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Saturday, October 11, 2003 ( 10/11/2003 08:03:00 AM ) Bill S. LAMENTATION OF DA WIMMEN AND SUCH – J.W. Hastings has posted a shopper’s comparison of Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkein, coming out favoring the former who he thinks is being unjustly ignored on the bookstore shelves. There's a certain irony in this: during the years Howard was writing for Weird Tales, he often came out ahead of writers like H.P. Lovecraft in the mag's reader's poll – a fact that often maddened Lovecraft boosters. I can see where Forager is coming from, though I think he occasionally fudges things to bolster his points: holding up an Oxford don/Texas yahoo dichotomy to support his contention that the Conan creator is the more vital writer is a bit of a rhetorical cheat, for instance – if you wanted, you could counter Hastings' characterizations by describing Howard as a drunken mama's boy. Too, pulling in movie casting decisions as evidence of Tolkein's wispiness is also fairly dubious since one could also argue whether Orlando Bloom actually is the best choice in Jackson's Lord of the Rings. I'd also note that Brigitte Neilsen made an appalling Red Sonja. Still, as one who favors the "grotesque" fantasy fiction of Mervyn Peake over both writers, I'll only note that while I've re-read Howard's work several times over the years, I've only made it through the Rings trilogy once. By itself, that doesn't say much – picking up Tolkein demands a longer commitment than a collection of Conan stories, after all – but I've also read Peake's equally dense Gormenghast trilogy more than once, so perhaps Tolkein just plain doesn't speak to me as strongly. I remember reading a critical assault on the Oxfordian by Michael Moorcock (a writer who managed to blend Howard and Peake in his Elric stories); maybe I should track that piece down. In sum: a highly debatable – and recommended – critique by Hastings. Is it me or is the quality of bloggish criticism growing denser? # | Friday, October 10, 2003 ( 10/10/2003 10:48:00 AM ) Bill S. "I GET IDEAS/I GET NOTIONS" – Posted today on my "Seasonal Rhinos" page, a consideration of the fall Television reissue, Marquee Moon. A tremendous album and a sweet reissue package, too. # | Thursday, October 09, 2003 ( 10/09/2003 01:32:00 PM ) Bill S. OH, THAT THIS TOO-TOO SULLIED FLESH – Speaking of MST3K, I see from the fannish Satellite of Love website that Rhino will be issuing a DVD pack of shows that aren't already in the company's videotape catalog: a four-disc set featuring entries from the series' Sci-Fi Channel years. The flicks in question are Space Mutiny, the overplayed Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, Girl in Gold Boots and Hamlet. Reportedly, the set will include new intros by Mike Nelson and movie trailers and price for $59.95. It's set for release on November 11, though at this writing there's no word about it on either Amazon or Rhino's sites. I'm psyched, though. # | ( 10/09/2003 01:21:00 PM ) Bill S. WHAT NO BAY OF BLOOD? – Keeping in the October spirit, Franklin Harris has re-posted an appreciation of Italian horror pic director Mario Bava, who I referenced a short time back in my review of Battle Royale. Bava, in addition to directing such bona fide classics as Black Sunday and Black Sabbath, also directed the last film to be deconstructed on Mystery Science Theater 3000: the campy criminal mastermind melodrama, Diabolik. # | ( 10/09/2003 12:42:00 PM ) Bill S. "WARM SKIN/WOLF GRIN" – Okay, let's get the chief gripe out of the way first: the new collection of music from the Buffy, the Vampire Slayer soundtrack, Radio Sunnydale (Virgin), only contains twelve tracks from the show's last three seasons. The series' first soundtrack set, culled from its earlier years, had eighteen. Why the short-sheeting? It isn't as if there's not a wealth of material to choose: rock – alt-rock, in particular – has been an integral part of the series' world from episode one, when Dashboard Prophets played at the town’s hip club, the Bronze. A lot of good groups have appeared on the Bronze's stage, playing just low enough so the Scooby Gang could carry on a conversation without shouting. So where in the Hellmouth are they? I've got no issues with the songs included: the Breeders' retake on the show's opening theme isn't much different from the Nerf Herder original, though the band's guitarwork is a smidgeon more surf-ish. Frente frontwoman Angie Hart's "Blue" (co-written with series creator Joss Whedon) has the feel of one of Julee Cruse's vocals on Twin Peaks and immediately recalls the episode it appeared in ("Conversations With Dead People"), while the Dandy Warhols' Stones-ish "Bohemian Like You" provides a witty backdrop to the rampage of good ol' troll Olaf in one of the final season's funnier episodes. A few tracks – Nikko Costa's r-&-b track, for instance – are more difficult to pin down, though. Too bad the booklet commentary by series song selector John King doesn't spell out where all the songs appeared on the show, huh? Befitting the series' oft-melancholy tone, many of the tracks go for the rueful voice (e.g., Aimee Mann's "Pavlov's Bell," Blur's airy dancetrack "There's No Other Way"). A cut from Joey Ramone's swan song album ("Stop Thinking About It") carries its own weight, particularly in the after-knowledge that the character it appears behind (Anya) doesn't make it to the end of the series alive. And like the first collection, Radio Sunnydale concludes with an evocative slice of orchestral soundtrack: the "Final Fight" score from Buffy's concluding episode. But where was Nerf Herder's appearance from their final Bronze performance ("What kind of a band plays during an Apocalypse?") Don't tell me the band priced itself off this disc. I know. Most hard-core Sunnydale-ians have probably already bought this disc (despite zero push from Virgin Records) at full price. Still, it would've been nice – doncha think? – if the crew behind Radio Sunnydale had worked just a leetle bit harder toward delivering a more full-blooded package worthy of this matchless supernatural series' final years. # | Wednesday, October 08, 2003 ( 10/08/2003 01:56:00 PM ) Bill S. THE HITLER GROPER – Not much left to say about the California election except to note that I'm personally no longer going to accept any attempts at characterizing California as the Left Coast with anything other than a derisive snort. I did want to toss bouquets at Jon Stewart and The Daily Show for its quasi-live coverage of the election. Favorite moment: when correspondent Steven Colbert started discussing accusations that Arnold Schwarzenegger had once "fondled Adolf Hitler." After anchor Stewart pointed that Der Fuehrer had died long before the actor candidate had even been born, Colbert paused, then blithely repeated the accusation, anyway. All you need know about modern American journalism was captured in that single mock exchange. # | ( 10/08/2003 01:13:00 PM ) Bill S. "FEAR, FEAR, IS A MAN'S BEST FRIEND" – Thanks to the efforts of Psychotronic Psean Collins, I've been reading and thinking about horror entertainments much more this month than I usually do – no mean feat since I generally like to think about scary stuff most any time of the year, let alone October. Sean's been putting together some thoughtful material about his favorite horrors – and what makes 'em work. Reading his thesis on monumental elements of great horror movies, I found myself doing something removed from his scholarly critical approach: namely, revisiting some movies I found really-&-truly scary and trying to isolate where I was at the time they first worked their mojo. Here, then, in order of personal experience, are five of 'em:
And, just as importantly, I still remember 'em as scary. . . # | Tuesday, October 07, 2003 ( 10/07/2003 12:24:00 PM ) Bill S. SIXTY-MINUTE MANGA – (Episode Four: In which our explorations lead us to a much-lauded work of horror manga.) Mention that you're curious about manga, and one of the first names manga-philes will likely offer is Junji Ito. The young writer/artist has staked a place for himself in the realm of horror comics, primarily on the basis of two limited series: Tomie and Uzumaki. I went looking for both at my local comic shop and chain bookstores – of the two, Uzumaki (Viz) was easier to find. I was able to buy all three volumes in the series over two weeks' time. Unlike the other GN paperbacks I've been reading, Uzumaki isn't printed in the back-to-front format of "100% manga;" instead, it's been reconfigured for Western readers. For a moment, the mango dabbler in me rebeled against this concession – hey, I've invested time and energy in training my eyes to read backwards . . . what’s the deal? – but that momentary hubris abated once I delved into Ito's beautifully textured artwork. Hard to imagine an idea less promising than the one put forth in Uzumaki, a trilogy about a Japanese town named Kurozc-cho that's haunted and ultimately destroyed by spirals. Spirals! Memories of cheesy B-pictures with villainous hypnotists immediately pop into play. (Cue the theremin.) Quick! Hide the Spiro-graph®! It's ee-vil! Once I started reading the series, it became obvious that Ito has anticipated my initial smart-assed reaction. Not only is he aware of the essential absurdist nature of his conceit, he also strives to stretch it as far as he can. Much has been written about the fine line between horror and comedy: Uzumaki swirls around that line like one of its own mad dust devils. There are scenes in all three books that make the reader go aw, c'mon! - only to veer into ghastly seriousness. If Ito isn't always fully successful in maintaining control of his tone, you have to admire his audacity. The series is narrated by a teenaged girl, Kirie Goshima, who winds up at the literal center of most of the events that hit her town. Her best friend, a bespectacled boy named Shiuchi, is the one who serves as harbinger of doom, in part because his father is the first to come under sway of dark forces. As Kirie walks to the train station to meet her friend, she happens upon Shuichi's father, crouched in an alley staring at an empty snail shell. When she describes this scene to Shuichi, the young boy goes off, stating that the town is making him and his family crazy. "This town is contaminated by spirals!" he says, and we quickly learn his father has grown so obsessed by the shape that he's quit his job and has taken to collecting samples of it: sea-shells, springs, children's toys, dress patterns. He goes to Kirie's father, a potter, and asks him to create a ceramic spiral, and in so doing sparks the potter's own self-destructive fixation with this ubiquitous geometric form. The town's spiral possession starts manifesting itself in increasingly grotesque ways. When Shiuchi’s mother throws away her husband's spiral collection, he begins to emulate spirals, culminating in a death that's both cartoonish and disturbing. When his body is cremated, the ashes emanating from the crematorium spiral into the sky and then descend into a pond located in the center of town. Driven mad by the death of her husband, Shiuchi's mother attempts to remove all the spirals off her body – which leads to volume one's most unnerving vertiginous conceit (without giving any plot away, let's just note that it revolves around the woman's last days in hospital). After Ito has established his basic premise through Shuichi's family, the story loses some of its straightforward momentum. We get individual chapters focusing on other townspeople – a schoolgirl with a tiny scar on her forehead, two young lovers caught in a Montague/Capulet conflict in the town’s poverty-struck row houses, a second schoolgirl with a burning desire to be noticed – plus an effectively ghostly chapter involving Kirie's father and his kiln. By volume two, the physical transformation motif becomes even stronger, as some of the slower townsfolk start to transform into snails – an idea that owes as much to Ionesco than it does Weird Tales until the third volume when some of the other townspeople start to eat these once-human snails, again yanking an absurd conceit into the realm of horror. Some nicely horrific chapters set in the town's hospital (where Kirie winds up after a near fatal adventure in a lighthouse) comprise the largest part of the middle book. By the final volume, the entire town is ravaged by this all-consuming geometry: repeatedly assaulted by hurricanes and sudden whirlwinds, its own roads twisted into paths that turn in on themselves. In short, we've entered H.P. Lovecraft territory – the land of horrifying mathematics and eldritch forces imposing themselves on modern unfortunates. Even some of Uzumaki's minor ideas take a page from old Howard Phillips: the row housing which assumes a major role in the series' final chapters, for instance, recalls Lovecraft's obsessive fear of poverty's trappings (without the racist underpinnings). When we're taken to the source of Kurozc-cho's demolition – an ancient city hidden beneath the town – we can't help thinking of the New England writer's Elder Gods. Ito's art is rendered in a detailed style that is exceedingly friendly to Western readers: only occasionally does he appear to utilize tricks that look odd to manga newcomers. In one chapter, for instance, Shiuchi is shown thoughtfully examining his friend Kirie – an act that is pointlessly emphasized by the words "glance glance" placed in the space between the two characters. But more often, the artist's tight control of doom-laden atmosphere pleasantly reminds me of American horror artists like Reed Crandall in his Warren period, with a nod to Edvard Munch tossed in for good measure. There's even a winking allusion to "The Scream" placed in the background of one panel. But unlike Hollywood's jokey attempts at decontextualizing that image, Ito recalls Munch's late-night angst and recurrent themes of body loathing. Somehow I suspect that the Norwegian artist'd really identify with the hospital chapters, with their devouring women and infants. In the end, Uzumaki succeeds as a creepy graphic exercise. In contemporary terms, the only American comic book writer/artist to successfully work this turf is arguably Charles Burns, who also brings a tone of camp detachment to the proceedings that I don't detect in Junji Ito. I can see why manga boosters have put Ito in the top of introductory list: his art's accessible, while his plots – though occasionally opaque on the background details – work a realm of dread most older readers will recognize. Me, I've headed from finishing the spiral books straight into Ito's earlier series, Tomie. The work's measurably rougher, but it's still nicely (this last was inevitable, gang!) twisted. # | Monday, October 06, 2003 ( 10/06/2003 12:23:00 PM ) Bill S. "I ADMIT TO HAVING AN OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE PERSONALITY" – Crawling across the country, American Splendor (HBO) finally opened in my neck of the woods this week. I've been anticipating this film with much the same fervor that your average X-Men junkie reserves for Hollywoodizations of Claremont's World, so I was more than eager to see it. Being a comic book fan and a moviegoer is often a matter of regularly revising expectations: you go into a movie adaptation of your favorite graphic work with high hopes and the only way you can maintain 'em is to continually adjust the bar as you watch. Yet once Sheri Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini's flick started unreeling, I gratefully settled into the moviegoing experience without feeling like I had to make any concessions. The writer/directors capture Pekar's comics better than I know I expected. Berman & Pulcini don't take the easy route either. Mixing images from Pekar's slice-o'-life "off the streets of Cleveland" comics with acted dramatizations of the comics plus real-life interviews with Pekar, spouse Joyce Brabner and self-proclaimed nerd/Splendor regular Toby Radloff, the movie strives for the same collation of tiny observations Pekar uses in his comic series and by-and-large achieves it. The film is chronologically structured to follow Pekar's life from his early years as a V.A. clerk and part-time record dealer through his bout of quasi-celebrity as the author of autobiographical comics and early relationship with Brabner ("Man, she's got good-lookin' handwriting," Pekar gushes as he reads her introductory letter). It does not, happily, ignore the supporting cast of real-life working stiffs who also inhabit Pekar's comic books. As a writer and autobiographer, Pekar works with a variety of artists, each of whom renders both Harvey and his friends differently. When spouse-to-be Joyce – wonderfully played by Hope Davis (loved her delivery tossing off snap DSM diagnoses of Pekar and his compatriots) – is asked by Pekar to meet him for the first time, she's initially reluctant. She's seen, she states, so many different cartoon images of him, how does she know what he really looks like? (Is he really, for instance, as hairy as collaborator/buddy R. Crumb makes him out to be?) In the movie, we get several on-screen versions of Harvey, too: Paul Giamatti acting the role ("He doesn't look nothing like me – whatever," the genuine Pekar notes in his narration) and Pekar himself being interviewed by the filmmakers and in clips from Late Night with David Letterman. At one point, the actors playing Harv and Joyce watch a California theatre production of American Splendor, as a scene we've already seen dramatized on film is unconvincingly and comically replayed on-stage. That's a whole lotta Harvey. You'd think all this meta-storytelling would work against the basic purity of Pekar's work – which, after all, is devoted to autobiography and naturalistic snapshots of mundane life (without, as Pekar would put it, the "getting crushed to Earth" component of American Naturalistic novels) – but it doesn't. A big key to the film's success is its smart reliance on Pekar's keen ear for dialog (not many comic book movies could so fully pull straight from the word balloons of their source material). But an equally important piece is Giamatti's performance, which captures every aspect of the comic book Pekar – the V.A. hospital grind, the curmudgeonly free-lance writer, the obsessive collector and whole-scale neurotic – believably and appealingly. When the movie reaches its most serious act, our hero's battle with cancer as originally dramatized by Brabner & Pekar in the Our Cancer Year graphic novel, Giamatti nails Pekar's fear and frustration beautifully, even when the directors briefly bobble one of the moments (Pekar's notorious final guest appearance on Letterman). It's a damn fine piece of acting. There was a time when I first started reading Pekar's comics that I thought the title he gave his series was meant to be taken ironically. But the longer he's been writing and the more developed his vision of American life has grown, the less sarcastic his title appears. It would've been easy to turn this movie into either a sneering or a sentimentalized vision of Pekar's life and work. American Splendor, the movie, does neither. For once, this viewer's fannish expectations have been fully satisfied. . . # | |
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