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Thursday, December 07, 2006 ( 12/07/2006 10:06:00 AM ) Bill S. WIMMEN THEY BE DIFFERENT FROM MEN – Now, I know there was a time when Christopher Hitchens was considered a witty guy with a sharp way of wielding a contrarian opinion, but every time I tried reading his "provocative" Vanity Fair space-waster, "Why Women Aren't Funny," I found myself thinking, "Strip away the VF prose, and these are the words of a man who finds Larry the Cable Guy hilarious." # | ( 12/07/2006 09:29:00 AM ) Bill S. HAIR PLUGS ARE SO 1980’S, SEAN – The former Eunice Tate, Jennifer Salt, in her capacity as writer/producer for fx's nip/tuck, takes us back to the glory days of Chuck 'n' Bob with this week's episode (aging ventriloquist Willy Ward asks Sean for a face-lift so he can still look like his wiseacre dummy). Don't know the identity of the actor who played the over-the-hill voice-thrower, but I mentally kept visualizing Jay Johnson in the role . . . # | Wednesday, December 06, 2006 ( 12/06/2006 03:15:00 PM ) Bill S. "POWER SUPER/SUPER POWER" – For our mid-week music vid, what could be better than a rampaging multi-eyed monster, the Powerpuff Girls and the Apples in Stereo? A new album's coming out in '07? I'll believe it when I hear it . . . # | ( 12/06/2006 12:59:00 PM ) Bill S. PHEW! – Somehow, I don't know how, the template for this yere blog got flummoxed a coupla months ago, and I've only now gotten back to working on it. The list of reviews from 2003 – which I could've sworn was alphabetized – got all out of order, while 2002 disappeared altogether. So I spent some time today reordering '03. Nuthin' like going over a list of crap that you wish you could forget reviewing in the first place (I really sat through an episode of Threat Matrix!) to make you question the need for an index in the first place . . . # | Tuesday, December 05, 2006 ( 12/05/2006 10:50:00 AM ) Bill S.  "THIS GUN IS MY OTHER PARTNER" – (A Sixty-Minute Manga Excursion): Train Heartnet, the title lead of Kentaro Yabuki's Black Cat (Viz), is a boyish young man with wild hair, a belled collar on his long neck and a Roman numeral XIII tattooed on his chest. A former assassin for Chronos – a shadowy organization that controls 1/3 of the world's wealth – Train now works as a "sweeper" with his partner Sven Vollfied. Licensed bounty hunters, the duo travel the globe looking for miscreants with big rewards attached to 'em. In Book One's first character-establishing commission, they attempt to bring in a former gangland accountant who has both the law and the mob looking for him.Train faces off against the mob hitman sent to silence the accountant, and we get our first glimpse of his abilities and personality: like his feline namesake, he can leap amazing heights and is able to play a variation of bullets-&-bracelets with his especially crafted "orichalcum" pistol. Though impulsive and filled with boyish enthusiasms (for good food, for instance – being one of those characters who can eat anything and still keep his catlike figure), he's also capable of killing his ruthless adversary with a small smile on his face. Chain-smoking Sven is the pragmatic half of the partnership. Wearing an eye-patch and the kind of peach-fuzz facial hair that make him look like he only just recently passed into pubescence, he's the one who handles the business end of things, though he also gets to show his soft side when the pair hook with a little girl who also happens to be a programmed killer. What starts out as a fairly straightforward action series (for the first two contracts at least) quickly morphs into familiar Shonen Jumpy science-fantasy formula. Commissioned by a young woman named Rinslet Walker – a professional thief-for-hire prone to form-hugging outfits that flatteringly show off her gams – to travel to the Republic of Sapidoa (one of those countries that seems to perpetually have a big festival going on its streets) to bring in a crime boss called Torneo Rudman (love these names – are they Yabuki's or translator Kelly Sue DeConnick's?), they learn that Rudman is trafficking in the development of human weapons. His foremost creation is an orphaned twelve-year-old named Eve who has nanobots in her system that allow her to change body parts into anything she wants: like transform an arm into a long, body-impaling blade. Our heroes wind up freeing her from Rudman's clutches in Volume Two, and she quickly becomes part of the bounty hunting team. Not so Rinslet, who one suspects will waft in and out of our heroes' lives whenever it suits her own selfish purposes. Some dames are like that. The Rudman contract leads our team into first contact with Creed Diskenth, a former Chronos assassin like Train, and the man responsible for the death of the Black Cat's "dearest friend," a lady sweeper named Saya. Creed is an androgynously pretty figure with a major thing for Train; plotting to double-cross and overthrow Chronos, he attempts to enlist the sweeper, but our footloose hero wants none of it. With the appearance of Creed and his underlings, the sci-fantasy elements get upped even further: each one, we learn, has the ability to manifest their chi in powerful ways. One henchman, for instance, is capable of creating bee puppets that can sap your will when they sting and put you under their creator's control. Much of this talk of chi sounds very similar to the mystical gobbledegook that fuels Naruto's fight sequences – not much different than the catch-all of "mutation" used to buttress Marvel's X-books, actually – though when you get down to it, all the whys-&-wherefores are less important than the sight of a swarm of mechanical bees honing in our hero. Yabuki's art (as with other manga digests, we get to briefly meet his three art assistants in a set of one-page strips appended at the end of each volume) is clean and cartoonly in places (as with other manga series, he thinks nothing of rendering bumps on the head that at almost as big as the character's head itself), crisp during the action sequences when it needs to be (I found the fight sequences much easier to follow than, say, some of the dust-ups in Naruto) and serious when it needs to be. Though the series' tone is predominately devil-may-care, it occasionally strikes a tone of melancholy, most typically when Heartnet recalls his doomed dearest friend Saya. If Yabuki's protagonists look too fresh-faced to carry the weight of the world, it's a small quibble; his crew is deft at rendering appropriately debauched or careworn secondary characters. There's a Creed henchman who steps forward in Volume Three, for instance, who looks like he could be a young goth updating of Will Eisner's Mr. Carrion. His chi power: to take the dripping blood from his body and transform it into a gloppy weapon that he aims at his enemies. Now that's an out-there super-ability . . . Labels: sixty-minute manga # |Monday, December 04, 2006 ( 12/04/2006 03:46:00 PM ) Bill S. SECOND SEASONINGS – Worth noting that another Master of Horror, this time Dario Argento, has followed up his shaky debut offering with a superior second season tale, an adaptation of F. Paul Wilson's (unknown by me) short story "Pelts," starring Meat Loaf (now apparently calling himself Meat Loaf Aday). This tale of the evils of real fur was about as grisly as you could get – with some truly cringe-worthy moments – but, considering the subject matter, I can't fault Argento's decision to show as much as he did. (The face in the leg-hold trap was a truly startling moment – even when you know it's coming.) No dumb teen subplots in this 'un, thankfully, just grown-ups doing (and paying for doing) truly reprehensible things. Good bad times, beautifully lensed . . . # | Friday, December 01, 2006 ( 12/01/2006 11:01:00 PM ) Bill S. A MESSAGE FROM THE GADABOUT TO NETWORK DRAMA PRODUCERS – Tonight's episode of Numb3rs officially marks the last time anyone can use a cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" to add heavy emotional weight to the last five minutes of their program. The only reason we, the audience, have let it go this long is because we all still felt bad about that Bird on A Wire movie with Mel Gibson & Goldie Hawn. But enuff is enuff . . . # | ( 12/01/2006 03:19:00 PM ) Bill S. WEEKEND PET PIC – A wild hair day for Ziggy Stardust? Every day’s a wild hair day for Dusty!  # | ( 12/01/2006 02:31:00 PM ) Bill S. "THE JOKE IS THAT BATMAN NEVER LAUGHS!" – That DC would inaugurate its new monthly series of comics featuring Will Eisner's "The Spirit" with a one-shot Batman/Spirit team-up may make marketing sense (even among many American comics readers, Eisner's Sunday supplement hero is more known as a piece of comics history rather than a vibrant character – while everybody knows the Batman), though it's up for grabs whether the end results actually work as a satisfactory introduction to Denny Colt & Friends. As scripted by Jeph Loeb and penciller Darwyn Cooke (the primary creative force behind DC's upcoming solo Spirit comic), "Crime Convention" centers on a plot cooked up by Spirit nemesis, the perpetually unseen Octopus, to attack a Police Benevolent Association gathering in Hawaii. Lots of Batman and Spirit villains partake in said scheme – with femmes fatale Poison Ivy and P'Gell swapping burgs, locking onto the police commissioners from Central and Gotham City and casting 'em both under their respective spells. Turns out Commissioners Gordon and Dolan know each other, of course, though neither one apparently has time to read up on the villainesses plaguing each other's city. And so poor Jim Gordon is seduced by that merry black widow P'Gell, while Dolan is sealed with a kiss from Poison Ivy. Meanwhile, back in their respective cities, Batman and the Spirit have taken note of the sudden migration of every "big-time crook" in their stomping grounds. Separately deducing that this new criminal alliance (which calls itself Friends of the World) is headed toward Hawaii, our heroes show up to try and quash the plan, though in the end it's the criminals' proclivity for double-crossing each other (why anyone would willfully attempt an alliance with the Joker is beyond me) that ultimately does 'em in. As in many of the Eisner "Spirit" stories – particularly the later ones – the heroes exist more to mop up afterwards than to actually prevent a crime from being committed. Though some effort is made to connect the two lead heroes' worlds in this book (during a speech to the PBA gathering, Commissioner Gordon notes the similarities between Gotham and Central City: "We both have a colorful gallery of rogues who seem to think they are above the law . . . and we both have a costumed vigilante who shares in the hard work while creating more than his fair share of headaches"), Loeb & Cooke wind up tweaking both series' casts to get 'em to work together. Thus, we get a Robin who speaks like the character in the 60's era teevee campfest ("Holy, torpedo, Batman!") and a P'Gell who is a much less ambiguous villainess than she was in the Eisner stories. (One of the great things about Eisner's version of the character was the way she managed to dance around responsibility for the deaths of her short-lived wealthy husbands – here, she's much less slippery.) Neither shift does much for either series of characters, though I've gotta admit that the flattening of one of Eisner's great comic seductresses is a bit more worrisome if it's meant to provide a glimpse into the way that Cooke'll be treating the monthly comic. For, despite Commissioner Gordon's words, "The Spirit" has less to do with a "colorful gallery of rogues" (contrast the number of quickly recognizable Eisner villains in this book with the number of Batman baddies: aside from the vulture-bedecked Mister Carrion, there really aren't that many in Eisner's universe) than it does a cast of urban schmoes and wise-guys who are more likely to have backed into a life of crime than actively pursued it. The great "Spirit" stories were seven- and eight-page nuggets focused around little guys who turn to violence because they lack the imagination to come up with a better solution. They weren't about elaborate larger-than-life killing schemes. Though Eisner wasn't above giving us an occasional mad scientist or criminal mastermind, the stories we most remember are the microcosmic ones like "Ten Minutes," where a neighborhood kid foolishly attempts to rob a soda fountain and it all goes wrong in the amount of time it takes to read the seven-pager. Cooke's art (inked by J. Bone, who I mainly remember from a Jingle Belle comic) is, admittedly, a kick. But in terms of atmospherics, it's probably closer to the work produced during WWII by the Eisner Shop when the man himself was in the service than the (admittedly assisted) Sunday supplements he created back from the war. We see little of Eisner's baroque Gregg Toland-influenced camera angles or the shadowy, drippy urban backdrops, though a sequence where both our heroes duke it out in a dark room filled with Hawaiian totems is a step in the right direction. Cooke & Bone are more successful with the small comic character bits (also a draw in Eisner's original): some choice irrelevant gags playing different villains off each other; an amusing scene where Barbara Gordon meets her dad's new girlfriend, P'Gell, for the first time; a shot of Denny Colt eyeing the streetlight that has snagged his coat. The book's cover is cute, too: a variation on the Batman-Faces-Off-Against-His-Co-Star cover, showing the Caped Crusader as his usual scowling self, while the Spirit smirks knowingly from his half of the frame. (A quick irrelevant movie thought: wouldn't Ben Affleck have worked better as Denny Colt than he did Matt Murdock?) It tells us almost as much about both leads as we get from the entire story, which may, unfortunately, be part of the problem . . . # | ( 12/01/2006 07:36:00 AM ) Bill S. JELLY OF THE MONTH CLUB – While not as great as their 30-second version of A Christmas Story, the new Angry Alien bunny cast retelling of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is still plenty fun. But where's the scene where Clark gets stuck in the attic? # | ( 12/01/2006 07:02:00 AM ) Bill S. SNOW DAY – Most Fridays are a work-at-home day for yours truly, so watching the American Midwest go through its first snow storm of the season is a more restful than strenuous exercise this a.m. Outside, there's a pleasant haze of white in the air, and the lawn and street look largely undisturbed. Wish I hadn't held off stapling plastic over the back porch screens, tho . . . More later. # | |
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