You can read an interview I did with Larry Gonick, author of (among many other books) The Cartoon History of the Universe, over at the Talk Media Blog.
16
Oct
You can read an interview I did with Larry Gonick, author of (among many other books) The Cartoon History of the Universe, over at the Talk Media Blog.
15
Oct
I always felt Warp got a bit of a raw deal getting killed off in Salvation Run (which has numerous flaws as a story, not least the idea that half of the supervillains would willingly say “sure thing, Joker can be the leader!”). I mean, yeah, he’s a teleporter and all so he can come back easy enough, but even so – Warp is a cool character, and cool characters shouldn’t get sacrificed for a lousy climax to a miniseries most people didn’t even read. Warp’s ow-tray-zhuss French accent should be fiat armor enough to protect him in any crossover. That’s my belief and I’m sticking to it.
And really, that goes for most of the New Brotherhood of Evil – including Monsieur Mallah and the Brain, also both victims of Salvation Run and writers who don’t know awesome villains when they see them. But also Plasmus (a Nazi made entirely of acid goop, which is almost as good as Swarm, the Marvel Universe’s Nazi made out of bees) and Phobia (a fear inducing villainess with awesome costume). Those are awesome characters.
And then there is Houngan, a character who is really kind of dumb, and who escapes criticism mostly because the vast majority of his appearances have been drawn by George Perez. If ninety percent of Carcharo’s appearances were drawn by George Perez, he would be a totally awesome villain, rather than the worst of all the DC shark-themed villains. But Perez aside, sometimes you just have to recognize when a shitty character is shitty, even if they have a pretty nifty costume. (And Houngan’s, while a bit dated at this point and in need of a small bit of revamping, is pretty nifty.)
And Houngan is shitty, because his origin doesn’t exactly work. He’s a computer scientist, right? And he goes back to Haiti and he learns voodoo. Fine and good. Computers and voodoo, mix of science and magic – this could be a pretty good villain concept! And then what does he do?
He makes a voodoo doll, but it’s a computer voodoo doll. That’s it. That is Houngan’s entire fucking shtick.
Voodoo is this massive goddamn religion, right? With tons of nifty occult trappings: slave-zombies, evil spirits, secret societies, ancestral protection… hell, voodoo’s entire thing is that it is the religion that takes whatever it likes from every other religion. It is like open-source religion (which, and I know Houngan was created in the early 80s before open-source was really a thing, but whatever – the next time someone uses Houngan, they should understand how a computer scientist would think about open-source as applied to religion). All of this could be combined to make a pretty damn awesome character. (In fact, it did. And then they decided for some stupid reason he should be Sorcerer Supreme. Sorry, “Houngan Supreme.” Yeah, still bitter about that.)
But all Houngan does is one thing. He does a voodoo doll. Which he says is better because it’s done with computers, but whatever – it works the same as a regular old voodoo doll. All Houngan’s voodoo doll does that other voodoo dolls don’t is spark electricity every so often. Plus, given that Houngan needs a sample of skin or hair or whatever for his supposedly superior voodoo doll, every time he actually wants to use his voodoo doll, it’s the same scenario: the hero is unconscious or tied up or whatever, so he has time to stroll over and get a skin sample and put it in his voodoo doll, and then he uses the voodoo doll to hurt the hero.
So basically Houngan is the supervillain who’s really only threatening once you’ve already lost.
14
Oct
This is probably the sharpest bit of poetic satire I’ve seen in a very long time.
14
Oct
When I was ten, McDonald’s Monopoly came to Canada for the first time.
First off, when you’re ten, McDonald’s has a major impact on your entire life. Our local McDonald’s – the one just down the street from my school, St. Clement’s – got a drive-thru when I was eight, and for all of us this was an amazing thing. (My mother complained about it for months. She suspected it would cause traffic accidents. She was not correct.) When I was nine, they built a Playland in the basement of the McDonald’s, and by god you better believe that, regardless of the fact that at nine we were definitely stretching the possibilities of what Playland could offer, we played in that goddamn Playland like there was no tomorrow.
It wasn’t that we didn’t understand that McDonald’s did contests. But prior to McDonald’s Monopoly, we had never really known a contest that was really understandable on a kid level. It was always your basic sweepstakes for a plane trip or something, and you had to fill out a card. You know. Adult stuff. (Kids never want to fill out cards. You give a kid an entry requirement of ten jumping jacks, that’ll work. But a card? No.)
McDonald’s Monopoly was different. You collected pieces to win prizes, and they were Monopoly pieces! We all knew Monopoly. Most of us hadn’t yet realized that Monopoly is a terrible game, so additionally we all liked Monopoly. And the prize was a million dollars. When you’re a kid, you understand a million dollars: it is money forever. This was relatable. So we all started collecting pieces.
Now, as adults, we know that McDonald’s Monopoly is just your basic lottery draw. One of the properties in any given set is rare: Atlantic Avenue and Marvin Gardens are a dime a dozen, but Ventnor is as rare as a high-value scratch-and-win ticket. That’s how the prize system works. But the thing about being nine is that you don’t understand that, not at first anyway. You think all you have to do is get Ventnor Avenue and you win the trip to Disney World, and clearly someone must have it, because you have the other two.
An schoolyard black market in McDonald’s Monopoly pieces arose almost immediately. Trading was fast and furious: everybody had two or three pieces, and some people had as many as six or seven. The smarter kids soon realized that piece-for-piece deals were mediocre compared to “a piece and something else for a piece and something else.” My best trade, in retrospect, was Illinois Avenue, Tennesee Avenue and Park Place for St. Charles Place and a COBRA trooper. (My reasoning was that COBRA had lots of troopers, so when I played with GI Joes I clearly needed more COBRAs. The trade brought me my second – who never actually had his own gun, so he had to borrow the other trooper’s pistol. I never actually got another basic COBRA trooper. Cobra Commander thus had two flunkies, which later in life would make The Venture Brothers‘ 21 and 24 resonate for me.)
However, I was not the best trader in the schoolyard. That honour went to Sammy. Sammy wasn’t especially brilliant at haggling or quicker on the draw than average, but he had one advantage the rest of us did not: both of his parents worked, so they brought home McDonald’s for dinner a lot. This meant that Sammy ate a lot more McDonald’s than the rest of us. We were relying on the one family trip per week or every other week to Mickey D’s, plus begging for game pieces when we went there after school.
Sammy, on the other hand, got the equivalent number of game pieces that the rest of us might get in a month in the first week of play. This meant two things: firstly, he had a lot more pieces to bargain with. And secondly, he figured out much sooner than the rest of us that the game was not a simple “collect pieces of equal rarity to get a prize,” but that it was instead a lottery and that all the pieces that weren’t rare were completely worthless. What this meant, in practice, was that Sammy was willing to trade multiple pieces for absolutely anything else he considered to be of value: baseball cards, comics, toys, you name it. He sometimes asked for a piece, presumably just to keep up the illusion of piece equality for as long as he could.
Sammy’s dominance in the market demanded challenge, and my friends and I tried our best to match his seemingly inexhaustible supply. We went after school every day, asking for free pieces. After a week, the McDonald’s stopped giving out free pieces, so we upped the ante, buying small ice cream cones. (Which were thirty-nine cents, just to make you sick at the sense of inflation over time.) Two weeks later, the McDonald’s stopped giving out free pieces with small ice cream cones, so we upped the ante again, buying regular hamburgers – but hamburgers cost seventy-nine cents, and that was too expensive to be a daily purchase for schoolkids in the mid-80s.
The black market lasted about a month. That was about as long as it took us to realize the true nature of McDonald’s Monopoly. Sammy, by that point, had cleaned up on a level previously undreamt of on the schoolyard – he was the Proposition Joe of St. Clement’s, except nobody shot him in the end. The pieces we had collected were thrown out, worthless. When McDonald’s Monopoly came back the next year, we were not enticed. We had been burnt.
We knew now that Ronald McDonald was not a friendly clown. He was a lying bastard, and Grimace, Birdie, Mayor McCheese, Captain Crook, the McNugget Buddies and the Hamburglar were his willing accomplices, his McDonaldland Mafia. And, thanks to McDonald’s, we were never that young again.
14
Oct
Your guest hosts are Mary Murphy and Rex “FEEL THE GLAM” Harrington.
Tara-Jean and Vincent: salsa and contemporary. The salsa was probably the strongest single ballroom performance Tara-Jean’s done, which makes it… pretty good. Seriously, I’m glad Tara-Jean improved and all, but she was oversold hella strong during the first half of the season with mediocre dance after mediocre dance being praised to the moon for reasons that completely escape me. That having been said, the judges’ unending hardon for TJ was at least merited this week, because this was a damn good salsa; TJ’s performance was decent enough on the fundamentals that it didn’t detract from the big tricks (which were ABSOLUTELY FUCKING INSANE and Gustavo Vargas deserves a couple of slots’ worth of choreo on the American show at this point) and Vincent was as predictably excellent at this as you would expect.
The contemporary was just excellent. Stacey Tookey is fantastic. Other than a bit of a weak slow vault for Vincent at the beginning (I thought his extension was a bit… not there), I thought this was just about perfect.
Tara-Jean’s solo: Interesting choice in that she eschewed tricks and went for a more character-based performance instead. I thought this was good.
Vincent’s solo: They really need to let ballroom dancers “solo” with a partner somehow, because watching someone as good as Vincent have to half-ass a “ballroom solo” is just dumb.
Melanie and Everett: jazz/rock and hip-hop. Oh, god, it’s the return of “rock” as a category. It was bad last season and it was bad this time around too. Melissa Williams is at this point actively my least favorite choreographer on any SYTYCD anywhere; her routines seem to top out at “tolerable,” when she has a couple of good ideas (I thought the stage-dive end was actually a pretty clever ending; unfortunately a lot of the rest of the choreo was pretty boring) and frequently are just awkward. Performancewise, Melanie was pretty good and Everett was just terrible in this: he was seriously behind the beat for large chunks of the piece and visibly struggled with a couple of the lifts.
The hip-hop exposed Luther Brown’s major weakness as a choreographer: he’s not good at working down to dancers’ levels if they’re not strong hip-hop dancers already. (Much like Shane Sparks, for that matter.) Hence this routine, which featured Melanie killing it and Everett… kind of standing around a lot. Well, maybe I do Everett a bit of a disservice here; he wasn’t as bad as, say, most of the male contemporary dancers trying to dance hip-hop on the fifth American season. But he wasn’t anywhere near as good as Melanie is at hip-hop.
Melanie’s solo: Probably the weakest and least defined solo of her entire tenure, and Melanie is one of my favorites and it kills me to say that.
Everett’s solo: Tapping en pointe, check. Ankle crossover, check. Desperate attempt to cover up lack of any other significant tricks and the fact that he practically dances the same solo every time, check.
Jayme-Rae and Emanuel: quickstep and jazz/funk. I kind of get the feeling Pierre Allaire tries to dumb down the quickstep for the non-ballroom-trained dancers, either intentionally or subconsciously when he works with them, because large parts of this felt like they were being danced at half-speed, and I don’t mean in terms of performance but in terms of choreography. (It’s not called “average step.”) This wasn’t good enough: Emanuel was better than Jayme-Rae, to be sure (and what a pleasant surprise Emanuel’s ballroom abilities have generally been), but even so.
Blake McGrath’s jazz/funk felt like an attempt to recapture the glory of his infamously, gloriously dirty Lisa/Nico routine from last season, but the problem is that Jayme-Rae and Emanuel don’t have particularly good chemistry together (well, that and the fact that “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas is like poison to the soul and not a sexy grindy song either). Jayme-Rae did her best and I thought she sold it as much as possible: Emanuel just felt like he’s done.
Jayme-Rae’s solo: Not her best, although I thought that ending spin was brutally awesome.
Emanuel’s solo: Better than anything else he did tonight, although licking the stage was perhaps a bit of overkill.
Top three girls, contemporary: I thought this was lovely and definitely very classical in feeling, which for Mia Michaels is a bit of a departure. Nothing else to say, really, other than I agree with Tre’s assertion that Melanie was the strongest of the three.
Top three boys, “suavo funk”: This was fun, and it’s nice to see that Gustavo can choreo more than just ballroom. The judges really talked up Everett in this piece, which is fair because he was great, but I honestly think Vincent was even better. Emanuel, on the other hand, was weak and tentative; maybe that’s because he’s not comfortable bringin da funk, or maybe it’s because his foot is injured, but either way he wasn’t on par with the other two.
Should go home: Jayme-Rae and Everett.
Will go home: Melanie and Emanuel.
13
Oct
“Sylvester Stallone in a comedy” should rightly raise warning bells. Warning sirens. Some loud noise of some kind, indicating danger. After all, Stallone’s track record for comedies is dismal, to say the least. (Six words: Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot!) But every so often, the stars align just so, and what should be a disaster is surprisingly non-disastrous and even pretty entertaining.
This is not to say that Oscar is a perfect comedy. It isn’t. It’s broad. It’s not exactly subtle. And while Sly tries his best (and doesn’t do badly), he’s never going to be Groucho Marx or even Chico, and a comedy like this – a farce, a comedy of errors with a strong emphasis on wordplay – is not really his forte. Plus, there are a couple of supporting performances that just kind of make you wonder things. Like “how did Marisa Tomei ever make it when she started out so poorly?”
“When I took over, your books were a mess.”
“They don’t sound like they’re in no great shape now! …damn, that’s a double negative.”
But it’s just a likable little movie. It has Tim Curry in it, before he was seemingly permanently exiled to play villains for video games, being Tim Curry and therefore completely awesome. It has a great performance from Chazz Palmintieri as a big goon mobster. (I defy anyone to not laugh when Stallone demands he shed all his weapons, and Palmintieri gives sad puppy eyes as he leaves a pile of weapons on a counter, culminating in a spiked ball-and-chain.) It had a whole horde of great character actors at their best: Peter Reigert as a smart-mouthed mobster-turned-butler, William Atherton as a snooty banker, Kurtwood Smith as a moral but not-too-bright cop, Harry Shearer as one half of a pair of quirky Italian tailors, and the late, great Eddie Bracken as a police snitch. It’s got a great cameo by Kirk Douglas and an appearance by Don Ameche in one of his last roles. And it’s got a remarkably clever plot.
“Even in the old days he was known as an honest crook.”
“That’s an oxymoron.”
“Gee, you shouldn’t oughta said that, Doc.”
“Yeah, leave Connie alone. He does the best he can.”
Stallone plays Angelo “Snaps” Provolone, a mobster who promises his dying father he’ll go straight. To this end, he has liquidated his criminal enterprises and plans to buy his way into a bank partnership. However, on the day the papers are to be signed, his young accountant (Vincent Spano, who for a while in the late 80s and early 90s was looking like a big thing, but unfortunately fizzled) comes to him and requests the hand of his daughter in marriage. However, his daughter is in love with the chauffeur, Oscar, and is a bit of a brat who wants to get her way. The cops, suspicious of Snaps’ sudden cessation of criminal activity, are suspicious, and watching his house like hawks. So is a rival gang, looking to muscle in on Snaps (who now appears weak).
“I got it! Your daughter’s not your daughter, and the cash that used to be the jewels is now your underwear!”
And then it all starts to get complex. Because the young accountant hasn’t actually ever met Snaps’ daughter. And things rapidly start to spiral out from one misunderstanding; that’s how a comedy of errors works, see, little things ball up into bigger things and bigger and bigger and then – pow, the payoff. And the good thing about Oscar is that the comedic payoff is an excellent one, all things considered. It’s a fun, hammy comedy, the sort of film Hollywood genuinely doesn’t make anymore because it’s gloriously, unapologetically pre-ironic and we live in a post-ironic world.
Plus, Tim Curry as an elocution teacher. Come on.
12
Oct
…my weekly TV column for Torontoist does not pause.
12
Oct
(cover of Justice Traps the Guilty #50)
11
Oct
LIKED
– Zombieland is exactly as good as you were hoping it would be: it’s not Citizen Kane or anything, but it’s a consistently fun horror/comedy with the emphasis on the latter half of the equation and some very solid action sequences as well, plus a number of clever visual tricks that help keep the viewer engaged and entertained. This is what B-movies should be like, and I await the inevitable sequel with bated breath.
– The Jim/Pam wedding on The Office would have actually served the series very well as a finale, as others have noticed elsewhere, but even as a portion of the series it was a particularly good episode – not just for the obvious romantic/emotional catharsis but because it was just a well-written episode of a show that’s notable because it missteps so rarely. (Also: Oscar voguing. How can you not love Oscar voguing?)
– Planetary’s conclusion was about as good as could be hoped for – a note-perfect end to a near-perfect series (that, yes, only managed to produce 27 issues over nearly a decade, but that’s why it’s near-perfect).
DID NOT LIKE
– Doctor Voodoo manages the rare feat of making Dr. Strange look like a pussy-ass loser (I mean, even more than previous Marvel comics have done so) while making Doctor Voodoo look like a self-important twat. (And in the bargain, once again makes Dormammu look like a pathetic joke.) The only character to come out of the first issue not looking like a schmuck is Dr. Doom, and let’s be honest: Dr. Doom doesn’t need any help to look cool. On top of that, the comic itself is just pretty goddamned bad: heavy, ponderous dialogue that already felt a bit outdated in the 1970s combined with art that is just ugly and murky makes for a nigh-unreadable pile of slurry. Understand that, as a Dr. Strange fan, I am ostensibly the target audience for this comic. I wanted this comic to be good. Instead, it’s probably the worst new offering from Marvel in quite a while.
11
Oct
Okay so like imagine in your mind that there is a public men’s room that you are about to use in a place that gets a reasonable amount of traffic. The men’s room has two urinals and one toilet stall. When you walk in to take a leak, there is one guy, using one of the urinals.
What is the proper etiquette here? Is it to obey the unwritten rule of “pee as far away from other guys as possible,” and use the toilet for your business? Or is it to obey the rule of “if you don’t have to do a number two, don’t take up the toilet in case somebody rushes into the bathroom because it’s an emergency” and use the urinal, even though it means peeing right next to the other guy?
I am not gonna say which I did. I’m just gonna say that I ended up getting a dirty look from somebody.
9
Oct
Various Responsible Media Centrists have already started bloviating about how Barack Obama should decline to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. Now, under normal circumstances, this idea could be dismissed as the usual round of said media centrists advancing an idea because it is contrarian and therefore Very Serious, and really, we all know that’s the reason they’re advancing it; not from any genuine thought or concern, but because it is ostensibly a little bit shocking to suggest (and because, let us be honest, there is a certain stripe of media outlet that rather enjoys portraying the President as being unfit to receive the honor).
However, here’s the thing: he should decline to accept it.
The reason is simple: he has already gained all the political advantage of winning the award. Were he to decline now, he would still possess whatever moral authority winning the Nobel Peace Prize conveys at this point; it is impossible for him to unmake the Nobel committee’s decision. They can’t take that away from him, even if he gives it away. But if he declines to accept it, he appears humble, which earns him even more credibility (and at this point, worldwide, he has a lot of it). He can make a speech about how he doesn’t deserve this award when Timmy Who Campaigns Against Landmines or Joan The AIDS Researcher actually deserves it more than him, and give Timmy or Joan or whoever a major spike in credibility for their cause.
The math is simple: he gets more juice out of refusing the award than he does by accepting it. And while it might be nice to have a Nobel on the mantle to show to the grandkids one day, realistically if he can get more diplomatic stroke through refusal, that’s the wisest course of action.
9
Oct
(let’s see who can come up with the best The Wire reference)
8
Oct
IP Osgoode has a sane and reasonable summary of the Jack Kirby copyright reversion case here.
7
Oct
I am pretty comfortable with whatever people might think of me in most circumstances, but I am still compelled to make this perfectly bloody clear: I did not purchase a copy of Glamour with my own money. My wife and I have moved into a new apartment, and whoever lived here before us apparently did not forward his or her (I do not make assumptions) subscription. At one point we were basically camping at our new place, and there was a period of time where that Glamour was the only reading material in the house apart from the ingredients on the Special K. So I read it, and I will fight to the death any man, woman, or child who derides me for doing so.
Now, you may have never read a copy of Glamour, so you might think of me as a sort of explorer; the guy who went into the uncharted Amazon so you didn’t have to and reported back what he found (answer: small, delicious frogs).
I am here to tell you that Glamour Magazine is weird.
First off, the cover copy says “Finally! Answers to All Your Questions About Sex and Love.” For realsies, Glamour? It took 70 years of continuous, monthly publication, but as of the November 2009 issue, they have finally answered those last, nagging questions on the subject; with nothing more to be said, I am sure this final issue will become a collector’s item.
No, look, whoever decides what the big, bold, main cover copy will say for Glamour decided to simply mention that they will be answering questions about sex and dating. I would be quite fascinated to see what else is in that copywriter’s portfolio. The June 2005 issue of Playboy: “Photos of Naked Women Inside!” Consumer Reports, August ’07: “Reviews and Comparisons of Various Products Available for Purchase!” The award-winning February 2004 Newsweek: No images, just bold white text on a black field stating “CURRENT EVENTS.”
Anyway. Moving on. So, Scarlett Johansson is on the cover, right? And there’s a little “About the Cover” blurb near the front of the magazine as you’d expect, but they do not tell you who this person is and why you should read about her. No, they just assume you already know. Instead, they tell you what kind of makeup she’s wearing, how much it cost, and who did it for her. It’s like twenty lines of small type! And in the back there is an entire page dedicated to approximate prices of the clothes everybody is wearing. But I’m not sure that the young single mum who buys Glamour in the supermarket can afford a $75 T-shirt (no matter how many fuzzy pompoms it’s covered in), and wouldn’t rich people have a more exclusive source? Isn’t there, like, a special, platinum-level internet for the wealthy and famous? (Fun fact: Platinum Internet actually is a system of tubes.)
And then there’s the celebrity fragrances. Man, I don’t understand this either. Reese Witherspoon has a fragrance. All of a sudden that price page at the back seems almost sane to me. Because I guess you could see something Reese Witherspoon is wearing and want to buy it too, or think her makeup and hair are really done well and look up who did them. Maybe you could even find out where she learned how to act and do that too, if you really admired her or something. But here’s the thing – I have no idea what Reese Witherspoon smells like, and you probably do not either. None of the media through which you experience Reese Witherspoon includes aroma capabilities. What about watching Election makes you think, “Gosh, I bet she is a fantastic perfumer”?
But the most odious thing about this magazine was the feature on plus-size models, featuring a nude (but strategically covered) photo spread. Let’s leave aside the condescending-sounding copy accompanying the photos (“Oh. Wow. These Bodies Are Beautiful” is actually how the title of article is punctuated. Jeez guys, try not to sound too excited or anything). Let’s even leave out that none of these women are really even all that plus-sized. No, what I want to call Glamour out on is the self-congratulatory tone they seem to feel entitled to for daring to showcase *gasp* size 12 models. They devoted six pages or so to women of a so-called “average” body type … with the other two hundred and forty devoted to the same kind of superthin models as usual, and acted as though they just tore down the Berlin Wall. This does not impress me, Glamour. This is the fashion and body equivalent of “Um, actually, I’ve got a co-worker who’s black and I’m very friendly with him…”
And the real kicker about this whole thing? And the reason why the guy who usually writes about mainstream superhero comics is bringing it up?
This magazine costs $3.99.
Do you see? I have spent this blog post tearing down this magazine that is totally not even marketed to me, but even chock full of 246 pages of crap and ads that I cannot distinguish from the articles, it is probably still a better value than 22 plus ads pages of Dark Avengers of Cry for Justice at the same price. I understand Glamour going for $3.99; like I said, they have an itemized list on how much all the dresses and makeup cost.
I just hope they’ve got Brian Michael Bendis decked out in Louis Vuitton for all that.
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