the first time, Harley is trying to find her place in the world without having a significant other in her life. Her internal conflict centers on deep seeded trust issues: in herself and others. She is protector and antagonist at the same time. The conflict with Roman Sionis sets up a scenario that brings our four Sirens of Swat (my description) together. As such, the women ultimately must decide whether it is in their own best interest, and the future of Gotham, to protect or betray a young pick-pocket that stole something of value from Sionis.

The stunts, the action, the vivid colors, the pithy dialogue, even the '80s-style cliches (as a Boomer, I offer a tip of the hat to the writers on that) all result in a classic comic book movie. Gotham City was portrayed just as seedy and disturbed as I am used to, but not quite as visually dark as we see in other representations. Gotham, being a character unto itself, has been represented in many styles. This Gotham was a bit of a departure.

Now, did I like this movie? That’s hard to say. Sitting here, right now, having just finished watching the film about two hours ago, my jury is still out! I had major issues with the continuity of the story line. Narration of the initial animated introduction made a point of stating that to tell a story, you start at the beginning [unless you're Quentin Tarantino -Ed.]. Well, this movie did do that. But then frequent sequences of the story line became frenetic, disjointed, and, at times, hard to follow. I suspect it may be helpful to have read the actual comic books before seeing the film. That, I did not do. However, there is one HUGE plot inconsistency that I found distracting to the point of getting lost in the time line. Because of it, I was confused regarding whether what I was watching was happening in “present” time, or as “flash-back” action. Part of my confusion was on account of a costume accessory. I’m a bit of a stickler for details like that, especially when they play a prominent part in the story-telling.

This movie really wasn’t my cup of Jamba Juice. It seemed as though the director, Cathy Yan, was infusing the campiness of the Batman that I grew up with (Adam West) into Gotham City of 2020. For me, the movie did get more enjoyable as the film progressed to its conclusion. I’m not quite sure what that says about the film as a whole. But, if you are a DC Universe fan, this film is meant for you. Stick around for the little end-credit nugget if you are so inclined, but if you had the large soda, it’s not worth the bladder distress.

Cecilia Calabrese is the Vice President of the Agawam City Council and will serve as President of the Massachusetts Municipal Association in 2020. She is a licensed attorney in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as well as a Registered Dental Hygienist and a rental property manager. Married to her husband, Michael Calabrese, for 34 years, they have two grown children, Charles and Michaela Calabrese.

Cece has written featured articles in The Valley Advocate (Tom Duggan, Editor), as well as various opinion pieces in The Springfield Republican and The Agawam Advertiser News. She is currently on the pre-production crew for daughter Michaela’s graduate film project. Filming starts later this month! Please give your generous support to the project at GoFundMe.com.

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Photo credit(s): Movieweb

Truly Madly Deeply

The Definitive Origin of Harley Quinn.

The Batman Adventures: Mad Love by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm. Artwork by Bruce Timm and Glen Murakami.
Comic Book Review by Kerey McKenna.

Hello Nerds Who Read!

Back in 2016 the DC Cinematic Universe at Warner Brothers launched its answer to Marvel Universe’s Guardians of the Galaxy with Suicide Squad, a tale of villains forced to do the dirty work for a shadowy US intelligence organization. And the reviews, including my own, were mixed to poor. Frankly I was being charitable when I rated it the 3rd best superhero/anti-hero heist movie, even below a direct-to-video project. Four years later I would have to rate it lower as we got two more comic book heists in the Ant-Man movies.

However, one thing that did work about that poorly written, underlit, glum exercise in franchise building was Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, partner/victim of the murderous clown prince of crime The Joker (no, not either of the Oscar nominated ones). Since Harley’s debut in the epic 1990s Batman: The Animated Series, the character has been a fan favorite, appearing as a mainstay in other Batman projects prior to Suicide Squad (save for the WB movies and the Gotham TV series). Robbie’s performance knocked it out of the park with her Punch and Judy bat capturing the energy of a magic pixie dream girl that’s equal parts Bonnie Parker and Suicide Girl.

And since part of the success of the DC Cinematic Universe course correction was building upon the break-out heroine from another glum movie and giving their fun, larger-than-life characters epic and colorful visual palettes, it makes sense to bring Robbie’s Harley Quinn back to the big screen in Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn premiering today.

To mark the occasion, and to emphasize the Read in Nerds Who Read, I thought I’d do a quick retrospective on the origin comic book of Harley Quinn.

The Eisner award winning 1994 comic Mad Love was not Harley Quinn’s first appearance because, as noted, she had debuted on Batman: The Animated Series two years prior. Harley Quinn was an odd new addition to the Batman rogues gallery, introduced not as a villain in her own right but as a member of Joker’s gang. It seems the Joker, vaudevillain as he is, appreciated a lovely assistant around for certain gags and heists. However what soon became apparent to the creators of the show, and fans, was that Harley Quinn added exciting new possibilities to the Batman formula.

In the tie-in comic Mad Love, Dini and Timm went about giving their creation a proper spotlight and tragic origin story like they had other villains Mister Freeze, Two-Face, and Poison Ivy. They did such a good job that this comic was later adapted into an episode of the animated series, also called “Mad Love,” which certainly contributed to her growing popularity

If you have not seen the animated adaptation or have not seen it in a while I would highly recommend you seek it out. Arleen Sorkin as Harley Quinn, playing a part that was literally written for her, shows a great deal of range and has amazing chemistry with both Mark Hammil’s Joker and Kevin Conroy’s Batman. Pretty much everything in the show was also in the comic, save for some scenes that were cut presumably for pacing and for standards and practices of what was ostensibly a children's show.

As I discussed in my retrospective of the series as a work of film noir, Dini, Timm, and their collaborators were very much about capturing the feel of classic noir and pulp tales. After its opening scene of Batman preventing Joker and Harley from assassinating Commissioner Gordon, the story pumps the brakes on the action and becomes a story of a woman falling into madness, criminality, and love.

We learn that Harley Quinn used to be Doctor Harleen Quinzell, one of the psychiatrists at Arkham Asylum treating insane criminals, including the Joker. Over the course of their one-on-one therapy sessions, the Joker seemingly opens up to Doctor Quinzell, winning her over with his charms and tales of an abusive alcoholic father. Eventually she falls in love with the Joker and comes to see Batman as the true aggressor and bad guy when he and Joker fight for the fate of Gotham.

Completing the “Good girls don’t, bad girls do” morality play, Doctor Quinzel turns her back on normal society, adopts the name “Harley Quinn,” and joins the Joker in a life of crime. After reflecting upon her fall from grace she starts to face facts that she, the Joker, and Batman are stuck in a Love/Hate Triangle. So she decides it is time to go behind the Joker’s back if she’s going to get where she really wants to be in life.

If you’ve seen the episode you will remember how this ends and if you haven’t...well I’m not going to explain the joke.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival, coming to Waltham MA May 9, 2020. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Check out our review of Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn here at Nerds who Read!

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