The Factual Opinion

Comics Of The Weak: Dying For What You Believe In Comes Easy For Jughead

Siege # 3
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Art by Oliver Coipel, Mark Morale & Laura Martin
Published by Marvel Comics

Here's what they were hoping you'd feel while reading this issue:

Steve Rogers beheld the earth,
And, lo, it was waste and void:
And the heavens, and they had no light.
Tony Stark beheld the mountains, and, lo,
they trembled,
And all the hills moved to and
fro.
Thor beheld, and, lo, there was no
man,
And all the birds of the heavens
were fled.
Even boring ass corny stock characters like Mockingbird beheld, and, lo, the fruitful field
was a wilderness,
And all of the cities thereof were
broken down
At the presence of the Sentry,
And before His fierce anger.
For thus saith the Sentry:
The whole land shall be desolate;
Yet will I not make a full end.

Did you feel that way? Because that's how this was supposed to make you feel.

Didn't work, did it?

Titans # 23
Written by Eddie Berganza
Art by Scott Clark, Ardian Syaf, Dave Beaty, Vincente Cifuentes & Hi-Fi Design
Published by DC Comics

This is another in the long line of recent Titans comics that focuses on the reaction of Titans-related characters to Titans-related instances that have occurred in other comics (because nobody reads the Titans comic itself, so you can't actually do anything of Titanic importance in actual Titans issues), and all of its successes are negative ones, the most heinous portion being the depiction of the used-to-be-really-popular Teen Titans stomping on a bad guy like they're the LAPD and the bad guy is some random INSERT RACIAL SLUR THAT OFFENDS YOU THE MOST who made the mistake of wearing a X-Men 4 Life t-shirt while walking by their headquarters, which, in case anybody ever forgot, and they didn't, is a gigantic T standing up on an island. (Because T for TITANS, you know? Like this, these people make baskets in a factory shaped like a basket. But those employees and that basket factory are actually a Combo Breaker! if the kids in that Denzel movie were debating underneath a sign that said These Titans, They Stink, because at least the Titans aren't real people who go to work in a building that's shaped like what they do for a living, in case they forgot the choices they made that put them in this position, which is the choice to work in a building! Shaped Like A Basket!)

Oh, and yes, this comic had another page where Speedy is banging up his veins and even a page where Wonder Girl revealed that it took a human individual--in this particular story, a male human individual--to teach her the magic trick that is kicking a guy in the balls. And you know, the Factual Opinion has a Google Alert set up for the weirder edge of the comics blogosphere, and nobody seems to have stepped up to the plate and created a petition to criticize Eddie Berganza for inserting the kinda sexist concept that a young teenage girl needs to learn about the magic of Kicking a Dude In the Junk from a man, and like, really: what the fuck are you for, Internet? Besides that website where they put Ron Perlman's head on Jeanna Fine's body, that was totally years ago.

Speedy shooting up, teenagers stomping on people. Leads you to this:

Justice League: Rise of Arsenal: Rise and Fall # 1
Written by J.T. Krul
Art by Geraldo Borges & Marlo Alquiza
Published by DC Comics

Everybody's always hankering to walk away, it seems. "The Legion of Super-Heroes was so much better when Keith Giffen wrote it", and maybe that's true, but however good it was, it apparently wasn't good enough to just re-read those Giffen issues, there had to be more, more, more, gotta get some more blood into the pipeline. But--the Titans aren't any good. The golden moment for this title was over a long fucking time ago, and the best thing it did after those golden moments, back when the title used to outsell the fucking X-Men so hard that they even did a cross-over where Kitty Pryde held off on being a bitch using racial slurs being a progressive forward thinking pre-Vertigo female role model for 13 year old boys long enough to make kissy face with green-skinned Beast Boy, was when they spent the better part of two years having one of the Titans (the gay one back when comics were scared of having gay characters because it might upset, oh, who knows, probably the people that published them, it's impossible to believe anybody else ever cared, or if they did, that those people that cared weren't the same childless freaks who wear undersized novelty t-shirts and complain about gay characters now) kill his way through the lamer members of his own team before his father came along and shoved a sword through the body attached to his shitty haircut.

Otherwise, all of the Titans comics are terrible. The Titans comics right now: also terrible. There was a brief moment where DC's can't-go-wrong-with-sales guy Geoff Johns came along and did a bunch of stories under the Titans moniker, but that was a whole bunch of new people. But this Nightwing team? The one with Speedy on it? And Beast Boy? And fucking Raven? This shit hasn't worked for a hell of a lot longer than it has worked, and it's never ever going to work that way again, because you have to add new pussies and cocks to a soap opera because nobody wants to read a Will They or Won't They comic if the people involved have already Done So, Yep, Him Too.

But why walk away? Change the game, change what you want: this is what you wanted all along. They're running this shit like a mug's game. This guy, he seems nice, look at the way he writes, he made a good point, that this may be the one time you get to see a DC super-hero shoot up in the one arm he's got left, and while he's totally on the money that will be worth the price of admission--especially since its the same price of admission you'd have to pay to read another issue of the Avengers where Luke Cage talks about how he gets along with his mother-in-law with his shut-in wife and that hideous troll baby--the best part of reading the Rise of Arsenal is that you just know that someday in the near future there's going to be an issue where Roy Harper has to re-kill his dead eight-year-old daughter because of some left-over Black Lantern ring that Hal "I Can't Stop Judging People" Jordan forget to pick up because he was too busy thinking how best to remind people that he's better than them before somebody remembers that he's a fucking ex-con who believes you can best protect America by negotiating with terrorists.

You change what you're looking for. You start looking for this, you start getting excited by those soon-to-be classic "Comics Suck, Here's A Trick From The Movies" page layouts where the guy is screaming but you can't hear him because it's a slow-motion wait-for-it while a piece of thrown hospital bed heads towards the glass and then you get a one-armed man crying over the body of his dead daughter and he's fantasizing about how much she suffered right before he died, and that's comics, all of a sudden, comics. You're reading something that finally caught up with America, and America, we don't want something we like, we want something sleazy and wrong that we can hate, because we're better at hating than we are at anything else, and guess what, this is the future, this is comics that actually are relevant and right now. They just got contemporary again.

Scalped # 36
Written by Jason Aaron
Art by Davide Furno
Published by Vertigo Comics

This isn't bad at all! Aaron's a little more fun when he bows to his deployment of bad taste peanut brittle exploitation stuff, but the general rule of thumb with Scalped is that it's His Serious Book, the bookshelf collection that he can point to as proof-of-brains when being asked to defend his occupation in that mystical court of public opinion. (That court, the place where people sneer at comic books more than they sneer at, say, the Left Behind series or a television show about overweight beer enthusiasts--it doesn't exist, but you can't fault comics people for wanting to better their imagined social status; they are, in point of fact, people who produce things that require reading, and reading has rapidly become a surefire checkbox on the list of things that determine whether or not you're going to lose your procreation tools if (or when) the terrorists win, which they are sure to do anytime now, probably before anybody gets a chance to show their kids that whipsmart webcomic about the wacky best friends of a sentient aluminum can, because you just know that some of these serious American thinkers rolling deuce rightaboutnow are going to refuse to pay their income tax next month and both of those heinous fucking wars really need that cash, for bullets and body armor and drone missiles but mostly for bullets, the Lord God himself is looking down right now and thinking "look, i can't just step in and carve the fucking shells for you, that level of Intelligent Design would totally blow the whole Am I Real Or Not question that motivates my fan club to keep checking in at the local Rape Some Deaf Kids For Decades clubhouse, and in case you didn't comprehend what sleazy old Timothy Fingerfuck said last Sunday, i sort of need those gold-plated spires to stay in operation because i just can't break myself of the whole incense habit and those chuckling child fuckers are the only Pals o' Christ left willing to swing the bucket, because Episcopalians don't count due to their fundamental inability to stick to any, like seriously, i think they've kept one, of the Commandments and that's probably just the Don't Kill Anybody one which never really meant that much to me anyway".)

Orc Stain # 2
By James Stokoe
Published by Image Comics

You read enough individual issues of something, you either turn into a crazy person ranting about how a shitty franchise comic with consistently horrible art and a never-ending story involving tables and talking somehow Has Promise, despite having a label on the front that indicates, on a weekly basis, how long this shitty piece of shit has been a shitty piece of shit, or you turn into the kind of dejected whiner that you never wanted to be in the first place, because you've met the dejected whiners, those guys who take a twenty ounce Mountain Dew bottle and pour into another, bigger bottle of Mountain Dew, those guys who use words like Integrity and Decency and Portebellum in reference to some fucking newspaper strip from 100 years ago that was created to entertain monstrous robber barons who raped their maids and beat their cloven hoofed children with rubber tubing, but hey, that's life, right? You piss and moan a bit, you get on with it, nobody is gonna take away your Orc Stain, and yeah, life might turn out okay, because here's this book that's all Mash-Up, it's got penises getting cut-off, it's got cool guys, it's got all this intricate shit shoved into every page, it's got a different color scheme than the one that you see all the time, and it's Conan-y and Moebius-y and Geoff Darrow-y and here's the thing, maybe you're the fucker, and maybe you like things for the Wrong Reasons, but it's like the man says, "Meaning is the biggest suckers game out there", and you know what?

The kind of ass you get when people look at your book collection is a really shitty kind of ass. You like penises getting cut off. You like shit like this.

Superman # 698
Written by James Robinson
Art by Javier Pina & Bernard Chang
Published by DC Comics

The problem with All Star Superman, if you liked it: it fucked up a firmly held belief, one that DC has spent the better part of their publication history driving home, which was that Superman comics aren't very good unless they're really old & weird and they involve Supergirl and that pony who wanted to have sex with her. You go through life, you think you got it figured out: you read Batman comics because they're mean and (most of the time) the people who get the Batman gig try really fucking hard to make it work, and you skip Superman comics, because Superman has like one bad guy who doesn't suck apples (Intergang? the Banshee? the CADMUS Project?), but also DC refuses to pony up more than minimum wage to whoever draws the fucking things, and you learn to accept that occasionally Superman is going to show up in Gotham City and act like Helen Lovejoy whenever Batman eats the fingers of a purse-snatcher. "Oh my it isn't like this in Metropolis" yeah well why don't you go back there you gigantic pansy take your clown outfit with you

Then there's this shit about the family, or copyright, whatever, you read that stuff about copyright? Yeah i didn't read it either, i get some stuff cooking, that stuff is called pornography, i watch a lot of fucking pornography and some of it is pretty dicey and by dicey i mean you better not come a-knocking because you might just see some shit that you can't unsee my friend. But here's the thing about Copyright that those jokers didn't tell ya: Sonny Bono was a fucking Scientologist, he was like OT X-Men, he was the fucking Beta Ray Bill of the Church of Scientology meaning that they didn't have much use for him except for occasionally making him Do His Thang, which was pretty much singing that Cher duet with a baby Kelly Preston while Lord Mage Elron rubbed his nubbins with cottage cheese on the Freewinds Express Boat Outings, and then all of a sudden a big deal thing came along, which was that some of Grand Dragon Hubblier's creep-o "writings" or "sacred texts" or "drug fueled run-on sentences like this one" were going to hit the public domain and that was a serious problem, because if that shit hit the open market and everybody found out that this (allegedly) fat wife-beating junkie was, well, an allegedly fucking junkie who wrote about space aliens who flew around in DC-10's, than they were going to have trouble corralling some more scaredy-cats willing to fill the coffers in the (allegedly, these people are fucking mean), underground temple, so somebody slapped old Sonny until he was sober enough to shitbox that grin of his around a copyright extension bill and Time Warner got to ride that train along with everybody else, that train that kept precious fucking Superman in their hands, and by the way, did you know that the last surviving Warner brother that actually had power used to make people beg him on his hands and knees to keep their job every six months or so, even sometimes the janitors who'd been there for decades? Because that's what he did, and while there's not much in life that's as irritating as when somebody throws their eyebrows so far up their face it looks like the caterpillar just jumped out of its cocoon, all to further accent their "corporations are evil" response in a trying-to-kill-some-time debate about whether the greeters at Wal-Mart should get unionized, but really, Superman's had almost 80 years of stories, and if that isn't more than enough time, than nothing ever will be, and the SuperVirus that's going to reset humanity to Let's Fuck Before And After We Eat What We Can Catch status can't come soon enough. 

The Marvels Project # 7
Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Steve Epting & Dave Stewart
Published by Marvel Comics

The Metal Men are fine. Two of them seem to have the same personality, maybe even the same brain, one of them is a whiny little stutterbox who usually behaves like one of those gay male stereotypes who wear glasses and are really uncomfortable with physical expressions of intimacy, one is a girl, and her personality is dictated by, you know, "is a girl", and one of them is the de facto scumbag just because he's been known to want things that his daddy didn't expressly offer him. Oh, and there's a jolly fat guy, because hey, what's not funny about obstructive sleep apnea and negligible romantic interactions? HA HA HA, the fat guy says.

The thing is--the Metal Men are pretty much it if you don't want to read about Sad Robots Who are Defined By Sadness. (As long as you ignore the Japanese, and pretty much everybody except most people and the Japanese ignore the Japanese. You, i know you. You ignore the Japanese all the time. Who's that fucking your sister? It ain't Uncle Sam, Uncle Sam has a hat.)

Red Tornado? SAD. The Vision? SAD. Cliff Steele? Cool guy, but is sad all the time. Cyborg? Not fully robot, but he's sad all the time. Remember those old stories where he'd put on a hooded sweatshirt and watch kids playing on the swings and fantasize about when he had a real flesh and blood body? Lot of pathos in those stories. (Also some creepy ramifications, but hey, the creepy ramifications audience has kept a lot of companies afloat for longer than you've been alive, hate the player, not the game. Comics are sort of like amazing feats of architecture, in that you go through life hating slavery, but then you hit Egypt and start getting your cap peeled back thinking "man, these pyramids are really fucking incredible" knowing the whole time that there's no way those pyramids would've been built if, well, SLAVES, you know. And comics, it's like: man, this is really good. This is good, you read this? Good shit. And then you meet the guys who buys every appearance of the Huntress, and he has that whole Look, The HUNTRESS, and you're--this guy, he's keeping it afloat, right? Because shit, i'm just buying the Brubaker/Morrison shit, it ain't me they're counting on. Mr. Huntress, he's looking at those sleazy variants, he's licking his lips. This Is How Much, He says. Gimme some more of this, he's saying.)

Marvels Project: this issue was better than the first three or four, and that's in spite of the whole LOOK AT THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS pages, which, oh well, it's set during the War That Makes Everybody In The Entertainment Industry A Shit Load Of Money, (also lots of russians died), and it's not like Brubaker is to blame for the fact that there were three straight of weeks of Batman versus Swastikas just a few months back, or that just: NAZIS AND HOLOCAUST, it's HOLOCAUST-IC, still, how many times in your life do you want to go to comic book depictions of Auschwitz, my damie? Dead people. It's a lot of dead people. Also, there's a robot. And the robot! Is sad! He flies around, sad. He has super-powers, sad. He won a fight, sad. He got a sidekick! Still sad. Brooding, depressed, sad. 

Oh, and the Angel character: he better die in the last issue. He's a fucking baby. He looks, talks, is. Baby. He should die.

Black Blizzard
By Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Edited by Akemi Wegsmuller
Published by Drawn & Quarterly

Drawn & Quarterly doesn't really like publishing new comics anymore, but they do publish these, which are awesome. Even if they hadn't included the little interview in the back, where Tatsumi says that he made this shit when he was twenty in a forty day blitz, you'd probably guess that by reading it, because the fucking thing moves, it's a goddamn speed-high. There's these panels where a couple of guys hear the cops, start freaking out, and it's--you can see them running, you can see the snow forcing them back, and you're just right there with them. And the best part, and this might sound like a mean part, but it is the best part, is that the whole enterprise doesn't feel the least bit special, it doesn't feel like it's a high-water mark for manga or comics or anything like that, which is probably the only real negative thing you could say about all those Tezuka books that come out, which is that they all come bearing this This Is More Important And Integral To The Artform Than Anything You Own You Sensitive Prole. No, Black Blizzard: it's just an extended play piece of rubber, it's simple and plain and it gets to be expressive and fast and explosive because it never stops to try and make sense of the place where it stops, because it never actually stops until the end so you can see the part where people hold hands by choice and not chains. Grimy faces, repetition, everybody's yelling, and you gotta give D & Q credit, because while all they had to do was print the thing, they printed it like this: sloppy, yellow, silly.

This is what doing looks like. It's sitting on the shelf, they file it next to "trying".

Army of Two # 3
Written by Peter Milligan
Art by Dexter Soy & Jose Marzan Jr.
Published by Electronic Arts & IDW

Electronic Arts came onto the whole "replicate the same product with negligible differences on a consistent schedule" market a long time after comic books had, but they did it better than anybody else--it helped that they bought or litigated into oblivion every competitor they could--eventually resulting in them being one of the most successful video game companies on the planet.

So why involve themselves with publishing comic books? Why do this? They haven't even bothered to update the EA Comics website or the regular EA website to notify anybody who cares that there are three issues of the title out. Like--EA isn't the nicest bunch of guys in the world, they deserve whatever criticism people who care about that sort of thing has to dish out, but still, they are a pretty successful company capable of making more money on Tuesday than they made last Thursday, and it seems really unlikely that they're going to increase the massive audience that their video game titles have already by bringing on board the few thousand they can expect to grab in the comics market, and that model only holds water if you're willing to believe that the people buying the comic aren't already familiar with the particular video game in question, which, seriously, video games beat Avatar when it comes to profit margin and exposure, thanks to the Wii, your grandmother is clocking video game time that rivals late-90's Goldeneye drinking parties.

Batman # 697
Written & Drawn by Tony Daniel
Published by DC Comics

"And when they meet those who believe, they say, We believe; and when they are alone with their devils, they say: Surely we are with you; we were only mocking.

Allah will pay them back for their mockery, and He leaves them down alone in their inordinacy, blindly wandering on." - Qur'an

We are taking names, and when this dark age has passed, you, your backs, placed against walls. Your tears will be aborted with the curdled infant of mercy, your mewling pleas will be rendered mute by your ashen tongues. We dub thee Appeaser! We call your crimes Negotiation! Your surrender has been documented, your consent has been noted, you have sold asunder your honor, you will be given No Quarter. Enjoy your Catgirl, for her hot pink and high tops have penned your eulogy.

-Tucker Stone, 2010

Romancing The Stone: Guilding the Lily?

The Guild # 1
Written by Felicia Day
Art by Jim Rugg
Published by Dark Horse Comics

I am anxiously awaiting for the next issue of The Sword. It's not out yet. Oh, what to do? What to do? I happened by the comic shop and was perusing a couple of titles. But as soon as I picked up The Guild....well, I was hooked. Nose in the book, I became oblivious to anything going on around me. The art on the first page was enough to drag me in - female doing a video blog and a picture of the orchestra she plays in. I have never read a comic book like this, and yet everything felt so easy to read and familiar. So I bought it.

The "familiar" parts are familiar much to my dismay. I don't currently identify with this comic book "heroine", but between the renderings of her hanging out as the token girl with her jackass boyfriend's band, or sitting in front of her computer screen playing Tetris - those scenarios are very familiar to me, even though they no longer exist in my life. 

This comic may have intrigued me in a newer way than it would have have in the past. I'm currently immersed in new ideas, thoughts, all via the books and writings of Dr. Christiane Northrup, Sue Monk Kidd, Regena Thomashaer and many other women. Many ideas and insights about womanhood, female energy, pleasure, The Goddess, etc. One idea that I'm sure I'll barely be able to articulate here, is that for just the last 5,000 years are so, we've become patriarchal in a cultural sense, despite all the previous years and years and years, when woman (and the creative power of the feminine) was revered and celebrated.

Oh, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I'm about to turn into some angry, man-bashing, resentful chick using her blog to get back at everyone. No. No no no no no no no. This is just what's on my mind as I delve into a comic book, this particular comic book. I love men, they're okay with me. There will be no generalized male-bashing here. The only time you'll find me male-bashing is when it's about a character who's asking for it, a specific one. I'll make sure I've got their names right, you know what I"m sayin'? And yeah, all this stuff that's on my mind might be why, at one point during my reading, I had to flip back to the cover to check whether a female or male wrote it. "Felicia Day". Phew. Why that reaction, you ask? 

I was wondering who would write a girl like this main character, and to what end. It's a classic example of a fictional girl/woman/female who has no idea that she has the power to make herself happy. She thinks that must exist only in other people, places and things. She has this dickwad of a boyfriend, of course. He is self-obsessed, selfish and, well, just plain mean some times. And she sticks with him. He has no regard for her, so any nugget of attention is immediately lapped up. It's upsetting, but I figured it was the set-up for something.

And yes it is, because she finds a fantasy video where she can create a new persona. She starts playing there, and it's when one of he two dweebs that she meets online says "let's ditch the NewB. I got a stupid paper to write on stupid Wuthering Heights or some vagina lameness," that I turned to the cover to see who authored this. I just wanted to know what I was in for.

When I realized it was a female author, I decided to believe that she was doing this on purpose. She's illustrating a girl who needs to wake up. And hopefully, fingers crossed, that is what's about to happen.

But I'm a little worried. She gets into this new game, one where gets to be a hot, beautiful woman who has power. And just as we're rolling along she meets what appears to be a nice guy online. It's a cute interchange. And I found myself cheering "yes", to the idea of a better, nicer guy for Cyd, although I'm still not sure I need to remember her name.

Why though? Felicia Day has written a girl who is clearly in need of some empowerment. But rather than have her take charge of herself and change her life, it seems like "Mister Right" is gonna save her. And just then, in real life, her idiotic boyfriend shows up with more bad behavior. HOWEVER, this time he wants her involved in the bad behavior, so she accepts any behavior (it's a form of attention, after all) and she leaves her new Prince Charming alone in the video game.

So, is that what this is gonna be all about? Getting the boyfriend back? Finding a new boy? Please tell me now. Please tell me that this is a series where the main character, a female, is going to wake up an suddenly kick some ass. THAT I'll show up for month after month or week after week. But not this......not another long drama about a sad girl who can't break up with a guy who's bad for her. I lived that one, a long time ago.

So please, Felicia Day. Do something new and outrageous. Do something that will make Dr. Northrup, Sue Monk Kidd, Regena Thomashauer and me proud. Give us a girl who learns to own herself and, maybe, if they deserve her, be in partnership with a guy - not another desperate, needy chick who kills all her alone time waiting for somebody to tell her what to do.

I'd watch that first girl kick ass all over the place. The second one?

Not so much.

-Nina Stone, 2010

Television of the Weak: The Lies, Pretenses, and Falsehoods That Define Us

This week, it's Marty on Survivor and Celebrity Apprentice & Zeb on Lost.

Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains – “Banana Etiquette”
Martin Brown

Up until this week, the central force on Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains has been the Heroes’ tribes imploding cloud of suck. Dudes have spent the last five weeks (two weeks, island time) chasing challenge losses with awkward freak-outs and bad decisions. I suspect that there’s a lot going on with the Heroes’ tribe that we’re not privy to. Over the last three episodes, the Heroes voted out a major player in each of the tribe’s three alliances—first, Cirie, leaving Candace without a real ally; then, Tom, one of the best players in the game, who just happened to be, as he put it, “on the wrong side of the numbers.” This week’s elimination of James—the guy in the leg brace—would have been the right move last week. The edit made it clear “why” James went home—the injury made him dead weight around camp and in challenges, so they were wasting food on him—but didn’t parse the logic of keeping him over Tom last week only to get rid of him a couple days later.

With James’ elimination, the Heroes are left with five members. Traditionally, a tribe of five is a pretty tight force. However, the Heroes have voted off most of their strongest players—their two best strategists in Cirie and Tom, and three of their best physical competitors in Tom, Stephenie, and the injured James. Left with one genuine competitor (JT), one potential competitor that no one likes (Candace), a fat egotist with a broken toe (Rupert), a gawky beauty queen (Amanda), and a guy who seems to have given up (Colby), the question is going to be whether this ragtag band of, um, heroes will be able to band together to defeat the enormous Villains tribe. I’m guessing that they’ll fail.

Fortunately, both the Heroes and the Villains had to vote someone off in “Banana Etiquette,” and the dual tribal council allows Survivor to tell parallel stories of each tribe, and shift the central story of Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains toward a rivalry between two alpha-dogs on the Villains: Russell and Boston Rob. The episode opens with the two dudes talking smack to each other in the guise of trying to help each other out. The conversation ends with Rob telling Russell to watch his back, and Russell responding with, “Yeah. Well, same thing for you, man. Watch your back.”

There’s a lot that’s exciting about seeing these two guys lock horns. They’re pretty evenly matched. Each of them has dominated one full season, though neither of them won—arguably because of bitter juries that failed to recognize the game’s best player (though you could also argue that if they couldn’t get people to vote for them to win in the end, they weren’t playing as well as they could have been.) Each of them is playing at the top of his game, predicting the other’s moves way down the line and countering them early. Rob has the advantage of numbers, while Russell has the advantage of the hidden immunity idol.

Each week, in this space, I try to hold back at least a little bit of what happens in the episode, in the hopes that someone will actually chase that link up there and spend some time watching this venerable, under-rated show. This week’s episode stands a chance of going down as the best of a strong season, precisely because of that showdown between Rob and Russell, which culminates in a tribal council vote that had my adrenaline racing faster than I ever remember it racing because of a TV show. And the vote turns on a move that people are already calling the stupidest in Survivor history. It’s definitely worth checking out.

In terms of what happens from here, I suspect that the fallout from the “Banana Etiquette” votes will be palpable. The new, unified Heroes tribe may or may not have stones needed to rally. With the merge coming up, though, whoever’s left on the Heroes tribe will be useful to the Villains’ alliances. (I’m guessing that Amanda and JT will hook up with a couple of people on the opposite team.) The Villains vote will probably knock things around on that tribe, as well. Let’s just hope they keep enough compelling personalities around to keep this thing interesting.

The Celebrity Apprentice – “Give Me a Moment”
Martin Brown

Remember last week when I was all like, “Donald Trump is fully aware of the ironies that make The Celebrity Apprentice so great”? Well, I may have over-spoken. On the one hand, dude is talking about firing the asses off people, needling Rod Blagojevich about running his gums, and getting into woman-bedding contests with celebrity chef Curtis Stone. On the other hand, he seems to be positioning the show as a way to show how great Americans are under troubling circumstances—as if watching D-list celebrities cook hamburgers is some form of super-enlightened altruism. So, the verdict’s still out on that guy. It’s unclear whether he is completely oblivious to what a spellbinding jackass he’s coming off as, or whether he’s completely aware of it. Either way, dude is a genius.

The players, on the other hand, seem keyed into exactly how reality television works (or, as Cyndi Lauper so elegantly put it last week, “I think you’re supposed to drop dead, and then you wake up in the fish tank with the fishes, and then there’s a subtitle that says, ‘Now, she sleeps with the fishes.’”) Most of them are reality show veterans, and fully understand that the show rises and falls on its entertainment value, and its entertainment value mostly is going to boil down to D-list celebrities fighting over petty shit.

Immediately, Sharon Osbourne is talking as much smack as she possibly can about anyone who crosses her path. I don’t believe for a second that she believes any of it; it’s just that she has a heightened awareness of what’s expected of her on this show. In a sense, it’s actually the business-woman side of her that’s acting like a douchenozzle for the camera—she knows that’ll make her a key character, increase the ratings, and probably win some money for her charity. Most of the players have a similar sort of awareness, and it’s awesome to see D-list celebrities who absolutely know that they’re D-list celebrities, clamoring for attention in front of the cameras. Of course, it’s also kind of pathetic, which is exactly what makes it kind of awesome.

Bret Michaels, the Rock of Love, knows exactly how reality TV operates—ferchrissake, in the first episode, he got the guys’ team to name itself after his clothing line. But one of the best moments on this weeks’ episode came because of his (probably well-placed) paranoia that the editors would use footage of him taking a break as a way to paint him as a lazy-ass.

Still, the two most intriguing personalities on this season of The Celebrity Apprentice are in the complete opposite position: They have no idea how reality TV works. There’s Cyndi Lauper, who has absolutely no impulse control when it comes to her mouth. She spent the first episode dissing Trump’s wife, singing “True Colors” for diner customers, and pleading with Trump not to fire anyone because they all did such a good job. Rod Blagojevich seems to think that the editors are going to make him look great and, more importantly, innocent. He’s basically spending his time campaigning, and the editors are using it as a fantastic opportunity to re-enforce our stereotypes of crooked politicians. It is incredibly uncomfortable.

What remains to be seen, is whether The Celebrity Apprentice can configure all of these personalities into a compelling storyline—like if Blagojevich and Lauper fistfight each other, or Michaels and Osbourne, or both. If they can, it’ll be a hell of a season. If they can’t, we’ll end up with a smattering of disconnected, fascinating moments, spread out over two hour episodes every week. It’ll be like back-to-back episodes of I Love Money, intercut with YouTube memes every twenty minutes.

Lost – "Ab Aeterno"
Zeb L. West

Let me start by saying that this is a super fun episode! (You can take that as a signal that I’m about to trash it completely). Nestor Carbonell gets a chance to flex his acting muscles as we travel back in time to see the origin story of the enigmatic and ageless Richard Alpert.

The young Richard Alpert is such an earnest and guileless protagonist; it’s hard not to love him immediately. With his innocent superstitions about encountering the Devil, and his wide-eyed wonderment at each twist of fate, it’s reminiscent of Jack in the pilot episode, reacting with heroic abandon at each new bizarre event.

Sold into slavery for an accidental and altruistic crime, we see Alpert chained inside the hull of the Black Rock, which smashes into the four-toed statue to explain why it’s now just a foot! Tricked by the Smoke Monster with visions of his dead wife, our man the Spaniard is set up to murder Jacob, but after a right ass-kicking by the Man in White on the beach, he sees the error of his ways. Although this diversion into ancient history is completely satisfying for grounding the present-day events in a rich history, it’s a bit curious that it all had to happen through a flashBACK. Isn’t the whole conceit of this season that we use the flashSIDEWAYS for delivery of pertinent information? Why bother committing to this baffling convention, if it’s not going to be the main tool for delivering vital exposition? I’ll tell you why. BECAUSE THERE’S ABSOLUTELY NO VALUE THAT CAN POSSIBLY BE ADDED TO THE STORY WITH THE USE OF A DISCONNECTED PARALLEL UNIVERSE. Well, I feel better…

Despite the whole premise of this episode undermining the main storytelling device they’ve subjected us to for eight episodes, Alpert takes us on a fun journey through his moral dilemma. When Jacob finally levels with Alpert over a bottle of wine on the beach, the writers again choke on their own exposition. With a just-short-of-completely-banal speech, Jacob uses the wine bottle as a metaphorical stoolpigeon for his relationship with the Man in Black, casting the island as the cork, and the wine as pure evil, and the bottle as the world (?) and if the wine spills, it’ll stain the suede couch of human redemption… what the fuck are we talking about again?

I suppose they get away with it, but it’s these types of on-the-nose explanations which really drain all the fun and mystery out of Lost for me. I suppose the folks who demand an explanation for everything might be experiencing some kind of satisfaction as their theories are either confirmed or denied, but from a storytelling standpoint these scenes feel pretty obligatory. I guess it would take a lot more juevos to put your foot down and say ‘no, this show is about mystery, and for it to stay fun, we need to continue to cultivate the mystery,’ but maybe that’s what caused people to tune out midway through season four. And that ship probably sailed long ago anyway…

Does a show like Twin Peaks, that refused to simplify down into an explainable puzzle have more re-watch value than something that has a finite answer at the end? If you heard from a friend that (WARING: LATE 90s SPOILER!) Bruce Willis was dead the whole time in The 6th Sense, wouldn’t that be the most boring movie in the world to sit through? This is the trajectory which I think Lost is on, and I can’t help but predict that the final episode will be so chock-full of protracted exposition, that it will be the most tedious massive-ratings must-see-tv event of all time! You’ll know I was right if the viewing party you attend clears out 10 minutes after the end of the episode. Like watching a sporting event where your team doesn’t win.

What’s your prediction? There’s still a contest going on over here (at least, as far as I’m concerned)!

-Martin Brown, Zeb L. West, 2010

Too Many Movies Tuesdays: Sometimes The Punisher Should Use A Dildo

This week, Joe McCulloch  watched Ghost Writer, Matthew J. Brady took a swallow at the teat of Michael Moore's Capitalism while Tucker swam in the murk with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Last House on the Left and The Children Are Watching Us.

The Ghost Writer
Bolstered by synchronicity, 2010
Joe McCulloch

LOOK OUT; HERE I SPOIL THE NAIL-BITING THRILLS

So yeah, this is a Roman Polanski picture shot in early 2009 and based (quite closely, I understand) on a 2007 novel by co-screenwriter Robert Harris, and, granted, only the post-production was completed with Polanski literally under house arrest, sure, BUT, y’know - it’s also about a successful public figure/artist type more-or-less confined to his handlers while prosecution mounts and irate moralists froth over horrible things he did in the past, having allowed his doggish ardor to link him with a woman ultimately connected to sinister and destructive political-legal forces.

And, while few avenues of analysis seem more blatantly facile than reading a movie as representative of its director’s personal travails -- particularly considering the disconnected nature of the source material, to say nothing of the collaboration necessitated by a $45 million exhibit of the medium -- it’s worthwhile to observe that the Ghost Writer is fundamentally about reading and processing narratives, and divining their ugly, personal secrets. This is a low-key thriller, its score jaunty with strings up front and its pace kept leisurely, at first, almost winking at the audience when an early bit sees hired scribe Ewan McGregor literally fall asleep reading the latest draft of a political autobiography ‘by’ Pierce Brosnan, cleverly cast as a fictional Tony Blair by way of James Bond’s charismatic cultural cachet. The last ghost writer… DIED!! But he left… SECRETS!! An hour & change and one encounter with 94-year old character actor and former Mr. Freeze Eli Wallach as ‘the crazy man down by the shore’ later, McGregor is conducting tense Google searches linking Brosnan to a sinister American think tank and the CIA - it all seems a bit easy, and, in the end, it turns out it is, to Our Man’s dismay.

There is, of course, a complicated woman: Brosnan’s wife, initially the middle ground between the movie’s crazed, murderous protestors and various oily sympathizers -- Prof. Think Tank all but snakes out a forked tongue as he declares the younger generation so much more puritanical than their elders, an especially charged line -- but ultimately the masterfully directed agent of Brosnan’s and McGregor’s ruin. She is the true Ghost Writer of the title, the author of one man’s illegal acts and another’s misdirected heroic struggle against That Monster the Media Hates, and -- I guess unsurprisingly -- adored by Polanski’s eye, lavished with troubled character shading, certainly a fine protagonist in her own life contrasted with Brosnan’s smarmy, self-righteous publicity posture, a director who isn’t shit without a good screenwriter.

There is never any doubt that what he did was repulsive, so the film is both massively self-pitying and self-loathing, eventually launching itself into straight-out genre hysteria, as McGregor arrives too late at the ridiculous, cheesy true nature of his manuscript and on a dime the movie shifts into overdrive - nail-biting close-ups of hands passing a note, a defiant champagne glass raised to a supervillain, and a dark car zooming out of nowhere to smash the project into its one-shot denouement of papers -- information -- fluttering away, the whole thing perhaps unknowable. It’s the victory of canny tricks over realist investigation, fitting enough for a movie that frames Britain’s supplication to poisonous U.S. foreign policy as a soured, creepy love affair. The context is epically gross and fascinating, perhaps so much that you doubt it’s really there, that things really mean what you suspect they might, and for this kind of film, exactly about that, its either dead craft genius or a dread damn miracle.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Directed by Sweden's # 1 David Fincher Fan, 2010
Tucker Stone

TIME TO RUIN SOME SURPRISES

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is the made-up-for-everybody-else title given to Steig Larsson's Men Who Hate Women, the first in a trilogy that was published posthumously after Larsson's heart attack. The books--two of which have been released in America, the third of which will arrive in May--are hugely successful, in no small part to the still en vogue popularity of Swedish crime novels in translation. Like Henning Mankell's Wallander series, Larsson's books have an unexplainable critical cachet in America that ill serves any reading of the actual text. They're competent thrillers, pleasantly engaging books about depressive overthinkers and the nasty crimes they run across, but it's their settings that are removed from American crime fiction, not their style, rarely their mysteries, and certainly not their tribe of stock characters. (In Larsson's second book, one of the primary villains turns out to be a gigantic white man who is all but impervious to physical damage, and if you haven't run across one of those before, you've never read Ellroy or seen a karate movie.)

The film version of Tattoo doesn't skimp on importing the book wholesale--this is Christopher Columbus does Harry Potter stuff here, you can tell that everybody was terrified of What The Fans Would Say--making for a murder mystery movie that's a good bit longer than that genre ever fucking needs. Thankfully, the filmmakers were smart enough to dump what was clearly the most problematic of the book's many subplots--no, Ingmar, the movie doesn't feature its middle aged financial journalist bedding every woman he comes across, you'll have to rely on your bookmarks for that--but it still crashes around into multiple problems with its attempts to incorporate every little slice of first timer Larsson's extended potboiler.

That's not really a bad choice, when it comes down to it. Dragon Tattoo is a fast read, but a lot of that is a dumb read, with far too much attention placed on talking about how cold it is in some parts of Sweden (very) and what color everybody's jacket is (bright). Still, the books are affectionately termed "The Millennium Trilogy", making it a bit odd how little of the film pays attention to the magazine of that name, which shows up in the epilogue of the film after not having been seen since the opening minutes.

That being said, Larsson's books do have one ringer, and it's unsurprising that the film version of the first novel has the same: Lisbeth Salander, the only-in-fiction hacker savant female who ended up getting defacto title status when the rest of the world refused Larsson's original name for his novel. Lisbeth is about as far removed from realistic as is possible without the ability to reshape time with her fingers--besides being capable of accessing any computer short of NORAD (she has a fat friend called Plague who can handle that), she's got a photographic memory, is trained in kickboxing by world class fighters, and she's got that weird kind of autism that only exists when people are made up by writers. Oh, and she's got a horrifying background of rampant physical abuse, full tilt molestation and happens to be bisexual. 

Okay, enough about the book--after all, the movie understands why people liked the story, and it wasn't because of Larsson's author-as-character middle aged Casanova. It's because of Lisbeth, and while it takes a while for Noomi Rapace to get going, when she does, she doesn't disappoint. Early in the film, she's a complete cipher, dressed up in an outfit that looks like (because it was) it was jacked out of a middle aged man's fantasy version of a goth girl. She sleepwalks through a couple of scenes, and then, amidst all of her male counterpart's intercut scene- & plot-setting, she's raped. Not once, but twice. The film isn't even at the first hour mark.

Both of the scenes are horrifying, cut in a way that at first ignores any titillation, throws in some jump cuts of gruesome documentation, and eventually concludes with static shots of the nasty aftermath--Noomi shoving a soap encrusted fist into her own mouth, her limping across a bridge without cleaning any of the blood off--and they were grueling enough that three of the couples in the theater got right the fuck up and bailed out. What comes next though--and yes, we're thinking of you, Fake Mark Millar--is a weird little triumph, a nasty testament to the weirdness that is Larsson's overly-attributed character. She sets the guy up, she knocks him down, she stretches him out, and then she shoves a ten inch plug in his ass.

She steps back. She looks at it.

Then she kicks it in as hard as she can, twice, just to drive the point home. 

In the hours before she leaves, she tortures him, tattooing his flesh as he writhes around, listing his crimes across his torso. The camera goes apeshit, initially operating like hidden security footage, eventually swooping in, closer and closer, watching him scream, worshipping her bloody hands, her bored expression, her absence of malice. There's never a later scene where she questions what she's done, you never follow her into a shower and watch her try to scrub herself clean. She had a job to do, and that's all. She leaves him there, she walks away. In the book, he was covered in piss, shit, blood, vomit, and he laid like that for days before she returned to set him free, a decision that she is forced to regret in the next book. In the film, they never mention him again. He doesn't matter to her anymore, he was just a thing she had to punish, a thing she decided to teach. There's no reason to expend more screen time in his presence.

Those scenes aren't what the movie is about, and while that's fortunate for those uninterested in watching a movie about the raping of rapists, it's unfortunate for the rest of the film, which is an altogether predictable mystery focused on an unbelievably under-imagined serial rapist/killer whose only claim to originality is that his particular kill room is a brightly lit one that looks like an industrial restaurant kitchen. Noomi gets in her licks--she's a regular demon with a four iron--but too much of the film's real estate gets burned off in the hours it spends watching its stock characters typing words on computers and staring at black and white pictures. There's a brilliant sex scene where Noomi's armpit hair and boulder shoulders point to America's lie about what all attractive women look like, but the film delivers its punch early on, and by the end, you just don't care anymore. 

This guy too? 

Fine.

As long as she kills him, we're square.

Capitalism: A Love Story
Michael Moore keeps getting fatter, 2009
Matthew J. Brady

Michael Moore's movies would be better if he stayed off screen, at least outside of the occasional cut to him earnestly and compassionately questioning some interview subject about the ongoing atrocity that is their life. There's some compelling stuff here, from the opening comparison of modern America to Rome just before its fall, to the history of corporate greed run amuck (with some especially good digs at Ronald Reagan), to portraits of inexplicability like the how-can-this-possibly-be-legal trend of corporations taking out life insurance policies on their employees or airline pilots not being able to survive on annual salaries of less the $20,000. But every time Moore tries to get all "wacky" and pull some stunt like wandering around Wall Street with a sack bearing a dollar sign on the side and asking banks for the bailout money back, he undermines the serious message and makes himself look like a buffoon. It's too bad, since he provides plenty of negativity about our financial state of affairs, but also some positive reporting, like spotlighting grassroots movements in which Miami evictees move back in to their foreclosed houses and refuse to leave, or laid-off factory workers in Chicago staging a sit-in until their company provides them with severance pay. For a supposed man of the people, Moore can be really fucking narcissistic, but when he gets out of the way, he's got some good stuff to say. Too bad the only people listening will be those who are already far enough to his side of the political spectrum to put up with his shenanigans.

The Last House On The Left
Hey, The Guy From Breaking Bad, 2009
Tucker Stone

The dumbest, and ultimately best, scene in this film is near the beginning, when the soon-to-be-raped-in-grisly-fashion teenage female stares out at the lake, works herself into the best impression of Sternly Felt Adult Commitment her childlike face can muster, and then strips off all of her clothes and swims out to a buoy.

The music, swelling and heaving much like her youthful breasts (captured in close-up), her graceful strokes pounding against the water, she grabs ahold, pulls herself up, looks at her digital watch:

It's a personal best.

The rest of the film never catches hold of that scene's brilliantly over-the-top earnestness. Weirdly enough, it tries--but nobody wants to watch earnest rape, especially when it exists to mechanically produce revulsion and disgust in such a degree that the remainder of the film's post-horror scenes will have the audience cheering along as Tony Goldwyn and Monica Potter frantically kill their way through Garret Dilahunt's rape-happy murder crew. It's not that the revenge-for-sexual-assault twist can't work--see Dragon Tattoo for that--it's that nobody in the film ever really buys into what they're doing, except for the victim, who buys in so hard that she'll make your stomach churn. It's not even the fault of the actors involved; except for Aaron Paul, everybody in this film is stuck saying some of the dumbest shit on the planet, the worst off being the Evil Rape Woman who keeps bitching about rich people and actually uses the term "silver spoons". Everybody ends up fucked here, none more so than Sara Paxton, who apparently spent 17 hours filming the rape scene and was then sequestered to the job of Lay Around And Act Like She'd Been Raped for however long it took to film the rest of this piece of shit.

The Children Are Watching Us
C'mere and watch me kiss your mamma, ya goofy crybaby, 1944
Tucker Stone

Up until the last scene, this little slice of Italy is an all around charmer. It's another installment in the genre called Watch A Marriage Disintegrate, and while it wouldn't have been a tremendously novel idea to focus on "how does the kid take it" even if the movie had been filmed on a banana peel by a prodigious band of uppity chimps, the kid is cute, he cries well, and there's an entire scene shot in that classy circling images of faces talking style that's bang on fantastic. (And despite it being an Italian film, the requisite Aged Mother as Demonic Joy Vampire scene gets dispensed with in less than five minutes of screen time. That's always a plus.) The final scene though--it's just a bewildering twist, a weird little change-up that comes so far out of left field that it would probably get treated as post-production interference if the film were made today. Here, it comes across like the director never quite got what his pre-Dogma writer was trying to get across, but he figured he'd better shoot the fucker as writ and call it quits. It's a bad call, and considering how much better a previous minute plays--when the father flees down gigantic staircases, as his son weeps and begs him not to go, literally running "as fast as his fat legs can carry him"--it reads as a slice of Too Bad, So Sad. Still a pleasant enterprise, but a masterpiece it ain't.

-Matthew J. Brady, Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, 2010

Television of the Weak: Another Gentleman With Poor Phone Etiquette

This week, we're playing catch-up with some help from David Brothers. Survivor, Celebrity Apprentice, Archer, How To Make It In America & Lost, coming at-cha.

Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains – “Tonight We Make Our Move” and “Knights of the Round Table” by Martin Brown

Maybe it’s just that the adrenaline is wearing off, but I’m getting a little bit worried. The first five episodes of Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains have been somewhere between pretty damn good and staggeringly great, but I’m starting to feel like maybe the season is front-loaded. The good stuff first:

“Tonight, We Make Our Move” starts out with Coach having a little wah-wah about someone calling him lazy. He goes off with Tyson—his buddy from his initial season—breaks into tears, and threatens to leave the game. In his voice over, he says, “I’m human. I’m sensitive. I’m probably more sensitive than most people. I just hide it behind a lot of things I’ve accomplished, and a lot of machismo.” Now, here’s what’s awesome about Coach: Not only has the dude “accomplished” “a lot” (you know, like, getting kidnapped by headhunters, and flying helicopters and whatnot); not only is he “the only person out here that won’t compromise;” not only is he, as he tells us as he’s pulling out of his cry-cry, “different than most people, one of a kind, Last of the Mohicans, King Arthur, legend;” but, in addition to all of those things, he is BETTER at being SENSITIVE than everybody else.

Another thing about Coach: he is totally earnest in his Confucius-and-Dr. Martin Luther King-quoting ridiculousness. His belief in himself is not a put-on for the cameras (especially, when you compare him to someone like Russell, who uses every opportunity to talk about how great he is, probably because he is so fucking short.) This is evidenced by his exchange with Boston Rob, who tries to cheer him up:

Rob: What was that all about, man?

Coach: It’s just… I feel like I’m on the outside. I want to bond with you, but I feel like…

Rob (deep inhale): I’m going to tell you something right now. You’re not on the outside. Okay?

(Coach makes holding back tears face. Piano underscore begins.)

Rob: We’re good. Lookit: We’re gonna be okay. For real, man. Come here. [Bro hug] I know you’re hurtin’. It’s all right.

Coach: I mean, like, I wanna, like, sharpen each other out here. I wanna, like, do stuff together.

See? He couldn’t just leave it at the bro hug. He had to talk about sharpening himself on Rob. But then—but then you guys—he says stuff like, “Why doesn’t anybody ever say anything good about me? Am I that bad of a person, man?” And he has a point. Everybody thinks of Coach as a joke, and he’s on the Villains’ tribe, but, aside from sincerely thinking of himself as a hero, he’s not really a bad guy—just awkwardly confident. Awkwardly confident with a pony tail. And sometimes a feather earring. I have to admit, I am totally rooting for this guy.

Then, all kinds of game-driven things happen. The tribes compete in a reward challenge, which involves each player literally rubbing themselves down with oil and going down a slip-n-slide. The Heroes lose. The tribes compete in an immunity challenge which, like nearly every other immunity challenge this season, has a physical first half followed by a puzzle to solve in the second half. Again, the Heroes lose (though it’s a much closer fight than any of their other immunity losses, probably because Tom is leading them.) In between, each tribe finds a clue to a hidden immunity idol. The Heroes immediately break apart and begin individually looking for the idol. Meanwhile, the Villains, as a team, decide not to look for the idol. It’s a role-reversal that pretty well indicates the differences between the two tribes.

Tom, who’s in danger of being voted out of the Heroes’ tribe, finds the immunity idol, and what follows is twenty minutes of the best strategic play Survivor has ever seen. No less than four tribe members are candidates for elimination, and the culminating vote is one that could only been the result of seasoned players at the top of their game—in other words, something you rarely (if ever) get to see on Survivor, and something we, unfortunately, may not see again this season.

Additionally, Jeff Probst is absolutely on fire during Tribal Council, getting his hands dirty in a way he seldom has before. I’ve talked before in this space about how the initial All-Stars season, way back in 2004, suffered from the rampant egotism of the participants. And how, this time, not only are Jeff Probst and the producers prepared for that, but they’re using it to the show’s advantage. Their willingness to allow former unfailingly popular players reveal themselves as complete jackasses has been unprecedented. As an example, check out this moment from Tribal Council, when Jeff Probst completely dismantles not only Rupert’s strategy, but his whole Survivor persona:

Probst: Rupert, what are you basing your vote on?

Rupert (taking four times as long to say this as it will for you to read it): Trying to figure out how the heck we can bond together in these challenges, and win. But [long pause] I made alliances and promises that I want to keep.

Probst: So, it sounds like what you’re saying with that long pause is, “Not sure it will be the best vote, but I will be keeping my word.”

Rupert: That is exactly what I am saying.

Probst: Wow.

Rupert: I am keeping my word. I am gonna stand up to what I said.

Probst: What part of that makes sense? Keeping your word? In a game called “Outwit, Outplay, Outlast.” Keeping your word because, “I’m an honorable man and I want people to see me that way”? ‘Cause I’m looking at a tribe that… Y’all are keeping your word, great. All it’s doing is giving you more time here with me at Tribal Council.

Rupert: Sitting here at Tribal Council sucks.

Probst (throws up his hands like, “What the fuck?”): You’re a part of the reason based on that philosophy, Rupert.

Rupert: I know I am.

Probst: That’s the most honest and illuminating answer we’ve had in any of our tribal councils together.

Now, here’s a little tip for you, if you ever find yourself playing Survivor: Never underestimate the potential for other players to consistently make horrible moves. Incidentally, this is why I’m a little scared to watch Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains when it comes back next week, even though last week’s episode, “Knights of the Round Table,” was fairly bonkers. Rupert’s mentality looks like it’s going to dictate most of the gameplay on the Heroes’ side, and it looks like the Villains camp is in a similar position in terms of its voting predictability.

The Villains’ strategy of not looking for the immunity idol was based on statements by Rob and Sandra, who stated that anybody on the tribe caught looking for the idol would be voted off. But Rob and Sandra haven’t played Survivor since seasons 8 and 7, which means that they weren’t around when this newfangled hidden immunity idol started coming into play in season 11, which means that they don’t really know what a hidden immunity idol is. Russell, on the other hand, who played last season, wisely ignores the threat of being voted off, looks for and finds the hidden immunity idol. All he has to do is use it to build an alliance—which he does, with Parvati (cute, manipulative girl) and Coach (completely non-threatening guy)—and he can start picking off the rest of his tribe. Potentially, he has the key to winning the game. Rob and Sandra think he’s just riding his bike across their lawn, and they’re going to scare him away by shaking their canes at him.

As Rupert said, the Heroes already have an alliance that’s running their game into the ground. James and Amanda have already played twice together, Amanda and JT have some sort of cuddling situation going on, and Rupert and James have reportedly bonded over how famous and popular they are. According to Stephanie’s interview with Entertainment Weekly after she was voted off in the second episode, “Rupert would talk about himself and things he had done and how famous he was, and James would chime in about all the free stuff he had gotten. It was just unbelievable. It was, like, embarrassing for them.”

That would all be well and good, except that, as of the 4th elimination, the Heroes had lost four out of six challenges, and sent three people home. Obviously, something’s not working. Of the four person alliance, Rupert has a broken toe, Amanda doesn’t have a whole lot to offer during challenges, and James has been a victim of some sort of ongoing 'roid rage. Strategically, JT’s always going to be in a bad position because he’s won before. So, it’s possible that they’re sticking together out of weakness. More likely, they’re looking to hook up with Parvati and whoever she’s aligned with after the merge—since Parvati, Amanda and James were all part of an alliance in Micronesia. That won’t matter much if the Heroes’ tribe gets annihilated along the way, which looks inevitable. According to the previews for next week’s episode, both tribes will vote someone out, leaving the Heroes with 5 players, and the Villains with 8.

In the meantime, the Heroes are trying the strategy of overcompensation. The reward challenge in “Knights of the Round Table” was preceded by this little exchange:

Probst: The winning tribe will leave here and be taken to a beautiful watering hole, and you will enjoy a feast of… chocolate. Chocolate bars. Chocolate cake. Chocolate chip cookies. Chocolate milk.

(Villains excitedly flip out. Heroes give Probst the gas face.)

Probst: To make it a little more enticing, I want to whet your appetite with just a little taste of chocolate.

(Probst reveals two plates with tiny bites of chocolate. Villains continue going bananas. Heroes continue to give Probst the stank eye. Villains quickly eat their chocolate. Heroes refuse theirs.)

Probst: Colby, you have a look on your face like this is annoying, or somehow insulting. I handed you the plate and you’re like, “I don’t want this.”

Colby: I’m not annoyed with you, I’m ready to get to the challenge.

Probst: Free offer of chocolate, I’m just curious…

Colby: Don’t need it. Let’s go.

Probst: I got the message, brother. We’ll go when I’m ready. Rupert, why is nobody eating chocolate on the Heroes? What kind of a message are you sending to the Villains?

Rupert: Hopefully, focus. We don’t care about the reward. We just want to win the challenge.

Russell (from the Villains side): We’re always focused when we come to the challenge. That’s why we keep winning.

Now, energy is a pretty valuable commodity in Survivor. If the Heroes truly didn’t care about the reward—which would be silly anyway, since any kind of food on Survivor provides a serious advantage—there’s really no reason to even waste the energy on the challenge, which has no impact on the game except for its reward. They’re not going to intimidate the opposite team by winning a meaningless challenge, after the other team has spent twelve days roundly kicking their asses. Even if they win, they’re just going to be spinning their wheels. If they lose, they’re going to look buffoonish. Plus, couldn’t even a bite of chocolate give you a surge of energy that could help you win? But the most hilarious wasn’t the backwards logic. The most hilarious part was that the Heroes had to sit out a member of their team, and, after all that, they chose to sit out Colby. Dude spent an awful lot of energy putting his game face on just to sit on the bench.

Then, in the opening minutes of the challenge, super-pumped James fucks up his knee—probably because he’s more worried about showing the Villains how tough he is than about actually playing well. So, he gets tossed out of the game. But even that doesn’t stop the Heroes from trying to “intimidate” the Villains. During a break between matches, JT tackles Coach onto his neck. Then, Rupert literally picks Jerri up and throws her face-first into a pole. He apologizes, but the apology goes like this: “Like I meant to do that!” In his initial season, Rupert complained a lot about how the cool kids picked on him in high school. Now we’re beginning to see why they did: because he’s a big ol’ man-child. When the producers put the concept of Heroes vs. Villains together, there was no way they could have ever predicted that the Villains would be super-cool, while the Heroes wouldn’t be able to stop themselves from acting like a gaggle of assducks.

The Heroes, of course, lose the challenge. James gets sent back to camp with his leg in a brace. The Heroes then go on to lose the immunity challenge—again, getting lapped in the puzzle portion. The Heroes, now two for eight, face the dubious decision of voting off James, who can’t really walk, or voting off one of their able-bodied players.

So, here’s what I think is going to happen over the rest of the season: On the Heroes’ tribe, the alliance between Amanda, James, JT, and Rupert is going to hold up, and make it to the merge. They may vote off JT or James if it comes down to it. The Villains will continue to dominate, losing maybe two more players before the merge—I’m guessing Rob (one of my two favorite players goes home in “Knights of the Round Table,” and I’m pretty sure the other one’s going home next episode) and maybe Jerri. So, the Villains will go into the merge ahead somewhere around 7-3. But Russell and Parvati will hook up with Amanda and Rupert to take out most of the remaining Villains, leaving them to fight it out to the end. I think Parvati and Russell’s alliance will hold out until the finals. Granted, it’s much more about how all of this goes down, than it is about what actually happens, but I am worried—even though the first five episodes have been uniformly excellent—that I’m starting to get a little bit ahead of the season.

The Celebrity Apprentice – “Each team must run a diner” by Martin Brown

Over the course of its last season, The Celebrity Apprentice went from being an underdog to being a pop culture phenomenon. Now, it’s in the position of having to build on its own success—something the franchise has been historically bad at. Part of the appeal of the show comes from the fact that you’re watching D-list celebrities’ petty in-fighting. Plus, not only is the show conscious of that, but it encourages it. Think the teams last season each decided to film a commercial exploiting midgets during the same task by coincidence? This season, even the Donald himself seems wonderfully self aware. In the introductory segment he talks about hiring one celebrity apprentice, and then says, “As for the rest of them, I’m gonna fire the asses off of each and every one of them,” as if he can hear fans of kitschy reality television high-fiving each other all over the world.

But you can get all that by watching most VH-1 shows. The Celebrity Apprentice benefits from having Mark Burnett at the helm. Say what you will, he has unparalleled skill when it comes to producing and editing reality TV. There are several ingenious bits of casting on this season. He mines the MTV/VH-1 casting pool for two all-stars: Bret Michaels and Sharon Osbourne. He pulls potential career resuscitation moves for at least a couple of people viewers might have soft spots for, like Cyndi Lauper and Sinbad. And he gets at least one major casting coup in the guise of former Illinois Governer Rod Blagojevich (who Trump has called “the break-out star”).

Burnett’s touch shows up most palpably in the aspects of The Celebrity Apprentice that most people don’t acknowledge. For one thing, he gets you to root for people you wouldn’t otherwise give the time of day. As loathsome as you might find Blagojevich, you’re probably still rooting for him to go far, out of pure entertainment value. Then, you also have to admire Sinbad for charging straight toward the white elephant in the room by telling Blagojevich, “The first thing I would have told you was like this, ‘Rod, Roda, hang up the phone! Hang up the phone, man! Call me from the pay phone! Brothers know. Call me from the pay phone!” Even the ciphers show plenty of personality—pro-wrestler Maria Kanellis carries sodas in her cleavage; Darryl Strawberry has to navigate Trump’s questions about the seedy places in Manhattan he used to hang out in; Carol Leifer cracks herself up describing a fellow contestant. “Bret Michaels. Rock of Love, right? Where he’s basically a man whore.”

One reason you find yourself rooting for these people (in the game, at least, not in life), is because they’re doing things that they’re potentially good at. The reason that most of them are celebrities at all is because of a keen business sense. So, we get to watch underdogs succeed. Except when they fail. And when they fail, they fail colossally. This is a crucial difference between The Celebrity Apprentice and the non-celebrity Apprentice: On the non-celebrity Apprentice, idiots got cast because they looked like competent people, and we got tired of watching them do idiotic things—because it smelled like a set-up, people scrambling for their fifteen minutes of fame, and it was. Here, the celebrities have two compelling, competing reasons for participating—camera time, and money for charity. They are absurd people who are at least generally good at what they do. We get to watch them do idiotic things, but we also get to watch them do some clever things, framed by moderately noble motives (except for with Rod Blagojevich, who simply wants to exonerate himself via NBC.)

For those reasons, the first episode of The Celebrity Apprentice 3 shows a lot of promise, without having a whole lot of memorable moments. The best revolved around Cyndi Lauper’s friendship with Rosie O’Donnell, who Trump had a very public feud with. First, while contemplating calling Rosie to ask for a donation to the task, Cyndi got caught on camera talking smack about the Donald, and his wife. Later, during an interview, she explained, “The one rich person that I am really, really friendly, Mr. Trump insulted for four months on television. And, ironically, called her fat, and he, himself is not a thin man.” After the ladies’ loss (beginning the third straight season of the women’s team getting smoked), Cyndi brought this up as her defense for not raising more money, to which The Donald responded, “Ugh. She’s disgusting.” Why’s he got to bring up old shit?

What the first episode does really well is set-up the personalities and team dynamics: Michaels as the sensitive, earnest rock star; Blagojevich’s constant politicking; Goldberg’s skepticism of Blagojevich; the affability of Michael Johnson and Darryl Strawberry; Sinbad’s ability to humorously cut to the chase; chef Curtis Stone’s cleverness and skill; Cyndi Lauper’s loopy honesty; Sharon Osbourne’s ruthless business sense; Maria Kanellis’ ambition; Holly Robinson Peete’s assertiveness and strength; Salita Ebanks’ full consciousness that she’s cannon fodder; and Carol Leifer (who was fired) even got in a handful of cutting one-liners. The only person I don’t remember having a showcase moment was Summer Sanders (Olympic swimmer.) It’s enough to get me pumped about what could be another truly bonkers season.

How To Make It In America - by David Brothers

How to Make It In America is, at least theoretically, about Ben Epstein and Cam Calderon getting off their butts and making something of themselves. Now that they're pushing 30, they're gonna strike it rich, or at least solvent, by creating a new line of jeans. Along the way, they'll have to negotiate with Cam's menacing cousin Rene, played by an aging but still talented Luis Guzman, coordinate with one of Ben's rich friends, and fight against everyone who is telling them that they can't do their thing. And then, in the end, they'll win. They'll stick to their guns, believe in each other, and their jeans will be the talk of New York City.

Got it? Okay, now do like the show does and forget all of that. The jeans stuff, the "How to make it in America while having a multicultural set of friends," Rene being a threat... it's all sidestory. It's flavor. What this show is really about, and what this episode demonstrates admirably, is the life of these guys in the city. There's a couple minutes dedicated to Kid CuDi, known as Domingo in the show, having coffee with Cam. They toast life, and then this episode's main story, that of Ben having to figure out whether or not he should go to his ex's birthday party, rears its head.

How to Make It In America is basically about the life and times of people who lead a charmed life, who have things tend to work out in their favor, and who can pit chutzpah and bravado up against reality and come out on top. In a previous episode, Ben had to choose between his rent and paying to get samples of his jeans made. By the end of the episode, he buckles and puts his rent money toward the samples, only to find that Cam made enough money to cover the samples, leaving him free to cover the rent.

Things work out. There's no real tension, to be found. By the end of this episode, Ben's made good with his ex and had a great night out on the town at the same time. There's no reconciliation, but there's no big battle, either. They have an awkward and familiar conversation and then go on with their lives.

So, How to Make It In America is about Ben and Cam and Domingo and Rene and Rachel and whoever else stumbles in front of the camera. Everyone is very pretty, no one has real problems, and the light problems they experience, including an existential crisis, are quickly solved.

This is a show you watch because you like the people, which is lucky, because the cast is pretty agreeable. They're all from that New York City of cinema and novels, where even the thugs are attractive (well, sorta) and clever, every single woman is a ten out of ten, and getting some is as simple as saying, "You know we're gonna hook up, right?" Ben's a little more everyman than Cam or Domingo, represented as his total misreading of a house party hookup situation and later drunken visit to his ex's apartment, but he's not Peter Parker pathetic.

You can't watch this show if you care about the jeans or you're looking for some tips on how to hustle. The only advice this show has for you is "Find some beautiful friends and go to trashy house parties." This is a show where things happen, none of it matters, but you stay curious. What is that, a soap opera? Good enough for me.

Archer - "Job Offer" by David Brothers

The previous episodes of Archer made me cry laughing, but this one didn't. It was just okay compared to the rest. Archer gets a new job at a rival agency, someone makes a Beyonce joke, his mother puts a burn notice out on him (which results in an attempted attempted murder), people get drunk, infidelity, mama issues... the usual stuff. Funny ha ha, not funny [unintelligible]. Still worth watching, but I kinda missed the tears.

And then Archer called a recent sexual conquest "The Pelé of anal" and all was right with the world again.

Lost – "Recon" – Zeb L. West

I think I’ve identified where the writing went awry on Lost. It’s when they hired Captain Obvious onto the staff to write this entire bullshit ‘flash-sideways’ parallel plot. He probably knocked it out in an afternoon, and then went back to his day job, writing for FlashForward.

Maybe the trouble is that they’ve dealt so long in mystery that they have no idea how to actually reveal information without shitting themselves. It’s like they hired a pack of writers who specialized in captivatingly vague uncertainty on an epic scale, but when it comes time to write some good old fashioned exposition, they all just stare at the ground and started shuffling their feet, and mumble something about hiring Captain Obvious. Or perhaps they’ve just delayed exposition so long, that now they have to deliver an awkward overabundance.

Either way, the solution is not introducing Sawyer to another fucking new character (a brilliant cameo by Tina Fey, btw). And it’s not turning two characters we’ve spent FIVE SEASONS developing into brain-dead murderers. And it’s DEFINITELY not getting Sawyer and Kate back together.

Now I know a statement like that might not be too popular with the ladies (luckily most of them skip right to the Bad Girls Club rundown anyway). I know that some girls are Skaters, while others are Jaters, and still others are Suliets or Jackets. But I’m a Fuckit, and I root only for Sawyer. Why? Because he’s the only character who wants something that makes any sense at this point. To get off of this goddamned island. I’m a Sawyermokemonster, because I think these two can really help us just cut the shit here.

To say one nice thing about the episode, it starts off with a fun twist. Sawyer attempts to con a con-man’s wife, and when she calls his bluff, he is revealed to be a police officer in flash-sideways land. (PS –Hey Captain Obvious! Thanks for giving her the totally necessary line ‘you’re a cop!’ I totally wouldn’t have got that from the LAPD busting in to rescue him, or from Miles tossing him a badge! GJ!)

The actual plot-line we’re (increasingly less) interested in is moved forward only slightly by the revelation of a couple facts. First, Smoke-Monster Locke’s ‘mother’ went crazy just like Clare/Rousseau did. Second, Widmore is now after Locke, even though he’s always been after Ben.

To tell the truth, the best thing about Lost for me this week was stumbling upon this great flickr set of cartoony Lost-themed Valentines – aren’t they great!

-David Brothers, Martin Brown & Zeb L. West, 2010

Too Many Movies Tuesdays: "I'm A Freak, Chico!"

This week, Joe watched Pirate Radio while Tucker swallowed a dose of Green Zone, White Mane, Forty Guns, Alive, Blood of a Poet, Flying Doctors of East Africa & Lord of the Flies.

Green Zone
The olds hate that steadicam, 2010
Tucker Stone

Despite the continued fiscal assurances that the American public isn't interested in watching movies or television shows about Iraq, the machine continues to grind them out, again and again. There's been an overload of musings as to why, most of which seem to boil down to exaggerated political ramblings (don't worry, one is coming in a later paragraph), but the most unique one I've seen is the argument in a comment left on the AV Club, where one gentleman mentioned that American audiences just don't like watching movies set in deserts, ever, unless they're Lawrence of Arabia. "Desert movies always look boring," he said. For now, I'll ride lockstep with that AV Club guy. America: we don't like desert movies.

That Green Zone's action scenes are well done isn't much of a surprise--the time and place where the film is set restricts most of the running-and-gunning to the exact sort of one-man show that Damon & Greengrass perfected in the Bourne films. Cut out the more outlandish stuff that the environments of those movies allowed for, throw it into nightvision alley, and it's going to work. Damon's performance, while more of the same, is pretty good. He's thoroughly mastered that appearance of surprised preparation, always appearing to perform his swiveling torso action moves and lumbering body slams with a facial expression that says its his first time, that he isn't quite sure whether what he's doing will work. The Bourne house style is there as well, with United 93's Barry Ackroyd filing in for Oliver Reed's jagged camera work, and the only major failing on the same-as-always front turns out to be John Powell, who has decided that Green Zone is best served by having an obnoxious drum score in every scene, no matter if the characters are just opening a hotel room door or reading their email.

But this doesn't want to be an action movie, it wants to wrap its hands around the glory of the book its based on, and for that, it's got the wrong director, the wrong cinematographer, the wrong leads. There's probably a decent action movie inside the story that Brian Helgeland wants to tell, but there was never an action movie inside Imperial Life in the Emerald City. There was a comedy, and none of the people involved in Green Zone's production have a sense of humor. The brilliance of Imperial was its dry wit, the way Rajiv Chandrasekaran knew he had to provide room for the reader--the bewildered, war-hating reader--to laugh. Who was running the show, was what Chandrasekaran asked, and the answer--boot wearing suits, men who believed that an entire country could be changed and controlled through in-vogue ideas alone, men who hired fresh-from-college types who couldn't speak the language and made questions like "What's your position on abortion" an interview question for the job of reparing a domestic infrastructure that the military had effectively destroyed, all in expectation of a bent knee overflow of weeping gratitude on the part of the civilians--it was ridiculous, it was absurd, it was just so goddamn miserable you couldn't help but laugh. The alternative--the one that Helguland and Greengrass embrace with zero self-awarness--is one of conniving evil and vicious cruelty, yet another case where impotent rage results in a bunch of Darth Vader types playing checkers with the brown people. The book had heroes, sure--men who patrolled the streets without guards obsessed with catching zoo animals, men who ignored the influx of technology and helped Iraqi civilians rebuild a whiteboard-only stock exchange--but few of them were the Integrity First types that Damon portrays, and none of them were reporters, the group that serves as this film's greatest heroes. (There's a lot of cluelessness on display in Green Zone, but none achieve the heights of garishness found in that concluding shot of an email's cc listings. "Look", the film says. "Our hero is going to email a story to the same craven journalists that failed to do their job in the first place. Hopefully they can take a break from applauding everything they see.") 

It's understandable why the film goes astray--the release of torture documents, the Abu Gharib scandal, the continued unwillingness to admit that the Iraq war was motivated by straight up lies, all of these things have become national currency, they're clearly at the front of Helgeland's mind. There's a bit of admiration for the attempt that's made, a selective bit of praise for trying to do something with the sea of pain that is this continued misery--but the result is just another film that fails, and its failure is a mere showcase of this decade's tradition of lousy political art. The decision to skip past the wit, to ignore the fresh genius of In The Loop, to say that some things can't be made funny, and shouldn't--it's a bad, bad call. In the annals of political criticism, it's the Iannuccis, the Malcolm Tuckers, the Chandrasekarans, the Strangeloves that make it work. The rest of the time, people should just be sat down in front of Team America, forced to answer honestly: is this what you think you're doing?

Pirate Radio
aka: The Boat That Rocked, which was 19 minutes longer in the United Kingdom, which God has presumably forsaken, 2009
Joe McCulloch

The story of English offshore radio in the 1960s is a fascinating, complicated thing, manufacturing underground resistance to format and/or label-locked BBC and international commercial broadcasting through canny counter-programming and diverse, sometimes uneasy entrepreneurship that married the latest in young hits to, say, monied American evangelical Christian programming. So, naturally, writer/director Richard Curtis decided that his $50 million fictional evocation of the scene really ought to be an impossibly tedious series of ‘ribald’ anecdotes concerning horny Radio! Rebels! who fuck or attempt to fuck minimally-if-at-all-characterized women, which exist in this universe almost exclusively to facilitate men’s reflections on their penises or daddy issues. Worse yet, I get the sinking feeling it’s intended to be sophisticated and progressive, in that: (1.) guys think about stuff; (2.) ladies are interested without a thought in just about anything, save for some attempted cover-of-darkness surprise sex that affirms the necessity of bros sticking together; (3.) male homosexuality is tolerated as a delightful joke rather than outright reviled; and (4.) there’s a woefully vacant lesbian support staff character who is present to be a lesbian, albeit of the male titilation variety.

This all accounts for roughly an hour and a half of the total runtime, at which point our captivity is transferred to the B plot, a square, repressed, potentially murderous politicians BOOOO vs. Radio! Rebels! Sex! Counterculture! Music! Freedom! Hooray! scenario so insultingly simplistic you feel a twinge of disappointment that Philip Seymour Hoffman doesn’t defeat Kenneth Branagh at the end by hitting a power chord that sends him flying through a brick wall; instead, there’s a prolonged shipwreck sequence filled with groan-worthy images of heroic radio equipment and vintage records sinking in water, capped with an uplifting fable’s finale about how rock saves lives, our champions riding high on waves of stupid stinking ‘60s self-satisfaction.

You know what the actual climax of the pre-Marine Broadcasting Offenses Act of 1967 was? Radio Caroline, one of the free-floating broadcasters, attempted to strike up an alliance with Radio City, a rival broadcaster housed in a marine fort, supplying them with a new transmitter but pulling out of the deal for fear of political repercussions for occupying government property. Radio Caroline was not paid for the transmitter, prompting one of its directors, a decorated Major (eek!) and politician (awk!) to launch a raid on Radio City aimed at taking the transmitter out of commission, after which Radio City’s owner confronted him at his home and was shot to death in self-defense, as the courts determined. I don’t know about you, but this seems a damn sight more cinematic than radio disc jockey A wedding a beautiful woman on the deck of Radio Rebel Sex Freedom, only to discover she’s really snuck aboard for her attraction to radio disc jockey B, prompting radio disc jockey C to challenge radio disc jockey B to a game of chicken for the honor of radio disc jockey A than ends in everyone being friends again and that dumb bitch leaving the boat to never be mentioned again, lol. Brings to mind a later popular tune, Kenny Rogers’ Coward of the County, wherein young Tommy’s sweetheart is gang raped by local roughs and then excused from the story to make room for the real substance: how much shit Tommy’s gonna fuck up. Yeah, swingin’ ‘60s hard-dick heroes of Pirate Radio - they fucked some shit up, man!

Alive
It Probably Helped That They Were Athletes, 1993
Tucker Stone

If you have to put the smart money done, you don't look to the story of the Uruguayan rugby team, you look to the Essex. The Essex crew may have eaten less people, they may never have gotten a professionally made film, but those guys have set the bar impossibly high in the race to most primal survivor horror tale. But you can only read In The Heart of the Sea about four times a year before it starts ruining your REM sleep, so it's good to take a break every now and then to watch Ethan Hawke say "You didn't eat my sister, did you?"

Whether Alive is a "good movie" or not--that's a question that's never crossed my mind. Roger Ebert made a good point when he observed that a movie about 72-day survivors should've depicted them as having lost a lot more weight, but that's because Ebert's a film critic with no small amount of concern about whether Alive is a decent piece of art. For those of us who want a trip down the sidewinder, a little vacation in the fields of Would I Have What It Took fantasia, Alive just has to be 1) fucked up and 2) accurate. On the accuracy front, it's got some problems, but on the fucked up front, it's aces. They fill up the dirty socks of the dead with frozen chunks of human flesh, and they got those chunks by using broken glass to saw away at their dead friends. Some of them used their fervently held faith in Catholicism to assuage the guilt of cannibalism. Then the toughest sons of bitches sewed up a sleeping bag, filled up on dead friend jerky, and went mountain climbing without any gear. And the shit worked! And none of them went all Owen Chase crazy! Make a checkmark, baby bear: the medication is working.

The Flying Doctors of East Africa
Directed by Werner Herzog, 1969
Tucker Stone

Flying Doctors doesn't have a subtitle, but if it did, that subtitle would probably be something along the lines of "Communication Is A Fucker". Why does an infant die after a successful surgery? Because the local tribe ignores the don't-give-the-patient food rule. Why don't the elder members of one tribe stop rubbing their infected hands on their eyes? Because the nurses are using signs they can't comprehend.

Herzog doesn't hide his anger at colonialism in this one, he lets it go in a stream at the end of the film, but it's been made clear long before. It doesn't start that way--Flying Doctors focuses on the meat and potatoes, the work, it doesn't shy from looking at the situation with some complexity. The doctors are doing heroic, thankless work, they're at it for hours, risking their lives in tiny little planes to land on first time airfields, and they aren't able to do much but stem a bit of the tide. The locals can veer from some uncomfortable customs--like refusing to allow small children to return to its family if the child has been saved from a fatal illness, or falsely claiming medical expertise when they have none--to unexplainable strangeness, like when an entire tribe still fail to comprehend stairs despite years of immediate availability. It's at that point--when an out of sorts Herzog focuses his camera on some irritated adult women, still wavering as they attempt to navigate a four foot tall staircase--when the film does a backflip, and his argument begins to gel, his point of view begins to develop.

They aren't the problem, they're alive, they have been for years. The trade they've been given--the medical care, the drugs, the surgeries, the nurses--it's demanding an adaptation they're not obligated to make. For the trade to work, they have to change, and while the doctors and nurses never come across as smug racists, attempting to educate the native hordes, they're still forcing a group to become more like them. Use their technique, their invention, their visual language, change the way you see, abandon your tradition, become like us, and you can live, like us, longer.

It's a twist, in a way. He never actually criticizes anybody in the film, he merely points to what's being demanded, asking a five-year-old "why" to the question of whether it's so much better to enforce progress upon a group. Because they'll be better served by medical care? A medical care that isn't actually being taught to them, but rushed to them in tiny planes by foreign hands, before it's rushed quickly away? What are they losing in exchange? He's smart enough to realize the vague nihilism to his own attitude, and he never tried to imply that the charity on display isn't valid, that it isn't useful despite the shortcomings he witnesses. At the close, the successes of the medical team haven't been assaulted, but the inherent attitude--that progress is always better--has.

Lord of the Flies
Kill the Pig, 1963
Tucker Stone

Here's the thing about Piggy--he really is an obnoxious little bastard, and even before you know he's going to die, you sit there thinking "shut up" and he keeps talking, and then somebody tells him to shut up, and he does for a little while, but then he starts up again and it's...you want him to die. That's the point, that's the way the story works. Lord of the Flies isn't going to click for you unless you have a moment where you really, really want Piggy to shut the fuck up and go away to the other side of the island and never come back, and if he gets eaten by a boulder, good on God for that one. If you don't feel that irritation, and that irritation doesn't bounce off the wall of actual hatred at some point, then you spend the movie sneering at how quickly everything deteriorates into savagery, and you're missing the general point, which is that you're part of the club, you're not on a furlough. Hell, you're probably obsessing over Simon, because Simon says so little and seems so gentle and wise, and that's why putting Simon in the story is problematic because Simon doesn't really fit, he's just a weird little baby Jesus who never believes in the monster. Actually, Simon works better in this film version than he ever did in the book, because he screams right before they kill him, and the way he screams makes him sound like a real human being, albeit one with a really high pitched voice, and you can't hear that scream in the book.

Forty Guns
Sam Fuller Created America, 1957
Tucker Stone

Would've watched this sooner, but the DVD box art makes it look like a trip to the grandpa factory by way of the too much Jesus express. It's actually black and white, far more violent than the most optimistic expectation, and features a cast made almost completely out of ugly people. (Or people whose beauty has melted down their face to rest in bubbles of pockmarked fat around their chins.) While it has a dash of pro-female to its plot, with the rich-landowner-with-a-gang character being handled by an obviously exhausted Barbara Stanwyck, most of that is dispensed immediately in the song's first song, the lyrics of which boil down to "there's a woman who runs this town, but since she's a woman, she'll get broken by a man eventually, because that's how it is, i bet this ugly guy will teach her some lessons."

Which, of course, is what proceeds to happen. But! It's still a pretty unusual western, and it's Sam Fuller. While Sam was working back in the decades where you couldn't insert lingering shots of the damage that point blank bullet wounds cause, he isn't shy about the violence. (Except for one key assassination, which takes place at a wedding, everybody who gets shot in the film gets waxed at close range.) It's a dandy drink at the well of brutality, a film that displays zero concern for anything other than showcasing the cost that people have to pay if they wish to embrace a better way of life, even if they never appear to be capable of enjoying that better way of life in the first place. Under a different hand, the film might have attempted to expand upon the nonsensical love story that pretends to motivate the characters, but Fuller doesn't care at all whether or not any of what his two leads have to say to each other. Instead, he dumps their romantic jousting into a scene set inside a raging storm, gives all of the sexual innuendo to an ill-fated pairing of side characters who spend a third of their screen time masturbating a rifle and rubbing each others faces with a block of wood, all while the film's main antagonist slaps every woman he can find. "She's pregnant? Slapping will handle that! My sister? Looking like she needs a slap!" At the end, a fun game you can play at home is to make a list of the characters and then try to determine if you would ever want to see any of them again. You won't, but it's a fun game nonetheless.

White Mane
Has A Pony, 1952
Tucker Stone

While White Mane had other goals besides educating this particular viewer on why small girls are regularly stereotyped as being hard core horse fiends, that was what was most captivating about this 1st time White Mane experience. Gorgeous movie, the sort of thing that's probably never going to get made again outside of a high definition nature show, but its timeless and altogether satisfactory. It's always a bit silly to make up a list of things one might conceivably show to one's future children, as that particular line of thought seems to exist mostly so that one can excuse away the purchase of an inordinate amount of childish things, but yeah, White Mane: kids would really like this!

The Blood of a Poet
Surrealistically Poetized, 1930

There's a part in this movie where a little girl crawls around on the ceiling and screech-laughs. That part is pretty scary. Otherwise, this is a movie that you can watch, and after its over, you can say you watched it.

-Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone 2010

Romancing The Stone: Womb Rhymes With Tomb, I Blame The Patriarchy

Hello there!

 Welcome to another installment of "Holy shit, I can't get enough of the Sword." (Also known as, "Moderation, A Foreign Term." I'm your host, Nina.

I refuse to take full responsibility for my addiction, as I live with an enabler. At my request, the local pusher delivered the 19th, 20th, 21st and 22nd issues of The Sword. Apparently, I have now "caught up" with the series, and will have to wait for the 23rd issue to be released.

More than anything, I am really excited to report that I am now an issue reader. From now on I will be waiting, anxiously, each month for a new issue. That seems difficult and unfair, but it seems difficult and unfair in a way that I think is kind of fun. Delayed gratification isn't a concept that's been enforced upon me by outside circumstances since I was a child. But this--it isn't up to me, I can't budget my money and plan, i'm just waiting on a delivery. I feel like I should have mailed somebody box tops. What am I going to do in the meantime? I guess Cinderella will be a standby of mine....along with a couple of other old friends.

So, what happened in these four issues? A lot of shit. But there's also a few soap opera-y twists and maybe a bit of treading water. One of the issues, either 20 or 21, seemed a bit shorter than usual. The main twist in the 19th-21st issues is that Malia has announced her existence in Times Square (meaning she's announced herself to the whole world) and promised to save them from Dara, who the world know fears. (That's what happens when you kill what looks like people in front of hundreds of television cameras! Dara probably should have seen that coming.) In response, Dara and friends hijack a plane - which, for some reason, came across to me as being overly dramatic - and force the pilot fly them to NYC so that Dara can face Malia. Along the way, her best friends wounds, previously healed by the sword, begin to return. She refuses to let Dara heal her, and finally decides that she wants out of all of this confusion and insanity. (I can't decide if I totally agree with her "the Sword is a horrible influence" argument, but I do think it would have been a better idea to quit the team before she helped Dara hijack a plane.)

We also learn that Malia and Demetrios were SPOILER ALERT once lovers. But that he chose other women, and Dara's mom, for, well, their human qualities. I wasn't sure what impact this information would have on the story. It's interesting, it's weird, but...so what?

And then I read issue 22. Dara vs. Malia - Round 1. Ding!!

And so it begins. It begins with words. Whether or not Malia is truly a God, we don't know, but she is 4,000 years old. And the first battle of wits is Malia being all "I know more about you than you because I'm 4,000 years old and you are not. And your sooooo predictably human. Ugh!" We get the talking out of the way, and then the actual fighting begins, and Dara sort of gets her ass kicked in the beginning.

Eventually, Dara begins to get the upper hand. It happens when she realizes that the information that Malia tried to hurt her with - that Maila and Dara's father were once in love - is the very same thing that can hurt Malia. It begins when Dara is waiting for the sword to heal her shattered hand, and Malia says, "I only wish you father were alive, not only to see his daughter die by my hands, but to watch the world embrace me for it. What I would give to see Demetrios' reaction when I win over his stupid, precious humans. I can only hope he's somewhere, watching."

Dara begins laughing, and she says, "You wish my father was alive to watch you rule the world, just so you can spite him. Don't you see? Even in death...even after you killed him....my father has power over you."

Ah ha! Seeeee? See? The truth hurts! Man, Malia really fucks Dara up after that! But Dara now has the power to hurt Malia. Malia is still jaded and dejected from a lifetime of not being good enough - HUMAN enough - for Demetrios. It's a classic trick in the being-a-bitch book! Saying "you may be hot, but my mother, my sister, he chose us. You were just some girl he used to date."

And then, it gets even better! The fight intensifies. At one point, it seems like Dara is really about to breath her last breath. But then, Malia has to play "uncle." She says, "Call me God and I'll give you a quick death. Acknowledge my power and how foolish it was to challenge me."

So check this out. Check out what Dara says:

"y-yes...you....are obviously very powerful. But...Gods don't only destroy life. They create it as well. Which you can't. You can't even bear a child." Ooooh, Snap!

But holy mother of the Easter Bunny. You know what Malia does? She reaches into Dara's stomach, and pulls out her womb! And fallopian tubes! The whole kit 'n kaboodle! And says "I can't bear children....but neither can you!!!" And then, STOMPS ON HER WOMB.

WTF?!??!!! Have you ever heard, seen or read anything like this?!?!

(Oh, and Malia says what we all know. Even if Dara grabs the sword and heals from that wound, she'll never be "right" inside. That's pretty catty!)

I'm not happy for Dara, but I am happy that the entire world watched that happen to her, because now the world knows it better be scared of Malia too. She screams at the television cameras, it's transmitted around the world, and now everybody knows: Malia is evil. From what I've heard, this comic has only two issues left. I cannot even imagine what's going to happen next. 

I can't wait to find out.

-Nina Stone, 2010

Comics Of The Weak: You've Got To Put Your Faith In The Tech

There's been some problems at the factory.

Seems to have gotten repaired. 

Okay, comics, these are still sort of newish.

Gantz Volume 9
By Hiroya Oku
Published by Dark Horse Comics

Most of the time, Gantz is a comic that's about violence & gigantic, bigger-than-you're-thinking-right-now titties. (For the uninitiated, the bits on display in any single volume of Gantz make Power Girl's chest look like she stole hers off of a six year old Chinese boy.) In volume 8, all this breast fetishism was explained in an essay by series creator Hiroya Oku, where, in true iconoclastic fashion, he admitted that he liked to draw big boobs because big boobs are the best boobs, that he just loved looking at them as often as possible. But after all that honesty, Oku decided to confine his drawings of back-snapping cans to the chapter breaks in Volume 9, relying instead on the delivery of wall-to-wall action. While the initial sequence--a one boy battle against a tribe of superpowered alien dwarves--isn't much more than an anime storyboard, the closing half, set almost entirely in the boy's high school as the last alien survivor physically tears apart thirty-odd innocent civilian children, makes for a decent chunk of nasty exploitation. Gantz is fucking mean, gnarly shit, but it's yet to reach the point where the shocks don't bring surprise. It gets even better when you realize that the main character in Gantz is the true heir to Peter Parker, and that this--sleazy violence in Matrix jumpsuits--is where you turn if you're looking for a contemporary Spider-Man comic. It's 2010, and responsibility is an advertising tagline. Nowadays, a fresh-from-puberty kid with great power would use it to kill anybody that messed with him (every volume so far) and fuck Angelina Jolie (which he did in volume 8.)

Invincible Iron Man # 24
Written by Matt Fraction
Art by Salvador Larocca
Published by Marvel Comics

Poor Jim Rhodes. Guy's series gets cancelled due to being horrible, and when he has a chance to show up in the Iron Man title, he ends up about as useful as when Scatman Crothers traveled all the way to the Overlook in the middle of a whiteout only to catch an axe square in the chest. Sure, Jimmy still got some panel time, and sure, Salvador threw out a couple of close-ups, but in the end, all Jimmy got to do was lay on the floor and gurgle out some mucus bubbles.

Unwritten # 11
Written by Mike Carey
Art by Peter Gross, Jimmy Broxton & Chris Chuckry
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics

It's a good thing one can't figure out anything about a writer's personality by reading their work, because if you could, you'd have to admit that 99% of the people who write comic books are way too fucking obsessed with Nazi Germany.

Scream Queen: Sand & Fury
By Ho Che Anderson
Published by Fantagraphics

Scream Queen is a dark, violent horror story that provides a contemporary update on a folklore standard. Oddly enough, it's not being published by Vertigo, but one cound venture a guess that's because it's willing to frankly depict sexual intercourse. It's a good comic, hampered a bit by the choice to mix digital replication and more standard pen & ink art with some manner of willy-nilly concern that's undoubtably obvious to a few, but completely indiscernible to most. None of that really matters though, as this will be read, for the most part, by a group of people who will pretend that they aren't actually reading a horror comic that shows the nipple, but something far, far, more important.

Superman: The Last Stand of New Krypton # 1
Written by James Robinson & Sterling Gates
Art by Pete Woods
Published by DC Comics

If you took all of the shitty Superman comics from the last twelve months--don't worry about trying to separate the issues, they're all of them horrible--and you mixed those issues with a floury paste, DC Comics could feed all of the people starving to death in North Korea, and you wouldn't even have to remove the staples. (Kim Jong Il has them eating grass and animal bones, giving them the steel stomach of a Kryptonian.) And yet, DC continues to pretend that these comics have another use. It's disgusting, insensitive, and a little bit racist.

Mr. X Wolverine # 1
Written by Frank Tieri
Art by Paco Diaz, Guillermo Ortego & Ulises Arreola
Published by Marvel Comics

Here it is, that watershed moment when a plot device stops being useful and joins its brothers in the cabinet of Seen It Before, Better. There was still some muscle attached to bone back when a Howard Chaykin drawn Jigsaw excitedly told Frank Castle how much he loved him, but between here and there, this trick bled out on the floor. Frank Tieri tries to spin it up a bit by never putting the hardest phrase to fake between the lips of Wolverine, but in the age of digital, everything dies a lot quicker. Have fun at the funeral, Mister X.

Ultimate Comics Spider-Man # 8
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Art by Takeshi Miyazawa & Justin Ponsor
Published by Marvel Comics

It used to be that you'd read Ultimate Spider-Man comics just to get some kind of Spidey fix so you could have something to talk about whenever your buddy Todd came to visit, since the only thing Todd cares about is Peter Parker and those terrible short novels that Chekhov wrote, and one thing takes less time to deal with than the other. Amazing Spider-Man was just too much of a pain in the ass, and it was ugly to boot. But now, Amazing Spider-Man is a consistently gorgeous comic, containing some of the most expressive art that Marvel publishes, and while the stories just meander around, they're easy enough to ignore. Meanwhile, Ultimate Spider-Man has reset its comic to half-ass in appearance while dispensing the same teeth-curdling inside jokes that the whole Ultimate Comics existence was intitally intended to avoid. That's time for you, but it's also the point: it's never a good idea to stick with anything for too long, especially not when its primary ambition has always been to out-cute a picture of wrestling kittens.

The Mystic Hands of Dr. Strange # 1
Written by Keiron Gillen, Peter Milligan, Ted McKeever & Mike Carey
Art by Frazer Irving, Ted McKeever, Marcos Martin & Frank Brunner
Published by Marvel Comics

The classic criticism of Dr. Strange--that everybody wants to write him, but nobody wants to buy him--is probably a lot less true than it is that drawing a good Dr. Strange comic is fucking hard to do, it requires skills and time that no other Marvel character is going to demand, and right now, Big Two comics are going through a phase where writing is the big dog. That'll change, and while it hopefully won't result in a return to the days when there was a collective agreement to pretend that Todd McFarlane was a moral beacon of integrity, there will hopefully provide a chance for Marvel to put a Strange in the chamber. If and when, they can throw this little ditty out as an example of what to do right.

Criminal: The Sinners # 5
Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Sean Phillips
Published by Icon/Marvel Comics

While the main plot never really stopped reading like a season finale to Rescue Me, and the art always came across a bit rushed, this particular installment of Criminal did introduce the possibility that the Brubaker/Phillips team might someday deliver some kind of military story, and all things being equal, that's worth looking into. War comics are better than all the other kinds of comics.

Breaking Into Comics The Marvel Way # 1
Written by agggh
Art by bleaggghh
Published by Marvel Comics

Jesus, this is like getting punched in the face by mediocrity, and you'd think that a concept wouldn't have a good haymaker, but this shit actually hurts. It's not the content that's the problem--the content is just anthology standards, you could accurately call this thing "Marvel Comics Presents" or "Web of Spider-Man" or "What If: The Power Pack n' Stuff"--but the title, the way the entirety of the "interviews" all translate to "i met some guy and he hired me, that guy is like Jesus but more into burritos", it's fucking hilarious. Why not just put a parenthetical after that ridiculous "Breaking Into" title, something like "you have to follow Marvel execs on Twitter, also draw, are you good at kissing ass, that helps", and then you can just publish a bunch of full page advertisements for other Marvel books. This costs money? Who does that money go too?

S.W.O.R.D. # 5
Written by Keiron Gileen
Art by Stephen Saunders
Published by Marvel Comics

Mmm, he was totally awesome!

-tucker stone, 2010