A History of Violence

Ever since hearing the buzz about this out of Cannes, I've been looking forward to seeing it, and thankfully, despite being an arty film, History of Violence made it out to the local cinema here, and as a result I was able to see it. The film's action genre trappings clearly helped it get more acceptance than your average Cronenberg film would, and while I don't think this movie's got blockbuster potential, it's clearly something that's accessible, yet challenging for your average viewer.

David Cronenberg's a filmmaker who seems like someone I would love. However, to date, I've only seen one of his films, Existenz, and I was not a fan. It was very gimmicky and uninvolving, and despite some good ideas, it never really gelled together. However, I do want to see some of his other stuff, like Videodrome and Naked Lunch, because he has a really good reputation. Plus, he had a great guest appearance on Alias.

Compared to Existenz and from what I know of his other work, History of Violence seems to be a departure, working outside the trappings of the horror/sci-fi genre. However, the film actually has a lot in common with what was explored in Existenz, however, here it's taken from a completely different angle.

The film starts off a bit slow, which is a neccesity for the plot, but the beginning wasn't that strong. That's one of the problems with having to set up a mundane status quo, if you spend too much time on it, it hurts the film's forward momentum, as in the wedding scene in The Deer Hunter, however, if you don't spend enough time, you get no sense of the change when the action elements emerge. So, I think this film finds a solid balance, you thoroughly understood this guy's life.

The film is interesting in the way it navigates around the generic conventions of the action film. The story at first seems to have very little in common with an action movie, and when Tom stops the diner robbery, it's a momentary blip in his normal life, not an impetus to enter a generic space. That makes the film's forward progress even more interesting. We stay in the 'normal' world of the first twenty minutes well after the first apperance of the action stuff.

I was under the impression that the film would be primarily about the effect of this diner robbery on a man's life, and had no knowledge of the whole Joey issue. I think there's plenty to explore in how this one act of violence changes the way someone perceives things, but what this film did touched on a bunch of bigger issues. I always love films that discuss identity issues, and the way in which people 'wear' false personas. Tom is a construct, entirely fictional, but for those who know him, he's more real than Joey. That would mean that Tom has become more real than Joey, and the only person he has to continue fooling is himself.

But his act of heroism sees the Joey persona reemerge, and the appearance of Fogerty threatens to destroy the life Tom has led. With the emergence of Joey, the film leaves the everyday realism of small town America for the hyped up intensity of the world of action film. First glimpsed in the diner fight, this comes to a head in the scene where Tom kills Fogerty. The film presents extremely graphic violence, and clearly takes pleasure in showing Tom's skill as a killer. The noise of buzzing flies and sight of rotting flesh ties this in with the decaying organic environments of Existenz.

When Tom kills those men, it is Joey emerging to protect the false Tom indentity. Edie's discovery of this alternate persona calls into the question her entire life, most notably articulated when she asks if Tom just made up the name 'Tom Stall,' and if he did, what does that mean for her identity and the kids'. One of the more questionable scenes in the film is the rape, where Edie essentially stops resisting Tom and seems to enjoy what he's doing to her.

I do question it, but at the same time, I think her motivation is apparent. In the previous scene she'd told the sheriff that there was no Joey, realizing that to expose Tom's secret would be the destruction of her life. In the following scene, she has the choice between rejecting Tom/Joey and again rendering her life false, or accepting this man as Tom and allowing their life to continue as was. In the end, she chooses to let him back into the house, and in the final scene, even though we're not sure what will happen next, it's clear that Edie has embraced the lie, and chosen to see Tom as the family man he's created, rather than the killer he was.

The film reminded me of Chanwook Park's Vengeance trilogy, in the way it's a film about the negative effects of violence, yet at the same time clearly fetishizes the filmic depiction of violent acts. Cronenberg stages the final showdown as a hyperbolic scene of murder excess, where Joey's full skill as a killer comes into play to destroy everyone who knows about his past. Ironically, it's only Joey who can protect Tom, and after he kills all Richie's people, he's essentially killed Joey as well. He can go back to the life he had, and no one will know about who he as, except for Edie, and she's chosen to embrace the lie.

The film is clearly a critique of American life, implying that our peace and stability is a false front, built on countless violent acts, with more and more violence neccesary to preserve the status quo. I think this was a top notch film, simultaneously entertaining and thought provoking. It reminds me of Straw Dogs, in the way it uses thriller trappings as a strong critique of American life.

Film 2005

So far, this has been a pretty weak year for movies, or at least for American movies, because it usually takes a year or two for stuff from Asia and the rest of the world to make it over here. Other than Revenge of the Sith, there hasn't been one film out this year that I'd consider a truly great film. Crash, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Serenity, these have been good, but nothing essential. And more than that, there haven't even been that many films that I've wanted to see.

However, in the past couple of weeks, we've been starting to get the awards season films coming out and I'm suddenly flooded with films that I want to see. I'm on break this weekend, and I'll be heading to the city to see Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Mirrormask. I'm usually a bit hesitant about the young person transported to fantasy realm genre, it just seems very 80s. I remember even as a kid noticing the dated clothes and hairstyles of the people in them. However, a few weeks ago I watched Labyrinth and really enjoyed it. It was extremely 80s, but strangely, I love the datedness of the fashion now, it only enhances the story. Bowie was great, and it was cool to see a young Jennifer Connely. Some of the muppets worked, some didn't, but the fantasy ball sequence made the whole film worth seeing, with its wondeful masks and Bowie music. Between Eyes Wide Shut and this, there's just something about crazy masks.

And that brings us back to Mirrormask, which is being touted as a thematic successor to Labyrinth. The trailer's amazing and Neil is one of my favorite authors, even if this film does seem to indulge in some of the weaker points of his writing. But it seems to McKean who's the real star here, the visuals do an uncanny job of capturing the feeling of his comic art and design work.

I'm also hoping to get to Thumbsucker when I'm home. This is a film firmly planted in the quirky indie teen dramedy genre, and I usually enjoy those. It's got a great cast, and Air named a song after the director. However, the biggest draw for me is the soundtrack by The Polyphonic Spree. I got the soundtrack album, which is great, and I'm really interested to see how their music plays in a film.

Next week sees the release of two new films I want to see, though both have rather negative advance buzz. One is Domino, whose trailers have been a gloriously post modern, quick cut assault of off beat action. I think action movies usually work better when centered around a female protagonist, because it creates more interesting themes. If a man is going around as a bounty hunter, it's accepted, if a woman is, it raises questions, and there are very legitimate questions about why anyone would want to go around killing people. I'd like things to reach the point where people inherently question the reason why men would kill too, but we're not there yet.

Along with this, films with female action heroes are frequently more focused around creating realistic, or at least emotionally alive characters, as in the case of Kill Bill II, or on TV, Alas or Buffy. Of course there are exceptions, like Catwoman or Elektra. And it's not to say that you can't have good action films centered around men, Angel is a character who's just as emotionally complex as Buffy, it's just that generally your male action hero is motivated solely by either a family member who's kidnapped or a family member who's been killed, and that's what passes for character development.

And if you consider the fact that Keira Knightley and Natalie Portman at times look uncannily alike, this is closest we'll get to a followup to Leon. The trailers promise a quick cut, varying film stock, crazy visual film and I'm hoping that the finished product lives up to that.

Also on Friday, Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown is released. This is a film with awful advance buzz, but I'm willing to give anything Crowe does a look. Almost Famous is one of my favorite films, and I loved Vanilla Sky. However, Elizabethtown seems to have the same plot as Garden State, and I feel like that film covered the territory perfectly. So we'll see, that one may be a wait for the DVD.

Capote is something else I'd want to see. Philip Seymour Hoffman's one of my favorite actors, and I've read In Cold Blood twice, so I'd like to see how the book came about.

So, we'll see how much of this I get to. Reviews will be forthcoming.

Nip/Tuck: 'Kiki' (3x02)

Nip/Tuck is a show that always seems to be trying to push the boundaries of audience tolerance, putting stuff in the show that will make you say, "They've gone too far this time." And this season seems to be trying to take things the furthest they can go, so last episode we get nasty fat woman stuck to couch and this week it's bunch of transsexuals urinating on Matt, throw in a barely motivated threesome and every character smoking pot and you've got something to offend everyone. I'm not offended by the content, but I think in their attempt to push the boundaries, the show can lose some of its dramatic integrity.

Being on F/X , they have stricter limits than shows on HBO, and you won't hear the word Fuck or see nudity outsideof the surgery, but at the same time the show seems much more obsessed with how far it can go than something like Six Feet Under ever was. SFU could show you a dead body, but the focus was never on how nasty it was, it was merely backdrop for the real dramatic importance. However, Nip/Tuck is all about surface. One could say this is appropriate in a show about plastic surgery, but there's a reason that beauty is more than skin deep. So, maybe stop trying to push the boundaries of acceptability and start trying to restore a sense of order to the character arcs.

Even though the show's character arcs are thinly motivated, it's still very entertaining to watch. It's just I can't identify with any of these people, or empathize with them. I don't really care what happens to them, so I view the show as a passive observer. The only consistently entertaining characters are Christian and Kimber, and they barely appeared in this episode.

So, I watch, I enjoy, but I don't engage, and that's the show's main flaw.

Gilmore Girls: 'Always a Godmother, Never a God' (6x04)

Once again, Gilmore Girls gives us a solid but not extraordinary episode that continues to show us the lives that Rory and Lorelai are living without each other. I wouldn't say the show's been in a rut since the season premiere, but it hasn't matched that level of intensity since. I don't think the creators want to be that dark, the show is a dramedy, but that means that we've gotten a series of episodes that haven't really led anywhere and leave a lot of the more meaningful stuff to subtext.

Rory once again is getting more and more sucked into her grandmother's world. She's forced to run the party by herself, and makes all the polite jokes required of a person in polite society. But it's not clear whether this is something she actually enjoys, or just a task she has taken on to keep herself busy and further the illusion that she's actually doing something so dropping out of Yale was not a mistake.

Her conversation with Lane was all about this. I liked the fact that the awkwardness was palpable. These were two people who were really close, but very rarely interacted in recent episodes, so they have to cross that initial barrier to relate to each other again. Rory tries to defend her lifestyle, but it's pretty clear she's not entirely convinced even herself that what she's doing is the right thing.

Over with Lorelai, there were some funny bits with Beau. That setup was pure screwball comedy, it makes no sense in the plot, and is just dropped out of nowhere to be used for some jokes. They worked, but it was a bit odd nonetheless. I did like the scenes with her and Rory, where they both want to reach out, but just can't and as a result further alienate each other.

One curious thin about this episode was the fact that they went to commercial after what I assumed would be the end, when Rory goes to New York, but then came back for one two minute scene. Very strange. But that scene was great, the 'Riding the Bus with My Sister' clip was hilarious, it's hard to believe someone actually made that movie, but it's all too real.

So, not too much to say about this one, though next week's episode looks like it's got a lot of potential.

Across the Narrows Festival

I just got back from the epic concert event, Across the Narrows, a festival featuring The Raveonettes, Belle and Sebastian, The Polyphonic Spree and Beck, and some other bands who I did not go early enough to see. It took two hours via Metro North and Subway to get to Coney Island. The concert was held at Keyspan Park, where the minor league baseball team, the Brooklyn Cyclones, play, and it worked great for the concert. The stage was in the center of the field, so you could see from the stands, but there was also a general area where you could go as far front as you could get. I watched the first three bands I saw from very close to the stage, in a whole mess of people.

One note on the setlists below, I just put down all the songs I remembered them playing, roughly in order, but it's by no means exact. Still, it'll give you an idea of what was played.

The Raveonettes
You Say, You Lie//Attack of the Ghost Riders//Red Tan//Sleepwalking//Ode to L.A.//My Boyfriend's Back//Do You Believe Her?//Somewhere in Texas//Love in a Trashcan

So, the first band I saw was The Raveonettes. I actually started listening to them because they were going to be at this show and I figured I might as well know as many bands as I could to get my money's worth, and I ended up loving their stuff. They've got a dark 50s rock feel, like something that belongs in a David Lynch film. Their first album picks up on the simple driving elements of 50s rock, the same stuff that provided the foundations for punk. But with their most recent they branch out into 50s pop, and create some fantastic songs.



They opened with a nasty version of "You Say, You Lie," and I mean the good nasty. The song's three minutes on the album, but must have been at least five there, with some great extended instrumental stuff. That's my favorite element of seeing a band live, watching the ways they can transform the song through the medium of live performance, and this song was probably the highlight of their set, despite not being that remarkable on the album.

The most notable thing about their live show was how the lighter. poppy songs from "Pretty in Black" are turned into hard rockers like the stuff off the first album. Everything was heavier, more bass driven, and it worked really well. I don't think the crowd was that into them, but that's more because people were likely there to see Belle or Beck, and The Raveonettes were just a bonus along the way.



The other highlight of the set was "Sleepwalking," which is perfect for live playing, with its drastic changes in tone and tempo. It's always good to make people really want to her the rocking out part of the song again by interrupting it with something slower. Unfortunately they were cut off with one song to go, which I'd guess was "Uncertain Times," or at least that's the one track I really wish they'd played but didn't.



So, on the whole The Raveonettes were awesome. I was near a guitarist who either Indian or really tan and he was totally rocking out. And their singer is beautiful and has great stage presence. This is a band I definitely want to see again, I'd go to their NYC show next week, except I've got to be at school.



The Polyphonic Spree
Have a Day//It's the Sun//Hold Me Now//New Song//We Sound Amazed//Move Away and Shine (In a Dream)//What Would You Let Go//Everything Starts at the Seams//When the Fool Becomes a King

The Polyphonic Spree were my main reason for going to this show. It's a 45 minute bus ride and hour and a half train ride to my house from school. Then another two hours on trains to get to the show, then reverse all that, plus $55 for the ticket. But it's all worth it if it means getting a chance to see The Polyphonic Spree perform again. I saw them back in August of 2004 and it was the best concert I've ever been to, completely overwhelming.

I was a bit disappointed when they opened with 'Have a Day,' probably their weakest song, and choosing to open rather than the perfect opener "We Sound Amazed," made it even tougher. But they rebounded with a great rendition of 'It's the Sun,' and their set gradually kept building and building in quality.



I was able to get much closer to the band, and they were more spread out than at Irving Plaza, so I was able to observe a lot more of the instruments in use. They had an awesome electronic clarinet played by the floutist that produced some great noises. And there was also a really cool moog, an instrument played by waving you hands near it to make strange noises. Together these two and the keyboard were used to great effect during instrumental breakdown type sequences.

They played a new song which sounded pretty good, but it's tough to evaluate on one listen, especially in a live context. It was cool to hear Move Away and Shine, which is their most recent release and top notch stuff. The one misstep was a long version of "What Would You Let Go" which just died on the crowd, it's not a bad song, but it should be used more as a bridge between their bigger stuff, rather than as such a long piece in and of itself.



However, in the final couple of songs they did, they were the best I've ever seen them. "We Sound Amazed" was awesome, and was soon followed by what must have been a fifteen minute version of "When the Fool Becomes King." The Spree's songs are perfect for a live venue because they're so big and anthemic, and "Fool" is perfect because of its many stops and starts, letting them play with the audience. During the song there was an odd bit where the whole band froze and Tim wandered around looking at them. And after going through this whole song, they returned to the refrain from "It's the Sun," and just took it beyond, one of their drummers was just throwing stuff over, it was amazing. To do such a long buildup and then have this astonishing payoff, I was totally caught up in it, and the audience was thoroughly 'converted' by the end of the performance.

I would say this was even better than the first time I saw them. The sound quality was much better, as much as I loved the first show, I could barely hear during the second half of the performance, being outside worked better. And I can't wait for them to come around again.

Belle and Sebastian
Stars of Track and Field//The Wrong Girl//Electronic Renaissance//The Boy with the Arab Strap//Me and The Major//Loneliness of a Middle Distance Runner//I'm a Cuckoo//If You Find Yourself Caught in Love//Judy and the Dream of Horses

Belle and Sebastian were the other major reason I went to the show. I only started listening to them earlier this year, but they've since become one of my favorite bands and I was psyched to see them live. Now, as they were getting ready to go on I saw a line of four people holding violins. This was the band's string section, and it was huge. With the four violins, there were twelve people in Belle, and only coming after The Polyphonic Spree could this seem like a managable number.

It seems like most of their fans are still most enamored of their early work, particularly "If You're Feeling Sinister." Now, I love that album, but I actually prefer their more recent stuff, "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" is their best work. But, whenever they broke out a vintage track, the crowd went wild, most notably with the opener, "Stars of Track and Field." This is one of their best songs, and it was cool to hear it live.

The band seemed a bit disorganized. With The Spree, all their songs flowed into one another, building momentum, but Belle would stop between songs to rearrange instrumentation, slowing things down. I was impressed by how many instruments everyone could play, Stuart shifted between guitars and keyboard, and the others bounced around as well. I loved when they broke out the string section, and the trumpet bits were a highlight too, though the best instrumental portion was the harmonica solo on "Me and the Major."



While their early work is great, it's less conducive to live performance. I liked hearing those songs, but you can't really get into them as an audience member. But that's part of the problem with transferring certain kinds of music to a live venue. Can you really 'rock out' to dark, slow songs? However, that wasn't a big problem, since most of the songs they played were more uptempo.

My favorite song they did "If You Find Yourself Caught in Love," a solid song on the record, but phenomenal live. I had the problem that I don't know their catalogue that well, so a lot of the time I'd be struggling to figure out which song it was until they got to the chorus. They closed with a great rendition of "Judy and the Dream of Horses," which went over big with the crowd.

After listening to them, I was contemplating leaving. I'd been standing for four hours wedged in between a whole bunch of people, and it was taking a toll. I know Beck's singles and a few other songs, but I haven't listened to too much of his stuff. However, I got some food, ate it and then saw that Stuart of Belle and Sebastian was over signing autographs, so I got my ticket signed and asked him about the upcoming Belle and Sebastian comic, which he doesn't seem to be too involved in, though I guess the fact that it's adaptations of his songs means he did play a role. So, it was cool to talk with him, and by the time that was done, Beck was on, and I figured I might as well stay.

Beck
Black Tambourine//Girl//Devil's Haircut//Guero//Loser//Minus//Emergency//Guess I'm Doing Fine//Lonesome//Hotwax//Where It's At//Get Paid//Broken Drum//Lost Cause//Do You Realize//Golden Age//Clap Hands//Sexx Laws//Mixed//Epro

I started out at the back, watching the set from a distance. They had a very cool video backdrop, which was being mixed by a video DJ. So that threw all sorts of strange colors onto the performers. It was cool to hear 'Girl' and 'Loser,' songs I knew. As the set passed, I gradually moved forward and was getting more and more drawn in. The dancy rock worked really well live and there was all kinds of odd dancing going on in the crowd. His stuff works great live and he had a surprisingly strong stage presence.

This was backed up by a guy who was described as being responsible for "percussion and body movements." He broke out the break dancing favorites, the robot, the pulling yourself up from the ground, etc, and he was wearing the obligatory 70s police sunglasses, which were widespread today.



So, I loved Beck's set. He did a really cool acoustic part in the middle, where his band sat down to eat dinner, and after a couple of songs they started to use the plates and glasses as percussion instruments, eventually performing 'Golden Age' with this dinner table backing. I'm really glad I stayed, his set was top notch.

After it was over, I was hit in the face by something. I thought that was nasty, but I looked up and there was a guy saying "Setlist," so I looked down and there was a crumpled up piece of paper with the setlist on it. So, that explains why the one setlist here that's actually correct is for the guy who's work I don't even know. So that was a nice bonus, and by this time I was so tired from standing for six hours that I was able to zone out on the ride home and it went by quickly.

All the artists were great, but I also have to respect this concert for running on time. Everyone went on pretty much when they were supposed to and the time between set changes was minimal. I'd love to see this become an annual thing. And one other note, I didn't take any of these pictures, I just linked them off people's flickrs.

X-Men 162-176

In my continuing series of reviews tracing the history of the X-Men, I now reach uncharted territory. I'd already read everything from Giant Size to 161, but with these issues I move into unread material. Now obviously I know where most of these characters end up, but not how they get there, and that's what this journey is all about, as well as obviously reading some great comics, and with this chunk of issues, Claremont brings the book out of the funk it was in post Jean's death, and returns an urgency and sense of direction to the comic, not through an epic action story, but rather through an increased focus on character development. And it may just be coincidence, but the issue when everything took off was also the issue when Paul Smith took over on art, raising the bar on the book quite a bit.

The collection begins with the Brood storyline. This is a pretty big story in X-Men mythology, and proves that Claremont was still a fan of Alien two years after the Kitty Pryde Christmas story that clearly referenced the film. However, he uses this setup as an opportunity to do some very interesting stuff. The first issue is a Wolverine solo issue, where his healing factor battles the alien implant within him, even as he battles the Brood out in the physical world. The issue is perhaps most notable for the huge amount of first person Wolverine narration. In the early days of the character, there was very little insight into what motivated Logan, but here we begin to understand what the X-Men mean to him, that he sees them as his family now, and as a result is horrified by the prospect that he might have to kill them. This is a great plot point because it forces Wolverine's animal side and human side to battle it out. It makes sense to kill the X-Men, they're infected and a danger to him, but he can't do it, and that shows a major change in the character from where he was back in the early days of the book.

So, after this there's some stuff with the brood that isn't that exciting. Carol Danvers takes centerstage for a while, as the X-Men battle on the Brood planet. The most interesting thing here is Xavier's belief that he's failed the X-Men, and Moira's prompting which leads him to create the New Mutants, the first X-Men spinoff title.

The storyline takes a bit of a break with the first Paul Smith issue, which catches up with the characters, the best kind of Claremont writing. The best part of this storyline was Storm's transformation. It's huge scale stuff that's really cosmic and symbolic, the kind of thing Morrison would do. Storm goes out into space and dies, only to merge with a giant space-whale type entity and be reborn, appearing to the X-Men as an astral projection while her body regrows. It's really cool stuff, the sort of over the top, crazy concepts that comics are able to do like no other medium.

This sets up one of the most compelling throughlines of these issues, the transformation of Storm. In the previous review, I mentioned being frustrated at the fact that the X-Men wouldn't kill, even though it was clearly neccesary, here Storm recognizes that contradiction and decides that taking life sometimes has to be done. This comes to a head in the Japan issues, when she cuts loose with her powers, and ditches the Earth Goddess style for the mohawk and leather look. It's a really compelling character journey.

The other thing I loved in this set of issues was the ongoing subplot about Cyclops and Madelyne Pryor. This whole thing has been rendered moot by what happens later with the return of Jean, but with this read I'm trying (pretty successfully) to journey back into the mindset of a reader from the 80s, when Jean was dead, and there was no way to know exactly who Madelyne is. It's a great mystery, to have Scott run into someone who looks exactly like Jean, it keeps the issues Jean represented front and center without having to actually ressurect the character, and thus undo the dramatic impact of the actual Phoenix storyline. I don't get the need to bring Jean back, she wasn't a particularly interesting character in and of herself, it was more what she represented to Scott, and that part is still alive.

Over the course of the issues, we see Scott and Madeylne growing closer, all the while Scott is caught up in a web of grief and fear that she may in fact be Dark Phoenix. This is a nice example of using the genre to address the very real issue of people who try to substitute for the loss in their lives by finding a replacement, and placing undue expectations on that person. I think Claremont's writing during the Maddie/Scott sequences was some of his best, and notably it was fairly removed from the need for action scenes, it's just straight ahead romance, and that's one of Claremont's major strengths as a writer.

It's a strength on display in the really fun interactions between Kitty and Colossus. Kitty is trying to convince him she's old enough, but Colossus won't have it, and this leads to numerous interactions where Piotr cluelessly leads himself into another situation where they're kissing, and he's befuddled as to how they got there.

Paul Smith's art in these issues is phenomenal. His line work is striking, making really good looking people very capable of conveying emotion. He also does a lot of really interesting layouts. I'm not sure if it's coincidence, but around this time we see a lot less captioning from Claremont, instead relying on the pictures to tell the story.

Following the Brood Claremont does another classic storyline, as the X-Men encounter the Morlocks. This is a chance to see the darker Storm in action, and introduces more characters who will become a part of the X-Men mythos.

This is followed by a trip to Japan for Wolverine's wedding. Storm is again the highlight, but there's also a great issue where Rogue and Wolverine go out to bust some heads. Rogue is a character who's become an institution of the series, and it's interesting to see her start. She has to prove herself to the team, and by the end of that issue, I was sold on her. Even the exaggerated Southern accent works. The Japan story is also notable for the brilliant closing image of Wolverine, having been rejected by M'iko, shedding a tear as the issue closes. It's great art from Smith and a really striking antidote to the image of Wolverine as hard killer. The whole storyline in fact shows off Wolverine's human side better than anything else Claremont has done.

From there we get the return of Mastermind in issue 175, an issue that's a bit too long, and mainly has you wondering, how this will turn out not to really be Phoenix. It does end nicely, with Scott and Maddie getting married. This leads to a fun issue where Scott and Maddie battle a giant squid, and also have a lot of sex. This reminds me of old Hollywood movies in that we end a panel with Maddie saying "This old crate can fly itself for a while," then the next panel has a caption that says "Later," and Scott saying "That took my breath away." I think we know what went down between panels. And the issue ends with Scott deciding he wants to have a normal life with Maddie, and a caption saying "The Beginning."

I would say these issues go beyond the legendary Byrne run and stand up to the best comics being done today. The strong focus on character development, augmented by action stuff, recalls the best years of Buffy, and seeing Storm, Scott, Wolverine and Kitty go through major changes is great reading. There seem to be real consequences to every action, and the concepts Claremont works on here would define the book in the years after he left it. Reading this, it's easy to see why it was the most popular book at the time, it's easy to care about the characters and their world. That goodwill has kept the book on top of the charts for twenty years, and it's all due to the work of Chris Claremont, helped out now by Paul Smith.

Serenity

So after some problems along the way, I've finally gotten to see Joss Whedon's directorial debut, Serenity. Back in January, I watched the whole Firefly series, and enjoyed it. Whedon's work is most notable because the way that he allows characters and plots to develop and evolve over the years. That's why with both Angel and Buffy it was years towards the end of the series, (5 and 6 respectively) that were my favorites. We knew the characters so well, and they held so much baggage, it was riveting to watch that conflict unfold.

Firefly had a better start than either Angel or Buffy, the pilot was great, and though there were some rough patches in the middle, they really seemed to have things together by the end, and we were looking at a lot of potentially interesting stuff ahead. Alas, the series was cut down thirteen episodes in, and with this film we get a chance to see what could have been.

I was a bit surprised by how successful the film was at reconciling the need to simultaneously make sense to new viewers and appeal to fans. I never felt like there was really obvious exposition, even the stuff at the beginning with River was new to series viewers. Some points might have been hit a little too hard, like Kaylee's feelings for Simon, but that's acceptable and doesn't really take away from the film. I loved the long tracking shot that introduced all the characters, it recalls the bravura steadicam in the season premiere of Angel: Year Five.

The film moved really well, unlike a lot of recent action movies, it actually told a developed story, it wasn't just jumping from one fight scene to another. But at the same time, there was always a feeling that the characters were in peril, either from the Alliance or from River. And as the film built to its conclusion there was a great sense of escalating tension, particularly with Wash's sudden death.

My favorite part of the film was River and her unhinged fighting talent. Like Joss, I love female action heroes who fight in a graceful, stylish way. I loved her fight in the bar and the way it was as much an element of visual spectacle as narrative. Like the fight scenes in The Matrix it's largely about just showing off cool choreography.

The only element preventing it from reaching the heights of the best stylized fight scenes was the music, which was servicable, but never outright cool unto itself. Now, there's a school of thought that holds that score music should be invisible, the same goes for visual technique, but I think it's best when the music is simultaneously serving the story and cool unto itself, as in something like Oldboy. If they had a score on the level of Oldboy's, this movie would have been even better, but Joss was clearly aiming for a score that was subtle, not calling attention to itself. And I did like the fact that the show's theme song returns for the end credits.

I liked the fact that it felt like all the characters had a reason to be in the movie. A lot of times in a film that's based off an existing property you end up with characters who are there because the fans demand it, but have no reason to be in the movie, like in the X-Men films. However, here everyone has something to do, and the gradual introduction of Inara and Book meant that they actually had a more important role to play in the story than if they'd been there from the beginning.

Visually, the film was quite cool. The effects weren't always completely convincing, but the most important was that the visuals they were creating were great. I loved the 3-D hologram of River and Simon at the beginning, and the worlds they moved in were all interesting to look at. Clearly creating a world is important to Joss and this film does that.

I really liked the new villain, 'The Operative.' He reminded me of Lilah in the sense that there's a mutual respect even as our heroes know that what he/she fights for is wrong and has to be opposed. And the final confontation between him and Mal was great, though was overshadowed by the great fight in the tunnels versus the Reavers. I love the image of River with the ax standing over the dead bodies.

Still, it was not a perfect film. Joss' work gave me a much greater appreciation of the virtues of longform serial storytelling, to the point that the traditional three act story film seems woefully underdeveloped. A couple of years ago, my love of film split down two paths. I look to features for style and great filmmaking, with people like Wong Kar-Wai, while I look to TV stuff for stories. It's not a strict divide, but after experiencing Buffy, a film like Spider-Man 2 seems woefully underdeveloped when addressing the same themes.

So, compared to Joss' other work, a lot of the character stuff in this film seems strictly by the book screenplay writing, set up a character's problem, have them go through stuff, then resolve it. Kaylee's arc is a great example of this, here her desire for the doctor is easily resolved and we end at the point where the series would start to go deeper and explore the issue surrounding this new creature, her relationship. But as in film, a kiss at the fadeout is code for a presumed happy ending. Similarly, the Alliance threat isn't exactly easily dispatched, but it doesn't have the epic feel of a Buffy season ender. The film was a great ride, but it lacks the issues and subtext of Whedon's best work.

I can understand wanting the respect of working in features, but considering the fact that Whedon's primary strength is as a writer, a storyteller, he's just not able to do as much in film. Watching a lot of series made me realize that having a single main character is woefully inadaquete, because the people around him frequently have equally interesting stories, and to focus on a single narrative misses that. That's why I love something like Magnolia, because it explores the lives of a whole bunch of characters. The stuff I've written recently all has a whole bunch of characters, I'll create someone to serve a plot point, but as I write I 'discover' their story, and I have to write it in, and the beauty of serial storytelling is that you have the freedom to do this, to write in additional people.

But it's difficult to criticize a film what it didn't do. Serenity finds the right balance between satisfying new viewers without alienating viewers of the series. As much as I love Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, it's a film that's so exclusive, referring to detailed aspects from all episodes of the series on top of Lynch's already complex storytelling, it's not a film made for mass consumption, and even though this is part of why I love it, it's also something that led to a critical drubbing and Lynch's inability to get financing for his films for five years. Even if Serenity isn't a hit, I think it will show execs that Whedon can make a great action film for a low budget, and that's going to lead to a lot more.

David Lynch at Yale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

X-Men 139-161

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gilmore Girls: 'The Ungraduate' (6x03)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next Weekend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Burton's Corpse Bride

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gilmore Girls: 'Fight Face' (6x02)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lost Just Isn't that Good

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Essential X-Men (94-138)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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