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.

Scope in Story

I think one of the biggest problems in film criticism, and other media criticism, is the fact that most critics evaluate something more on the bad things about it than on what it does right. So, the best reviewed films are frequently the ones with the least bad things about them, rather than the most good.

This may sound like an arbitrary distinction, but it actually has a huge impact. If you evaluate a film based on what it does wrong, you're more likely to give a review to a safe film, one that doesn't take that many risks, so it doesn't have anything particularly wrong with it. Mystic River is one of the best examples of this, there's nothing really wrong with the film, but it's not a good film, because it doesn't do anything particularly good either. The film's problems lie mainly in just how safe it plays things, never doing anything interesting with the medium. People talk about Clint's films as harking back to old Hollywood, in their invisible editing and filmmaking techniques, and simple well told stories. However, as much as I enjoy some old Hollywood stuff, it's the fact that these films are so safe that makes them good films, but very rarely great.

If Mystic River is a prime example of a film that benefits from this critical approach, I think the Star Wars prequels, Revenge of the Sith in particular, were films that were hurt by it. Take a look at Revenge of the Sith next to virtually any other movie ever made and you'll see that in terms of story and visual scope, almost no other film can touch it. The film does so much, and the vast majority of it is successful, however, I don't think everything works. Natalie Portman was awful, some of the dialogue was weak, and there were a couple of awkward effects moments. However, in reviewing the film, people seize on these moments and use it to justify a negative review, while completely ignoring the fact that the film does so much that's phenomenal. Let's say the ambition of Mystic River is at a 3, and it acheives that, while Sith is aiming for a 10 and lands at around an 8. So, Sith may have more grating flaws, but it also has so much more that's good than Mystic River does, and that's why I think it's a better film.

I'd rather see a movie that attempts to do as much as possible and fails on a few counts than something that is completely safe and accomplishes everything it sets out to, but is trying to do something so small, it's not really worth doing in the first place. Now, Mystic River isn't a film I hated, but it's the fact that such a safe, routine film was considered one of the best films of 2003 and is still in the top 200 on IMDB. Sideways is another example, that was a film I did enjoy, but it was by no means one of the five best movies of 2004, it's this perceived shortage of quality films that makes critics shower praise on films that are solid, but unremarkable.

This is a huge thing in comics too. I read the first trade of Gotham Central, a book that got a lot of critical acclaim. The basic premise is a police procedural in Gotham City, and it's a servicable book, solid stories, but nothing you couldn't find an episode of Law and Order, and that's free, while you've got to pay ten bucks for the comic. That's part of the attitude in comics that TV and movies are superior mediums, so if we could just make something as good as CSI, people will read it.

The thing is, as a medium, comics can do things that no one else can, however, the industry is inferior to TV or movies, in the sense that if people want a story, they're not going to look to comics first. I know in my case, I got into comics because I saw the X-Men movie, and wanted more, and that led me to comics. However, most people are satisfied by seeing one X-Men movie every couple of years, the fans of the comics are the ones who need a bit more. That's why comics have such a burden, people don't look to them first, so they have to be good enough to make you pass on the DVD and pick up the trade.

What this means is that it's not enough for a comic story to be just good, it's got to be great. I don't want to read something I could watch on TV, I want to read something great that could only be done in comics. That's what Grant Morrison does, he's the best creative person in the world today, and his stories all take full advantage of what the medium can do. Alan Moore's another great example, it's no surprise that the movies based on his work have been awful, his books are so tied into the medium, and use it in a totally unique way that the medium and the story are inextricably linked. Someone like Warren Ellis may tell good stories, but you can tell he really wants to be making a movie, but couldn't, so he made his story for comics. That's what the whole widescreen action thing was about, trying to make comics into movies, instead of taking advantage of the medium's actual strengths. Most people get enough story from movies, they don't need more movies in their comics.

But getting back to the point about the scope of stories. All too often I'll leave a film saying that was good, but completely disposable. As an artist myself, I don't understand how someone could put in all the time it takes to make a film, and then make something like Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. I think of making films as a higher calling, like being a doctor, you're not going to become a filmmaker just by coincidence, it's something that should dominate your life, it's not a job where you just go into the office, do 9-5 and then go home, it's got to be an all consuming passion. So, I wonder how people could make a film and create something impersonal and just there. Reading reviews for Red Eye, I saw a lot of three star reviews, to the effect that it's a solid B-movie, a nice disposable entertainment. The thing is, is that why you become a filmmaker, to make disposable entertainment?

Now, I guess I just assume that if you want to be a filmmaker, you'd have the 'evolved' taste to love auteur films and look down on Hollywood product. But I guess some people go into movies to make just fun things, but I find that odd. I wouldn't want someone to make a film just because it's a good script, each film should have some personal resonance and be an expression of the artist's personal passion. When you hear Wong Kar-Wai talk about 2046, it's clear that this was a story he needed to tell, a story that dominated his life for five years while making the film. Similarly, with David Lynch, each film seems to be an expression of something deeply personal, it's not like David just decided, it's been a while since I made a movie, why don't I throw something together?

What WKW and Lynch do is make films that do so much and leave you with a lot to ponder. Watching the film is really just the first step on the journey to fully understading the work. They create films that are visually dazzling and use the medium in extraordinary ways, and in that sense, these films aim incredibly high. So, if WKW fails on some levels, as a lot of his projects do, they attempt so much that they're much more rewarding to watch than the staid, unexciting filmmaking of Eastwood.

If you're looking at films that aim high, no one can match PT Anderson in the late 90s, with his two epics, Boogie Nights and Magnolia. These are films with at least ten main characters in each, and that are a virtual textbook on how to use film techniques to enhance the emotional dynamic of a story. In Magnolia, the subject matter is small from an objective point of view, but for each of the characters, it's the biggest day of their lives, and the film's finale is an emotional apocalypse before the rebirth at the finale. Boogie Nights tells the story of this entire family of characters, the history of porn in the 70s and 80s, and at the same time can be read as an allegory for the failure of auteur filmmaking in the 70s. That's ambition.

Now, the thing is, there's no reason why every film shouldn't aim as high as Anderson's work, in its own way. Directors need to try to tell stories that aim high and make full use of what the medium can do. This means not making a script that at its best is just going to be good, it means aiming for great with every project.

But here's the problem, we live in a society where films that aim for greatness are criticized as overambitious or pretentious, criticisms that Magnolia received. 2046 also was criticized for trying to do too much. Here's the thing, critics only see a film once when they review it, I won't give my final opinion on a film until two viewings, and particularly with WKW, his films are often ok on the first viewing, then stunning on the second, once you don't have to worry about plot mechanics and can just enjoy the visuals and emotion.

It's the same in music, where 'back to basics' groups are lauded, while the Gorillaz are criticized for using a choir in their songs, claiming it tries to bring the song a false grandeur. False or not, I'd rather hear a song that aims for grandeur than something that just is trying to match the dynamic of something from the 70s. It all goes back to the fall of auteur cinema and prog rock, when personal expression became linked with pretentious excess. And unfortunately, the age of 'lean' and 'efficient' being synonymous with good is still upon us, while the people who aim a bit higher are criticized when small pieces of their work fail, even if the rest of the work puts to shame the vast majority of so called art.

The Big Picture

A few days ago I finished reading a book called The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood, a book that examines the ways that Hollywood changed since the 80s as a result of the fact that all the majors are now owned by absurdly huge media conglomerates who see films as media commodities that can support their television channels and consumer electronics products. The book lambasts the present Hollywood studio system, dwelling on the way that mainstream films have ceased to be art and instead are loss leaders for ancillary products.

Now, the reason I read this book was because I read an article by the author on why there's less nudity and sex in movies recently. The reason for this is because of all purpose twenty-first century villian, Wal Mart, who consign films with nudity or sex to the 'adult' area of their video section, and refuse to give them prominent placement at the front of the store. Wal Mart is even reluctant to stock R rated films, which means that studios will lose a major revenue source if they put out films with the sort of content that runs contrary to Wal Mart's values.

Now, in the book he goes on to talk about how marketing campaigns are geared entirely to the opening weekend, which means they want a film that will make most of its money in the opening weekend, then get out of the theater so they can ride the coat tails of the theatrical campaign for the DVD release. So, they want films that don't rely on building an audience, they want presold properties, hence the huge amount of TV remakes this summer. You don't have to explain the premise to people, they already know it. The thing that vexes me is the fact that I seriously doubt most people under 20 have heard of Dukes of Hazzard, yet the film is targetted at them, so the brand name won't even appeal to your target audience. Why not make an original film then?

The book makes me feel very bad about the state of mainstream cinema in America, I've seen enough bad films to know that they really are churning out product, not art, and the thing that has me so annoyed is the fact that people continue to see these shitty films and buy them on DVD, while ignoring the stuff that is really great. It's reached the point where I've seen only one American film this year that I'd consider a truly great movie, and that's Revenge of the Sith, a film that despite being a prime example of the commodification of movies, also works as a stunning piece of art.

That's the crucial thing to keep in mind, just because your movie doubles as a toy commercial, that doesn't mean it can't be a phenomenal movie. Sure, your Star Wars or Lord of the Rings generates a ton of money through licensing, but they are also great films, whereas so many blockbuster movies don't even try to do something original, they just synthesize things that had been successful in the past into a 'new' film.

The book does give you a good idea of why most Hollywood product is so awful, there's so many stages a film has to go through to get made, it's inevitable that the auterial spark will be diminished along the way. It's a tough thing, as a writer, I'm sure there's a ton of great writers out there who refused to compromise, and ended up not having their movies made, as many as the number of writers who did write a great script, but ended up having it lost on the journey to the screen.

A while back, I did a blog comparing the current American film scene to that of the 70s, ending on the hopeful note that this summer of bombs would lead Hollywood to become more experimental and get back to the more challenging cinema that was dominant in the 70s. However, this book would lead you to believe that's never going to happen.

The reason for this is because of the Wal Mart thing I talked about before, and the fact that those more challenging films don't translate well overseas. Stars and effects are apparently universal, while more subtle stuff doesn't play as well. The other reason is that while the box office may be slumping, the DVD market is keeping the studios quite wealthy, which means there's not really a dire threat. Studios don't make that much money from theatrical distribution, and since they have no financial stake in theaters, there's not a huge need to try to help them out.

While the studios are churning out increasingly less artistic films, they still do keep indie studios under their wing, things like Focus Features and Warner Independent. These subdivisions usually do lose money, but they also churn out the best American films that are made, usually supporting auteur filmmakers with more challening projects. Looking at my top ten films of 2004, there were five American movies on the list, all of them from these mini-majors. So, that's where we're seeing continued support for more challenging films in America.

The only problem is this means that most of the best filmmakers in the country don't have access to big budgets, or big audiences for that matter. The sad thing is that even though I really wish that studios would make more challenging films, people are so conditioned to expect a certain type of story that they really couldn't handle more challenging films.

I showed Irreversible at my film series and a woman asked me, "Why would you watch this movie," and I talked about how it uses cinema to depict the way a single act of violence can destroy people's lives, as well as showing the futility of revenge. She responded to this by saying "Ok, but that's not an evening's entertainment." People just expect a movie to tell a story, to entertain you, and I suppose that's valid. The thing is, I find being challenged by a film much more entertaining than just watching a disposable comedy, laughing while it's on, but leaving barely remembering what happened. But, I view film as art and most people don't.

That said, the upside of America is that TV has become a medium very friendly to auteurs. Look at the story of Joss Whedon, struggling screenwriter, doctoring scripts, but unable to express his true vision. He makes a show and is given basically carte blanche to do what he wants, and as a result, he's able to tell a story with more scope and fully developed characters than any film I've ever seen. In the new highbrow serial type show, we see the mature subject matter and challenging characters that were the hallmarks of 70s Hollywood, but now with the added bonus of added time to develop much larger and more complex storylines. This season of Six Feet Under was better than any film I've seen this year, with the exception of Sith, and The Sopranos puts to shame even the brilliant Godfather and Goodfellas. TV is still looked down upon, but the work being done there is really phenomenal, and if I could do anything, it wouldn't be to make a film, it would be to be able to do a long form series on HBO.

My Film Projects

Today I set up a little site to showcase the films that I've made over the past couple of years. I finished editing Ricky Frost yesterday and finally figured out how to make a managable file to post on the net, so that went up and I also put on Extracurricular Activities. You can get to the site here.

I'm quite happy with the way Ricky Frost came out, it's a fully realized story, and very stylish. I think it touches on issues that are actually quite relevant to a lot of people my age that haven't been discussed in movies before. It's definitely the most personal film I've done, most of the stuff I write incorporates stuff from my life, but only to build characters, not as the central plot elements, but with this movie, I tell a story that could happen in the world I live in, to the people I know. It's something that's worth doing occasionally.

Creative Projects

I haven't posted here in a while, and the main reason for that is that I haven't had the chance to watch that many movies or read anything lately, and that's because I've been spending almost all my time working on my own creative projects.

Last week I was spending all day editing Extracurricular Activities, the film I made with the summer workshop I ran for LMC. So, I had an odd relationship to this film, because I didn't have much to do with the creation of the story, or the physical shooting of it, that was done by the kids in the workshop. But at the same time, I was in charge of the whole thing directing how things were going and helping the kids get good shots. And then Jordan and I edited the whole film and put it to music, so I did a lot on the film.

So we finished that movie Monday and screened it twice, first for the parents of the kids in the workshop and then later in Jordan's backyard for our friends. It went over quite well, and a lot of people were calling it the best movie we've ever done. I'm not sure about that, but I found it interesting that people responded so well to a film that I really like, but find a bit impersonal. There are some artistic bits, but it's much less artsy than the movie we made last year in the workshop, A Cold Summer. Extracurricular actually has a pretty tight narrative, and with a few exceptions, sticks pretty strongly to the Hollywood rules, about goal-oriented characters driving the plot forward.

I'm not necessarily opposed to this, but I guess I'm unsure how I feel about making something so conventional. But, the important thing to keep in mind is that this workshop was about showing kids how to make a movie, not my personal expression, so getting paid a lot of money to make a film that turned out well isn't bad at all.

Once this was finished, I started editing Ricky Frost, the film Jordan and I shot over winter break back in January. It had lain dormant for a long time, but I'm glad to bring it back. The thing about Ricky Frost is we never quite finished shooting, we ran out of time, so some scenes were never filmed. This leaves me with some holes in the story I have to fill in during editing. And then we've got these massive dialogue scenes with no cutaways, which are very tough to make sense of and to make interesting. However, I was on camera for the vast majority of this movie, and it looks great. So, I'm trying to sculpt the raw material into a unified film. It's not so much narrative as just a look into some characters' lives at a point in time. I don't think people are going to respond to this film in the same way as they did 'Extracurricular Activities,' because its primary concern isn't telling a story.

As I mentioned a while back, this summer I came to realize that the mainstream moviegoer really does look for the traditional Hollywood narrative. They view film exclusively as a storytelling medium, and taking time to show things that are just beautiful is considered a waste of time. And in that case, this film will have some wasted moments, but I think they're beautiful, and it's my movie so I'm editing it in a way that pleases me first, and the viewer second. But, at the same time, there's some very relatable dilemmas in there, so people may respond, especially people my age. I know both Jordan and I wrote a lot from what we'd experienced, so it should be pretty real.

That editing goes on, and at the same time the first issue of my comic, Division Shadow is almost finished. We've got 21 of 24 pages drawn, about 12 inked, and I'm still working on securing a letterer, but once he's in place, the thing will be basically good to go. I've set up a site for the comic over at www.divisionshadow.com, definitely check out the gallery section, where you can see some finished pages.

This project is something I'm really proud of. It's been dominating my thoughts ever since the artists started on it, and my greatest problem is I keep coming up with new scenes for an already bloated project. And each new page costs me more money, but if it helps the work, it's worth it. I've been so busy with this film stuff, I haven't had a chance to work on new material in a while, which means that the artists are almost catching up with me. For a long time, I'd just had three scripts sitting there, and no rush to finish things, so now having to hurry is a bit annoying in the short run, but good in the long term. I'd really like to get at least a rough version of everything finished, so I know how long the book will be.

So, that's what's up with me now. Once I finish Ricky Frost, I'll have a lot more time, hopefully by Monday that project will be in the bag, and I'll have some time to do some writing on the comic before I go back to school.