The Funhouse Journal

Films 2011

2012-01-26T23:55:00.002-05:00

As usual films seen for the first time from January 1 to December 31, 2011.

Best:

Alphabetical this year - normally I figure if I'm silly enough to do this at all might as well go all the way but maybe it's time to be only 90% silly.

Attack the Block (Joe Cornish 2011) - Don't know what it says about me that there are two monster-attack films on this list but as pure entertainment nothing I saw was this clever, imaginative or tightly controlled and as social observation it was nearly as strong.

Dillinger e Morto (Marco Ferrri 1969) - I'd never heard of this until Criterion's release but what a stupefying experience. Sometimes starkly controlled and other times almost over-determined but cryptic, elliptical and not quite like anything else.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Peter Yates 1973) - Yep, I'm a sucker for naturalistic, low-level crime stories and they're actually fairly uncommon in films - this one is even an adaptation from a fantastic novel. This look at a bottom-rung fixer/go-between who slowly gets ground in the gears could easily have been too heavy-handed or, oddly, too dark but there's more going on here than in the handful of episodes of The Wire that I saw.

Greenberg (Noah Baumbach 2010) - Another almost slice-of-life story about a nobody, only this time no crime just a confused, badly adjusted guy trying to make something happen - but the film manages to capture life's confusion and unexpected changes.

The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus (Terry Gilliam 2009) - Childish fantasy films like the Lord of the Rings series get the attention but this is the real thing.

Lola (Jacques Demy 1961) - Like its New Wave contemporaries a sharp, not entirely cheerful character study of two people drifting through life - one competely aware of it, the other not.

Le Quattro Volte (Michelangelo Frammartino 2010) - Forget all the spiritual mumbo-jumbo surrounding this film and go for the minimal, nearly blank look at rural life that's either one of the most peculiar documentaries ever made or one of the least story-filled stories. And it boasts probably the most audacious shot I saw this year - a lengthy, single-take gag that I swear is a Tati tribute.

Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu 2009) - Odd that a film this visual and where so little happens is actually about language though instead of a dissertation this is more allusive and open - poetic in the deepest sense.

Pontypool (Bruce MacDonald 2008) - And hey another film that's "about language" and in this case it had me laughing out loud even though this isn't a comedy (and the humor was intentional or at least not unintended). Just imagine a Beckett zombie film only this is by Canadians so they're smarter and more human than Beckett ever was.

Road to Nowhere (Monte Hellman 2010) - If you don't like it that title is all too descriptive but I'd claim it's a Rivettean hall-of-mirrors and in a way more audacious than Tree of Life. Hellman is one of America's great directors and it's a shame it takes so many years for his films to get made.

The Social Network (David Fincher 2010) - Citizen Kane reimagined for the consumer generation.

The 3 Rs (David Lynch 2011) - A "trailer" for the Vienna Film Festival that borders on self-parody but is just as confusing (and disturbing) as his best work.

Honorable:

American Revolution 2 (Howard Alk & Mike Gray 1969)

Bridesmaids (Paul Feig 2011)

Bug (William Friedkin 2006)

Careful! (Guy Maddin 1992)

Carlton-Browne of the F.O. (Roy Boulting 1959)

Death Rides a Horse (Giulio Petroni 1967)

Deep Red (Dario Argento 1975)

Don't Look Back (Marina de Van 2009)

Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy 2010)

Extract (Mike Judge 2009)

Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith 1963)

La Jetee (Chris Marker 1962)

The Killer Inside Me (Michael Winterbottom 2010)

Monsters (Gareth Edwards 2010)

A Prophet (Jacques Audiard 2009)

Red State (Kevin Smith 2011)

Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas 2008)

The Sun's Burial (Nagisa Oshima 1960)

The Tempest (Derek Jarman 1979)

Trollhunter (André Øvredal 2010)

24 City (Jia Zhang-ke 2008)

Va Savoir (Jacques Rivette 2001)

The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke 2009)

Winter's Bone (Debra Granik 2010)

Crimes:

Jonah Hex (Jimmy Hayward 2010)

Knight and Day (James Mangold 2010)

Don't Touch the White Woman (Marco Ferreri 1974)

The Room (Tommy Wiseau 2003)

Antichrist (Lars von Trier 2009)

Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul 2006)

The Green Hornet (Michel Gondry 2011)

Rubber (Quentin Dupieux 2010)

The Expendables (Sylvester Stallone 2010)

Battle Los Angeles (Jonathan Liebesman 2011)

Seven Mummies (Nick Quested 2006)

Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé 2009)

Top films I didn't see:

Borrowing an idea from another critic who decided to show some of the arbitrariness of this whole process by listing the top films he hadn't seen. I'm only including ones that I would be likely to, well, like - things along the lines of the highly praised Uncle Boonmee or Midnight in Paris seem long shots to me.

A Separation

The Turin Horse

This Is Not a Film

The Artist

A Dangerous Method

Kill List

Drive

Carlos

Another Year

Mysteries of Lisbon

Film Socialisme

Young Adult

Hugo

Mildred Pierce

Life Without Principle

Margaret

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

and I can't imagine where I'd ever get to see Christian Marclay's The Clock (saw his Guitar Drag at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago) but it sounds incredible.

Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen 2011)

2012-01-25T22:30:00.001-05:00

Woody Allen periodically gets "he's back" praise though really he hasn't been back in twenty or so years. Midnight in Paris is the latest trigger for such claims and it's as hard to see why as it has been with any of the previous ones. The film is really nothing more than a Twilight Zone episode complete with a stated moral, only at more than four times the length. Allen goes to little trouble expanding this and instead simply pads - his usual artist-wannabe protagonist, an annoying pedant, a repressive (but not repressed) woman and so forth. He even resorts to almost four minutes of nothing but pure postcard-pictoral views of the city - really he should have been paying more attention to Atget.

The 20s Paris we get in the film is up front about being a fantasy and it would be easy to write off the whole thing as the protagonist's dream except for a brief scene of another character also being pulled into the past (quite inexplicably into what appears to be Louis XIV's period). The problem isn't that it's a fantasy but that it's one aimed at a modern American audience. That's why none of the historical figures are French except for a passing mention of Cocteau - the rest are all American or Spanish. Where's oh let's go with Proust, Artaud, Giradoux, Perse, Colette, Gide, Mauriac, Bernanos or even squeezing in Simenon and Celine just among the writers. And as a filmmaker shouldn't Allen have found just some room for Renoir, Gance, L'Herbier, Clair, Epstein, Dulac, Carne, Feyder, etc? I have no idea which of these were in Paris at this time but it's plausible for most of them and anyway the chronology of the people actually in the film doesn't match either. (And yes I know Simenon and Feyder were Belgian but they lived in France so I'm leaving it.)

But the critical point comes up with the Surrealists, bunches of whom were definitely in Paris and definitely high profile. In Allen's Paris we get Dali who just spouts silliness and then Ray and Bunuel who have very little dialogue at all. (Though Bunuel is given the idea for The Exterminating Angel in a bit reminiscent of Marty giving Chuck Berry rock 'n' roll in Back to the Future.) In other words the Surrealists are just dismissed as window-dressing where we're shown none of their anti-clericism, on-again off-again relations with the Communists, epater-le-bourgeouise tactics, blatant if pecuilar eroticism, etc. But then Allen goes out of his way to avoid politics to the point that Hemingway's "war" sounds almost abstract. This Paris has no crippled veterans, no Action Francaise, no socialists or anarchists.

But so what? Isn't Midnight in Paris just a charming fantasy film? Maybe but Allen doesn't have the light touch needed for this. He did at one point (just think Zelig or Stardust Memories or Purple Rose of Cairo) but that's long gone. It's fine that he never explains the mechanics of Midnight's situation - why for instance does Gil return every night but his past-girlfriend get to choose to stay? Why does somebody drive out every night to pick up our protagonist? What do they think they're doing? Doesn't much matter. But one stumble is the book Gil finds that's his past-girlfriend's diary - apparently this is the actual handwritten diary though that's never made clear and I just thought it was a printed book until that started to seem implausible. It's way too arbitrary that Gil will stumble across this and then be able to recognize it even though he doesn't know French. And of course that the tour guide will translate just the right section seemingly at random. Maybe this is the problem at being four times the length of a Twilight Zone episode - it's hard to stay light or clever when you're trying to keep up the running time.

American Horror Story

2012-01-12T08:00:00.001-05:00

When I first heard that An American Horror Story was about a haunted house the obvious question was how? How could you fill a season let alone an entire series about a haunted house? Such stories have clear limitations and certainly the creators of Glee don’t have the imagination or abilities to by pass such limitations. As it happens the question of the series was resolved in a press conference where the announcement was made that each season will focus on a different house (and presumably a different cast though wouldn’t it be interesting if they kept the same actors every season but had them play different characters).

Filling the first season was done two ways. The first was to provide a parallel story so as a result we start the show with a family In crisis due to the husband’s infidelity and, it’s hinted, the wife’s dissatisfaction with having given up an artistic career (as a cellist of all things). I’m not sure this was deliberately done to fill the season so much as this is just how TV/film writers work now – characters are given one or two clearly delineated problems. TV writers in particular seem unable to write except in terms of The Family. (Reinforcing this is the flood of screenwriting books and classes, none designed to teach how to write a good script no matter what they claim but only a saleable one.) That this is the case can be shown by the thinness of the characters despite having twelve long episodes to fill – just think of how much more effective even routine films of the 30s or 40s were at creating characters in a mere fragment of this running time.

The issue with starting a horror film with an already damaged family is that it sidetracks the point of the genre which starts from normality then undergoes a disruption before returning to the status quo or something resembling it (the basic arc as well of mysteries and to a different degree romance/melodrama and comedies). In and of itself the show’s change isn’t important but what it means is that there’s already a story there (the broken family) that really doesn’t need the haunted house element and even more to the point it downplays the horror element. It’s one thing to see good people trying to overcome adversity but quite another to watch self-centered unpleasant ones. Where’s the problem? After all as American Horror Story gives us there’s not much tension – a depressed teenaged goth girl with family troubles and uprooted 3000 miles from her home and friends is certainly low-hanging fruit for any evil spirits.

But maybe this is why the creators relied even more on the second method of filling up the season – excess. Rather than a story with a couple of subplots American Horror Story seems determined to throw in everything possible. So we get the usual haunted house creeps and vengeful spirits but a nonstop parade of mass murderers, the victims, arsonists, illegal abortionists, rapist dentists, nosy neighbors, rowdy teenagers, Frankenstein-monster body constructions, deformed children in the attic, even more cheating husbands, malicious twins, a Downs Syndrome woman, a ghost who doesn’t know she’s a ghost. Oh and it goes on – the Black Dahlia, the lost colony of Roanoke, a Southern Gothic mother, a rehash of Beetlejuice (yes really), some elements lifted from Kill Baby Kill (the rolling ball and the house that can’t be escaped), a full-body fetish rubber suit and eventually the, yes, Antichrist. Nearly every episode starts with a flashback scene as well. And though this description almost makes it sound like a black comedy that’s clearly not the point even though it has one of the funniest scenes I saw this year (the ultrasound technician fainting) that seems to have been meant seriously.

At least AHS isn’t boring even though it’s not particularly clever or interesting or even good (in whatever way you want to interpret “good”). The whole thing runs along with stuff happening, stuff not mattering much and lots of people dying. It’s clear that the creators never really thought this through. A major plot point is that ghosts can’t leave the house though we actually see a couple who do. Why? What happens with the so-called Antichrist baby? Why are there so many spirits in this house and why do some hide and some not? Why does the family get a happy ending just because they died? This feels purely created by a perceived need to wrap up the season on a high note rather than anything in the story – after all nothing similar happens to the other spirits and why should the family conflicts be erased just by death? What’s the deal with Jessica Lange’s character living next door? And why would anybody move into a house that’s had so many public murders?

Guess we may never know but then do we much care. (Except maybe for the Entertainment Weekly writer who raved enough in a cover story to claim this might be the strangest TV show ever – clearly someone who hasn’t seen much TV.) I half hope the next season will focus on a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere with maybe just a couple of characters – imagine Beckett rewriting The House on the Borderland. But we’ll just get a rehash of the first season which is its own horror story. (See how cleverly I did that? Hollywood call me….)

Rosenbaum's spoilers

2012-01-11T22:16:00.002-05:00

I read Jonathan Rosenbaum's "In Defence of Spoilers" back when it first appeared and back when it looked like just more of Rosenbaum's developing flakiness. But he felt strongly enough about it to include the piece in his recent book Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia - wonder if the editor asked him to rethink that decision.

Because it's an odd piece, not a defence so much as an attack on people who want to avoid spoilers. Rosenbaum basically calls them infants and compares their desire to avoid spoilers to wanting to be taken care of by parents - not exactly a mature approach in itself. Especially when you consider that much of his piece is so self-centered, claiming that it keeps him from doing his job or that not everybody thinks that way. As for doing his job of course as a critic spoilers (or more accurately full descriptive access to the film) shouldn't be avoided but much of the time his job isn't as a critic but a reviewer which is a different situation. As a reviewer most of his job is consumer advice and that involves not actually, y'know, damaging the reader's experience any more than necessary. As a reviewer avoiding spoilers is a key part of the job and if Rosenbaum disagrees then he really shouldn't have been writing reviews.

It's also strange that he apparently doesn't realize that the historical examples are irrelevant or perhaps even contradict his point. Yes, many early novels had (often lengthy) chapter titles that revealed what would happen and sure some works even mention a key plot point or even ending in the title. (And how did he miss the Trollope novels that tell you outright in the first chapter what's going to happen at the end and recommend that if this isn't acceptable then to stop reading?) But these examples all are the artist's decision, whether they might have been a convention of the time doesn't matter. When an artist doesn't include such revelations then isn't it a bit arrogant to claim that a reviewer has the right to do so?

Other parts of the piece aren't even worth discussing. To claim that avoiding spoilers would also mean he should avoid mentioning epigraphs is quite silly if not just a bizarre I'm-gonna-take-my-ball-and-go-home hissy fit. Admittedly the piece shows Rosenbaum at his worst but unfortunately it's not completely atypical of his late writing (which I'll get into more if I ever cover Goodbye Cinema).

Halloween Movies Part 2

2011-12-21T08:00:00.000-05:00

Well, late with this one as well. As expected I never got to 31 horror movies in October – the count was 18 though if I hadn’t spent time watching other movies and TV probably could have made it. (And as it turned out Red State is marketed as a horror film but it isn’t, not really.) So onward:

The Horde (Yannick Dahan & Benjamin Rocher 2009) - So many zombie movies look pretty much the same and while this one is from the same template (group trapped in an enclosed space) it does most things right. For one thing it’s quite grim, almost excessively so, without the joking or in-references that fill (and dilute) other z-films. The set-up of a group of quasi-rogue cops forced to band with Nigerian & Eastern European gangsters is an unusual set-up and the film follows the logic of the story to the bleak (though expected) end.

Pontypool (Bruce McDonald 2008) - Another zombie movie but about as far from The Horde as possible. Pontypool could almost be a play since with one minor exception all the action takes place in one location and there are only a few characters. (Maybe horror films are one of the last bastions for the dramatic unities.) While The Horde is almost an action film at heart, Pontypool is an intellectual puzzle leaning towards artfilm. In fact the source of the zombie outbreak is utterly unique and so unpredictable and so completely appropriate to the nature of Pontypool as a film (and maybe even cinema itself) that it had me laughing out loud. But the whole thing is anchored by two burrowing performances by Stephen McHattie as an arrogant radio host trapped in a small town trying to make sense of the senseless and Lisa Houle as the exasperated producer wanting to keep the whole show going.

Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (Seth Hold 1971)- Another late Hammer film like Vampire Circus but unlike that one this is mostly plodding. If nothing else there’s no mummy in it – a preserved Egyptian priestess yes but she’s not mummified. The story moves along far too slowly and completely predictably with mostly in-it-for-the-paycheck actors (though Valerie Leon seems to have been hired for the impressive cleavage she displays).

I Married a Witch (Rene Clair 1942) – A light supernatural comedy from Clair’s American period most notable for Veronica Lake’s bubbly performance. Films like this and Topper haven’t received the attention of say the Universal horrors perhaps because they aren’t at heart horror films and quite likely because they’re also so spread out chronologically that it’s a tad tricky to make genre connections (though such clearly exist). And you can’t rule out that mostly male horror fans are likely to dismiss anything that’s to a large extent a romantic comedy. This one may be predictable but it’s fairly clever and the cast puts a lot into keeping the proceedings swift and the dialogue crisp. Sometimes that’s really all you need.

Tokyo Gore Police (Yoshihiro Nishimura 2008) - That title will tell you this isn’t any light supernatural comedy though I suppose it is more or less comic in approach. Which is probably just as well considering that it’s possibly the most violent or at least bloodiest film I’ve seen and at times one of the most imaginative. There’s some stuff here that is unique and if that’s a lot of effort for something of this nature well hey at least it keeps the filmmakers off the streets.

The Last Exorcism (Daniel Stamm 2010) - Yet another fake documentary, this time about an exorcist who’s realized it’s all a scam and decides to take one last job. As you could guess nothing turns out quite right though the way it doesn’t turn out quite right keeps the film from being dull with some plot twists and a few effective Blair Witch-styled spooky scenes. A couple of problems though. First is that nobody seems to have a cell phone which while I realize this was done to keep the story on track (can’t have them calling the police all the time can we?) it does seem odd. Especially when it would take only a very short bit of dialogue to explain that phones aren’t working, either because they’re so far out in the country or for more mysterious reasons. The other issue is the ending which I’m not going to reveal except to point out that since the film exorcist spends time at the start showing how he fakes demonic effects then at the end shouldn’t we also think there’s a strong possibility that what we’re seeing was also faked? The ending is presented so bluntly that I think we’re supposed to take it at face value but the film itself raised the question of falsifying appearances so it’s not unreasonable to take that approach. Still, if the description of The Last Exorcist sounds like your kinda movie then it almost certainly is.

Madhouse (Jim Clark 1974) - I’m not entirely sure how Vincent Price got to be such an icon. He always seems to be if not quite mocking his roles and the genre then at least to be unserious about it. This approach works to advantage in his Corman films and a few like Theatre of Blood but then you get things like Madhouse that isn’t comic but is certainly a bit too loose for its own good. Price playing a disgraced horror film icon (more or less like Dr Phibes) is self-reflexive and pairing him with Peter Cushing must have seemed like a great idea during pre-production. And certainly there are some unusual characters like the spider-loving wife or the greedy parents of a murder victim but overall the murder mystery aspect overwhelms any sense of suspense or even sometimes even plain old storytelling. Price fans will probably get more out of this than the rest of us.

Giant from the Unknown (Richard E. Cunha 1958) - I love these 50s b-movies that seem tossed together in a week. The location filming adds a bit of documentary feel (I suspect those old general stores and cabins were real and not sets) and the idea of a resurrected Spanish conquistador is unusual. B-Western vet Bob Steele appears as a suspicious sheriff.

Session 9 (Brad Anderson 2001) – David Caruso stars as an asbestos remover working on an abandoned psychiatric hospital. Just that one sentence tells you about everything you need to know. The attempt is towards spooky and psychological but really it just sort of wanders along with a bit of is-this-real and a tad of is-he-crazy. Ken Loach vet Peter Mullan does a good turn but there’s just not much to work with. Doesn’t help that this was shot in a form of digital that ends up blurring the image a bit too much (though I suppose if I liked the film this could be justified as adding to the ambiguity).

I Sell the Dead (Glenn McQuaid 2008) – An attempt at horror-comedy that doesn’t work either way. The basic idea of 18th century graverobbers who discover that reanimated corpses bring more money than plain ole nonanimated ones has some potential but there’s not a real story. Instead this is closer to a collection of short films, not smartly done enough to be called picaresque and not episodic enough to make me suspect it was a failed TV pilot. I’m not really sure about the story's date because the film is a bit unclear about that and about exactly where it happens (Scotland? England?) though there’s a good chance I was just snoozing when this was explained. I do wonder if the guillotine was ever used in the British isles – seems wrong.

Grace (Paul Solet 2009) – A pregnant woman whose husband died in a wreck must deal with medical complications, an intrusive mother-in-law and a baby that might be Something Other. There, I just saved you an hour and a half so use it wisely.

Brad Meltzer's Decoded

2011-12-20T19:43:00.002-05:00

I really should have known better. When I heard that there was a show called Brad Meltzer’s Decoded and they were tackling legitimate historical mysteries I thought this would be worth watching. In case you aren’t aware of the show in it writer Meltzer oversees three investigators as they tackle such mysteries. They include a lawyer, an engineer and a journalist so right away you can see the problem – no historian. But since The History Channel has little to do with history any more this probably isn’t surprising but it is a big tipoff that Decoded isn’t particularly serious. The other tipoff looking back is that Meltzer was responsible for Identity Crisis, one of the worst comics stories in years being both incredibly stupid (the murderer was discovered by teeny tiny footprints left on the victim’s brain presented just as seriously as anything Ed Wood did) and blatantly offensive (rape as entertainment).

The first episode is about the missing cornerstone at the White House. Holy cow! The cornerstone is missing? Why haven’t we heard about this? Well the reason is simple – because it’s not missing. The cornerstone is there it’s just that nobody knows which stone it is. So yawn right but Meltzer and crew have to get a full episode out of this so they start fudging the “missing” to suggest that maybe it really is gone. And Meltzer even tries to claim that the physical cornerstone is somehow a cornerstone of democracy when in fact even the entire White House isn’t. You could move the president into a large condo and that wouldn’t change democracy.

So off the crew goes to figure out the cornerstone mystery. The biggest mystery is why anybody thought this would be an appropriate choice for the first episode. Now when I say the crew goes out into the field that’s because Meltzer is really just a figurehead. He lends his name, does a bit of narration, appears for one segment but is otherwise not really involved with the events. The show is structured as reality TV with each investigator giving talking-head interviews about whether they’re progressing faster than another investigator. Needless to say not much history here.

More in line with what The History Channel has become are the various kooks that are interviewed. One guy claims that the cornerstone was stolen, something for which there is not only no evidence but absolutely no reason to consider. Of course that doesn’t stop Meltzer from picking up on this. But that’s just the start. We get somebody claiming about how evil Masons are planning to take over the world and then even more bizarrely a man suggesting that there’s an alternate version of the Constitution hidden in the cornerstone which would destroy our country if found. Why would this guy even be aired? He completely invented this story and even shows that he has no idea what he’s talking about with the destruction claim – an alternate version of the Constitution would have absolutely no political effect.

Meltzer does get to indulge some Mason conspiracies and even puts a few on camera who try their best to be mysterious and hint that they know deep secrets. Meltzer even claims how Masons are the guardians of ancient secrets but if you’ve ever met a Mason or read anything about them you know they aren’t guarding diddly.

So let’s see, we have a pointless non-mysterious mystery (at the end of the show they point out that the cornerstone is there where it’s always been), some hack TV personalities (they auditioned instead of being chosen for any accomplishments), a sloppy writer who’s almost literally phoning it in and interviews with people who should have been left alone in their basements. Not much to decode here.

DCnU Weeks Three & Four

2011-12-08T08:14:00.004-05:00

Over two months late so I almost left this post as yet another of the countless projects I started but never finished. But bits were already written so stray comments:

* The new DC makes so few changes or at least the big changes are almost in unimportant areas that all the Flashpoint stories will fade away faster than expected. They were already considered as Elseworlds books in all but name though at least Elseworlds books were expected to stand on their own - these seem like a temporary diversion. As pointless as, say, the House of M stories were at least they provided a rationale for the big change at the end. In this case we get merely a cosmic glitch (as best I understand it and honestly I haven't tried very hard).

* The Flash and Wonder Woman were better than I'd expected. I, Vampire got a lot of commentary but there's not much in the first issue. Batman has far too much padding - these are comics writers not philosophers. I've already started to forget most of the others though I'm sure they'll come back up when or if I get to the next issues. (And one thing from this vantage point is that following issues can make a difference - Stormwatch seemed misconceived in its first issue but the next two connect a real story and as a bonus includes a laugh-out-loud panel that casually explains a loose plot point.)

* There's been some praise for DC's genre mix but really that's hard to see since most are done if not like superhero books then as somehow connected. So a Western book gets moved back to an East Coast city (Gotham of course) and treated as more some kind of serial-killer procedural. The war books have superheroes flitting through and are more techno-thrill than any kind of war-is-hell story. And it's not like we were getting comedy or romance or even some kind of artsy book.

* Which of course now seems like the relaunch's biggest missed opportunity. Imagine if DC really had started an ongoing version of Bizarro or brought back Solo. Or even more plausibly brought in outside talent even if only for the launch. They already have an in with Stephen King - let him do Swamp Thing for a year. Or imagine Charles Stross or Jonathan Lethem or Quentin Tarantino just to pick writers who might actually do it. Heck why not even go after somebody like Joyce Carol Oates or Pynchon or John Banville.

* For books that are supposed to have a wider appeal there's sure an awful lot of extreme violence here. Green Lanterns sliced in half, a complete genocide, a room full of body parts, a man's face peeled off, an exploding baby. Did DC think the popularity of James Patterson or True Blood indicates a cultural shift in this direction? The problem isn't that the stories are violent but that they're unnecessarily so - we'd get the point even if the Lanterns had merely dropped down. And the body-part room doesn't convey any sense of the horrors of African politics but just comes across as almost comic in its excess. (The inherent lack of understanding in using superhero comics in relation to such real-world issues is a topic for another time.)

* And of course the sex stuff is already almost forgotten. The whole Catwoman thing was just a strange what-were-they-thinking moment. It's almost like instead of the real script somebody accidentally sent the artist a couple of pages of slash fiction and that's what we got. And while the writer's claim that Starfire's dialogue was meant as a kind of playful taunt is at least plausible we're still left wondering why none of the people who read the script or saw the drafted artwork realized that it didn't come off that way. It's stuff like this that sometimes makes me wish mainstream comics weren't written by comics fans.

Vast Narratives

2011-12-06T21:44:00.002-05:00

In the library catalog I ran across something called Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (edited by Pat Harrigan & Noah Wardrip-Fruin in 2009). Naturally this sounded like something worth exploring but you never can tell with these kinds of things. A check of the contents showed pieces on Dr. Who, Cerebus, RPGs, more Dr. Who, the Cthulhu mythos, superhero comics and yet more Dr. Who. Now certainly more my kinda thing (even though I had successfully resisted Dr. Who until a couple of years ago) but this being an academic library I had to wait a full year for whoever had it out to feel inclined to tote it back.

Unsurprisingly the book is something of a mixed bag. The contributors range from academics to genre novelists to computer programmers (in fact the library shelved this with the computer gaming books - again it being an academic library nearly all the books are theoretical instead of practical). This does generate a bit of the (hold on metaphor alert) illuminating friction that was clearly intended. Chris Sim's account of Cerebus is useful as a corrective to standard critical approaches, David Kalat's piece on Fantomas as substantial as most of his work is, a couple of Dr. Who novelists on the place of those books in the canon is indeed surprising (this sort of stuff is usually sidelined but they make a case that indeed there could be more here than the TV episodes), an account of the development of Black Lightning shows some of the multiplicity in mainstream comics.

But there's a lot of filler. Sean O'Sullivan's piece on Deadwood and third seasons is odd, at least partly because it's unclear how the show could be considered "vast" and in any case a mere third season would argue against that. And odd would be acceptable but not dull, unimaginative and using unnecessary newly coined terms. Robin Laws and Scott Glancy drone on about games in pieces that really needed an editorial hand. Respected TV academic Jason Mittell investigates The Wire but sounds more like an entertainment critic than somebody who supposedly thinks for a living - lots of superlatives and nothing to make me reconsider having given up on the whole show as too cliched after two discs. Michael Bonesteel writes about Henry Darger's In the Realms of the Unreal as a "literary masterwork in the rough" but anybody who's read excerpts of this extremely long work would surely doubt this. I'm a little unclear whether Bonesteel has read the entire thing or even most of it - Darger's book has never been published which is hardly surprising considering how monumentally tedious it seems to be. And a piece about Mann's Joseph and His Brothers apparently drifted in from another anthology.

What's unusual for a book at least partly from academics is how little theorizing there is. There's no real attempt to even define "vast narrative" though a sidebar in the introduction says they're doing more by example - fine to a degree but a bit more boundaries (or is that too contrary to vastness) would have prevented things like the Deadwood misstep. Which may be just as well - we hardly need more smug references to Bourdieu or Baudrillard (though Bahktin maybe). Third Person manages to skip what might be the most familiar vast narrative in our culture - soap operas. The geeky tone of the book is likely one reason, and also likely why there's so little mention of more conventional high culture.

For instance, easily considered as vast narratives:
Rabelais
Trollope's novels
Musil's The Man Without Qualities
Henry Williamson's A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight
the Trojan epics (even if most no longer exist)
the Mahabharata
Truffaut's Antoine Doinel films
Rivette's Out 1
modernist maxi-poems like Pound's Cantos, Olson's Maximus Poems, Zukofsky's A, etc
duration-breaking documentaries like the Up series, Shoah or Phantom India
Wagner's Ring cycle (though Berlioz's Les Troyens was so long that it was actually replaced by Tannhauser)
Shakespeare's history cycle (even if not intended as a group)
Ken Jacobs' Star Spangled to Death
even things like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County or James Branch Cabell's Poictesme

And the SFF worlds of course abound in vast narratives though admittedly many are merely just very long. Perry Rhodan is little known in the US but the series is over 2600 (nope, not a typo) novels and novellas - the English translations are a mere fraction at about 120 books. Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga is about twenty overlapping books. Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion cycle/structure/whatever is pretty much a unique case of vastness as it echoes, interrelates, skips among, shares pieces and whathaveyou among dozens of books. For even more fun many are long out of print and quite unlikely to be in your local library.

Me & Hedy Lamarr

2011-11-29T01:04:00.002-05:00

With the new Richard Rhodes book about Hedy Lamarr's inventions it occurred to me that there's a very good chance I might be responsible for this being better known. What happened is that sometime around 1995 or 96 I was doing freelance writing and research for Turner Classic Movies. Unconnected to this I had been skimming through Nicolas Slonimsky's Music Since 1900, a fascinating compendium of events, news items, performances, etc in chronological order, thousands and thousands of them and with an eye for the odd and eccentric. Somewhere in there I ran across a bit about Lamarr's patent, included because of George Antheil's involvement. So I photocopied the info, passed it along to the TCM people and soon afterwards this was being used in some of the on-air segments surrounding the films. From there obviously many people heard about this and several years later I noticed more mentions of Lamarr's patent. (Poor Antheil tends to be overlooked.) The information wasn't completely unknown of course. There was a piece in 1990 from Forbes apparently (Google Books is unclear about the original source) and at least some engineers had been using the idea since the 80s according to another book. But otherwise there seem to be very few references before the end of the 90s so I might as well take some credit for this.

Someday I should mention the band I designed a logo for, one that they're still using, but never received any credit for that.

The Rocketeer

2011-11-01T16:17:00.002-04:00

Dave Stevens' The Rocketeer originally appeared during the period when I wasn't reading comics though I still knew about it somehow, perhaps from the movie which I saw when released or perhaps from periodically checking on the comics world. It was a highly praised and greatly loved series so it seems inevitable that word would get around. My library turned out to have a copy of 2009's The Rocketeer: The Complete Adventures so it was easy to get up to speed and then to speedily wonder why anybody would bother.

Despite looming fairly large as an icon there are only two Rocketeer stories. The first is a slam-bang origin with fights, Nazi spies, hot dames, etc. It's all Golden Age stuff or at least an attempt at GA stuff though in many times the page count of a real story from that era and overall fairly routine. The second story is a more interesting one about a troubled past, revenge killings and circus freaks. The main problem is that it's really not a Rocketeer story. Yes, the Rocketeer makes a couple of appearances but for no real reason - the story could have easily been written without him since there's no need for his abilities.

The real appeal I have to assume is Stevens' art which is a clean, modelled style with elements of cartooning (hats they fly off heads in surprise and similar iconography). Plus of course the cheesecake. The distressed damsel is based on Bettie Page (yawn) and Stevens rarely passes an opportunity to have her in sultry poses and often even barely clothed. In fact the last image of her is wearing barely nothing in public that would hardly be passable today but in 1938 would certainly have resulted in being arrested. And oddly here is also perhaps Stevens' weakest spot, a clumsy handling of the figure where proportions change or seem wrong and in a couple of spots look like Stevens perhaps had never seen a human body. Then again this is a common failing among comics artists who too often learn drawing from other comics and not even other art let alone real life.

It's hard not to wonder why in 25 years or so that this is all the Rocketeer that Stevens produced. Presumably his illness was a factor later on but otherwise was it too time consuming? Was he just not that interested? Any idiot could have come up with more stories (just turn on your TV set or pick up a comic book for proof) so that couldn't have been the reason. The short bio in the book is a just-the-facts piece and doesn't address this. (And why not have an appreciation in a book of this type?) Then again maybe this is all the Rocketeer we needed.

Halloween Movies Batch 1

2011-10-09T17:46:00.002-04:00

Somewhere I got the idea to watch 31 horror movies in October. Not one a day because that's not possible and in fact 31 is quite implausible - I'm really shooting for about 20. It's not just the limited time but the other stuff that's around - the DVD for Carlos just arrived, wanted to start that Kurahara set, new TV season started and of course a flood of books. So:

Deep Red (Dario Argento 1975) - Thought I'd already seen this but after watching it (inspired by a clip in Trailers from Hell) there's nothing familiar so probably I never have. This is Argento's peak period since nearly everything from about 1980 forward has been quite pointless. But this has a tinge of genuine surrealism (the giant set looks like De Chirico and includes a parody of Hopper's "Nighthawks" and an almost-parody of classical sculpture) alongside the kind of ambiguous, spooky dream-logic that animates some of the best horror films. The story jumps around from psychic premonitions to bird attacks to an old dark house and tosses in a bunch of odd characters such as a witch girl that have nothing really to do with the main narrative. The film is a tad long (I saw the full version not the US edit) but generally doesn't flag.

Day of the Dead (Steve Miner 2008) - I'd heard that this quasi-remake of the Romero film was pretty much unwatchable so it's a small surprise to find that it's a fairly effective zombie film, routine in its focus on survival and escape but managed efficiently and with a decent twist or two. Considering how many genuinely bad zombie films have flooded out in the past decade I don't know where this got such a negative reputation but it's not deserved, not necessarily recommended but certainly not a disaster.

The Vampire's Ghost (Lesley Selander 1945) - A somewhat odd Republic B that places a vampire tired of (un)life in a small African town where the natives seem to know what's going on but the colonials don't. I was reminded from time to time of the Lewton films and though this is nowhere near that league (but what is?) it's certainly above the run-of-the-mill outings. Selander was a hugely prolific director often in Westerns but this has an effective use of shadows and framing that makes me wonder if the film is a one-off possibly inspired by the theme or a collaborator or his other works have anything to offer.

Seven Mummies (Nick Quested 2006) - I heard about this film in a call for papers for an academic conference that may have been something like "Undead in the West". I suspect they just grabbed the title out of a keyword match because while it may have something to do with undead (the story is pretty confusing) it's also a very bottom-of-the-barrel effort. The cinematographer appears to have just made a career change considering how often it's too dark or too washed out, too blurry. Some of that is possibly deliberate - the director did music videos before - but considering that the story barely makes any sense I don't know that they get much of the doubt. It starts well enough with several convicts escaping from a crashed van and trying to make it to the Mexican border. Danny Trejo plays an Half-Mad Old Man Who Supplies Backstory (why do these HMOMWSB always laugh so much?) and inspires the convicts to head for some lost gold. None of them seem to think it odd that they turn up in an Old West town and from there bad stuff happens but it's a little unclear who or why - the mummies barely appear at all or maybe I'm confusing something else with them. By the end it's hard to care.

Vampire Circus (Robert Young 1972) - A late Hammer that slides into decadence with full-on nudity, explicit violence, clumsy script and incredibly ineffective special effects. How many other films from the 70s would frequently use jump-cut disappearances? There's a small town in what seems to be early 19th century Germany where the residents killed the local vampire. Years later a mysterious circus shows up and guess what? Odd things happen! No it's true - odd things! So let's see there's a clown dwarf, a panther man, twin acrobats, a naked cat lady (none of the locals raise an eyebrow at this), a laughing gypsy woman, a silent strong man (Dave Prowse who in a few years would be Darth Vader) and in one tent a mirror that's a portal to the vampire's tomb. Actually it's all kinda fun in a shoddy badfilm way.

Levres de Sang (Jean Rollin 1975) - About a third of this is prime Rollin, ambiguous and dream-like with almost (but not quite) a painter's eye for composition. But a third is people chatting and a third people walking and walking so I guess we just take what we can get. There's not much of a story beyond a man who sees a ruined castle in an advertisement and thinks it has something to do with a childhood incident that may have happened or may have been imagined. Actions seem almost arbitrary - he gets locked into a room for unclear reasons and when he's freed he doesn't bother to question anybody who frees him. And yes there are vampires promised more or less by the title but this barely qualifies as a vampire film. The ending though is like something out of an absurdist drama.

The Ghost Goes West (Rene Clair 1935) - "Slight but charming" is probably the tagline. The script is so blunt that the main characters might as well be named Boy and Girl since they show no personality other than what the actors bring. But as with so many films of this era it's the rest where the real attraction lies - supporting actors, set design, off-hand gags. Eugene Pallette may be the real star and in smaller parts the group of annoyed creditors or a bored butler who has about one line but also the funniest part of the movie. The British idea of America in this period is presented as rapacious businessmen and guns-blazing gangsters but then again this is a comedy.

Netflix streaming

2011-10-05T21:39:00.002-04:00

So when Netflix first launched streaming I gave it a shot and wasn't too impressed. Apart from having to sit at my computer watching something (two-hour WoW raid no problem, two-hour movie different story) Netflix determined what quality image based on the connection and you couldn't force a higher one as with most streaming media. And there were lots of pauses, pixellation, etc.

But with the new Netflix rates I decided to test it again on my actual TV before dumping it and the test was surprisingly effective. I set up a network so I wouldn't have to haul my modem around and after several days I'm pretty much hooked. The image is usually DVD-quality or close enough to not matter and I've consistently received almost perfect streams. The only image problem I've had from the streaming was one film with some compression artifacting but it was not only a very low-budget effort but filmed fairly indifferently and I suspect that the transfer was shoddy as well. Over these days I've only had a few pauses but they were under a second and all happened during the same hour so I think it was a connection issue.

The only consistent issue has been some subpar originals. Watched a minute or two of Ophuls' Caught and it was VHS quality and fairly indifferent VHS at that. A 70s Christopher Lee film I sampled was also blah quality and most likely a TV print. On the other hand the 1945 Republic B The Vampire's Ghost had an excellent transfer. So most of these other titles not on DVD have been a mixed bag.

In fact it's these extra non-DVD films that have been the hook for me. There's a surprising number of 40s musicals that not only have I never heard of but I've never heard of the performers. Plus many 50s crime/quasi-noir films, several poliziotteschi (English-dubbed of course), a lot of 60s spy and adventure films, 50s British comedies, etc. Plus oddities like Bogdanovich's notorious At Long Last Love, Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, the Malick-scripted Deadhead Miles, Altman's early The Delinquents, Tashlin's It's Only Money and so forth.

Of course some of the stuff that's streaming-only at Netflix actually has DVDs but the company is definitely clearing out or not replacing many titles on disc and not always the obscure ones. The days when it had most DVD releases are long gone and today it's not even pretending (though you can't tell from the press releases). There's still not as much streaming as you might expect given that Netflix is pretty literally betting the company on this - out of their Top 100 list there are maybe a handful streaming and most big current releases don't show. I suspect this is one reason the interface is so clunky - make it hard to navigate and it creates the impression of lots of stuff where if we could easily see just a title like the DVD queue then it's clear what's missing.

Another bonus has been the TV shows. I'm hooked on Warehouse 13 and this lets me finish the second season without constantly waiting for DVDs. Even better I can sample shows I was curious about but never felt like putting into a DVD queue - Parks and Recreation, Damages, Breaking Bad, Thriller, MI-5. Or to check out Farscape since people have raved about it and the descriptions sound like my kinda show but the first ep I watched didn't grab me. Now I can check a bit more. Plus older Doctor Who and my current guilty pleasure Psych. And Netflix resolves one problem I always have with TV which is remembering what I've seen. It stores where you left so when I pull up say Warehouse 13 it's ready to start the next ep.

And did I mention just a ton of MST3K?

DCnU Week Two

2011-09-22T13:55:00.003-04:00

A week late and partly because the seemingly cool idea of reviewing all the new releases lost most of its appeal when confronted with the reality of so many half-hearted and barely "new" titles. Still there's better this week than last.

So just quickly: Frankenstein, Agent of SHADE is easily the pick of this batch - focused story, effortless characterization, strange ideas. Batwoman is probably next with its fantastic Williams art and forward-moving story. Surprisingly Mister Terrific works pretty well even though it feels more like an introduction. And as much as I've complained about all the books that are intros Green Lantern and Red Lanterns feel like we're thrown into the middle of stories. Apparently these two are just continuations from the pre-re-launch books which I abandoned because DC was apparently trying to make the Lantern books be their equivalent of the X-Men titles and repel all outsiders - frequent title changes, constant & pointless crossed stories, overly complex narratives, loads of barely distinguishable characters. Batman and Robin is mostly a Damian whine-fest though I suspect it will improve. Demon Knights is probably not very good but it's my kinda book and I liked it. Legion Lost is pretty much incomprehensible. Grifter appears to be a quasi-origin but doesn't make much sense. Suicide Squad is a horrible, extended torture scene - no seriously. And making Amanda Waller thin takes a distinctive character and turns her into yet another of the faceless masses - so much for diversity. I don't get the point of Deathstroke except that he's a Bad Guy. Resurrection Man has promise (how's that for vague?). And I also don't see why Superboy is such an extended origin; get to the point already.

DCnU Week One

2011-09-11T23:40:00.004-04:00

Or should this be Week Two? The previous week was So Important according to DC that they only published two issues - Flashpoint #5 and the new Justice League. We finally got the explanation behind the whole thing in Flashpoint but not why the new DCU is any different from the previous one. Unlike Crisis on Infinite Earths it's hard to imagine many people re-reading the whole Flashpoint saga in the future - most of us didn't even do it now.

The new Justice League was pretty decent. And that's the problem - if you're relaunching your entire line and aiming to attract non-comics readers then "pretty decent" isn't really good enough. In fact the oddest thing about the issue is that it's not a Justice League story but really just a Batman & Green Lantern teamup (with cameos from Steel and Superman). Understandable to some degree when you consider that these two cluster of titles are DC's strongest-selling and a wild guess would be that having movies featuring the characters was something of a factor but there's almost no Wow Factor and not much new. Batman hunted by police? Batman as urban legend? Green Lantern as show off & go-getter? Yep, yep and yep. Then again the Batman and GL books apparently are the least changed in the relaunch - probably that money factor again.

This pattern continues in the rest of the Week One titles - not much changed, some decent stuff, some not. Far too many of the books feel like introductions or warm-ups instead of something that just grabs you. So alphabetically:

Action Comics - It's kinda cool that this is probably one of the few books from any company that still has "comics" in the title - they may have re-numbered it but at least some tradition remains. This is the one I had highest hopes for considering Grant Morrison was more or less getting to cut loose so it's a letdown that this feels like an extended introduction that in the future could go either way. Superman fighting bad landlords and wife beaters goes back to the earliest stories but seems like a mistake today. A superstrong alien with heat vision (it's a bit unclear whether he can actually fly) doesn't feel like the best way to approach spouse abuse. Hyper-intelligent gorillas or sentient rock critters yes but real-world daily problems not so much. Still it's set five years ago so I suspect the story will be about Superman finding his place or something that I hope is more interesting. The new Lex Luthor is quite promising but the whole military hunting Supes bit feels way too much like General Ross hunting the Hulk.

Animal Man - You might be thinking it's about time to just give up on this character but it turns out to be one of the better titles here. Lemire balances the family life of an almost washed-up hero (I love The Believer parody) with some of the stranger aspects of that life and Foreman's art really works for what's otherwise a probably too-long dream sequence. The genuinely creepy ending makes me think this is really a Vertigo book placed in the DCU and that certainly can't be a bad thing.

Batgirl - All the controversy about putting Barbara back into the costume really pushed one key point - even apart from any role model idea (always a bit dubious) why get rid of a unique character to go back to one who, well, is not? Barbara's status as handicapped seems to be explained away that she just got better though maybe I missed something. And though she makes references to being stiff and still not able to move well but you sure can't tell it from the story. Just compare that to one of the early Spider-Man stories where he twists his foot on a coiled rope and is genuinely limited as a result. The issue still hasn't sold me that the change was a good idea but with Gail Simone writing I'll give her a lot of leeway.

Batwing - Why does this even exist? Did somebody say "Well there's Shaft in Africa so we need Batman in Africa. Only Batman's not available so let's make a copy." And then apparently decided to have the book deal with real African issues such as endemic violence and child soldiers. Certainly comics can handle such subjects but superhero comics almost certainly not and definitely certainly not a hack like Winick.

Detective Comics - Hey it's "comics" again! And mostly this is a pretty solid Batman tale with a bit o' detecting, a bit o' eluding the cops, a bit o' talking to the cops, a bit o' fightin'. The Joker seems excessively violent and the ending is so over-the-top that it may unbalance the story - we'll have to see how it plays out.

Green Arrow - Superhero fights some bad guys. That's it. Though the final page promises there might be more interesting developments to come (but most likely won't).

Hawk and Dove - Liefeld's run on this came during a time when I wasn't reading comics and I've still never read it but sure hope it had more life than this. His art has improved to the extent that it's not quite so busy with OCD crosshatching (or so sheerly inhumanly proportioned figures) but he still draws everybody like they're scowling. Or maybe grimacing. But all of them, all of the time. It's a chore to read. Interesting though that the Ditko original made Dove seem like the weirdo but in recent incarnations it's Hawk that's been unreasonable.

Justice League International - This is more like what Justice League should have been - a full team, a goal, bickering, behind-the-scenes maneuvering, etc. It's still somewhat routine and is too clearly going after the old Giffen/DeMatteis vibe though with less blatant comedy. Could develop into something or just coast along.

Men of War - It seemed good that DC was giving war books a chance but this turns out to be really just another superhero book though apparently one where the focus isn't on the superhero (or maybe supervillain - that's not resolved in the issue). Featuring Sgt Rock's grandson who turns out to be yet another can't-follow-the-rules-but-have-my-own-integrity guy which will take more effort than shown here to give him any kind of traction. It doesn't help that this seems pretty hawkish or at least gets fascinated by all the war tech 'n' talk.

O.M.A.C. - This might be the most purely fun comic of the bunch. It's nothing more than a long fight scene with bits of plot to hook the next issue but it's also Keith Giffen in full-on 70s-Kirby pastiche which is a hoot.

Static Shock - This is another odd one. I guess the idea is to support at least one Milestone character and since this guy had his own cartoon he got picked. It's nice that they force some science lessons in Silver Age style but other than that there's not much going on here.

Stormwatch - At times this feels like a Wildstorm book popping at a good perk but then that may be a problem. How can Apollo and The Midnighter actually exist alongside regular DC characters? More to the point why spend most of an issue with folk trying to convince somebody to join their team? Not exactly high drama, not even medium drama. The bits of interlaced stories point to something bigger but like I said - way too many introductory issues.

Swamp Thing - Bringing back Alec Holland seemed like a bad idea but Snyder's take that this makes him a confused, lost character may work - there's a Vertigo feel here as well even despite the appearance of Superman. (Who seems a lot more traditional than the one we get in Action.) After all this is an issue where the title character appears on just one page.

blogs & writing

2011-08-14T21:36:00.002-04:00

While the freedom from editors and (mostly) from commerce of blogging offers the possibility of more inventive or even outright experimental writing there doesn't appear to be a lot of that happening. Most blogs still fall into either comments or essays (however brief) - even most of the poetry blogs I've sampled are pretty unimaginative.

One reason I thought about this is my last post which was originally something I had written about Thor and Norse myths but never really finished and then something else about the commonplace statement that superheroes are a mythology. The myth link seemed to bind them together but in reality it didn't work very well. Guess maybe I should have just left he movie/myth thing as it was and then the only real idea in the next part might even fitted onto Twitter despite my efforts to expand it (only to realize of course that there wasn't much to expand).

And so nothing inventive or experimental here either.

Superheroes and mythology

2011-08-09T20:32:00.004-04:00

Imagine if the Thor movie had been something like actual Norse myths, possibly along the lines of Tsui Hark directing Nicolas Refn's Valhalla Rising from a From Hell-era Alan Moore script. Stone and ice and blood, so grimly dark that it couldn't be called nihilist only because that's the easy way out. There's a reason none of those names are associated with Hollywood or even America - because that's exactly the kind of film nobody there wants to make (though they like to pretend The Dark Knight is such).

But then Thor comes at the mythology at two removes. First Stan and Jack pilfered the originals (which have come down to us in less-than-original form but there's nothing that can be done about that) for pieces. So Loki was Odin's blood-brother (at least in some versions) now shifted to Thor's adoptive brother. Sif gets a sword and her hair changed from blonde to brunette (more interesting considering that at least two entire myths revolve around her blonde hair). And Thor himself loses a beard and has his hair changed from red to blond making him look...well Aryan. Gone as far as I can tell (the Thor comics have never interested me much) are the stories about how Odin lost his eye and acquired wisdom, the hall of the dead, the constant combat, and of course how Loki changed himself into a female horse, got mounted by a stallion then gave birth to Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir.

The movie moves even further to the point that it hints all the gods are just aliens and the magic just technology. Odin becomes even more the kindly patriarch than in the comic. You knew that no movie would ever use Thor's goat-drawn carriage which honestly may not be in many of the comics but is at least used in Simonson's run.

The reason I'm bringing up all this is because of the common tendency to compare superheroes to a modern mythology. It's presented almost that bluntly like we're supposed to stroke our chins and go "mmm modern mythology how deep and wise". In Grant Morrison's new Supergods he even claims to explore this but beyond comparing the looks of some characters to gods (such as Hawkman to Horus) he doesn't go any further, not even whether these characters were in fact based on any gods whatsoever.

But what would this mean? Does saying superheroes are mythic or their stories a mythology mean anything?

One problem is the very concept of mythology. They way it's presented to most of us in a standard education is that myths are (a) stories that explain something about the world and (b) the religion or religion equivalent of early ("primitive") socities. But even if you didn't know about the vast centuries-old academic debate concerning myths it would be obvious that "mythology" is a very elastic term. Some myths are explanatory and some are wisdom tales but large numbers are just as easily entertainment or historical or warnings or simply cryptic. The story of Pyramus and Thisbe does end up explaining the color of mulberries but it's quite a complicated (though short) method for such a purpose. Did the Romans only care about mulberries? Did the thousands of stories explaining every fruit and plant not come down to us? Was the story intended for more tragic purposes? (Which might explain what attracted Shakespeare to remake it and later parody it.) Was the love story the purpose and the mulberries just an afterthought? Or what is the point of Leda and the Swan? Or for that matter Loki giving birth to Sleipnir? What on earth could that possibly explain?

It doesn't help that most of us encounter myths in cohesive stories with the contradictions generally removed - instead of the numerous conflicting and often fragmentary originals it's Edith Hamilton. Now I wouldn't knock Hamilton or Bulfinch or the D'Aulaires but the point is that the original myths are messy but we learn them cleaned up and then have simplistic reasons for their existence taught to us. The original myths do sometimes explain things and were in fact sometimes religious (though not always in quite the way we might think about that). But they served numerous other functions from pure amusement to preserving historical memories (the latter even has its own name "Euhemerism").

So I think you can see what this might have to do with superheroes. Most people claiming superheroes=modern myth are trying to latch onto something grandiose but really it's true more because superheroes are stories about beings with unusual abilities and like myths are often contradictory and fill many functions. I don't think that Superman appeals to us because he's a sun god (as Morrison claims) otherwise Supreme or Hyperion would be just as popular. (Though it's worth noting Warren Ellis named his Superman clone Apollo. (And since this is comics by "clone" I don't mean an actual clone of Superman (such as the current Superboy) but a character modelled on Superman.))

So if Hercules/Herakles can go through all his adventures (choking snakes, twelve labors, searching for the Golden Fleece, murdering his family) then in many ways that's similar to a superhero's origin and varied exploits (minus the family-murder unless it's Irredeemable I guess). Sure they're not all that similar but my point is that myths are at their core stories and more specifically stories beyond the everyday. In addition to all the other functions myths were meant, at least at times, to entertain, a word that's come to mean something of little real consequence but in some sense is what most art is intended to do (the whole amuse-and-instruct thing with or without the instruct). So I see superheroes=myth not as tapping into any archetypes (which seem dubious to me at best) but more in the area of variant stories, sometimes conflicting and sometimes of opaque purposes.

Yep, a long post for such a tiny point but hey that's the Internet.

Retired email signature

2011-06-28T20:41:00.000-04:00

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." (Robert Heinlein)

Peter Mendelsund

2011-06-25T17:55:00.002-04:00

One thing about working in a bookstore (and shopping in bookstores and obsessively browsing book websites) is that I see a lot of book covers. Most of course are pretty blah, maybe effective at indicating the type of book but little else. (And maybe not always then - a few months back a customer asked for a recommendation and Cathleen Schine's books sounded exactly like what she wanted. Only when we pulled out the books the covers made them look like fuzzy Picoult-ish romance novels and the customer passed.) It wasn't until I stumbled across this post about designer Peter Mendelsund that I realized that many of my favorite current covers were done by the same person. This must be how a lot of the early auteurists felt when discovering that their favorite films were done by the same directors, except in my defense the cover designer name is always tucked away so if you're not actively looking for it you won't find it.

There's not much stylistically that connects Mendelsund's covers but many of these stood out - the Dostoevsky editions, Tezuka's Dororo, Carey's Peter & Oliver, the cloth of Mr Peanut (paper cover is different) and more - it's not on this page but he also did the new Foucault and Benjamin designs. I'd never seen the cloth of Anatomy of Fascism but it's a much better cover than the too-literal paperback (which I have). I will confess though that I never liked the Larsson cover - too vague but also too busy. So it's interesting to read in a profile that Mendelsund originally had different proposals that the publisher rejected. (There's another good 2008 interview here and a more recent one focusing on Kafka.) (And really by now shouldn't there be a better way to indicate a link than just "here"? I'm too lazy to figure it out.)

Mendelsund's domain-named website is down but he has a blog at http://jacketmechanical.blogspot.com/ that also has other samples of his work. And of course he Twitters but who doesn't?

Or

2011-06-09T23:00:00.001-04:00

As Mike Sterling tweets: It's almost criminal that now, of all times, the DC blog does not allow comments. We are being deprived of some spectacular entertainment.

DCnU

2011-06-09T22:04:00.002-04:00

Yeah, guess I really should be parsing Catullus or tracing the development of bridge imagery in the High Modernists but it's DC's reboot/relaunch/revamp that's been most interesting lately. In case you don't know in September DC is releasing 52 new series all at #1 and apparently with revised or simplified continuity. It's a big move and naturally generated a lot of discussion which after all is much of the point. I don't have anything particularly interesting to say but:

* 52 new series but I'm betting at least half will be gone in a year.

* Looking at an almost-compete list there are maybe a dozen I'll actually buy - the four Batman titles, Batwoman, DC Universe Presents (at least the Deadman story), Justice League, Justice League Dark, Demon Knights, Swamp Thing, Sgt Rock and All-Star Western. But it's hard to tell. Sgt Rock could be really dumb and that first issue more than enough.

* Others look interesting such as Azzarello on Wonder Woman but even Brubaker couldn't do much with that character. Frankenstein, I Vampire, Resurrection Man, Hawk & Dove, Legion Lost, Suicide Squad and some of these other second-tier titles have the potential to be really strong just because there's so much possibility but more likely they'll just fade into wandering stories with unfocused characters. Normally I'd love the idea of a Blackhawk series but this modernized version sounds like they're copying GI Joe. The rest will just have to wait. Did we really need an Aquaman book? Red Lanterns? Firestorm? I stopped reading Titans years ago but the cover of the new issue looks absolutely horrible. And don't all those Justice League variations sound like DC is trying to copy Marvel's Avengers strategy?

* It's nice to see Azzarello, Lemire and Milligan here but DC really missed a chance to bring in fresher or indie creators. Why not make Bizarro an ongoing? Or another Wednesday Comics? But really it looks like DC is trying to make it seem new while following the old approaches, nothing too strange thank you very much.

* Several people have commented on how this was a chance for DC to bring the Wildstorm characters into the DCU but I'm not sure why they would bother. (And notice there's no Authority.) Perhaps more to the point is the rumors we've been hearing for a couple of years about DC exploring the possibility of its own Ultimate line apparently were true - it's just that they did this with all their books (excepting Vertigo of course but now some of that's being pulled into DCnU as well).

* I was disappointed to hear Barbara Gordon would become Batgirl, apparently being either healed or reverted to a pre-shooting status. (Maybe they're just going to retcon away all Alan Moore stories - bye bye Mogo.) There are already two more-than-servicable Batgirl possibilities and as Oracle Gordon has consistently been one of the most fully realized characters in mainstream comics. But Jill Pantozzi at Newsarama makes an even stronger case that DC is really not living up to its claims of diversity.

* Guess if you're going to do it then go all the way but it's sad to hear Detective and probably Action will lose their original numbering. Still that too may be back in a year. At least DC isn't as bad about this as Marvel who at times might as well just number every issue of every series #1.

* And the announcement that Ambush Bug won't be involved in any of this means I may just skip the whole thing. Hey as long as that overpriced Sugar & Spike archive isn't delayed....

Ending BSG (spoilers of course)

2011-06-05T21:17:00.002-04:00

There were a few rough patches at the start but the real cracks in Battlestar Galactica started to show (just as they implausibly would later in the diegetic ship) in season three. More and more emphasis was placed on destiny and prophecy and dream visions until the show started to slip out of science fiction. Heavy-handed stories didn't help. They re-made the Babylon 5 episode about a doctor who decides to override a religious group's objection to medical care only this time with a clear-cut distinction of the doctor being a flat-out murderer while B5's doctor made a decision with tragic results but it was a decision that most of us would also have made. (And I suppose some people might argue that this wasn't deliberately a remake but really religious refusal to accept medical care is so extremely rare that it's far more likely the BSG writers got the idea from B5 than it is they got it from real life.)

But the ending was jaw-dropping. Two angels standing in the middle of our (mine, yours) modern-day NYC discussing God's plans while viewers are treated to supposedly threatening but actually quite innocuous images of robots? Seriously - angels? Toy robots? And Kara turning out to be a ghost more or less? Which also makes that undamaged ship she flew back at the start of season four a ghost ship despite having a physical existence. God apparently programmed the co-ordinates into the ship. (I really wish I was kidding about all this.)

Even without that we're treated to the spectacle of the last remaining humans (oh wait, there are some already on the planet - again God's plan) deciding to destroy all their technology on the idea that this can "break the cycle of violence". How not having tools and shelter will do that - even not having weapons - is quite unclear. Having fertile soil and lots of game doesn't guarantee survival - just look at the history of settlers in the Americas and the BSG people are deliberately going to technology centuries earlier than that. And spreading the remaining 38K people around the planet? There has to be some population density for a birth rate high enough for the group to expand though I suppose there's always those tribespeople wandering around. I understand why Chief might want to go live alone but why does Adama? The show writers messed around for a couple of seasons then had to rush everything.

Really it was too much to expect the show to end well. Season four continued most of the fantasy elements from the previous season but added quite clumsy storytelling, the kind of mistakes that usually only happen with beginners. For instance, one episode about two-thirds through devotes almost half its time to one of the most shameless exposition dumps I've ever seen. Two characters, one who has regained his memory and the other returned from...well let's just say she also regained her memory, those two characters give monologues of backstory so we know how the Final Five and the Cylons came to be. That's right, it sounds like they're reading out of the show bible for twenty minutes. It still doesn't make any sense. (Why does everybody call them the Final Five? They're really only final from our position as viewers.) And then there's the episode where Kara talks with a piano player for an entire episode and who, gasp, turns out to be imaginary though most viewers will have much earlier figured this out. Or the kind of fake lesson that mortality makes us human - the kind of dumb stuff the original Star Trek pushed but that we could easily ignore then because it's only a minute or two instead of BSG agonizing over it for hours. It's false because mortality has no more bearing on us being human than our chemistry being carbon-based - we can't change it and in any case share this with pretty much every other living creature.

Or filling the final two episodes with completely pointless flashbacks - the only remotely logical reason I can see for these is that the BSG writers thought this was "character development". Folks, you're about to end the entire show - if the characters aren't developed or revealed or explored or expanded by now then none of this helps. We already know that Lee and Kara were attracted to each other, that Gaius claimed to love Blondie (I have no idea what we're supposed to call her), that Ellen and Saul actually do love each other and so forth. If anything Admiral Adama needed this focus since he had become the fuzziest, most pooorly planned of the major characters. I'm far more intrigued by the revelation that their culture had strip clubs but then BSG was a show that avoided being science fiction as much as possible. "Keep It Familiar" must have been posted on the writer's office walls. Much of the final episodes revolve around the importance of Hera but clearly everything would have worked out the same even if she had died.

Which is the other oddity about BSG. As the show went along there's so much discussion about the Cylons being machines but there's not much that marks them as machines. Apparently they're medically identical to humans and display no superior intelligence or physical abilities. So what makes them machines? Is this the point that they eventually become human?

Not many (or actually any as far as I can find) people commented about how authoritarian the show became. The mutiny was easily the highlight of season four, the kind of clear storytelling the show had earlier where people get caught up in events and sometimes make wrong decisions. And it's built on the entirely reasonable resistance to working with Cylons that you would expect from people who watched them nearly wipe out all of humanity. But once the mutiny is down then the Admiral and President get to make the decisions, no more democracy. Not that we saw much democracy earlier but maybe this was the point of that half-baked section The Razor that told us sometimes leaders have to make hard decisions and we're expected to follow orders. (The Razor lost most of its point by having the captain explain herself - I guess so that we don't think she's insane - and by having the lead character ask for redemption at the end instead of owning up to her actions.) This authoritarian bent is also why the President increasingly sides with the military until it seems like there's no real distinction, in sharp contrast to the show's first season which was built around the conflict between military and civilian authority. But hey that must all be God's plan as well.

Thor (Kenneth Branagh 2011)

2011-05-06T20:40:00.003-04:00

* Thor rides a horse. I'd like to think there was serious discussion about having him in a cart drawn by goats as is traditional and is even in the comics (at least sometimes).

* But that gets to another point. Supposedly Marvel is able to finance its movies all by itself but if so then why is it trying to ape the most conventional Hollywood approach? The bombast, predictable "twists", clunky exposition, streamlined narrative are the hallmarks of studios relying too much on test audiences and Robert McKee. Marvel had a chance to make fresher movies and it certainly has the talent available. (Bendis is in the end credits - can you imagine if he'd done some of the dialogue?) For example that long exposition at the start (seriously, professional writers came up with this?) mentions only the frost giants and not any of the other mythological races such as dwarves because the giants are the only ones who will figure in the rest of the film. Background, texture, characterization, even plain old entertainment just goes out the window. Similarly Thor falls for Jane simply because she's the only woman around (other than the assistant). Why not have some really short scene where she shows courage or ingenuity or something that catches his attention? Why not have her in the drinking contest with Thor? As it is she's little more than another damsel in distress.

* Still, most of whatever substance the film might have (and there's not too much) comes from a surprisingly effective cast. Particularly Tom Hiddleston as Loki has a role that could easily be just another quasi-insane bad guy and is more or less written that way. Hiddleston manages to convey that Loki does have legitimate reasons, murderous and immoral sure but still plausible almost like Richard III in Asgard. Perhaps Branagh's experience helped here because otherwise he's a fairly undistinguished director.

* Staying through the credits appears to reveal what the Avengers movie will be about - Loki and the Cosmic Cube. Loki of course is the conventional choice but the Cube seems more odd except that the movie will need a threat large enough to draw all those characters together. As it stands it looks like almost all the running time will be devoted to how they become a group considering that one currently has no way to get to Earth, another is serving in SHIELD, one is being hunted, one is running a large corporation, another presumably frozen in ice and none of them know each other.

* The Hawkeye cameo is a nice touch though probably 90% of the audience won't have any idea about the point and think it's just peculiar. Note that Renner isn't in the credits.

* Wouldn't it have been cool if the final credit "Thor will return in The Avengers" said "Thor will return in Goldeneye" and then "Goldeneye" gets scratched out and replaced by "The Avengers"? But then this is a film that needs much more humor and lightness than it gets.

* Like so many costume and mythological films the characters too often seem to be standing around waiting for the camera to turn on them. Does the frost giant king simply sit on his throne with other giants standing at attention? Does Loki just stand on his balcony with a staff staring over Asgard? This goes back to the earlier point that writers who pay too much attention to McKee and producers who want the simplest possible film are deliberately trying to avoid detail and background. But it just feels weird. As wretched as Avatar is it didn't share these faults and you'd think somebody would learn from its success.

* The Avengers movie really needs a scene where Odin and Nick Fury discuss eye patches.

The Man from UNCLE

2011-04-24T10:30:00.004-04:00

A guy at work has been going through episodes of The Man from UNCLE and convinced me that it was worth trying out. I don't remember ever having seen it before - far too young during the original run and while it almost certainly was syndicated either it didn't show in my area or I skipped it. So from Netflix comes a disc with the first three episodes.

* Illya only very briefly appears in the first two episodes with Solo instead going solo. Turns out that there was originally some idea that the series would focus only on Solo, probably one reason the show's title is singular. In this incarnation it's very Bond-ish though apparently it got campier later on.

* The whole thing is very much b-movie level though mostly with a little bit of style rather than a point-shoot approach. Richard Donner directs two of the episodes and though he never became a director of any note he at least was professional. There's often some low-angle shots, a few in near darkness (which must have been hard to see on 1964 TV sets), takes are fairly short, there's some efficient framing, etc.

* Still, the third episode breaks down on the script level with all sorts of nonsensical jumps and characters acting much dimmer than they should. The quickness of shooting becomes apparent in a few mistmatches. Most notable is a scene where Solo & Illya have landed in a helicopter only to be stopped seconds later by a partisan/smuggler - he clearly would have been visible and right next to them but Donner resolves this by simply having him walk around from behind the camera where he was supposedly not seen.

* The b-movie serial-chapter feel reminded me of Alias though clearly it's true of almost all episodic TV dramas. I've only seen two episodes of CSI (both in the Miami branch) but all these procedurals are clearly b-movie equivalents.

* It's odd to see the shapely UNCLE assistant whose sole function appears to be eyecandy - Solo openly leers at her a couple of times. Even in the story she actually sits in a bikini under a sun lamp while at work!

* And why is UNCLE headquarters "hidden" in a small NYC laundry? The very first episode shows that the bad guys know exactly where it is and the civilians that Solo meets have read about UNCLE so it's not highly secret. I know this looks cool and is probably better than them just showing up at, say, the Baxter Building for work but really the neighbors would have to notice all the activity every single day in such a tiny business.

* The guest stars are I suppose another attraction to the show. These episodes have Slim Pickens (Dr Strangelove opened that January), Anne Francis (Honey West would be the following year) and Jill Ireland (who was married to David McCallum). Variety and the ever-popular star appeal are operative though Ireland is completely wooden.

* I think this disc was as much as I need to see.

Nine Years & Counting

2011-04-23T23:35:00.002-04:00

Well I missed the anniversary earlier this month but hard to believe this has been going nine years. In that time I've worked like a dog and done about fifty posts - a bimonthly blog posting schedule is just grueling. In the next nine years I'm hoping to have sixty posts done. Can always dream.

The Imperfectionists

2011-03-15T23:31:00.002-04:00

The title page of Tom Rachman's 2010 The Imperfectionists states "a novel" though this seems more like the work of a marketing person who realizes, or at least has heard the conventional wisdom, that short story collections don't sell than the work of, say, an author who's written an actual novel. Genre designations are in some sense irrelevant but the "novel" claim raises expectations or hopes or even a reading mode that there will be more connection or sum-greater-than-parts result. In the end we're left with several stories that sometimes mention characters from another and sometimes reference an event from another story but never to build - clip those out to make a pure short story collection and the result would have been almost identical.

Still, the book is entertaining, if that's the right word for a series of examinations of loneliness. In this, Rachman is helped by starting-writer clumsiness and a general heavy-handed approach to almost everything - a more subtle or experienced writer doing this wouldn't have been entertaining so much as depressing. Just take the story of an unambitious obituary writer in dead-end job who then interviews somebody who gives a philosophical digression on death but unexpectedly he has a death in his family only to create a new life out of the crash. So far ok I suppose and my synopsis did pile it on a bit thick (though didn't distort). The catch is when the obituary writer pulls an underhanded scheme to replace his boss - we've been shown how mean, even cruel, the boss is and how incompetent so apparently readers are intended to feel accepting of the scheme.

That's hardly the stuff of serious writing and Rachman doesn't stop there. Another story features a lonely woman who eventually falls for a sloppy, careless man who steals from her (maybe - the story is a tad vague, probably unintentionally) but stays with him. Rachman has the woman state outright how lonely she is even though he's already shown her alone in her apartment or ignored by waiters in favor of her "buxom" friend. There's no need to underline the motive but that's Rachman's approach. Other stories are similar and the final story in fact just falls apart. The protagonist comes across as mentally deficient though I really doubt that was the intention, we're asked to believe that his grandfather's private letters have been easily available in a desk for over four decades, that nobody at the newspaper realized it was about to close (and these are mostly reporters!), that one of them would be angry enough to kill a dog and finally that it's even possible to easily "snap" a large dog's neck. It's one of those pieces that feels misjudged all the way through.

Rachman sets the book in Rome but apart from names of streets and food there's almost nothing actually about Rome (which I heard somewhere is not a boring city) or about how foreigners would live in the city or negotiate the culture. Even the Italians who appear don't seem any different than the Americans who mostly are the other characters. He also puts his characters in an English-language newspaper and does get a bit more mileage out of that than Rome but the stories generally have little to do with work or even with the people being together at work. The book could have been moved to a shipping firm in Oakland and probably would have needed little change.

I realize all this is mostly a contemporary approach to the short story - avoid description, give us some moment of clarity (or at least a twist), keep it tight, focus on character. Which may not have been the best idea since Rachman adds his own faults (including a weakness for Big Themes and a peculiar idea to use present tense) to this often bland style when really a more novelistic book with digressions and smells and odd etiquette and journalist habits and other real bugs in the imaginary garden would have been so much more interesting even if it really wasn't any better.

(For what it's worth the OED has no listing for "imperfectionist".)

Last two years of Grant Morrison's comics in one sentence

2011-01-30T22:53:00.002-05:00

A bit long to quote so just go to http://www.newsarama.com/comics/11-comic-deaths-didnt-stick-110126.html and the Batman entry.

Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy 2010)

2011-01-24T08:55:00.000-05:00

I'd read very little about Exit Through the Gift Shop (which opens with "A Banksy Film" but otherwise has no credited director though everybody seems to be assigning that to Banksy). So perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that the film wasn't really what I expected since such expectations after all were based on almost nothing. Somehow I had the impression that it plays with "reality" and documentary form and would fit in with F for Fake, some of Kiarostami or Herzog's work, or even on a different track James Benning or Waking Life. In short I didn't expect what is almost an A&E Biography-styled narrative though to be fair some of this (such as the portentous voice-over) seems to be tongue-in-cheek.

Looking up reviews afterwards what I'd picked up is the idea that some of the film might be a hoax, something that pretty much every reviewer does (even me). As Andrew O'Hehir at Salon aptly put it, "One can only wish the New York Times had viewed the Bush administration's call to war with half the caution with which it has approached Exit Through the Gift Shop, the new documentary made (or presided over, or something) by the mysterious British street artist Banksy." Much of the events in the film can be verified independently so most reviewers tend to answer eventually with a shrug and comment that what's real doesn't much matter because after all that's the point.

But at least some of it does matter. If the Sotheby's auctions for instance are staged then some of the target of art world commercialism is manipulated too much to be effective. If that's really not Banksy talking then can we assume he's speaking Banksy's opinions? There are some oddities within the film. Much of the first half is Guetta's tapes of street artists but at one point there's a shot of him in action so who made that? If Guetta wasn't yet involved who filmed Banksy at the West Bank when he claimed they weren't documenting his work? Though filmed over a decade the people don't always seem to change that much. Why does Banksy become so definite about how bad Mr Brainwash is? Why does he knock Guetta's original film when he would be more likely to applaud something unconventional? For that matter the DVD includes a 15-minute "lawyer's edit" of the original that seems suspiciously like this was only made to be included in Exit itself.

In a way none of this matters. It would have been simple for another person to be taping; somebody familiar with the area remarked that one of the decade-old shots must be that old since it doesn't show some recent buildings; etc. The entire thing could be completely legit but what seems plausible (though "likely" is hard to judge) is that Brainwash was actually a Banksy et al project so Exit is more or less documenting a hoax without itself being a hoax (if such a distinction is possible).

So having written all this I suppose Exit does in some way play with the idea of what is real though it's notable that this only comes from extra-textual information. Watching the film there's no tip-off even if moments do feel a bit out of place or staged but then documentaries have been doing that as long as there have been documentaries. What to me is more problematic is the subject. The street artists are mostly of minor interest, more on the level of craft than art. Really, thousands of images of Andre the Giant's face with the word "obey"? Gosh that's really sticking it to our consumerist society! This may be why the film's interviewees continually mention how subversive this is but only once notes that by the time the film opens this stuff was about two decades old. Banksy turns out to be something almost completely different - imaginative, inventive, sometimes ambiguous and often with what can only be described as a real aesthetic charge. (In fact it wouldn't be too surprising if "Banksy" turned out eventually to be a collective name rather than an individual's.) Which is yet another reason the film's final half hour focusing on the sub-Warhol Brainwash and done in reality show will-he-succeed-or-not mode becomes so tedious.

It's a commonplace idea that today we're in a society of images and shifting realities so maybe that's why so many reviewers are interpreting Exit as being somehow about those processes. But if so the film is fairly toothless. The quote that's often included in reviews comes near the end: "At the same time, the joke's on.... Well, I'm not sure who the joke's on. I'm not even sure there is a joke." This is presented as an insight but I feel it should be taken at face value - there's just not as much here as most of us would have liked to see.

recent viewing

2011-01-23T11:50:00.000-05:00

Jonah Hex (Jimmy Hayward 2010) - When I first heard a Jonah Hex film was being made I thought it's about time. There's potential, a huge backlog of stories and Hex could appeal to a post-Deadwood audience. There wouldn't need to be any updating or revision - in fact Hex would make a great TV series and could fit onto either network or cable. Still, my expectations weren't too high and the result is far below that. The entire thing is basically an episode of The Wild Wild West (even down to Lance Reddick in a too-brief Artemus Gordon role and an appearance by President Grant) with a hint of Django-ish spaghetti Western thrown in. (The machine guns and coffin seem almost like Django references but I wouldn't be surprised if nobody connected with Jonah Hex had seen that film.) Hex is given a supernatural ability that's not in the comics (as far as I know anyway - there are a lot of comics) and since this ability really just fills in a couple of plot points that could easily have been done more realistically I suspect this is a holdover from an earlier script. In fact with that, a running time of 81 minutes, Megan Fox in an almost non-existant role, mishmashed generic Indians and some oddities about setting (the film is mostly in Virginia and South Carolina but one bad guy heads out the door and is in the Southwest) I further suspect that the whole thing was cobbled together from several scripts and then had possibly some severe post-filming trims. The filmmakers go out of their way to explain that Hex was a "good" Confederate who didn't support slavery, anachronistically refer to terrorists and in a film about the US Centennial omit any mention of the other big news event of the day - Custer's defeat. Then again at least the whole thing is short. Oh and did I mention the scene where a wounded Hex is rescued by his dog running to get help Lassie-style?

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (Shawn Levy 2009) - So since I claimed the original was horrible why would I watch the sequel? Mainly the result of being at my parents' during the holidays and nothing else was on. As it turns out the sequel is actually fairly amusing. And by "fairly amusing" I mean in a nothing-else-was-on-cable way. Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon are still onboard as writers and this time even get small cameos but the film mostly works due to fast pacing, a lot of stuff happening, Amy Adams spouting faux 30s slang and Hank Azaria delivering what is nearly a one-man comedy show proving he should be in nearly every film that comes out.

Cop Out (Kevin Smith 2010) - Why was this not on my Hollywood-can't-make-comedies-anymore post? Merciful amnesia is the most likely explanation. I believe this is Smith's first film as director where he didn't also write (though a couple of out-of-place raunch-humor scenes suggest he tried to add his mark). Apparently the idea was to make a tribute/parody/recreation/something of 80s cop films along Beverly Hills Cop lines, even to the point of recruiting Harold Faltermeyer for the music (at least when 20+ year-old-songs aren't being blasted at us). And no, I have no idea why anybody would want to do that. The story is confusing, the jokes thud, Tracy Morgan is almost unwatchable, the pacing limps. Only the indestructible Bruce Willis and goofy Seann William Scott have any kind of dignity or grace.

The Librarian: Quest for the Spear (Peter Winther 2004) - Another why-did-he-watch-this film? Well, io9 had a piece about heroic librarians that made this sound like it might be interesting. Nope. The writers seem to have been going on automatic and be competely unfamiliar with any similar work (maybe because it's fantasy and only geeks do those?). So there's no explanation of what the library really is or who is intended to use it (actually it's far closer to an archive), a peculiar one-librarian-at-a-time backstory that doesn't really make much sense, mostly very obvious mythological references, etc. And you have to wonder if this is all so secret then what about the security guards or if the library houses such powerful artifacts then why don't they prevent the robbery and why an inexperienced librarian for an obviously powerful organization only gets one assistant and so forth. The script is executed in a fairly stodgy TV-movie style and appears to have been shot mostly in front of greenscreens. Bob Newhart and Jane Curtin should have been more prominent.

Unstoppable (Tony Scott 2010) - A b-movie pumped up with a-level money and talent which seems mostly a waste from the finished work. I saw 1985's Runaway Train (partly based on a Kurosawa script apparently) so long ago that I don't remember much about it but I'd be surprised if Unstoppable is any improvement. There's a little bit of human interest backstory thrown in like the writer learned from a how-to book but I doubt anybody would miss that if it was gone. It's nice to see an action film that doesn't have guns since usually the kind of situations that would fit that tend to be absorbed into disaster films or adventures. The oddest thing in fact about Unstoppable is that the government agency man is presented as quite competant and smart - this time it's the slimy business people that do the bad things.

Tangled (Nathan Greno & Byron Howard 2010) - Another in the default mode of high-profile kids movies - injokes for the grownups, plenty of parodies, smart ass attitude, celeb voices. (There's an entire other world of low-budget kids films that hardly anybody without children sees - I probably haven't since my niece and nephew got old enough that these didn't interest them any more.) Tangled is completely in that trend but even so it still seems a bit slight, almost feels like there's not enough story. As it is the filmmakers have enough trouble balancing the fairy tale aspect (where it makes sense that Rapunzel would never have stepped out of the tower or a land full of smugglers, soldiers and hunters wouldn't know about the tower anyway) with more current narrative expectations. Trying to update it makes you question the fairy tale part, at least in the way it's done here. Alan Menken supplies the music and why couldn't they have found somebody else? It's not like the country isn't crawling with fine songwriters. Imagine what Stephin Merritt could have done.

The future of music?

2011-01-16T22:03:00.003-05:00

Ann Powers has a new piece about music's "whole new way of doing business" but it's one of those think pieces newspapers generate that extrapolate wildly from a small sample. After all whether the writer is fer it or agin it they have to make it big to attract readers (the arts section version of if-it-bleeds). Doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong - for all I know fluid remixes and unstable musical configurations are where we're heading. But as usual with these pieces Powers is overestimating both the changes and the potential audience for what's happening. After all up until recordings achieved dominance over radio and sheet music (and to some extent live performance) after WW2 music was always in a state of "remix" and process. Classical is constantly an arena of interpretation, folk music a mirror maze of variations and pop itself dealt in multiple versions for decades. (That's one reason the older pop covers of rock, such as Pat Boone's Little Richard, are usually misinterpreted - they were dealing with rock as with any other trend only to have the ground rules changed so much that future listeners incorrectly thought this was bandwagon-jumping.) Some of the changes listed in the piece seem a bit odd. After all whether music was made on an iPad or a laptop or a desktop makes pretty much no difference unlike her example of an electric solid-body guitar which doesn't sound the same. But there are numerous other instances - artist-run labels from the 1950s onward (Mingus is the earliest I've been able to find), fan-only releases (even the Beatles did this), Throbbing Gristle releasing recordings of every live show they did, countless limited-editions, white-label and anonymous techno/electronica, punk one-offs, disco 12-inches, and so forth. I even got Chumbawamba's early albums years ago by sending a blank cassette and a stamped, self-addressed envelope to a guy in NYC who'd duplicate and send it back - a completely authorized alternative distribution system (which is why I was sure I'd misunderstood the name when a radio announcer on a commercial station played what turned out to be their only hit).

Still, the piece is right that it's great to see experiments but as Milton Babbitt might have remarked who's listening? I'm not aware of anybody I know tracking any of this stuff down not even the Gaiman fans or the college students where I work. (And Powers' labelling Gaiman "process art"? He's not Alvin Lucier.) That's where I think the grand claims in the piece fall apart but we'll have to wait another decade or so to know for sure. Really, most people are going to hear something on the radio or that a friend sent then go to iTunes to get it. Most of these experiments aren't even intended for the mass audience (well possibly Radiohead's pay-as-you-please album might have been) but are for the fans, obsessives and, well, critics.

The bigger question that the piece wisely only hints at is how all this distribution flux will actually affect the music. I can imagine somebody downloading that new MIA mixtape because they've heard good things about her (and maybe an earlier song or two) and then deciding she's way overrated (because the release is clearly a throwaway). And those early Kanye mixes didn't seem to have any effect on the final release which I can't imagine would have been any different whether they were put out or not. But who knows maybe this will create the listeners for rougher or less "finished" pieces or a taste for more inventive music. But I doubt it.

Starting shows - The Unit & Stargate SG-1

2011-01-12T20:37:00.004-05:00

Watched the first disc for each of two shows.

The Unit is one I was aware of without paying any attention until recently learning that David Mamet was the creator. How could I pass that up? Well unfortunately from these first four episodes there's not much Mamet-like about it. I didn't expect anything on the order of his stark Spartan, a sort of American Le Samourai, but this is even more standard network. Don't know if Mamet wanted it this way or it's a compromise or if just the first eps are laying the groundwork. So far each ep is divided into two parallel stories - one about the anti-terrorist unit's mission of the week and the other about the at-home wives dealing with being at home. I really hope it gets a bit more complex than this because so far it feels very outdated with the men out hunting and the women cooking. Not helping is that at the start the women appear Stepford-Wife-ish in their blank comittment to the secrecy of the unit, so much that I thought this was deliberate but it might have been intended to be completely serious. The unit's activities also seem a bit odd (though the show is supposedly based on a memoir about Delta Force). In these eps they're in Afghanistan, the Serengeti, Indonesia, Idaho and Los Angeles. For all I know this is how Delta Force actually operates but it seems a bit scattered if not actually illegal (something they pay lip service to for Indonesia). There are a few story glitches such as sending one soldier out to nearby forest to infilitrate an assassination mastermind's cabin without ever explaining how anybody knew even roughly where he was. Still I'm an action film junkie and this works well enough that I'll likely finish the first season.

Stargate SG-1 is something I also never paid any attention to until recently starting to hear good things about it and the related series. The original movie is just godawful, notable only for Kurt Russell having one of the worst haircuts in film history. The first disc of the series is the double-length pilot and two eps. The pilot actually was a nice lead-in with a consciously b-movie feel (seemingly modelled on the first Star Trek series) and setting up some potentially interesting stories like a renegade alien warrior joining the team and a refugee crisis. It's got humor without going completely tongue-in-cheek and keeps a fairly brisk pace. The two eps make me wonder about the rest of the show. One is a decent story about an alien infestation that's familiar but at least not boring. It's a change from the pilot though and in fact even resolves the refugee story completely off-screen. (They're sent back to the original planet even though that was not a possibility before.) The next ep is called "Emancipation" and is as dully heavy-handed as anything I've seen. The basic idea is that a world based roughly on the Mongols keeps women in a second-class position (and one thing about the show seems to be that these cultures transplanted from Earth in the past never evolve over the centuries). The woman physicist/soldier doesn't like this and by the end, well, emancipates them. So the team just happens to end up with the one tribe where the leader wants this to happen then they decide it's their role to change the social and political structure (with a tiny bit of discussion just as when Kirk justifies ignoring The Prime Directive yet again) then they show magic sticks (ie guns) that awe the natives just as any cheesy b-movie and so on. The capper is when this desk-jockey physicist who had "level three" hand-to-hand combat training fights a hardened warrior who has been doing this his whole life and inexplicably defeats him - an ending made all the worse because there's a potential reason within the story that is completely ignored (that the warrior wanted his daughter to live so he lost as a way for that to happen and still save face). I'll certainly give this another disc because after all Babylon 5 might have been the greatest TV show ever but it had at least one huge clinker ("Infection" I'm looking at you).

Best Films 2010

2011-01-09T12:28:00.006-05:00

The best I saw from January 1 to December 31, 2010. (And last year's list.)

1. The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch 2009)

2. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson 2007)

3. The New World (Terrence Malick 2005)

4. In the Loop (Armando Iannucci 2009)

5. Fantastic Mr Fox (Wes Anderson 2009)

6. The Red Shoes (Michael Powell 1948)

7. Coraline (Henry Selick 2009)

8. Le Roman d'un Tricheur / Story of a Cheat (Sacha Guitry 1936)

9. Platform (Jia Zhang-ke 2000)

10. A Prophet (Jacques Audiard 2009)

11. Voy a explotar (Gerardo Naranjo 2008)

Honorable: Trafic (Jacques Tati 1971), Classe Tous Risques (Claude Sautet 1960), Horror Rises from the Tomb (Carlos Aured 1973), House (Nobuhiko Obayashi 1977), Iron Man 2 (Jon Favreau 2010), Jennifer's Body (Karyn Kusama 2009), Le Quai des Brumes (Marcel Carné 1938), Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich 2010), The Crazies (Breck Eisner 2010)

Worst: Stargate, Repo Men, Cop Out, Kick-Ass, Predators, Birdemic: Shock and Terror, Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton 2010), The Incredible Hulk, I Love You, Man, The Ugly Truth, GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Dead Snow, Of Time and the City, Night at the Museum, National Treasure: Book of Secrets

The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski 2010)

2011-01-03T22:28:00.002-05:00

Every year there is a movie or two that gathers critical acclaim for inexplicable reasons. The Ghost Writer made both of Entertainment Weekly's year-end lists, fourth on the Village Voice poll, fourth on Film Comment's poll and though it didn't place in Sight & Sound's it's on several of the individual lists.

So why? Did they choose this as a token classed-up genre film to praise? Think Polanski is due more recognition? Needed something to fill out their list? Actually believe it's seriously political? Listed to too many other critics?

The film plays out almost like a ghost story - moody, slow-moving, portents of danger, a mysterious death. In fact I actually wondered for much of the first hour if we'd find out at the end that the ghost writer (he's not named) would turn out to be an actual ghost. (One of the DVD extras reveals that Robert Harris and Polanski screened Sunset Boulevard before filming though apparently never going that far with the narration they later abandoned.) The catch is that unlike some similar horror movies that play off mood--such as the late Jean Rollin's--The Ghost Writer pays attention to the story as important and it really takes a long time to get to the point. There are the elements of a thriller but stretched out until they almost become pointless and I really doubt that was the intention. (Jarmusch's The Limits of Control is a smarter, funnier and far more radical reimagining of the thriller.) The film really would have been improved if half an hour was cut, not to the point of making it more slam-bang action but at least so we're spared watching Ewan McGregor spend long stretches seemingly trying to remember where he's supposed to be standing.

I suppose the other reasons for the acclaim may be the idea that it's character-driven and political. But the ghost writer is pretty much a blank, given no family, no political opinions, probably no friends and even just filling in for an earlier ghost writer. More or less the only other characters are a barely written assistant, the former prime minister who would have seemed almost the same except for Pierce Brosnan and then his wife as really the only one who comes across as a traditional "fully developed" character (though again much of the credit will have to go to Olivia Williams who manages to be both abrasive and, well, haunted at the same time). The political angle is actually kept to the right tone in the film but is certainly over-rated by many critics. Certainly many of us wondered why Tony Blair always seemed so supportive of the US and if this answer is implausible it's one that you'll pause for just a second.

I have to admit that the film builds to a clever ending, the kind that too many viewers might be tempted to dismiss as obvious but of course that's only after seeing it. And the final shot is a nice touch. Responding to critics like this makes the film sound bad which it's not but then it's also not really worth making an effort to see.

Forewards

2010-12-26T14:26:00.003-05:00

Nothing of value really to post but that's one point of blogging right? Some kind of quasi-Beckett nothing to say but will say it anyway attitude.

So - book forewards. My simple rule is never read them in advance for fiction but usually for non-fiction. And the simple reason for the simple rule is the foreward potentially ruining the story. A good example is Pankaj Mishra's foreward to Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur (a fantastic and highly recommended book by the way). Mishra blithely reveals the ending of the novel and in a good bit of detail. That may or may not matter in some cases (today most people who read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd know beforehand the identity of the killer) but this is one novel where the resolution is not only in some doubt up to almost the end but has a haunting and effective coda that Mishra also reveals.

It doesn't help that Mishra's foreward is mostly pointless anyway. The only thing of real value is to place Farrell's book in the context of an entire subgenre of Mutiny novels that few Americans like myself, even the Anglophilic ones, are likely to know existed. (Actually I'd guess few Brits do nowadays either.) I also think of Ray Bradbury's foreward to the NYRB collection of John Collier's stories that while a nice little memory of Collier says almost nothing about this mostly forgotten writer. That book could have used a page of biography much like you get with a Penguin Classic. In fact Collier sounds like a full biography would be worthwhile. (And another by the way but those Collier stories are amazing - superficially little twist-ending pieces but greatly imaginative and surprisingly resonant.)

So why couldn't the foreward have become an afterward? In fact why aren't most forewards to novels/short story collections moved to the end? I'd guess it's partly tradition and probably even more marketing. The foreward's author is usually an additional selling point such as Bradbury with the Collier. I'm not really knocking the marketing - NYRB for instance frequently matches an appropriate foreward writer with each book.

B5 / BSG

2010-12-26T10:16:00.005-05:00

An episode early in Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica has a shaman-ish person tell the Lucy Lawless Cylon that she will indeed hold The Special Baby in her arms. By the end of the episode that happens.

In the very first episode of Babylon 5 (after the pilot) Londo has a dream that he and G'Kar will strangle each other to death. This makes sense because not only are they fighting each other but they're more or less trying to wipe out each other's race. The dream comes true but it's a couple of seasons later and when it happens means something entirely different than what we originally thought.

This moment in BSG is when I realized just how much the show is if not exactly picking up pieces from B5 then following on ground it had cleared. The difference is that B5 is a richer, more complex show (at least so far - I have a season and a half to go of BSG). In this example I still have no idea why BSG had this little prediction because it means nothing and as far as I can tell doesn't hint at anything greater. It's almost like the BSG creators said "wouldn't it be cool" but didn't think it through. In B5 how the characters move from hatred to their final stage is one of the main stories of the show and thematically parallels the other stories. It's also structurally a strategy frequently used in B5 where a few times we're told what will happen but it's not quite as we'd expect, or more broadly and commonly times when a character changes or reveals something over time. (There are too many of the latter but some worth noting are the comic-relief character who turns out to be the first to stand up to the Shadows, the loyal aide who betrays Sinclair in a moment of weakness, the closest to an actually "evil" person Bester revealing something from his past.)

What else did BSG draw from or at least echo B5? The military vs civilian authority conflict (in fact a major theme of B5 is the proper use of authority and who is able to claim it), the focus on religion (though I'm still not sure where BSG is going with this but B5 is more varied and realistic), an alcoholic character (but then this is a go-to problem for lazy writers - though again B5 focused more on the struggle while BSG seems to have just switched it on and off as needed), the conflict of possibly misguided secret police (in BSG the New Caprica human police story is resolved in a couple of eps but B5 takes the Night Watch story much longer and to some degree more morally complicated) and more. BSG even has an ep where one character thinks that they may have triggered the Cylon attack but then they're let off the hook because it was clearly "thousands" of things that created that result. B5 brings on the person whose misunderstanding caused the Minbari War and thereby almost completely wiped out the human race - in the B5 world nobody gets a last-minute reprieve. (Clearly the BSG creators could have come up with this idea without ever even having heard of B5 but the basic idea is so similiar that it seems almost like a cop or an hommage, depending on your view.)

But there's another area where I'm surprised BSG falls below B5 and that's the background and the supporting characters. In BSG we get the initial Cylon attack and bits about the previous conflict but that's about it. BSG has about a dozen main characters with only a few others appearing from time to time. By contrast in B5 we know a lot about the Minbari War which ended before the show starts not to mention the Narn-Centauri conflict, the history of the other Babylon stations, etc. There are also numerous other characters, some who appear very briefly for a specific plot point but others more frequently for other purposes. (One of the most interesting is the Minbari warrior Neroon who appears in just a few eps - initially he's a source of conflict but in a nice bit of writing comes around to the other side without really changing character.) B5 also had a few "gimmick" episodes - many series have an ep done as a news report (MASH for instance). But some of B5's most memorable are these gimmick shows - the one told from the viewpoint of two maintenance men, Neil Gaiman's "Halloween" ep and definitely the last ep of Season 4 (the one that has sections set 100, 500, 1000 and a million years after the main story). BSG mostly avoids the gimmick eps or in one case (the boxing ep) badly botches it.

I think there's a reason for this and it relates to why BSG gathered such acclaim while B5 will remain underrated. BSG was created by TV writers who happen to like SF but B5 was created by a SF fan who happens to be a TV writer. So Straczynski wrote "real" SF - densely interrelated, deep backstory, morally complex. The BSG creators streamlined all of that - fewer characters with a simpler story and only a few sidestories. It feels like no accident that BSG's "other" look completely like humans (with the metal Cylons rarely appearing). Altogether people who don't like SF (or aren't willing to try it) can feel like they're open-minded by watching a SF show while mostly seeing it as an unusual war series. No having to deal with B5's lizard people, Renaissance-excess-looking humanoids, sentient insects, mist people, cyborgs, psionics and so forth. Viewers can also watch an ep or two of BSG and get some of the gist of the show but for B5 you have to watch much more. Much of B5's main point doesn't come together until the end of the first season (on purpose) and it takes nearly the entire show for the full architecture to come out. As I pointed out before B5 is a show where change is the main point - if nothing else the big conflict appears to be familiar Good vs Evil but eventually turns out to be something quite different. I still have hopes that BSG will surprise me and come together towards the end but at the moment am not too hopeful.

Bernstein's music meaning

2010-12-19T22:14:00.003-05:00

I watched the first two of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts. The first is about how music doesn't have any real meaning, that music is only "about" music. Bernstein takes part of Strauss' Don Quixote and comes up with a story about Superman rescuing a wrongly convicted man from prison as an example of how the music could fit a completely different story (though I wonder if rhetorically a better approach would have been to come up with a story that was not obviously the wrong one--and also to not tell the audience beforehand). Then you get the other usual examples such as how a single note doesn't convey anything though adding a second starts a melody and rhythm still without conveying any meaning. And so on.

But the second concert is "What Makes American Music" and immediately I think you can see the problem. If music actually doesn't meaning anything then it can't mean "American". It's impossible to tell whether Bernstein realized this or had another explanation (a shard of pottery might not mean anything but can still be identified as having been created by Greeks or Egyptians). But much of his exploration about the Americanness of American music rests on what has to be called meaning - the "openess" that recalls our West, the "youth" and "vitality" that parallels our young country, the mixing of different styles that comes from our various immigrant traditions, etc.

The second episode also stands out for a current viewer for reasons that clearly nobody then thought about. When Bernstein mentions some countries where our "forefathers" originated and then has kids in the audience shout out their own, well nothing African is ever mentioned. Nor Asia for that matter but it's the jazz that he discusses later that had such a huge impact on American music. I also couldn't help noticing that the orchestra was completely male (a quick search couldn't come up with the first woman in the NY Philharmonic - many firsts but I wanted the first permanent member and didn't feel like spending more than a couple of minutes looking). One oddity is that when Bernstein played some brief bits of music and asked what country they reminded the audience of - one got a roar of "Hungary". I don't know if things were different in 1958 or in NYC or maybe in just the kind of people who would go to such a concert but I don't have the foggiest idea of what Hungarian music might sound like (not counting Bartok or the Galloping Coroners), in fact realized I couldn't even point to Hungary on the map. (I tested it and picked out the Ukraine which is one country over so hey good for an American right?)

Music has always notoriously been the most abstract art and consequently often seen as the most pure. ("All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.") And I think it really doesn't have meaning in most instances - that music is really just a tool for thinking about music. But it can have a somewhat provisional meaning from repeated uses in certain contexts. How many of us whenever we hear pizzicato strings think of somebody tiptoeing? Or interpret certain kinds of ambiguously tonal music as tense or scary? Use in movies and cartoons (and I'd guess before that in opera, theatre and program music) creates an assigned meaning to certain music even if in practice it may not last. (Bernstein uses the William Tell Overture as an example because it brings to mind the Lone Ranger which was more true in 1958 than today - I haven't seen the show in probably 35 years and that overture really no longer brings up any cowboys for me.) Whether music can create or evoke or recall emotions is an even trickier topic though Bernstein apparently assumes it can. I just think of all the free jazz fans I know who claim that such music is pure, unmediated emotion which to me seems almost completely wrong. You have to learn to interpret say Brotzmann in such a way and to me much of this doesn't seem to have the same emotion than other fans hear (it's usually funny to me while they often think it's angry). And that's not even getting to the Ornette/Braxton branch of free jazz.

Can Hollywood make comedies any more?

2010-12-14T19:25:00.001-05:00

If this was one of those thought pieces beloved by Sunday paper editors I could come up with reasons that there seem to be so few decent comedies coming out of Hollywood but most of the time those pieces seem either too obvious or too implausible. So let's just look at some recent misfires:

I Love You, Man (John Hamburg 2009) - The basic idea is to make a genre-pure romantic comedy but based on a male friendship, something Friends did once or twice but in much less time and to much greater effect. I'm really not sure if the genre itself can't support a feature based on this idea or if just that this film can't. If there weren't some people visible on screen I'd almost think the entire film was written, shot, edited and scored by computers and nowadays maybe the machines just created the people-images as well. It's never good when the supporting cast upstages the front line folk and in this case people like Thomas Lennon, Jon Favreau and JK Simmons do just that. They're about the only time the film doesn't feel planned on pure, predictable conventions.

I Love You, Beth Cooper (Chris Columbus 2009) - Yep another "I love you" film and one that I watched because somewhere I'd heard the book was actually good. The movie is not. It's basically an 80s teen comedy minus the nudity - guess "basically" should really be "almost exactly". It's the nerd, the popular people, the violent jock, the late-night highjinks, etc. Still the entire thing feels off, like it was shot completely on a back lot (actually Canada which is the same thing). It doesn't look like anywhere really and the characters don't act like anybody particularly. In fact the film is so badly done that I didn't even get much of the basic premise until almost halfway through - the nerd has an idealized version of Beth in his mind and the movie is supposed to be about how the reality doesn't meet the ideal except that the "reality" is she's a bad driver (played for laughs), has an abusive boyfriend (more or less also for laughs or at least plot complications) and the most un-ideal thing she does is kiss a store clerk so she can buy beer when she's not old enough (which apparently in the book is something a bit different). None of this comes across as ideal-shattering unless maybe you're a completely blinkered nerd who didn't pay attention to nearly anything.

Date Night (Shawn Levy 2010) - Middle-class folk lost in the big city or lost in a comedy of errors. Either way it feels some like Scorsese's After Hours which isn't exactly an achievement. The most interesting aspect of the film is to see Tina Fey actually cracking jokes and realize how far romantic comedy has fallen from the screwball era - back then we got individual, strong-willed women like Harlow or Hepburn sparring with equally sharp men but today it's almost timid women like Katherine Heigl being taught the true meaning of life by some "unconventional" man. (See the next two films.) In any case it's not that Date Night is so implausible and apparently takes place in a NYC as small as 24's LA but that there's so little, well, comedy. A bit where Fey and Carell pretend to be Euro-trash at a restaurant feels like an SNL sketch plopped into the film and while it's nothing special more like that could have helped. Again there's some good bits by supporting cast (James Franco, Mark Wahlberg).

My Life in Ruins (Donald Petrie 2009) - Yep overworked career woman taught to be carefree by a carefree man. Or in this case two - Richard Dreyfuss provides a mental shakeup while some Greek hunk takes care of the physical. (I'm sure in a century viewers will make fun of our era - "Did they think everything could be cured by sex?") I never saw My Big Fat Greek Wedding and so have no idea whether Vardalos is really just a supporting actress stuck into a lead or if this film is just a misfire. It hardly matters. Probably the NPR-ish take on Greece should grate but at some point the whole thing feels like some pointless sitcom passing by while you zone out on the couch.

The Ugly Truth (Robert Luketic 2009) - And yet again a career woman etc etc. I'll admit that 27 Dresses had its moments but not this one. The idea seems to have been to replicate Knocked Up and thus a fairly standard PG-13 romantic comedy got laced with so much graphic sex chat that even Kevin Smith might have asked to dial it back a bit. None of that adds anything at all to the film and this is one case where if the filmmakers had trusted the genre conventions to do most of the work they could have turned out a better film or if not better then at least less annoying.

Night at the Museum (Shawn Levy 2006) - The only career woman this time is barely in the film but maybe that was a mistake. After successfully ignoring this for a few years my brother suggested I would like it. He was wrong. As a big-budget, fx-driven event film this is no more imaginative or entertaining than you would expect. It takes forever to get going, runs like thudding clockwork and for a film that ostensibly has some historical content seems to have no actual historical work done. Just think what Terry Gilliam might have done with it. And with Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon credited as writers I bet there's a much better early draft of the script somewhere.

Monsters vs Aliens (Rob Letterman & Conrad Vernon 2009) - Maybe a kids movie doesn't go here but since the default setting for such is comic I'm going with it. Despite a few nice film references at the start (House of Wax, etc) this pretty quickly falls into a routine misfits-save-the-day story that rarely bothers to take advantage of the potential in such a premise. If for the titles only Monsters Inc is an obvious comparison but the whole thing feels like the script was a draft away from being truly finished.

Poor ole literary fiction

2010-12-12T22:28:00.002-05:00

Edward Docx has a piece in The Guardian today which "argues that even good genre fiction doesn't bear comparison with works of true literary merit". His targets are primarily Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown which is really the low-hanging fruit but Docx of course is going after the whole genre idea. He at least is very clear about the reason which is that all genres are "by definition a constrained form of writing" and he's absolutely right because that is in fact what makes a genre a genre just as a fruit, say, contains seeds or a train by definition travels on a predetermined track. You could say this is a kind of straw-man argument and point out that "literary fiction" is itself a genre in the sense that it is also constrained (middle-class life dramas told in mostly straight-forward but "elegant" prose with of course small wings of magic realism for fantasy-that-dare-not-speak-its-name, historical (he mentions Mantel and Roth) for variety, experimental for imaginative approaches, etc). Now I'll admit his snide comments on Lee Child's statement are somewhat funny (even if I think the reason he mentions Crime and Punishment as a thriller is because he doesn't actually know what a thriller is) and that most genre fiction is purely a way to pass time at best - but then isn't most literary fiction also a way to pass time for people who don't want to read about gunfights, vampires or unsolved murders? And certainly some such readers believe the mere presence of gunfights etc means that the story is of less value than one about a middle-class life drama. Because sometimes those genre stories can deal more effectively with certain subjects or ideas or emotions than "literary" fiction - in fact at some point the genre story is literary rather than just output of the publishing business. My guess is that Docx doesn't want to deal with work on such a case-by-case basis and it's hard to blame him completely - I'd guess that in the romance section of my bookstore is something of value but there's no way I'm spending the time to sift through it. (And I have to wonder about Docx including Robert Harris among Tom Clancy and Danielle Steel - on this side of the Atlantic I get the impression that Harris is considered of a higher level - if nothign else I thought his Imperium much more substantial than Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety which I'm comparing only because they're both historical novels by writers mentioned in this article.) Roger Ebert often says something to the effect that he doesn't care what a film is about but how it is about it. Sure a genre is more than the story but also how it's told - from my experience thrillers or mysteries tend towards a blunt, terse style while some SF and fantasy can use a more lush even long-winded style even to the point of a broad vocabulary that most "literary" writes would be afraid to use. But Docx would just as soon not deal with any of this.

Summer movies

2010-11-07T18:57:00.002-05:00

The time to cover last summer's movies would be in a couple of years when there's an opportunity to see most of them but by then nobody cares, if indeed anybody does now. This summer I missed more than usual due to the "lost summer" effect of moving our store and then getting sick. But in any case:

Iron Man 2 (Jon Favreau 2010) - The first film filled exactly what most people expect comic books to be: one-dimensional but lovably eccentric characters, straight-forward conflicts resolved by hitting, few story complications and politically right-wing. The sequel is a vast improvement, giving Stark something harder to resolve (alcoholism which I actually forgot was not in the first film), a better supporting cast and true comic book pull-out-all-the-stops action. It's got plenty of lapses - how for instance does Whiplash know Stark is at the race when that was a last-minute decision? Why is Pepper made such a helpless damsel? And of course what has to be one of the most jaw-dropping scenes where a legal assistant shows up when Stark is training and then he makes her get into the ring to fight. I guess "harassment" (not to mention "battery") is for the next film. My suspicion is that this entire scene was done after principle shooting when they realized that the Black Widow pretty much came out of nowhere and this was a way to hint at it. All in all it's too bad that Favreau has apparently claimed the film was something of a mistake.

Predators (Nimród Antal 2010) - My brother warned me this was bad but hey it had to be somewhat amusing right? Nope, not at all. The entire thing feels like a direct-to-video Predator ripoff with stock characters (hey it's another "black ops" guy!), incredibly tedious fights, leaden banter and quite implausible plot twists. Danny Trejo should have been in more of it and Laurence Fishburne brings a bit of spark when he's onscreen but otherwise you're mainly wondering how the Predators could infiltrate human society enough to pick this group of n'er-do-wells.

Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich 2010) - After a sequel that in many ways was better than the first the Toy Story series comes up with a clever finish that's still the weakest of the three films. It's hard to recapture the freshness of the original idea and to some degree that inability, a sort of routineness, is what the film is about. Maybe that's why it seems less like a kids film with some business added for the adults than an adult film with business for the kids. Obvious I guess but then I don't have much else worth saying.

Did I really only see four summer movies this year? (Inception was in an earlier post.) Apparently so.

Alternate endings to Inception

2010-10-12T19:35:00.002-04:00

Watching Inception I kept thinking "It better not end with Was It All A Dream? It better not end with Was It All A Dream?" And of course it ended with Was It All A Dream? This was pretty much unnecessary because the point of the film is the difficulty of telling reality from dream (interesting only for college freshmen or terminal stoners) and in fact one character even remarks that the entire story feels more like a dream creation, pointing out the action-film chases and the evil corporation though she could easily have added the barely there characters, the lack of backstory, the thin settings or for that matter a character named Ariadne who designs mazes. This latter approach is far more fruitful - the relationship or really parallels of genre construction to dream logic. But then the film that most people seem to think Inception is was actually made last year with far more smarts and texture and resonance and confusion (and with one single audacious edit that outdoes the entirity of Inception) - Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control.

(And somewhere I have to add, so it might as well be here, that Philip Dick also made the same kind of what-is-reality stories that Inception is clearly descends from. The major exception is that there was a political aspect to Dick's work even in his bonkers late-career books - who controls "reality" or "image", who manipulates it and for what purpose? No surprise that's not a major topic in a Hollywood blockbuster but Nolan clearly didn't even try to sneak it in.)

But the ending went even further by rubbing the arbitrariness in our faces - if that final shot had lasted just another few seconds the question would have been resolved, mostly anyway. Unlike say Lost in Translation or Broken Flowers where the meaning of the end depends on a conversation that the viewer can't hear, Inception feels more like a con game and a much-too-long one at that. You can claim some of this is the genre conventions that the film uses - why Cobb says three-level dreams and inceptions are possible but then doesn't reveal any further information. We know that later he'll provide that information but the genre requires that it be withheld at this point. The better part of the ending is one that apparently wasn't much discussed (but then I haven't searched through a lot of commentary) - was the inception successful? Does Fischer fils break up the company?

So here are some suggestions for other ways the film could (and maybe should) have ended:

* Cobb starts spinning the top as before, camera on the table. Pan up to his face, he sees his children and then walks away. Fade out. No more images of the spinning (or not) top.

* Cobb sees his children, looks at the spinning top for a second then picks it up and puts it in his pocket.

* Same last shot as current but the kids run in and accidentally bump the table, knocking the top off.

* Same last shot but Miles (Michael Caine) comes in and picks up the top before it stops or not.

* Last shot continues until the top tips over but it just keeps rolling around and around.

* Top tips over and stops. But the room slowly tips at a small but noticable angle.

* Top tips over and stops. Cobb comes back, looks at it and starts it spinning again.

* Last shot but dolly back where we can't see the top and until there are two figures at the edge of the room on each side of the screen, just watching. They're Mal (the wife) and Ariadne (the architect).

Kick-Ass (Matthew Vaughn 2010)

2010-08-29T23:20:00.002-04:00

Look at it this way: The book is about the limits of fantasies, about a guy who discovers his dream of being a real superhero is boring until it ends up with him stabbed, tortured, humiliated and in true Peter-Parker-style worse off than when he started. Except that Parker at least knows he helped people while Kick-Ass takes down a drug dealer purely by accident and another superhero with even more elaborate fantasies simply executed with a bullet to the head.

The movie is about how fun it would be to live a superhero's life, about how despite a few setbacks that everybody experiences at the start the hero takes down a drug dealer, gets the girl, makes friends and rides a jaunty jetpack around NYC. In short, the movie wallows in the fantasies that the book attacks.

Admittedly the movie starts off more or less the same but there's one scene where you can see it change. Kick-Ass climbs into Katie's open window at night to admit that he's really Dave, her supposedly gay bff, and oh yeah that he's not gay. Despite initial shock and attacking him with sporting equipment she then decides instead to take him to bed and become his girlfriend. The whole thing is so beyond-implausible that I was sure this was an imaginary sequence, even well after the scene had ended. In the book Dave only reveals that he's not gay, prompting Katie to have him beaten up before she taunts him with her boyfriend and has her other friends ridicule him. A bit extreme but not just more plausible but more to the point. (It may also be worth noting that with this change to Katie and the movie having Mindy's mother actually be dead pretty much every woman in the movie becomes a sex object or a nobody like Red Mist's mom. The book won't win any feminist awards but at least there's some autonomy to the characters.)

It's not that the story is too medium-specific to comics but that Vaughn didn't rethink it enough as a movie. Mostly what he did was change the comics references to movie ones (such as Spider-Man and Batman not the book's She-Hulk and Nova), stretch the story too far then force the ending into something more conventional. It appears that he was originally headed towards the book's ending which is why the scene with Hit-Girl's "origin" clearly states that it's not entirely true. No surprise that nearly all the sex from the book is gone - same thing happened with Wanted. And it's one thing to show an 11-year-old girl as a mass murderer but the book's scene where she sniffs cocaine (believing it to be a power enhancer) clearly had to go. It doesn't help that the movie was made on too-obvious sets and a CGI NYC which only makes it more unrealistic. And I'm still not sure why he revealed Red Mist's identity so early unless it's more of the Hollywood idea that audiences hate surprises. (Which certainly doesn't bode well for the adaptation of Chosen.)

The book isn't exactly subtle and Millar wasn't trying to be but it does have its own consistency and some psychological depth. Millar at least shows Hit-Girl reacting to her father's death - the movie just has her shrug it off like some b-movie action star. It's hard to tell if Chloe Moretz and Nicolas Cage were miscast or if they were deliberately playing up the characters' happy talk falseness - falseness that is a key part of the book but that the movie takes as completely true. But then superhero comics have a fairly long tradition of self-examination that's not common in movies and could even be traced (if you're willing to stretch) back to Don Quixote and Northanger Abbey. Kick-Ass the movie had possibilities but it would have required a filmmaker who actually understood the purpose of the story and was willing to follow that path.

The Wire

2010-08-06T08:00:00.000-04:00

I must be sick because descriptions of The Wire (the TV show not the magazine) as a sociological examination of the American city actually sounded good to me. "Complex", "bleak", "stark", "deep" are often used and that's not even getting to the superlatives ("greatest show ever" or some variation is common). So yeah this is definitely my kind of show.

Except, well, I don't think it is. I watched the first two discs (first five episodes) and was very surprised, almost shocked even, at how conventional and un-complex, un-bleak the show is. Just look at it this way: A ragtag team of misfits who don't get along are tucked away in a crumbling basement while trying to take down a criminal mastermind (who Mabuse-like most law enforcement have never even heard of). One has a temper problem, one can't stop talking, one is so righteous that he got busted down to routine duties, etc. Gosh, they even have a lesbian - how broadminded is that! And oh yeah the drug dealers are given almost equal time. One wants to move up in the organization, one is street muscle, one is mostly a businessman, etc. Gosh, they even have a gay drug dealer - how broadminded is that!

And to be honest I don't particularly care about how original the story may or may not be. (Claims that it's based on journalistic reality are of course a way to avoid dealing with the actual show.) What seems most odd is how clumsy it's put together. There are several monologues that are clearly meant as actor showcases - they're blatantly, almost agressively, unrealistic though not to the point that even sympathetic viewers might call them Brechtian. They feel inserted whenever exposition or background or character info is needed. One of them when the drug dealer explains in bizarre detail how he murdered a woman seems oddly placed since it reveals a killer when there was no reason to do so. (And who had the idea for the scene investigating the apartment where the murder happened to have the dialogue be entirely variations on a curse word? That's more like a Saturday Night Live sketch.) David Simon claimed he was making a response to the procedurals that dominate TV crime shows so it makes sense that he would remove the mystery from a murder mystery. Still, in this specific case there's no real benefit unless it's later in the season that I haven't seen yet.

Trying to portray a surveillance society comes in fits even though that's the reference in the series title. One particularly odd moment is a cut to video security camera images of the drug dealers leaving a building and getting into cars. The image itself is pure padding--there isn't the slightest narrative purpose unless they were trying to document modern urban transportation methods--but the jump to a black-and-white video image is jarring for no purpose, especially since it's the only such moment in the episode. We do get bits about the use of pagers and public phones but it's hardly as interesting as Clockers for instance.

For all I know The Wire improves. I keep thinking of watching Babylon 5 the first time and after about the fourth or fifth episode asking some friends who were big supporters (in fact they helped bring it to TNT for the final season) that it was merely ok so far and does it get any better. They said absolutely yes and were absolutely right so I wonder whether The Wire really does get down to business later or whether it stays with this sloppy, half-hearted drama that's not particularly dramatic. There's no way it can retroactively improve these early episodes but there's a chance that with all the basics out of the way it can start moving to worthwhile territory. I just don't think it's worth my time to go along with the journey.

Up in the Air (Jason Reitman 2009)

2010-08-05T21:32:00.002-04:00

Reitman previously gave us the godawful Juno but since Up in the Air is merely pedestrian and predictable I suppose that counts as some kind of progress. It's a movie where as soon as two antagonistic characters are sent on a road trip you know they will come to some kind of mutual admiration. Where the confident young hotshot will learn life isn't what she expects. Where when Clooney's character Ryan decides (on stage during a lecture no less) to surprise visit his girlfriend that she will turn out to have another life. Where an employee that threatens suicide but nobody believes her will follow through. Where when his sister mentions they can't travel anywhere on their honeymoon Ryan will eventually give them some of his hoarded airline miles.

To some degree predictability doesn't much matter since most art depends on it. Many of Shakespeare's plays dealt with stories familiar to the original audiences and Stanley Wells has noted that he even avoided many of the surprise twists often found in work by his contemporaries. What matters in Up in the Air is that Reitman is trying to create an illusion of hard-earned wisdom or at least surprise but the film is as unsurprising (and less imaginative) than, say, 27 Dresses. Apparently the idea is that we see Ryan learn how alienated he really is, how he really does need other people, which seems a little odd given that Ryan and much of the first half is basically comic despite the on-screen firings. As viewers we already know Ryan is alienated just as we know Daffy Duck has a temper problem so seeing their realization doesn't have much point. This isn't a tragedy - we aren't seeing Oedipus have a bad moment or even Falstaff hearing "I know thee not old man".

In fact one of the main problems with Up in the Air is to even consider Ryan alienated. There are after all many people who are perfectly happy in such circumstances, who don't need this intricate web of other people that the film ultimately insists is the norm. Perhaps the most interesting scene is one where Ryan has Natalie "sell" him on the idea of marriage but she sputters because she clearly has never really thought about the "why". (Can you imagine what Hawks or Sturges would have made of this material? Or going a completely different direction Mike Leigh? It's certainly unfair to compare Reitman to them but at least that shows why it's easy to say he wasn't even trying.) By the end of the film it's clear that, even despite Alex's offer of cheerful adultery, Reitman is firmly on the idea that there are no other options other than the most straightforward, mainstream one.

And that's only a problem because unlike a romantic comedy Reitman is pretending to be open-minded. Just look at the scene where Ryan has to convince his sister's fiance to go through with the wedding. Where you might expect some kind of smart dialogue or even quasi-clever argument Ryan simply drones on for a while, just as he previously had been the world's most monotonous inspirational speaker. (Which early in the film I thought was part of the joke but later wondered if there was some disconnect from the script.) An argument could be made that the fiance really doesn't need convincing, that he really wants the wedding but simply needs a push over last-minute jitters, but that's not what's in the film. Are we really supposed to think Ryan is finally being a big brother? Or that his clumsy "do you want to be alone" talk really works?

There is supposedly some kind of topicality in the fact that Ryan is hired to fire people (though the book appeared in 2001). If anything this is even more implausible and ultimately grating. We get brief talking head shots of various reactions to the firings and in one scene Ryan convincing a fired employee that he's now free to pursue his interest in cooking. Are we really supposed to think this is what happens? That the firing was a "good thing"? The only reason I suspect so is the incredibly ill-conceived sequence at the end where another series of talking heads tell us how fortunate they are to have, well, whatever/whoever it is that they have. You probably couldn't come up with a more cynically manipulative "happy" ending and if nothing else it shows that Up in the Air has absolutely nothing to say about the current economic situation or in fact about corporate America. As far as we get from the film the firings are simply something that happens like a tornado. Apart from a bit at the start about Ryan being hired because the actual managers don't have the courage, there's no hint that firings are actual decisions made by actual people and in many cases are not at all necessary - they're done to preserve profitability not to preserve the actual existence of the company. So while viewers are sold on the idea that Ryan offers a humane way to do the firings, that's as far as the film is willing to go.

Should we watch TV?

2010-08-01T10:49:00.003-04:00

Over the past year and a half I've watched more TV that any other time in my life. The trigger was an HD set that I received for Christmas but the accelerants were the wide availability of shows on DVD and some current ones that I actually felt like watching. So I've plowed through entire seasons of many shows while keeping up with several others but at some point it's hard not to wonder whether it was worth the trouble. I watched How I Met Your Mother, for instance, purely because it was on with a group of other shows I liked even though I realized that whatever the show had worthwhile was gone this season (yes even the cliched musical bit) and I watched purely out of habit.

The June 18th Entertainment Weekly said "it's just a fact" that TV is now better than the movies though typically they only mean mainstream Hollywood movies. And it's also worth noting that they're only talking about fiction TV. Their examples include Glee, Modern Family and Lost for the ones I've seen and Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Good Wife and Dexter for the ones I haven't. Now to be fair their examples aren't considered good but "worthy of spirited and enthusiastic discussion" as a kind of weasel way to avoid the glaring fact that Glee is objectively bad (characters so stereotyped they border on offensive, implausible stories that go nowhere, unimaginative staging, a sad conviction that pastiche is art) and burned up all its inspiration in the first half of the season.

But one catch of course in saying that Mad Men is better than current movies is this compares one season (13 episodes) to about six movies. If there are a couple of tedious episodes, a meandering storyline that goes through the entire season and a fair amount of filler that all gets ignored if the overall impact is mostly positive. So to compare that to a far-more-compact movie or two isn't quite a level field.

I'm not really arguing one way or the other whether "TV is better than the movies" but this is really just a long way into my main question whether TV is worth the time involved. I recently started True Blood and even after the third episode the main stories hadn't really been brought into focus - this is after three hours which even an overly long movie would have been already finished. Watching the first season of Fringe I almost gave up until learning what the big reveal would be and that the creators had increased the speed of the story to maintain interest. After seeing the whole season this only made me wonder what it would have been like without that increase because this moved so slowly that it did indeed feel like a waste of time. And at the moment I'm stalled halfway through season three of Lost because it's become so tedious that it's tricky to picture getting through even the rest of this season. (But considering that the general opinion is that I'm at the weakest part of the entire series I'm likely to give it a try.)

Somebody I trust has recommended Damages and in fact it sounds like my kinda show. But what I'm now looking at is whether it's worth going through what would be the equivalent of about 6 movies or 2-3 books for one season. Put that way the answer is a clear "no" but I suspect that at some point I'll actually check out the first ep or two then continue just to finish it.

One reason, actually probably the main reason, that TV creates this idea of "better" is the familiarity factor - you know the characters, the basic story, the parameters so it's comforting to visit this regularly and too often this comfort can be misunderstood as substance. At its best this extended storytelling mode can allow for depth, variety and effects that simply aren't possible in a movie - examples would be Babylon 5, The Sopranos (at least the first four seasons), The Simpsons. Even second and third tier shows can benefit from this though far too often they're just padding out a thin story.

The familiarity factor is why I stuck with How I Met Your Mother until it got to the point that I felt insulted when watching it, or that I'm continuing to watch True Blood even though so far it appears to be completely lightweight. I won't be the first person to suggest that American TV suffers from its insistence on 13 or 24 episode seasons and continuing the show for multiple seasons. Fawlty Towers stands out as nearly perfect because there are only 12 episodes (which was two seasons). Watching True Blood I often wonder why the creators thought to do it as a TV show instead of a movie since so far there's not enough story for an entire season. Something similar happens in comics where a story that would have taken one issue in the 60s now goes on for five or six (and that's not counting all the completely useless spinoffs and miniseries to tie-in to events). Or even books since there was no reason for Harry Potter to take up seven volumes - three would have been more than enough.

Now that the novelty of watching entire seasons on an HD TV has worn off this is the kind of calculation that's becoming more common for me though certainly everybody does it to some degree. To get back to that list I'm sure at some point to check out Mad Men, I like the Dexter books but heard the TV show is watered down and again don't see where there's enough material for a series, Breaking Bad is a toss up and The Good Wife sounds like a real snooze.

Torchwood update

2010-06-07T08:00:00.000-04:00

Just finished the next disc and since one ep ("Random Shoes") is narrated by a ghost I think the show can pretty firmly be considered only partially SF. I'm not especially concerned one way or the other exactly how this or any show might be classified but do think it's interesting how this is marketed. The creators of FlashFoward for instance went way out of their way to claim the show isn't SF but they had two options - either the blackout event was technical in orgin which would make it SF or it was not technical which means supernatural and it's fantasy. But while the FlashForward folk are scared of losing viewers if the show is labelled SF the Torchwood people seem to be latching onto the SF status of Dr. Who as a way to get viewers who might have ignored a Brit version of Supernatural.

In any case, "Random Shoes" is one of those eps where the show goes outside the usual routine - other examples being the documentary on MASH and E.R., the ep told from the viewpoint of two maintenance guys in Babylon 5, the VH1 "where are they now" Simpsons. (Too bad there was no way for 24 to have done an ep about an investigative journalist trying to piece together Jack's career.) In this case it's not just the ghost but that the person was a UFO buff who observed Torchwood only from far away (and which had been set up in an earlier ep). It's mostly well done though a tad too much towards the maudlin carpe diem, life's little things approach.

The other ep on the disc was "They Keep Killing Suzie" which except for a quasi-scientific explanation would have been another resurrected life vampire story with also a positive "appreciate the moments" theme. Well that theme and the genius of bored evil since it does have a clever and pretty unbelievable twist. (And I know I've been in the book business too long when the characters read out an ISBN--the first use of that I can remember in any movie or show--for a Faber edition of Dickinson but when they start with "019" I immediately think that's actually an Oxford number. Turns out I was correct too - why didn't they use the actual ISBN?)

Torchwood

2010-06-06T12:50:00.002-04:00

I'm about halfway through the first season of Torchwood and am pretty hooked despite a few too many cliches ("Some things we aren't meant to know") and too much striving for effect (apparently the best place for a private conversation was for them to crawl out onto the top of a dangerously open domed building). Despite hearing good things about it for a while I had deliberately avoided learning any details and almost gave it a pass when somebody at work told me it's a Dr. Who spinoff - though I might otherwise seem like a strong candidate for Who-fandom, in actuality I've found it mostly pretty dreary. Torchwood though is more like The X-Files and Men in Black but darker, with more plausible/confused characters, better acted and so far more focused. Plus I've heard it only gets better.

But while I'd argue that Dr. Who isn't really science fiction (no consistency, no real effort to even give nominal scientific reasons, too many fantasy elements) Torchwood seems even less so despite actually stating that it's more so. After all Jack constantly talks about "aliens" and "the future" and what could be more SF?

But the second episode was about a body-inhabiting alien and if you removed the meteorite that caused it to land absolutely everything else is really a spiritual possession story, even down to the sexual element which is far more common in such stories than in SF. The mind-reading story is practically a retelling of the familiar "be careful what you wish for" fantasy. That's not even mentioning the (almost-great) fairy episode where Jack doesn't even bother with an SF explanation though he doesn't go so far as to rule one out.

As for Jack - I happened to be reading Julia Briggs' 1977 Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story and came across a statement about the first ghost investigators (Carnacki, John Silence and that ilk):

The psychic doctor is usually an engimatic and unworldly figure whose scattered hints as to his interpretation at first only serve to increase our suspense, while his final explantion often introduces a further level of meaning to the story, or adds conviction by providing a semi-scientific explanation. (p59)

Which sounds exactly like Jack, especially if an extra meaning is added to "his interpretation" so that it not only means his diegetic interpretation but the viewer's interpretation of his character.

But another disc just arrived from Netflix....

What's wrong with American TV & movies

2010-06-02T09:58:00.002-04:00

"Living in America I miss the British sense of humour, that cynicism and sense of realism. It's almost impossible to explain to people. If you say something to Americans, they believe what you say. How ridiculous is that? They take you at face value, so I have to have these injections of ironic sanity to keep me on an even keel."

Richard Thompson in The Guardian.

It's not the sense of humor but this perceived value to bluntness, to face value. How often do you hear people (Americans) saying "straight talker" as a synonym for "truth teller"? Praising somebody who "tells it like it is." Of course they're wrong - it's far easier to lie with a blunt statement than a more elaborate one because the detectors come up for the elaborations.

So the point is that in show after show after movie after movie you have characters talk with nothing behind them. At any moment they'll launch into a description of their motives which are invariably correct. They act like particles in a physics equation. This is even when the motives are so blatantly obvious you'd figure a beginning screenwriter would muss them up a bit instead of actually underlining them.

In a commentary for an ep of The Sopranos David Chase remarked how fun it is to write a show where everybody lies and that's become a kind of touchstone for me. Not that characters should lie but don't real people do things for reasons they don't understand? Or their reasons are conflicted, distorted, mere justifications or even outright wrong? I'm not pushing "realism" or even a pointless notion like "well-rounded characters" so much as simple dramatic interest. And it's worth noting that what I'm describing is pretty rare in American films up until maybe the 60s and then slowly increasing so there's clearly a commercial motive that's trying to make the works as streamlined as possible.

Book introductions

2010-06-01T08:00:00.000-04:00

I never read the introductions to novels first and a good example why is Pankaj Mishra's intro to JG Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur (which by the way is a very highly recommended book). Mishra does offer a little bit of analysis and spends about a page situating the book within a tradition of Mutiny novels, an entire subgenre I didn't even know existed. (I place that to being American but suspect that even most Brits aren't aware of it either.) But Mishra spends most of the introduction on a plot synopsis that even gives away the ending. Why? Either we're about to read the novel and don't want this or we're coming back afterwards and don't need it. I'm picking on this because it's just something I've read recently but it's not an uncommon problem with novel introductions.

But what really got me started is David Rieff's introduction to the current edition of Graham Greene's The Lawless Roads, his account of a 1938 trip to Mexico. Rieff is mainly, actually almost exclusively, concerned with the book as a precursor to The Power and the Glory and as such he finds it wanting. He attacks the travel genre as "narcisstic" and only a "miscellany" even stating that the novel is more universal. This seems an odd way to introduce a travel book (which he does claim is "very good") even if you think it's true. And I suspect he would have been even harsher if the book is considered journalism or reportage.

What's most clearly missing in Rieff's introduction is, well, everything. Why did Greene write the book? The back cover says it was a commission but for whom? Did they want a conventional travel account or a report on religious suppression? (They didn't exactly get either.) The copyright page reveals that it was published in the US the same year as England (1939) though under a different title (Another Mexico) but was it published in Mexico? What was the reception? How accurate is Greene's account? What did he leave out? Has anybody identified the unnamed but very specific people Greene encountered? Did Greene have any opinions about the book at publication or later?

There's also a suggestions for further reading included but everything is related to Greene's life. Nothing about Mexico or its history. In fact even considered as purely non-historical the book desperately needs notes. There are references to Campion and Peguy (Greene didn't bother with first names) that I got, or at least think I got, but there are numerous mentions of other things (an unspecified Jules Romains novel, bits of British culture, Mexican politics) that I and most readers would need help deciphering.

Reading SF/Fantasy, Part Four

2010-05-31T09:20:00.003-04:00

I recently heard a lecture from Salman Rushdie that was devoted to the idea that a narrow idea of realism/naturalism has come to dominate "serious" literature despite the fact that it's a historical and cultural anomaly. (Sound familiar?) Rushdie called it the Sterne/Richardson split where so many writers follow the Richardson side, even if this seems a tad dubious as legit analysis of literary development.

What stood out most is that despite Rushdie's stated attempt to rope in the ignored or outsiders or neglected he focused almost entirely on canonical work. There were passing mentions of Tolkien, Harry Potter and Lost but it was unclear whether he'd actually read any of those (except Lost which he said he's never watched). He did make a pointed and accurate dig at Avatar but his most positive references were to Garcia Marquez, the Arabian Nights, the Brothers Grimm and one or two similar. Not even the SF/fantasy writers that have been grabbed by the lit establishment: LeGuin, Crowley, Bradbury. And especially not the great SF/F writers who could be listed by the dozens but if you're reading this you already know. (Unless I suppose you're Rushdie who I would recommend Lieber, Lafferty, Pratchett, Blaylock, Lansdale, CA Smith, Wolfe, Peake, Wellman, Merritt, etc without even getting to the SF side (or for that matter the metaficational side).)

It was also hard not to wonder about whether he really meant this when he devoted a long section of the lecture to determining exactly how many people had been killed during the Arabian Nights. In a sense this is a question of some interest (only possibly and only very limited interest) but what he was after was an approach to the text as a realist work. In other words he made the calculation using the assumption that the frame story is a literal and exact account though the catch is that Rushdie didn't seem aware that's what he was doing. It's that lack of awareness that made me wonder whether he really is as dedicated or even aware of literary broadness as he stated. Perhaps, perhaps not.

Reading SF/Fantasy, Part Three

2010-05-30T08:00:00.000-04:00

The first two posts had been written (at some point I had the silly idea of doing an entire week on this topic) when another appeared that to a large degree parallels what I was writing. A writer at IO9 says that genre labels are really just reading instructions and I think he has a point. Douglas Wolk made a similar argument for comics using the inevitable though inelegant term "super-readers". Super-readers are the ones with hundreds and hundreds of comics stories in their brains, who can understand not just the character histories but the dense web of allusions, variety of techniques and good ole storytelling conventions. Super-readers are the ones who could tell you why any Spider-Man reference to a clone is meant to be funny or why the Batcave has a giant penny or could explain the rise and fall of the thought balloon.

Now the problem with comics readers is that too many prefer this so creators have taken to using super-reader familiarity as a barrier to non-comics fans instead of a shortcut or a foundation for more complex stories. (Watchmen has always reminded me of a Godard film - newcomers will get the point but the deeper your familiarity with comics and cinema the more you'll get from the work.) If you're an outsider then pick up pretty much any recent superhero comics (though this will stand out best--or is that worst?--in Blackest Night or Siege) or if you're an insider then just imagine if you didn't get any of this. Sometimes a writer will push this to the point that even super-readers balk (as Grant Morrison learned with Batman: RIP and Final Crisis) but that's pretty rare. Or sometimes a writer makes a mistake such as a recent issue of Brave and the Bold that featured Xombi, a character from a defunct company who hasn't appeared in over a decade but the writer never offered the slightest explanation of who he was.

This reading-instruction idea would also explain why so much film SF it noticably simpler (and usually simpler-minded) than written SF. Sure there's a ton of written SF that's no more thoughtful than Star Wars (not really SF but that's a topic for another time) or Avatar but the catch is that there's really not a lot of first-rate film SF and that would be because it has to be accessible for mainstream audiences. Not accessible in the sense of taking away references or ideas but in not leaving viewers feeling like they don't understand something, a feeling that SF readers take as an element of the genre. (I don't mean that SF readers believe they're too dumb to understand but that they're willing to go along with something with either the idea that the writer has figured it out or that it will be explained later, depending on how important it is to the story and maybe even the subgenre.)

Reading SF/Fantasy, Part Two

2010-05-29T08:00:00.000-04:00

Ted Gioia (Dana's brother) has written a piece asking "Did sci-fi writers from the 1940s and 1950s anticipate the future of serious literature better than the so-called 'serious writers' or, for that matter, the highbrow critics?" (The site doesn't have a permalink so if you're trying to find this much past the post date you may have to poke around a bit.)

The one thing I would emphasize is he's talking about "future of serious literature" not The Future in general. One thing people unfamiliar with SF tend to latch onto is how well it's predicting The Future but that's never been the point of SF. Writers weren't really trying to determine if there would be flying cars or ringworlds or generation ships or what have you - they're playing with ideas. Gioia tends to go a bit too far in the other direction, knocking hard SF since it "always prove[s] to laughably wrong-headed" without quite realizing that even here it's the "F" in SF that's important.

And I can't help but point out that what Gioia is calling "conceptual fiction" pretty much everybody else calls SF & Fantasy. True, he's trying to be more inclusive and pull in magical realism, faux allegories, quasi-fairy tales, some metafiction, etc but nearly all that really is SF&F just not labelled that way. Trying to be helpful with this marketing issue many writers and critics have taken to calling this other stuff "slipstream" though so far it's nearly all SF&F-derived writers who do so.

Still, Gioia's piece is decent but the big problem is it doesn't seem very effective. For me and the few people reading this blog he's preaching to the choir and doing so as somebody who just converted so excuse us for being a tad dubious. But it's even harder to imagine the "serious" critics/readers he mentions deciding hey they should give these books a try and maybe the foundation of their aesthetics is really just sand after all. After all the Library of America recently admitted Dick, Lovecraft and that fantastic tales anthology while publishers like Vintage or NYRB Classics push Bester, Wyndham and a few others. That could give the impression of being open-minded but we know it's not really true.

Maybe it would have helped if Gioia pointed out that the current conception of realism/naturalism that dominates "serious" fiction is pretty much a historical anomaly. The idea didn't even quite exist until about the 19th century or at least rarely as anything more than grace notes. Even what we have today as realism is fairly narrow, deriving in the "serious" lit world from Joyce/Chekhov quiet observation and epiphanies or from Joyce/Faulkner language play and regionalism. (I know this is a very abstracted and peculiar view but for one sentence I think it's basically correct.)

To me it boils down to something Christopher Hitchens wrote back when Harpers did its Annotated column: "Read widely and read deeply." Easier stated than done of course and for those of us with decreasing amounts of time it's not likely that we're going to experiment too much. But how much you really claim to know an art form does depend on this just as I can't take seriously a film critic who couldn't tell you a thing about, say, Ulmer, Fuller, Kiarostami, Wiseman, Trinh, Dwan, Gehr, Rollin, etc.

Reading SF/Fantasy, Part One

2010-05-28T08:00:00.001-04:00

The recent Southern fiction issue of Oxford American had a piece about Donald Barthleme that discussed in some detail his story "City of Churches".

As a freshman at the University of Alabama in 1979, I was put in the advanced English class which as far as I could tell (or remember) meant that there was more focus on literature than continually writing papers. When we read Sartre's story "The Wall" one student started discussing how this tied in to existentialism as if we all knew what was what but as a small-town kid from south Alabama, unlike this Birmingham guy, I'd never heard about any of that. (And if you're not a Southerner you likely won't realize that north and south Alabama are quite different.) Growing up I read constantly, didn't watch much TV and not many movies, and the reading was nearly all SF/fantasy with bits of parallel lit (Doc Savage pulps, a few mysteries here and there, some of the more ghost-story-looking romances like Victoria Holt, military histories). But I didn't read Sartre or for that matter almost any of the standard canon, not even in school.

So when the class came to read "City of Churches" I ended up in an oddly reversed situation. The story is about a woman who visits a city where all the buildings are churches. The class went nuts and had the hardest time with this but for me, who'd spent years reading books with radically different worlds or even laws of physics and where actually specifying the changes in detail was considered weak writing, for me this story was no problem. In fact I loved it in a way I didn't the Sartre. (Though today I have resisted re-reading Barthleme because of a feeling that I'll find him far less interesting than I did in my 20s. And I've still read almost no more Sartre.)

So reading SF/Fantasy made me more open to postmodernist writing? Maybe, it certainly creates a greater willingness to tolerate differences, at least for a while. Still I suspect this is more related to whatever quirk made me instantly like free jazz, musique concrete and structuralist film (not to mention other writers from Pound to Borges to Pynchon). After all most SF/Fantasy readers can be quite dismissive of experimentation of any kind.

from the library

2010-05-27T20:32:00.002-04:00

Since I can't twitter the list then the blog must be where documentation can be documented for that 25th century historian:

Dominguez - Mexico in Mind
Greene - The Lawless Roads
Lynd - Wobblies & Zapatistas
Buchenau - Mexico Otherwise
Powers - France in Mind
Kay Ryan - Best of It: New & Sel Poems
Burt - Art of the Sonnet
Wells - Shakespeare & Co.
Warren - Sel Poems of Robert Penn Warren
Assouline - Simenon A Biography

The Mexican books are because this Sept is the country's bicentennial so I'm working on events and displays for our store. And of course US schools teach so little history that I knew pretty much nothing about Mexico.

Twittering 3

2010-05-27T12:50:00.000-04:00

It's hardly news that the severe space constraint of Twitter precludes almost anything of substance and like most people my idea had been that it's mostly what-I-just-ate stream-of-consciousness from people distracted by sparkles and bushes that look like puppies. That's why discovering the network of links and news items seemed interesting - just the goods without the (already minor) trouble of full blogging.

But the thing is - faced with a blank Twitter box about all I can think to do is document something personal and utterly trivial. But since I don't even care about that then certainly nobody else does (not even you Mr 25th Century Historian Trying to Recover Our Daily Lives).

And while it seems like this might be where I add whatever cultural items I've encountered again the limited space makes it opaque at best, useless at not-best. (Mexico: The Frozen Revolution is a B, maybe B+ for effort, B- for actual interest) How's that help? Still, it's better than dining histories.

Crisis of comics publishing

2010-05-27T08:00:00.000-04:00

Augie de Blieck over at CBR has a summary of the problems with mainstream comics publishing that's pretty accurate. He highlights the word "purposefully" a couple of times and though it's a bit hard to picture editors or marketing staff at The Big Two consciously limiting their audience it may be just as hard to think that they're completely unaware that this is exactly what they're doing. High prices, convoluted stories that lose even readers like me, dedication to a format only fans like, etc probably drive away readers just as much as any nerdish aura to comics. Just remember a few years ago when it looked like the entry of trade paperbacks into mainstream stores would be the breakthrough? Just walk into a big store now. If you can even find the things (and Borders seems to shift them periodically) there's no concession made for readers. Some tpb series are numbered, some aren't, and in any case which series needs to be read in order? If somebody likes the Iron Man movies and goes into the store how do they know what to do with a couple dozen books? (Hint: Don't start with the "Essential" volume 1 which of course sounds like the most obvious.) The Big Two increasingly put new releases into hardcover first apparently to satisfy a fairly small slice of their already small fan base but apparently also to seem like "real" publishers. Thing is that unlike a regular trade publisher they've already recouped costs through the original serial publication so the hardcovers are bad marketing excesses. You have to wonder when even a newish publisher like Boom follows this same pattern for their Pixar and Muppet books - who on earth buys the pamphlets for The Incredibles or Muppets other than collectors? Just starting with the tpb is going to hit the parents as well as the regular fans.

And of course this doesn't even get into the managa world which is in the start of its long-anticipated contraction.

Twittering 2

2010-05-26T23:43:00.003-04:00

Well trying to resolve the retweet display issue I heard that it doesn't happen with Tweetdeck so I decided to try that. Catch is that it requires some Adobe program to download so I figured to skip it. After finding nothing else I thought let's do Tweetdeck and uninstall the Adobe program right after the download which is what I did. But then Tweetdeck wouldn't run at all because despite saying it needed the Adobe to download it actually needs it to run at all. And I don't want more junk on my computer - I don't even have Adobe Acrobat partly for that reason but even more because pdfs are clumsy and annoying.

It turns out that the other big third-party Twitter programs either also use that Adobe program or are aimed at pro users so I gave up on those. Tried experimenting with old-style retweets where you basically just copy and paste but apart from being extra work it just displayed odd. The legit Twitter account in the post didn't show with a link while the non-legit one did. Most likely this is the way I used the "@" but still it hardly seems worth the trouble. And the ugly RSS feed is very slow to update.

So at the moment I'm think there's no reason to keep trying to figure this out. My Twitter was intended as simply an additional info stream but since it can't be used completely for that it will be an additional commentary stream. Mostly useless commentary but there ya are.

Monday sitcom finales

2010-05-26T08:00:00.000-04:00

I had a weakness for the four: The Big Bang Theory closed last season with a clever riff on being gone for a summer but this time the episode could have been almost anywhere in the season. Too bad much of the real geekiness has drained out . How I Met Your Mother has never been particularly good but this season dropped most of the flashbacks and intertwined stories while trying to turn the aggressively one-dimensional Barney into something almost two-dimensional until it felt more and more like a chore to watch. Ending with the start of a pregnancy storyline means it's also the end for me. Two and a Half Men also seems unsure where to go after wisely jettisoning the fiancee but then spending far too much time on potty jokes. This may have also overstayed its (minor) welcome. As for Rules of Engagement I'm not sure if this was the finale since it started late and only has 13 eps so far. But the creators seem to have been toying with creating an almost-classic farce though an admittedly low-key one and let down mainly by an oddly slack resolution. Still Patrick Warburton should be on far more shows.

Twittering

2010-05-25T20:27:00.003-04:00

I had no real interest in Twitter until doing it at work for promotional purposes then realizing that it's pretty cool for news updates instead of simply people recording the minutae of their daily lives. When I found it's possible to display Twitter on my blog then the whole thing seemed like a good idea.

And of course there's a catch: The Twitter gadget that displays doesn't show any retweets. (After searching it turns out that there's something called a user timeline which is what's actually displayed and that doesn't have the retweets.) For me this is a big deal because those other tweets are what got me started on this at all. I found a way to put the RSS feed on the blog which does show the retweets but is darn ugly because it's doing everything as links and not just text. There might be some way to reformat this display but I can't find it easily and at the moment don't feel like doing more research. And I tried doing what's called old-style retweets which is not using Twitter's retweet button but copying and pasting the other tweet. The catch is that when the other site's name is added the character length is exceeded and I don't want to take credit by removing their name.

Couldn't Twitter just add an option to display retweets?

Short story anthologies

2010-05-06T08:00:00.000-04:00

I checked out the recent (7th) edition of Ann Charters' text The Story and Its Writer because she had added a section on graphic storytelling. It's a fairly timid start: a page of McCloud, three of Eisner showing how Hamlet could be done in the form, Crumb's Kafka adaptation and excerpts from Satrapi, Spiegelman, G. Hernandez, Taniguchi and Barry. Not bad really but an entire Spirit story and a more typical Crumb would really have done a better job.

What interested me looking at the rest of the anthology is that even in 2007 it's so predictably mainstream. Is Charters really that narrow-minded or is she just afraid professors won't use this in class if it's not following the canon. Out of all the writers included only Bradbury and LeGuin could be considered out of the literary mainstream and that's only in a pinch since the lit.main. long ago adopted them (and as far as I'm concerned they can keep LeGuin). Just think of all the fine and important writers who are missing due to Charters' enormous blindness - Chandler, Sturgeon, Gene Wolfe, Ballard, Lafferty, Ellison, Aldiss, Bloch, Roald Dahl, Moorcock, Frederic Brown and so on and so on. The "genre" world has produced many of the best short story writes over the past century if for no other reason than because this has stayed mostly an actual renumerative market. (Though another reason would be that that the SFF world has been remarkably open to unconventional approaches, despite the Dangerous Visions/New World growing pains.)

Maybe not that important but I read a few of the stories here that were new to me (despite the current trend towards enormous anthologies making the book almost too unwieldly to read) and they weren't the kind of thing that makes me think "Oh well it's OK because this is so good." A Chinua Achebe story is so pointless that I think it was included only through some kind of misguided affirmitive action and there are a few others just like it.

I recently stumbled across another story anthology that was also intended for classroom use - Milton Crane's 50 Great Short Stories. First published in 1952 it's still in print and is a much more fertile selection. Alongside the usual suspects (Chekhov, Hemingway, Joyce, etc) you'll find O. Henry, Saroyan, Lardner, Mencken (!), Huxley, Thurber, John O'Hara - folk now mostly but unjustly out of fashion. There's also a selection from a recent discovery John Collier who wrote tight, imaginative comic and fantasy pieces though he was about as mainstream as you could get, just not literary mainstream. His "De Mortuis" is a gem-bright masterpiece of construction and character creation through tiny strokes, all with an amazing double-twist ending. Crane isn't any bigger on the "genre" crowd than Charters (unless Lord Dunsany counts) but the book feels more like actual storytelling rather than the world of creative writing workshops.

Perhaps even better is Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories, reissued a few years back by NYRB Classics, but I'm planning to do a full post about it.

The wages of academia

2010-05-05T20:08:00.002-04:00

Maybe it's worth starting out by saying Paul Lopes' Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book (2009) is more or less a passable history. Reading it would give you a decent idea of the broad outline of exactly what its subtitle promises but probably not much more. At heart the book is a high school term paper which isn't surprising since at heart much, possibly most, academic writing is merely a more complex variant of such papers: dutiful marshalling of sources, obsessive even excessive footnoting, appeal to other authorities, broad claims of value with little noticable result, a deliberately unimaginative style (the result of forcing people who aren't interested in writing to write), and so on.

Academic books often start with references to canonical writers/thinkers almost like classical epics started with an invocation to the muses. In Lopes' case it's Bourdieu and Fiske before he's off developing his own not-particularly-helpful terms (Heroic Age) and then apparently believing he's doing serious work by claiming comics are "recombinant culture", something comics fans have always loved, and loved loudly, about the form. Always amusing is the assumption that until academics handled the subject not much of real importance had been done - in his introduction Lopes notes the "first serious academic works on comic books in the United States" as if this was some kind of landmark and then the next paragraph snidely swipes at authors who "have written general trade books". (I've even had a history professor tell me with no apparent irony that only academics can write history with any real value.)

But so what? Well back to my remark that the book is "more or less a passable history" let's check the index. Well nothing about Barks or Bendis. Look a little more - no Stanley or DeCarlo, no Fine or Meskin, no Grant Morrison (but a mention of Toni Morrison), no Steranko, Chaykin, Jack Cole, neither of the Simonsons, Wolverton, P. Craig Russell, Will Elder, Jaxon, Bill Warren, and so on.

It's not just that a history can't mention even all the major figures (or you end up with something like David Cook's History of Narrative Film that's so burdened with endless lists that it's practically useless). But Lopes seems, and now we're back at high school term paper territory, to have not read much of the material and worked mainly from easily available histories. He is a sociologist so let's be kind and assume he has no interest in art or creativity but a glance through the notes (there is no bibliography) doesn't show many sources beyond the obvious. Comics history is nothing if not heavily documented but the catch is that most of this isn't in easily available sources (Lopes does use Alter Ego though) and probably more importantly for a book like this not easily available in university libraries. (The university library I use has a fairly large selection of academic books on comics -- in fact that's where I checked out this Lopes book -- but very little primary material, excepting an astounding two entire fixtures of Japanese-language manga.) By the way, The Falcon wasn't the first black superhero (as claimed on page 68) - that distinction goes to the Black Panther who Lopes mentions in the exact same sentence.

Unfortunately there isn't a good overall history of comic books. Roger Sabin's Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels might be the best since it's well-illustrated and covers British as well as American but it has too much an overview approach. Bradford Wright's Comic Book Nation is solid up until the Comics Code and then the author seems to have lost interest - two-thirds of comics history is covered in just the last third of the book. Steranko, Feiffer and Goulart's books are outdated or narrow while others such as the Rough Guide or Paul Gravett's Graphic Novels tend to be more consumer oriented than history minded.

Matterhorn

2010-04-28T20:12:00.002-04:00

Probably the most positively reviewed book so far this year is Karl Marlantes' Matterhorn. Typical of most reviews is Mark Bowden's for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Similar to others he calls it "starkly realistic", claims it's "about disillusionment and betrayal" and doesn't stint on the praise ("a rich, fine, powerful story told with excruciating precision"). Like nearly all other reviewers he references The Naked and the Dead and The Thin Red Line but Bowden at least has a broader range by mentioning Going After Cacciato and A Farewell to Arms. He does have one odd statement by saying it's not until four pages in that the reader knows the book is set in Vietnam. Of course that means the reader didn't notice the cover ("A novel of the Vietnam war"), the title page with the same notice, the unit organization, the map of Vietnam and then decided that the note about a glossary in the back isn't worthy of immediate attention. Well let's just assume Bowden had an ARC without all that but still the first page is combat Marines in the jungle which narrows down the possible wars and then a reference (right at start of second page) to a fire base would probably pin it down to Vietnam even without a specific name.

Still, all in all, Matterhorn is an almost stereotypical first novel: quasi-autobiographical, somtimes clumsy, too often devoted to Big Statements and far far too long. At almost 600 pages this is a book that's nearly twice the size necessary for what Marlantes actually does.

And what is he doing? His main points are that war is a violent and messy business and that people in command often make bad decisions for bad reasons. Nothing new here and in fact these are what people of our time expect from war stories. Just look at the claims that Saving Private Ryan is anti-war purely on the basis of the explicit violence when in fact that is often exactly what draws people to war (what The Hurt Locker intends to explore, and sometimes does). Other ages were just as aware of war's violence and probably more often at first hand than most of us today but that wasn't the focus. With works like Matterhorn it's almost like reading a cookbook that tells us almost nothing but how messy cooking is. (As a stubborn pacifist I'm not saying go back to glorifications of war, only that displaying the violence is not of itself particularly interesting or political.)

Matterhorn's story follows a newly arrived college boy who takes command of a unit as it holds a hill of uncertain value, then leaves, then heads back. The novel follows him from a somewhat fuzzy idea of what combat actually is (he mainly wants this to help a future political career) while he learns to take command and handle nearly crushing pressure. The catch is that this officer is a fairly bland person, all too clearly intended to be a bit of an Everyman to avoid alienating readers. The people surrounding him tend towards stock as well: a commander who doesn't like that this war is different from Korea, the lifer sergeant, the farm boy newbie, a Black Power organizer, and so forth. Marlantes does skip to different viewpoints but often he really is just skipping over - in this sense comparisons to The Thin Red Line only serve to show how timid Matterhorn is.

The other marks of a first novel can be found in numerous tiny issues. Marlantes uses a steady, somewhat plodding style that works without being particularly efficient or allusive. At one point he gives a full flashback to a secondary character which is an odd intrusion. Dialogue tends to be rough and sometimes a bit awkward. There's a longish scene where a black soldier explains to the college officer how all Americans are racist but not all are prejudiced and what that might mean politically. For all I know Marlantes is quoting verbatim actual conversation from his tour but in the book it comes off as implausible and something that limits characters rather than expanding them. (And whether it's actual conversation or whether anything in the book really happened doesn't matter - it's labelled a novel instead of a memoir and must be approached as such.) Considering the brevity of the actual story, the thinness of the characters and the unremarkable prose there's absolutely no reason for Matterhorn to run as long as it does - it really should have been about half its length.

If this post comes across as somewhat harsh that's mostly a reaction to the extravagant claims being made for Matterhorn. It is a reasonably interesting book whose real strength is the detailed descriptions of how a Marine unit actually worked - the procedures, the policies, the routines, the traditions, the jargon. Of course saying this is a manual to run a 1969 Marine unit isn't going to sell books but hey Moby-Dick is nearly a whaling instruction manual at times. (Though come to think of it that was a legendary poor seller.) Marlantes does also know how to keep the story going with only a few times that it flags and then mostly because he's muddling characters or actions. What he's done with Matterhorn is write a moderately effective adventure story that's getting a rep for literary value because there's not much "adventure" in it and because he's added just enough Meaning.

Freakonomics

2010-04-27T08:00:00.000-04:00

For such a popular and acclaimed book I expected something more substantial though a cynic might argue why did I think it appealed to so many people? This really isn't any primer on economics or statistics but is instead illustrations on question solving. For instance, why do so many crack dealers still live with their parents? Answer is that they're so low in the orgnization that they actually make little money but the authors Levitt and Dubner actually go through the data to explain this and show how it works that way.

Towards the end they criticize experts who come up with definite answers just to get publicity but I can't tell if Levitt and Dubner expect us to understand that they're doing exactly the same thing or if in fact they really are unaware. Look at their discussion of why crime rates have been falling for a couple of decades. They talk about the "diverse army of experts" who came up with a "phalanx of hypotheses to explain the drop in crime". They then list the most common, state that only three have any evidence and then that "one of the greatest measurable causes" isn't on the list and was never mentioned in any newspapers. That unmentioned reason is the legalization of abortion which resulted in fewer unwanted children and therefore fewer adults inclined towards crime.

Now the thing is that Levitt and Dubner are no different than any of these other experts. They criticize what they see as wrong, they have a main cause that they propose and they have their own data/evidence to support it. I'm not saying they're wrong because their reason does make sense but making sense and being true are not the same thing. If legalized abortion as a cause is measurable and so obvious then doesn't it raise a red flag that nobody has discussed this before? Is Levitt (the actual economist of the duo) really so insightful that he found something everybody missed? (And let's just assume that the no mentions in newspapers does actually mean experts weren't discussing this - there is a large gap between mass media and academics/policy experts.) Doesn't it make more sense that Levitt found something that's already been discussed and dismissed? Or that he has the wrong data? Again, I don't know. Freakonomics seems plausible but like so many social issues this is very complex and it's impossible to completely separate all the causes - in fact I would think it's possible that there is no actual cause at all, at least in the sense that they mean.

They also sometimes use the wrong data which doesn't quite create more confidence. They discuss (p149) the parents of an eight-year-old who they allow to go to a house with a swimming pool but not to one with a gun. Levitt & Dubner claim that this is both wrong and irrational because the statistics show that the liklihood of dying at a pool is greater than that of dying from guns. Now I'm just going to assume that their statistics are true - the source in the footnotes is one of Levitt's own articles in the Sun-Times. But what their statistics are measuring are numbers across the entire country and in aggregate - 1 death under age 10 per 11K pools, 1 similar death per 1 million guns (which he translates to a total 550 pool deaths and 175 gun deaths per year). What really is needed are statistics concerning deaths in households that actually have guns. In other words, how many children actually die from playing in a household with guns rather than a number based on total deaths and total guns. Also it could only help his case but Levitt doesn't distinguish between intentional and unintentional gun deaths.

But when you expand this the parents decision seems more reasonable. Most "near-misses" at a swimming pool create mainly a frightening event (one statistic I found is permanent damage happens to less than 20% of children hospitalized but of course most wouldn't need hospitalization) but with guns there is a wide variety of permanent injuries that could result. So instead of focusing on just deaths Levitt needs to pull in statistics on injuries, disfigurements and other permanent damage.

This example is actually a fairly small one in the book and to some degree doesn't entirely matter. What they're really doing is raising a question and then exploring possible ways that data might be utilized and examined to help provide answers. That process is the real core of the book even though I suppose most people are actually just taking away that real estate agents sell their own houses for more than they get for customers, probably remembering a reason or two why this should be so and likely forgetting how Levitt figured it out. Maybe this is one reason I found the short newspaper articles included in the paperback edition more interesting than most of the original book.

Glee

2010-04-26T21:39:00.002-04:00

Glee seems intended, if not destined, for guilty pleasure status - that uneasy category where you either recognize something you like is more or less objectively bad, or you just don't feel up to explaining why you like it. For pop culture critics this almost seems like an irrelevant category: If it sounds good it is good, or in less succinct words the pleasure is the message and it can't be bad if you like it.

So I suppose this is the point where I explain that Glee overcomes its limitations and frequent lack of imagination but in fact it really is simply a bad show and if I like it then that's only in sections and scenes, at times enough to convince myself that there just might be something there though increasingly less so. (If "increasingly less" even makes sense.) Simply look at the characters: a stardom-aiming Jewish showbiz kid, a jock who really just wants to sing, a chubby black diva who thinks wailing is singing, a scheming cheerleader, a ditzy blonde and then the effeminate gay guy who is given almost every stereotype trait you can imagine. They are all stereotypes which isn't a problem -- nearly all narrative art relys on stereotypes to some degree -- but that stereotypes is all they are. And to judge by the progress so far, all they will be. It's as if the writers completed the pilot and decided "Whew, we are finished with that. Who said characters are hard? Now on to some improbably convoluted story about a fake preganancy...."

Maybe this rudimentary, even defective, sense of drama is why there are so many messages and often the weakest part of the series. The episode about handicapped kids was particularly dim. How many high schools would let large numbers of its students into wheelchairs just to prove a point that they all already know? Making a musical number out of this borders on insensitivity if not outright offensiveness - "Rolling on the River"? Why not just have them do ZZ Top's "Legs"? The decision to give Sue a sister with Down's syndrome was apparently a tactic to make her more human (or "well-rounded" as creative writing teachers might have it) but was such an utter misjudgement that the sister was immediately dropped.

And though I didn't expect performances of Cole Porter or Bob Dylan, the music choices have been particularly bland, on purpose you'd have to think. Songs from Wicked? Lionel Richie? Celine Dion? That horrible Beyonce song?

So then why am I even bothering to write about this or to have watched all of Glee so far? Because when it worked you could see the potential for something more substantial. Admittedly my ideal version of Glee would be closer to Moulin Rouge directed by Frederick Wiseman but even within its current confines the show sometimes struggles to life Herbert-Wise-style. The two rap numbers were amusing (though I have to wonder why even bother doing "Gold Digger" if you're going to censor the lyrics), there really should be more than the one Bacharach song, the bit from Cabaret was effective and an almost vicious version of "You Keep Me Hanging On" was one of the highlights. In fact what gave me some hope that Glee might turn out different is that it was slowly making the evil, manipulative cheerleader into the moral core of the show (minus, of course, the evil and the manipulation).

But the two episodes since returning from a long break seem like whatever the creators were doing they used up all their ideas. Already. The cheerleader was completely sidelined along with nearly all the stories from the earlier episodes (the whole Will-Emma thing put on hold, the Will-wife story nearly forgotten, Sue right back as if nothing happened before, etc). Which made the first episode back a series of song performances that mostly had no connection to the story, might as well make a concert film instead of musical.

But there was worse to come. An episode of all Madonna songs sounded like an iffy idea at best - in practice it was about as hellishly tedious as anything could possibly be. Sure some people claim, usually with more enthusiasm than sense, Madonna is a feminist icon but to hear everybody in the show chant this mantra makes you feel like it can't possibly be true. Again there's little connection of the songs to any story but the greatest failing is that the performances are more pastiches rather than anything original. A recreation of the "Vogue" video was probably a blast to do in real-life but is completely pointless otherwise. Only a marching band number showed that there might have been any potential in Madonna at all. Too many more episodes like that and -- well I can't resist this-- and I will gleefully abandon Glee.

Cherie Priest's Boneshaker

2010-04-09T22:48:00.000-04:00

The cover has a blurb from Mike Mignola: "If Jules Verne and George Romero got together to rewrite American history, it might go something like this." Of course that sounds like something I'd love but as you've certainly guessed I didn't. Priest set out to make an explicitly steampunk novel (in fact "steampunk" is the final word in the entire book) but it reads not just like a first novel but like it was written by somebody who had really only even read a few novels. In fact Priest has published a handful before so either she's just that bad or simply had a dip. A good editor might have salvaged a little more but those are an increasingly rare breed (though the more scary alternative is that the original manuscript was worse and the editor did indeed work on it).

Just look at this way of providing background. The book opens with several pages from a (fictional) non-fiction book that explains the history of this alternative-history. Then the first part of the actual narrative has a biographer show up to interview the main character Briar about the person he's writing about so now we get more backstory. A bunch of exposition, explanation of characters and then the biographer vanishes until a pointless epilogue. That's a lot to slog through to get the actual story started and it could have all been easily cut out with bits and pieces reinserted elsewhere if needed.

Once the story is going, Priest proves to be a lackluster stylist. She favors a clean, almost blunt approach as so many current writers do but she also can't help but push readers. "Without the coat, her body had a lean look to it--as if she worked too long, and ate too little or too poorly." Priest has already told us Briar works too long and is about to get to the eating so this is just heavy underlining. Characters talk while raising eyebrows, under the breath, mumbling, agreeing, etc - not to the point that it's obtrusive but more than necessary. Considering her steampunk intentions a more Dickensian approach wouldn't have been out of place or failing that some good old-fashioned pulp excess. Admittedly both are fairly out of fashion except for parodies or deliberate pastiches but this would have been the place.

The story itself isn't completely hopeless but is a bit more straightforward and predictable than needed. Priest even makes the three most powerful characters women and then has one of them point it out - fair enough but readers already noticed and if they hadn't then this only jostles the story. Too much is a character having to get from A to B and then the main suspense is "will they get from A to B?" Sure, that is more or less true of The Odyssey or The Divine Comedy or Lord of the Rings but the difference is whether A-to-B is all that's going on. And too much for Boneshaker it is.

Solicitations: Marvel

2010-03-27T08:00:00.000-04:00

Marvel's June Solicitations.

The day we never thought would come: Marvelman Classic Primer! Wait, "classic"? "Primer"? Oh yeah, apparently Marvel is going to start reprinting a lot of the original Marvelman stories that absolutely nobody cares about. I've actually read some so this isn't entirely snide; the stuff is pretty deadly. Is it possible they still don't have rights to the Moore/Gaiman stories? It's also a bit funny that the blurb mentions Marvelman "created" by Mick Anglo - guess that sounds better than "slightly revised Captain Marvel and laughed at US copyright law from the other side of the Atlantic".

Then some kind of "Women of Marvel" thing that doesn't seem to make any sense (other than they apparently can't resist cheesecake covers). More Stephen King and Anita Blake comics that I've heard actually sell fairly well (though I found the Dark Tower novel unreadable and the first Anita Blake book merely passable). I don't understand why there's a Sense & Sensibility series just like the other classics adaptations. I suppose there's a market for a tpb but who buys these in a series?

What the heck, five Deadpool books? Interesting that Merc with a Mouth is now a "limited series" which sounds better than "we're cancelling it". That's actually been a fave for a few months. (Need to check out writer Victor Gischler's novels.)

I gave up on Ultimate Comics with Ultimatum and all the X-Men books even further back. Kept with Amazing Spider-Man for a while after it went to a thrice-a-month schedule and the other Spider books were cancelled but that still feels like a bad move. Before one series could be a little light-hearted, another a bit more serious and soap-opera-y but now it's hard to pick out arcs and expensive to feel like having to keep up. So now I skip it all. Of course Marvel's claim that we just need the one book didn't last as they added Web of Spider-Man, Peter Parker and an endless stream of minis. Some of them may be good but that seems unlikely.

Yet more Avengers relaunches which is also tiresome. (In a few years it will all be lumped together anyway so Marvel can celebrate issue #500 or whatever.) I'll certainly try the two Bendis and the Brubaker series but Avengers Academy just sounds like it's been created to be cancelled. Hank Pym and a bunch of kids? I almost dozed off just typing that.

And let's just skim the rest. Good: Brubaker's Captain America, Andy Diggle's Daredevil (well I'm just guessing actually), Fraction's Invincible Iron Man, Bendis' Powers. Bad: Don't know because there's a bunch (and I mean a BUNCH) of stuff that is utterly anti-promising. Hawkeye & Mockingbird? A SHIELD series with Leonardo Da Vinci and Isaac Newton? Another Dracula book? Almost half the Marvel line?

As for the collections there's the same hardcover problem. Who buys a Ghost Rider by Jason Aaron Omnibus? Or for that matter a hardcover of Deadpool Team-Up? Marvel is putting out a bit over 50 collections in June (50!) and only Criminal even remotely interests me (well maybe the fifth volume of Essential Captain America but I already have much of this in the color reprints).

Solicitations: DC

2010-03-26T21:28:00.002-04:00

Every month the comic companies put out their new soliciations, meant for stores to place orders but avidly read by fans (sometimes as if they were divining with tea leaves). I thought it would be fun to run through the new ones but in actuality this didn't turn out too interesting - you've been warned.

Let's start with DC's June solicitations.

The first thing that pops out is that Superman and Batman both hit issue #700 that month? And Wonder Woman at #600? This seems pretty unlikely to be mild about it and in fact it turns out that Wonder Woman had some tinkering with the numbers (after all they start a new series every few years). Superman and Batman both began about a season apart--the first issues weren't dated by month--so I supposed it's possible they actually got this close, though Superman for a long time went by The Adventures of Superman but without changing the numbering. In any case I really wish they could have tempted Neal Adams to do some Batman art again.

Next, some Brightest Day stuff that I'll skip (I've completely given up trying to sort out the multicolored Lanterns - just isn't worth the effort y'know?). Another Green Arrow launch and I can't help but wish they'd just make him an outright bad guy, Irredeemable style. Sure it'd be an utterly implausible twist but better that than this weak "moral issues" stuff. James Robinson's Justice League of America may be where I finally bail. But Gail Simone back on Birds of Prey is good news - maybe she should be writing all the other books.

As for the Joker's Asylum linked one-shots, this is the kind of thing that I wonder why it exists. Can anybody really be waiting to see this? And did any of the creators want to make it? Still, Sienkiewicz art on the Mad Hatter will be worth checking out.

The Batman books have been great since Bruce Wayne "died" - the interplay between Dick and Damian are just the twist needed though I do wonder if anybody can keep this going whenever Morrison leaves. In fact Morrison's Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne is the kind of thing I'd ignore (much like Flash: Rebirth) if Morrison wasn't involved. I'm hoping for the best but it could still end up like Brubaker's misjudged return of Captain America mini.

I lost interest in all the Superman books with the whole return of Krypton event, just too tedious and pointless. There's yet another attempt at keeping the Legion going but I expect this will last about two years just as the last ones have. Maybe that's the inspiration for Straczynski teaming the Legion of Substitute Heroes with The Inferior Five which sounds very fanboy-cool except that Straczynski has never been noted for a sense of humor.

And oh there just a bunch of other stuff. What seems good: more Giffen's Doom Patrol, Dini's Zatanna. What doesn't: Winick taking over Power Girl, Warlord chugging along, and who on earth buys The Great Ten? Really, did anybody read Final Crisis and go "Wow, I'd give my left pinky if these guys had their own series!"

As for the collections I still don't understand why there are so many hardcovers. Do they really sell that well or is this more a prestige thing? Or even a misguided attempt at perking up demand? I might get that collection of old Batman Annuals if it wasn't hardcover and $40. (Still DC is promising "Giant Batman, Rip Van Batman, Zebra Batman, Merman Batman and more". Heck, the reason I love Morrison's work is that he could easily be planning Zebra Batman for this summer.) The only one I'm even considering buying is the third Showcase collection of Sgt. Rock.

The Wildstorm stuff is mostly skippable as usual. A new Tom Strong mini but without Moore. I wouldn't care about DV8 except Brian Wood is writing so maybe I'll check out the first issue. And Busiek is finally revealing the Silver Agent story which might well ruin one of the cool things about Astro City.

I usually read Vertigo books in trades, except for Fables and Jack of Fables which I often save and read entire arcs at once so they might as well be trades. There's a new DMZ trade but I'm not caught up to that yet, House of Mystery yes and the tpb of the next volume of the recolored Sandman.

some recent horror films

2010-03-18T15:03:00.004-04:00

I don't usually give spoiler warnings but that seems appropriate here.

Jennifer's Body (Karyn Kusama 2009) - The common perception of this as a failed Megan Fox vehicle is likely due from people who haven't actually seen it. The film creates a context for Fox's limited acting abilities just as Terminator did for Schwarzenegger's. But it's also a clever take on high-school horror that successfully balances the grim (a high-body-count fire) with comic (an indie rock band trying to perform a Satanic sacrifice). The film also satirizes cultural obsession with tragedy and its ready-made "healing" narrative but almost obliquely, perhaps the best way. And like the best horror films (though this isn't quite to that level) it has an increasing sense of playing for keeps. (Odd that it ends with nearly the same shot as Paranormal Activity - a young woman who's just had a brush with a demon looking knowingly into a video camera.)

Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi 2009) - It's not a surprise to find out that the script was originally written around the Evil Dead period - it has that same mix of energized horror tropes and gross-out comedy. Or course that doesn't seem quite so clever now, making Drag Me the equivalent of a rock band covering "Louie Louie" or "Wild Thing" - fun but that's about as far as it goes. The ending bothered me for some reason. The twist with the coin envelope was well-done and since Raimi put it in plain sight I think most of us feel if we were paying closer attention we would have predicted it. But that's probably the mark of a good twist ending. However why end up with the protagonist, well, dragged to hell? Horror films do traffic in a sense of an unfair universe (though typically personified in malevolent beings of various types) but this ending seems extremely disproportionate to what she did originally.

Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer 2009) - Starts as a pretty decent comic zombie film, perhaps a bit too heavy on the "rules to survive" but not to a harmful extent. Then it starts to feel more and more tossed off until the final sequence in an amusement park that's about as mindless and hollow as anything I've ever seen. If it had maintained the opening tone nobody really would have cared that the film has an apocalyptic event with no apocalypse - months later the electricity is still on, food supplies are available and roads across half the country are easily navigated. And of course a country of 300 million is now apparently just 300, zombies included. But when the film gets too bland that's what stands out. The filmmakers really should have watched Dead Alive first.

Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli 2007/2009) - Maybe this would have benefited from a studio remake as originally intended. What we actually get has a decent idea, better-than-expected acting and not too much else. Even though it's aiming for a more classical approach of suggesting rather than showing there's just too little happening in the film. I kept looking for little things in the background or the edges of the frame but nothing there. The Blair Witch Project in a way showed even less but showing and seeing were the actual point - it was built around epistemology in a way that Paranormal only pretends to be. At first it seems like a strength that the film doesn't explain anything but simply presents us with a given. After a while when not much is going on it's hard not to wonder why the demon (assuming that's what it is) chose this girl and why when she was 8? Why wait this long, why do so little, why save a photograph and then years later stick in the attic? And why does the couple not close their door at night if there's weird stuff going on? The spookiest moment is the woman standing motionless for several hours at night and the ending does have an unusually effective jump shot. (There's a weaker alternative ending on the DVD that's much more conventional.)

Dead Snow (Tommy Wirkola 2009) - With IFC distributing this in the US you would think there would be something imaginative or inventive or simply well-constructed about the film but nope. Students in a snow-bound cabin, Nazi zombies - anything you can imagine is better than what we find in the film. You get a crusty local passing by who tells one story that of course explains the background. You get no phone reception, only one person who knows how to get back to the cars, zombies that at times seem mindless and at times smarter than the students. By the middle of the film it's almost like the filmmakers gave up trying to tell a story and just had stuff happen. I don't know how else to explain a film that is within-boundaries reasonably naturalistic but then has a guy amputate his own arm with no tourniquet and cauterizing on the equivalent of a candle flame, who then spends the rest of the film running (yes actually running) around without even becoming pale. We also have no idea why the zombies have waited 60+ years but decided now would be a good time to act.

recent viewing

2010-03-18T14:33:00.002-04:00

Night at the Museum (Shawn Levy 2006) - Somebody told me this is actually pretty good and I would like it. He was wrong. (Though with Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant as credited writers the first draft of the script was probably much better.)

Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-Hsien 1993) - Often considered Hou's masterpiece but I suspect that's mainly because the far superior City of Sadness is so hard to see. In fact this seems like one of Hou's lesser efforts to me though maybe people who like long stretches of unedited puppet shows might be more forgiving. Some of the reminiscences of the real-life Li Tianlu go on too long, resulting in a film that feels far too fragmented.

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow 2009) - I suppose a genre film is considered something more when it's announced as such - thus the opening epigraph that fades out leaving just the point of the film readable, the wounded character who states the premise and then in the film's most ridiculous moment the main character's monologue to a baby. (Actually the entire last stateside sequence would have been vastly improved and no harder to understand if it had no dialogue at all.) Overall it's not up to the level of another bomb-defusing film The Small Back Room and the plot of a guy who doesn't play by the rules but gets results dammit was long ago played out. Still, the attempt to build a kind of moral view through detailed sequences of work at times is almost Bressonian, Pickpocket with explosives. Since it's in a way not really "about" Iraq it's no surprise that there's nothing political in a larger policy sense but considering that the entire purpose is to examine masculine identity under the pressure of combat it is a surprise that Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal didn't address the politics of the American military being composed of what are essentially mercenaries and predominantly from certain social classes. But then again how many Hollywood films would ever do that?

Of Time and the City (Terence Davies 2008) - Davies' documentary about his memories of growing up in Liverpool surely must be coasting on his reputation. I can't imagine any other reason something this unwatchable would have been financed and released. Basically it's a rambling spoken piece with nearly random images accompanying, at times it's not even clear the words actually match what we're seeing. What Davies remembers isn't too interesting anyway: a youthful crisis of faith, deprivations of post-War England, how much he disliked rock 'n' roll. His pompously sensitive delivery doesn't help either.

Fight Club (David Fincher 1999) - Nope, I'd never seen it and don't feel that I missed much but then again if I was 20-something might feel differently. Not bad overall but I expected something a bit more astringent - this is one of those films that might have been better if it was smarter or dumber. The faux apocalyptic ending felt like a mistake and not an entirely successful close to the story's premise though Fincher probably wanted something rousing for the viewers.

So what comics are good?

2010-03-16T08:00:00.000-04:00

After whining about the decline of comics for many posts I thought it might be worth mentioning ones that are actually good. I'm going to mainly focus on regular ongoings just because that's easier to keep straight.

Captain America - Ed Brubaker is constantly surprising as he mixes superheroics (mad scientists, superspies, guys who talk to falcons) with more serious concerns such as moral responsibility and the ravages of violence.

Batman, Batman and Robin, Detective Comics, Streets of Gotham - Killing Bruce Wayne turned out to be the shot in the arm this whole corner of the DCU needed. The dynamics of the new Batman and new Robin feel fresh and unpredictable while the side stories in Detective and Streets are just as interesting. I'm not yet as convinced by Gotham City Sirens and haven't gotten around to the other related ones (Red Robin, Batgirl, etc).

Mighty Avengers, New Avengers - Bendis can certainly do wrong but he rarely does in these two. And he's probably the best dialogue writer in all of comics.

Invincible Iron Man - Matt Fraction is writing this as a science fiction political thriller and it feels like he's completely nailed the character.

Jonah Hex - I suspect DC kept this going because of the upcoming movie but it's solid storytelling. We need more Westerns.

Unwritten - I have a feeling this could lose steam the further the story goes but at the moment it's really playing with the possibilities of its premise (a guy whose father wrote a Harry Potter-esque series based on him but finds out much more went on).

House of Mystery - Maybe the way to avoid the notorious low sales of anthology titles is to have a continuing frame story. In this case it's incongrous characters trapped in a mysterious, otherworldly house - exactly the kind of thing I love though I suppose others could be bored. The entire series becomes at some point about the very nature of storytelling.

Fables & Jack of Fables - It was a great idea to make the spin-off book quite different from the original - one somewhat sombre, the other giddy comedy.

Powers - Bendis again but having his own universe lets him get away with stories that could never appear in the regular Marvel world.

the Deadpool books - Yeah yeah I know. Overexposed and three ongoings? But at the moment the mix of black humor (sometimes so black it's not even humor), wild superheroics, clever dialogue and a genuinely insane main character are pretty hard to resist.

the Big Two kids books - The various books that were being published under the Marvel Adventures and Johnny DC lines were aimed fairly young (I'd guess 7 or 8 up to early teens) but for the past couple of years were the most consistently enjoyable being put out. They had that Silver Age feel of invention and pure entertainment without being at all retro. Too bad they're now nearly all cancelled.

Bongo - Yep the Simpsons and Futurama comics are rarely as good as the shows (except for the annual Treehouse of Horror issue) if only because they're not as dense. But they're still usually a hoot and the recent addition of Sergio Aragones pushes them to the top.

There are several others that I mainly read in trades and are about a year or two behind what's currently appearing. These include: Amazing Spider-Man (though it's been uneven since going to the three-times-a-month schedule), Daredevil, The Goon, DMZ, Ex Machina, Irresistible.

The Funnies Business, Part Two

2010-03-15T08:00:00.000-04:00

Really it looks like I'm following io9 but some of this was written before the appearance of their recent piece Superhero Tragedy Porn Is Bad for Comics. And the cause was the same - the stupefyingly cynical and completely artless last issue of Justice League: Cry for Justice where Roy Harper's daughter (age around nine or ten) is killed purely for shock value. I guess we should be grateful they didn't find her in a refrigerator but this shows just how little thought is going into so many recent comics and how far they'll go to bump sales on a wave of controversy. Because the main problem isn't just that this happened but that it was completely unnecessary - writer James Robinson with the approval of DC editors had decided to chop off Roy's arm and kill tens of thousands of people in Star City. Killing a harmless girl who hadn't even appeared in the story was just a bad move. If nothing else it's a disruption to the story that reveals how shoddy the whole business is. As the io9 writer puts it, "when superheroes have 'adult' problems, the childishness of their pursuits waxes large."

But I suppose they were working from the end backwards and the end is that they wanted to have Green Arrow become a killer. ("Executioner" isn't correct because that means state power and Oliver is acting completely on his own.) So they arranged for this trio of events to push him to the edge and then the bad guy going free to tip him over. Guess we'll find out why they wanted Oliver in this position in Robinson's run on the regular Justice League series but no matter how that plays out, Cry for Justice will still be a monumental misjudgement.

On a less offensive level, the mini-series had several other problems. Robinson has never been a particularly efficient writer but his dialogue here is often clumsy and overbearing. He's also trying to hard for the fan service - a passing reference to Claw the Unconquered works because it makes no difference whether you get it or not but Ray Palmer remembering his stint in the Teen Titans just puts you to a stop with a "what?". (I had to look it up - apparently he was turned into a teenager a few years back.) Supergirl is a main character but is portrayed pretty much as a porn star with a costume that looks airbrushed onto her. Robinson does have her figure out the big bad guy's secret but she doesn't do anything about it. That's right: doesn't do anything about it. It's not until Roy's off bleeding on the satellite floor and the city killing machinery is underway that Supergirl starts her monologue about hey you slipped up here and that thing you said revealed this. All done when everybody else has already very definitely discovered the truth so whatever she might have figured out doesn't matter in the least. And really what was the point of a completely gratuitous scene with Starfire and Donna Troy in bikinis? It just feels creepy.

The Funnies Business

2010-03-14T08:00:00.000-04:00

Publishers Weekly had a piece on "Big-Cross Over Events and the Barrier Method" that sums up the situation pretty nicely. The writer Todd Allen puts most of the blame on the business end, on a need for steady sales because these are publicly traded companies. That must be true to some degree though as outsiders we will never know. Certainly the editorial people at both companies claim there's no such pressure but the amount of cancellations, relaunches, reboots and yes cross-overs shows that something other than purely creative considerations are at work.

Many writers and artists complain about cross-overs but they tend to be the less powerful ones, people like Peter David or Christopher Priest. (Grant Morrison did at one time but he's top of the heap at the moment.) The ones like Johns or Bendis that drive these events rarely say anything negative about them. In fact it was while reading Morrrison's run on Animal Man that I first really saw the problem. When going through that series, the spots where it tied in to big events at the time no longer matter and in fact only hurt the story. Morrison talks about that briefly in one of the tpbs but it's easy to see in many places.

Of course nearly all these people learn to be follow company lines pretty early in their career and we generally have little idea what they're really thinking unless something comes out later. But it looks like many creators get caught up in the idea of a Big Event and are able to convince themselves that this is actually good storytelling. And I can't entirely blame them - if DC came to me and said, hey want to write a huge story that can use any character we've ever published and make any changes you want, then heck I'd likely do it too.

(I have to add one example that also ties back to an earlier post came in a recent issue of Siege. Now this should have been a good event. The idea is simple - Osborn and his government-sanctioned supervillains-pretending-to-be-good-guys invade Asgard and everybody else tries to stop them. Four issues, potentially tight & restricted story, big cast, big stakes - easy right? Well Marvel first started advertising that "an Avenger will die!" as if that matters at all, though considering that there are now four separate Avengers teams running around maybe a little thinning of the herd can't hurt. But the death (Ares in case anybody cares but really nobody does) was a two-page spread of him being literally torn apart in very graphic detail. At some point it's hard not to think these creators really are stuck at age 12.)

One solution is what Alan Moore proposed in the never-realized "Twilight of the Superheroes" where there's a main story in a separate series and then everybody else can tie-in if they think it's worth doing. He wrote then that such an event "would have a sensible and logical reason for crossing over with other titles, so that the readers who were prompted to try a new title as a result of the crossover or vice versa didn't feel cheated by some tenuous linkage of storylines that was at best spurious and at worst nonexistent." That nails the problem we're seeing today and Moore wrote that a quarter of a century ago.

The Big Two at times appear to trying something like this by putting the event into its own mini-series and then adding other minis rather than using ongoing series. Final Crisis possibly came closest to this idea though considering the links between the minis and then to Batman: RIP in those regular books it was hardly a streamlined approach.

Another solution frequently proposed (and that even the editorial people say they're doing but never really follow through, as Allen's article points out) is to just put a moratorium on cross-overs. This seems unlikely considering that the business has adopted this blockbuster mentality - it's pretty easy to mark the decline of American film back to studio reactions to Star Wars and there's a chance we're seeing the same thing in comics.

Because what I'm really getting at isn't the events or that they might cause problems for retrospective reading - it's that so many mainstream comics creators are producing inferior work and appear to not care about stories or characters or ideas, in short to not care about all the things that drive people to create art. And the real problem is that very few of them seem to realize that.

Girl Comics #1

2010-03-13T23:14:00.002-05:00

Apparently inspired by their indie anthology Strange Tales (which was of course "inspired" by DC's Bizarro), Marvel decided to spotlight the "Women of Marvel" as pointed out on the cover. There have been some complaints about the title Girl Comics but that's mostly from people who don't really understand feminism - the contents are a bigger issue.

The cheesy opening ("We don't do it for the sake of power or glory though we are powerful and glorious") is as bland as most introductions are but at least indicates the point of the series. A point that's completely contradicted by the very first story where a woman in trouble is rescued by Nightcrawler. True she does help by bonking the baddie on the head with a high-heeled shoe but it's hard to imagine how having a weak damsel saved by a strong man gets across any kind of positive message (and since it's not a story, barely even an anecdote, the message would be the only point).

Another story has a guy online setting up to meet a girl at a park, only the "girl" is the Punisher. Then it's revealed that the guy is preparing to abduct the girl. He arrives at the park and is promptly murdered by the Punisher. Again not even really a story and you have to wonder why the creators thought this was a good idea (though a likely guess is that they've heard too many scare stories from TV and magazines - the rate of such crimes is much lower than most people have been led to believe). The guy as far as we know hasn't even committed a crime. A similar story in Deadpool #900 at least gave the background and oddly enough had more a feeling of reality. Here the Punisher comes across just as creepy as the would-be abductor.

The rest of the issue is at least decent. The highlight is Robin Furth & Agnes Garbowska's evocation of classic children's lit using Franklin and Valeria Richards. A few years back Devin Grayson was one of the best writers in comics but she faded out - she has an ok but not any better X-Men story here. Jill Thompson's Venus looks great but feels just a tad too clunky.

While I want to support anything different that the Big Two try, at this point I don't know whether the next issue will be worth picking up.

Book covers

2010-03-05T21:23:00.002-05:00

Amazon's Omnivoracious blog compares covers of US and UK editions of some titles, an idea the writer picked up from another blog called The Millions which did 2010 and 2009 versions. So now I'm disappointed that we didn't get the British cover for Netherland which is so much better than the American. It also makes me wonder about the decisions behind some of them. The US cover for Stockett's The Help is so bland that I didn't realize until recently it had been getting good reviews - it just looked like more quasi-romantic churn. Moore's A Gate at the Stairs is almost as bad in the US version and while I don't think the UK's is too much better it at least looks like something you wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen hauling around.

I get a daily newsletter called Shelf Awareness of bookstore news and every week they quiz some author with a set of standard questions. One is "Book you've bought for the cover" and surprisingly most respondents say they don't buy books based on the cover, almost as if they'd been asked to divulge some slightly disgusting fleshly proclivity. Not a huge majority answer this way but perhaps a bit over half and the thing is that I think they're lying. Now I can imagine "normal" folk not buying based on a cover but writers? Book people? This is our STUFF and pretty much every writer and remotely dedicated reader connects to the physical book in a way that I assume those normals do to cars and clothes. Why even pretend that the cover had no influence in a decision?

I'll have to admit that I rarely buy books purely for the cover alone, at least not since a high school binge where Frazetta covers in the used store meant an instant purchase. Partly this is because I already have too much. There have been a few recently that tempted me, especially those Penguins with the comic artists covers - Ware, Sacco, Jason, Millionare. And the recent cover for Under the Volcano with its Day of the Dead skull though the temptation is at least partly because I was thinking of re-reading it and that would be a good excuse.

But there are also covers that work against books, not merely bad covers to forgettable books (of which there is an endless stream) but ones for books worth reading. Michael Shea's Nifft the Lean is a wonderful, sharply written novel but the cover made it look like the most generic heroic fantasy and a reissue as The Incompleat Nifft was possibly even worse. A friend was reading one of the Flashman novels while riding the bus to work and said she had to wrap it in brown paper because she was afraid somebody seeing just the cover would think it was racist (which you'll know isn't true if you've read any of the books). An entire post could go to textbook covers because they frequently look like somebody just grabbed an image from the stock library. In fact I know for sure that happened in at least one case where our store had a sociology book where the cover was a group of multi-ethnic young people having a grand old time on what looked like a beach. A few months later we got flyers advertising some kind of travel service that used the exact same photograph.

And I might as well mention my all-time favorite textbook cover: the geek joke for John Taylor's Classical Mechanics.

Two lists

2010-02-28T22:52:00.002-05:00

The AV Club made a list of 35 odds 'n' sods albums as essential as official releases and the first surprise is that they found that many worthy ones. The writers certainly admit that all aren't perfect but that's not the point - the point is that these are up to the standards of the other albums and by the ones I'm familiar with (about half) that's true. I would have added Joy Division's Still and The Great Lost Kinks Album and maybe even the Sex Pistols' Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle which has always seemed more a stray tracks collection than a soundtrack (especially since it doesn't have much to do with the film).

A different note is IO9's 75 Books You Should Own for DC Comics' 75 Anniversary. The whole "own" bit makes this too aggressive, especially considering that several selections are Absolute/Omnibus editions that are too much (too much money, too much size) for even many fans. There's one real slip - Mad and The Spirit are now owned by DC but aren't in any sense part of its history. Some of the selections really shouldn't have been (Golden Age, 52, Blackest Night) but more importantly the emphasis on what can currently be bought means large chunks of DC is missing - nearly all of the Western, SF, horror and war comics, completely all of the romance, comedy and teen (nobody really wants a Binky or Scooter revival but trust me that some of the Jerry Lewis and Bob Hope issues still hold up), and genuine but unreprinted treasures such as Sugar & Spike. Otherwise, the list is pretty decent and it's nice to see recognition for often overlooked titles like WE3 (one of the best works in any medium I've encountered in the past decade), Doctor 13: Architecture and Morality, Sleeper and the finale to Grant Morrison's Animal Man.

Worst rock films?

2010-02-23T21:05:00.002-05:00

The headline says Jim DeRogatis Picks the Worst Rock Movies Ever but in fact he's really picking movies often claimed to be the best where he doesn't agree. Normally this would be a big "so what" but DeRogatis is a decent critic (I worked with him briefly years ago on a newspaper Elvis tribute) and also because I mostly agree with him. The Last Waltz always seemed far more boring than its rep suggests and mainly because it feels too staged. Woodstock as a movie isn't quite so tedious (or maybe it is but in a different way) but as he points out the myth is and while you'd think that punk would have punctured that, well I guess that too was a bit too much myth. DeRogatis nails the problem with Heavy Metal Parking Lot and if you've seen any of director Jeff Krulik's other films you'd know he's full of hipster scorn masquerading as an appreciation for trash culture. (Oddly enough I used to work with somebody who might have been in the film except for an accident - she had tickets and was ready to go but did something that resulted in her mother grounding her so she never made the show.) Now I'll admit HMPL does have a kind of mean, voyeuristic fun in watching rednecks be rednecks but then again have you ever been tailgating before a college football game? As DeRogatis points out, the vast majority of the people in either case are perfectly fine but it's the small percentage of jerks that are amusing or annoying.

As for Rock Star I'm not sure what he saw in it - this should have been almost the greatest film ever but mostly fell flat.

Food prejudices

2010-02-14T09:00:00.000-05:00

I sometimes go to a place that serves Chicago hot dogs, a bit unusual considering that I live half a continent away. They have a big mass-produced sign saying that they won't put ketchup on hot dogs which for all I know is a national prejudice but one I always associate with Chicago. Maybe that's because the first time I encountered such an idea was in a Straight Dope column which originated from Chicago.

The thing that's so funny is that like so many prejudices the anti-ketchup people have a definite reason (ketchup is too sweet) but a reason that still won't convince anybody, maybe because it's arbitrary. Have you ever had a Chicago dog? Relish and a pickle spear? Peppers? Tomatoes? People that state "ketchup smothers the flavor of the hot dog" but who will eat a Chicago dog that smothers the flavor even more are simply dishonest.

These prejudices can be found in lots of places. I remember a Food Network chef saying that a well-done steak shouldn't even be eaten but really that's not his call. It's easy to start an argument in some places about the "proper" way to make chili or BBQ. Some people clearly enjoy questioning the authenticity of ethnic/international restaurants. I once read somebody who blasted all the supposedly ignorant diners who eat sushi with chopsticks (in Japan it's finger food) or who bite it in two instead of eating all at once, something that stood out to me because I hate eating sushi with my fingers and frequently the pieces are too big to really enjoy unless bitten in half. And people I know who've been to Thailand or Mexico then point out how our Thai and Mexican restaurants aren't quite like what is eaten there? Not news and even if it was nobody cares.

Now I know that much of this is just people creating arguments about something that doesn't matter or can't be resolved just as others will get into cats vs dogs, or DC vs Marvel, or pretty much anything involving sports. The difference with food tends to be that they can pretend to scientific reasons (the too-sweet ketchup approach) or historical ones (whether chili should have beans). In the end none of that matters. To paraphrase Duke Ellington if it tastes good then it is good.

What happened to World of Warcraft

2010-02-13T08:00:00.000-05:00

I started WoW a few months after it went online but after about a year went to playing intermittently, usually about one month on then two off. I just noticed that last year I only played two months and a good bit of that is because of the great simplification that's been going on. Summer of 2008 I had figured that would be my last but just a couple of months later Jon at work told me that with a new patch hunters could now tame devilsaurs so of course I was back. (Though as cool as devilsaurs look I found core hounds to be much better.)

A good example is Alterac Valley. When I first reached the level to enter it was fairly complex. Each side tended to break up into teams to gather the materials for flyers or reinforcements, try to summon the big gods, round up wolves, capture mines, etc. There was strategy involved even if getting 40 complete strangers to do it was tough. One result is that matches could last a long time - I was in one that went two hours and there were believable reports of some that lasted up to six. Today, though, that's nearly all gone. AV matches tend to be races to take out the towers then the general and as a result rarely last more than 20-30 minutes. I was even in one that lasted just nine.

There are probably hundreds of other changes designed to simplify and speed up the game that mostly feels like dumbing it down. Some of this was inevitable. Increasing the leveling speed almost had to be done so that enough people would be at the cap for the expansions. The hunter mechanics were so hard to understand correctly that most hunters were played very poorly - that definitely needed to be streamlined. While it does remove some of the concrete feel of a persistent world to allow players to enter a battleground from anywhere I have to admit that I like that. And while allowing the purchase of purple gear through honor points caused an outcry from hardcore players it's the only way non-raiders like me would ever get this stuff.

But I guess what really seems missing is the feeling for about the first couple of years of openness and discovery. Though I rarely join groups and have never been in an instance raid I did participate in several city raids. The impromptu weekend battles around Tarren Mill were a hoot even if there were fairly pointless. There was a lot of crafting discussions and figuring out best approaches to gear or talents. Guilds since then seem to be less friendly though maybe I'm just in the wrong ones. (Being in a large, imploding guild was certainly less than fun even if it had a train-wreck fascination.)

The expansions drained most of that while the daily quests, jousting and world pvp took much of the rest. With players spread out there's less opportunity for ad hoc pvp (or even ad hoc help) and the battlegrounds and dailies absorb attention. In a way I suppose it's better that there's a direction but it still feels like something is missing and I'm certainly not the only person to feel that way. It was fun for a while to level characters in different races or classes but after a while you're playing through the same quest for the sixth or seventh time so yawn. (Blizz has steadfastly refused introducing random factors and events, don't know whether that's from specific design issues or a more abstract sense of purpose.) Admittedly one of the great things about WoW is that it supports numerous types of playing styles and personalities but that can't really help much after a while. Once hitting the cap everything feels more restricted but then lots of hardcore players feel otherwise. Maybe it's just that grinding the same dailies and waiting hours for an instance aren't really for me. I'll admit that the Cataclysm expansion will draw me back by essentially creating a new but still familiar game but that's probably months away.

Chuck Season Three

2010-02-12T17:12:00.000-05:00

The story so far: One of my local TV stations used to run The Simpsons syndicated when I got home and was eating dinner. When Chuck started it was right after The Simpsons so even though the premise wasn't that promising I ended up watching maybe a third or so of the first season. Eventually The Simpsons was ditched in favor of Jeopardy or some other mindless game show so I now almost never watch "live" TV and consequently was mostly going to pass on Chuck )even though that makes it sound like I thought this through to a decision when really I never considered it). But a guy at work kept talking it up and eventually I watched nearly all the second season, missing only a few at the first. And it was pretty fun in a mostly haphazard sort of way. There was a big mis-step when they decided to Get Serious and have Chuck secretly witness Sarah murder an unarmed spy who was threatening him but I knew the show couldn't pull off any real drama and sure enough that lasted barely into the next episode. Then there was a big, reasonably inventive storyline at the end (Chevy Chase as an evil mastermind!) that worked pretty well and made big shakeups in the premise.

The story today: Except Season Three undid everything in the first episode. The worst decision was to kill off the corporate-shill store manager but not reveal that to most of the characters, instead telling them he'd been transferred to another store. So why not just transfer him? The murder is out of keeping with the show's tone, especially when it went to this much trouble to reboot. That was the other mistake - undoing the previous story elements so that the status quo is the same as the first two seasons.

There is one change that's been kept so far which is that Chuck now has an improved Intersect in his head that will let him do actions he couldn't before - kung fu, surgical procedures, speak foreign languages, etc. The mistake is that the writers decided to make it defective so that sometimes the Intersect works and sometimes not. Stated that way this seems like a decent approach that avoids making Chuck a superspy but clearly it wasn't thought completely through. The problem is that the defect is being used so that the Intersect doesn't work when that's "dramatic" but works when the writers need it to. So in a recent episode Chuck learned a martial arts kick when it was useful for a comic gag (and to start a subplot) but not when it was actually needed for a real fight.

There also doesn't seem to have been much thought about how the show should actually work now that the original concept has been more or less played out. The conflict between spy activity and Buy More regular life drove most of the humor but now that connection is long gone and we're left with a decent workplace sitcom and a half-assed spy show. Getting the two together will start to be more and more arbitrary, possibly ending up with the approach taken by Friends where all the main characters had to be in every episode so eventually the two or three main stories had no relation to each other and could have been shuffled with no effect on each other.

Oh and that whole romantic/sexual tension stuff is just not tense or funny or interesting - same for Chuck's timid nerdiness. I may give the show one more episode to do something but most likely it's a finished deal.

Avatar (Cameron 2009)

2010-02-07T21:22:00.002-05:00

If I was 15 there's a good chance I'd think this was an amazing film but since that's been a long time ago now all I think is why so many awards are going to what is in every respect except budget a B-movie. Yes that does sound almost like a compliment but I mean it's closer to one of those lame Lippert productions that MST3K loved to ridicule (except that Avatar is mostly an animated film). It probably doesn't take any more than 15 minutes into Avatar than you can predict the entire story. Isn't there supposed to be some kind of second act twist? Or did Cameron (who can still direct an action sequence like nobody's business but shouldn't be writing his own films) believe that he'd actually done that? Michelle Rodriguez could have hooked him up with a Lost writer or two. (Just imagine The People teaming up with The Others leading a herd of polar bears.)

Some stray thoughts:

* So 140 years into the future when they send a super-expensive piece of biotech out into the field nobody bothers to put a GPS into it?

* The aliens are a mix of generic American Indians and Ewoks (and mostly "played" by black actors) while the evil miners & soldiers are almost all white guys. Did nobody point this out to Cameron? Or was a working title for the film Liberal Guilt? (Though not guilty enough for Cameron to realize how racist this is.) Can you imagine if he'd swapped Rodriguez and Ribisi's roles? Or better yet had the mining boss played by, say, Oprah?

* This good v. evil idea is also why the military sequences are deliberately evocative of Vietnam movies. Notice how the opening sequence is mostly VTOL-type craft but later we get what are essentially helicopters. I couldn't help but think of a line from Gardens of Stone where somebody says how can the enemy possibly hope to win by fighting helicopers with bows and arrows and the response is how could they possibly hope to defeat an enemy that would fight helicopters with bows and arrows.

* One reason for making the aliens that way is Cameron wanted them to be utopian and one function of utopias over the past four centuries is to criticize the existing social structure. But Cameron really should have been telling a story and he's made them so perfect that at some point there's really no drama. Even trying to make them underdogs he went so far to underpower them that he had to create a "flux" to reduce the power of most human weapons and vehicle. Apparently even that didn't satisify him and in the film's most jaw-dropping moment (again, not meant in a good way) he used a literal deus ex mundus to save the aliens. (Mama Planet has a sense of dramatic timing - note how she didn't bother attacking until it would change the course of the battle.)

* Why even bother making Jake lame? The story would have played out almost exactly the same if he wasn't and actually might have been more interesting if he had a conflict between duty and what he's seeing rather than wanting to get an operation. (Though honestly I'm not really sure if viewers are supposed to believe he's thinking at all considering how little is devoted to anything except his Dances With Wolves moments.)

* And like the Costner film this is in a long line where some white guy shows minorities/Third Worlders/indigenous people how they can save themselves and live a proper life. (Or similarly a man showing women how to be women in Tootsie.) What seems so obvious in stuff from the 30s & 40s probably gets a pass now if we have to read subtitles.

* So Rodriguez does show up to rescue our heroes from prison. Good for her. But wait - didn't she disobey direct orders and visibly break ranks? Shouldn't she be in prison herself waiting a court martial?

* For a world that's so deadly (I half expected something on the order of Harry Harrison's Deathworld) it's notable that by the end bodies can lie in the forest for hours and nothing tries to nibble on it. Maybe The People don't taste so good. Ever notice how many designers (or creative consultants if that's their title) when trying to come up with alien wildlife just add a couple of limbs? Now why would animals that live in a heavily undergrown jungle need extra legs? Especially on a planet that we're told has lower gravity (though apart from that bit of dialogue there's nothing else to indicate it).

* I also can't help wondering why the shaman woman knew the Tree of Life can transfer a consciousness. Is that something they do often? An inspired guess?

* The frequent use of 2008/9 slang ("bitch" etc), attitudes and the simplistic story mean that viewers in a 30-40 years will think this is just as dated as old stuff seems to us now. The dialogue part in SF is always tough because if you try to make it too much like a potential future then you're likely to lose readers/viewers (think of A Clockwork Orange (book not film) or Riddley Walker). Still, Cameron didn't even bother trying. Dude, the computers are just toys - they can't improve the film.

* Nobody cares but it was odd (well not too odd, in fact barely even worth mentioning) watching Drag Me to Hell in the morning and then going to this later and seeing the same character actor Dileep Rao (psychic and scientist respectively). He's been in exactly two feature films and I just happened to see them on the same day.

Two films

2010-01-31T08:00:00.000-05:00

C.S. Lewis remarked somewhere (I think in The Discarded Image) that real art always gives too much or too little information for the average viewer/reader. Now of course this is pretty smug--gosh we know better than the plebes--and it's also dead-wrong unless you're a true elitist, but still it's something worth considering. Many artists do in fact give us too much, high modernists such as Joyce, Pound, Proust, etc being prime examples. Others keep it spare, Beckett, Glass or possibly Chekhov. And then there are some such as Shakespeare who in their time were perfectly transparent but today are too much. The point that I take from Lewis is more a general approach rather than absolutes - in other words many people have trouble with this type of art because they don't know how to deal with the abundance or the lack. After all somebody who can plow through enormous fantasy trilogies or for that matter the Aubery/Maturin series certainly has the stamina for Proust; it's the mindset that's a different issue.

The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch 2009) - For the first 10, 15 minutes I thought Jarmusch had made a completely tedious clunker. Then the film's unique narrative (there really isn't much of one) and texture (repetition, blankness, calmness) started to take over and if by the end I wasn't 100% convinced it still stands as a pretty remarkable work. In the solid, verite-esque making-of doc on the DVD Jarmusch remarks that he's made his big-budget action film with fights, schemes, hot babes, exotic locations, etc and the odd thing is that he's completely right except for the "big budget" part. The catch? The Limits of Control is sort of the film that's left when you take all the stuff we usually see in an action thriller out, leaving us with walking, waiting, driving, sleeping. It's not a Warhol film because there actually are secret meetings, coded messages, an action sequence, clandestine activities, identity changes, it's just that in Jarmusch's world we're watching a pattern not pretending to delve into psychology or causation. And very little of this is ever explained. Why does the protagonist always order two espressos? Personal preference? (We only ever see him drink one.) A flag for his contacts? For part of the film I thought Jarmusch had made Dead Man II and that we'd get the same revelation as there or maybe as De Palma's Femme Fatale. In fact there are a few moments that are completely inexplicable such as a film poster portraying an event that the artist couldn't possibly have witnessed. And in the film's most audacious moment, the protagonist is confronted with the task of entering a building that appears utterly secure and fully monitored. His explanation of how it was accomplished more or less sums up the film and honors the thriller convention of its main character's ingenuity while otherwise utterly violating not just thriller conventions but those of most any form of film. That the moment works shows how much Jarmusch is in control or maybe just willing to trust a lack of control. This is a film that I suspect will improve on a second viewing.

La mujer sin cabeza / The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel 2008) - Another film that withholds or at least doesn't bother with certain information but one centered around a never-resolved mystery that suggests Blow-Up or L'Avventura. A woman on a remote road hits something - was it a dog or the boy whose body is found nearby several days later? The first section effectively creates a sense of anomie and directionless tension as the woman wanders through a hospital, her job and her home in what seems to be a kind of vauge shock. Martel presents much of this in an oblique method. The incident, for instance, is shot with a camera on the passenger's seat pointed at the driver and with one exception there are no edits or camera movements. Even when she pulls the car over to get out we can only see her in corners of the image or sections of the car window. Now the one exception is an unmotivated cutaway (meaning it's clearly not meant to be anything the woman sees) where we see the object in the road behind. It looks mostly like a dog but is in extreme longshot so you can't really tell - other sections of the film support the dog idea but it's clear after a while that resolving what happened isn't in any way the point of the film. In fact after a while I'm not sure what the point was meant to be and I don't mean that in a good way. Many reviewers claim it's an expose of privileged class but that's a difficult argument to make. Yes, the woman is a dentist and obviously pretty well off, and yes she does employ clearly not well-off Indians to garden or clean but that's hardly anything newsworthy, hardly even an observation. In one sequence where the woman drives a worker home the film even resorts to that idea that the lower classes may be poor but they have more fun, they're more open and more alive (or at least have better music). Martel's way of presenting a (non)story through stray bits of dialogue, glancing moments, apparently motiveless actions is one that normally I would love but here just leaves me cold. (And I feel like pointing out that some reviews have over-played the ambiguity - Hoberman says a "ghostly" handprint on the car window suggests the boy was hit but the print was there before the incident, while another reviewer says we're never shown how the woman gets to the hospital which for one thing doesn't really matter but more importantly there's a fairly long shot showing her being driven, a shot that's replicated later in the film. My pointing out thus endeth.)

Comics - happy happy joy joy?

2010-01-30T10:00:00.000-05:00

"I just like the idea of my escapism actually feeling less oppressive than my real life again."

That mostly sums up the point of Will 2010 Be The Year Of Superheroic Niceness?, an accurate piece about The Big Two's plans to turn their lines lighter, less grim (marketing hooks are Heroic Age at Marvel and Brightest Day at DC). Though the piece avoids laying any blame on the actual comic writers that's really where it goes (and I'm including the editorial staff here since in this world they're far more a creative force than book publishing editors). They're the ones who seem incapable of moving beyond the status quo and whose collective idea of "serious" is determining which character dies next. So we get a constant stream of Big Events where Nothing Will Ever Be the Same (though it always is), heavy-handed preaching (do good, people) and sheer jaw-dropping stupidity (not the fun kind either). Just so we know that the creators are serious.

Some of this is almost built into the system. Since each company has to produce a significant number of issues each year, most featuring tentpole characters, after a while it's hard to keep that interesting. So there have to be changes though usually not ones that will alienate the readers (though the widely disparaged Kyle Rayner and One More Day events show that no matter how much fans complain they won't completely abandon characters). This is where the grim 'n' gritty comes in. Ever since the double-whammy of Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns most comics creators have assumed that what gave those works their power was the violence and sex and took them as a license to go wild until we end up with the traditionally light DC giving us a teenaged girl tortured to death with power tools (though she got better) or another stuffed into a refrigerator. Or over at Marvel the entire Ultimatum mess.

Admittedly those are extreme examples but the general feel has been that comics creators think they have to engage with The Real World though the results are rarely worth the trouble. These are after all stories about grown people in colorful, tight costumes and boasting magical powers - there are limits to realism before they just become silly. (One of the nadirs is the Iron Man movie when in blatant Bush propaganda he trots over to the "Middle East" to vanquish the bad guys, though almost anything Judd Winick writes is also a good candidate.)

So in a way to move from the kids stigma that always haunts comics, many creators push to be more grown-up though apparently without really understanding what that might mean in this context. Just look at Identity Crisis which took a "real" novelist for writer and gave us a stupendously misjudged moment with the entire rape sequence. (The tiny footprints on a victim's brain was also misjudged but in an entirely different way.) This isn't the place to discuss why murder is acceptable for pure escapist entertainment (just turn on your TV or see the walls in libraries & bookstores) but not rape, or at least not in Anglo-American culture. In fact it's a little hard to imagine what the creators were thinking but the clear point is to, y'know, keep it real and apparently rape, murder and forced lobotomies are the only ways they could think to do that. Just recently in the Blackest Night event Kyle Rayner died and the forums were full of comments about how successfully DC managed to keep this quiet. The reason as it turns out is that he was resurrected the very next issue with The Power of Love just like T'Challa in the current Black Panther series. (And as much as I defend superhero comics it's stuff like this made by adults in all apparent seriousness that make me want to jump ship.) On a broader level that's why we're also getting this constant stream of dead characters or why potentially substantial stories such as Civil War end up being yet more one-sided blather - the creators are so blinded by an idea of "reality" that they can't think of anything else to do. (It's also why so many stories take five issues when one would really be enough - they want to tell every little moment.)

I'm not saying that we should go back to the Silver Age - that ship has, as they say, sailed. But it's notable that the kids comics released as Marvel Adventures and Johnny DC (most apparently cancelled now) have been more imaginative, substantial and plain fun than the regular series. And there are some that can be considered "grown-up" without falling into this grimness trap - at the moment I'd point out Brubaker's Captain America as an example even if he did kill off the main character. Perhaps this is in some way related to the constant need to point out a moral that tends to infect so much mainstream comics (though it's possibly even more prominent in TV). The creators don't entirely understand how to tell a story or at least don't feel comfortable if that's all they're doing.

I'm not suggesting that comic writers need to bone up on Henry James or Chekhov but certainly they appear to have read too narrowly. Geoff Johns is a perfect example of somebody intimately familiar with comics (at least superhero comics) but seems to have little beyond that. Just check out his recent Green Lantern run for an example of how turgid and insular a writer can get. It's enough to drive a reader over to Ware and Tomine and etc. Honestly though I don't expect anything to change. There's still going to be some good work done amidst the flow of junk and while some people will claim that's always the case for anything I can't help but keep hoping otherwise.

Being Human

2010-01-29T11:00:00.000-05:00

When I first heard about this show a few months ago it was described as a vampire, werewolf and ghost are roommates. Pure sitcom fun, right? Well imagine my surprise watching the pilot ep to find that it's a fairly dark, quasi-existentialist drama, though admittedly with bits of low-key humor. (And I should point out that I watched the original BBC eps - apparently the ones airing on BBC America are heavily edited for content and time.) One interesting quirk is that after the pilot all the main roles except for one were recast but the entire pilot is still the beginning of the story. It's peculiar to see the story continue with different actors, though clearly part of the intention was to lighten it up just a bit. (Bunuel tried the same tactic in Tristana, definitely one of his lesser films.)

Being Human does go a bit overboard on underlining what "being human" might mean rather than letting that come out of the events. Doesn't help that most of the eps open with voice-over musings that suggest Mohinder wandered over from Heroes to lend a hand. But that's easy to let slide considering that it otherwise manages to be clever, reasonably surprising and sometimes even effectively moving, perhaps a result of spending a bit more time on daily life than the Big Plot Points. The ending seems a tad forced but mostly it effectively wraps up the stories by the end of the season without feeling arbitrary. Season two just started a week or so back.

And the world's best-selling author is....

2010-01-28T22:09:00.002-05:00

...James Patterson? Then again his books are always on the new release tables and I couldn't tell him apart from Michael Connelly, John Sanford or any of those, though it seems likely they're imitating Patterson (even down to jacket design). This profile is actually pretty interesting even if it doesn't make me want to read any of his books. The journalist might have added a bit more context - this type of industrial fiction production dates back at least to Fantomas and American pulps and runs up through 50s/60s paperback originals and series like Mack Bolan, Perry Rhodan and The Executioner with companies like Harlequin coming from a less author-centered angle. Ever notice how people whose work is critically disparaged tend to fall back on the "well lots of people like it" defense. There is some truth in that but it's also worth remembering that Hitler won an election as far as the wisdom of crowds (if we didn't need reminding). It's hard to tell how much Patterson actually uses this himself and how much is just the journalist picking quotes.

A few links

2010-01-24T22:29:00.002-05:00

* Newspaper articles are too long (and follow outdated stylistic ideas).

* The New Yorker on Neil Gaiman. (Though one error: the original Sandman did not wear a zoot suit, just a trenchcoat.)

* Creepy unexplained broadcasts.

* Top 10 Victorian detective stories.

* Dirda on Auster and Highsmith.

Fantasy Noir

2010-01-21T08:00:00.000-05:00

There's talk (is that vague enough?) about a new sub-genre called fantasy noir. This inevitably raises images of hardboiled PIs cruising the mean streets of Faerie Town and in fact there's already a long line of such works, most famously Who Framed Roger Rabbit? but also including Jonathan Lethem's first novel Gun, With Occasional Music, Hjortsberg's Fallen Angel, Steve Niles' Cal MacDonald books, Garrett's Lord Darcy series, far too many vampire detectives and so forth. But fantasy noir is supposed to be something different, apparently familiar fantasy elements re-arranged and pumped up but is most likely somebody trying to rope unrelated books together.

One of the most commonly referenced, even acclaimed, is Richard K. Morgan's The Steel Remains (2009). I wasn't impressed by his Altered Carbon, mostly a routine detective story with SF elements tacked on or to be more accurate since the SF elements are the core of the set-up, it's a story that could have been told as easily without the SF. He also did a Black Widow mini that was neither here nor there.

The Steel Remains isn't much of a departure. It's yet another story of a down-and-out soldier and some buddies who have to prevent a take-over of their world - that's way too simplistic but is basically what's happening. That it's considered "noir" is because of the cursing, violence and sex (two of the three main characters are gay though since one never acts on it that's mostly theoretical). Just shocking, I'm sure. But none of this is new and compared to, say, Martin's A Game of Thrones this looks like the work of a 12-year-old. It's also worth noting that Morgan hedges his fantasy by providing a kind of SF explanation for what might be "magic" though that's never entirely clear. All this noir-ness doesn't add anything to The Steel Remains which is at heart very conventional, even predictable, and I certainly won't be reading the next book in the series.

More successful is Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim (2009) which places an escapee from Hell on the trail of the people who put him there. In some way this is also predictable but for an even more obvious reason than The Steel Remains. Sandman Slim is more or less a rewrite of The Hunter, the first book in Donald Westlake's Parker series (filmed indelibly as Point Blank and too delibly as Payback). At least Kadrey doesn't try to hide this - Westlake used the pseudonym Stark for the novels and Kadrey's protagonist is named Stark.

I believe I read Kadrey's first novel, 1988's Metrophage, back when I was plowing through anything even vaguely cyberpunkish but after looking up some descriptions online can't be sure - in any case it definitely didn't leave too much of an impact 20 years later. In Sandman Slim the "noir" aspect is more conventional since it's set in L.A. and has that familiar first-person narrative tone. But it's a book filled with demons, black magicians, talkative severed heads, white-power thugs, Victorian criminal Vidocq himself, etc, all done with just a bit of humor that comes from realizing how silly this is even if we won't admit it. Escapee Stark does have his goals but is somewhat amoral, not enough to seem psychopathic but enough that his idea of the right thing to do doesn't always match the reader's - John Constantine is an obvious influence. Some of the cultural references (Esquivel, Martin Denny) are so dated that it suggests this book was in Kadrey's drawer for the past decade and he over-does the wisecracks at times. Still, the story is completely wrapped up and has a surprise at the end that it would be impossible to guess but means the next book might be even better.

Just too many books

2010-01-20T08:00:00.000-05:00

In a moment of synchronicity (add your own quotes to the word), I happened across two different pieces about having too many books. Apart from the intrinsic interest of each they're an illustration of work by somebody who writes and by somebody who is a writer, perhaps a too-cute distinction but one that's real, or at least defensible, enough.

Charlie Brooker in The Guardian has just realized that he has more books and DVDs that he can get through in the rest of his life. I came to the same realization about 15 years ago but without the same crisis.

Where Brooker goes with this is that he's buying stuff he just thinks he wants and that the freedom of choice is confusing. It's an indication that he's fairly superficial about this when he claims that from his computer he can download nearly any film or piece of music ever made which is simply wrong. Dave Kehr seems to have calculated that only about 4% of American films have been released on home video (see here) which I'll assume is more a rough calculation than a thorough review. But just for argument let's say Kehr is way off and that 20% of American films have been released and that the Internet has a ton of bootlegs that triple this up to 60%. That's still a lot of films not available and it gets even worse when we look outside American borders.

But really Brooker just wants to vent a bit about all the stuff he's acquired but not read, watched or heard. True readers, watchers and listeners don't really care about this, in fact the accumulations tend to be a by-product of intense involvement with whatever artform you prefer. Clearly some of us may take it to extremes (I haven't stopped purchasing books in the past 15 years) but even his idea of not wanting a "cultural diet" is hardly the response of somebody who really cares.

The piece by a real writer (dated the same as Brooks though I found them about a week apart) is Roger Ebert's "Books do furnish a life". Ebert is specific, doesn't leap to general conclusions from his own experience and just writes with more fluidity and interest. His piece also sounds very familiar to me despite a lot of obvious differences (for me no wife, no house, no residence in another country). But I know what he means about this: I have about six or seven translations of Don Quixote that clearly I will never read, three or four of Homer, two editions of Aubrey (admittedly they're practically different books), both abridgements of The Golden Bough (though at least not the entire thing), two complete Shakespeares along with single editions of several plays, and so forth. Plus literal piles of books that I need to read right now but tend to hang around. Ebert is to some degree simply explaining the situation but it's one where many of us are fellow travellers.

Two books

2010-01-19T08:00:00.000-05:00

It seems logical in some non-pc way to put these together.

Salman Rushdie Midnight's Children (1981) - It took me a few months to get through this, not because I didn't like it but because it's so richly textured and also so nonlinear that it didn't have much of a narrative drive to keep pulling me back every day. So I'd go through a chapter or two then set it aside (unintentionally) for a week or so then pick it up again until finally going through the entire last half in about three days. It's an odd book with a central conceit of children born at the same time with special powers that could have come straight from a comic book (such as Rising Stars which may have well taken its idea from Rushdie though it's certainly not an uncommon one). Or more likely Tristram Shandy with the novel being more or less the narrator's autobiography, taking a long section to even get to his birth, commenting on the wayward story, the oddball family and even the narrator losing the tip of a body part when a door/window shuts. What's most attractive is Rushdie's dense, very "written" style that draws all sorts of pop culture, historical, legendary references into what are nearly prose poems. Not for Rushdie an unobtrusive, supposedly clear style that just focuses on events. That also does tend to be a problem at times when I was trying to figure out just who somebody is supposed to be. Rushdie makes a huge miscalculation for the final third of the book (which I'm not revealing but you can't miss) that's pretty much a what-was-he-thinking moment. I believe the intention was to show some of the arbitrary changes that can happen in life but in practice it so completely derails the story that I'd very nearly recommend not even reading that last section. On the other hand so much of the final part is devoted to the idea of India and what it means to be Indian that unless you care about that (and frankly I don't, my apologies to the entirety of India and its diaspora) then it's especially rough sledding. Midnight's Children does make me think some of his later novels might well be more controlled and successful than this one.

Junot Diaz The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) - This might also be described as "promising" though admittedly the promise is pretty well hidden. Diaz's story of the sufferings of three generations of Dominicans does have some heft and covers history unfamiliar to most Americans. However he's chosen to tell this in a slangy, faux-speech style full of n-words, SF/fantasy references, Spanish phrases, etc that it's hard to take seriously. It's almost like Diaz watched a few months of MTV, copied bits of dialogue and stuck them into his book. Whether in fact this is how young Dominicans talk is irrelevant (and probably not true) because the result is artificial in the most annoying way. Trying to copy speech in writing anyway is always problematic; even Twain had difficulty pulling it off. The nerd culture references feel second-hand, mostly drawn from Lord of the Rings and the most obvious Marvel comics, though there is one reference to Marvelman that even most comics fans wouldn't get. He also misspells Gorilla Grodd. Diaz has also oddly decided to focus on Oscar's virginity with an intensity that would rival any teen sex comedy, almost like American Pie: The Dominican Years. Too bad he also has the same sensitivity and emotional depth as such a comedy. I'll have to admit one thing I do admire about the book is that Diaz so completely ignores the writing-school platitude to "show don't tell". That advice is useful if you're writing a specific type of fiction and possibly to focus beginning writers but in general just ignores so many types of writing. In this case Diaz uses several narrators to tell the story and in fact it actually is telling just as you might get in an oral tradition. This is part of the point, however clumsily he may have done it. There is enough of interest in the book that I did finish the whole thing but it's really a trivial effort.

Wednesday Comics

2010-01-18T08:00:00.000-05:00

Though it finished a few months ago I finally got around to reading the remainder. I don't really understand DC's fascination with weekly comics. I stuck with 52 for pure fan appeal (Super-Chief! Ambush Bug!) and inertia but passed on Countdown and Trinity. This past week they just announced two alternating bi-weeklies as well as a separate weekly about the DC Online game. Who on earth reads all that?

Wednesday Comics seemed different since it was far more limited (just 12 issues) and in an unusually large newspaper-format that offered the possibility for something quite different than the usual run. The end result was predictably mixed with a couple that could easily have been done as a backup story in a regular comic but others that really pushed the limit.

A run-down:

Batman (Azzarello & Risso) - The 100 Bullets team does a decent hard-boiled tale that's more interesting than most of what's been in the regular books these past couple of years.

Kamandi (Gibbons & Sook) - Doing this as a Hal Foster tribute was inspired, especially since the story is otherwise fairly familiar.

Superman (Arcudi & Bermejo) - Very slight with art that's merely larger instead of using the potential space.

Deadman (Bullock & Heuck) - Our hero visits the underworld, tangles with bad people - the twist ending is so obvious that the real twist would have been to not do it.

Green Lantern (Busiek & Quiñones) - Another story that's much better than anything in the regular books even if it is fairly straight-forward.

Metamorpho (Gaiman & Allred) - Allred was born to draw this - too bad Gaiman wasn't born to write it. Some cutesy fourth-wall pushing can't disguise how much Gaiman was working on autopilot.

Teen Titans - (Berganza & Galloway) - Completely forgettable but done with some hideous computer graphics.

Adam Strange (Pope) - I don't know if Paul Pope was the right person for this character (maybe he should have done Deadman) but he doesn't completely disgrace himself.

Supergirl (Palmiotti & Conner) - The undisputed highlight and exactly the kind of thing that got me hooked on comics. Krypto and Streaky are having bouts where they run out of control and Supergirl has to figure out what's happening. It's imaginative, cute and funny.

Metal Men (DiDio & García-López) - A routine tale about a clash with a supervillain but at least decently done.

Wonder Woman (Caldwell) - A complete botch - in fact the text is so difficult to read that I gave up around the fourth issue and didn't even bother trying. To Caldwell's credit he at least used the full page to an extent that it would be almost pointless to reduce the size.

Sgt. Rock (Adam & Joe Kubert) - The story is pretty slight but something other than superheroes is always welcome and Kubert pere hasn't lost anything over the years.

The Flash (Kerschl & Fletcher) - A very clever piece that starts with Barry's story done superhero-style and Iris' done as a romance comic and then mixes and matches from there without ever becoming too forced or complex.

The Demon & Catwoman (Simonson & Stelfreeze) - Though I would much rather have had Simonson's art this mismatched match still works reasonably well.

Hawkman (Baker) - Another decent and somewhat unusual story (and the second with a guest appearance by Aquaman).

What Jack Did

2010-01-17T13:40:00.002-05:00

Jack Bauer is the ultimate ends-justify-the-means guy. Part of the fun of 24 is seeing just how far he'll go though admittedly by now the creators are having to dial it back a bit because there's not much else he can do and still be considered even borderline sane.

So in connection with tonight's start of the new season here's some of the stuff he's done over the past seven seasons, in no particular order:

Stole a helicopter. Twice.
Hijacked an airplane. Twice.
Committed first-degree murder. Twice. (Nina Myers and the prisoner at start of Season Two.)
Robbed a convenience store.
Shot a woman he knew was completely innocent in the thigh.
Executed his boss. (Though on the president's orders.)
Faked a terrorist attack.
Participated in a real terrorist attack (the bombing of his own headquarters).
Kidnapped the president of the United States.
Chopped off his partner's hand with an axe.
Shot and killed another partner.
Faked his own death.
Tortured his brother almost to death.
Got addicted to heroin as part of an undercover operation.
Started a prison riot.
He invaded a foreign embassy (technically an act of war).
He forced a doctor at gunpoint to stop an operation, dooming the patient (his girlfriend's former husband) to death.
Left the country to avoid a Congressional subpoena.
And he's broken so many prisoners out of custody or escaped himself that these are barely misdemeanors in 24-World.

(Check out a post of "7 wacky moments" that of course includes the Kim-cougar tete a tete. That's really just peer pressure because compared to most of Season Six it's really not that "wacky".)

Summer movies

2010-01-11T08:51:00.000-05:00

Well a few months later seems the appropriate time to comment on summer movies. Listed in the order I saw them over the summer (no DVDs). There didn't seem to be as many interesting releases this year and several times I wanted to go see something but there wasn't anything particularly attractive, especially with matinees at $8.

Star Trek (J.J. Abrams) - Mentioned earlier as something of an ideal summer movie and the only film here that I want to see again.

The Hangover (Todd Phillips) - With its reconstruction of events remembered only in fragments this resembles a comic version of Memento. It's certainly quite inventive in spots and as funny as almost anything I saw this year. The big problem is that even though this is a movie about a bachelor part in Las Vegas did it have to be so blatantly misogynist? I'm not even trying to be pc about it - this was so severe and completely unnecessary that it took the film down a couple of notches.

Land of the Lost (Brad Silberling) - Yes, I know better than to watch a Will Ferrell movie but the original TV show was a keystone in my childhood. Its oddball adventures and twisting concepts burrowed into my young teenage mind and while I'm sure it would be painful to see now it still couldn't be as painful as this film. From just a few minutes in until the finish it's a "what were they thinking" experience with joke after joke thudding flat and no apparent effort to hold anything together. Was all that potty humor really necessary? (No but why were they even trying?) Danny McBride is the only person to bring anything of life. With any luck Ferrell will soon become a where-are-they-now memory.

Year One (Harold Ramis) - I'll admit that the trailer made me laugh and got me into the theatre. Turns out anything of even passing amusement was in the trailer so we're left with a tedious travel story where stuff just kinda happens and soon I wanted Jack Black's normal stupid hyperactivity, usually something to avoid. Ramis is usually much better but everybody falls now and then.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Michael Bay) - Yep, I've seen the first film again and still think it's a solid action outing. This is something else. It's a bad sign that in the very first scene not only could I not tell the robots apart but it wasn't until later that I realized that some of them were supposed to be the good guys. And it just gets dumber and more anti-sensical from there. A lot could be forgiven for some decent dialogue - during the chase scenes a bit of screwball-esque bickering between LaBeouf and Fox would have done fine but apparently that never crossed anybody's mind. C'mon just hire some sitcom writer for a bit of script doctoring. Then again after a while you just have to shut down and gawk at the purty esploshuns.

Up (Pete Docter & Bob Peterson) - For a while it seemed like Pixar could do no wrong. Then The Incredibles ended up being entertaining but unimaginative, Cars was a complete misfire that looked like a Pixar ripoff, Ratatouille was their first film that was hurt by being done with computer animation (if anything needed cel work this was it) and WALL-E had a landmark first half and a blandly conventional second. Up is a bit of a return though it's got just a bit too much stop-the-bad-guy heroics to really go back to their glory days. And you have to admire them for front-loading such a sad story.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (Carlos Saldanha & Mike Thurmeier) - I saw this in 3D. First surprise was that it was an extra $5 which I would have skipped except I wanted to try modern 3D. It didn't add much if anything to the film. Some of the chases and swinging are appropriately "exciting" but in general I should have watched 2D. Overall the film was a passable time waster, nothing particularly good but not where I kept checking my watch.

Public Enemies (Michael Mann) - I'd hoped for The Untouchables meets Heat but got, well I don't know but something I didn't want. Too much of the story is bogged down in the minutae of the various criminals (possibly a result of basing this on a non-fiction book or at least having paid for the rights and feeling like they needed to use the material). After a while it's hard to tell who's who and harder to much care.

District 9 (Neill Blomkamp) - Possibly not really a summer movie but it came out at the end and got strong promotions during the summer so I'm counting it. I'm a sucker for fake documentaries so when the first scenes appeared that couldn't have been in the "doc" that we're watching I was a bit annoyed. Turns out to have been Blomkamp's strategy to move us into a more standard story - the entire thing ends with a wham-bam action sequence that shows us who really should have directed Transformers. Though Blomkamp doesn't completely follow his premise all the way through (that action sequence remember?) he still has enough clever twists and genuine anomie that it's a distinctive film. I think, though, that most of the positive reviews are congratulating themselves for recognizing the political commentary which is really Blomkamp's biggest mistake. Such a heavy-handed reference to apartheid is pretty pointless or even regressive. By now nobody is going to be swayed about apartheid itself and far far less about actual racism here at home. Certainly Blomkamp stacks the deck by making the aliens anthropomorphic and giving them cute lil' babies. Imagine if they had been genuinely alien with breadloaf-sized slugs for infants, inexplicable murders/sacrifices, strange behavior, etc. Or what if they weren't all the same, what if some were the equivalent of worker insects with leaders of a completely different type. Anti-racism is based on the premise that all people are basically the same (and I'm using "premise" not because I don't believe it but because this is a contested and not self-evident idea). What if the aliens were in fact vastly different? Is it acceptable to put barely sentient drones into a camp? Then again that's not the film he made - his is the one where we recognize the essential humanity of aliens and grant them essentially human rights. For a far more nuanced and complex view of this idea check out American Zombie.

Best Films of 2008-2009

2010-01-10T20:04:00.002-05:00

Looking back I noticed there was no list for 2008 so I'm combining - don't think there was one for 2007 either but that will just be left alone. As always, best films I saw for the first time from January 1, 2008 through December 31, 2009.

1. The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo 1966) - I avoided this for a long time, expecting heavy-handed preaching. Instead it's one of the most ambiguous but clear-minded films about violence, politics and personal responsibility that I've ever encountered; a film where everybody is caught in a hopeless situation and struggles to get out, often with uncertain results, sometimes with worse. It must have been something in the water but from the mid-60s to the end of the 70s Italy produced possibly the greatest run of political cinema ever (just think of the names: Bertolucci, Rosi, Olmi, Leone, Corbucci, Monicelli, Ferreri, Pasolini, the Tavianis).

2. I'm Not There (Todd Haynes 2007) - Another one where I had low expectations - multiple actors portraying Dylan? Yawn. But it's actually different actors playing different characters based on aspects of Dylan, a tiny but crucial difference that allows the film to move from the historical Dylan while it also cleaves closely to him. (An astonishing amount of dialogue comes from actual Dylan interviews.) At times a sarcastic attack on celebrity culture, at others an intimate family struggle, the film is far more than a clever trick and repays multiple viewings. Plus Richard Gere's calmly haunted performance is one for the ages.

3. The Curse of the Cat People (Robert Wise 1944) - Despite the lurid title, this is one of the most beautiful films ever made, a sharply imagined quilt of childhood, memory and redemption.

4. Il Generale Della Rovere (Roberto Rossellini 1959) - Yeah it's also about redemption which normally means Sunday school lessons but Rossellini is just as interested in what that might actually mean and what kind of compromises might even raise the issue. He's tied this to a character that seems almost like the genial crook (not a real criminal surely) who inhabits so many stories until the mask starts slipping as he realizes the same thing as Homer Simpson: "D'oh, why do my actions have consequences?"

5. Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville 1969) - Talk about compromise, this unsettling portrait of the French resistance borders on despair and may be one of the least heroic films about people who were genuinely heroic. It's not a cheap dichotomy since that confusion and suffocation drive the film. That Melville felt this way a quarter century later showed how some things never heal.

6. A Canterbury Tale (Michael Powell 1944) - Probably nobody made better propaganda films than Powell & Pressburger (unless you're counting Eisenstein). This one was intended to boost British morale during the war but is far more than that. Its small-town England with an offskilter sense of humor, comfortable (though flexible) tradition and sheer humane feeling (not to mention a dash of mysticism) is perhaps utopian but one that we would all like to see.

7. Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch 1943) - Starts like a comedy - after he dies a guy shows up at The Celestial Accountant to see if he's going up or down for the rest of eternity. And yes his misadventures through life are mostly comic but as they accumulate you slowly realize how disconnected this man is, how giving but self-centered, how cheerful but not entirely happy. The film is either beyond category or it's nearly all of them.

8. Crime Wave (Andre de Toth 1954) - One of the most noirest noir I've seen, it almost feels carved from shadows, at least when it's not acting like a pitiless documentary of trapped people.

9. The Leopard Man (Jacques Tourneur 1943) - Another Val Lewton masterpiece but not as recognized as the others. It uses a violent death in a New Mexican border town to build a complex portrait of class differences and folkways; that it does so in a smidgen over an hour is a harsh rebuke to nearly every Hollywood director who can barely even tell a coherent story in twice that time.

10. Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson 1966) - I've never understood people who claim Bresson is a deeply emotional director. The end of Pickpocket seems like a joke to me and it's a testament that the film works just as well that way as if it was completely serious. The much-acclaimed ending here is clearly no joke but neither is it a bang nor a whimper - it simply is. That's Bresson's strength - focusing on moments that would be lost in a more conventionally told story and pretty much ignoring the rest.

11. Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch 1933) - Lubitsch's pre-code exploration of a love triangle is both hilarious and heartbreaking even if it exists in a never-never land of starving artist garrets and swanky penthouses.

12. Pigs and Battleships (Shohei Imamura 1961) - It starts as a look at a bottom-of-the-barrel yakuza flunky trapped (or maybe he likes it) in a port town with his long-suffering girlfriend but slowly reveals that "long-suffering" doesn't fit her as she slowly becomes the real hero of the story.

13. The Great Silence (Sergio Corbucci 1968) - Snow, Mormons, a bounty hunter smarter than the "hero", more snow, a lead role without a single line of dialogue, small-town politics and a jaw-dropping but utterly believable ending that kept the film out of English-speaking countries for almost three decades.

14. Burn After Reading (Coen Bros 2008) - No Country for Old Men is too arch, too underlined but this is what the Coens are best at - darkly comic stories of losers who just aren't as smart as they think they are.

15. Exiled (Johnny To 2006) - Opening with what I'm convinced is an homage to Once Upon a Time in the West this pushes the conventions of heroic bloodshed films in ways that Woo wouldn't have imagined when he made A Better Tomorrow.

16. American Zombie (Grace Lee 2007) - Yet another fake documentary but this time made by real documentarians. This appears to be an examination of race with socialized zombies filling in as a minority but slowly undermines any kind of easy identification, any sort of yes/no politics. Maybe that's in part because the documentary form isn't used here for simple storytelling purposes but as a way to show just how we can or can't know what we think we do, to the point that viewers never find out what happened in perhaps the film's key event.

17. Isle of the Dead (Mark Robson 1945) - Maybe I should have just included the entire Lewton box set but this stark, haunted tale set during a plague in the middle of the Greek civil war is certainly not what you'd expect to come out of a studio at any time in Hollywood's history. Karloff's portrayal of a general who may be slowly going insane is one of his best.

Honorable: Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry 2008), Bedlam (Mark Robson 1946), The Big Gundown (Sergio Sollima 1966), Black Test Car (Yasuzo Masumura 1962), Brand Upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin 2006), Cloverfield (Matt Reeves 2008), The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel 2006), Diary of the Dead (George Romero), District 9 (Neill Blomkamp 2009), Election (Johnny To 2005), Enchanted (Kevin Lima 2007), The Ghost Ship (Mark Robson 1943), Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Guillermo del Toro 2008), Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog 2005), Hellzapoppin' (H.C. Potter 1941), Inglorious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino 2009), Inside (Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury 2007), Justice League: The New Frontier (Dave Bullock 2008), Keoma (Enzo G. Castellari 1976), Lisa and the Devil (Mario Bava 1974), Long Weekend (Colin Eggleston 1978), Made in USA (Jean-Luc Godard 1966), Martyrs (Pascal Laugier 2008), Mr. Freedom (William Klein 1969), Murder My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk 1944), Mysterious Object at Noon (Apichatpong Weerasethakul 2000), No Country for Old Men (Coen Bros 2007), Observe and Report (Jody Hill 2009), Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-Hsien 1993), Putney Swope (Robert Downey 1969), Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster 2008), Star Trek (JJ Abrams 2009), The Stolen Airship (Karel Zeman 1967), Sweeney Todd (Tim Burton 2008), The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (Roberto Rossellini 1966), Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch 1932), Up (Pete Docter & Bob Peterson 2009), WALL-E (Andrew Stanton 2008), Wanted (Timur Bekmambetov 2008), The World (Jia Zhang-ke 2004).

Crimes: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Celestial Subway Line (Ken Jacobs), D-War: Dragon Wars, The Heartbreak Kid, Hostel II, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, Juno, King Kong (Jackson), Watchmen, Leatherheads, Mamma Mia!, Once, Land of the Lost, The Spirit, Throne of Blood, 300, The Whole Ten Yards, Zack and Miri Make a Porno.

Best Movies of the Decade

2010-01-02T20:23:00.002-05:00

I've often commented on my listophilia but even so making a best-of-the-decade seemed too much. But after reading many such lists I couldn't help it. So a rough list done alphabetically and including only fiction features - these are films that stuck with me for whatever reason.

Before Sunset (Linklater)
Bright Future (Kurosawa)
City of Lost Souls (Miike)
Code Unknown (Haneke)
Decasia (Morrison)
The Devil's Backbone (del Toro)
Donnie Darko (Kelly)
Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (Maddin)
The Dreamers (Bertolucci)
Femme Fatale (De Palma)
Ghost World (Zwigoff)
The Host (Bong)
I'm Not There (Haynes)
Moulin Rouge (Luhrmann)
Mulholland Drive (Lynch)
Spirited Away (Miyazaki)
Unknown Pleasures (Jia)
Y tu mama tambien (Cuaron)

Beau Travail (Denis) and The Wind Will Carry Us (Kiarostami) are 1999 per IMDB but others are including as 2000 - they would be here. And there must be dozens upon dozens of perfectly fine films ("completely realized artistic accomplishments" if you prefer) that just didn't stick as strongly as the list - from In Praise of Love to American Psycho, Yi Yi to Casino Royale, Battle Royale to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

So what if Charles Stross hates Star Trek?

2009-10-18T20:47:00.002-04:00

SF fans have been, well, agitated about Charles Stross' blog post where he declares that he hates Star Trek, Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica. Doesn't seem to matter that he admits to have never seen the latter two or maybe that's just the first warning sign that while he has a point, he's taking it to ridiculous lengths. Yep, Star Trek has a lot of technobabble and usually ill-disguised t.b. at that. And yep most incarnations of Star Trek are mediocre at best, the original included. But it looks like Stross just wants to whine a bit. Just look at his comment 197 where he says B5 is a "FAIL" because each alien race has its own culture while humans have thousands. But does he really expect the show (or a novel even) to display maybe 15 cultures, giving three per race. Or should that be 1015 adding in the humans? Not really and clearly he's just letting his argument get away from him.

But where he's missing the point is that unicultured aliens and technobabble don't necessarily invalidate the story, even as SF. Just think of non-SF novels about culture clashes such as White Teeth or The American or Midnight's Children. They work just fine portraying just two or three cultures. And isn't all the nautical terms in, say, Moby-Dick or an Aubrey-Maturin novel just technobabble? Admittedly based on actual technology but for the vast majority of readers no different from dilithium crystals and actually far more confusing (and therefore a hinderance to the story).

There's no point reading too much into a blog post that Stross probably didn't spend much effort writing but he doesn't back away from it. The bigger issue that apparently eluded him almost entirely is that film & TV aren't the most effective media for SF, that they date so much faster than written SF but more importantly those forms of storytelling tend to downplay the very elements that make SF into SF.

Couple of snide reviews

2009-09-28T22:43:00.003-04:00

IO9 on FlashForward just about nails it ("Subtlety, thy strong point isn't FlashForward"). Be warned that this is the kind of review that's basically a synopsis with commentary (which sounds like a value judgement but is really just description). (Other people have pointed out how the kangaroo is equivalent to Lost's polar bear - apparently there's even an Oceanic Airlines billboard somewhere in FlashForward's first few minutes.)

MSNBC on the Fame remake is amusing and the kind of thing that seems deadly accurate even if I haven't seen the film and likely never will - didn't like the original so a watered down remake is even less appealing (and hey isn't that what Glee is for?).

46 Essential Rock Reads

2009-09-15T08:00:00.002-04:00

Some LA Times bloggers recently came up with a list of 46 Essential Rock Reads that's pretty decent. (I've read 14.) No explanation of why 46 or even why various ones were chosen (they can't think Goldman's Elvis is actually good can they?) but still you could do far worse.

And of course the point for the rest of us is to show how knowledgable we are by pointing out the omissions so:

Geoffrey Stokes Star-Making Machinery: Inside the Business of Rock and Roll - A start to finish look at the creation and release of an album that's surprisingly remained unique almost three decades later. There are plenty of retrospective looks and some odds 'n' ends such as the documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster but this is a real inside look that should have inspired more.

Nick Tosches Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story - One of the key rock biographies that doesn't just make cultural connections but sees a big picture that most writers never even realize might be there.

Mark Shipper Paperback Writer: The Life and Times of the Beatles, the Spurious Chronicle of Their Rise to Stardom, Their Triumphs and Disasters, Plus the Amazing Story of Their Ultimate Reunion - A novel that imagines a different ending for the Beatles and in the process dissects and sorts through the concept of stardom. And then it closes with one of the saddest endings you'll ever read.

Dave Rimmer Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop - Maybe not rock exactly but pop dynamics have rarely been this exposed.

David Toop Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds - Even less rock here but a key work for wandering through sets of overlapping and conflicting ideas that motivated so much post-war music.

Bob Dylan Chronicles: Volume 1 - Isn't this far more important (and just plain interesting) than Tarantula?

Stupid Web Tricks: Slideshows

2009-09-13T23:33:00.002-04:00

I'm seeing these with more frequency, the kind of thing where we're promised 10 Hottest Megan Fox Photos or 15 Best Serbian Horror Films but instead of a full list we have to click through all of them to even see what they are. Now the Fox Photos yep that will be clicked but most of us are going to start snoozing for other slideshows.

Recently I found one that shows what a bad idea this is. Foods Your Dog Should Never Eat sounds like it should be very important if you want a healthy, happy dog. But there's about 18 of these (the rest of the 27 slides are an ad and some further explanations) which means not many people will get to an unexpected one like #12 Persimmons, Peaches, and Plums because they will have lost interest around #6 or #7. (Well I lost interest around #2 but I'm guessing people who actually have dogs will be a tad more motivated, at least until they see it's mostly familiar stuff.)

So the slideshow design undermines the entire point of an article such as this. What most readers need is the full list and quickly find things they don't know or maybe more info on ones they weren't sure about. Instead the slideshow forces needless and counter-productive interaction.

But while I'm on this page might as well point out that the design clearly shows how little interest WebMD has in this article anyway. The actual text is far smaller than the accompanying photo, in fact is smaller than the adjacent advertisement. Looking at the entire page the text isn't immediately obvious but almost an afterthought (which might in fact be true).

The article itself doesn't live up to the title. The section about not eating raw eggs for instance is very clearly not a "never" item and the parts about sugar and fat are just ridiculous (and also not even remotely a "never"). So we go from genuine warnings about dangers at the start and end up with a cliched diet with fruits, vegetables and cooked rice, just the sort of thing that people who don't enjoy food push in the mistaken belief that it's more healthy.