All Strange Places

Things Observed: 01-08-2012

2012-01-06T19:11:00.001-05:00

Had a great lunch with some NaNoWriMo people today, and on the way home I drove past this lovely, grand looking Catholic church that was hosting what may be the best Christmas nativity scene ever made. It was one of those painted wooden stand-up jobs, but someone had put some real care and effort into the painting and making sure that the figures looked really active and dynamic. It was very nicely done.

The only problem is that it looked like all of the characters were having a gigantic, screaming Christmas Dinner argument.

Shit looked like the climax of the paternity reveal specials that day-time talk shows do. One Wise Man all pointing angrily down at the Baby Jesus while he screamed across the manger at his buddies. Mary stuck off in one corner, down on her knees with an expression of shock on her face. Brilliant.

I kind of want to go back and put a life-size cardboard cut out of Maury in the middle of it.

Doin' Thangs

2012-01-03T17:53:00.001-05:00

2012 is getting under way, and that means that it is, again, time to pretend like I'm taking this blog seriously for a month or two.

Watch this space.

Excerpts from an Undergraduate Psychology Survey

2011-12-03T15:50:00.001-05:00

Every year, literally dozens of psychology experiments and surveys are designed and carried out by undergraduate Psychology majors. And just as surely as these tests are designed, there are plenty of students who will volunteer to participate in them…either because the girl with the clipboard standing in the middle of the quad is cute, or because they are failing Psych 101 and need some extra credit points. But whether you are filling out a form in the middle of the cafeteria or typing in endless answers on an ancient computer in a forgotten corner of campus, these tests almost always consist of five to one hundred questions about basic morality and they are always boring. So, because I was talking to an old Psych major last night about this crap, I decided to write my own survey.

Here are some excerpts.

Question 1: Let’s just get this out of the way right now. Are you going to answer these questions honestly? Because a lot of people don’t. I mean, a lot of people. And they really shouldn’t, because this is part of our grade, okay? We worked really hard on these questions and if our results come back all screwed up again, Professor Halloran is probably going to fail us and we’ll never get to go to the Rat Lab. So are you? Based on how big of a douche you feel like being this afternoon, please answer “Yes” or “No” below.

Question 10: Hey man, you’re taking Psych 101, right? Dude, how cool was Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment? So awesome. We’re circulating a petition to get the department to let us stage a recreation next semester, so please answer “Yes,” “No,” or “Indifferent” below based on your support for this idea. Okay, back to the test.

Question 17: You are walking in the Mojave Desert and you find five dollars. A nearby jack-rabbit watches you pick up the money, and--though he does not say anything--you suspect that it might be his. In fifty words or less, please describe how you deal with this moral conundrum.

Question 25: This test has been going on for quite a while now. Depending on how quickly you are answering the questions, we predict that you have been alone in this room for anywhere between fifteen minutes to an hour. In that time, the temperature has not changed, the lights have not flickered, and there has been no high-pitched buzzing designed to trigger your rage centers. On a scale of one to five, how disappointed are you by the absence of each of these classic movie psychology test elements?

Question 34: A psychology student administering a survey has just asked you a deeply personal question about that time when you were five and your mother yelled at you and left you crying in the middle of the frozen food aisle at the grocery store. She does not give any indication as to how she knows about this incident. On a scale of Cyan to Crimson (where Cyan equals “Placid,” Crimson equals “Wrathful,” and the entire intervening color spectrum equates to the corresponding range of emotions) how does this invasion of childhood trauma and your innermost shameful moments make you feel?

Question 55: Now that the test is nearly complete, please think back to Question One. On a scale of one to eight, where One equals “Extremely Truthful” and Eight equals “Highly Duplicitous” please evaluate your adherence to your earlier answer. If you do not remember what Question One was, or cannot recall your answer, please enter “Do Not Know” to restart this test.

Question 79: When you signed up for this experiment you expected the test to be administered by a real person, didn’t you? Maybe they had one of those sweet Voight-Kampff machines from Blade Runner? Please roll the provided six sided die and input your answer where 1-3 equal “Yes” and 4-6 equal “No.” If your answer does not correspond with your die roll, you are permitted to reroll once. If your answer still does not correspond upon rerolling, please contact a member of the testing staff so that they may administer an Opinion Shift and bring your thinking more in line with that of your die.

I Think Too Much About Things

2011-06-11T01:34:00.003-04:00

I went and saw Super 8 today and would like the opportunity to talk about it at some length (short version: it was okay), but that isn’t what I’m here to talk about right now. I want to talk about the trailer for the Kevin James vehicle Zookeeper, because something about it stuck in my craw and I kind of just want to get the thoughts down on paper.

Now, you may have seen this trailer. Or maybe you haven’t. Or maybe you saw the first couple of seconds and then stuck your fingers in your ears and closed your eyes until it went away because you’ve got a thing about Kevin James. If you’re interested, the trailer can be found here, or you can proceed knowing simply that it is a movie about a rotund zookeeper whose girlfriend dumps him for being a zookeeper. He then fights to get her back with the help of a bunch of gravelly voiced, vaguely Hispanic sounding talking zoo animals. Oh, also, Rosario Dawson is in it as his coworker.

So, here’s my problem: In the trailer, Kevin James’s character takes his girl out to ride horses on the beach and do all sorts of movie-romantic shit. He proposes to her, and she rejects him citing that she is uncomfortable with the idea of being married to a zookeeper. So…what? She’s willing to date the guy. Presumably go out in public with him. Introduce him to her family. Go bowling. Share mutual friends. Have awkward sex. Whatever, all that crap. NO PROBLEM AT ALL. But MARRIAGE? To a ZOOKEEPER? SCANDALOUS! Let’s ignore for a moment that any ranking zoo staffer is a dedicated professional who likely holds a doctorate or other high educational award. Let’s ignore the fact that, even though he probably doesn’t make much money, he’s still likely to function as an excellent provider and caregiver as a circumstance of his progression. Let’s even ignore the fact that the people who wrote this movie likely have little to no idea what a zookeeper actually is or does.

Instead let’s focus on this: She has engaged this man in a long term, serious relationship, and when confronted with the prospect of continuing that relationship she rejects it because she’s too shallow to deal with his profession. AND AFTERWARDS HE WANTS HER BACK.

HE WANTS HER BACK AND PINES FOR HER FOR FIVE YEARS. There is no joke here. This is actually how things are presented in the trailer. We are supposed to take this shit seriously. The movie is about a man trying to get a woman back, five years after she uses him and then rejects him.

Way to not even try to present a healthy relationship, screenwriters.

But that’s really only the first problem that I have with this, and from it stems my major problem: Rosario Dawson. This is not to say that I have a problem with Rosario Dawson. She’s a beautiful woman and a wonderful actress, and I really enjoyed the comic book that she helped create; Image’s Occult Crimes Taskforce. What I have a problem with is the character that she seems to play in this film. She’s not really in the trailer but for a couple of shots, but she’s shown to play a coworker of James’s character who agrees to help him win back his ex by posing as his new, jealously inducing girlfriend.

So what’s the problem here? Well, that comes from the relationship that she has with James as well. She’s gorgeous and they get along and they’re on friendly terms and they share a profession, and she’s into him enough that she’ll agree to go out with him—even on terms that demean her as a human being. So why aren’t they dating already? For all intents and purposes (unless James is playing a closeted White Supremacist) the two are movie-perfect for one another. The easy answer is that there would be no movie if the two of them were in a happy relationship, but I think the issue runs deeper than that.

American film still seems to have a pretty serious hang up when it comes to brown people. I’m not sure that it’s racism, really. I think it has more to do with the fact that Hollywood is afraid that if they push Middle America’s comfort zone too far, Middle America is going to break up with them and go start hanging out more with Television and Netflix. It’s the reason why we still see remakes of “White” films retailored for Black audiences, and remakes of “Black” films retailored for White audiences. They’re paranoid that certain cultural groups won’t go see something if they perceive it as being for a different cultural group. And while this is certainly true in some areas, there isn’t any good excuse for it to seep out into film as a whole. Zookeeper is being presented as a broad, all ages/races/creeds comedy, so why is it that the interracial relationship has to be turned into a demeaning sham? Why is it that the White protagonist has to use his perfectly nice non-White friend so he can finally get with a generic, shallow, skinny blonde White chick? Hell, for that matter, why would a dude even think about doing that with Rosario Dawson throwing herself at him?

I’d really like an answer. I know that I won’t get one, but I’d like it all the same. Regardless, we still live in the 21st century now, Hollywood, and this is what you’re giving us? Try to stand up straight and have some dignity.

-Sean

CASSINI MISSION

2011-06-04T23:55:00.001-04:00

I’d like to share a little something with anyone reading this. I love space. I love the everloving crap out of it. Getting out there had been one of my greatest ambitions for as long as I can remember, even in the face of physical shortcomings that make such a dream prohibitive. With that in mind, I will leave you now with Chris Abbas’s breathtaking abstract short CASSINI MISSION. Constructed of countless still images captured and sent back to the Earth by NASA’s Cassini Probe, this is a beautiful piece of work—whether you’re looking to reaffirm the dream, find some phenomenal editing, or just trance out. If you like it, please leave some positive words on Mr. Abbas’s Vimeo page. Good evening to you all.

CASSINI MISSION from Chris Abbas on Vimeo.

-Sean

Horrors of Food

2011-04-14T18:27:00.002-04:00

So I was out on some errands today when lunch rolled around, and just as I began to become hungry I came upon a Smokey Bones. Now, depending on where you live, you either do or don’t know what that is so I’ll explain: Smokey Bones is kind of a cheese-ball barbeque chain that seems to run through most of the American South. It’s really nothing special, nor anything overly healthy, but they do a pretty good beef brisket sandwich and I’m not the kind of person who easily says no to a pretty good beef brisket sandwich.

Well, it had been a while since I had stepped into one of their branches, and apparently the days of the Pretty Good Beef Brisket Sandwich are long gone. These places used to be fairly quiet and understated; sort of a rustic mountain lodge thing run through the filter of tidy, modern architecture. Now they’re loud and smart-alecky with club cards and a lot of televisions showing music videos and hunting/fishing videos and a channel that seems to be a perpetually shifting mash-up of trivia, America’s Funniest Home Videos entries, and scenes from the Jim Varney Ernest movies. The walls are covered in pictures incorporating the restaurant’s logo and graphics portraying memetic slogans termed “boneisms” that accompany crude Photoshop tracings of Frat Bros eating the restaurant’s food and ogling women. It’s all of the tastelessness of an Applebee's buried under an extra layer of tastelessness supplied by the internet. The saving grace of the place is that their music loop contains a Stray Cats song.

And the sandwich? That’s not anywhere on the menu these days. By the time I’ve realized this though, I’m sitting at a booth at the farthest corner from the door and the waitress has already brought me my drink. I’m committed. So I settle on a hamburger that sounds nice and when the waitress asks what kind of side I want I opt up a dollar for the kettle chips because the picture of the appetizer portion made them look crisp and half-way healthy and I’m trying to work on this whole “not eating my own weight in butter every day” thing lately. This will be a nice meal, I tell myself. I am a smart person who has done a smart thing.

Sweet mother, how wrong I was. Here is a rough timeline of my first ten seconds with the meal:

00:00 – Food arrives. Waitress is unsmiling and grim, as though delivering final meal to dying man.

00:01 – Burger looks good, if not sloppily presented. Lettuce is chopped and on top-half of bun with onion. Getting it on top of the rest of the sandwich intact will be a challenge. Mayonnaise is served on side, in small cup: fair sentiment.

00:05 – First bite. Notice with dismay that there are three forms of onion on burger: 1) Standard red onion circles in lettuce. 2) Fried onion tangles on top of cheese/bacon layer. 3) Butter softened chunks swimming in barbeque sauce under cheese. Type One is expected and type Two is advertised in item description. Type Three is a complete surprise and completely overpowering in flavor and consistency. I dislike the consistency of bare, softened onions and sauce has already been unwittingly added. Slight feeling of upset.

00:08 – Attention turned to chips. Double take taken. Chips appear greasy and gritty, as though freshly fried and heavily over-seasoned. Large chunks of sea salt adorn. Pick one up and shake. Noting comes up. Could it be?

00:09 – Simultaneously delicious and revolting. The chips have been battered, deep fried, and salted. Mouth confirms like large piece of forensic machinery on CSI set. Most of the little, golden hills of chips on the plate are welded together with breading.

00:10 – Look around. Waitress is gone. Nobody is watching. There is no prank. Southern chefs have reached their ultimate triumph and deep fried a thing that was already fried. There was no fanfare or victory parade. They didn’t even serve it at a State Fair. This is something that can be had in a chain restaurant. I turn back to my plate.

So here’s the thing: I’ve written this so far as though it were all incredibly, oppressively bad. It really wasn’t. The atmosphere was incredibly, oppressively bad, I’ll grant. The food was pretty good though. I mean, not great. No better than I would have expected, and also no worse. It was perfectly fair and I can see why the place was packed with day-wagers on group lunches. The restaurant cultivates a a strongly over-done feeling of casual fun, and the menu is diverse enough to reflect that. Prices were also reasonable, especially for the portion sizes that I observed.

I did have a problem with the way that the food was advertised though. The things that I mentioned as being off or odd with my food were features of it that had gone completely undescribed in the menu. We are not talking about a “served with seasonal greens” kind of thing where you can reasonably assume that you are going to get fresh, seasonal greens, we are talking about the “Oh, yeah, also: this whole thing is fried and served on a bed of clarified butter and poutine” kind of discrepancy that you get when your waitress brings you your food and your first impulse is to say, “This is not at all what I ordered.” When you order what—under almost any circumstances—would be a more healthy side alternative and it comes out three times less healthy than an order of french-fries, you are entering a whole new realm of menu item false advertising.

It’s not a comment on anyone’s eating habits, it’s just an observation on something that’s been happening more and more often to me lately. Despite our supposedly increased awareness of health issues in this country, we seem to be moving ever and ever closer to the most extreme culinary excesses of the ‘90s. Something that I thought we were actually doing a good job of getting away from for a while.

For god’s sake, I stopped into a McDonald’s for breakfast while on the road the other day, and the girl asked me if I wanted to order a slice of apple pie or a milkshake at 9:30 in the morning. Why? Because the company is now running a promotion which says that cashiers have to ask if the customer wants a dessert, because they are otherwise eligible for a free dessert at any time of day. This is patently ridiculous given both the obesity problem that we face as a nation, and the average IQ of a McDonald’s cashier.

Whatever, though. Who am I to complain about this kind of stuff? For lunch I ate a burger that probably weighted in at half a pound and a serving of deep fried things that had already been fried. And I didn’t once question my sullen, chubby waitress about any of the discrepancies in my order.

I’ve felt absolutely god awful since then. Probably will all day. I think a salad is in order for dinner.

BONUS OBSERVATION(!) : While I was on my way out of the restaurant, I saw a funny little fat kid standing up in a booth. He was funny in the way of funny little fat kids: about eight, with a bad haircut, ill dressed and awkwardly clumsy. As I got closer though, I noticed the barbed-wire tattoo that ran across the front of his throat, and the large rose bloom that crawled out of the stretched out collar of his shirt and up the side of his neck. I thought they were strange choices for temporary tattoos, and a lot larger than anything I remember seeing as a kid, but then I looked at the mother and noticed what a disaster of piercings and cheap ink she was. The quality of the kid's stuff didn't look too great from five feet away either. The more I think about it, the more I feel as though the the marks on the little chunk weren't temporary at all.

Unless I Don't

2011-01-18T12:13:00.002-05:00

So the list thing kind of fell apart in a big way last week. Despite the best of intentions I didn't have the time or proper internet access in England to put those posts together. Now though, having returned, I begin preparations to move in a month and will likely be unable to post as frequently as I would otherwise like. I'm going to try to get going on those lists though, and hopefully have them coming at a steady rate starting tomorrow or this evening. I'm also going to try and find the time to do some minor site maintenance and get things up and running the way that I had always intended. Thank you for your continued patience, and please console yourselves with the fact that I can't get any worse about posting than I already am.

So...

2011-01-06T20:29:00.002-05:00

Heya, Internet. It's been a while, hasn't it? I don't want to make it sound like we broke up, but I guess we kind of did and then we just kept on using each other in entirely unproductive ways for a couple of months. I want to move beyond that though, because this is a new year and I want to try new things, and one of those new things is going back to the old things that I was doing before I lost interest in blogging, namely: blogging.

And I'm going to embrace this new attitude by falling in line with the second oldest and most time-honored of blogging traditions (vocally hating things being the first) and produce a series of lists that encapsulate what I liked in the year of 2010. In the interest of bucking tradition though I am not going to have a set number of things that I will put into each of these lists (because, honestly, it wasn't that great of a year for some things) and will be doing individual lists for books, comics, film/television, the internet, and Real Life.

So look for the first of those tomorrow, won't you?

Journey to the Centre of the YouTube, Part 4

2010-10-22T00:00:00.001-04:00

An older video, edited together by the absolutely great Everything is Terrible and featuring the amazing Maryjean Ballner, the creator of Cat Massage! Cat Massage! Cat Massage!

Look Out: It is a Monster.

2010-09-25T01:58:00.001-04:00

Last spring, the CW’s Supernatural closed off its fifth season with a move that really rubbed me the wrong way. Originally designed to be a capstone for the series, the episode was changed at the last minute to make way for a sixth season; tacking a couple of seconds worth of footage onto the very end that took the (in my opinion) best ending of a genre show since Babylon 5 finished up in 1998 and turned it into a cheap, cliffhanger twist-ending that only served to set up an unplanned continuation by manufacturing some unsatisfying drama.

I understand that there’s always a level of creator control that gets taken away when you have a successful, long-term property like Supernatural. Even dedicated series helmsmen like Eric Kripke and J. Michael Straczynski are almost expected to lose some control over the direction of the program to the suits as time goes on…it’s just part of the industry. But where Straczynski worked inside the system and still ended Babylon 5 as he intended to and when he wanted to, Kripke has apparently just bailed with little more than a little temper-tantrum and an “England soldiers on.” And while I have to respect the man for stepping down as showrunner when he was done with what he had to say, it doesn’t change the fact that his concessions to the network allowed the ending of that last episode to become unforgivably tacky and tonight it has launched a new season that, well, it’s got a bit of an odd smell about it.

Actually, the smell isn’t that unfamiliar. It smells like season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Actually, it reeks of season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Yeah. The one with the secret military organization and the college and the terrible cyborg-monster thing at the end and the endlessly stupid charisma-sucking vortex that was Riley Finn. The one where we lost almost all sense of narrative coherence and continuity. The one that the show never recovered from.

In case it’s not clear: No. I’m not really happy about it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Supernatural is a show that has very, very rarely done me wrong. That’s an uncommon feat for a program that has gone on for as long as it has. It’s clever and inventive and cool and even when it misfires it usually does so in a way that you can enjoy. As such, I feel that it’s earned a certain amount of loyalty from me. Don’t get me wrong, I am not one of those people who constantly says that “the fans deserve better” when he’s confronted with something that he doesn’t like from a series that he does. I very rarely feel that the performers or writers or creators owe me anything because I choose to enjoy the program that they produce, but this is a show that I have continually enjoyed since it premiered and as such I do feel an obligation to ride out a rough patch here and there. As such, I’m not going to be writing the show off after a lousy season opener and intend to give the newly continued Supernatural a fair shake before I start trying to pretend that season five ended a few seconds sooner than it did.

But oh man, was this ever a lousy season opener.

When last we saw the Winchester brothers, Dean had finally made it out of the family business of hunting monsters and killing demons by averting the Biblical apocalypse and seeing his brother Sam sacrifice himself in the process. After a parting of ways with the show’s other characters he returns to Lisa, the one still-living woman who he could be said to have a meaningful relationship with, serving as a supporter to her and her son as her recovers from the psychological trauma of the past few years and tries to build something like a normal life for himself. And while the show is focused on that thread for the first ten minutes or so of this episode I was really kind of digging it. For the first time in the show’s run we get to see Dean as what he has always wanted to be: a functioning human being. He goes to work, spends time with his surrogate family, has a few friends, and generally works his way through a little domestic montage that intercuts with him reflecting on past events, showing how even simple, everyday actions like using a hammer or locking a door were warped into something paranoid and wretched by his old lifestyle, all while showing how he has changed and adapted…just not so much that he doesn’t still keep a Devil’s Trap painted under the doormat and a shotgun and hex bag under his bed. This bittersweet series of shots was really one of the few things that I felt was missing from the previous season’s ending. Jensen Ackles even looks more the part, sporting a comfortable extra few pounds and a more grown-up haircut that really make Dean seem like he’s been living soft for the past year.

It’s all really quite lovely and I was pleasantly surprised, even as the show takes a turn toward old, familiar territory with Dean starting to see demon signs wherever he goes and begins to come to the conclusion that he’s going to have to do something about it; dodging around the subject with Lisa until she finally confronts him about it and gives him the okay to do what he needs to do. As an episode it’s really working so far, and keeps on doing so until the critter turns out to be none other than Azazel, the yellow eyed demon who served as the big-bad in seasons one and two. This was an intriguing turn for me, because even in his brief scene he gives some small explanation for how he has returned to life, a minimal explanation certainly (he was brought back as the result of some sort of end-of-the-apocalypse cosmic reset) but one that could be more fully explored at a later time and could also serve to explain how Sam was back on earth and no longer possessed by the devil (as those familiar with the cringe-inducing final moments of season five already know him to be).

I wouldn’t have objected to this so much, not because I like the idea of recycling villains after they’re dead, and not even because Fredric Lehne is so much fun to watch as the character, but because it actually is some kind of explanation. But, alas, when Sam shows up moments later to save Dean from the demon, the episode takes a serious turn for the worse. When we come back from commercial, Dean is waking up on a cot in a mysterious house with Sam sitting over him and his reaction is…less than stellar. It isn’t bad, per-se, it’s just exactly what you’d expect. He’s very upset for a moment, and then very angry for a moment, and then they hug. It’s the standard issue Supernatural emotional payoff/resolution scene, and while that gag may have worked up until this point, well, things are a little bit different this time, aren’t they? Shouldn’t there be some further exploration of emotion? Or even some further mistrust between the two? Sam even tells Dean during their conversation that Azazel wasn’t real but rather a lethal hallucination caused by a djinn. So what does Sam have to do to prove that he’s not a hallucination? He cuts himself on the arm with a knife and drinks some (holy?) water. Nothing that requires Dean’s interaction. Nothing that a hallucinatory character capable of physical murder shouldn’t be able to do anyway. It’s a shockingly lazy scene for a show that usually takes its time and tests its characters very harshly, and is indicative of the overly rushed tone of the rest of the episode.

So, ready for the next couple of minutes? Here they are: Sam is alive and has been alive since, well, since Dean thought he died. Also alive is the brothers’ grandfather Samuel, who died back in the seventies. They don’t know why and they don’t seem to care, and you can tell this because when Dean asks them they say “We don’t know” and change the subject so they can introduce a trio of characters whose names you won’t learn this week because they aren’t going to have their names used for the rest of the episode. These guys are Sam and Dean’s cousins on their mother’s side, and they are all professional hunters who the Winchesters have never met or heard of before and who have apparently never heard of the Winchesters before either, despite the fact that every other hunter we’ve ever seen has instantly treated Sam and Dean like monster killing royalty. One of these guys is also played by Corin Nemic and is, thus, almost guaranteed to be a complete slimeball/villain. Also, Bobby knows about Sam too (though I would have loved it if Bobby’s deadpan reaction to the brother’s resurrection was simply a result of how many dead people he’s seen up and walking around over the years) and didn’t tell Dean because he thought he was being nice. Also, there are djinn around and they’re gunning for Winchester blood. Also, Sam and the gang suddenly want Dean to join up with them again and leave his new family despite the fact that a couple of minutes before they were all talking about how they didn’t tell him that Sam was alive because they wanted to be all noble and let him have his normal life. They get very upset when Dean doesn’t like this idea, which is some serious bullshit considering what absolute dicks they’re all being.

You see what I did there? How I rushed through ALL of that pretty vital exposition like it meant absolutely nothing? Good, because that’s exactly how this week’s script handles it. This is several weeks worth of plot and exposition compressed into a slipshod second and third act. It would be way too much material even before the introductory first act and the monster-of-the-week djinn fight in the fourth and fifth acts. I think it’s pretty much needless to say that this is a completely preposterous way to tell a story, much less to set up the next chapter in a long-form serial production that I’ve always admired for its willingness to take its time and fill gaps in the chronology with fun adventure stories. This is a show that built it’s mythology and plot for five years at a pace that could sometimes seem glacial and ultimately produced one of the most emotionally effecting hours of television in recent memory, so what the hell happened to that notion, huh?

This episode is, to be perfectly blunt, amateur hour. Sera Gamble, who has written some absolutely stellar episodes of the show in the past, seems lost here as writer, executive producer, and new showrunner--turning in a sloppy script that got turned into a sloppy episode that goes absolutely nowhere and satisfies on no level after the title card comes up. The concept of the djinn could have been very interesting on its own, serving as it does as a callback to the season two episode What Is and What Should Never Be with the creatures coming for revenge against the Winchesters for the djinn they killed in that episode. Unfortunately, it seems that they are ultimately only in the episode to serve as a catalyst that brings the brothers back together and so that one may be captured by Samuel and the other Campbells for their undoubtedly nefarious purposes. It just gets turned into a lazy retread of a previous monster, so that it can be lazily captured by a group of seedy seeming characters who have obvious yet unobserved ulterior motives.

Actually, the bits that I liked best were mostly Dean’s interactions with Lisa. They’re believable, and understanding and pretty solidly written and they actually feel like things that the characters care about and mean when they say them. When Dean makes his final decision to spit in the face of his old family and stick with the one that he has adopted and found peace with, I was actually quite proud of the character. That family was intended as Dean’s reward for his trials, for all of the growth that he’s seen since the show’s pilot aired in 2005. Frankly, he deserves that, if only from the viewpoint of narrative closure. If I want to look at it that way though, (and I do because I like to look at things like that as a storyteller, and that doesn’t grant us another season of television featuring the established eye-candy that brings in the teenage girls) Sam also deserves to stay trapped in the cage with Lucifer for the rest of time because that’s his fate as a martyr and tragic hero.

So, with that in mind, it sort of pains me to bring this up: If this season is to succeed from a narrative standpoint, Lisa and her son Ben need to die or go away in some other, permanent way. This isn’t because I dislike them as characters, because I have liked them ever since they were introduced back in season three as the throw-away gag that Dean might have an illegitimate son--but because they’re noncombatants in a show that has a history of treating noncombatants like canon-fodder. If they’re allowed to continue to exist, they’re doomed to become the Wesley Crusher and Dawn Summers of this generation of television, if only by the nature of the conventions of the genre. If they survive and stick around they will become an emotional albatross around Dean’s neck: the loved ones who can’t defend themselves and are thus a constant target for murder and kidnapping by all manner of villain. Even if they aren’t brought along on the road as weekly characters there will be constant reminders of their existence; tired reiterations of how Dean is doing things for his girl back home now, emotional diatribes about how hard it is for him to leave them behind, panicked drives back to fight on the home-front as Ben gets into yet another monster-related mishap. The kid has been kidnapped by demons once already: that shit’s gonna happen again.

These are the kinds of characters that are appealing to a writer though. They seem initially intruiging, like they could be a good emotional front for the show—-something to counterbalance all of the fighting and mythology-—but that’s a mentality that usually wears off pretty quickly. The characters soon become annoying. The writer feels compelled to include them so that the viewer doesn’t forget about them, and the viewer just finds them obnoxious after a while because they get in the way of the plot. It’s an angle that needs to be cleared up ASAP if the writers really intend to get Dean back on the road in the next couple of weeks. Actually, I’d like to think that the writers have a lot more than that to do if they want to get Dean back on the road, because Dean has, up until now, proven to be far from a dumb character. He may not be overly bright, but he can smell bullshit coming and he’s suspicious as well, and I’d like to think that for the sake of continuity they’re going to have to do some pretty good explaining as they develop and launch us into this season’s plot.

I’m going to call a stop on this for now, because twenty-six hundred words is more than enough to dedicate to a single hour of television. I’ll try to keep covering the rest of this season though, because I have the feeling that Supernatural fans are going to either witness a serious turnaround in the coming weeks or the beginning of a massive television train wreck. Either way, it should be worth looking at from a storytelling perspective.

-Sean

PS. : Jesus, was the music in this episode ever obnoxious. Supernatural has a history of keeping things really quiet for the most part, only dipping into the horror-movie bag of musical tricks every once in a while and relying mostly on the visuals, but sound-manufactured jump scares were all over the place in this episode and there were a couple of scenes where the score was so loud that I could barely hear the dialogue over it. Just icing on the cake, I guess.

Just putting this here…

2010-09-16T11:15:00.001-04:00

…so I can remember to buy China Mieville a drink some day.

"I disliked Star Trek intensely. I thought it was terrible. And I think part of my problem is that I feel like the relationship between JJ Abrams' projects and geek culture is one of relatively unloving repackaging - sort of cynical. I taste contempt in the air. Now I'm not a child - I know that all big scifi projects are suffused with the contempt of big money for its own target audience. But there's something about [JJ's projects] that makes me particularly uncomfortable."
-China Mieville

Real content is coming sometime. I swear.

-Sean

IN THE THEATER: Machete

2010-09-05T20:54:00.001-04:00

Way back in the wild and heady days 2007, pop-culture princes Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino released the amazingly unsuccessful exploitation double-feature Grindhouse, and at the very head of that experience was this:

That’s amazing isn’t it? It’s big and preposterous and perfectly, stupidly fun. It set the tone for Grindhouse perfectly, and then, better, Rodriguez came to announce that he had written the whole damn thing and intended to turn it into a feature. And then, with his usual style he spent several years dragging his feet as he put together a ludicrous cast and team and then shot the whole thing over the course of a couple of weeks.

So now Machete is here. It is a real thing. And in a surprise that will shock (SHOCK!) the pants off of absolutely nobody, it is—like the film that spawned it—not particularly good.

Now, when I say that, I don’t want you to take my meaning to be that the movie is bad. It is, but in that intentional and cheesy manner of the new wave of exploitation films. Machete seems to be striving, first and foremost, to be a lot of fun…it’s full of guns and knives and explosions and bad one-liners and blood and manly men and hot women who all end up naked at some point or another. As a prime example, here’s a rundown of the first few minutes:

1: Machete kills a load of dudes. He is a Bad Cop On The Edge. YEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHH!

2: Full frontal female nudity.

3: Steven Segal is a Mexican drug kingpin who dresses like a European dictator and carries a bright red katana. Yes, this is the greatest cross-racial casting since Touch of Evil.

4: Blood and cursing and cheesy digital gore out the arse.

5: The naked woman pulls a cellular phone out of her vagina.

6: Terrible, terrible writing delivered with hilarious, scene-chewing aplomb.

7: A wonderful shooting style with an amazing sheen of artificial grit and scratches and hyper-saturated colors that you can’t look away from.

And it’s great. It’s over the top, it’s ridiculous, it looks great and it sounds great and it is JUST. SO. MUCH. FUN. And then the credits come up and they’re great too, and then the movie comes back and, well, it just never gets back to where it was…

When the credits end the film grain is gone. The color saturation remains, and it still looks spectacular, but without the grain it seems like more like a trick than an element. And just as suddenly all of the dynamic and cheesy cinematography disappears. And the bizarre, extreme gags. And the madcap way in which all of the characters just devour the friggin’ scenery. And when all of those things go, the fun kind of evaporates along with them.

And for a while the movie just slows to an absolute crawl. For the longest time, all it does is introduce characters and organizations and little flashes of story while Danny Trejo just kind of stands around looking like a meaner version of the rawhide chew your dog lost under the couch last year. Except for rare, brilliant moments, Machete is a fairly passive character until the last act, and it’s not just because there’s nothing for him to be doing—it’s because there’s just too much else going on around him. He does things, but there’s little evidence that he’s actually at the center of the story or that he’s really all that important. Hell, the whole crux of him being hired to assassinate the Senator is that he’s nobody important at all--and the movie keeps milking the idea that day laborers are nobodies for laughs for quite some time. Saying that Machete is the star of this show is like watching Syriana and afterwards claiming that it was all about Matt Damon’s character. He’s in it, but it isn’t about him.

It’s not that the story and the interplay is uninteresting; it’s this sort of coolly cartoonish false-flag/border war/drug cartel conspiracy plot. It’s not that there aren't outrageous gags and great moments. It’s not that there aren’t a half-dozen utterly fantastic characters who I would love to see movies about, because there are literally that many characters in this movie who get great setups and origin stories and are, like, perfect old-school grindhouse characters.

But that’s just the problem. There’s too much. There’s too much going on. It’s a movie that desperately calls for a simple, flashy approach and the script just does not accommodate that. It just gets bogged down in all of it’s own stuff and where it should be dreadfully entertaining it becomes…not tedious, but sort of pedestrian. Without the flashy cinematography and filters, the film looks like exactly what it is: cheaply shot on mid-range digital cameras. And without a tight, sharp script it becomes increasingly clear that Rodriguez approached this project like he seems to most of his children’s films: throw crap at the wall and keep anything that sticks.

And that’s so frustrating, because the last time Rodriguez ventured into this territory we ended up with Planet Terror, which is fun and sharply written and tightly over-directed into a brilliant play on exploitation and zombie movies. So we know that ol’ RobRod can do this kind of stuff and do it so well it’ll break you open laughing. But with Machete it’s more like Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse; Death Proof, which starts out just as strong as Machete does, and just as quickly devolves into tedious fucking about as the director plays around on set with his man-crush.

So I guess you can call me disappointed. Call me disappointed because most of this movie is boring and unfunny. Call me disappointed for not being able to forgive that just because it has some good kills and some cheesy sex scenes set to ‘70s porn music. Call me disappointed because I walked into a movie starring Danny Trejo--a performer who I normally feel is funny and lively in his smaller bits--only to find that he sleepwalks through a starring role. Call me disappointed because when the end credits came up and they announce that “Machete Will Return” in not one, but two other movies that might possibly (read: probably not) be made someday, I was less interested in that and more in the prospect of a spin-off about Lindsay Lohan’s character.

Lindsay.

Lohan.

I don’t think I need to say more than that.

-Sean

Or Not…

2010-09-01T19:18:00.001-04:00

It’s proving to be a bitchy little week. Trying to do a lot and getting very little done. Not even reading or watching anything. If I can I’m going to dedicate the weekend to getting ahead on writing columns. Until then, here’s something that I thought was pretty great—courtesy of Rogue Leader:

Here’s a link to the original post.

And here’s one to a guide of where is where.

-Sean

Vital Statistics: Week of 08/01 - 08/28

2010-08-29T22:45:00.001-04:00

As a way of easing back into the swing of things, here are some thoughts on the things I’ve been reading and watching in the past couple of weeks:

READING:

The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett, 1934.

Hammett is one of the grand-daddies of American detective fiction, and he was known for an economy of style that sort of breaks my brain when I read it, but in a good way. The Thin Man is fun, light reading but it works more as a comedy of manners than a detective story, and the setting, voice, and gender relations date it far more readily than most work in the genre. I enjoy the novel, but this is a rare case where I like the movie better.

The White Rose, Glen Cook, 1985.

The White Rose marks the end of the Black Company over-story referred to as The Books of The North and it does so with the sort of merciless competency that I’ve come to expect from Cook’s prose. The story jumps around in time quite a bit through epistolary machinations but it does so well. The book brings this chapter of the Company’s history to a close quite nicely and takes a couple of twists and turns that are satisfying if not always unexpected. Also a great “Weird Geography” book what with most of it taking place on the otherworldly Plain of Fear—an environment only mentioned in passing in the preceding Shadows Linger.

Shadow Games, Glen Cook, 1989.

And that brings us to the first of the two Books of The South, as Croaker leads the Black Company out of The Lady’s empire and back to the land that spawned their outfit four-hundred years prior. This one is a bit more melancholy than the previous entries, dealing primarily with Croaker coming to terms with his own advancing age and the personal inadequacies that are coming to bear now that he has assumed control of the Company. Cook handles that side of things very well though, and takes the opportunity to get us more in on the side of seeing how things come together in the Company. In previous books, Croaker has served primarily as Annalist and Physician, and now that he’s in a position of power and having to support the Company as he leads it to its disbanding in Khatovar, we get much more of an inside look at how the organization is run and a much wider view of how the battles play out. It doesn’t always work though; as Croaker is now writing and fighting from a position of command, the larger battles in the third act become a bit too large to really grasp due to Cook’s spare prose and sharp, isolated imagery. It’s something that works better when we’re seeing it from the perspective of the man on the ground, not the one watching the proceedings. That said, the book is still immensely enjoyable and Cook continues to be remorseless when it comes to tormenting and killing his characters. I could probably stand to sit down and read all of the other books in the series right now if I didn’t have things to look at for my thesis.

The House of Breath, William Goyen, 1950.

Lovely imagery and layering and some technically excellent writing. Otherwise I couldn’t stand it. There’s a bit where a river starts narrating the book mid-chapter that sort of broke my brain (in a bad way this time) for a little while. Even a big room full of writers couldn’t find much nice to say about it. I’d say dodge it unless you’re into that sort of thing.

DMZ, Volume 05: The Hidden War, Brian Wood, Others, 2008. (Issues #23-28)

Brian Wood’s DMZ is one of the best comics that I’m reading right now, and no joking. A very near future story where the Second American Civil War has been fought to a standstill and the burned out ruins of Manhattan have become a thinly populated demilitarized zone. The book has an thick air of probability to it, and I never cease to be amazed by the art and Wood’s ability to tell small, personal stories set in this world that are at once as sad as they are as proud and hopeful. This particular volume is made up of those little stories; one-shot tales about the figures who live in the DMZ and how they came to be where they are, from an aging graffiti artist, to a failed suicide bomber, to the gangster who runs Chinatown and aims to own the whole city by the time the war is over. It’s pretty great and, right now, it’s the comic book that I’m most likely to recommend to people who don’t read comic books.

VIEWING:

The Losers, Weed Road, Warner Bros, 2010.

This was one that I really enjoyed in theaters, but looking at it now my impressions have begun to cool. I still like it, but it doesn’t really much work as a cohesive whole. The villain is too goofy and blatantly villainous for the film that he’s been put in, and the weapons that he’s buying are like something out of the later Pierce Brosnan Bond films. The movie doesn’t take itself too seriously to begin with, but it isn’t weird enough to accommodate a guy who shoots his assistant because she stumbles while walking next to him. I also still don’t object to all of the changes that they made in translating it from the comic. I wish that it had been more like the comic, sure. The comic is pretty damn brilliant. But I think that it comes into it’s own well enough for all but the most hard-core purists to find some merit there.

That’s all for now, folks. Look for a new COOKING COLUMN tomorrow afternoon some time, and another thing later in the week. I also sort of want to talk about television at some point, but we’ll see where that goes.

-Sean

Journey to the Centre of the YouTube, Part 3

2010-08-26T12:09:00.001-04:00

I’ve always been a big fan of The Kids in the Hall. You can tell that their stuff doesn’t always work the way they want it to, but there’s usually almost always something funny in their skits. The following is an example of them firing on all cylinders:

Also, I’m now back from my travels. Expect columns and the like to go back on broadcast next week.

-Sean

Vital Statistics: Week of 07/25-07/31

2010-08-04T23:38:00.001-04:00

The observant reader may have noticed that posting has been very light lately. I’ve been tremendously busy with projects and prepping for school to start back up and you can expect things to continue like this for the next week or so. It’s unfortunate but I sort of have to do it. So please look forward to a resumption of regular broadcasts soon, and go now to this tatty list of things with my apologies:

Books Read:

Dragonforge, James Maxey, 2008.

I finished this one up and found it enjoyable if not as strong as the first entry in the series. There’s an awful lot of new exposition that is covered very quickly (so quickly that it seems almost as if it will not be touched upon again, and if that’s the case; why bother?), and there’s a tremendous amount of reliance on coincidence. Maxey pulls a lot from Christianity in his setting, using it as one of the three primary religions that shape the landscape of the world, and I’m a little bit concerned that he might be moving in the direction of a supernatural guiding hand. Still, a good, light adventure/fantasy read.

-Sean

COMICS: “X-Wing: Rogue Leader”

2010-07-30T00:25:00.002-04:00

NOTE: This column was originally supposed to run on Wednesday the 28th. It is running now because I A) Fail at auto-publishing, and B) Fail at checking my site to make sure things are auto-publishing.

It’s Wednesday, and that means new comics. But since I don’t really buy single issues anymore I’m going to start doing something else instead. I’ve had a couple of opportunities to recommend titles to people over the last month or so, and every time I’ve recommended Dark Horse’s old Star Wars: X-Wing: Rogue Squadron monthly. Running from 1995 to 1998, this is a book that I absolutely loved when I was younger and I have always been ready to throw out a recommendation for it. It’s been a long time since I read so much as a single issue though, so I’ve decided to revisit this particular nostalgia factory in the interest of having comics to talk about on this site and, for the next few weeks, I’ll be covering this series on a story to story basis.

As we begin, I’m already going to have to amend myself. You see, back in the fall of 2005, Dark Horse ran a sort of revival X-Wing series without series mastermind Michael A. Stackpole. Going back to before the beginning of the original series, X-Wing: Rogue Leader ran for three issues that served as a follow-up The Return of the Jedi and a direct lead-in to the original first story-arc, The Rebel Opposition. As such, I’m going to have to start here if I’m going chronologically. Which is a shame, because Rogue Leader totally sucks.

And with that? Here we go, here we go, here we go:

STATISTICS:

Script: Haden Blackman

Art: Tomas Giorello

Colors: Michael Atiyeh

Issues: 3

Run Dates: September ‘05 - November ‘05

BACKGROUND:

Oh my god, I barely even know where to begin. I mean…just issues out the ass. First off, I can’t even figure out what the rationale was behind it’s publication. It’s a prequel to the original series, taking up a week after the Battle of Endor, and leaving off just a few days before the mission to Cilpar that makes up The Rebel Opposition. It’s a very tight time-frame, the events of the story taking place over the course of only a couple of days. This is perfectly acceptable, I suppose, but I just have never gotten the why of the story.

Don’t get me wrong, the arc does highlight an important moment in the continuity of the series: the passing of leadership over Rogue Squadron from Luke Skywalker to Wedge Antilles. But why now? This arc was released in 2005, nearly eight years after the end of the original series and seven after the end of the series of novels by Mike Stackpole and Aaron Alston. And it was released a full year before Dark Horse started re-releasing the old series as part of their Omnibus project. So basically we have an isolated incident. A short-run series released without fanfare, which can have no chance of continuation because it would actively clash with the rest of the continuity. So we’re left with the idea of a quick cash-in; something that I’ve found Dark Horse to usually be above. I just can’t find the logic in it.

But who cares about that crap? Logic and commercial viability are for nerds. We’re talking about Star Wars comics, and that’s serious business.

WHAT’S THIS ALL ABOUT THEN:

So, it’s a week after the Battle of Endor. The Emperor and Vader are dead, the Empire is in disarray, and the Rebel Alliance is running a clean-up operation in the forest moon’s orbit. Luke Skywalker is fresh back from the events of The Truce at Bakura (a novel I could have sworn took place over more than the span of two days) and is putting together a small group of pilots for a mission to monitor Imperial activity in the Corellia system because…there’s an absence of Imperial activity there? And this merits pulling pilots from firefighting efforts, funeral detail, and hunting stormtrooper guerilla squads? I guess if Luke Skywalker wants a mission then he gets a mission. Here are our Rogues:

Luke Skywalker: Rogue Leader

He’s Luke Skywalker. Come on. I don’t need to explain this. He’s a Jedi, an X-Wing pilot and he’s also kind of a dick in this book. Just sayin’.

Ten Numb: Rogue Does Not Have a Call Number

Ten Numb is the token alien in this series. He does next to nothing. And since he doesn’t appear anywhere else in continuity he is all but guaranteed to be dead by issue three. He also leads his own B-Wing squadron, so why was he chosen for this? Hell, why did he go along with it?

Tycho Celchu: Rogue Prettyboy (Nine)

Tycho is usually a much better character than he is presented as here. The conflict and duality that are inherent in the character takes a backseat here to the, “Oh, ain’t he handsome,” factor. A-Wing pilot.

Wes Jansen: Rogue My, What a Comically Large Gun (Five)

I had a horrible time finding a decent picture of Jansen for this. He’s either obscured or in the background for most of this arc. His is a character who is also not quite there for this story. He does things, but he doesn’t feel like anything more than an extra. Also an X-Wing pilot.

Wedge Antilles: Rogue Awesome (Two)

This book is pretty much Wedge and Luke’s show, which is fine since it’s a passing of the torch thing. He’s really the most thoroughly developed character in the book, but it feels like it was done at the expense of everything and everyone else. He also spends the entire book dressed like Han Solo. No excuse is ever given, but I’d like to imagine it’s because the artist and colorist thought that he was Han Solo. And honestly? The alternative is that all Corellian pilots dress the same, which is boring as hell. Our last X-Wing pilot.

After some perfunctory scenes wherein we are introduced to our characters and they are given their mission, the Rogues are quickly off to Corellia, and its capital city of Coronet. They quickly check into a bar, and Luke reveals that he has pulled everyone from their very important assignments so that they can take some shore leave! Yes! Wedge is no longer pulling Star Destroyer sized chunks of debris out of declining orbits, and Ten is no longer putting out fires on the surface of Endor’s moon because why? Because Luke Skywalker decided that he wanted to have a vacation in enemy territory! Why that’s perfectly okay! I don’t know why he didn’t just say so. He didn’t have to misappropriate Alliance materiel and personnel for that. I’m sure that they would have just let him go if he asked. He’s only Luke Goddamn Skywalker. It’s not like this is the first time. He’s the king of flaking out and going off to do whatever he wants.

So we get a little bit of exposition about Corellia, and a little bit of “I’m getting too old for this shit,” dialogue between Wedge and Luke (galactic heroes AND crotchety old men by age twenty-two?) as they set up kip at a cantina so Tycho can go be handsome at the ladies. Unfortunately, further tedious pleasantries are interrupted by the arrival of the plot, in the form of some stormtroopers launching a rocket into the middle of the cantina. Are they assassins? Crazy? Reactionary remnant forces acting out a terrorist plot? Who knows, they’re dispatched quickly and easily. But that’s okay, because as our heroes round the corner they come face to face with an entire army of pissed off Imperials who are more than willing to fight them for the opportunity to question one another.

And that’s it. That’s the first issue. Luke Skywalker shanghais his buddies and a complete stranger into going on vacation under false pretenses and then they get into a fight. It’s twenty-two pages of nothing interesting happening. Almost all of the dialogue is exposition, and it isn’t even decent exposition, and the sole other action sequence at the beginning (Tycho and Jansen fighting a giant Gorax on the forest moon) is handled so quickly and cleanly that it might as well only be mentioned in passing later. They don’t even bother to report on what happened when they radio in after the fight. It’s like nothing that anyone does matters, which is fantastic luck because it’s like none of them care.

But it has to get better, right? Not really, no. Things are probably going to get spoiler-ish from here on out, so skip ahead to the art section if you’d like to remain pure.

Issue two is mostly fighting and chase sequences, but as with the fights in issue one, everything seems too easy. Rogue Squadron is supposed to be sort of an elite force. In the future they’ll sort of be portrayed as a group of Marines; going forth and taking names in any situation or environment. That shines through here, but it’s kind of done in an effortless way. The characters are all just insanely competent and the writer either failed to come up with a challenging scenario for them or decided that it wasn’t necessary. (I’m not familiar with Haden Blackman’s other work, so I don’t know if laziness is his MO or not) As a result, we just sort of coast through the episode until about two-thirds of the way through when we’re introduced to our villain, General Weir.

And General Weir is a problem too. There is absolutely nothing about him that is interesting. He’s fanatical Imperial villain #3,698,425. He sneers and struts and tortures and hates aliens and he thinks that the Emperor is forever. No effort is ever made to develop him at all, and since he isn’t actually introduced until more than halfway (!) through the story, there isn’t any room to do so either. If this were the beginning of a new, larger series where he could serve as a recurring villain then he could have some potential, but since he never shows up in continuity ever again, then the dedicated Star Wars reader knows that, like Ten Numb, Weir will be dead or captured by the end of issue three. So in the end, all he is is another trite villain of the week, whose sole distinguishing characteristic is that he wears glossy black Scout armor with bright red bandoliers crossed over his chest. No, I am not joking.

In This Picture: Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

So we have weak action, weak characters, and a villain who looks like he dropped out of a remedial course for GI.Joe bad guys…dare we ask what happens next? Well, when confronted with the combined might of four guys, our fearsome villain and his army turns tail and runs, taking the time to quickly capture Ten in a moment of startling incompetence. The rest of the Rogues give chase as Weir pulls his men off planet and limps back home and, as the issue ends, Ten wakes up to find himself in Weir’s secret underground fortress, badly beaten and minus one hand. Such villainy!

And then issue three rolls around, and if you thought things were flimsy before, well, whoo-boy. Weir has amassed a huge subterranean storehouse of ships and walkers and gear, and he even has the men to run it all. He’s planning on starting his own COUNTER-rebellion, to avenge the destruction of the Empire which, as all of the exposition in issue one informed us, has not actually been destroyed. He’s totally rebelling though, and he’s going to do it with all of the information he has pulled out of Ten during off-screen torture/interrogation sequences. Apparently the little dude took all of three minutes to break.

Luke and the gang track Weir’s ships to his base but need to get inside. They enlist the help of the native Selonian population by promising them really, really hard that the Emperor and Darth Vader are dead and gone. The Selonians agree to lend aid, but are never seen again. Seriously. They just vanish. I guess the offer of aid only extended as far as the door. So, once again, four guys armed with handguns face off against a vast display of Imperial might. And apparently the Rogues just look so absolutely badass that Weir orders an emergency evacuation as soon as they show up. Weir runs in a TIE, Wedge and Tycho pursue in similar fashion, and Wedge gets to shoot the villain down and punch him in the face. Meanwhile, Jansen finds Ten dead on the interrogation table (called it) and Luke fights the entire Imperial force on his own off-screen.

It could have been a great, large action sequence but it’s all handled so ineptly you can barely keep track of it. Everything is over before you know it and all of the surviving characters are suddenly back with the fleet at Endor. Wedge asserts that he wants to keep fighting more now than ever, Luke hands over control of the squadron, and Wedge goes to meet his new pilots and give a terrible little speech about freedom and inspiration. The end.

I don’t really know what to say at this point. The whole thing is like a clinical case in completely screwing the comics pooch. I’m not sure that Blackman could have written anything more flat and uninspired if he had been trying to and was also suddenly Mark Millar. It fits into the continuity of the rest of the series, and I guess it’s an okay prologue since it’s all uphill from here…but really now. It’s just bad. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

A VERITABLE PARADE OF ARTISTRY:

So, I’m really not crazy about the art in this arc either. I guess that probably isn’t a surprise at this point, but there it is. And it isn’t that the art is genuinely terrible, it’s just wildly inconsistent. Sometimes it’s thoroughly middle of the road, sometimes it’s got that soft-edged, hyper-real John Cassaday look, and the rest of the time it looks sort of like the stuff that Cam Kennedy did on the Dark Empire series; all hard edges and weird crosshatching and deep, saturated colors. The comparisons aren’t exact, but on a page to page basis we’re seeing some very different looking work.

Further, characters lack consistency in their depiction--again, not badly, but enough to be noticeable. There are some serious scale and anatomy problems that crop up (Luke practices the Jedi art of not having any frigging bones several times), and Tomas Giorello has a fantastic knack for displaying some of the most flat and lifeless splash pages I’ve ever seen. There’s also a real lack in consistency in the way that Corellia is portrayed. We never really see enough of it to establish a good geography, but there are enough descriptions of the planet and her people for the art team to be able to put something together that at least holds up. The city of Coronet also has the tendency to look ridiculous; all silver-age sci-fi city spires, weird lights and shiny surfaces. It doesn’t look all that much like a city just shaking off the shackles of Imperial oppression. And the cast of extras is populated largely with humans dressed in silly hats, giant boots and puffy clothes, all done in mismatched neon jungle prints. In the end, Coronet looks like it belongs on Krypton and it’s inhabitants all dress like Vanilla Ice. It’s strange and kind of embarrassing to look at, especially given Giorello’s predilection to only using shadow for dramatic effect. A substantial portion of the second act is set at night, but even that all seems to be lit by an even, all-encompassing light source.

The book has some lovely technical art though. The arc’s one big dogfight is kind of flat and silly, but the ships look tremendous for the most part. There’s a lot of transition in the art department over the course of the Rogue Squadron book, and it isn’t always a pretty read, but the technical art is pretty steadily great throughout. So I guess Rogue Leader has that going for it.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t point out a couple of other little things. There’s some nice use of white-space and unconventional panel shapes in issue three, where Luke and Wedge stand on the bridge of a Star Destroyer and look out into space and the interior of the ship has been whited out so they are standing in a void staring out into a void. It’s a trick panel that isn’t really special in an average or better book, but it stands out nicely here. There is also a panel in issue two where Luke has an epiphany and the panel is shaped like an exclamation point. It’s a little bit of literalistic silliness that I can’t not include a picture of:

Finally, this book has what I think is the single most lovingly detailed likeness of venerable internet meme-machine Admiral Ackbar looking pleasantly surprised that has ever been put to paper:

“A Hickory Farms basket? Why, you shouldn't have!”

LAST NAIL:

So Rogue Leader isn’t very good. That’s not really a surprise for me. I knew it wasn’t very good when I read it the first time. It was the revitalization of a beloved series though, so what can I say? I had hope. And because I still have hope, I’m going to forge on with the rest of the series despite this rocky start. Because, hey: It can’t all be nostalgia, can it?

Next week: The Rebel Opposition

-Sean

Vital Statistics: 07/18-07/24

2010-07-26T20:42:00.001-04:00

Coming this week on All Strange Places: A new COOKING COLUMN, something about television maybe, the start of a series on comics, a lot of Starcraft II (Which probably won’t actually appear here, the be honest. Unless I write up some thoughts.), and I might try my hand at liveblogging something. Exciting, right? No. Don’t answer. I already know.

You’re excited.

I think.

Here’s some crap:

Books Read:

Dragonforge, James Maxey, 2008.

James Maxey’s first fantasy novel, Bitterwood, was one of my most pleasant surprises last summer. I’m only about halfway through this sequel and despite its sort of doofy title, it’s an enjoyable and intelligently written fantasy story. I don’t usually go for fantasy stories that are set in a sharply retrogressed future world, but Maxey is up-front about the whole thing, and by not shitting around with the cliché he manages it give it a fresh and honest fell.

Movies Watched:

2010: The Year We Make Contact, MGM, 1984.

For some reason this is a tremendously unpopular sequel, but I’ve always preferred it to Kubrick’s original. There’s almost nothing about it that I dislike (though Dana Elcar is woefully and hilariously miscast as a Russian) and it has some truly wonderful special effects work, much of which is unlike anything I’ve seen anywhere else. If you’ve never seen it because of the nasty stigma that follows it, I’d heartilly recommend rectifying that.

Writing:

Fresh Pages: 03
Blog Posts: 02

-Sean

COOKING COLUMN: Moroccan Lamb-Shank Meshoui

2010-07-20T02:50:00.003-04:00

Welcome to the first official installment of Cooking Column! This is going to be a recipe week. But more than that, we’re going to be looking at a whole meal--main course, sides, desert, the works--and we’re going to be centering that around a traditional Moroccan dish; a lamb meshoui.

This is a fairly diverse dish, mixing a bunch of different flavors and elements into a whole that should be able to please or impress just about any group of diners. It also has the extra bonus of being kind of showy without actually being complicated to make.

In This Photo: Dark culinary mysteries which shall be revealed.

SECTION ONE: Elements and Component Parts

Before we begin in earnest, let’s take a rundown of the dishes we’ll be preparing and the bits that we’ll need to put those together:

Lamb and Stewing Vegetables:

Lamb Shanks (One shank per person served is a decent rule of thumb, though you can easily split a large shank between two people)
Six large carrots
One large, yellow onion
Six stalks celery
Three to five cloves of garlic
Salt
Paprika
Ground Coriander
Ten-count fresh Cardamom seed pods
Half-dozen Bay Leaves
Three tablespoons butter
Two tablespoons olive oil

Couscous:

One to two cups uncooked couscous (a cup of couscous can, in general, comfortably feed four people)
Saffron strands (ten to fifteen fresh strands should do nicely without overpowering the dish)
Two or three Cinnamon sticks
Two or three Bay Leaves
Two teaspoons olive oil
five-count fresh Cardamom seed pods
Toasted Pine Nuts (about five per serving is good)

Extras:

A vegetable of the cook’s choice, usually selected in regard to those who feel like they need something green at a meal. Peas are a good choice to compliment this meal.
Associated paraphernalia for the vegetable chosen.

Sangria:

One bottle blueberry wine
One half-bottle pomegranate wine
One large orange
One large apple

Deserts:

Sugar cookie dough (you can make your own if you want, but a package of premade Pillsbury dough will be more than fine)
Three teaspoons Common Anise Seeds
One package fresh strawberries (other berries or light fruit will be fine)
Four ounces heavy cream
Four ounces whipping cream
Five tablespoons sugar

Naturally, this is a pretty daunting materials list. Keep in mind though that a lot of items listed are spices and seasonings, so that takes a pretty big chunk of the legwork out of your trip to the store. This is also intended to be a large, party sort of meal so it’s a little bit more grandiose than a lot of the food I’ll be talking about here in the future.

All told, the expense for this meal was about one-hundred dollars, including the cost of already owned spices. I was cooking for five but could have handily fed eight. In the long run, this isn’t a great everyday meal, but it’s fantastic and easy for special dinner occasions.

SECTION TWO: The Main Course

So you’re ready to cook something. Great! The first and most obvious step to preparing a meal is to step into the kitchen. If you don’t have access to a kitchen and are planning on cooking this anyway, then you have my respect because you’re obviously some kind of damn wizard. Rock on, Gandalf.

Once you’ve decided not to mail in that application to Hogwarts and have stepped into the kitchen, take stock again. Make sure that you have everything that you’re going to need. Running out to the store to pick up something that you forgot while you’ve got something in the oven can be a serious disaster, and while improvisation is at the heart of cooking, it’s usually best done on your own time. Experiment on yourself; not on your dinner guests.

But let’s begin. I chose lamb shanks for this meal because they’re generally nice cuts of meat. They’re fairly easy to find most of the time, have a nice long grain to them and a lot of good meat, and are usually not too fatty while also remaining tender. They can be expensive sometimes, but usually I can find them for no more than the equivalent per-pound price of a middling cut of beef. As such, they’re an all around nice piece of meat to work with, though they often take a good amount of cooking time to be prepared properly.

The first thing you’re going to want to do once you unwrap your meat is rinse it in cool water, clearing off any congealed or otherwise sticky butcher-shop crap that can accumulate between when you buy the meat and cook it. Lightly pat the meat dry with a paper towel and set it aside for the time being. You’ll also want to take out your chunk of butter and set it aside on the counter to soften a bit. Preheat your oven to three-hundred-and-twenty-five degrees and then move on to your stewing vegetables.

In a single pot meal like this, it’s important to prepare your vegetables properly. Personal preference has a say, but in a dish that can need to cook for up to five hours, the size of your carrot chunks can mean the difference between crisp-yet-cooked and completely soggy.

For the sake of consistency, I cut the carrots and celery into inch long chunks, and cut the onion from the top into inch-wide crescents. Things like celery and onion are pretty much guaranteed to turn to mush in a long term cooking environment, but thankfully they’re mostly there to provide flavor and extra moisture for the meat. In the end, the two elements complement the rest of the meal with their flavor and people are pretty accepting of their being limp and kind of gross.

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Two of these things will be seriously ratty looking by dinner time.

Once you’ve taken care and mauled your vegetables, turn your knife on those garlic cloves. De-husking can be an outright chore most of the time, and it’s one of those things that it’s best to learn early on in your cooking career. Having a good grasp on the concept can save you a lot of time and headache down the road. A lot of people like to crush the clove with the flat of their knife to loosen the husk and then peel it off, but my personal preference is to chop the clove length-wise and then pop the meat out with a light squeeze. No matter which way you find easier, you’re going to get the garlic clean and apply pressure to the meat, stirring up the volatile oils. Chop the garlic to a fine consistency and then place it in a large mixing bowl with the rest of your vegetables.

Interlude 01: Here’s Where I Talk About Garlic

You might have noticed that I’m having you chop your garlic last and are now wondering why. Then again, maybe you aren’t. Maybe you’re wondering how multi-vitamins are made, or how somebody can talk about garlic so much. Well get yourself sorted man, because there’s a reason for the way I recommend that you prepare your garlic.

The primary volatile element in garlic is an enzyme called allinaise. Like most volatile components in the foods we use for seasoning, allinaise is what gives garlic it’s distinctive smell and plays a big part in how we taste it. Like the sulphur compounds in onions, the more you bruise and cut the flesh of a garlic clove, the more allinaise you release. For our purposes, we’re chopping the garlic fairly fine because we’re cooking a large quantity of food and we want the flavor to come through. We also want a lot of flavor to come through because this is a dish that we’ll be cooking for a long time, and exposure to prolonged high temperatures will cause allinaise to break down.

Further, I’ve recommended that you chop your garlic last because garlic doesn’t sit all that well. Once you’ve prepared it, it needs to get cooking pretty quickly, because exposure to open air will cause the flesh to oxidize quickly. Take too long, and you’ll end up with garlic that is bitter instead of rich. If you have to let garlic sit for a while, covering it in a thin layer of olive oil will slow down the oxidation process.

Finally, garlic can be difficult to chop. It gets sticky as the oils are released, and will clump nastily to the cutting board, the knife, your hands, anything. To remedy this, sprinkle some sea salt on the cutting surface before you begin. As you begin to cut, the salt will absorb some of the oil; softening the garlic and breaking it down some. It should also stop the clumping and make the garlic easier to work with.

Okay, back to business. Once you’ve got all of your vegetables in a bowl, drizzle your olive oil over the mixture and add your Paprika, Bay Leaves and Coriander powder. Now get your hands in there and mix everything until all of the vegetables are lightly coated in the oil and spice mixture. If everything seems ready to go, dump the mixture into your tagine and form a mound with it. If you don’t have or aren’t using a tagine, then a large, oven-safe casserole dish will do nicely. In the case of your using a dish, make sure to position your vegetables in a mound-shaped line running lengthwise down the center of the dish.

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With your vegetables taken care of, it’s time to return to the lamb. By now your lamb should have drained some and your butter should have softened a bit. Dry the lamb again if necessary and then vigorously rub the butter onto the meat. If it’s easier for you, you can also melt your butter completely in the microwave (twenty seconds should do) and apply it to the meat with a pastry brush. Since we’re roasting the meat for a prolonged period, the objective here is to create a sort of vapor barrier on the outside of the meat. By applying a thin layer of fat, we’re ensuring that a lot of liquid stays inside of the meat during the cooking process--keeping it moist and tender--and also causing the outer layer of skin and muscle to brown and crisp in a way that is visually appealing and adds extra texture to the meat. It’s sort of like faking the outside of a rotisserie chicken.

With your meat thoroughly buttered, arrange it in the tagine on top of the vegetables. Make sure that you leave enough room for air to flow between the meat and the top portion of the tagine. If you’re using a casserole dish, arrange the meat in a similar fashion, propping it up on your vegetable pile. Once you have your meat in position, sprinkle some coarse sea salt over the top of it and the ground up contents of your Cardamom pods.

Interlude 02: Some Things You Hopefully Didn’t Know About Cardamom

There are two types of Cardamom—-Green and Brown—-both of which are in the ginger family. Green Cardamom, which I am using here, is generally the more easily found in stores and is often more expensive than the brown variety. It is a fairly earthy seasoning and lends a slight eucalyptus taste to things that it is cooked with. As such, it’s usually used in teas and deserts and rice dishes.

Fresh Cardamom is a nice addition to many dishes, lending a slight sweetening effect, but it can be a real pain in the ass to prepare. Usually, the entire pod can be dropped into a broth for infusion and discarded later, but since this is an oven meal we need to remove the seeds from the pod. (Note: nobody who matters will actually think less of you if you just use powdered Cardamom)

To prepare fresh Cardamom, go back to what I said earlier about Garlic. Crush the pod under the flat of your blade to pop it open and then pull the seeds out. Make sure to remove the inner husk from the seeds (it will be off-white and kind of puffy) and then put the seeds through a couple of good grinds in a mortar and pestle. The result should look similar to course-ground peppercorns.

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By now, your oven should be ready at temperature and you’re ready to put the main course on the backburner for four to five hours. Place the top on the tagine, making sure that it fits snuggly with the base, or take a long piece of tinfoil and tent it over the top of your casserole dish. Place it in the oven and get ready for a bit of a waiting game.

For the next several hours you’re going to have to stick pretty close to the kitchen. By no means should you obsess over the state of your meat, but stick close and keep yourself aware of any sudden changes in scent. You’d be surprised at how quickly you notice when something starts to burn.

While the meat and vegetables cook, it’s a good idea to check on it every half an hour or so. This shouldn’t be as big of a concern in the tagine, but there’s a lot of liquid that’s going to cook out of your food and pool in the bottom of your dish. Like a turkey or a baked chicken, you’re going to want to periodically baste the meal to make sure everything stays moist and cooks evenly.

If you run into a situation like I did where you have too much liquid and an overflow or submergence of the vegetables seems likely, don’t be afraid to suck out excess liquid with your baster. If you’re the kind of person who likes to plan for future meals, then this is a great opportunity to freeze the excess liquid in a Tupperware container for use as stock later. Just make sure that you let the liquid sit out for a while so it can cool and separate. You’ll want to skim the fat off of the stock before you freeze it to maintain it’s quality.

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That’s really all there is to the main course. When the meal is ready to serve, I’d recommend separating the vegetables out for the sake of convenience and serving the meat in the tagine. It’s also probably a good idea to separate out the bay leaves before serving, but that isn’t strictly necessary.

With that out of the way, let’s move on to the rest of the meal.

SECTION THREE: Your Couscous and You

Couscous is one of my favorite things ever. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it’s diverse. You can make it taste like just about anything you want and do so quickly, and that’s a fantastic asset if your kitchen is one where a lot of the cooking is done on the fly. It’s also one of those rare things that you can buy in bulk and actually have it keep, which is great because a little of this Berber rolled-grain goes a seriously long way.

For this meal, you can start on the couscous as soon as you put the main course in the oven. Take your cinnamon sticks and stick them in the toaster oven for several minutes. While they’re toasting, select a stove-top pot with a tight-fitting cover and fill it with water. Your package of couscous should have the necessary amount of water printed on it, but a good rule of thumb is one-and-a-quarter cups to every one cup of uncooked couscous. When you can smell the cinnamon from across the room, remove it from the toaster and put it in the water to soak along with your bay leaves.

You aren’t going to be doing much with the couscous for the next while. Because of how quickly it actually cooks, you don’t really want to touch it again until you’re about a half-hour away from taking the main course out of the oven.

When the time has come, prepare the remainder of your seasonings and ingredients. (pine nuts, Saffron, and Cardamom pods, remember?) When you’re using fresh or whole spices and seasonings, it’s generally a good idea to take the time to lightly toast them and stir up their volatile oils. This will generally enhance the flavor of the dish by drawing out the individual flavors of the spices, making them sharper and more distinct. Toast them in the same way that you did the cinnamon earlier, though keep a sharper eye on it this time. Your pine nuts should just start to brown when everything is ready.

Extract and prepare the Cardamom in the same way as before, (or try the infusion technique, the choice is yours), and then grind the Saffron to a fine powder. You don’t need to do anything else with the pine nuts as they are there more for added texture in the dish rather than flavor. Mix all of the seasonings into the standing water with the cinnamon and bay leaves, add your olive oil, and put the pot on the stove to boil.

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Bring the seasoning mixture and the water to a rapid boil and then fish out the cinnamon sticks and the bay leaves. (and the Cardamom pods if you went the infusion route) By now they will have done their job and added a bit of subtle flavor to the water and the whole dish by association. Stir in your dry couscous and briefly return the whole mixture to heat. When it has begun to boil again, remove the pot from heat and cover it. The couscous should expand and absorb the water in five minutes or less.

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It’s not often that you can literally watch your food cook.

When the couscous has absorbed the water, fluff it lightly with a fork and transfer it to a serving dish. The texture should be slightly sticky, but not visibly clumpy. If it is to your preference, add some garnish or extra seasoning, though a couple of pats of butter will usually do it for most people.

SECTION FOUR: Chef’s Choice

As I said in the first section, this side dish is really up to you as an individual cook. It isn’t strictly necessary, but if you’re stretching the main course for more diners or want to provide some extra variety, then it is entirely acceptable to add another vegetable.

My personal preference in this case was straight, old-fashioned peas. They’re easy and fairly flavor-neutral and they complement couscous nicely. If you need my help to boil a bag of frozen peas though, I’m going to have to come up with some remedial columns for hopeless cases.

Go ahead. Add your own touch to the meal. I’m cool with it. Seriously.

SECTION FIVE: Sangria, Bitches!

Sangria isn’t something that is always to my liking. I’m not much of a wine drinker in general, but this chilled fruit/wine combo drink is fairly light and refreshing and can be nice on a hot summer evening.

For this particular meal, I went with a couple of fruit wines. The blueberry wine has a lot of sweetness to it without being overpowering, and the pomegranate adds a tart touch. Mix your wines in a large carafe and leave it in the fridge or in a spot where the mix isn’t likely to get too warm.

Next, chop up your fruit. I went with a single apple and a single orange. You don’t really need a whole lot of fruit for something like this because your objective is to add flavor over time. Once you add the fruit to the wine, put it back in the refrigerator to keep it chilled for a couple of hours and let it breathe. If you think it is necessary, you can also add a couple of cups of orange juice to add volume and extra flavor. Also, for some added lightness, you can dump a couple of cans of cold Sprite into the mix just before serving.

It’s pretty straight forward really, and makes for a nice change of pace when served with a larger, heavier meal.

SECTION SIX: Like Strawberry Short-Cake, but Kind of Not

I’m pretty sure that you have to be sick of me by now, and, honestly, I wrote so much about garlic that I’m thinking of going and getting myself tested. This is the home stretch though, so we’d best just soldier on. Just lie back and think of England, ladies and gentlemen; we’ve reached the desert dish.

For the sake of variety, I went with something a little bit Mediterranean that was also readily identifiable by American diners. Aniseed, or Common Anise, is a slightly sweet spice that lends a licorice taste to whatever it is cooked in. Often baked into cakes and cookies, it also has some digestive properties which make it nice in herbal teas or in the desert that follows a heavy meal.

Since the meal has been fairly heavy thus far, I went with a large, thin cookie as the basis of the dish rather than a more traditional pound-cake or unflavored scone. Since we’re using a prepared cookie dough, just kneaded the Anise seeds into the dough and roll the whole thing out flat on the pan before cooking it to spec. The end result is a thin, brittle sugar cookie, flecked throughout with spots of solid black and brown. The sheet should break up nicely into sections roughly four to five inches across and less than a quarter of an inch thick.

With the cookies set aside to cool, turn your attention to your whipped cream. Combine your heavy cream and your whipping cream together in a large mixing bowl. As you begin to mix the components, slowly add in three tablespoons of sugar. Continue to mix until the cream solidifies tot eh point of peaking. The resulting cream should be light and fluffy, but not too heavily sweet.

Three or four minutes in a mixer should produce the desired peaks.(pictured right)

Next take your fruit and begin to slice it up. The choice of fruit is really a personal one. I would recommend keeping your choice in the berry family for the sake of consistency, but if you have something more exotic that you would rather use then by all means try it out. I went with strawberries mostly because they’re traditional and it’s hard to find someone who won’t eat them.

With your fruit prepared, sprinkle the remaining sugar over the top of it and let it sit while you put out the base layer of cookie. Put down the berries over the cookie, and then a layer of cream. Cap each serving off with a second cookie and use the remaining cream to garnish. Serve cold.

SECTION SEVEN: Wrap Up

And that’s it. I hope you’ve enjoyed this first installation of Cooking Column and can get some use out of it. Please leave any ideas, questions, or other comments in the comment section, and please join me next week for another--less labyrinthine--article.

If you like this recipe, please take it and enjoy it with my blessings. That’s what it’s here for. And if you’re on the fence about it, it really is more easy than the length of the article makes it seem. I’m being comprehensive for the sake of being comprehensive. Also: this meal actually produces relatively few dirty dishes, and ample opportunity to clean up as you go. And when cooking a large meal, that’s always exciting.

I leave you now with one last picture of the short-cakes, and my thanks for your readership. It’s appreciated, folks. I wouldn’t do it otherwise.

-Sean

Vital Statistics: Week of 07/11-07/17

2010-07-18T21:03:00.001-04:00

Just a few short things this week. Hope everyone is liking the new format and the new column ideas. I’m getting more into the swing of this, I think.

Books Read:

Another slow reading week. Started something but can’t really speak on it after so few pages.

Comics Read:

Star Wars: X-Wing: Rogue Leader, Dark Horse, 2005. (Issues #1-3)

DVD’s Watched:

Space: Above & Beyond, Fox Television, 1995, (Disk 6)

Films Watched:

Inception, Warner Brothers/Legendary Pictures, 2010.

A solid science-fiction heist story. It is quite good all around and has a very slick concept/presentation, but it doesn’t really bring anything new to the genre.

Writing:

New Pages: 30
Old Pages Scrapped: 03
Pages Edited: 06
Personal Deadline Met: No.
Blog Posts: 05

-Sean

IN THE THEATER: Inception

2010-07-16T18:17:00.001-04:00

Over the next few days, you’re going to see an awful lot of critics refer to Inception as a challenging film. Viewers will walk away from their theaters calling the film complex and nuanced and spouting praise for writer/director Christopher Nolan. That’s if they like it of course. If they don’t then they’re going to call it confusing and boring and maybe even stupid. And walking away from this film, the question on my mind isn’t so much “Which party is right?” as it is “Is any party right?” And my answer?

Maybe a little of both.

Let me explain: Inception is a film that is only as challenging as you allow it to be. If you don’t accept what it is telling you and try to over-think things then you’re going to find yourself muddling through the plot, grappling onto statement after idea after statement in the interest of finding a way to ground yourself as an observer. Alternately, if you choose to let the film and the world wash over you and pay attention as you go, then you’ll very quickly find yourself deposited at the credits and find that you understood all of what went on.

The reason for this is that Inception falls into a category of science fiction that I like to refer to as Immersive Science Fiction. It’s a little sub-genre I have identified that is peopled with writers like William Gibson. Immersive authors write stories where almost all of the world and technical exposition is done in the background. As a style, it does not pander to the audience, it does not attempt to make everything crystal clear at all times, it does not care about telling you how the jetpack on page eighty-three works, or how the bad guys tracked the hero through space at the fifty minute mark.

Early on, Inception gives you the little bits that you absolutely need—-terminology, that the tech exists, how it effects the world—-and then it just lights out for the Territories, supplementing your reality for its own and trusting that you will be interested enough in the characters and the story to ride along. And as it moves it gives you more and more little flashes of how the world works; showing you how it is different and how it is the same and illustrating the rules that dictate this reality without taking much time to implicitly state them. As the film chugs along, the viewer is with the characters all of the way. We latch onto them because, as human beings, they are the most familiar facet of this world, and as they move through the plot we move with them and build up our own understanding of how things work.

I’m making this sound more complex than it is. Basically what you need to know is this: The movie shows you the world without really telling you about it, and then it tricks you into filling in whatever blanks you find the most pressing, and when it’s all over you feel more satisfied as a viewer because you played a role in the endeavor that was not completely passive. It isn’t something that works flawlessly on film, but it works well enough that you can still let yourself slip into the texture of the film and come away with an excellent feel for it. Which is something that can’t even be said about most books, so more power to Nolan for doing it.

So what about the rest of it? The acting and the action and the other stuff that people who aren’t writers actually care about? Well, there’s a reason why I included “spouting praise for writer/director Christopher Nolan” in my bit earlier on. Chris Nolan is, to my mind, one of the strongest and most consistent directors of the 21st century. The man is an unstoppable juggernaut of directing chops. He crushes faces and collects skulls and swims in talent like Scrooge McDuck swims in gold coins. And Inception really doesn’t do much to change that.

The film is beautifully shot. The visuals are crisp and clear and the digital effects-—while not always of the highest caliber—-are always integrated well into the film; serving as intentional representative imagery rather than flash for the sake of flash. There is also some really great stunt work going on, and some gigantic “zero-gravity” sequences that showcase some of the best fight sequences of their type. The film is just staggering to look at.

Things don’t hold up as well on the less technical levels, unfortunately. The plot is strong; presenting itself well and moving at a pace that is at once brisk enough to satisfy the story-driven viewer, but also lets in enough character work to let the actors really do their thing on a more personal level. But once you strip away all of the fancy lucid dreaming stuff, Inception is really just a heist movie. It’s Ocean’s Eleven, minus the jokes and a bunch of characters and inside Cillian Murphy’s head. And while I would go so far as to say that it is a very well made heist movie, it doesn’t ever take that notion anywhere you haven’t seen. The same basic sorts of things that you expect to go wrong in heist movies all go wrong, and they are all resolved in the ways that you would expect. It is all hidden under a very slick veneer, but when it comes down to it, the veneer is a lot thicker in other places.

There’s also some pretty clunky writing spaced throughout the script. Nothing that you’re likely to specifically remember by the time that the credits are over, but there are little conversations or lines that are just ham-handed enough to give you pause. They’re unfortunate little moments strewn across a script that is otherwise nice and tight. The film also just gets things over with early and has the characters constantly be willing to call each other on their bullshit. When Leonardo DiCaprio’s Cobb starts to show that he’s having a psychological meltdown, Ariadne (Ellen Page) actually does something and confronts him about it. Characters show concern for each other and act upon that, and it is a lovely change of pace from summer films where you often feel like the characters even know that they’re in a movie, where they’re just holding all of their emotional bits in check until the plot train coasts into the station where they’re supposed to unload. It is so remarkably refreshing to see people acting like real people that I can barely even express it.

And the cast is lovely, by the way. There are plenty of people on the cast list who you know are going to be there and be solid, like DiCaprio and Page, and then there are people who just kind of sow up as a matter of course and please you with their mere presence. Performers like Cillian Murphy and Tom Berenger and Michael Caine and Dileep Rao who didn’t get a single frame of attention in the trailers but bring a great deal of talent and presence to the table. Going into the film as a person who remembers performers and their work, the cast is like going out for dinner and a movie and then spending the entire time running into people who you are genuinely happy to see. Pretty much everyone is great pretty much all of the time, and it is hardly surprising at all.

So, in the end, Inception doesn’t really take you anywhere you haven’t been to before, but it gets you there in a car you’ve never been in. And it’s a really nice car. Flaws aside, the film comes highly recommended. Enjoy.

-Sean

The Digital Tarkovsky Library

2010-07-13T22:59:00.001-04:00

It has been brought to my attention that the entire feature-length library of director Andrei Tarkovsky has been made available on OpenCulture.com. For those readers who love film and are unfamiliar with Tarkovsky’s work, I have no choice but to give these films a serious recommendation.

Tarkovsky is not an easy director to watch. His films are not easy films. They are slow burns of image and idea. Like many directors who operated under the USSR, Tarkovsky was not afraid to take his time and tell his stories deliberately and without the excesses of flashier films. This is a man who Ingmar Bergman called “the greatest director” and sometimes I am inclined to agree.

So please—should the notion take you—watch and enjoy.

-Sean

(News shamelessly reposted from WarrenEllis.com)

INTRODUCING: Cooking Column

2010-07-12T20:39:00.001-04:00

When I was in college, I was surprised at how many people I knew who couldn’t cook. And I don’t mean that the were just bad cooks, I mean that they didn’t know the first thing about how to use an oven. Since then, I’ve gone on to discover just how many people in general don’t know an ounce about how to prepare food for themselves beyond the bare minimum. I always found this sort of baffling, because I was allowed and encouraged to cook as a child. I thoroughly enjoy a wide variety of foods, I like to prepare them, I like to eat them, I like to talk about them...the works.

So, I got to thinking that the majority of people really do enjoy food. There are some for whom eating and subsisting is a mechanical action, yes, and there are also the obnoxious “foodies” or whatever the hell they’re calling themselves now, but there are also those other people: The people who like food and are interested in it, but don’t really know where to begin. Something like Food Network seems like the obvious choice to start with, but that’s sort of deceptive. A lot of their shows either pander excessively, or cater specifically to people who already know the fundamentals and are into some fairly advanced prep techniques. Cookbooks aren’t always that much better, numerous and often poorly written as they are. So where does that leave the people in the middle ground?

Well, for those people I now introduce Cooking Column. This project, with its stunningly uncreative name, will update once a week with recipes, technique and tool guides, and little bits and pieces from my own cooking explorations. It won’t always be a new recipe every week, it probably won’t even be something that you personally will want or need every week, but it will hopefully be something like a comprehensive look at food and cooking that can be of help to the layman and the advanced cook. So if you’re into that, be sure to come back next Monday for a new column and probably some sarcasm. I certainly look forward to both of those things.

-Sean

Vital Statistics: Week of 04/04 – 04/10

2010-07-11T16:44:00.001-04:00

Weird, busy week. Apologies for the lack of updates. I’ve made some minor formatting changes and applied them. If there are any display issues, please let me know. I’ve also got a couple of little columns starting up next week, along with the next installation in Working Through the Stack.

Books Read:

Didn’t really have any time for reading this week, unfortunately.

DVDs Watched:

Space, Above and Beyond, Fox Television, 1995. (Disk 4)

Writing:

Pages Written: 11
Pages Edited: 20
Blog Posts: 2

-Sean

Vital Statistics: Week of 06/27 – 04/03

2010-07-10T23:07:00.001-04:00

Super late post on this. Things have kind of been a pain in the ass lately.

Books Read:

Pages of Pain, Troy Denning, 1996.

Still haven’t finished this. Kind of frustrating. I love the book when I’m reading it, but I can’t seem to focus on it for any amount of time. Just one of those things.

Shadows Linger, Glen Cook, 1990

Really great read if you can take Cook’s style. The brisk, war-journalist tone of the book could probably be quite off-putting for some readers, but I rather enjoy it. Follows up the story from The Black Company nicely, while also working as a more personal and character driven type of story, and it builds things nicely to the conclusion in the next book. I also have to commend Cook for taking the tired old fantasy archetype of the cowardly, downtrodden tavern master and turning it into something enjoyable and well developed with the character of Marron Shed. On the whole, a terribly enjoyable book and follow-up, even if Raven does go out like a total bitch.

DVDs Watched:

Slither, Universal Pictures, 2006.

Science fiction version of Evil Dead 2. Really fun casual viewing, with some really creative horror/comedy elements and effects. Great cast, well put together, and some fantastic special features on the disk. This is one of those movies that I’ll pop in for noise and will usually end up sitting down to watch regardless.

Space, Above and Beyond, Fox Television, 1995. (Disks 1-3)

Doing this one for the next Working Through the Stack Column, so keep an eye out for that.

Writing:

Pages Typed: 11
Pages Handwritten: 6
Pages Edited: 0

-Sean

Work Week

2010-07-07T14:36:00.001-04:00

Slow posting week last week, and expect this week to continue as such. I’m still looking at changes to the site layout to make thing easier to read and view, and I’m working on a season of television for the next Working Through the Stack post, so it’s taking longer than usual. I also have a couple of ideas for more articles and content that I’m exploring, and am writing regularly while trying to get ready for school to start up again next month. So yeah, little busy. Expect a Vital Statistics post for last week later today, and do stay tuned.

-Sean

Journey to the Centre of the YouTube, Part Two

2010-06-28T20:19:00.001-04:00

And we’re back, with a Steve Steven’s track that you might remember from 1986…

This, like Top Gun, might be one of the best worst things ever. Good night, everyone.

-Sean

Vital Statistics: Week of 06/20 – 06/26

2010-06-27T18:35:00.001-04:00

If I’m going to be perfectly honest then I have to say that these posts are kind of stupid. For some reason though, I find them very soothing. There’s just something nice about having a week-to-week record of what I’ve been reading and watching and writing. And besides; what the hell else is a blog really for? So, here is volume three of my weekly list of things you didn’t need to know. Now with little reviews!

Books Read:

Pages of Pain, Troy Denning, 1996.

The summer months always put me into a funk where all I really want to read is franchise fiction and pulp lit. It’s great, easy summer reading and can be a wonderful way to find more work by authors whose original stories and novels you really enjoyed. Troy Denning is one of those guys, but Pages of Pain is really anything but easy reading. The prose is fairly dense and the subject matter is rather dire. I’ve been working on this one for more than a week now, but I keep getting distracted. If I were to ever want to run a D&D campaign set in Sigil though, this is the book I would fall back on for locations and little details.

Star Wars: Hard Contact, Karen Traviss, 2005.

Traviss is another of those authors who I’ll usually track across the boundary between franchise and original fiction. Her original long-form military sci-fi series sort of petered out for me at the halfway point, but she remains an author that I really enjoy. This was her first novel in the Star Wars stable, and it kind of shows, but it’s still thoroughly enjoyable if you like that sort of thing.

DVDs Watched:

Outland, Warner Brothers/The Ladd Company, 1981.

I see you are interested in Outland. Outland is a wise thing to be interested in. Please see this post for more information about Outland if you would like to know more about Outland. Outland.

The Road, Dimension Films/2929 Productions, 2009.

Gorgeous scenery and production design and some really fine performances from some really fin performers. When I wasn’t drooling over the little environmental details and started paying attention to the film though, I will reluctantly admit to being nearly bored to tears. Post apocalyptic fiction may be great for allowing the players to moodily navel-gaze and lament the things that they have lost, but in a film it doesn’t really make for a solid viewing experience. I don’t mind watching a survival story, but at least have your actors behave in a way that lets me believe they’re actually capable of surviving. An extra dose of half-baked voice-over philosophizing makes this a beautiful but tedious film.

Edge of Darkness, Warner Brothers/BBC Films, 2010.

Welcome back, Mel.

Comics Read:

Star Wars: X-Wing, Rogue Squadron: The Phantom Affair (Series Issues #5-8), Dark Horse, 1996.

You may have figured out that I’m awfully fond of Star Wars. No matter how many times George Lucas may try to hurt me, I’ll still have some room in my heart for the franchise, especially when it’s focused on characters who either aren’t from the films or only played very small roles. The Phantom Affair is the second story-arc from Dark Horse’s ongoing monthly from back in the ‘90s (now the third, thanks to a botched semi-reboot a few years back) and it is where the series really hit its stride, I think, finding the balance of humor and action that Mike Stackpole established in his novels while also really nailing the vibe and look of Star Wars. Succeeds despite the truncated storytelling style of the medium, and some inconsistent art.

Writing:

Pages Typed: 9
Pages Edited: 0
Pages That Are Any Good: 5?
Pages Typed in a Barnes & Noble Cafe: 9
Electrical Outlets in that cafe: 1 (Seriously? Seriously? Just one, guys? That’s the best you can do?)
Number of Computers Being Used by the Girl Sitting in Front of the Outlet: 0
Number of People in Line for the Outlet: 4
Number of Times She Laughed When People Asked Her to Move: Many, that absolute bitch.
Excuse Given When Staff was Confronted with the Issue: “But we have free 3G Wireless!”
Number of Damns I Give About That: 0
Review of the B&N Cafe: Guys, you have great iced tea and scones, but I move around a lot during the day, and until more than one person can plug their laptop in to work, don’t expect me to come back.

-Sean

Working Through the Stack, Part 2

2010-06-27T17:40:00.001-04:00

I love the 1981 Peter Hyams film Outland. It’s one of those quiet, serious science fiction films from the ‘80s that seems nearly perfect when you’re watching it, but is sort of hard to encapsulate properly when describing it. So, in lieu of a proper write-up, I’m going to present you with an equation I cooked up on GraphJam.com to better explain the film:

Now armed with this information, I feel that those of you unlucky enough to have not seen this film should be tempted to seek it out. Because if the pure, unbridled power of Movie Mathematics can’t convince you, nothing can.

-Sean

(NOTE: Working Through the Stack is a multi-part project in which I have dedicate myself to exploring the lost and forgotten corners of my DVD collection. More information may be found here.)

Working Through the Stack, Part One

2010-06-24T16:48:00.006-04:00

Not long ago, I announced my intention to work my way through the forgotten and mislaid stretches of my DVD collection. Having set this goal for myself, I went ahead and started off with the Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall collection that Warner Brothers put out in 2005 as part of their Signature Collection series of releases.What follows will be a series of short reviews; mostly comments and basic thoughts, with little technical bits here and there. So let’s begin:

To Have and Have Not

In a collection of movies that chronicles and glorifies Bogart and Bacall’s performances together, To Have and Have Not is fairly important. Released in 1945, the Howard Hawks directed production marks not just the two performers’ first on-screen encounter, but also Bacall’s first time in front of the camera. The film is fairly straightforward: Bogart is a charter-boat captain in French Martinique, Bacall is an (obviously) attractive young woman—seemingly on the run and short on money and luck—and together they get caught up in a the smuggling of Resistance leaders out of occupied France. Upon comparison, the story has more in common with Casablanca than the Ernest Hemmingway book upon which it is based, but it ultimately holds up well enough on its own.

It’s one of Hawk’s more simple and straight-forward films (at least in the context of those that I’ve seen) but I think that in the long run it is stronger for that. The simplicity and spare cast of characters works well in the film’s favor, and mostly an Bacall’s behalf. She’s extremely green in this one and, despite her natural charms and talent, it shows through in places. She seems nervous or a bit jittery in some scenes but is fine in others, and in more still she’s laying on the smokiness and the sultriness awfully thick. It makes for a fairly inconsistent performance layered on top of a character that is pretty shallow to begin with. To their credit, Bogart and Hawks seem to have intentionally slowed things down for her. William Faulkner’s script keeps the banter to a less-than-breakneck speed so that Bacall can hold her own with more experienced costars Bogart and Walter Brennan, and the more leisurely pace of the film lets her natural chemistry with Bogart really show through.

Cleanly shot and also willing to take it’s time, the movie is ultimately a little slow for the lack of banter and never manages to not be as good as either the source material or the film to which it is inevitably compared. It has its high points and its place in history and its very own famous quotation, but it never works up the steam to really be anything special. To Have and Have Not is basically satisfying but ultimately underdeveloped.

The Big Sleep

One of my all time favorite films. I’m a great fan of Raymond Chandler, and his novel of the same name remains one of my favorites as well. This isn’t the straightest adaptation ever, losing some of Chandler’s original edge and altering the ending in favor of a cleaner close that fits more with the film version’s playing up of the relationship between Marlowe (Bogart), and Vivian Sternwood (Bacall). As far as these things go though, it’s a hell of a lot closer to the source material than To Have and Have Not. So it has that going for it at the very least.

For those unfamiliar, The Big Sleep is another Howard Hawks production, this one from 1946. It follows a Los Angeles private detective hired on by a wealthy invalid to put to rest the blackmailing of his youngest daughter, Carmen (Martha Vickers). Along the way, Marlowe encounters Bacall’s elder Sternwood daughter and the two get caught up together in an ever-expanding ring of gamblers, pornographers, thugs and gangsters. With a clean shooting style, a large and well-defined cast, and some utterly fantastic, banter-rife dialogue, the film comes together as a sharp and quick example of early film-noir.

Regrettably, the film isn’t as coherent as it could be. The source novel is quite complex, and the film sticks pretty closely to that. However, as a consequence of the script’s need to put Bogart and Bacall in a closer, more romantically driven relationship and the censoring of the time, the film does have a tendency to glaze over plot points that were more thoroughly developed in the novel.

On the subject of Bogart and Bacall’s relationship though, things flow a lot better this time around. The pair’s natural chemistry shows through a lot more this time around, and works as an exceptional counterpoint to the antagonistic nature of their relationship in the film. Bacall is much improved too, displaying a level of acting talent far beyond what she seemed capable of only a year before. She also takes a lot of the smoke and force out of her singing voice for her sole number here, blowing her super-throaty performances in To Have and Have Not completely out of my mind. The supporting cast is quite good as well, with notable standouts such as Louis Jean Heydt (as Joe Brody) and the previously mentioned Martha Vickers (playing a pitch perfect Carmen Sternwood).

So ultimately, this is a much better film than To Have and Have Not, showcasing a lot more acting talent and a more complex story on a larger budget. The plot can become overly convoluted at times, but never to the point of being incomprehensible, and it almost always moves along quickly enough to stay interesting and satisfying. Also, for a more hard edged and modern take on Chandler’s story, you might want to check out Made in England, the first (and currently only) volume of Warren Ellis and J.H. Williams’ ongoing comic series, Desolation Jones.

Dark Passage

Moving along we come to the Delmer Daves directed Dark Passage, from the David Goodis novel of the same name. Released in 1947, it is a fairly early example of what many viewers would consider to be proper film noir, and when viewed in that mindset it is really remarkably good.

While I cannot speak to the source material, the film stands as a solid and very stylish work of noir. It is dark and dour in the way of that genre, moving at a pace that is at once tensely rapid yet satisfyingly leisurely. The story, that of an accused murderer (Bogart) who escapes from San Quentin Prison and into San Francisco with the aid of some unlikely helpers, is pretty conventional, as is the cinematography. Where Dark Passage really stands out, is in the way that it deal with Bogart’s character in the early parts of the film:

As an escaped convict, Vincent Parry’s worst enemy is himself and the risk that an identifiable face presents, and, given that, the he very quickly goes in for some back-alley plastic surgery. So, working on the basis that Bogart has to provide Parry’s voice but must look like himself after the alteration, the film presents nearly its entire first half from a forced first-person perspective. The technique works surprisingly well given the ungainly nature of the equipment used, and there are some really very clever tricks and transitions hidden throughout the sequence. It’s all very well executed and is extremely satisfying to watch, not just on its technical merits, but in the larger context of the film.

So how does Dark Passage hold up in relation to the previous two films? The story is much cleaner and more compact than The Big Sleep while staying well above the overly simple To Have and Have Not. The interplay between Bogart and Bacall is also much more refined here than in either of the previous films, developing much more deliberately and solidly than in the THaHN and building beyond the interesting but simply aggressive animal magnetism that we saw in The Big Sleep. The two of them feel like a real couple here, coming together over a reasonable span of time and displaying a more realistic pattern of interaction. Maybe it comes from the fact that Bogart and Bacall had been married for a couple of years by this point, but the two feel much more reasonable and mature around one another.

So, on the whole, Dark Passage is a very strong work of noir, displaying several very interesting and unusual flourishes while never becoming tired. It also heaps some love on the lavish and beautiful art-deco architecture that was prevalent in the San Francisco of that day. Look at Bacall’s apartment building in particular for this, as well as the attention paid to the city’s skyline and the Golden Gate Bridge.

Key Largo

The last film in this collection, John Huston’s 1948 production of Key Largo, is also the final film that Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart appeared in together. This is somewhat regrettable, not just because it marks the end of a generally terrific on-screen pairing, but because the film isn’t really all that good.

This isn’t anyone’s fault in particular, the movie is just uneven; constantly trying to balance out tense, highly dramatic scenes with quiet introspection and character building. Normally I would applaud this kind of balancing act, but the setting and the limited timeframe of the plot don’t give any real room for the kind of transitions that are needed. As a result, the film feels bipolar, often jumping from quiet and sweet to loud and cruel with little warning. Bogart’s character is also one of those annoying, male leads who is just too much of a Jack-of-All-Trades. In the beginning he’s just a soldier out to call on the widow and father of a dead comrade, but by the end he’s also an accomplished boater, a skilled con, an expert on organized crime, a coward, a hero, and some kind of pioneer of psychological warfare. As a performer he’s spinning a hell of a lot of plates, and spinning them well, but as a character he’s almost like a cartoon.

I don’t want to make it seem like there’s nothing to like here. Most of the performances are really very good, and when the movie gets tense it gets really tense. Bogart and Bacall work very well together once again, but the characters are working in just too short of a time frame for things to be believable, and their emotions for one another have to flip on and off as quickly as the movie’s high-notes do. Maybe if Huston had set a more deliberate tone for the film and worked on the pacing more I would be saying otherwise, but—as a whole—Key Largo feels rushed, and is too uneven to be really enjoyable.

So, there we are. The first go around of this continuing series done and out of the way. As I move forward with this, any input that you may have on either the format or the reviews will be more than welcome. I hope that you’ve enjoyed the article, and if you have I hope that you’ll stick around for more in the coming weeks.

-Sean

Vital Statistics, Week of June 13-19

2010-06-21T14:54:00.001-04:00

Last week was pretty busy for me, so there was little activity here. I’m still not finished with the first Stack article as I still haven’t gotten a chance to watch Key Largo, and the site has gone unchanged because It’s been hard to find a spare minute. So, in lieu of actual content, here is more gibberish:

Books Read:

Gun, With Occasional Music, Jonathan Lethem, 1994.
Pages of Pain, Troy Denning, 1996.

Films Watched:

DVD:

The Boat that Rocked, Universal, 2009.

Writing:

Pages Typed: 2
Pages Hand Written: 6
Pages Edited: 0
Blog Posts: 1

Thank you for your patience during this trying…whatever. Normal broadcasting operations should be resuming shortly.

Finally, here is a photo I took of the stack of movies and television shows that I have made it my business to watch:

-- Jesus Christ, how did I let something like this happen? --

-Sean

Vital Statistics, Week of June 6-12, 2010

2010-06-15T20:26:00.001-04:00

While I finish up the first entry of my “Working Through the Stack” feature, here are some things that you really do not need to know:

Books Read:

The Regulators, Stephen King (Writing as Richard Bachman), 1996.
Gun, With Occasional Music, Jonathan Lethem, 1994.
Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Allies, Christie Golden, 2010.

Films Watched:

DVD:

To Have and Have Not, Warner Brothers, 1944.
The Big Sleep, Warner Brothers, 1946.
Dark Passage, Warner Brothers, 1947.

Theater:

The A-Team, 20th Century Fox, 2010.

Television:

The Specialist, Warner Brothers, 1994.

Comics Read:

Serenity Float Out (Series Issue #7), Dark Horse, 2010.
DMZ: Friendly Fire (Volume #4, Collecting Issues #18-22), DC/Vertigo, 2008.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: Commencement (Volume #1, Collecting Issues #1-6), Dark Horse, 2006.

Writing:

Pages Typed: 7
Pages Hand-Written: 4
Pages Edited: 12
Blog Posts: 4

I would also like to take the opportunity to direct your attention somewhere offsite. The Outpost, is an in-development collaborative project that myself and a few others are hammering out. Most of my content there will mirror things that I post there, but our intention is to create a more comprehensive center for finding reviews and thoughts pertaining to all kinds of media. I’ll keep linking to the main page as the idea continues to evolve, and if it seems like the kind of thing that you would be interested in reading, then I would encourage you to bookmark it for future use.

In the coming days I’m going to try and institute a couple of format changes that have been suggested to me, and I’ll have my thoughts on the Bogart/Bacall box set up as well.

-Sean

In the Theater: The A-Team

2010-06-11T18:24:00.002-04:00

I have a serious soft spot for Men-On-a-Mission movies. In a lot of ways they represent the sense of fun that I look for in an average summer theater-going experience. With that in mind, I was really pleased to discover that we had three such films coming at us this season, starting with The Losers (one of two films I’ve seen this year that I liked well enough to see twice), working through The A-Team, and closing with Stallone’s The Expendables later in the year. So, in the end, I may not be the best person to voice a wholly impartial opinion on The A-Team, but I’ll try to anyway.

The A-Team isn’t a smart movie. There’s nothing wrong with that, because it really isn’t a stupid movie either. It’s a summer movie and it knows that. It is also just smart enough to know that it isn’t smart. So instead of setting its sights on being an edgy or brooding reboot—that tries to impress by being a hard-edged version of a thing that the audience is already familiar with—it dedicates itself to just being fun.

And it is fun. The A-Team is big, and it is loud, and it is one serious mother of a mover, and it is fun and over the top without ever becoming too cartoonish (I’m looking at you, Transformers) or offensive or stupid (I’m looking at you, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen). The film very rarely takes a break during its runtime of an hour and fifty-seven minutes, moving rapidly from action sequence to exposition to montage to comedy set-piece with a sort of tirelessness that it commendable for being furious but never tiresome. The action sequences also work well for the most part, keeping with the pace and not relying overly on the use of digital effects. Some of these sequences do get a bit too frantic for their own good, unfortunately; pulling in too close and putting too much emphasis on shaky-cam style shooting and editing. The action also lacks the quietly extravagant style that Joe Carnahan brought into earlier efforts like Smokin’ Aces and Narc.

The film also does a nice job of modernizing the franchise and establishing itself, taking the audience from the team’s original coming together in Mexico to their last mission in Iraq quickly and efficiently without getting bogged down in the political situations prevalent in either country and maintaining a sharp focus on getting us involved/familiar with the characters as rapidly as possible. The story also stays enjoyable and pretty straight forward for the duration, but it does lose some traction towards the end of the second act when it tries to break out a couple of twists and double-crosses. It also never really establishes the stakes. Don’t get me wrong, the audience is told what is going on, and what could happen becomes quite obvious…but the film concentrates so wholly on the characters that it does tend to lose sight of the fact that there’s more at stake than the continued freedom of Hannibal & Company.

And speaking of the team: The casting here solid and occasionally inspired. Liam Neeson works very well as Hannibal, mugging and chewing scenery with the same enthusiasm as predecessor George Peppard. Sharlto Copley is excellent as well, dropping the drama from his turn in District 9 and dialing the neuroticism up to show some serious comedic range. Bradley Cooper continues to do a good job being Bradley Cooper, which is fine in the context of Face. Jessica Biel turns out a surprisingly solid performance that actually holds a decently hard edge. Patrick Wilson’s wannabe CIA Super-Spook/Villain is surprisingly manic and unpredictable. And Quinton Jackson does a good job of trying to put his own spin on B.A. Baracus, even if the script does seem to want him to just pretend to be Mister T the entire time.

So in the end, it isn’t a great film, but it is a good one. It works hard to provide a sense of momentum, giving up some good action and a few genuine laughs along the way, and it hardly even tries to set up a franchise at the end. So, if you like action films or buddy flicks, if you have a sense of nostalgia for the old show or if you just want to spend a good afternoon in the theater, you could do a whole hell of a lot worse than The A-Team.

-Sean

Journey to the Centre of the YouTube

2010-06-11T00:27:00.001-04:00

Back when I ran a crappy little blog called The Digital Litterateur I used to highlight YouTube videos that really stood out to me, not just for being funny in that YouTube kind of way, but for being genuinely clever or interesting or even just really ass-backwards and weird. Since I know that I’m going to keep doing that here too (it’s just part of who I am), I’ve decided to put up one of my old favorites.

Never before have I been so touched by the power of the human spirit. On YouTube.

The DVD Collection That I Forgot

2010-06-08T12:51:00.001-04:00

Since I finished my undergrad work a little over a year ago, my DVD collection has sat largely unused in a pile of boxes tucked away in a quiet corner of my living space. Recently I decided to pop those boxes open and do a sort of headcount—making sure that nothing had been broken or otherwise damaged—and I was surprised to realize how many of the cases had never been opened. When I counted, I discovered that at some point during my Senior year I had bought no fewer than forty-four movies and seven seasons of television that I had just never even bothered to watch. Many of them were films that I had seen before, but all the same…I feel a need to rectify this (personally perceived) issue.

So, over the course of the next few months I am going to try and watch the films that I forgot I owned. As I work my way through them, I will probably do a short write-up on each one. These smaller articles will probably be posted in clumps that represent a week’s worth of viewing. In the case that a film inspires some larger analysis, then those will be posted on their own. I will also likely not discuss the season box sets, because that’s an awfully large amount of content to try and craft a short consensus on.

I’ll be beginning this week with the Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall box set that Warner Brothers put out in 2005. I bought this one used because I of a sudden desperate need to own a copy of The Big Sleep, and I have never seen any of the other three films included: To Have and Have Not, Dark Passage, and Key Largo. So be sure to look for thoughts on all four films by the end of the week.

-Sean

Sound Check

2010-06-07T22:54:00.005-04:00

For those of you looking for a standard-issue Welcome Post, this is the closest you're liable to get, fellow travelers. I'm finally dedicating myself more fully to doing a blog, I've got a name on it that I like and a layout that I'm fond of. As such, "welcome" to any readers who see this (and even to the ones who don't), thank you for visiting and for your consideration. I know that finding a website worth reading can be difficult on the best of days, and even harder when it comes to blogs. I hope that All Strange Places suits you or any person who you might recommend it to.

As far as a declaration of intent goes, you won't find a more concise one than the description in the sidebar. I'll be posting essays and opinion pieces here, as well as reviews of films, books, games, and comics when I think I have something interesting to say on the topic. You'll also find the occasional piece of film criticism and theory dedicated to older films as I discover them or work something out on them. There will also be periodic links and videos and other standard blogger crap, but I'll try to keep that interesting too. I'll also endeavor to keep the politicking to a minimum.

So, again: Welcome and enjoy.

-Sean

PS: I'd also like to take this chance to get some usage stuff out of the way. This is a blogger page, obviously, so there's that. The posts here will all be written by myself unless otherwise noted. I don't have a problem with a reader quoting anything, though I would appreciate a link to your content and an acknowledgment. (If I post a piece of fiction, things will be different, but please contact me about it.) Finally, the header graphic was made using an old NOAA chart of the Virgin Islands and the text is done in HeadlineHPLHS, a font made freely available by the inestimably awesome HP. Lovecraft Historical Society.