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Saturday, January 11, 2003 ( 1/11/2003 04:51:00 PM ) Bill S. MISTER CLEAN & THE SUPREMES – Friday was Civics Night in our house: watching the mid-season premieres of two new network series respectively set in the legislative & judicial arenas, your humble viewer couldn’t help wondering What Hath The West Wing Wrought? Too much “thought-provoking” teledrama, and yours truly starts thinking about flipping over to The Cartoon Network. I particularly had this impulse during Mister Sterling, NBC’s attempt at retooling Capra-corn populism for an imaginary 21st century Washington DC (a world where the Democrats hold a tenuous Senate majority!) The show tells the story of Bill Sterling, Jr. (Josh Brolin), scion of beloved retired Dem bigwig Bill Sr. (James Whitmore, looking as olde statesmanlike as ever). Junior gets drafted into the job of U.S. Senator when his predecessor, a scandal-ridden California politico, keels over dead. The state’s governor, seeking a replacement voters’ll see as “Mr. Clean,” hits on the idea of asking the untainted Sterling. Our hero, who’s been teaching convicts to get their high school equivalency (thus establishing his hard-nosed humanitarianism), reluctantly agrees, though he’s wary about becoming a career politico like the old man. Yeah, our boy’s got Father Issues. The really big rub: nobody thinks to ask Bill Jr. what party he belongs to. Turns out he’s an Independent, which throws the delicate balance of power in the Senate into disarray – and allows Sterling to play His Own Man within the staid two-party system. You can tell Brolin’s character is gonna be a straight arrow when he refuses to let an unctuous lobbyist buy him breakfast, then cans the effete chief of staff who warns him not to be such a “Pollyanna.” Mister Smith w./ bigger balls, in other words. Brolin is mannishly sincere in the role, but he and the rest of the show’s fine cast are in danger of being undone by the series’ timeslot. NBC has plugged it into the Friday feel-good zone once inhabited by Providence, is advertizing it as one of those shows that'll make you feel proud about being an American. Which doesn’t bode well for fans of the flawed & spirited political wrestling matches dramatized by The West Wing. The harried group of state Supreme Court judges who inhabit CBS’ Queens Supreme don’t have much time for any feel-good motions. As led by Oliver Platt, this be-robed bunch is too busy dealing w./ the chaotic legal system to waste time worrying about party affiliation or ideology. Not for them the niceties of liberal guilt: sitting in judgment on a case of alleged racial profiling, Annabella Sciorra’s judge looks at the guilty black defendant’s sweat-suit and concludes its fabric was unsuited to innocent jogging. Held hostage by a whacked-out juror whose thwarted desire for a cigarette has led to his pulling a gun on judge & fellow jurors, Platt’s Jack Moran effortlessly lies to get the man to drop his guns. As one juror notes, Moran’s a great lawyer even if he is a lousy judge. Platt’s protagonist – the fast-talking, doubtless self-destructive reprobate – is a character he’s played before (and, c’mon, can you see the guy playing any other part?) But he’s suited to the rough-&-tumble milieu of Queens Supreme: a place so tough it has Big Pussy delivering coffee to the judges’ bench. As usual, Platt’s character’s actions make him a pain-in-the-ass to everyone else, including estranged wife Kristen Johnson (damn, I forgot how much I missed watching her on television!) But I’m betting it’ll also make his show more enduring than the squishy Mister Sterling – even if Moran does have Doogie Howser’s bud working for him as a law clerk. And any law show w./ the smarts to use Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns and Money” as its opening theme has hooked me several weeks just on principal. . . # | Friday, January 10, 2003 ( 1/10/2003 12:07:00 PM ) Bill S. “KINGS DON’T MEAN A THING” – The beaming cartoon cat on the front cover of Kim Deitch’s aptly titled The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Pantheon) looks innocent enough. But turn the volume over and the same ‘toon head leers at you salaciously: innocence & experience in one four-fingered figure. Largely set in the early days of American animation, Dreams reprints a quartet of black-and-white graphic tales centering around Ted Mishkin, an alcoholic cartoonist haunted by the vision of a demonic cartoon cat named Waldo. Mishkin is like Elwood P. Dowd the way Jimmy Stewart has reportedly said he wished he could’ve play him: sans the crowd-pleasing cuddliness. The young cartoonist begins his career working for Winsor Newton (Deitch’s fictionalized version of Winsor McCay, creator of the classic comic strip “Little Nemo in Slumberland” & the first animated cartoon, “Gertie the Dinosaur”) then is hired for the fledgling Fontaine Fables Studio. There he creates a series of groundbreaking cartoons starring the hallucination who has been following him around since childhood. Deitch’s book jumps through various stages of Mishkin’s roller-coaster career: from top animator at Fontaine to hack funny animal artist for a comic book company in the 50’s – w./ periodic extended stays at Berndale Acres Sanitarium. The story's a forlornly melancholy one, and Deitch the artist captures it through his trademark stiffly eye-popping style. Mishken and his mentor Newton are repeatedly betrayed by the industry, while their personal lives fare no better. That's life on the Boulevard. Our hero nurtures a life-long infatuation for co-worker Lillian, who instead is involved in a loveless affair w./ Ted’s brother Al. A ‘toon version of Lil appears alongside Waldo in “Dream Street,” a Fontaine feature that provides a darkly ironic counterpoint throughout the book. At one point – when Ted discovers his love & brother embracing – images from "Dream Street" flood the page, overwhelming Mishkin. Few graphic artists are as capable of making hallucinogenic madness look so simultaneously effulgent & mundane. Deitch has long shown an affinity for the Kenneth Anger view of Hollywood Babylon (he once did a weekly alternative press strip entitled “Hollywoodland”), which shows up in a series of subplots surrounding the other denizens of Fontaine studios. The mysterious defenestration of Reba Fontaine, wife of the studio head, gets repeatedly revisited like one of the career-busting scandals from Anger’s famous chronicle of movietown excess. The fortunes of Fontaine Studios – its unsuccessful attempts to ape the Disney style at the expense of more honest artists like Mishkin, its union-busting activities that led to Lillian’s dismissal, its later revival as a source for pop culture geegaws – parallels the unfortunate trajectory of studios like Fleischer, whose more unique visions were demolished by the Disney monolith. Deitch’s genius lies in his ability to make us care about these long-lost battles, to see the squandered potential and the heartbreak of putting your life in an industry that doesn’t give a rat’s ass for personal expression. As an early figure in the underground comix movement and the son of a Terrytoons animator, Deitch is uniquely qualified to look at this enduring conflict between art & commerce. Boulevard has been showing up on several comic critics’ Top Ten lists for 2002 (including Andrew Arnold’s) and for good reason. It's one of the best expressions to date of this energetically eccentric cartoonist’s unique take on the highs & lows of pop culture. ADDENDUM: For a more detailed discussion of the art & motifs in Deitch's work, check out the first of The Comics Journal’s Message Board “book club” discussions, moderated by comics critic/Deitch fan Yakov Chodosh. UPDATE: Thanks to Yakov for catching my original misspelling of "Winsor." # | Thursday, January 09, 2003 ( 1/09/2003 08:32:00 AM ) Bill S. BRING ON THE FOOD POLICE – Looking at my referral gauge last night, I couldn’t help noticing that at one time all but one of my referrals came from readers looking for material relating to “Michael Genadry” and “gastric bypass.” Not too surprising to see this happening Wednesday: last night’s ep of Ed devoted a considerable amount of air time to its gastric bypass plotline, which was introduced to explain actor Genadry’s own weight loss following his own summer surgery. First time I wrote about this plot, I was critical of the writers’ handling of this much-discussed medical procedure. Last night’s ep contained some of the same problems I noted earlier: reflected in a sequence that came early in the show. In it, we see super-sized high schooler going through a preparatory interview w./ his surgeon and family physician, Doctor Mike Burton (Josh Randall), in attendance. At one point during the discussion, Mark (who in the past has been remarkably well-read about the procedure) is surprised to learn how little food he’ll be ingesting once he’s had the procedure: four-hundred calories. How many calories have I been eating? he asks, and Doctor Mike answers w./ authority: 6,000. Cut to a shot of our hero looking crestfallen. Okay, I wonder, how does Doctor Mike know this? Have the food police been keeping Mark under hidden surveillance? And, more to the point, how does Doctor Mike know this and Mark not know? Are we to presume that a fat kid is not acquainted with simple calorie counting in this day and age? And, even more significantly, are we to assume that Mark is undergoing weight loss surgery without ever having engaged in a serious attempt at nutritional eating? Sorry, I don’t buy it. I can accept that the character is in some measure of denial about the way he’s been living – but not to this degree. Mark, it’s been established, is a smart & witty kid who has a fund of esoteric knowledge. Asked by his friends to devise a last meal before going under the knife, he's able to rattle off a menu reflecting a gourmet’s knowledge of fine dining. This kid knows how many calories he consumes, and to act like he doesn’t just reflects one of the medical community’s standing ad hominems: all fat people don’t really know how much they’re eating. There are folks for who that doubtless is true – but not Warren Cheswick’s best bud. # | ( 1/09/2003 08:23:00 AM ) Bill S. WHAT’S AN UTNE, ANYWAY? – Hearty congrats to The Comics Journal for winning an Utne Independent Press Award in the category of "Arts/Literature Coverage" (in a tie w./ Art Journal). The award, described in the January 2003 issue of The Utne Reader (sort of a leftie version of Reader’s Digest), for TCJ was explained thus: Equal parts trade publication, fanzine, and arts and culture review, this well-edited publication is sure to please anyone who takes comics the least bit seriously.As a recent discussion in The Johnny Bacardi Show (link on the right) reveals, there are a few comics fans who’d take issue w./ the above. But I’m not one of ‘em. I’m presently in the midst of reading the latest issue (#249): I’m particularly fascinated by two pieces (one of ‘em a Will Eisner interview) describing conditions and output of the industry shops that flourished in comics’ early decades. Utne also gave out another comics-focused award, incidentally. Under the category of "General Excellence, Zines," John Porcellino’s King Cat Comics received top honors. The zine is described thus: Slow, sweet stories about the small epiphanies of life told with a few careful lines – both in text and illustration.I’m not familiar w./ this title or artist (who was subject to a recent TCJ interview, interestingly), but it looks like I want to be. Cool to see two different parts of the art comics world getting acknowledgement. (In answer to my title question, the Reader contents page includes the following helpful explication: “Our staff searches through thousands of small press publications along with internet sites, newly published books and other off-the-beaten-path sources looking for the best articles and freshest ideas. Utne, by the way, rhymes with chutney and means ‘far out’ in Norwegian.” (The real answer – which I knew; I was just tryin' to get your attention – is more mundane, however; the mag’s founder was a guy named Eric Utne.) # | Wednesday, January 08, 2003 ( 1/08/2003 10:24:00 AM ) Bill S. “HE WAS SOME KIND OF A MAN” – Perhaps it’s the proximity of the two season premieres that did it, but watching the first ep of The Shield’s second season, I found myself thinking, “Vic Mackey is Greg Stillson w./ a badge.” Both characters affect a high moral ground when it serves their purposes, yet their base modus operandi rest on physical intimidation & violence. For both characters, public well-being is secondary to their drive for personal profit, though their capacity for self-deception is boundless. Stillson is a psychopath, while Mackey at the very least is a sociopath: one look at those blank blue eyes as he blew a fellow cop away in the show’s debut ep was enough to establish that. The difference, of course, lies in the characters’ respective places in their teevee universes. The Dead Zone’s Stillson is an antagonist, a political candidate who we see will reduce the nation’s capital to radioactive ash if he ever attains the presidency. Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) is The Shield’s protagonist – Tony Soprano’s only real rival in the TV Anti-Hero Sweeps – a ruthless & opportunistic cop in the meaner-than-mean streets of Farmington, CA. Shielded by his politically ambitious Captain (Benito Martinez), Mackey and his special unit underlings cut deals w./ local drug dealers and stomp down hard on those dealers’ competitors. Oh, yeah, and occasionally they arrest some real bad guys, too. This season opens w./ our main man frantically trying to find his family (they left at the end of last season), leaving the unit’s well-being in the hands of spikey-haired second-in-command Shane Vendrell (Walton Goggins). The problem is that Shane has even less of a sense of boundaries than Vic. Wanting to “take things up a notch” (okay, no more Emeril references ever again, people!), he spends the unit’s cached money on a big drug buy and winds up purchasing poisoned coke – no longer just abetting local dealers but actually becoming a middle-man supplier. This angers Mackey, primarily because the big doof has lost all this cash just when Vic needs $50,000 to pay a p.i. looking for his missing wife. So he and the boys hie it down to Mexico to get their money back. When confronted by Captain Alcevedo about the reason for this sudden trip, Mackey gets all huffy and talks about wanting to stow the flow of poisoned coke onto the streets. Mackey, we’re repeatedly told, has been off his game since his wife ran off (woman’s a lot quicker on the draw than Carmella Soprano). Which leaves the bulk of the real police work to Detectives Wagenbach (Jay Karnes) & Charlotte Wyms (C.C.H. Pounder, who continues to shoulder the role of moral center with her customary professional aplomb). One of the show’s repeated ironies is the fact that, for all his ethical emptiness, Mackey gets results more consistently than the tough-minded Wyms. In season two’s premiere, for example, Vic and boys smuggle a dealer across the border (along w./ a big satchel fulla cash) where a federal warrant awaits; Charlotte winds up seeing the dealer’s brother go free even though she and we know that this scumwad is a murdering rapist. To be sure, the writers have set things up so it’ll work this way – brother one, after all, has the feds after him, while numero two only has a sealed juvie case against him – but in a time where legal niceties are being progressively downplayed over expediency in the War on Terror, it certainly feels like The Shield is reflective of something zeitgeisty. For all the promo blather about Vic Mackey being a “different kind of cop,” the reality is his brand of corruptness-cum-controlling-effectiveness has long been a film noir tradition. Think Orson Welles’ Hank Quinlan in the classic Touch of Evil: now there (as Marlene Dietrich notes) was some kind of a man. Chiklis is surprisingly commanding in his role, but the fact is without the equally strong work of actors like Martinez, Karnes & Pounder to ground him, he’d quickly become tiresome. Even a different kind of cop needs hard-working mainstreamers to back him up and play against. # | Monday, January 06, 2003 ( 1/06/2003 10:05:00 AM ) Bill S. “IF WE CAN’T BELIEVE IN MARTHA STEWART, WHAT’S LEFT?” – When last we left Dead Zone denizen Johnny Smith (Anthony Michael Hall), our hero was reeling from an apocalyptic psychic vision sparked by touching sociopathic politician Greg Stillson (Sean Patrick Flanery). Several weeks later, and Smith has been obsessively shadowing the charismatic Stillson, a candidate who seemingly can’t get through three sentences of speechifying without bringing “God” into the mix. This gets him the support of the slippery Reverend Purdy (David Ogden Stiers), who also has a hidden agenda involving our man John. Second season of U.S.A.’s summer success, The Dead Zone, began last night, and though the ep opens by following the plot lines set at the end of last season, we soon found ourselves sidetracked. The Stillson plot (a major component in the Stephen King source novel) was suspended in favor of a cat-&-mouse game between hero psychic Smith and a kidnapper. Said kidnapper is a Bible-babbling busted dot.commer who has been driven around the bend by his failure. He snatches the son of the CEO who has bought out his company, threatening to kill him unless Johnny can use his psychic powers to find the boy. Only one hitch: ever since his Big Bang End-of-the-World vision, our hero’s psychic powers have been as reliable as a cheap cell phone. We keep hoping the guy from the Sprint commercials will appear to help Johnny w./ his piss-poor reception. By mid-show, of course, the psychic visions have started coming in clearly again. We have a showdown in a busted bank (lots of refs to economic struggling in this ep) where our dot-com kidnapper has locked his victim in a still-usable vault. He’s kidnapped the boy, we learn, to bring Johnny into the picture, viewing our protagonist as a messenger of God. What said message is supposed to be remains opaque, though at some level it revolves around the fact that we’ve lost our way in our dogged pursuit of Martha Stewart-style comfort. Hey, the guy’s clearly nuts, so we’re not supposed to analyze his actions too closely. Not a bad season opener, though I can’t help worrying how long they intend to leave the Stillson plot hanging. This isn’t Hamlet, after all, and that vision of an ash-strewn Washington D.C. isn't something we can ignore forever. Then again, all the religio-themed dialog (at one point, our psycho baddie uses Shadrach, Meshach & Abednego as a warning) echoes the hypocritical sloganeering used by Stillson. So perhaps we haven’t ventured too far from King’s source plot, after all. . . # | Sunday, January 05, 2003 ( 1/05/2003 10:48:00 AM ) Bill S. NOT A CHARLIE CHAN MOVIE – Watched Robert Altman’s Gosford Park last night. Not a flick for casual viewing: Altman and screenwriter Julian Fellowes drop you in the midst of this heavily populated English mansion circa 1932 and force you to work out the relationships ‘tween masters & servants. Took me about an hour of movie to get all the characters straight, and by then the flick started messing w./ our understanding of ‘em. It was only a matter of time before Altman, a master of the Comedy of Manners, took his knowing eye into the English drawing room Like the underappreciated Cookie’s Fortune, the movie uses the murder mystery format as a means for dissecting social parameters & pretensions. If I enjoy Fortune more than I do the more recent pic, it’s probably because Altman’s southern mystery connected more clearly to the world I inhabit. The upstairs/downstairs setting of Gosford can’t help but contain a whiff of nostalgic yearning, no matter how cleanly realized its view of British class society may be. Altman & Fellowes attempt to take some of the bloom off the setting by plunking an American character into the mix: a movie producer played by Bob Balaban, “researching” the countryside estate milieu for a proposed Charlie Chan movie. Simultaneously enraptured and skeptical about the world he finds himself in, the character serves to occasionally puncture the rituals all the other characters take for granted, but he isn’t utilized enough. Another outsider, Stephen Fry’s comically incompetent detective inspector, seems to have come from another movie altogether, playing the role far more broadly than any of the rest of the cast. I usually like Fry, but in this case, I found him distracting. Still, watching the rest of the film’s cast of solid pro Brit actors (Maggie Smith, Derek Jacobi, Helen Mirren, Jeremy Northam, et al) exchanging arch looks & innuendos, forming then breaking alliances, remains wryly entertaining. And as with other great Altman flicks, the man’s mastery of camera and staging is a joy to watch by itself (lots of neat light & shadow play in this ‘un). When we got to the revelation of the mystery's solution, I was ready to watch Gosford Park once more from scratch just to see how it all fit – the mark of a solid mystery movie. # | |
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