I'm Baaaack....

The first thing I noticed in Kurosawa's High and Low (B+) is that, gosh, it sure is weird seeing Toshiro Mifune in a contemporary business suit. The second thing I noticed is that in a standard movie plot where a kidnapper threatens a victim right after the victim has refused to join forces with his business associates, is the assumption in the viewer's mind is that the kidnapper is tied in with the victim's business associates somehow. That's not the case here, and it does leave the plot dangling for about three fourths of the way through the film.

Maybe it has something to do with the Japanese custom of deferring to authority, which is why the detectives in the case don't confront Mifune's business partners about the kidnapping-if only to clear their collective name. Nonetheless, it's a plot thread that I found disconcerting, and considering that Kurosawa is one of the most methodical and detailed filmmakers in history, I took it as a bit of sloppiness in his process. But it turns out Kurosawa's got bigger fish to fry.

What happens in High and Low is how Kurosawa takes the pulp origins of a Ed McBain novel and turns it into a critique of the differences between the rich and poor in post-war Japan. In the McBain novel, (from what I understand), the business guy tracks down the kidnapper and beats him like a red-headed stepchild until he gets his money back. And he triumphs over his competitors, too.

In High and Low, Mifune pays off the kidnapper by overextending himself to his bank, gets the kid back, wins the admiration of the town, and gets toppled from his perch by the bank, now calling in his loan. He leaves the movie a humble shoe-maker. If this came up in an American film, the David O. Selsnick-type producer would do a spit-take in his martini, lob his cigar into the screen writer's eye, and have the poor slob black-listed by HUAC for being a dirty Commie rat-fink. But we're in Japan. And Kurosawa is in Dostoevsky territory.

Turns out the kidnapper is a disfigured med student who has to watch Mifune every day in Mifune's air-conditioned home up on the hill while the poor slob sweats it out in his hovel. So in the end, even though he's been brought to justice, traditionally, the kidnapper ends the movie laughing remorselessly over his triumph of the 'low' over the 'high'.

The Book of Genesis: Illustrated by Robert Crumb (A) If Crumb never did another drawing for public viewing ever again, we'd be quite happy to have this bit as the capstone of his career. It is, simply put, the best thing he's done. And considering all he did was render the most literal rendition that he could of the first fifty chapters of the book of Genesis, it could be read by the average Crumb fan (like myself) as the most subversive bit of satire that makes 'When the God damned Niggers Take Over America' look like 'The Simpsons'.

Reading it at face value, you begin to see why the major Judeo-Christian sects take their cues from the New Testament. God does come across as a drunken sailor who caught his wife in bed with the first mate throughout the book. I don't want to get started on any theological discussions, here, but it seems that getting kicked out of the Garden doesn't improve anyone's idea of morality. It's not that God's view of mankind since the Fall from Grace is, 'No more Mr. Nice Guy', but rather, 'Where'd you all get the idea I was ever a Nice Guy in the first place?'

As for the book itself, Crumb must've scoured the Rogue's gallery of the Tel Aviv police department. I understand he was on this for five years, not just drawing but conducting the most pain-staking research he could, with the help of one Robert Moser, who's translation of the five books of Moses came out in 2004. The only thing I'm sorry about is that we'll never see Crumb's take on the next fifty chapters of the Old Testament...

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (C) Looking at this movie, then reading the credits which have Eric Roth, the writer behind 'Forest Gump' as screenwriter, I'm tempted to ask, 'Why bother?' So it's 'Forest Gump' without Robert Zemekis' sense of satire. Since everyone in the movie treats Button's reverse-aging condition with the same surprise they'd treat someone who had six toes on one foot, there's no point to this movie. Yeah, it's sold as a love story, but if you think about it, since Benjamin Button doesn't seem to have any type of personality, it's hard to see why anyone would be attracted to him.


G.I. Joe: Rise of the Crap and Transformers 2: Crap of the Crapening (F) Well, serves me right. Even the mitigating factor that I saw these for free doesn't stop filling me with the regret that I could've spent my free rentals on anything else in the video store. Transformers goes from being stupid, in the first one, to being incoherent and stupid in this one. No surprise there. And G.I. Joe- well, it's 'Team America' by those South Park guys, only told in dead earnest, and with less poo and pee and puke. And less exploding-ham Michael Moore, which was a loss, in my view.

What I didn't count on was how much of a recruiting arm for the U.S. armed forces that they turned out to be, though anyone dumb enough to enlist on the appeal of these movies kinda deserves to be used only as live mine-sweepers. Just sayin', is all. Speaking of dumb, the people out there who actually liked these films can't really rise to any more of a defense than, "It's just a thrill ride, and you shouldn't expect too much when you're going to see these type of films." The trouble with that point of view is that, metaphorically speaking, I shouldn't be pelted with sewage while I'm seated in the proverbial roller-coaster. Again, just sayin'.

Planet Earth (B+) By now, it's an article of faith that if you own a Blu-ray player, and an H-D television, you will pick up this excellent BBC series. It's a testament to it's power that it impressed even me, a person indifferent to nature documentaries. Not only because of the amazing presentation in 1080p goodness in vivid colour and the 5.1 surround sound quality, certainly. But it manages to be entertaining by the footage of the unique flora and fauna of our world. In particular, the shots of the rare snow leopard, the recurring theme of having vast forests change colour through time-lapse photography, and if you think about it, the utter tenacity of the crew involved in getting these shots.

I have to admit, there were a couple of moments right out of a horror film. The first was the depiction of a type of spore that infects insects and turns them into zombies who sprout fungi out of their heads. Unfortunately, I can't recall any more details owing to my reaction of 'NYGHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!' when I first saw that. The second was a tribe of cute little chimps on a raid to a rival group of chimps, which ended with them killing and eating one. Narrator David Attenborough disingenuously says, 'Perhaps they needed the extra protein.' No, Dave, they killed and ate him because chimpanzees are vicious, mean, ill-tempered brutes who will rip off your face and eat it if you give them a sliver of a chance. I am thus led to the conclusion that we humans are in the right when we dress them up in clown costumes and humiliate the hairy little shit-bags in public to further reinforce our dominance over other sentient beings on this planet...

"I Vant to Suck Your Blood..."

After watching 'True Blood' (C-) and 'Twilight' (F), I really have to take on the part of that little kid in the 'Emperor's New Clothes'. Why in the name of Bela Lugosi are vampires so popular these days? As fantasy themes, the idea of eternal life has been done to death. The vampire, in pop-culture terms, is an Eastern European folk tale invention meant to admonish the peasant class from abandoning the teachings of the church. Notice how most folk causes of vampirism involve being unbaptized, consorting with degenerates, and so on. And you'll notice how defeating or protection from vampires usually involves invoking religion.

The best explanation of vampirism was in the Garth Ennis comic, 'Preacher', where the undead Irish vampire Cassidy discovers that the religious elements just don't factor into the vampire world, as far as his experience, and the consequences involve a personal inability to reconcile the physical advantages in being a vampire with any sense of personal responsibility. The only other real acknowledgement of the actual effects of vampirism come from that little-seen comic by Fiona Staples I mentioned, and David Goyer's 'Blade 3' movie.

Which brings me to 'True Blood.' It gives us the premise that vampires really exist, and with the recent invention of synthetic blood, are capable of living with real people. Also, it gives us a world where casual, frequent sex seems really fun, Southern rednecks really do live up to their worst stereotypes, and enough people have special powers like shape-shifting and mind-reading. (Hey, if you've got vampires, why the Hell not, I say...) And since it's set in the American South, we've got enough sub-Flannery O'Connor/ William Falkner subtexts to hold our attention, if the vampire stuff-which I found dreary-has us rolling our eyes. Alan Bell being the creator, he makes enough connections between vampirism and racism/homophobia to justify his paycheck. Having worked my way through half of season one so far, It occurred to me that it'd be a far better show if it didn't have the vampire/supernatural powers crap dragging it down.

Then there's 'Twilight'. Oh, God. The only way this dreary, pointless slog is even remotely watchable is by listening to the 'Rifftrax' commentary by the MST3K folks over it. The undead protagonist is a whiny douche with a James Dean fetish, the female love interest is self-involved and dull, (and the actress has no skill except blinking her eyes really fast.) the story takes forever to go anywhere, none of the other characters have anything resembling personalities- they all exist to explain plot points, or provide background for the setting, or act as tour guides for the vampire life. I can understand why thirteen year old girls like it so much, though. It makes vampirism a metaphor for abstinence, and entering puberty is understandably scary for teenagers. The female lead seems to not have any problems fitting in right away with the other kids, though. Since she doesn't have any type of personality on display, we have to wonder why the Edward character is so attracted to her. I hate you, 'Twilight' franchise. What's worse, there's apparently a whole new sub-genre of books out there involving vampires, werewolves, demons and the like living in the real world, falling in love with humans, or vice-versa, and...and...gnngh...

A Basterd's Work...

Inglorious Basterds (A-)

Lt. Aldo Raine: You know somethin', Utivich? I think this might just be my masterpiece.

This is a weird movie. Let's call it a deeply flawed masterpiece. (And perversely, its flaws make it such a good film...) I'm saying that because while it's got so many problems, there are characters and scenes and bits of dialogue that take it off into the stratosphere of classic film-making. So let's get the problematic stuff out of the way:

-It feels like the second or third film in a series. Or like the climax to a cult T.V. show like 'The Prisoner'. None of the 'good guys' outside of Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent and maybe Eli Roth have anything like a distinct presence. So the movie assumes you know all about who they all are and what their motivations are about...

-Some of the scenes go on for way too long, and repeat the same effect of drawing out the tension in a scene for an inordinate amount of time. (The scene in the cellar, especially, made me start to feel like the Hugo Steiglitz character in his flogging fantasy/flashback...)

-While the foreign actors more than hold their own, (see below) putting Brad Pitt, Mike Myers and Eli Roth in the movie seem more like 'stunt casting' than a well thought out plan...

-It's really self-indulgent. Well, when is a Tarantino film NOT self-indulgent? That is, Tarantino lives in a world where everything is based on movies, and movie references. So everyone and everything in his films relates more to a film reference to the way people talk and behave in real life. So ultimately, there is nothing in any of his movies that you can take away and relate to real life in any way, shape, or form. In that sense, he's the A.V. nerd trying to pretend he's one of the street toughs hanging out by the smoking section.


And yet...

It's got some of the most memorable characters that I've ever seen. German actor's Christoph Waltz's 'Col. Hans Landa' character, for instance, should get him an Oscar. In fact, one of the hallmarks of this movie is how all the 'bad guys' are nuanced, fleshed-out characters full of ambiguity and substance. It's a weird inversion of the nature of 'war/adventure' films where the Germans are the faceless, amoral killbots, and the heros are given as much backstory and distinct personalities as they need. (The 'Basterds' themselves all even look alike.) Indeed, in an early scene, Hitler himself compares one of the Americans to the Golem, the Jewish monster of clay.

Besides Landa, there's the character of Fredrick Zoller, the war hero who's being groomed by Gobbels to be a Germanic version of Audie Murphy. What's amazing about the Zoller character is how he's set up like the traditional hero of a rom/com. He's charming, witty, and as his behavior in the theater at the end points out, genuinely troubled about being touted as a war hero. (He's the only one in the seats not cheering or laughing at the dying American soldiers.) His pursuit of Shoshanna,(Mélanie Laurent) the revenge-seeking theater owner is played out like a standard rom/com trope. (The low-key nice guy is persistent towards his love interest, and goes out of his way to help her. In a traditional sense, she would eventually lose her resistance, and reciprocate his feelings.) In this case, his pursuit leads to his death, and not just because he's a Nazi. In the real world, any guy who behaves like a movie 'rom/com' hero is really a creepy, passive/aggressive, manipulative cretin with an over-inflated sense of entitlement. A 'Nice Guy', in other words. So, if you want to find it, there's a feminist sensibility in Tarantino's film.

Now onto Landa. Man, actor Christoph Waltz must've felt like Christmas and his birthday came early the day he got this part! I predict Landa will be a part of pop culture alongside 'Daniel Plainburn' and 'Hannibal Lecter' as awesome villains. He is brutal, low-key, cunning, charming and goofy. And capable of being all those things in the space of thirty seconds. The opening chapter, where Landa confronts a French farmer hiding a Jewish family under his cottage, with its reference to the opening of 'The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, is a perfect short film in and by itself. The other observation about Landa I have is how his evil has a unassailable logic to it. From his monologue in the beginning comparing Jews to rats to his opportunistic offer at the film's end about how his switching sides to the Allies gives us a character who's mastered the art of always staying two steps ahead of everyone else. (Another neat bit: His diabolical reason at the film's beginning for switching from French to English while talking to the farmer. You think it's Tarantino's nod to American audiences' impatience with subtitles, but Landa's reason becomes chillingly apparent...)

Now let's look at Shoshanna Dreyfuss, the vengeance-seeking survivor of Landa's massacre in the first scene. I'm going to go ahead and tell you flat out that Tarantino's taste in leading ladies is simpatico with mine. (Blonde, blue-eyed, wide face, imperfect nose. Gives me 'wood', as they say...) She wins me over in her first face-to-face with Landa. They're discussing her participation in the premier of 'Nation's Pride', the propaganda film Joseph Gobbels is premiering at her theater-after much prodding by the love-lorn Zoller- and Landa starts playing his cat-and-mouse game with her. (I don't think he suspects her of anything in particular, it's just his standard modus operandi as a SD officer.Laurent's face this whole time is a study in restraint and grace under pressure. I also love her makeup ritual in the final chapter, putting rouge on her face like an Apache. (Quick film-geek bit: I was a little surprised she didn't kiss the bullets before putting them in her gun, like Zoe Tamerlane in Abel Ferrara's Ms. .45. Film-geek bit over.) Her final scene has her image projected triumphantly over a cloud of smoke, laughing gloriously over the Germans trapped in the burning theater below. I mentioned earlier how Tarantino's developing a feminist sense in his films. That is, he's a heterosexual writer/director who loves women without putting them on a pedestal or turning them into whores.

If there's an underlying theme in this movie, it's that the Germans believe that they can be both good Nazis and still remain decent people in some aspect of themselves. The officer at the beginning refusing to sell out his comrades, the Germans in the cellar scene celebrating the birth of one of their friends' sons, Zoller's belief that he can be a German war hero and win the love of a beautiful French girl, even Landa's conviction that he can switch sides at the last moment and still come out ahead. Better people than me have pointed out that Tarantino lives in low film, but he visits high film enough so that his body of work is engaged by the artistic potential in low film.

In this case, it's the idea of making a Jewish Revenge Fantasy. Most North Americans, not being Jewish, don't take this into account when doing WW2 films, since the Allies already took their revenge on Germany during the war. Generally in movies, Jews during WW2 are portrayed as Noble Victims, or the Ineffectual Resistance. (That is, when they do take a stand, it's usually symbolic, and the Jewish protagonists have the burden of being tormented by their conscience.) In the case of Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino figured, What the Hell, might as well go all the way and wipe out the Nazi High Command in one go. I'd defend his revision of history on the grounds that: 1) The Nazis lost anyways, 2) if the High Command escaped, Shoshanna's and the Basterds revenge wouldn't have meant anything, rendering the movie moot, and 3) I likes me some plot twists in my film entertainment. Look at it like this: Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie gave us Valkyrie (Which, as long as I'm here, gets a C) which is set up like a standard thriller. Problem being, since the ending is a foregone conclusion-Hitler, does not, point of fact, get killed in the bomb, there's no tension and you're just stuck watching Col. Von Stauffberg march to his doom. In terms of drama, it's a case of Great Evil switching over for Slightly-Less Evil, which isn't a mitigating factor in High Drama.

In conclusion, while it's not as good as Pulp Fiction, I'd put it at the second best film he's done. The High Cinema parts and the Low Film parts don't mesh together as successfully as in Pulp Fiction, but that's only because he's stretching himself into an uncharted territory.

Rise of the Geek Squad

District 9 (B-) Solid Sci-fi actioner set in South Africa. Well, in the whole history of sci-fi, the aliens always appear in the United States, so why the hell wouldn't they appear over Johannesburg, for a change? You might think it's a satiric commentary on apartheid, but it's not. It's an action movie with elements of docu-drama to keep the movie's pacing going. This level of convolution is to hide the fact that director Neill Blonmkamp is the newest member of what I like to call, 'The Geek Squad'. Pardon me while I digress...

THE RISE OF THE GEEK SQUAD

In the beginning, there was George Lucas. A skinny hot-rodder from Northern California, he got into film after a near-fatal car crash. He went to USC to study, and made his name with a short film called 'THX-1138'. Also while there, he made friends with a gentleman named Francis Ford Coppola. Once they graduated, they formed their own film studio called 'American Zoetrope', where they could make films without studio interference. (It was their version of United Artists.) Lucas made an expanded version of his student film, 'THX', then made a crowd-pleasing little comedy set in the 'fifties called 'American Grafitti', which touched a nerve with film goers in the early 70's who were then in the middle of a nostalgia boom.

Then Lucas made 'Star Wars'. I'm sure there are lost tribes in the South Pacific who know who Darth Vader is, so I'll spare you the rehashing of the movie and the impact it's had on movie making since the late 70's. What 'Star Wars' is most responsible for, is the rise of a subset of filmmakers I like to call, 'The Geek Squad'.

The Geek Squad consists of filmmakers who favour style over content, who ooh and ah over the most mundane technical detail of the film making process, and who's eye for detail and ability to reference older films pushes out any concern for things like plot, characterization, or story. I think the problem kicked into high gear once CGI became so sophisticated it wound up shortcutting the creative process of problem solving for a film maker.

Please understand, I'm not trying to condemn a whole end of the movie industry here, I'm just trying to get a handle on a particular process of the filmmaking industry that's gone out of whack. The particular metaphor I'd like to use is of a cake. The film in and of itself consists of a cake with frosting. The story, the theme, the characterization is the actual cake itself, and the special effects are the icing. The trick is that you want the audience to eat the cake. (May I interject by pointing out that this is a very clumsy metaphor, but I'm stuck with it for now, and so are you.) The members of the Geek Squad that I'm going to list below are all united by their common ability to pile too much icing, as it were, on top of their metaphorical cake...

First, the Good: David Fincher, Robert Zemeckis, James Cameron. Sam Raimi. These are the guys who understand the balance between the icing and the cake. While they acknowledge that the special effects in their films are important, they are more than willing and capable to use complicated, time-consuming, expensive special effects in throw-away shots that last for maybe an instant on screen. (Not surprisingly, these guys tend to have money fights with the money people at the studios they're working for.) While the films they make aren't as timeless as Martin Scorsese's or as universally loved as Spielberg's, they've developed enough of a body of solid, substantial work to make any time you spend watching their films time well spent. I'm keeping an eye on Fincher, in particular. 'Fight Club' was an amazing piece of work that makes me think his best is still yet to come. What's interesting to note: they all got their start doing low-budget films, paid their dues, so to speak, and proved they all had the chops for bigger and better things. (Yeah, Fincher's got the type of career arc you'd see with Micheal Bay-about which terrible things are about to be written-but he's managed to shake off the various stigmas his early film career saddled him with.)

The Not-So-Bad: The Wachowski Brothers, Peter Jackson: While I officially like most of the films these guys have done, I have absolutely no desire to ever see any of them again. While they operate by the same standards as the Good guys in the above paragraph, they tend to get bogged down in the little details of the technical craft of film-making. One statement for the prosecution: Notice how the CGI characters in their movies tend to have more, well, 'Life' than the actual actors? Gollum, in the LOTR trilogy, has more personality than all the other characters combined. Their movies tend to drag from plot point to plot point, and you could play an endless game of "Who would you cast instead of (blank) in (movie) over (blank) with all their films. For instance, if you put Will Smith or Ewan MacGregor in the lead in the Matrix trilogy, you wouldn't get a different or better or worse movie out of it.

The Downright Should've-Been-Drowned-At-Birth-Ugly: Zack Snyder, Michael Bay, McG, Paul W.S. Anderson, Stephen Somners: Now we're in the dregs. These guys ram their production values down your throat with a chimney sweep brush. I'm pretty sure they all got their start doing commercials and music videos, and any thing that they've learned from their time in those trenches is something that they've never built on. Bay, in particular, is the most offensive. Every movie he's ever made looks like an extended Chevrolet car commercial. You know your film career's taken a turn for the worse when the nicest thing anyone can say about your work is that "The fight scenes were somewhat coherent"...

So where does Blonmkamp fit into all this? Right now, he's in 'not-so-bad' status. The thing is, he's making the wrong film. (The story involves a Michael Scott like bureaucrat getting infected by an alien fuel and slowly mutating into one of the disenfranchised aliens in the movie.) What the film needed to focus on more was his alien transformation. As it stood, the focus of the film was around the near-perfect CGI with the aliens and their armored combat suits-where Blonmkamp's short "Alive in Johannesburg" was centered around. Where he goes from here, in my estimation, is another version of Peter Jackson.



Patton Oswalt: My Weakness is Strong. (A) So what is this 'alternate comedy' of which the young people speak? Is it chuckles delivered from behind rectangular glasses and a flannel shirt underneath an ironic t-shirt of a teddy bear cuddling a honeypot and the words "Jesus Woves OO!" in script underneath? Well, my personal belief is that it's comedy that the audience gains the most enjoyment from when they themselves are bringing something to the experience. That is, their routines require that you, the audience, has a certain level of education and life experience that they are bringing to the venue that the comedian is performing in. Unlike, say, Dane Cook or Carlos Mencia, for example.

In Oswalt's case, the enjoyment derived is like listening to a slightly drunk English teacher with about fifty unpublished novels under his considerable belt. His work is literate and refined in that way you can imagine he writes out his work about a dozen times, field-tests it over and over again in clubs, and distills the best parts for us. With dick jokes. Also, there's always been an underlying glee and genuine enthusiasm in his work in that he just can't wait to bring up the absurdities in his life. It's why he got the part of the rat chef in 'Ratatouille', basically. He's truly enthralled about the things he likes, and he's equally thrilled over the things in life he hates. It's infectious.


Kate Beaton-Hark! A Vagrant (A)

How to describe the work of Kate Beaton? Well, here goes...

Kate Beaton is like your friend's bratty little sister, and you're over at his parent's basement, smoking shitty weed and playing 'Altered Beast' on his Sega Genesis. And Kate comes in and watches you both for a bit, with a sour expression on her face and her arms folded. Then she snorts, "Video games are gay!" And your friend goes, "Shut up, Kate! You're just here 'cuz you've got a thing for Tom!" And Kate turns red and shrieks in horror and says, "EWWWW! No way! I'm here to keep you two from having gay sex with each other!" And your friend throws the 'Altered Beast' case at her head as she runs off, cackling like a sea hag.

Then a short time later, Kate slinks back into the basement, stands really close to you, you look up and she shyly hands you a folded piece of paper, and says, "This is for you" while not looking you in the eyes. You open it and it's a cartoon of you getting double-dicked up the dirt pipe by Sir John A. MacDonald and Lester Pearson. You go, 'WHAT THE FUCK?', Kate runs off cackling again, your friend hits 'pause' , jumps up, chases Kate down and punches her in the upper arm. Kate squirms off, and runs upstairs crying, "I'M SO TELLING MOM YOU'RE SMOKING POT!" and slams the door behind her.

And several years later she gets a history degree, inflicts her rich, expressive comics on the world, and we all win.

Playing Catch Up, Part Two

Bruno (C) After watching this so-so comedy, it occurred to me that not only does Sacha Baron Cohen have his comic character destruct after the release of the film, his 'shtick' of pretending to be a fish out of water for laughs played on the unsuspecting is played out at this point.

Chuck (C+) Lightweight comedy/thriller about a nerd who's got a government computer full of secrets in his head, and the two agents from different intelligence agencies that 'handle' him. The laughs were, for me, more of the 'in my head' than 'out loud' variety. It's a premise with a limited run, not unlike Dollhouse, actually. That is, the humour's too slight to justify watching for any length of time, and once the story arc starts to take itself too seriously, it'll have to come to it's logical conclusion. (Nerd gets computer removed, one way or the other.) Not bad, though I don't get the groundswell of support this series has achieved amongst the general public. Also, the historical precedent the U.S. intelligence agencies have set in security compromises has always been to 'shoot, shovel and forget'. Though if you're going for an outlandish premise like this, you might as well take all the gimmes you can get, I suppose.

The Wrestler (C+) The big flaw in this film is that if you're going to make the main character so beaten up and degraded by life that his only real option is to go out dying what he loves, (professional wrestling) it's a good idea to not have a charming and likable actor like Mickey Roarke as your lead. Classically speaking, tragedy is the tale of a good man coming to grief because of character flaws within himself that others can see, but he himself cannot. In this case, the only flaw I can see Roarke's character having is an inability for long-term planning. Consider this: His daughter is so estranged from him, he'd of have to have been a molester. His financial situation is so bad, he starts the film locked out of his trailer. He spends the film trying to connect not only with his daughter but with stripper Marissa Tomei, who comes across as really self-involved. (Yeah, unlike the daughter, I can understand her motivations, but c'mon, Marissa! It's Mickey Roarke, for God's sake!) As a pro-wrestler, we see him as committed and dedicated (and respected by his colleagues.) So at the end of the day, the movie just beats up on him to turn him into a Christ figure.

On a political note, I've just got a quick point regarding the defacto leader of the 'Birther' movement in the States, Orly Tate. Orly, honey, if the likes of Karl Rove and Ann Coultier are saying that the "Kenyan Certificate of Birth" is a fraud up there with Piltdown Man, it's time to get the hell out of the spotlight...

See for yourself...

Playing Catch Up, Part One.

Well, looks as though I've fallen behind on my 'duties' as it were, so I'll just motor on ahead and crank out some really quick reviews for ye...


Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job (B) There's funny 'ha-ha', and funny 'hm', and this is definitely on the side of funny 'hm'. Then again, so was Monty Python. Proof of Michael O'Donoghue's theorem, "Making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy".

Taken (C-) Put A-lister Liam Neeson in a C-list action thriller, drag him from contrived action set piece to action set piece and...we're done. Not a waste of 90 minutes, anyways.

Up (B+) Solid effort from Pixar. Not a classic like 'The Incredibles' or 'Ratatouille', but even sub-standard Pixar fare like 'Cars' is ahead of anything else Dreamworks is doing, so it's a win-win, as far as I'm concerned.

Let The Right One In (B) 'Twilight' for non-stupid people. Naturally, the general population stayed away in droves, as they say.

Quantum of Solace (C) Jason Bourne with a British accent.

Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe (and Newswipe, too.) (B+) Snotty, indignant takes on mostly British t.v. and news. It's a t.v. extension of Brooker's column in the Guardian also called 'Screenwipe', oddly enough. Like Robot Chicken, it's short and to the point. More than 22 minutes of vitriol from Brooker, and you'll find yourself yelling at the screen not in agreement, but for Chuck to get away from the 'telly' and hire a pro to blow him.

Adam Curtis's documentaries (A) He's a British version of Errol Morris in that his style of documentary is witty and, dare I say, playful? Unlike Morris, who tends to operate on the broad theme of discovering people who fall through the cracks in the system, Curtis's overarching theme in his documentaries seems to be an exploration of the effects when a power elite attempts to impose an ideology on a chaotic system. Inevitably, the power elite, whether it's the British government in 'The Mayfair Set' or the P.R. companies in 'The Century of The Self' winds up shooting itself in the foot and creating a bigger problem than the ones that they originally set out to solve.

I like to think of Curtis as an 'anti-conspiracy' theorist, on account that A) anyone with half a brain can tell you that great global conspiracies just don't exist- there's just too many vectors of pressure in the world. and B) Curtis doesn't seem to have any ideological agenda outside of reframing a view of the world in the post WW2 environment. So, with all that in mind, I've thoughtfully provided links to his stuff that you all can watch on your computer, too. Isn't that nice of me?

2009 SBC report: I'm going to have to break my earlier promise to see every blockbuster that's in release this summer on account of Transformers 2 and G.I. Joe looking like the most retarded, insulting crap that a major studio has ever released. I've gone on and on at length about how contemporary entertainment seems to be more bound and determined to literally insult its audience. Honestly, three hour movies based on kid's toys? That's literally a step away from, "Taco Bell Dog: the movie" or "Shamwow: the motion picture". I don't think the executives who green-light these things are sneering contemptuously at the audience. Rather, I suspect they're just throwing up their hands in exasperation, flinging crap at the screen, and hoping it'll stick. The cast and crew on these things rationalize their involvement in these, ("Hey, I've got a family to feed!") and the downward spiral continues...

...And Bill Keane is S. Clay Wilson...

The Doug Wright Collection (C-)

This is one of those times where I feel like the kid in the story, 'The Emperor's New Clothes'. You know, the one who tactfully points out that the king, is in fact, naked. In this case, the naked king is the hardcover, 240 page collection of the work of Doug Wright, Canada's Master Cartoonist. I've read all this praise and over-heated tributes to the guy, and well... I just don't see it.Yeah, he's a good draughtsman, but I get the impression that for Doug Wright, cartooning involved being an artist first... and telling, you know, gags was like, well, not on the top five things one does in one's pursuit of a career as a cartoonist. The gags, such as they are, are so pedestrian that if you look through the entire run of his career doing 'Nipper' and 'Doug Wright's Family', one single motif pops up through the whole 31 year run of the strip: 1) Doug's kids engage in typical kid behavior. (playing hockey, roughhousing, exploring the neighbourhood.) 2) Being kids, their activities lead them into getting their clothes dirty or torn, getting scrapes on their knees or elbows, or mildly damaging property. and 3) receiving a glower of embarrassment from their mom, or a glower of rage from Dad. And that's it! That's thirty-one years of Doug Wright's career as a cartoonist in three sentences. The level of humour on display here is on par with 'Reader's Digest', 'Family Circus', and 'Fred Basset'. (Oh, who am I kidding. I like to imagine Doug Wright looking at Family Circus and snarling, red-faced, 'THAT'S CRAZY!! WHERE DOES THAT BILL KEANE SONOFABITCH GET OFF? I MEAN, THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS INVISIBLE GHOSTS NAMED, 'NOTME'! THAT'S NUTS! IS HE TRYING TO WRITE A SCIENCE FICTION STRIP? AND THAT FRED BASSET! EVERYONE KNOWS DOGS DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH!! ARE THEY HIPPIES SMOKING REEFER? HAS THE WORLD GONE MAD?! BOYS, COME HERE AND LET ME YELL AT YOU SOME MORE!! GNAAAARRRGH!) Face it, Bill Keane is S. Clay Wilson next to Doug Wright.

I realize I'm being hard on poor Doug Wright here, so let me backpedal a bit. His drawing is top-notch, and it's nice to see such a body of work collected about a uniquely Canadian cartoonist. (The kids play a lot of hockey, instead of, you know, baseball, and there's references to particularly Canadian institutions, like Imperial Oil, fr' instance.) My animosity in this case is leveled more at the marketing geniuses at Drawn and Quarterly, the book's publisher. The byline reads, 'Canada's Master Cartoonist.', and my first thought is, 'Since when?' I'd put Aislin, Lynn Johnston, Chester Brown, John Byrne, Hal Foster, Kate Beaton, Seth (one of the editors of this tome, by the way), and even Dave Sim among a lot of others way up ahead of poor old Wright.

In trying to inflate a journeyman cartoonist up to legendary proportions, Seth and Brad MacKay don't do him any favours in the long run. In the highly likely event sales for this book don't merit a second volume, I really hope Seth doesn't go into some kind of public funk over 'Canadians apathy over a criminally overlooked national treasure." once that happens.