Red Sonja: Black, White, Red #5

Three more tales of Red Sonja are captured here by various writers and artists. Each story from Red Sonja: Black, White, Red #5 has a common theme of Sonja being either the hunter or the hunted.

My favorite of the three tales, in “The Hunted” Baron Raaf has hired an assortment of mercenaries to hunt Red Sonja but the She-Devil with a Sword dispatches them one by one before going after the man who sent them.

Red Sonja hunts a witch and fights werewolves on the side of a mountain in “The Chill Touch of Sorcery!” And Sonja meets a new challenger in the brash “Erik the Black: He-Demon with an Axe” who walks into a tavern boasting of his greatness to Sonja but never walks out.

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The Hand of God

  • Title: È stata la mano di Dio
  • IMDb: link

Filippo Scotti stars as the aimless Fabietto in 80s Naples in this coming of age story from Paolo Sorrentino. We’re introduced to Fabietto’s extended dysfunctional family including his womanizing father (Toni Servillo), prankster mother (Teresa Saponangelo), older brother with dreams of becoming an actor (Marlon Joubert), and lascivious aunt (Luisa Ranieri). The film is beautifully shot by Daria D’Antonio framing our stumbling protagonist disconnected from the world long before tragedy strikes upending his life even more.

Sorrentino doesn’t seem to have a destination for Fabietto in mind. Although he grows over the course of the film taking interest in more than football, it’s hard to tell how much he’s actually learned. The untethered protagonist means the film seems aimless as well, even if that’s the point as Fabietto finally discovers he can no longer allow life to pass him by and must start making hard choices.

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The Amazing Spider-Man #81

Despite what the cover suggests, this isn’t a Spider-Man vs. Spider-Man comic although it does feature the first meeting of Ben Reilly and Miles Morales (at least with both of them wearing Spidey costumes) who the Beyond Corporation wants their corporate hero’s help in stopping him from using the name Spider-Man.

The bad guy of the issue (if you don’t count the evil corporate types of Beyond while foreshadowing the inevitable turn of Maxine Danger as a super-villain) is the utterly forgettable Rhizome who the two Spider-Men team-up to stop. Seriously? It took two of them to stop what looks like a drunken mistake by Poison Ivy? Anywho, Maxine isn’t pleased with Ben for not pushing the copyright issue with the other Spider-Man, although she may have other more pressing concerns involving Doctor Octopus.

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The Mystery of the Vanishing Treasure

  • Title: The Mystery of the Vanishing Treasure
  • wiki: link

Way Back Wednesday takes us back to a mystery involving the Three Investigators whose mantra of “We Investigate Everything” leads them into a pair of cases involving a museum robbery in broad daylight and an elderly woman being tormented by gnomes. The museum robbery starts off the Three Investigators story as a large jeweled golden belt disappears, but that crime is put on hold for much of the book as Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews instead investigate the odd appearance of gnomes up to nefarious purposes scaring an elderly woman, while hiding their true purposes for tunneling under her home, which is brought to the trio by their old friend and mentor Hector Sebastian (Alfred Hitchcock in the original printing).

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