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.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Thursday, December 8, 2011
DCnU Weeks Three & Four
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.
* 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.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Vast Narratives
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.
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.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Me & Hedy Lamarr
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.
Someday I should mention the band I designed a logo for, one that they're still using, but never received any credit for that.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
The Rocketeer
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.
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.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Halloween Movies Batch 1
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Netflix streaming
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?
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?
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