artbrute

The Best of 2011

2012-01-15T13:21:00.000-08:00

Year in review: I'm waiting until this late in the new year to talk about the good stuff, because let's face it, all the good movies come out in the last five weeks of the year. Mainly because of the Holiday season, and when Oscar time rolls around, these films are still fresh in people's minds. As for the other forty-seven weeks of the year, well, go fuck yourself, movie-going public! Here's a quick catch-up:

Drive-Best movie of the year. Like a Michael Mann film with more depth, really. One minor quibble: Ryan Gosling plays his character as more autistic than he really should.

Rango-Good, solid animated film not by Pixar. Beautiful cinematography-in a CG film! And Johnny Depp is pitch-perfect.

Hunger- Stark film of Bobby Sands, who died of a hunger strike during the Irish Troubles. Irish filmmaker Steve McQueen is known more for installation pieces, which I haven't seen. I kinda want to see his new film, 'Shame' which also stars my man-crush Michael Fassbender. But my skin might crawl off me.

Who Is Harry Nillsson And Why Is Everyone Talking About Him? -My parents had 'Nillsson, Schmillson' on eight-track back in the day, which led me to wonder why this guy didn't get as much props as Randy Newman. (Answer: He drank himself to the brink, then managed to pull back before he died.)

Source Code- I've said all I need to say about this one. Now that 'special effects' are a given in film, we can all get back to putting the 'science' back in 'science-fiction' films...

Unstoppable - Solid, meat-and-potatoes blue collar thriller by, believe it or not, Tony Scott. No, I'm not joking. Actually, Scott the Younger is perfectly capable of directing good movies. (True Romance, Crimson Tide.) He just needs a solid script behind him.

Attack The Block- Funny, genuinely thrilling low-budget horror film out of Britain. Produced by Edgar Wright, which is why I saw it in the first place.

Exit Through The Gift Shop -'Guerrilla' artist Banksy asks the question, "Why is Banksy so popular?" Turns out Banksy doesn't know anymore than you or I would. Funny as hell, though.

Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol. -Yep. Tom Cruise still runs like a girl in this one. But it's actually a well-crafted thriller. I like the bit of fakery at the beginning where we're led to believe that it's Tom Cruise who gets killed, and not some random agent of the IMF. Speaking of which, the plot of three out of four MI movies is, "Tom Cruise gets disavowed by the agency and has to clear his name." You'd think an organization which can give its field agents cool gadgets like inflatable landing pods and building climbing gloves would spend a little more money on its HR department. Or Tom Cruise's character's self-esteem is so low his relationship with the IMF is like an abusive marriage...

Cars 2 - A bad Pixar film is still a good film, by any standards. Not memorable, but not bad at all. The drawback to being Pixar is that once you become a gold standard for animated films, once you do movies like this, critics tend to act like you pooped in their cornflakes.

Hanna. -Good Soundtrack, Bad movie. By 'Bad', I mean in this case, it's a movie made by people who don't usually make this type of movie, so the beats that they hit don't jell with the audience. To be more direct: I'd rather watch a movie with Jason Flemying and his off-beat boho-hippie family as they tramp through Europe and North Africa, than this movie. There's a point where the baddies kidnap the boho family and interrogate them on Hanna's whereabouts, you hope the family gets away unscathed, but then you see the fate of the retired clown living in the abandoned fun park and you know Flemying and co. are dead meat.

Bridesmaids - Mixes the 'gross-out' comedy with the 'chick-flick'. It's funny, the characters are likable and have layers of depth to them, but the improv nature of the film just pads it out for too long. (It's two hours!) But we get to see Rod from 'The IT crowd' in a supporting role.

Worst movie of the year that was not 'Jack and Jill'. - Suckerpunch, by Zack Snyder. Mean-spirited, patronizing, have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too misogyny. Looks like it was filmed through a glass of urine, as well.

Best comics of 2011: Pincochio by Winshcluss, Hark, a Vagrant by Kate Beaton and Paying for It, by Chester Brown. I'm begrudgingly liking Craig Thompson's 'Habibi' as well.

Best T.V.: Charlie Brooker's Wipe2011 and How TV Ruined Your Life, Breaking Bad, Louie and that new dark horse candidate from Britian's ITV, Downton Abbey. Otherwise known as 'that T.V. show you recommend to your mom.'. Best documentary: the three part 'All Machines of Loving Grace' by Adam Curtis.

Best Video Game: Portal 2, in a walk. Funny, clever, and the moment you figure out how to finish a puzzle is like a rush. I'm only sorry it was so short. While I'm on topic, I got 'Skyrim' for Christmas, and it's 'Fallout' with swords and magic. I'm playing it, but it reminds me why I'm so acrimonious to the Sword-and-sorcery genre. (If I hear one more guard say, '...then I took an arrow to the knee' one more time...) Also, going on the quests within the game seems like the biggest, most frustrating chore, ever. You think you've finished one long, drawn-out quest, then sure enough, "And now you must go find this thing!" Christ. It's starting to feel more like a job than entertainment at this point...

Best new tech: The Iphone 4s. I earlier bemoaned not having a sassy robot butler/valet in this, the twenty-first of centuries. Well, guess what? The Iphone has Siri, a voice-activated search engine/assistant who finds stuff for you! She can play a song off your Itunes list, she can call up someone on your contact list, she can find stuff on the internet for you! She'll even run your copy of Angry Birds or Grand Theft Auto for you! The thing is, she's not so much 'Sassy', as she has more of the tone of a put-upon CSR who's nearing the end of her shift. So about the tenth time she tells you, "I'm sorry, I can't find that for you.", you start to think your inanimate Iphone is going to lose its temper and tell you to fuck off. She will find 'Duck Vaginas' on the internet for you, however. I'm not joking! Also: Facetime, which makes me feel like George Jetson!

Best website: RedLetterMedia. Milwalkee filmmakers Mike Stoklasa and Jay Bauman take apart movies in the most surgical and funniest format ever. (They're the ones who dissected the execrable 'Star Wars' prequels.) I'm only sorry that they don't put up their vlogs more often. Well, maybe they would if we all donate here, hm?

So, see you all next year, okay?

Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

2011-12-16T14:17:00.000-08:00

Saint Peter resignedly placed his account ledger on the lectern stand in front of the Pearly Gates, and, not for the last time, felt like a bad cliche in a lazy editorial cartoonist's repertoire of over-used tropes. Slowly, patiently, he signed in the departed, checking their names off in his great ledger. Just then, a motion caught his eye. A tall, slightly puffy-looking middle aged man in a tweed jacket, slacks, a tousled head of hair and a shirt unbuttoned to his sternum wandered blithely by him into Heaven's gate. An outrage! Saint Peter cleared his throat to attract the man's attention. The man coolly turned to face St. Peter, then took a final swig of the tumbler of amber liquid in his hand. The ice cubes rattled as the glass thumped on Saint Peter's lectern.

"Aha. Steward. I'll be having another Balvenie, please.", the man enunciated in a deep, plummy Oxford dialect. "Neat, this time." Saint Peter put his hands on his hips and regarded the man with a cock eye.

"Christopher Hitchens, you SHIT!", he exploded. "Just what the bloody Hell do you think you're doing?"

"Just shuffled off the mortal coil, and I'm grabbing a table inside, obviously."

"YOU?", spluttered Saint Peter. "You, of all people? First of all, there's a bloody line over to our left, in case you didn't notice, and I can't see how you didn't! And secondly-", Saint Peter paused, his finger dramatically pointing upwards to emphasize his point." Didn't you explicitly say that not only were you an avowed atheist, but you spent your final years debating learned men of God of the very existence of this place! How dare you think you can just march on in, sir?"

Hitchens calmly stared down Saint Peter. "Well, firstly, SIR!", he uttered sarcastically. "Doesn't it seem kind of silly treating the entrance to Eternal Grace like a airline check-in counter?" Hitchens dramatically paused a bit, wishing for another scotch to sip whilst dramatically pausing for emphasis.

"And secondly, does it not say, sir, in that contradictory collection of tribal proofs of Semitic lineage that you call, 'The Bible', that, and I'm literally quoting here, "The faithful will be joined with their father in Heaven, while the liars, the murderous, the treacherous will be cast down with Satan and his hordes?"

"Ee-yeess..?", said Saint Peter, sensing a trap.

"Well,", continued Hitchens. "See the gap there, between the first part of the statement and the second? What about all the people in between? The atheists and Muslims and Buddhists and Scientologists who aren't murderous or treacherous or liars? I understand the concept, that all morality comes from God and thus those on the outside are vulnerable to temptation and the devil and all that. But you know, sir, that there are good people who aren't believers. I know you do. You can't miss them. Therefore:"

"If God alone can deliver us from temptation, And,some people who don't believe in God are also able to resist temptation, then, God must offer his protection against temptation even to some who don't believe in God. One could even say that God aids the atheist's honest desire to follow one of God's rules... even while he continues to deny God. Such as myself, for instance."

Saint Peter spluttered. 'What-what hubris is this, sir?"

Hitchens turned to walk into Heaven. "I'm hoping to bone Sarah Bernhardt while I'm here, actually. Ta!" A dismissive wave of the hand, and Hitchens was away.

Saint Peter watched him leave, then sighed and turned back to his ledger. Some days, he thought, some days it just doesn't pay to get out of bed.

(Please note: I lifted certain parts, (well, STOLE, really,) of this dialogue from David Wong of Cracked.com. I'm not that smart, honestly.)

MOVIE NEWS!!

2011-12-05T13:14:00.000-08:00

NEW MOVIES IN 2012!

-I'll Kill You, You Bastard! -Aging action star goes apeshit and kills a bunch of people who kidnapped and killed his daughter. Explosions, car chases, and the aging action star gets a few quips in, even.

-Who's She Gonna Fuck? - Rom/com where the adorably clumsy lead actress goes on a series of wacky dates to determine which one she's a-gonna fuck. (Spoiler alert: it's the guy in the poster) Yeah, her roommate is a gay man. Spoiler alert: the lead actress marries the guy in the movie poster at the movie's end and throws the bouquet. Her gay roommate catches it and attracts the flirtatious attention of an unlikable supporting character. He rolls his eyes in consternation at the audience!

-Zany PG-13 Comedy -C-list comedian stars as regular guy in improbable comic scenario. Hot Maxim magazine cover girl plays his improbable love interest. Lots of groin punches, pratfalls, and farting in this one. Perhaps the lead will eat fecal matter by mistake? There's probably an animal that pees and poops and masturbates, also. We made this and we don't know. Go and see.

-Action Adventure Based On Children's Toys, making, in essence, a two hour commercial that you pay money to see. We shit you not. Explosions, giant bridges and buildings collapse, hundreds of cars on a freeway go flying. From the producers of 'Meh' and the six guys who wrote, 'Ehh.' comes...'Guhhhh...'

-Franchise Picture 3: The Return of The Franchise -All your favorite characters are back! Well, except for that one guy who's agent got all uppity. Anyway, turns out there's a twist! One of the good guys is actually bad. Oooh! Guaranteed to have at least one explosion. Oh, fuck you. Like you've got anything else to fill your life with, you mindless sheep. It's Friday, you can't get a babysitter, take the damn kids to this. At least you won't have to talk to the little shit-bags for a couple of hours.

-Animated Kid's Cartoon. In 3D. It's for kids. We put some jokes in for the parents who take their kids to these things so they don't get too bored. We got a couple of real actors to do voices so the parents and man-babies who go to these things can go, "Hey, isn't that Jonah Hill playing the green thingy?", during the movie.

-Big Budget Comic Book Movie -Ooh, finally! Didn't think they'd ever get around to this one. Hey, why is that actor playing the lead superhero? He sucks! I'm going to register my contempt on the internet right after I get home! Didja know IMDB's 'trivia' section tells us that the render-farm of computers doing that one special effect took 18 months to make that one scene? Prediction: It takes a bath in the domestic market, breaks even in the foreign market, makes its profit in rentals.

-Biopic.-Contemporary actor plays idealized version of beloved classic celebrity. Details include: poor-but-humble beginnings, determined rise to top, personal tragedy, fall from grace, redemption. Last scene has 25 year old actor in old-man makeup sitting on his porch, contemplating his life's rich pageant. Gets nominated for Best Actor Oscar, doesn't win.

-Quirky Indie film. -Featuring: Bon Iver on the soundtrack, long, meditative shots of the poignantly decaying urban landscape. Probably a 'Manic Pixie Dream Girl' in this one! Oh, who are we kidding? None of you lumps are gonna see this one! Took a prize home at some film festival somewhere, as the trailer endlessly points out, anyways.

-Horror Film - Oh, don't go in there! No, don't go in there! Ah, she went in there! Now she's dead! Oh, I'm so scared! This movie is scary! Hey, why'd she go in there in the first place? The really clever bit is when 'fridge logic' kicks in about five minutes after you leave the theater.

-Oscar Bait -Goddammit, if we don't take the Oscar for Best Picture, I'm gonna burn this studio to the ground! Now get in there and get me an Oscar! Do you hear me, Respected British Stage Actors who are in this thing? Get me an Oscar! I want full retard! I want handicaps! I want abusive husbands! I want growing up covered in your parent's vomit in picturesque Dublin! Go! Go! Go!

-Eddie Murphy and/or Steve Martin comedy -It's kinda cute how they just keep trying, you know?

-Foreign Film -What the Hell is this? How am I supposed to keep up with the movie if I have to read the subtitles at the bottom? Fuck this, if I wanna read, I'll pick up a book. That one chick is hot, though. Maybe the internet has naked photos of her.

-Remake of Classic Film. -Oh, hey, they cast the original's lead actor as a supporting player! That's a neat bit of meta-commentary that's never happened before. #sarcasm. IMDB's 'Trivia' section says they spent five million in CGI editing out his expressions of shame and self-loathing.

-Reboot of Film made a decade ago. IMDB's 'Trivia' section tells us that when the studio approached the original lead actor to reprise his iconic role from ten years ago, he refused. His IMDB listing says he's working as a drywaller in San Bernadino, now.

-White Person Saves The Minorities. -White person shows up, saves the minorities. You're welcome, minorities! Now stop being so uppity! Fuckin' ingrates.

-Mickey Roarke Tries Again. -This is the one, folks! This time, for reals, Mickey is back to the top! Oh, wait. The movie came out and Roarke called it a 'piece of shit'. Well, maybe next time...

-Adaptation of Tween Novel -Meh. Hey, why are they casting a white teenage girl in the lead? Wasn't the main character in the original novel...Black? Ah, fuckit.

-And Yet Another Nicolas Cage Movie -The object lesson in Cage's fall from grace is that once you become a successful movie star, you tend to assume the money tap will never stop flowing. When it inevitably does, dropping millions of dollars on castles you've never visited, let alone lived in seems like a really bad move, in retrospect.

-George Clooney Drama - Clooney plays a man on the edge! When he finds out what the higher-ups have been to, it's up to him to blow the whistle! But it could mean he loses...everything...Also starring: Tilda Swinton as the icy lawyer, Phillip Seymour Thomas as Clooney's oily boss, and some hot chick as his wife/girlfriend. Directed by Stephen Soudeberg or somebody like that.

-I Lost a Bunch of Money Investing in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi Scheme, So Now I'm Stuck Doing These Crap-fests. -starring: Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick, John Malkovich. Also: Patrick Stewart, Ben Kingsley, and Michael Caine. (who didn't actually lose any money to Madoff, they just, you know, love money.)

Movie News:

Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 comes to DVD and Blu-Ray last month, albeit with a error: “Ayn Rand’s timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice comes to life…”, incorrectly reads the copy on the back. This is obviously an egregious error of the utmost ineptitude and the producers apologize for the mistake. New covers will be sent to people who register via their web-site. The new copy should, of course, read, "The pointless, unwatchable, low-budget film version of Rand's bloating door-stopper has now, inexplicably been turned into an over-priced drink coaster. Don't hold your breath for parts 2 and 3, folks! By the way, thanks for your money, STUPID!"

Also out on DVD/Blu-ray this week:

-Adorably Quirky! This warm-hearted indie flick stars Michael Cera and Zooey Deschaniels as lovable misfits looking for love. Various reviewers have called it, 'Different', 'Offbeat', and 'Quirkily Adorable'. Some catchy indie-musicians on the soundtrack, though. (Now on Itunes!)

-'Punching, Shooting, and Brooding' In this British thriller, Jason Statham punches, Clive Owen shoots, and Daniel Craig broods.

-'Low Budget Sci-Fi Direct-to-Video Title Cunningly Titled So You'll Think It's A Video Release Of A Big-Budget Sci-Fi Movie That's Still In Theaters'

-'Low Budget Film With A Now-Major Star In It That They Did Before They Hit It Big So Now Their Face Is On The Cover Even Though They're In It For Only Five Minutes'

-'Overpriced Box Set Of Old T.V. Series That You'll Buy, Watch Maybe Three Episodes Of, Then Will Sit Gathering Dust For The Rest Of Eternity.'

-'Director's Cut' -Comes with five extra minutes of footage, commentary track with embittered director getting drunk and passive/aggressive during the course of the commentary.

-'25th Anniversary Edition' -$70 'limited edition' box set. Comes with Blu-ray, Dvd, and Digital Copy (Which is only valid until next week.) Also, extra disc full of pointless extras like forty-minute documentary on catering staff, and a 'collectible' gee-gaw that's broken once you've bought this and actually opened the box. Wait until next month, when they're selling this on Amazon for five bucks. The digital copy won't be valid anymore, and the collectible gee-gaw is missing, but hey. Five bucks.

-'Another Goddamned Adam Sandler Comedy' Fuck. Fuck fuck fuckity fuck. Also starring: Rob Schneider, David Spade, Nick Swanson, Farts, Bodily Fluids In Food And On Clothing And Hair, Product Placement, Fuck.

-'Dreamworks Animated Kids Film' -cover shows lead character displaying 'tude. And by 'tude, we mean, 'looks at viewer with smug expression and raised eyebrow. Starring: Overpriced Comedic Actor doing weird voice so you don't recognize him. Also starring: Indie/Alt-comedians known for their R-rated stand-up routines inexplicably doing voice-over work in a children's movie. Valuable life lessons are learned.

Holiday Previews: Yep, it's the movies that you've waited all year to see that have been hyped up this past year. You probably even saw these previews in the theater this summer before watching 'Green Lantern' and left thinking more about the trailers then the movie you just saw! This is the Oscar-bait, folks! Added bonus: Since they come out during the holidays, you can take your relatives that you only see during this time so it'll count for actually spending time with 'em! Enjoy!

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows: What I always liked about the 'Holmes' character is how he was such a hard-drinkin', hard-livin', hard-lovin' brawler in the original stories. Oh, he wasn't? Ah, well. Future rental.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: It's kinda grim when you consider that director David Fincher has more talent on display when he's just 'phoning in' a film (like this one) than most other filmmakers have had in their entire careers.

The Muppet Movie: They're Baaaaaack! Ok, if I had to take a kid to a movie, this would be the one. That grinding sound you're hearing is Frank Oz's teeth.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Gary Oldman's one of those actors who plays great villains, but meh heroes. But since I'm at the age now where I relate more to George Smiley than James Bond, it's worth a look, anyhoo. I think Smiley defeats one of the bad guys in this by making him a cup of tea to death...

Mission Impossible-Ghost Protocol: Tom Cruise does more running in this one. Hey, didja all notice that he runs like a girl! Really! After this and the upcoming 'San Francisco Fire' movie, Brad Bird slinks back to Pixar.

Hugo: I actually want to see this. Hence, no snarky comments. Well, here's one: I recall the original book being sold in stores as a 'graphic novel', being that it had illustrations in it like the original Alice in Wonderland. That's not a 'graphic novel', it's a 'book with illustrations'. Also: No ol' Squishy-face DiCaprio in this one, Marty? Augh! That was two snarky comments! Sorry, sorry.

The Adventures of Tintin: I don't have a good feeling about this one. Peter Jackson is an okay director, but he's never done a movie that I really liked. I think it'll tank for two reasons: People who are interested in Tintin aren't going to want to see this, (because it's not really a Tintin story) and people who don't know anything about Tintin aren't going to have any reason to want to see this. (The advertising emphasises the voice actors and the director and the producer, instead of the Tintin franchise. Never a good sign.) Back in the 60's, a couple of live-action Tintin movies were made in Europe, and they were outgrossed by Pippi Longstocking, if I'm not mistaken. The second reason is that the character design is like the one in 'Mars needs Mom's', which didn't outsell 'Theater closed for repairs' in ticket sales.

If I really had to think about why Herge's 'Tintin' comics are so popular, I'd say Tintin in and of himself isn't the reason. He doesn't have any distinguishing personality characteristics, he isn't particularly funny or witty, and he gets out of a lot of his perils in the comics by sheer luck. He's merely a reason to keep the story moving. All the supporting characters have basically one character trait to differentiate them from Tintin. (Captain Haddock is a surly drunk, Professor Calculus is hard of hearing and absent-minded, Thompson and Thomson are bumbling incompetents, etc.) And yet...

What Herge and his assistants gave us was a world that we could get utterly lost in. The world of Herge was clear, incredibly detailed, and looked a lot like the one we lived in, except for all that moral grey stuff. The villains were utterly, well, villainous, our friends and allies were absolutely with us, the perils were thrilling as well as being, well, perilous. It was a world that could only exist in the comics, and specifically, the comics of Herge. That, ultimately, is why I don't have high hopes for the movie.

We're at the stage in history where computer animation is taken as a given, so the novelty of rendering and animating these characters as realistically as possible has worn off long ago. I'd describe the style on display here as 'Realistic/Cartoony', where the art is taken as close as possible to the 'uncanny valley' as can be done. The thing is, movie goer's find this style off-putting. As evidenced in Robert Zemeckis' ill-fated 'Polar Express' and 'Beowulf'. I'm reminded of an old National Lampoon article where an illustrator rendered classic newspaper characters as realistically as possible with appropriately grim captions depicting their fate. (Popeye suffered from a grotesque case of the bends, Henry was born without a mouth, Little Orphan Annie had glaucoma, etc.) As a counter-example, I'll point to the style on display in 'Rango', which is 'Cartoony/Realistic'. The characters themselves are caricatures of lizards, birds, and the occasional person rendered in as 'real' a style as can be done within the parameters of the caricature.. Their animation, however, is highly stylized. This manages to circumvent the whole 'uncanny valley' issue in modern computer animation.

War Horse: Like every Spielberg film in the last two decades, it will have individual scenes of undeniable impact and power. Like every Spielberg film in the last two decades, it will be a case of the sum not being greater than the parts.

Alvin and The Chipmunks: Chip-wrecked: Fuck off. If I had to take a kid to a movie, and they really, REALLY wanted to see this one, I'd bribe them with a new video game console, instead.

Harold and Kumar's 3d Christmas: Fuck you. I'ma gonna see this. I'm probably gonna laugh. It's probably not going to be as good as the first one, in retrospect, but fuck you, nonetheless.

On 'Jack and Jill"

2011-12-01T13:38:00.000-08:00

Just for giggles, after I had seen the trailers for that new Adam Sandler movie, I decided to write a synopsis of the movie, based solely on the trailers. Here's what I came up with, off the top of my head:

"Adam Sandler plays a successful professional who makes at least six figures a year at a job which he seems to do without a lot of effort or sacrifice. His wife is younger and very attractive, and his children are cute and probably adopted. Into this bucolic existence comes his twin sister, also played by Sandler, to visit for the holidays. While Sandler's male character is successful and socially well-adjusted, his twin sister is probably working as a wage slave at an office, single, and appears to lack some social graces. This causes friction between them during her stay, as illuminated via a series of broad physical sight gags, one of which inevitably has Sandler getting hit in the testicles by his sibling. Oh, and there's a scene where she makes a big deal about going to the 'Olive Garden', because, you know, PRODUCT PLACEMENT! Adding to Sandler's discomfort, a famous actor, Al Pacino of 'Dog Day Afternoon', takes a fancy to his sister, and begins to court her. This adds more tension to her presence. Finally, an argument between them ensues involving the actor's courtship of her, which climaxes when the twin sister character breaks into Sandler's 'upset woman' trope, then hits him in the nuts, and goes to stay in a hotel. A montage follows where the sister is holed up in said motel, sadly watching Lifetime movies and chick flicks on the hotel cable and wolfing down pints of Haggen-Das. (We see a pile of empty ice cream containers behind her to emphasize her sorrow. Also, PRODUCT PLACEMENT!!) Meanwhile, Sandler's 'Jack' is gloomily watching old home videos of him and his sister interacting when they were younger. Poignant piano music is playing. He sentimentally chuckles in fond reminiscence upon viewing a scene where his sister hits him in the nuts and he falls down. Perhaps his eyes are tearing up. Then his wife appears, gives him a comforting touch on the shoulder, and gives him the speech about how family is important and his sister may be annoying, but she's the only sister he has, and nothing can change it. (It should be noted that the wife in this movie acts more like the caretaker to a special needs child, than a spouse.) This inspires 'Jack' to mend the bridge betwixt him and his sister, who's had a similar epiphany via a showing of 'Steel Magnolias' on her hotel's Starz cable channel. PRODUCT PLACEMENT!! As neither are where the other person thinks they are, a zany, madcap romp through Los Angles ensues, with the famous actor joining forces with 'Jack' to hunt down the sister. The sister, it turns out, has taken a detour to an old abandoned school playground where her and her brother used to practice their 'double dutch' skills, and in the act of nostalgia, has gotten herself in peril. She sees a ball that she threw up on the roof to torment her brother, and attempts to climb up on the roof to get it. In so doing, she loses her footing on the rusty drainpipe she's standing on, and is dangling perilously off the edge of the school roof. Her brother and Al Pacino of 'And Justice For All' happen to come upon her, assume she's trying to commit suicide, and rush to the top of the roof to rescue her. In trying to rescue her, 'Jack' has to hold Al Pacino by his pants to steady him while Pacino reaches out for 'Jill'. While reaching out to 'Jill', Al confesses his love for her and makes a marriage proposal. This shocks 'Jack' so much, that he loses his grip on Al, and Al falls forward to his doom. At the last minute, Al catches 'Jill' and 'Jack' grabs the cuff of Al's pants, yanking them down around his ankles. Al Pacino was in such movies as 'Heat' and 'Serpico', by the way. 'Jill' tearfully agrees to a de-pantsed Al's offer of marriage. The movie's final scene has Al Pacino marrying 'Jill', much to 'Jack's bemusement. (At the Olive Garden. PRODUCT PLACEMENT!!) We are then treated to a scene of 'Godfather' actor Al Pacino gleefully french-kissing Adam Sandler in drag, with lots of tongue and slobber, much to the wedding party's discomfort. 'Jill' then throws the bouquet, which by a million-to-one shot, hits 'Jack' square in the nuts. Fortunately, 'Jack' planned ahead, and is wearing a protective cup down there on this, his sister's special day. (At some point during the movie, probably during the wedding, we're treated to a cameo by Rob Schnider.) You no longer need to see this movie, America! You're welcome."
So. After having seen the Red Letter Media episode on Jack and Jill, I now realize that when I tried to predict the story, I made the unfortunate mistake of swinging too high. Here, as far as I can tell, is the actual story:

Adam Sandler plays a successful ad executive who makes at least six figures a year at a job which he seems to do without a lot of effort or sacrifice. His wife is younger and very attractive, and his children are cute and one, at least, is adopted. (Maybe the other one is as well, I don't know. I need to stress that I didn't see this movie.) His current task at work is to convince Al Pacino, the star of 'The Godfather' to appear in an ad promo for his company's client, Dunkin' Donuts. PRODUCT PLACEMENT!! (Because 'Pacino' rhymes with 'Cappuccino', you see.) Into this bucolic existence comes his twin sister, also played by Sandler, to visit for the holidays. While Sandler's male character is successful and socially well-adjusted, his twin sister is probably working as a wage slave at an office, single, and appears to lack most social graces. This causes friction between them during her stay, as illuminated via a series of broad physical sight gags, none of which has Sandler getting hit in the testicles by his sibling, surprisingly enough.. Oh, and there's a scene where she makes a big deal about going on a 'Royal Caribbean Cruise Line' PRODUCT PLACEMENT!! because, you know, PRODUCT PLACEMENT!!. And when I say PRODUCT PLACEMENT!!, I mean they literally stop the movie to show a commercial for the 'Royal Caribbean Cruise Line'. The 'Jill' character even evidently says stuff like, 'Oh, look at all the wonderful activities they have on board this amazing cruise liner!' or something like that, I don't know, I didn't see this movie.

Adding to Sandler's discomfort, Al Pacino of 'Dog Day Afternoon', takes a fancy to his sister while Jack and Jill are attending a Lakers' game. This gives Jack hope that he can convince Pacino, an
award-winning actor with a solid body of legitimate work behind him, to appear in his company's Dunkin' Donuts campaign. (If Pacino does not appear in this Dunkin' Donuts ad campaign, Jack is
evidently in no danger of losing his job, nor will his company go under. So there are no stakes within the film to have Pacino sign on with Adam Sandler's character's ad agency. ) So I guess Pacino is on the same cruise as Jack, his family, and Jill, so Jack dresses up as Jill to flirt with Pacino, the star of 'Dog Day Afternoon' to sweeten the pot of Pacino signing on with Jack's ad company. I think. And I believe that Pacino, the star of 'And Justice For All' and 'Serpico' does it, and we get to see Pacino do an ad for Dunkin' Donuts and that's the movie.

In between all this is a scene where Jack takes Jill to a petting zoo or something and Jill gets on a pony and she's too overweight to ride it, so the pony's legs splay out from it at an angle that suggests that the pony would've been put down in real life to spare it further agony. They would've shot the pony right there. In front of all the little kids. In the face. And this all is played for laughs, I imagine. Again, I did not see this movie. Oh, and there's a scene where Jack and his family, including Jill, attend his Mexican gardener's family picnic, and there's a bunch of mean racist jokes at the expense of Mexicans, but since it's all coming out of the mouth of the Mexican gardener, it's okay, I think. And an old lady gets hit in the face by a ball or something, and since they're at a Mexican picnic, someone stuffs some chili peppers under her nose and that revives her and then she eats the peppers and I guess that's all supposed to be funny, because old ladies don't eat hot peppers? And Jill eats authentic Mexican food and gets the shits and it's funny, too. I guess.

Where I dropped the ball in my earlier, sarcastic assessment of this film is that I assumed Katie Holmes, as Sandler's 'Jack' character's wife would behave like Sandler's characters mother instead of his spouse. Instead, her job is to do nothing. She evidently stands off to the side the entire movie and makes no effort to interact with the other characters. Perhaps marrying Tom Cruise was not such a good idea, in retrospect. What else did I get wrong? Pacino and 'Jill' don't get married, I think, though there's a scene where Pacino licks 'Jill' armpit, and it's all hairy and that's supposed to be funny. I believe that 'Jill' finds true love with the Mexican gardener. Also, more surprisingly, while David Spade, Dana Carvey, and Chris Farley's brother have cameos, there's no Rob Schinder to be seen.

And I foolishly assumed that any jokes in this movie would be crafted. It's all non-stop, wall-to-wall people falling down and smacking each other and easy, physical comedy that makes you long for the wit and sophistication of the Three Stooges. Surprisingly, while I predicted plenty of shot's to the nuts, there are none to be found. There's no scenes of fake sentiment to fool the 'tards silly or bored or unlucky enough to see this movie to think it has a heart. There's no mention of the Olive Garden restaurant franchise, either. I suspect that when Sandler and co. wrote this, they had a hard enough time stuffing in PRODUCT PLACEMENT!! references to Coca-Cola, Oreo's, Pepto-Bismol, Sony electronics, Royal Carribean Cruise Lines, Dunkin' Donuts, and American Airlines, perhaps there were other products, I don't know. Again, I did not see this movie. Maybe Olive Garden made them an offer, and it just wasn't enough money.

So here's what I don't get. When you go to a movie in a theater these days, you have to sit through several commercials. Then you sit through several movie trailers, which are commercials themselves.

Then you sit through this movie, which is ninety minutes of product placement. And you just paid fifteen dollars to do this! Shouldn't the movie studio pay you? Or let you in for free, at least? This whole experience has taught me that I, too, can be a hacky, shitty, low-brow writer/director of hacky, shitty, unfunny, racist, mean-spirited 'comedies'. If I'm only willing to lower my standards. And throw any ability to craft a coherent, enjoyable story out the window. Don't you people get it? I accidentally wrote a better movie that the actual film, 'Jack and Jill', by MISTAKE!

I suspect what happened is that Sandler has taken stock of his career. He's weighed the balance and found his rewards wanting. If he makes an 'Adam Sandler' comedy, while it will make bank, the critics will hate it and that will turn off a bigger audience. When he appears in a 'real' movie, like 'Punchdrunk Love' or 'Love Reign Over Me' or 'Spanglish', no one will see them and the critics will respond with, 'Meh'. So at this point, he's realized that he's a middle-aged man who's stock in trade is playing screaming, violent, idiot man-children for comic effect. While this trope has its charms in a twenty-something actor, once the actor in question hits his forties, the appeal begins to diminish, not surprisingly. So now he's at the stage in his life where he's just gone, 'Fuck it, time to cash out.' And so he does. Watch for his next film, 'Open For Business!' In this one, Sandler plays a middle-aged, filthy rich comic actor who needs to get ninety product placements in a ninety minute movie! Can he do it? Go and see...

Look! Up In The Sky! It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's...

2011-10-19T13:23:00.000-07:00

...It's BirdPlaneMan! Fuck me, he's hideous!

I believe I predicted earlier that once Superhero movies started consistently tanking at the box office, studios would stop making superhero movies. I was incorrect in this regard, simply because if you market these things well enough, they're going to at least make the millions of dollars back that it took to produce these things. Also, it's not like the public has another medium to explore the superhero genre in these days, does it? Ah, right. Video games and T.V. shows. Of course, of course. Excuse me whilst I digress:

Back in the day, about 1988, back when modems were dial-up, and the cool kid was the one who had a 300 baud modem that only took fifteen minutes to download a 16-bit Playmate centerfold from a bulletin board, there was a serious controversy a-brewin'. Was it the election of wimp George Bush the Elder? Nope. Was it the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and the effect on our glorious capitalist economy? No, again. It was the casting of a specific actor as the lead in the upcoming 'Batman' movie. Yes, Warner Brothers had greenlit a big-budget screen adaptation of The Batman, and comic fans hearts everywhere were all-aflutter over the obviously egregious casting of Michael Keaton, that 'Swing-shift' comic actor guy as the lead. The horror! Now, this was pre-internet, so if you were a comic fan, you had to register your disdain by writing an actual letter to the Comic Buyer's Guide, and many did, thus showing their commitment to the promotion of the superhero comic book as a Serious and Legitimate Art Form. What was Warner Brothers thinking? Was this movie going to be a campy joke fest? Was Keaton going to start doing the 'Batusi' half-way through the film? Why not cast a real serious actor like Rutger Hauer or Bruce Willis? The fools! Didn't Warner Brothers read all those magazine articles that said, "Bang! Pow! Zoom! Comics aren't just for kids!" The release of this 'Last Temptation of Batman' was going to set the cause of the comic book industry back to the dark ages! (Well, casting Jack Nicholson as the Joker was a nice touch.) The end result? Batman went on to make over four hundred million dollars worldwide.

And the last 'Batman' film made over one billion dollars. If I was a majority shareholder at Time/Warner, I'd be doing some serious accounting. "So...how much does the DC comics licensing division make per year? Um, hm. And that figure with all those zeros behind it, that's on the up and up. Okay. Now. How much is the-what are they called again, silly book division? Oh, comic-book division making this year? Yeah, with that whole '52 reboot' thing. Hm. That's a lot less zeros over there. Why don't we take all the people who are making the few zeros at the end of the integer from that division... and move them over to this division with the more zeros at the end of the integer? We'll make a lot more zeros with the more successful division! Sorry, what? Oh, the superhero comic book fans will be angry if we reduce the amount of comics in our stable. Oh. Gosh, I bet they'll be so angry, they'll protest by not seeing the movies based on their favorite comic book character? For the first weekend, at least! And I'm sure they won't buy any video games or DVDs either! Oh, I'm so concerned. Look, here's my concerned face! Look!"

I guess my ultimate point is in all this rambling is that while the superhero comic is a dying medium, the superhero genre is as strong as ever. It's just that Time/Warner, (DC's parent company) and Disney, (Marvel's parent company) have seen the writing on the wall and in this case, the wall is a movie screen, and the writing is projected images of A and B list actors in tight suits emoting in front of green screens. So superhero comics, as a medium, get left further and further behind. The publishers will continue to try marketing gimmicks like DC's recent 'New 52' lineup, sales will continue to slowly drop, more talent will leave for other commercial mediums, sales will keep dropping, and finally, an odd equilibrium will be achieved where superhero comics, manga, "Art" comics, and non-superhero comics will all occupy the same rough region in the publishing arena.

Case in point: X-Men: First Class (C+) Not bad, not great. Weird thing is, they had a good movie in this somewhere, but it kinda got lost along the way. I think. Here's some notes:

-The retro 60's look of the film works to its advantage; they don't hit you over the head with archaic references. It's a nod to the classic Bond films, I suspect. The thing is, since the Bond films were the property of the Broccoli family, the directors in question were somewhat limited in the directions that they could take their films. This led to the whole series having the feel of being done by competent, if uninspired journeymen directors. Which is what's happening here.

-James McAvoy and Micheal Fassbinder work just fine as younger versions of the mutant leaders. However, it's kind of embarassing watching Fassbinder, whom I'm developing a hetro man-crush on as an actor, bathetic-ally monologuing at the movie's end. Did Stan Lee write this bit? (Seriously, go watch Fassbinder in Steve McQueen's brilliant 'Hunger', after you see this. An actor's life, indeed.)

-"Sure, bad guy who ruthlessly killed all our Government guards to get to us, and destroyed our base, I'll go with you! What could go wrong?" and "Sure, other villain who almost killed my step-brother, paralyzed him from the waist down and went off on an insane tangent with that goofy, over-dramatic speech of yours back there, I'll join your side! What could go wrong?" Which leads me to:

-While Magneto is the bad guy, in the movie's context, his argument against the humans makes the most sense. In that I mean Professor X doesn't seem to have any type of long term plans for the mutant community except for "Let's get a bunch of people with superpowers under the same roof." You don't do your movie any favors by making the bad guy the one with the most logical long term survival plan.

-The movie seems to be positioning Magneto as the superhero Malcolm X to Professor X's Martin Luther King, I suppose. The thing is, if you try to tie in real-world issues like civil rights to a silly popcorn movie, it tends to put a bit of a damper on the whole 'fun' concept, doesn't it? I like to imagine Martin Luther King, in this movie's history, trying to come up with a slogan for his 'Freedom March' of 1964 and going, "Say! Why don't we co-opt the mutants' ideology to succinctly promote our goals of treating all human beings with dignity and compassion?" Then twenty years later, gay rights activists can borrow the mutants' slogans for their cause. Doesn't it seem kind of ridiculous tieing in actual human rights issues to people in costumes blowing up stuff with their mind? (This is why I don't bother with superhero comics. When real-world concerns bang into superhero comic story lines, they just wind up pointing out the inherent absurdities in the superhero genre. Why didn't Spiderman or Superman stop the World Trade Center from collapsing? Why don't they do something about famine in Africa? Or wars in Eastern Europe? Or..? You get my point.)

-When one of your leads has the acting ability of an athlete guest-hosting on SNL, I guess it's a good idea to put her in her underwear for most of the movie. Honestly, January Jones' idea of 'acting' is blinking rapidly while delivering lines meant to be menacing but come off like she's ordering a pizza.

-The shout-outs to Rebecca Romain and Hugh Jackman were a nice touch.

-I believe, at the day's end, the superhero-in-a-movie is going to triumph over the superhero comic if only for the simple reason in a movie you can get your fix in ninety minutes. Whereas in a comic series, a first time reader has to wade through a backlog of plots and story lines decades old in order to keep on top of the current story. The unexpected added bonus of this is that it, -well, getting back issues of comics off the internet, also- has basically killed off the speculator market for comic collecting that sprang up in the Nineties.

As long as I'm ranting about comics, here's some actual comics I picked up...

Century 1969: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (B-) The conceit of Alan Moore's and Kevin O'Neil's comic series is that Mina from Dracula and Allan Quartermain from King Solomon's Mines have teamed up with other fictional characters to fight Evil. The broad concept works well enough, except for a couple of minor issues: Firstly, since Mina and Allan change their appearances in issue to issue, as well as their personalities, it's like having to get re-acquainted with new leads every issue. Wouldn't it be simpler to just take other fictional characters and tweak them enough to avoid a lawsuit? Like, maybe Holden Caufield and Anne Frank team up? (That's an idea in really poor taste, but you get my drift.) Secondly, Moore's adding in fictional in-jokes is a little like XKCD's trope of making obscure science and computer references. Unlike XKCD, Moore's crafted a good enough story so if you miss the in-jokes, you're not lost on the story.

Hate Annual #7 (C+) Peter Bagge's original 'Hate' series worked as it was the result of a suburban man in his thirties looking in on a subculture he had just left- the 'grunge' movement in Seattle. Bagge had enough sympathy for his characters to make his stories relate-able, but enough distance from them to put his comics in perspective. Bagge wisely ended 'Hate' just as his main character, Buddy Bradley, had reached a level of stability in his life, and thus, ended a chapter of his life. When the annuals look in on Buddy's married life, they come across as sitcom material that I suspect Bagge feels more obliged to produce then wants to. Bagge's strips of the history of scientists and libertarians, on the other hand, are what he really seems interested in these days. (Go check out his archive at Reason magazine, here.)

I now realize that the next big project Bagge needs to tackle would be a biography of Ayn Rand. Seriously.

Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice by Ivan Brunetti (A) Brunetti does in 77 pages what Scott McCloud tried to do in two volumes of 'Inventing Comics' and 'Reinventing Comics'. It's a overview of Brunetti's cartooning classes, and as succinct and as in-depth an overview of the medium of comics and cartoons as you're ever going to get. Even if you don't do his hands-on guide to cartooning, I guarantee you'll come away from this with a deeper and richer understanding of the ideas and craft behind it. A must-have. See? I'm not such a grouchy fuck, after all!

Humour about the Equipment

2011-09-26T12:24:00.000-07:00

Here's my take on XKCD: Once upon a time in a land far away, there lived a king who was a vainglorious peacock. He spent vast sums of money on his wardrobe, and spent more time then he should have consulting with tailors, cobblers, seamstresses and the like. One day two con-artists presented themselves to him as magic tailors from far away. They claimed to the king that they had created a fabric with a wonderful quality. It had, they claimed, the ability to appear invisible to people of shall we say not high moral standings. The king asked to see this cloth, and the con-artists then mimed pulling out a bolt of cloth, pretending they were holding the fabric in question. The king, not wanting to appear low, immediately enthused over the quality of the cloth and commissioned robes of state from the false tailors for a large sum of money.

Once the tailors 'finished' their work, they bade the king strip to his undergarments so they could drape the robes about his person. The king then pronounced he would undertake a royal procession through his city, so all the people would admire his new clothes, and also, root out the bad eggs in his kingdom. He then set out on his procession, clad only in his underwear. The people on his parade route murmured in appreciation of the king's finery, themselves not wanting to appear base and low. Just then, a little boy stuck his head out of the crowd and said:

XKCD is a overrated mess of stick figures making math jokes. The problem is that creator Randall Munroe set himself a premise wherein the characters make increasingly obscure math, science, and computer programming jokes. To the presumed amusement of people who have interest in those disciplines. I like to imagine some drone who works with Excel spreadsheet programs crossing his fingers and hoping Randall will make a strip about Excel spreadsheets next time. Because XKCD's humor is based on making increasingly obscure references to scientific disciplines, Randall's setups become more convoluted, and the comedic payoff becomes less rewarding. "Geek" humour shares a quality with 'Stoner' humor in that it's jokes about the equipment. For instance, in an old 'Cheech and Chong' routine, a stoner is on a satirical game show where he's asked, 'How many joints are in a lid?' The stoner replies 'Two." If you're a pot smoker from the 70's, it's a funny gag in that you presumably buy lids of pot that contain from four to a dozen joints. (I've never heard the term 'Lid' used in that context in twenty years. Yeah, I've smoked pot. Wanna hang out and discuss Hesse's Siddhartha and make plans to visit next year's Burning Man festival?)

Where the Emperor's New Clothes metaphor comes in is in the implication that if you don't like XKCD, it's because you're too stupid to get XKCD. I don't think this was Randall's attempt to 'critic-proof' his comic strip, but the implication is still there. "I get the gags in XKCD, and therefore, I'm part of the tribe. People who don't like it are too stupid because their tiny Neanderthal brains can't wrap their head around the profound concepts described therein." The problem with this line of thought, besides it coming from a geek asshole, is that in this day and age, one can simply Google an obscure reference in order to 'get' it. My point is, if one has to go through all this effort for a stick-figure comic, why even bother in the first place?

I wouldn't be so hard on XKCD if Randall displayed some acuity in his drawing. While using stick figures and pie charts and graphs and actuarial tables to illustrate a joke are all well and good, Randall's limited drawing skills constrict his jokes, so if he needs those tools in his toolbox, they aren't there for him to use, so he has to abandon a gag that he wants to tell on account of it'll demand a level of draughtsmanship he simply doesn't have access to. Eventually, he'll get to the point where he'll have to make a multi-page observation tying in the writing of Douglas Hofstader with Xeno's paradox and throw in Fibonacci's equation,... and the punchline will be.."A dog wearing a hat." or something equally banal. Then he'll be making 'shaggy dog' jokes until his comic drops out of favor, then he'll abandon the whole enterprise.

Look, to illustrate my point, here's a comic by Kate Beaton:

And here's an unfair but accurate rendering by me in the style of Randall Munroe:

While the XKCD pastiche works as a gag, it's clearly inferior to the original Beaton strip. While Beaton's line has a very sparse, sketchy quality, she manages to convey a world of intent in it. (God, I love that look of sarcastic disdain Rose gives her co-workers in that third panel!) When you reduce everything in the comic to a stick figure, there's layers of narrative within a gag that you just will not have access to. Also, Beaton's main source of humor is history, and the stories she tells have a funny, literate quality to them. So you learn something instead of having your insider's knowledge of computers or math stroked.

Life Is Great...

2011-09-13T14:52:00.000-07:00

Rango (A-) There's a lot of reasons to like this movie, but here's the main one for me: Non-Pixar animation studios are starting to get the message. In this case, the studio getting the message is ILM, Lucas' go-to guys for CGI. Oh, and the message is that you can do an animated CGI film that's really good, and it doesn't have to be made under the Disney banner. In the case of Rango, they gave the job to Gore Verblinski, who is not known for doing animated films. Neither is screenwriter John Logan, for that matter. And they brought the Coen brother's long-time DP, (Name) So you get an animated film that doesn't look like a typical animated film. (I like to imagine the fights Verblinski and co. had with the execs at Nickelodeon over the colour palette of this film:

'So no primary colours?"

"Nope. It's going to be shot like a classic Spaghetti Western." "Well, how are kids going to know it's for them?" "Sigh. Funny thing about kids is, they're smarter then we tend to give 'em credit for...")

While the story is one we've seen before- It's High Noon mixed with Chinatown- It's Logan and Verblinski's abilities, and Johnny Depp, and what they bring to an animated film that makes Rango so entertaining. Put it this way: Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo has a story that you've seen in a million other westerns, the cast makes me cock an eye, (Dean Martin?) but it's one of the best westerns I've ever seen. In Rango's case, the story isn't what the film is about, it's about the lead character's discovery of the heroic qualities within himself. While I usually complain about the logic of hiring A list actors to do voice overs in animation-Jack Black in Shark Tales, for instance- Depp's done a damn fine job here. I don't think the film's relative success is owing to just bringing non-animators on board. I think it's because both ILM and Verblinski had enough faith in the animation staff to do the job that they were asked to do. Heads will explode. It's a wonderful antidote to the crap like "Yogi Bear' and 'The Smurfs' that's been rammed down throats all year.

(I have one minor quibble with the plot of Rango, though: Wouldn't it have been better to establish Rattlesnake Jake's presence earlier on in the film? His return would've been a cause for genuine dread among not just Rango and the townsfolk, but the viewer as well. As it is, while he's an intimidating presence, he seems more like an anti-Deus Ex Machina plot device than an actual character.)

Conan The Barbarian (C+) Actually, not too bad. I mean, of course, the one with Ah-noldt, that bodybuilding chick, the surfer dude and James Earl Jones. Not that recent one with the Kevin Sorbo look-alike. Haven't seen that one. God, no. I like to imagine screenwriter Oliver Stone doing a line of coke and going back to his typewriter after getting an angry phone call from Dino DeLaurentis, ordering him to 'take out that scene where Conan surfs onto the beach of the island where Thusa Doom's castle is!' They're shooting this in Romania, director John Milnus! There's no surfing in Romania! I kid because I care.

It's the type of High Fantasy movie that works because it takes itself as seriously as it has to, no more, and no less. The temptation for jaded film types like Milnus and Stone is to put a bunch of tongue-in-cheek, yes-we-know-this-is-goofy-just-enjoy-the-ride stuff in it, but thankfully, they didn't. (There's one scene of Conan drunkenly punching out a camel-couldn't resist, eh, fellas?) The success of this movie, however, led to the whole genre of High Fantasy Sword and Sorcery film in the 80's of which I monotonously bitched about earlier. (If you can't be bothered to click the link, let me give you a TL:DR, as the kids say: Instead of making variations within a genre, they remade 'Conan'. Again. And Again. And Again. And Again. and-well, you get the idea...)

High Fantasy came out of the world of Pulp Fiction, where hacks got about a penny a word to crank out hard boiled fantasies about cynical gumshoes, soldiers of fortune, ghost-hunters, and of course, swashbuckling barbarians. At this point in history, we can all write pastiches of the pulp genre in our sleep. Well, I can, anyway. The dime store 'dreadful', as the press used to call them, went the way of the buggy whip maker on account of movies and T.V. If one is tempted to look back on those days with rose-colored glasses and sigh about why we don't bring back the simple, nerve-tingling excitement of those pulp adventures in our modern media, the answer is simple. 1) Why crank that shit out for a penny a word when the Screen Writers Guild will pay you points for a multimillion dollar movie these days, and 2) Believe me when I tell you, most of that stuff was not just cranked out shit, but utter shit. (For a penny a word, editors got their money's worth.) Herein lies the impending fate of the superhero genre.

Pinocchio by Winschluss (B+) So onto comics. Winschluss has a wavy, Peter DeSeve-line style which suits the satrical tone of the book nicely. It's also all done in pantomime, which is tougher to pull off in an extended narrative then you might think. (The only dialogue we get comes from a drunken reprobate Jiminy Cockroach, who takes up residence in the Pinocchio robot's head and has about as much influence on the robot's conscience as-well, yeah.) It's an extended piss-take on the treacly goodness of the classic Disney films, where Gepetto invents the robot to hopefully sell to the military, the robot separates from Gepetto owing to Gepetto's wife tragically mistaking Pinocchio's nose-a flamethrower-for a marital aid. From there on every trope in the original is gleefully subverted. Even Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs are brought into the story. It's crass and vulgar and perverse and I was sorry to see it end.

My 'Starwatcher' meme...

2011-08-12T18:25:00.000-07:00

Just my quick contribution to that 'StarWatcher' meme that's been a-floatin' round the internet. As well as a plug for Steve LeCouilliard's awesome third volume of 'Much the Miller's Son'. (Click here, if you're looking for a copy!) Eighty pages of comic goodness for only twenty bucks! It's hardbound, like all fine art books usually are, so it's got that touch of class going for it!

Big Cartel's a store for the independent artist-type, so have a bit of a shufti around, mebbe you'll see something else that catches your fancy. Oh, and again, I am incredibly sorry for putting a caricature of poor Steve in a promotional piece for him. Forbearance of Job, that one...

Movies, movies, movies

2011-08-08T11:14:00.000-07:00

SuckerPunch (D-) I don't want to give this a flat-out 'F', because the production design is just too good. But the movie itself is just so awful and mean-spirited, I found myself yelling 'Fuck you!' at the T.V. screen. I'm reminded of a cartoon by Sam Henderson, which shows a young woman looking offended at her boyfriend's collection of superhero comics, with the usual big-titted, wasp-waisted women in high heels and thong bikinis on the cover. "But I thought you liked depictions of strong women!", he complains. (Actually, the great Kate Beaton and some friends of her have summed up that whole 'Strong! Female! Protagonists!' trope up nicely, and here it is: (http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=311)

What I find most offensive, and I wouldn't call myself any type of feminist, is the underlying message that the story seems to be giving us. and that is that women are only fuckholes who can relate to men by either seducing them with their seductive wiles, or chopping their heads off with gleaming swords and blowing holes in them with sexy, high-tech guns. While dressing like the DVD cover of a porn movie. Yeah. No character has anything like a personality, or any depth, or any defining characteristics that would make me give a shit about their goals or problems. I think what happened is that director Zack Snyder doodled a bunch of 'Heavy Metal' cover-type sketches in his sketchbook. Stuff like a teenage girl in a Japanese schoolgirl outfit with a samurai sword and an H&K MP5 sub-machine gun strapped to her back, standing on the side gun platform of a B-17 bomber, firing off rounds from a .50 caliber machine gun. While a dragon circles around in the back of his sketch, breathing fire. Then he let out a satisfied grunt and mumbled, "This'd make a Kewl fuckin' movie, maan." Then he took a hit off his bong in celebration.

So the story is this girl named 'Baby Doll' (urgh.) is sent to an insane asylum because she accidentally killed her little sister while trying to rescue her from the attentions of her step-father. It seems as if her step-father has paid off a guard at the asylum named 'Blue', to get her a lobotomy. It's set in some stylized version of the 60's, where the film stock has that slightly yellowish look to it, like a dog peed on the film stock. While B.D. is at the asylum, I guess she goes into a fantasy world-or maybe it is really real, man. I don't know.-where the asylum is a front for a nightclub/brothel where the girls dance for customers who will later purchase their services. I think. So then-(phew.) B.D. apparently has this sexy dance that's so seductive that everyone who sees it is in awe, if they're a female, or they ejaculate their testicles out their pee-holes if they're a guy, I don't know. Because we don't get to see B.D. do her sexy dance. Instead,she goes into some weird fantasy reverie during her dance where her and the other inmates/stripper-whores (Strong! Female! Protagonists!) are in some fantasy world where she's fighting giant samurais, or German WWI zombie soldiers, or dragons, or in a Bell Huey chopper trying to defuse a bomb. It's porn movie plotting, where the whole movie is a setup to get to the 'fantasy' elements. It's set like a video game, too, where the girls have to get some items to escape from the brothel/asylum so they can get to the Next Level and Power Up.

Anyway, turns out that Baby Doll doesn't actually escape, because all the girls except her and one other get killed off - The story is so disjointed at this point that I just threw up my hands in despair- so she distracts the asylum guards-or were they gangster thugs? so her friend can escape. Oh, and Scott Glenn's the 'mentor' figure who sends the girls on their fantasy missions, and he shows up in the end as a kindly bus driver who lets the last girl on his bus to avoid the police. And Zack Snyder's kid scowls at her. Really.

The big problem here is that why does Baby Doll have to fantasize that she's in a brothel when she's in an insane asylum? Either have her stepdad sell her to a brothel in the first place, or keep her in the asylum. The extra layer of fantasy just tangles up the story without adding anything to it. (It's not 'her' story, either. Another girl escapes owing to B.D.'s sacrifices, thus rendering the past eighty minutes we as an audience spent investing in her character moot.) Maybe it's Snyder's attempt at an 'Inception'/'Matrix' like plot? If it is, I don't buy it, for the ham-fisted way it's crammed in.

Another thing I've noticed is that some professional film critics have positioned that this film is, in fact, a sly satire of the Summer Blockbuster, like Paul Verhoven's Starship Troopers. That the gratuitous titillation and Kewl 'splosions are in fact Snyder's meta-narrative commentary on pandering to an adolescent male movie audience. I don't buy that argument, because it seems more like Snyder's trying to have his cake and eat it too. "I was being IRONIC, DUUUDE", I like to imagine him shouting at his computer screen, reading negative comments about 'SuckerPunch' on some movie bulletin board.

If there's one constant theme in Snyder's movies, it's that he is the most literal-minded director in contemporary film making. (It's probably why he was the only person who could've directed the 'Watchmen' movie.) You could say that '300' was told from the point of view of the surviving Spartan, Dilios, so as to inspire the other warriors in an upcoming battle. That the Persians were portrayed as evil and decadent, and the Spartans as idealized supermen, with naught but giant shields to protect their gay-porn physiques. (The real Spartans were armored like tanks.) But Snyder says in the DVD commentary that he took the look of the film straight from Miller's comic book. To Snyder, 'Subtext' is a type of sandwich sold at Quizno's.

You know what? Fuckit, I'm giving this steaming turd an 'F', after all. Admiring the production values of a movie like this is like complimenting 'Triumph of The Will' for its cinematography. I hate to think of some poor woman in the production department of some special effects company having to wade through a mountain of political bullshit where she works, only wanting to earn a living in the film industry, working at least twice as hard and twice as long as the guys in her workplace to get to where she is and getting stuck working on this lump of shit. I notice that its rating was 'pg-13', which is a small mercy. What the fuck a 'R' rated version of this would be like, I can't begin to imagine. (I can imagine, actually, and if Zack Snyder cast porn stars in this, after it came out, they'd be worried about the effect it would have on their day jobs.) The only audience that could possibly begin to enjoy something like this would be 14-year old boys who were still gaping in awe at the wonder of body hair, and even then, they'd be made uncomfortable by watching this. Fuck this movie, fuck Zak Snyder, and fuck Legendary Pictures and Warner Brothers for not talking him out of making this steamer. 'Hobo With a Shotgun' had endless scenes of people bathing in blood, and it didn't make me feel as a tenth as dirty for watching it as 'Suckerpunch' did.

Big Bang Theory (C+) As far as generic three-camera sitcoms go, I've seen worse. It's not unfunny, but the writing takes the straightest line between two points that I've ever seen in my life. It's created and produced by (guy) who's responsible for 'Two and a half men', that Charlie Sheen sitcom where...yeah. Put it this way: If I were the type of person who plopped himself in front of a T.V. every evening, and 'Big Bang Theory' came on just before a show I really wanted to watch did, (Like 'Breaking Bad' or 'Boardwalk Empire'), I'd feel the extra half hour I spent watching it wasn't wasted. It's a kinda condescending description, but there it is. For the record, I thought Grahame Linehan's 'The I.T. Crowd' is funnier, mainly because Linehan is better at avoiding 'straight line's' in his plotting..

It's got some press for having an actual physicist on staff to fact-check the nerdy guys's lines for accuracy, and the writers make sure that the pop culture references are accurate, but. One thing did occur to me about the internal logic of the show, and here it is: So the premise is that you have these two young theoretical physicists, Leonard and Sheldon, living in an apartment in Los Angeles , and working at CalTech. A very attractive and personable young woman named Penny has moved in across the way, and in spite of their social hang-ups, Penny and the nerds become friends. I understand Leonard and Penny start dating in the third season. Anyways, Penny is making ends meet working at a Cheesecake Cafe while chasing her dream of becoming an actress in L.A. With me so far? Okay. So. Explain to me why two guys with doctorates working in a prestigious university who should be making about sixty thousand a year are living in the same building as a woman who makes minimum wage plus tips from her job? ($23,000, according to Ehow. Thank you, Ehow!) There's a line in the first season that Leonard and Sheldon are saving money on rent by rooming up, but given the salary they should be getting from their jobs, there needs to be a good reason why they're living in the place that they are. It's a minor point, to be sure, but from what I've seen of the series, there's no explanation for why the nerdy physicists with Phd's have the same living arrangements as a struggling actress. (There's a 'brick joke' about why their apartment building's elevator is not working that ties into the characters, by the way, so perhaps the reason for Sheldon and Leonard's living arrangements is set up in a later episode.)

Captain America: The Next 'Avengers' movie teaser. (C) Meh. I don't say that in a snotty or dismissive way, mind you. It's just that the whole movie is split into two parts. In the first half, we meet Steve Rogers, weedy nerd from the 40's who's aching to get into the fray to give the Nazi's what for. A scientist working on a super-secret project for the Allies just happens to hear him earnestly express his desires, and brings Steve on board. Steve shows the Army guys and the scientists his worth during his training by displaying his ingenuity and his willingness to sacrifice himself. He's then injected with a super-serum that makes him bigger and stronger. All well and good. Then the movie just plods it's way to the end, from action piece to action piece. Then Nick Fury shows up at the end to offer him a job with the Avengers.

The whole movie feels like it was originally four hours long, and that they cut out a bunch of scenes to make it to theaters. Steve hits it off with the Strong! Female! Character! two-thirds of the way through, and it's treated as they connected between scenes in the film. Same with him gaining the respect of the other soldiers and the grizzled Army officer leading the project. The movie loses all momentum once Rogers becomes Captain America, and just listlessly marches from scene to scene until the end. I guess it's supposed to pump us up for the upcoming 'Avengers' movie. If Marvel is joylessly cranking out these type of movies, why should I care?

Speaking of caring, the movie puts a lot of thought and energy into the production design. Perhaps too much thought. The first half has a bunch of clever bits of business replicating the naivete of American propaganda during WW2. And everything has a solid 40's look to it. Then they go to Europe and we get Super Nazis with laser tanks and dis-integrator rays. Yeah, it looks cool, but it just has the feel of 'Oo! Let's put this in, or the audience will get bored!'. I was relived when the credits ended. (Maybe there was a teaser bit after the credits, like with Iron Man, but I just didn't care at that point.)

Writing Movies (Redacted:for fun) and Profit. by the guys who created 'Reno 911' and then went on to write 'Herbie: Fully Loaded' and 'Night at The Museum' (C+) To be fair, as insider guides to Making Your Mark in the Movie Industry go, this one has the best practical information that I've ever seen. And they have a sense of humour about what it is that they do. Namely, to put asses in seats. I've been tempted to pick up those guides like Robert McKee's book and the like, but then I've realized, "Hang on. What movies have the authors of these screenwriting 'how-to' books actually have made?" Then I look 'em up on IMDB, and realize that these are the people who write scripts to movies I wouldn't watch on a dare.

At the end of the day, and the 'Night at The Museum' guys are guilty of this as well, they all fall back on the whiny defense of 'My movie made a hundred million at the box office! So there!'. Which is like the argument that dog shit is better than cornflakes, since a billion flies eat dog shit, and you eat cornflakes for breakfast. My point is, if you want to really learn how to write for movies, look at the movies of writers like Leigh Brackett, Preston Sturges, and William Goldman. You'll learn a hell of lot more, and you get to enjoy some good movies, too.

Hobo With A Shotgun (C+) Here's an interesting bit of movie trivia for you: Did you know that in the 70's and 80's, Canada had a lot of tax credit breaks for its film industry? That's right! And remember how that turned out? Remember what a powerhouse of World Cinema Canada came to be during the 70's and 80's? Oh, right. Let me put Canada's contribution to the world of film during those days like this: If you watch enough episodes of 'Mystery Science Theater 3000', you'll notice most of the movies from the 70's and 80's that they make fun of were, at the least, produced in Canada.

Which brings me to 'Hobo With a Shotgun'. Which, if it wasn't shot on Hi-def video, you would swear had been gathering dust on the back shelf of some mom-n-pop video store in the early 90's. So the question remains: Is it any good? Well, put it like this- It's based on the fake trailer the original filmmakers shot for Tarantino's 'Grindhouse'. And it lives up to the over-the-top trash that the trailer promised. So there's that. I wish the people making this had put a little more effort into their sound production- Don't they rent clip-on mikes in Nova Scotia, fellas? But it's got Rutger Hauer as the Hobo of the title, being his usual intense self. And 'Ricky' from 'Trailer Park Boys' makes a bloody cameo early on. So there you go.

The 'SLIFR' quiz, part 3

2011-06-15T12:27:00.000-07:00

1) Depending on your mood, your favorite or least-loved movie cliché

Favorite? When the guy gets the girl.(Even if it's thematically correct for the guy to lose the girl so he learns some valuable life lessons, it's still a gyp, in movie terms.) Least loved? When the plucky misfit underdog gets the girl/scores the winning point in the big game/beats up the bully/shows up the stuffy establishment types AGAINST ALL ODDS! ( You'd think the secret to success in life is to be a plucky underdog type. Why those 'life coach' professions don't give lessons in plucky underdog-ism is beyond me...)

2) Regardless of whether or not you eventually caught up with it, which film classic have you lied about seeing in the past?

Visconti's The Leopard. Don't know why I not only felt compelled to lie about that, but actually recommended it to someone! Then I got the blu-ray Criterion version, got fifteen minutes in, and realized, "Hang on. This is the Visconti that directed 'Death in Venice', right?" I'm at zero for two at staying awake during this movie. Molasses in January, that Visconti, is...

3) Roland Young or Edward Everett Horton?

Pass.

4) Second favorite Frank Tashlin movie

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (to be honest, I've only seen two of his films...)

5) Clockwork Orange-- yes or no?

An unequivocal yes. Kubrick's really gaining ground for me as one of my favorites. I'm still afraid to see 'Eyes Wide Shut', though.

6) Best/favorite use of gender dysphoria in a horror film (Ariel Schudson)

Psycho. It's the obvious one, but it works for me.

7) Melanie Laurent or Blake Lively?

Laurent, obviously. What a Basterd...

8) Best movie of 2011 (so far…)

Exit Through The Gift Shop. Well, I saw it this year...

9) Favorite screen performer with a noticeable facial deformity (Peg Aloi)

I want to say Tina Fey, but that's too mean-oops.

10) Lars von Trier: shithead or misunderstood comic savant? (Dean Treadway)

After his 'Hitler' stunt at Cannes this year, I'm now convinced Von Trier is a real-life version of Larry David, Euro-division.

11) Timothy Carey or Henry Silva?

Silva. Even when he's playing a 'good guy', he still gives me the creeps...

12) Low-profile writer who deserves more attention from critics and /or audiences.

Why Christopher McQuarrie isn't getting more 'props' these days is a true mystery.

13) Movie most recently viewed theatrically, and on DVD, Blu-ray or streaming

Haven't seen a theater film this year, and the year's half over. On DVD, 'Scott Pilgrim'.

14) Favorite film noir villain

Harry Lime.

15) Best thing about streaming movies?

Netflix Canada seems to have the type of movies that I'd buy, watch once, then feel bad for buying, even if I only paid five bucks for 'em. It's guilt-free trash!

16) Fay Spain or France Nuyen? (Peter Nellhaus)

Pass.

17) Favorite Kirk Douglas that isn’t called Spartacus (Peter Nellhaus)

Paths of Glory. Douglas can act with his neck!

18) Favorite movie about cars

I want to be cute and say, 'Cars', but I'd be full of shit. So I'll go with the original 'Gone in 60 Seconds'. 'Gumball Rally' works, too. Funny thing about them is, they're movies that were'nt made by real film directors, but by professional stuntmen back in the 70's. So they aren't real movies, in that the plot is simple-minded, there's no character development, and more thought was put into the stunts than anything else. It's car porn, actually.

19) Audrey Totter or Marie Windsor?

Pass.

20) Existing Stephen King movie adaptation that could use an remake/reboot/overhaul

Frank Darabont remakes 'Salem's Lot'.

21) Low-profile director who deserves more attention from critics and/or audiences

I'm biased because I'm in the middle of his latest 3 part series for the BBC, but Adam Curtis. Given his penchant for using licsened movie clips and sound tracks, there's a snowball's chance in Hell his stuff will ever be broadcast over here in the Colonies...

22) What actor that you previously enjoyed has become distracting or a self-parody? (Adam Ross)

Robert DeNiro. 'Analize This' was the nail in the coffin for me.

23) Best place in the world to see a movie

Ideally, Paris in the spring. Best place I've seen movies? Vancouver.

24) Charles McGraw or Sterling Hayden?

Hayden, naturally.

25) Second favorite Yasujiro Ozu film?

Pass. I've never seen an Ozu film. (I'm now afraid that Ozu might be like Visconti, above.)

26) Most memorable horror movie father figure

The Stepfather in The Stepfather.

27) Name a non-action-oriented movie that would be fun to see in Sensurround

Perversely, 'Irreversible'. Well, I wouldn't see it, but it would be fun to see an audience puke their guts out in unison. Not just because of the violence, mind, but also mainly due to Noe's disorienting soundtrack. Care of that Bangalter fellow from Daft Punk.

28) Chris Evans or Ryan Reynolds?

Ryan Reynolds.

29) Favorite relatively unknown supporting player, from either or both the classic and the modern era

Vincent Schiavelli. Aw, you know, that guy. The crazy ghost from 'Ghost'. Or one of Salieri's handlers from 'Amadeus'. Go look him up.

30) Real-life movie location you most recently visited or saw

Literally a block from my house. See, they were shooting a movie called, 'Boot Camp' with Mila Kunis, and I bummed a cigarette off her. I honestly didn't make the connection because, why would Mila Kunis be in Calgary? Then again, if you're making a low-budget thriller and shooting a scene in Denver, Colorado where the movie is set is too expensive, why wouldn't she be, in retrospect. Also, I drove by the location where they shot the 'Snow Fortress' scene in 'Inception'. Chills did not go down my spine.

31) Second favorite Budd Boetticher movie

That one with all the bullfightin' in it.

32) Mara Corday or Julie Adams?

Pass.

33) Favorite Universal-International western?

Pass.

34) What's the biggest "gimmick" that's drawn you out to see a movie? (Sal Gomez)

Ironically, this '3d' thingy that all the young people are talking about. I saw 'Avatar', and thought it was ok. I then saw 'Tron Legacy' and realized that putting '3D' at the end of a movie is a sure-fire way to keep me from seeing a film ever again...

35) Favorite actress of the silent era?

Mary Pickford, America's Sweetheart! (Even though she was from Toronto...)

36) Best Eugene Pallette performance (Larry Aydlette)

Pass. You know, I'm starting to feel a littl inadaquate in regards to my understanding of Classic Cinema, here, folks...

38) What could multiplex owners do right now to improve the theatrical viewing experience for moviegoers? What could moviegoers do?

As grim as this sounds, I think multiplex owners are doing everything they can to get and keep viewers. Including the above-mentioned 3D gimmick which has the opposite effect. (Well, for me, anyways.) What could moviegoers do? SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP. AND. TURN. OFF. YOUR. GODDAMNED. CELLPHONES. And get off my lawn! Damned kids. Grumble, mumble, mutter.

On that topic, The famed Alamo Drafthouse just released a PSA mocking a jackass who left a whiny voice-mail to their phones. The moral to all this? The world doesn't revolve around you, especially in a movie theater, 'tard. So maybe theater franchises need to take a tip from the Drafthouse.

Good Grief, Chester Brown

2011-05-24T12:25:00.000-07:00

Paying For It - Chester Brown (B)

(To a long-time alt/indy comic fan like myself, this is catnip to a Siamese. To a layman who may have possibly heard of Brown through 'Louis Riel', however, this could be like dog shit to a socialite. Though you can't go wrong writing about whore-mongering, in terms of salacious subject matter. As an example of Brown's unique narrative skills in the comic book terrain, it's beyond reproach. He's developed a deliberately dispassionate style of writing for comics which suits a subject like this perfectly. His style even allows for some humour, in the way his friends Joe Matt and Seth react to his turn to compensated 'dating.

Brown the polemicist, on the other hand, has some issues...

I'm reminded of the Aesop fable of the Fox Who Got His Tail Chopped Off. It happened that a Fox caught its tail in a trap, and in struggling to release himself lost all of it but the stump. At first he was ashamed to show himself among his fellow foxes. But at last he determined to put a bolder face upon his misfortune, and summoned all the foxes to a general meeting to consider a proposal which he had to place before them. When they had assembled together the Fox proposed that they should all do away with their tails. He pointed out how inconvenient a tail was when they were pursued by their enemies, the dogs; how much it was in the way when they desired to sit down and hold a friendly conversation with one another. He failed to see any advantage in carrying about such a useless encumbrance. "That is all very well," said one of the older foxes; "but I do not think you would have recommended us to dispense with our chief ornament if you had not happened to lose it yourself."

The moral here being: Distrust interested advice.

The interested advice in this case, it seems to me, is that since Brown has found a measure of quantifiable equilibrium vis-a-vis his interactions with women, the logical conclusion that he's come to is that all intimate relations by everyone should be conducted in such a straight-forward manner. The problem is that not all women, and certainly not all men feel comfortable with such an arrangement, obviously. Another problem is that Brown makes the assumption that everyone in the sex industry had a variety of employment options open to them, and chose that particular line of work to earn their daily crust. Try explaining Brown's point of view to someone in Eastern Europe, or Thailand, or your basic streetwalker here in North America, and they'll look at you like you just grew a second head. Yeah, there's sex-positive workers like Tracy Quan here in the First world, but I can't help thinking that people like her are way more the exception than the rule.

Which brings me to my next point, Brown's curious objection to legalization. He's using the single example of Nevada's regulations regarding the sex industry to argue against it. It's a poor example, and really, bringing up a single example to refute a point of principle is bad rhetoric. At the very least, if prostitution were to be regulated, you'd at least want the staff to undergo regular health checks, wouldn't you? I certainly wouldn't want a short-order cook with hep C bleeding into my curry fries, so it just stands to reason that I (hypothetically) wouldn't want a sex worker that I hire to give me a raging case of crotch crickets... Secondly, the advantages of regulating it would go a long way to keeping the number of people being exploited way down, and taxing the service would pay for the above mentioned health care and other benefits like con selling and the like.(It's like rationalizing smoking.)

All discussions about regulating prostitution in Canada are academic, of course. Firstly, with the rise of Harper's majority Conservative government, it's highly unlikely that regulating sex work here will ever come up under serious discussion. (An amusing side note: before the election, NDP lead Jack Layton was revealed to have visited a 'common bawdy house' for the intent of getting a 'massage'. The end result of this last-minute revelation was that the NDP is now the official opposition. The moral of this seems to be, if you want to visit whorehouses and you're a public figure, and you get busted, being a left-leaning political candidate is probably the best position to be in. I'm being facetious, of course.) Secondly, we've already got a sort-of solution to the issue, and you'll find it under 'E for Escort agency' in your local phone book. (or on the internet, more likely.) It seems to me that escort agencies, at least here in Calgary, tend to fly under legal scrutiny for the most part. I suspect it's more of an 'out of sight, out of mind' thing than a practical solution. Unless rival agencies rat each other out to the cops, that is. Anyways, the vice squad here, as I suspect in most cities, tends to concentrate on the streetwalkers, since they're the ones at the most risk for abuse.

I guess at this point I should point out that my interest in all this is in the abstract as well. I can't ever see myself 'paying for it', mainly because I couldn't be sure I wasn't contributing to exploiting someone else's misery by supporting their possible bad career choice, (my halo's in the mail.) and secondly- let's be honest here, any escort I hired would see me less as a client and more as a mark. ("Ee-yeah. I'm gonna hafta ask for the cash upfront. See, I gotta take it to my driver downstairs. I'll be right back! See ya!")

At the end of the day, the comic in itself is certainly worth a look. Hats off to Chester Brown for having the guts to discuss such a button-pushing issue, and to put such a personal take on it. I suspect one of the side effects of this might be adding to the stereotype of professional cartoonists being creepy, asocial nerds but them's the breaks, I guess.

Hi. My name is Tom, and I'm an Idiot.

2011-04-19T13:52:00.000-07:00

Boy, it sure feels good to get that off my chest! Whoo! Let me just clarify. When I say that I'm an Idiot, I don't mean in the literal sense, that I have a low I.Q. and am only suitable for doing labour that would tax a monkey or brewery horse. I mean that I'm an Idiot in the way that there's a lot of stuff about the world that I just don't know about. Being a mammal, and thus controlled by my emotional state, I am likely to jump to erroneous conclusions based on limited or biased data. Because I am an emotional being and not a robot, I am likely to interpret the data that I am presented according to how my current world-view is at the time. I am also likely to spew forth subjective opinions based on my conclusions and my current world-view and attempt to present them as facts, like I am a fat, fact-shitting machine. When, actually, I am not.

My sole saving grace in this regard, I suppose, is that if I am confronted with further evidence that is contrary to my original opinions, and if I am capable of acknowledging my original errors in judgment, I can admit that I have made a mistake. Subsequently, once I publicly acknowledge my mistake, I can learn from my mistake, and hopefully refrain from making the same mistake again. In my case, I have found that this takes about three or four times before it sinks into my pink, gooey brain. This is because I'm an Idiot.

I'm bringing this all up because of a couple of odd events recently came up regarding the creator of 'Dilbert', the comic strip much beloved by office monkeys and cubicle drones across the world. The premise of 'Dilbert' is to point out the absurdities and contradictions of office culture for comic effect. Subsequently, Ted from Accounting has a hearty chuckle at the day's offering from Scott Adams, 'Dilbert's' creator, cuts out the strip and puts it on the bulletin board in his cubicle. Occasionally, he will look up and a slight snort of delight will issue from his lips as he recollects Adams' latest bon mot. If the day's offering is particularly trenchant, Ted will white-out a 'Dilbert' character's name, and write in the name of a co-worker, then place the altered strip in question upon the communal bulletin board. Hence, all in the environment will share in Ted's wry observation how that one character is just like Patty in Accounts Receivable, who's always on the darn copy machine. Then they all go back to being replaceable cogs in a vast, uncaring corporate machine.

I'm not a fan of 'Dilbert', obviously. Though to be fair, the office environment is a breeding ground for finding humour in the absurdities of corporate culture, and from the perspective of middle management, finding the funny in both upper management's absurd whims and those lower in the pecking order, like vendors and service personnel' clueless-ness seems to be a prime field for comedy. I imagine it's a survival tactic for the office workers in that position, as well.

Those odd events I referred to earlier were Adams' baiting his blog readers into an argument on Men's Rights issues, writing an adorable misogynist rant comparing women to spoiled children begging for candy. And getting his ass handed to him by readers of his blog, then backpedaling and claiming that he was 'trolling' his readers, and it was all a 'cunning plan' to bring up the absurdities of Men's Rights, and oh, how you silly monkeys Just Don't Get It At All. Or Scott Adams, for that matter. Then earlier this week, Adams was busted for creating a sock-puppet account on various message boards, bravely leaping to Adams' defense when his integrity or intelligence was called into question. Adams was busted, and to no one's surprise, proceeded to write up a 3,000 word justification-not an apology, mind you-about why he created a sock puppet. Who kept bringing up the 'fact' that Adams was a 'Certifiable Genius'.

The impression I'm taking away from all this is that Adams is the type of person who trains professionally for a career in Middle Management. Thus, when he creates a product that is wildly successful, (in this case, the comic strip, 'Dilbert') he assumes that his success is owing to his brilliance as a idea man and a relentless self-promoter. And not because he happened to capture a zeitgeist of documenting the absurdities of corporate culture at the right time and in the right place. Subsequently, while Adams has made mucho banko off his merchandising from 'Dilbert', all his non-'Dilbert' businesses have failed, (Like his meatless 'Dilberto' burrito) or are in the process of failing. (He runs a restaurant in California that is evidently losing money, if the article in the New York Times' Veteran's Day edition is any indication...) The common theme throughout all this is that Adams is either incapable or unwilling to acknowledge his shortcomings and limitations. Hardly the qualifications for a 'Certifiable Genius', I'd say.

You know something? Maybe I'm not such an Idiot, after all.

Horseshoes for Elephants, and Paying for Water.

2011-03-23T14:13:00.000-07:00

(Note: when I wrote the following, er, tirade, 'The Goon' comic creator Eric Powell had a very funny and very articulate video editorial bemoaning the lack of variety in the domestic comic market. Namely, that it's mostly super-hero comics. Powell's comic, The Goon, is a relatively successful non-superhero adventure comic. I'd provide a link to the video on YouTube in question, but it doesn't seem to be there anymore. Maybe the scene of a mainstream publisher comically sodomizing a hapless artist as a metaphor for the industry might've had something to do with it? Anyways, sorry. You'll have to take my word for it...)

Eric Powell's editorial on the lack of variety in the comics field bothered me, and not the content itself, which I'm in agreement with. Rather, it's a matter of perspective, and I'd like to present the following ham-fisted, clumsy, and probably unfair metaphor to illustrate.

Powell is a village blacksmith, who makes riding tackle and shoes for a specific type of mount. You would think, upon entering his shop, that he makes tackle and shoes for horses, being a
blacksmith and all. You would be wrong. Powell makes tackle and shoes for elephants. He is saying that he works in a field that is traditionally serving horse-riders, has always served
horse-riders, and when you think of blacksmiths, you always think of horse-riders. Well, Powell points out, there's room in the field for not just horses, but gazelles, elephants, ostriches, elk,
reindeer, wildebeests, and even chihuahuas pulling sleds. If the traditional horse-rider likes horses, might he or she not also like different types of mounts as well?

Well. The problem is not twenty feet from Powell's livery, there's a massive six-lane superhighway full of fast cars and very fast bikes. These methods of transportation are faster, more fun to drive, and get you from point a to point b better than mounts. Occasionally, a canny bike or car maker might brand their vehicle with the name of a particular horse for marketing reasons. The people who equip those horses usually don't benefit materially from the branding. People who buy a car named after a horse don't usually go out and buy the horse as well, you see. So a lot of people who would like to make a living as blacksmiths usually wind up getting jobs working in auto and motorbike plants. The pay's better, the risks are less, and the prestige is
greater. At the very least, you're going through the same grief as in the smithy business, but you get a living wage, usually.

Now here's where my metaphor gets wonky. In the past decade, a new form of conveyance has appeared. Sky bikes and Spinner cars. (Like in Blade Runner.) They go faster, and in three
dimensions, and they're even more fun to drive than the cars and bikes on the highways. The problem with them, from a builder's point of view, is that most people who fly in these things
have figured out how to get them for free. Worse still, the sky riders' vehicles can emulate the qualities of not just cars and bikes, but horses as well. That is, while a car builder might throw the blacksmith a few bucks, more out of largess than out of honor or obligation, the person flying around in the rocket car that can look like a horse or a car is not only not going to pay the blacksmith and the car builder any money for their efforts, he's (well, it's always a he, isn't it?) going to get quite indignant at the suggestion.

Pay for this wonderful thing I have? Are you mad? Why, for the love of God, should I even do such a crazy thing? These sky bikes (Digital media) are just lying around, not being used? Have you seen the price of a movie ticket recently? I just downloaded the entire run of Neil Gaiman's Sandman collection for free! I don't have the space for all those comics and movies and books and DVD collections of T.V. shows in my apartment! Besides, if I don't ride that sky car, someone else will! (In a bitter display of irony, the type of person who gets free movies, video games, T.V. shows, and, yes, even comic books off the Internet usually has a bottle of brand-name water somewhere on their desk that they paid a couple of bucks for. Oh, sigh...)

I've seen this complaint about the lack of variety in the domestic comic book market for the last twenty years, and while some things are getting better, a lot of things are getting worse.

While artists and writers might start getting royalties from reprints of their work, that doesn't mean jack if their publisher goes under for lack of income. Powell's concern about the lack of
variety in the market at this point in the twenty-first century is like a Japanese businessman complaining about the train being late while a tsunami wave is rushing towards him. (Sorry, Japan. Sorry, Eric Powell.)

Here's a hypothetical: You're a comic artist, and you want to put up the first issue of your first comic for sale. Well, firstly, you have to spend money at a printer. A LOT of money at a printer. Then, you would have to take copies of your comic around to all the comic shops in your area and see if they want to sell them for you. This is going to take a long fucking time. So there's this distributor called Diamond who acts as the middle man and does all that running around for you, so you send a copy off to them to see if they will distribute your comic for you all over North America. If they agree, and the chance that they will is better then showing up at your local minor-league hockey team's tryouts to start on the path to being a professional hockey player, you're in business. If you want to do this comic thing for a living, and not just a hobby that worst case scenario, pays for itself, you have to devote a major part of your working day to not just making the actual comic. Remember, you've also to got to promote your work at conventions, schmooze with industry people, deal with shippers and the printer, and sweet jesus the costs! Not just to your wallet, but the waking hours of your day! And what if your comic just doesn't cut it? Not that it's bad, or you're a terrible administrator, but you do everything you can with the time and resources that you have, and your comic just doesn't sell enough copies to earn you a living. That 's a hell of a risk, but people do that every day.

Sometimes they forge ahead even knowing the pitfalls.

So web distribution seems like an easier solution, doesn't it? Make up your comic, upload it to Apple's Itunes site, or Amazon's e-book page, someone pays two bucks to download it on their Ipad3 or ColorKindle or whatever, you keep 70% of that two bucks, with enough paying readers, you're making money. Better still, you've got the time to do other things. Hell, maybe even another comic series.

Hang on. Remember those guys above I mentioned? The ones with the flying cars? Remember when I said that they figured out how to get their hands on those flying cars for free? "Flying
cars" was my own lame metaphor for "Digital Media". And those guys aren't being spiteful, or mean, or cheap, or greedy. (They're not taking movies and T.V. shows (or bikes and cars) off
the 'net and selling them. Well, unless they're Chinese. Or Russian.) That's just the way they've been doing things for over a decade now. Try explaining to them that what they're doing is
literally starving you to death, and it's like trying to explain Calculus to a chimp. To these guys, the whole of the Internet is a cornucopia of free stuff that's just lying around. Nothing's being
destroyed. No paper or plastic went into making an Mp3 or a Divx video. Every time a photo or comic or book or magazine is converted to a jpeg or a .cbr file, God doesn't kill a kitten. What, for the love of God does this all mean for the aspiring writer or artist or musician in this century? Are they going to have to go back to the Patronage system of the Renaissance? Will they be the 21st century version of the street busker?

Okay. Remember when I pointed out the irony of some kid downloading t.v. shows and movies and video games onto his computer? Hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars of media onto
his hard drive for the relative cost of Internet bandwidth. And on his desk is a bottle of water. Fucking tap water. That he paid for from a store. Water, that is free, that falls from the sky into
a bucket that, if you think of it, you can run through a filter and will likely be safe to drink. (Unless you currently live in Sendai, Japan. Again, sorry, Japan.) Somebody convinced that kid
that shelling out two bucks for that water was a good idea. I don't know how comic artists can currently convince people to drink their brand of tap water, but like it or not. THAT'S the
future of not just the comic industry, but the entire media industry. It's an unknown future, but as always, it's the only one we've got.

Inappropriate Behavior

2011-03-08T12:03:00.000-08:00

I'm just putting the above inappropriate promotional bit up to remind everyone that my long-suffering pal, Steve LeCouilliard, is offering a pre-ordering option on his Xeric-award winning comic, Much the Miller's Son! Go here for details. Won't you feel the silly goose if you miss out? I believe he's signing these and giving away a little sketch in each book to sweeten that pot. How capital! (I'm placing my order next week! Though I suspect Steve'll send me an I.E.D instead of a sketch 'cause of my rather rude ad above...)

Oh, and before you kill yourself because you can't get a copy of Book 2 of Much the Miller's Son, go here, to this page on Amazon! (or, I guess, you could go here, to Steve's Paypal page to get a copy...)

Right, now to business...

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (B) A documentary about the epic struggle between the sinister Billy Mitchell and the good-natured Steve Wiebe in having the top score in 'Donkey Kong'. There's a rather clueless statement made by one of the enthusiasts of the 'Classic Arcade High-Score' clan, and here it is:

Walter Day: I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to be the center of attention. I wanted the glory, I wanted the fame. I wanted the pretty girls to come up and say, "Hi, I see that you're good at Centipede."

Oh, IMDB has given me another one:
Billy Mitchell: No matter what I say, it draws controversy. It's sort of like the abortion issue.

The big question is, if the filmmakers had said to anyone, fellas, relax, it's just a game, would the participants have gone mad with fury and turned this goofy movie into a tragedy? You come away with the impression that Mitchell and Wiebe are kinda damaged souls, willing to devote their lives to being really good at a particular thing, irregardless of how important that thing is in most people's lives.

If you didn't know any better, you'd swear it was a mock-documentary, like Best of Show or Spinal Tap. If you feel that the filmmakers are exploiting the obliviousness and single-mindedness of Mitchell and Wiebe for a cheap laugh, might I point out that we currently live in a time where the rule of 'bad publicity is better than no publicity', a rule the cretinous Charlie Sheen seems quite happy to exploit...

Megamind (C) It's a lazier version of 'Despicable Me', if such a thing can be believed. Can we have a moratorium on cueing up classic songs for comedic value in kid's movies? (Megamind ends with the leads dancing around to Michael Jackson's 'Bad'. Despicable Me ends with the leads dancing around to the Bee Gee's 'You Should be Dancing'.)

Look Around You (A) Brilliantly deadpan comic take on school science programs. It's a tribute to the British style of comedy that a lot of the humor comes from the willingness of the creators to make the pacing slow enough to resemble the glacial pace of those classic sciencs shows of long ago. It's a comedy that works if you bring something to it. The closest thing on this side of the Atlantic that I've seen that comes close is Mr. Show's brilliant 'Marylin Monster's Pizza Palace'. (David Cross plays a Marilyn-Manson type rocker-turned entrepreneur narrating a staff training video for his pizza franchise... Oh, here it is, on Youtube! Thank you, Youtube!)

Quick Catch-up:

2011-02-08T11:35:00.000-08:00

The Social Network: (A) It's directed like a thriller, but no one dies. It's got some very funny bits, but it's not a comedy. You got your Fincher in my Sorkin. Whoda thunk it?

True Grit: (B) Solid remake of the John Wayne classic. Not a major Coen Brothers film, but I'll take what I can get.

Tron Legacy: (D) Well, the soundtrack was nice...

Running Wilde: (C-) Methadone for Arrested Development junkies. Well, if there's any justice, we'll see Peter Sarafinowitz in something else soon.

Despicable Me: (C) Loved the character design, thought the story was too, well, contrived. (Woulda been nice to see an actual super-hero to offset the villains.)

Drunk, Stoned, Brilliant, Dead: The Writers and Artists who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great by Rick Meyerowitz. (B) At this point, I've got enough 'NatLamp' memoirs to last me a lifetime, and I'm hoping this is the last one that a contributor puts out.

Acme Cartoon Library 20: Lint: (C) The main character-not protagonist-in Chris Ware's latest comic is one of Rusty Brown's tormentors in school. It's a biography for the type of person who doesn't usually get a biography, and in retrospect, there's a good reason for that. Ware portrays Jason Lint as the type of lower-level alpha male who goes through life with an inflated sense of entitlement, whom, given his social class, has most of his entitlements fulfilled. When someone like Ware makes something like this, it comes across as an act of literary revenge, not unlike 'Revolutionary Road', where the protagonists suffer not because of the elements of Classic Tragedy, but because someone like Lint gave Ware a wedgie in gym class. Because Lint doesn't have any capacity for self-reflection, the reader doesn't have any ability to empathize with him.

Between this comic and Dan Clowes' 'Wilson', maybe a new trend in 'alt-cartooning' is coming. By which I mean the Rise of the Unlikeable Lead Character. I'm on record as being a Chris Ware fan myself, but I can see why a lot of cartoonists really find his work a turn-off.

Finally, might I recommend you stop by this website and check out my pal Steve LeCouilliard's web-comic, 'Much the Miller's Son'? It's a funny bit of ribaldry in the classic model of a French comic from the 70's. (Well, that's the best comparison I've got for now.) And he just got a much-coveted Xeric grant, too! Jolly Hockeysticks for Steve! (Best part: there's no video game references, role-playing game references, gay furries, tormented goth kids or Mary Sue characters to be seen! A true mark of a potentially great web comic!)

Sword and Sorcery: One Movie to Bind them All

2011-01-20T12:42:00.000-08:00

(I was watching the animated film Fire and Ice the other day-you know? The one by Ralph
Bakshi that was meant to be a Frazetta painting brought to glorious life? No? You don't know what I'm talking about? Well, here it is on YouTube in all its cheesy glory! Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF1i-26N9j0

Back already? What an awesome movie! It's so cool! The way the main blond guy goes all sickhouse on the bad guys! And the brunette with the big tits and huge ass? Rowr! I'd sheath my sword in her scabbard, if you know what I mean...(I mean I'd have sex with her, that's what I mean.) And that dude with the cowl? So dark and brooding. He's a Nazareth album cover come to life! So, er, yeah. It's not a very good movie, is it? Kinda generic and phoned in, really. Seems like they took about half an hour on the script, didn't they? Looks like they put the story on autopilot.

While I was watching it, about a third of the way in, I wondered, "Hang on. Didn't I see 'Fire and Ice' already? I must have! This story seems so familiar! I was reciting lines of dialogue along with the actors! I've got to have seen this movie at least two or three times, but I swear I have no recollection of watching it before YouTube!"

It's more of the nature of the Sword-and-Sorcery genre that it's so familiar, and after a microsecond's thought, I realized that every S&S movie is essentially the same movie, only shot over and over and over again. I guess people want to watch the same movie over and over and over again. I swear on a stack of Bibles that if the film industry got its start making S&S films, we'd be all reading books and watching T.V. as our primary leisure activity. (Until the rise of the Internet, of course.)

The plot of every single S&S movie ever made since the Steve Reeves 'Hercules' movies seems to be along these lines:
A Mighty Warrior (heretofore known as MW) sets out on a journey. It's usually a journey of vengeance to confront an Evil Villian. (here tofor known as the EV.) Sometimes the quest is to retrieve a stolen item or treasure from EV's lair, or to rescue someone from EV's lair. Anyways, the point is that since the EV is not going to return the person or thing he has taken, at least willingly, the EV is going to have to die. So when you boil the story down to its essential elements, vengeance is the engine ultimately driving the story. Here's how it goes:

Mighty Warrior is wronged by Evil Villian. MW goes on a quest to EV's lair to confront and probably kill EV as an act of vengeance. MW encounters sidekicks along the way. The sidekicks may be at least one, probably two, maybe all three of the following:

The Warrior/Priestess/Noble/Humble Peasant Hot Chick who wishes to prove herself to the world/avenge her family as EV has done her wrong as well. Even if MW and Hot Chick-heretofore known as HC don't become an 'item', at some point in the movie she tenderly shows MW her boobs to get him to sleep with her. (note: this plot point doesn't appear before a S&S movie made before 1980.) He usually refuses, being of noble intent, but he appreciates the gesture, none the same.

Next we have the Comic Relief- usually a bumbling thief, who follows the MW because the MW freed him from people about to kill CR for ripping them off. You know, as an act of vengeance. If the CR's original intention is to get a bunch of loot from EV's massive lair, that motivation is usually superseded by joining in MW's quest for vengeance in a gesture of comradeship.

Finally, we come to the third character. He's not always in these things, but he's in enough of them. He's called the Doomed Anti-Hero. Maybe he's another MW who's suffered at EV's hands. Sometimes he's a former lackey of EV who wants revenge as well. And sometimes he's a current lackey of EV whom EV has charged to infiltrate MW's little plucky troupe to subvert MW's quest for revenge. Anyways, assuming he didn't sacrifice himself for MW and co's benefit before, he always dies in the final battle with EV, usually as an act of redemption.

During the quest, MW and his trope inevitably encounter the following places:

1) the Town Pub, which always has information on EV's whereabouts and where we get to witness MW's fighting prowess after some local toughs either clumsily hit on HC or threaten MW. (DAH isn't aboard yet, though we may be treated to a shot of a cowled DAH silently drinking in a corner, watching MW's fighting prowess. If we see DAH at this point, he shortly joins MW outside the Pub.) CR is either cowering behind the bar, perhaps helping himself to the libations or picking the pockets of the onlookers. Perhaps HC gets a shot of proving her marital prowess fighting the locals as well. After this plot point, we sooner or later get to the inevitable second place all Sword and Sorcery stories wind up in...

2) The Inhospitable Wilderness. Maybe it's all Jungle, maybe it's all Desert, could be a lava filled volcano. Maybe an abandoned city, if the budget is big enough. It's big, it's wild and the opening shot has its vast panoramic vista defined by EV's lair way in the background, usually surrounded by ominous storm clouds. We then cut to a close up of our heroes regarding the Inhospitable Wilderness with both awe and determination. Then the MW or the HC say, 'Well, the sooner we get started..." and start to move on. (If the DAH hasn't been introduced yet, this is the setting we meet him. If he's already been introduced, he mutters some specific fact about the Inhospitable Wilderness being especially lethal. This seemingly random fact plays a part in the party's later escape from the Inhospitable Wilderness.) The CW reluctantly follows, uttering some laconic statement about their impending demise. Sure enough, the Inhospitable Wilderness has various Impediments to the MW's band passing through. Maybe magic Lava Golems, Zombies, Killer Monkeys, whatever. Anyways, while the troupe is quite adept at killing the Impediments, it becomes obvious that there are eventually, just too many Impediments to defeat in combat. So the troupe has to run to the other side of the Inhospitable Wilderness. Perhaps a trap has been set off and is closing/closing in on the troupe, its arrival with the troupe either killing them outright, trapping them forever, or providing a lethal impediment to their egress from the Inhospitable Wilderness, leaving them to the fates of the Impediments. The music takes a thrilling tone, the action is more frenetic, and just as the music reaches its peak...the trope reaches safety. Please note: the sooner that DAH has joined the troupe in the film, the more likely he dies sacrificing himself to save the rest at this point.

3) The Romantic/Comedic interlude. It's late, they're tired...'We camp tonight!', exclaims the MW. Assuming the DAH hasn't sacrificed himself at this point, he might suggest a breather to the eager MW. "It would be foolish to proceed now, my hotheaded friend! EV's scouts are everywhere! And work best...at night..." The CR attempts to bond with DAH,who's sharpening his weapon by the campfire. This attempt is usually and laconically rebuffed. "Have you ever had a Bloodsword through your stomach, oh overly-loquacious thief?" "er..I'll just leave you alone.." "You do that." And the HC and the MW gets some alone time. It's at this point that the MW gives us the plot of the movie. "...Things were happy in my land. The Gemstone of Ar'ah stood as a tribute to my people's industry and goodness. The people worked hard and reaped the benefits of their labour...suddenly, EV and his army appeared...demanded tribute...my people are a proud one...my father died protecting my mother and siblings with a full quarrel of arrows in him...I was knocked out and left for dead... Where once stood the Gemstone, now stands an empty hole, like a pockmark on a virgin's face...swore on their funeral pyre..since that day, I've honed my body to be an instrument of vengeance..." The HC expresses sympathy, then if she doesn't bare her chest yet, shares her story of woe. To emphasise his exemplary character, he refuses to fuck her, as it would 'deter me from my vengeance' or some other gay shit.

And it's at this point the movie shoots itself in the foot. "When you avenge your family, what will you do then?" the HC not unreasonably asks. To which he replies, with a wry smile, "Don't know. I haven't thought that far ahead. (Neither has the screenwriter.) Perhaps I'll settle down." It's obvious the movie, indeed the entire of revenge in a fictional narrative, doesn't think this all through. Understand this as a basic moral concept: If you hit me, you have done a bad thing. If I hit you back, I have not redressed the balance, I have committed a bad thing. Two bad things have been done. If a father shoots his daughter's rapist, his actions are understandable from a biological perspective. But from a legal and moral perspective, he has done Evil.

When a fictional narrative presents revenge as a positive act by a protagonist, it does not account for that simple moral perspective. Which is why we have real movies like 'Oldboy' and 'Irreversible' to present the true nature of revenge. Ultimately, that's why I personally don't have any real interest in the sword-and-sorcery genre as a valid entertainment medium. It is a vacation from life. There is nothing you can take from that genre and apply to your own life.

The other subtext you'll find in the S&S genre is the comment on the decadence of civilization. When the protagonist has to interact with civilized elements, like merchants, nobles, and others involved in the building of order and a society, it's usually to the protagonists' detriment. (This is also an element in the classic western, but that's not germane to the discussion now.) The merchant who hires the MW's services to obtain a macguffin usually tries to renege on his part of the deal, namely paying the MW for his troubles. The noble who hires the MW to fight his battles for him usually betrays the MW at some point in the second act. The seemingly kindly town mayor who hires the MW to rescue his daughter from brigands usually blames the MW for taking his daughter's virtue. All who betray the MW meet a gruesome fate at the end, hopefully ironic. (The greedy merchant has liquid gold poured down his throat/the two-timing noble's brigands discover his betrayal and tear him limb from limb/ the town mayor's daughter gives it up for the MW and spends the rest of the movie dressed like the fleet's in town, if you see what I mean, for instance.) And so on and so on.

At the end of the day, the S&S genre is escapist pulp entertainment, and revenge as the engine to motivate a character is the most basic one that the dramatic world has. You have to remember that the pulp fiction market in its time, tended to crank this stuff out at quite a clip, being that the pay rate per word was barely enough to live on. So things like nuance, moral shades of grey, and the like tended to go out the window when you were on a deadline. In the schlock movie biz, sword and sorcery epics were around the cheapest genre to poop out, especially in Europe, where they already had the settings on hand just lying around. But if you're looking for any depth or meaning to that particular genre, well, you're gonna be looking a long time. It's an escape from reality. Dr. Tolken's work, on the top end of that scale, had the benefit of the knowledge of a linguistics professor bringing his knowledge of language, history and folklore to his stories. And to be honest, Randall in Clerks 2 had the most succinct critique of that saga I've ever seen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92iU4Tn8iSw

Anyways, back to the generic S&S: Finally, we reach the climax, 4) the EV's Stronghold. Maybe the band sneaks in through a sewer or back door, perhaps the CW, finding some courage, tricks some guards into a shadowy alley and the guards' uniforms are taken from their subdued forms. Or they go in swinging. Or his thieving skills come to the front and he scales a wall to let them in the Stronghold from the other side. Finally, we reach the EV. He makes some gloating speech about his evil nature. Perhaps he says, in essence, "Hey, I am what I am." He then offers to have the MW join him or die. If -oops, WHEN the MW turns him down, he angrily strikes. Or it's at this point the DAH makes his move and betrays the group. If we're being really grim, either the HC or the CR, but not both, perish at the DAH's hands. The MW angrily strikes down the DAH to confront the EV. (Note: if the DAH was working for the EV and decides to throw his lot in with the MW's side, this is where the EV angrily kills the DAH.) Sometimes the EV has a Loyal Lackey fight his battles for him. If the DAH is still here, he fights the LL, while the MW fights the EV. Maybe the LL kills the DAH, much to the EV's glee and the MW's consternation. It's at this point the MW kills the LL. At this point the EV makes a gloating comment about how the MW's good traits will be his undoing. Another mighty battle between the EV and the MW ensues. After striking some serious damage against the MW, the EV is brought to his knees. The EV pleads for mercy. The MW snorts in derision, makes some laconic comment about the EV, then kills him. "Noooooooo!" cries the EV as he dies. If any in the MW's party have died in the aftermath, the survivors make some comment about how they'll be missed and the nature of their courage. The final shot is of the MW walking off triumphantly into the sunset. If the HC is still around, they kiss. If the CR is around, a friendly smile and comradely clasp of the arms is to be had. Triumphant music. End credits with a lot of Spanish/and or Italian last names on the crew and cast come up. The end.

In summation, if you've seen one S&S, you've seen 'em all. So I propose that if you must, absolutely have to watch a S&S film, there is one film you need to see, and then your obligations to that genre will have been fulfilled. Will it be 'Conan the Barbarian', 'Willow'? 'Krull'? 'Fire and Ice'? Any of the Ray Harryhausen or Steve Reeves ones? No.

The one movie you must see to satisfy your "S&S' jones is the following one:

The Wizard of Oz.

You're welcome.

SLIFR movie quiz, part two

2011-01-10T11:40:00.000-08:00

So, courtesy of the 'Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule' movie blog, here's my answers to their idiosyncratic movie quiz:

1) Best Movie of 2010 - 2010 is the year I saw less new movies than I've normally seen ever. Partially because T.V. had the gall to be so damned entertaining these past few years, and partially because the movie industry's fallen into the bad rut of trying gimmicks instead of telling stories. So I'm gonna go with 'The Social Network'.

2) Second-favorite Roman Polanski Movie
-Tess of the D'urbanvilles

3) Jason Statham or Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson
-Jason Statham.

4) Favorite movie that could be classified as a genre hybrid
-Pulp Fiction. But of course, all of Tarantino's movies are nothing if not blah blah blah...

5) How important is foreknowledge of a film’s production history? Should it factor into one’s reaction to a film?
-None whatsoever and Nope. If you're a professional film critic, I suspect it's going to colour your take of the film, and you'll take it into account when reviewing a film. ("Coming off a troubled production...") But for a layman like me, foreknowledge of a film's history is a film geek's game...

6) William Powell & Myrna Loy or Cary Grant & Irene Dunne
-Bill and Myrna.

7) Best Actor of 2010
-Peter Sarafinowitcz. I've only seen him in television shows, (Look Around You and Running Wilde) which may not count. But more of him, please.

8) Most important lesson learned from the past decade of watching movies
-That the message that the nerdy guy gets the beautiful girl because only she can see his sterling inner qualities is the longest one-way street in movie tropes, ever.

9) Last movie seen (DVD/Blu-ray/theater)
-Toy Story 3/Inception/Tron Legacy. Can we add 'movies purchased off the internet, like off the Playstation Network?' That would be 'How to Train Your Dragon', by the way...

10) Most appropriate punishment for director Tom Six
-"anosognosia" - The state of being so dumb that one cannot understand how dumb one is being. It's a perfect way to describe the world view of Tom Six. His attitude towards everyone's reaction to the 'Human Centipede' is about the same as the cast of the 'Jersey Shore's take on their new-found 'fame'. So, in essence, the rock of anosognosia that Tom Six is under is his ideal punishment.

11) Best under-the-radar movie almost no one else has had the chance to see
-Chris Morris' 'Four Lions'

12) Sheree North or Angie Dickinson
-Angie. If only for her spunky grifter in 'Rio Bravo'.

13) Favorite nakedly autobiographical movie
-Lindsay Anderson's 'If'.

14) Movie which best evokes a specific real-life place
-'The Big Lebowski'. I can't recall a movie which sums up Los Angeles more succinctly...

15) Best Director of 2010
-David Fincher.

16) Second-favorite Farrelly Brothers Movie
-'There's Something About Mary.

17) Favorite holiday movie
-'It's a Wonderful Life'

18) Best Actress of 2010
-My default answer would be Olivia Wilde, since she was the only one 'acting' in Tron. Like I said, it's been a pretty weak year for me and new movies...

19) Joe Don Baker or Bo Svenson
-Joe Don Baker.

20) Of those notable figures in the world of the movies who died in 2011, name the one you’ll miss the most
-I think you mean '2010', fella. On that note, Dennis Hopper, naturally.

21) Think of a movie with a notable musical score and describe what it might feel like without that accompaniment.
The moody score of Michael Mann's 'The Insider'. I can't begin to imagine what it would sound like with a more traditional score. Actually, all of Mann's films, now that I think of it, have the type of score that's inseparable from the visuals.

22) Best Screenplay of 2010
-The Social Network. In a walk.

23) Movie You Feel Most Evangelistic About Right Now
-again, 'Four Lions' by Chris Morris.

24) Worst/funniest movie accent ever
-Worst as in most offensive? Mickey Rooney in 'Breakfast at Tiffany's'. Funniest? Peter Sellers in 'A Shot in the Dark'. But Sellers was being intentionally bad/funny.

25) Best Cinematography of 2010
-Toy Story 3. Is it a cheat? No.

26) Olivia Wilde or Gemma Arterton
-Oliva Wilde, if only because she was the only person, like I said above, actually, you know, acting in Tron Legacy...

27) Name the three best movies you saw for the first time in 2010 (Thanks, Larry!)
-Ballad of a Soldier, American Movie, The Grapes of Wrath (Thanks, Netflix!)

28) Best romantic movie couple of 2010
-Spanish version Buzz Lightyear and Jessie the Cowgirl from Toy Story 3? (Again, slim pickin's this year...)

29) Favorite shock/surprise ending
-Dae Su-Oh's discovery in the climax of Chan Wook Park's 'Oldboy'. Had me out of the chair in shock, which never happens...(I'm hoping they didn't mean, 'in 2010...')

30) Best cinematic reason to have stayed home and read a book in 2010
-"...in 3D..."

31) Movies in 2011 could make me much happier if they’ only_______________
-not be in 3d, not be 'based on a graphic novel', not be inspired by a self-help book, or any book by Nicolas Sparks,for that matter.

ASK KEITH OLBERMANN WHILE HE'S FEUDING WITH HIS NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOUR

2010-12-16T14:03:00.000-08:00

Dear Mr. Obermann: What difficulties did you encounter moving from ESPN to MSNBC? And who's your choice for the NHL playoffs this year? Judy from Tulsa
Dear Judy: Ted, Hi. Listen, Ted. I'm not trying to be rude here but you really need to secure your garbage cans a little better. Yeah, they're blowing over every time a strong wind hits the street, and we've got trash from your cans blowing onto my yard. Ok, I know I told you last week to switch from those noisy metal garbage cans to the new plastic ones, but Ted, listen. If you can't tie the cans to the side of your house, maybe you could keep them in your garage until Garbage Collection day? Yeah, it's Thursday at 6, same as usual. Ted, I'm not being patronizing here. I'm trying to help, okay? Well, I'll stay on my side of the fence if your garbage stays in its cans on your side of the fence, okay, pal?

Dear Mr. Olbermann: If you had known in advance what the fallout from MSNBC over your donations to the Democratic candidates would have been, would you have done things differently? Ken from Oakland

Dear Ken: Yeah, Ted, it was me who left that note in your mailbox. Well, if you weren't so defensive all the time, I'd have come by for a friendly chat. Look, the fact is, your damn kid and his friends are playing that music of theirs too damn loud! You gotta get him to turn it down!
Okay, fine, he stapled a bunch of egg cartons to the inside of the garage, great. Ted, that does jack squat if he's playing with the garage door open! Look, I called the city bylaw office, and your kid's band is violating a noise bylaw! I'm gonna get the cops next time! What? What's that? Hey, that's funny! "Buy some Earplugs!" How 'bout you teach your damn kid some manners? Ted, Ted. Listen. I'm trying to be reasonable, here.
Look- Ted, look. I'm on the community board and- Yeah, that's right! I am throwing my weight around, fella! I paid a good price for my house and I don't want my property values to plummet! You know what else? I'm smelling pot coming from there! Yeah, pot! Wouldn't that be a surprise for the cops, the next time they come by to investigate the next noise complaint! Oh, yeah? I'll mind my business when you learn to raise your kids! Up yours, too, buster!

Dear Mr. Olbermann: If one of the responsibilities of the news media is to be as objective as possible, don't you feel that the ideological schism between you and other pundits like your rival Bill O'Reilly will have negative long-term effects on the news media in general? What I mean is, the public' choice in the news is becoming so fragmented, that ultimately, its faith in the news to provide useful information in a timely manner is compromised. The news media becomes an arm of an entertainment empire, and in the end, a mis-informed public winds up acting against its own interests. As seen in the rise of the Tea Party activists, for example. To be even more succinct, wouldn't you agree it's a bad thing that if I, an American who wants the news about my own country without any spin put on it, has to log on to the Guardian U.K. web page? Kevin from Berkley

Dear Kevin: Ok, that does it, Ted. No more Mr. Nice guy! Yes, Ted, that is a lump of dog shit I'm holding here. More specifically, a lump of your dog's shit. I thought your damn kid shat on my lawn at first. Well, it wouldn't surprise me, Ted. What the fuck is that thing, Ted? It shits its body weight twice a day! No, Goddamnit, YOU FUCKING LISTEN! I paid a professional landscaper 25 grand to cover my lawn in Kentucky Blue Grass! They have to import that sod from fucking Kentucky! Oh, don't you roll your eyes at me, you fancy fuck! Firstly, you're paying to have my lawn replaced, asshole! Oh, I'll sue those fake tits off you wife if you don't pay up, fuckface! That dogshit of yours is like battery acid on my Kentucky Blue Grass! Oh, you'll pay, Ted! And you know what else? The next time I catch that shithound crapping on my lawn, I'm not calling Animal Control! No, I'm coming out with a shovel and beating that little rat-fuck shit mutant to death! I'll leave the remains in your fucking mailbox, not a letter! Fuck me? Fuck you, Ted!

Watch this!

'Windup...and the fastball!'

There! Yeah, that dog shit looks really good on your garage door. You know, the door your stoner asshole kid won't shut when he's playing fuckin' feedback through his fuckin' crappy-ass speakers! No, assfuck, I won't wash it off! You wash it off. And throw it in those Wal-mart garbage cans you're too fuckin' stupid to tie down! Oh, yeah? Yeah? You wanna go, Ted? Buddy, you just fucked with the wrong Marine! I ate Bill O'Reilly and crapped out Sarah Palin, bitch! Fucking George Bush is scared of me, Ted! Yeah, Ted, come on, bring the noise! There's gonna be a shitstorm, Ted! Three sounds, Ted! The 'whiff' of you swinging and missing me, the 'crack' of me knocking you flat on your ass, and the 'cha-ching' of my lawsuit against you! Swing at me and you'll have to sell your house! I win, Ted!

Ahh, that's right, go on, crawl back to your hole, Ted! I'll be watching you, bud! Yeah, real tough, flipping me off behind your screen door, Ted! Hey, Ted! Send your wife out, guy! I'll let her know what time it is! Yeah, go on, slam your front door, tough guy. Real brave.

Hm. I wonder if we have still have any of that fried chicken from last night in the fridge...

ASK A GUY WHO'S RUNNING A DUNGEONS & DRAGONS CAMPAIGN

2010-12-15T13:21:00.000-08:00

Dear Guy Who's Running A Dungeons & Dragons Campaign: Help! My daughter is out of control! Ever since she started junior high, she's become like Jekyll and Hyde! She constantly sasses her mother and me, she refuses to help with chores around the house, she's always on the phone, and when she's not on the phone, she's up in her room on that Internet thingy. Worse still, she's starting to stay out later and later. Last night, she showed up at one in the morning! With makeup! Is this all just a 'teen' thing, or should I be concerned? Up To Here In Duluth

Dear Duluth: Hello, Brian? It's your turn to roll for a saving throw. What? Yes, I know your bard is immune to non-magical charms, but this succubus is using a MAGIC charm SPELL, Brian! Roll! Okay, you do get a plus 2 on your throw. Good, fifteen. Okay, that's not enough to save, so your bard drops his sword and walks- What? No, a fifteen isn't enough to save. Okay, look. It's simple math. You need an eighteen to save against magic charm, and you only rolled a fifteen. Fifteen plus two is? No, it is in fact, seventeen.

Ok, check your calculator. Thank you. Hey, Grant, it's your turn to roll.

Yes, Grant, it's a GROUP charm. That means everyone has to roll.

No, it says here in the Monster Manual that the Succubus can cast a GROUP charm once per combat session. See? Now roll. Fine, nineteen, you make it. Now roll for your henchman. Eighteen. Safe! He reels a bit but stands his- hey, where's Ian? IAN! IAN! You're up, dude! Where is he? Ian, hello-oo? Is he in the john? He is? Fine, we'll wait. What?

'Does the succubus have nice tits'?, Brian? Well, for an eight-foot demon with bat wings, red eyes, razor sharp nails, yes, I suppose she does, at that. I don't see what her 'titties' have to do with- Sorry?

Well, Brian, since you're under her enchantment, I don't think this is the time to 'Do her', is it? IAN! HURRY UP!

Dear Guy Who's Running A Dungeons & Dragons Campaign: I just purchased an older house. It's very nice, built about forty years ago with solid construction, treated wood siding, attic in the garage, two stories. My problem is the gutters along the roof are in need of replacing. They seem to be the old tin/aluminum ones, that warp after a while, and they're making my house look kind of run down. My question is two-fold: What type of gutter would you recommend I replace them with, and secondly, is there a gutter on the market that blocks out debris like leaves and such? A reasonably priced gutter would be okay, but I'm concerned with climbing a ladder for two stories to clean out the gutters every spring. Thanks! Houseproud in Cleveland

Dear Houseproud: What the Christ is Ian doing in there? IAN! HURRY UP! God, if he clogs my mom's basement toilet again, I swear I'll- Hm?

Well, no, Brian, your henchman can't attack, on account of he's by the dungeon entrance, guarding your horses.

Well, you could call him, if it wasn't for the facts that A: You're under an enchantment, and currently have no free will and B: Cell phones aren't available in the world of Medieval Kluthor. Okay, Grant, your henchman can get Brian's henchman, but he can't break off the fight until the next turn, then it'll take five to six turns to go get Brian's henchman, and another five to six turns to come back, so the party won't have access to your henchman's sword. If that's what you guys want, fine. But we're waiting for IAN! IAN! COME ON, MAN!

Oh, what were you doing in there, giving birth? It's your turn to- OH, CHRIST, IAN! TURN THE FAN ON! Jeez! Um, my mom's got some air freshener in there, could you-? Thanks.

*cough*

God in Heaven, what did you eat? Anyways, it's your turn, roll for a save.

Yeah, it's the succubus, she's using a group charm spell. Okay, roll. Whoop, the dice fell off the table. Roll again.

I don't care if it's a twenty, Ian, it fell off the table, it doesn't count. Roll again. No, we agreed last time that dice that fall off the table don't count. Yes, I let it go last week because Brian got all upset and shit when he bounced that dice attacking the Orc chief, and it was one in the morning and some of us have to work at KFC in the A.M. Namely, me.

Yes, Brian, you were near tears. No, you weren't 'angry', you were almost crying.

NO! NO, I'M NOT LETTING HIS ROLL STAND! Ian, roll. Ok, it's eighteen, you're safe, you big baby. Well, if you guys hadn't blown a gasket over a rule that we already agreed on, we'd be moving on. Grant, stop playing 'Angry Bird' on your Iphone and pay attention. Brian, Grant wants to send his henchman to get your henchman to help you fight the succubus, but I told him-

Well, you could use your Magic Remote Message spell, Brian, if you weren't, and I say this again, enchanted. For the second fucking time, already. Are you sure you guys want to send him on? He can't attack this round, and it'll take ten rounds for him to get Brian's henchman? Okay, he's breaking combat this round. Ian, didn't you turn on the bathroom fan?

Dear Guy Who's Running A Dungeons & Dragons Campaign: I recently purchased a 87' Monte Carlo in great condition except for one thing. It leaks oil. A lot. I've already replaced the oil filter, and the oil tray in the engine, but I'm still getting an oil leak. I've heard Monte Carlo's are notorious for leaking oil, but this is getting kind of ridiculous! Oh, I've checked the oil hose, and it's fine, by the way. Thanks in advance! Oil Be Back, in Oxnard

Dear OBB: Okay, Grant, roll for a hit. That's a twelve, with plus three for demons on your sword, and that's a hit. Roll for damage. Six. No, Grant,your bonus is just for a hit, not for damage. Well, yeah, but Succubus aren't Chaotic Evil, they're Neutral Evil. Your sword bonus is for Chaotic Evil, remember? Okay, look at the Monster Manual. What, Ian?

*long pause*

Ian, your henchman can't attack the succubus because he's running back to the entrance to get Brian's henchman.

No, you can't call him back, he's gone.

No, you can't roll for him to hear you call him back because he's gone. What part of that do you not understand? Okay, Ian, roll. What's that smell? The bathroom fan's on but... Eight. That's a miss. Okay, So the succubus rears back and takes a swing at Brian- Huh?

*longer pause, puts head in hands* BRIAN-LISTEN-VERY-CLOSELY. AND FOR THE-THIRD-AND-FINAL-FUCKING-TIME!

YOU-ARE-UNDER-THE-SUCCUBUS'-ENCHANTMENT. YOU-MISSED-YOUR-ATTACK-BECAUSE-YOU-ARE-ENCHANTED. YOU-CAN-ROLL-TO-BREAK-THE-ENCHANTMENT-IN-TWO-TURNS-BUT-YOU-ARE-NOW-HELPLESS. DO-YOU-UNDERSTAND? You CANNOT attack.

God!

What, Grant?

No, Grant. Your henchman can't pull out his Demon Stone because, as I keep pointing out, he's getting Brian's henchman back at the dungeon entrance. Can I finish this round? Okay, the Succubus rolls, that's a hit, and- no, Brian, a fifteen is a hit!

No, see, your armor class is-

No, Brian, this is basic math, again. Grant, I swear to fuck if you don't put that Iphone away, I'm going to-to...

WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT SMELL? IAN, ARE YOU SITTING IN MY HOUSE AT MY TABLE WITH ACTUAL SHIT IN YOUR PANTS? THE FUCK, DUDE? THE FUCK? YOU SPENT TEN MINUTES IN MY MOM'S BATHROOM IN HER BASEMENT TAKING A SHIT AND YOU AREN'T FINISHED? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU? SHUT-THE-FUCK-UP, BRIAN!! GRANT, GIVE ME THAT IPHONE OR I'LL TAKE IT FROM YOU AND SMASH IT OVER YOUR STUPID CUNT-LICKING, ASS-FUCK SHITHEAD!

*long, awkward pause*

Ok, you know what? Get out. All of you. Get the fuck out of my house. Now. Fuck all you assholes. I spent a week working on this dungeon and for what? So you assholes can act like retards, whine, carry on, argue over every rule in the book, try to have sex with female monsters that are trying to kill you, BRIAN, play games on your phone, GRANT, and finally, and unbelievably, IAN, not be toilet trained. I was going to lay my final throne of the Lich-Queen Xymoxia on you fucking ingrates, but you know what? You're all going to miss out! That's right, Brian! I had a +4 Vorpal sword over her throne and you could'a got your greasy little palms on it! Ha, ha! But now you're not gonna! You all would've got 5000 experience points, which would've put Ian and Grant up a level, 2000 gold pieces each, and five, count 'em five fucking healing potions! If you fuckin' gaylords can't act like adults and treat Dungeons and Dragons with the gravitas and respect it deserves, the world is going to continue to see table-top RPGs as juvenile, sophomoric, lightweight entertainment for nerds. And you guys are just perpetuating the stereotypes. So once again, good job, fuck all of you, get your shit, and get the hell out. Goodbye, forever, asshats.

Excuse me, Grant, what was that?

Well, yeah, Grant, obviously I'm still on for our World of Warcraft clan's raid this next Tuesday. Dur!

Whether Netflix?

2010-11-03T12:18:00.000-07:00

So Netflix's VOD service came to Canada in late September, which is one of the reasons October was a wash for this blog. I'm not sure what the selection for Netflix is like in the States in terms of its VOD service. But for what I'm getting and for the price I'm paying, it's a pretty good deal.

On first glance, browsing through the selection, my thoughts were, "Hm. The selection here seems to be along the lines of a family-run independent video store five years ago when it's a holiday weekend and you've just come in a half-hour before closing. So all the first-run movies are rented out, and most of the second-run movies are as well. In other words, blockbusters like Iron Man and Avatar are nowhere to be seen. (I suspect if Netflix's VOD service in Canada really takes off, they'll offer a premium package for $25 a month, so you can get access to those aforementioned type of new releases.)

On the other hand, the selection is a lot better than I expected. I'd break it down like this: 50% unwatchable direct-to-video independent stuff that even the Sy-Fi channel turned their nose up, (Giant Octopus Vs. Giant Whatever, Independent Horror Movie where All the Female Cast Gets Nekked, Indie Gay Dramady Where Three Actors From Community Theater Sit in a Room and Whine About Being Gay), 30% movies and T.V. shows that you've already seen dozens of times already, but you wouldn't say no to seeing again, like Dune, Aliens, and the Ren and Stimpy show, and 20% films that are pretty good, but you wouldn't have rented them if you were at that mom-and-pop store because they were buried in the stack of dross. (Cache, Yojimbo, Irreversible- a pretty surprisingly good selection at that, really.) The overall selection is large enough that the numbers are in my favour.

So here's a quick look at what I've been watching:

Into the Night (D) - Uneven comedy/thriller by John Landis starring Michelle Pfeffer and Jeff Goldblum. It looks like Landis wanted to direct a tribute to Blake Edwards' Pink Panther series, but the violence is too brutal to laugh off, and some of the cameos are really distracting. (You see Dan Ackroyd in the beginning as one of Goldblum's co-workers, and you assume he's going to turn up in the story later as part of the plot, but it's just a pointless cameo, like David Cronenburg.)

Funny Games (B) - Micheal Heneke's admonition/experiment in horror porn doesn't really work, on account of the type of people who see films like 'Saw' and 'Hostel' don't exactly run to Heneke films. And the type of people who see Heneke films don't watch horror porn, as a rule. I howled over the John Zorn song in the opening, and the 'rewind' bit near the end, which is not the intention Heneke had, I think...

Dune (B+) - Could've been a contender. I'm watching it, and thinking that if Lynch had gotten the control he needed, this would've been a masterpiece. All he needed to do, in retrospect, was remind the money people that he's not Jodrowsky...

Irreversible (A) - Brilliant.

Lake of Fire (B) - Sober doc about the abortion debate in America. Even though director Tony Kaye is being as even-handed and objective as humanly possible about both sides, the pro-life lobby still come across as a bunch of extremist loons. (Fun game: Put the words 'white' and 'christian' in front of the pro-life nuts when they start preaching about the 'rights of the unborn'. It puts their arguments in a more understandable context...)

The Human Centipede (F) - An awful movie, and not just for the obvious reasons. You get the impression director/writer Tom Six would carve a swastika on his forehead if it sold tickets. Matter of fact, if the distributor could figure out a way to charge people to NOT see this film, they'd be making Avatar money. It's not just the crappy acting, direction, editing (in a Tommy Wiseau way), but the fact that Six doesn't seem to understand the difference between an idea and a conceit.

Movie Quiz!

2010-09-07T14:20:00.000-07:00

So there's this blog I stop by from time to time called, "Sergio Leone and The Infield Fly Rule". It's a pretty good movie based blog, full of esoterica for movie geeks like me. Last week they had this little quiz by this guy by the name of David Huxley, and I thought it was kinda fun, so...

Here it is:

1) Classic film you most want to experience that has so far eluded you.

(The Leopard by Visconti)

2) Greatest Criterion DVD/Blu-ray release ever

(The Seven Samurai.)

3) The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon?

(The Maltese Falcon, if only for that great final shot of Spade descending the stairs.)

4) Jason Bateman or Paul Rudd?

(My official answer is that the jury's still out. I've liked Rudd's laid-back style since 40-year old Virgin. But Bateman in 'Arrested Development' is one of my favorite 'straight-man' roles ever. He tends to play the same role in every movie that I've seen him in, however.)

5) Best mother/child (male or female) movie star combo

(Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher)

6) Who are the Robert Mitchums and Ida Lupinos among working movie actors? Do modern parallels to such masculine and no-nonsense feminine stars even exist? If not, why not?

(It's a tough question to answer because the mechanism that gave us the Mitchums and Lupinos doesn't exist anymore. The mechanism that exists in film today cranks out pretty blanks like Keanu Reeves and Tom Cruise for men, and Julia Roberts and Gwyneth Paltrow for women. I don't like them as actors, but they put butts in seats, hence their popularity. You have to look to the fringes for the type of actors like Mitchum and Lupino, so you get Cathrine Keener and maybe Ellen Page for the women. On further reflection, contemporary British actors are more suited to fill the Mitchum spot than your typical American actor. I'm thinking of Daniel Craig, Jason Statham and Clive Owen, for instance. I'm sure if I thought this through, I'd come up with more American examples.)

7) Favorite Preston Sturges movie

(One of my biggest embarrassments is that I've only seen two Sturges movies all the way through, so Sullivan's Travels would qualify. If I saw The Lady Eve, that would be my favorite, I suspect...)

8) Odette Yustman or Mary Elizabeth Winstead?

(Pass. Oh, wait! Winstead was the girl who got left as 'collateral' for the Challenger by her friends in 'Deathproof'? Winsted, then.)

9) Is there a movie that if you found out a partner or love interest loved (or didn't love) would qualify as a Relationship Deal Breaker?

(If they liked the excrable Sex and the City series and movies enough to own them, I'd probably dump 'em. Though the type of women who take Sex and the City as a guide on real-life lifestyles to aspire to don't have any interest in me romantically, anyways. On the other side of the coin, anyone I dated who couldn't at least appreciate a classic western like The Searchers, or a black comedy like Dr. Strangelove wouldn't hold my long-term interest.)

10) Favorite DVD commentary

(Paul Verhoeven. Runner-up: John Carpenter, esp. paired off with Kurt Russell, in 'Big Trouble in Little China'.)

11) Movies most recently seen on DVD, Blu-ray and theatrically

(DVD: Gone With the Wind, Blu-ray: True Romance, and Inception for the theater.)

12) Dirk Bogarde or Alan Bates?

(Alan Bates.)

13) Favorite DVD extra

(Commentaries, in general. Occasionally, like the rare Criterion min-doc or the Blade Runner box set or Clockwork Orange Blu-ray docs, you'll get genuinly in-depth insight into the film process, but those are few and far between. While I'm on the subject, some dvds have commentary tracks that don't seem to serve any purpose except for the same reason you get a toy in your cereal box.)

14) Brian De Palma’s Scarface— yes or no?

(Yes, but with serious reservations. )

15) Best comic moment from a horror film that is not a horror comedy (Young Frankenstein, Love At First Bite, et al.)

(I can't answer this one. I'm sure there's been moments like that in horror films that I've seen that serve to relieve the genuine tension in a horror film, but I can't come up with one right now. I remember a scene in one of the 'Friday the 13th' film where Jason is wreaking havoc at a kid's camp, and we get a scene where two kids are hiding under a bed, listening to all the mayhem Jason Vorrhees is a-wreaking. "So,", says one kid to the other. "What did you want to be when you grew up?"...But I don't consider the Friday the 13th series actual horror films...)

16) Jane Birkin or Edwige Fenech?

(Pass.)

17) Favorite Wong Kar-wai movie

(I can't answer. Wong Kar-wai, like Truffaut, Visconti and Goddard, falls under the catagory of 'Filmmakers on my 'to-see' list.)

18) Best horrific moment from a comedy that is not a horror comedy

(Would Vincent shooting Marvin in 'Pulp Fiction' count? That whole scene in Jimmy's kitchen is like an American Monty Python sketch...)

19) From 2010, a specific example of what movies are doing right…

(Pixar Studios. The entire process of movie-making done right. Their formula is to not have a formula, if you know what I mean. More specific? Okay, the movie 'Kick-Ass', which makes a silk purse from a sow's ear...)

20) Ryan Reynolds or Chris Evans?

(Ryan Reynolds.)

21) Speculate about the future of online film writing. What’s next?

(A ruthlessly Darwinian process. Since nobody except for Roger Ebert seems to be in the position of even scratching out a living doing it, the best long-term writers will be doing it for love. And the possibility of on-line critics being able to influence studios seems marginal, at best. Whether we'll see the return of the likes of a Pauline Kael being brought to the studios as a consultant remains to be seen. Having said all that, www.redlettermedia.com and his surgical takedown of the Star Wars prequels is the type of thing we need more of, please.)

22) Roger Livesey or David Farrar?

(Again, pass.)

23) Best father/child (male or female) movie star combo

(Kirk Douglas/Michael Douglas. Mike could never live up to his dad, (Who could?) but he's done a good job trying...)

24) Favorite Freddie Francis movie (as Director)

(Pass.)

25) Bringing Up Baby or The Awful Truth?

(Bringing Up Baby. Cary Grant in Hepburn's gown freaking out. "Because I just went gay all of a sudden! ", he shrieks in frustration, jumping up. The camera follows his jump.)

26) Tina Fey or Kristen Wiig?

(Tina Fey.)

27) Name a stylistically important director and the best film that would have never been made without his/her influence.

(Howard Hawks. Best film? Seven Samurai.)

28) Movie you’d most enjoy seeing remade and transplanted to a different culture (i.e. Yimou Zhang’s A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop.)

(Kurosawa's High and Low, made by a contemporary American filmmaker, set now. It was orignally an Ed McBain novel. What would be interesting is to see how a contemporary audience would take a classic Greek tragedy. It would be truly universal.)

29) Link to a picture/frame grab of a movie image that for you best illustrates bliss. Elaborate.

'Nuff said.

30) With a tip of that hat to Glenn Kenny, think of a just-slightly-inadequate alternate title for a famous movie. (Examples from GK: Fan Fiction; Boudu Relieved From Cramping; The Mild Imprecation of the Cat People)

(Dr Strangelove or: You People Know That This Film Is a Comedy, Right?)

...And...You're Welcome...

2010-08-05T09:45:00.000-07:00

Inception (C+) Upon reflection, this is the movie Brian DePalma should've made instead of Christopher Nolan. Not that Nolan's a bad filmmaker, but he's more of a clockmaker who happens to work in film than a filmmaker. His films tend to set up a Big Idea, then follow the implications of the Big Idea. In the case of Inception, the Big Idea is that the technology exists to enter into other people's dreams,and interact in such a way with their dream state as to take secrets out of their heads. And then we get the premise that if one can take an idea from a person in such a way, it should be possible to implant an idea in a person's head. With me?

It's a Heist Movie, as well. Now, the standard trope of the Heist Movie is that the Heist itself takes place about halfway/2/3rds into the picture. The Heist is shown to be meticulously plotted, brilliantly and professionally executed...and then one of the robbers involved gets greedy or careless and the whole enterprise falls apart after the fact. Inception is not that type of Heist movie. The main pleasure in Inception is in learning about the premise, buying the premise, and watching the burglars carry out the Heist-in-Reverse. Some of the set pieces, such as the shifting Paris landscape and the battle in the rotating hallway, are truly thrilling.

The problem is, as I mentioned earlier, is that Nolan is more of a clockmaker than a film-maker. Compare Inception with DePalma's 'Femme Fatale', which has a heist as it's bookend and a dream taking up the majority of the movie. I wouldn't call 'Femme Fatale' a great movie, but it evokes a dream state far more successfully than Inception did. Part of the problem Nolan has is that a film has a limited time to tell a story, and for this type of story, he has to spend most of his time selling the premise and how it works to his audience, so the characters get short shrift. Ellen Page, in particular, may as well have been called, "Miss Exposition". My point being, if you can't buy the setup as Nolan sells it, the movie falls apart. His use of how dream logic worked really bugged me, if I may cite 'Fridge Logic'. Why, given the history of dreams in cinema, from Bunuel to Jodrowsky to Tarsem, does Nolan go for the simplest and easiest ways to depict a world of dreaming?

(P.S. Here's a link to a website comparing 'Inception' to a Don Rosa 'Scrooge McDuck' comic with essentially the same storyline...) You're welcome.

Kick-Ass (The movie, not the comic) (B) After I thoroughly bad-mouthed the comic last time, I entirely expected to hate the movie as well. (Yeah, and I like to drink expired milk and complain about how sour it is. Wanna make something of it? Huh? Let's you and me wrassle!) Well, guess what, this movie is really, surprisingly enjoyable! Mainly because director/co-writer Matthew Vaughn isn't looking down on his characters (and the audience) as much as Mark Millar was. For instance, when Millar answers the question, "Why aren't there superheroes in real-life?", he says, "Because you losers reading this comic fantasizing about being super-heroes need a wake-up call and I'm just the guy to do it!" Vaughn's answer, on the other hand, is, "Because real-life is far more interesting than any comic book."
The story isn't hampered by an Idiot Plot, the characters are funny and likable, (I love Nicholas Cage's Adam West accent) and the action is over-the-top without condemning the viewer for getting off on it. As for the issue of Hit-Girl and watching an eleven-year old girl cuss like a sailor and kill bad guys, it didn't bother me at all. (Again, unlike the comic, her dad had a legitimate reason for going up against the bad guys.) Plus, I've always wanted to see a kid call someone a 'cunt' in a movie. Comic gold, that is. Seriously.

Blacksad (A) I love this series. Not because it sells me, an avowed hater of 'mature' anthropomorphic animal comics on it's premise-a cat detective goes a-sleuthing. Not because Juanjo Guarnido's watercolours are so detailed, precise, and beautifully rendered. And not because Juan Diaz Canales' scripts are so well-plotted. (He's like a Spanish Patrica Highstreet.) It's because...

Ok, that's entirely why I love this series. Look at this page here...

You're welcome.

"Wilsoooon!!"

2010-06-15T12:28:00.000-07:00

Wilson (C+) One fairly recent comic character trope that I've noticed is what could be called the Emotionally Autistic Lout. His (it's always a he.) standard comic bit is to behave in an insensitive and socially inappropriate way around others, and in this way comedic juice is squeezed. His earliest appearance is in John Cleese's Basil Fawlty character, but he's come a cropper in the past decade. Off the top of my head, you've seen him in Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge, Sacha Baron Cohen's characters, and most notably in Ricky Gervais' leads in Gervais' T.V. series. He's a mostly British character, since their sense of social propriety is more rigid. Over on this end of the pond, you'll see him in embryonic form in Seinfeld, advancing to Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, and the cast of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

I'm bringing him up in discussing Dan Clowes' Wilson, since Clowes' title character is an E.A.L in human form. By which I mean, he engages in the type of boorish behavior that Larry David does in Curb Your Enthusiasm, but Clowes plays it for drama, not for chuckles. The problem is, we as readers wind up writing Wilson off after about four or five pages in. So we're following the story only to see how bad Wilson's self-deception will lead him. (Turns out, it's pretty bad. He kidnaps his estranged wife and the here-to-unknown daughter she gave up for adoption after they separated. He goes to prison for six years as a result.)

Because Clowes plays the character for drama, the more well-adjusted characters in his life write him off as quickly as we do. (Meeting his daughter, post-prison, she points out that 'she doesn't want any more drama in her life'.) The only human contact he has is by childishly bullying random strangers he meets and becoming intimate with the woman who pet-sat his beloved dog. (She moves in with him as an alternative to being homeless.) If Clowes had played the character darker, he would've been moving into Ivan Brunetti territory, and Brunetti's stratagem is to distance the reader from actual suffering.

In reading interviews with Clowes, I got the impression that he was trying to use classic comic book idioms from strips like 'Peanuts' and 'Barnaby' to tell adult stories. I don't think it succeeded, entirely, partly for the reasons above, and partly for the stylistic technique he uses.
(The book consists of 77 one page black-out strips, drawn in different styles.) The whole book feels like an epilogue to a bigger story, like the epigram to a John Cheever or John Updike novel.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Harlan Ellison

2010-05-27T13:42:00.000-07:00

In tribute to author, Harlan Ellison, who's birthday is today, I'd like to reprint an excerpt from Gay Talese's legendary profile of Frank Sinatra entitled, "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold". Keep in mind this is an earlier draft than the one that appeared in Esquire magazine in 1965...

The room cracked with the clack of billiard balls. There were about a dozen spectators in the room, most of them young men who were watching Leo Durocher shoot against two other aspiring hustlers who were not very good. This private drinking club has among its membership many actors, directors, writers, models, nearly all of them a good deal younger than Sinatra or Durocher and much more casual in the way they dress for the evening. Many of the young women, their long hair flowing loosely below their shoulders, wore tight, fanny-fitting Jax pants and very expensive sweaters; and a few of the young men wore blue or green velour shirts with high collars and narrow tight pants, and Italian loafers.

It was obvious from the way Sinatra looked at these people in the poolroom that they were not his style, but he leaned back against a high stool that was against the wall, holding his drink in his right hand, and said nothing, just watched Durocher slam the billiard balls back and forth. The younger men in the room, accustomed to seeing Sinatra at this club, treated him without deference, although they said nothing offensive. They were a cool young group, very California-cool and casual, and one of the coolest seemed to be a little guy, very quick of movement, who had a sharp profile, pale blue eyes, blondish hair, and squared eyeglasses. He wore a pair of brown corduroy slacks, a green shaggy-dog Shetland sweater, a tan suede jacket, and Game Warden boots, for which he had recently paid $60.

Frank Sinatra, leaning against the stool, sniffling a bit from his cold, could not take his eyes off the Game Warden boots. Once, after gazing at them for a few moments, he turned away; but now he was focused on them again. The owner of the boots, who was just standing in them watching the pool game, was named Harlan Ellison, a writer who had just completed work on a screenplay, The Oscar. Finally Sinatra could not contain himself.

"Hey," he yelled in his slightly harsh voice that still had a soft, sharp edge. "Those Italian boots?"

Without taking his eyes off the pool game in progress, Ellison muttered, "I dunno. Italian leather, maybe."

Sinatra, not to be thwarted, snarled back, "The hell you talkin' about, kid?"

Ellison slowly shifted his weight from one foot to the other, then coolly regarded Sinatra.

"By Italian leather, I mean that they were made with the left-over skin from yer ma's last labiaoplasty." The room temperature dropped by several degrees. Several mouths opened in disbelief. The music playing over the scene came to an abrupt, needle-scratching halt. Sinatra himself turned purple in rage, his clenching fist shattering the bourbon tumbler in it. Shards poked through his flesh, dripping blood and Jack Daniels onto the parquet.

"WHAT-DID-YOU-SAY?" choked out Sinatra, his eyes bulging from their sockets in disbelief.

"I got six more pairs like 'em at home, all made from your mother's meat curtains, you tone-deaf, dago wop guinea spaghetti-slurpin' gimlet-eyed, fat-titted embarrassing stereotype douchenozzle, that's what I said. Are you retarded as well as ugly and stupid?" Ellison then turned his back on Sinatra, putting a dime on the pool table to indicate that he was next in line to play pool.

Sinatra quivered with a fury so intense it looked like he was stuck in an industrial paint-mixer. He appeared to have bitten through his lower lip, spitting pinkish saliva like a rabid dog. Slowly, he turned to the pale and quiet crowd of sycophants and hangers-on around him. With a superhuman effort, he regained his composure and addressed them in a low, menacing voice.

"Let's blow this joint." With the air of a funeral procession, Sinatra and his cronies filed out the door. The room was as still as a museum. All eyes were on Ellison, nonchalantly picking through the pool cue rack, searching for a favorite. Finally the tension in the room started to deflate, when suddenly, Sinatra angrily strode back in, and spun Harlan around to face him.

"Just one thing, you sawed-off runt.", Sinatra menaced, an inch from Ellison's implacable face. "A douche-nozzle, that's that little rubber tip on the end of a hose connected to a douche-bag, right?"

Ellison nodded. "That would be correct, Mr. Sinatra."

"Just making sure, is all." Sinatra spun on his heels and walked out, not to be seen for a very long time.

For obvious reasons, this draft has not seen the light of day until now...

Hope for the Future

2010-05-26T10:45:00.000-07:00

You know, it seems sometimes like we're living in the End of Days. The Gulf coast is being covered by a multi-million gallon oil slick, and the engineers and oil executives charged with cleaning it up seem to think yelling at it will make it go away. North Korea is starting to rattle its saber. Insane Clown Posse make a video wherein they gap with awe at elementary physics like chimps. And Jenny McCarthy is an advocate for bringing us all back to the Dark Ages. Bleak times indeed.

Then I see something like the following, and I think...

"I think we're all gonna be okay."

2010-05-04T14:52:00.000-07:00

Kick Ass (D :The comic, not the movie.) I'm not sure whether writer Mark Millar is Stupid-Smart or Smart-Stupid. By which I mean he's either too stupid to understand one of the underlying requirements of a compelling story is to create characters a reader can form some kind of empathy with. While being smart enough to know how to pander to an adolescent (in mentality if not in age) readership by filling his comics with lovingly rendered scenes of people being shot in the balls, fried in the balls, shot in the face, having various body parts removed by knives, having a ten-year old girl get shot and beaten, etc.

OR: He's just smart enough to know that if he fills a basic superhero trope-what if superheros really, REALLY, really, no-Watchmen-post-modern bullshit-here with all sorts of post-modern references-exist, like having his protagonist become famous over YouTube, his characters face off over lines like, "You think this is some kind of Harry Osborne vs. Peter Parker moment?", he will create a post-post-modern superhero comic book that will have fat Comic Book Guys giggling and punching each other in their flabby arms with glee and saying, 'Oh, dude! He totally referenced the Punisher, there!'. While being stupid in that the only reason none of his 'superhero' characters get killed or put into wheelchairs or get sent to jail or the mental ward by the cops is that there's no story, otherwise.

It's Idiot Plotting. Like in the horror movie when the Horny Teenagers Split Up to Check Out Old Man Johnson's Allegedly Haunted House And Possibly Suck Face And Rub Genitals Only To Get Meticulously And Brutally Murdered By Hatchet Face Who The Old Dude At The Stop-N-Go Says Haunts The Johnson House, But It Turns Out In The Third Reel That Hatchet Face Is In Fact Poindexter The Nerd Who Is Insanely Bitter That Kelly Terwilliger Didn't Go On That Date With Him. If the horny teenagers had decided, in the first reel, to just reasonably decide, 'Fuck that, let's rent 'Saw 8' and chillax at Stacey's house!', there'd be no movie.

Actually, I've read enough of Millar's work to consider a third option. He's possibly Smart-Bitter. He's talented enough to come up with high-concept comics, like Superman being Soviet Russian, or thinly-veiled celebrities being part of a secret cabal of assassins, or Kick-Ass. But he knows he doesn't have the chops to create engaging stories, or empathic characters. So I'm starting to see a sort of passive admonishment to his audience. 'This is me, fucking you in the ass', the Eminem clone says to the reader in the final page of Wanted. He's in essence, saying, 'I hate you flabby turds who read my junk, I hate the comic publishers for being too pusillanimous to produce anything other than adolescent power/revenge fantasies, but most of all, I hate myself, for I can do nothing else. Fuck my life.'

Spring has sprung...

2010-04-22T10:48:00.000-07:00

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (B-) Here's a funny thing: They say baseball players can identify a batter by the sound his bat makes when it hits the ball. For my part, after I got about fifteen minutes into this cartoon, the pacing of the story and the timing of the gags led to to think, "Hm. This story's a lot like the late lamented Clone High cartoon. And sure enough, after a trip to the IMDB, it turns out it was written and directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the same guys responsible for Clone High. So it's nice to see they're working.

As for the movie itself, it was based off a short children's book written by an illustrator named Ron Barrett and his wife. I'm familiar with Barrett because he was responsible for a cartoon in the old National Lampoon called, "Politenessman", the premise of that being that someone would be in a terrible predicament, and Politenessman would send his stainless steel hankie in to bonk an offender of etiquette on the head, Politenessman would appear to exhort said offender of their breach of etiquette, and the offender would clean up their act, so to speak. Usually with dire consequences to the offender. (One example, off the top of my head, had a woman victimized by a phone pervert, wind up marrying her attacker.)

I brought that up because the original 'Cloudy' book was a pretty simple idea. What with it being a kid's book and all. What Lord and Miller did was flesh out the premise and give it a solid story, with their own little gags and twists in dialogue. Which kind of makes me wonder what they could do with, say, 'Pat the Bunny'.

Ninja Assassin (D-) Is there any other type of ninja? The title's a little like saying, 'Lawn mowing Gardener'. And it goes downhill from there, believe it or not. The OTT gore in the first scene leads you to think you're getting a Wachowski Brothers version of 'Punisher: War Zone'.

What you are getting, point of fact, is a 21st century version of a cheesy Golan-Globus direct-to-video actioner. Only instead of Barry Bostwick or Michael Pare, you're getting a Korean pop star named 'Rain' in the lead. Nothing about it stuck with me, except Berlin looks a lot like Vancouver, with more misspelled German signs. Oh, and when someone in this film gets hit by a bullet or throwing star or chunk of flying wood splinters or a paper cut, they squirt out a bathtub full of CGI blood. Except in 'Rain's' case, where he squirts out two bathtub's of blood.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe (C+ -so far as I'm only 3 volumes in) We really don't need another whiny indy-comic about the tortured path of young romance stinking up the book stores, do we? And despite all surface appearances in this comic, Bryan Lee O'Malley, the creator, agrees with me. It occurred to me that it's not a comic influenced by North American indy-comics from the past twenty years, as much as it's influenced by Manga. O'Malley probably figured that he was in no position to view the tortured path of young love with any sense of proportion or distance, so he just went with the DragonBall Z trope. Which makes for more enjoyable reading, really.

Final Flesh (A for the idea, C for the execution) The mad genius behind Wonder Showzen and Xavier: Renegade Angel is back with a vengeance. Vernon Chatman's premise for this little cup of odd is as follows: Evidently, there are video production companies in the States which will, for a fee, (About a thousand dollars, if Chatman is to be believed.) produce tailor-made pornography according to a client's script. So if one has the money, one can hire a staff of eager young smut peddlers to fornicate to one's specifications of whatever sexual preferences one wishes to see. (I believe there are companies in other countries which can indulge these fetishes more extremely, which is why 'Swap.avi' is loose on the internet...)

So Chatman, evil little cutlet that he is, writes up four scripts with no sexual content whatsoever and a load of the odd, surreal dialogue he's famous for, ("Gregor Samsa will have the last laugh", one performer laments upon realizing the cockroaches will inherit the earth...) and foists it on four separate 'studios'. The results are surreal, kind of disturbing, and funny as hell. The performers go at the material they've been handed by Chatman with varying results. The talent on display here ranges from porn actor quality (Well...) to oddly enthusiastic. (The last act's particapants seem to be most in on the joke. Plus, they're the most attractive.) If nothing else, I can check this weirdly endearing little exercise off my big list of "Things I need to see before I die".

Fantastic Mr. Fox. (C+) Wes Anderson's greatest strength is in his ability to portray how dysfunctional families, well, function. So when he directs an animated film, he's sort of hobbled by the technical limitations of stop-motion animation. To put it more directly, I'm not watching an animated film based on a Ronald Dahl's children's book as much as I'm watching a Wes Anderson animated film based on a Ronald Dahl's children's book where I'm distracted by appearances of Anderson's stock company. (Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, William Defoe, and Jason Swartzman, for instance.) So I'm missing out on a lot of the subtleties and nuances the physical actors bring to their roles.

For instance, instead of showing us that Mr. Fox's son is insecure about how he measures up in his father's eyes, we have to have a scene where Mr. Fox and his wife explicitly inform us of this fact. It's a job Anderson can do with his eyes closed at this point in live-action film, but it's beyond anyone's ability to get across in a stop-motion animation, given the technical limitations of the medium. There are other examples, of course. (The mean rat/weasel played by William Defoe implies he had a past with Mr. Fox's wife, but nothing comes of it. Why? And the other animals don't seem to react in any way after Mr. Fox's rash behavior leaves them homeless. Mr. Fox's son seems to resent his cousin's growing infatuation with his female lab partner, but her role is unfinished. And so on.)

Overall, it's not a bad film. The art direction is amazing, with hyper-detailed sets and a colour scheme with no greens or blues. But in the end, it's a fairly generic kid's cartoon with a fairly standard set of tropes you'll find in any kid's cartoon. (Be true to yourself, Everyone is good at one thing at least, etc.) And Wes Anderson being behind all this, I was hoping for something more.

Oh, before I go, here's a quick Mea Culpa. A while back, I ripped on the movie Network as a whole. In fact, I've gone back and watched it a couple of times since, and my position has changed. It's a genuinely darkly funny satire, with solid performances by Peter Finch, William Holden, and Faye Dunaway, who can do neurotic and vulnerable like nobody's business. My main beef was with Beatrice Straight's role in the movie, which in hindsight, didn't really need to be in the film in the first place. Writer Paddy Chayefsky put her in to emphasize how Diana Christensen's poisonous world view was corrupting Max Schumacher's outlook, and how Diana was turning Max into one of her 'humanoids', as Max put it.

However, since Max had enough perceptive in the news business in the first place, he came to reject Diana, and her grasp for network ratings without having his personal life damaged enough. (He was watching Diana turn his mentally unhinged friend Howard Beale into a carnival freak already.) So Chayefsky really didn't need to write Max's wife into the script to hammer the point home. I suspect he and director Sidney Lumet felt they needed Max's wife to deliver a boilerplate 'hurting spouse' monologue to add to the drama and spoonfeed the viewer. Or something.

So...Avatar...

2010-04-13T14:40:00.000-07:00

Avatar (C+) Meh, it was okay. Took me out of myself for three hours. (Geddit? Haw!) I went in wanting to hate this movie, 'cuz I'm such a non-conformist, dontya know, but I really couldn't. It's too well-crafted and expertly paced. And I was really impressed by the CGI. On the other hand, I can't really rave about this movie because, let's face it, 'Company Man Goes Rogue' is as over used a story trope as 'Kiss Me Quick, For I'm Dying'.

If you know anything about how CGI is made, the special effects are really impressive. In fact, I'd say that the staff at WETA have essentially solved the problem of the 'Uncanny Valley' in terms of CGI. You're not distracted by the clunkiness you usually see in CG characters, so you can relax and enjoy the story. The world of Pandora, though it seems like Roger Dean, he of the Yes and Asia album covers, was lead designer, looks like a genuine location.

Now, herein lies the problem. There's been so much work and so much thought put in behind the scenes at making this movie, that the movie itself is ultimately, well...meh. Haven't we seen this movie over and over and over again? Dances With Wolves, Pocohontas, The Last Samurai... the list goes on and on. All the characters have exactly one basic trait, pounded into us over and over. The military guy is just itching to wipe the Navi from the face of the planet, the scientists all act like excited little kids when the avatars come to life, the Navi themselves are straight out of 50's westerns central casting. (With a touch of blue paint.)

And lead actor Sam Worthington. I'm sure he's a nice guy in real life, but, well, I've seen him in two movies now (where he's the same character-a company man who goes native-think about it when you watch Terminator-Salvation.) and he seems to come from the Keanu Reeves school of acting. In fact, you know what? Worthington's not an actor, not in the usual sense. He's more of an Acting Technician, like Reeves. Let me elaborate.

There's always been a substrata of the entertainment industry where the mechanism is set up so the film is essentially idiot-proof, particularly where acting is concerned. All the person has to do is show up, hit their marks, repeat the lines that they've been memorized, and make a frowny face where appropriate, or look off over the camera's left side to indicate their character is facing a serious moral dilemma. (Megan Fox, Hayden Christensen, most kid actors, I'm looking at you...) What they're doing isn't acting, it's being a prop with a rudimentary nervous system.

In fact, you wouldn't want a real actor for a movie like this. Notice how in the execrable Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the performances of Jude Law, Gwyenth Paltrow and Micheal Gambon are so flattened out. In the case of people like Worthington and Reeves, you'll notice how their dialogue in Avatar and the Matrix film is expository in nature. ("That's a BIG tree", exclaims Worthington after we are given a massive tilt shot revealing the giant tree where the Navi live, to an oppressive soundtrack. You know, in case we had missed the point...)

Maybe that's the fundamental flaw with this type of contemporary blockbuster. Since nothing is left to chance, the movie is not directed or written, as much as it's designed. Like a roller coaster or a Coke advertisement. All flaws are carefully poly filled in, but any quirks or happy accidents wind up getting buffed out as well. At the end of the day, it's a thing designed to be liked, so you go in, pay your fifteen bucks, (or more if you're seeing the IMAX version...) and it's not the worst three hours you've spent at the movies. But it's not the best, either.

Oh, before I forget, the 3-d effect does nothing for me, personally. Honestly, I found it more than a little distracting at times, and the reason it was a short-lived gimmick in the fifties is the same reason it's going to be a short-lived gimmick now. It does nothing to enhance the pleasure in a good movie, or an okay movie like Avatar. Conversely, it will not save a bad movie. So if for no other reason than for sheer economics-no theater chain is going to spend more money converting its theaters to showing 3d films than it has to- I predict the 3d novelty will run its course by about the time Tron Legacy hits theaters this December.

(P.s. The photo above is of James Cameron mock-strangling his ex-wife and Best Oscar winner Kathyn Bigelow at the awards ceremony. Just FYI.)

More Short Cuts...

2010-03-31T13:59:00.000-07:00

The Hurt Locker (B) Kathyrn Bigelow, to her credit, has stopped trying to be the tough girl on the playground. That is, while she understands all the tropes and idioms of action and violence, she's developed a sense of proportion in their use. In this case, the story of a bomb disposal tech in Iraq, her skills let her give the feeling of randomness that a job in that field has over one's destiny. (The opening scene gives us a careful, by-the-book disposal expert who dies in spite of his caution, and the rest of the movie's about another disposal expert whose recklessness seems to work in his favor.)

World's Greatest Dad (C+) A 'Heathers' like satire where Robin Williams plays a failing teacher saddled with a hateful little homunculus of a son. The son's death, (from accidental auto-erotic asphyxiation-ew.) leads to a chain of events where the boy gets credited with a depth of spirit he never really had. It loses it's nerve near the end, but if Robin Williams' character had played his cards through, the movie would've been veering into even darker waters than it was already.

Big Fan (B-) It's a throwback to movies of the 70's, where the lead didn't have a character arc. What I mean is, in the process of the story unfolding, the lead actor doesn't grow from his experiences. So the story is about why the character is what he is instead of taking him from point a to point b. I refer, of course, to Bob Rafelson's excellent 'Five Easy Pieces', where Jack Nicholson plays the estranged son of a family of wealthy over-achievers.

In the case of 'Big Fan', Patton Oswalt (yep, him again.) plays a lumpen sad-sack who's only joy in life is following the fortunes of his favorite football team, and specifically, its star quarterback. Because his life is so narrow in it's focus, a chance meeting with his beloved player leads to a tragic outcome. Oswalt's character takes a course of action that leads him into serious legal trouble at the movie's end.

The whole tone of the movie is more than a little sad, and I suspect anyone who's a big sports fan (or, um, comic book fan, or tabletop RPG fan...) will feel a painful twinge of recognition of Oswalt's progress.

Moon (B+) Speaking of 70's movies, David Bowie's son Duncan Jones makes a bang-up debut in this feature. I'm reminded of 'Silent Running', special-effects whiz Douglas Trumbull's directorial debut. The art direction makes more than a nod to Kubrick's '2001', and covers up the low budget. Sam Rockwell is turning out to be one of my favorite actors these days, and extra bonus: Kevin Spacey's nod to 'HAL' turns out to be a good guy after all. I wonder how Jones' next film will turn out, assuming that he's getting a bigger budget...

A Perfect Thing...

2010-02-27T17:42:00.000-08:00

The Room -(Ungradeable) I've hit a point in my life where, for the most part, I can't enjoy watching a movie for the 'camp' value any more. I just don't have the patience to watch 'Mystery Science Theater 3000' these days because as my life goes on, I feel that time I spend chuckling ironically over 'Monster-a-go-go' or some Golan-Globus schlock fest could've been spent watching a genuine film made with care and commitment. As a case in point, I've only watched about fifteen minutes of Uwe Boll's crapfest, 'Alone in the Dark' before I switched off. (You know, it's the one where Tara Reid plays an anthropologist. Yeah.) While I get the trope of 'So Bad It's Good', just fine, most movies that fall under that rubic are...well, just bad.

It's because in this day and age, anything hacked out cheaply for the lowest common denominator is usually done by indifferent technicians, like Uwe Boll, above. There are other examples, naturally. Michael Bay shoots films like he's still directing Pontiac car commercials, the Seltzer/Friedburg guys who excrete those 'Scary/Date/Epic' movies. You get the idea. It's because there's so much money at stake, any films like 'Manos-The Hands of Fate' haven't got a hope in hell of ever getting made. These days, one million dollars for a budget is basically no-budget cinema.

So here's Tommy Wiseau's debut, 'The Room'. How bad is it? Let me put it this way: Jerry Lewis made an as-of-now unreleasable film, 'The Day the Clown Cried', which is part of Hollywood lore as possibly the worst film ever. (Brief synopsis: Lewis plays a washed-up circus clown in Nazi Germany named Helmut Doork. He drunkenly insults a Nazi official and is sent to Auschwitz. There, he finds a job entertaining condemned children on their way to the gas chamber. Comedian Harry Shearer, from the Simpsons, has seen it and calls it, 'A Perfect Thing', in that its sheer awfulness is as close to missing the mark on movie-making as you are ever hoping to get. If you think about the initial premise, and shoot downwards in your estimation on how bad such a thing could be, you're giving Lewis too much credit...)

The Room is Tommy Wiseau's 'Perfect Thing'. Every possible way a film can fuck up, this film fucks up. The story is incoherent. Subplots fall away to nothing. The acting is community theater-awful. Actors disappear and their lines are given to other people. Pointless establishing shots and even more pointless green-screen shots are splattered high and low. There is no sense of time passing. The camera goes out of focus. This is, beyond a doubt, the worst movie I've ever seen in my life.

And yet, it has a weird fascinating pull to it, for two reasons: one, the star, producer, writer and director, Tommy Wiseau. He's a clueless little middle-aged, lumpy troll with a mop of curly black hair and a strange foreign accent who tries to pass himself off as 'a regular, nice guy' in this film. (That's him in the above poster.) So here's the story, such as it is: Tommy plays a 'great guy' who works at a bank, doing something, we're not sure, and is about to marry his fiancee, Lisa, in a month. After a couple of soft-core love scenes where Tommy tries to screw her belly-button, apparently, Lisa decides that she doesn't want to marry him, and cheats on him with his best friend. He finds out about her betrayal, flips out at them at a party, then kills himself. There's a couple of subplots, where Tommy is supporting some retarded kid who owes a drug dealer money, and Lisa's mom tells Lisa that she has cancer, and nothing comes of them. Oh, and there's this other friend of Tommy and Lisa who's a shrink, and he tells them to work out their problems, but the actor playing him quit halfway through, (wonder why?) so the shrink's lines go to this guy we've never seen before. (It makes Ed Wood substituting his chiropractor for Bela Lugosi in Plan 9 look like Scorsese.) Tommy Wiseau shoots this film the same way he acts, with a clueless oblivion that I've never seen before and I will never see again, hopefully. Wiseau has literally made art in reverse.

The other impression I've gotten from this movie is that, as inept and weird as it is, it's come from a very deeply personal place from Tommy Wiseau. In his past, some heartless bitch screwed him over, tore his heart out and stomped on it with a pair of golf cleats. And this movie is his revenge, his cry of pain, his soul laid bare. I'm kind of sad to have seen it, for I know that what ever Mr. Wiseau chooses to do in the future will never come close to the sheer ineptitude and goofiness of this, his magnum opus. He can only go up from here.

Humour Can be Funny.

2010-01-22T18:18:00.000-08:00

Here's a few funny things for you:

First up, a couple of drawings by a fellow named Angus Mcleod cleverly illustrating how both world wars played out.

World War 1: (Links to his DeviantART page.)

World War 2: (Links, again, to his DeviantART page.)

I can't wait to see his take on the Cold War...

And finally, it's been all over the net, but I just have to put it here: Milwaukee filmmaker Mike Stoklasa's brilliant dissection of 'The Phantom Menace'. It's in seven parts onYoutube, each 10 minutes (about), and it's one of the funniest things I've seen so far on Youtube. The funniest thing, of course, being that woman tickling that kitten.

Even funnier, of course, are the butthurt comments from Star Wars fans on the Youtube comment page. Ever notice how fanboys love to squeal in pain before the blow hits? They don't try to defend the movie directly, naturally. They wind up whining because 'serial killers aren't funny, you know!' and such. (Stoklasa frames the video essay through the mind of a deranged creep who keeps hookers chained up in his filthy basement.)

I don't have anything to add to Stoklasa's essay, except to bring up the old chestnut about story construction where we ask three questions about a scene to determine its effectiveness:

-Who wants what from whom?
-What happens if they don't get what they're after?
-Why do they have to get it NOW?

(If you subject 'The Phantom Menace' to this line of inquiry, your answers will be very disappointing. Like, 'They had to bring Jar-Jar into the film, somehow.' or 'Lucas wanted to show off the special effects in the pod racing scene'-type disappointing. Go on, try it! It's a lot of
fun!)

Best of 2009

2010-01-11T12:53:00.000-08:00

Like everyone else with a blog, I'm going to give you my 'best of the year'. Unlike everyone else, I'm not going to inflict pictures of my holidays or my new cat or when my kid started to walk or some other guff which would bore anyone not in my immediate circle of relations.
Nope, this year you get my faves of T.V., comics, and other ephemera. Isn't that nice of me?
Best T.V.- The Wire. Well, this year I sat down with the entire five season run of it, so it's the best for me, innit? So how good is it. Well, let's put it this way...

Say there's an alien civilization that deems itself the guardian of determining whether an emerging civilization should be allowed to thrive, or be wiped out on the merit of that civilization's cultural output. With me so far? So if a civilization's most popular T.v. show (or whatever visual medium that they have, like some holoviewer.) is, say, 'Rape for Breakfast' with Your Host, Zzyxklop Pootswallow, then this alien civilization pushes the 'world obliterator' button on their giant spaceship and blasts them to oblivion. Follow me? So this hypothetical bunch of cultural fascists looks in on our world, and this is what they see on our television...

-'Reality' shows consisting of shrieking, vaguely-attractive morons humiliating themselves for a shot of fame, and by fame I mean having the average person remember them by saying, "Um, Bimbo Starletta? Wasn't she that girl who went on that reality show, got voted off, had a home sex tape released, got photographed flashing her vag-yay-ya getting out of a car in a nightclub, punched her step-mom, made a cameo in that 'Reality Show Movie' movie, put her name on a line of crappy handbags sold at Wal-Mart, and was found dead in a hotel room choked to death on someone else's vomit? Or am I thinking of some other person?"

-'News' programs with about as much useful information as the back of a cereal box, the advantage going to the cereal box as it has some information in French (Well, here in Canada, anyway.) Really, the T.V. news' priorities are so screwed up that if the two main stories were, "Famous person has sex with other person who is not spouse", and "Meteor on collision course with Earth, All Doomed", which do you think would be the lead in? No, the other one, smarty.

-'Commentator's' like that yowling suburban dad-type on MSNBC, and that former 'morning radio zoo crew' fat guy on Fox, who's modeled his show on Peter Finch's performance in 'Network', only 'Network' was a vicious satire of television, and Finch's character was a crazy man having a meltdown on national television being cruelly exploited by his employers, and I'm not joking about Glenn Beck using Howard Beale as his inspiration, by the way...

You get the idea. So the aliens sigh, lift the trigger on their 'World Obliterator' button, and ominously dangle a finger over it. Just then, one alien grabs the other alien's hand (or tentacle, or pseudo-pod.) and says, "Hang on a moment, have a look at this." And they will see 'The Wire'. They will see not just another police procedural drama, but a social novel like 'Les Miserable' brought to T.V. They will see how a dysfunctional system, well, functions. They will see the civic government fail to live up to it's end of the social contract, and let it's constituents down. They will see how it's police get hamstringed by loopholes and bureaucracy. They will see it's working class increasingly marginalized and victimized. They will see how crime reform gets hamstrung and the reformers hung out to dry. They will see schools run like prisons, where a good day for a teacher is one where the kids don't slice each other up with razor blades. They will see demoralized politicians not only compromising every principle, but having to eat shit with a smile and a plea for more shit. They will see the media disenfranchised and cynical. They will see the drug dealers as complex, morally grey people, not just shadowy boogie men. And they will see Omar Little. Oh, yes.

Omar Little has to be one of the most amazing fictional creations in T.V. history. He's an outlaw in every sense of the word, being the literal embodiment of that Marlon Brando response to the question, 'What are you rebelling against?' A homeless gay thug, his very name causes the people of East Baltimore to run screaming in the opposite direction. (I suspect his queerness is more an act of rebellion than a biological imperative.) He takes an especial glee in robbing drug dealers. For me, his most memorable performance is his scene in a courtroom, dressed in the Omar Little idea of 'Business Wear'. He seems to delight in the legal staff's discomfort. And finally, he's the romanticised 'outlaw code' taken to it's logical conclusion.

So in summary, these imaginary aliens that I just made up will spare us based on our willingness to entertain, subvert and inform, all in the space of five seasons of what I think is the best T.V. series ever. So thank you, series creators David Simon and Ed Burns. Thank you for saving us from a hypothetical alien obliteration.
Favorite T.V. bits: The limey junior exec gets his foot chewed off by the wayward lawn mower in this season of Mad Men. Walt watching Jesse's girlfriend choke to death on her own vomit in Breaking Bad. (You get to watch Walt's humanity fade away as well. Eww.)

Favorite Movie: Inglorious Basterds. Duh.
Best Comic: R. Crumb's first fifty books of Genesis.

Best Consumer Purchase I Made That Helps Ensure Humanity's Survival Through These Difficult Economic Times: The Playstation 3. Though to be honest, the only games I've bought for it are games I've already got for my Xbox360, because they look so good in hi-def. Isn't that incredibly sad? I'm dead inside. Well, not quite, since it's better put to use as a dumping ground for all the movies and t.v. shows I don't want to keep on my computer, and well, it's got Blu-Ray. Once you go Blu-Ray, you don't go back. All I'm saying...
Odd Observation I've Made After Watching Too Much T.V. This Holiday Season: I just don't watch a lot of broadcast television, and haven't for a long time. That's not a brag, it's just that passive t.v. viewing is a habit I fell out of a long time ago. So the experience of watching it now for me is like being plunged into a ice-cold bathtub. For instance: I was shocked to discover the appalling amount of anti-depressants being hawked on television. And 'anti-depressant' supplements, which, I assume, are to give your Valium and Prozac an extra little kick. What freaks me out is the disclaimer that using these will increase your feelings of being suicidal. Sweet Jesus! All things being considered, I think I'll stay mildly bummed most of the time if the alternative is snuffing it owing to a chemical imbalance...

The runner-up, of course, is that blanket-thingy with arms in it because you're presumably too inconvenienced to pull the blanket covering you down to reach for the t.v. remote or a Hot Pocket. That's beyond satire. It's literally one step above some RonCo/KTel product that blinks your eyes for your or inhales oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide on your behalf.
Proof that 2010 is officially, 'The Future'. While we're not organizing a joint Soviet/U.S. space mission to Jupiter just yet, it seems we're one step closer to that one cliche of 'The Future'. I'm talking of course, of 'Sex Robots'. See here. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/10/roxxxy-sex-robot-photo-wo_n_417976.html Isn't science wonderful? (I've said this before, but it bears repeating: If I somehow got one of these as a joke, I'd have a nervous breakdown trying to figure out how to get rid of it! Imagine the cops talking to me- 'No, honestly, officer! I didn't have sex with it! No, I got it as a joke! No, I realize that someone thought it was a real dead hooker and that's why you're here, but I didn't even touch it! Look, swab the- Oh, God. Please shoot me.')

I'm Baaaack....

2009-12-15T19:24:00.000-08:00

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..."

2009-09-09T12:31:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-09-04T09:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-30T09:45:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-10T11:39:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-08-05T12:31:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-06-14T13:03:00.000-07:00

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.

2009 Summer Blockbusters!

2009-05-27T12:34:00.000-07:00

So this summer, I plan on seeing all the big blockbuster films and judging them accordingly. And by judging accordingly, I don't mean I'll be reviewing them like a real film, I mean I'll be assigning them a rating based on the following criteria: 1) Is there a scene where two people face against each other in dead earnest, scowling and glaring at each other so close, they can smell each other's bad breath? 2) Will there be big explosions that either vehicles or people walk nonchalantly away from to emphasize their bad-assedness? 3) Will there be little ethnic children in the movie to emphasize the fundamental humanity of the protagonists? 4) Is there lots o' lens flare in the cinematography? 5) Is there innovative camera work that really adds nothing to the story, but it looks cool? 6) Is the cast populated with robots or humourless robot-like automatons? 7) Is time travel a plot point? 8) Is the film part of a 'franchise', that is, is it banking on the audience's goodwill towards earlier versions of the characters and settings to pull in the dosh? 9) Does the story fall to pieces if you spend more than five minutes thinking about it? (See: point #7) 10) Is the soundtrack so loud and bombastic that it kills your sperm cells?

Star Trek (B-) It is in fact, SULU, who fires the torpedoes. That comes from a bit from comedian Patton Oswalt, who tells us of his time in a liberal arts college when he had to take an elementary physics class, taught by the head of the physics department. At the semester's end, the professor, in a probably misguided attempt to reach out to the little art-fag wood nymphs, drizzled some pop culture dust atop the questions in the finals test. One of the questions was phrased as such: The U.S.S. Enterprise, moving at a specific speed, fires its torpedoes at a Klingon warbird at a certain speed. The Klingon ship is moving at another defined speed. The student is then, given the variables, asked at what time Chekov's torpedoes hit the cruiser. It's a speed vs. velocity question dressed up to appeal to the students. Upon reading the question, Oswalt gets up from his desk, and according to a friend in the class, says something 'VERY specific and VERY angrily to the professor, then storms out of the class in a huff.' The professor hangs his head, then addresses the class:

"I have just been informed, that it is Sulu, and not Chekov who fires the weapons in Star Trek. If this makes the question impossible to solve for you, please turn the test book into my T.A. , and I will head home to drink a full bottle of gin, then slip into a hot bath and open my veins. Fuck all of you, I do not want to live on this planet with you anymore..."

This addresses the inherent problem in adapting a much-loved franchise like the Star Trek one for an audience. Because there's been, what, almost forty years of back-story and continuity to the Star Trek saga, any new stories are inevitably going to antagonize any Trekkie-nit picker. (I, for one, was chuffed that Finnigan did not make an appearance during Kirk's time in Star Fleet...) So J.J Abrams and the writers did the only thing they could. That is, reboot the series.

When doing this type of movie, the rule is thus: Give the audience what they need, not what they want. (If you give an audience what they want, you get the last three movies of the Star Wars series. Serves you right, Star Wars nerds.) While a hardcore audience would like to see every shout-out and in-joke from the last forty years crammed into their movie, it would make for a tedious, five-hour yawn fest, and Paramount would go broke. So they go with a reboot, where Kirk and Spock's destiny is changed thanks to some pissed off Romulan miners travelling back through time. This results in Old Spock and New Spock living in the same timeline, as well as changing the dynamics between the main characters. It winds up being a pulp sci-fi adventure straight out of Doc Smith.

And that's okay. While I think time-travel plots in sci-fi movies tend to be really fucking stupid, (Even the Back to the Future franchise took a good idea and beat it into the ground to the point where they basically wanted to do a western-oh, sorry...) and Star Trek is no better in that regard... In this case, I'm gonna go with it because otherwise the lack of continuity and my dwelling on all of it will lead me to kill myself in shame...

2009 Summer Blockbuster checklist: Lens Flare? Lots and lots. Characters scowling and facing off? Check! Nonchalant retreats from an explosion? Yup. Cute little ethnics? Well, Scotty gets an Ewok covered in snot as a sidekick, so close enough! Cool camera work? Um, in this case, the camera work actually has a sense of proportion, except for the lens flare, so...No. Humorless automatons? You'd think Spock would do the job, but he actually shows some emotion in this, so no on that count, also. Time travel? Check. Franchise? It's 'Star Trek', doye. Flimsy script? Eeyeah, but they couldn't not write themselves into a corner, put it that way... Loud soundtrack? Oh, my, yes. Final tally: 8/10

Terminator: Salvation: The End of the Franchise: (C-)

If you gave Skynet a hundred million dollars to make a Terminator movie, this is what it would come up with. There is no indication that human beings worked on the script at all. So what you get is boring slog from action sequence to action sequence until the end credits. If it were a demo reel for a special effects company, I'd give it a 'A', for what that's worth. And let's face it, the plot of the first movie was, 'Run from a robot.' The second movie's plot was 'Run from a different robot.' The third movie's plot was... well, you see what I mean, right. And they screwed it up?

Instead of hashing over the movie, I'd like to explain why the movie stunk on ice, and there's two main reasons: Spinelessness on the director's part, and studio politics. Taking the last point first, it's a case of Christian Bale demanding (and getting) a bigger part as John Connor, thus forcing the writers- the guys who wrote 'Catwoman', 'The Net', and 'The last Terminator movie starring the current governor of the fifth largest economy in the world and that chick who wound up in a couple of Uwe Boll flicks, so she should be on an infomercial hawking shoddy weight-loss crap pretty soon.' - to write him a bigger part. And the movie suffers. Suffers more, I should say. On the plus side, it looks like Bale won't be in any position to make any more creative demands on that magnitude.

Then there's 'McG'. Oh, Mcg! He makes Michael Bay look like Robert Bresson! Well, he can put an action sequence together okay. But you can tell that's all he's interested in. You can see him twiddle his thumbs and yawn whenever there's story exposition or character development on screen. Also, I get the impression he's just too nice to direct actors over a long shoot. Case for the prosecution? Bale's infamous tirade to the schmucky lighting director who 'blew his concentration.' Bale goes on a near-psychotic four and a half minute rant to the guy, in front of a conspicuously silent McG. McG should've just shut Bale down after half a minute, sent the lighting guy away, and taken the extra time to cool things down on the set. That's part of his fucking job, after all.

2009 SBC: Face-off? It's practically the center piece of the movie! Lens flare? Nope. Looks like they filmed it through a cheesecloth, actually. Nonchalant bad-assery walking away from booms? Can't really remember, but there must've been. Remember, it's Terminator! Innovative camera work? It's McG! Robots? Terminator! Cute little kids? One! (Well, two if you count the teenager playing Kyle Reese.) She even squeezes the 'good' robot's hand near the end to emphasize humanity's connection! Aww! Time Travel? Terminator! Flimsy script? Like it was written on a spider's web! Franchise? Terminator! Loud-ass soundtrack? Terminator! Final tally: 10/10. Terminator! Terminator? FUCKING TERMINATOR!!

Bang! Pow! Zoom! Comics aren't just for... Oh, hell...

2009-03-10T01:18:00.000-07:00

Watchmen (C+) "So, you people who are into comic books who aren't kids have been going on for the what, past twenty three years- about this 'Watchmen' comic, right?"

"Well, ah-hum, firstly, they're called 'graphic novels'-"

"Yeah, whatever, fancy. So I saw the movie that 'watchmen' comic was based on last night-"

"Well, you should know that the writer, Alan Moore, disavowed any connection with the movie adaptation of his 'graphic novel"-

"You mean, 'comic book'. Anyways, Poindexter, the movie I saw last night was a clumsy, disjointed mess. It was basically 'Mystery Men' without, you know, any of the laughs. And a lot more pointless violence. Like a lot of directors who cut their teeth on doing commercials, Zack Snyder pushes the visuals over the actual narrative. As a result, what you get isn't a movie in the regular sense, but a Cliff Notes version of the comic book."

"It's a 'graphic-"

"If you call a comic book a 'graphic novel' one more time, I will punch you in the face!"

Ok, enough with the Socratic dialogue. It's actually not bad, for being an action movie. And as an adaptation of an all but unadaptable comic book, it's about as good as that type of thing as you're going to see.

The point I was struggling with earlier is that it highlights the main problem of adapting comic books to the movies. That is, the movie's ability to get the audience to suspend its disbelief in order to enjoy the movie. (An aside: I enjoyed Iron Man a little more than The Dark Knight because Iron Man's more effective in getting an audience-well, me, at least,-on board more than Dark Knight was. Call it the Dumbo Effect. If we can't accept a flying elephant in the first place, we aren't going to enjoy the movie, 'Dumbo'. And if we can't accept the premise that people are capable of superhuman feats of agility and strength (while in high heels and capes, no less) while retaining universal human traits we can relate to...Well, you get what I'm saying.)

So it gives us a world where superheros really exist, and sets it in a time where the threat of nuclear annihilation was literally hanging over our heads. The plot involves some retired superheroes trying to find out why one of their number was killed, which leads to a global conspiracy involving another one of their type. This conspiracy involves framing another superhero for killing millions of people which will, presumably, lead to a sort of peace between the United States and Russia, as they will have to combine their forces to keep this rogue superhero at bay.

If that plotline doesn't bother you, you will probably enjoy this movie. As for myself, well, yeah, it's pretty dumb, but I guess it makes sense in the context of the movie. And let's face it, Zack Snyder managed to pull off what better directors like Paul Greengrass and Terry Gilliam couldn't do, with a lot of visual flair, so there's that. Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl, Jeffery Dean Morgan as the Comedian and Jackie Haley as Rorschach do a bang up job as actual people put into the unreal context of a superhero narrative.

My ultimate point though, is that if 'Watchmen' is a high point for comics as a respectable medium, then comics still have a long way to go. (The plot of the comic involved a giant space squid. Yup.) Snyder's direction does kind of bring up the shortcomings of the original comic.
I'm not sure what the point was to make Nixon out to use Dr. Manhattan to extend Nixon's time in office. Sure, he was a bastard, but unlike Bush the Usurper, Nixon knew his limits. (The actor in the movie does such a bad Nixon impersonation, I honestly thought for a moment that Nixon might be directly involved with the plot. He's just window dressing, though.) And some of the musical references, taken from the comic, are a little too spot on. (It's a bit like Forrest Gump without Robert Zemeckis' sense of humor)

And in a movie like this where all the details are so meticulous and so thought out, (Warner Brothers is probably counting on DVD sales to make bank.) when some details don't work, they really don't work. Casting thirty-seven year old Carla Gugino as sixty-seven year old Sally Jupiter doesn't work when you look at her bad makeup job. And Malin Akerman as Sally's daughter, Laurie, really doesn't pull off the character. (Off the top of my head, I'dve gone with Juliette Lewis, maybe?) While I'm here, the sex scene between Laurie and Dan, the Nite Owl gets my vote as Second Most Unerotic Love Scene in Movie History, The First One, of Course, Being That Scene In the Second Matrix Movie.

And the violence. I suppose you could argue that the over-the-top fight scene between Laurie, Dan, and the knot-tops was meant to emphasize the hypocrisy of a society condemning a vigilante like Rorschach while endorsing 'nicer' heroes like Silk Spectre and Nite Owl, who are equally as brutal. But I suspect it's done more out of Zack Snyder's love of meticulous gore and graphic brutality, like his earlier '300'. It's just a turn-on for him.

Overall, it's ok, just not the masterpiece it wants to be. (And not the high watermark comic fans want to validate themselves.) Like Peter Jackson's 'Lord of the Rings' movies, it shoehorns a broad, complex story into a limited time frame. It may have been better as a two-parter, but that's all academic. The only way I'd personally get bent out of shape would be if every single copy of the comic disappeared in a puff of paper dust the day the movie opened.

Don't Like...

2009-02-22T10:44:00.000-08:00

Apocalypse Nerd (C-) It's Peter Bagge's six issue 'post-Armageddon' tale about what would happen if a computer nerd and his jock best friend had to fend for themselves in the face of nuclear anarchy. That whole 'last man on earth' fantasy is a pretty standard trope in science fiction, and is never more prevalent in times of socio-economic crisis. (During the '80s, I recall a hell of a lot of 'post-apocalypse' fiction coming out in movies and T.V. From 'Mad Max' to 'Threads', it was a sub-genre with a lot of legs to it.)

The problem is, Peter Bagge as a storyteller just doesn't know how to end a story. He had the same problem in his popular series, 'Hate' about the life and loves of Buddy Bradley, the slacker-est slacker in the Pacific Northwest. (That series ended on a lame 'in-joke'.) 'Hate' ended because Buddy had reached a compromise with his life, and the most interesting part of his life was over, and thusly, there were no more tales to tell. (Interesting aside: Version 2.0 of Love and Rockets operates on the premise that the Hernandez' brothers characters are natural celebrities, and takes for granted that there's an audience for the most boring details of their lives.)

Dollhouse (tentative C) Put it this way: if Joss Whedon's name wasn't on it, I'd have given it a pass. Unlike 'Firefly', the premise is kind of convoluted, and let's face it, Eliza Deshku is fine eye-candy, but kind of limited as an actress for this type of thing.

So the premise is thus: A company develops a technology where they can 'wipe' the memories and personalities of young, attractive people and implant different personalities and skills in them for a price. Naturally, the assumption is that there are enough rich people out there who are in the position to hire this service-who's default service is 'escort who genuinely loves you'. In watching the first two episodes of this series, a whole load of 'But-but...there's no explosions in space!' type of questions arise.

First off, given the amount of cost is setting up and maintaining this type of operation, the costs to any clients would be astronomical. To the point where your average rich guy would figure it would be less money and hassle to fly to Vegas and get a couple of high-end escorts who were Penthouse Pets, instead. (Or hiring an actual, experienced hostage negotiator or back-up singer...) Any remaining richie riches wanting to use this service wouldn't provide enough of an income to support this type of company, unless the company's premise was just a front for a broader scheme that the viewer isn't aware of. (Which I presume is a sub-plot of the series.) It's like trying to invent a battery-powered battery installer.

Secondly, the dramatic arc of the series involves Eliza's character, 'Echo' various personalities starting to bleed into each other, creating the show's major conflict. In practical terms, this means the organization is at a terrible legal, financial, and practical liability. (Another subplot involves an earlier blank slate's personalities blending into a murdering psychopath and escaping.) As a viewer, this means that in order to maintain an interest in the show, you have to identify with the main character. Since there's no 'there, there' in this case, your interest is going to be limited. About as limited as Eliza Deshku's acting abilities. (Put it this way: How do you get the batteries into the above-mentioned battery installer?)

I'll give it a few more episodes, but unlike Firefly, I won't be too bummed when it gets canceled.

F.A.Q.s about the 44th president of the U.S.A.

2009-01-20T12:46:00.000-08:00

1. No, he is not going to start a 'race war' once he takes office.

2. No, he is not also 'The King of Africa'.

3. Yes, as a matter of fact, it is a 'good thing' that a man in probably the most powerful political office in the world is not someone I would want to 'have a beer with'. I'd like to imagine he has better things to do than listen to me rant about comic books...

4. Yes, Rush Limbaugh's career is pretty much over at this point. He's one Vicodin overdose from a Tom Metzger tirade on his radio show.

5. Yes, it's the same with Ann Coulter. Alien Freak Porn is her only viable career option at this point.

6. No, white people, you will not have to go 'pick cotton in the fields' to make up for two hundred years of oppression. See point #1.

7. No, sorry. Racism is not officially 'over'. It will be officially over when America elects an openly gay president and the only compliant they have with him is, "So he picked that tie to go with that shirt for his inauguration?"

8. No, he is not backed by the Seven Jew Bankers Who Live In A Vault Eight Miles Below The Surface Of The Earth. Honestly, where do you come up with this?

9. No, his cabinet possibly appointing a 'Car Tsar' does not mean you'll have to exchange your SUV for a Trabant.

10. What does this mean for the Right in America? Glad you asked. Here's a breakdown of what's in store for 'em...

A) Karl Rove gets his old job back of sneaking into farmers' henhouses and sucking the yolk out of chicken eggs.
B) Bill O'Reiley manages to keep his composure for about a month, then while denouncing the administration's economic recovery plan on his show, bursts into a Tourette's-like tirade consisting of racial epithets until his manager kills the transmission. An attempt at an apology digs O'Reiley even deeper when, in his attempt to claim he was 'misquoted', proclaims that he when he said, "All niggers are faggots!", he really meant to say, "All faggots are niggers!". He is then ironically lynched immediately after the press conference.
C) Lt. Ellen Ripley shows up and blasts Ann Coulter out of the God-damned airlock, yet again.
D) Having failed Satan in his end of the deal that he made, Dick Cheney is unceremoniously sucked back to Hell.
E) Former President George Whatsisname makes history in becoming the first former president who conducts speaking engagements to have to pay people to hear him talk. Bush declares personal bankruptcy after only three stops on his infamous "My Bad" tour.

11.Yes, this will create a conundrum for political cartoonists, on account of the free ride that they've had for the past eight years.

12. Yes, the comparison to Lincoln is quite apt, considering that they both entered into a time when the economy was in the crapper, the states were divided, and the previous administration left this mess for them to clean up. If he breaks even, he'll be doing alright. Bonus: Michelle is no Mary Todd...

13. Yes, our prime minister, Stephen Harper, is, in fact, a dick.

Year in Review

2009-01-12T11:49:00.000-08:00

Best T.V. series- The Wire. Yes, I realize this outs me as being whiter than mayo on Wonder Bread, but screw it. All that raving about it from whiteys from 'Salon' to 'The New York Times' actually is merited. Yes, it is the rare t.v. event that you can describe as being like a novel. (I don't want to get too pretentious, but comparisons to Les Miserable are not unwarranted in this case...) In fact, as I go through the rest of the series- I'm on season two now- I'll be commenting on it in the new year.

Mad Men was pretty good, too, though having Don Draper take an extended vacation through Los Angles put his character arc in a holding pattern that really didn't need to be there, I think. Also, there's talk that series creator Matthew Weiner might not be coming back next season, which, if true, doesn't bode well for the rest of the series...

Finally, I've jumped with both feet aboard the 'revamped' Battlestar Galactica franchise, with the Christmas bonus of seasons one and two coming my way. I'll be commenting on that in the new year as well.

Best comics- Acme Comics and Stories, by Chris Ware. Ware can do no wrong, as far as I'm concerned. I've noticed a huge Chris Ware backlash of recent, however. While he's done more to advance the vocabulary of the comics medium this side of Jack Kirby, I imagine the people who don't like his work are put off not only by the sheer effort into reading his work-seriously, you need a magnifying glass-but the overall bleak tone of his stories.

Best Movie- Wall-E. 'nuff said.

Well, 'Dark Knight' was okay, but 'Iron Man' beat it out for sheer comic book fun. Robert Downey Jr. has Christian Bale beat in the 'layabout rich kid' department, besides. (Yes, smarty-pants, I saw some 'real' movies, as well.)

Best video game- Grand Theft Auto IV. Duh. Honorable mentions: Fallout 3, LittleBig Planet (which ate up all my free time at my brother's place during the holidays.)

Guiltiest pleasure: Loveline with Dr. Drew and Stryker- It's a 'breeder' version of Dan Savage's advice column, in that there's no pretext of helping people out with, er, intimate issues, and anyone who calls up is going to get it, both barrels. Their advice seems to consist of: "Seek Professional medical attention", "Stop sleeping with that person you are sleeping with." and, "Don't worry about it. Yes, it's fucked up, but you're not hurting yourself or others so really, don't worry about it." (As a pointless aside, they had on Tom Morello, the guitarist for Rage Against the Machine, who encapsulated in a nutshell why politics in America are so fucked. In a nutshell: our man briefly worked as an aide to a senator, fielding calls from his constituents. One voter phoned the office, and wanted to know what the congressman was going to do about 'all them Messkins and Nigras' moving into her community. Morello, understandably, told her to go fuck herself and hung up. The next day, the congressman raked him over the coals for 'alienating a voter'. So Morello quit.)

New Gem in the Outhouse Dept: Virus comics, by a chap from Toronto improbably named Winston Roundtree. Unlike 99.9% of web cartoonists, he can actually draw, (his work has an Evan Dorkin quality to it) and he has a genuine point of view. Enjoy it while you can, for like all cartoonists with actual talent like Tim Krider or Tristan Farnon who foolishly put their work up on the Internet, he will eventually come to his senses and go on to do something that pays better and has more dignity attached to it. Like picking up spit from the floor of a sleazy bar with his bare hands, or biting the heads off chickens in a sideshow. For example.

Playing Catch-up...

2009-01-05T12:25:00.000-08:00

Death Race-2008-(D-) Well, it was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, who's essentially Uwe Boll with more money. I actually sympathize with the producers who have to work with this guy. For instance:

Paul Anderson: So let's put a big-ass eighteen-wheeler in the competition, blowing away all the other drivers, yeah?

Producer: But Paul, that makes no sense? If we have a story where a bunch of convicts are racing around a track in souped up cars trying to blast each other away, on pay-per-view... why, oh, why would the warden drop this aforementioned 'death truck' in the middle of the race, blatantly killing off all the participants? Wouldn't that be like having one team on a football field suddenly stop playing defense and start reading the newspapers that they just pulled out from under their jerseys? I don't think paying customers would appreciate such a blatant fix in the show they're watching?

P.A. Fine, you don't like it? Fire me, pay me out, and good luck recouping your money after I walk off this turd half-way through production and you go further in the hole getting this project back on track.

Pro: (sighs) Oh...kay. An eighteen wheeler, it is...

P.A. I loves my job!

Venture Brothers -Season 3 (C)

To be honest, this season's been the weakest one yet. I realize the creators Jackson Publick and Doc. Hammer felt the need to catch up on some characters' back stories, but to be honest...the audience didn't. I've noticed that the series tends to reference 'Star Wars' a lot, and I think it's picked up some of the Star Wars franchise's bad habits. Like giving us information that we didn't really need to know. We don't know how Master Billy Quizboy lost his hand and eye and we don't care to know. We don't care about Rusty's dad's inner life, or the fact Cato may have killed Jonas Sr., or yadda yadda ya. As a result, this season's been a bunch of filler episodes that don't go anywhere, and worse yet, don't let us see the characters we want to see.

Entourage- (C+) It's 'Sex and the City' for men. Well, unlike 'Sex', since it's about the trials and tribulations of an A-list actor and his friends/servants, there's an undercurrent of insecurity running through the series. Which gives it more depth than 'Sex', if just for that. Also, Jeremy Piven as the young actor's agent is a hoot and a half.

Generation Kill- (B) Even though this mini-series was produced by David Simon (of 'The Wire') and based on the award-winning book of the same name by Evan Wright, this series kinda got sunk in the ratings. I suspect the reason for that is that Americans tend to view the Iraq war with the same level of discomfort that they view a relative who's a drug-addled prostitute. Also, like the Wire, Simon brings the most clear-eyed, unsentimental view that he can to a soldier's life in the field. And by clear-eyed, I mean cynical. We see poor decisions from officers, lack of support, incompetent officers not being punished, good officers being investigated...well, it goes on. For what it's worth, the Forward Recon marines know full well what they've gotten themselves into, and it wasn't ideals like patriotism and payback for 9/11 that put them in Iraq.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen- The Black Dossier by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neil (C+) Like most beardos, I'm of the opinion that the last substantial piece Moore did in comics was 'From Hell', and all his work since, even his 'LoEG' stuff is kinda like a bottle of pop with the lid off. It's still pretty good, but the fizz is off, as they say. Anyways, what's interesting here is that Trey Parker, of all people, beat Moore to the punch in the exploration of the theme of how the world of our imagination is as real as the meatspace we currently inhabit. ( I'm referring to the three-parter 'Imaginationland' episodes in this season of South Park, don'tyaknow.)

What's odd in both cases how Moore and Parker, in making references to popular characters in our collective imagination, they go for the broadest, most easily digestible characters in pop culture. I can understand why 'South Park' would make references to say, 'The Cavity Creeps' from an old Crest gel commercial, for instance. But it would've been kinda nice to have Moore make a passing reference to maybe, Atticus Finch from 'To Kill a Mockingbird' or Holden Caulfield from 'Catcher in the Rye'. Heck, even Steerpike from 'Gormenghast' would've been a nice touch. The problem with keeping your references to pulp fiction characters from the turn of last century is that you're giving a new life to characters who outlived their relevance decades ago, past the point to where even the people who created them stopped giving a crap about them. More, well, 'literary' characters in the story would've made the ending monologue have that much more resonance.I did like the appearance of 'Chitty chitty Bang-Bang' in Q's labs, though. (Geddit? Ian Fleming created both of 'em...)

And while I'm here... South Park-season 12 (B-) After a decade, Parker and Stone have finally figured out that pushing their Libertarian agenda doesn't make for good entertainment, while exploring the world beyond the four main characters does. In particular, the last two episodes were my favorite, if only because they highlight what an old fogey I am becoming. I'm talking, of course, about the show's commentary on 'High School Musical' and the Goth-lite 'True Blood/ Twilight' fandom. The former's appeal, as far as I can tell, is that tweenagers love watching asexual, scrubbed teenagers sing and dance about being popular, and the latter's appeal, as far as I can tell, is that vampire teenagers are cool and sexy and melodramatic as long as they aren't, you know, having sex or drinking blood. The final episode depicts how old-school Goth kids predictably react to this Goth-lite epidemic. With sneering, passive contempt, of course. Then with Butter's help, they burn down the local Hot Topic, which as we all know, is one of the primary offenders of repackaging the discontent of youth, and then selling it back to them at a hefty mark-up.

Mad Men, Ep. 13. "Meditations in an Emergency"

2008-12-07T09:49:00.000-08:00

With the Cuban Missile Crisis looming in the background, Sterling-Cooper's merger looms in the foreground. Betty learns she's pregnant, Don comes back home to an ambivalent Betty and a failed power grab by Duck.

-We'll be seeing a lot more of Father Gill next season, I think. I like how the writers have made him a staunch hard-liner in terms of addressing his parish, without making him out to be a hypocrite (He doesn't come onto Peggy) or an asshole. He's a rare character in

televison, the idealist who pushes his values as far as he can in the real world without coming across as naive or cruel. Any conflict that he's involved with in season 3 will examine the point at which Gill has to re-evaluate his effectiveness as a priest.

-I'm torn between Betty's dalliance with the random guy in the bar. Half of me says, "You go, girl!" and the other half is disappointed. (but not surprised.) She can't take a moral high ground against Don's cheating anymore, and with the upcoming pregnancy, she won't be inclined to stray, for at least a long while.

-The showdown between Duck and Don during the merger is like watching the coyote try to catch the road runner. Duck was so sure he could put Don on a short leash, the waves of humiliation he felt after learning Don 'Doesn't have a contract' glowed red off him. Looks like there's a new replacement for 'Office Drunk' with the abscence of Freddy Rumsen...

-"This doesn't affect the merger, does it?" quips Roger after Duck's humiliation. Oh, Roger! Always with the one-liners...

Part of the pleasure of watching "Mad Men" for me is seeing how the story unfolds on a tightrope. As I've said before, we've got likeable characters doing unlikeable things, which makes it hard to really empathise with most of them. Glimpses into Duck's home life and the incredible self-loathing he has, even has me sympathising for him a bit. (He's the closest thing, besides Jimmy Barrett, to a villian on the show.)

You, along with the main characters, can't really explain why the main characters behave the way they do, it just 'feels right'. So when Betty screws the stranger at the bar, it makes sense. When Duck abandons his beloved dog on Madison Avenue, it feels like the type of self-punishing behavior a guy like Duck would engage in. When Peggy, smiling, twists the knife on Pete informing him of their kid, it feels right. (Peggy knows more than Pete how their raising a kid together would be a really bad idea. Also, she's ruthless enough to enjoy letting him know about that little fact.)

So when the show goes through it's missteps- like the 'real Don Draper's wife' bit, for example, it's disapponting. My concern is that when viewers stop watching "Mad Men", it'll turn into a soap opera in order to regain viewers, and lose the spark it had in becoming one of the most compelling shows on T.V. right now.

GEORGE W. BUSH WINS THIRD TERM AS PRESIDENT IN SURPRISE UPSET

2008-11-06T23:53:00.000-08:00

(AP) The 2008 presidential election ended in a surprise sweep with incumbent president George W. Bush being re-elected in an unprecedented landslide. With the Bush-Cheney ticket written in electronic voting booths by an overwhelming 98% of the American population, as well as the American citizenry voting near-unanimously to repeal the fifteenth amendment- which forbids a standing U.S. President to serve more than two terms in office-the final count came as a surprise to a populace subjected to a long, arduous process previously dominated by Republican candidate and war hero John McCain, and that Negro fellow for the Democrats.

Flanked by several members of the First Brigade of the Third Infantry, President-Elect Bush expressed his surprise and delight in the eleventh-hour decision by the American public.

"Well, now...", he chuckled to a select group of reporters from Fox news. "This is an unexpected but welcome surprise. I had no idea that the American people's faith in me as their president was so deep and abiding that they would not only vote Republican, but with one voice, demand that I and Mr. Cheney be the instrument through which America guides the world for a third, unprecedented term of office. After much deliberation, and prayer, both Mr. Cheney and I humbly accept. Thank you and God bless!"

This moving speech was only slightly marred by the unwelcome appearance of some unwashed socialist leftist types yelling incoherently about 'rigged booths' and 'scandal', but they were quickly dispatched by the police with the aid of small-arms fire, drowned out by the subsequent fireworks display and Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A."

Reactions from the other candidates were mixed. Republican hopeful John McCain refused to comment, leaving his party headquarters in his SUV in what appeared to be, "a snit", reported Republican campaign workers. Vice-President nominee Sarah Palin appeared confused for a moment, asking everyone in earshot, "So, does this mean I'm President now? Hm?" before being ushered on a car back to a plane to Alaska, her home state.

The colored Democrat candidate evidently was so enraged that he stomped his feet and raised his voice, prompting several Homeland Security officers to usher him and his staff and family to Guantanamo Bay for not only their own protection, but to ensure America's safety and security in the transitional process ahead.

While this historic and unprecedented event raises several questions about the electoral process, most of these questions are ultimately of no importance or consequence to the American public, and as of this time, it is strongly suggested that every American refrain from pursuing any alternate lines of inquiry.

In an unrelated note, the newly-created Ministry of Plenty proudly announced that the national chocolate ration will be increased to twenty grammes per week.

Ep. 11 "The Jet Set"

2008-10-20T00:04:00.000-07:00

While Pete sorta works in L.A., Don gets caught up by some 'Beautiful People'. Peggy's attempt to connect with Kurt brings up an awkward revelation. Duck attempts to grab the reins at Sterling Cooper.

As I mentioned last time, Mad Men has episodes that are mostly set-up, and episodes that are mostly pay-off. This'un's a 'pay-off' episode, with Kurt's revelation, Duck's revealing his true intentions at Sterling-Cooper, and Don's final line.

-When is Pete not an oaf? Sitting in his suit at the hotel pool, (and lamely hitting on girls in bikinis) and bullying the hotel bartender. He seemed pretty excited over the MIRV presentations at the Kubrick-influenced meeting room. Contrast that with Don's obvious unease.

-Don's encounter with the 'jet set'. Your first thought is that these people are way too friendly, maybe they're con-artists? The thing is, Don's too self-assured to come across as a potential mark, and while it's obvious Don has money, he doesn't have enough to make a long-con worth while. So I suppose these people are what they appear to be. That is, self-involved new-rich types who live a life of rootless privilege. It's this rootless aspect which appeals to Don, which is why he impulsively jumps into Joy's convertible to Palm Springs.

-However, even a life of rootless privilege has its costs, which is evident to Don upon the arrival of a member of the jet set hauling his kids around. (It's no coincidence they resemble Don and Betty's kids.) It's that incident, coupled with Don's passing out from heatstroke and his anxiety at the MIRV demonstration - and perhaps the glimpse of the Betty doppleganger at the episode's beginning? which makes Don place a phone call and give us the jaw-dropper of the season this far:

"Hello, this is Dick Whitman. I'd love to see you soon."

-Kurt's 'coming out' is right up there with Adam's suicide and Peggy's pregnancy as one of Mad Men's false notes. (Though Sal's reaction is priceless...) Looks like Ken, Pete and Harry are gonna be doin' some queer-stompin' in the halls of Sterling-Cooper pretty soon. Yee-haw! Seriously, though, Kurt has nothing to gain from coming out of the closet, and in all likelihood, will get booted from S.C. for being a 'pervert'. ( You can imagine a red-faced, furious Bert Cooper firing Kurt: "This company has a reputation to uphold, mister- or should I say, missy!! Why can't you be a normal man like that Salvatore in the art department?" ) The only reason I can see for it is so's Kurt can be a dramatic counterpoint to the repressed Sal in season 3.

-Duck looks to be the series' 'bad guy', with his motivations for trying to get his former employers to buy out Sterling-Cooper. (It's more to spite Don and Roger than to prove his business acumen.) The results are somewhat anticlimactic, however. Roger and Bert seem to warm to the idea right away, which makes Duck's fall off the wagon over his betrayal somewhat pointless.

Episode 10, "The Inheritance"

2008-10-12T08:15:00.000-07:00

Betty visits her ailing father and confronts both Don and Glen, that creepy neighbour kid. Betty also makes a tentative connection with an unusual contact. Paul's girlfriend asks for a bigger commitment from him. Pete confronts his family about legacies.

-"Madmen" seems to be divided into episodes that mostly set up, and episodes that mostly pay off. (Episode 13 of last season being a 'pay-off' episode, for example.) This episode's a set-up one, with the impending trip to L.A., Pete's intent to adopt, and Paul taking a 'Freedom Train' to Birmingham with his girlfriend.

-It's Betty's story here, with her realization that for all intents and purposes, she's now an orphan. It's a tribute to the nuanced writing on this show that while Betty toys with Don and Glen, she never loses our sympathy. She's going to let Don back home, eventually. It's just a question of when. (And when she kicked Don out again, weren't you thinkin' 'You go, girl!')

-We haven't seen the last of Glen Bishop, the creepy kid of divorcee' Helen. I figured she'd be back this season. She was too prominent a character in season 1 to be pitched on the discard pile. And yes, Betty putting him in one of Don's t-shirts and combing his hair in Don's 70-30 split was intentional...

-"He has no people! You can't trust someone like that!" exclaims Betty's dad, before he mistakes Betty for his late wife in the wrongest way possible. While that statement sums up Don in a nutshell, I bet Betty lets Don back home after her father's funeral.

-Pete's Creepy Family makes an appearance, and I suspect Pete and Trudy will adopt a child, more out of Pete's need to spite than out of any desire to have a real family.

-Harry's the most morally grounded character on the show. He feels genuine guilt over his drunken office fling with secretary Hildy from last season, which Hildy smooths over during the baby shower. Remember his bit of slapstick over opening Ken Cosgrove's pay stub?

-This episode's best moment? "Well, Happy birthday!", exclaims Bert Cooper as he pops his head into the baby shower.

-Paul is rapidly becoming unlikable to me personally. His treatment of his girlfriend makes me hope she dumps him in Birmingham. ("From a Marxist standpoint, the markets dictate a colorblind society. The consumer has no color," he smugly pontificates to the black passengers on the bus.) You just know when the rocks start flying, Paul'll be hightailing it back to New York, rationalizing all the way. ("Ultimately, I can effect more change in one day in my position at Sterling-Cooper than walking a hundred miles through Georgia!", he will say, than demand a double martini from the stewardess on his first class trip back home...)

Who Watches the...meh...

2008-09-30T09:33:00.000-07:00

"Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen it's true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout, "Save us." ...and I'll look down and whisper "No."
- Rorschach's opening monologue from the comic, 'Watchmen'

"If you approach comics as a poor relation to film, you are left with a movie that does not move, has no soundtrack and lacks the benefit of having a recognizable movie star in the lead role."
-Alan Moore, writer of the comic, 'Watchmen'

For my own part, I'm gonna see the movie version of 'Watchmen' when it comes out next March. (Presuming that Fox and Warner Brothers resolve their legal differences over the movie by then...) However, I don't expect it to be anything more than a 'not funny' version of The Incredibles. (or 'The Tick', or 'Venture Brothers' or 'Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog' or...) One indicator that a studio doesn't have a lot of faith in a movie like this is the casting of relative no-name actors. (Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan is the only actor on the roster I'm really familiar with. There's also Carla Gugino, from 'Spy Kids' and Malin Akerman, who's highest profile parts so far are as a hillbilly's over-sexed wife in "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" and the Farrelly brother's execrable remake of Neil Simon's "The Heartbreak Kid", where she plays Ben Stiller's shrewish bride. Not a good sign.)

As an unabashed comic nerd, you'd think, that on the surface, I'd want to see a movie based on an entertaining comic book. Wouldn't the fact that a mainstream medium was acknowledging my sophomoric interests by validating my previously sad-ham-with-failure-gravy of an existence? You'd think I'd want to see, say, Daniel Day-Lewis degrade himself by emoting lines like, "You'll pay for killing those orphans, Dr. Despair!" And ninety minutes of CGI explosions, giant metal robots, and lady pirate Amazon ninjas. With big, bouncy boobies?

Hold on.

To paraphrase Laurie Anderson, making a movie based on a comic is a little like dancing about architecture. That is, while in a comic the reader can go back to a previous page if they so wish, a movie can only go foreward in time, and has a limited space to tell its story. (Could, say, Chris Ware's comics be translated to film?) Like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the transfer of a specific medium-comics- to another specific medium- film- changes the nature of the thing being transfered. I'm getting a little pretentious here, so let me pull back a bit.

Film, in the commercial sense, is a medium that takes from other mediums and doesn't give back to them. Put it this way: If you've seen the 'Godfather' trilogy, you're not likely to seek out original author Mario Puzo's other works, like 'The Sicillian', for instance. And in the mainstream comics world, the X-men franchise hasn't seen an appreciable increase in sales owing to the recent movies. And why would they? If you are so inclined to seek out the X-men comics, you'll find yourself wandering into a narrative morass that only hours of reading on Wikipedia will enable you to unravel.

And in the case of Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, the level of reference is so convoluted in terms of a narrative, it demands you go back and read it again and again to discover more meaning in the comic. For instance, we notice early on that a random nutcase on the streets of New York is, in fact, the sociopathic vigilante called Rorschach. Little details like airships floating in the background, and the egg-like design of cars, as well as the cigarettes some characters smoke add to bigger details like Dr. Manhattan's influence on American society in this time, as well as the integration of Vietnam as the 51st state. Trying to shoehorn these details into a movie will make the movie's narrative clumsy and full of odd expositional dialogue.

I can only imagine Warner Brothers is hoping they'll cover the movie's costs with its theatrical release, and make money on DVD sales. (Director Zack Snyder talks about the cornucopia of extras that'll be on the DVD.) The whole experience is an attempt to wring as much money out of that particular sponge.

The line of thinking seems to be, "If Warner Brothers make a movie of 'Watchmen', movie-goers will be inspired to seek out the original graphic novel, and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons will get more exposure as artists, and this will inspire them to create more and better works in the comic genre."

No, it won't. For one thing, DC comics is owned by Warner Brothers, and Moore and Gibbons were treated rather shabbily by DC when they signed the deal to do 'Watchmen'. (One of the main points of their contract was that the rights would reverse to Moore and Gibbons once Watchmen went out of print for a few years. Well, twenty-two years later, we see how useful that clause was to Moore and Gibbons. It's like they're being punished for doing superlative work...) As a result, Alan Moore refuses to work for DC anymore. What's going to happen is that the movie comes out, thousands of internet nerds bitch and argue how disappointing it is, and maybe DC pushes a couple of thousand copies extra of Watchmen over the time period. Not that either Moore or Gibbons would materially benefit from any of it, mind you.

So in an odd way, this legal battle between Fox and Warner Brothers is a good thing. Consider this: The movie's been made, and everyone who's worked on it has been paid for their work, presumably. (The only downer is that people like Snyder and the producers won't see any extra money on it if it never gets released.) If it never sees the light of day, the beetle-browed denizens of the internet who are bitching about it, like,er, me, get their wish of never having a solid work degraded to another, more popular medium. The internet nerds who want to see it get to speculate endlessly about what kind of movie it could be, and argue with each other about who'd be a better casting decision in what particular role. Everybody wins.

Well, not Alan Moore. If he put his name on the movie, he'd be decried as a sell-out who abandoned his principles for a few dollars. And if the movie tanks, he'd be the one taking the blame. ("Alan Moore's seminal 'Watchmen' flops at the box office...") And if it makes bank, Warner Brothers is going to jump to the head of the parade float, taking all the credit. ('Zack Snyder's adaptation of the ground-breaking comic, 'Watchmen' creeps up on last year's 'The Dark Knight' in terms of ticket sales...")

Mad Men backlog...

2008-09-29T00:31:00.000-07:00

"The Gold Violin" Ep. 7

The episode's title refers to the title of the short story Ken Cosgrove lets Sal read after their shared mis-adventure (with Jane Siegel) into Bert Cooper's office to view the Rothko painting hung upon his wall. And there's a lot of 'gold violins' in this episode. (If a gold violin is an object of unattainable beauty which is, ultimately, useless.) And the hateful Jimmy Barrett drops the dime on Don and Mrs. Barrett's affair to Betty.

Firstly, we've got Jane Seigel, who is Ken's 'gold violin'. She effortlessly brushes his flirtations off the whole episode, without seeming rude or offended. I like how she sweet-talks the junior execs into sneaking into Cooper's office to look at his Rothko. She does it for the sheer perverse thrill of breaking a rule. Note how she's the first to leave- ("Mm. Interesting..." she says, disinterested.) Later, Joan confronts her on the little adventure, the claws come out, and Joan fires Jane. Without missing a beat, Jane goes to Roger Sterling to 'say goodbye', and plays Roger off against Joan. Looks like she's Roger's 'gold violin' too.

And Ken's Sal's 'gold violin'. While Ken connects with Sal over their appreciation of the Rothko and Sal's complement of Ken's writing, it's pretty evident Sal's developing a crush on Ken. (He keeps the lighter that Ken accidentally left.) I feel so sorry for Sal's wife, though. (And I'm glad the detail of whether Kitty was Sal's wife or girlfriend was cleared up...)

Even though Jimmy Barrett's the cuckold in Don and Bobbi's affair, I can't help but despise him through and through. I get the impression that his professional life feeds on the misery in his private life. His relationship with his wife is strictly business, the price of his success having to endure his wife sleeping around with their professional contacts. His humiliation feeds the latent hostility in his 'act', he gets more success, his wife/agent meets more contacts... He's in a loop. You can feel the glee in his voice when he tells off Don near the end of the episode.

One more 'Gold Violin'. Don's brand new Cadillac. ("You see that little sensor?" he boasts to Betty. "It dims the headlights automatically whenever another car's ahead.") It's a subconscious act of revenge on her part when she throws up in it after Barrett rats out Don to her on Don's infidelity...

I think Don bought the car not just for its status, ("Of course, you already walk about in elegance!" exclaims the Cadillac salesman to a dapper Don.) but to remove himself further from Dick Whitman. An early flashback in the showroom shows a younger Don as an unsuccessful used car salesman, having his 'Don Draper' persona busted by a woman from the real Don Draper's past.

"A Night to Remember" Ep. 8

Peggy's relationship with young Father Gil deepens, Don's attempt to ingratiate Sterling Cooper with Heineken's as a client backfires on the home front, and Joan's shot at a lateral promotion fizzles out.

At this point, anyone who hasn't been watching 'Madmen' from the beginning is shit out of luck. My advice: Thank God for the first season DVD. And, er, other sources... (There's a TORRENT of 'em out there, if you get my drift...)

-When I say Peggy and Father Gil's relationship deepens, I don't mean I think they'll start a romantic relationship. I'm hoping Peggy can find a true confidante. (If I were Peggy, I wouldn't trust Draper as far as I could throw him. Though he does come across as the perfect mentor for her at work.) I can't put my finger on it, but I'm sure Gil's compassion for Peggy is genuine, and not just a priest doing his 'Christian' duty. Maybe it's his Jesuit get-up.

-Betty's suspicions about Don's philandering come to a head after she feels humiliated. When Don explains to the Heineken rep he invited to dinner at his home how he 'tricked' Betty into buying Heineken beer for their little get-together, it's the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. Though the rep's wife probably left more of an impression on everyone else at the dinner.

-"Crab, Duck. Duck, Crab!" You know Roger loved giving that introduction to Duck and Crab, the Heineken rep.

-Here's the odd thing about the world of advertising: While Joan is good at reading t.v. scripts for Harry, she's not the right person for the job, as the clients notice her first, and not the work. However, Peggy's rise at Sterling-Cooper is in part to her mousy appearance. That is, clients see the work first, then her.

-It's seeing Jimmy Barrett's Utz potato chip ad on the television that's the final straw for Betty. Despite Don's cool demeanor, and Betty's inability to find any evidence of Don's cheating in his home office, she throws him out of the house. The final shot of this episode has Don at Sterling-Cooper at the company kitchen, getting a bottle of Heineken out of the fridge.

Mad Men Ep. 9 "Six Weeks Leave"

Betty spirals into depression and apathy over her and Don's split, which leads her to cut off a potential avenue for revenge against Don. Freddy Rumsen's bladder faux-pax turns into a promotion for Peggy. A drunken send-off for Freddy leads to Roger's surprising revelation.

Don Draper is a tragic hero in the classic sense. That is, while he does the right thing almost every step of the way-technically, it was Bobbie Barrett who seduced him- he still winds up making a mess of things. For example, Don's attempt to connect with Roger at the bar leads to Roger misinterpreting Don and leaving his wife for his secretary. And Don's attempt to save Freddy Rumsen's job only convinces Roger even more so that Freddy's a liability for Sterling-Cooper. And finally, Don's attempt to reconcile with Betty only antagonizes her worse. They'll reconcile eventually, maybe not this season, but given the Draper's social class, and how the divorced mom last season was looked down upon, Don and Betty will get back together, if only for 'the sake of the children'...

-It was a neat little touch how Betty engineered setting up her riding buddy Francine with the preppy guy who's been mooning over her this season. It removes the temptation from her, and it gives her moral leverage against Don, in her own mind.

-Marilyn Monroe's suicide sets the mood for this episode. Watching the women in the office grieving while the men make neutral comments reminded me of the schism between the sexes when Princess Diana died. Note the black elevator operator's comment on Marilyn's suicide: "Some people can be hidden in plain sight." It's Roger's lack of empathy towards Joan's grief that infuriates her. And, I suspect, starts the ball rolling for Roger to leave his wife.

-I was surprised at how sad I was when Sterling-Cooper cut Freddy loose. He's a buffoon like Pete Campbell, sure. But unlike Pete, he was genial and harmless. It was the junior executives mean comments about his losing control of his bladder that made me empathize with him when Don tore a strip off them for their cruelty. Given Don's past, there's an added layer of meaning when he snarls, "Just a man's name, right?"

-Though Salvatore's look when Freddy gives him a heaping glass of booze is priceless.

-To make matters worse, Freddy's loss is Peggy's gain. Remember, it was Freddy who pushed Peggy into a junior copywriter's slot at Sterling-Cooper. And let's face it, doesn't devout Catholic Peggy have enough guilt on her plate already? Don's solemn promotion of Peggy (and Peggy's immediate dressing-down of Pete) makes it look like there's going to be a Pete-Duck vs. Don-Peggy rivalry in the office. Which makes me think: Given Pete's complete contempt for 'sloppy drunks', how do you think he's going to react to Duck once Duck falls off the wagon again?

-While I liked seeing Don belt Jimmy Barrett in the mouth at the illicit gambling club, Jimmy's sudden appearance seemed a little too neat.

-Roger and Don go for a nightcap after seeing Freddy off. (And what a sad scene! "No, what am I going to do?" laments Freddy after Don's lame reassurances.) where Roger tries to crowbar open Don's defenses. He doesn't get too far- Don references his punching Barrett as "a real Archibald Whitman maneuver", which tells us more about Don than it does to Roger. It's Don's line about how 'life moves in only one direction- forward' that has tragic consequences for Roger and Don.

-The tragic consequences being, of course, Roger's wife confronting Don the next morning about Don's exhorting Roger to leave her for 'his secretary'. Given Joan's curt rejection of Roger's advances earlier, and Don's secretary Jane's tears, I have to assume that Roger, did in fact, help himself to a heaping slice of Jane after all.

"Maidenform"

2008-09-01T10:10:00.000-07:00

Madmen Season 2, Ep. 6- "Maidenform"

Don't know how I missed all the 'mirror' leitmotifs in this episode- Kudos to Noel Murray of the 'Onion A.V. club' for pointing 'em out. This episode has Don punishing himself -and Bobbie!- for his lying. Meanwhile, Peggy tries to get in the boy's club and starts to take Bobbie's advice from last episode to heart, and we get to look into the life of Duck Phillips...

So, first we have Don. When him and the family are at a country club Memorial Day bar-b-que, he stands up quite uncomfortably when the M.C. asks all the veterans to stand in recognition of 'all the brave men who won't be eating ribs today'. (What a great line!) So he goes running off to Bobbie hoping she'll help him forget who he is. Big mistake, as Bobbie keeps reminding him of the past when she starts talking about her son and daughter. He ties an excited Bobbie to the bed, then when she hints about his reputation as a 'ladies' man', he angrily gets dressed and leaves her there, much to her horror. The episode ends when Don's daughter watches him shave, then says, "I won't talk anymore." Don remembers his asking Bobbie to stop talking, then slumps onto the toilet in self-loathing. The camera pulls out to reveal his reflection in the bathroom mirror.

Peggy's education into the ad men business continues as she plots to become one of the boys. As Joan points out, 'I never got as far as you, so I wouldn't know what to tell you, dear.', when Peggy comes to her for advice. While she's writing the actual work, it's Paul Kinsey and Don who take the credit, much to her chagrin. Not that it matters, as the Maidenform execs decide that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. (Well, they decided that on the way to Sterling-Cooper, but went through the meeting out of obligation.) It's not a total loss, as the Maidenform guys generously treat the S.C. execs to a night on the town at a burlesque bar. Peggy shows up in a low-cut dress and ingratiates herself into the party. Much to Pete's disapproval. (or is that renewed interest?)

Finally, I got what I wanted last week, that is, a little more insight into the misery of Duck Phillip's world. His ex-wife is getting remarried, his kids don't have a lot of respect for him, and the only member of his family who's pleased to see him is his dog, Chauncey. After the debacle of the American Airlines pitch, and the inertia of the Maidenform one, Duck winds up doing a triple gainer somersault off the wagon. What drives the point home is the way he abandons Chauncey on Madison Ave after the dog watches him struggle with a bottle in one of the art guys' office.

-After spending the episode getting emasculated by his brother and Peggy, Pete picks up a model from the Maidenform tryouts and goesback to her place. Which she shares with her mother. Egad. Pete and the girl make out to a T.V. show waxing poetic about America's air superiority. When he heads back home, he smugly regards himself in the mirror. I so wanted his wife to bust him just then. (...'And is that perfume I smell on you, Peter Campbell?'...)

-No, Pete. As a matter of fact, Duck is right. Bringing a dog into the office is a stupid idea. You oaf. (I just had a thought. Do you think Freddy Rumsen is Peter in fifteen years? And is Duck what Don will become in five? Discuss.)

-Peggy's looking better and better as the season continues. Joan's right about her fashion sense, though. She started to display some style in the beginning, but went back to her schoolmarm look in the middle.

-speaking of Joan, she's looking a little broader in the beam these days too. Methinks her impending marriage is killing her desire to be a sex kitten. Least, that's what I'm hoping. I hope it's not actress Christina Hendricks puttin' on the pounds...

-Man, Betty looks good in that bathing suit! On the topic of female flesh on parade, -and there's a lot of it in this episode- How hard must it have been to cast women now who have that specific body type that was so popular in the early sixties? (You know, the wide hips and slight pooch below the belly button?)

-Something about that model that Pete went home with struck me as 'off'. Her line about coming back from London struck me as a lie, considering that she lives with her mom. Also, she seemed to be trying too hard to be more sexy than she is. Compare her with Bobbie, Betty, and Joan, who come across as effortlessly sexy.

-Don's treatment of Bobbie is going to bite him in the ass, big-time. Either she's going to make his life a living hell in the months to come, or her husband is. And from what I saw of next week's previews, it could be both.

-Dig that old Spanish-American war vet in the corner, precariously tottering up on his crutches!

-That opening song is The Decemberist's 'The Infanta', by the way.

Robots and Bong hits

2008-08-27T05:02:00.000-07:00

Wall-E (A) It's taken as an article of faith that large corporations care only about maximizing profits at the expense of everything else. It's kinda true-note the recent troubles in the banking community, for example. But it's not actually true. Starbucks, for instance, is frickin' everywhere, but they make good coffee. And Walt Disney cranks out a lot of product for kids that seems designed to insult them-as the trailers before Wall-E indicated-but they do have the smarts to leave Pixar alone to do their thing.

Which is kind of ironic, considering the subtext in Pixar's Wall-E is the idea that large corporations don't always have the consumer's best interests as their primary concern. The storyline being that a Wal-Mart-like mega-company called 'Buy-N-Large' has assumed control of the whole world, made it too cluttered to live in, and built giant spaceships for the population to live on while robots tidy up back home. The problem being that, after 800 years, the planet is apparently still too dirty for the humans to return to, and also, after 800 years of having their every need catered to by robots, humans have become unmotivated slugs who move around on recliners whilst sipping pizza from a cup.

This is all just a backdrop for the main story, which is about two different robots who meet and fall in love. And Pixar pulls it off beautifully. Since the main characters don't speak, in a conventional sense, the story has to unfold through visuals, which is what animation as a genre is best at. (There's an extended scene where Wall-E and EVE cavort around the outside of the giant spaceship like Astaire and Rogers.) Notice how, through Wall-E's actions, and how he reacts to the world around him, we learn all we need to know about him in the first fifteen minutes of the film. Notice how EVE acts, and how she reacts to Wall-E and his world, and how we've got two different personalities who meet and hit it off.

Now consider that there's virtually no dialogue between them for the whole movie. I understand sound designer Ben Burtt was given dialogue by the screenwriters which he 'translated' into robot-speak for the movie. The performances of all the robots in the film, in fact, are wonderfully nuanced. Notice how the little scrubbing robot spends his time chasing Wall-E down with an air of growing frustration. When he catches up with Wall-e, he scrubs away at him with an especial glee.

The only quibble I have is the use of live-action actors in certain bits, which tends to throw one out of the movie. I suppose you could say it reinforces the difference between the humans when they left Earth, and the slug-like creatures they've grown into, but it's not that necessary. (There's a neat little visual gag in the captain's cabin showing the previous captains of the ship, each more obese then their predecessor...)

Getting back to my earlier statement about mega companies, I notice a lot of people on the 'net seem to be trying to make Wall-E out to be 'Idiotcrasy Jr.' Which really isn't the case, here, folks. The underlying message in the subtext isn't, "If you place your faith in a soulless consumer culture, you'll be a fatty Mcfatterson." but, 'If you want a better life, the amount of effort you put into it will pay off in ways that'll surprise you.' Which isn't a bad message for a kid's movie, actually...

(Oh, crap! While I'm here, I might want to point out the utter futility of trying to convince kids to see a Disney or Dreamworks animated film by putting their trailers before a Pixar film. It's like putting a McDonald's poster near the entrance to Thomas Keller's French Laundry restaurant. In my case, I tuned out after the first five seconds of the 'Madagascar 2' trailer, and by the time Pixar's short, 'Presto' came up, I couldn't tell you what the other trailers were for. Wait- I think they were for Disney's 'Bolt' which is what I guess the people who couldn't get on at Pixar but had too much self-respect to work at Dreamworks have to do and 'Beverly Hills Chihuahua', which is the entertainment equivalent of Child Abuse. Seriously, if you made a kid see that, the theater staff should call Child Services and have you arrested...)

Harold And Kumar Fulfill a Contractual Obligation (D-) Not much to say, really. The first movie worked because underneath all the pot humor, there was an undercurrent of anxiety about growing up non-white in America. The trouble was, once that point was made, there's not a whole lot else you could do with the characters. As a result, this movie doesn't have a lot going on besides dragging Harold and Kumar from gross-out gag to gross-out gag. There's a sub-plot about Kumar trying to get to his college girlfriend's wedding to stop it, but given the way the Kumar character behaves like a clueless, selfish dolt, it's hard to see why Harold's still friends with him, let alone why his ex-girlfriend would want to have anything to do with him. And trying to sell George Dubya as a goofily affable frat boy doesn't float with me. He's probably more like the petty, mean-spirited Rob Corddry Homeland Security character, in the context of this film. The return of Neil Patrick Harris-tripping on 'shrooms and riding a unicorn, no less- is the only reason this movie doesn't get an 'F' from me.

"The New Girl"

2008-08-24T23:37:00.000-07:00

Mad Men Season 2, Episode 5 "The New Girl"

Clever title, this. It refers to A) Bobbie Barrett starting to 'negotiate' her way into Don's pants; replacing Rachel. B) Peggy's more assertive character, and C) Don's new secretary-what a little yummy!

-Everyone seems to be giving Don that "I know what you did!" look this episode. Rachel-with her new husband, Tilden Katz (?!), Peggy, Betty, Joan, Jimmy, hell, even the cop at the station.

Though in the context of the episode, leaving things unsaid seems to be the best strategy all around. When Roger Cooper and Joan discuss Joan's marriage, they wind up sniping at each other, as do Pete and his wife regarding their pregnancy issue. To be honest, Pete's wife already has a kid to deal with.

-I might be reading too much into this, but doesn't Don's advice to Peggy during her stay in the hospital seem awfully close to what he told Adam in season one? Could Don be trying to make up for abandoning Adam by mentoring Peggy? That may not be the best decision for Don, considering the leverage he's giving Peggy over him.

-Bobbie's becoming a more interesting character as the series progresses, mainly because she's the one doing the chasing, as opposed to Don, this time around. It's odd seeing her reach out to Peggy, as this worldly show-biz type and this odd mousy copywriter live on different worlds.

There's two bits of humour that come out of left field in this episode- which is where the best gags come from. The first is Pete's, er, 'visual aids' in the doctor's office where he's giving his sperm sample- there's a copy of U.S. News and World Report mixed amongst the nudie mags. The second is Freddie Rumsen's cockblock of Ken Cosgrove and the new secretary. Just as Ken's moving in for the kill, Freddie comes out and zips his fly up and down arrhythmically. "Sounds like Mozart!", he enthuses. What the fuck, Freddie?

Speaking of the new girl, while Joan's leaving 'single girl' status, she's not so willing to give up her status at the office so eagerly, as her remonstrating the new girl so bluntly demonstrates. Again, maybe it's just me, but her wiggle seems more pronounced then ever this season. (Don't tell me the writers have actress Christina Hendricks donning the fat suit, now?)

Tropic Thunder

2008-08-20T12:52:00.000-07:00

Tropic Thunder (C+) A sort-of-clever, if not memorable piss-take by Ben Stiller on war movies and Hollywood. You know, there are probably primitive tribesmen in New Guinea who know that movie stars are insecure, that movie directors are pompous, and that movie producers are pricks. Which makes the satire in this film come across as kind of half-hearted. And half-way over the top is nowhere near over the top for a movie like this. So the only real pleasure you're going to get out of this film is in Tom Cruise's cameo as a fat, balding, sausage-fingered, foul-mouthed producer. The odd thing is, though, is that it's probably Cruise's best acting in, well, forever. The last time I saw Cruise trying to stretch himself as an actor (I haven't seen Magnolia.) was in Michael Mann's Collateral, and he didn't do too good a job then. You needed to see a blandly handsome man rotting from within in that role, and Cruise couldn't pull it off. (Maybe Pierce Brosnan or Russel Crowe, perhaps?) He was too fresh-faced and energetic to make me believe he was a world-weary hit man, and the dye-job he did on his hair just seemed like a bad dye-job.

The strange thing in this movie is that he's buried under a bald cap, fake nose and stubby fingers, and I've never seen him take off in a part like he does here. He's a close relative of one of Mike Myers' grotesque 'Austin Powers' characters, like Fat Bastard or Goldmember. I've got a sneaking suspicion that while Cruise the Scientologist is determined to show a sane, stable, and happy human to the rest of the world, it's a role like this that gives us Tom Cruise, actual person, warts and all. (His performance is like watching Cruise's actual persona squirt out like meat through a grinder...)

As for the rest of the film, eh... The rest of the characters are so one-dimensional, any satire that Stiller intended falls flat on its face. They're just the set up for a collection of one-liners. Case in point: Matthew McConaughey plays Stiller's agent, and in a climactic scene, Cruise's slimy producer tries to convince him to let his client die off in the jungle, and in return, Cruise will give him a G5 Gulfstream jet. As it turns out, McConaughey returns to the jungle to proudly announce to Stiller that he got him "Tivo in his house for the shoot!" The scene makes no sense, as there was nothing in his character previously to demonstrate any shred of conscious in him, so when McConaughey shows up in a long shot, at first you think it's the film director (played by Steve Coogan) who got blown up by an old land mine.

"Three Sundays"

2008-08-18T10:19:00.000-07:00

Season 2, Episode 4, "Three Sundays"

Three consecutive Sundays in "Madmen", and the underlying theme seems to be, "Getting stabbed in the back." Sterling-Cooper gets shafted by American Airlines when their contact gets fired, making all their hard work for nothing. Peggy's older sister- much older- resents her growing friendship with the young Jesuit priest, and stabs Peggy in the back during her Confession. Then you've got Don dragging his heels in disciplining his son. Naturally, Betty thinks he's making her out to be the bad guy to the kids. And finally, Roger starts the episode pushing for a traditional marriage for his daughter, then ending the show sweet-talking a call girl out to dinner. (Shafting both his wife and her next client!)

-If there's a broader theme for this episode, I'd guess it's about how being responsible and doing the right thing isn't going to be rewarded. As the young priest points out to Peggy's sister, Anita, in the confession box. Don's attempt to be a better husband and father seems like an uphill battle- Betty and him get into a shoving match. Then you have Sterling-Cooper's meticulous proposal for American Airlines thrown out because their contact got fired. Don's daughter seems to be getting a free ride, while his son's getting the wrath of Betty, which mirrors the sibling rivalry between Peggy and Anita.

-You wonder if Duck was taking a perverse glee in giving the bad news to Sterling-Cooper about Shel's firing. (I didn't notice the 'last supper' reference of the presentation team's staging 'til someone on the A.V. club's board pointed it out.) I'm sure putting Shel's name on the presentation folder didn't help matters much...

-The secretarial pool REALLY doesn't like Peggy, not only since she makes more money, but she gets to hit the buffet table before them.

-Don's daughter likes that Scotch. Oh, yes.

-I hope we see more of Colin Hanks' Jesuit priest this season. I hope he picked up on Peggy's sister's spiteful gesture in Confession for what it was. I'd like to think his giving her the Easter egg 'for the little one' in the final scene was a gesture of compassion, and not a 'You're so busted, Peggy!' Maybe it's both?...

-Whadda ya wanna bet that the reason Ken Cosgrove gets 300 a week as opposed to Pete's 75 is his unofficial job as the office pimp? He knows an awful lot about call girls...

-It's funny, but even though Betty's in the right about their son, it's Don we empathise with. I have to assume his story about his dad beating him was true, even though one's first assumption is it's yet another lie.

-You can't help but like Roger, even though he cheats on his wife for the same reason he enjoys working at Sterling-Cooper. "It's the thrill of the chase", he tells Don, trying to console Don over the loss of American Airlines. Though if you can afford to buy out a call girl, there's not much thrill there, really.

-Check out Pete's tennis outfit on that one Sunday! Come on, Pete! Sal's supposed to be the gay one!

-Don's silence when Betty asks him, "Would you be the man you are today if your dad didn't spank you?"

-I can't say I blame Anita for her 'confession'. She's married to a lout, her figure's gone, and she got stuck raising Peggy's kid. No doubt her family views her as the 'baby factory'.

-Betty was reading that F. Scott Fitzgerald book the horny riding patron referenced in the last episode.

-So far, Duck's the only character who's life we haven't had a look at. It's kind of odd, given the trademark of this series is to show off the many facets of the character's personalities. They seem to be setting him up as a foil for Don in the business, but I'm hoping there's much more to Duck then we're seeing. While Don views advertising as an art form, where the pitch to the client is the bait on the hook, Duck's point of view is that if one is going fishing, why not use a grenade in the pond to get the fish? (It's a clumsy metaphor, but I just woke up...)

While I'm here, I've heard some critisism that at the end of the day, 'MadMen' is just a soap opera with a higher budget. This is an understandable assessment, but wrong, and here's why.

On the surface, it's a story about a bunch of disparate characters in a specific time and place, and how they interact with each other, and how outside events affect them. Which, in broad terms, is how a soap opera works. However, in a soap opera, its story lines could be charitably described as melodramatic, 'And Then' plotting. For instance:

For one character's story arc in a season on a soap opera, the season starts with Sweet Polly Baker's cliffhanger pregnancy from last episode turning out to be a miscarriage. AND THEN, it turns out that the kindly, handsome young minister Dr. Anderson was really the father, not her rising young hotshot executive husband Dan. AND THEN her sleazy half-brother Nathan shows up 'for a few days' to crash on her couch and work on his 'business idea' which he tells everyone is to start a surf shop in their city of Missoula, Montana but he's really hiding from the Mob and his business involves getting runaway teenage girls to pose for nude photos for the Internet, AND THEN it turns out that Polly's baby wasn't born dead but a deranged nurse stole the kid to raise as her own, AND THEN... but you get the idea.

The point is, Polly's always going to have a likable, or sympathetic personality, and her latest crisis is going to be resolved before the season ends. Unless the actress playing Polly wants more money, or wants to expand her career by doing something less degrading, like appear in a national ad for hemmoroid commercials, in which case, the soap opera producers will kill her off in a melodramatic way.

In MadMen, what defines the show is the complexities of the characters. Betty Draper comes across as melancholy and sheltered, and now her character seems to be taking on darker aspects, with her increasing impatience to her husband and kids, with an increasing awareness of the power of her sexuality. Pete Campbell initially comes across as a glad-handing, unctous little weasel, until you get a glimpse of his home life and how emasculated he is by his family. And Don Draper is one of the most complex characters in T.V. fiction. He's a man with a strong sense of integrity, who takes pride in his work and his family. Until you find that his entire life is a lie. He lied to get to where he is in the world, his job involves lying, ultimately. And he's desperatly unhappy. What compounds this is that this is the life he chose for himself, and he can't see any way out of it. (What's coming up in this season is Don's attempt to make the best of the hand that he's been dealt, and finding that not only doing the 'right thing' offers no rewards, but winds up making a complicated life even more complicated.

That's why the few melodramatic touches in the show seem so out of place. Peggy's pregnancy and Don's half-brother's suicide, for example. I understand creator Matthew Weiner was concerned that the show might not get a second season, hence why those odd touches went in. Since it looks good to continue for at least a couple more seasons, I'm hoping the quality of the series won't be brought down by bits like those.

"The Benefactor"

2008-08-13T13:03:00.000-07:00

Since I've just started watching 'Generation Kill' as well, I'm just gonna go ahead and start a new topic, "T.V. Notes". I'll be commenting on it and Mad Men in that section, as well as any other T.V. related topics I can scrounge up.

Episode 3, season 2 "The Benefactor"

-This episode's full of uncomfortable moments, as the popular comedian hired to promote potato chips in a t.v. commercial cruelly insults the sponsor's wife. (She's pretty big.) Don is drafted to perform what is now known as 'Damage Control'. In other words, he has to get the comedian, the comedian's wife/manager, and the sponsors together so's the comedian can apologize for his behavior. The second story thread has Harry bucking for a higher star at Sterling-Cooper. (This starts when Harry opens Ken Cosgrove's paycheck 'by mistake' and discovers Ken makes a hundred dollars more than him. Meanwhile, Betty flirts with and then rejects the advances of another patron of her riding club.

-The scene with Betty and the young Lothario at her riding club make me think she's starting to extend her powers of seduction a little more than the season's premier, where she got the mechanic to install her car's belt for free.

-One of Mad Men's trademarks is how certain scenes bounce off each other in subtle ways. Note how the final scene of Don with Betty has an uneasy tone to it, compared with the scene of Harry cuddling up to his wife's pregnant stomach after he told her of his promotion. Don goaded Betty into helping him smooth things over with the chip people, and Harry's wife inadvertently goaded him into going for a raise.

-Dig how Roger gives Harry a mock benediction in promoting him to 'head of T.V.'. I bet it was an ad lib by actor John Slatterly, who has an awesome perverse sense of humour in his commentaries on the DVD.

-Peggy stands out in this episode in her one scene, since she's in the room where the 'crew' is watching a controversial episode of 'The Defenders', going on Harry's suggestion that their lipstick client may be willing to sponsor controversy to gain customers. They aren't, but the move impresses Roger Sterling enough to get Harry a promotion and a raise. Anyways, note how uncomfortable Peggy is while watching the show. It's about a teenager getting a 'rhymes-with-gagortion'. Oh, she can relate...

-and the awkward pleasantries between Sal and the lipstick rep. (who tried to seduce Sal last season. Cough.)

-What foreign movie was Don watching at the show's beginning? And why? It wasn't Hiroshima Mon Amour, was it?

-I love the near-silent scene at the beginning where Harry's trying to find a way to repair Ken's opened pay stub envelope.

-Don seems cartoonishly confident of his sex appeal this episode, as evidenced by his 'persuasion' of the comedian's wife to make her meal ticket apologize to the sponsors. Not a very sincere apology, either. We'll be seeing more of Jimmy and Bobbie. Is Don so disgusted of her (and himself) that he has to use dish soap to wash out his mouth when he gets home? Yes.

-Notice how Jimmy Barrett none-too-subtly bites his fist when the fat wife says that she's not sure she's 'big enough to accept' his apology. BTW, Bobbie Barrett is played by Melinda McGraw, who was Jim Gordon's wife in the Batman movies...

-Fred Rumsen drunkenly dozes off during the ad shoot, leading to crass comedian Jimmy Barrett to insult the client's fat wife, and his penance is a tart riposte from Ken. On the other hand, Don's secretary gets fired, simply because she didn't cover up enough for Don. It's a man's world, baby...

Da-na-na-na-na-na... Batman!

2008-08-06T11:19:00.000-07:00

The Dark Knight (A-)

Like Iron Man, Chris Nolan's movie works because it's being played straight, no ironic winks, no over the top designs, no melodramatic set designs. And no nipples on the costumes. That kinda helps. The story, well, it's Michael Mann's 'Heat' only Al Pacino's in a Kevlar suit, and he's really a Welshman with pneumonia. (Notice the 'Heat' homage by the cameo of William Fichter as a banker for the Mob...) Really, Bale's 'Batman' voice is so phelgmmy, I half expected Commissioner Gordon or Lucius Fox or Alfred to offer him a throat lozenge.

And in this case, what gives it the 'A', is Heath Ledger's Joker. Hell of a way to introduce your bad guy, what with that 'pencil trick'. Ledger's Joker is such a walking bag of decay, I almost expected a tooth to fall out of his mouth as some point. If Ledger does get an Oscar next year, it won't be just out of posthumous pity. When you watch this Joker, it's like watching a homeless guy without any pants taking a long shit along the sidewalk, just shuffling along with a trail of poo behind him like a snail. It's funny and creepy at the same time. Note the amount of nervous chuckles in a theater when he appears.

What gives it the 'minus' in my rating is Christian Bale. Oh, yeah. I went there. First off, the mock-Clint Eastwood voice he's using as Batman gives his part a more comic edge than either Nolan or Bale intended. (Couldn't have Nolan re-dubbed Bale's voice?) Also, Bale needs to take layabout playboy millionaire lessons from Robert Downey Jr.

The only question is, where is Nolan going to go for the inevitable third movie? The remaining villians in the Batman universe are so camp, (The Riddler, The Penguin, er, Catwoman...) the current franchise is in danger of losing its 'gritty, realistic' tag. Maybe establish the Penguin as a Dick Cheney-type businessman? I suspect they may bring Two-face back, though I don't envy the actor who has to follow Heath Ledger...

Mad Men: Season Two- "Flight 1"

2008-08-04T09:26:00.000-07:00

-Opens at a party in Paul Kinsey's fashionably unfashionable apartment in Montauk, New Jersey. Joan is disgusted by Paul's boho chic, his stealing a typewriter, and his black girlfriend. (Remember, they used to go out...) I'm kinda grossed out by his posing, as well. I wanna see more of Sal's relationship with his um, 'beard'...

-The big story is the crash of American Airline's flight to Los Angeles, and how it affects the working relationships in Sterling-Cooper. Turns out Pete Campbell's dad was on the flight, a fact the increasingly soulless Duck nudges Pete to use to Sterling-Cooper's advantage in getting American Airlines as a client. As disgusting a stunt it was, I'm reminded of how Pete's dad treated him when Pete asked for a loan for a New York apartment down payment in season one (And given his parent's finances, why Pete's dad turned him down), and so, in retrospect, in Pete's position, his exploiting his personal tragedy for Sterling Cooper's benefit is the most logical action that Pete can do...

-The scene where Pete's with his family has a creepy vibe to it. They're like zombies robotically reciting a script. This resonates with Pete's attempt to reach out to Don earlier. ("How does someone react to this?")

-Betty's behavior towards Don at the bridge party. I suspect she's channeling her aggression towards Don towards her bridge game. Note how hostile she is to the kids this season. I bet her hostility becomes more latent as this season progresses...

-We get to see the fate of Peggy and Pete's bastard child. He's being looked after by Peggy's sister. When Peggy tells her mother that she's capable of making her own decisions, her mom counters that, "The doctors and the State of New York didn't think so!". Note how in the final scene, when Peggy's mom hands Peggy her son to receive communion, that the kid starts crying and won't stop. Other churchgoers head out of the frame to receive their communion, leaving Peggy and her son alone...

- Chris Manley's work for season two is exceptional. He's captured that soft, unnatural lighting in the office that you'd see in 60's movies perfectly. The final scene with Peggy in the church has a dark visual counterpoint to the rest of the show.

-Don, for all his lying and cheating, is a man of deep integrity. It's hard to watch the scene where he cuts the Mohawk client loose. Don's assurances that it wasn't his decision don't give the client any comfort. Does Don turn down the Asian waitress as a form of self-punishment, or is he being corralled by Betty's callousness and Duck's heartlessness?

Notes on Madmen: Season One, part three...

2008-07-28T12:42:00.000-07:00

Ep. 11 "Indian Summer"

-Adam Whitman's suicide. It seems a bit too melodramatic, given that we don't know that much else about the character. It's a too easy way to get the character out of the series, isn't it? I'm starting to wonder if the real Don Draper's family is gonna start looking for him...

-The blunt way Peggy gets the 'weight-loss device' assigned to her to write copy for. She discovers it has other, er, benefits to it...

-"Red, you are the finest piece of ass I ever had, and I'm glad I got to roam those hills!" Roger's statement to Joan as she's doing his face is both bizarre and touching...

-Betty's 'distraction' while against the washing machine. (She's fantasizing about the pushy young air conditioner salesmen that Don chewed her out for letting into the house earlier.) The song playing on the soundtrack while she's lost in her um, reverie is "Agua de Beber" ("Water to Drink") by Astrud Gilberto.

-Bert Cooper's formal offer to Don to make him a partner. Bert offers to introduce Don to Ayn Rand. (I kinda hope we get to see her...)

-Pete gets a package meant for Don. (It's from Adam...)

Ep. 12 "Nixon vs. Kennedy"

-This one's a pivotal episode, in which we get Don Draper's 'origin story', if you will. In the transformation from Dick Whitman, Army private who wets himself when fired upon, to king of New York, Don Draper, he finds that trading up your identity has some immediate benefits, as the young woman who offers him a drink makes clear. The cost, leaving behind a younger brother who idolizes him, doesn't become evident until much later.

-I love how the theme of Draper's secret being unmasked is treated as anticlimactic. It's Campbell's fate that the stick he thought he had to hit Don with has absolutely no effect whatsoever on Bert Cooper. Don's panicking and running to Rachel to leave with her to Los Angeles comes to nothing. Did Don seriously think she was going to take him up on his offer? As I said earlier, a lesser series would drag Don's fear of being unmasked throughout the whole run. Once it's settled here, there's other avenues it can take which can surprise both the audience and the creators of the show...

Ep. 13 "The Wheel"

-"Nostalgia - it's delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, "nostalgia" literally means "the pain from an old wound." It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel. It let's us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved."

Don's using his own life to sell product, with emotionally devastating results. (He has a giddy fantasy of going with his family to her parent's place. The episode ends with Don all alone, his head in his hands.) It's a powerful scene.

-Another touching scene is Betty's meeting with the weird kid of Helen Bishop, the divorced neighbour. "Please tell me everything's going to be okay..."

-Peggy's casual cruelty towards the voice actress during the readings wins her the respect of Ken Cosgrove. (That whole scene was hard to watch...)

-Peggy's pregnancy and Adam's suicide were, for me, the only false notes of this season. They have kind of a soap-opera feel to them, and in a series like this, where subtlety and nuance run the show, even if they're going to have repercussions later on... Well, they come close to throwing me out of the show.

Season Two, ep. 1 "For those who think young" notes.

-I nearly shat a walrus when in the middle of Betty and Francine gleefully/horrified-ly discussing the fate of Betty's old roommate- she's a prostitute- I realized that Francine is in fact, Heartless Bitch from the last season of House! Betty's flirting with the mechanic to fix her car for two-thirds cheaper makes us think how excited her former roommate's profession has made her, especially after her failed tete-a-tete with Don in the New York Savoy, no less.

-Funniest scene in the show: the montage showing various cast members reacting to Jackie Kennedy's T.V. tour of the White House. Joan is enthralled, as is Salvatore. (Is he married now?) Don is-meh, and then we cut to Pete Campbell, eating his wife's Valentine chocolates whilst watching a kid's sci-fi program. Pete reminds me of Dave Foley, during his 'Kids in the Hall' phase.

-Is it just me, or is Duck Phillips turning out to be a douchenozzle? His confrontation with Don had a little more acrimony in in than I'd think necessary...

-the running theme of youth: Don and Peggy's angle to pitch to the airline people, the younger-than-they-look new writers, Pete watching T.V., the young, pretty First Lady on the T.V.

-Was Peggy being helpful to Don's new secretary, or was she just passing the bitch ball along in frustration? Note how Joan demands the other office girl call Peggy, "Miss Olson". Then Joan moves the new Xerox machine into Peggy's office, much to Peggy's consternation.

-Remember Don's annoyance over the V.W. ads from last season? With the younger ad men being interviewed-I'm sure those two prospects were boyfriends-, the younger men in the elevator making crude jokes and one not taking his hat off when a woman enters the elevator, and the doctor telling Don to watch his smokin' and drinkin' (Note how Don spitefully eats a big, fat, egg and sausage breakfast in the bar.) Don seems about to have a coronary over his advancing age.

Notes on Madmen: Season One, part two...

2008-07-27T09:45:00.000-07:00

Ep. 6 "Babylon"

-This episode opens with Don's accident of slipping down his stairs, and smacking his head on the floor. This brings up a remembrance of his past as a little boy when his younger half-brother was born. Whom he rejects.

-Betty talks about her desire for Don, both physical and spiritual.

-Roger's wife and daughter pop by the office to visit Roger, who's with Don and Joan. While Joan escorts Roger's daughter off to make a hair appointment, Roger expresses some concern over his daughter's lack of motivation. This concern continues as Roger, half-dressed in a hotel, expresses his feelings towards his daughter to his mistress, who turns out to be Joan.

-In trying out lipstick for a new client, Peggy discovers her knack for clever word smithing (Basket of Kisses) which leads her career down a different path.

-Hell of a lot of characters exchanging trivia in this episode. (Betty and Don, Don and Rachel, the junior ad execs.) I notice the characters also use etymology to define words and their roots. It's another leitmotif through the series, particularly coming to the fore at the series' end.

Ep. 7 "Red in the Face"

- The big issue in this episode is Roger's not-so-subtle flirting with Betty, much to Don's contempt. We're still in the era, mind you, where if you couldn't sweet-talk 'em into your bed, chasing them down was an acceptable alternative. Don's revenge is to make the unhealthy Roger eat a shit-load of oysters with his martini lunch and walk up twenty flights of stairs (Don paid off the elevator boy to shut down the service.) Roger barfs up his vodka and oysters in front of the client.

-More of Pete's emasculation continues as he tries to return a wedding gift. (It's a Chip-N-Dip, the name itself castrates Pete every time he says it.) After an awkward encounter with a former school chum, ("Hey, it's Humps the Camel Campbell!") Pete tells the sales girl at the return counter that the guy has the clap. He gets a BB gun in exchange, much to his wife's extreme displeasure. (He is such a child...)

Ep. 8 "Hobo Code"

-One of my favorite episodes in the series. Don's past is revealed in a flashback to when he was a young boy and a hobo came to visit. Though a bum, the man is thoughtful and well spoken,and makes an impression on young Dick. Particularly the monologue to Dick about just pulling up and moving on. After being shabbily treated by Dick's step-father, the hobo leaves a 'hobo mark' on his family farm that says, "A dishonest man lives here." The scene ends with present-day Don waking up his son and assuring him he will never lie to him.

-Peggy's success on writing copy for the lipstick company leads to some acrimony with Joan and especially Pete. (At an after-work celebration, Pete sulks while Peggy dances around. "I hate seeing you like this!", he complains. What, happy?)

-Don's break-up with Midge when he realizes she's in love with one of her beatnik/hippie friends. Though he offers her his five-thousand bonus as an incentive for her to run away to Paris with him, she turns him down. Don endorses the cheque to her anyways, then walks out of her life, at least for the rest of the season. (As he leaves, one of the beats warn him that the cops are outside, and 'he can't go out there, man!" "No." responds Don. "You can't." The police politely greet Don as he leaves Midge's apartment.

As an aside, I've noticed that some people out there in Internet land are complaining that the hipsters in this series are drawn in too-broad strokes, like casting the cartoon Maynard J. Krebs in a John Updike story. This is a misreading. What these people are, are not particularly committed to the Jack Kerouac-Henry Miller outsider-artist. They like the bohemian lifestyle, and the lack of responsibility that goes along with it, but none of them have any particular insight or creative talent, except for Midge. And she's as much a part of the commercial creative world as Don is, her cynical asides notwithstanding. (The lack of talent on display is evident in the performances at the coffee shop that Don gets dragged to by Midge...) Don crumbles one guy's typical complaints about Don being 'The Man' with Don pointing out that there is, in fact, no big system controlled by 'The Man' and no 'Man', at all. ("Aw, man! Why'd you have to bring me down like that?")

-Salvatore's encounter with the lipstick sales rep. I understand the actor Bryan Batt is gay himself, I'm not sure a straight actor could've pulled off such a subtle performance. Watch his face light up as he considers the other man's offer. I suspect Salvatore is so in the closet, he doesn't know he's gay himself...

Ep. 9 "Shoot"

-Betty goes through an interesting arc this episode. A rival ad firm is courting Don, and to sweeten the pot, they offer Betty a modeling job for Coca-Cola. Obviously, she's delighted to recapture her modeling days and Don reluctantly allows it. After Don sees the proofs, he turns down the ad firm's offer, so they fire Betty. The episode ends with the frustrated Betty shooting at the neighbor's doves to his horror. I love the insolent way her cigarette dangles from her lips as she takes aim at the birds.

-Betty's nostalgia for her modeling days, working for a guy named Gianni. She gleefully models some dresses of his for her friend, Francine.

-Betty's meeting with Dr. Wayne, the shrink."You're angry at your mother," She gets defensive after he comments on her mother's disapproval of her modeling career. "She wanted me to be beautiful so I could find a man -- there's nothing wrong with that."

-Pete's clever way to counter the Kennedy ads. (Sterling Cooper's working for Nixon.) Inspired by an anecdote about throwing a funeral for his frat's mascot dog, he buys up t.v. space in states like Illinois, so the Kennedy promoters will have to put JFK on the radio over there. It's obvious he has strong feelings for Peggy, as evidenced by him sucker-punching Ken Cosgrove after Cosgrove makes a comment about Peggy.

-Tensions seem to be rising between Joan and Peggy.

Ep. 10 "Long Weekend"

-Betty's resentment over her father's new girlfriend.

-Don's outburst over the agency losing the Dr. Scholl's account.

-Joan comparing her and Roger's affair to Shirley Maclean's situation in "The Apartment".

-Joan's roommate's clumsy pass at her, and Joan's ruthless rebuff of her.

-Roger's 'after-hours' party with Don and the two twins. It takes a creepy turn when we see Roger riding one of the girls like a horse. (Don and the girl's sister look very uncomfortable.) You feel almost glad when Roger gets a heart attack...

-For the first time in the series, Don opens up to Rachel (and us.) who's he's started getting physical with. His mother was a prostitute, and when she died in childbirth, they delivered the baby to his father and his wife. His father was a drunk who got kicked in the face by a horse. When he died, his step-mother took up with another man. The last lines: "I was raised by those two sorry people."