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Saturday, February 28, 2009 ( 2/28/2009 10:03:00 AM ) Bill S. THAT DAMN SHOE: Well, yesterday was my last at the job. It's always a drag when you empty out your desk and lug your books back home. I've had to do it several times now, and it never gets any easier. I did a couple of interviews this week for a new position in the area, but the pickin's are slim in this struggling mining region, so I'm having to cast my search out further. We really don't want to move again, but there ain't a hell of a lot of options here. After I posted and mailed my first piece about my lay-off, I received a couple emails from more conservative friends telling me I shouldn't try to lay the blame for our country's economic woes on any one political party. I don't. I do, however, look to a Republican-controlled state government for the way it chose to respond to the crisis: slashing the budget long before it knew what kind of money would be coming from the feds, using the budget crisis as an opportunity to go Medieval on education and social service programs. One of the reasons we as humans band together into tribes is to protect the most vulnerable among us. Children fall under that category. By attempting to balance the books at the expense of their protection and well-being, my state legislators have said a lot about their own negligible humanity. I know, I know: he's just whining 'coz he lost his paycheck. Sure, that's a part of it. But for me, the act of counseling and working with families has also been something that's long kept me grounded. Without that heady dose of reality -- of going into the homes of people who are really struggling -- this pop-nerd would've gotten lost for good in world of junk escapism years ago. I really want to get back to the work. Here's hoping I'm soon given the opportunity to do so . . . # | Friday, February 27, 2009 ( 2/27/2009 09:29:00 AM ) Bill S.  "THAT'S SCIENCE, OBSERVABLE, REPRODUCIBLE." Alice Hotwire, the title lead of Radical Comics' four-ish mini-series, Hotwire: Requiem for the Dead, is a Detective Exorcist, working in a future city besieged by ghosts. As imagined by British comics A-Lister Warren Ellis (story) and Steve Pugh (script/art), she's a less jokey version of Judge Anderson, the shapely "psi-cop" from the Judge Dredd series. But where Anderson memorably flaunted regs in the rules-cuffed Dredd World, Hotwire is beholden to 'em. In a city where the supernatural regularly impinges on the mundane, she clings to the idea that "Everything real follows rules."Alice's respect for the rules doesn't endear her to the rest of her peers (who see her as "elitist and difficult"). In ish #1, Metro City is in the midst of a riot that the other cops blame on her, holding her responsible for circulated inflammatory footage of two cops beating on a pair of immigrant kids. Her more-than-reluctant back-up Detective Peter Mobey definitely thinks she's the whistle-blower -- "This is all your bloody fault, your stupid bitch!" he bellows at her early in the story -- but he goes along with her anyway, into the depths of the city's haunted ghetto, Old Town East. The city's ghosts -- called "blue lights" in an attempt to make them seem less ominous -- possess their victims and the victims' families. When the mini-series opens, we see Alice attempting to exorcize a father taken over by a ghost who claims to be his little dead daughter, though the family denies any such child ever existed. Blue lights supposedly can be dispersed when hit with enough amperage, but this 'un proves too stubborn for that. And though suppressor towers are placed throughout the city to keep out blue lights, ghostly possessions are escalating. Someone's messing around with these supernatural entities, though we haven't got a clue as to who this might be by the end of the first issue. As scripted by writer/artist Pugh, the urban world that Alice inhabits is smokily dystopic: in one panel, we're shown Detective Mobey's daughter watching a cartoon on television, and the bright blue sky on-screen provides a stark contrast to the gray miasmic city outside. Though Metro City's locale isn't disclosed in the opener, several British-isms creep into the dialog. ("It's either a top laugh, or you'll end up sobbing like a baby," Alice notes, describing the possessions that are a regular event in Old Town East.) Judge Anderson would recognize the place, as would her sometime partner Dredd. Pugh's possession sequences are both atmospheric and action-packed: all crackling green light (long a dramatic convention for depicting ghosts) and mist. If the artist may overdo the pouty-lipped overbite look on his heroine, as scripted, she proves an agreeable hard-ass. "'Most folk' are more likely to read their horoscope than to look both ways when crossing a busy street," this difficult elitist declares near the end of the first ish, and that line alone was enough to make me want to follow her through the rest of this diverting sci-fi horror mini-series. Labels: fifteen-minute comic # |Thursday, February 26, 2009 ( 2/26/2009 06:24:00 AM ) Bill S. "EYEBALLS, EYEBALLS, EYEBALLS, FLOATING THROUGH THE AIR." After last night's C.S.I.: New York, teevee writers have a real challenge before 'em now: how you gonna match this ep for sheer credulity strain? Opening the show with a city vulture dropping an eyeball into Stella Bonasera's cuppa joe ("Hey!" the bird must've been thinking, "wonder if I can hit that lady copper's cup from fifty feet away?") took some heavy scriptwriting chutzpah. "I mean, what are the odds?" a character asks at the end of the ep. Pretty high in TVLand . . . # | Wednesday, February 25, 2009 ( 2/25/2009 06:27:00 AM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: Back in the D.I.Y. era, the Stranglers walked a weird space between punk, prog and pop-rock; this is one of my favorite tracks of theirs, "Get A Grip on Yourself." Looking at the silhouettes of that pogoing audience in that tiny club really takes me back . . . # | Sunday, February 22, 2009 ( 2/22/2009 01:36:00 PM ) Bill S. THAT'S IT: No more Friday the 13th reviews . . . # | ( 2/22/2009 10:20:00 AM ) Bill S.  "I'LL NEVER FORGET THAT HORRIBLE FACE, NEVER!" With Friday the 13th -- Part 3, the popular, if critically maligned, horror series fully settled into its formula. Having set Jason Voorhees as its centerpiece slice-and-dicer, the only steps left were to 1.) establish his seeming indestructibility and 2.) get him a hockey mask so that makeup folks didn't have to work every day slathering on his demented creature face. The first is accomplished during the movie's final showdown between Jason (a somewhat slighter-looking Richard Brooker) and this outing's spunky heroine (Dana Kimmel). When Kimmel's Chris ties a noose around the killer's neck and knocks him off the upper loft of a barn, the act doesn't snap our stubborn psycho's neck. Instead, he lifts his arms and pulls himself up to get out of the noose. "You can't be alive!" Chris shouts, but we in the audience know differently.The hockey mask gets donned about an hour into the film -- after Jason takes it from the movie's obligatory joker ("I beg your pardon," said prankster says at one point in the flick, "I'm not an asshole, I'm an actor!") who'd used it with a spear gun to frighten a girl he wishes to impress. Our joker gets it at the hands of Jason, of course, as does the girl, who proves victim to one of the movie's cooler 3-D moments: a face-on spear gun shot that definitely got folks in the original theater audience ducking. This 3-D buff knows because he was there. The 3-D fx are Part Three's primary raisin d'etre, and returning director Steve Miner happily reupped the gore factor from the previous flick to accommodate 'em. Part Three wasn't the first horror movie to utilize three-dimensions to enhance its kill scenes -- that honor belongs to Paul Morrisey's campy Flesh for Frankenstein -- but it unsparingly took advantage of the technique. The film may look visually muddy, but when that spear comes your way, a hand-standing teen gets chopped in two or a victim's eyeball pops into the camera, it's undeniably effective. Watching it in regular dimensions, though, the stylized nature of the action becomes blatant. As the movie's actors hold pointy objects in your face for longer than they would in real-life, you can't help thinking of John Candy and Eugene Levy leaning back and forth into the camera with goofily menacing expressions on their faces. Too, viewing Part Three after sitting through the recent DVD "deluxe editions" of the first two Fridays, there's a sense that once the filmmakers decided to make their picture in 3-D, they gave up any other pretense toward innovation. One of the killings proves a direct copy of Kevin Bacon's throaty demise from the first flick, while the movie's finish unapologetically swipes Adrienne King's memorable canoe hallucination, only this time replacing kiddie Jason with a rotting Mama Voorhees. Miner and company don't bother to deny what they're doing -- before the killing, they show our doomed victim reading an issue of Fangoria with an article devoted to makeup man Tom Savini -- but that can't eliminate the sense of overfamiliarity. A couple of small story tweaks should be noted, though. In addition to slaying the usual horny teens and the occasional overly interested snoop, Jason has started to widen his overly moralistic path. First victims we see after a too-long intro using selected footage from the previous film are a pair of country storekeepers: a slovenly wife and an overeating husband. No longer content to settle with Lust as a primary factor in victim selection, Mr. Sinners-on-the Edge-of-an-Angry-Machete now slices the Gluttonous and Slothful. After he later dispatches a trio of Wrathful bikers, you half expect Kevin Spacey to pop up once the hockey mask's removed. Paramount's new "deluxe edition" DVD reissue comes with the flick in both its 3-D and plain formats -- and helpfully includes two cardboard glasses for those who want to brave the former. I sincerely tried the 3-D version, but found the experience even murkier than I remembered on my old-fashioned 26-inch Toshiba. (I did jump ahead to the eyeball kick, though.) The plain version of the film looks dirtier in places than either of the previous reissued Fridays, but not distractingly so. Still, if you've never seen this rascal in 3-D and have a better home entertainment set-up than this writer, that's the way to go. More than anything, the addition of that extra dimension announced the series' full transition from a story series into a logic-bedamned plotless amusement park ride. For the largely uncritical audience that continued to make the formula a hit, the shift doubtless went unnoticed. Labels: psychotronic psinema # | |
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