Category: Culture

Feeling pretty traumatized. The Claremont/Davis Excalibur is good, and the Davis sans Claremont stuff is all kinds of fun if you like that kind of thing, which I do. But eventually Davis goes away and it becomes all fill in authors and lousy art and X-Men crossovers.

Conveniently, you can tell where the really horrendous stuff begins, because there are hologram covers. No kidding. I’ve never owned a comic with a hologram cover before. I feel kind of unclean.

So here’s what happened.

About a month ago, I picked up the four phonebooks of Essential X-Men on a whim. For those unfamiliar, phonebooks are cheap black and white reprints of old comic books. It’s one of the few ways we see long runs of classic comics kept in print. These were the first umpteen issues of Chris Claremont’s run on X-Men, including the Phoenix Saga, and they are darned good. I’d never read ‘em before. The energy of the writing is very engaging, and the plotting is solid and fairly complex. This is the X-Men before they got weighed down with too much continuity. Fun.

After finishing ‘em, I had that completist impulse to go read all the X-Men. I quickly did what I always do when I get that urge; I read the rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks FAQ and remind myself of the hash they made of Jean Grey until the impulse goes away.

This time, I was reminded that Warren Ellis’ run on Excalibur represents one of the few significant big chunks of Ellis’ work I’ve never read. After a little more struggle, I convinced myself that it would be OK to read just the Ellis issues, and dropped over to EBay in hopes of finding ‘em. You never know.

That’s where it got bad. I searched on Excalibur, and found an absolutely complete run of every Excalibur-related comic in the world. I mean, everything — the Alan Moore Captain Britain Jasper’s Warp graphic novel, the Wisdom and Pryde mini, the whole damned thing. With no bids on it. And less than an hour to go in the auction, so I didn’t have time to sleep on it and think better of the idea in the morning.

There are now two boxes of Excalibur on my floor, and I’ve been reminded as I reread the FAQ while writing this entry that somewhere in the middle of it all there are gross Phoenix retcons. The Warren Ellis issues start around #85. Fortunately, most of the intervening stuff is Claremont and/or Alan Davis, but there’s a bunch of Scott Lobdell in there too.

If I don’t make it out alive, don’t send in a search party. The risk is too great.

Four or five episodes in, and by my reckoning, Mister Sterling has pretty much jumped the shark. Wasn’t much of a shark, at that. There was a lot of promise in the premise of a Senator appointed to fill out a term who turned out to be an independent, but it’s squandered by making him a Democrat in independent clothing. So far, other than a quick list of issues in the first episode, there’s really nothing about him that doesn’t follow the liberal line. Which isn’t a bad thing per se, but don’t tell me he’s an independent thinker. Heck, his true blue Democratic staff anointed him as “the guy we always wanted to work for” last episode.

It’s not as if there aren’t plenty of examples out there. He could have been Ron Paul. Well, OK, there’s no way in hell that show would have gotten picked up, but it would have been entertaining. He could have been Bernie Sanders or Paul Wellstone, and that might have actually worked. It’s a shame.

Tonight’s episode pissed me off enough to remind me that I’d meant to follow up my initial review. The crisis of the week is a nice Guatemalan cleaning lady whose mother is dying, and who wants to go back to say goodbye for a day. Alas, her green card application is still in process so if she leaves the country she can’t come back. Senator Sterling runs roughshod over INS and in the end gets his way.

Which really sucks, because there was a great speech from the Commissioner of the INS about how if they made every decision individually the green card backlog would be ten years long. Really good, came across as really principled, definitely thought-provoking. It was shot down about five seconds later when everyone points out that the guy’s just posturing to get something for himself. Sterling winds up threatening the Commissioner and gets his way.

That strikes me as a total copout, since it doesn’t address the argument against making exceptions and in the end what you have is a Senator who bullies bureaucrats to make sure that the right thing happens. He sure doesn’t address any fundamental problems, like helping the INS streamline procedures. The message is that everything would be OK if the 100 Senators just took a personal interest in every problem case. Great.

Oh, and of course the entire controversy could have been avoided if instead of trying to convince the INS to ignore their own regulations, Senator Sterling just asked someone to expedite the processing of the cleaning lady’s application. Me, I’d have gone that way instead of asking a mid-level INS staffer to go to the airport and sneak the cleaning lady back into the country. But that’s just me.

Oddly, I’m still kind of enjoying the show, but I think it’s because of Audra McDonald (who plays Senator Sterling’s chief of staff) and Stanley Kamel (the former chief of staff). Kamel in particular is really solid as the lifetime staffer who is the best money raiser in the country; it’d have been easy to play him as the bad guy, but Kamel’s portraying someone who just doesn’t know any other way to be. Nice nuances. The rest of the cast is OK, but nobody’s working too hard, if you know what I mean. Oh, and Josh Broslin, Senator Sterling himself, is pretty much just overacting.

So yeah. Some fun performances, and a lot of utterly dorky politics. You could save the whole thing by turning it into a dark story about the rise of a new Huey Long — Sterling’s got that populist flair — but somehow I think they aren’t gonna go that way.

I was intending to have a busy movie weekend, but after City of God I really didn’t want to see anything else. I actually went down to the Copley Place to see Intacto, but it was sold out twenty minutes before showtime, so I punted to City of God. The Copley is a lousy excuse for an art house theater, but it was the only place in town showing Intacto; thus, I wound up in a cramped little bandbox with a floor that sloped up to the tiny little screen. Pathetic.

About ten minutes into City of God, I’d pretty much forgotten that I’d get a better cinema experience from a bargain basement second run theater in Iowa.

I suspect part of my enthused reaction was just meeting a new set of cinematic conventions; I’ve never seen a Brazilian movie before, so there was a lot of novelty in it for me. On the other hand, the energy of the direction and acting was universal. The directors, Katia Lund and Fernando Meirelles, are fearlessly willing to use bullet time and stop motion — but only for real emotional effects. You get the sense that they’ve never thought about the distinction between pulp and real art; for them, everything’s just another technique to use when telling the story.

The same egalitarian approach applies to the casting. Most of the actors are residents of the slums the movie chronicles, cast after extensive acting workshops. It pays off. Philippe Haagensen in particular has real star charisma.

I’d heard the story was very dense, and it was fairly compact, but it wasn’t the sort of fast cut patchwork you see in the average Tarantino homage. There were a lot of stories to tell, but they don’t intercut; they weave together, and elements of one turn up again later. This allows the nuances time to grow, and gives the audience time to absorb.

Highly recommended.