30
Oct
The Frighteners. Six years or so ago, it was slightly more obscure, but those movies with the hobbits in them mean that Peter Jackson’s earlier movies have received more attention. Of course, most of that attention went to Heavenly Creatures, which is excellent and deserves it and that’s all right, but The Frighteners is a pretty goddamned solid movie in its own right, and just right for Halloween viewing (hence this post, you see).
In its way, The Frighteners is delightful. Yes, it’s a bit uneven, starting out as an off-kilter supernatural comedy then shifting to a horror flick and finally culminating in balls-out sci-fantasy action. But it’s good comedy followed by good horror followed by good action, so if it’s uneven in tone it never really varies in quality, and the special effects are just choice to boot, the entire way through.
This is one of Michael J. Fox’s last onscreen film roles before he permanently migrated to television and the occasional voice-acting job, and it’s worth noting just how fucking good an actor Fox is, not just as a comedian (and during the funny parts of this movie, his timing remains as choice as ever), but as a dramatic actor too and even as a believable action star in the “normal guy forced to crank it up” ouevre of action. Fox just has chops a mile deep. It’s uncanny how talented he was in his prime, and a further reminder of how much Parkinson’s Disease really goddamn sucks ass.
Fox of course completely commits to the role of Frank Bannister, a man with deep emotional scars who can see the dead (and uses it for personal gain in the least satisfying of ways). But he’s matched by a cast that commits to their roles in turn. Trini Alvarado, whose career never really took off – and that’s a shame, because she pairs up Andie McDowell-esque looks with the actual acting talent Andie McDowell never had – works the love-interest/co-hero mode excellently, and her contributions to the final fight scene are wholly exciting. Chi McBride shows up (really, once I type the words “Chi McBride” you know at least part of whatever I’m talking about will be good) along with John Astin as an elderly ghost, and I am not quite sure how that works particularly. (Along with a lot of the other elements in this movie – The Frighteners is a movie that requires wholesale commitment from the viewer and a willingness to think things like “well, ghosts, that’s why” a lot.) Jake Busey’s crazy-ass baddie is just fantastic – utterly psychotic and well worthy of his eventual ghostly asskicking – and yes, he really is the spitting image of his dad, and all the moreso in this flick. And Jeffrey Combs’ crazy-ass FBI agent (there is a lot of crazy in this movie, but it mostly works because a movie that is about people who deal with ghosts should be weird as all get out) is hilarious.
And, again, it’s Peter Jackson, and that means one thing: inventive visual genius married to an action sense that equals top-notch entertainment for all concerned. Well, not all, maybe, because this is a movie where a guy’s head explodes and rotting things fall apart at times. But if you like that, or at least can get past it, then by all means, catch this.
P.S. Go with the director’s cut, which adds both fifteen extra minutes and 150 percent better flow in the action sequences. Trust me on this one: Peter Jackson films are always more coherent in the director’s edits.
29
Oct
After a skip week due to dental pain issues (like “being high on codeine for most of a week”), my TV column at Torontoist is once again up and running.
29
Oct
What the fucking hell is up with PvP?
Look, I’m not so naive as to think that the strip is as good as it was three or four years ago, when Kurtz was arguably at his peak, and when the comic was genuinely good. The art’s gotten worse, Kurtz has gotten lazier, and nowadays it’s actually funny maybe one strip in five, if that. But over the last few months, the comic has just cratered. It has entered that special realm we in the Comic Strip Lookin’ At profession call “worse than Garfield.”
I mean, seriously: “The Jade Fontaine Mysteries?” Really. Let’s just take a look at this in detail for a second: it’s a two-and-a-half-week-long storyline. With not one, but three introductory strips (four if you count the “he’s dead” strip). Half of the strips don’t even have punchlines, which last I heard is kind of important in a gag-a-day strip. (Unless this sort-of-alternate-Rockford Files-reality where Jade is a hobbyist detective is something you find innately funny. Kurtz might. I don’t think most people do.) Most of the punchlines that are there aren’t that good (the CSI gag is worth a chuckle, but the rest… yeah, you’d have to be really generous to call this warmed-over 80s-sitcom hackwork “funny”). The storyline isn’t even particularly clever: it’s predictable and just plain dull.
“Bing, bang, bing, popcorn” is not a fucking punchline.
This is terrible, terrible stuff, and it’s all the more disappointing because this is a comic that at one point was reliably entertaining – not Schulz or Watterson or Kelly, but usually pretty witty and clever (even if Kurtz’ grammar and punctuation were never and have never been, ahem, airtight).
Let me say, firmly, that this isn’t the “why isn’t PvP a gaming comic any more” rant that’s been blustered out a million times. There is no reason that Kurtz has to do a gaming comic. (Indeed, I read his Wedlock strip that he did on Modern Tales a few years ago, and it was better than most of his work on PvP by a country mile, and again, this is when PvP didn’t suck.) There are tons of shitty gaming comics out there, and even a few good ones like Penny Arcade and… uh… okay, there’s Penny Arcade, I guess. If Kurtz doesn’t want to make XBox jokes, there’s no reason he should feel obligated to make XBox jokes.
But when PvP was a dedicated gaming comic, as opposed to the generic kinda-geek culture comic it’s become, it had focus. Not everybody would get the gamer jokes, but those who would could appreciate the quality thereof.
One of the most basic lessons any comedian can tell you is this: the wider you spread your sights, the better you have to be. Comedy is hard, and in order to avoid being banal you have to be able to bring a fresh observation to the table. There’s a reason comics idolize guys like Bill Cosby. If you haven’t seen the documentary Comedian (which is worth a watch), there’s one segment where Chris Rock, in complete awe, recounts to other comedians how he watched Cosby kill two sets, back-to-back, “with no repeats” – meaning Bill Cosby did two killer ninety-minute sets without repeating a single joke, gag or story. I’ve done standup, a few times back in the day, and after doing one five-minute set a half-dozen times got it to the point where I could – well, not kill, but at least entertain reasonably. I cold-opened a few beginner’s shows and managed to successfully warm up the crowd, and I was happy with that – but that was the same set every time, refined over the course of a month or so. That’s not three hours of material, you know?
I’m getting away from my point here, which is that someone like Cosby – or Bob Newhart, or Woody Allen (who did legendary standup back in the day), or Bill Hicks, these guys can/could rock out fresh material in a heartbeat about anything, because they were just that good that they could find a fresh, original take on any subject that crossed their mind. Other people, on the other hand, aren’t quite at that level – so they find themselves a niche that’s unoccupied. Jeff Foxworthy does redneck jokes and good ol’ boy humour. Denis Leary does “common-sense” rants. Sarah Silverman has her “cute Jewish girl who says absolutely dreadful things” shtick. Dane Cook goes up on stage and spazzes out like a fucknut.
And all of this is fine (well, except for Dane Cook), because it’s better, in the world of professional laughery, to be funny about something than unfunny about everything. You winnow down until you hit that sweet spot, where you’re as funny as possible with as broad an appeal as possible. Scott Kurtz used to be in that zone, and he sure as hell isn’t now. I can’t help but suspect that it’s because he wants to widen PvP‘s commercial appeal. (Remember when he offered PvP to newspapers for free and pretty much everybody passed? That had to sting, and I wonder if it in turn affected his creative mindset.)
Anyway. Moral of story: “Bing, bang, bing, popcorn” is sucky and I would please like less of that. Thank you.
26
Oct
Your daily “life is getting more like Paranoia all the damn time” link of the day:
(I’m not even kidding a little. This is exactly the sort of thing you would expect to find in a Paranoia supplement, except that there it would’ve been played up as a joke. Go ahead, tell me I’m wrong.)
26
Oct
#32 in an increasingly-innumerate series of thirty:
One of the things that fascinates me about Legion as a concept is that it is one thousand years in the future, and the variance and similarity with which the DC Universe of “today” would reflect upon its future one millennium later would by necessity at least reflect the variance and similarity of our world to the Earth of about one thousand years ago.
Consider our planet around the year 1000 mark. The Byzantine Empire – which nowadays is barely a footnote in most basic history textbooks – is at its height under Basil II. The Saxon dynasties in England are reaching their nadir, and in less than half a century William The Conqueror is going to show up and, well, conquer. In Japan, the Fujiwara regency is going to dominate for another four hundred years. Monasticism – one of the most important tools for scientific advancement until the Renaissance – is only getting going! There’s practically no major works of art being produced at this time that will survive the next thousand years; we’re technically still in the Dark Ages. This world is almost totally dissimilar from what we recognize as modern society.
(Mark Waid, occasionally played up some brilliant aspects of this, such as the renaming of cities. Of course, he also had 20th-century paper-and-ink comic books surviving as artistic artifacts for a thousand years.)
But at the same time, this is the time at which the first major secret societies arose. And come on, secret societies are pretty awesome, not just for their innate sinister (or deus ex machina) story potential, but also because of how they manage to get things wrong as time passes along and they adopt a pseudo-religious reverence for their lyrical misinterpretation of historical record.
And what better subject for a society to form around in the DC Universe than Wesley Dodds, the first costumed super-hero? (Well, depending on which writer you read, that might actually be the Crimson Avenger, but there’s no reason the Illuminated Order Of Scarlet Vengeance can’t be lurking around a few shadows down and to the left, continually feuding with these Johnny-come-latelies who don’t even know what issue of Whiz Comics Spy Smasher first appeared in.)
The Sandymen – or the Righteous Collective Of The Ebon Desert, if you prefer (and they do) – hide in the background of the future, quietly assembling in back rooms to ensure that costumed superheroism can continue to propogate in the brave new universe. R.J. Brande may or may not be a member – although if he is, he probably knows more about the true history of the universe than they do. In the history painstakingly assembled by the Sandymen, the Justice League of Internationalism was founded by Kyle Gardner and Donna Prince, summoning the force of the mystical Black Lightning of H’ronmeer to combat the Seven Deadly Sinistarros threatening to destroy the planet.
But even though they get a lot of things wrong – they also get a lot of things right. They know about Kryptonite, including the effects of Steel Kryptonite (only discovered in 2128, and only seen twice since then) and Translucent-K (an artificial K-compound invented in 2437) on Kryptonians and other races alike. They know the last whereabouts of Brainiac 3.6, and why you don’t go near that black hole (well, why you stay further away from that black hole as opposed to other black holes). They don’t know where J’onn J’onzz is now, but they know the details of his last recorded heroic act (2750, on Khundia of all places).
Inaccurate archives. They’re fun. And they’re more fun when they’re a bunch of principled historian-nerds who are, unfortunately, wrong a lot of the time.
25
Oct
From JLA/Hitman:
One of the things I like about Garth Ennis is that, as a writer, he steadfastly refuses to write slow, lazy arcs around potentially offensive subtopics. What we have here is a fairly subtle and just simply well-written example of this.
The subtopic in question here is “Superman is a Christian.” (And, given that he was raised in Kansas, the odds are pretty good that he’s a Methodist. Although, given his emphasis on deeds over words, he might make a good Catholic as well. Really, this sort of thing is fun!)
Now, there’s a long and proud history of the stupidly fake Kryptonian religion in DC Comics, based around Rao, the godly personification of Krypton’s sun, and all of it exists for one reason: people weren’t comfortable writing Superman as a Christian. This is understandable, considering that Superman was created by a couple of Jews in the first place, and that we often recognize that comics history is a gradual, accumulated thing. One of the biggest reasons for this? It wasn’t until the first Superman movie that Smallville was finally and definitively located in Kansas. Prior to that, it was in Generic Rural Location, U.S.A., although occasionally comic writers would hint at its location being in rural Maryland. (Mostly because they wanted it to be somewhat close to Metropolis, which for a very long time was supposedly in Delaware – although, with Smallville unapologetically placing Metropolis in Kansas as well, this might change over the next few years.)
But nowadays, we’re coming up on thirty solid years of Superman being raised in small-town Kansas. It’s become an accepted part of the canon, unthinkable to ditch. Much as in Batman continuity, Arkham Asylum only dates back to the mid-70s, and Alfred Pennyworth being a coolly competent English butler rather than a comic prop only to the mid-80s – these are all relatively recent additions to comics canon, but sometimes, things just stick. Harley Quinn, along with the other minor story tweaks introduced by the animated Batman cartoon, is probably the best and most recent example of something just glomming onto canon in this manner.
In Superman canon, Lex Luthor has only been a ruthless business genius for about twenty years, but it’s stuck just as firmly as Kansas did, and this in spite of the fact that a lot of top-name writers obviously wish he could just be a boring old mad scientist again. (Sorry, but Tycoon Luthor is just an endlessly more interesting variation on the character, guys. Deal with it.)
Now, with that greater detail of geographic certainty placing Smallville more definitively (and if you’re a detail nut, you can not only place Smallville in Kansas, but even give a good geographic guess as to which county it’s supposed to be in), this narrows down the demographics of the Kents. Having Superman exclaim “Great Rao!” as a euphemism for a mild religious blasphemy is cute, but it also served as as a signal that, in previous modes of storytelling, Superman was a generic stand-in. Maybe Smallville was a small town filled with Lutherans. Or Quakers. Or Seventh-Day Adventists. Or Jews. (Okay, Siegel and Shuster aside, Smallville probably wasn’t Jewish.) When Smallville was just an idea rather than a fictionalized location, this was more possible…
…but nowadays, with continuity being what it is, it’s kind of dumb. Superman was raised by a prototypical small-town couple in Kansas. Jonathan and Martha Kent are supposed to exemplify small-town America in every way except for being truly virtuous people, all the better to serve as example for young Clark. On balance of probabilities, the exceptional likelihood is that the Kents are practicing Christians, and given Superman’s personal belief system before you attach a religion to it, that goes for him as well. Besides which, religious belief tends to be inertious, and a conversion to Raoism (or whatever you call it) would require a pretty serious life event for Superman to realistically do such a thing.
(On the other hand, it makes perfect sense for Supergirl to swear in Rao’s name, what with her having been raised in the faith and all.)
So, Superman’s a Christian. Now, a shitty writer would make a big deal out of this. I can just see twenty-two pages from some drama-producer about how Superman’s Christianity makes him a hypocrite, for example. Or, worse, a crossover with Zauriel WHERE ONLY SUPERMAN’S RELIGIOUS BELIEF CAN blah blah blah Armageddon-cakes.
Garth Ennis, on the other hand, plays it as it lays. He doesn’t need to write some dramatic toss about Superman’s angst or anger with God or whatever. He just ends his comic with Superman flying up to the moon to pray for Tommy Monoghan, because Ennis understands that prayer, like all human activity, is ultimately an expression of the self, and doesn’t have to be especially noteworthy. It’s not something you overlook; it’s just something you add, another level to understand the character on. It doesn’t have to be a story hook. It just has to be there.
And that’s why Ennis can write rings around most comic superhero writers when he feels like it.
25
Oct
McDonald’s foods as pizza toppings.
The horrific thing is that, even though I do valiantly try and usually manage to eat in a healthy manner, I found myself wondering what this would be like with A&W or Wendy’s.
24
Oct
Sorry for the dead-time on the site; in between extremely major dental issues, not one but indeed both computers flaming out and requiring repairs, and everything else I normally have to deal with, this past week has been hectic. I’ve got a lot of stuff hopefully getting this site back up to speed in the next couple of days, I promise.
In the meantime, however, if you are really jonesing for something written by a Canadian with the last name of Bird, go read my little sister’s article on working in a tar-sands camp. It is good. Your life will be enriched as a result.
19
Oct
Wisdom teeth being removed. Back in operation hopefully by Tuesday.
18
Oct
No, seriously: Turkey invading Kurdish Iraq is very, very, very bad.
On a scale of 1 to 10, it is Bad. It is a recipe for Bad Sandwich, preceded by Bad Salad and finishing with Bad Cobbler. It’s not Strong Bad, it’s just Bad Bad. It’s Baddosity-level is plus-twelve. Cinematically speaking, this is a Gigli-equivalent level of Bad.
It’s not good, is what I’m saying.
18
Oct
Blame Church.
17
Oct
So let me get this straight:
1.) we have discovered another, Earth-like planet, potentially capable of supporting life;
2.) it orbits a red sun;
3.) it’s a larger planet, and the gravity there is stronger than it is here;
4.) it is twenty light years away, so it could have exploded nineteen years ago and we would only know about it next year.
Clearly, we must watch the skies for incoming escape pods. Alert Kansas!
(Oh, come on, you thought of it too.)
17
Oct
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