| Pop Culture Gadabout | ||
|
Saturday, October 02, 2004 ( 10/02/2004 09:26:00 AM ) Bill S. LAWYERS, CRIBS & MONEY – Not much to say about UPN's new Taye Diggs series, Kevin Hill, which we caught Friday on its second broadcast. It's heartwarming fluff – well-played heartwarming fluff (Diggs is smartly cast as the hound-dog lawyer with the heart of marshmallow) – that would probably find a larger audience if it were part of one of the Big Three's mid-primetime lineup. Basically a male version of the Diane Keaton vehicle, Baby Boom (though with the added cultural resonance you get putting a buppie male in the role of single parent), it looks to be the kind of series where you could skip several weeks' worth of episodes, return and still be diverted for an hour. Solid, if unsurprising teevee fare, in other words – but, damn, that baby sure is cute! # | Friday, October 01, 2004 ( 10/01/2004 11:31:00 AM ) Bill S. "BIKINI GIRLS WITH MACHINE GUNS" – Been working on some longer writings for other venues, so let's just stick to some simple bullet-pointing here today, okay?
Background Music for This Round: Cramps, Stay Sick (has anyone out there heard the new two-disc release of early Cramps marginalia, incidentally?) # | ( 10/01/2004 06:48:00 AM ) Bill S. JUST A STONED SLACKER, THAT'S ME – I flowed in and out of the presidential debates last night, more so I could get the jokes on The Daily Show than out of expectation that I'd learn anything new about or from the candidates. DShow anchor Stewart and company came across pretty smooth – and, yes, funny, too – on their live follow-up to the Bush 'N' Kerry Show. But Rudolph Giuliani certainly looked like a big poop in one of the DShow's two post-debate interviews, chiding Jon for making a joke about Poland being part of the U.S.-led coalition. Rudy, do you know what network you're on? It's Comedy Central: they make jokes there. . . # | Thursday, September 30, 2004 ( 9/30/2004 01:48:00 PM ) Bill S. IT'S FUNNY BECAUSE IT'S, YOU KNOW. . . – Best moment from last night's The Daily Show: faux reporter Ed Helms discusses the story he plans to submit on tonight's Bush/Kerry Debate, claiming that he's already written most of the piece and plans to plug a few details into it to confirm the points he's already written. When show host Stewart asks the correspondent what he plans to do if one of the candidates says or does something unexpected, Helms blithely responds, oh, that's for the bloggers to pick up. . . # | ( 9/30/2004 01:36:00 PM ) Bill S. "QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS, FLOODING INTO THE MIND OF THE CONCERNED YOUNG PERSON TODAY. . ." – Thought I'd belatedly take the opportunity to jump in on the circulating blogosphere meme first brought to my attention by Johanna and Shane. Basically, it involves encouraging you, the alert reader, to submit five questions of your choosing to the Comments section of this blog. I'll endeavor to respond to every one of 'em, though I can't vouch for the veracity of my answers. . . UPDATE: The misremembered quote above has been corrected after a listen to Just Another Band from L.A. this a.m. # | ( 9/30/2004 11:57:00 AM ) Bill S. "A LONG TIME AGO, WE USED TO BE FRIENDS. . ." – The opening theme to Veronica Mars, UPN's new teengirl 'tec show, is both radio contemporary and thematically right: Dandy Warhols' "We Use to Be Friends," a track which suits a character who's currently on the outs with her former friends. (Certainly more appropriate than C.S.I.: New York's evocation of a "teenage wasteland.") It's arguably the most effective use of a modern pop song this season: as tidy a sonic opener as Phantom Planet's "California" is to The O.C. The O.C. comparison is especially relevant since both it and Mars are set in moneyed West Coast burgs. With the latter, it's Neptune, California, where townees and officials remain diligently obeisant to the wealthy Kane family, whose patriarch made millions during the software boom. Title figure Veronica (Kristen Bell) was once best friend of Kane daughter Lilly (What? Not Betty?) – and best girl to Kane son Duncan (Teddy Dunn) – until the former got murdered and Veronica's sheriff dad (Enrico Colantoni, marginally more interesting than he was on Just Shoot Me) started relentlessly pursuing Daddy Kane as prime suspect. As a result of this quixotic pursuit, Sheriff Mars got canned and Veronica bounced from the In Crowd. It's in this status as Outsider (and, yes, the first ep manages to squeeze in an S.E. Hinton joke) that we first meet our heroine. Navigating between her high school's two most visible cliques, the young-&-privileged 09-ers and a lumpen prole biker gang called the PCH Bike Club, Veronica divides her time between helping out fellow students like new kid Wallace Fennel (Percy Daggs III), who incurs the wrath of the bike club when he inadvertently gets two members busted for shoplifting, or Weevil (Francis Capra), the Leader of the Pack who’s unjustly accused of credit card theft – and helping her dad as a private investigator. The former city sheriff now runs Keith Mars Investigation and relies on his daughter to do some of the grunt work, something that you'd think would put his p.i. license at risk, though both the town's public defender and its scumbag present sheriff (Michael Muhney) don't make much of a deal about it. Kind of like all those public officials in Sunnydale who never publicly acknowledged either the presence of a Hellmouth or a slayer in their midst. You can get away with a lot when you're a perky teenaged girl. Always hovering in the background, of course, is the murder of Veronica's friend, a back story that gets crawlingly revealed even as it informs most of the characters' behaviors. Though a disgruntled former employee of Jake Kane was ultimately tagged as the killer, Something Doesn't Add Up. Look to see more clues on this case sparingly parceled out as the season progresses. . . UPN, in its drive to air a new teen show that'll pull in viewers, is clearly hoping Veronica will fill the considerable hole left by a departing Buffy Summers, but I'm not sure it helps the net to push the comparison over much. Sure, both shows are centered around spunky blond heroines (true to the hard-boiled detective tradition, Veronica Mars is narrated by its protagonist), but the stakes on each show are quite a bit different. Where the Buffster spent her nights averting Apocalypse and stunt fighting a variety of Long-Legged Beasties, Veronica's cases are more mundane: bullying, shoplifting and a stolen credit card. It's all believably teenaged, but part of the genius of Buffy lay in the way that show found convincing teen angst in unbelievable storylines. Bell, in her roles as problem solver (her solutions are more strategic than the action-oriented Buffy) and narrator, makes an appealing series center: wary about high school hierarchy yet also aware of her own desires to once more fit in its upper echelons; pretty fair with a world-weary pop-centric quip (though none too nerdy about it); capable of venturing into the city's seedier neighborhoods at night with her trusty dog Back-Up by her side. She alternates between lovingly tolerating her too-old-to-be-cool father and wondering just what it is that's got him so focused on Jake Kane’s guilt. The rest of the cast, on the basis of two episodes, fall into fairly predictable roles: geek friend, dangerous-but-good-hearted punk, rich kid jock. Somewhere in the midst of all this is Sydney Tamiia Poitier, no longer flirting with Jason Ritter on Joan of Arcadia, now working as faculty sponsor for the high school paper. And elsewhere on the sidelines is Veronica's briefly-seen-in-flashback mother, who ditched the family when things got tough. Mére Mars has an undefined connection to Big Boss Kane, but so far all we've gotten are hints & allegations. So will Veronica Mars be the middlin' UPN's new big teen franchise? I'm skeptical, but perhaps that's because I was hoping that this show would show more p.i. action – and less high school hi-jinx. I'll be following the show a little longer (at least 'til 24 returns to Fox) so Veronica and the gang'll still have time to wow this totally-outta-the-demographic viewer. But time's a flyin', girl, so you'd better get to it. . . # | Tuesday, September 28, 2004 ( 9/28/2004 02:15:00 PM ) Bill S. STICKIN' IT TO THE MAN – Watched Runaway Jury the other night on HBO. An adaptation of the John Grisham best-seller about a self-satisfied professional jury tamperer (Gene Hackman), the good-hearted liberal lawyer (Dustin Hoffman) on the other side of the case and the juror (John Cusack) who plays 'em both, the movie works about as well as most Grisham movies do even if it does fall down in its over-tidy finish. I mean: I'm an old Lefty who remains perpetually suspicious of big business and believes some level of gun regulation is a good thing – and even I didn't buy the pie-eyed way the flick resolved its focal anti-gun company lawsuit. Still, it's far from the lamest Grisham adaptation to date. (That honor goes to The Firm, though I've got a sneakin' suspicion Christmas With the Kranks may edge ahead of it.) Hoffman and Hackman have a fun time with their roles (Hackman, in particular, plays his three-piece reactionary with hand-rollin' glee), even if their big confrontation scene in a courthouse men's room fizzles more than it crackles. And, say what you will about Grisham, he has a knack for creating great menacing henchmen. In sum, not a bad evening's entertainment. . . # | Monday, September 27, 2004 ( 9/27/2004 09:05:00 AM ) Bill S. "TAKE YOUR MAMA OUT ALL NIGHT" – That loud whoop! you might've heard this weekend was me reacting to my first hearing of the Scissors Sisters' debut CD. S'been some time since a new band's disc came up and almost instantly started French kissing my ears, but, I'll tell ya, this beat-happy blend of Bowie/Supertramp/Elton/nameyerfavorite70sband does it. Instantly classic moment: the group's danceclub BeeGee-ification of Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb," the best recontexturalization of a pop song standard since the Pet Shop Boys blended U-2 with Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons. . . # | ( 9/27/2004 07:29:00 AM ) Bill S.  FORTUNE'S FOOL – I read my first Elric short story in a Lancer collection of heroic fantasy back when I was a young teen. The fantasy (I not longer recall which one it was, having reread the ever evolving saga ever the years) was unlike anything else in the anthology: where other sword-&-sorcery stories followed the Conan model, giving us a hero who charged through every dilemma on the force of his muscles, Elric was different. He was a scholar and a sorcerer, a sensitive albino weakened by the thin blood of years of in-breeding who strengthened himself through spells – and eventually through the Chaos-bred Black Sword that drank the souls of its victims and gave their strength to its wielder. This was the kind of s-&-s hero that a bookish teenaged introvert could relate to! A sword-&-sorcery series that wallowed in anti-heroism, angst and thematic ambiguity, it reached me at just the right age. I quickly sought out the Lancer paperbacks telling Elric's fuller, tragic story.At that time, there were only a couple of 'em. But though he'd already told the tale of Elric's ultimate demise, over time author Michael Moorcock kept writing more Elric novels, filling in the spaces between the original cycle of stories. There are Elric fans who'll tell you that this decades long process of revisionism has been a mistake: that by extending the albino's story he has also diluted the impact of his original series. I can see that point of view, but I can also note that some of the later Elric novels (The Revenge of the Rose, say) are also quite fine in their ornately written fashion. The early Elric stories are quickly written pulp that drive you headlong into their protagonist’s doom; the later tales are almost pre-Raphaelite in their obsessive attention to detail. I became a Moorcock fan after reading Elric, and though there are other works in his canon that I've grown to favor (the Cornelius books, the first of which is written as a modern parody of Elric; Dancers at the End of Time; Gloriana; his recent Southern s-f trilogy), I enjoy periodically returning to Elric. As a young writer, in particular, Moorcock threw everything at his disposal into those stories: heightened adolescent angst, Freudian and Jungian symbolism, comic book plotting developed by hacking out stories for the British publishers, an allegorical structure (the entropic battle between Order and Chaos) that has stood him in good stead through years of writing now, a love for fantasists that ranged from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Merwyn Peake – and used 'em to build one of the great fantasy creations. Moorcock would write other sword-&-sorcery series (the Chronicles of Corum, Hawkmoon, et al), connecting them to the Elric stories by arguing that each figure was a manifestation of a Joseph Campbell-styled figure he dubbed the Eternal Champion. And while they have their moments, none are as powerful as Elric. All of which brings us to Elric: The Making of A Sorcerer, a new DC prestige series scripted by Moorcock with art by the thoroughly apt Walter Simonson. A four-part prequel to the prose saga, the comic mini-series follows our hero as a student of the sorcerous arts as he embarks on a quartet of dream-quests. The son of the ruler of Melniboné, a land created through "terrifying compacts with the supernatural," Elric is first in line to ascend to the throne, though, of course, he has a rival in his scheming cousin Yyrkoon. Coveting both the emperorship and the albino youth's one-and-only love, Elric's cousin Cymoril, Yyrkoon makes his first move against the student while he's in the throes of his first dream-quest. Not an unfamiliar fantasy plot, to be sure, and there is plenty in this comic that longtime Elric followers will recognize. The Black Sword, which doesn't make an appearance in the earliest prose stories, shows up in our hero's dream-quest as he travels six thousand years back to the birth of Melniboné. With a work like this, there are two base questions that initially need to be answered: 1.) will followers of the series feel it's faithful to the original character and 2.) will newcomers be able to follow what's going on without requiring an annotated edition connecting panels to source prose? I'm more qualified to answer the first question at this point – since so many details (the introduction of the Dragon Caves of Imrryr, for instance) resonate in later books – but I would guess that the relatively straightforward storyline makes it accessible to the unfamiliar reader. When I first saw Simonson's rendering of Elric, my response was to balk at his version of the character: this is not the haunted, doomed albino swordsman of my self-visualized memories. But once I realized that the story is set before the events that most change our hero, I accepted the portrayal. Many of the other elements of Moorcock's series – the Dreaming City, the Dragon Caves and their inhabitants, the first of many towering gods – are wonderfully captured by the artist, who has shown an affinity for this type of fantasy material ever since his run as writer/artist for Marvel's Thor. Moorcock wisely makes room for Simonson's graphics; he clearly knows when to shut up. The only awkward moment in the first volume comes when Simonson silently depicts a week's worth of Elric's study preparation for the dream-quest without clearly delineating the passage of time. When the writer's narration breaks in at the bottom of the page with "And so begins the first long dream. . .," the reader is momentarily brought up short. With the next chapter, both writer and artist regain their footing, however. One piece of Simonson's visual scheme that surprised me at first was the incorporation of Amerindian imagery into the dream-quest to Melniboné's past. I've always conceptualized Elric's land as representative of Old Europe (mired in its own traditions, more than a little decadent), though given the expatriate British writer's more recent years living in Texas, the shift makes sense. European culture's not the only one that appears stuck in outmoded paradigms nowadays. As an introduction to Moorcock's classic character, I probably wouldn't recommend The Making of A Sorcerer. (If you can find good used copies of The Stealer of Souls and Stormbringer in their original Lancer paperbacks, that's the way to go, though if you wish to read the material as expanded, revised and reordered to Moorcock’s current specs, the more recent White Wolf Publishing editions are your best route.) The first issue of Making shows promise, but it's not Elric in his full blurrily heroic glory. There is one moment that efectively conveys the character's darker side, however: when the sorcerer magically compels a giant to carry him across a river of flaming lava and said enemy dies, cursing Elric for his "lack of mercy." It's not the last time that will happen in an Elric story. . . # | |
|
|
