Category: Reviews

Joe Clark is annotating Pattern Recognition, bit by bit. This has the potential to be truly cool if he gets traction. (Via Boing Boing.)

I’m all about the public service announcements this long weekend. Today, I note that the new edition of Swordspoint includes several short stories set in the nameless city. And I’m sure you already knew there’s a sequel out.

It’s a little known fact that the best gonzo journalists around are writing for a little ezine known as the Death Valley Driver Video Review.

One time I was making fun of Bionic J because she was wearing this big skiing goggles and I said she looked like a doofus like Yoko Ono.

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.

It seems worthy of note that Rick Veitch did a fill-in issue of JLA this month. It’s a one issue story, so you could even pick it up and read it if you don’t read JLA. Although it’d be kind of pointless if you’re not a comics fan, but we can’t have everything. Veitch is one of those guys who slips back and forth between alternative comics and mainstream superheros; I guess you’d say he’s an alternative comics writer and artist who happens to like the superhero genre a lot. Kind of a psychedelic orientation. I really liked his JLA.

The following has some spoilers.

The weekend’s movies were Far From Heaven and Catch Me If You Can. Definitely a retro weekend, not even counting the incredibly hip Soma FM Secret Agent streaming radio station I’ve had tuned in since Thursday. I feel like a martini, and you’re just the sort of woman to drink me…

Ah, sorry. The mood took me for a moment. More a Catch Me If You Can mood, I think; that’s the lighter of the two films. It has that jazzy sixties bliss to it, up to and including invoking James Bond with a short Goldfinger clip. That makes the contrast between the two all the more interesting, though, since they’re both about transgressions against the natural order.

Frank Abagnale Jr. breaks free of social restrictions and demonstrates exactly how much we rely on social convention to fend off the intruder. In Far From Heaven, the Whitakers both transgress, with varying degrees of success. But in Catch Me If You Can, the final dynamic is very different. We’re encouraged to cheer for the young con man — and in the end we’re reassured that it was OK to cheer, because he got caught and his pursuer was his very best friend. His real father (played by Christopher Walken, in a really brilliant turn) taught him that it was OK to lie, and wound up a sad sorry corpse. His surrogate father, the FBI agent, brought him back to the straight and narrow and in the end everyone’s happy.

Far From Heaven doesn’t offer the easy out. Cathy Whitaker’s life is ruined by the combination of her transgression and that of her husband, Frank. Oddly, Frank’s life doesn’t seem to be so bad, which got me thinking about the exact relationship between her love for a black gardener and his love for another man.

Homosexuality is so far outside the comprehension of the time that the couple can barely even talk about what’s going on. Their first scene together after she catches him kissing a man is particularly well filmed; it’s an atonal song of confusion and barely spoken thoughts and stammers. Lovely stuff. As a result, Frank’s infidelities are ignored by the world around him. Cathy’s potential infidelities are not.

Did Cathy step outside her life only because she had no other reaction to Frank’s actions? I think so, to a degree. Raymond (her gardener) is a symbol, and she’s willing to reject him when it’s the necessary thing to do. She doesn’t go back to him until Frank rejects her, at which point she needs another anchor in her life. Then again, when faced with the fact that going with Raymond will only hurt his daughter, she steps back. The safest analysis is that she really does love him, and that Far From Heaven follows the line of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas all the way through, but I wonder.

Anyhow, meanderings through theory aside, I recommend both of ‘em. Far From Heaven is by far the better movie, but Catch Me If You Can is a fun little romp if you don’t get hung up on obsessing about the end. It’s hardly Spielberg’s fault that the real Frank Abagnale turned to the side of the law, after all. They’re both excellent evocations of times past, lovingly and skillfully filmed. Good weekend for movies.

Mister Sterling isn’t bad. I was kind of expecting something more draggy, and it is a touch preachy at times, but as TV dramas go it’s not bad. I like the cast, I like the characters, and I was OK with the setup. I can say that last mostly because of the nice little twist in the middle of the first episode, which I personally took as a metatextual zing at everyone who thought the show would be The West Wing II.

The back and forth between Senator Sterling and his new chief of staff regarding his beliefs lived up to the promise of the twist. Keep up the ambiguity and it’ll be a decent drama; lose track of the differences between the new Senator and the party with which he votes and it’ll wind up sucking. I’ll be interested to see how long the writers are willing to portray someone in the Senator’s unusual political position as laudable.