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Saturday, May 11, 2002 ( 5/11/2002 08:56:00 AM ) Bill S. MARK GREENE REDUX – Webhead pushed ahead of the E.R. doc yesterday, but I couldn’t omit commenting on our dying hero’s final moments. Thursday’s ep of E.R., written and directed by John Wells, took us to Hawaii with the terminal Greene and his daughter – lots of father/child moments as Anthony Edwards made his last heartbreaking stabs at connecting with the surly teen. It provided strong counterpoint to the storyline several seasons back around Green’s attempts to make a connection with his own dying father. The episode offered Edwards good acting moments (most startling scene: when Greene, who’s been losing functional control of his right side, falls to the floor trying to get out of bed and lets loose with a single angry, “Shit!” – for all that South Park ran that word into the ground, it still has impact when used unexpectedly to denote a strong emotion) and was wise enough not to totally resolve the father/daughter conflict in a neat TV package. A decent old-fashioned swan song, I thought: sentimental in spots but not unjustly so. It was certainly better than NBC’s Hallmark-toned promos (“Come – say goodbye to Mark Green one last time!”) would have led you to believe. Sometimes a network’s promotional department is a series’ worst enemy. # | ( 5/11/2002 08:48:00 AM ) Bill S. ALPHA MALES & MISSED DEMEANORS – When it came down to the wire, I picked Spider-Man over Woody Allen’s new movie this week, and, on the basis of the slam reviews it’s been receiving, I’ll most likely be waiting for Hollywood Ending to show up on cable before I see it. (Not a bad thing: Allen’s comedies aren’t much diminished by the move to small screen.) Word has it that the new flick pretty much nails the coffin on Allen’s screen persona – too bad, but I suspect the guy might still have some good comedies in him, even if they don’t star him. Purple Rose of Cairo and Bullets Over Broadway (to pick two obvious examples) were both great flicks featuring other actors in the basic Allen role: in Cairo’s case, the role was taken by Mia Farrow, in Broadway by John Cusack. Part of the trick, I continue to suspect, lies in Allen working with a good sympathetic co-scripter (e.g., Douglas McGrath on Broadway) with a more contemporarily-attuned ear for weeding out the clunkers. Reading all the pans of Allen’s newest starring vehicle, I couldn’t help zeroing in on the number of times that critics called attention to the age discrepancy between Allen and his leading ladies. The man’s past public actions have heightened this focus, of course, but I still find it interesting to note that while an action hero like Clint Eastwood can wine and dine any number of younger types in his flicks, only the comedian gets called on it. (When Hitchcock was casting North By Northwest, he used Jessie Royce Landis, a woman who was the same age as Cary Grant, to play Grant’s mother, while Grant got to romance the considerably younger Eva Marie Saint.) Maybe we’re more willing to accept this age gap when the hero is an alpha male – instead of a weedy geezer like Woody. Or maybe critics are just tired of Allen himself, playing the age card as a way to slam him without getting much disagreement from their readership. # | Friday, May 10, 2002 ( 5/10/2002 01:20:00 PM ) Bill S. ARACHNOPHILIA – I really wanted to like Spider-Man, and I did. But I’m still trying to sort out how much my love of the movie is steeped in my need to love it and how much is in the film itself. Saw it for the first time yesterday, and I know I’ll be seeing it a second time in the theaters before summer’s end. By the standards of the Hollywood summer flick, Spider-Man delivers the goods, with much more clarity than we’ve seen in many of these CGI-heavy action fantasies. But the movie only takes off in fits and starts; it never fully catches fire and swoops you into its world the way that a great flick can. I did not, on leaving the multiplex, immediately want to turn around and watch it all over again – like I did, say, with director Sam Raimi’s debut film. With adapted movies you’ve got two primary critical concerns:
As a reader, I always return to the source: Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s painfully nerdy Parker, the kid who’s thrust into adulthood before he’s ready by the sudden acquisition of power and the death of his “father,” Uncle Ben. The early Lee/Ditko version may look clunky by today’s standards, but that’s always worked to its benefit. Reading those seminal books is like reading original versions of Grimm’s Household Stories over their later gussied-up and bowdlerized fairy tale revamps. Their relative crudity adds to their sense of straightforward honesty. Tobey Maguire’s Parker is not that version – for one thing, he’s three years older (a sea change when you’re talking adolescence), much more capable of sloughing off the vestiges of his geeky teen-hood once he’s been transformed by that fateful spider bite. But he does connect to a Spider-Man I recognize: the later Stan Lee model done in collaboration with artists John Romita Sr. and Gil Kane. That era of Spider-Man is the one that provides the most meat for the movie, particularly in its second half when Peter moves into the city with Harry Osborne and has his showdown with Harry’s father, Green Goblin, on top of that city bridge. Not a bad period to use (most likely, it’s the era director Raimi and scripter David Koepp know best), though it stints on much of the doubt and guilt that made the more callow Spider-Man so much fun. (One quick example: when Daily Bugle blowhard J. Jonah Jameson initiates his anti-Spidey campaign in the press, the Lee/Ditko version wonders more than once if J.J.J. is right; Maguire's Parker is given two moments to argue with the old gasbag.) Still, the moviemakers could’ve picked from much more fallow periods. As for the movie itself: like other superhero origin flicks, it’s really two stories – the first half setting up our hero and his abilities, the second showing him in battle with a suitably villainous arch-nemesis. Traditionally (think Superman – The Movie, with its stentorian Krypton/Smallville opener and its energetically campy Lex Luthor closer), the second half is where the filmmakers really get to go town, but I found myself more enthralled by Spider-Man’s set-up than its putative pay-off. Parker’s first fumbling attempts at controlling his organic webshooters provide some nicely low-down comedy, while the moments where he actually comes to grips with his newfound powers (our hero’s first webspun race across the city rooftops, his caged wrestling match) have a giddy rush that totally had me on the movie’s side. Raimi and Koepp even stage our hero’s most self-absorbed moment – the character-changing instant where Parker doesn’t stop the robber who’ll in turn kill his Uncle Ben – as a temporary victory against the slimy wrestling promoter who has just stiffed Spidey. But once Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin takes center stage, the flick becomes more pedestrian. I initially liked the look of the character, reminiscent of the old Japanese Starman movies, but after a while, the inflexible hard-cast of his helmet mask proved a distraction. Dafoe’s best scenes center around him ranting at himself in his mansion, but even these started to pale after a while: I kept waiting for Raimi to break into the gonzo motions of his Evil Dead flicks, and it never happened. Could be that Raimi was so concerned about getting the look of the comic book right (I happily laughed out loud at the moment where the shadow of our hero appears behind Uncle Ben’s killer in their warehouse confrontation: hanging upside by his web, the figure has the jaunty bow-legged look of classic Spider-Man) that he was afraid to really cut loose. Like a Merchant-Ivory production so focused on the look of a classic work that the story and character elements get shorted, Spider-Man makes all the right moves but inconsistently captures the heart and soul of its source. I may be in the minority here. But when Cliff Robertson’s Uncle Ben gives his load-bearing speech about “great power and responsibility,” I didn’t quite swallow how he even built to the line. When Parker’s Aunt May is threatened by the Green Goblin, the scene is so truncated that we’re not even worried about her being in peril (poor Rosemary Harris doesn’t even get a good cowering scene!) When roomie Harry Osborne declares his loathing for Spider-Man, blaming Peter for the death of super-villain Norman Osborne, we’re not even sure how he got there. When Peter turns away from the love of his life, Mary Jane Watson (Kirstin Dunst), out of concern for her safety, the agony of that decision is never really communicated (though I really wanted it to be, since the moment was most like the early chracter). Too many Big Moments in Spider-Man happen because Koepp scripted ‘em, not because they convincingly derived from the story. (Lest we forget, Koepp is the screenwriter who once had a dinosaur dock a crew-less cargo ship in Jurassic Park II, so it's not there aren't any precedents here.) Those grouses aside, there’s plenty to love about the movie. Raimi and co. do a grand job catching the feel of a simultaneously real and imaginary N.Y.C. and environs. (One moment between Peter and M.J., showing the row of cramped fenced-in Queens backyards catches the setting perfectly.) Though some of the secondary actors don’t quite match our visual sense of the characters (a dark-haired Flash Thompson?), the main cast convincingly inhabits its underwritten characters. Maguire and Dunst are particularly fine as the leads: even under his mask, Maguire’s voice reminds us of the still-nervous kid beneath, and while Dunst’s Mary Jane may not be the va-va-voom Romita-rendered party girl that she started out to be in the books, the actress has endowed her with a winningly sly flirtatiousness. J.K. Simmons’ Jameson is a major hoot, too. I fully expected not to, but I also found myself getting off on the CGI effects. Palpably artificial, they nevertheless were more convincing than any of the alternative approaches that the movies have given us. (Four Supermans plus a Supergirl, and I still don’t believe a man/girl can fly.) I have no doubt at all that a decade from now audiences will be laughing at our visual naiveté, but for now some of the movie’s action scenes just plain look cool! Watching our hero balletically swerve from web to web, then suddenly stick fast to the side of a wall, I knew I was at the movie I’d come to see. It’s possible that repeat viewings will wipe away the brace of good feelings I have for this flick. But for the moment, at least, I can state unequivocally that this year’s Spider-Man is, pound for pound, the best and more faithful mainstream superhero flick that I’ve ever seen. At least until Ang Lee’s Hulk comes out. . . # | Thursday, May 09, 2002 ( 5/09/2002 08:28:00 AM ) Bill S. DEFENDER OF THE AMERICAN DREAM – I can see the thinking behind Marvel Knight’s current Captain America series: if any American superhero was designed to “Fight Terror” (as the cover to issue #2 advises us), it’s the warrior of World War II. Marvel’s most blatant attempt to catch that War on Terror zeitgeist, the new Captain America opens on the same scene we saw in that Amazing Spider-Man WTC issue: our hero sifting through the rubble of the 9-11 attack. (None of the other supertypes from Straczynski’s original story are visible, though – what a buncha fair weather heroes!) Midpoint into the first issue, and it’s seven months later. We’re in Centerville (a real nice place to raise your kids up), a small-town that's attacked by terrorists led by a fundamentalist madman named Al-Tariq. We’re not told much about the terrorists in the first two issues, but it’s pretty clear that they’re meant to be Muslim. Al-Tariq and his crew have somehow gotten into this small American town (pop.: 600). “Before this is over,” the narration assures our hero, “somebody’s going to tell you how this could happen . . . three hundred miles into American airspace.” That many Marvel supervillains can span the world without worrying about the niceties of international borders doesn’t seem germane. What matters is the fact that the Evil Terrorists are holding Centerville hostage and want to affect an exchange with Cap. They hope to defeat and kill this symbol of America, “to pay with his blood for the crimes of a nation of blood.” Reading this series, you can’t help but feel transported to the glory days of reactionary war films like John Milius’ Red Dawn or the Chuck Norris actioner Invasion U.S.A.. The flicks were utter crap, but they also fed into real public fears. To his credit, scripter John Ney Rieber at least manages to deflect any criticism of xenophobic pandering by including a scene in the first issue where an Arabic American youth (“My name’s Samir, not Osama. And my father was born on this street –") is threatened by a grieving NYC father, only to be stopped by Cap with an inspirational “We’re all Americans” speech. While I have no doubt at all that savvy filmmakers are currently filming their own War on Terror fantasias, it’s a testimony to the speed with which comics can be produced that Marvel’s managed to rush out this series. I’m not sure it works in the context of the Marvel Universe, but I also suspect that many readers won’t care very much about that. What’s primary is the sight of our hero kicking terrorist butt. This he does. But, hey, he’s Captain America – what'd you expect? # | Wednesday, May 08, 2002 ( 5/08/2002 12:18:00 PM ) Bill S. “I WONDER WHY WE LISTEN TO POETS” – Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is one those albums whose back story has received almost as much attention as the work itself. It’s an admittedly irresistible story: critically lauded alterna-pop band, after three cultishly successful elpees for a major label (Warner Bros), can’t get said label to support their fourth release. While shopping for a new label (which ironically turns out to be a WB subsidiary), the group places the material on its website and builds up fannish interest. When the CD is finally released, the critical kudos are quick in coming – a triumphant victory for artistic integrity! I’ve listened to the album repeatedly since I bought it last weekend, and I’m puzzled by Warners’ original balk. Foxtrot doesn’t sound all that different from past Wilco outings (Summerteeth, in particular). Songwriter Jeff Tweedy merges roots rock with singer/songwriter contemplativeness: he’s like a pomo Tom Petty with much of the pissy energy drained out. When he’s on, he creates beautiful pop sounds; when he’s off, he gets all drone-y. Happily, Foxtrot leans more toward pop than nod, though you probably wouldn't wanna put it on if you had to keep awake on a long drive. There are great moments of guitar noise on the disc (e.g., the spare electric freak-out that caps “I’m the Man Whose Loves You;” the fuzz-tones that take “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” into darker territory), some Beatle-style psychedelia (“Pot Kettle Black” has background orchestration that reminds me of XTC’s “Grass”), quirky hooks plus lyrics that anticipate our current dark political climate (“Ashes of American Flags”) without concretely commenting on it. I could do without the moody sustained keyboarding on the disc’s final track, though I enjoyed the calculatedly off-key piano work on the album’s opener – so I guess that’s a wash. I continue to contend that Tweedy is moving toward a pure pop mean that’ll some day lead to a bang-up album. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is not that work, but I think he’s getting closer. Just stay away from the Sominex, Jeff. # | ( 5/08/2002 09:05:00 AM ) Bill S. TARA, TARA, TARA – Figures that soon as they place Amber Benson’s Tara on the opening cast creds of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that they’d do something horrendous to her last night. (What? Stealing her brain last season wasn’t enough?) You knew things were gonna blow up on the show when they devoted so much of the first half hour to how buoyant and happy the reunited Willow and Tara were. Haven’t read any fan site comments on last night’s ep, but I suspect that some gay-friendly fans are already sharpening their pens in anticipatory condemnation of Tara, the Lesbian Martyr. Meanwhile in our ongoing quest for comic book riffs, we have this brief moment. Buffy has uncovered and entered the Evil Nerds’ lair. Casing the joint, she comes upon some collector’s models. Among them, she spies Vampirella, Warren Comics’ sexy vampire heroine from the planet Draculon. Confronted by this exemplar of horny adolescent fanboyishness, all our heroine can say is, “Ewwww.” This from the gal who's been Spike's boytoy these last few months . . . # | Tuesday, May 07, 2002 ( 5/07/2002 04:30:00 PM ) Bill S. THE COLOR OF NO MONEY - Came out of my monthly poker game $11.20 poorer this week: my biggest loss in over a year (so much for that Nice Price CD I was eyeing the other day!) Consequently, I’m just too depressed to comment on pop culture today. . . # | Monday, May 06, 2002 ( 5/06/2002 09:40:00 AM ) Bill S. IT’S A WEBHEAD WORLD - To nobody’s real surprise, Spider-Man had a record-breaking opening weekend: something media watchers had been predicting but still pretty cool to see. Predicting movie openings is no-lose proposition for media types. If a flick doesn’t meet the projection, it’s never because the one doing the number crunch was off – it’s because the movie was a disappointment. I try to ignore that game, in part, because the stuff I most often like doesn’t always have Big Numbers. In the case of Spidey reportage, though, the opening box has been difficult to ignore. I wasn’t part of that record-breaking mob: had too many family obligations and, besides, with a flick like this you know it’s gonna be around for a while. So I’ve got no fast-breaking commentary on the movie today. I know I’m violating the Internet Rules of Instant Engagement, but so it goes. I’m glad to see the movie’s doing well, though I remain dubious about the usual stories that claim the movie’ll pull Marvel out of the heaps. This has never happened before – the success of comics will rise or fall on the worth of comics themselves, not a Hollywoodized take on the material – and I don’t think it’ll happen now. The movie will no doubt pull in a few curious readers, particularly since Marvel’s been heavily hitting chain bookstores with trade releases. But holding onto ‘em is something else again. # | Sunday, May 05, 2002 ( 5/05/2002 03:04:00 PM ) Bill S. THE WOODMAN - Watching Woody Allen: A Life in Film, Richard Schickel’s career-spanning TCM interview with the comedian/filmmaker, got me considering the career of this much-abused funny guy. I enjoy Woody’s movies – even the serious ones – though even the most ardent Woodmaniac would have to admit that his output’s been spotty. Last fully successful Allen flick that I recall was Crimes and Misdemeanors, his seriocomic take on Reagan Era amorality: largely on the basis of Martin Landau’s great heart of darkness performance. But even a trifle like Manhattan Murder Mystery or Mighty Aphrodite keeps my attention. I like the worlds they evoke and I like the voice of their creator. Schickel’s ninety-minute docu-interview, reportedly culled from four hours of interviewing, breezes through the highlights of the filmmaker’s career. It provides a good retrospective of his hits as well as some of the more interesting misses, though there are some curious omissions (or am I the only one who misses A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy?) The format at times seems restrictive – just Allen speaking into the camera, followed by some snippets of film footage to illustrate what he’s talking about – and at times I wished for the presence of a more assertive interviewer. But perhaps the approach was the best way to get Allen to open up (clearly, the man has reason to be wary about the press): as it is, Allen frequently undercuts the merits of his own work. I would have liked to’ve seen a discussion about the condition in which the early films were made (Allen’s funniest films were written with collaborators, Mickey Rose and Marshall Brickman), in part, because I suspect that this collaborative process was a healthy one for his movies. But though Brickman receives a cursory mention, the documentary's primary focus was on the more solitary, hermetic approach that Allen has adopted over the last few decades. (Whatever became of Marshall Brickman, anyway?) At this stage in his life, I find it heartening that the guy is still making movies. Though a quick scan of reviews of his current offering, Hollywood Ending, shows it getting trounced by critics, I still plan to see the pic. In an age where too many movies are loud, rote & impersonal, there’s something both bracing and humane about the whine of the Woodman. # | |
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