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Friday, December 03, 2004 ( 12/03/2004 02:09:00 PM ) Bill S. "WHAT FAMILY DOESN'T HAVE ITS LITTLE . . . ECCENTRICITIES?" – Finished re-reading Amazing Spider-Man #514 last night to see if I could come to any personal conclusions about J.M. Straczynski's controversial Gwen Stacy/Norman Osborn storyline. As a story arc, "Sins Past" suffers from a familiar fault in many of JMS' lesser efforts – loads of heavy emotional build-up to a pallid pay-off – but I wasn't initially too put off by the basic plot. The sudden appearance of a hitherto unknown pregnancy is a soap opera stable, and if the timing issues around Gwen's giving birth to twin progeny are wonky, well, longtime soap addicts know that this is a part of soap life, too (as with the child who leaves a show only to return six months later as a young adult.) Still, I can see where fans are coming from when they react to the news of sexual coupling between the once-pristine Gwen Stacy and the skuzzy maniac in the green goblin suit. Straczynski's "adult" plotline isn't just a violation of character; it's a violation of the storytelling premises and format under which these characters were first crafted. Though she's been memorialized for years in all manner of Spider-Man stories, the fact remains that Gwen Stacy was created and lived her comic book life in a time when Marvel's superhero comics were aimed at a wider aged-ranged readership than the current plotline allows. Reading that these figures from the brightly colored Lee & Ditko/Romita Sr. comics once engaged in a sordid sexual coupling is a bit like learning Santa Claus has a thing for young elves: it might make a rollicking episode of South Park, but would you wanna hear a stanza about it in a public holiday reading of "The Night Before Christmas"? Face it, for better or worse, Spider-Man is, at heart, an All Ages character. Sure, there's a dab of darkness in his origin, but even fairy tales have their share of death and abandonment. There is only so far that you can stretch a character like this into "mature" themes without breaking 'em, and with "Sins Past," I suspect that JMS hit that breaking point the moment he gave us a full-page of Gwen & Norman doin' the deed. Yeah, I know that the sequence was the product of a distraught Peter Parker's imagination, but that it existed for any reason in the character's long-running flagship title says volumes about the House of Idea's willful disregard for a significant segment of its former audience. Perhaps if Marvel had presented the story in a format other than the usual floppy comics that've been the webspinner's home all these years, it might've been different. DC has, for years now, gotten away with all kinds of transgressive treatments of its bread-&-butter superheroes via canny use of their pricier "prestige" books. But aside from its "Explicit Content" MAX titles, Marvel has shown no real interest in explicitly delineating the age-range of its various comic lines (what does it say that Brian Bendis' aptly foul-mouthed Powers doesn't even contain a vague "PSR" anywhere on its front cover?) As Dorian Wright has rightly noted (and was quoted by The Comics Journal) in his blog, this unwillingness to differentiate just who each book is aimed at does nothing to encourage new purchasers – and, in fact, may actively discourage skittish parents or dubious neophytes. Maybe this is a lot to heap on what, in retrospect, will probably be seen as a weak entry in a comic book series that has seen its share of creative missteps over the years. But I've still gotta wonder about the editorial acumen of a company that's willing to show one of its best-known characters imagining sex between his late girlfriend and a slimy middle-aged nemesis. Did someone take the "adult" from the old Amazing Adult Fantasy literally? UPDATE: Jim Henley likes the most recent Amazing Spider-Man plotline more than me – and catches some decent moments between Peter and Mary Jane Parker in Straczynski's script (one of the strengths of JMS' run has been the way he’s enlivened the series' primary supporting cast). Jim then wonders if my comments about the nature of the Spider-Man character put me in the same league as John Byrne, who has definitely pronounced that an "All-Ages" book should never ever ever become an "Adult" book – world without end amen. Lord help me if I've come across as doctrinaire as John Byrne. I should note that, by and large, I've enjoyed JMS' run on AS-M. It's had its silly moments, sure, (Hey, look! There's Doc Doom striding through the airport!) and its failures (recently rereading the Big Talk issue between Peter Parker and Aunt May in Best of Spider-Man Volume 2, I found it much less successful than I'd remembered it). But it's also had some grand stuff, too. I'm especially fond of the dark mysticism plotlines, which have utilized Lee & Ditko's Doctor Strange multiverse as the jumping off point for some wonderful flights of visual imagination and some hefty emotional pay-off, too. So I'm not ready to "fire" JMS on the title (as Scott Tipton has). But I still have to wonder if the guy wouldn't benefit from a more tight-ass editor, one with enough sense to rein in some of his excesses and the savvy to recognize when a storyline is heading beyond the bonds of one of its flagship floppies. UPDATE II: Johanna Draper Carlson also notes my original posting – and catches the point I was trying to make about "target audiences." # | Thursday, December 02, 2004 ( 12/02/2004 08:22:00 AM ) Bill S. HITCHIN' – Watched Christopher Hitchens on The Daily Show last night: a sure-looked-soused-to-me performance that may've made sense to those who follow the man's every eloquently written word, but came across disjointed to the rest of us. To be fair, interviewer Stewart didn't help by rumbling over several of Hitchens' points, but in the end the pundit did himself in. Whenever I hear someone definitively assert – as Hitch did last night – that "everybody knows" what frauds religio-hucksters like Jimmy Swaggart are, I can only think, "You don't live in Central Illinois, do you?" # | Wednesday, December 01, 2004 ( 12/01/2004 02:41:00 PM ) Bill S. SWEET STUFF – In a season that can be plenty fallow for new pop releases, fanboy guitar popper Matthew Sweet has recently unleashed two discs in the U.S., Living Things and Kimi Ga Suki (which was earlier released in Japan but is only now making it to these shores.) Over at the Rhino website, the gang is celebrating the occasion by posting an interview conducted in 2000 when Sweet's best-of Time Capsule collection was released. Worth the time if you enjoy Sweet's brand of don't-let-me-be-misunderstood power pop. (I do.) Haven't purchased either disc yet, but from all initial reports, the Japanese release is the one to go for first – as it represents the return of several ace sessioners (like guitar wiz Richard Lloyd) who helped make Sweet's best-known disc, Girlfriend, so ear-licious. # | ( 12/01/2004 01:06:00 PM ) Bill S. JUST A SHORT QUERY – Anyone else out there nonspecifically weirded-out by the use of John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" for K-Mart's Martha Stewart holiday teevee ads? # | Tuesday, November 30, 2004 ( 11/30/2004 09:44:00 AM ) Bill S. "I'VE GOT JUST AS MUCH RESPECT FOR A DEAD BODY AS ANYONE ELSE AROUND HERE!" – Perhaps the best that can be noted about the misbegotten remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the fact that Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel, creators of the original Chain Saw are listed as producers. One can only hope that the twosome made out well financially from this denatured reworking of their much-cherished piece of cannibal film dementia because what scripter Scott Kosar and director Marcus Nispel do to the material is worse than even the most half-baked low-budget sequel: they make it a Hollywood film. The 2003 remake of this seventies era "meat-is-murder" classic is slickly put together and packed with appropriately icky makeup moments (the foremost has to be a string of sticky viscera that stretches before our eyes as a de-limbed victim is lifted from the floor), but at no time do we ever get the sense that we're seeing anything more than a piece of movie product. The original Chain Saw was something that audiences experienced, as oppose to merely watching. Getting gobsmacked by a low-budget drive-in movie may not be your idea of a good time, but to modern horror aficionados, the original remains a model of storytelling ruthlessness. The current Chainsaw (the two versions can be differentiated by whether they make the title instrument one word or two) is little more than another teens-in-peril movie. The movie starts out promisingly, with a reprise of John Larroquette's narrative intro, then gives us a Blair Witch indebted videocam sequence of police investigating the crime scene after the events of the movie have supposedly occurred. The net effect of this prologue is to undermine the film's sealed-in feeling: though the remake extends the horror beyond a single housed family to the members of an entire rural community, it can't feel as horrifically claustrophobic since we've already seen outside authority figures strolling through the murder scene. In its drive to make this fake true story feel "truer," the remake consistently undercuts the elements that make it great. Does it do us any good to learn that Leatherface, the hulking chain saw wielding maniac with human skin masks, is named Thomas Brown Hewitt – or that the reason he's wearing these grisly coverings is to hide a disease-riddled face? And though the original was set in the early seventies when it was made, does it make sense to set the remake then, too, opening our first shot of our van-driving victims-to-be with "Sweet Home Alabama" on the soundtrack? We get the point – the story's set in the deep rural south (because everyone knows that cannibalistic psychos would never hide in a northern city, right, Jeffrey Dahmer?) – but it also makes the movie feel like a queasy nostalgia trip: the cinema equivalent of a packaged Jack the Ripper tour. Critiquing the original, Sean Collins once noted that none of the original movie's victims indulged in the typical horror movie "sins" – they neither engaged in premarital sex nor otherwise transgressed against the conservative values of teen horror movies, and this consequently made their ordeal even more horrendous because there was none of the implicit they had it coming element imbedded in your more typical slasher film. In the remake, our doomed quintet is returning from Mexico with two pounds of pot – and though heroine Erin (Jessica Biel) tries to get her boyfriend (Eric Balfour) to stop what he's doing, he essentially blows her off. Meanwhile, in the back of the van, two of the crew are all over each other, though we quickly learn the girl is in the duo is just a hitchhiker that has recently been picked up. Clearly, this bunch has it coming. When it comes, the results are much more gruesome than the original (which relied on suggestion – and a well-placed meat hook – more than it did gore effects) and considerably less effective. The acting by familiar faces like Biel & Balfour may be more "professional," but their familiarity only works to distance us from the film, even if Balfour does try to hide his recognizable puss under a ball cap. Even the presence of F. Lee Ermey (the D.I. from Stanley Kubrick's best horror film) as a foul-mouthed sheriff and member of the movie's extended cannibalistic family (it's not a surprise – you know he's a psycho the minute you meet him) can't elevate the film, though, Lord knows, Ermey puts a lot of energy into the scenes where he's required to taunt his captive kids. I wasn't bored with the remake and even enjoyed a couple of the twists that scripter Kosar tossed into the tale: as when heroine Erin gets picked up by a rescuing big rig trucker, only to discover (unlike the original) that her travails aren't yet over. But the difference between the two Massacres is encapsulated by their endings. In the original, the last thing we see is Leatherface, dancing in the desolate Texas landscape, waving his buzzing saw; in the remake, we return to the opening videocam scene for a final "shock" and a totally derivative copy of Blair Witch's finale. It's the difference between the lasting gonzo poetry of pure drive-in horror – and the transient thrill of competent Hollywood hackwork. . . # | Monday, November 29, 2004 ( 11/29/2004 03:29:00 PM ) Bill S.  "YOU DUMB-ASS!" – Been trying to wrap my brain around Ho! Super Milk-Chan, the surreally infantile "Adult Swim" animé that's been running in the wee hours of Sunday night. On the surface, the show isn't much different from Aqua Teen Hunger Force: a trio of strange types, barely capable of getting along, embark on off-beat adventures without the least idea of how they plan to resolve anything. But in the end, the show is slipperier and much more otherworldly than ATHF.Central figure, Milk, is a big-headed little girl in a spacesuit too big for her tiny body; she's acquisitive and prone to sudden temper outbursts (not that different from Grandmaster Shake, come to think of it). Though she apparently works as an agent for the President of the World (a bulbous-headed figure who vaguely resembles a hippo), she never has any money and begins each episode hiding from her landlord. Residing with Milk are a condom-shaped robot named Tetsuko and a green mustachioed worm/slug named Hanage, who doesn't speak, though occasionally we're privy to the Voice of His Heart. In last night's offering, our heroine gets called by the President just before aliens kidnap the world leader. Turns out said extraterrestrials are grabbing earthlings as part of human Farm Project 2000, which involves swiping humans so the alien cans clone them and use the bodies as a food source. Our trio ventures out into the ultra-futuristic city to look for the abducted Prez, but even with the help of a urinating robot dog, they never really find the abductors. Instead, Hanage is taken, then rejected for being too unpalatable. Once the aliens have pumped enough snot(!) from the President's nose to create a pool of clones, they return him to his office. Order is restored, even though our heroine hasn't really done anything to restore it. To be fair, Milk is more interested in childishly playing trains and verbally abusing Tetsuko than doing any hard-core heroine work (why the doltish, fly-riddled President feels so dependent on her is an unexplained mystery). Occasionally, the show abandons its pretense of a story to focus on the irrelevant plight of a neighboring family of ants – or to briefly indulge in a poetic video essay. The whole shebang is all presented in an art style that reminds me in places of Dutch undergrounder Evert Geradts. It's a bit like reading a children's picture book backwards on acid. Perhaps it's the culture gap, the greater stream of non-sequiturs or the more assertively bizarro visual scheme, but Ho! Super Milk-Chan makes "Adult Swim"'s other new offering, Tom Goes to the Mayor, look even flatter and more un-funny than it already is. (No mean feat that.) I find myself chuckling quite a lot at the show, even when I'm not entirely sure why. I read that there's a more Americanized version of this show out on DVD which replaces some of the toon's more obscure Japanese pop culture references with Western ones. Kudos to The Cartoon Network for not going that route; comprehension is overrated, anyway. . . # | ( 11/29/2004 01:10:00 PM ) Bill S. I SEE YOUR TRU COLORS – I was wondering about the new season of Tru Calling, which was supposed to commence in November, and then I read a piece at Todd Murray's blog which indicates that Fox has cancelled the show. Going to Fox's website, I see that the show is now supposed to start its second season in 2005. So which is it? # | Sunday, November 28, 2004 ( 11/28/2004 06:11:00 PM ) Bill S. OH, MY ACHING _____ – Spent much of the afternoon rearranging upstairs – and, as part of this chore, I moved all of my comic book boxes out of the half-attic and into a more accessible area. Don't have the number of long boxes that I did in my spendthrift youth (only counted ten, plus ten more half-sized boxes), but it still was one of those tasks that get you seriously reconsidering your collecting habit. What saved me was opening some of those babies and randomly paging through some of the comics' stories. Read the whole "National Gorilla Suit Day" piece from the short-lived Don Martin Magazine while sitting on the floor, for instance, and it really done my heart good. Almost made up for the half a tube of Icy Hot that Becky had to rub on my lower back later in the day. . . # | |
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