Tracy Jordan, the 30 Rock character played by Tracy Morgan, lets some amazing non-sequiters fly. What makes them so funny is that you can almost see a logic behind some of them, but something has clearly gone seriously wrong.
"Always dress like you're going to be murdered in those clothes."
The joke happens in that split second where you get into his head, and see this as a version of the cliche "live every day like it is your last," and the line mothers use on their children sometimes to get them to wear clean underwear -- "how will you feel if you get hit by a truck and they find you and you are wearing dirty underwear?" Jordan's version makes a certain kind of sense, but it is too specific to be a proverb (it is about clothes), the imagery is too violent to be mainstream (being murdered), and it is undercut by the kind of wonderful force of thinking style is so important, you should care how you dress on the day you will be murdered, because certainly other people will notice. You want to look good on the pavement, of course.
"Live every week like it's Shark Week"
The revised cliche is the same: "live every day as if it were your last." But here there is no suggestion that your death (inevitable) will come through murder. Instead the "danger" is only suggested by the word "shark," an animal that is dangerous in real life, but not when seen on a TV screen as part of The Discovery Channel's annual Shark Week, which has specials on sharks. What is funny, and faintly disturbing here, is the psychotically literal way he thinks about that week of programming, how seriously he takes the advertising, which always looks like "Shark Week: It's Coming." A lesser show would have a crazy person say crazy things ("I'll kill you all!" "What?" "Nothing".) What makes this great is the casual way his insanity is folded into a version of sage advice, and gets to us before we know what it is.
A similar kind of casual insanity is when he is defending his behavior to Tina Fey with "Hey. Bird's gotta fly. Fish gotta swim. Chinese dude's gotta change back into a tiger at midnight." Its funny because the crazy is not the point of what he is saying, it is just an illustration of his sane point. And the real crazy is in assuming other people will know what he is talking about without question.
"Affirmative action was designed to keep women and minorities in competition with each other to distract us while white dudes inject AIDS into our chicken nuggets. That's a metaphor."
A lesser show would have stopped with that first sentence, which is standard conspiracy theory stuff -- he is a loon, we get it. But "its a metaphor" lets us see that he has some distance on what he is saying, of course that is not real. Except that the distance gained does not really make him seem more sane, because he neglects to tell us what he thinks it is a metaphor for. He assumes we will know.
In another episode Tina Fey comes to talk about a problem both she and Jordan are familiar with. She says forcefully "we have to do something" and he IMMEDIATELY says excitedly "Lets crash my car and see if the airbags go off!" A good part of being crazy is walking around with absolutely no context at all. It simply does not occur to him that she has something -- even a topic -- in mind. In spite of her tone, and her personality, he treats her like she is just bored and looking for something to do for fun. Even crazier is his idea of what would be a fun thing for them to do together. It has a child's "how does this work" enthusiasm, which makes you love him even though he seems dangerous.
After Jack hijacks Jordan's little league coaching job, Jordan says that the truth will out in his book "Betrayal, colon, what really happened with my baseball team, comma, disaster at knuckle beach, question mark." It knocks me out how he gets caught up in the idea of a lengthy faux-serious title, and the absurdity of vocalizing punctuation marks.
And over and above all of this is the fact that the character's name, Tracy Jordan, is so close to the actor's name, Tracy Morgan, so that you think that he might really think like this.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Free Form Comments
Say whatever you want to in the comments to this post -- random, off topic thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, criticisms (which can be anonymous), surveys, introductions if you have never commented before, personal news, self-promotion, requests to be added to the blog roll and so on. If a week goes by and I have failed to add you to the blog roll TELL ME TO DO IT AGAIN, and KEEP TELLING ME UNTIL IT GETS DONE. I can be lazy about updating the non-post parts of this site. Remember these comments can be directed at all the readers, not just me.
ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy (but now might not be). That is often the reason I fail to get back to people, and on a blog, after a few days, the comments thread dies and I just kind of forget about it. Let's use this space to fix that, because it does need to be fixed; I look like a jackass sometimes, leaving people hanging. I will TRY to respond to any questions here.
AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore. For example, if you thought of a great quote for the great quote commonplace book, but now no one is reading that, you could put it here.You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.
WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If you think your free form comment here might be better as its own post, but you do not want it to be public yet, email it to me. My email address is available on my blogger profile page. If I think it will work on this site, your post will be published here with your name in the title of the post. You can propose what you will, I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music and books.
ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy (but now might not be). That is often the reason I fail to get back to people, and on a blog, after a few days, the comments thread dies and I just kind of forget about it. Let's use this space to fix that, because it does need to be fixed; I look like a jackass sometimes, leaving people hanging. I will TRY to respond to any questions here.
AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore. For example, if you thought of a great quote for the great quote commonplace book, but now no one is reading that, you could put it here.You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.
WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If you think your free form comment here might be better as its own post, but you do not want it to be public yet, email it to me. My email address is available on my blogger profile page. If I think it will work on this site, your post will be published here with your name in the title of the post. You can propose what you will, I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music and books.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Jason Powell on Classic X-Men #11, part b, “Hope”
[Jason Powell continues his issue by issue look at Claremont's X-Men. For more in this series see the toolbar on the right.]
The next issue will establish that the X-Men spent some time actually relaxing in the United Kingdom between X-Men issues #103 and #104, and “Hope” takes place at some point during that vacation. The star is Phil, a British fantasy writer who no longer feels inspired by what he does, but finds a new muse in the form of a passing Storm. Storm, it seems, has at some point since joining the X-Men become a fan of Phil’s novels. She recognizes him from his book jacket, and swoops him up to join her for a ride on the wind.
It’s all rather fanciful and good-natured, with some good turns of phrase by Claremont in the narration ... but something feels off in this one. Storm at one point tells Phil that while she has incredible powers, she lacks another talent: the ability to convey the wonder of them. “That is your gift,” she tells him. Of course, in real life, Claremont is the writer who conveys to us what it’s like to be an X-Man. So is the writer a stand-in for Claremont? If so, did Claremont really go through a phase when the passion was gone out of his writing? And what are we to make of the fact that Phil is suicidal at the start of the story and -- even after meeting Storm and hearing her impassioned plea that not throw away his life – Phil still seems pretty keen on jumping off a building in the final panel?
There’s something to be said for the fact that Claremont doesn’t make Phil’s dilemma clean-cut. He doesn’t immediately find his life reaffirmed just because of his chance encounter with Ororo. By the same token, Phil’s character arc is muddled enough that I’m not quite clear what the point is here. The matter is further obfuscated by Claremont throwing a psychopathic murderer (who only preys on women) right into the middle of the story. I’m sure he just wanted some action to spice things up, but it’s a rather garish b-movie twist to throw in when you’re trying to tell a sensitive tale about an artist who’s lost his spark.
Like “The Gift,” this one doesn’t really work. It’s elevated a bit, granted, by the possibility that Claremont is taking us into a dark part of his own psyche. (I’m particularly intrigued by Phil’s wondering whether he should simply quit. “So why don’t I leave?” he asks himself, then immediately answers, “No guts. I’ll always be more scared of what I’m giving up than what I might gain. Too bloody comfortable ...” Was this how Claremont felt about Marvel in 1987, when this story was published?) But while it remains a fascinating curiosity, and while it is another example of John Bolton’s mastery of his craft (it is superbly illustrated throughout), “Hope” stands as the second of only two misfires by Claremont and Bolton.
[Again I have not read the b-sides, but it seems like Claremont is being awfully smug here, as the writer encounters a character only he can really interpret -- especially as Claremont has put himself more directly into the X-Men in earlier issues.]
The next issue will establish that the X-Men spent some time actually relaxing in the United Kingdom between X-Men issues #103 and #104, and “Hope” takes place at some point during that vacation. The star is Phil, a British fantasy writer who no longer feels inspired by what he does, but finds a new muse in the form of a passing Storm. Storm, it seems, has at some point since joining the X-Men become a fan of Phil’s novels. She recognizes him from his book jacket, and swoops him up to join her for a ride on the wind.
It’s all rather fanciful and good-natured, with some good turns of phrase by Claremont in the narration ... but something feels off in this one. Storm at one point tells Phil that while she has incredible powers, she lacks another talent: the ability to convey the wonder of them. “That is your gift,” she tells him. Of course, in real life, Claremont is the writer who conveys to us what it’s like to be an X-Man. So is the writer a stand-in for Claremont? If so, did Claremont really go through a phase when the passion was gone out of his writing? And what are we to make of the fact that Phil is suicidal at the start of the story and -- even after meeting Storm and hearing her impassioned plea that not throw away his life – Phil still seems pretty keen on jumping off a building in the final panel?
There’s something to be said for the fact that Claremont doesn’t make Phil’s dilemma clean-cut. He doesn’t immediately find his life reaffirmed just because of his chance encounter with Ororo. By the same token, Phil’s character arc is muddled enough that I’m not quite clear what the point is here. The matter is further obfuscated by Claremont throwing a psychopathic murderer (who only preys on women) right into the middle of the story. I’m sure he just wanted some action to spice things up, but it’s a rather garish b-movie twist to throw in when you’re trying to tell a sensitive tale about an artist who’s lost his spark.
Like “The Gift,” this one doesn’t really work. It’s elevated a bit, granted, by the possibility that Claremont is taking us into a dark part of his own psyche. (I’m particularly intrigued by Phil’s wondering whether he should simply quit. “So why don’t I leave?” he asks himself, then immediately answers, “No guts. I’ll always be more scared of what I’m giving up than what I might gain. Too bloody comfortable ...” Was this how Claremont felt about Marvel in 1987, when this story was published?) But while it remains a fascinating curiosity, and while it is another example of John Bolton’s mastery of his craft (it is superbly illustrated throughout), “Hope” stands as the second of only two misfires by Claremont and Bolton.
[Again I have not read the b-sides, but it seems like Claremont is being awfully smug here, as the writer encounters a character only he can really interpret -- especially as Claremont has put himself more directly into the X-Men in earlier issues.]
Matrix Ping Pong (Commonplace Book)
This little youtube clip, less that two minutes long, went up years ago, but it is one that I keep going back to, so I thought I would put it here, just to sort of keep it. And as usual, there may be people who missed it the first time around.
Monday, January 28, 2008
A 30 Rock Joke
[I have been thinking about doing a short series of posts on jokes but I am worried that "explaining" jokes will not be any fun to read. This is a test balloon. This is also from memory and may be inexact.]
In an episode of 30 Rock uber-corporate guy Alec Baldwin wants to teach comedy writer Tina Fey about the fine art of negotiation (I think). Trying to convince her, he says "I want to teach you Lemon! Let me be the Michelle Pfeiffer to your angry black kid who learns that poetry is just another form of rap."
Like a lot of jokes, this is funny because it compresses a lot in a small space -- here an absurd image and a movie critique. To start with, the "casting" is funny: the rich, aggressive, threatening Alec Baldwin will be the slight, physically intimidated white woman, while the little white woman Tina Fey will be the "angry black kid." Doubly funny with Baldwin is that he dated Michelle Pfeiffer, and they starred together in Married to the Mob, which comes close to just short circuiting the whole thing.
The phrase "Let me be the X to your Y" creates a metaphor that is usually pretty general, as in "let me be the lyric to your song" or something. Even when it is more specific (e.g. "let me be the Romeo to your Juliet") it is usually so famous it has the quality of a generalization -- Romeo and Juliet being the archetypical lovers.
The first thing that strikes you with Baldwin's formulation is that it is absurdly specific -- a Michelle Pfeiffer character in a moderately popular movie ten years ago.
The second half does two things. "The angry black kid who learns that poetry is just another form of rap" importantly does not have a name we remember off the top of our head -- he is not specific at all. This critiques the movie, which claims to be all about a white teacher inspiring these under-privledged kids, but treats the kids as such stereotypes they might as well not have names.
The second half of Baldwin's line also makes you realize that your initial feeling that the reference is absurd because it is specific is only part of the joke -- the real joke is that the movie about teaching angry black kids that poetry is just another form of rap is virtually a genre: off of the top of my head Freedom Writers and the shows Boston Public and an episode of Judging Amy come to mind. I am sure there are others. So in a way Baldwin's reference, which at first seems absurdly specific, turns out to be perfectly general, in part because it is ten years old and makes you think of more recent examples that would have been closer to hand.
The whole joke manages to be absurdly random, but also in an odd way perfectly intelligent, all at the same time.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Heath Ledger, Brandon Lee, Bruce Lee
I would have forgotten about an off-handed comment I made a few weeks ago were it not for Streebo and Neil -- who both mentioned it on their blogs. Since I was part of the discussion I figured I would put it up here as well.
Discussing the trailer for the upcoming Batman movie, Neil Shyminsky said
"Having watched the trailer, I'm also noticing a lot of similarities between Ledger's Joker and The Crow: the aesthetic, the posture, the stare. Which all, again, seems very un-Joker-like."
At which point I responded
"Un-Joker like is only half the problem. The real problem is why on on earth you would want the Crow haunting your movie?"
It is not just that there is this connection between Heath Ledger dying before Dark Knight is out and Brandon Lee dying before The Crow came out. It is also that Brandon Lee's death itself recalls the death of his father, Bruce Lee, before finishing HIS final film, Game of Death. All three actors died playing characters whose job it was to bring death to others in a dramatic, fun way.
I think the thing that really strikes a chord with everyone in these cases is that when you discover that the actor died, you are also faced with this uncanny knowledge that they will return shortly -- when Dark Knight, The Crow or Game of Death hits theaters. It reminds us that the feeling of immediacy that we get from movies is just an illusion. Like literal stars, there is this sense that by the time the light of movie stars gets to us, they may have burned out already.
Discussing the trailer for the upcoming Batman movie, Neil Shyminsky said
"Having watched the trailer, I'm also noticing a lot of similarities between Ledger's Joker and The Crow: the aesthetic, the posture, the stare. Which all, again, seems very un-Joker-like."
At which point I responded
"Un-Joker like is only half the problem. The real problem is why on on earth you would want the Crow haunting your movie?"
It is not just that there is this connection between Heath Ledger dying before Dark Knight is out and Brandon Lee dying before The Crow came out. It is also that Brandon Lee's death itself recalls the death of his father, Bruce Lee, before finishing HIS final film, Game of Death. All three actors died playing characters whose job it was to bring death to others in a dramatic, fun way.
I think the thing that really strikes a chord with everyone in these cases is that when you discover that the actor died, you are also faced with this uncanny knowledge that they will return shortly -- when Dark Knight, The Crow or Game of Death hits theaters. It reminds us that the feeling of immediacy that we get from movies is just an illusion. Like literal stars, there is this sense that by the time the light of movie stars gets to us, they may have burned out already.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Jason Powell on Classic X-Men #11, part a (UXM #103)
[Jason Powell continues his issue by issue look at Claremont's X-Men. For more in this series see the toolbar on the right.]
“Fall of the Tower”
So, apparently Banshee’s ancestral home, Cassidy Keep is home not only to Banshee’s family but also to a bunch of leprechauns. This is a strange turn for the story to take at this point (though it was clearly planned – Banshee asked about the “little ones” in the previous issue). I’m not sure the presence of leprechauns in Banshee’s childhood home has ever been explained, or even mentioned, after this. Claremont will never touch it again after this issue, which concludes the Juggernaut story arc.
Paul O’Brien has commented that the Juggernaut is a character that loses potency the more you use him, because each time he’s beat, his boast of being unstoppable becomes that much more laughable. So it’s nice that, here at least, Claremont doesn’t give the neophyte X-Men a real win over the villain. It adds both to the Juggernaut’s power and to the notion that these particular X-Men are still somewhat green. Instead, Juggernaut freaks out after seeing Black Tom Cassidy knocked into the ocean by Bnashee, and dives into the ocean after him ... “his life risked – perhaps lost – in a desperate attempt to save his friend.” This is an early example of Claremont attempting to give some dimension even to some of the more one-note villains: Juggernaut in the Silver Age had only one trait – he wanted to kill Charles Xavier. Now, the character has a second quality, and it’s oddly touching: He’s got a friend.
Also, in this issue: Wolverine’s real name is given for the first time as “Logan.” We all know that now, of course, but readers back in the ‘70s had no idea – until Uncanny X-Men #103, when a leprechaun calls Wolverine “Mr. Logan” and he says “How do you know my name?” It seems strange, doesn’t it, in retrospect, to think that Wolverine’s real name was originally revealed by a leprechaun?)
Finally, “Fall of the Tower” at last brings us back to the loose end that is Eric the Red. We learn that he’s the one who contrived for the X-Men to get trashed by Juggernaut and Black Tom, but we still don’t learn his agenda. However, a final cliffhanger tells us that Eric has gotten himself a new ally – and “the gentleman’s name is Magneto.” (Claremont seems to like this sentence. He will use it in narrative captions in at least two other Magneto stories over the next few years.)
It seems worth noting at this point that Claremont is pretty canny in how he fits the old villains (the Sentinels, the Juggernaut and now Magneto) into the new series. The Sentinels were a natural, of course, because they’re enemies of all mutants – old X-Men and new X-Men alike. Juggernaut also makes sense, since his grudge is against the Professor, who of course is still around. And of course Magneto is right around the corner, a villain who doesn’t bear a grudge against any individual X-Men so much as he’s opposed to Xavier and his students’ entire ideology. These villains are all worked in very nicely. And the slow-burn of the Eric the Red subplot (along with the revelation that he’s the one deploying one villain after another against the X-Men) gives momentum and focus to comics that would otherwise seem like gimmicky, villain-of-the-month stories. (Though they are that too, to some degree. This is still a superhero comic book, after all.)
[Claremont's simple device here, is that rather than just doing simple one villain a month stories, recasts the one villain a month as a wheels within wheels thing. This is a move Whedon will use a lot on Buffy. You keep the network happy with stories that can be easily serialized, but you also get to work on a bigger palate. I have been told this, but the more Claremont I read the more I see how Whedon learned everything from him.]
“Fall of the Tower”
So, apparently Banshee’s ancestral home, Cassidy Keep is home not only to Banshee’s family but also to a bunch of leprechauns. This is a strange turn for the story to take at this point (though it was clearly planned – Banshee asked about the “little ones” in the previous issue). I’m not sure the presence of leprechauns in Banshee’s childhood home has ever been explained, or even mentioned, after this. Claremont will never touch it again after this issue, which concludes the Juggernaut story arc.
Paul O’Brien has commented that the Juggernaut is a character that loses potency the more you use him, because each time he’s beat, his boast of being unstoppable becomes that much more laughable. So it’s nice that, here at least, Claremont doesn’t give the neophyte X-Men a real win over the villain. It adds both to the Juggernaut’s power and to the notion that these particular X-Men are still somewhat green. Instead, Juggernaut freaks out after seeing Black Tom Cassidy knocked into the ocean by Bnashee, and dives into the ocean after him ... “his life risked – perhaps lost – in a desperate attempt to save his friend.” This is an early example of Claremont attempting to give some dimension even to some of the more one-note villains: Juggernaut in the Silver Age had only one trait – he wanted to kill Charles Xavier. Now, the character has a second quality, and it’s oddly touching: He’s got a friend.
Also, in this issue: Wolverine’s real name is given for the first time as “Logan.” We all know that now, of course, but readers back in the ‘70s had no idea – until Uncanny X-Men #103, when a leprechaun calls Wolverine “Mr. Logan” and he says “How do you know my name?” It seems strange, doesn’t it, in retrospect, to think that Wolverine’s real name was originally revealed by a leprechaun?)
Finally, “Fall of the Tower” at last brings us back to the loose end that is Eric the Red. We learn that he’s the one who contrived for the X-Men to get trashed by Juggernaut and Black Tom, but we still don’t learn his agenda. However, a final cliffhanger tells us that Eric has gotten himself a new ally – and “the gentleman’s name is Magneto.” (Claremont seems to like this sentence. He will use it in narrative captions in at least two other Magneto stories over the next few years.)
It seems worth noting at this point that Claremont is pretty canny in how he fits the old villains (the Sentinels, the Juggernaut and now Magneto) into the new series. The Sentinels were a natural, of course, because they’re enemies of all mutants – old X-Men and new X-Men alike. Juggernaut also makes sense, since his grudge is against the Professor, who of course is still around. And of course Magneto is right around the corner, a villain who doesn’t bear a grudge against any individual X-Men so much as he’s opposed to Xavier and his students’ entire ideology. These villains are all worked in very nicely. And the slow-burn of the Eric the Red subplot (along with the revelation that he’s the one deploying one villain after another against the X-Men) gives momentum and focus to comics that would otherwise seem like gimmicky, villain-of-the-month stories. (Though they are that too, to some degree. This is still a superhero comic book, after all.)
[Claremont's simple device here, is that rather than just doing simple one villain a month stories, recasts the one villain a month as a wheels within wheels thing. This is a move Whedon will use a lot on Buffy. You keep the network happy with stories that can be easily serialized, but you also get to work on a bigger palate. I have been told this, but the more Claremont I read the more I see how Whedon learned everything from him.]
Friday, January 25, 2008
Quick Question: Mark Twain Quote
I am looking for a quote by, I think, Mark Twain. Something about how realism is achieved in fiction. It is about how in life you might need money and then just luckily find it -- that is just a thing that happens sometimes -- but that if you do that in a story it will not be realistic. If you know the quote I am looking for, put it in the comments.
Comics Out January 23, 2008
X-Men 207. Bachalo's first panel, a muddy close up of a boring creature called Predator X, is great in its combination of cartoon and abstract art. His faces during the Rogue-Mystique confrontation are also top notch -- even more than Kitson, Bachalo makes talking heads just fun to watch. I want some X-Men action figures based off of his style. As for the story, this concludes the big Messiah Complex thing, of which I only got the prologue and the Bachalo parts. Thankfully Bachalo drew the conclusion so I could see how it all ended and feel glad I did not get the rest of it. From my limited perspective, this is your standard "everything changes -- no wait nothing does" ending. It looks like two characters are killed but upcoming solicits make it clear that they are not. And as for the baby the story revolves around? In the first episode of the fifth season of Buffy, Whedon introduces Dawn, Buffy's little sister, who turns out not to be a real girl but I kind of magical construct; at the end of the season it looks like her sacrifice will save everyone, neatly taking out of play at the end the thing you introduced at the beginning. But Whedon is smarter than that, and makes Dawn a real character who continues on. Messiah Complex, at this point, has gone the more boring route of taking the baby out of play, to the future. There is a whole other Cable series in which she will appear, but as for this story, not such a satisfying ending. And it really did not seem like there was enough material for 13 issues -- certainly I did not feel like I was missing out on anything without those other parts.
Order 7. Turns out this book, which just got better and better, will be cancelled with issue 10, which is lame. This issue is the best one yet, featuring a really interesting confrontation between Namor, and Hellrung, who should be totally outclassed, but figures out how to deal with the situation in a smart believable way. (For people who view every Marvel issue in the context of the Marvel Universe there may be an objection that in a world of shapeshifters and whatnot Hellrung's threat does not make much sense, but I encourage you not to be that guy. You have to view stories in their own right, on some level, and not always as part of a bigger thing).
Astonishing X-Men 24. The fact that Whedon's three other arcs have been six issues and this one is six with a Giant Sized conclusion -- a conclusion that is not just an epilogue or something as I assumed, but very much the other part of the cliffhanger this ends on -- made me feel, perhaps unfairly, that this issue was unnecessary. I guess it was not, I just think Whedon has trained me to expect a conclusion of some kind at issue 6. I thought this Breakworld arc would end here, and the epilogue would treat the fallout, and, say, Nova. I really don't see a reason for a Giant Sized special to conclude rather than a 25th or 25th and 26th issue here, except maybe they want to get the new team on this title faster. I don't have any real complaints about this issue, except for maybe two panels where Cassaday makes Emma Frost's face look like that of a bulky man.
Umbrella Academy 5 (which came out last week but I just got it this week). The introduction of the title card was awesome. There was some over-the-top violence that was pretty surprising. More important, Ba is such a great artist on this book and Number 5's character is advanced in significant ways. This book hits the "monkey's are intrinsically awesome" button too many times (Spaceboy, Pogo, the police monkeys), but it remains strong.
In comics news Newsarama has a six page lettered preview of Millar and Hitch's first Fantastic Four issue, which did not really get my attention, but I suppose I will still buy it; Heath Ledger, the Joker, died; DC's solicits are up and include some awesome action figures based off of their All Star titles, which is to say based off of Miller and Quitely's designs, which I love; Marvel's solicits are up; and there is an interview with Matt Fraction, whose Order is cancelled at issue 10, and who will be doing a Young Avengers Presents book and a Thor special. So good news and bad news.
Review, discuss, recommend.
Order 7. Turns out this book, which just got better and better, will be cancelled with issue 10, which is lame. This issue is the best one yet, featuring a really interesting confrontation between Namor, and Hellrung, who should be totally outclassed, but figures out how to deal with the situation in a smart believable way. (For people who view every Marvel issue in the context of the Marvel Universe there may be an objection that in a world of shapeshifters and whatnot Hellrung's threat does not make much sense, but I encourage you not to be that guy. You have to view stories in their own right, on some level, and not always as part of a bigger thing).
Astonishing X-Men 24. The fact that Whedon's three other arcs have been six issues and this one is six with a Giant Sized conclusion -- a conclusion that is not just an epilogue or something as I assumed, but very much the other part of the cliffhanger this ends on -- made me feel, perhaps unfairly, that this issue was unnecessary. I guess it was not, I just think Whedon has trained me to expect a conclusion of some kind at issue 6. I thought this Breakworld arc would end here, and the epilogue would treat the fallout, and, say, Nova. I really don't see a reason for a Giant Sized special to conclude rather than a 25th or 25th and 26th issue here, except maybe they want to get the new team on this title faster. I don't have any real complaints about this issue, except for maybe two panels where Cassaday makes Emma Frost's face look like that of a bulky man.
Umbrella Academy 5 (which came out last week but I just got it this week). The introduction of the title card was awesome. There was some over-the-top violence that was pretty surprising. More important, Ba is such a great artist on this book and Number 5's character is advanced in significant ways. This book hits the "monkey's are intrinsically awesome" button too many times (Spaceboy, Pogo, the police monkeys), but it remains strong.
In comics news Newsarama has a six page lettered preview of Millar and Hitch's first Fantastic Four issue, which did not really get my attention, but I suppose I will still buy it; Heath Ledger, the Joker, died; DC's solicits are up and include some awesome action figures based off of their All Star titles, which is to say based off of Miller and Quitely's designs, which I love; Marvel's solicits are up; and there is an interview with Matt Fraction, whose Order is cancelled at issue 10, and who will be doing a Young Avengers Presents book and a Thor special. So good news and bad news.
Review, discuss, recommend.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Onion AV Club 2007 Film Poll
The Onion AV Club put a call out for its third annual reader film poll. They wanted people's top five films with comments, as they are looking for a few key quotes to use when they put up the results. Though you have heard some of this before, here is what I sent them.
1. Death Proof. The pacing of a double feature probably made more sense when you could see it at a drive-in while having sex with your girlfriend. Grindhouse was annoying. But Death Proof, on its own, allows you to just relax with great characters listening to the best music ever before giving the audience the apotheosis of what popular films do best – an incredibly violent beat-down where you can fully cheer on the aggressors because Snake Plissken deserves it. He can handle the first set of girls, who engage in every slasher no-no, but is completely unprepared for Tarantino’s version of “real” girls – movie people, including Zoe Bell as herself. Tarantino, however, is never simple. You have to rethink your vicarious thrills on the way home when you remember they left Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and the intimation of sex, with the rapist from Kill Bill.
2. Ratatouille. The message of the Incredibles was “if everyone is special, no one is,” and mere mortals should not try to rise above their station, or they will become evil, like the villain. The message of Ratatouille was “anyone can cook” – not that anyone can learn, but that genius, beyond mere teaching, may appear anywhere, even in a rat. You have to think that director Brad Bird saw Amadeus and – when everyone else wondered with Salieri why God passed over them – really sympathized with Mozart. Ratatouille was a technical marvel – and the short that preceded it was a good as anything Loony Toons ever did – but ultimately you must be blown away by a major kid’s picture that eschews an easy moral in favour of a personal, harsh, totally undemocratic vision.
3. No Country for Old Men. The best literary anti-western since Dead Man, and the return of the Cohen brothers. In a normal Western (or superhero movie, or action movie) evil enters, the people that are supposed to deal with it cannot, someone comes in from the outside, fixes it, and leaves. Here neither the sheriff nor a slick outside hire can get near the alien, principled evil of Chigurh. Stunningly, in the third act, major moments are kept off screen as the film, like Tommy Lee Jones’s sheriff, looses track of the thing – and it has the total audacity to end suddenly, nothing resolved, with the openness of an enigmatic dream vision reminiscent of a strong modern poem. As in Dead Man the Spartan Western gives way to something genuinely visionary.
4. Beowulf. For twelve dollars you get to see Crispin Glover, as a mutant fish monster, recite old English poetry in motion capture animation in 3D. This is what the movies are for – showing us things we never would have thought possible. The film, in its absurd glory, and intentionally archaic obvious symbols – sword = penis, cave = vagina – captures the hyperbolic aggression of the poem, while revising it in genuinely interesting, persuasive, ironic, ways. Plus Angelina Jolie, in the nude, in a cave, rises from the lake in organic mutant high heels, which is hilarious.
5. Southland Tales. Donnie Darko is a fun movie that makes no sense if you stop and think about it. Southland Tales tested everyone’s patience by doing the same thing on a wider canvas. Whatever point about oil, republicans, the media, and Iraq director Kelly was trying to make is lost in the phantasmagoria, but the stunt casting raises it to a whole new register. The Rock and porn-star Buffy threesome slow-dancing with a pregnant Mandy Moore is one of two dozen examples. A broken film, but some of the strangest, most haunting fragments you will ever see on celluloid. Southland Tales succeeds on extra-credit glory and brazen insanity alone, which I would not have thought possible.
1. Death Proof. The pacing of a double feature probably made more sense when you could see it at a drive-in while having sex with your girlfriend. Grindhouse was annoying. But Death Proof, on its own, allows you to just relax with great characters listening to the best music ever before giving the audience the apotheosis of what popular films do best – an incredibly violent beat-down where you can fully cheer on the aggressors because Snake Plissken deserves it. He can handle the first set of girls, who engage in every slasher no-no, but is completely unprepared for Tarantino’s version of “real” girls – movie people, including Zoe Bell as herself. Tarantino, however, is never simple. You have to rethink your vicarious thrills on the way home when you remember they left Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and the intimation of sex, with the rapist from Kill Bill.
2. Ratatouille. The message of the Incredibles was “if everyone is special, no one is,” and mere mortals should not try to rise above their station, or they will become evil, like the villain. The message of Ratatouille was “anyone can cook” – not that anyone can learn, but that genius, beyond mere teaching, may appear anywhere, even in a rat. You have to think that director Brad Bird saw Amadeus and – when everyone else wondered with Salieri why God passed over them – really sympathized with Mozart. Ratatouille was a technical marvel – and the short that preceded it was a good as anything Loony Toons ever did – but ultimately you must be blown away by a major kid’s picture that eschews an easy moral in favour of a personal, harsh, totally undemocratic vision.
3. No Country for Old Men. The best literary anti-western since Dead Man, and the return of the Cohen brothers. In a normal Western (or superhero movie, or action movie) evil enters, the people that are supposed to deal with it cannot, someone comes in from the outside, fixes it, and leaves. Here neither the sheriff nor a slick outside hire can get near the alien, principled evil of Chigurh. Stunningly, in the third act, major moments are kept off screen as the film, like Tommy Lee Jones’s sheriff, looses track of the thing – and it has the total audacity to end suddenly, nothing resolved, with the openness of an enigmatic dream vision reminiscent of a strong modern poem. As in Dead Man the Spartan Western gives way to something genuinely visionary.
4. Beowulf. For twelve dollars you get to see Crispin Glover, as a mutant fish monster, recite old English poetry in motion capture animation in 3D. This is what the movies are for – showing us things we never would have thought possible. The film, in its absurd glory, and intentionally archaic obvious symbols – sword = penis, cave = vagina – captures the hyperbolic aggression of the poem, while revising it in genuinely interesting, persuasive, ironic, ways. Plus Angelina Jolie, in the nude, in a cave, rises from the lake in organic mutant high heels, which is hilarious.
5. Southland Tales. Donnie Darko is a fun movie that makes no sense if you stop and think about it. Southland Tales tested everyone’s patience by doing the same thing on a wider canvas. Whatever point about oil, republicans, the media, and Iraq director Kelly was trying to make is lost in the phantasmagoria, but the stunt casting raises it to a whole new register. The Rock and porn-star Buffy threesome slow-dancing with a pregnant Mandy Moore is one of two dozen examples. A broken film, but some of the strangest, most haunting fragments you will ever see on celluloid. Southland Tales succeeds on extra-credit glory and brazen insanity alone, which I would not have thought possible.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Free Form Comments
Say whatever you want to in the comments to this post -- random, off topic thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, criticisms (which can be anonymous), surveys, introductions if you have never commented before, personal news, self-promotion, requests to be added to the blog roll and so on. If a week goes by and I have failed to add you to the blog roll TELL ME TO DO IT AGAIN, and KEEP TELLING ME UNTIL IT GETS DONE. I can be lazy about updating the non-post parts of this site. Remember these comments can be directed at all the readers, not just me.
ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy (but now might not be). That is often the reason I fail to get back to people, and on a blog, after a few days, the comments thread dies and I just kind of forget about it. Let's use this space to fix that, because it does need to be fixed; I look like a jackass sometimes, leaving people hanging. I will TRY to respond to any questions here.
AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore. For example, if you thought of a great quote for the great quote commonplace book, but now no one is reading that, you could put it here.You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.
WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If you think your free form comment here might be better as its own post, but you do not want it to be public yet, email it to me. My email address is available on my blogger profile page. If I think it will work on this site, your post will be published here with your name in the title of the post. You can propose what you will, I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music and books.
ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy (but now might not be). That is often the reason I fail to get back to people, and on a blog, after a few days, the comments thread dies and I just kind of forget about it. Let's use this space to fix that, because it does need to be fixed; I look like a jackass sometimes, leaving people hanging. I will TRY to respond to any questions here.
AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore. For example, if you thought of a great quote for the great quote commonplace book, but now no one is reading that, you could put it here.You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.
WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If you think your free form comment here might be better as its own post, but you do not want it to be public yet, email it to me. My email address is available on my blogger profile page. If I think it will work on this site, your post will be published here with your name in the title of the post. You can propose what you will, I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music and books.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Jason Powell on Classic X-Men #10, part b
[Jason Powell continues his issue by issue look at Claremont's Classic X-Men. For more in this series click the link on the right toolbar under "Guest Bloggers".]
"Tag, Sucker”
"Tag, Sucker” is set somewhere at an indeterminate point in between the X-Men’s earliest adventures. I’ve come to think of it as the final in a four-part set of character sketches focusing on the four pillars of Claremont’s original “new” X-Men cast. Storm was the focus of Classic X-Men #2b, Nightcrawler of 4b, Colossus of 5b, and now Wolverine takes center stage here. Each one of these stories gets quickly and directly to the core of what each character was originally all about, in elegantly simple terms. The premise behind “Tag, Sucker!” is that when Wolverine returned to the States as an X-Man, he inadvertently got the attention of an old nemesis, called Sabretooth. We never see Sabretooth in this story (well, except his hands), but he plays a game of cat-and-mouse with Logan and wins, ultimately tearing out Wolverine’s throat and leaving him for dead. Logan survives thanks to his healing factor, a little shaken and a little humbled.
That’s the plot, very much “Wolverine 101” in terms of structure. Some of Claremont’s technique here has come to be thought of as clichés when it comes to this character – most particularly the tough, brooding first-person narration that always manages include an expositional laundry list of Wolverine’s various and sundry abilities and powers. Still, it’s a good lesson in how to write the character properly, and indeed, the art of writing a good Wolverine story seems to be lost, if things like “Origin” and especially the more recent material involving characters like Romulus and Lazarus, etc., are any indication.
There is a temporal contradiction in Wolverine, made explicit in “Tag, Sucker.” Wolverine is more animal than man, a savage more at home in the wilderness than among civilization. However, he also has a skeleton lined with adamantium and three razor sharp claws that extend from each hand, making him (to quote the present story) “some fancy sci-fi piece of work.” The use of “sci-fi” is reminiscent of what Geoff wrote about Batman in “JLA: Classified”: “He identifies all the crazy gear he has as ‘science FICTION’ gear even though, for him, it is real.” In Wolverine’s case, his reference to his own technological enhancements as “sci-fi” is derisive, because his inclination is in the other direction – more rooted in the values of the past, rather than the “sci-fi” future; away from technology, not toward it.
Wolverine’s hatred of civilization, particularly of cities—with their noise, pollution, etc. – is intrinsic to his own character but also important in the context of the other members of the cast. Classic X-Men #5’s “Prison of the Heart” pointed out that Colossus feels more at home among the wide expanses of his collective farm in Russia (where he knew all “1,237 souls” by name) than in the crowded city. And in “First Friends” in issue #2, Storm’s thought balloons discuss how ill at ease she feels soaring in a sky where there are huge, claustrophobic buildings that block out the sun and cut their residents off from mother nature. It’s an interesting thematic element for Claremont to bring in, positioning three of the pillars of this X-Men cast as being incompatible with their environment.
Nightcrawler, curiously, is the only one who seems more at home in a modern city than he was in his old home (a kind of generically, stereotypically Bavarian community, as shown in Giant-Sized X-Men #1). It’s fitting perhaps that the “ugliest” of the new X-Men is the one who is most comfortable with his surroundings.
"Tag, Sucker”
"Tag, Sucker” is set somewhere at an indeterminate point in between the X-Men’s earliest adventures. I’ve come to think of it as the final in a four-part set of character sketches focusing on the four pillars of Claremont’s original “new” X-Men cast. Storm was the focus of Classic X-Men #2b, Nightcrawler of 4b, Colossus of 5b, and now Wolverine takes center stage here. Each one of these stories gets quickly and directly to the core of what each character was originally all about, in elegantly simple terms. The premise behind “Tag, Sucker!” is that when Wolverine returned to the States as an X-Man, he inadvertently got the attention of an old nemesis, called Sabretooth. We never see Sabretooth in this story (well, except his hands), but he plays a game of cat-and-mouse with Logan and wins, ultimately tearing out Wolverine’s throat and leaving him for dead. Logan survives thanks to his healing factor, a little shaken and a little humbled.
That’s the plot, very much “Wolverine 101” in terms of structure. Some of Claremont’s technique here has come to be thought of as clichés when it comes to this character – most particularly the tough, brooding first-person narration that always manages include an expositional laundry list of Wolverine’s various and sundry abilities and powers. Still, it’s a good lesson in how to write the character properly, and indeed, the art of writing a good Wolverine story seems to be lost, if things like “Origin” and especially the more recent material involving characters like Romulus and Lazarus, etc., are any indication.
There is a temporal contradiction in Wolverine, made explicit in “Tag, Sucker.” Wolverine is more animal than man, a savage more at home in the wilderness than among civilization. However, he also has a skeleton lined with adamantium and three razor sharp claws that extend from each hand, making him (to quote the present story) “some fancy sci-fi piece of work.” The use of “sci-fi” is reminiscent of what Geoff wrote about Batman in “JLA: Classified”: “He identifies all the crazy gear he has as ‘science FICTION’ gear even though, for him, it is real.” In Wolverine’s case, his reference to his own technological enhancements as “sci-fi” is derisive, because his inclination is in the other direction – more rooted in the values of the past, rather than the “sci-fi” future; away from technology, not toward it.
Wolverine’s hatred of civilization, particularly of cities—with their noise, pollution, etc. – is intrinsic to his own character but also important in the context of the other members of the cast. Classic X-Men #5’s “Prison of the Heart” pointed out that Colossus feels more at home among the wide expanses of his collective farm in Russia (where he knew all “1,237 souls” by name) than in the crowded city. And in “First Friends” in issue #2, Storm’s thought balloons discuss how ill at ease she feels soaring in a sky where there are huge, claustrophobic buildings that block out the sun and cut their residents off from mother nature. It’s an interesting thematic element for Claremont to bring in, positioning three of the pillars of this X-Men cast as being incompatible with their environment.
Nightcrawler, curiously, is the only one who seems more at home in a modern city than he was in his old home (a kind of generically, stereotypically Bavarian community, as shown in Giant-Sized X-Men #1). It’s fitting perhaps that the “ugliest” of the new X-Men is the one who is most comfortable with his surroundings.
Jim Ridley on I Know Who Killed Me (Commonplace Book)
Jim Ridley, a few weeks ago, wrote an article called Ten Movies in 2007 That Deserved More Attention. HIs brief comment on Lindsay Lohan's flop I Know Who Killed Me encapsulates the kind of criticism I like best -- criticism that makes genuinely surprising observations about trash and gets me to re-think something. There are quite a few folks around here in the "I don't care what kind of smart thing you can say, that still sucked" camp, often followed by a compliment along the lines of "the criticism is more interesting that the film." I have taken this position myself, at times. Nevertheless I still think it is a substantial accomplishment to make me go back and at least question my initial judgement, as this comment did. Here is what he said.
I Know Who Killed Me. Not even Lindsay Lohan's sojourn in the tabloids stirred up much interest in this marvel of trashy delirium. A pity, too: Chris Sivertson's mystifying mood piece about a demure honor student who morphs into a mutilated stripper was sold as torture porn, but it's closer in spirit to a glue-huffing remake of Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique. As psychodrama, it was even more potent. Try finding a more eerie metaphor for a child star's uneasy transition to adulthood than pole-dancer Lohan facing her Disney-princess self packed away in a casket.
I Know Who Killed Me. Not even Lindsay Lohan's sojourn in the tabloids stirred up much interest in this marvel of trashy delirium. A pity, too: Chris Sivertson's mystifying mood piece about a demure honor student who morphs into a mutilated stripper was sold as torture porn, but it's closer in spirit to a glue-huffing remake of Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique. As psychodrama, it was even more potent. Try finding a more eerie metaphor for a child star's uneasy transition to adulthood than pole-dancer Lohan facing her Disney-princess self packed away in a casket.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Great Movies Under 90 Minutes
[Today is a holiday. Light posting is allowed.]
After Cloverfield, I got to thinking about how great a perfectly taut full-length mainstream movie under 90 minutes can be. No Vacancy and Red Eye are the two I came up with, but I want to hear about some I might have missed, or forgotten about.
After Cloverfield, I got to thinking about how great a perfectly taut full-length mainstream movie under 90 minutes can be. No Vacancy and Red Eye are the two I came up with, but I want to hear about some I might have missed, or forgotten about.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Be Kind Rewind
I thought Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was good, but overrated: there was a great story in there, but too much time, often redundant time, was spent with the non Jim Carey and Kate Winslet characters. I missed The Science of Sleep completely, and no one said I should see it. Gondry's new movie had me at "starring Mos Def and Jack Black." The trailer is one that I have watched again and again, and I hope the film is half as good as the trailer, though I have a slight fear it won't be.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Cloverfield Review (no spoilers)
The wonderfully understated title Cloverfield refers to the military designation for the creature that attacks New York City. The film claims to be recovered footage from "the area known as Central Park." A surprise party is being filmed for posterity when the creature attacks, and the guy with the camera continues to record the attempt of him and his friends to get from lower Manhattan to Midtown to save a girl our main character loves, but has treated badly. We see everything else mostly in glimpses along the way -- the military, the triage hospital in Bloomingdale's, the little crab like creatures that fall off of the big one. It is only 74 minutes long, but that is a virtue -- it taut and focused like Red Eye or Vacancy, and has none of the bloat you would get with a standard monster movie with an ensemble cast (e.g. the American Godzilla).
Cloverfield is a pretty amazing little movie, in large part because of the way it positions itself in relation to other movies. It is very much what it looks like: Blair Witch Project meets Godzilla. I think that the Blair Witch Project had few inheritors because the concept is such a gimmick -- recovered footage from amateur camera-work -- but it does not feel at all gimmicky here. In the years since Blair Witch so many people have cameras as part of their phones, and record so much and throw it up on the internet that it seems completely natural that someone would be filling a party and then keep filming when an attack starts. There are some wonderful moments -- before the attack and afterward -- in which the camera films not just people, but also people filming things on their camera-phones, and TV News coverage -- so that the first time you see the little crab creatures you are watching a guy with a camera film TV footage in an electronics store. That is something that the Blair Witch Project -- by design, and because of the time period -- could not capture, and it makes you feel that the concept is necessary, rather than a gimmick or a repetition.
Cloverfield also provides a narrative reason for the standard film procedure -- in large part derived from stuff like Alien -- of seeing the big monster only in glimpses until the big reveal. Here we don't feel the "director" is toying with us -- we see that he is merely doing his best. The creature us blocked by buildings most of the time, and that is not his fault. It is all very persuasive, and removes the feeling that the monster movie is just a game. The main virtue of the Blair Witch camera work is the immediacy. The "editing" of Cloverfield makes you feel like you are watching the "real" version of something you have seen faked for years, and, hauntingly, the "tape" being used for the camera already had something else on it before the monster attack, and you catch glimpses of the romantic story underneath that relates directly to the motivation to save the girl, and provides a nice level of irony that would otherwise be missing.
Cloverfield also picks up the "September 11th = Monster" equation from Spielberg's War of the Worlds, a movie very much in its sights. Spielberg's film goes for immediacy in the camera work, but the "recovered" footage gimmick trumps him, in part because footage from people on the street was how so much of 9-11 was captured. Helping tremendously is the fact that Cloverfield's actors are unknowns, which helps you believe they are real people and this is really happening. There was a lot to like about War of the Worlds, and I love Tom Cruise, but Cruise was horribly cast in War of the Worlds as a dock-worker -- the guy is the American equivalent of royalty, and will never convince me, with his perfect hair, teeth, and jaw that he is anything other than Tom Cruise. He was much better, for example, in Eyes Wide Shut, where you feel there is more of a connection to his real upper class life, with his real upper class wife, their marital problems, his ambiguous sexuality, and his shadowy Scientology meetings. In addition to beating War of the Worlds in terms of casting and immediacy, Cloverfield also swerves from Spielberg's very fake ending, in which everyone makes it alive and well to a perfect Boston house, with the leaves falling from the trees in the most idyllic way. This is not a spoiler since you know from the teaser trailer that this is "recovered," rather than "delivered," footage.
Cloverfield makes the monster movie feel believable again, and necessary.
Jason Powell on Classic X-Men #10, part a (UXM #102)
[Jason Powell continues his issue by issue look at Claremont's X-Men. For more in this series see the toolbar on the right.]
Grant Morrison, in one of his tortured “comics are like pop music” analogies (which would be fine if he spoke more intelligently about music), has commented that when he wrote X-Men, he felt inclined to play certain “riffs,” which to him meant bringing in material from the Claremont/Cockrum/Byrne era: Sentinels, Phoenix, dystopian futures, the Shi’ar. Morrison also suggested that he was the “Jimi Hendrix” of those riffs. I’m not sure about that part, but his point – that every new writer on X-Men has to keep things fresh by adding some new kind of distortion to the familiar riffs – is well taken. In these earliest, Claremont comics, that is exactly what’s happening. He and Cockrum are playing the familiar X-Men riffs (first Sentinels, now the Juggernaut), with the twist being – simply enough – the new protagonists. Note that Claremont here has deliberately kept the remaining Silver Age X-Men – Charles, Scott and Jean – at home so that only the five new X-Men fight the Juggernaut in the present story.
Another twist on the riff is that Juggernaut, Charles Xavier’s stepbrother, has teamed up with Black Tom Cassidy, Sean’s cousin. How did these two link up? It’s not explained in this story, or in any other that I’ve ever read. It’s not just an alliance of convenience, either. At the end of X-Men #103, Juggernaut claims that Black Tom is his “best friend.” Is it just coincidence that two relatives of X-Men members happened to befriend each other?
We also learn Storm’s origin here. She is actually the daughter of an “African princess” and an American journalist named Munroe. So, Ororo’s full name is technically “Ororo Munroe,” which is odd enough on the ears that it will only be spoken about three times in the next 17 years of Claremont X-Men comics. We also learn exactly what happened to make Storm a claustrophobe. Previous stories (specifically Classic X-Men #2b and #4a) told us she was buried alive with her parents, but here we learn more details. Her family was living in Cairo, Egypt when an air-strike buried them. Ororo dug her way out, and was later taken in and trained in the fine arts of begging, thievery and lock-picking by an Egyptian Fagin called “Achmad.” Upon reaching adulthood, she headed to Africa, which she intuitively recognized as her mother’s homeland. A new page unique to Classic X-Men #10 fills in a blank left by the X-Men #102 origin – specifically, when did she learn about her elemental powers? Answer: Eventually. And eventually after that, some local tribes learned of her abilities and entreated her, as though she were a goddess, to help end a drought. She was happy to, and thus we learn how she got to where she was when we first saw her in Giant-Sized #1.
Classic X-Men #10 makes another alteration to the origin. I’ll quote Paul O’Brien for the explanation:
“[In X-Men #102], her parents were killed, and she developed claustrophobia, when Cairo was bombed during the Suez Crisis. ... When that story was reprinted in CLASSIC X-MEN, they deleted all the references to the Suez Crisis - but didn't replace them with anything else. There was just a generic airstrike. Apparently people just go around bombing Cairo in the Marvel Universe.”
Paul O’Brien is funny.
There’s also a scene in which Jean tells her visiting roommate Misty Knight that she died and then brought herself back to life. This originally was a fairly oblique reference on her part, and the conversation was never followed up on in any subsequent issues of either X-Men or Iron Fist. Happily, Classic X-Men fixes this too. For one thing, the story told in Classic X-Men #8b has already shown us Jean dying and then being resurrected. Claremont and Bolton’s backup in Classic X-Men #13 will feature Misty following up on Jean’s cryptic reference here.
One final odd thing: John Byrne claims that at this point during Claremont’s run, Claremont had not read any X-Men issues except the Neal Adams ones. But Juggernaut didn’t appear in any of those. So is Claremont just winging it here with his characterization? If so, he’s pretty much spot on – particularly in the moment when Juggernaut says condescendingly to the X-Men, “I – Am – A – Juggernaut!” This is a straight-up reference to the original Lee/Kirby Juggernaut story, when he says “I – Am – The – Juggernaut!” (Yes, the hyphens appear in both instances.) Claremont had to have been familiar with the Silver Age dialogue, or else he included his homage at the behest of an editor (or Cockrum). No way is that duplicated dialogue coincidence.
[Just two things from me:
1. You are being very polite here on the subject of Black Tom and Juggernaut, but let me ask the question -- are we supposed to read the relationship as homosexual, here or in later comics? Is that why there is never an explanation of how the two teamed up, because you can only imply, but never discuss, such a thing in X-Men comics in the 70s?
2. Storm's father says in this issue "I knew Storm was special from the moment of her conception." Is this a normal expression that I am over-thinking? Because it strikes me as a deeply weird thing to say, as it is very close to "I knew Storm was special from the moment after I had sex with her mom," and also because the "moment of conception" is a moment reconstructed after the fact -- you don't know when it is, you only know when it was -- so you cannot really know something about a child from the moment of conception.]
Grant Morrison, in one of his tortured “comics are like pop music” analogies (which would be fine if he spoke more intelligently about music), has commented that when he wrote X-Men, he felt inclined to play certain “riffs,” which to him meant bringing in material from the Claremont/Cockrum/Byrne era: Sentinels, Phoenix, dystopian futures, the Shi’ar. Morrison also suggested that he was the “Jimi Hendrix” of those riffs. I’m not sure about that part, but his point – that every new writer on X-Men has to keep things fresh by adding some new kind of distortion to the familiar riffs – is well taken. In these earliest, Claremont comics, that is exactly what’s happening. He and Cockrum are playing the familiar X-Men riffs (first Sentinels, now the Juggernaut), with the twist being – simply enough – the new protagonists. Note that Claremont here has deliberately kept the remaining Silver Age X-Men – Charles, Scott and Jean – at home so that only the five new X-Men fight the Juggernaut in the present story.
Another twist on the riff is that Juggernaut, Charles Xavier’s stepbrother, has teamed up with Black Tom Cassidy, Sean’s cousin. How did these two link up? It’s not explained in this story, or in any other that I’ve ever read. It’s not just an alliance of convenience, either. At the end of X-Men #103, Juggernaut claims that Black Tom is his “best friend.” Is it just coincidence that two relatives of X-Men members happened to befriend each other?
We also learn Storm’s origin here. She is actually the daughter of an “African princess” and an American journalist named Munroe. So, Ororo’s full name is technically “Ororo Munroe,” which is odd enough on the ears that it will only be spoken about three times in the next 17 years of Claremont X-Men comics. We also learn exactly what happened to make Storm a claustrophobe. Previous stories (specifically Classic X-Men #2b and #4a) told us she was buried alive with her parents, but here we learn more details. Her family was living in Cairo, Egypt when an air-strike buried them. Ororo dug her way out, and was later taken in and trained in the fine arts of begging, thievery and lock-picking by an Egyptian Fagin called “Achmad.” Upon reaching adulthood, she headed to Africa, which she intuitively recognized as her mother’s homeland. A new page unique to Classic X-Men #10 fills in a blank left by the X-Men #102 origin – specifically, when did she learn about her elemental powers? Answer: Eventually. And eventually after that, some local tribes learned of her abilities and entreated her, as though she were a goddess, to help end a drought. She was happy to, and thus we learn how she got to where she was when we first saw her in Giant-Sized #1.
Classic X-Men #10 makes another alteration to the origin. I’ll quote Paul O’Brien for the explanation:
“[In X-Men #102], her parents were killed, and she developed claustrophobia, when Cairo was bombed during the Suez Crisis. ... When that story was reprinted in CLASSIC X-MEN, they deleted all the references to the Suez Crisis - but didn't replace them with anything else. There was just a generic airstrike. Apparently people just go around bombing Cairo in the Marvel Universe.”
Paul O’Brien is funny.
There’s also a scene in which Jean tells her visiting roommate Misty Knight that she died and then brought herself back to life. This originally was a fairly oblique reference on her part, and the conversation was never followed up on in any subsequent issues of either X-Men or Iron Fist. Happily, Classic X-Men fixes this too. For one thing, the story told in Classic X-Men #8b has already shown us Jean dying and then being resurrected. Claremont and Bolton’s backup in Classic X-Men #13 will feature Misty following up on Jean’s cryptic reference here.
One final odd thing: John Byrne claims that at this point during Claremont’s run, Claremont had not read any X-Men issues except the Neal Adams ones. But Juggernaut didn’t appear in any of those. So is Claremont just winging it here with his characterization? If so, he’s pretty much spot on – particularly in the moment when Juggernaut says condescendingly to the X-Men, “I – Am – A – Juggernaut!” This is a straight-up reference to the original Lee/Kirby Juggernaut story, when he says “I – Am – The – Juggernaut!” (Yes, the hyphens appear in both instances.) Claremont had to have been familiar with the Silver Age dialogue, or else he included his homage at the behest of an editor (or Cockrum). No way is that duplicated dialogue coincidence.
[Just two things from me:
1. You are being very polite here on the subject of Black Tom and Juggernaut, but let me ask the question -- are we supposed to read the relationship as homosexual, here or in later comics? Is that why there is never an explanation of how the two teamed up, because you can only imply, but never discuss, such a thing in X-Men comics in the 70s?
2. Storm's father says in this issue "I knew Storm was special from the moment of her conception." Is this a normal expression that I am over-thinking? Because it strikes me as a deeply weird thing to say, as it is very close to "I knew Storm was special from the moment after I had sex with her mom," and also because the "moment of conception" is a moment reconstructed after the fact -- you don't know when it is, you only know when it was -- so you cannot really know something about a child from the moment of conception.]
Friday, January 18, 2008
Comics Out January 16, 2008
Angel 3. Illyria bursts out of a dragon's neck and I cannot help but notice two things -- the art was so muddy I thought she severed its head, and the dragon seems unharmed after losing chunks of bone. There is maybe an interesting twist at the end of the issue. Generally acceptable, but only if you are already a fan of Whedon and Angel.
Iron Fist. David Aja draws only nine pages here and guest artists cover bits of the real time story (not a flashback) for maybe the first time. The main story is still solid, and I was glad Aja got to draw the battle, and the Prince of Orphans is a really powerful character. The plane still flies. But with the art changes I cannot help but notice that the perfectly engineered weights are maybe a little off, and we see something a little out of balance here for the first time, a bit of rattling. Still the best monthly mainstream ongoing.
In Comics News nothing caught my attention. Review, discuss, recommend.
Iron Fist. David Aja draws only nine pages here and guest artists cover bits of the real time story (not a flashback) for maybe the first time. The main story is still solid, and I was glad Aja got to draw the battle, and the Prince of Orphans is a really powerful character. The plane still flies. But with the art changes I cannot help but notice that the perfectly engineered weights are maybe a little off, and we see something a little out of balance here for the first time, a bit of rattling. Still the best monthly mainstream ongoing.
In Comics News nothing caught my attention. Review, discuss, recommend.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Shoot ‘Em Up
Shoot ‘Em Up is an awful movie, whose only vague virtue – very vague – is that Clive Owen parodies his self-serious role in Children of Men as a protector of a child. But Shoot ‘Em Up reminded me of an important thing.
I have to stop being lazy. Like many people, especially comic book fans, I have been known to review things by simply listing off thing I feel are self-evidently awesome. Ninja Man-Bats, Monkeys and Robots, Giant Apes, lesbian assassins, Russian bears with Jet Packs. But you can see, watching Shoot Em Up, that this is exactly how these guys imagined their own project. Clive Owen delivers a baby while shooting a million gunmen with crazy acrobatics – flipping over a table to use it as a shield, then, when it lands on the toolkit that was once on the table, using it as the ramp it has now become, for example. The baby’s umbilical cord is severed with a gun blast. Clive Owen has sex with Monica Belluchi, and fends off a second host of gunmen while continuing to have sex with her in various positions. There is a gun with a thumb-print safety on one of the bad guys, but our hero figures out how to use it by cutting the guy’s hand off and bringing it with him. Bullets are fired with strings and carrots, and at one point, no gun at all. There is a sky-diving shootout where someone lands on helicopter blades. I have to stop using one of my favourite Blake lines in my reviews – “Exuberance is Beauty.” Because Shoot ‘Em Up is exuberant, I suppose, but it is still awful.
Shoot ‘Em Up reminds us that it is all in the execution. Matt Fraction may say of Iron Fist “Kung-Fu billionaire – how is this not on issue 600 by now?” but that is false modesty. The book is not good because it features a Kung-Fu billionaire. The Kung Fu billionaire seems like something inevitably awesome because Matt Fraction and company are writing the thing. Exuberance is not beauty. Flawless execution is beauty – and will make it look like it is just the ideas that sell themselves.
I have to stop being lazy. Like many people, especially comic book fans, I have been known to review things by simply listing off thing I feel are self-evidently awesome. Ninja Man-Bats, Monkeys and Robots, Giant Apes, lesbian assassins, Russian bears with Jet Packs. But you can see, watching Shoot Em Up, that this is exactly how these guys imagined their own project. Clive Owen delivers a baby while shooting a million gunmen with crazy acrobatics – flipping over a table to use it as a shield, then, when it lands on the toolkit that was once on the table, using it as the ramp it has now become, for example. The baby’s umbilical cord is severed with a gun blast. Clive Owen has sex with Monica Belluchi, and fends off a second host of gunmen while continuing to have sex with her in various positions. There is a gun with a thumb-print safety on one of the bad guys, but our hero figures out how to use it by cutting the guy’s hand off and bringing it with him. Bullets are fired with strings and carrots, and at one point, no gun at all. There is a sky-diving shootout where someone lands on helicopter blades. I have to stop using one of my favourite Blake lines in my reviews – “Exuberance is Beauty.” Because Shoot ‘Em Up is exuberant, I suppose, but it is still awful.
Shoot ‘Em Up reminds us that it is all in the execution. Matt Fraction may say of Iron Fist “Kung-Fu billionaire – how is this not on issue 600 by now?” but that is false modesty. The book is not good because it features a Kung-Fu billionaire. The Kung Fu billionaire seems like something inevitably awesome because Matt Fraction and company are writing the thing. Exuberance is not beauty. Flawless execution is beauty – and will make it look like it is just the ideas that sell themselves.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Mitch: Beirut’s “Nantes” and Phantom Brains in Space
[Guest blogger Mitch with a music review. I want to see more stuff on here about music, using youtube clips. Get to work, all of you.]
My new favorite band is Beirut, a pretty much one-man show put on by 22-year-old Zach Condon. This is the video for the song “Nantes” off the new(ish) album The Flying Cup Club:
The video makes magic an all-too common feeling New Yorkers get every morning — putting on your iPod, going down the stairs and heading off to work. I like that the music is obviously recorded live and I’m AMAZED that the acoustics are as good as they are with all those instruments.
The song itself exhibits all the best elements of Condon’s textured, peculiar sound. Attitude-wise “Nantes” manages to exude both jubilance and melancholy, but never wholly elects one over the other. There are only 70 words in the song and most of them are warbled incoherently. All the instrumentation seems to be on loan from the coast of France (where the city Nantes is located) and my enjoyment Condon’s music in general probably comes from that. (Since the movie Amelie I think everyone has grown a soft spot for vampy, romantic accordions.) Though it’s lost in this live recording, the music has this terrific tinny quality on the album, as if it’s being played through a gramophone in a steel supply closet.
The pile up of these straightforward, amateurish components produces a mysteriously euphoric digression that is equal parts folk music, French New-Wave film score and high school marching band. Maybe it’s not music for Fraction to “load his guns to by the early light of dawn,” but it could certainly underscore him chasing a red balloon through the streets of Paris. If there is muzak playing in the waiting room of Heaven, it probably sounds a lot like Beirut.
On a completely unrelated yet-still-somehow-related note, there was a fantastic article called “Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs?” in the Science section of the New York Times today. Briefly, the article explores the “Boltzmann Brain Problem,” which is a bizarre extension of the notion that anything that can happen in an infinite Universe IS happening. In this case, that an exact living copy of your brain can (and according to science as we know it, must) materialize into empty space trillions of light years away.
I only mention this because the Beirut song and this article were both rattling around in head today and I’m fascinated by how my mind managed to link two completely isolated pieces of information. Now when I hear the lyrics “well it's been a long time, long time now/ since I've seen you smile” I will only ever be able to picture a lovesick brain floating somewhere in the middle of the Universe.
My new favorite band is Beirut, a pretty much one-man show put on by 22-year-old Zach Condon. This is the video for the song “Nantes” off the new(ish) album The Flying Cup Club:
The video makes magic an all-too common feeling New Yorkers get every morning — putting on your iPod, going down the stairs and heading off to work. I like that the music is obviously recorded live and I’m AMAZED that the acoustics are as good as they are with all those instruments.
The song itself exhibits all the best elements of Condon’s textured, peculiar sound. Attitude-wise “Nantes” manages to exude both jubilance and melancholy, but never wholly elects one over the other. There are only 70 words in the song and most of them are warbled incoherently. All the instrumentation seems to be on loan from the coast of France (where the city Nantes is located) and my enjoyment Condon’s music in general probably comes from that. (Since the movie Amelie I think everyone has grown a soft spot for vampy, romantic accordions.) Though it’s lost in this live recording, the music has this terrific tinny quality on the album, as if it’s being played through a gramophone in a steel supply closet.
The pile up of these straightforward, amateurish components produces a mysteriously euphoric digression that is equal parts folk music, French New-Wave film score and high school marching band. Maybe it’s not music for Fraction to “load his guns to by the early light of dawn,” but it could certainly underscore him chasing a red balloon through the streets of Paris. If there is muzak playing in the waiting room of Heaven, it probably sounds a lot like Beirut.
On a completely unrelated yet-still-somehow-related note, there was a fantastic article called “Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs?” in the Science section of the New York Times today. Briefly, the article explores the “Boltzmann Brain Problem,” which is a bizarre extension of the notion that anything that can happen in an infinite Universe IS happening. In this case, that an exact living copy of your brain can (and according to science as we know it, must) materialize into empty space trillions of light years away.
I only mention this because the Beirut song and this article were both rattling around in head today and I’m fascinated by how my mind managed to link two completely isolated pieces of information. Now when I hear the lyrics “well it's been a long time, long time now/ since I've seen you smile” I will only ever be able to picture a lovesick brain floating somewhere in the middle of the Universe.
Free Form Comments
Say whatever you want to in the comments to this post -- random, off topic thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, criticisms (which can be anonymous), surveys, introductions if you have never commented before, personal news, self-promotion, requests to be added to the blog roll and so on. If a week goes by and I have failed to add you to the blog roll TELL ME TO DO IT AGAIN, and KEEP TELLING ME UNTIL IT GETS DONE. I can be lazy about updating the non-post parts of this site. Remember these comments can be directed at all the readers, not just me.
ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy (but now might not be). That is often the reason I fail to get back to people, and on a blog, after a few days, the comments thread dies and I just kind of forget about it. Let's use this space to fix that, because it does need to be fixed; I look like a jackass sometimes, leaving people hanging. I will TRY to respond to any questions here.
AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore. For example, if you thought of a great quote for the great quote commonplace book, but now no one is reading that, you could put it here.You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.
WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If you think your free form comment here might be better as its own post, but you do not want it to be public yet, email it to me. My email address is available on my blogger profile page. If I think it will work on this site, your post will be published here with your name in the title of the post. You can propose what you will, I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music and books.
ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy (but now might not be). That is often the reason I fail to get back to people, and on a blog, after a few days, the comments thread dies and I just kind of forget about it. Let's use this space to fix that, because it does need to be fixed; I look like a jackass sometimes, leaving people hanging. I will TRY to respond to any questions here.
AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore. For example, if you thought of a great quote for the great quote commonplace book, but now no one is reading that, you could put it here.You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.
WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If you think your free form comment here might be better as its own post, but you do not want it to be public yet, email it to me. My email address is available on my blogger profile page. If I think it will work on this site, your post will be published here with your name in the title of the post. You can propose what you will, I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music and books.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Jason Powell on Classic X-Men #9, part b, “The Gift”
[Jason Powell continues his issue by issue look at Claremont's X-Men -- NOW TWICE A WEEK, TUESDAYS and SATURDAYS. For more in this series see his name on the toolbar on the right.]
Well, talk about lousy timing. Geoff gives me a bit of grief because I suggest that Claremont should be applauded for his optimistic, “Love conquers all” philosophy, saying that if it’s not persuasive, then such a philosophy is just a cliché. I argue that Claremont DOES render it persuasively ... and then along comes “The Gift,” one of Claremont’s most feeble gestures in the direction of optimism. While I maintain that first eight Claremont-Bolton backups are each brilliant in their own way, and a few of them are utter perfection from start to finish, “The Gift,” in Classic X-Men #9, represents Claremont and Bolton’s first misstep. Indeed, it turns out to be the weakest of their roughly two-dozen collaborations on this title.
The story is set in between the panels of the main part-a narrative, while the X-Men are waiting in the hospital for Jean Grey to recover. Nightcrawler happens to be looking out a window, and sees a lonely kid wandering the grounds. He teleports down and very quickly befriends the child. They’re a very cute sequence in the middle where they play a sort of impromptu game of tag, and Nightcrawler of course keeps winning because of his ability to teleport. Bolton captures the perfect tone, leading to a playful and light-hearted sequence.
The rest of story, however, which ought to be just as whimsical – the point of the story being that Nightcrawler’s optimism breaks through the kid’s shell of depression – is overwritten. The bit in which Nightcrawler teaches Daniel to juggle is just a little too precious, for example. It comes off as trite.
Them there’s the ending: The following morning, Nightcrawler searches the hospital for Daniel, only to learn that the boy was a sick patient, and he died last night. So the kid Nightcrawler spent the evening palling around with was “... A GHOST?!” Hmmm.
So Nightcrawler and the ghost of a boy who died happened to meet up and become friends. The point of all this? Well, according to Nightcrawler, at the end (talking to himself, mind you): “The world – like a juggler’s balls – goes round and round ... and the trick is to live, the best you can, while you can. For that way, there will always be lights shining bravely, joyously – even in the deepest darkness.”
With all the times Claremont’s way with words has gotten me me right in the gut, I am inclined to cut him a lot of slack. But I also need to call him out when I feel like he’s fallen short. And, with that muddled attempt at an optimistic theme (be the best you can be – if you do, there will be lights!), “The Gift” falls very short indeed.
[The issue by issue analysis is a harsh taskmaster, because it does not allow you to gloss over any misstep. I have not read the issue, but it is interesting to me that Claremont is making a thematic chime here -- Nightcrawler finds the dead and back again kid as Jean is beginning her tenure as the most famous dead and back again character in comics.]
Well, talk about lousy timing. Geoff gives me a bit of grief because I suggest that Claremont should be applauded for his optimistic, “Love conquers all” philosophy, saying that if it’s not persuasive, then such a philosophy is just a cliché. I argue that Claremont DOES render it persuasively ... and then along comes “The Gift,” one of Claremont’s most feeble gestures in the direction of optimism. While I maintain that first eight Claremont-Bolton backups are each brilliant in their own way, and a few of them are utter perfection from start to finish, “The Gift,” in Classic X-Men #9, represents Claremont and Bolton’s first misstep. Indeed, it turns out to be the weakest of their roughly two-dozen collaborations on this title.
The story is set in between the panels of the main part-a narrative, while the X-Men are waiting in the hospital for Jean Grey to recover. Nightcrawler happens to be looking out a window, and sees a lonely kid wandering the grounds. He teleports down and very quickly befriends the child. They’re a very cute sequence in the middle where they play a sort of impromptu game of tag, and Nightcrawler of course keeps winning because of his ability to teleport. Bolton captures the perfect tone, leading to a playful and light-hearted sequence.
The rest of story, however, which ought to be just as whimsical – the point of the story being that Nightcrawler’s optimism breaks through the kid’s shell of depression – is overwritten. The bit in which Nightcrawler teaches Daniel to juggle is just a little too precious, for example. It comes off as trite.
Them there’s the ending: The following morning, Nightcrawler searches the hospital for Daniel, only to learn that the boy was a sick patient, and he died last night. So the kid Nightcrawler spent the evening palling around with was “... A GHOST?!” Hmmm.
So Nightcrawler and the ghost of a boy who died happened to meet up and become friends. The point of all this? Well, according to Nightcrawler, at the end (talking to himself, mind you): “The world – like a juggler’s balls – goes round and round ... and the trick is to live, the best you can, while you can. For that way, there will always be lights shining bravely, joyously – even in the deepest darkness.”
With all the times Claremont’s way with words has gotten me me right in the gut, I am inclined to cut him a lot of slack. But I also need to call him out when I feel like he’s fallen short. And, with that muddled attempt at an optimistic theme (be the best you can be – if you do, there will be lights!), “The Gift” falls very short indeed.
[The issue by issue analysis is a harsh taskmaster, because it does not allow you to gloss over any misstep. I have not read the issue, but it is interesting to me that Claremont is making a thematic chime here -- Nightcrawler finds the dead and back again kid as Jean is beginning her tenure as the most famous dead and back again character in comics.]
Melville’s Gnostic Fragment (Commonplace Book)
Melville, author of Moby-Dick, wrote pretty good poetry, it turns out:
Found and family, build a state
The pledged event is still the same.
Matter in end will never abate
His ancient brutal claim.
Indolence is heaven’s ally here,
And energy the child of hell.
The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear
But brims the poisoned well.
Found and family, build a state
The pledged event is still the same.
Matter in end will never abate
His ancient brutal claim.
Indolence is heaven’s ally here,
And energy the child of hell.
The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear
But brims the poisoned well.
Monday, January 14, 2008
The Unit
The Unit is created by David Mamet, one of my favourite writers. Like 24 the show is about Military Alpha Males doing the right thing, one of my guilty pleasures. Episodes written by Mamet himself contain flashes of his brilliant, weird, oddly poetic, tough-guy speak. “How’s the world, young soldier?” “Light and Bright, Sir.” The series is about a black-ops unit: at one point two of them, one black and one white, introduce themselves to the authorities as Mr. Black and Mr. White. When two more show up, Mr. Black introduces the two new guys as “Mr. Black and Mr. White.” “I thought Black and White were your names” he says. “They’re our brothers” comes the deadpan reply.
The problem is, at least in the first eight episodes (all I have seen at this point) the show, a kind of cross between 24 and Alias, is locked into a very limited structure. An hour-long drama with commercials, the show globe-hops almost every episode and at a minimum every episode focuses equally on the soldiers on a mission and the wives at home – and sometimes one of those plots includes a subplot. Because the show is committed to doing one off episodes – so thorough is the show about this I watched two episodes out of order and did not even notice – the dual plots, less than 20 minutes each, are forced to resolve with sitcom like simplicity. If a wife refuses to pray at the beginning of the hour, by the end she will be asking God for help. 24 has its share of problems, but its false neatness is covered up much better by the 24 hours in 24 episodes structure than CBS’s too friendly design.
I would very much like to see Mamet writing a season of 24, because the strengths of both could be easily combined. The characters on 24 never say anything memorable.
As a side note there is a weird connection between the two shows. Dennis Haysbert – who plays the president in season 2 of 24, and is also the guy from the All State Insurance adds because he is famous for noble trustworthy characters – is the leader of the unit, a Delta Force black-ops team. Max Martini – the second in command under Haysbert on the unit – also starred briefly on 24, as a military guy hired by Haysbert’s president to take down a Delta Force black-ops team. So The Unit makes these two guys from 24 into the opponents they faced on 24 and recasts the black ops guys as the good guys.
The problem is, at least in the first eight episodes (all I have seen at this point) the show, a kind of cross between 24 and Alias, is locked into a very limited structure. An hour-long drama with commercials, the show globe-hops almost every episode and at a minimum every episode focuses equally on the soldiers on a mission and the wives at home – and sometimes one of those plots includes a subplot. Because the show is committed to doing one off episodes – so thorough is the show about this I watched two episodes out of order and did not even notice – the dual plots, less than 20 minutes each, are forced to resolve with sitcom like simplicity. If a wife refuses to pray at the beginning of the hour, by the end she will be asking God for help. 24 has its share of problems, but its false neatness is covered up much better by the 24 hours in 24 episodes structure than CBS’s too friendly design.
I would very much like to see Mamet writing a season of 24, because the strengths of both could be easily combined. The characters on 24 never say anything memorable.
As a side note there is a weird connection between the two shows. Dennis Haysbert – who plays the president in season 2 of 24, and is also the guy from the All State Insurance adds because he is famous for noble trustworthy characters – is the leader of the unit, a Delta Force black-ops team. Max Martini – the second in command under Haysbert on the unit – also starred briefly on 24, as a military guy hired by Haysbert’s president to take down a Delta Force black-ops team. So The Unit makes these two guys from 24 into the opponents they faced on 24 and recasts the black ops guys as the good guys.
Music to Run To
I am looking for recommendations for songs to listen to while I jog. As person obsessed with popular genres I like songs used in films and TV, but I also listen to a lot of rap. My current favorites include songs off of M.I.A's Kala, Liquid Swords, Man or Astroman, and Unkle: War Stories. What I am looking for are songs that might go well with one of these:
"Make Your Own Kind of Music" (which Desmond works out to in the hatch on Lost)
"A la Menthe" (The Night Fox's laser dance song from Ocean's 12)
"Riot in Thunder Alley" (the car chase sequence in Death Proof)
"Malaguena Salerosa" (the closing credits to Kill Bill vol. 2)
"Flowmotion" by Bone Thugs N Harmony
The extended remix of the theme song from The Unit -- basically some guy Moby-ed up a Marine Core drill chant. Best running song ever.
What I am looking for is music to load your guns to by the early light of dawn, as Matt Fraction describes the new Unkle album.
Links to a free chance to listen to a bit of the song would be appreciated but are not necessary.
"Make Your Own Kind of Music" (which Desmond works out to in the hatch on Lost)
"A la Menthe" (The Night Fox's laser dance song from Ocean's 12)
"Riot in Thunder Alley" (the car chase sequence in Death Proof)
"Malaguena Salerosa" (the closing credits to Kill Bill vol. 2)
"Flowmotion" by Bone Thugs N Harmony
The extended remix of the theme song from The Unit -- basically some guy Moby-ed up a Marine Core drill chant. Best running song ever.
What I am looking for is music to load your guns to by the early light of dawn, as Matt Fraction describes the new Unkle album.
Links to a free chance to listen to a bit of the song would be appreciated but are not necessary.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Movies, TV, Short Stories, Novel (Stephen Frug Comment Pull Quote)
Stephen Frug wrote in a comment last week, on the subject of the Wire (the comment pull quote does not necessarily have to be from this week):
It seems to me that this whole "watching people change" is one of the thing that well-done serial TV has going for it: showing convincing change because there is time and space and context to do it. It's our cultural equivalent of those long 19th-Century novels; and it fundamentally can show character change in a way extremely difficult to do in the more compressed space of a film, a shorter novel or a graphic novel.
(Comics, as a serial medium, ought to be good at this... but I can't think of any examples that have been; partly because the best comics tend to be shorter runs or unified graphic novels, and long runs just don't sustain their quality long enough. But I'd love counter-examples.)
To this I want to add an observation. There used to be this distinction between the "big screen" of cinema and the "small screen" of television, with "small screen" often being a pejorative. But TV went all wide-screen, and on a lot of high end shows the season or even the series rather than the episode became the main narrative arc. Northern Exposure is all about the episode, 24 about the season, and Lost about the full six-season series (though of course all of these have smaller acts inside them -- even a Northern Exposure episode is broken up into four acts).
As you all know I have a habit, sometimes a bad one, of talking about pop culture in terms of high culture and vice versa. Admittedly this whole analogy could be off. But I used to think of movies as the novels -- sometimes trilogies -- and TV as being like short stories. And like the novel and the short story, I though of movies as having more gravity. But now movies -- even the kind that come in trilogies -- feel small compared to Dickensian fare like The Wire. Movies have become the short story while, as Stephen Frug points out, quality TV has become the 19th century novel.
Pricing is similar, though of course there are exceptions (a 12 dollar movie will be between 76 minutes and two hours and forty minutes). But there still seems to be a formal dissonance: you have to GO OUT to a HUGE SCREEN to see a small story, and you stay in and watch a small screen to see a HUGE story. But then again, maybe that makes perfect sense. You used to go out to see plays which often required unity of time and space, and then could go home and read War and Peace by the fire.
I do not really know what my point is here, except I think it would be an interesting experiment to see a movie theater play a TV show on a big screen in, say, two hour units over 12 days. Especially since we all go the other direction and watch movies meant for the big screen at home, on DVD.
It seems to me that this whole "watching people change" is one of the thing that well-done serial TV has going for it: showing convincing change because there is time and space and context to do it. It's our cultural equivalent of those long 19th-Century novels; and it fundamentally can show character change in a way extremely difficult to do in the more compressed space of a film, a shorter novel or a graphic novel.
(Comics, as a serial medium, ought to be good at this... but I can't think of any examples that have been; partly because the best comics tend to be shorter runs or unified graphic novels, and long runs just don't sustain their quality long enough. But I'd love counter-examples.)
To this I want to add an observation. There used to be this distinction between the "big screen" of cinema and the "small screen" of television, with "small screen" often being a pejorative. But TV went all wide-screen, and on a lot of high end shows the season or even the series rather than the episode became the main narrative arc. Northern Exposure is all about the episode, 24 about the season, and Lost about the full six-season series (though of course all of these have smaller acts inside them -- even a Northern Exposure episode is broken up into four acts).
As you all know I have a habit, sometimes a bad one, of talking about pop culture in terms of high culture and vice versa. Admittedly this whole analogy could be off. But I used to think of movies as the novels -- sometimes trilogies -- and TV as being like short stories. And like the novel and the short story, I though of movies as having more gravity. But now movies -- even the kind that come in trilogies -- feel small compared to Dickensian fare like The Wire. Movies have become the short story while, as Stephen Frug points out, quality TV has become the 19th century novel.
Pricing is similar, though of course there are exceptions (a 12 dollar movie will be between 76 minutes and two hours and forty minutes). But there still seems to be a formal dissonance: you have to GO OUT to a HUGE SCREEN to see a small story, and you stay in and watch a small screen to see a HUGE story. But then again, maybe that makes perfect sense. You used to go out to see plays which often required unity of time and space, and then could go home and read War and Peace by the fire.
I do not really know what my point is here, except I think it would be an interesting experiment to see a movie theater play a TV show on a big screen in, say, two hour units over 12 days. Especially since we all go the other direction and watch movies meant for the big screen at home, on DVD.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Jason Powell on Classic X-Men #9, part a (UXM #101)
[This post is part of a series of posts looking issue by issue at Claremont's X-Men. For more in this series see the tool bar on the right.]
There’s a story that appeared in Les Daniels’ biography of Marvel Comics. I don’t remember the story’s title, but it was written by Chris Claremont and starred Wolverine, and Daniels said that Claremont referred to it as “Wolverine 101,” because it contained all the basic elements that he felt are required for a successful Wolverine story.
Here, however, we have a LITERAL “X-Men 101,” and as chance would have it, there is quite a lot here that one could argue makes up the quintessence of what an X-Men story – particularly a Claremont X-Men story – should be.
We begin with another splash that super-imposes Jean over the careening shuttle (just as Classic X-Men #8, part b ended), and then a magnificent two-page spread of the shuttle crashing in Jamaica Bay. (X-Men #101 is the finest artistic accomplishment of Cockrum’s first run. It’s filled with fantastic images like this.)
One by one the X-Men’s heads break the surface, and then Jean comes careening out of the lake, once again delivering the “Hear me, X-Men ... Now and forever, I am Phoenix” speech. Like Banshee’s amending “we” to “I” in UXM #98, this is another example of Claremont’s intuitive far-sightedness. For better or worse, Jean really will be Phoenix “now and forever.”
At this point, Classic X-Men #9 gives us some newly interpolated pages to get the X-Men out of Jamaica Bay and into the hospital, where Jean is admitted as a coma patient. In the original comic, X-Men #101, this was partly accomplished by Storm using her powers to somehow change everybody into civilian clothes. Claremont revises that here. Instead, Nightcrawler uses his holographic image inducer to make the X-Men all appear as normal people in civilian clothes. This ends up working out nicely, as the image inducer will continue to play an important role over the next few issues. (Meanwhile, a new page shows Phoenix turning her costume into normal clothes while unconscious – which Scott and Professor X immediately recognize as something that would require an insane amount of power. So, the original bit with Storm REALLY has to be ret-conned out now.)
Cut to: a lot of angst, as the X-Men sit in the hospital waiting room, praying for Jean to recover. This is the first time in the original continuity that we learn that Wolverine is in love with Jean (though X-Men #100 hinted at it).
We get some nice characterization from Cyclops, who up till now had thought that the X-Men were what gave his life meaning. “But they’re not,” he thinks to himself torturedly, “It’s Jean.” Nicely soap-operatic moment. Not long after, a doctor announces that Jean has come out of her coma, and Scott collapses onto a piece of furniture muttering, “Thank God. Thank ... God. Very melodramatic, but I like it. After all, the point is that Scott is deeply and profoundly in love – a state that brings out the melodrama in all of us.
The X-Men’s angry reaction when Professor X sends them on an “enforced vacation,” may be a joke on Claremont and Cockrum’s part: There are many times during the Silver Age X-Men run that Professor X announces a vacation for the students at the beginning of the issue, they’d all get excited and head for various fun-time destinations – and then they’d be called back by Page 6 to fight a villain. Having the new X-Men react negatively to a vacation is a funny inverse on the idea.
There’s a great couple of pages that show the X-Men driving along a country road and then arriving at Banshee’s castle. These are probably my two favorite Cockrum pages in his entire run on the comic book. The full-page splash of the castle in particular is gorgeous.
Nightcrawler does a comedy bit with his image-inducer, using it to make him look like various celebrities in rapid succession. At one point, he makes himself look like Groucho Marx and then makes one of the most abysmal puns that has ever seen print anywhere. That part always makes me cringe.
Claremont officially and prematurely truncates the Colossus/Storm sexual tension in this issue. Nightcrawler makes a joke about it, Storm says, “I enjoy being with BOTH of you ... the three of us will go into dinner together, as equals,” and that’s that. It’s a notable first stab by Claremont at a kind of feminism: He’s happy to pair all the male characters off with ladies, but Storm is an independent woman and therefore doesn’t need a boyfriend. Fair enough, and actually a nice way of bucking tradition. (Peter David has commented that when he first read the early Claremont X-Men issues, he tried to guess which male member of the team Storm would end up with, never suspecting the answer would be “none of them.”)
So – an aircraft crash, Jean Grey proclaiming that she is Phoenix “now and forever,” Scott and Wolverine both experiencing angst over Jean, some fun character interaction that includes some gentle sexual tension, and a tough, vaguely feminist super heroine.
That’s X-Men 101.
There’s a story that appeared in Les Daniels’ biography of Marvel Comics. I don’t remember the story’s title, but it was written by Chris Claremont and starred Wolverine, and Daniels said that Claremont referred to it as “Wolverine 101,” because it contained all the basic elements that he felt are required for a successful Wolverine story.
Here, however, we have a LITERAL “X-Men 101,” and as chance would have it, there is quite a lot here that one could argue makes up the quintessence of what an X-Men story – particularly a Claremont X-Men story – should be.
We begin with another splash that super-imposes Jean over the careening shuttle (just as Classic X-Men #8, part b ended), and then a magnificent two-page spread of the shuttle crashing in Jamaica Bay. (X-Men #101 is the finest artistic accomplishment of Cockrum’s first run. It’s filled with fantastic images like this.)
One by one the X-Men’s heads break the surface, and then Jean comes careening out of the lake, once again delivering the “Hear me, X-Men ... Now and forever, I am Phoenix” speech. Like Banshee’s amending “we” to “I” in UXM #98, this is another example of Claremont’s intuitive far-sightedness. For better or worse, Jean really will be Phoenix “now and forever.”
At this point, Classic X-Men #9 gives us some newly interpolated pages to get the X-Men out of Jamaica Bay and into the hospital, where Jean is admitted as a coma patient. In the original comic, X-Men #101, this was partly accomplished by Storm using her powers to somehow change everybody into civilian clothes. Claremont revises that here. Instead, Nightcrawler uses his holographic image inducer to make the X-Men all appear as normal people in civilian clothes. This ends up working out nicely, as the image inducer will continue to play an important role over the next few issues. (Meanwhile, a new page shows Phoenix turning her costume into normal clothes while unconscious – which Scott and Professor X immediately recognize as something that would require an insane amount of power. So, the original bit with Storm REALLY has to be ret-conned out now.)
Cut to: a lot of angst, as the X-Men sit in the hospital waiting room, praying for Jean to recover. This is the first time in the original continuity that we learn that Wolverine is in love with Jean (though X-Men #100 hinted at it).
We get some nice characterization from Cyclops, who up till now had thought that the X-Men were what gave his life meaning. “But they’re not,” he thinks to himself torturedly, “It’s Jean.” Nicely soap-operatic moment. Not long after, a doctor announces that Jean has come out of her coma, and Scott collapses onto a piece of furniture muttering, “Thank God. Thank ... God. Very melodramatic, but I like it. After all, the point is that Scott is deeply and profoundly in love – a state that brings out the melodrama in all of us.
The X-Men’s angry reaction when Professor X sends them on an “enforced vacation,” may be a joke on Claremont and Cockrum’s part: There are many times during the Silver Age X-Men run that Professor X announces a vacation for the students at the beginning of the issue, they’d all get excited and head for various fun-time destinations – and then they’d be called back by Page 6 to fight a villain. Having the new X-Men react negatively to a vacation is a funny inverse on the idea.
There’s a great couple of pages that show the X-Men driving along a country road and then arriving at Banshee’s castle. These are probably my two favorite Cockrum pages in his entire run on the comic book. The full-page splash of the castle in particular is gorgeous.
Nightcrawler does a comedy bit with his image-inducer, using it to make him look like various celebrities in rapid succession. At one point, he makes himself look like Groucho Marx and then makes one of the most abysmal puns that has ever seen print anywhere. That part always makes me cringe.
Claremont officially and prematurely truncates the Colossus/Storm sexual tension in this issue. Nightcrawler makes a joke about it, Storm says, “I enjoy being with BOTH of you ... the three of us will go into dinner together, as equals,” and that’s that. It’s a notable first stab by Claremont at a kind of feminism: He’s happy to pair all the male characters off with ladies, but Storm is an independent woman and therefore doesn’t need a boyfriend. Fair enough, and actually a nice way of bucking tradition. (Peter David has commented that when he first read the early Claremont X-Men issues, he tried to guess which male member of the team Storm would end up with, never suspecting the answer would be “none of them.”)
So – an aircraft crash, Jean Grey proclaiming that she is Phoenix “now and forever,” Scott and Wolverine both experiencing angst over Jean, some fun character interaction that includes some gentle sexual tension, and a tough, vaguely feminist super heroine.
That’s X-Men 101.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Comics Out January 9, 2008
Punisher 15. This title continues to be goofy lightweight fun, and I really like Wegener on the art. Cartoon-y is the wrong word for him, because you don't think of this as ever being animated. He just does funny comic book images, if that is not a completely stupid thing to say. Anxiety of Influence is a funny thing on this title -- I bet this would not be half as lightweight, funny, and wonderful if Ennis was not doing serious work on his Punisher. Fraction's knowing he cannot do what Ennis does has made him completely himself here. This is my favorite arc so far.
Hulk 1. The number 1 here has less meaning that I have ever seen a number have. The normally un-flaggable Ed McGuinness is not doing it for me here, and he was the only reason I got it. It could be the inker. I like McGuinness at Maximum Cartoon-y, as he was on JLA Classified and Batman/Superman. There are some almost great images here, but too many dull, lifeless ones. Don't get the guy who makes old Saturday Mornings look like Sunday Afternoons draw a weak-ass superhero CSI thing that, really, good God, no one needed. Also I remembered to like Matt Fraction on the Order more -- I remember thinking that a Russian Bear Bad Guy was intrinsically awesome, but no, it is the writing of course. Jeph Loeb has no idea how to capture the brilliance of a Russian Bear Bad Guy (for example -- no jet-pack). But my biggest pet peeve? This sentence "Rick Jones, what've you gotten yourself into This time?!" There is only two people who talk like this. Douche-bags, and people who are trying really hard not to loose the audience that they are supposed to not be aware of. No. More. Of. This. Please.
EDIT: Also, what on earth is going on with his neck on the cover. I mean I am no anatomy expert, especially when it comes to monsters, but come on.
In comics news Spider-Man: One More Day: The Schadenfreude Saga continues. Schadenfreude, from the German, literally, "Damage Joy." Yeah, that's about right.
Hulk 1. The number 1 here has less meaning that I have ever seen a number have. The normally un-flaggable Ed McGuinness is not doing it for me here, and he was the only reason I got it. It could be the inker. I like McGuinness at Maximum Cartoon-y, as he was on JLA Classified and Batman/Superman. There are some almost great images here, but too many dull, lifeless ones. Don't get the guy who makes old Saturday Mornings look like Sunday Afternoons draw a weak-ass superhero CSI thing that, really, good God, no one needed. Also I remembered to like Matt Fraction on the Order more -- I remember thinking that a Russian Bear Bad Guy was intrinsically awesome, but no, it is the writing of course. Jeph Loeb has no idea how to capture the brilliance of a Russian Bear Bad Guy (for example -- no jet-pack). But my biggest pet peeve? This sentence "Rick Jones, what've you gotten yourself into This time?!" There is only two people who talk like this. Douche-bags, and people who are trying really hard not to loose the audience that they are supposed to not be aware of. No. More. Of. This. Please.
EDIT: Also, what on earth is going on with his neck on the cover. I mean I am no anatomy expert, especially when it comes to monsters, but come on.
In comics news Spider-Man: One More Day: The Schadenfreude Saga continues. Schadenfreude, from the German, literally, "Damage Joy." Yeah, that's about right.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
24
[This is part of my recent series of dispatches from the recent past. Netflix has me watching TV shows that I missed for various reasons, and I just finished 24 season one.]
For all the trouble it must cause to editors, costume designers, and lighting technicians, the “24 episodes portraying 24 hours” conceit is a screenwriter’s dream. It allows you to talk to the audience, tell them something and make them believe it without question. When someone says they will kill Jack if they do not hear from Palmer in 15 minutes – you know this is fifteen minutes of YOUR LIFE, including the trip to the bathroom you are going to take when the show goes to commercial. Characters are constantly making proclamations about time on the show because the writers know that if you can demonstrate that the characters have something in common with the audience – the desire to see a little girl saved for example – the audience will be more emotionally involved. On 24 time is a device the show can use to make this connection, in addition to all the other tools in the toolbox.
It is admittedly a fairly absurd device. Because 24 usually relies on four things going on at once (Jack’s story, Palmer’s story, Kim’s story, CTU’s story) the show is premised on the idea that at no point will something interesting be going on in two places at once. Jack will do something interesting for five minutes, then have a short stretch to drive with nothing going on while we cut to something beginning and ending with Kim, then downtime for her while we move to CTU, and so on. The show’s creators like to stress the “realism” of 24, but there is nothing realistic about it. It is an American James Bond story, whose very artificial premise gives it a boost of energy that sets it a bit above its counterparts. In the first season, by the way, Kim Bauer is kidnapped, on average, every eight hours.
52 was an attempt to create a comic book analogue for 24, but they misunderstood the main virtue of the thing – 52 accurately measures what week you are reading the book – the same week the story takes place – but this is a far cry from matching the reader on a minute by minute basis.
For all the trouble it must cause to editors, costume designers, and lighting technicians, the “24 episodes portraying 24 hours” conceit is a screenwriter’s dream. It allows you to talk to the audience, tell them something and make them believe it without question. When someone says they will kill Jack if they do not hear from Palmer in 15 minutes – you know this is fifteen minutes of YOUR LIFE, including the trip to the bathroom you are going to take when the show goes to commercial. Characters are constantly making proclamations about time on the show because the writers know that if you can demonstrate that the characters have something in common with the audience – the desire to see a little girl saved for example – the audience will be more emotionally involved. On 24 time is a device the show can use to make this connection, in addition to all the other tools in the toolbox.
It is admittedly a fairly absurd device. Because 24 usually relies on four things going on at once (Jack’s story, Palmer’s story, Kim’s story, CTU’s story) the show is premised on the idea that at no point will something interesting be going on in two places at once. Jack will do something interesting for five minutes, then have a short stretch to drive with nothing going on while we cut to something beginning and ending with Kim, then downtime for her while we move to CTU, and so on. The show’s creators like to stress the “realism” of 24, but there is nothing realistic about it. It is an American James Bond story, whose very artificial premise gives it a boost of energy that sets it a bit above its counterparts. In the first season, by the way, Kim Bauer is kidnapped, on average, every eight hours.
52 was an attempt to create a comic book analogue for 24, but they misunderstood the main virtue of the thing – 52 accurately measures what week you are reading the book – the same week the story takes place – but this is a far cry from matching the reader on a minute by minute basis.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Free Form Comments
Say whatever you want to in the comments to this post -- random, off topic thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, criticisms (which can be anonymous), surveys, introductions if you have never commented before, personal news, self-promotion, requests to be added to the blog roll and so on. If a week goes by and I have failed to add you to the blog roll TELL ME TO DO IT AGAIN, and KEEP TELLING ME UNTIL IT GETS DONE. I can be lazy about updating the non-post parts of this site. Remember these comments can be directed at all the readers, not just me.
ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy (but now might not be). That is often the reason I fail to get back to people, and on a blog, after a few days, the comments thread dies and I just kind of forget about it. Let's use this space to fix that, because it does need to be fixed; I look like a jackass sometimes, leaving people hanging. I will TRY to respond to any questions here.
AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore. For example, if you thought of a great quote for the great quote commonplace book, but now no one is reading that, you could put it here.You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.
WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If you think your free form comment here might be better as its own post, but you do not want it to be public yet, email it to me. My email address is available on my blogger profile page. If I think it will work on this site, your post will be published here with your name in the title of the post. You can propose what you will, I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music and books.
ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy (but now might not be). That is often the reason I fail to get back to people, and on a blog, after a few days, the comments thread dies and I just kind of forget about it. Let's use this space to fix that, because it does need to be fixed; I look like a jackass sometimes, leaving people hanging. I will TRY to respond to any questions here.
AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore. For example, if you thought of a great quote for the great quote commonplace book, but now no one is reading that, you could put it here.You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.
WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If you think your free form comment here might be better as its own post, but you do not want it to be public yet, email it to me. My email address is available on my blogger profile page. If I think it will work on this site, your post will be published here with your name in the title of the post. You can propose what you will, I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music and books.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Shining (Commonplace Book)
I never put it up on the blog before because I assumed everyone knew about it, but I bumped into someone the other day who had never seen this brilliant editing joke using the film The Shining. I am putting this up for the eight people who missed it. For everyone else it is worth watching more than once.
Monday, January 07, 2008
There Will Be Blood
There Will Be Blood is a serious accomplishment, but I am going to have to put it in a category with Pan’s Labyrinth and Children of Men (and P.T. Anderson’s earlier Boogie Nights): nearly perfectly crafted movies that were not for me.
The main factor, perhaps an unfair one to blame the movie for, was the trailer and the reviews – which all had me ready for an apocalyptic epic with a main character who was in the tradition of Milton’s Satan, Captain Ahab, and the Judge from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. “Apocalyptic” was a word used in more than one review, as was “force of nature.” One review did compare Plainview to Ahab and one used the word “satanic”. “Epic” was also a word tossed around. The idea of that kind of film set in the early part of the twentieth century that pits a religious evangelical religion against capitalism in the form of two powerful men essentially building California got my attention immediately. The trailer, packing the film’s best music and imagery – fire, blood, violence, religious enthusiasm – into something pounding toward a stunning climax of misanthropy, confirmed this for me. Plainview’s voice alone is amazing. Magnolia was too much like Short Cuts to be a good movie in its own right, I thought, but the scene with the frogs was pretty amazing – something totally unnatural breaking in and changing everything was stunning. Punch Drunk Love did my favourite thing: take a stale genre, and make its clichés – will the couple work it out? Love conquers All – persuasive, dangerous and powerful again. P.T. Anderson is going to do something stunning here, I thought.
He does do something stunning, I guess. Certainly the camera work, landscape and the music go a long way toward that “epic” feel, as does the two hour and 40 minute running time. (As a side-note, I did like the music, though I think Neil Young wins for best music in a western in Dead Man). And it’s not like I hated There Will Be Blood, or could not tell that is was an amazing movie in its own right. But it is not at all what I wanted. Daniel Day Lewis’s Daniel Plainview is not Satan, Ahab, or the Judge. (If you have not read Blood Meridian, but have seen No Country for Old Men, the Judge is a bit like Chigurh, if Chigurh danced and played the violin, and talked philosophy). Daniel Plainview, in the film, is not the Satanic figure of awe that he is in the trailer. He has a satanic energy, a dark drive, to be sure – this is what the reviews seize upon. But his energy is only directed toward oil. Ahab’s energy is directed toward the whale, but in the context of the whale’s place in the cosmos. God, or Nature, is Ahab’s true opponent. Ahab is Shakespearian. Plainview is Sinclair-ian. Plainview is selfish in an uninteresting way, myopic, drunk, childish, interested in petty humiliation, and his misanthropy is not apocalyptic or Gnostic – he just doesn’t like people. “Cruel” is too dramatic a word for him; “mean” is better. He thinks he is big, but the movie shows him to be small. Similarly Paul Dano’s preacher Eli Sunday. The trailer shows him for a moment preaching and you figure, having seen Magnolia, that this preaching scene is going to be a 20 minute, single take, tour-de-force – but it is not. It is a short scene, and more than a little silly, intentionally. Like Plainview, the film shows Sunday to be smaller than he thinks, and than I was lead to believe – petty, childish, stupid, and small. The trailer got me thinking this would be a clash of the titans, and I got something else. I blame P.T. Anderson less for this than I blame the reviewers and maybe the guy who cut the trailer. Though to be fair, my experience may be the point – maybe the film wanted to show me that capitalism and religious evangelicalism are just petty things from petty people. I guess I already figured that, maybe. If you read my earlier review of Children of Men and Pan’s Labyrinth (linked in the tool-bar on the right) you can see why this movie was not for me.
I think I would have preferred a movie a lot like this one, but where Plainview is more like The Judge and where it ends, with no warning after nearly three hours of perfect realism, with God smiting everyone with fire from the sky. Someone make me that movie.
Two final notes:
The more I think about Southland Tales, the more I like it.
I think it is possible I am crazy here, and that There Will Be Blood is not at all how I described it. I will continue to think on it. This is a first reaction.
The main factor, perhaps an unfair one to blame the movie for, was the trailer and the reviews – which all had me ready for an apocalyptic epic with a main character who was in the tradition of Milton’s Satan, Captain Ahab, and the Judge from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. “Apocalyptic” was a word used in more than one review, as was “force of nature.” One review did compare Plainview to Ahab and one used the word “satanic”. “Epic” was also a word tossed around. The idea of that kind of film set in the early part of the twentieth century that pits a religious evangelical religion against capitalism in the form of two powerful men essentially building California got my attention immediately. The trailer, packing the film’s best music and imagery – fire, blood, violence, religious enthusiasm – into something pounding toward a stunning climax of misanthropy, confirmed this for me. Plainview’s voice alone is amazing. Magnolia was too much like Short Cuts to be a good movie in its own right, I thought, but the scene with the frogs was pretty amazing – something totally unnatural breaking in and changing everything was stunning. Punch Drunk Love did my favourite thing: take a stale genre, and make its clichés – will the couple work it out? Love conquers All – persuasive, dangerous and powerful again. P.T. Anderson is going to do something stunning here, I thought.
He does do something stunning, I guess. Certainly the camera work, landscape and the music go a long way toward that “epic” feel, as does the two hour and 40 minute running time. (As a side-note, I did like the music, though I think Neil Young wins for best music in a western in Dead Man). And it’s not like I hated There Will Be Blood, or could not tell that is was an amazing movie in its own right. But it is not at all what I wanted. Daniel Day Lewis’s Daniel Plainview is not Satan, Ahab, or the Judge. (If you have not read Blood Meridian, but have seen No Country for Old Men, the Judge is a bit like Chigurh, if Chigurh danced and played the violin, and talked philosophy). Daniel Plainview, in the film, is not the Satanic figure of awe that he is in the trailer. He has a satanic energy, a dark drive, to be sure – this is what the reviews seize upon. But his energy is only directed toward oil. Ahab’s energy is directed toward the whale, but in the context of the whale’s place in the cosmos. God, or Nature, is Ahab’s true opponent. Ahab is Shakespearian. Plainview is Sinclair-ian. Plainview is selfish in an uninteresting way, myopic, drunk, childish, interested in petty humiliation, and his misanthropy is not apocalyptic or Gnostic – he just doesn’t like people. “Cruel” is too dramatic a word for him; “mean” is better. He thinks he is big, but the movie shows him to be small. Similarly Paul Dano’s preacher Eli Sunday. The trailer shows him for a moment preaching and you figure, having seen Magnolia, that this preaching scene is going to be a 20 minute, single take, tour-de-force – but it is not. It is a short scene, and more than a little silly, intentionally. Like Plainview, the film shows Sunday to be smaller than he thinks, and than I was lead to believe – petty, childish, stupid, and small. The trailer got me thinking this would be a clash of the titans, and I got something else. I blame P.T. Anderson less for this than I blame the reviewers and maybe the guy who cut the trailer. Though to be fair, my experience may be the point – maybe the film wanted to show me that capitalism and religious evangelicalism are just petty things from petty people. I guess I already figured that, maybe. If you read my earlier review of Children of Men and Pan’s Labyrinth (linked in the tool-bar on the right) you can see why this movie was not for me.
I think I would have preferred a movie a lot like this one, but where Plainview is more like The Judge and where it ends, with no warning after nearly three hours of perfect realism, with God smiting everyone with fire from the sky. Someone make me that movie.
Two final notes:
The more I think about Southland Tales, the more I like it.
I think it is possible I am crazy here, and that There Will Be Blood is not at all how I described it. I will continue to think on it. This is a first reaction.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Comics Out January 4, 2008
Buffy 10. With the Faith arc over, nearly half of the Buffy Season 8 comics are not very good. This one, written by Joss, is certainly a step up, and features good use of one of his favorite devices: joking half-serious fantasy gives way, gradually, to a very real emotional rift -- here, one very persuasively handled. The joke with Dawn's clothes you can see coming from a million miles away, but I really did like that Willow's sexual fantasy involves Tina Fey. I myself have a tremendous crush on Tina Fey, and of course Whedon does too -- she is his archetypical adorable but overlooked nerd. The art continues to fluctuate between acceptable and just bad -- where exactly is Buffy's knee supposed to be in the very first panel of this issue? Any way you look at it she has some kind of awful withered leg in a shot that should surely be alluring -- this is a sex fantasy after all. This comic continues, and I don't hate it or anything, but Joss is not convincing me to NEED more Buffy stories.
In Comics News, everyone is talking about the outcome of One More Day. Newsarama has a lot of stories about it, but none of them seemed very interesting to me. Please tell me if I am wrong.
In Comics News, everyone is talking about the outcome of One More Day. Newsarama has a lot of stories about it, but none of them seemed very interesting to me. Please tell me if I am wrong.
Truth v Fiction in Art (Comment Pull Quote)
Mitch reivewed the Farnsworth Invention this week, and in that review he wondered
Can an ending still be true to the story if it isn’t actually true to the source material?
I wrote
I think folks around here will already guess I think it CAN, and also that to a certain extent IT MUST. Oscar Wilde famously complained that the problem with life is that it has not sense of dramatic structure, or proportion, or timing. Art, said Wilde, was our chance to teach life its proper place. That being said, it still may be the case that in Sorkin may have gone too far in simplifying the ending -- not because it is false, but because it suggests that the audience is too dumb to understand complexity. Changing the ending of such a recent piece of history, he should also have been prepared for the backlash -- it is not like he is making 300.
HCDuvall, in the comments, is our Pull Quote of the Week. Here is what he said:
I think the creative impulses might be the same in film, to sum up in a dramatic. Witness the The Aviator, one of the many Scorsese films that makes me sit there and think that he should either cut the thing in half or make a Ken Burns length mini-series.
As for fiction and truth, I’m borrowing the phrase from a Sandman comic, but the power of fiction is that it can tell true things without being true. But another facet is that fiction can play with real people. It’s one thing to write a romance now that says Mary Boleyn left the court to her sister for true love and family, it’s another to make a movie about Jonathan Nash and skip over the abandoned wife and kid who he once told, more or less “I like the new one, he’s smarter” (a Beautiful Mind), for sheer dramatics. Which is a longwinded way of saying these endings may be true the story, but if the story isn’t true to life, then why are you telling it this way? If the story is meant to be saying something else, why not use “pure” fiction? I believe when based on facts it is important to be true—if the ending needs modified facts, the ending isn’t wrong, it’s the story you’re telling that’s broken. It’s like building a stagecoach out of car parts or something. Somebody’s being simpleminded, but it’s not necessarily the driver. It’s a disservice.
I'm not so much arguing against dramatic license, I hope, as contrived simplicity and I realize that Geoff is too, taking it from the audience pt of view. The thing about Wilde’s statement and it’s ilk, though, and this might just be a peeve of mine, is that when melding facts and truth with entertainment and art, that life is complex is the first to fall to “true endings” and commercial drives…People get a lot of their fact from fiction. I let Sorkin off the hook for that astronaut moon urban legend he included in the play (The version I heard had Neil Armstrong, which Sorkin didn’t use, and when I mentioned that to my viewing companion when I saw the play, she figured Sorkin probably had it righter than me—and we were both wrong).
I’ll finish off with another wordy example of things, to say that I know these things are harmless but it’s so easy to lose sight of how easy mixing is (and elsewhen I’d argue unnecessary). So there’s this place in New York hidden away in behind a big curtain, in the middle of the lobby of a swank midtown hotel. The place has vinyl fake wood walls, great burgers, cramped booths, and long lines. And last time I was there a tourist sits down next to my group, he’s an airline pilot, and he says whenever he’s in New York from Israel he gets a burger before he flies out. And the man says how before they built this hotel this divey place with beer pitchers below room service with $20 burgers was here and the owner wouldn’t sell out, so they built around him. Thing of it is, and I didn’t correct him, that’s bull. The place has been open maybe six years. It’s a great harmless story, but it’s marketing. Get in the habit of letting facts go to suit fiction and you can sell anything.
Can an ending still be true to the story if it isn’t actually true to the source material?
I wrote
I think folks around here will already guess I think it CAN, and also that to a certain extent IT MUST. Oscar Wilde famously complained that the problem with life is that it has not sense of dramatic structure, or proportion, or timing. Art, said Wilde, was our chance to teach life its proper place. That being said, it still may be the case that in Sorkin may have gone too far in simplifying the ending -- not because it is false, but because it suggests that the audience is too dumb to understand complexity. Changing the ending of such a recent piece of history, he should also have been prepared for the backlash -- it is not like he is making 300.
HCDuvall, in the comments, is our Pull Quote of the Week. Here is what he said:
I think the creative impulses might be the same in film, to sum up in a dramatic. Witness the The Aviator, one of the many Scorsese films that makes me sit there and think that he should either cut the thing in half or make a Ken Burns length mini-series.
As for fiction and truth, I’m borrowing the phrase from a Sandman comic, but the power of fiction is that it can tell true things without being true. But another facet is that fiction can play with real people. It’s one thing to write a romance now that says Mary Boleyn left the court to her sister for true love and family, it’s another to make a movie about Jonathan Nash and skip over the abandoned wife and kid who he once told, more or less “I like the new one, he’s smarter” (a Beautiful Mind), for sheer dramatics. Which is a longwinded way of saying these endings may be true the story, but if the story isn’t true to life, then why are you telling it this way? If the story is meant to be saying something else, why not use “pure” fiction? I believe when based on facts it is important to be true—if the ending needs modified facts, the ending isn’t wrong, it’s the story you’re telling that’s broken. It’s like building a stagecoach out of car parts or something. Somebody’s being simpleminded, but it’s not necessarily the driver. It’s a disservice.
I'm not so much arguing against dramatic license, I hope, as contrived simplicity and I realize that Geoff is too, taking it from the audience pt of view. The thing about Wilde’s statement and it’s ilk, though, and this might just be a peeve of mine, is that when melding facts and truth with entertainment and art, that life is complex is the first to fall to “true endings” and commercial drives…People get a lot of their fact from fiction. I let Sorkin off the hook for that astronaut moon urban legend he included in the play (The version I heard had Neil Armstrong, which Sorkin didn’t use, and when I mentioned that to my viewing companion when I saw the play, she figured Sorkin probably had it righter than me—and we were both wrong).
I’ll finish off with another wordy example of things, to say that I know these things are harmless but it’s so easy to lose sight of how easy mixing is (and elsewhen I’d argue unnecessary). So there’s this place in New York hidden away in behind a big curtain, in the middle of the lobby of a swank midtown hotel. The place has vinyl fake wood walls, great burgers, cramped booths, and long lines. And last time I was there a tourist sits down next to my group, he’s an airline pilot, and he says whenever he’s in New York from Israel he gets a burger before he flies out. And the man says how before they built this hotel this divey place with beer pitchers below room service with $20 burgers was here and the owner wouldn’t sell out, so they built around him. Thing of it is, and I didn’t correct him, that’s bull. The place has been open maybe six years. It’s a great harmless story, but it’s marketing. Get in the habit of letting facts go to suit fiction and you can sell anything.
Saturday, January 05, 2008
Jason Powell on Classic X-Men #8, part b
[This post is part of a series looking at Claremont's X-Men issue by issue. For more in this series click Jason's name in the too-bar on the right. I make comments at the bottom in italics]
“Greater Love Hath No X-Man,” Act II
Eight issues in, and Claremont and Bolton are still on top of their game. This is a direct continuation from X-Men #100 (or Classic #8, part a), in which we see Jean physically die from radiation poisoning. It’s rendered with suitable grotesqueness by John Bolton. Jean’s mind somehow survives, however, and encounters an alien being (who first appears as solid white blankness) offering a way in which Jean can live. Jean is skeptical and frightened, but over the course of several pages (during which the blank whiteness gradually coalesces, first into a vaguely humanoid shape and finally into a duplicate of Jean Grey), the being expresses – in very lovely and poetic terms – why Jean should accept the offer.
So, Jean accepts, and Claremont leads us to understand that her love for Scott is her primary motivation. Although she also wants to save the X-Men and, of course, to live, it is out of love that she makes a pact with this being. This is a significant example of where Claremont’s priorities are. He’s got a sort of hippie outlook: Love is all you need. Greater love hath no X-Man. (That quote, by the way, is from John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” In both parts a and b of the story, that allusion seems mainly to apply to Jean.) This unapologetic optimism is one of the things I admire about Claremont’s work, particularly over the course of his 17-year X-Men run.
Some people have accused these Claremont-Bolton backups of being too wordy, and too low on action. Certainly this issue might lend fuel to that argument: It is 12 pages of Jean and an alien talking to each other. But again, I’d urge readers to enjoy the flow of the dialogue, the way Claremont allows the two characters to wind quite naturally through every nuance and implication of the bond that the entity is proposing – up to and including a warning from the being that this grand experiment might end in disaster, and Jean’s use of the phrase “dance with the devil” to describe what she’s getting into. It’s a beautiful example of a slow burn.
The final page is a super-imposition. In a full-page splash, we see the shuttle careening through space, and on top of that a full shot of Jean in her new, Cockrum-designed costume. “Forgive me, X-Men,” she says. “I am no longer the woman you knew! I am fire, the soul and substance of life incarnate! Now and forever – I am PHOENIX!” Originally this speech first appeared – with slightly different wording -- in Uncanny X-Men #101, but Claremont is introducing it a bit early. He’s deliberately building in repetition between the original X-Men stories and these new “Classic” backups. The effect is to cement these moments in the readers’ minds, and it’s not out of caprice. Claremont is helping to solidify certain resonances, which will make themselves fully felt in the nine-part Dark Phoenix saga.
Notable bit: Phoenix/Jean recognizes that there’s a spark of life remaining in her corpse – some piece of her soul that doesn’t want to accept the entity’s offer, so it’s staying put. So Phoenix-Jean wraps corpse-Jean in a “cocoon,” noting that eventually this Jean will awaken. “What then?” she wonders? Going through the comics in chronological order as this series is doing, the answer to that question won’t come for quite a while. But most people know the answer by now: This is building in a precursor to the ret-con that would eventually let Marvel resurrect Jean Grey. So Claremont is playing nice here – weaving into his original run an editorial mandate that he was passionately opposed to. But he’s also doing it in his way; reworking the ret-con so that it fits his “love conquers all” outlook. It’s to his credit that he and Bolton manage, in this story, to spin some gold out of the terrible, leaden comics that made it necessary in the first place.
One last note: Phoenix’s costume is green and gold, but Dave Cockrum had originally conceived it as white and gold. The idea was nixed because the editors thought it wouldn’t work: Comic book paper being so thin back then, anything colored white would be marred by inky bleed-through from the other side of the page. Interesting then that, in this story, Claremont, Bolton and colorist Glynis Oliver give us a cosmic entity rendered as blank whiteness. And while it’s true that, yes, there is some bleed from the other side of the page in all of these renderings, the overall effect is still lovely. It’s particularly nice the way the spare whiteness shows off the elegant beauty of Bolton’s figure drawing. The full-page splash of the Phoenix force manifesting as the outline of Jean’s female figure is particularly gorgeous.
[I don't want to sound like a curmudgeon -- though I always do -- but I don't think it is fair to compliment a writer for a theme like "Love Conquers All" unless that theme is persuasively rendered; persuasively rendering a cliched theme like that is extraordinarily difficult, and Punch Drunk Love is one of the few things I can think of that made that theme work in a notable way. But again: I am the curmudgeon. And also I thought that might be an interesting thing to talk about, which is why I did not ask Jason to say, revise his post on this point.
That story about the "playing nice" ret-con does make Claremont sound like a nice guy, though.
Morrison has Jean return in the white when we see her in Here Comes Tomorrow, which is pretty cool. All part his whole "the future is the past" thing.
On a side note, I think it is interesting that Claremont turned Jean into a mythical being who is continually born again from its own ashes -- and then got upset that Jean was brought back. I suppose his point would be that the power comes back again and again, not the vessel. But still -- one of the reasons it is so easy to bring back Phoenix-Jean is that that is what the Phoenix is supposed to do.]
“Greater Love Hath No X-Man,” Act II
Eight issues in, and Claremont and Bolton are still on top of their game. This is a direct continuation from X-Men #100 (or Classic #8, part a), in which we see Jean physically die from radiation poisoning. It’s rendered with suitable grotesqueness by John Bolton. Jean’s mind somehow survives, however, and encounters an alien being (who first appears as solid white blankness) offering a way in which Jean can live. Jean is skeptical and frightened, but over the course of several pages (during which the blank whiteness gradually coalesces, first into a vaguely humanoid shape and finally into a duplicate of Jean Grey), the being expresses – in very lovely and poetic terms – why Jean should accept the offer.
So, Jean accepts, and Claremont leads us to understand that her love for Scott is her primary motivation. Although she also wants to save the X-Men and, of course, to live, it is out of love that she makes a pact with this being. This is a significant example of where Claremont’s priorities are. He’s got a sort of hippie outlook: Love is all you need. Greater love hath no X-Man. (That quote, by the way, is from John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” In both parts a and b of the story, that allusion seems mainly to apply to Jean.) This unapologetic optimism is one of the things I admire about Claremont’s work, particularly over the course of his 17-year X-Men run.
Some people have accused these Claremont-Bolton backups of being too wordy, and too low on action. Certainly this issue might lend fuel to that argument: It is 12 pages of Jean and an alien talking to each other. But again, I’d urge readers to enjoy the flow of the dialogue, the way Claremont allows the two characters to wind quite naturally through every nuance and implication of the bond that the entity is proposing – up to and including a warning from the being that this grand experiment might end in disaster, and Jean’s use of the phrase “dance with the devil” to describe what she’s getting into. It’s a beautiful example of a slow burn.
The final page is a super-imposition. In a full-page splash, we see the shuttle careening through space, and on top of that a full shot of Jean in her new, Cockrum-designed costume. “Forgive me, X-Men,” she says. “I am no longer the woman you knew! I am fire, the soul and substance of life incarnate! Now and forever – I am PHOENIX!” Originally this speech first appeared – with slightly different wording -- in Uncanny X-Men #101, but Claremont is introducing it a bit early. He’s deliberately building in repetition between the original X-Men stories and these new “Classic” backups. The effect is to cement these moments in the readers’ minds, and it’s not out of caprice. Claremont is helping to solidify certain resonances, which will make themselves fully felt in the nine-part Dark Phoenix saga.
Notable bit: Phoenix/Jean recognizes that there’s a spark of life remaining in her corpse – some piece of her soul that doesn’t want to accept the entity’s offer, so it’s staying put. So Phoenix-Jean wraps corpse-Jean in a “cocoon,” noting that eventually this Jean will awaken. “What then?” she wonders? Going through the comics in chronological order as this series is doing, the answer to that question won’t come for quite a while. But most people know the answer by now: This is building in a precursor to the ret-con that would eventually let Marvel resurrect Jean Grey. So Claremont is playing nice here – weaving into his original run an editorial mandate that he was passionately opposed to. But he’s also doing it in his way; reworking the ret-con so that it fits his “love conquers all” outlook. It’s to his credit that he and Bolton manage, in this story, to spin some gold out of the terrible, leaden comics that made it necessary in the first place.
One last note: Phoenix’s costume is green and gold, but Dave Cockrum had originally conceived it as white and gold. The idea was nixed because the editors thought it wouldn’t work: Comic book paper being so thin back then, anything colored white would be marred by inky bleed-through from the other side of the page. Interesting then that, in this story, Claremont, Bolton and colorist Glynis Oliver give us a cosmic entity rendered as blank whiteness. And while it’s true that, yes, there is some bleed from the other side of the page in all of these renderings, the overall effect is still lovely. It’s particularly nice the way the spare whiteness shows off the elegant beauty of Bolton’s figure drawing. The full-page splash of the Phoenix force manifesting as the outline of Jean’s female figure is particularly gorgeous.
[I don't want to sound like a curmudgeon -- though I always do -- but I don't think it is fair to compliment a writer for a theme like "Love Conquers All" unless that theme is persuasively rendered; persuasively rendering a cliched theme like that is extraordinarily difficult, and Punch Drunk Love is one of the few things I can think of that made that theme work in a notable way. But again: I am the curmudgeon. And also I thought that might be an interesting thing to talk about, which is why I did not ask Jason to say, revise his post on this point.
That story about the "playing nice" ret-con does make Claremont sound like a nice guy, though.
Morrison has Jean return in the white when we see her in Here Comes Tomorrow, which is pretty cool. All part his whole "the future is the past" thing.
On a side note, I think it is interesting that Claremont turned Jean into a mythical being who is continually born again from its own ashes -- and then got upset that Jean was brought back. I suppose his point would be that the power comes back again and again, not the vessel. But still -- one of the reasons it is so easy to bring back Phoenix-Jean is that that is what the Phoenix is supposed to do.]
Friday, January 04, 2008
The Wire
People just go on and on about what makes The Wire one of the best television shows ever, or the best crime story in any medium, or what have you. Realism is cited often, but I do not care that much about realism. What I love about The Wire is that at the beginning of every episode, there is this implied voice speaking to you, one that says “You are smart. This is going to be a complicated story, with a lot of characters, characters with names, and nicknames that are going to be hard to keep track of, characters that are not good guys or bad guys but just guys, so you do not know who to root for. But we know you are smart. So we are not going to provide you with absurd exposition every fifteen minutes – no one, at any point, is going to just going to summarize what the show is about to a character who already knows, just so we can be sure you are keeping up. Because that is stupid, and we are all working too hard on this story to waste time being redundant, and making ourselves clear to addle-minded viewers who just came back from the bathroom. You are smart. TV is NOT for stupid people, potentially.”
Plus characters change in a way that is more persuasive and satisfying than any show I have ever seen, and that is one of the main reasons we tell stories -- to watch people change. But that is maybe another post.
I have only just finished the first season of The Wire, but this is why I have decided that the WGA strike is good – because I have not seen every episode of The Wire, The Unit, 24, Battlestar Galactica, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Flight of the Concords, and Ugly Betty. And I have a Netflix account. Expect more in my series Vaguely Anachronistic Comments on Stuff from the Recent Past.
Plus characters change in a way that is more persuasive and satisfying than any show I have ever seen, and that is one of the main reasons we tell stories -- to watch people change. But that is maybe another post.
I have only just finished the first season of The Wire, but this is why I have decided that the WGA strike is good – because I have not seen every episode of The Wire, The Unit, 24, Battlestar Galactica, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Flight of the Concords, and Ugly Betty. And I have a Netflix account. Expect more in my series Vaguely Anachronistic Comments on Stuff from the Recent Past.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Our Weekly Format
The format around here has gotten very confused in the last few weeks. It started back when I wanted to switch out Free Form Comments for Comics Out posts. When the holidays hit I got the idea that Free Form Comments should come out on the day comics come out and that the Comics Out posts should go two days later -- New Year's and Christmas moved comics out day twice in two weeks, and I forgot about the commonplace book, and I had guest bloggers to post, and I did not want to post anything substantial, especially the work of guests, on a day when no one would be reading, like Christmas day, or New Years eve. Next Week I hope to resume our regular schedule of
Monday: Post
Tuesday: Commonplace Book
Wednesday: Free Form Comments
Thursday: Post
Friday: Comics Out
Saturday: Claremont's X-Men series
Sunday: Comment Pull Quote
with a guest blogger posts appearing on days when the other post is not too big, or when there is no other post. I do not want to post more than twice a day right now.
Monday: Post
Tuesday: Commonplace Book
Wednesday: Free Form Comments
Thursday: Post
Friday: Comics Out
Saturday: Claremont's X-Men series
Sunday: Comment Pull Quote
with a guest blogger posts appearing on days when the other post is not too big, or when there is no other post. I do not want to post more than twice a day right now.
Free Form Comments
Say whatever you want to in the comments to this post -- random, off topic thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, criticisms (which can be anonymous), surveys, introductions if you have never commented before, personal news, self-promotion, requests to be added to the blog roll and so on. If a week goes by and I have failed to add you to the blog roll TELL ME TO DO IT AGAIN, and KEEP TELLING ME UNTIL IT GETS DONE. I can be lazy about updating the non-post parts of this site. Remember these comments can be directed at all the readers, not just me.
ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy (but now might not be). That is often the reason I fail to get back to people, and on a blog, after a few days, the comments thread dies and I just kind of forget about it. Let's use this space to fix that, because it does need to be fixed; I look like a jackass sometimes, leaving people hanging. I will TRY to respond to any questions here.
AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore. For example, if you thought of a great quote for the great quote commonplace book, but now no one is reading that, you could put it here.You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.
WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If you think your free form comment here might be better as its own post, but you do not want it to be public yet, email it to me. My email address is available on my blogger profile page. If I think it will work on this site, your post will be published here with your name in the title of the post. You can propose what you will, I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music and books.
ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy (but now might not be). That is often the reason I fail to get back to people, and on a blog, after a few days, the comments thread dies and I just kind of forget about it. Let's use this space to fix that, because it does need to be fixed; I look like a jackass sometimes, leaving people hanging. I will TRY to respond to any questions here.
AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore. For example, if you thought of a great quote for the great quote commonplace book, but now no one is reading that, you could put it here.You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.
WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If you think your free form comment here might be better as its own post, but you do not want it to be public yet, email it to me. My email address is available on my blogger profile page. If I think it will work on this site, your post will be published here with your name in the title of the post. You can propose what you will, I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music and books.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Mitch Reviews Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention
[Guest blogger Mitch reviews Aaron Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention. I make some comments at the bottom.]
Aaron Sorkin's new play The Farnsworth Invention is on Broadway now and in general it's a very brisk, entertaining historical drama. But in the most important ways, it seems, it is the textbook definition of a bad historical drama, in that much of the narrative is completely, utterly untrue. Sorkin is always a hotly debated figure on this blog, so I thought I’d pose the question: if the play is good, does it matter if Sorkin tweaked history to improve the dramatic flow of the story?
Spoilers follow.
When I worked for my old job, one of my tasks was carting scripts around from one Broadway executive’s office to another. Just to make it as surreal as possible, this task was carried out in the company limo. Most of this was painfully uninteresting and anyone who has spent time in a cab in midtown Manhattan at lunchtime can probably imagine how annoying it was. Every once and a while, though, something really neat found it’s way into my lap. One day I was in the limo and I found myself with the manuscript of Sorkin’s new play, The Farnsworth Invention—a historical drama that illustrates the complications Philo Farnsworth endured while inventing and securing the patent for television. Immediately I thought it was a great idea. Here is Broadway playwright cum television producer Sorkin returning to Broadway with a play about television. When Hank Azaria was cast, I knew that I would definitely go see it.
The play is rapid in the best sense of the word—there are over 60 characters in just as many locations. Farnsworth (played by very well by Jimmi Simpson) and RCA mogul David Sarnoff (played by Azaria) counter-narrate the action of the play through five decades. Occasionally Sorkin stumbles into cheesy scenes between two characters where one character starts to leave, but then stops and says “for whatever it’s worth…etc;” but mostly his reverence for the history and potential of television is inspiring. The climactic court case where RCA swiped the patent for television from Farnsworth and left him drunk and depressed left my fiancée and I captivated.
There’s only problem. Farnsworth DIDN’T lose the patent to RCA. While Sorkin’s play makes a brief mention to the fact that there were numerous appeals in the case, the rights were, in fact, eventually sold to RCA. The play is audaciously cut and dry about the matter—Sorkin didn’t trust the audience to grasp the complexity of years of both won and un-won legal battles that would, yes, eventually sink Farnswoth into drunken depression.
I guess I wondered if such a simplification is insulting to the memory of Farnsworth or merely economical storytelling. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wonder long. Pressed by members of Farnsworth’s family, the New York Post (of all places) printed this article.
Not to be undone, Sorkin sent a defensive email to the Farnsworth family member, which the family member posted here. There is also a great review of the play, which compares it to other revisionary historical dramas.
With respect to the members of Farnsworth’s family, I find myself strangely siding with Sorkin on this. Granted, he is quite defensive and in denial in that post, but even so—his ending is KIND OF a better ending for the stage version of Farnsworth. Remember, in real life Farnsworth the underdog won a lot of money and still became a lay-about alcoholic. Dramatically, it was better to me to see Farnsworth definitively defeated in one case, rather than worn down over a couple of decades.
The reaction of Farnsworth’s family reminded me eerily of the fan outcry at the ending to Star Trek: Enterprise, which was almost universally reviled as being untrue to the series. (Look it up on Wikipedia if you are interested: It’s called “These are the Voyages”) All of this led me to wonder about endings in general. In this case, can an ending still be true to the story if it isn’t actually true to the source material?
[I think folks around here will already guess I think it CAN, and also that to a certain extent IT MUST. Oscar Wilde famously complained that the problem with life is that it has not sense of dramatic structure, or proportion, or timing. Art, said Wilde, was our chance to teach life its proper place. That being said, it still may be the case that in Sorkin may have gone too far in simplifying the ending -- not because it is false, but because it suggests that the audience is too dumb to understand complexity. Changing the ending of such a recent piece of history, he should also have been prepared for the backlash -- it is not like he is making 300.]
Aaron Sorkin's new play The Farnsworth Invention is on Broadway now and in general it's a very brisk, entertaining historical drama. But in the most important ways, it seems, it is the textbook definition of a bad historical drama, in that much of the narrative is completely, utterly untrue. Sorkin is always a hotly debated figure on this blog, so I thought I’d pose the question: if the play is good, does it matter if Sorkin tweaked history to improve the dramatic flow of the story?
Spoilers follow.
When I worked for my old job, one of my tasks was carting scripts around from one Broadway executive’s office to another. Just to make it as surreal as possible, this task was carried out in the company limo. Most of this was painfully uninteresting and anyone who has spent time in a cab in midtown Manhattan at lunchtime can probably imagine how annoying it was. Every once and a while, though, something really neat found it’s way into my lap. One day I was in the limo and I found myself with the manuscript of Sorkin’s new play, The Farnsworth Invention—a historical drama that illustrates the complications Philo Farnsworth endured while inventing and securing the patent for television. Immediately I thought it was a great idea. Here is Broadway playwright cum television producer Sorkin returning to Broadway with a play about television. When Hank Azaria was cast, I knew that I would definitely go see it.
The play is rapid in the best sense of the word—there are over 60 characters in just as many locations. Farnsworth (played by very well by Jimmi Simpson) and RCA mogul David Sarnoff (played by Azaria) counter-narrate the action of the play through five decades. Occasionally Sorkin stumbles into cheesy scenes between two characters where one character starts to leave, but then stops and says “for whatever it’s worth…etc;” but mostly his reverence for the history and potential of television is inspiring. The climactic court case where RCA swiped the patent for television from Farnsworth and left him drunk and depressed left my fiancée and I captivated.
There’s only problem. Farnsworth DIDN’T lose the patent to RCA. While Sorkin’s play makes a brief mention to the fact that there were numerous appeals in the case, the rights were, in fact, eventually sold to RCA. The play is audaciously cut and dry about the matter—Sorkin didn’t trust the audience to grasp the complexity of years of both won and un-won legal battles that would, yes, eventually sink Farnswoth into drunken depression.
I guess I wondered if such a simplification is insulting to the memory of Farnsworth or merely economical storytelling. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wonder long. Pressed by members of Farnsworth’s family, the New York Post (of all places) printed this article.
Not to be undone, Sorkin sent a defensive email to the Farnsworth family member, which the family member posted here. There is also a great review of the play, which compares it to other revisionary historical dramas.
With respect to the members of Farnsworth’s family, I find myself strangely siding with Sorkin on this. Granted, he is quite defensive and in denial in that post, but even so—his ending is KIND OF a better ending for the stage version of Farnsworth. Remember, in real life Farnsworth the underdog won a lot of money and still became a lay-about alcoholic. Dramatically, it was better to me to see Farnsworth definitively defeated in one case, rather than worn down over a couple of decades.
The reaction of Farnsworth’s family reminded me eerily of the fan outcry at the ending to Star Trek: Enterprise, which was almost universally reviled as being untrue to the series. (Look it up on Wikipedia if you are interested: It’s called “These are the Voyages”) All of this led me to wonder about endings in general. In this case, can an ending still be true to the story if it isn’t actually true to the source material?
[I think folks around here will already guess I think it CAN, and also that to a certain extent IT MUST. Oscar Wilde famously complained that the problem with life is that it has not sense of dramatic structure, or proportion, or timing. Art, said Wilde, was our chance to teach life its proper place. That being said, it still may be the case that in Sorkin may have gone too far in simplifying the ending -- not because it is false, but because it suggests that the audience is too dumb to understand complexity. Changing the ending of such a recent piece of history, he should also have been prepared for the backlash -- it is not like he is making 300.]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
