Muckraking

The last two reviews I’ve done for Thor’s Comics Column (The End Times of Bram and Ben and Todd, the Ugliest Kid in the World ) have inadvertently been thematically linked. Both of these books are deliberately, gleefully offensive, something that’s become a time-honoured tradition in the medium of comics since at least the era of “Tales From the Crypt”…and really, it goes back to at least the days of 18^th-century political cartoons. Or hell, dirty paintings on cave walls. Comics seem more inclined to this kind of assault on good taste than most other media, something I accredit partly to how few overseers the standard comic has in the production phase, and partly to how far beneath the radar the average indie comic is able to fly. But even without those aspects I feel like there’s something in the medium itself that lends itself to assaulting people’s delicate social mores—a certain underlying anarchy implicit in portraying reality in stylized form. (Animation has something similar going on, from the classic Loony Tunes to the modern slew of R-rated cartoon shows.)

As you might be able to tell, I’m generally in favour of pushing boundaries, but that doesn’t mean I automatically salute comics creators who publish whatever juvenile, offensive nonsense they can get away with. As I said in the reviews linked above, I think taking a scattergun to good taste can be a positive thing…if done in an intelligent context. The more over-the-top your shock value, the more carefully it has to be deployed, and there’s no quicker way to get on my bad side than being shocking for the sake of being shocking. Perhaps more importantly, if you’re going to talk the talk, I expect you to walk the walk.

I’ve been to the San Diego Comic-Con a few times, thanks largely to friend and collaborator Chuck Whelon. My first time there, in 2004, was juuuuust before the huge crowds of non-nerds caught on that this was a chance to catch a glimpse of big movies and their stars and directors before they were released, and it was still possible to get in to see them without spending most of the convention waiting in line. In later visits I tended to skip the madness of Hall H and focus on the actual comics, but that first trip was spent planted in the big lecture halls watching advance clips of The Incredibles and listening to the creators of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (it was a pretty good year for neat geek projects, in retrospect).

One of the presentations I saw that year was for Team America: World Police. I knew Trey Parker and Matt Stone were working on an all-puppet action movie that would lampoon the war on terror in the style of the Thunderbirds, and while I wasn’t the world’s biggest fan of the duo, I thought the combination of the uniqueness of the medium and the subject matter made it sound like an exciting flick. What I saw on the stage, though, turned me against Parker and Stone for life. I understand that they were in the late stages of finishing the movie and were rather exhausted, but the hour-long presentation consisted of nothing but whining from the duo—whining about how much they hated actors, whining about how much harder it was to work with puppets, whining about how much hard work this all had been. When you factor in the incredibly simplistic, half-assed animation of South Park, it became clear to me that these were a pair of over-privileged jerks who thought it was the height of hilarity to mock everyone else but whose own inconvenience warranted a jeremiad. This was emphasized when the movie came out and large chunks of it were devoted to repetitive, tiresome “takedowns” of everyone in Hollywood Parker and Stone personally disliked, including a nonsensical plotline springing from their personal vendetta against Michael Moore.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “He’s only saying that because his political beliefs are being tweaked.” But actually it’s just the opposite. I’m a hardcore leftie, but I’d LOVE it if someone delivered a smart, incisive takedown of Michael Moore. That’s not what Parker and Stone did, though. The Michael Moore segments of the movie are simply Parker and Stone taking revenge on a guy who done them wrong (Parker and Stone were featured in Bowling for Columbine but refused to make an animated segment for the movie; Moore proceeded to make one in the style of South Park and place it right after the Parker and Stone segment, which the duo felt mislead people into thinking they’d been active participants in the movie rather than interview subjects). There’s no real criticism of Moore’s beliefs other than linking him to the movie’s half-baked “liberals are terrorists” theme, which isn’t any more well-thought-out than the kinds of idiocies that right-wing talking heads were spewing during the Bush years. What’s almost worse is that Parker and Stone present this whole thing as surrounded by ironic quote marks, dramatizing right-wing talking points with a veneer of ridiculousness so that if called on it they can say they’re satirizing it. It’s the ultimate in having their cake and eating it too.

For the record, I have enjoyed South Park in the past, and I’m not trying to argue that Parker and Stone are are right-wing lunatics. Actually that’s almost the problem: I don’t think they actually believe in anything, and are simply taking an aggressively contrarian stand to get noticed. Which wouldn’t be so bad in and of itself, but combined with the aforementioned sense of privilege and whininess, it becomes excruciating. (A gay acquaintance of mine was extremely angry at the episode that called for people to ease off on criticism of “the f word”: “So, these privileged heterosexual Republican-voters are going to lecture me on being offended by a slur aimed specifically at people like me?” was the thrust of his complaint.) Apparently a recent South Park episode featured metacommentary on Parker and Stone’s growing displeasure at their need to be relentlessly cynical and negative towards everything, to which I can only quote Porky Pig: “You b-b-b-b-buttered your bread, now you can lie in it.”

Another guy about whom I have similarly mixed feelings is Garth Ennis. Unlike Parker and Stone, I don’t think Ennis is a nihilist, and in fact, I think he can be a really excellent writer. But as anyone who’s read a lot of his work knows, he can very definitely fall into the same adolescent contrarian stance. There’s his incredibly, often pointlessly graphic violence, his depiction of superheroes as out-of-control, amoral hedonists in The Boys, and his juvenile mockery of religion in Preacher. I’ve actually read Preacher multiple times and own the entire series; it’s unquestionably an engaging, entertaining story, but I’m consistently disappointed by how Ennis keeps trying to pretend he has something to say, about religion or America or anything else, when it’s pretty clear he doesn’t. Christianity only exists in Preacher as something he can bring up for a cheap, shocking gag once in a while; the only people who are going to be offended by it are the kind of fundamentalists who wouldn’t be reading the comic in the first place. It’s a nonstop parade of “Hey, you hold this stuff sacred? Well, fuck you, I’mma smear shit all over it! Ha ha!” Ennis never even really gets around to explaining WHY religion is bad; he just takes it as self-evident. He’s shooting fish in a barrel. (And no, I’m not religious. If I’m offended by any of this jive it’s not the subject matter but how much contempt Ennis has for his readers.) 

More on this subject here: http://hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/10/subversion-satire-and-shut-the-fuck-up-deflection-and-lazy-thinking-in-comics-criticism-2/

After all that, I probably come off as a hopeless prude, but I reiterate my original point: I’m a strong supporter of thinkers and storytellers who attempt to push boundaries. My issue is with people who take “causing offense” as a starting point. To stay on the religion thing, Charles Darwin didn’t sit down and attempt to destroy the bible by writing The Origin of Species (regardless of what certain fundamentalists seem to think); he simply followed his thoughts to their rational conclusion, and came back with a book that shocked half the world. The same is true of Alfred Kinsey or Friedrich Nietzsche. This may seem like a somewhat lopsided argument, that I’m holding up an impossible standard to pop culture storytellers, but you see my point—nothing is ever more shocking than ideas. An obvious provocation can garner attention in the short term, but all you’re doing is shoving something into the muck. Muck washes off. Exposing an existing rot within your chosen subject—that’s far more dangerous, and it’s what art should be doing.

A Life In Trek

Hi! Miss me?

It’s been a tumultuous six months or so for me, encompassing a move, a new job and a whackload of freelance projects, and this blog has seemed like something that’s easy enough to shrug off. But I’m finding myself wasting so much time on Twitter and various message boards that I might as well post my thoughts on stuff here instead. Plus, I’m trying to get more serious as a writer and attempting regular blog posts is a good way to discipline myself.

So anyway, let’s talk about Star Trek.

***

Star Trek: The Next Generation was the pop cultural equivalent of my first adolescent crush. I’d loved TV shows before that, in much the same way that you love people as a small child, largely because they are present and bringing you food. TNG was the first show that was “mine” properly speaking—the first pop cultural artifact that I actively sought out and became properly obsessed over.

And I do mean obsessed. I think my interest in the show coincided with it becoming syndicated for the first time, though I was too young to be sure about that. I think I started out somewhere in the second season, because I specifically remember seeing the first season for the first time and thinking how cheesy it looked and how much the show had evolved. I watched those first three seasons on a freaking loop—I taped them and rewatched them every day, and I absolutely had to be home to watch the syndicated rerun no matter how many times I’d seen the episode before. I bought all the spinoff novels (fortunately there weren’t too many of those to blow my money on) and most of the technical manuals, alien race guides, and eventually the TNG Companion became one of my proudest possessions. I wrote up elaborate encyclopedia-style listings of the various alien races, planets, and technology (thank God the internet wasn’t really a thing back then…though, wait, is the fact that I wrote these for my own amusement more or less sad than creating a Wiki?) It got so I could identify an episode by watching the first couple of seconds and…sigh, yes...hearing Picard recite the Stardate.



So yeah, pretty damn nerdy.

What’s weird about this is that I never really felt compelled to check out the original series. Part of that was that I don’t think it was airing in syndication on any of the channels I received at the time, or at least, nowhere that was convenient for me. My ten-year-old brain was wired kind of weirdly. I’d religiously plunk myself down in front of the TV right after school and watch cartoons, old sitcoms, and TNG, but I rarely felt compelled to watch in the evening.

Until, of course, I twigged to the fact that there were actual NEW EPISODES of TNG airing later in the evening (along with some other shows, like that “Simpsons” thing my VCR-obsessed family friend used to show me whenever I came over). I had discovered…Prime Time.

(Look, I’ve lived a very boring life, OK? Without exaggerated pomposity my autobiography’s going to be basically unreadable.)

Friday nights at 10, the night that TNG aired, became appointment television for me and my family—because I of course sucked them into it too. I’m always a little amazed at how my sisters, especially, picked up my pop cultural obsessions, for all that they acted like I was annoying them at the time; one of them can still remember albums worth of Weird Al lyrics, and the other owns an enormous prestige hardcover collection of Sandman and V For Vendetta. I’m contagious!

As for my parents, my dad likes anything tech-heavy, and my mom (a British ex-pat) likes watching theatrically trained Brit actors go at it. Of course my dad especially couldn’t help making snarky remarks through some of the show’s worst excesses, particularly the often stiff acting, but hey, family bonding is family bonding.

Oddly, it was around the time that Deep Space Nine spun off that I started to sour on Trek. Believe it or not, DS9 is the reason I’m delving into this whole subject, which is going to take up several blog posts—I’ve been working my way through it recently—but at the time, I found myself developing an aversion to it pretty fast, despite the slick production values. Part of it might be that I couldn’t interest the rest of my family in it, so I was watching it alone for season two. But another part of it was that that obsessive childhood brain of mine—man, this is really making me sound like I have OCD or something, isn’t it?—had fixated on what I thought were the “rules” of Trek, and DS9 was starting to break those rules. You can’t really blame me; this obsession with Trek was partly about me discovering how stories were told, visually and textually, and of course there’s no-one who gloms onto formulas like a student adrift in the vast, scary sea of creativity. But at the time it seemed like a betrayal. More on that anon.

Anyway, this was actually pretty small potatoes, if interesting in retrospect; the real issue was that the cracks were starting to show in TNG for me. The laziness of their treatment of aliens was a huge factor, for a start. I’m not just talking about the lameness of those infamous “bumpy forehead” designs (which were partly a budget issue, after all—even as a kid I understood these guys didn’t have George Lucas’s budget). It was the way the word “alien” never seemed to mean anything to the Trek writers. Aside from Klingons, Borg, and a handful of others, every alien species on this show spoke, acted, and emoted like a human being, and that’s just lame writing. It didn’t help that most of them appeared for a single episode and then vanished, never to be heard from again, which didn’t exactly help build a rich and detailed world. Likewise, the show’s continuity started to seem slapdash; I was interested in the “nodular” nature of TV storytelling at the time, but even then I thought it was a bit of a ripoff that so many major ideas could get sidelined and even abandoned. I mean are Trill people with weird foreheads or with dots down their necks I ASK YOU TREK PRODUCERS.

Ahem. I did mention that I was a nerd, right?

My list of problems with the show started to pile up until it was at least as large as the stuff I liked about it—something that’s become part of my makeup as a fan, unfortunately—but I kept watching all the way through to the finale, “All Good Things…” which I remember being really very good. And then that was that.

I think part of me knew it was in my best interests to make a clean break from Trek, and I even recall a vague sense of relief. Take this geeky burden from off me, Lord! Not that I hadn’t found new geek interests—I think The X-Files had grabbed most of my attention at the time, concurrent with Batman: The Animated Series--and those distracted me long enough to keep me from re-visiting TNG.

When I finally decided to start catching up on Trek a few years back, I made a conscious decision NOT to watch TNG, and in fact I don’t plan to ever revisit the show. I’m not the kind to wallow in nostalgia (ask me about Transformers sometime, and how my childhood love for them quickly became bemusement, leading into seething hatred thanks to the likes of Michael Bay) but Star Trek: The Next Generation seems to be the embodiment, for me, of a memory that the real thing will never be able to match.

End Of The Year, End of the World

Hi! Miss me?

It's been a crazy few months here at Phortress Phantasmic, mostly due to an overload of illustration work (which is a very good thing, of course, for my ability to not starve to death and those who enjoy watching me not starve to death). Things are calming down a little now, so it's time to take inventory of...stuff.

Firstly! Lemuria is back, obviously, and if you haven't been following it, it's recently featured the return of Hordo of Atlantis from the second-ever story. Plus lots of pirates. I do have every intention of colouring these strips as soon as I can find a moment to do so...

I also want to finally return to Freak U. and yes, even Night Shift; I'm going to say Freak U. will return sometime in February. Night Shift, I'm not sure about. Even Amazon Space Rangers, which is effectively dead as a comic, is sort of back in the form of a series of prints I'm working on...here's the first.

More on that later. Um, what else? I guess I'll bang out some reviews for the end of 2011 and early 2012:

Sherlock Holmes 2: A Game of Shadows and Sherlock, Season 2: It's kind of weird how pop culture is suddenly Sherlock-happy, isn't it? And now apparently there's an "American Sherlock" TV show in development, which will probably just be "House meets CSI" crap. Anyway, it must hurt Guy Ritchie and Robert Downey Jr. right down in their spleen to know that their big-budget theatrical steampunk version of Sherlock Holmes is being so consistently upstaged by a BBC production starring a previously-unknown and the guy from The Office. I mean, the Downey Sherlock Holmes movies seem to make decent bank, and I actually liked the first one somewhat--putting aside the stupid action movie setpieces, the script actually captured the tone and characterizations of the stories, and avoided some of the pitfalls modern Holmes adaptations sometimes fall into (Watson isn't an idiot, the supernatural is revealed to be fraudulent). But Game of Shadows was just awful--loud, bloated, bombastic, without a trace of wit or refinement. Yes, refinement. Sherlock Holmes should be REFINED, dammit. He should also spend at least a little of his time, y'know, solving mysteries, something Ritchie apparently has no interest in whatsoever. Even worse, the movie's version of Moriarty is staggeringly bland, which seems like it's the last thing Ritchie would get wrong.

This, more than anything, is something that looks completely embarrassing when stacked up against the Stephen Moffat show, because this was the season they got to play with Moriarty, and they absolutely nailed it. The accepted wisdom on Moriarty is that there's something "everymannish" about him, as if he had no personality of his own and could blend in perfectly with the background, the better to manipulate his criminal network. The movie interprets this, as I said, as "let's make Moriarty really, really boring". The show has a very clever take, as we saw last season: first by having Moriarty "speak" using other people's voices, and then revealing him as an unsettling creature whose speech patterns seem to vibrate at random across the entire spectrum of human speech, while never once sounding natural--an obvious advantage when your archnemesis is a guy who can tell everything about you from a glance and a few words. Some people seem to have found this a little annoying, and actor Andrew Scott has toned it down a lot this season, but it's still present. Scott is creepy every second he's on screen--he knows exactly when to go over the top and when to tamp it down a little (but only a little). His over-the-topness is employed in a highly restrained manner, if that makes any sense. But then, it may be necessary to go a little over-the-top when you're sharing the screen with Benedict Cumberbatch. On the flip side, Lara Pulver plays it perfectly cool as Irene Adler, in "A Scandal in Belgravia", somehow managing to be impassive and expressive at the same time, and she too strikes sparks with Cumberbatch--if this season has an overriding flaw, it's that Martin Freeman as Watson gets pushed a little too far to the side by all the larger-than-life personalities.

In general, though, this season is better than the mostly-great first, which was weighed down by the inferior (and racist) "The Blind Banker" and a somewhat chaotic plot in "The Great Game". This seasons' weakest entry is "The Hounds of Baskerville", which is a little padded, but which still manages to get some real mileage out of pitting Sherlock against the supernatural, and develops the theme of Sherlock's increasing humanity in a smart way, by having him deal with crippling terror, something he never thought he'd have to do. "Belgravia" is probably the best single episode of the show so far (for the record--SPOILERS--my opinion is that Adler faked the whole scenario at the end for the sake of faking her death, but also to see if she could draw Sherlock out; so did in fact "win" their game in a sense, by revealing him to have feelings. That's just my interpretation, though, and if Moffat meant for it to be a straightforward "Sherlock saves the day" moment, I do think that's a misstep). And Moriarty's plan in "The Reichenbach Fall" is extremely clever, a brilliant way of upping the stakes and showing why he's a real threat to Holmes, as opposed to just a guy with a really epic scheme to take over the world.

I *am* a little skeptical that Moffat can pull off the reveal of how Holmes pulled off his triumph at the end there--Moffat's shown he's not immune to illogical deus ex machinas in Doctor Who, as the last season showed--but I'll definitely be watching. Oh hell yes.

Hmmm, that ended up taking a lot more space than I expected. OK, I guess I now have the material for a whole series of posts!

Since JUNE?!? Yikes.

And then there was the time I stopped blogging for four months.

I have to admit that my heart isn't in blogging and tweeting and all the online social stuff the way it is with producing my webcomics. (Not that I've been updating those particularly consistently either...) I often feel like I'm generating a lot of content that's sort of pointless and redundant and nothing to do with my real strengths. There are so many good, intelligent bloggers out there that it can get a little intimidating.

But by the same token, I've realized that I do spend a lot of time commenting on message board threads and whatnot, so why not just organize my thoughts elsewhere into coherent blog posts? Voila, free content.

Combine that with actually freeing up some time after a month and a half of being incredibly busy with illustration projects, and having some big projects on the boils, and I think I'm ready to do this again.

OK, so, where is we?

--I broke down and got a DeviantArt page. I still have some problems with DA, not the least of which is the name (which far too many contributors seem to take literally...part of the reason I resisted this for a long time is not wanting to get linked in any way to, say, people who draw anime furry panty shots), but it IS a good way to network and promote yourself as an artist, so what the hell. And immediately on the heels of sneering at people's sexy drawings, here's a bunch of sexy drawings I did for a local band (the somewhat less sexy cover of the album is here.) (Wait, I apologize to the band members of Disphraxia for suggesting they aren't sexy.)

--I'm on twitter, too, @prankster36 . I've always felt Twitter to be a bit of a waste of time, but again, promotional tool. Plus, I was reading an article with...I think it was Patton Oswalt, and he opened my eyes a bit, pointing out that Twitter can be a valid medium for expression, encouraging conciseness and discipline.

--I'm still cranking out reviews for Thor's Comic Column on Chud.com; over the past two months, of course, I've weighed in a bit on The New 52 (short version: it could have revolutionized comics, and instead DC decided to offer up a heapin' helping of the same-old, same-old, served with a generous dollop of sexism and a truly laughable nostalgia for the early 90s, which aren't ever coming back comics people.) In terms of comics that are actually good? G. Willow Wilson and Pablo Rivera's Mystic has been a wonderful surprise, an intelligent fantasy comic that actually manages to achieve a clever political subtext (as in, tied up with political concerns with our world, even though it's set in a fantastical universe) in an elegant and non-preachy way that you can totally ignore if you just want to read a comic that is basically Harry Potter meets Mean Girls, which is what this is. And Matt Fraction and Gabriel Ba's (and Fabio Moon's, though he's not drawing this arc) awesomely mind-melting Casanova has returned with a new miniseries, Avaritia, that tops the already-exemplary work these guys were doing. I just read the first of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels, and it's obvious that Fraction is basically attempting to do one of those, except on acid (and they were pretty trippy to begin with). READ THIS COMIC, people.

--I'm planning to participate in NaNoWriMo, though not in the conventional way. For me it'll be NaNoReNoWriMo (National Not Really a Novel Writing Month). More to come.

--Also probably of interest to no one but a certain blonde Dutch lady: you are the best girlfriend ever. Love you, sweetheart. And I promise I won't grow a mustache for next month.

Here endeth the lesson. Go forth and multiply.

Detecting Phantasmic Activity in proximity to the Web

OK, I surrender. I'm twittering now. I'm sure it's the kind of thing everyone will find utterly fascinating.

Perhaps less insipid content can be found at Chud, where Thor's Comic Column lives on. (Even though that particular page doesn't list me among the contributors for some reason....) New columns go up every Friday.

I'm working on a couple of big projects, one for an ongoing client, another for a potential client (which will be really cool if it gets off the ground), and a third which is entirely personal, a gift for my sister and her new husband, who just got hitched over the weekend. In case you were wondering what's been occupying my time. It's a pair of nifty-looking Art Nouveau-ish posters, and I'll post 'em as soon as they're finished.

As for strips, as you may have noticed, a new Freak U. went up today, and I'm hopefully back on track from this point on. New Lemuria on April 4th. I'm still trying to get the backlog of strips coloured in, don't know how long that'll be, but I'm trying to get it done soonish. Possibly by the end of April, at which point I plan to unleash a marketing blitz on the web. Stay tuned.

BEHOLD! The Return of...FOURTH WORLD FRIDAYS!!!

A couple of years ago, I began a little project called Fourth World Fridays, on an earlier (and, to my eternal shame, Livejournal) version of this blog. I wanted to review and analyze the entirety of Jack Kirby's Fourth World books, issue by issue, one a week. Why the Fourth World? Well, up until that point, I had been rather dubious about the supposed talents of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. It's not that I didn't think they were talented, and I wasn't denying their massive influence on superhero comics, but as a guy who's always felt that superheroes sometimes get too much of the spotlight in analyses of comics history, I always thought that the monument to Lee and Kirby had been erected overtop of Eisner, Barks, and any number of deserving foreign comics artists and newspaper strip creators. It seemed like the main think L&K get credited with is bringing a new sophistication to superheroes, which they undeniably did, but considering that the other creators I just listed were all so much more sophisticated anyway (in my view), this wasn't the massive achievement that people made it out to be. It seemed like their elevation to godhood had come about due to their domination of a single genre, one which had been unfairly elevated above the others.

Wasn't I such an awesomely rebellious contrarian?

In all seriousness, I do still have some of these reservations about the superhero genre, but I realize I had a pretty superficial understanding of Kirby's work. (I'm still a little skeptical of Stan Lee, who never really produced anything of merit apart from Kirby or the other Marvel artists, but I wouldn't deny he had some good ideas, and was an extremely talented editor and promoter. Anyway, more on Stan in the entries to come.) The work that changed my mind about Kirby was, naturally, The Fourth World, which was indeed one of the most ambitious and visionary works produced in the medium of comics. At a time when superhero comics were beginning to struggle with being "serious" and "deep", and mostly doing a hilariously bad job of it, Kirby launched the first superhero series that had a real thematic depth to it. The characters, in particular, were refreshingly complex, while still being big, bombastic, larger-than-life types (as suited a series about literal gods), and the series had some surprisingly sophisticated things to say about power and authority, self-actualization, the creative process, and the then-current generation (of which Kirby was, obviously, not a part).

Also, it was completely bugfuck insane, in the most delightful way imaginable.

Now, don't get me wrong, it's far from flawless. Very, very far. The plotting is often haphazard, the dialogue is famously clunky--sometimes it seems to go out of its way to be as hilariously awkward as possible--and the whole enterprise is often utterly, majestically silly, from the ridiculous costumes to the general sense of unhipness that was inevitable in a work produced by a middle-aged comics artist attempting to pay tribute to the youth culture of the late 60s and early 70s. But the thing is, the things that often make it silly are the same things that make it great--the sense of complete earnestness, open-heartedness, and commitment to every premise, no matter how bizarre or ridiculous, coupled with the willingness to let imagination lead the way. The result is a series that's an acquired taste, to say the least, and requires a bit of work to really appreciate--but it's also instantly compelling. Even if your first impulse is to make fun of it (I have to admit, mine certainly was) you'll never be bored reading it.

Or, hopefully, reading about it.

I admit right up front, this is a pretty blatant attempt to recycle content for this blog. Fourth World Fridays originally had their own blog, which you can read right here if you're so inclined. I'm doing this again partly because I don't really see the point of having a separate blog and want to amalgamate everything, and partly because I'm quite proud of this series, but I think with a little editing it could be really, really good. Plus, my attitudes have changed--I feel I might have been a little too snarky in the original series, and I want to rewrite them to reflect my renewed respect for Kirby. Sure, you could just click on over there and read the whole thing in rough draft form, but...that...would be...uh...mean?

Anyhow. From now on, Fridays are FOURTH WORLD FRIDAYS here on Phantasmic Blog. GO! GO! GO!!!

Plans for 2011

I know, I know...bad blogger.

There's two reasons I update this thing so rarely. One is that, when I get spare time between illustration commissions and whatever "real" job I happen to be working at the time, the priority is always going to be my comics. (That's Lemuria and Freak U. for those of you just now sneaking into the theater. The latter of which just came back, a day late, and the former of which will be returning this coming Monday, for the record. Hey, I might as well kick off the new year with some shilling!) The other is that I always feel like, if I'm going to blog, I want to do transcend links and "Hey, last night's Doctor Who sure was the ROXXOR"-type posts and do a real essay-type thing with pictures and gewgaws, like my epic Tintin post. And those take time and effort that I not only can't really spare, but a level of concentration that I don't have.

But I am going to make an attempt to do some more posts this year; I've got a couple of ideas for thematically linked series of posts, one on fantasy, and one on TV shows, which will hopefully help to generate new content. I'm also hoping to do more Bollblogging, and I'll be going back to reviewing comics for a certain major movie/pop culture site after the tragic failure of out column at JoBlo.com. (More about that next week.) Looking back--and this post sort of inadvertantly turned into a retrospective on this blog, didn't it?--I'm actually pretty proud of some of the writing I've done here over the past couple of years, so I say, it's time to get a little more serious about it...

Oh, and happy 2011!

As Promised....

...you can now buy Freak U. Volume 2 in a handsome 192-page trade paperback format. By clicking on that link. Right there. Or this picture:



Go do. Need money.

Whineblogging

FFWHOOOOOOFFFF. (That was me blowing the dust off this blog.)

Well. The Toronto FanExpo has been and gone--being the thing that, together with a trip to Nepal and a new girlfriend, has been occupying my summer. So yes--I do apologize for the lack of updates, both here and at Phantasmic Tales, and I do promise to be more regular with this stuff from here on out.

How was the show? It was...a little disappointing, to be honest. For one thing, there were some serious organizational issues, which Chris Bird has already touched on, but perhaps not emphatically enough. On Saturday, one of the people at my table was unable to get back into the convention despite being an exhibitor. That had to do with the fact that they packed us into the tiny North Hall, as Bird says, and then oversold--but it was also partly due to the pointlessly strict security. Exhibitors weren't simply allowed to show their passes to get in. Oh no. They had to get their passes punched for that day, and then get their hands stamped. Like what happens when you go to a club or a theme park. And they did it with the weakest, most water- (and sweat-) soluble ink I've ever seen. My co-exhibitor Justin was particularly pissed because he'd been planning to help set up, go home and shower, and then come back.

Regular patrons who bought three-day passes had it even worse: they were forced to wear a bracelet that they couldn't take off for three days. Seriously.

All of this was simply to prevent people trading passes, which is immensely stupid, particularly in the case of exhibitors. As my other co-exhibitor Nick pointed out, ticket sales are pretty marginal compared to the amount of money they make from exhibitors. By inconveniencing and insulting everyone to stop a relatively small number of people who'd be willing to go through all the rigamarole of trading passes back and forth, they probably lost more ticket sales than they saved. Again, this is particularly moronic when it comes to exhibitors, who have to sit at the table for hours--if I can find a friend who's willing to trade off my pass, is it really an immense loss to the con if we split our time there? Exhibitors are where you make your money, FanExpo. You gain so much more by accomodating them than you do by playing Scrooge.

The annoying part is that these shenanigans cast a pall over everyone, resulting in no one being in a purchasing mood. Our sales were way, way down from last year as a result.

So yeah. Not really worth spending all summer preparing for in that respect.

There were some bright spots, though. Fellow Durham Comics Guild members Dylan, Kris and Nathan sold out of their 16-page book, Larz, which I'd printed on our newly-purchased communal printer. Which seems to work OK, and may enable us to print our own stuff from now on. I also personally sold several copies of Freak U. Volume 2 (which I'll post a link to as soon as IndyPlanet approves it, promise). What was most important and exciting, though, were the many people I met and made a real connection with, many of which might lead to possibilities or new talent for the guild. I actually met not one but two very talented sets of creators making a comic called "SpyGuy"--one of whom, Mike Kitchen, has been a mainstay of the Toronto area conventions for a while now, along with his brother Blair. There was also the amazing Steve Mannion, who is NOT a Toronto mainstay, but has a great action-hero name. What's exciting is that he came up from the same sort of situation that I and most of the Guild are coming from, and he was full of tips 'n' tricks. In addition, a LOT of other people contacted us about appearing at other shows.

So a mixed bag this year, but in the long run it may end up paying off. But the important thing is...it's over.

Miss Me?

Been super-busy. Aside from trying to keep my head above water with Lemuria and Freak U (both of which will hopefully have new printed material by this summer) I've been tackling some major illustration work which will be keeping me busy for a few weeks yet. But I am going to make an effort to blog more; I've got two big ideas for ongoing posts which I'm hoping to launch within the week.

In the meantime, I'm still contributing to and now editing the new comics review column at JoBlo.com, so if you want to read more of my golden thoughts, there's the place! We're now weekly, with a new column every Tuesday.

I Found A Way To Make A Fantasy Webcomic About Blogging. Go Me.

A new Swordi and Sorcera story begins today in Lemuria!

(At the time of writing, the comic isn't completely coloured yet. But it went up on time! I'm improving!)

Because I Was Losing Track of Which Earth This Was

OK, so I just learned about this. More details here (warning: link to AICN).

My first thought: this could be big. Very, very big.

Don't misunderstand me. In terms of the actual stories they apparently plan to tell, this sounds, um, inessential. Well, OK: unbelievably boring. But I'm saying that from the perspective of a longtime superhero comic reader. From the perspective of a teenager who hasn't read a Superman or Batman comic before--which, let's face it, is by no means improbable these days--this could only be somewhatboring.

Um. I'm getting a little off track here. Let's circle round and come back.

The crucial thing here is not the story, it's the publishing strategy. These are trade paperback OGNs aimed specifically at the book market, with a major publisher providing the marketing muscle. That's the potential paradigm shift here. In terms of sales, what the Big Two have been doing wrong has has less to do with their subject matter than their ability to break out of their fanatically loyal but tiny audience pool. Recent attempts to do so have largely been well-meaning but somewhat doomed, because they were creating material for new readers with no way for those new readers to get to them. Not only were they sold in the terrible pamphlet format, which in and of itself is forbidding to anyone who isn't a hardcore nerd, they were plunked on the direct market store* shelf alongside Rape Avenger and BoobGirl or whatever. And since "new readers" generally translate to "kids", you can imagine how well these have raked in the newbies.

This all seems pretty obvious to me, and I doubt many people would disagree, though given that a lot of people have a vested interest in the direct market they may balk at what needs to be done. But there's been pretty much no excuse for DC and Marvel to keep doing this; their job, or the jobs of the comic divisions at least, is to get their product out there, and they've suffered from an appalling lack of leadership in this regard. You get the definite sense that it's a combination of nerdy short-sightedness and fogeyism; bizarrely, a lot of comics publishers seem to be genuinely convinced--still--that the gold rush of the early 90s is going to return, and that that was ever a logical model for selling comics in the first place. I think that's part of the emphasis on the pamphlet format, and the reason they charge so much per issue; they're still stuck, if only subliminally, in the collector's mindset. Or rather, a lot of their readers are, and attempts to force them to move on have failed, so they figure they may as well keep catering to that attitude.

This, of course, goes against the whole reason pamphlets were created in the first place: they were cheap. You could buy a stack of them and not be out much money, which meant that your buying habits could be dictated by nothing more than "that looks cool". Which is how people would prefer to buy things, generally. When the prices get jacked up to the level they're at it becomes a matter of YOU MUST BUY THIS ISSUE BECAUSE IMPORTANT CONTINUITY STUFF HAPPENS, which is a pitch that only appeals to the hardcore. I really do think it's as simple as that.

So. Now we have DC launching this series which will be more accessible (it's an odd fact that Graphic Novels, even if they're more expensive than the individual issues that make them up, still feel more satisfactorily priced, because you get the sense that you sat down and read a full story), and are going to be plunked down where the non-hardcore can see them. I don't think a lot of Jane Austin fans are going to be compelled to pick this up, but the vast potential audience of "kids and teens who saw the movie" are actually being reached. Combine that with some actual marketing which, again, will presumably go beyond "Previews", and you've got the potential for superhero comics to actually become a popular genre again.

Now, I still think there are a lot of potential missteps here, starting with the subject matter. No one, and I mean no one, needs a new retelling of Superman or Batman's origin at this point. DC is clearly playing it safe, the way they've done with their animated movie series, but I think they're misjudging the market a little. The kid's and young adult's book audience is not as pathologically addicted to comfort food as the adult superhero audience; they're probably, on the whole, more likely to be looking for something new and different, especially if they're picking up a graphic novel for the first time. A new story featuring either of these two characters would probably go over better with new readers, not to mention the many lesser characters DC can't peddle to geeks but who could be big with kids. (If their next offering is a well-done Wonder Woman story, I think it could be huge--the ratio of girls looking for stuff to read is immensely higher in "real" bookstores.)

And it doesn't look much like these stories are aimed at younger kids, which is already a fairly successful audience for graphic novels that make it to bookstores. Likewise, even aside from the tiresome grim 'n' grittiness of many current titles (and both Straczynski and Johns are guilty of this) there's a sense of self-importance around superheroes that has led to lousy storytelling--decompression, talkiness, cloying pop culture references, you know the drill. These comics are so busy trying to be REAL ADULT DRAMA that they've forgotten the fun and imagination that appealled to kids, which is how they saturated the culture in the first place. If these new books are too heavy on the "standing around angsting" school of comics, they may not find traction.

But this might not matter. I think that a lot of comics fans--and I'm guilty of this--focus too much on the nitty gritty of the stories, thinking that there's some magic element we're missing that will achieve popularity. It's good in a sense, because it keeps us honest, and anything that can draw superhero comics back from the morass of self-referential wankery that they're constantly threatening to fall into is a good thing. But the fact of the matter is, there are a lot of cruddy movies, TV shows, and books that achieve massive popularity, and they're not, on average, any better than the average lousy comic. So I'm led to believe that yes, it is a failure of delivery rather than a failure of content that's been holding comics back. The new approach is a huge step, and it might be all it takes to break the logjam. I'll be watching this with interest...

*I happen to be lucky in that I have always had access to appealing, well-run comics stores; Toronto probably has more of these per square mile than any other city in North America, except maybe San Francisco. But even here, I've encountered enough of the traditional fleapits run by people with terrible social skills to relate to the horror stories, and let's face it, the very material offered by the comics industry lends a certain off-colour character to all but the most specialist of stores.

I Want 15 Minutes of Internet Fame Every 15 Minutes

Hey whoa!

I kicked back this weekend and spent a goodish chunk of it reconnecting with "friends" and "family"--you know, those things that interfere with making webcomics. But before I took my little hiatus from cyberspace, I read Chris Sim's Invincible Super-Blog, as I do pretty much every day. I'm sure anyone reading this knows of Chris, and he doesn't need my pathetic pimpage, but he truly is one of the most hilarious and enthusastic comics bloggers around. There are a whole ton of great comics bloggers out there--I should probably do a post linking to my favourites--and many of them are intellectually invigorating and funny, there's a certain collective sense of grimness hanging over them, a despair at how far the noble comics medium has sunk. Chris, along with Bully The Little Stuffed Bull, provides the vital service of keeping the comics blogosphere fun and engaging, and quite possibly prevents most of us who are still devoted to comics from slitting our wrists.

Anyway, while I'm sometimes a bit shy about pimping my stuff elsewhere, when Chris posted this, it struck me as a perfect opportunity to link to The Archon, not expecting more than a nod or two. To my surprise, I got a bunch of glowing praise in the ISB thread and a ton of hits, leading to a post on Johanna Draper Carlson's Comics Worth Reading blog. Which is another really excellent blog that I do read a lot. Sheesh, maybe I won't make a new post, this one has plenty of links.

It's not like I set the internet on fire or anything, but it was really gratifying to see something I've done get that much attention. A lot of the time I feel like I'm labouring in the trenches a bit, not making much of a splash out there in the comics world, so even a little thing like this means a lot to me.

Enough narcissism. The long and the short of this is that I'd been mulling over doing another, similar project--also featuring Dan DeCarlo style vs.comic-book SF--and this has made me determined to do it. More to come...


though I do find it a bit depressing how many intelligent, engaged feminist comics bloggers are



Which also means, incidentally, that traffic on this forum probably spiked heavily this weekend, for whatever that's worth...

Toronto FilmFest Reviews: Up in the Air

I started the filmfest with the work of one "Juno" alum, and I finish it with another. (And both have J. K. Simmons in them!) Jason Reitman's had both his previous films premiere at TIFF, and both times people were buzzing madly about them during the fest, so it's not surprising that "Up In the Air" received a hero's welcome this year, with people already anointing it this year's Oscar frontrunner. Unfortunately, even if the hype had been more modest I'm not sure the movie would have lived up to it. While this is a much better movie than the standard Oscar bait, it's actually probably my least favourite of Reitman's movies so far. Since my favourite is the wickedly satirical "Thank You For Smoking", his first movie, it's hard to avoid the feeling that Reitman is devolving as a filmmaker, or at least being swallowed by the Hollywood pap factory.

George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a successful corporate hatchetman who flies around the country firing employees for management types too craven to do it themselves. He's one of these guys who's adapted himself perfectly to the kind of job very few people can do successfully--he has to deal with angry, devastated, hopeless, sometimes even suicidal people, and make them leave, if not happily, than at least complacently. Ryan's not the kind of jerk who takes pleasure in this stuff, either--he sees it as a crucial part of his job to understand the people he's terminating, and set them on the path to getting their life back together. In fact, he honestly seems to believe he's giving people a neccessary push towards finding a better career, and he may even be right in some cases. Essentially, Ryan seems to enjoy engaging very passionately with people for a short period of time, and then cutting them loose. If you think this might be a metaphor for how Ryan approaches his relationships, well, give yourself a cigar.

Another way in which Ryan is uniquely suited for the job: he loves travelling, which he's got down to a science. Most business travelers yearn for the days they can spend at home; Ryan begrudges every moment he's not on the road. In fact, he's angling to become only the 8th person ever to accrue one million frequent flyer miles, which would grant him membership into an elite club with a ton of traveller's perks. He's got no one waiting for him at home--even his sisters (one of whom, Julie (Melanie Lynskey) is due to get married in a few weeks) are virtual strangers to him. When he meets Alex (Vera Farmiga), a fellow traveller with similar proclivities, he seems to have hit the jackpot: Alex jets around the country as much as he does, and she's happy to have a series of romantic flings with him every time their paths cross, then leave him alone the rest of the time.

Unfortunately, Ryan's lifestyle suddenly finds itself threatened by Natalie (Anna Kendrick, who's great), a fresh-out-of-Princeton middle-manager hired by his boss (Jason Bateman) to streamline their business. Her solution involves using teleconference screens to fire people over the net, an idea which Ryan hates, and with pretty good reason. A compromise is reached: Natalie will tag along with Ryan for a few weeks and learn the ins and outs, which she hopes will refine her process, and he hopes will show her and their boss what a lousy idea this is. Naturally, a mentor-student relationship develops, and both parties Learn Something About Themselves.

This movie is trying to be a cross between Jerry Maguire and In Good Company (that's the Dennis Quaid/Topher Grace movie from a few years back about a rivalry between an older and younger executive that morphs into friendship). I liked both those movies--yeah, I like Jerry Maguire, sue me--because they had a sense of humanity first and foremost. You couldn't call them "unpredictable", per se, but it felt like the plot was evolving naturally out of the characters' decisions rather than following a screenwriter's formula, and its emotional beats felt earned. "Up In the Air", on the other hand, features some fine acting--that's probably the best thing about it--and the characters are relatively well-fleshed out, but the plot feels like a bigger concern here, and it's entirely predictable once you get to the second act. In fact, the climax features the kind of "romantic" moment that Clooney, with the Coen brothers, already skewered in "Intolerable Cruelty". There's a late, minor twist, but I saw that one coming too. Frankly, the whole movie feels like it's trying too hard to be heartwarming.

This is a light and genial movie, suitable for a holiday movie rental with your parents or something, but there's no way it deserves a Best Picture win. And Reitman really needs to steer his ship towards edgier waters--I would hate for "Smoking" to turn out to be a fluke.

Toronto FilmFest Reviews: The Invention of Lying

There seems to have been a mini-golden age for British comedy shows in the last decade; I've gone on about The League of Gentlemen in the past, and I've only just discovered the genius that is Garth Merenghi's Darkplace, to name two. Of course, the two big stars to emerge from this are Simon Pegg and Ricky Gervais, both of whom have had mixed successes in movies--Pegg's starred in two absolute classics, but away from Edgar Wright he actually has a pretty lousy track record. As for Gervais, he's made some forgettable cameos (Night at the Museum? Why, Ricky?!?) and starred in one decent but overly genial movie, Ghost Town. I say "overly genial" because Gervais's TV work, for the lucky three or four of you who have yet to experience it, is known for being dark and cutting and gleefully horrible, and I'm among the many who are deeply worried that Gervais is too eager to neuter himself for Hollywood.

This worry lingered a bit for the first few minutes of "The Invention of Lying", which, as you no doubt know by now, is about a world in which everyone tells the truth, through some unexplained quirk of history (or possibly neurological evolution?) The concept, needless to say, provides tons of comedic fodder which is used to its utmost. The concern came because most of the really nasty stuff, at first, was aimed squarely at Gervais's character Mark Bellison, as he goes on a blind date with Anna McDoogles (Jennifer Garner) and is, naturally, subject to her constant torrent of frankness. Despite her eventual admittance that she had a better time than she expected, she also tells Mark that she won't be going out with him again, because he's just not attractive enough.

This is all quite funny but a little on the fluffy side. It's once Mark goes into work the next day that the movie really starts to flex its muscles and become darkly insightful and imaginative. Mark works as a screenwriter, which in this world is a pretty limiting profession (I'll leave it to you to imagine the details), and given his recent output he's on the verge of losing his job, as his secretary (Tina Fey, in the first of many MANY celebrity cameos) can't help but remind him. His professional archnemesis, Brad Kessler (Rob Lowe) gloats over his coming downfall in a hilariously straightforward depiction of office politics (at least there's no backstabbing in this world!). On top of all this, Mark is on the verge of being evicted from his apartment...until an opportunity arises, a couple of neurons click together, and Mark invents the world's first lie. Suddenly, Mark has the means to turn his life around, though even with his newfound power there are bound to be complications.

The whole first half of this movie builds and builds, getting increasingly daring in where it's willing to go for humour. There's one moment where Mark backs away from taking full advantage of his power, which felt a little like Gervais getting cold feet, but it's more than made up for by what comes later. Mark comes up with one big lie, meant with only the best of intentions...and suddenly his whole society is in turmoil, and Mark keeps digging in deeper in an attempt to fix things. Believe me when I say I couldn't *believe* where Gervais was willing to go with the concept, and it's not even hinted at in the trailers. The knives are going to be out for this one, believe me.

I was so busy picking my jaw up off the floor that I didn't really mind when the rest of the movie quickly slipped back into romcom mode and spent the bulk of the remaining time on Mark and Anna's relationship, which does get a little sappy. I do feel like the air is leaking out of the movie throughout the third act (though there are still a couple of great gags), which is disappointing, as I feel like the movie could have been a true classic if it had continued in the direction that it was going. Still--the fact that it went there at all is pretty amazing, and more than justifies the price of the ticket. 2/3rds of a comedy classic are better than none. Also, this movie cures cancer and is made of ice cream.

Toronto FilmFest Reviews: Shinboru (Symbol)

When is a subgenre born? Does it simply derive from a formula or certain elements that are reused often enough? Or can it be a set of expectations you bring into the theater with you? I ask because Symbol seems to be deliberately riffing on all of these things, trying to find the line where familiar tropes become, well, symbols. It plays both with a familiar subgenre and a less-familiar setup that's on the verge of becoming a subgenre at this point; you could even argue that this is the movie that pushes it over.

For most of its running time, Symbol seems to be two completely unrelated movies running parallel to each other. One is a Mexican Lucha Libre movie (or maybe "short film" is more appropriate, given the relatively small amount of running time it involves). It's perfectly conventionally shot and with a simple narrative; the wrestler Escargot Man prepares for a tag team match, while a kid in the audience cheers him on.

The other storyline is deliberately, seemingly perversely different. A nameless Japanese man (comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto, who also wrote and directed) wakes up in a featureless white room about the size of a bachelor apartment, wearing a set of candy-coloured pajamas and a ridiculous bowl cut. He has no idea how he got there. Exploring the room, he finds exactly one notable feature: a button on the wall shaped like, uh, male genitalia. Pressing it triggers an explosion of cherubs from the wall, who leave behind...more penis-shaped buttons. Pressing those buttons, in turn, triggers a bizarre and seemingly useless array of objects that come shooting out of the walls, along with other, generally disagreeable effects (like one which turns into a butt and farts toxic fumes at him). Eventually, though, some of the buttons start to reveal their potential usefulness in mounting an escape...except that whoever trapped him in this room seems determined to screw with his head.

Believe it or not, all this weirdness turns out to be headed somewhere relatively straightforward. I mean, it's still a weird movie that I'm sure even Matsumoto wouldn't be able to explain completely, employing as it does Lynchian dream logic and a love of the absurd for the absurd's sake. But the two threads do end up coming together in a way that...well, "makes sense" might not be the way to put it, but they do come together to make a point. The movie makes an attempt at profundity near the end which is a lot more palatable for being weird and slightly inexplicable.

Up until then, aside from the slight and seemingly straightforward Luchadore subplot, the movie is a one-man show. Matsumoto unfortunately depends a little too much on mugging and acting zanily idiotic--the character he's playing makes a number of choices that reveal him to be a dimbulb--but the situation is a natural one for humour, especially as the faceless forces that control the room seem to enjoy tormenting him. There's also a hilarious recurring sequence in which comic book panels narrate Pajamas Guy's various plans for escape while Matsumoto grooves out in the foreground. (And the narration is in English for some reason!)

I'm not sure if "Shinboru" has some other shading of meaning that doesn't translate well into English--I'm assuming that the Symbol of the title refers to the little penis-buttons (yeah, I knew writing this review was going to be awkward), but it also seems to relate to the various motifs and elements we expect in a genre story, and the storyteller's attempt to break free of them. In that sense, this is an extremely meta movie. One thing's for sure, if the movie's about helping to define genres, than its clearly staking out a patch of ground under "bizarre Japanese mindf***".

Toronto FilmFest Reviews: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

#2 in the "didn't see the original" lineup for this year's fest. (I actually ended up skipping the third.) This has been a fascinating movie to watch being made--you've got one of the most eccentric directors and one of the most eccentric actors around, plus a feud between Herzog and the director of the original (not the most sane of directors himself), a villain played by a (shudder) rapper-turend-actor, and a small role for Val Kilmer into the bargain. Throw in one of the most off-the-wall trailers of the year, and it doesn't seem that unreasonable that the end product would be one of the most memorably deranged movies ever made. And yet this movie--despite certainly having off-the-wall moments--is ultimately disappointingly conventional.

Nicholas Cage plays Terence McDonough (No relation to H.I., I assume), the titular Bad Lieutenant this time out. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Cage did something valorous--it may have been saving a prisoner who'd been in lock-up as the flood waters rose around him, and who Cage (and his partner Stevie Pruit--Kilmer) seemed happy to let drown right up until the last moment. It's not made clear if that's what earns him his promotion to lieutenant, or indeed if it's what caused the back pain that plagues him a year later. Terry's prescribed medication by his doctor, but being the rotten egg he is Terry already seems to have other pharmaceutical interests, including crack which a fellow officer regularly procures for him from the evidence room, and which he shares with his prostitute girlfriend Frankie (Eva Mendes). Unfortunately, the other officer is getting cold feet, and Terry's supply is drying up; he's reduced to shaking down kids outside of clubs (or maybe "reduced" isn't the right word--he seems to outright relish it).

At any rate, the plot kicks off with the murder of a family of Sengalese immigrants who may have been involved with drugs. The clues are pointing at a local drug dealer, Big Fate (Xzibit, who's not bad, despite my earlier snark) but as Terry pursues him, he seems to care less and less about solving the crime and more about finding ways to turn Big Fate into a useful friend. Meanwhile his gambling debts are piling up, his encounter with one of Frankie's customers leads to even bigger trouble, and the cocktail of drugs coursing through his system are on the brink of causing a neurological meltdown.

The movie I was most reminded of, watching this flick, was Scarface, despite the fact that the protagonist is ostensibly on the other side of the law. Both movies chart the "professional" rise and the psychological breakdown of a larger-than-life criminal who revels in bad behaviour, who may be troubled by guilt and even entertain thoughts of redemption, but doesn't seem to know how to accomplish this except by getting into more trouble. This tension between whether Terry will make a play at redemption or fall completely to the dark side powers the movie, and the outcome is by no means certain in a Werner Herzog movie. Likewise, Cage, in his usual full-throttle crazy mode, is constantly entertaining. We may not like to admit it, but we--or many of us, at least--enjoy watching people Get Away With It, indulging in our worst impulses without consequences (at least not for a while), and this movie provides this exact spectacle. In fact, this may be Cage's magnum opus when it comes to crazy performances.

Unfortunately, the movie itself is nowhere near as entertainingly unhinged as its protagonist. If you've seen the trailer, you've seen everything that qualifies as a "WTF" moment; the rest is a pretty conventional police/crime thriller. According to Herzog's remarks at the beginning, he didn't want to call the movie "Bad Lieutenant" at all, but he was being financed by the guy who owned the rights, and "wanted to start a franchise". This is a truly lousy idea, unless said financier plans to hire every demented director he can to keep remaking this movie in different cities. But even then, the end results here tend far more towards the conventional than you would hope, so I have a hard time getting behind that idea either. All in all, the various misconceived, train-wreck aspects of this movie seem to have cancelled each other out and resulted in a watchable but disappointingly middle-of-the-road flick.

Toronto FilmFest Reviews: Solomon Kane

For all his cinematic sins, I'll never be able to completely condemn George Lucas. The man reawakened the pulp action-swashbuckler, one of my favourite genres, and one that might never have been the same after the 60s and 70s if it hadn't been for Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. (I really don't want to get into whether those two, and Jaws, killed the boom of great 70s movies, but, um, they didn't.) A swashbuckler, especially one with SF or fantasy elements, can almost never fail to entertain me, as long as it rises to the level of "competent".

"Competent" describes this new Solomon Kane movie to a T. Except for one odd aspect, the movie is about as generic as it's possible to be given the subject matter. Yet I had fun, even while acknowledging that this could have been so much better.

Kane (James Purefoy, best known as Marc Antony on Rome) is the second-born son of a Devonshire nobleman (Max "the Von Sydow" Von Sydow) who is disinherited by his father after he refuses to enter the priesthood. Fleeing England, he turns to piracy, and in 1600 he and his men storm a North African stronghold in search of treasure, only to encounter a supernatural, demonic force who claims that Kane's soul belongs to them. Shaken, Kane returns to England and enters a convent (I think?) in an attempt to purge his sins, but is sent away by the head Abbot/Panjandorum because of a dream he had. Yes, really. Kane next takes up with a family of puritans, led by Pete "the Postletwaite" Postlethwaite and Alice "the Krige" Krige, and finds a temporary happiness. But evil is ravaging the land, and naturally, Kane's vow of non-violence is about to be tested.

While I've only read a couple of Robert E. Howard's original Kane stories, I felt like the character was pretty well-represented here; a lot of new details were added, but as far as I can tell the basics of the character were all nailed. What's more, the grim tone, the theme of penance and the storyline that puts the hero face to face with pure evil all seem perfectly well-suited to Solomon Kane. Which is why I feel a little churlish in pointing out just how many action-adventure movies these days hit these exact same beats. Somehow, without going out of their way to change things (Kane's emo backstory might be considered a bit over-the-top), writer-director Michael J. Bassett feels like he's fundamentally watered-down the character. Sure, he's still a dour puritan who scowls in the face of evil, but the way it's handled he becomes pretty much indistinguishable from any troubled pretty-boy wannabe badass adventure hero seeking redemption, the type of which we get so often these days. In particular, it's hard not to think of "Van Helsing", especially since Purefoy both resembles and seems to be trying to imitate Hugh Jackman. Based on what I've seen of Van Helsing, this is a significantly better movie, but it still gets (fairly or otherwise) saddled with a feeling of been-there, done-that.

The other odd thing about this movie is how closely it hews to the structure of an 80s barbarian flick. Bassett is clearly well aware that he's adapting the work of Robert E. Howard, but he lets that inform the story too much, with a sorcerous warlord sending out hordes of reavers, led by a faceless brute, to pillage the countryside, and Our Hero must carry the torch for the downtrodden people to rise up against etc. etc. etc. This is particularly weird since it turns Elizabethan England into, apparently, the Hyborian age. I realize it was still a pretty brutal era in many ways, but surely there was, like, an army to stop warriors from rampaging across the kingdom unchecked? But then, this is a movie that doesn't seem to particularly care about the difference between catholicism and protestantism when it comes to its lead character's faith--one's as good as another to a 17th century Englishman seeking redemption, right?

I didn't mean to trash this movie quite as roundly as I did, but the more I consider it, the more of a blown opportunity this seems like. I remember an article I read as a teen pointing out that action/adventure movies are all about character, and that a hero with distinctive character traits who inhabits a well-realized, unique world is probably the single most important element in such a movie. Yet here's a flick that takes a pre-existing, memorable character and seems determined to make him as generic as possible. If there's fun to be had here, it's pretty much in spite of the movie's intentions.

Toronto FilmFest Reviews: [REC] 2

I wound up seeing a number of movies at the fest that were follow-ups to movies I hadn't seen; this was the first one. The original was a reportedly very scary Spanish zombie movie; it was remade as the apparently less-satisfying Quarantine, which I haven't seen either. So, uh, apologies for any mistakes in what follows. Also, of necessity, I'm going to reveal stuff which I believe was more surprising in the original film.

The sequel begins 15 minutes after the events of the original movie, with a SWAT team prepping to enter a quarantined building along with an official from the Ministry of Health (Jonathan Mellor). Some kind of viral outbreak has caused the inhabitants to start acting very strangely, in a manner familiar to anyone who's seen a zombie movie (though, at first, they seem to be more or less the same as the Infected from 28 Days later, rather than actual undead people). The Health official (I didn't catch his name, sorry) is unusually determined and seems to know more about the outbreak than he's letting on.

It's revealed quickly that the "Health official" is in fact a priest, an agent of the Vatican (God, I love movies with secret agent priests. I'm not even being sarcastic.) and that a former colleague of his is responsible for the outbreak. No mere disease, this is apparently a biologically transmitted form of demonic possession, originating from a single possessed girl. The former owner of the building's penthouse was another Vatican agent who was working on finding a cure, but instead the demonic influence began to spread like a disease. The agent is determined to find a sample of the original girl's blood, something he knows can be used to formulate a cure--and something he can't let any of the SWAT members, or any of the other survivors they encounter, leave without.

I know the original was filmed in real-time from the POV of a camera that existed within the world of the story, like Cloverfield. This movie is the same, and like any sequel provides us with a technological upgrade. In this case, it's the SWAT members who have a digital camera with a feature that lets them cut between the cameras installed in the helmets of the various team members. Another camera is added to the mix in the form of three teenagers who sneak into the building just for kicks, before they realize how serious the situation is. And yet a third camera, this one with an infrared capability, comes along later with a survivor of the original movie (Manuela Velasco). Directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza manage to use these cameras quite effectively to tell the story in a mostly seamless manner, with only a little of the nauseating shaky-cam that tends to haunt these things. There are a few times when it seems too convenient, if not outright boneheaded, for everything to be filmed as nicely as it is (near the climax, the other characters are left to grope around in darkness as the cameraman watches from the sideline with the night-vision), but given that it lets us see what's going on clearly, I can't complain too much.

This is a taut and effectively chilling movie that makes great use of locations and atmosphere to get you squirming in your seat. I think the best compliment I can give this movie is that it relies on two worn-out tropes, the zombie movie and the POV-cam movie, yet works tremendously for all that.

Toronto FilmFest Reviews: A Serious Man

I've had to let this one stew for a while. The Coen brothers are funny--they can make incredibly tight, spare movies like No Country For Old Men, and then they can turn around and make thematically and narratively dense flicks like Miller's Crossing. A Serious Man is one of the latter, and I'm going to have to see it at least once more to unpack everything that's going on here. I'm fairly certain, though, that it's one of their best.

Larry Gopnik (Mitch Stuhlbarg)'s life is in turmoil. He's a physics professor who's up for tenure, when he's confronted with a Korean student (Stephen Park) who wants to bribe him to get a passing grade. Meanwhile Larry's wife (Sari Lennick) suddenly announces that she wants a divorce, because she's fallen in love with their hilariously touchy-feely neighbour Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). The two of them proceed to bully him out of his own house, along with his brother Arthur (Richard Kind) who was already sleeping on their couch. On top of that, his son Danny (Aaron Wolff) is approaching his bar mitzvah, but he's got troubles of his own, being harassed by a bully for the money he owes him for pot.

Larry's life becomes so incredibly tumuluous that he suffers an existential crisis and begins a campaign to seek advice from various rabbis. Unfortunately, their advice is rarely conforting and often actively bewildering. If only he could get in to see the legendary Rabbi Marshak (Alan Mendell), maybe it would all make sense...

What's impressive about this movie is that, even at a glance, it seems to be working on several different thematic levels at once. I'm pretty sure it's functioning both as a primer on Jewish philosophy and an examination of rationality vs. mysticism, while at the same time it's a more personal story about guilt. And I've heard one critic mention that it can further be read as a refutation of chaos theory! Needless to say, some of this goes over my head, but it's still a fascinating movie that I'll be chewing over for a while to come.

It's also pretty darn funny, as you'd expect, in that dry, weird Coen way. It's got a certain spark to it, too, a sense almost of joy in spite of the rather cynical goings-on; almost like the Coens were struggling a bit to maintain their usual detatchment and contempt for the characters. But then, since the Coens are Jewish and grew up in Minnesota in the 60s, which is the same time, place and culture that provides the backdrop for this movie, it's hard to escape the idea that they may have made a more personal film than usual. It's certainly interesting to see the Coens tackling the big questions of God and Fate and the Universe, not that they treat it with any less snarkiness than they do anything else.

Clearly on track to be the best movie I'll see at the festival, unless "Up In The Air" is really, really good.