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Saturday, August 12, 2006 ( 8/12/2006 07:32:00 AM ) Bill S.  "IF IT WASN'T FOR HER, I NEVER WOULD HAVE BECOME THE EVER-LOVIN' IDOL'A MILLIONS!"– Haven't been keeping up on the doings in the Marvel Universe lately (apparently, there's a – what? – civil war going on or somp'n?) so I recently decided to take a quick peak thanx to the friendly folks at OfficeMax. Just in time for school supplies buyin' season, Marvel and Max – in collaboration with a group called Teachers Count – has put our a Fantastic Four/Spider-Man team-up guest-starring the OfficeMax Super Teachers of the Year. You haven't seen such pulse-pounding action since Daredevil fought Vapora for the Gas Appliance Manufacturers Association.From the looks of this book (scripted by Tom DeFalco, penciled by Ron Lim w./ inks by Pat Davidson & Mostafa Moussa), not too much of note has happened in the MU, though. Peter Parker is still a science teacher at Midtown High; the FF still maintains its hq. in the Baxter Building; Johnny Storm is still an immature dick, etc. The only new information we learn is the fact that there's an OfficeMax around the corner from the Baxter and that proto-nerd Reed Richards has apparently never been inside one before ("Wow! OfficeMax has it all. We'll have no trouble finding Doom with all these school supplies.") That and the fact that Doombots are no match for a group of really determined teachers . . . The plot, such as it is, revolves around FF nemesis Doctor Doom's attempt to siphon the knowledge from a sextet of bright school kids (the six who nominated their teachers for the real-life OfficeMax award: they get rewarded with a one-panel appearance, looking very blank-eyed). Why super-genius Doom is stealing knowledge from a group of sixth graders is never fully explained ("Knowledge is power, and Doom knows it!" one of their teachers states, but that presumes that all knowledge is of equal merit.) Perhaps Doom thinks that if he'd paid better attention in sixth grade science class, he wouldn't have made the error that cost him his good looks? Packing the six students' teachers (the OMSTotY) into the Fantasticar ("I wish I had a vehicle like this for field trips," one of the educators states), our superheroes track Doom to a distant, isolated castle – where both the FF and Spidey are immediately captured by the supervillain. It's up to the OMSTotY to storm the castle and rescue Marvel's Finest, which they do, ultimately utilizing (I kid you not) an OfficeMax rubber band ball to free the heroes. As they trash Doom's castle, the superheroes sing the praises of good teachers: "A teacher's job is never done," the Thing states. "That's why they're respected by students, parents and everyone else!" (The Marvel Universe truly is a wondrous place.) When we get back to the Baxter Building, we learn that the six students are still blank-brained, but that's, okay, since they still have their teachers ("We'll help them regain their lost knowledge!" "That's who we are and what we do!") The full extent of the kids' lost knowledge is never made explicit. I started wondering whether they were gonna need to learn how to re-tie their shoes . . .among other things. Okay, a pleasantly goofy freebie with a decent message (Stay In School, Kids! And Listen To Yer Teachers!) And judging from what goes on it, I'm guessing that things are plenty stable in the Marvel Universe, right? Nice to know . . . # | Friday, August 11, 2006 ( 8/11/2006 11:50:00 AM ) Bill S. A HUNGRY HUNGRY HIPPO FULL O' SNARK – Recently learned that Rick Johnson, a rock writer who made Macomb, IL, his home base, passed away from natural causes recently. Rick was an adherent of the fervent-loud-&-disrespectful school of rock criticism best exemplified by Lester Bangs. He was a regular fixture at Creem Magazine during its heyday – once garnering p.o.ed readership response for opening a review of a Runaways' elpee by bluntly opining, "These bitches suck!" An encyclopedic writer with a predilection for inserting references to old kids' games and Hanna-Barbera cartoons into his reviews, Johnson was one of those critics who could always make me chuckle – even when I disagreed with his assessment of the music (like most of the Creemsters, Rick wasn't very tolerant of pop sweetening.) Met him a couple of times when we were both writing for a giveaway music paper called The Prairie Sun: he could be as much of an engaging asshole in person as he was in print. (That was not meant as an insult!) Adios, Rick! . . . # | ( 8/11/2006 03:56:00 AM ) Bill S. "YOU KNOW TALK IS CHEAP, AND RUMORS AIN'T NICE!" – In honor of the recent release of a decent remastered version of Cheap Trick's fifth album (hey, Sony, why the seven year gap between this and the first four?), here's an imbedded vid of the title song . . . # | Thursday, August 10, 2006 ( 8/10/2006 11:26:00 AM ) Bill S. TWO OR THREE MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE – So we're watching this week's ep of Sci-Fi’s Eureka, and I'm enjoying the sight of supporting player Matt Frewer comically grimacing into the camera. At one point, I turn to my wife and say, "Matt's not Edison Carter any more; he's become Blank Reg!" # | ( 8/10/2006 09:15:00 AM ) Bill S. RE: THE KNEE – Just got back from the doctor's – and apparently I'm suffering from what is called carpet layer's knee ("You mean 'housemaid's knee'?" wife Becky asked when I recounted my doctor's visit. "Nonono," I replied, "carpet layer's knee!" The latter sounds much more manly, right?) Basic prescription for it is a bunch of ibuprofen over the next two weeks and keeping off my knees – that's distinctly manageable, even if it means I may have to reluctantly forgo working in the backyard for the next two weekends . . . # | ( 8/10/2006 05:42:00 AM ) Bill S.  "TRAUMA BONDS PEOPLE!" – It's things like this that keep me goin' to the discount stores: picked up a copy of Eli Roth's Cabin Fever (2003) recently for cheap, and, after watching it, I definitely consider it five bucks well spent. I'd read about Roth after his more recent Hostel had drawn raves from a variety of horror aficionados (including some, like Tom the Dog, who loathed Fever), but this was my first experience with his feature work. (I do have a vague memory of seeing at least one of his Rotten Fruit shorts, though I can't dredge up where that was.) Based on what I've read about Hostel, I suspect that Roth's first feature is more to my personal tastes: a willfully disreputable recreation of 70's drive-in horror excess that gleefully zips from eye-cringing gore (a leg-shaving scene that's so memorable that they use the moment on the DVD's menu) to broad rural antics that would make Herschel Gordon Lewis chortle – all in the service of messily dispatching a crew of brazenly familiar collegians.The movie centers around a quintet of unlikable vacationing students who've rented a cabin in the woods and discover, to their dismay, that the hill man who happened upon their campfire and started spewing blood all over the inside of their truck has a highly contagious rapidly manifesting flesh-eating virus. Before you can say, "Every man for himself," one of the group comes down with the disease – and the rest lock her up for the night in a nearby woodshed. Unbeknownst to them, the contagious hill man has wandered off to die and fall into the reservoir that feeds the area's drinking water. Where horror flicks like the original Night of the Living Dead took their cast of ordinary folk and forced them to reluctantly band together in the interests of survival, the kids in Fever waste little time in self-interestedly splitting apart. The nature of the disease – the fact that any one of 'em could already be infected – is part of the problem, but since even the flick's putative nice guy, passive-aggressive Paul (Boy Meets World's Rider Strong,) is a bit of a self-serving dick, you get the feeling that these kids would fly apart just as quickly facing a machete-wielding maniac. Those few representatives of the outside world – a seemingly racist shopkeeper, a sheriff's deputy who acts like he wandered in off of a bad porno, a crazed farm wife – are no help, of course, but that's standard for these kinds of movies. What's new is the speed with which our core group disintegrates into a pack of self-serving assholes. If Roth's take on human nature is profoundly cynical, the travails he subjects his victims to are so crowd-pleasingly tasteless (he gives us one of the nastiest foreplay scenes ever - and later tops this queasy moment of sexual shock with a shot of our hero Paul pouring Listerine on his crotch!) that their outlandishness lightens things up considerably. The film's erratic tone may push it out of the realm of "pure horror" (unlike, as I understand it, Hostel,) but for me it proved part of the movie's appeal. Even Fever's nobody-gets-out-of-here-alive conclusion is keyed to jaunty bluegrass music, a tip of the fiddle to earlier rural gore-fests like 2,000 Maniacs and Last House on the Left: tragedy tomorrow, corn-pone comedy tonight . . . # | Tuesday, August 08, 2006 ( 8/08/2006 01:40:00 PM ) Bill S. GETTING A LEG UP – Regular visitors to this blog will doubtless recall that we’ve been spending much of our weekend time working on the goddamned house next door. One of the final projects that's been occupying my attention has been backyard fencing. Our last tenants had put some fence panels up on the yard's west side – replacing the snow fence we used to keep the dogs in the yard – but, not to put too fine a point on it, they did an utterly crappy job. As a result, I've been most recently devoting my weekend time to pulling up fence posts, unscrewing paneling from posts and trees, then replanting the fencing in a somewhat straighter line. At least I was spending my weekends in the backyard. A little over a week ago, after a weekend of stooping and lifting wood paneling, I started noticing a stiffness in my left knee: some limited range of motion and twinges of pain if I tried to bend it over much. Pulled something, I thought; it'll go down in a few days. Except . . .it didn't. As the week progressed, it grew increasingly more difficult to walk on my left leg. It's not real swollen, but it sure feels taut. If I step down too hard – by nature, I'm a clumper – shooting pains course through my left side. Can't really isolate a moment where I actually injured the leg, but the pain's indisputable. I spent much of last weekend with my leg elevated, writing on a legal pad and hobbling around with an adjustable cane that I'd borrowed from my wife. Watched some crappy teevee (VH-1 – there's no reason to do I Love the 90's yet!), read Gilbert Hernandez's Sloth (review to eventually follow) plus a Sue Grafton mystery (R) – and occasionally limped into the study, feeling my knee as it popped. Monday, I had an even worse time getting around – it felt like my leg had locked up, which made it loads of fun climbing the stairs to a second floor office. Concerned, Becky phoned our family doctor and made an appointment for Thursday. Today, thankfully, the knee's feeling a bit better, so here's hoping by the time we actually make it to my Thursday appointment, I'll be able to talk to the doc about my cholesterol levels instead . . . # | ( 8/08/2006 04:55:00 AM ) Bill S. "FOR THE TIME THAT I'VE BEEN GIVEN: SUCH A LITTLE WHILE!" – While driving home last night, I heard rock historian Ed Ward do a tribute to singer/songwriter Arthur Lee on "Fresh Air." Lee, reportedly, passed away from acute myelogenous leukemia last week, an ailment that the former Love frontman had been suffering from for some time. His career as a prototypal psychedelic rocker was undeniably erratic, but with Love, he produced one acid-tinged masterwork, Forever Changes. (I write about Rhino's deluxe reissue of this disc as item ten on my Top Flight Rhinos page.) To my ears, Love was the arty L.A. band to beat in the sixties – even if fellow Elektra labelmates Jim Morrison and the Doors got more of the attention – and Changes remains one of the great rock albums. (If you don't believe me, check Gordon Dymowski's appreciation.) First Syd Barrett, now Lee: I feel like a major part of my drug-crazed youth has melted away like the ice cream man . . . UPDATE: Here's a link to alternate track versions of Changes' opener and closer: "Alone Again Or" and "You Set The Scene." UPDATE II: Video Watchblogger Tim Lucas has a wonderful appreciation of Lee and his career posted. Didn't know Lee's house was used in Roger Corman's The Trip, but it makes perfect sense. # | Monday, August 07, 2006 ( 8/07/2006 12:41:00 PM ) Bill S. THE ABSENT-MINDED PROFESSOR – In these lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, we sometimes find ourselves checking out the TV-movie mysteries on Hallmark Channel. Formulaic and inoffensive, crafted by solid unexciting pros who've been doing this stuff for decades, featuring TV performers who primarily appear to be between major network sitcoms (John Larroquette, Lea Thompson, Kellie Martin), these offerings are basically designed to appeal to the same geezer audience who made Murder, She Wrote, Matlock and Diagnosis: Murder long-running ratings performers. This weekend, we caught the rerun (it first aired in January) of what looks to be the start of a new series of Hallmark TV-flicks, Murder 101, starring Dick Van Dyke, shifting gears from a murder-solving physician to a dotty criminology professor. Never watched Diagnosis: Murder when it was a first-run series on The Tiffany Network, but from the promos that I've seen over the years, I'd gather that Van Dyke’s character there was a fairly no-nonsense Jessica Fletcher type. 101's Jonathan Maxwell is a more broadly comic figure – prone to locking himself out of his house and occasionally knocking into the end tables. To see the once lithe physical comedian do these mild bits of stumble business is more than a little disconcerting: you keep worrying that the guy'll break more than a simple ceramic statue. Too, Van Dyke's ol' professor appears to be equipped with a pair of ill-fitting dentures that definitely impede his delivery. Perhaps this is the way the comedian wanted to play the character, but it definitely impedes his delivery. Halfway into the TV-movie, I found myself yearning for the relatively subdued performing style of Jerry Van Dyke. Our series lead is teamed with another family member in this outing: son Barry, who I see from IMDB also had a role on Diagnosis. This was my first time seeing him in action – though presumably brought in to play the William Katt or Moses role from Perry Mason teleflicks (you know: the guy who gets to do all the running), his primary function in 101 is to flirt with suspect Tracey Needham. Though not related to Professor Maxwell in the story, every once in a while you can hear his father's voice come out of his mouth. Pretty odd. Haven't mentioned the telemovie's "mystery" yet because, frankly, there wasn't much to it. The sleazy CFO for an Enron-type company (to emphasize the comparison, scripter Dean Hargrove has more than one character say, "This is just like Enron!") appears to've been blown up in his home, and the last one seen with him was Needham's financial reporter, Cheryl Collins. Unlike another Hargrove Hallmark movie series, Jane Doe, which pits its puzzle-mistress heroine against a series of "impossible" crimes, the stakes are fairly low-pressure in 101; we never once worry that prime suspect Cheryl will be found guilty of murder. Thing is, none of the other suspects prove interesting enough for us care about them either. One of the more toothless Hallmark mystery TV-movies, in other words – and considering the modest bar that's typically set for these genre works, that's sayin' something. Think I need to view some prime Dick Van Dyke to push this turkey out of my brain: his sixties sitcom, perhaps, or Cold Turkey or Carl Reiner's Hollywood downer, The Comic. No, skip The Comic. I'm bummed already . . . # | Sunday, August 06, 2006 ( 8/06/2006 10:43:00 AM ) Bill S. "OH NO, THEO, NOT ANOTHER SWEATER!" – Funniest moment in this week's episode of USA's Psych: when phony psychic Shawn Spencer is shown standing in front of a blackboard filled with indecipherable calculations because "it works on Numbers." Best joke against the competition since Sledge Hammer was shown watching ratings bruiser Cosby inbetween cases. . . # | ( 8/06/2006 09:12:00 AM ) Bill S. "THIS IS MY TRUE FORM. IT IS WHO I AM!" – So I'm sitting in my study Friday a.m., doing the work at home thing, when the dogs rouse to tell me someone's at the door. It's the UPS man, and it turns out he's left a comic-sized envelope on my porch from DC Comics. When I tear it open, I see it contains the first issue of the eight-part mini-series, Martian Manhunter. "This is new," I think. As a polymorphous pop culture blogger, I've gotten review copies before, of course, but the only item from one of the two majors that I'd received in the past was a black-&-white photocopy for an issue of Firestorm. "Maybe it's the start of a trend?" I can't help wishfully thinking. Perhaps, a small corrupting voice in the back of my head starts wheedling, if I write a full-on rave for this title, I'll be added to the big package list of reviewers – like David Alan Doane or Joanna Draper Carlson – and start to get boxes of similar books to blog review? Should I add my middle name to this blog to make 'em take me seriously? (William Robert a.k.a. Billy Bob Sherman? Naw, forget that!) Okay, then: Martian Manhunter is the best superhero comic that I’ve read all year!!!!!!!No, not really. Though tight personal finances have kept my mainstream superhero comics purchases to a barebones minimum this year, I have been following Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman, which immediately renders the abovewritten hyperbolic statement wrong-headed. So wot's the True Review? As the cover asserts, MM is a follow-up to DC's Brave New World one-shot. I've missed that particular 80-Page Giant, so part of what scripter A.J. Lieberman has to do on the first four pages is bring me up to date. The Martian Manhunter I primarily remember is a back-up feature superhero in the pages of fifties Detective Comics, a bland green-skinned Yul Brynner whose Martian name J'onn J'onzz conveniently translated into English. (As a kid reading those Silver Age comics, I used to imagine turning my own name into an alien one with the expedient use of a few apostrophes and some creative spelling: B'ill Sh'urmnn, Gadabout from Mars!) But the current version is determinedly more alien-looking, more like the denizen of a Star Wars cantina than an Eisenhower Era green man. This markedly different look doesn't set well with all of us Earthlings: "I've seen the JLA," one suspicious cop says. "I know what the Manhunter looks like – and it ain't anything like you." The times, in short, are much less tolerant than they were even in the McCarthyite Fifties, when a shape-shifting alien could join a confederation of justice-minded super-types and fit in easily. Hero J'onn is treated to the same wary-eyed hostility accorded to a Marvel mutant. It's a harsh comic book world out there, a point scripter Lieberman unsubtly hammers home by opening this mini-series with a recreation of Cain & Abel that'll be visually echoed in the first ish's last page. Humankind's first recorded killing, our condescending alien hero states, made murder a part of our D.N.A., but before now he always thought he was immune to the impulse. Like Identity Crisis, the DC event series that first pushed the JLA into a prolonged game of Scruples, Martian Manhunter is designed to push its hero to the brink of Moral Quandary Land. You might wonder, as I sometimes do, whether every costumed super-type has to be shoved to the brink every time (stock answer: sure they do, because coming back from it is what makes 'em a hero, dammit!) But let's not immediately get sidetracked into broader questions, let's just consider the dilemma that is presently facing J'onn. The book (which has a slightly squishy timeframe) opens on our hero flying down as he considers all that has occurred in the past year: a friend murdered, his killer killed and the JLA disbanded. "I thought I'd lost everything, only to learn had more to lose than I had ever dreamed possible," he tells us – then we backtrack "thirty-two minutes ago" to a mysterious building where a figure is making a run for it into the dark city night. Cut to a conference room where a sinister looking businesswoman is chewing out her scientist underlings for letting "the creature" escape. The lady is named Ms. Ferdinand, and she quickly establishes her villainous bona fides in time-honored James Bond criminal mastermind tradition by blowing away an incompetent project head (so much for that retirement party!) and putting another eager underlings in his place. Without giving away too much, I will note that the escapee's an alien (you can tell there's something different about him simply from the way artist Al Barrioneuvo won't clearly let us see him at first) with an ultra-obscure Silver Age pedigree – and he is in telepathic contact with our hero. The agency in pursuit of the alien is one of those shadowy corporations with vague political connections. They appear to developing weaponry based on alien physiology – at one point our hero is assaulted by a "psionic pulse," which we're told Martians can produce under duress ("Did I know that J'onn could shoot a 'psionic pulse?'" I wonder.) – and would rather kill their escapee than see him connect with our hero. To this end, Ms. Ferdinand sends out a Psy-Ops assassin from the "Liberty List." J'onn races to save the fleeing alien, but since we know from the get-go that this is a flashback to events that will lead to the Martian Manhunter losing it, we're fairly certain he can't be successful. Nothing too unfamiliar here, though artists Barrionuevo & Bit treat their urban setting with a moody oppressiveness: the panels where our shadowy alien first escapes into a street scattered with debris and cast-off street people are especially convincing. I'm not fully certain about the parameters of J'onn's powers: at one point we're told he's as powerful as Superman, though there's a hint that this might be an underestimation. Yet the one battle scene against what appears to be a robot drone – a chance for our hero's powers to be shown in play – could use more narrative support from Lieberman to tell us what the heck is happening. Is J'onn using that "psionic pulse" to behead the robot or what? The visuals don’t really tell us. In the end, Martian Manhunter #1 proves an efficient example of the current drive to add an edge to back-of-the-book characters who once were most notable for their conspicuous lack of personality. J'onn's new Say-It-Loud-I'm-Green-And-I'm-Proud persona and the subsequent hostility it evokes may have a currency in these days of heightened xenophobia, but I don't think you can take that comparison too far. Let's just state that the J'onn J'onzz we see in this comic is part of a long line of upright heroes who get Pushed Too Far – and whether you accept what he does as a result depends on how much affection you hold for the original version of this non-character. Me, I'm okay with it (I'm still, however, holding a grudge over what was done to Elongated Man and his wife), though I honestly don't see this roughening up elevating the Martian Manhunter to first tier status. But what do I know? I thought Identity Crisis was gonna be written out of existence within a year of its conclusion . . . A PATENTLY SELF-SERVING POSTSCRIPT: Lookin' at the UPS label originally placed on the envelope to me, I see that it was originally addressed to "Bill Sherman, Residential, West Division, Normal, IL 61761," which may've kept it from being delivered in as timely as a manner as intended. So, hey, DC Comics – and anybody else who might ever want to send me spiffy review material, money and/or fresh fruit: it's 908 West Division, Normal, Illinois! # | |
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