David Lynch at Yale

Last month I found out that David Lynch would be giving a lecture at Yale, as part of a promotional tour for the David Lynch Foundation, an organization he's in charge of that's designed to promote meditation as a part of education in schools. Lynch is one of my favorite filmmakers, and is the creator of my favorite TV series, Twin Peaks, so this was an essential event for me. According to the promotional material, the lecture was going to be on "Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain," so I wasn't expecting something exclusively about his films, but still, I was rather disappointed by what went down.

The event opened with a roughly twenty minute Q&A period with Lynch, where people could ask questions about his films. I got on line to ask a question, but never made it to the front. Anyway, there was some interesting territory covered here. Someone asked about whether Lynch would work with Kyle McLachlan again, and he said he wanted to, but there just hadn't been a project where Kyle would fit. And looking at the three films he's made since Fire Walk With Me, I'd agree. Personally, Kyle was so good at playing Cooper, I have trouble seeing him as any other character. So, Lynch would either have to place him in someone very close to that role, or someone so far removed from it that he's barely recognizable.

Lynch also talked a bit about the process by which he created the music for his films, describing scenes to Angelo Badalamenti as Angelo worked out music to accompany it, which is pretty cool. Angelo's stuff for Twin Peaks is phenomenal, but I don't notice it that much in Lynch's other work, he's got some great cues in the second half of Mulholland Dr., but I don't see his music as so completely essential to most of Lynch's films as some other scores are. Lynch also made the good point that you can't just use your favorite songs in the movie, which is why he had to wait ten years to find a way to fit This Mortal Coil's 'Song to the Siren,' into one of his films.

He also talked about his move to digital filmmaking. He's using the Sony PD150, a camera I love. I used the PD170 to shoot 'Ricky Frost,' so I'm actually using a better camera than Lynch. I'm using film in my production class this semester, and coming from digital, it's extremely annoying and restrictive, something Lynch echoed, discussing the freedom that digital gives him. I love being able to hold the PD170 in my hand and just shoot a scene anyway I like, instead of having to have someone else doing focus, and struggling to run the camera as I shoot. So, I'm in total agreement here, digital is much better as a filmmaker, though the question still lingers of whether the footage looks as good as film.

He also talked some about his intuitive creative process, relying on instinct to construct films. However, the vast majority of the event was focused on the meditation stuff. Now, I'm well aware of the beneficial effects of meditation, but the way it was presented here was both off putting and boring. Lynch was used as an attraction to get you in the door, so that you'd have to listen to Dr. Jon Hegeland, a physicist who appeared in the awful film 'What the Bleep Do You Know?' This was a film that touched on many of the same issues he discussed tonight, fit into a story that starts out as an educational video level narrative, then descends into an absoultely bizarre blend of lowbrow humor and scenes that are supposed to comment on the stuff they're discussing, but just turn out being bad.

Anyway, this guy was an awful speaker, going on forever in a boring way, and the subsequent demonstration of the power of meditation on the brain using an EEG was so fraught by technical difficulties, it was rendered essentially meaningless. But, I've got a greater problem with the whole foundation. They're all about spreading the power of meditation, so during a two hour presentation they don't actually show you any of the techniques, they just try to get you to sign up for their programs. That leads me to believe that the event isn't so much about promoting meditation as promoting what their organization is selling.

I think it would have been much more effective to give us a how to guide to TM, step by step, simple, and encourage people to pursue it on their own. This would have been much better than just going on about its power and how easy it is, without telling us actually how to do it. That's all I wanted to know, and they didn't give it to me, but I don't really want to go to a class or something to find out, so now I'm not going to pursue it.

So, I sat through this presentation because Lynch was going to be doing more Q&A after. Now, I suspect a couple of the people in this segment of the Q&A were plants, just because they asked very specific questions that allowed David to go on about meditating for a while, and they used all the terminology he had used, in a way that indicates they had pre-existing knowledge of what David's speaking about, and the specific terms he uses.

Anyway, the event was marred by the fact that people asked the worst questions I've ever heard, absoultely apalling. First off, everyone prefaced their question with a couple of minutes about themselves, absoultely pointless speaking about how they're big fans, and respect him and stuff. If you're at the event he probably knows that, and we don't need to hear. There's three minutes of intro and then ten seconds to ask the question, just ask your question and get off the mic, nobody cares about you.

And then there's people who took a step further, one girl did that speech just so she could give David a copy of one of her films, and another guy was there just to tell David about his psychiatric condition (seriously), and another to ask David if he'd seen a film about another meditation technique.

If you have a chance to ask David Lynch anything, don't ask him these stupid questions. The man who created Twin Peaks does not need to hear about your schizophrenia when he could be talking about his creative process and clarifying things about the films. This guy has such a font of knowledge that only one man in the world has, so let's hear from him. It's like if Jesus came back and did a Q&A, and people spent all the time saying how they're big fans, you've only got Jesus for an hour, there's more important things to discuss than the fact that you're a fan.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to ask Lynch a question, and he left the venue so quickly after the event I couldn't talk to him at all. I think it's a nice thing to do to stick around for a few minutes after and talk with your fans. It means a lot to them and doesn't take you long. I know with the most recent Joss event, I was annoyed by the questions, but I left with a good feeling because I got to talk to him after.

So, I'm glad I went to the event, but I'm a bit annoyed that Lynch was just used to get people in the door to listen to this presentation on TM, and I feel like they're approaching that in the wrong way. Meditation isn't something that should be bought or sold, as they seem to be doing, I'd love it if they went on a tour teaching people to meditate, instead they're trying to get people into their organization and no actual meditation happened. And the awful questions made me think more negatively of humanity as a whole. My god, those questions, there were three decent ones out of roughly fifteen asked.

X-Men 139-161

The journey through Essential X-Men continues, I finished Volume 3 a couple of days ago, and I've read a few issues of issue four, but I'm going to save the brood storyline for my next review. Anyway, last time I was talking about X-Men, it was more about the issues surrounding Chris Claremont's standing in comics history than the actual book, and this sure was riveting, but I'm going to try to touch a bit more on what happened in these issues.

So, we pick up right after the Dark Phoenix saga, generally considered to be the high point of the book, and I wouldn't argue with that. It's huge scale storytelling, a really long, well developed plot that provided a sort of backbone to the early part of Claremont's run. You don't really notice how essential the Phoenix stuff is to giving the book a sense of direction until it's gone. In these issues, the book sort of drifts, there's some good storylines, but not as much character development and the plot doesn't really seem to be going anywhere.

For starters, there's the awful Wendigo storyline. Alpha Flight are barely even characters, yet they turn up again, and another awful Marvel universe character finds his way into the book, namely Wendigo. The X-Men work much better in they're in a world with a sharp dichotomy between human and mutant. The whole metaphor of a world that hates and fears them is undercut if the world simultaneously loves the Fantastic Four. And for that reason alone, it's better if these other Marvel Verse characters don't find their way into the book. However, there's also the fact that they're generally speaking awful characters. Wendigo is the same as Sauron, a man who turns into something evil and attacks people. The story hits the same awful beats and drags on.

However, Claremont and Byrne return to from with 'Days of Future Past,' the issue that inadvertantly led to some of the most complex continuity in any mainstream property. But, while the issue may have wrought Cable, Bishop and more, as a standalone piece it's a great chunk of storytelling. I always enjoy an alternate world or dystopian future and we've got it here. The future segments are really well done, and I like the foreshadowing of having them working with Magneto. This is also the first issue of the book to credibly present the idea of mutant prejudice as a realistic concern. Seeing the future X-Men being ripped apart is still pretty harrowing.

This issue is clearly the major inspiration for Buffy's season three episode 'The Wish,' right down to all the main characters getting killed at the end. And the fact that Rachel Summers eventually turns up in the main timeline may have been a loose inspiration for Dopplegangland.

Claremont and Byrne's 'breakup' issue is the fun Kitty Pryde attacked in the mansion piece. However this issue begins the annoying trend of completely destroying the mansion in every storyline for a while, to the point that they even start to comment on it in the book.

After Byrne leaves, Dave Cockrum returns to the book. His art has a much simpler, silver age feel, which I don't think works as well for the book. He makes me appreciate Byrne's consistently great art more, though his reputation in comics would certainly be better if he had died right after completing this run. Time has not been kind to Byrne, or Claremont for that matter.

Anyway, this book closes out with an issue where Cyclops fights a surreal battle against someone named D'Spare. There's some pretty cool dream sequence within, and it sets up a nice subplot with Scott and Lee Forrester stranded on an island that's eventually revealed to be Magneto's. I really liked the character development there and the Bond movie style villain-hero social interaction between Erik and Scott.

Even as that going on, we've got a fairly weak main storyline, involving Arcade and Dr. Doom. Arcade is an awful character, I'm almost ashamed to be writing an analysis of a story that Arcade is involved in. Speaking of Bond movie style interaction, there's a good scene with Dr. Doom and Storm, but that storyline goes on too long and doesn't really lead anywhere.

The highlight of this chunk of the series is undoubtedly the stunning X-Men 150. In Morrison's run 150 was the ultimate battle with Magneto, the highlight of his run, and Claremont's 150 is probably the highlight of his so far. This issue is critical because it's the first time we get the sense of Magneto as a sympathetic character, and the ending where he break down in tears over Kitty's body is genuinely effective. This issue redefines the character and forces you to question whether he might actually be doing the right thing. Hero/villain ambiguity is always a plus for me, and this issue is a total success.

From there, things go a bit downhill. There's the Emma Frost/Storm bodyswitch storyline. Emma isn't a particularly developed character here, so it's a fairly standard trying to get the body back thing. Emma is actually my favorite character by the time of Grant's run, though from what I hear Joss is messing with her a bit, making her move back towards evil, which isn't good. Grant's treatment of her was genius, and the whole X-Men series could really end with her and Scott kissing in his last issue. No more was needed. But, I'll find out more about what Joss is doing in October when the trade of his second story line is released.

Anyway, this is followed by the return of Corsair and the start of the Brood storyline. There's some good stuff with Scott adjusting to the idea of Corsair being his father, but on the whole these issues are pretty weak. Things just seem to happen and there's no sense of the story going anywhere.

However, in 161, things improve. This issue is Xavier's flashback to his time working in a hospital with Magneto, and though I'm a bit uncomfortable with a concentration camp playing so prominently in the story, it's pretty respectful and works well.

Throughout the end of these issues there's a lot of dwelling on the idea that the X-Men don't kill, not even creatures like the Brood. I'm a pretty nonviolent person, but I think it's odd to have Claremont constantly putting them in situations where they need to defend their life, or the lives of others and killing is the only way to do that, yet they won't. You want them to just kill these things and they would be perfectly justified, yet you've got these characters who refuse to.

So, now I'm into unread territory. I'd read through the first three Essential volumes before, but I've never read the stuff after 161 and I've heard pretty good things about it, with some people claiming it's better than the Byrne run. It still astounds me that Claremont could write the book for 186 issues, not to mention what he did on the spinoff books. That's mindblowing, if I were to work on a book for as long as he worked on X-Men, I'd be writing it until 2021. And again, even though I'm a bit negative here, the fact that he built this entire world is astounding, and it's tragic that he doesn't actually won any of it, and after all this issues, taking X-Men from nothing to the biggest comic on the market, he could just be thrown off the book, it's tragic.

Gilmore Girls: 'The Ungraduate' (6x03)

This episode sees the show further settling into the new status quo that's been created with the rift between Lorelai and Rory. The emotional intensity has been taken down a bit since the first episode, and things haven't gotten quite as dark as I thought they would. This episode was fairly bright all around, entertaining, but not particularly substanative.

The one plot line I did love was seeing Lane's band back on the show. They're my favorite supporting characters, and the only ones who can be consistently interesting without interacting with the main characters, which is good because they're really off in their own world, disconnected from the rest of the characters. The thing I really like about that plot line is how different it is from other stuff on both this show and TV in general. You usually don't see that much about creating art and seeing as how that's something very important to me, it's cool to get to see it. I think some people feel that doing a show about makign a piece of art is too insular, and a lot of complaints were leveled against the Claire art school storyline in Six Feet Under for that very reason, but I love those episodes, and I really like the way Lane's band keeps moving forward, gradually becoming more and more successful. And it seems like they're going to continue that way with their new recording money.

With Lorelai we get a relatively goofy plot, the construction stuff. It worked pretty well, but wasn't too consequential. Similar stuff went on with her meetings with Paris. The show has a problem that it's got too many peripheral characters, who don't organically fit into storylines. Michel, Paris, Sookie, Kirk and Lane all really have no connection to the main plots and with the exception of Lane, don't have too much development of their own. And the more they mess with the show's status quo, the more difficult it is to fit them in.

I missed Rory's rage a bit here, last episode had her suitably angry with her station in life, but here she seems to be relatively back to normal and happy, though I did like the echoing of the scene where she's introduced to Yale.

And then the big news at the end of the episode is Lorelai putting off the wedding. It's a generally accepted rule that to put your characters in a happy romantic relationship is a mistake, and a wedding is particularly final, used in movies and TV as an ending, with the promise of future happiness, rather than the beginning of more potential drama.

But things don't have to be that way. Six Feet Under's Nate and Brenda were a Luke and Lorelai type couple, where you know they're going to be together eventually, but what that show did was show their married life as a source of real drama and issues for the two of them, rather than as a mythical happy ending. Admittedly, they might have been a bit too harsh, I really don't see either Luke or Lorelai dying anytime soon, but the basic principle could work. Lorelai's definitely someone who would have issues in a final long term relationship, with no more outs, much like Nate had a lot of issues. And I think they could get married and still have real issues, the only thing is, I'm not so sure that the creators want to go down that route and have really wrenching issues between the two of them.

So in that case, putting off the wedding is the best dramatic choice, and could provide a big happy ending when Rory reunites with Lorelai. However, I think that won't happen until at least the season finale, and even they do solve their current argument, there's a lot of big issues between Rory and Lorelai that still need to be resolved.

Next Weekend

Next weekend is looking to be one of the high points of the year, fitting a whole bunch of great events into one three day stretch. It all begins Friday when I'm going to Yale to see David Lynch give a lecture called "Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain." I love Lynch's films, he's one of the most consistently challenging filmmakers out there today and his best films are enigmas that require multiple viewings to fully understand. I always like to meet the people behind the works of fiction I love, and Lynch is way up there on my list.

But besides the fact that he's made so many great films, I'm also really interested in hearing what Lynch has to say about the brain and the creative process. The reason for this lecture is that he's doing a tour of colleges in order to raise awareness about his foundation devoted to making meditation available to school children. In Lynch on Lynch, he spends a long time talking about his creative process, and how he's not so much making the story as tapping into some higher plane that he receives the story from. So, he'll sit in a chair and wait for the story to come to him, quite similar to the idea of the Immateria that Alan Moore talks about in Promethea. So hearing him talk more about this in person should be pretty interesting.

And maybe he'll give some details on Inland Empire, it's supposedly been in the works for a couple of years now, and is supposed to premiere at Cannes in May, so he's probably pretty far along with it. Plus, he's got a great voice, and hearing Gordon Cole live should be fun.

So, that's Friday, then Saturday I'm going to see Serenity, Joss Whedon's film. I was supposed to see it a few weeks ago when Joss appeared here, but I was shut out, so I'll finally get a chance Saturday. It'll be cool to see what Joss can do with these characters to build off the series, though I doubt it'll be one of the all time great films, it's almost guaranteed to be entertaining. Plus, I'm really interested to see how it does at the box office, I just don't see high grosses, but considering its low budget, I doubt it will lose money.

Then Sunday is another major event, the Across the Narrows concert in Brooklyn. The premise of this music festival is to have simultaneous concerts in Brooklyn and Staten Island, one on each day of the weekend, for four concerts total. They're all pretty good, featuring such bands as Oasis, Doves and The Killers, but the best one for me was the second Brooklyn one featuring The Polyphonic Spree, Belle and Sebastian, The Raveonettes and Beck.

The Polyphonic Spree put on the best concert I've ever been to when I saw them last. The sound was completely overwhelming as 25 people played with such enthusiasm. After a really long wait, followed by a flute solo, the pounding entrance on 'We Sound Amazed' was a completely overwhelming wall of sound, literally shaking the floor beneath me. The whole show was phenomenal, the lights coming on as they sing "It's the sun!" Most Spree songs fit perfectly in a live setting, with their anthemtic choruses and massive instrumental portions.

This show will probably feature some material from their new album, the Thumbsucker soundtrack. Being a soundtrack, there's not that many fully realized songs on there, but 'Move Away and Shine' is one of the best songs The Spree have ever done and I'm really looking forward to hearing that one live. They're just so energetic, it's impossible not to enjoy one of their shows.

The other band that made this show an essential one for me is Belle and Sebastian. I started listening to them earlier this year, and I've become a huge fan. Their songs are very smart, lyrically clever like The Smiths. I usuallly don't care much about lyrics, but theirs really capture your attention, most notably on 'Storytelling,' a song about the rules of writing a story which is really funny and catchy.

But, even without the great lyrics, the music on their songs is great. They use a lot of big instrumentation, featuring strings, synthesizer and most notably a trumpet. The instrumental solo on 'Sleep the Clock Around' is beautiful. I also like the way they integrate the multiple vocalists. One of the best moments in their work is on 'Lazy Line Painter Jane,' when a female vocalist comes in, just taking control of the song, elevating it. I've been binging through their alubms lately, trying to get caught up for this concert. So far all their stuff has been pretty solid, though the best is 'If You're Feeling Sinister' and 'The Boy with the Arab Strap.' I've still got to get through the second disk of Push Barman Open Old Wounds and Dear Catastrophe Waitress before the concert.

These two drew me to the concert, but knowing about the other bands, I figured I'd check them out so it wouldn't just be waiting around be the two bands I did like, and I'm really glad I did. The Raveonettes are one of my new favorites, I've been listening to a lot of their most recent album, Pretty in Black. The album reminds me a lot of David Lynch in the way it has a very dark, yet 50s feel. The songs have guitar and vocal parts that are very 50s, and they even cover 'My Boyfriend's Back.' But, their 50s is a darker version, it's almost a post apocalyptic reconstruction of the 50s.

The best track is 'Uncertain Times,' a love song that reaches epic heights, with a great guitar part driving it. 'Sleepwalking' is a bit more rocking, driving track. But nearly every song on the album is solid, seeming to come from a distorted time warp. Their earlier work is more conventional and modern sounding, but still fun to listen to, and I'm really psyched to hear them live.

So, this will be one long, hopefully awesome concert. I've got the dream that The Polyphonic Spree and Belle and Sebastian will combine for a track, bringing it to 35 people on the stage, though the tone of their songs are so different, it might be tough to do. But regardless, seperately they'll have enough awesomeness to carry it.

Tim Burton's Corpse Bride

So, the second time in three months, Tim Burton has a new film out. Even though I loved Nightmare Before Christmas, I wasn't that anxious to see Tim go back to stop motion animation. With a few exceptions (Nightmare, Cowboy Bebop) I'm not usually that big a fan of animation. Even though I'm all about the visual aspect of filmmaking, I really do enjoy seeing the work of real actors and it's alchemy of director, script and actor that makes a film great. Animators, for all their technical skill can't match the performance skill of a great actor. Only in Cowboy Bebop have I seen really subtle acting from an animated character, and that's largely because of the time the creators could take to develop their characters.

But regardless, it's a new Tim Burton film and that alone is reason for excitement. However, I wasn't too into this one before its release, and actually seeing the film hasn't made me like it that much more. This is Tim Burton's weakest film since Planet of the Apes, and while it fails to succeed for vastly different reasons, it too lacks the magic that makes the best Burton films feel incredibly wacky and unhinged, filled with innocent emotion.

Where Corpse Bride does succeed is visually, the stop motion is gorgeous, even if the characters bare an unfortunate resemblence to those in the Puffs tissue commercials. They move thoroughly realistically, and the way they make Victoria's hair wet, among other little touches, is great.

However, the film really suffers from feeling like a retread of Nightmare Before Christmas. Admittedly, that's a film that's been built up from good film to legend status in the twelve years since its release, to the point where I'm now in love with every aspect of the film and fully accept the songs and characters. So, this film suffers from Phantom Menace syndrome, where I can't forgive this film's negatives, even as I gloss over the bad parts of Nightmare.

But, the film does so many things that are precisely reminiscent of Nightmare that you can't help but compare. For example, one of the great bits of Nightmare is the 'Making Christmas' montage, where we see a bunch of characters from Halloweentown singing about how they're making a grotesque version of Christmas. Here we get the residents of the land of the dead singing about their grotesque version of a wedding. The jokes are virtually the same and the song has the same structure, only without the great driving melody.

The songs in Nightmare are what really makes it great, and the music here barely qualifies as songs. There's no chorus or variation, the songs are like those gap bridging speak-songs in operettas, where plot information has to be conveyed to get us to the next emotional song, except here there are no emotional songs, the weak songs lead nowhere. Other than the Cab Calloway style land of the dead piece, there's no good music, and even that song is a weaker version Oogie Boogie's song in Nightmare. After Elfman's phenomenal songs in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I was expecting something really exciting here, but instead we get stuff that's just weak and unmemorable.

The jokey land of the dead characters are like the rejects from Halloweentown, and a lot of the gags tread the same ground, just they're not as funny here. Maybe it's targetted at kids, but Nightmare worked for all ages, and this film should be held to the same standards.

Where the film does work is in the relationship between Victor and Victoria. I really did want them to get together, even as I was also sympathetic to the plight of the Corpse Bride. Johnny Depp and Emily Watson were great together, and I'd love to see Emily Watson appear in Burton's next live action project. She has a great doll-like look that would really fit into Burton's world. And even though he's treaded this ground many times before, the idea of two innocent people crossing the boundaries of a corrupt society is always great stuff for Burton.

But, even as the core works, there's too much time spent on humor that doesn't hit, and broadly drawn characters with no depth. This is one of only two Burton films that I would consider a failure. The whole point of it is to spotlight stop motion animation, but the stop motion has become so good, so perfect, that it doesn't have the eccentric charm that made stop motion unique, the knowledge that it was fake, but that very knowledge made it all the more entertaining. The joy of the Harryhausen skeletons isn't in the fact that these look like real skeletons moving, it's in seeing something that looks kind of real, but not quite, moving in an impossible way. Nightmare captured this, but the clean look of Corpse Bride makes it look more like a CG film than traditional stop motion.

So, Tim needs to drop a great new live action project soon, because it's been a long time since he's made a great movie. Hell, none of his four most recent films were even as good as Mars Attacks! I want to see him get back to something a bit messier and nastier, not filled with special effects or schmaltz, just the raw angry emotion of Edward Scissorhands or Batman Returns, or the genuinely odd humor of Beetlejuice. Lately, Burton feels like someone copying his style rather than the genuine article.

Nip/Tuck: 'Ma Boone' (3x01)

Around March I watched the first two seasons of Nip/Tuck, a show that I enjoyed a lot, but it never went further than that. It's a soap opera through and through, in both the positive sense of long plots and character based storytelling, and the negative, in that there isn't that much character growth, the story doesn't seem to be going anywhere. But at the same time it's an extremely enjoyable show, so I was psyched for the return.

It's always a bit tough to pick up a highly continuous show after a long break, you don't have the strong connection to the characters that you develop when watching a show in a continuous binge. So, the show has to work to bring you back into its headspace and not only advance the plots, but also remind you of where they were to begin with. Six Feet Under's premiere this year did an astonishing job of bringing right back to where I was when I was finished watching the fourth season, it was one of the most emotionally wrenching episodes of the series, and I got all those emotions, by the end I was completely back in the world of the series.

Here, I was caught up on all the plots, but I was still a bit distanced and that caused to see more of the weaknesses than if I was still fully immersed in the series, as I was when I finished watching the second season. I remember right after finishing that finale I was really excited to find out who the carver was, but a lot of time has passed, and now I didn't really care, and while I do care, I never reached that same level of concern that I had at the end of the last season.

Nip/Tuck is a show that always works by blending together extreme glamour with some really nasty images, and this episode certainly did that. I'm not sure why they choose to show the really graphic surgeries, I get the idea of setting up the world, as Six Feet Under did with some early corpses, but at this point we've got the idea, do we still need to see something like the breast implant removal, which is just nasty and doesn't add anything to the plot? While the woman on the couch was very nasty, she was also the central focus of the episode, so it makes sense to spend so much time with her, and on her surgery.

I think the episode's decision to set up a parallel between Christian and Ma Boone was just too obvious. There was no need to sell it so hard. The whole Ma Boone thing was odd and nasty, but still worked from a story point of view.

There's a lot of potential for interesting stuff with Julia this season, seeing what happens to someone whose been dependent their whole life, how do they carve out a seperate identity for themselves? However, we don't see too much of her this episode, so I can imagine that'll become a more prominent feature of future episodes.

My favorite character last season was Kimber, and I'm glad to see that she's become a regular this season, and her continuing work as a director of porn films has some dramatic potential.

One thing I found really odd was the threesome. Now, I never mind two hot women kissing, but it seemed very tangentially connected to the narrative, I guess the point was that this was Christian reclaiming his personality, as he tells Kimber, "I'm back baby," but it still seemed a bit odd and came out of nowhere. But the show always seems to go for cheap thrills, and if they're still thrilling, does it matter if they're cheap?

This is a show that isn't trying to be a great work of art, it's all about entertaining the audience, and in that respect this episode succeeded, and despite the show's myriad flaws, I wouldn't miss the next episode.

Poison

A few days ago I watched Todd Haynes' first feature, Poison. Todd has been my most recent 'discovery,' and after seeing Far From Heaven a while back, I set out to see all of his films, a quest that is now complete. Haynes is someone who creates great, challenging films that are always a bit off. Everything he's made seems to take place in a world that's not quite our own, whether it's the 50s Sirk world of Far From Heaven or the slightly skewed 80s of Safe. All three of Todd's features that I've seen ended up on my Top 100 Films All Time list, and Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story surpasses even the greatness of those films. So, I was understandably excited to see Poison, and at least complete the journey through the filmmaking world of Todd Haynes.

Right from the beginning, Poison puts you in a really weird headspace. I'm not sure if it felt like that when it was first released, but this film just seems to come from another world, and the voice of that other world is the narrator of the Richie storyline. I think she narrated Superstar also, and it's the oddest, seemingly calm, yet disturbing voice. Combine that with the grainy file photo and the long shot of a child's hand reaching for something and I was in a strange place. And the film doesn't really leave that strange place. From a narrative point of view, and a thematic point of view, this film doesn't really make it, but where it does succeed is in sustaining an odd feeling for an hour and a half, and a lot of the time, that's more interesting than a classically structured narrative.

As I talked about in my piece on running a film series, a lot of people don't seem to enjoy the slow paced world building that Haynes did in Safe, and I don't think they'd enjoy what he does here, because from a story point of view, there's a ton of issues. The film has three seperate segments that are intercut, but there's no real connection between them, and in terms of style they're worlds apart.

One segment revolves around a prisoner who's jealous that the inmate he's in love with is hanging out with other prisoners. This makes it sound like a really bad teen prison show, but the way the feelings are dealt with is through a bunch of dream sequences and voiceover. The dream sequences represent the prisoner's time at a juvenile home, but they're set in an odd meadow type environment, and have a lot of bizarre, dreamlike imagery. These sequences are interesting from an aesthetic point of view, and the spitting scene is quite disturbing, but I'm not sure what the thematic point of them is. They work as a purely visual element, providing a contrast to the dark enclosed prison, but their position in regards to the narrative is a bit obscure.

This story has its moments, and is probably the most well made, but it's also the least entertaining. Going to the other extreme, we've got a story about a scientist who discovers how to turn the 'sex gene' into a liquid form, and accidentally ingests it, causing him to take on the appearance of a leper. I thought this was just a bizarre tale, imitating the style of 50s sci-fi movies, but reading about it online indicates that it was meant to be an allegory for the AIDS crisis. That makes sense, but I guess it shows how much society has 'moved on' from that crisis, even though it's still affecting thousands of people. It's just not part of our cultural consciousness at present.

Anyway, this story is entertaining, notably the overwrought acting, but its value as dramatic piece is questionable. I love the shots of a rotating black and white wheel intercut with all kinds of crazy things, and the way the piece seems to take place in a world that's kind of like the 50s, but not quite. Without viewing it as an allegory, it's rather nonsensical, but the ending works really well, and provides a nice thematic wrap up for the whole movie. So, again, narrative not a big concern here, but in terms of creating a mood it succeeds.

The final piece is told in documentary style, harkening back to Haynes' work on Superstar. The mockumentary format has been used to death lately, but it works well here, as the people who knew gradually construct a picture of Richie, the seven year old boy who killed his father. I love the visual of Richie looking in at his mother having sex with the gardener, staged in such a way that it's obvious the footage is film composited in the frame. It's great when the footage within the door actually zooms in, breaking any illusion of reality.

The ending of this piece is very enigmatic and leaves a lot of things unanswered, which works well. This isn't the kind of story where you want to find out that Richie ran off somewhere and died in a ditch, the entire power is in the fact that we're reconstructing this person solely from other peoples' impressions of him. It's a technique Haynes brings back later in Velvet Goldmine.

What prevents the film from working as a cohesive whole is the fact that these stories don't really have any discernable connections to each other. They all focus on some element of humanity's dark side, but other than that, the styles, tones and content are all vastly different, and intercutting these totally different stories doesn't add much to them, or produce any really interesting juxtapositions, which is the whole point of intercutting.

So, Poison was worth watching because of its alien atmosphere, and I definitely enjoyed it, but I don't think it's anywhere near as successful as the work that would follow. You can see the potential for greatness here, but potential alone doesn't make a film great. But I always love to watch people who experiment with the medium and try to do something different, and this film certainly does.

Gilmore Girls: 'Fight Face' (6x02)

This week's episode wasn't as strong as last week's brilliant opener, but that's to be expected. Last week was all about revelations about the characters' emotional states, and now we get to spend a bit more time playing around in this new status quo.

I really like the fact that we still haven't gotten an easy resolution to the Lorelai/Rory feud. I think it seems a bit artificial, these two have been so close, would Lorelai really shut her out so fully, but you have to keep in mind the fact that she's very self conscious of what she's doing. She's trying to shut Rory out so much that she has no choice but to apologize. It's putting the onus of responsibility on her. So, that's why it makes sense, even though it creates behavior that seems to be unnatural or out of character. Lorelai even seems to have some problems staying 'in character' for her mission, under this constant pressure to just let Rory back in. And I think it's clear that Rory feels quite hurt by the fact that Lorelai seems to have so thoroughly rejected her. It's inexplicable.

On the episode's plot specifics. I really liked Rory's storyline, putting her in this emotionally dazed state, with no one to really connect to emotionally. She speaks to the maid and the maid gets fired. Her aggression comes out when she, for no apparent reason, gets in a fight with one of her fellow community servers. I think she's got a ton of pent up frustration and none of her usual methods for venting are there, so she lashes out there as frustration at her life builds up. It could be construed as out of character behavior, the Rory of years earlier certainly wouldn't do that, but that's the whole point of the storyline, she's changed and has to reject the life she had in order to grow, and ultimately come back to it.

And Emily's prison ettiquete speech was hilarious. I loved her giving Rory a pack of cigarettes to use as currency. It's a nice job of using a scenario for both dramatic and comic purposes.

The TJ/Luke stuff was ok, it falls into the 'wacky antics' segment of the show, and since most of the townspeople were missing, it fell on TJ to pick up the slack. I guess that's an example of where a show has elements that I don't really like, but are neccesary just because they're part of the show's package. Buffy always had to fight something, and there's always got to be some wacky small town stuff on Gilmore Girls, but in both cases, I think it takes away from the more important character stuff.

I'm not a big fan of the dog storyline, though there were some good laughs out of it, so it wasn't all bad. I like the way Luke and Lorelai are able to argue, but not have things get out of hand and hurt the overall relationship because of one petty thing.

The best two scenes this week were Rory in Luke's, very awkward and sad at the end, and the final scene with Lorelai confronting Rory on the side of the road. It's interesting that the first two episodes of this season have ended abruptly on uncertain emotional footing.

So, it's not the greatest episode, but there's a lot of really interesting stuff going on, and I really like the direction the plots are going. Hopefully next week we'll see Lane and her band, they're the only reliably strong characters outside of the Gilmores and Luke.

Lost Just Isn't that Good

So yesterday the Emmys were announced and Lost won the award for best drama. Now, I did watch the whole first season, so it's not like I hated the show, but it's got so many flaws and a lack of real storytelling ability that it's far from a good story or piece of art, it's something that keeps you watching by providing the occasional flash of quality every once in a while, then going back to the same routine. It suffers from the frequent problem that ongoing serialized works can have and that's to have stuff happen to the characters, instead of allowing plots to form organically out of the interactions between them.

For example, in the first season they set up Boone as very protective of his sister Shanon, going so far as do a whole flashback about this. At the same time, they set up an attraction between Shanon and Sayid. This is good plotting, Boone will go after Sayid, leaving Shanon torn between her brother and the the man she may love. But wait, once Shanon and Sayid actually begin the relationship, the very first scene in which they're walking back to camp, they find out that Boone is dead. That's some apallingly bad plotting, to take away the source of tension in your narrative, right at the moment when the plot should be coming to a head.

And that's just one example, this is a show that seems to be more concerned about coming up with something to get to the next episode, rather than having well developed characters. Once you have good characters, you have to do very little work to make things interesting. All the characters are basically the same as they were at the beginning of the season, and there haven't been many storylines with events of lasting emotional significance. People should go through massive changes, considering they are stranded on an island, but no one does. The characters are all stable, something perhaps best exemplified by the show's narrative structure, which features flashbacks designed to show how the characters got to where they are now, when it would be much more interesting to watch the characters evolve in the present.

So, this show did not deserve an emmy, especially up against the best season yet of 24 and a phenomenal year from one of the best shows ever, Six Feet Under. The thing about Lost is that it aspires to be a film, and uses the narrative style of action movies, where characters are generally just archetypes. We know them all from past movies, so there's not a pressing need to really develop them. To some extent, every character starts off as a type, but the whole point of doing a TV show is that you have enough time to go in depth on each of your characters. In a long form narrative, you can have characters as complex and contradictory as Brenda or Nate, and you just can't do that in movies because there just isn't enough time.

Similarly, the beauty of TV's long form storytelling is that you can have all the action come out of character decisions. There's no need to just have stuff appear suddenly, look at Buffy season six as a shining example of how character decisions alone can propel a narrative forward. There was no need for a big villain because the characters had enough conflicts between them to sustain the season. And it's not even like the show was coasting or anything, it's riveting to watch these long held tensions come to the surface and witness the domino effect of actions that lead to something bigger. Six Feet Under does this really well, frequently starting the season with a slow burn to establish mood and tensions, then bringing everything to a head at the end of the season. If you let the characters grow, your show will write itself.

The problem with shows like Lost, Alias, The OC and others is that the characters all have to remain relatively stable, because they're not written deep enough to allow for growth. Brenda's sex addiction in season two emerges organically, while Marisa's flirtation with lesbiansim seems like a cheap narrative ploy. On Lost, all kinds of stuff happens to the characters and they just react. Same on Alias. There's no subtext, it's just the characters going along, confronting each new peril. These shows create the illusion of depth and continuity because on the surface their plots are very complex. However, these complex plots mask the fact that the show isn't going anywhere. Buffy always felt like it was moving forward, while Alias, it seems like JJ is struggling to come up with enough to make it to the end of the season.

And that comes to the major dichotomy in television, comics and any other ongoing narrative medium. Is the story going somewhere, is there an ending in mind, or is it just going until people stop caring? If it's going somewhere, that allows you to have actions with lasting consequences, but if there's no ending, then things have to stay relatively the same. The producers of Lost claim to be going somewhere, but even if the plot genuinely is, which I doubt, the characters aren't. A plot revelation is good for a one time surprise, but a character evolution will give you a whole series.

And to top it all off, I come across an article in which Damon Lindleof, co-creator of Lost, repeatedly cracks on Twin Peaks, citing the show as an example of letting early promise go to waste. Now, yes, there were some issues in season two, but the series rebounds, and never got as bad as people claim. Plus to claim that it got lost in its own mythology would imply that Lynch's stylistic exploration in the last episode and FWWM is a failure, and I just can't agree with that.

So, Lost isn't the worst show, but it really surprises me that so many people love the show so much. It's got so many dramatic flaws, I don't see it as successful on an artistic level.

Essential X-Men (94-138)

Lately, I've been reading through my Essential X-Men tradepaperbacks, books that collect Chris Claremont's run on X-Men, from its beginning, to issue 213 in the most recent volume. While Stan Lee may have created the concept of the X-Men, Chris Claremont is the one who really deserves credit for making the book successful and culturally important, and though his later work isn't that good, he deserves a great place in both comics and pop culture history because in this book he developed a whole new way of writing action stories.

Claremont's greatest contribution was his blending of heavy soap opera elements into the traditional superhero stuff. So, there's a still a lot of fights and villains menacing the X-Men, but the core of the book is the character relationships and development over the course of the book. It's really striking to compare these stories to more recent X-Men stuff (Morrison and Whedon excluded) because over time the characters have become iconic, they've been through so much it would seem impossible for all this to happen in one life. And that means that it's difficult to really relate to them.

However, back in the 70s and 80s, the characters were not icons, and that gave Claremont much greater freedom to have them change and grow. In the storyline that's widely considered the peak of the book, the Dark Phoenix Saga, the drama comes out of the relationships that have been built up over the course of the book, and the ending combines the action element with the emotional, the action is used as a stage to act out the emotional drama of the book.

This style of storytelling was picked up by Joss Whedon, and used to incredible effect in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Claremont has a lot of flaws, but Whedon takes the form he developed and takes full advantage of it. The 'Dark Willow' storyline is the most explicit tie in to Claremont's work, but the Angelus arc in season two contains more of the emotional beats. Can Buffy put her personal feelings aside and do what's best for the world by defeating Angelus? She faces the same dilemma that Cyclops does, and in both cases, we don't really care if the world gets destroyed, the emotional relationship is much more important.

There are a lot of other similarities. In both cases, they work with genre trappings and the seeming requirement to have a fight scene in every issue/episode, however, this action frequently seems unneccesary and takes time away from the more important character stuff. The other major similarity is the prominence of strong women in a traditonally male genre, and not only strong physically, but women who make decisions. Jean as Phoenix is the causal motivator, not Cyclops who simply observes what goes on, frequently confused. Storm is also quite strong, and Kitty Pryde stands out as a completely different depiction of a teenage girl than what we usually get in the media, strong, intelligent, but still flawed.

Judging from what he's written about the X-Men, Kitty Pryde was a bigger influence than any other character on Joss, and provides the most obvious template for the powerful but flawed adolescent female characters who dominate his work, and when he took over X-Men, he made it a priority to get Kitty on the team.

Still, for all of his undeniable influence on what came after, are the actual comics any good? It's definitely dated, especially the early issues. Alan Moore and Frank Miller redefined comics in the 80s by moving away from thought balloons and third person captions and instead using the art to really tell the story. Claremont, while nowhere near as bad as Silver Age Marvel stuff, relies on a lot of tell, don't show storytelling.

The third person captions are awful, most of the time they don't really add anything that isn't already there in the art, and there's some very overwrought writing within. However, I'm a bit torn on the thought balloons. On the one hand, I'm so used to the post-Moore minimalist comic style, where thought balloons would only be used as a pastiche. However, with such a large cast, it would be really difficult to convey their feelings and emotions without the balloons and they really do help to round people out quickly. But at the same time I feel like it's a narrative cheat. But if it works, is there anything wrong with a narrative cheat? I can't say for sure.

The book also has some hallmarks of its era, the disco mutant Dazzler most notably, but also some of the outfits Kitty wears and the look of the aliens the X-Men encounter on their journeys around. Though looking at the backcover of Essential X-Men Volume 6, it seems like we've barely touched on the 80s. I wish I could find an image online because this is just the essence of 80s, Storm's mohawk, Nightcrawler's chia pet hair, it's great. I have to say I enjoy this period stuff, I don't think it takes away at all from the story and it makes it a lot more fun to read.

Claremont's other big flaw is that he frequently does storylines that tap into the larger Marvel universe and undermine the relatively mundane world he'd developed for the X-Men. So, Storm encountering Luke Cage, that works, but the Savage Land feels completely absurd and just doesn't work at all. I hate those barbarian stories, they're always awful because barbarians make bad characters. Then the Shiar business takes away from the emotional reality of the Phoenix. It is tightly intertwined with the plot, but I just don't like it.

Then he's also sort of constrained by the reality of comics at the time. Marvel's motto was 'each issue could be somebody's first,' so there's frequent scenes where Wolverine will say something like "I can easily cut through this with my retractable, unbreakable adamantium claws," clearly exposition for new readers. And then there's the fact that towards the beginning of each issue someone always gives a speech summing up what has happened before, something that was required by Marvel back then.

And Marvel's edict that every issue must have a fight scene in it also holds back Claremont. I'm not sure if Claremont would have had a much smaller amount of fight scenes if he got his way, but it feels like he doesn't really care about the action parts of the book, in the same way that the fight scenes in Buffy, with a few exceptions, just take away from the actual character development.

But despite its myriad flaws, it doesn't take away from the fact that these books are amazingly compulsive reading. The best works are ones I respect creatively and get totally addicted to, X-Men I don't completely respect as a piece of art, but it's extremely compulsive reading. Character arcs develop over long periods and seemingly irrelevant plot elements freqnetly have additional meaning. For instance, the Warhawk issue seems like a pointless standalone villain tale, but it has a huge impact twenty issues later when we get to the Hellfire Club storyline.

And it's a joy to watch the characters develop. Claremont's run on X-Men lasted roughly 185 issues, and I think Cerebus is the only title that one creator worked on for so long. This book is Claremont's vision and he totally knows all the characters. He's created fully rounded, flawed people that may be successful as heroes, but still have petty jealousy and myriad insecurities. Spider Man might have started the hero as downtrodden victim thing, but his was played more for comedy, here we see the X-Men all really struggling with issues that don't really get resolved or go away, just like they wouldn't in real life. Colossus feels guilty about abandoning his family to join the X-Men, and he can never shake those feelings. Wolverine reminds me a lot of later period Spike, someone who's cold on the outside, but inside has deep feelings and insecurities. Even though I've only read the first few issues with her, Kitty Pryde is probably Claremont's greatest creation, a fully realized, rounded and interesting character.

I also like the way Claremont manages to rotate through a huge cast of characters. There's about six X-men during the Byrne run, but you've got Xavier, Moira, and the original X-Men all cycling through on occasion, bringing the number of recurring characters to around twenty. And if you compare the level of development on the original X-Men to the new ones, you can see just how good Claremont is in comparison to what came before.

Claremont falters when he does overtly mystical or otherworldly stuff, but when he does storylines grounded in reality, the work is great. The Hellfire Club storyline is top notch, particularly the issue that ends with Wolverine in the sewer, getting ready to rescue his friends. It's one of those moments where you just know shit's about to go down. Reading these, I'm trying to pinpoint the moment where Wolverine became the breakout X-Men character, and if he hadn't by that point, that issue would certainly have done it.

The issues I like most are the ones where there's no action, and he just lets the characters do their thing. Though there's a bunch of really good action storylines, notably Proteus, which is a really cool concept, and he uses it take the characters in a new direction.

Ultimately, despite all his flaws, Claremont tells stories that make you want to keep reading. Most ongoing stories use some kind of generic hook, or high concept to bring the reader in, and gradually become less reliant on it in the storytelling, instead focusing merely on the characters. This happens in Six Feet Under, Buffy and one of the problems of X-Men is that it never quite leaves behind this reliance on generic trappings to focus solely on the characters, but at the time, it probably just wasn't possible.

Reading those books, you don't get the feeling that you're reading the start of a franchise that would ultimately end up generating billions and dollars and in many ways, keep Marvel afloat. Instead it seems like one guy telling stories he was interested in telling, and it just so happened that, for once, the best product rose to the top and was rewarded with good sales and success.

With this work, Claremont brings comics as far as they could go under the rules that governed mainstream work in the 1980s, single issue storytelling rather than an overarching narrative, at least one fight per issue and stories geared towards kids. Claremont breaks all of these rules to some extent, but he's still constrained by them. It takes Alan Moore and Frank Miller to open the floodgates, and then the British invasion of Morrison, Ellis, Ennis, etc. to redefine the norms of comics. But look at Moore's Swamp Thing and you'll see a work similarly reliant on overwrought third person captions that aren't so far from what Claremont writes here.

So, Claremont's flaws are in the time he came up in, and despite the revolution in comics storytelling, he hasn't changed, hence the negative reaction to his recent work. Writing about his work, I run into a lot of conflicting feelings, that show up in the constant switch between praising him and writing about his failures. Ultimately what Claremont did was make characters people cared about enough to keep the comic book's sales high for thirty years. And even though the vast majority of mainstream people don't know it, when they go to see the X-Men film, or watch Buffy, they're witnessing the legacy of Chris Claremont.

Gilmore Girls: 'The New and Improved Lorelai (6x01)

Last spring and summer, I watched the first five seasons of Gilmore Girls, and I enjoyed the whole run of the show. If a show has respect for its characters and allows them to grow and change, it pretty much doesn't matter what genre it's in, I'm going to enjoy it. Change is the key element of stories, and I pretty much demand strict continuity from the shows I watch. So, for its first four years Gilmore Girls was consistently entertaining and I enjoyed watching it, but it never reached the heights of my absolute favorite shows.

During the fourth season, the show started to get into a bit of a rut. There were still interesting elements, but the Lorelai/Jason storyline was pretty weak, and everything just felt like more of the same. However, in the last couple of episodes of that year, everything changed. We finally got resolution on the Luke/Lorelai romantic tension, with the really funny self help tapes bit, and Rory finally did something morally wrong when she slept with Dean. So, this set up a lot of issues going into the fifth season.

And coming out of this, we saw the first real messing with the show's basic premise, a mother and daughter who are more like best friends. Class war had always been critical to the series, Lorelai's feeling that her success is more legitimate because she did it without her parents, and that the life she lives in Stars Hollow is more satisfying than the one her parents have with their society friends in Hartford. And throughout the series, Rory had accepted this, even as she occasionally annoyed Lorelai with her nice behavior towards her grandparents, and indulging them in things they wanted her to do that Lorelai had rejected at her age, like going to the debutante ball back in year one.

But when Rory starts dating Logan, she becomes more immersed in their world than ever, and there's a great episode where Dean is standing outside of a party at her house, while she's inside with Logan and his whole crew, Dean serving as a stand in for the whole Stars Hollow life that her mother so cherishes.

And this culminates at the end of the season when Rory steals a yacht and decides she's quitting Yale, runing the plans her mother had for her her entire life. And this new season premiere is notable in that it contains no scenes between Lorelai and Rory, a bold move considering it's their relationship that has been the traditional focus of the show. But I like the fact that they did that, because it builds up the tension between them. By not speaking, and communicating through intermediaries, it increases the awkwardness that will be there when they eventually do meet up again.

And what this also does is make Lorelai unable to fully embrace the happiness she should have from being engaged. Despite their engagement, her and Lukke seemed on edge here, certainly not behaving like people who have just made a huge commitment to each other. But, there's an understandable tension between them, to Luke it's inexplicable how Lorelai could just let Rory go. The reason Lorelai has to let Rory do her own thing is because she doesn't want to become her parents and try to shackle Rory to a life she doesn't want. The thing that's great is the way they invert things, rather than slumping it like Lorelai did, Rory has chosen to run away to the upper class life that Lorelai herself had rejected, and what that does is throw Lorelai's life into turmoil. The one thing she could always hold over her parents was how successful Rory turned out, not because of her parents' involvement, but because Lorelai raised Rory her way. And it's the fact that Rory would turn away from her at such a critical moment that makes Lorelai willing to just let her go here, to live with the consequence of her choice.

Which isn't to say that Lorelai doesn't care about Rory, she still loves her as much as before, it's just that she realizes something no one else does, Rory is a grown up and has to make her own choices.

At the same time, Rory finds herself struggling to convince people that she really has changed, and has no desire to return to college life. Logan doesn't believe her, even as Rory seems to have fully embraced the ne'er-do-well lifestyle of his friends. Seeing her dreams and entire lifeplan called into question last season, Rory has decided to live a life completely removed from who she was, living day to day with no higher purpose or goal.

So, this material works great, creating conflict between all the characters, and placing Lorelai in a very uncomfortable position, and I'm seeing a lot of parallels between the overall structure of Buffy. At the end of season five, Buffy got darker than ever before culminating in the death of its main character. Gilmore Girls did the same, and ended with the 'death' of the show's main focus, the Lorelai-Rory relationship. And it looks like this year of Gilmore Girls may be the darkest yet, following the fallout of last year, much like Buffy did. Buffy season six is my favorite season of television ever made, so if this season can capture that same feeliing, I'll be thrilled.

However, the show still has flaws that prevent it from being completely successful. The strength of the show is the relationships, but we've still got sequences dealing with the cartoonish townsfolk, who are always the low point of an episode. These people don't change or grow at all, and they really couldn't, they're not designed to, but they seem out of tone with the other goings on.

Similarly, having watched a lot of Six Feet Under over the summer, the way the show is shot seems uninspired. This really is invisible filmmaking, but Six Feet Under's style of shooting serves to heighten the emotions and be beautiful in and of itself, while there's not much interesting going on here filmmaking wise.

That said, the last shot was fabulous, capturing everything we need to know about Lorelai in this episode. And I'm not watching the show for great filmmaking. It would be nice to have, but to bring it in now would seem out of place.

So, top notch episode here, really interesting character dynamics, and I hope they play out this tension for a long time rather than resolving it easily. This has the potential to take the show to a level of quality beyond everything it's done in the past.

Punch Drunk Love

As I mentioned before, I just watched the film Punch Drunk Love for the second time. PDL was Paul Thomas Anderson's follow up to Magnolia, one of my top five favorite films of all time, so when I watched this the first time, I was expecting something great, if the same level of transcendence that Magnolia reaches. On the first viewing, what's most striking is how minimalist the film is. After the excess, in terms of style and story scope, of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, PDL sees Anderson pull back and do something much smaller and intimate. There's only two developed characters, and there's almost none of the cutting between different plotlines that was used to such great effect in Magnolia. Instead, this film dives deep into the world of a man who's got some problems.

The first really bold choice that Anderson makes with this film is casting Adam Sandler. Unlike most of my generation, I'm a big Sandler hater, his semi-retarded man-child characters are not funny or entertaining to watch, and along with Chris Farley, his output represents a nadir in terms of films that people seem to genuinely love. But, what Anderson does with this film is take a variation on the traditional Sandler character and play the film as a drama instead of a comedy, or at least a dark comedy instead of a straight ahead comedy.

Though I'm no expert, looking at his other films, you can see Sandler's social ineptitudes played for laughs, and his tendency for manic rage provides some of the biggest comic payoffs. In this film, there's a number of scenes that would have been done as comic setpieces in his other films, notably the smashing of the glass and the bathroom scene, but here, rather than focusing on the act itself, Anderson dwells on the aftermath. The emotional crux of the bathroom scene isn't the fact that he has this rage, we've seen that before, it's observing how this rage has alienated him from society, beautifully done here in the awkward conversation between Barry and the restaurant owner. We sympathize with Barry, but it's completely understandable why this guy would want Barry to get out of his restaurant.

So, the entire film is in some ways designed to challenge the generic conventions of the 'Adam Sandler movie,' and essentially take him out of the cartoon world he usually lives in and show the real world consequences of his characters' actions. This is the Watchmen of Adam Sandler films, deconstructing the generic elements and repositioning them in a real world context.

But, someone with as strong an authorial voice as Anderson would not use a film merely to riff on what's come before, or at least what's come before in one specific genre. Instead, the film becomes an odd fusion of this completely naive, uncorrupted belief in the power of true love to conquer all and the gritty identity theft scheme, which leads to some moments of extreme violence, both physical and verbal. It's the same thing I was talking about in my review of 3 Iron, a fairy tale love story that is occasionally punctuated by the crushing weight of the real world.

There's two primary themes the film touches on. One is finding a way to use one's rage and indignation at past trauma to create a stronger self in the present. This is almost a superhero origin story, as Barry has to learn to use his power to fight evil instead of using it to destroy himself. As the film begins, Barry is totally alone, he has no outlet for his emotions, and any attempts to put on a false smile around his sisters are eventually undermined by their constant dwelling on the ways they used to embarrass him as a child. This drives him to once again break the glass, and his inability to have a real relationship with anyone drives him to the phone sex line.

The phone sex line seems designed to show the way that love has been commodified in modern society. The pure expression of love is gone, but you can buy fake love for $2.99 a minute. But, that's not even the extent of it, this group that claims to offer love actually uses loneliness as a means of stealing peoples' identities. They find people at their greatest moment of weakness and use their own shame as a way to exploit them. Barry's shame is what constrains him through the whole first half of the film. He's ashamed at what he did as a child, he's ashamed he called the phone sex line, he's so embarrased about what he did in the past that he's unable to open himself up and make connections with new people in the present.

The fear that Lena has heard bad things about him from his sister is what prevents him from first going out with her, Only when she opens up to him can he go out with her, this is something that's repeated after their first date, only when she calls him and says that she wanted to kiss him does he have the courage to fully express his emotions.

After his trip to Hawaii, Barry seems imbued with power, and as he says at the end of the film, "I have love and that makes me strong." He fights and defeats four men with no problem when he feels that they have threatened Lena, and when he goes to confront Dean, it is his utter confidence in himself and his power that allows him to win. Dean is someone who's able to push people around by calling them on their mistakes, through sheer force of will, but when Barry matches his strength, he cowers and lets Barry go.

And now free from the shackles of the past, Barry can embrace his love, and things look good for his future. The real emotional love has defeated the commodified shameful love .

From a technical point of view, Anderson again creates a challenging and always intriuging film that pushes a lot of boundaries in regards to what's acceptable in cinema. The most notable visual element is the brilliant use of color. By associating Barry with blue and Lena with red, he's able to play up the emotion of any scene just by well placed color. When Barry stands on a red rug at the hotel, we know that Lena will be along soon. When they're driving and the entire scene is bathed in blue light, we get the feeling that Barry is comfortable, at home. The use of lens flares and lines of light moving across the screen creates some really striking images.

And most importantly, Anderson is a master at framing a scene. The way he shoots is frequently unconventional, but almost always works to achieve the effect intended. There's some great tracking shots here, most notably the one in which Lena and Barry walk out of the restaurant and are followed by the huge truck. I also love the way he pushes the whites, in the opening scenes and in the grocery store. And the integration of music is top notch as well. The use of lush strings calls back to the classical Hollywood era, but it's percussive backing to scenes that's really interesting. Frequently the characters behave as if they are actually hearing the music and move accordingly.

All that said, I do have some issues with the film. I don't really like Barry in the first half of the film, and even in the second half, she still seems not quite grown up, though Lena also seems a bit childlike, so perhaps they belong together. Also, the change in tones works at times, but occasionally it's just too jarring, and prevents the film from achieving the full romantic feeling he was going for. I don't think it reaches the same perfect romantic height as Amelie, and it's that sort of pure feeling of love that I think Anderson was going for here. Also, as I said with Hard Eight, there's just not as much here as in Anderson's other films. I think Anderson's strength lies in showing us a lot of characters interacting, so having one main characters seems a bit restrictive. But that doesn't in any way mean that this isn' an engrossing and successful film.

The casting here is interesting. Only two of the 'Anderson Company Players' appear here, and in what are essentially glorified cameos. Sandler is great here, I think his performance is a complete success. Emily Watson is top notch as well, in a character not that far removed from her role in Breaking the Waves. It was also cool to see Mary Lynn Raskjub, who's great on 24, get some film work. Do I miss Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Melora Walters, etc.? Yes, but if Anderson felt the need to write parts for all of them in every one of his films, it would start to hurt the films, as in the case of Christopher Guest's most recent stuff, where there's all kinds of narrative digressions just so they can fit in all their actors.

Coming off Magnolia, nothing was going to be completely satisfying, but PDL works by going in a completely opposite direction and crafting a different, but still interesting story. Anderson's one of my favorite directors and I can't wait to see what he gives us next.

PTA Quote

I watched Punch Drunk Love today, and I'll have a review of that tomorrow, but in looking online, I came across a really interesting quote from PTA.

"I have a feeling, one of those gut feelings, that I'll make pretty good movies the rest of my life. And maybe I'll make some clunkers, maybe I'll make some winners, but I guess the way that I really feel is that Magnolia is, for better or worse, the best movie I'll ever make."
- Paul Thomas Anderson

This is something I'd definitely agree with, but I find it interesting that PTA himself views Magnolia as sort of the pinnacle of his style, and despite being so young, he basically feels that he could never top it. Most directors do a bunch of movies and then do what I'd call their 'compilation movie,' a film that features all their stylistic tricks, the unique things that make a film theirs. For David Lynch, this was Mulholland Dr., with its 50s style heroine, red curtains, lip synching performers, blonde/brunette dichotomy, etc. For Tim Burton, it's The Nightmare Before Christmas, for Wong Kar-Wai it's 2046. These are the films that so immersed in the director's style, it basically means that they have to make a radical change with their next project.

Magnolia does this for PTA, it takes the style he'd developed in Boogie Nights and brings it to the extreme. In this one film he defines his style and makes any future explorations with it irrelevant. Magnolia is such a singular entity that to go back and make another big ensemble movie would be nearly impossible. It took Robert Altman 18 years to follow up Nashville with Short Cuts, and it could take just as long for PTA to go back to the style of film that defined him.

So, with Punch Drunk Love, I doubt he expected to top Magnolia, that's just too big a task. Magnolia is one of those transcendent films where everything comes together and works. I never expected PTA to top Magnolia, but I find it interesting that he agrees with me there. Is that a bit disheartening, yeah, but I think it's PTA being realistic and that I respect.

3 Iron

3 Iron is a film by Kim Ki-Duk, the Korean auteur behind The Isle, and the annoyingly titled Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring. Both of those films were really interesting, challenging films. Kim's films are notable for their minimal use of dialogue. The Isle's main character is a mute, and in Spring, there is very little dialogue.

3 Iron raises the bar, showing us a love story where the main characters never speak to each other, and one of them never speaks at all. This is the sort of thing that could be gimmicky, and at times seems a bit constraining, but when the two main characters are together, it's achingly beautiful. Tae-Suk is quite similar to a bunch of Wong Kar-Wai characters, in the way that he inhabits other people's houses as sort of a vacation for himself. If he had a voiceover going over the action, he would be pretty close to the mute in Fallen Angels.

However, Kim is much more interested in minimalism, his shots don't call attention to themselves, and he almost never uses non-source music. In this sense, his goal is to immerse the viewer in the world of the film, not using any techniques that could puncture that illusion. Much like Hard Eight, this film is more about creating an atmosphere, a feeling, than anything else. When Sun and Tae-Suk are together, there's a feeling of safety, and it's wonderful to watch them figure out the boundaries of their relationship in the first scene, as he takes care of her, and she opens up to him.

Being a Kim Ki-Duk film, there are some scenes of violence, though nothing approaching the extremes of The Isle. The scene in which Tae-suk fires golf balls at the abusive husband is almost cathartic because of the silent approval Sun gives to teh action. The scene in which Tae-suk's golfball ends up causing a car crash is more troubling. By this point, I was fully behind the characters and their relationship, to the point that I could think only of the potentially negative consequences this would have for them, rather than about the person who is dead in the car.

I love the way Tae-suk seems to speak through music, the songs he plays providing the only expressive sound during the middle section of the film. The songs themselves were great, but they also functioned well to establish the atmosphere of safety and love that exists between the two characters. It brought me back to the similar scene in Irreversible, where Alex and Marcus lounge around their apartment with a song playing in the background that creates this feeling of utter bliss.

But, the world soon intrudes upon Tae-Suk and Sun's relationship, and this is quite jarring. The very act of speaking seems cold and unreal compared to the wordless passion of our two main characters. The prison scenes are probably the best example of this.

From there, the film splits off in two directions. I found Tae-Suk's prison scenes very interesting. Throughout the film, he's trying to stay below society's radar, and just move from house to house without being noticed. Now, he seeks to become essentially invisible, and through that process once again be able to go back with Sun to the life they once had, and avoid the problems that the world creates. The use of perspective shooting here was phenomenal, building the idea of Tae-suk as an almost superhuman force.

Then at the same time, we see Sun's utter despair, only to witness her reborn when Tae-suk finally does appear. At the end, she speaks, and though her husband thinks she's talking to him, now it seems that words have become her way of communicating with Tae-suk, without her husband knowing. Some of the moments here were just heartbreakingly beautiful, most notably the shot of Sun kissing Tae-suk, even as she is being hugged by her husband. This is a perfect visual representation of the way that she has found a way to hide him within her everyday life. It's such a good image, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Kim started with that image and the rest of the project grew out of it.

Then there's the ending of the movie, which like The Isle, gives us an ambiguous image, one that we need to apply our own meaning to. The shot before the last, where Sun is backing into Tae-suk, searching for him, and eventually finding him when they reach the wall, is another phenomenal one.

Then the closing leaves us a bit unclear. We see her messing with the scale earlier in the film, but that wouldn't explain why their weight comes to zero, and then the closing quote sets up a basic choice, with its words about the ambiguity of reality and dreams. The question is did he ever really come back, or is this all just in her head? Both make sense, and I'd actually lean more towards the dream explanation.

It seems to me that this man represents to her the freedom she can't have, so by imagining herself living a life wth him, behind her husband's back, it provides an escape that keeps her happy. She loses herself in these daydreams and memories, this one great experience making her happy enough to open up to her husband again.

But, I don't think you really need an answer for the ending, regardless of whether it's real or not, it tells us how the experience she's gone through during the film has changed her, and standing on the scale at the end, she's not weighed down by her problems, she's able to transcend them.

I think this is Kim's best film, largely because it's the most emotionally involving. You really care about these people, in a way you never did for the characters in Spring or The Isle. And from a filmmaking standpoint, the control of the frame and storytelling here is incredible. Kim is able to make you feel exactly what he wants you to feel and that's quite an accomplishment.

So, I loved this, and now I'm on the look out for more Kim, perhaps Bad Boy and Samaritan Girl will be my next DVD pickups.

The Engine

Now that I'm back at school, it also means that I'm back to my job here, lab consultant, which entails sitting in the computer lab and helping people who need help. In practice this means I get paid to do my school work and mess around on the internet. So, this is a great job, however sometimes, during a long shift, I run out of stuff on the internet to do, and so was the case yesterday when I was about two hours in, finished with my school work and just sitting there. Luckily, something emerged and the entire year of computing work has been made much brighter. That something is Warren Ellis' new forum, The Engine.

Ellis is the writer of a bunch of great comics, and some not so great ones. From 1998 until 2002, he ran The Warren Ellis Forum. I got on bored rather late, sometime in 2001, but while I was there, there were some good times. I guess there were some constructive aspects of it, I heard about a bunch of interesting comics, as well as learning better the full potential of images.google.com. However, I found it most interesting viewing as a social experiment. Ellis ran the place with no concern for free speech, or balanced discussion of his work. Anyone who posted something negative about one of his books, even if it was within a review that was positive on the whole, was attacked by either Ellis himself or one of the gang of regulars who fully supported him. More than anything else, I think that was responsible for Ellis' rise to prominence around that time, if you heard him talking about his books constantly, you'd be more likely to check them out. I know I read everything Ellis did during the forum era, but haven't read anything he's done since, the work hasn't changed a whole lot, it's just that I didn't get the advertising.

The entire concept of the forum was mindboggling to me at first. Here was Ellis, one of the biggest writers in comics, reading every single post of this forum and frequently replying within minutes to a post. It seemed like he never left the place except to sleep. It was definitely cool to be able to converse with him, and on the whole, it was one of the best web communities I've been a part of. So, I was sad to see it go.

Anyway, fast forward to the present and Ellis has brought back the forum in a new form, this time as The Engine, a place for creators to talk with fans about original comics work. I think that's actually better than the frequently rambling WEF, and there's a ton of potential here, especially as an area in which to promote my comic. It brought back a lot of memories reading through the messages yesterday, and I'm glad to be getting in on the ground floor of this one. I suppose part of me really wants to be in Warren's inner circle, I was too late to make it there last time.

And if nothing else, this will provide hours of quality reading while I'm working in the lab.

Hard Eight a.k.a Sydney

Yesterday I watched PT Anderson's film Hard Eight for the second time. He ran into a lot of studio trouble when making the film, most notably with the title, he wanted the film to be called Sydney, but the studio insisted on Hard Eight. But at this point, Anderson had only done some PA work, so he didn't have the clout to control his own film. Now, he had done some shorts before, but for someone who'd never done a feature, Hard Eight is a really well made, restrained debut, though watching it at the time, I seriously doubt most people would see the potential for something like Magnolia coming from this guy.

But, to the film itself. The most striking thing in Hard Eight is how slow paced the film is, I don't think it's boring at all. but it's a film that's much more about getting you into an emotional space than conveying a narrative. Befitting its lead character, the film is almost tired, and any action seems to require a lot of exertion. Most of the film consists of dialogue scenes, and there's not that much music, though what music there is, is great. The film's aspect ratio is 2.35:1 and Anderson uses the full frame, frequently playing dialogue scenes in single take long shots that distance you from the characters, and reduce the tension that could be present in some scenes.

The reason for this is because the film's main character is someone who almost never expresses his emotions. Sydney just appears at the beginning of the film, and for the vast majority of its run time, his motives are unclear. We see his relationship with John, but don't get a real sense of what the man himself is like. The only things we know about him are the way he treats people, specifically the respect he gives Clementine and the disdain he has for Jimmy. So, rather than try to tell us who this guy is and what he's really feeling through filmmaking techniques, Anderson maintains the ambiguity by playing things very low key and just allowing the events to play themselves out.

That's not to say this is a film where the technique is invisible. Anderson's eye for a great frame is evident right from the start, and I was frequently struck by how he uses framing to create suspense, as in the scene where Sydney drops his keys in the car, and is hunched down looking for him, but the camera stays looking out the window, making us think that Jimmy is going to attack him there. However, he subverts this expectation by cutting and having Jimmy smash through the other window. Anderson makes great use of the lights in Las Vegas and Reno, their garishness a contrast to the low key human characters. He also has some great tracking shots, foreshadowing the astonishing stuff he would do in later films.

Anderson is one of the very rare filmmakers who I would consider equally brilliant as a writer and a director. Most people are either directors who write, like Wong Kar-Wai or David Lynch, or writers who direct, like Kevin Smith. Anderson is so good at both aspects of the process that you can't imagine anyone else directing his script, or him directing a film he didn't write. Hard Eight is like this as well, the film consists of mostly dialogue scenes, with very little overt stylization or action, and yet through the filmmaking, he creates a mood that really defines the film, and makes it completely different from the countless other neo-noirs that emerged in the late 90s.

The film's greatest failing is ultimately its lack of scope, especially in comparison to Anderson's subsequent films. It's an expertly made film that does everything it sets out to do, but what it sets out to do isn't that unique or ambitious. That's why I wouldn't put the movie on the same par as a Magnolia or Boogie Nights.

Looking at the film in the context of Anderson's later work, there's a few things that stand out. One is the cast. Philip Baker Hall gets the spotlight here and gives a phenomenal performance. His acting is all in the way he carries himself, watching him you know he's been through so much. John C. Reilly also does his first work with Anderson here, and he's not quite as good as in his later roles. He's solid overall, but there's a few lines that just felt unrealistic to me, he really comes into his own with Magnolia. Philip Seymour Hoffman does a one scene cameo and he's pretty solid, though I seriously have to question the mullet. And Melora Walters turns up very briefly at the end, her performance with only a couple of lines was apparently good enough to inspire Anderson to bring her back for Boogie Nights, and subsequently to the best role in Magnolia.

Other than Anderson regulars, I loved Gwyneth Paltrow in this movie. This is the only movie I've seen her in that's set in the present, and it was nice to see her divorced from mannered styles of acting and instead do something more grounded in reality. She's great here, nicely conveying the false persona she puts on to attract clients, and then subtly letting her guard down around Sydney.

In that respect, this film touches on a core Anderson theme, and that's how lonely people can turn themselves into new families, families that are frequently more loving than their 'real' families.. Here, Sydney acts as a father to John and Clementine, helping these two struggling people become self sufficient. This family clearly means more to him than his biological family, who he hasn't seen in a long time. That same dynamic turns up in Boogie Nights, when Jack brings together a collection of loner misfits and turns them into an extended family that works on the films. When Dirk bottoms out at the end of the film, he doesn't go back to his mother and father, he goes back to Jack and Amber, and they take him in again.

Magnolia is the ultimate extension of this theme, as people struggle to form new bonds as a result of the awful families they had in the past. Claudia ultimately finds solace in a reconstructed family with her mother and Jim, and Frank and Linda become more family than they'd ever been, united by the loss of Earl.

And in Punch Drunk Love, we see Barry struggling to live with his family. Though, you'll notice I haven't referred to that film much. I only saw it once, about two years ago, so I bought it off Ebay, it should be here in a couple of days, and I'll review it once I see it, having become an expert on Anderson. Though both PDL and Hard Eight lack the outrageous ambition that made Boogie Nights and Magnolia landmarks in cinematic history, at least for me.

So, Hard Eight stands as a wonderful mood piece, that captures the lives of a few people passing through Sydney's world. And at the end, he finds himself back where he began, with blood on his hands, and the knowledge that no matter what he does, he can never completely atone for what he'd done.

Song of the Week: David Wrench 'Sodium Lights'

Welcome to the first addition of an exciting new feature on Thoughts on Stuff, and that's the song of the week. Here, following the lead of MP3 blogs like Fluxblog, I will be presenting a song that I've been liking this week, with a link to download it. So, out of respect for my ancestors, this week's song is actually one that was featured on Fluxblog.

David Wrench - Sodium Lights

I don't know much about this artist, but I'm looking to find out more having heard this brilliant track. It reminds me a bit of Moby, but he is both more rock and more far reaching in the scope of instrumentation than Moby's stuff. I love the instrumental crescendo at the beginning, leading to the subdued first verse. Then the song slowly builds, adding layers of keyboard stuff, and increased emotion to the vocal, until it explodes into dance mode at the chorus, the peak of the song until the insane keyboard instrumental part that hits around 3:20.

The song combines two of my favorite genres, orchestral rock and dance, with liberal use of odd synth effects. It's the rare electronica song that has this emoitonal a vocal and that fusion is what makes the song so effective.

So download this and check it out for yourself. It hit me on the first listen, but definitely give it a couple of tries if it doesn't take on the first listen. And I'll be looking for more Wrench, because this is the sort of song that hits so many of the things I love about music.

Joss Whedon Q&A

So, today here at Wesleyan alum Joss Whedon was appearing to screen his new film, Serenity and do a Q&A afterwards. So, this event is at 7:30, most of your Wesleyan films events don't start until fifteen minutes or so after the listed time, and it was nowhere near full at the last event they did with Joss, but I figured I'd get there early just to be sure. So, I have dinner and get there at 7:10 and there's a massive line, stretching around the building. Apparently freshmen have not gotten the memo on the whole fashionably late thing, so I'm a bit nervous, but figure I should get in. And the line winds it way along and I'm getting close when one of the workers comes out and says "You're probably not going to get in, you can wait if you want, but it's not looking good," but I've heard that one before, and I figure they're just trying to weed out the people who don't really want to be there anyway. However, we don't move forward much more, and eventually the guy comes out and says that they are filled to capacity, and we would not get in.

So, I was quite annoyed at this point, and I sort of lingered around the door, talking to one of the people I know who works there, but he said that they were completely full. However, he did say I could come back in two hours and see the Q&A. This was not the best turn of events, I did want to see the film, but if I had to miss one thing, the film itself or the Q&A, I'd rather miss the film, because I can see that in a month, while this Q&A is a once in a lifetime thing, or twice I guess, since I already saw Joss when he appeared here back in Spring of 2004.

That Q&A was one of the best events I've ever been to, coming right as I was finishing my first viewing of Angel, becoming caught up as they prepared to air the final four episodes of the series. I was so into Joss' work at that point, it was amazing to hear him speak about Buffy and Angel and the worlds he had created. Hearing him talk about the process of creating a story was inspiring and relatable, I really understood his claim that the stories you end up telling are the ones that just won't shut up, they force themselves to be told somehow.

And I guess for him, Firefly is one of those stories, but I think the series was just starting to get good when it was cancelled. And because they had shown Serenity right before, the vast majority of questions here were about that world, and the film. Unfortunately I got a couple of spoilers for what happens in the movie, but most of the questions people asked were equally true for the series as they were for the film.

I'll commend the fact that people didn't ask really obvious, boring questions, but I think there was a bit too much of a focus on the Western elements of the film, four people must have asked which Western movies and tropes were a major influence on him. I feel like if you have someone who has created so much original stuff, it would be more interesting to hear about his process than just to go over what influenced him again and again. I'd imagine these were people who'd just seen the film, not any of his series, and as a result didn't have a big picture view of his work. Side note, it's very annoying that these people got to see the film instead of me who has seen all three series, but I guess this means I've got to show up earlier next time Interestingly, there were virtually no Buffy questions, I guess people felt that would have been looked at as sort of backtracking.

During the big Q&A there were a few interesting questions. One person asked about the reason for Joss' fixation on adolescent female heroes who commit violent acts and even he seemed at a bit of a loss, claiming that "my therapist and I are working on that." Even in the limited stuff I've done, I can see a lot of connected character types that come up almost subconsciously. When you're a writer, there's a way you see the world, and Joss clearly sees these type of female characters as important, something that's reflected in the work.

But the really interesting stuff came up after the big Q&A when Joss was signing stuff and fielding individual questions. Just as in the last time he was here, the crowd of people gradually diminished until only people who really knew his work were left. One really interesting thing he said was that when he came here to Wes, he made a conscious decision to focus on film and devote all his energy to that. He stopped doing anything that wasn't related to either watching or making movies. That's something I'm really happy to hear, because while I haven't done the total cut off, I can't think of the last really fun thing I did that wasn't somehow related to a work of fiction. I think he felt like you need to completely know film if you're going to make it, and wiht each new film you see, it's easier to understand what works and what doesn't work in cinematic storytelling. Martin Scorsese said the same thing, he used to watch two or three movies a day, so did Richard Linklater, so clearly this is the sort of devotion that one needs to become a filmmaker, or at least it doesn't hurt on the journey to making films.

I asked him the much rumored Spike movie. And he said that it required so many creative people to make, it was difficult to line up, and that they needed to make "a few more connections" before it would happen. He did say that it would take place after the end of Angel and would clear up some of the issues that people still had. I guess the biggest issue would be, do they live or die, and if there's a movie, that would imply that at least some of them survive. So, it is still in the works, but it's a matter of finding the time and bringing people together to make it happen.

The other really fun thing was when he was talking with someone about Runaways, the comic. He said that he still goes to the comic store every Wednesday and buys more books than he should, including Runaways, Powers and a whole bunch of Ultimate Marvel stuff. But, he was talking with someone else about Runaways and was just so enthused about it, talking about how great issue eighteen was, and how he and Bendis fought at Marvel to save it. I haven't read the comic, but it was so cool to see that a creator of so much phenomenal stuff was still a really passionate fan of fiction, and able to talk like someone you might run into at any local comic shop. The other thing he spoke about really passionately was Veronica Mars, saying it was the only show where he felt honored that it was called "the next Buffy." That's a show I need to check out, because everyone who watches it seems to completely fall in love with it.

Another interesting bit was when he talked about how people had criticized Firefly for ripping off Cowboy Bebop, but he had never seen the series. That's something that stood out to me when I saw it, Firefly definitely feels like it could be set in the same universe as Bebop. I'm sure there's a bunch of fanfic crossovers available on the internet. And as a fan of both series, it was cool to hear Joss mention the criticism.

He talked about a bunch of other interesting stuff, but that's what stood out the most to me. I get the feeling that Joss has so many great stories to tell and I wish he had more time to tell them all. I'd love to see him getting a TV series going, preferably on somewhere like HBO, without the constrains of network TV, or to just do some quick movies based on original stories, or an original comics work, just something to get more of his ideas out there.

So, it was an enjoyable time, he did about two hours of Q&A, and was always really entertaining to listen to. I don't think it was quite as mind blowing as the first time, because I knew more what to expect, but I could still listen to him talk for as long as he's willing to.