The Factual Opinion

Romancing the Stone: Good Way To Lose A Limb

American Vampire # 1
By Scott Snyder & Stephen King
Art by Rafael Albuquerque
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics

Nothin' like dating a vampire. (A vampire comic, that is.) At this point, I've definitely read quite a few vampire stories. I'm not sure when I became such a fan, but, as I've said before, I really enjoy seeing how each new writer/author of a vampire story uses the world's vampire mythologies in their own way. What do they keep? What do they discard? What gets rewritten?

What was great about American Vampire #1 was its seduction of me. Ooooh, yes. Two stories in this issue, both to be continued, and although there is a little Vampire Action, it's not the focus. No, the vampire parts are the dark, mysterious underbelly of the story, and this story is teased out, its yet to be fully revealed. In fact, reading this issue reminded me of when I've enjoyed a burlesque number....not too much really gets shown, but hoo-weee! am I interested!!

I'm a huge fan of anything set in the late 1880s/early 1900s. The first story is set in 1925, and the second is in 1880. I loved how the first one opened - very cinematic in the way that there's a voiceover (so-to-speak) narrating one thing, and yet we see pictures of entirely different circumstances than the one being narrated. (Plus, I didn't quite grasp the discrepancy at first. The "reveal" of that difference came later, after i'd been hooked, sucked in--and then I realized I'd been tricked, but not in a negative way.) I've come to really appreciate the skill with which some of these comics pop up with images that make me say, "Oh my God! What happened?!" In this case one girl, seemingly dead, is trying to tell the man who just discovered her body that she's alive - and in the very next frame, we find out she's the voice behind of the narration. It's three days earlier, and within the next few pages I've fallen in love with her character. She's snappy, sassy, a go-getter and a true friend. Cliched? Maybe, but I love her just the same. And just as we begin to learn what may have happened to her - cliffhanger! To be continued! And we're onto story two...

Although there is one cross over character between the stories.....now things are getting really interesting. It's like the burlesque dancer that is this American Vampire just took off one item of clothing, to reveal that she's still covered up underneath. And it's so tantalizing! (I wish I had a male analogy for burlesque, since all the people involved in this comic's creation seem to be dudes, but I've only witnessed women do it. Sorry, but today's male strippers don't hold a candle to the old school art of burlesque. Oh, and not that I've seen that many male strippers. I've witnessed a couple. Just a couple. For science.)

The cross-over character between the stories is a criminal named Skinner, and he's just been caught for bank robbery and a few other things. To make a long story short, we witness his near escape from a train, a shoot out, and (possibly) his beginnings as a vampire. That's the cliffhanger--we know he's going to survive, and look unaged, 40 years later--but that's a long time, so who knows what's coming. I have my suspicions!

The art in this, by Rafael Abuquerque, is fantastic. As is my usual cross to bear (and yours, sorry) I don't have much of an art vernacular. But--and this is going to sound a little silly--this comic book looks exactly how I wanted comic books to look when I was a little girl. My cousin, Ted, would buy a comic book now and then, and I wanted in on the action, too. Reading world balloons was always fun. But there was something about those books he bought back then that didn't work for me. They had too much crammed into the small frames, everything was too busy. My eye never rested on the page, it became work to take it all in. That isn't the case here. From the style of the era being so well captured, to a depiction of vampires in a whole new way - slightly zombie and animalistic in look - I loved every page. The old-timey glamour was mixed with a realness of humanity. This is my cup of tea, and I know how to boil water. (What?)

I'm not abandoning The Sword, but I'm cruelly aware that our time is limited. There is an end in sight. And, well, a girl's gotta have a back up plan, right?

-Nina Stone, 2010

Comics Of The Weak: "I glance at the blood-flecked scroll on which is written It Is Time To Reveal The True Essence of the Nation"

Brightest Day # 0
Written by Geoff Johns & Peter Tomasi
Art by Fernando Pasarin
Published by DC Comics

It opens the same way Blackest Night did, the same way Blackest Night closed, with another scene set in a cemetery, where a super-hero ponders and waxes. A baby bird falls from a tree, it's head smashing and smearing pink brain matter across a headstone.

Super-heroes don't waste time with the little things anymore, it seems to say. They fuck each other in rooms full of candles, dreaming of the people they've dismantled. They stand unsure of the deep water, terrified and ashamed, unaware that papa Hal hates fear worst of all, and if he knew that the fishman was scared of fish, what would he do?

What would you, it seems to ask--would you fill up a kiddie pool with ice and try to force a retcon upon the world, to trick strangers into forgetting your mistakes? Could you put on a fake smile and watch your ex-boyfriend fuck a hot doctor? Do you have that kind of drive?

It's been classed as a death-soaked shouting opus, hysterical comics, but that's by a writer whose image is tied in up with the lifelong play-acting of his most well-known fictional creation, whereas this, and those, is tied in a creator whose public visage most closely resembles this, or of course this, and while the rules of yesterday say that the personal shouldn't impact the professional, this--an event mini-series built around characters who have spent the better part of the last twenty years starring in a consistent string of failing, unwanted titles--isn't a product for any sort of mass audience, it's the product for a specific one, and that specific one knows these creators names and buys because of those names, then they go out and create that image and hand it right back, and they say "you'll play this part", and the nod is given, and the rings start to fall, the referencing hits fever pitch, and fucking heroes die. That public image is what makes all the difference in the story's reception, because when Geoff Johns writes a comic that opens with a baby bird brain smash and then depicts a scared of water Aquaman in a world where the Hawk-people fuck each other's mouths in a hall of their own memories, the undercurrent of response is a hellz yeah fist-pump, where under the hand of an Ellis, the enterprise would be praised for its caustic and scathing explosion of what-you-expect, an Ennis credit would carry the cheers for the satire and criticism, under Fraction or Casey it would be labeled as a cool, hip rejection of the squares, and James Robinson's stories wouldn't be read at all, because their response is prepared in advance--Starman Meant So Much, So Much.

And this is Johns. So the baby bird comes back to life. Shoulders are firmly squared. Throats are lubricated, prepared for shouting. David Finch draws the covers! Maxwell Lord has returned! Do you remember Millenium, friends? Because if you do--well, get ready to have your mindz blown.

Consumer Review Machine: Dark Wolverine # 84

Intended Audience: Marvel Comics fans interested in Siege tie-ins, Daniel Way fans, Daken (Wolverine's son) fans, series completionists, Giuseppe Camuncoli fans.

Audience who will be most disappointed: Marvel Comics fans interested in Siege tie-ins, as the only pages of the comic that take place during Siege are the first and last pages, the rest of the issue is told in a "What If" vein, only occurring within Daken's mind.

Audience who will be most satisfied: Daken fans, probably. He is heavily featured in the comic and wins many of his battles, including the most important battle of all, which is the one for his very soul.

Brief Synopsis: Daken, Bullseye and a bunch of soldiers are losing a fight against various enemies, Daken experiences what might happen if he attempted to be a good soldier. He chooses not to be a good soldier because it would be hard to convince the people around him to trust him.

Is comic effective in it's goals: To entertain, no. To be a new issue of a long-running series, yes. To feature some nice drawings by Camuncoli, yes. To be well written, no.

One positive thing about the comic: it has a nice drawing of someone getting razors shoved into their crotch.

Prelude To Deadpool Corps # 5
Written by Victor Gischler
Art by Kyle Baker
Published by Marvel Comics

This is fucking genius, the very much top of the anti-art art that is comics when they're in the hands of pendulous, bullball swinging gentlefolk, even better that it's continued on with a live-in-concert faux performance by the artist, where he said "politics, nah" at a recent convention panel. See, what do you bring to the table when you do something like Prelude To Deadpool Corps, a weekly series about Deadpool, Lady Deadpool, Dogpool, Kidpool & Headpool that uses an extended Mario Kart style gag for its cover? Well, you bring this: ugly digital art. But not ugly digital art in some lazy, here-you-go, gimme-some-money way. No, you go over the top completely, you create and manipulate and digitize and jiggle out some bacon--shit, you make this, it's like Kyle Baker had a secret college of Batman Digital Justice going on in the background of his actual you-get-to-see-this career.

Of course, it all depends on how you define "good", how you manage what you determine to be "entertaining", in which case, the rocks, they be-a-looming. Because: this isn't very funny. Because: this is the fifth part of a mini-series prologue, and Baker only shows up in the last issue. Because: this isn't ugly as argument-for-not-ugly, this is straight up ugly to look at. Because: this is what Baker--an undeniably talented guy with an enviable amount of intelligence and taste--felt his paystub deserved.

And yet! It's brilliant because of that, it's genius for that very reason, because this little piece of shit, this thing that nobody seems to like that much, is the truthful, brutal answer to the idea that you have to give a corporation everything so that you can give yourself something, because no, you don't. They don't deserve your best, they never did, they never will. You think DC makes the best Batman comics? No, they don't. They make the only Batman comics, that's all. If the doors opened, if one of those lawsuits actually went down the pike, yes, there would be shit, mountains of horrible, horrible shit, but it wouldn't take but a week before it clicked that the shit wasn't markedly different from what the corporate entertainment guys were producing. These people--they aren't bad people, they aren't evil, but they're just an employer, they don't get to have your fucking soul and your integrity, nobody takes that away, you have to give it over. You're looking at that paycheck, and it's late, or it's not enough for the time you spent, the time you took from what you love, but maybe, just maybe, you can be one of their best soldiers, the soldier that never complains, and they'll take care of you, and they'll believe in you, and they won't send you home with a piece of shit script that nobody wants, they won't bleed out the work you do by cheaping and rushing the coloring, they'll live up to their promises for you even though they didn't for him and her because you tried so hard and you worked overtime and you told yourself everybody has to make sacrifices that's all it will be better next time and somebody will take notice this time and I can catch up on sleep later and I just know that this is the last one, the last one, and then it's home free and they'll take care of me in the end.

And maybe they will. They always have before, right?

Cold Space # 1

The first page of this comic features the phrase "I hate cops".

Captain America Black Panther Flags of Our Fathers Other Title Available # 1

The first page of this comic features the phrase "I hate Nazi's".

Hey, guys. Enough with the "hate" talk, alright? What do you love? There's so much to be excited about. There's complete seasons of Animaniacs on DVD, there's a new episode of Dr. Who, we've got a good year of posthumous Guru-related cash-in releases to look forward too, maybe we'll get to have a holy war with Iran, iPad, you know, iPad, Samuel Jackson has a comic now, that whole attempt to crack down on Craigslist-based prostitiion failed miserably--seriously, why the glum faces? It's like you've forgotten how to have fun. Did you forget how to have fun? When's the last time you used the words "You guys" to start a sentence fragment? Been a while, I'm betting! Try it out. C'mon, look for a movie preview or something. Why so mean?

U mad?

Ultimate Comics Enemy # 3
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Art by Rafe Sandoval
Published by Marvel Comics

If you wanted to describe the current industrial status of the Ultimate comics line, you'd probably do well to head over to the Internet archives and start digging up articles about Wildstorm relaunches, because that seems to be the model they're following on this thing. The original launches of these titles--the Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Ultimates--those fucking things worked as products. You could swing those bitches from telephone poles, they had that much momentum going. The line had its fair share of misfires--Elektra got two mini-series, ya heard--but none of them were able to annihilate the floor as well as Ultimatum and Ultimates 3 did, they just blew this cocksucker out of the water, it's like the whole Ultimate universe was a living person who used to be the slickest cat in the office, but then he showed up to work covered in duck feces talking about how his mother won't loan him any tinfoil, cuz, shits, there's a parade a-coming. So they take that son of a bitch out on "sabbatical", and when he comes back into work he's got some odd looking scars on his face and he's all bloated up now, and he eats lots and lots of carrot sticks and won't look you in the eye. He's still working, like, here he says, Reed Richards is dead. Here's how Nick Fury argues with a woman. Here, the Thing loves Sue. Here. Here. Here.

Batman # 698
Written by Tony Daniel
Art by Guillem March
Published by DC Comics

Check this out, this is how you know that Dick Grayson is a temporary Batman.

They won't even give him a fucking computer. He just has pieces of cardboard stuck on the wall in the "Batbunker". And Alfred is--wait a second, let's look at that closer.

Is that Alfred? It looks like the Leader. And why do they keep the batbong in the garage? Mixing fumes with the stash is just a recipe for a rough evening.  

Doc Savage # 1
Written by Paul Malmont
Art by Howard Porter, Art Thibert & Brian Miller
Published by DC Comics

Right on time to watch DC's other attempt at a second super-hero imprint get cancelled, Doc Savage is the first new title to be launched out of Brian Azzarello's First Wave mini-series, which, if you haven't kept track, has only released one issue out of its six, meaning that DC made the decision to launch two new ongoing series (besides Savage, a new Spirit series comes out tomorrow) without any proof that anybody wanted to read spin-offs of the First Wave mini-series, or, you know, the First Wave mini-series itself. It's possible that DC is just copying what's commonly referred to as Marvel's Hulk strategy, which is to flood the market with Hulk products in the hope that people will just become anything-Hulk-related fans the way they are Bendis fans, because hey, this says Hulk on it. Hulk, it says on this. That's possible, except that DC already did that once, eight months ago, when they started the Red Circle line of comics, and you have to imagine they're aware of how well that worked out, which is that it did not work out at all.

But that's industrial truth, that's not about content, and so what, Doc Savage, maybe it's good, what's it like?

It's pretty fucking terrible, actually. Children that look like alien wax dummies, an apparent contractual obligation to rip the lead character's shirt over and over again, more of the strange fascination with which writers have endowed the supporting characters that surround a lead with which few readers could even pretend a familiarity with, and a plot that centers around having said characters do as little as possible for the majority of the time in which they're being introduced. But hey, it does have a blimp on the cover. 

The Savage Axe of Ares # 1
Written by Gregg Hurwitz, John Barber, Ted McKeever & Duane Swierczynski
Art by C.P. Smith, Jefte Palo, Ted McKeever & Leonardo Manco
Published by Marvel Comics

Another black and white retro style anthology comic in the same vein of the pretty great Dr. Strange one from last month, this installment is pretty disappointing, despite a pleasant detour by Ted McKeever where Ares handles a God of War style boss fight. For some reason, Gregg Hurwitz is given a ton of pages in which to tell the story of two guys running from a warehouse to a forest, and C.P. Smith just gives up about three panels in and proceeds to draw disconnected frames of...stuff, you know, like statue people and tanks. John Barber is next, he's an associate editor type who does this kind of fill-in work from time to time, and he spits up one of those sorts of stories that sounds like something an old man would ramble about in a gladiator movie. A bathroom-break voice-over, like "the princess didn't understand it at first, but as the sun boiled the blood drenched corpses of her subjects, a thought crossed her mind", that kind of thing. The art's nice though, these things are starting to have the kind of potential for pleasant surprise that MOME used to have before it turned left into a building.

Amazing Spider-Man # 627
Written by Roger Stern
Art by Lee Weeks & Dean White
Published by Marvel Comics

While parts of this issue appear to have spurt forth from Lee Weeks mimicking John Romita Jr., that's about as close to contemporary as it gets, excluding the use of SD cards, which is vaguely contemporary, probably until September at least? Otherwise, this is some old school comics, complete with a page of Spider-Man mentioning old stories while the editors tell you where they came from. (And yeah, the current Spider-Man editor does that a lot, but these are referencing stories from 400 issues back.) Still, the story makes sense, at least until the end, so you can't really say it doesn't work. But that last page is a fucking minefield of failure, a goofy looking Silver Surfer type declaring war against sleep, and it reads like garbage sex, which is when you have sex with garbage.

Irredeemable Special # 1
Written by Mark Waid
Art by Howard Chaykin, Paul Azaceta & Emma Rios
Published by Boom Comics

Hey, Chaykin! He's pretty much just turned in convention sketches of American Flagg characters for this assignment, but there's a sloppiness to them that's sort of awesome, like he's writing a message in secret codes the way he did in that black and white Iron Man story a few months ago. Or maybe it's just a fuck you, draw your own precious eyes, i'm-Howard-Chaykin kind of thing. Azaceta takes the whole thing seriously, which is a mistake--it's Irredeemable, you know? This comic was created because Mark Waid wasn't able to sit down at a computer without incessantly googling his own name, and he turned that moment in life into a comic book about Superman killing people. You don't take this kind of assignment seriously, you screw around and collect a paycheck. Fuck it, Chaykin will probably explain it him later.

Punishermax # 6
Written by Jason Aaron
Art by Steve Dillon & Matt Hollingsworth
Published by Marvel Comics

Aaron has run smack into the same problem that besieged all of the other non-Ennis/Gischler writers that have handled the character for the last decade or so, which is that everything that's in the comic that isn't Frank Castle is far more interesting than Frank Castle, from the obvious stuff, like a particularly goofy version of Bullseye, to the surprising: Frank's doctor, who was stuck in the Nam with old pre-Pun Castle. Wouldn't you like to read about that guy? That doctor? Instead of Frank? Yes, you would. Of course, even having something in the comic that is interesting puts the team somewhat ahead of the people who tried to follow Ennis, and having Steve Dillon cooking up the gore leaves the issues a decent enough way to check in on a character who seems to have returned to the precarious position of failure he was in before Garth came along and figured him out. Still, you might want to get ready for something like this.

Hellcyon # 1
By Lucas Marangon
Published by Dark Horse Comics

Basic robot shit with motorcycles and fighting. This guy can draw the shit out of robots, by the by, although he's crazy to use computer color tricks to try and make his crowd scenes look more populated. And while the story is pretty routine, it's always a little touchy when you start pushing "originality" and "new" as the temperature with which all comics shalt be judged. Hell, you could have Superman play the steel drums with an uncooked hot dog, and it would be totally fresh 'n different take on the character. You could put Wolverine in a turtleneck and a grass hula skirt. That would just be crazy, some marching to the beat of your own drummer shit there.

Still, this is pretty generic, and is probably going to be ignored by a big portion of its potential audience, because the immediate visual response is the thought "guess Dark Horse bought some kind of Robotech license."

King City # 7
By Brandon Graham
Published by Image Comics

King City is like one of those Latin American electronica albums that Punk Planet used to recommend, those oddball forty minute mixes of music that sounds sort of familiar, but come arranged and delivered in a way that's so sincerely different, so confidently sure in its experimentation that, if it wasn't so playful, would probably be thought of as labored and strident, another installment of trying too hard. City just doesn't read like its creator is putting anything on, there's no fakery, it's a guy and a magic cat, it's roly poly sexy girls who are smarter than everybody else around them, loyalty and dark suited bad guys, and if it wasn't for the casual death, dismemberment and chainsaw guns, the comic might fall into the crevice in the brain where things go when you're trying to decide if it's something little kids would like to read. It's gorgeous to look at, and not in the way where you try to seek out an adjective that translates to "positive" so that you can compliment the art and move back to a plot recap, but in the way that the comics big empty spaces stack on top of packages of densely lined industrial complexes, the way a jiggling butt is lovingly highlighted, all while the ever so perfect letterering describes these "child burying hips". The other nice thing about King City is that it feels finished, thought out, planned--and yet it's still languid and whimsical, as quick to stop and tell a joke as it is to throw a couple of bodies down to the organ harvesters, all while a barely-mentioned Korean zombie war rages in the past. You could do worse than have a stack of these, and a too adorable for public display mug to sit on top of them.

Slam Dunk Volume 9
By Takehiko Inoue
Published by Viz

Although reading thousands of pages of Slam Dunk in one long row would undoubtably dismantle one's enjoyment of the series, with all of the little jokes and brutish physicality losing their charm as the repetition mounts, it is a pain in the ass to wait, boo hoo. Inoue's drawings may be more refined in Vagabond, and his ambition may be higher in Real, but in Slam Dunk, it's all gutter punk levels of engagement. Volume 8 consisted of one long ass gang battle, a fight that left almost the entire team covered in blood covered bruises, leading to a flood of exposition as the team's soothsaying four-eyed member explained where the town's biggest bad boy came from: the basketball team, naturally. By the end, Ponyboy had collapsed in front of the head coach, begging his way back. With Volume 9, we watch as the rest of the thugs take the entirety of the fight's consequences on the back, leaving their former brother-in-crime to rejoin his original orange-balled family. From there on, it's game time, and while the series nominal lead character has yet to score a point (and has been ejected from every game he's played), the team is rapidly destroying everything around them. (120-47 scores, etc.) The romance seems to be set on a slow burn, the championships are a few months away, and yet, in another of Inoue's twisted rejections of expectation, none but a few obsessives--and future opponents with mounting concerns--are actually watching the games as they happen. Considering the success this series had in Japan, it would be too much to credit the man with anticipating its American futures, but you can't really dismiss the coincidence: nobody, sans the hardcores, is paying attention.

-Tucker Stone, 2010

Romancing the Stone: Nobody Should Tell Her Cinderella Was A Mini-Series

This sort of feels like a reluctant booty call. I've got one more issue of The Sword that I'm waiting on, but I know it won't be around for a while. I honestly I didn't feel like reading something else. But I've got this little column I'm committed too. So I figured I'd call on Cindy again.

Cinderella # 6
Written by Chris Roberson
Art by Shawn McManus
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics

You know how it is. I know she's around. I know she's up for a good read. And I know that I've gotten pleasure from her in the past. So, why not?!?

But, know what, Girl? I'm still not that into you. It's not you, it's..wait, I've said all this before. I guess it's me? Maybe I'm being cruel? And that's what dating's all about, right? Trying to find the right fit. By being cruel.

Hey girl. I tried. I didn't mean to come back, but I did.

I know, I know. I must've been a little nostalgic for how it used to be. That first date was pretty great. I found you clever, I found you feisty. And clever! And feisty! I just found all your plays on fairytales so adorable and engaging. I couldn't wait to spend more time with you. So I did.  We've had a number of dates. And then...I skipped one. I just forgot. Totally blew you off. My bad. 

So, I decided to let the past be the past and just swing by, one more time, with issue number 6. I didn't totally know how we ended up with Aladdin captured by your Fairy Godmother. Hey, that's okay. I didn't really need to know how either of you got there. You'd moved on! I'd told you I was leaving once before! (I guess the honest truth is that, um, I didn't care enough to know what had been going on with you.)

And you know, here you are again, Cindy. So clever. So full of piss, just fully stocked with vinegar. Did I mention that you're always so clever, clever, clever? There's your whole Fairy Godmother thing, that Hickory the mouse of Hickory Dickory Dock fame. Oh, look, all sorts of fairy tale connections...they're all here. Being so darn cute that, like, I don't even have to try, do I? You'll just spoon feed me your cleverness and I'll just suck it on down. I don't have to think real hard, I don't even really need to think at all. I don't have to figure anything out or learn anything or have a catharsis. I just read, and maybe every now and then, I'll get to chuckle at all your wit, which I'll never miss, because it's got a neon sign next to it.

You know what? This is so totally boring. This gets old fast. For me, these kinds of comics are supposed to operate as some form of escape. Some kind of "whoop, there goes the day", and I'm lost in story. Yet here I am, reading this. You know what I was thinking about? I was thinking, "Man, I'm so bored. My life is way more exciting than this comic. I think I'll get back to it."

Did you ever date a comedian or class clown type? You think they're the coolest thing ever. So full of charisma, wit, charm--you can't wait to be with them. But after a while, you realize that's all they can be. Everything is a joke. Everything is about getting attention. It's all one note. There's no space or way to connect because, well, they're so busy doing their thing. 

That's how I feel about Cindy now. I actually feel bad about feeling that way. At one time, I was a little in love with her. But quite frankly, now that i've read other comics that truly grab me or make me feel or think about big topics, Cindy seems so shallow. She seems so boring.  

I guess this is my first official break up. "Stone" Cold Break-up. I just can't do this anymore. I shouldn't do this anymore. I'm calling it quits with Cinderella.

-Nina Stone, 2010

Too Many Movies: Moral Rectitude Is The New Sincerity

Joe McCulloch watched Kick-Ass. Matthew Brady watched Black Dynamite. Tucker watched Babe.

Kick-Ass
Directed by Matthew Vaughn, 2010
Joe McCulloch

At the moment this looks to be on track to probably recoup its production budget in theaters and not much more, which is about as expected, at least for me, but I’ve gotta cop to being a little startled by the level of controversy this thing’s managed to attract. Seriously, did everyone already forget Orphan? ‘Cause Kick-Ass wasn’t even the best foul-mouthed murderous 12-year old actress vehicle of the last year, and from the looks of it now, it might not wind up the highest grossing. (No, really: Orphan made over $75 million worldwide. Ebert gave it three and a half stars!)

Awww, that’s being disingenuous though; a horror movie is expected to be gross and repellent, while superheroes -- by which I mean movie superheroes, a specific, particularly franchise-friendly subset of action movies, just one shelf over from most expensive sci-fi -- are still big beating pistons in the heat engine of the American movie summer, which I think promotes certain expectations about where the content can and cannot go. Plus Kick-Ass had a wall of hype behind it as turn-your-brain-off good times aimed basically at teenagers, R rating or not, which provides easy enough reception for public outrage/dismay. And, anyway, mainline critics/commentators tend to be oversensitive to vivid content by dint of prolonged, sometimes comprehensive exposure to the relative placidity of other works - hence the frankly bizarre reactions from certain quarters to something as innocuously candied as Speed Racer.

What I’m saying is, when I see Chloe Moretz getting punched in the nose by an able-bodied adult male, I’m not lamenting the state of the media so much as wondering why the hell she’s still awake; I mean, not to draw too many comparisons, but when Vera Farmiga karate kicked Isabelle Fuhrman in the face, that girl stayed down. At least Mark Millar made it clear that Hit Girl is out of her mind on drugs during the action bits, which isn’t a logical excuse for cutting dude’s limbs off with a katana or anything, but it at least provides the gloss of ‘real-world’ rationalization that characterizes the whole of Kick-Ass: The Comic. In contrast, Kick-Ass: The Movie is encapsulated by the soundtrack blaring an obvious November Rain knockoff refrain as Our Heroine prepares to take out an entire hallway of villains, i.e. it’s like something you know, only a bit cynically less.

I’ll be blunt now: this just is a dumber version of the comic. Not responsive or subversive, only dumber. It’s the kind of movie where the bit with him outside his love interest’s window ends up in tearful confessions and a romantic sex scene, and later there’s a plaintive conversation about how she’s worried about his superhero activities and other serious parts about the price of being a hero, just like in Spider-Man. Oh, there’s action scenes, ok but noticeably hampered by having a 12-year old anchor a bunch of them; get ready for plenty of tight close-ups and quick cutting, and shiny CG gore, about on the level of Ninja Assassin but half a mile out from Punisher: War Zone. It doesn’t hold a candle to JRJR’s pages, that’s for damn sure, or even the movie version of Wanted.

That’s the best (and most obvious) point of comparison - while Wanted ripped out all but the sickly wish-fulfillment center of the comic and replaced it with its own political subtext and oddball whimsy (PROPHETIC LOOM), Kick-Ass merely waters everything down. I hope you didn’t think the lip-biting racial subtext of the comic was excised, oh no - it’s diluted with the addition of a barely-present positive black character (an ex-partner of Nicolas Cage as: Nicolas Cage who glowers at things) and a more diverse makeup of the non-mobster villains, but Kick-Ass still bursts in on a cartoon monster of a black ex-boyfriend to deliver some hormone-addled hurt, now lead off with a taser gag prominently anticipated by The Hangover. Oh, and this time it’s Kick-Ass’ lady love’s black ex-boyfriend, and he’s still posing as (lol) gay to get close to her, except now after they start fucking there’s some rib-tickling humor about how he (lol) used to accompany her to (lol) girly things because that’s (rofl) gay!!

For every fanboy element that’s played down in-movie, another is senselessly added, from the lolicon augmentation of Hit Girl’s character to an extended homage to first-person shooters. And I mean senseless - for all the trouble I have with Millar’s scripts sometimes, in the end he’s only a less attentive Garth Ennis, swapping out, say, the careful (if caffeinated) interplay of race/class elements surrounding Punisher villain Barracuda with salvos of off-putting character traits reprized at the very end in gotcha! fashion. So both Kick-Ass’ dad and would-be girlfriend wind up in by-all-accounts perfectly happy relationships with black partners while Our Man jerks off alone, having seriously hurt feelings with his gay masquerade. That doesn’t make the character arc successful or interesting, but at least understandable, while the movie is content to turn into Pineapple Express for its closing half-hour. Some might call it more honest, but to my mind it just transforms half-cocked inquisition into plain vanilla pandering.

Black Dynamite
2009, not 1971
Matthew J. Brady

Spoilers, if it matters.

Sometimes, a movie comes along that manages to recapture a past style so perfectly that one can't help but think it's a lost classic, unearthed for the world to see and glory in. When it comes to 70s blaxploitation films, Black Dynamite is not that movie, but it does seem to come close at times. For a good portion of its running time, it hits all the right notes, coming off as a cross between Black Belt Jones and Dolemite, with just a little bit of self-awareness for those who are paying attention, like acting that's too purposely bad, little wink-nudge moments of goofiness like a bad guy shouting insults backward at a pursuer while driving instead of watching the road and subsequently driving off a cliff, soundtrack songs that comment a bit too specifically on the onscreen events, a character who always speaks in rhyme stopping mid-sentence because he can't figure out how to finish his couplet. It's funny stuff, with some pretty good kung fu too. And then somewhere around the two-thirds mark, characters start mugging to the camera and doing silly shit out of a Naked Gun movie, and the bad guys' plot turns out to involve malt liquor spiked with penis-shrinking drugs. Hoo boy. But just when the whole thing seems like a lost cause, the filmmakers decide to go over the top with their goofiness, leading to a massive kung fu battle and a climactic nunchuk fight against Richard Nixon in the Oval Office, including Lincoln's ghost as a deus ex machina. That's pretty hilarious, and while it's not the "lost" classic that it might seem to be trying to be at first glance, it's a pretty good time. Any movie that starts off with tri-colored nudity in the montage that introduces the main character can't be all bad, right?

Babe
Involves Animals, 1995
Tucker Stone

You ever see this? It's about a pig who is really good at herding sheep, because he's genuinely nice to the sheep and is pretty much able to get them to do magic tricks and backflips as favors. The pig is owned by James Cromwell, and his performance as "stoic farmer who rarely speaks" was good enough to get him an Oscar nomination. He lost out to Kevin Spacey, who played a cripple in some movie about boyfriends.

Babe isn't really the type of movie that you watch because you're desperate to find out how it ends--it's  obvious from the very beginning that the movie is going to be conclude with Babe winning a sheep-herding contest--it's the kind of movie you watch because there's kids who want to watch it, or because you're a manic depressive who hasn't been able to afford his medication for a couple of months and you keep thinking about hanging yourself whenever you look at the bathroom door. There's parts of the film that are interesting, but mostly because they seem out of place. (For example, after a sheep gets killed by some stray dogs, the action cuts from the dying sheep freaking out in a really high-pitched voice to a close-up shot of the sheep's dead face after James Cromwell throws the carcass on the back of a trailer. Why do that? The movie isn't realistic by any stretch of the imagination, it's not like it's necessary to get all Upton Sinclair on the viewer.) Most of the film's dialog is coming from the animals, all of whom speak through a mix of puppetry and effects, and while it's much less creepy than those baby commercials where the babies buy stock and make sex jokes, it's still unnerving when the conversations go on for a couple of minutes. For some reason, they all start to look like they're heads going to split in half, like the dog in The Thing.

At the end of the movie, James Cromwell says something nice to the pig, but it's really anti-climactic and strange--something like "good enough, pig. good enough", I can't remember the exact wording. Eventually the credits start rolling, and there's one of those horrible "contemporary" songs featuring the actors who voiced the animals, one of those crappy pop-rap-dance songs that sounds like the product of a focus group, something that was dated in 1995 and sounds even worse now. It's really loud too, and it ruins whatever charm the movie did have, all of which was based around the cuteness of some of the animals. If you're going to watch it, you should turn it off before that song happens.

You probably shouldn't watch it anyway.

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

Television of the Weak: Ain't Those Ladies Wear Baseball Caps In This House

This week, Zeb eats Lost, Matthew gargles Fringe, and Tucker pets 24.

Fringe: "Peter" and "Olivia. In the Lab. With the Revolver."
Matthew J. Brady

So, is this show even worth watching anymore? What was the damn point again? Of the two episodes that have aired since Fringe returned from its month-or-two hiatus, the first was the one that answered that questions positively, a near-perfect blend of the show's stupidity and kinda-coolness. The cliffhanger we were left with was: Dude, Peter is from a parallel universe! Sure, we knew that already, but finally the show got past obvious hinting and had Olivia discover the big secret. So now we get her confrontation with Walter, who proceeds to tell her the whole story, making for an episode-long flashback to his past, which allows the show to start with a clever 80s-style version of the opening credits and continue jokingly throughout by making the 3-D intertitles appear in a funky 80s computer font. Walter also gets to wear young-person makeup and get all emotional when his son (played by an actor who is pretty terrible, but does look uncannily like a younger version of Joshua Jackson) dies immediately after practicing that "flipping a coin across the knuckles" move that adult Peter does, giving Walter his lucky silver dollar, and making a tearful goodbye speech. Convenient!

So, young Peter was sick of an unspecified illness, but Walter was working on a "formula" that could cure him, presumably like a magic potion in a Final Fantasy game. Luckily, Walter had invented a window that could see into the parallel universe we've all heard so much about, where things are more scientifically advanced (they have modern, product-placed cell phones, back in the 80s!). It doesn't help though; Peter gives his tearful farewell and dies pathetically, but there's still hope for alternate-Peter. Unfortunately, Walter watches his double (which he nicknames "Walternate", ho ho ho) screw up the magical cure formula (you see, when he mixes chemicals wrong, it turns red, but when it's right it turns blue, since that's how science works on this show), dooming the other Peter to die stupidly too. So he's got no choice but to build a portal to the other universe and kidnap Peter, and while he does intends to return him, we all know how that went. This will make for an especially awkward inter-dimensional family reunion.

So, yes, ridiculous, implausible stuff, but enjoyable in its stupidity, the kind of thing this show does excellently when it hits that formula just right. Unfortunately, the next episode immediately jumps back to stupidity, without the enjoyability factor to leaven things out. It's an hour long angst-fest, as Olivia gets all guilty about knowing the truth about Peter but being sworn to secrecy by Walter, who fears the revelation will ruin everything, for plot purposes. Even amateur therapist Kevin Corrigan can't make this conundrum interesting. Sure, there's also a plot about some guy that Walter experimented on along with Olivia 20 years ago going around and infecting his fellow subjects with cancer, which makes for at least one nifty visual, but this mostly seems to just be the introduction of a plot generator for future episodes, as more of Olivia's childhood pals pop up and demonstrate strange powers. It's also a chance for Olivia to show what a crappy FBI agent she is, since she runs away from Cancer-Jerk like a slasher movie victim rather than just pulling her gun and shooting him. Given the trend in this show, I fear that this sort of thing is going to be the norm from now on, boring character "tension" and over-seriousness related to the stupidity of the "science". But that first episode gives me hope; the show needs more silliness along those lines, and if it's going to take itself too seriously, it could at least get all bombastic about its universe-hopping headless bad guys and psychic kid criminals instead of scene after scene of dumb shit like people wondering why so-and-so won't look them in the eye. Be dumb, Fringe, but do it smartly, dammit!

24 - "8:00AM - 9:00AM"
Tucker Stone

24's been on so long that the time frame conceit doesn't mean much anymore, and the show stopped coming up with scenarios that closely depended upon the split screen effect. So when something like this episode comes along, finding some juice in those techniques serves up such a fresh reminder of what made the show so compelling that it almost seems like new blood has been injected. It hasn't though, not really--it's just a return to old tricks, the only difference being that this is a style and delivery choice, not another repetition of plot. But when the trick hasn't been used in a while, and the trick hasn't been used this well in an even longer while, it's able to catch hold of the old excitement, and, just like that, 24 becomes entertaining again.

In this episode, we learn that Jack Bauer's previous promises to Renee that he would "help you get through this, whatever it takes" meant that he would take her somewhere quiet at 8:14 in the morning and have some sex with her, and while that was the obvious direction these two have been on since Renee first showed up and yanked Jack away from the Senate subcommittee he so deservedly was being condemned by, it's still a little jarring to see Kiefer Sutherland kissing a woman in an apartment without an ulterior motive involving some kind of bomb. (It's also pretty fucking gross, because a big chunk of the whole "this" that he's helping her "get through" involves the sex she didn't want to have with the blond Cylon from Galactica.) Either way, it's time for an old fashioned boot-knocking, and in the first surprising turn of the episode, the characters are actually given an extended period of time in which to get it on. (Except for one or two instances in previous seasons, people on 24 usually get undressed, have sex, and then get half-way dressed in 10-12 minutes of the show's accelerated run-time.) Not this time. Jack and Renee go at it for a good half-hour, and they seem to really enjoy themselves, which is markedly different from the four times (i can remember, maybe there's more) where characters on 24 were stuck fucking somebody they hated for the good of America.

Of course, the sex means the main action figures on the show are off the table for a long time, so the writers decide to breeze through as many of the standard devices as possible, like the final villain reveal (the Russians, of course), the fan-service Chloe-does-shit moment (where she replaces Bubba as the doomed leader of CTU) and the first of what will  be many return-of-an-old character, this time being weird-old ex-President Logan. Meanwhile, amidst all this nonsense, a brilliantly cast Joel Bissonnette (the food court guy from Fight Club), kills an old man, sets up his trusty rifle, and stares, irritated, at a naked Jack/Renee combo while awaiting the moment when he can pop his own shot off.

From that point, it's never in doubt what's going to happen--Renee will get hit, she'll die, Jack will go crazy/turn purple--and the show will spiral through all manner of bloody revenge. And then they whip out a curveball.

It happens in the seconds right after Renee gets shot--right in the gut, where Jack's wife was shot, back in season one, but at least there's no baby inside, nasty. All of a sudden, the editors and director have a reason to use the split-screen for something other than a doubled shot of what's on screen, for something other than a line-up of head shots. Sean Calley whips out his old copy of the Heat soundtrack, Jack picks up Renee's still breathing body, Bissonnette grabs his rifle, and the two men--separated by buildings, framed on either side of the screen--try to beat the other one downstairs. And while Jack has to carry a naked, dying woman barefoot, Bissonnette is on a much higher floor, and its in those next 120 seconds that the show captures the old magic--an even match, simple drama, no political idiocy, no speechifying, nothing but running, nothing but movement, pace, momentum.

After Jack makes it out, the show gets ridiculous again--some cabdriver from F-Zero wearing a 1920's era Irish cap flies through traffic like he's James Caan in Elf--and Renee, of course, doesn't survive. Kiefer Sutherland does that silent yelling thing that he believes resembles crying, Bissonnette disappears to hatch a new plan.

It's still another dead girlfriend. It's still a shitty season. But those two minutes?

Solid as rocks.

Lost - "Everybody Loves Hugo"
Zeb L. West

So I get this four a.m. phone call from The Factual Opinion’s Editor-in-Chief, Tucker Stone… and he’s all red-in-the-face, telling me I’ve GOT to return to the column because one of my adoring fans left a comment on last week’s Television of the Weak post gushing about how sad he was that I’d missed a week. I’ve always been powerless to the tears of women, children and internet trolls, so like any dutiful freelance “writer” would, I prematurely ended my sabbatical in the Congo, setting my perpetually half-written autobiography aside (composed entirely of 140-character tweets), and returned to the top secret Factual Opinion Headquarters in the basement of the Alamo, just in time to resume my methodical dismantling of the storytelling travesty which has replaced the show I use to like called LOST.

Needless to say I was as shocked as all Americans last week to discover that the parallel ‘flash sideways’ plot was actually…*gasp*…somehow related to the show’s main plot! As my army of faithful readers will no doubt remember, I’ve spent WEEKS bashing the flash sideways as irrelevant, tasteless and rude. But to those who held out hope that this seemingly self-sabotaging plot device might actually pan out, I hope you’re not disappointed if I don’t eat crow. While it’s satisfying to finally see a glimmer of connection between these two universes (the one we’ve spent five seasons building and the one that Captain Obvious slapped together one afternoon after a three-martini lunch) there’s still the small issue of how these two words actually intersect! (For ad nauseam explanation, see last five posts)

But please don’t mistake my disappointment for despair, faithful reader! As fiercely as any die-hard LOST fan, I too want this cock-tease of a show to deliver the powerhouse conclusion we were promised! And I hope (someday) you’ll realize that my merciless criticism of the show’s increasingly lazy writing, transparent plot conveniences, and increasing ratio of exposition to action comes not out of a desire to make my own candle glow brighter! But from an uncompromising desire to get you the ending you deserve! The best and only way I know how! By making snarky suggestions on the World-Wide-Web’s #1 culture, music and fashion-tips blog (I’m talking about TFO here (in case that wasn’t clear)) to the writers of LOST (who I’m positive are reading this) about plot-changes for episodes that were (unfortunately for my needs) filmed months ago!

Why did they blow up Ilana in this episode?

Why did they do that?

Why?

They had to spend some time at the beginning of this episode reminding us who the fuck Libby was, because for three seasons, nobody gave a fuck about that character. She was killed off not out of a desire to deepen Hurley’s character, but because she and the actress playing Ana Lucia were arrested for driving drunk in Hawaii, remember?

In the bonus material of the first season box set, there is a featurette where the writers talk about how they intended to set up Jack as the great white hero in the first episode, and then plan to mind-fuck the audience by killing him off right at the end of the pilot! Dave had a great comment after the 4/2 column, telling an anecdote about the writers shrugging their shoulders when asked by executives what happens when the man stops pushing the button. It’s these same shoulder-shruggers who are responsible for ending this epic story. And I just hate to see such audience loyalty rewarded with such weak sauce.

PS – To my adoring heckler, if you’re the same guy who responded to my first post of this season, I still think you’re ahead in the standings for the best prediction of the season. Plus, I’m pretty sure I found those LOST valentines from the 3/21 post by checking out your Tumblr blog. So in other words, thanks for your participation dipshit! ;D

-Matthew J. Brady, Zeb L. West, Martin Brown, Nina & Tucker Stone, 2010

Romancing the Stone: I'm Gonna Snitch On The Littlest B****

If you missed it, Nina Stone participated in the April round-up of guest reviews over at the pugnacious and insightful Trouble With Comics blog. If you need some bait, she just so happened to get her mitts on the long out-of-print Troubled Souls, a Garth Ennis/John McCrea team-up from 1989 that may (or may not) be the writer's first published comics effort. (She liked it.) Make sure you carve out some time to keep up with Trouble--they've got quite a line-up of guests right now, and their regular crew of comics coverage-types is one you'll most certainly recognize. Thank you again to Trouble With Comics, especially Christopher Allen, for the opportunity.

And now back to your regular program.

This bring me so much joy - my two worlds colliding into one delightful item.

By day, I teach, sing and dance with the littlest of children and (sometimes) their parents and/or caregivers. In my evenings, I either write about comics (well, once a week), or hear a whole lot about them from my husband. So just like the old Reese's commercial “Hey - you got my chocolate in your peanut butter.” “No, your peanut butter got in my chocolate.” “Two great tastes that taste great together.....” "It tastes like ashes in my mouth." 

Off topic. See where i'm going though? Somebody got a children's book in their comic, and I found it!

The Littlest Bitch: A Not-For-Children Children's Book
Story by David Quinn & Michael Davis
Illustrated by Devon Devereaux
Published by Sellers

I loved reading this.

At the very least, this is a clever and entertaining book that poignantly combines the precocious know-it-all and boss-of-it-all -isms of your typical four year old with that of a ruthless, corporate something-kinda-adult, focusing on a little girl who quickly pushes all the way to the top, burning bridges everywhere she goes. It's a perfect mix and it got me wondering why I hadn’t seen the obvious similarities before.

If one wants to take a closer look, I think even more can be taken from it. The George Bernard Shaw quote “We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing” comes to mind. In this case, though, our little friend, Isabel, doesn’t grow old. As a matter of fact - she doesn’t "grow" at all. And at some point, her lack of emotional maturity messes up her guts, and she starts physically shrinking.

Poor Isabel? Sure, at first. Her initial bossiness is hilarious, it doesn't matter that it's mean. But just like in real life, it begins to get old, even though she never does. She just gets smaller and smaller and everyone outgrows her. Eventually, she is so small that her worst nightmare comes true. She gets (literally) “eaten for breakfast.”

The structure isn’t quite that of your typical children’s book - which would have a relatively simple conflict that children can identify with -- but that doesn’t really matter because it’s not a children’s book, hence the subtitle. As a matter of fact, any of the criticism that I would have for it from the point-of-view of a children’s book enthusiast is moot. This isn't a children’s book, so it doesn't have to play by their rules. Initially I was disappointed that it was in black and white. But because it is, you can be sure that few children are going to choose to read it over Llama Llama Red Pajama.

The format is really interesting. It’s narrated by Isabel’s “Mummy.” Every time you turn a page, her narration is on the left and the comics are on the right. So, there you have your comic!! (The comics have bubbles, so there's plenty to read!) I'm sure that it could have been done completely in comic book form. But I don't think it would have been as clever that way.

Isabel is drawn with a perfectly set bob with a thick set of bangs accenting her cat-like yet dead eyes. She’s got a big head. I’m sure the pun is intended. No other face, when we see a face, is drawn like hers. Her siblings both have circular eyes, brown hair and are long and lanky juxtaposing Isabel’s blonde angles. In most frames, she’s this tiny, angular intense thing in opposition to everything around her whether it be her huge desk chair or father. As she gets smaller and smaller, the pearls that used to hug her neck get longer and longer. It’s truly delightful to see her eventually become half the size of a strip of bacon on her mother’s breakfast plate. And I don’t think it’s any coincidence that on page six while referring Beth from Little Women as “a wimp”, Isabel also says, “In the Real World she’d be eaten for breakfast.” Food for thought? (Ba-dump-bum. I’m here all week. Please tip your servers!)

It’s just funny to mediate on the similarities between four-year-olds and cutthroat big wigs. When I worked as a temp in private equity I certainly witnessed my fair share of the adult version of temper tantrums. Possibly just as many as I see in preschool? At least they don't curse so much in preschool.

Speaking of preschool, at a seminar earlier this year, we (the staff where I teach) were at a workshop where the speaker was discussing the difference in learning styles between males and females. And in discussing learning styles and behavior, the discussion about how mean and cut-throat girls become at an early age came up. Teachers were reporting conversations from their classrooms that were about girls attempting to wield power over the other girls by the old, “Lisa, you can come to my birthday party. But Sara, you can’t.” And how at those early ages they even start the whole, “okay, Jenny’s not our friend today” and then proceed to give a little girl, was just their best friend the day before, the silent treatment all day until she cries.

It’s a shame, but we girls learn this catty, manipulative, passive-aggressive behavior at an early age. It looks like Isabel was the best in her class.

-Nina Stone, 2010

Too Many Movies: Let's Dispense With The Dates For Now

This week, Matthew Brady took himself a gulp of the Antichrist while Joe McCulloch dallied in the fields of Electra Glide In Blue all so that Tucker could sit and spit with Werner Herzog down in sunny Port of Call - New Orleans.

Antichrist
Lars Von Trier is a weirdo, 2009
Matthew J. Brady

SPOILERS!

Lars Von Trier hates women, or so goes the popular refrain. That's debatable, but he certainly has a knack for putting them through some awful shit in his movies, whether they do it to themselves or have it inflicted on them. So what to make of this bizarre film, an apparent attempt at pre-made controversy full of over-mysterious, pseudo-mystical, semi-psychological smoke-up-the-ass blowing, graphic sex, bodily mutilation, and actually pretty incredible imagery? The more one ponders it, the more it seems that he's just stringing together some shocking scenes with a bare-bones plot that leaves enough unexplained to seem deep, but there's really no there there. Still: there's some amazing visuals, starting from an opening scene shot entirely in super-slow motion of Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg fucking while their toddler gets out of bed, wanders to an open window, and falls to his death. It's enrapturing and horrifyingly beautiful, enough to make the viewer sit through the rest of the nonsense. Unfortunately, there's nowhere to go but down from there, as Dafoe, a psychologist, starts treating his wife's depression, determining that she's afraid of something and eventually embarking on a therapeutic retreat to a remote wilderness cabin where he puts her through meditation exercises and she initiates lots and lots of frantic sex. It's all pretty explicit, with penetration shots and everything, but it's not sexy in the slightest, mostly because Gainsbourg's bony ass makes it seem like Dafoe is fucking a refugee from Auschwitz. And then there's the reveal that she's batshit nuts, penning some sort of thesis/manifesto that determines that various crimes against women throughout history were all merited and was torturing their son and let him die on purpose. So when her husband finds out, she does the natural thing and knocks him out during sex, masturbates him until he ejaculates blood, drills a hole through his leg, weights him down with a grindstone, and cuts off her clitoris with a pair of rust scissors. What? Yes. That all actually happens, and it's not like it's possible to blink and miss it. So, yeah, Dafoe kills her, and the movie ends. Von Trier!

This is all pretty much bullshit, maybe Von Trier's way of saying, "You think I hate women? Well check this shit out, fuckers!" There's some unexplained mystical nonsense involving constellations, magical animals, ghosts, and who knows what else, but it's all a bunch of feces-flavored fluff piled on top of that clitoris scene, which was certainly the whole point of the movie. Still, there's some gorgeous cinematography here, the forest full of lush greens, shots of twisted branches that look like they could be scrawled slashes of ink on paper, acorns that resemble blue marbles for some reason raining down from the roof of the cabin, and a bit involving a deer with a miscarried fawn dangling from its hindquarters. Is it worth sitting through Von Trier vomiting up weird, stupid shit in order to piss people off? In a word? No. But I say watch it anyway, so you can brag at parties and be shunned by polite society. Victory all around!

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
His Soul's Still Dancing, 2009
Tucker Stone

Originally appearing in what had to be the greatest film trailer of all time, whose arrival had been prepared by the greatest remark about one's predecessor of all time (that being when Herzog admitted he had no idea who Abel Ferrera was, nor seen any of the man's films), The Bad Lieutenant--don't forget about that all-important "The" in its title--is neither sequel nor remake, although one won't miss the multiple points where this film bumps into the Harvey Keitel original. In place of religion, we have humor and lizards, and in place of Keitel's hideous, bodily fluid covered performance, we have Cage, and you can be forgiven for the hot flashes of memory that course through the veins throughout. This is the Cage of old--think Raising Arizona in energy--combined with the Cage of Face/Off, which remains the high water mark in terms of sheer bizarro Cage-ian weirdness, the indisputable rejoinder to that hammy shit he does in Leaving Las Vegas. Whatever it is that convinced the man to ignore any attempt towards subtlety, bottle it and sell it, because this is the sort of onscreen performing that everybody should be doing.

On the page, The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans (try to figure out the pauses) is a boring bad cop film interspersed with some out-and-out brilliant moments of weird dialog and black humor. In the hands of Herzog, who uses a Tarantino/PTA style follow shot for no good reason beyond obsessing over a few pictures in a busted up tenement house, jiggling the camera as if a plane is landing in the living room, the film is undoubtedly stranger and more compelling, sure. But it's Cage and the Herzog regulars (Brad Dourif & Michael Shannon) who make the film work, all of them performing as if they've crossed-over from another universe, one where human beings use talking only after wild-eyed staring and physical gestures have failed them. Fairuza Balk seems to get the picture that escapes Xzibit and Val Kilmer--this isn't about real people, it's about guts and alien emotion, and no amount of flirtatious dialog will get her point across as well as throwing her foot up on the bumper of Cage's car, pumping her crotch at him, mistaking his hunger for crack as lust, all while a live alligator stares at the body of (we assume) his dead mate's leg, flapping in the wind. One romance ended, another begins, even though Cage never gets it up when the time comes. Imaginary iguanas, lucky crack pipes, breakdancing ghosts, and filthy, filthy sex: pistol grip pumped, on my lap at all times.

Electra Glide in Blue
Directed by your eldest uncle, 1972
Joe McCulloch

This one gets better on multiple viewings, until all it takes is those opening images of leather & steel fading into dead sepia and American myth to bring right snap to mind your favorite cane-waving coal belt purple Democrat, nursing a blunt and reminiscing about cops pulling you over just to point out a dead headlight or dumping a drunken kid off at the front door ‘cause they don’t want to deal with him. “They still do that sometimes,” it’s said, eyes directed toward Robert Blake as the summary of believing in wise police authority, of knowing there’s hard, solid rules, good & bad, rightful distinctions on wheels with virile guns, yet somehow... Cowboy Individual, because, paradoxically, they believe in true legislated order. Most of the cops in this movie are full of shit, which is appropriate; the heaviest law and order types in my life have always been the first to caution me that there’s some real fucking thugs out there with badges. That, friends, is the picture here, the shits in power prompting the opposition to seal their break forever, and oh woe, oh yes, we’re born to kill now. That’s where the America sung about over the closing credits was cut down the middle, goes this parable, and there goes the righteous sitting in the road, receding into idealization. Some people call this a counterculture movie. Fuck that - it’s the final episode of Dragnet. Just keep that in mind and you’ve got all you need, right up though That Ending, which can easily seem awesome or ridiculous on literally any given viewing, though we all know it’s both.

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

Television of the Weak: "Hauntingly Effective Storytelling"

This week, Martin watched Survivor and Celebrity Apprentice, Tucker sat through 24 and hopes he spoils it for you, and Tim O'Neil showed up to explain why you should be paying attention to Grey's Anatomy. Yes.

Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains - "I'm Not a Good Villain" 
Martin Brown

Fundamental difference between reality TV and scripted TV: reality TV, by its very nature, allows for the muddiness of human intention. Scripted TV, as a habit, does not.

Take this storyline on Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains. Colby Donaldson was the golden boy of the second season of Survivor. When he came back to play in Survivor:All Stars two years later, he seemed tired and got voted out early. In preparation for Survivor:Heroes vs. Villains, Colby recognized that he hadn't brought his A-game to All Stars, and promised to come with the thunder for the new season. Straight out of the gate, though, he got literally dragged across the field by a dude on the other team that everybody thought was a joke. Then, he ended up in an alliance that found itself being systematically voted out, as his tribe lost challenge after challenge. Soon, it seemed like all he was doing around camp was laying face-first in the ocean, staring into the water. A glimmer of hope showed in his game when one of his tribemates mangled his knee, and they voted him out in order to try to keep the tribe strong. As of the end of the last episode, Colby was in a position where he had to show and prove, or go home.

On a scripted program, Colby leading the Heroes tribe to subsequent victory would have looked similar to last week's episode. He would have recognized his situation, realized it was do-or-die, and then triumphantly led his team to victory, redeeming himself and his team. But on Survivor, you get the added benefit of Colby literally picking up a woman and literally throwing her out of his way on his way to victory. There's still the whole comeback-kid story arc, but you also can't ignore the fact that the dude is totally overcompensating, not to mention a little pathetic. So do you root for him, or not? Are you supposed to, or not?

Clearly, Survivor has labeled each of the castaways on Heroes vs. Villains as a good guy or a bad guy. But, over the course of this season, they've never been beholden to those definitions. The effect, for me, has been that I've found myself rooting for people I hated in the past; I've found myself rooting against people I thought I liked; and I've found myself more emotionally engaged than I've ever been in a TV show. Yeah, it's weird to talk about being "emotionally engaged" with a TV show that's so fundamentally goofy--what with the alliances and tribal councils and slip-n-slide challenges and all--but I think that's a bi-product of watching multi-dimensional personalities cope with extreme circumstances.

The problem now is that the most dynamic personalities are the one who are being voted out. The show is beginning to be dominated by fewer and fewer people. There's no one left to really root for on the Heroes' side, and the Villains look to follow suit. The season has been virtually flawless so far, with each episode topping the one before it in surprising ways. But, as of this last episode, the two major storylines--the Heroes' implosion, and the rivalry between Rob and Russell--have each reached a kind of conclusion. Either the show's going to have to make a sharp left turn, or some personalities are going to have to show up soon, if Heroes vs. Villains wants to sustain its momentum.

The Celebrity Apprentice - "Muggles and Wizards" 
Martin Brown

Two hour episodes have always been too long for The Celebrity Apprentice, but this week's episode was stretched exceedingly thin. It spent about 30 minutes establishing Rod Blagojevich's technology deficiencies, to the point where they spent so much time making him look inept that it was suspicious. All of the evidence of Blagojevich's ineptitude--him lifting up a computer to see if there was anything underneath, mispronouncing the names of Harry Potter houses, or falling asleep on plane, say--could be recontextualized to show something completely different. And I know things have gotten tiresome when I find myself thinking about ways that Rod Blagojevich may have gotten screwed by the editors. Though, come to think of it, so far that's his whole criminal defense, too--that he comes off a lot different when you get to hear the whole tape. So maybe, in some small way, Blagojevich is getting exactly what he wanted when he signed on for The Apprentice in the first place: reasonable doubt. That's what you'd call justice.

Grey's Anatomy - "Sympathy for the Parents" 
Tim O'Neil

If you've never had the pleasure of watching Grey's Anatomy, I can explain the show's premise very simply: imagine a hospital that isn't a hospital. Imagine this hospital / not-hospital, staffed by doctors / not-doctors, knowledgeable in medicine / not-medicine, but far less interested in curing their Patients of the Week than in fucking each other, or sometimes even hitting each other. Sometimes even fucking and hitting each other at the same time (don't worry, that's actually happened). This is, in other words, the worst medical drama of all time, the kind of show that exists to make House look like a procedural documentary on Discovery Health. And yet, for all it's absolute and unequivocal incompetence, it somehow manages to remain interesting and even occasionally riveting week-in and week-out. It's not something I'm proud to admit, but admitting that you are helpless in the hands of a higher power is the first step in any twelve step recovery program. So, here I am: 

My name is Tim, and I'm addicted to Grey's Anatomy.  

(See what I mean about the hitting?)

The way Grey's works is actually pretty simple. Essentially, every character is unlikeable to a greater or lesser degree. Oh, sure, there are some characters who may be temporarily more popular or more appealing than others - but even the best of them, with almost no exceptions, are all pretty much intolerable. In a cast of about ten regular characters and half-a-dozen more peripheral presences, each one takes their turn being an asshole - or doing something otherwise despicable - at regular intervals. Don't get too attached to anyone! Characters on this show have a nasty habit of being written off between episodes and never being mentioned by anyone again, ever. The best an actor can hope for is that after they've been unceremoniously fired by the producers their character might get a few rueful references in future episodes. If you're a charter cast member, your absence might be noticed with more frequency. (And if you're Katherine Heigl, your absence will be noticed every episode as the show tries unsuccessfully to recover its equilibrium after losing its only actor with so much as a modicum of talent and charisma.) But make no mistake: if modern Grey's has any defining characteristic, it's sheer chaotic churn. If you're a young actor hired to fill a new roll on the show, you probably have a better chance of surviving on the Battle Royale island than lasting six whole episodes.  

(Paging Dr. Stevens - the show is even suckier without you!) 

Anyway, now that I've laid some groundwork for this, the Inaugural Installment of Grey's Anatomy at TFO, we shall begin. 

First, this wasn't that bad an episode, as these things go. It was a Karev-heavy episode, which is hardly a bad thing - in the post-Heigl talent vaccum, he is perhaps the show's best performer, or rather, "least worst." The problem is that since Izzie left, his plots have been pretty one-note - he's currently a long-suffering martyr, the former bad boy who was reformed by the love of the good Doctor Stevens. They hooked up for the (seemingly!) final time as she was dying of stage IV metastatic melanoma, they got married but - surprise! - she lived due to an incredibly miraculous cancer treatment. Of course, their marriage was built on death adrenaline and, honestly, they're both selfish assholes, so its no surprise the relationship fell apart as soon as he realized he was stuck with her for longer than a week and would probably never get to score any of that sweet widower pity sex. Then he started flirting with Dr. Reed Adamson and it looked like maybe they were going to hook up and she was going to be his post-Izzie fling, but - surprise! - Dr. Adamson hasn't been seen in a few episodes despite the fact that she is one of a handful of new cast members who made a big splash at the beginning of the season (because, you know, they fire so many they have to constantly replace them). Chances are we'll never see her again. (This is a recurring theme, I may have mentioned.) But now he's again a lone wolf who sort of slept with Lexie "Little" Grey earlier in this season, which was one of the factors that contributed to Lexie and Sloan breaking up. (Sloan, AKA Eric Dane, had a sex tape you may have seen.) And then his brother shows up on his doorstep, asking for a free hernia operation, and things go wild because Karev never even bothered to tell his crazy white trash family that he had even been married.

And if you're wondering why I used the pejorative phrase "white trash," it's because the producers and writers at Grey's have taken very careful steps to ensure that we do not for a second forget that Karev's family is from a lower rung on the socio-economic status, and that his having been able to lift himself out of poverty in order to become a surgeon is no less than a Herculean feat of the Will-to-Power made flesh in the Overman. Because, gosh, Karev's mother takes anti-depressants and his siblings were in and out of foster care. Isn't it great that he hasn't succumbed to the inevitable entropy of America's permanent economic underclass? Yay illusory upward mobility!  

Dear Dr. Karev: You're sassy! Never change! 

So anyway, Brother Karev gets his operation, causes havoc and splits, never to be seen again. That's your token stab at social relevance because poor people don't have insurance. 

Meanwhile, please allow me introduce you to the three worst actors in the world:  

From left to right, that's Kim Raver as Teddy Altman, Sandra Oh as Cristina Yang, and Kevin McKidd as Owen Hunt. They form the show's current "hot triangle," a shape slightly complicated by Teddy's current sexual relationship with a newly domesticated Sloan (Sloan asked Teddy out soon after Lexi left him because his heretofore-unknown teenage daughter turned up pregnant in order to leech money off her plastic surgeon deadbeat dad.) Basically, all three of these people are awful. Awful, awful, awful. I can honestly say that when Hunt and Yang are on screen with each other they make me want to reconsider ever having sex again. When they are actually stimulating sex (which is OFTEN, they take their clothes off on Grey's even more often than they hit each other), the only plausible solution to the unmitigated horror on display is simply to go full-on Oedipus - there are some things which, when seen, cannot be unseen. I don't know what it is, exactly, but these two actors have the worst chemistry of any romantic couple I've ever seen on film. On their own, the characters aren't necessarily bad, but together they are just repulsive. I don't know how to explain it, even though myself and Violet have spent a great deal of time trying to piece together exactly why this is. It's like - you know how some actors have chemistry? Like, say, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Breathless - two actors who you can instantaneously see belong together, who share a palpable and tangible sexual reciprocity, whose depth of passion is deep enough to communicate entire movies worth of subtext with as little as an arched eyebrow. Hunt and Yang are like that, only completely reversed: when they stand together, it's as if some kind of door has been opened into another realm of pain and terror, and things have stepped out of this door which should not exist in our universe of three-dimensional Euclidean geometry.

So, the fact that Hunt and Yang (or, if you want to be cute, "Yunt") are being delivered to the viewer as some kind of Eternal Romance for the Ages is simply, well, it makes me want to die each and every time I think about it. This is especially funny if you recall that Yang's previous Eternal Romance for the Ages was with another charter cast member who got fired because he said some stupid homophobic shit in public, and was therefore erased from memory. All you really need to know about Hunt is that the actor who plays him, Kevin McKidd, was previously featured in this. He's a Iraq War vet who suffers from PTSD of the kind that is often triggered by kissing or sharing a bed with Cristina Yang. I'm not joking! He tried to strangle her in bed once, and it was AWESOME because for a moment there I really though they'd pull the trigger on some kind of murder-suicide shit, but of course they didn't. And now even though they're still together the current storyline is all about how she is afraid of him because, like, he's going to have some sort of triggering event that drops him back into The Shit and he'll go nuts and kill everyone. Hell, you should be afraid, Cristina Yang. You should live your life in a state of profound and unreasoning terror at having to share a bed with this:  

Oh, wait! Sorry, wrong image: 

 

(Can you believe this guy was in Trainspotting? I can't!) 

Even though Hunt the addled Ginger war vet isn't what you might call "a catch," he's got two women fighting over the chance to pluck his wiry red thatch from between their teeth. The other is recent cast addition, Dr. Altman, a fellow Iraq vet pulled in to Seattle by Hunt "supposedly" so she could teach Yang all about being a cardiac surgeon (which is kind of not how I imagine hospital HR searches are conducted in the real world), but really because they share a Sacred Bond, having been part of the Band of Brothers who Fought the Good Fight and got blown up by IEDs and all that stuff. Which is well and good, I'm sure, but c'mon. Who the hell wants to wake up next to Darth Ginger? Who the hell would fight for the privilege? Crazy motherfuckers, that's who. So I say, go on, Dr. Altman. Schtupp Sloan to your heart's content. They call him McSteamy for a reason, after all. He's hot, you should totally hit that. He's got his own sex tape. Hunt? Not so much. I'd really rather he never had a sex tape. Leave him and Yang to their own precious brand of hell, eternally making love with all the eroticism of a fat man slapping together two ziplock bags of rotting meat in the Stop & Shop parking lot on a hot summers day.

24 - "6:00AM - 8:00AM"
Tucker Stone

That doesn't even kind of look real.

1) Here's a back-and-forth sequence:

Jack: There's a mole in CTU.

Renee: How is that possible?

Well, shit, how is that possible? There's been a mole every single season, and in a couple of seasons, there was more than one mole. Considering one of the seasons only had a functioning CTU division for a couple of Janeane Garofuuuuking hours, the concept that anybody--even a semi-functioning human being conjured from liposuction waste--could express surprise at the idea of a mole in the sieve of capability that is 24's Counter Terrorism Unit can only have been included as a big help help we're so fucking tired of working on this show moment from the writers. When the show finally gets around to tearing down the sets and unlocks the writer's cave, you're probably going to discover a bunch of emaciated crazies hovering over the half-eaten body of the one Nader supporter the show had. (Don't cry any tears for that softie, because he was surely responsible for that clown-y human rights lawyer from season four.)

2) If you're in any extended length acting program that isn't designed solely to play Glenda to the fantasies of the shallow, emotionally damaged shitbags that make up the majority of the attendees, there's a point where the teachers--the female teachers who have actual screen credit to point at--will take the female students aside and explain to them that they have to learn how to master two specific scenes if they harbor any hope of ever paying the rent with television or film parts.

• Explosive crying, with actual tears, leading to the admission that you've been raped.
• Explosive crying, with actual tears, after another actor tells you that a family member (usually a child) has died in some manner of horrible fashion.

Because it's acting school, there will be extensive, lengthy discussions regarding the hideous sexism inherent in the popularity of these two scenes, and because it's acting school, these discussions will always include multiple instances where various members of the class will point out that "we could just do theater", to which everyone will nod while murmuring, before going back to silently obsessing about how to get the work they want to get, which is the work that they think will pay them lots and lots of money despite the fact that they aren't actually attractive enough to find success as a character actor on the PAX network.

It's a shitty system, there's never a point where anybody disagrees with that. But it's the system, and nobody in acting school has any interest in changing it. They paid the tuition because they want to get a seat.

The women who play the wife and daughter of the Elvis Costello looking-dude who plays the President of the IRK, which is a made-up Middle Eastern country of (one is led to assume) Muslim lunatics that Elvis has a tenuous control over, have spent every hour up until this one being, at best, completely intolerable. That's not their fault! Nobody on 24 ever wins any prizes for their performance, because 24 has terrible writing and depends on the constancy of the accelerating format to create tension, which hopefully give birth to drama. And yet, because they paid attention in drama school, or because they understand and accept the way this kind of television show is supposed to function, they played the scene where they found out that Mr. President had been captured extremely well, and that was just a prelude to the really amazing job of crying and clothes rending that they delivered when they found out that he had his throat slashed wide open on "the internet" for the world to see. The lines themselves weren't much--a lot of "no, no, NO NO NO" and "NO NO NO" and "NO NO WHERE IS JON BEEF NO HE IS DEAD"--but when coupled with some hitching sobs and and guttural rage bombs, they took it to the next level. (The next level after "completely intolerable" is "tolerable".)

3) And yes, they did kill the guy, and he got a silent count, just like the fat guy from Suicide Kings, who didn't deserve one either. Actually, nobody deserves a silent count anymore, because that was a relic from when there were characters on the show besides Jack & Chloe that the audience had a real connection with. As of this stage of 24, you could sneak onto the set and light Cherry Jones on fire and still have a hard time convincing yourself that this would change the plot in any noticeable fashion. None of these people matter anymore, they're just wet cogs getting moved around an Ikea warehouse with bad lighting. Kill them or don't, but quit throwing out three fingers and screaming West Side everytime you do something that roughly approximates something you did before.

That leads us to 4)

Which is the Starbuck versus Freddie Prinze, Jr. remix homage of a key scene from the first season's conclusion, when Jack Bauer pulled Nina Myers out of her car mid-escape, pressed a gun against her head, and threatened to kill her before being talked down by George Mason. That scene was a rare moment for 24, a decent contradiction to the rule mentioned above. See, here's the other thing about the acting on 24: Kiefer isn't really very good. He wasn't very good when he found out his wife died (within hours of finding out she was pregnant with his second child), and he isn't any better the rest of the time. He's serviceable, he always has been. In that scene, he was just doing the umpteenth variation on a tight-jawed anger mumble, which is that thing he does where he holds his breath (you can hear him choke it out at the end of a line) and head shake where he seems to be knocking his eyes back into functionality, which he invariably follows by blinking and looking quickly to the left and right. It's a dumb trick, a habit, but it's part of the whole creation that is his Jack performance, a way of saying "see, the Jack who kills and the Jack who doesn't are like two different programs that can't run on the mainframe at the same time". (I guess that would make them operating systems?)

Xander Berkeley--who was probably the best actor the show ever had, if you're ignoring that professional race car driver and a cameo by former Presidential candidate John McCain--played George Mason back then, and he was, no doubt about it, incredible. (Xander's done about a million things, and besides being the original Waingro, he showed up in Heat as the guy who fucked Al Pacino's wife. "But you cannot, watch, my motherfuckingtv", said Al Pacino.) In that first season scene, Kiefer is choking out Nina, he's clearly going to shot her, there's no question, he's gonna shot the shit out of her and dig the bullets out with a spoon and refashion new bullets out of the shells and his anger so that he can shoot her again, and how does Xander play it?

He just smirks, and he sighs, and he says "aw, c'mon Jack. This is no good." And then he says "hey, let's go inside. Hey Jack! let's go inside!" He shrugs his shoulders, he underplays, he fucking sidles over like he's picking up a girl too young for him at a bar he's too overdressed to be at, and he talks like he's asking for extra napkins. It's even more genius than this moment, and this was probably one of the best moments the show had that didn't involve violence:

Back in the beginning, the show knew to have somebody like Xander Berkeley on their payroll, because the only way to fully get into Jack's ridiculousness was to have somebody in the room who knew that Jack was fucking ridiculous. He was an incredibly useful tool, a tool that was coin-operated as long as you could get the President on the phone to tell him in which direction he should aim his weapons-of-mass-destruction body, but that didn't mean you took him seriously, because...well, look at the guy. 

He's a fucking moron.

-Martin Brown, Tim O'Neil, Tucker Stone, 2010