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Saturday, July 02, 2005 ( 7/02/2005 07:18:00 AM ) Bill S. "I ALWAYS WANTED TO SEE HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES. . ." – When I told folks I was planning on seeing George A. Romero's Land of the Dead as a part of July 4th weekend, I was being more than a little facetious. ("What could be more American than flesh-eating zombies?") But after viewing the fourth entry in the writer/director's groundbreaking horror series, turns out my half-assed joke may've been more on target than I knew. There are loads of fireworks in this movie – they even have a plot point – and enough nods to the notion of revolution 'tween the haves and have-nots to guarantee that more than one right wing screedster will be relying on this flick as another example of Hollywood's so-called "left wing bias." (Even if the proudly Pittsburghian Romero has never exactly been a Hollywood guy.) With its opening in an all-American park (where a trio of befuddled zombies are seen tunelessly and comically fumbling with their instruments in the band shell) to its trek across the river and a sharply divided city, this Land is plainly meant to be yours and my land. The set-up is fairly basic: we're a few years down the road from the events in Night of the Living Dead and living humanity is holed up in a few heavily barricaded cities across the country. Within these enclaves, life has devolved into a more severe class-based system, with the wealthy living the lush life in a heavily guarded building called Fiddler's Green and the proles living in the kind of raggedy-assed slums that'll put you in mind of Mad Max's Thunderdome, right down to the presence of a sinister midget. Across the river, the dead are stumbling around, waiting for some fresh meat to stumble their way – while the wealthy's hirelings regularly venture into the 'burbs in a heavily armored and accessorized vehicle (called Dead Reckoning) to forage for supplies. There obviously ain't a whole lotta family farming going on these days. Some zombie lovers (Franklin Harris among 'em) have observed that Land's class-based culture – with hammy kingpin Dennis Hopper holding tight to his position as the wealthiest man in the city – doesn't make a whole lot of sense when the currency he is shown hoarding so zealously won't amount to a hill of beans. But I accepted his (and sleazy underling John Leguizamo's) irrational adherence to the idea that Money Matters, even in a land where the dead are ever-ready to pull your head off, simply because crisis frequently fosters a strong dependence on old structures. Much as the structural dynamics of racism have lingered long after its prime economic motor (slavery) ceased to exist in this country, the mechanics of a class-based culture have sufficient autonomous life to survive past the death of currency. Gotta admire the writer/director's willingness to stage his own internal political debates so openly: while the recent remake of Dawn worked overtime to be All Frights to All People, Romero doesn't muffle his proletarian sympathies one whit. Where the movie's clearly left-leaning politics (at one point Hopper calls Lequizamo's extortionist Cholo a "terrorist;" in another Leguizamo threatens to do a "jihad" on Hopper's ass) grow confusing for me at least is in the muddled way Romero sets up his polarized society. Who, exactly, are supposed to the class-based victims? The slum-dwelling urbanites who are kept out of Hopper's glistening sanctuary? Or the ever-hungry zombies? Perhaps it's both? There's a not-quite-convincing statement made by one of the survivors near the end of the flick, expressing commonality between zombies and the regular folk, but I'm not sure I bought it. One thing is clear: the illusion of safety that's been maintained within the city isn't going to hold forever. The zombies, exemplified by a large black undead man in a mechanics' suit with the name "Big Daddy" (Eugene Clark, giving the best one-man monster performance in a modern horror flick since Jeff Goldblum turned into Brundlefly) emblazoned across his pocket, are growing smarter and more persistent. Though earlier Dead flicks gave lip-service to the idea that these revived creatures were growing more sentient and learning to use tools, in Land we get to see this happening. When Big Daddy shows up to ultimately do in both Hopper and Leguizamo, you can't help but feel proud of the big fella; it took a lot of thought and effort for him to get to Fiddler's Green. Class-based dichotomies aside, perhaps the primary political message of Land is a little bit broader: that, even with the threat of an irrefutable outside menace clamoring to get in, too many of us are looking for ways to feather our nest to pay enough attention to the very real dangers surrounding us. The only major characters to survive this particular outing are part of a small band of stick-together survivors (Simon Baker & Asia Argento among 'em) planning to split for – where else? – Canada. Decades away from the sixties that spawned the first Night, our neighbors to the north still signify as the modern equivalent to Huck Finn's "territories." I had a good time viewing Land, even if I can't say that I was ever exactly caught up in it the way I was with Romero's original Night and Dawn. Too many intervening years of xeroxed zombie films, comics and bad rock bands swiping EC imagery have definitely diluted the impact of Romero's redefining genre tropes. And, as with George Lucas' final three Star Wars flicks, you really wish that Romero the auteur had the sense to pull in a writer/collaborator to retool some of his lamer lines. (Is John Russo still alive?) Still, Romero knows what we're all really looking for in these films – great gore effects and lots of 'em – and is still enough of the psychotronic pshowman to keep 'em in the forefront. (My favorite is a walking corpse that appears headless because it's nearly decapitated until – surprise! – the head flips back onto its neck and the creature chomps down on a hapless victim.) Lots of good work from Greg Nicotero and the gang at KNB, and, aside from the Big Whoa moments, they also pull off some neatly creepy visual poetry. The sequence when the army of undead creatures rise from the river may recall a similar moment from Pirates of the Caribbean (not to mention, Coppola's Apocalypse Now), but that doesn't diminish its own dark beauty. Though they may stumble and around moan like the nearly brain-dead creatures they are, Romero's living dead still get the moments of gothic grandeur that they deserve. . . UPDATE: Sean "Outbreak" Collins has posted his deservedly anticipated take on Land, and in the process he links to a whole bunch of other thought-provoking examinations of this well-stuffed film, including Ian Brill's and Jon Hasting's. Check it out, all you zombie buffs. . . # | Friday, July 01, 2005 ( 7/01/2005 03:49:00 PM ) Bill S. "JUST THE WAY TO START THE DAY." – Any consideration of Larry Young – or, more specifically, the books Young writes for his own indy comics line, AiT/Planet Lar – must inevitably be as much about the practice of self-advertisement as it about the work itself. Reading the first issue of Young’s new color comic mini-series, Black Diamond On Ramp, a neatly hard-edged series set in a dystopian near future, I was reminded how much canny marketing can add to a pop experience. Taken by itself, the "story" to the opening chapter is markedly slight. We barely get a sense of the story's futuristic setting, for instance (just a pair of hovering spy cams that appear in one panel), while two of the story's major figures, one of the 'em the story's antagonist, don't even appear in the chapter. If the first issue of Black Diamond had contained just its graphic story, without the five pages of supporting text accompanying it, all we would've had is a well-made mildly Tarantino-ish (check that conversation 'tween the two henchmen about the "two types of plots") genre piece that may or may not've brought us back for a second issue, depending on our affinity for stories featuring the image of a sweet li'l ol' lady getting flattened by a falling car. But Larry, bless his Barnumesque soul, knows the value of good hype, and he pays as much creative attention to the rest of his packaging as he does the work itself. This may rub some art comics types the wrong way – when you're building a line on personality as much as product, there's always a part of the audience who just ain't gonna dig your personality – but for many of us it's an appealing part of the line. Contrast Black Diamond with the recent debut issue of the new Mr. T comic. That work simply gave us an opening chapter utterly devoid of the character we expected to see – with nary a hint that he'd emerge as the story progressed. If Young had been writing the series, he'd have given us a four-page discourse on the elements of T-ness that first attracted him (and by extension: us) to the character as well as a series of teasing hints on where he planned to take the mohawked one. Per the book's text backgrounds, Black Diamond's story is set in a future America where the country has been firmly divided into two groups of people: ground dwellers (repped by the Cleaver-styled inhabitants of a quiet Cali suburb) and literal highwaymen, who live off a massive system of eight-lane roads that are elevated above the sleepy 'burbs. Young's tale opens by flipping between one of the suburbanites, "Doctor Don," as he wakes and goes through his morning ablutions, and a chatty pair of shotgun toting henchmen as they tool along the freeway overhead. These two are no ill-read dummies, since they even manage to slip in a ref to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (as both seen by Shakespeare and by Tom Stoppard) along the way, though the exact nature of their current undertaking is not explained. As we watch Doctor Don floss his teeth and read the sports section, we see the duo embark on a high-speed chase with another driver ("Jesus! What a way to start the day," the second driver sez, a line that's repeated with minor variations by nearly every other character in the book.) One of those two vehicles winds up flying off the road and landing in that quiet suburban neighb. Jon Proctor's art captures this blend of the mundane and pulpish beautifully (though I've gotta admit I was a little bit disconcerted by the shifting patch of chest hair he gives his buck nekkid hero), while his use of early morning, half-lit color in this dawn-set entry is particularly fine (lots of brown and khaki hues in this issue). We may be in the future, but the type of cars on the sky-high-highway aren't anything we wouldn't have seen in a Paul Bartel Death Race movie. (Young makes the high-concept comparison to Mad Max: me, I see the David Carradine vehicle, Cannonball, which incidentally is not to be confused with Cannonball Run.) It has, in other words, the appropriate low-budget feeling for a story you might've watched at the drive-in if drive-ins weren't an endangered species in this country. (Perhaps they exist off Young's eight-lane highway?) Aside from the roadway violence and that shmushed-up grandma, we don't get too much plot in this opener, just the careful accretion of contrasting moods. Don's wife, we're told, is on a "business trip," so neither he nor we know from the first chapter what is made clear in the afterward text: that she's been kidnapped and will need to be rescued by her orthodontist (Oh, so that's the kinda doctor he is – which explains the flossing, eh?) hubby. So what about what Paul Harvey would've called the Rest of the Story? That's for Larry & Jon to reveal in the months ahead. Based on the snippets doled out in this great big teaser of a first issue, I'm eager to see if the series lives up to its promises. . . # | Wednesday, June 29, 2005 ( 6/29/2005 09:22:00 AM ) Bill S. "ARE YOU THE KEYMASTER?" – A week-and-a-half ago, as I was readying to make a quick late weekend grocery run, I ran into a small problem. I couldn't find my key ring. I'd used 'em earlier that weekend: on the ring is my car, house and office keys, so when I’d driven the dogs to the Normal Dog Park, I had the keys in my hand. But, now, they'd mysteriously vanished. Spent two hours of my Sunday scouring the house in a futile search, growing progressively more pissed off at myself in the process. The best theory around their disappearance: I'd left the keys on a dresser in the bedroom, a place where we sometimes let the ferrets loose to play, and one of the little buggers had hidden 'em. I moved a lot of furniture around in that room to test that theory, but it was to no avail. It didn't cost more than a couple of bucks to replace my house and office keys, but when I brought the PT Cruiser keys into the hardware store, I learned something I hadn't realized about cars nowadays. Prior to our acquisition of the Cruiser, we had never owned a car that'd been built in the same decade that we'd purchased it. So how was I supposed to know that moderne car keys have a chip inside which significantly adds to their replacement cost? If we went to the dealer, a new key with one of those keyless electronic door opener jobbers was gonna set us back a hundred smackers. Jesus. So, naturally, I went without buying a replacement set, made do with using my wife's keys whenever I needed the car. And at least once a day, I'd double-check a part of the house, just on the off-chance that I'd experienced a momentary fugue state the first time I looked and missed seeing what was right in front of my nose. I hadn't realized how much self-worth was invested in having my own set of keys, though; losing those babies made me decidedly surly. And when I had Becky's keys in my pocket, I felt antsy and ineffectual – not just worried about losing the only set we now seemingly had, but vaguely feeling like an imposter for holding keys that weren't really mine. Then there were those days I'd return from work and forget to immediately put Becky's keys back into the purse. When I'd notice 'em in my jeans pocket an hour later, I'd feel guilty for having held onto 'em. Happily for my peace of mind, we finally found the missing set this Monday. Turns out they'd fallen into the back seat of the Cruiser, presumably while I was nudging the dogs out of the car (they both love to ride in the back seat), and were hidden by the blanket we use to protect the upholstery. For the first time in days, I was able to drive our car into work this morning with my own personal key in the ignition (no unnecessary nail clippers danglin' on my key ring, thank you!) Gotta tell you: after feeling off-kilter for over a week, I'm a-okay today. Keys are important. # | Tuesday, June 28, 2005 ( 6/28/2005 05:23:00 AM ) Bill S. "THIS WAS BUILT BY AN ORDINARY FELLOW" – It's summer, so it must be time for A Program About Unusual Buildings And Other Roadside Stuff, an hour-long documentary written and narrated by Rick Seback devoted to great weird buildings like the L.A. restaurant shaped like a hot dog (as seen in Ruthless People and a hundred other movies set in Hollywood) as well as the Collinsville, Illinois, water tower that's the World’s Largest Catsup Bottle. The show's running on PBS, so if you're a Big Things aficionado like yours truly (or like Zippy's Bill Griffith, who once more is interviewed on the subject of outlandish architecture), check yer local listings. # | Monday, June 27, 2005 ( 6/27/2005 01:13:00 PM ) Bill S. LOWS AND FISHERS – Haven't wanted to say much about the new concluding season of HBO's dark dramedy Six Feet Under yet because I keep hoping that the show'll pick itself out of its doldrums. But after three eps, there's a real sense of let's-get-this-over-with to the whole proceedings. Series creator Alan Ball has been noticeably absent on the writing front thus far, and his mordant wit is very much missed. The characters' downward spirals (two Fishers currently in relationships with mentally ill men?) are so inexorable and grimly paced that any element of surprise and/or sick fun has been leeched out of the show. Even the series' trademark opening demises have been distressingly lackluster. And while watching George's mother die in front of him as a boy may help to "explain" some of his wounded behaviors, it's a bit of a structural cheat since – unlike every other opening death on the show – it in no way connects to the underlying bizness of undertaking. Unless things spark up considerably, I suspect most fans of this once-fine show (myself, included) will be breathing a sigh of relief once it reaches its conclusion later this summer. . . # | Sunday, June 26, 2005 ( 6/26/2005 10:46:00 AM ) Bill S. JIBBA JABBER – More than two decades ago, I was working as a child care worker/counselor in a group home for wards of the state of Illinois. These kids, who ranged in age from pre-teen to verge-of-legal-adulthood had been removed from their homes (usually for reasons of abuse and neglect) and were generally considered difficult to manage. (In some cases they were: had some ribs cracked when a boy threw a chair at me once.) But there were some teevee shows that you could usually count on to hold on their attention for an hour – and, back in the mid-80's, the best was The A-Team. The boys in the home loved that silly show, and, of course, the character that they related to most was Mr. T's B.A. Baracas: comically loud-mouthed and abrasive, physically threatening yet intensely loyal to his friends, the mohawked action figure made a perfect hero for a group of immature kids who themselves had a lot of barely managed anger. Whenever T spoke on screen, it'd be punctuated by a howl of laughter from the kids, especially when he was putting down Dwight Schultz' manic lunatic Murdock. Living in a group home, you had to deal with similar characters every day. It never seemed to occur to any of these kids that to their peers, they were Murdock; they all wanted to be "Bad Ass" Baracas. I thought of those young T fans while perusing a pdf. review copy of the debut issue of AP Comics' new Mr. T book. As written by Chris Bunting and illustrated by Neil Edwards & Andy Emberling, the UK-puplished book is an attempt at reinvigorating the action character by placing him in a modern Dead End urban setting. Instead of the larger-than-life antics of the television A-Team, the comic book T hearkens back to the blaxplotation boom of movies like Penitentiary 2 (which featured T in a small role as – who else? – himself): the bulk of its first issue is devoted to establishing how mean the streets can be. Though Bunting ironically opens with the words to "Teddy Bears' Picnic" in the first pages, what we get in the panels is a young black kid buying drugs from a trio of extremely well groomed pushers and nearly killing himself as a result. (We see a full paged image of the boy passed out in a slum dwelling with a tear rolling out of one eye and blood running from his nose.) Our young victim has fallen to a new street drug called "Shaz 8," and a local doctor named Jeremiah is driven by the sight of this newest casualty to want to do something about the drug menace. He seeks out ("It's time to make a special house call!") Mr. T, who appears to be hiding in the shadows of a basement apartment without electricity. You used to single-handedly keep this neighborhood safe, he tells the darkness-shrouded street fighter, but T is reluctant to jump into action again. Framed for an undisclosed crime that resulted in prison time, he has been working to keep himself under the radar since his release. "I think crime-fighting is pointless," he tells Jeremiah, but we know that despite his misgivings he'll soon be back in the fray, anyway, kickin' ass and takin' names. Unfortunately, the first issue takes so much time establishing its set-up that all it can do is promise that'll happen in issue #2. Still, I think the book imparts the flavor of what its creators are trying to do. Edwards & Emberling's art is dark and suitably steroidal (there's an unintentional irony imbedded in the story, I suspect, in the fact that the new street drug is described as a steroid derivative which either kills or drives its users psychotic), though in some panels their figures look more like looming cardboard cutouts than they do fully fleshed figures. The art suits the overly serious tone of Bunting's script, however: if you're expecting a comic book replay of the campy Mr. T catch-phrases, you'll be sorely disappointed. No fool pityin' taking place in this grim universe, gang, though over on the AP website, they're much less timid when it comes to hypefully pulling out the phraseology that made T famous. To be honest, though, I was hoping that the book's creators had taken a more over-the-top approach, something like Azzarello & Corben's MAX take on Luke Cage. At some point, when you're working with a self-celebratory caricature like this, you need to pay homage to the elements that originally made him so beloved: the braggadocio, the quick temper and impatience with fools, the slice of peacock adornment repped by his bright gold jewelry. Just making him another reluctant, misunderstood action figure in a familiar fight against the Drug Lords does little to the out-sized culture hero who once won the hearts of a bunch of disenfranchised group home kids. (Perhaps they might've recognized our victim kid – if he'd been given the least bit of recognizable character.) A shame, really. . . # | |
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