Airplane Movies (Hancock and Sex and the City)

by Sara [This is part one of two]

I have a horrible fear of flying. This doesn't keep me from traveling, but aside from drugging myself into incoherency, I often find I have to rely on the in-flight entertainment to keep me from falling into abject terror at the slightest tremor or bump. Some airlines have awesome in-flight entertainment. I once flew on a Virgin International aircraft that had better in-demand music, TV and movies than my home. And I love JetBlue for letting me watch TV from the minute I sit down until I have to deplane. However, I recently flew with Alitalia and their in-flight "entertainment" well, it was slim pickins. I had a choice of about 8 movies, two of which were Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Both of which I've seen and were the unfortunate top choices. I was left with: Mama Mia, Hancock, Sex in the City (the movie), Speed Racer, and then three Italian language movies. The magazine had promised a Bollywood production but they lied. I saw Hancock and Sex in the City on the flight out and Mama Mia and Speed Racer on the way back. I would like to emphasize that if I were not trapped on a flying metal tube for 9 hours I wouldn't touch any of those movies, even if I were in as drugged a state on land as I was in the air. But, this is a girl who on one flight watched Welcome to Mooseport, and none of those seemed to be as bad as that. I will now break down each movie according to my reaction and what was going on in the flight at the time. Oh and SPOILERS ABOUND, however I assume with this trash no one gives a rat's.

Part One: Red Eye Flight from New York To Rome - Hancock and Sex and the City.

Ok, this flight was empty. There were two rows to every one person. This is seen as a positive, especially by my friend who can sleep on airplanes. I watched Hancock with dinner. It was the best of all four movies I ended up suffering through. Yes, Will Smith cutesy shtick have worn thin, yes it is hard to buy him as a grumpy drunk but this movie has Michael Bluth. I was the only person on earth who didn't know the twist so I suppose I experienced it the way the movie people wanted. The twist wasn't interesting and the last, oh, 20 minutes or so were not very satisfying. So with the magic of cell phones Will Smith and Charlize Theron can stay in touch without one or the other dying? Who are "these people" that keep coming for them? She makes it sound like it's the same people every time but it's so obviously not. And THAT GUY is the "Big Bad?" really?! He's not even a semi-famous B-list actor so why would I even care. And, wtf? Why do they only need a distance of a few feet to be immortal? meh, whatever. My biggest complaint is tat Michael Bluth isn't given enough to do. That and then he takes her back anyway and then Will Smith puts a heart logo on the moon and then suddenly all the ad people now think it's a totes cool idea? But the movie took me through dinner, during which there was turbulence. The kind where you have to hold you cup or it will fall off the wee table. So I was way more interested in the movie than I had to be.

Turbulence continues, I take the first half of my happy pill and flip to: The Sex In The City The Movie What Was Made From that TV Show What the Womens Folk Like.

Ugh. No really. Ugh. The pill has kicked in and so I'm zooey but I'm conscious. This movie is terrible even stoned. I never liked the show. I hate the clothes. I hate the cloying tone. I want to punch out Carrie Whatshernuts from the opening line that tells me how that women in their 20's come to New York for labels and love. I personally came to New York to study art, have sex, get very drunk, grow up and have a life. I have never own Prada anything, don't know anyone who does and don't know anyone who cares. Moving on... I truly hate these women. And why the fuck to they keep screeching "SAMANTHA!!!" whenever the woman from Mannequin shows up? She's always showing up. This should stop being exciting news... Oh, this one time I totes saw Chris Noth while I was in Chelsea seeing art. He was filming an ep of Law and Order: Chris Noth Wears a Jacket or whatever. I see him around a lot tho. I do not think he's at all attractive. Plus, I was a totally Lenny Briscoe fan. Anyhoodle, moving on. Why does Carrie have feathers sticking to her head? I never understand the fashion crap of this show, which I have caught in syndication unfortunately. I guess in this world Fashion = Looking As Stupid As Possible. But really, this observation of mine is not new, I know. I am caught however by one moment. The only moment in the entire 50-hour long crapfest that was this movie (seriously, I had nothing to do and nowhere to go but I was begging this movie to end round about the 2nd hour. This thing was LOOOOONG). Ok, the moment is Kristen Davis holding Horseface McGee and screaming at Chris Noth to stay away. I am tearing up remembering this. Seriously. Kristen was so raw and so freaking real. I did NOT belong in this movie. I recommend watching these 30 seconds and these 30 seconds only. The rest of this is just really... the messages they are pushing, it's such fucking llama shit. Jennifer Hudson's character is shoehorned in and lame, but whenever she's on screen all I can think is "oh, that poor girl, I wonder how she is" cos that whole tragedy was really sad. This is not what they wanted me to think. There is a scene where someone shits themselves. No, really, someone shits themselves. Amidst tons of sex jokes and boiling women down to flat stereotypes and vomiting designers names at us they cram in a poop joke. loverly. the movie ends predictably with everyone getting what they want out of life. Samantha's a whore - NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT (sayeth the movie to us) the rest of them are again happily married (oh, hey! horseface marries Law and Order in the same courthouse that Geoff and I debated about changing our names to Spaghetti-Batman! This is my only moment of excitement. The red head who is really a blonde and now a late-in-life lesbian goes back to her husband cos in this movie when someone cheats, but they only do it once and are really REALLY sorry and it's actually the women's fault cos she didn't fuck him enough and instead of talking about it he cheated but again is REALLY REALLY SORRY said woman must take him back or be seen by everyone, including her bestest friendies, as a coldhearted unfeeling snake. Listen, I have my own (ok, Dan Savage's) thoughts on cheating, but really. If this is her deal breaker, it's her deal breaker. But fine, movie, I get it. he LOVES her so it's totes ok. Oh and lovely Kristen Davis (she's really cute) has a real baby because adopting a Chinese one totes isn't like having a kid for really-REALS. and having a kid for really-reals means you are extra-specially in love and your Chinese baby is just a symbol of how your love was totes weak before. take THAT! and horseface gets married and has a big closet even though the shit that Law and Order there pulled is shown to be like, super mean but again, if you're really REALLY SORRY and you really REALLY LOVE someone, you totes have to get married even if marriage isn't really for you. and like, not everyone has to get married, cos being a slut is TOTES COOL but, like, most people should get married cos like, love RAWKS. oh and: Prada, louboutin, lacroix yadda yadda yadda. I am now stupider and ANGRIER for having watched this shit. I am glaring, half stoned, around the empty cabin of this airplane needing to take my wrath out on someone but fail. I have to swallow my rage and remarks of "WHAT THE FUCK, NO SERIOUSLY WHAT THE FUCK" along with the rest of my pill. I spend the rest of the flight failing to sleep while being too drugged to open my eyes. I am content to listen to several episodes (that I have seen a couple of times already) of The Fairly Oddparents and then some horribly lame sounding kids show called Vampire Weekend...no wait, that's the band. It was Vampire something. There were vampires in it, from what I remember hearing.

The Invisibles #1

by Ping33

These posts started as a project on the Comic Geek Speak forum. A bunch of people said they were going to read an issue of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles each week and discuss it. By issue 4 I found myself alone. As I write this: I am up through issue 10 and am really enjoying the project even while I feel like I'm missing the discussion I was so looking forward to. I suggested lifting my posts from the forum and posting them here to Geoff and he was kind enough to like the idea (with his love and scholarship of Morrison, I thought this might be something he was interested in. Due the informal nature of some of the earlier posts (especially up through issue 5 when I realized I was kind of alone.) I'm going to edit them a bit, combining multiple posts and bridging some ideas and formalizing the format a bit. From issue 11, I will be writing my new entries with the blog in mind. Not sure if I'll keep posting on the forum or not... I think it kind of depends on feedback from Geoff and anyone else who wants to read it in either place.
Now onto the good stuff:

Invisibles #1: Dead Beatles.

I have this whole series in the original issues. I was 16 when #1 came out, and I got it because I was reading more than half the Vertigo line and I still remember the silhouette of King Mob's mask from the promo material, which was mysterious and intriguing. In issue 1 we're introduced to Dane and King Mob. Dane is a troubled Liverpool teenager, King Mob is a globe trotting super-spy, looking for a new recurute. King Mob spends most of the issue talking to old friends. In the middle of the issue both characters have mystical expirences involving The Beatles, Dane sees John Lennon talking to Stuart Sutcliffe through a wrinkle in time, King Mob contacts Lennon's god head though a drug trip. Dane lights his school on fire, gets thrown in a reform school which steals souls and makes slaves of troubled teenagers and is broken out by King mob.

Upon looking at it now: The circular nature of the whole series evident in this one issue was the first thing which struck me. Actually, maybe the second, after the Natural Born Killers advert on the back cover which makes me think about just how much this book was a product of its times. Along with the title, we get an actual Dead Beetle at the beginning and at the end,
(Dead Beatle:) Stuart Sutcliffe's mention of his girlfriend Astrid followed in the story by the appearance of a Vauxhall Astra with a license plate which (if you ignore the J) is a visual palindrome: 215 pvq. We get Dane saying "It's sort of like I've seen it before, but I haven't" to the King Mob graffiti. Then there's the stuff we don't know yet: Mr. Six, Edith, (Mario reminds me that: 'The guards who get shot at Harmony House come back on their own story later on.') On top of all of this comes with a level of irony which I'm not sure is intentional in that you have an overall story about chaos which is so neatly ordered. King Mob may blow up Harmony House, but is there a greater harmony than the series as a whole, when taken from 10,000 feet? And So we Return and Begin Again... and so we do indeed.

One of the joys of having the single issues, is having the letter column: Invisible Ink. In this issue there are obviously no letters; instead what you get is a one-page note from Morrison. He begins:

"Destroy this Comic! That's my advice. When you've finished reading The Invisibles #1, tear it up, burn it, feed it to your lizards, lock it in the trunk of a stolen car and push it off a bridge. You'll feel good, believe me. It's only a comic after all. Do you really need more of these things cluttering up your life? Do you really need to be chained to a mountainous dead weight of paper? There'll be another one next month anyway, and chances are your memories of this comic will be much better than the real thing."

Well, I just switched to trades, mostly because they are far more manageable than the mountain of clutter which, in my case really is a mountain of clutter with nothing resembling order, care or organization... for the most part. I used to be better, at this collecting thing, I used to bag and board and alphabetize I'm glad I was still doing it throughout the Invisibles... because issue #1 was much better than I remembered. Far more magical than any story in the series was the fact that when I looked for my issues I found the complete run sitting all in order exactly in the first spot I looked. Truly, this was synchronicity, BARBELiTH at work!

TV and Comics This Week (Final Crisis, LOST, BSG, 24)

FInal Crisis 7. Grant Morrison has been pissing me off lately, with the messy art in Final Crisis 6, and the ambiguous (and I have argued not in a good way) chose-your-own-ending to Batman RIP. And as much as I love his earlier work, I do HATE fill in artists. People were always telling me that messy inconsistent artistic chaos was great because it matched the theme of the book -- intentionally in Invisibles, unintentionally in New X-Men. I don't deny that it matches thematically; I just deny that that particular way of expressing the theme leads to bad storytelling. People need to stop praising ambiguity and chaos as good things in and of themselves -- it is how it is handled by the writer that makes it work or fail, and I call FAIL on BATMAN RIP and the INVISIBLES. That said I LOVED Final Crisis 7 in all its ambiguous messy glory -- Morrison can stick hell of a landing, even on a messy book (New X-Men, Invisibles). Batman RIP promised a reveal of the Black Glove through a series of red herrings, then failed to deliver anything. Final Crisis 7 promised to celebrate the insanity of the multiverse and superhero comics generally and could not have delivered more thoroughly -- Supermen from the multiverse team up to use solar powers on a cosmic vampire, while the Green Lanterns show up to collectively stake the thing; the army of god arrives with them at the same time Captain Carrot and the Zoo Crew show up -- and you realize this is what superhero comics do that nothing else can. I am amazed that Morrison was able to play with Obama joking that he was Superman by opening with the black president of the United States who was also the Superman of his world. Morrison will often talk about creating a new kind of storytelling mode, and sometimes this seems an empty boast, as it did when he described 52 as genuinely different. The most important thing about Final Crisis 7 is that is DOES seem like a new kind of way to tell a mainstream superhero story. I talked about Morrison's elliptical style in the first two issue of Final Crisis and said it was not fully figured out yet, but it seemed like a good idea -- he really figures it out here. The thing reads more like some crazy John Ashbery poem than anything else, and I absolutely love it. Every panel was fun even when I was not sure what was going on. (Did Hawkman die?)

LOST 5.3. I liked LOST this week, more than the first two episodes, though I am not sure how much I have to say about it. I really like the island skipping though time as a way to tell all those stories that have only been alluded to and I love how quickly we made it all the way back to 1954 to get a key detail -- Widmore was an Other in his youth. I am really excited to hear about the "Adam and Eve" bodies in the caves from season one (which, because of time travel could be characters we know), the Pirate Ship landing, Rousseau's crew, the Dharma people and the war between the Dharma people and the Others, and that four toed statue. I never saw Cane but I heard it was good -- in any case I am glad it got cancelled so that Richard can be in all the island flashbacks. And, at some point, will the end of in the future? Also that new girl Other is totally Faraday's Mom, who is totally Mrs Hawking -- check the hair and the first name and the timeframe.

BSG. Several people got upset because with only nine episodes to go they felt BSG should be going mythology episodes all the time, but BSG has always been about stories centered on people. Mary McDonnell owned the episode with here scene in the hallway arguing that her and Adama deserve a break. It was not perfect -- the opening scene with the Ultrasound had some nice camera work hanging on the image for a long time, but it was very strange to see Tigh and Six acting like a happy family so suddenly. Starbuck's cripple jokes were really lame and that scene lacked the acting chops it needed -- Starbuck needs something to DO. I am still on the fence about Gaeda as Ahab. The other complaint was Callie, who already morphed quickly into a shrew willing to kill her baby, now revealed as unfaithful as well. It had to happen. Clearly the writers decided on the final five late in the game -- and at no point during the first half of season 4 did anyone mention the fact that Callie's baby was a cylon human hybrid and thus as important as Hera. I figured that baby was going out the airlock with Callie, but this is how they wanted to keep Hera uniquely important. One detail that fails , however, is it made a lot more sense that Callie wanted to kill her baby when she planned to kill herself if she thought the baby was half cylon. Now she just seems really mean. A rare instance of poor plotting on the part of the writers gave her a very unfortunate -- and I am sure some will argue misogynistic -- character arc.

24. 24 was good and action packed this week -- better than it has been for a bit. But it is still pretty foolish. This show needs a new gimick.

Jason Powell on Uncanny X-Men #194

[Guest Blogger Jason Powell continues his issue by issue look at Chris Claremont’s X-Men run. For more in this series, see the toolbar on the right.]

“Juggernaut’s Back in Town”

While from late 1984 to early 1985 Claremont was reaching new heights of narrative complexity with Bill Sienkiewicz on New Mutants, he seems to have been relatively less inspired by the art on Uncanny. John Romita Jr. is a formidable artist by any standard, but compared to Sienkiewicz he is of course much more conventional. So in February of ’85, while New Mutants completed the multi-layered “Legion” trilogy, featuring a metaphoric struggle between an Arabic terrorist and an Israeli mutant -- a story that still seems timely over two decades later – the Uncanny X-Men fight the Juggernaut for the umpteenth time.

What lifts the story above expectation is Claremont’s shrewd decision to transfer his apparent own sense of ennui as an author to that of the characters. In one of Claremont’s funniest openers, we get a montage of the X-Men hearing a radio report of Juggernaut’s return to New York City, and most of them react with boredom, apathy, or – most humorously in Nightcrawler’s case – a petulant tantrum. The sequence (filled with lovely art details by Romita Jr. including, marvelously, Kitty phasing through her alarm clock so that it explodes and she can go back to sleep) can’t help but bring a grin. The very notion that the X-Men are simply fed up with this sort of thing is a wonderful dash of prosaic realism, lifting the story into being something beyond the rote superhero clichés it makes fun of.

The bit wherein Wolverine talks Nightcrawler into going out to take on Juggernaut again is priceless as well, worthy of extended quotation:

Nightcrawler: “Anyone ever tell you, Logan, that you’re a sadistic brute?”
Wolverine: “You’re the first.”
Nightcrawler: “We’re in no shape for this.”
Wolverine: “We’re also all there is.”
Nightcrawler: “Do we have to?”
Wolverine: “Nope. We never have to.”
Nightcrawler: “Sigh – coffee?”
Wolverine: “Already brewed.”

Logan’s deadpan responses are quite funny, a canny way of sweetening the firm undercurrent of the X-Men’s responsibility (“We’re also all there is”). Note also that Wolverine doesn’t contradict Kurt’s assertion that the X-Men are in “no shape for this,” nor is he enough of a “sadistic brute” to suggest that they go out to fight the Juggernaut before they’ve had their morning coffee. Hilarious.

Claremont also comes up with a clever new use for Rogue’s powers in Uncanny #194: Although Rogue had previously absorbed several characters’ powers simultaneously (it was during her first appearance in Avengers Annual #10), this issue marks the first time Claremont has made a visual trick of the idea. The image of the Rogue/Nightcrawler/Colossus amalgam is great, very comic-booky, and it’s also nice to see a reiteration of Nightcrawler’s trick from two issues earlier of teleporting only a piece of the enemy.

“Juggernaut’s Back in Town” also features the use of a simple, but classic, trick in the arsenal of any good serial superhero writer: The taking down of a classic powerhouse villain to demonstrate how formidable the NEW bad guy is. Granted, Cain Marko’s “unstoppable” gimmick had been devalued over the years thanks to various comics in which he was physically overpowered. Still, Nimrod’s ability to toss Juggernaut around like a toy is a good shorthand way of establishing his power-level. It also continues Claremont’s political re-alignment of the X-Men. Once again, they find themselves in sympathy with former enemies – outcasts, in other words – in the face of a new enemy who represents the Establishment (Nimrod was built by the U.S. government, his entire existence dedicated to the maintenance of the status quo). Not only do the X-Men protect Juggernaut in spite of the fact that he’s a “jerk” (another hilarious line from Rogue toward the end of the issue), but they also escape the scene of the altercation via the Morlock tunnels.

Annotations department: The epilogue set at KGB headquarters with Colonel Vazhin ranting about a coming Armageddon goes nowhere – but in an oblique symmetry, Rogue’s listening to the “Nazgul” on Page 5 is a reference to George R.R. Martin’s 1984 sci-fi novel “The Armageddon Rag.”

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