Ken and Robin Consume Media: Fantastic 4, The Ax, and a Cozy House Explosion
December 2nd, 2025 | Robin
Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.
Recommended
The Ax (Fiction, Donald E. Westlake, 1997) Laid off from a middle management job at a paper company, Burke Devore decides to end his two-year stretch (with no end in sight) of unemployment by killing a middle manager at a paper company, along with the six people with better resumes for that job than his. One of Westlake’s most successful straight psychological thrillers touches Raskolnikovian depths with an uncanny first-person voice, along with Westlake’s untouchable skill at plotting.—KH
Christmas Pudding (Fiction, Nancy Mitford, 1932) To gain access to the journals of a Victorian poet he intends to write about, an indolent writer conspires with a raffish young friend, his subject’s grandson, to pose as his tutor over the holidays . Hilarious, knowing dissection of gentry folkways.—RDL
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Film, Japan, Nagisa Oshima, 1969) Standoffish book shoplifter (Tadanori Yokoo) and angry store clerk (Rie Yokoyama) circle one another in an ambivalent quasi-relationship. Brechtian essay film made in collaboration with an experimental theater company wrestles with sexuality as a force that surfaces from the id to attack the certainties of male intellectuals.—RDL
The Fantastic 4: First Steps (Film, US, Matt Shakman, 2025) Ex-astronaut couple (Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby), her brother (Joseph Quinn) and their best friend (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) use their superpowers to save her unborn child, and the world, from the planet-eating giant alien Galactus (Ralph Ineson.) An (almost) self-contained story and sure sense for the right tonal notes give third-time’s-the-charm status to the MCU version of the foundational comic books.—RDL
Ikarie XB 1 (Film, Czechoslovakia, Jindrich Polák, 1963) The crew of an interstellar exploration ship endures the deadly rigors of space travel. Humanistic depiction of a community under pressure tells a story without antagonists.—RDL
Sky High (Fiction, Michael Gilbert, 1955) When Major MacMorris is blown up with his house, Mrs. Artside has lost a tenor for her church choir but gains a mystery to unravel. Gilbert has fun with the “cozy village” mystery in this one, distributing the investigations between Mrs. Artside, her ex-commando son Tim, and eventually Inspector Hazlerigg. Not especially difficult as a whodunit, a bit of a howdunit, but mostly a chance to follow Gilbert through his felicity with small dramas.—KH
Good
The Tender Bar (Film, US, George Clooney, 2021) Abandoned by his deadbeat disk jockey dad (Max Martini), a thoughtful (Daniel Ranieri) kid grows into a Yale student with literary aspirations (Tye Sheridan) under the substitute tutelage of his autodidact bartender uncle (Ben Affleck.) Affectionate character portraits take center stage in an adaptation of a memoir without a strong narrative line.—RDL
Vera Cruz (Film, US, Robert Aldrich, 1954) Ex-Confederate colonel Ben Trane (Gary Cooper) teams up with outlaw gunman Joe Erin (Burt Lancaster) and they sell their services to Emperor Maximilian, who commissions them to escort the Countess Marie (Denise Darcel) to Vera Cruz through the Juarista rebel forces. Intermittently gorgeous shots by Ernest Laszlo and plenty of gunplay and betrayal punctuate a proto-spaghetti Western in which not even Gary Cooper is immune to greed and situational ethics. The timing and rhythm of the film seem off (too many rewrites and too many cuts), and Burt Lancaster’s endless mugging gets a tad old as even Lanc later admitted: "There I was, acting my ass off. I looked like an idiot, and Coop was absolutely marvelous."—KH
Okay
Topaz (Film, US, Alfred Hitchcock, 1969) In the days preceding the Cuban missile crisis, a French intelligence officer (Frederick Stafford) sidesteps his own bosses to freelance an operation for his US counterpart (John Forsythe.) Although it’s interesting to see Hitch tackle a more topical and realistic spy story than usual, and to see him working with French stars Michel Piccoli and Philippe Noiret, the multi-protagonist Leon Uris source novel leaves him mostly serving its complicated plot.—RDL
