Filming Original Works

I watched the first X-Men film a few days ago, inspired by my marathon journey through Claremont's X-Men run, and watching the film furthered a lot of what I've been thinking about recently in terms of filmmaking, most notably, the question of why someone would want to adapt another work into a film.

So, let's say it's 1987, the era of X-Men comics I reviewed in my last post. Chris Claremont has been writing the book for 120 issues, and you're given the task of making this into a film. Well the obvious place to start would be to look at what makes Claremont's work successful, what would make people want to follow this book for so long, and this is the long form character development. Claremont's writing is brilliant because of the way he gradually changes characters, and makes you feel like they're real people, living real lives, no matter what extraordinary events they come across, everything makes an impact on them and causes changes. However, Claremont's strength, the longform character development, just can't be done in a feature film, where story guides things instead of character. That's why an X-Men film can never be as strong as the comics, because it can't go into anywhere near the depth that the comics work does.

The X-Men film isn't bad, however it suffers from the same thing that mars numerous films based on other properties, namely a divide between telling the film's story and at the same needing to please the film's fans. In this case, that means that characters who have complex, developed arcs in the comics are reduced to caricature here. If you were doing an X-Men film in 1988, it would be impossible to make a satisfying Storm because she's a character constantly in flux. Post Claremont, she settled into a safe personality, and that's what's represented in the film. There's no sense of the conflicted, layered character from the comics, and Halle Berry's apalling accent doesn't help. Nor do lines like "Do you know what happens to a toad when it's struck by lightning?" Similarly, Scott is reduced to a couple of character traits and Jean is just an object for Logan to be attracted to. They don't really serve the story, they're just there because you need to have some X-Men in the movie, however Storm, Jean and Cyclops add very little to the plot. If you were to write this film from scratch, there's no way you'd include these three deadweight characters, instead Wolverine would go after Rogue himself and confront Magneto one on one, backed by Xavier.

Similar problems occur in Serenity, where complex characters from the series are reduced to a few specific traits and shoehorned into easy goal-based arcs. For example, Kaylie wants to get together with Simon, she has some problems, and then she does. There's no complexity there, it's just a setup and knock 'em down, clean and simple. Compare that to the more complex courtship they had in the series.

Now, you may say that these films are based on long form works and are the exception rather than the rule. However, in adapting novels you run into the same problems. A book usually has too much material for a film, so you have to streamline things, cut out parts and give the characters simple, easy arcs, and still, people will say that the book was better than the movie.

Take something like From Hell, it's a decent film, but it's a completely different thing than the book. The book reveals who the killer is in the second chatper, and then is about exploring what drives someone to kill, and what the consequences of his actions are on his mental state. The film is a whodunit, for which the climax is the revelation of the killer. It's a completely different story, but with just enough of the book to make you annoyed about the copious amounts of brilliant material that got left out. From Hell the book is so well structured to fit into the comics medium, a deep, challenging, intellectual work that is perfect in and of itself.

So, the question arises, if adapting a work is so problematic, why is almost every film coming out based on a pre-existing property? The obvious answer is money. Studios want something that audiences will already be familiar with, because that means all they have to tell people is when it comes out. The audience will already know whether they want to go or not.

However, what reallly bothers me is why, as a filmmaker, you would want to adapt another work? This question gets to a core issue about film that bothers me to no end and that's the fact that even people working in it see it as somehow an inferior medium to the written word, which is so wrong I can't even say. Film is the ultimate medium, combining the best elements of prose, theater, music and painting, and when applied properly, the medium can touch you emotionally in a way that no others can.

Now, when I approach a film, I don't see writing, directing and editing as three seperate processes. They're all intertwined in creating the film. When I'm writing a movie, I'm transcribing the film that's already in my head, and when I'm shooting I'm trying to match that. So, I see the writing as an essential part of the filmmaking process, I wouldn't write a film and not direct it, or direct a film I didn't write, because the two are so intertwined.

Similarly, I would be very hesitant to do a story I didn't come up with. I don't understand why it's acceptable to adapt a work from another medium into a film. For one, it's constricting and rarely produces a truly great film. But it's also this implication that so called 'literary' work is better than 'the movies.' If someone was to write a novel version of Magnolia, do you think the literary community would be calling it the best novel of the year? And yet every year at the Academy Awards, you see films based on novels being acclaimed as the best of the year. It's ridiculous, I want films that bring something new to the world, something unique to the director's vision, you should be in film because you have ideas and a desire to say something, not just because you're able to read a book.

Am I saying that films based on other works shouldn't be honored? The vast majority of films I love are original works, but some like Ghost World or Batman Returns are based on existing properties. In his latter days, Kubrick worked from pre-existing properties as well. But, what Ghost World did was function more as an additional story in the universe, rather than just an adaptation. And with Batman Returns and The Shining, they are both films that are clearly the product of an auteur, who chose the material specifically to put his stamp on it.

However, I still would prefer to see original material, specifically created for the screen. When you watch a Wong Kar-Wai film it's incredible the energy that it exudes, because he's actually a filmmaker rather than someone who writes and directs. What's the difference? WKW works out his films by shooting footage and then seeing what works. So, rather than essentially making the film with the script and then hoping that it works when acted, he makes the film in the filming. Similar methods are used on Irreversible and Elephant, films that are created in the process of their filming, with heavy improvisation, both from the actors and in the style of shooting. And all of these films feel unique and vital, they're stories that could only be told in the medium of cinema.

I guess that's what I'm getting at. The best works aren't just good stories, they're specifically tailored to their medium. That's why adaptations of Alan Moore's works inevitably fail, because he's so good at using that which is specific to the medium of comics, so the story is good, but it's really in the telling that the brilliance emerges. Someone else writes Watchmen, it's a solid revisionist superhero story, like Rising Stars, but Alan uses the medium itself so thoroughly that the work becomes something more.

And when you make a film off a book it's very tough to do that. Books are written based on internal narratives, and usually involve the characters' thoughts in some way. Films can't do that, so you can either end up with a voiceover, which seems forced and stagy, or copious exposition to get points across. Similarly, books usually aren't designed to be that visual, because you can't see what happens in them.

Film has so many unique capabilities, it's foolish to harness yourself to a medium that doesn't allow for these. I consider Magnolia a brilliant film because it uses the medium so well. The use of cutting to connect the characters is something uniquely filmic. He lets the images and music speak in a way that no other medium could do well. Magnolia is a great story, but because of how it's made, it transcends to one of the greatest works of fiction ever made.

So, in light of this, it always bothers me when I hear that someone's adapting a book for the screen. Did you become a director to tell someone else's stories? Is Ron Howard so passionate about the Da Vinci Code that he needed to film it, or is he someone who doesn't really have any stories left to tell and decided to look for something that would likely be popular? Similarly, why is Peter Jackson making a King Kong film? I know it's the movie that inspired him to become a director, but I'm not going to go out and do a comic book remake of The Invisibles, or film another Star Wars. What could doing that remake possibly acheive, the story has been told, and the ideas it has are already out there.

Remakes are the most creatively bankrupt exercise possible. Could you imagine someone saying I've decided to do a rewrite of Catcher in the Rye? "The first one was good, but it's been a while and we could use another version." That sounds ridiculous, and a film remake should sound just as ridiculous. Film is art, and you're not contributing anything by doing something that's already been said. Just because there's a precedent doesn't mean we should accept this behavior.

That's not to say that every story has to be completely original. Tarantino loved old Kung-Fu movies, but he didn't decide to remake 'Lady Snowblood,' instead he took what he loved from them, the feeling they gave him as a viewer, and distilled it into one film. It's the same thing that Morrison did with Flex Mentallo, rather than remaking silver age comics, he distilled the sense of wonder he felt reading them into the book. That's what gives us Star Wars and Indiana Jones, whereas the remake gives us Flash Gordon.

And it's only getting worse. Very few people can get away with writing an original screenplay, and most of the successful films are based on something else. I guess what we need is a revolution wherein the people who make films aren't ones who just know how to use a camera, they're people with stories to tell, who write, direct, shoot and edit their films, true filmmakers rather than an assembly line. Story is the most powerful tool and the fact that our most culturally important medium is getting hand me downs from books and comics is unacceptable. If you're a director who's adapting something else, maybe it's time you got out of the game and let people with stories to tell make their films.

X-Men 195-213

The journey through X-men history continues here, as Claremont passes the 100 issue mark and just keeps going. By the end of this chunk of issues, he had been writing the book for twelve years, which is incredible, and the fact that the book still feels fresh and relevant is testament to just how strong a storyteller he is.

However, that's not to say there aren't some problems in this chunk of issues. 195 co-stars Power Pack, perhaps the dumbest concept that Marvel has ever published. They're a team of young kids who have superhero adventures without their parents knowing. It's so ridiculous and for some reason, they get teamed up with Wolverine in two different issues in this collection. Wolverine interacting with Kitty is a good contrast, Wolverine interacting with Power Pack is awful. If you saw a bunch of kids going around doing superheroics wouldn't you likely try to stop them and call their parents, not fight along side them? In previous reviews I've mentioned the fact that X-Men is best when it's insular, and that having other stuff from the Marvel Universe intrude usually the human/mutant dichotomy that becomes more and more essential to the book.

In a later issue, in which Wolverine battles Lady Deathstrike, the presence of one of the Power kids undermines what is otherwise a top notch dramatic story, illustrated by Barry Windsor Smith. Smith reminds me of Chris Weston in the way his work has a dirty, almost diseased feel. His work's very unique and, largely due the brilliance of LifeDeath I, his presence in a story is a good indicator that it's something special. The concept of the body shop is interesting, and I like the way that the Hellfire Club soldiers that Wolverine wounded back in the Byrne era keep coming back. It's the same idea as Morrison's brilliant Best Man Fall, to show that the actions of our 'hero' can actually cause huge problems for ordinary, decent people. However good the issue is, it's difficult to really accept it when you've got a member of Power Pack in there, I don't know if Claremont was forced to include the character, but whatever happened, it was an awful choice.

Back in the late 190s, we get more stuff with Secret Wars II. This also hurts the book, and even though some of the material works, you don't feel like you're getting a complete story, it takes away from the important stuff going on in the title, and I'd prefer if the major development on Rachel didn't happen as a result of her involvement with the Beyonder. The other lowlight in this chunk of issues is the awful issue in which Kitty and Colossus battle Arcade's robots, or the similarly bad issue where Kurt fights Arcade. This guy is an awful character, why must Claremont continually bring him back? I see no conceivable way to do a good Arcade storyline.

However, leading up to 200, we get a really interesting series of events featuring Magneto. One of my favorite issues of X-Men is 150, where Magneto battles the X-Men, and for the first time he's presented as a logical man, who may actually have a point, rather than a one dimensional villain. At the end of the issue he breaks down, thinking that he's killed Kitty, and we don't see him again until he washes up with Lee Forrester. When Magneto returns, his character's journey continues down its logical path, and we find he has given up his militant ways and is now working together with Xavier. The scenes where they work together as allies are wonderful and it's a shame that Xavier is shipped off into space at the end of 200 because I think there's a lot of potential to show Erik and Xavier working together, and continuing their ideological conflict on a more intellectual level.

One of the most interesting scenes in this time is when Magneto and Kitty go to the Holocaust museum, where Magneto seeks his ancestors. The scene has a curious blend of real world reverence for tragic events and yet, there is also the strong presence of the fantastic, when Mystique and Freedom Force attack. Magneto reveals he is a mutant and is soon turned against by the people he was just connecting with.

A similarly interesting scene is when Kitty goes after the people who attacked Professor X. They call her a mutie and such, then she makes the racial comparison explicit, asking one of her attackers if he would like it if she called him a nigger. It's very harsh language, and definitely disturbing. The question is, is Claremont's use of these real world racial problems exploitative, or does it come organically out of the story? It's definitely unsettling, but I think that's the point. So, it's difficult to say for sure, but I have to respect his ability to confront issues head on.

So, this stuff leads to 200, 'The Trial of Magneto.' This is a great issue because your logic is played against emotion. The masses have turned out to protest Magneto, and they are justified in wanting him convicted. His prior actions make him deserving of the worst punishment possible, yet we know he has changed, and as a result are strongly behind him. It suffers a bit from recap syndrome, just detailing stories that went before, but there's such an inherent tension in the issue that the recaps just build the suspense. Plus, I like the fact that Magneto does get successfully reformed. The villain turned hero is one of my favorite storytelling tropes and as a result, I was a big fan of this character arc.

Before the Magneto issue, the Essential X-men book reprints two long issues chronicling the adventures of The New Mutants and The X-Men in Asgard. These issues aren't bad, but they don't really do much for the characters. It's a 'ripping yarn' type thing that's much more important for The New Mutants than it is for the X-Men. Art Adams' art in the book is phenomenal, definitely the highlight of the story. But, this barbarian type fantasy just isn't that fun to read, it's something that should have been left in the 80s.

After Magneto's trial, we get some further development with Scott and Maddy Pryor. I feel a real attachment to Pryor for some reason, likely because I know the bad things in store for the character, and the fact that Scott behaves so unkindly towards her. In her first appearances, Maddy is great, and her initial romance with Scott provides the subplot for my favorite era of the book. However, here we see that Scott can never really commit to an ordinary life, he's always going to put himself in the role of leader, and that's what issue 201 is about, where Storm fights him to show that it's okay to let someone else be in charge for a while. I haven't read the start of X-Factor, so I'm a bit hazy on where things go from here, but I do know that Scott abandons Maddie to go back to Jean.

This is what Morrison gets to the core of in his run, the fact that Scott is emotionally stunted, someone who's drawn to Jean more as an idea than as a person. It actually reminds me a bit of Nate from Six Feet Under, in the sense that he tried to have a normal life with Lisa, but the memory of this fiery love he had with Brenda prevents him from fully embracing their life together. That's why Scott's relationship with Emma Frost is so intriuging, he's consciously moving away from the relationship that has defined his life thus far, even as Emma tempts him with Jean's Phoenix iconography, the memory of what they used to be. He's a very flawed character, though with his move to X-Factor, I don't get to see how he progresses. However, there is an Essential X-Factor coming out soon, so I'll be picking that up and following his journey.

Anyway, moving on there's the two Secret Wars issues and the Nightcrawler issue I mentioned before. The Nightcrawler issue itself isn't that good, but it does bring up a lot of interesting stuff about the character. He's restless and not suited to the complex moral landscape the X-Men find themselves in. He'd rather be a swashbuckler in a strict manichean world, where he could easily get thrills finding bad guys, rather than having to deal with issues. It's a nice progression of the character's journey.

That's one of the most satisfying thing about Claremont's writing, all the characters are always moving steadily forward. It may be very slow, gradual development, but they are never stagnant. Storm, Wolverine, Nightcrawler and Colossus are Claremont's most notable creations, and over the course of his run, they've all changed in significant ways, while still remaining true to the core of their personality. It's a lot like Whedon's work on Buffy, by the end of season six, Willow has changed a huge amount, but deep down, she's still the same character. It's a gradual process of evolution that is only really apparent when you step back and examine where the characters have been. The experiences he's had with the X-Men have made Kurt bitter and jaded, causing him to want to escape into fantasy personas, and that's what the issue is really about.

Following this is an arc in which the X-Men battle Nimrod, while turning on Rachel. I'm not a big fan of Rachel, largely because her origin is so convoluted, it's difficult to connect with her as a person. She opened the floodgates for a lot of awful characters, however, this ending for her arc is pretty interesting. I like the role Wolverine plays here, as someone who is so scarred by his own moral decay that he's willing to kill Rachel rather than let her become a killer. It's to make up for when he couldn't kill Jean back in the Dark Phoenix era.

This series of issues, and arguably Claremont's entire run to date, is about the morality of being a hero, and the inevitable compromises that come with that role. Storm started out purely committed to her ideals of good, such that she couldn't even kill the brood back in the 160s. Back in those issues, I wrote that it bothered me how none of the X-Men were willing to kill, even though it was clearly neccesary. That has changed, now their idealism is totally compromised and they're just trying to survive. This leads to the team up with the Hellfire Club to battle Nimrod. Much like with Magneto, their worst enemy has now become an ally, and it's interesting to watch the X-Men work together with the Hellfire Club to defeat a greater foe.

Nimrod himself is even presented in a positive light. The people are behind him, and he's nice enough to help a kid with his homework. He mentions that he's developing emotions, from posing as human for so long, he's starting to become human. The X-Men are hated by the public yet call themselves heroes. In destroying Nimrod they further anger the public to protect themselves. So, fighting for their own lives, can they really consider what they're doing to be good?

At this time, Claremont amps up the mutant/human conflict, culminating in the brilliant Mutant Massacre storyline. For the first chunk of his run, up until Days of Future Past and even beyond, the conflict between mutant and human isn't really a big deal. The X-men don't have too many problems with people and there's no sense of mutants being a threat or menace. That's why I find it hard to accept the Byrne run as the archetypal X-series, it actually has very little in common with what ended up in the film, and though it was good, I'd consider Paul Smith, or this post-200 era to be the work that defined the series.

The Mutant Massacre is the first crossover, which would later become the bane of the X-titles, but here it's very cool to read, seeing all the pieces connect across titles, even as they remain essentially independent. You could read just X-Men and follow what's going on, but like those early Buffy/Angel crossovers, reading X-Factor or New Mutants will fill in the details you'd miss. The overarching event that ties the issues together is the titular massacre, as the Marauders invade the Morlock tunnels to kill all the Morlocks within them. Why? That's unclear as of yet, but reference is made to Mister Sinister, and I know that all of this eventually leads to the events of Inferno.

But this in many ways is the peak of the mutant/human conflict so far. The X-men work best when they're not traditional superheroes, rather they're just messed up people struggling to survive and that's the case here. They try to help the Morlocks, and end up just collecting bodies and trying to help the few who survive. I love the end of the first issue, when Storm tells Wolverine to bring back one prisoner, and deal with the rest. Storm, who once valued life so highly, has become totally compromised, and instructs Wolverine to go out and kill the Marauders. Colossus takes pleasure in killing one of the Marauders, and is raring to go after more, though he is restrained at the mansion. This is the culmination of the moral decay that began with the Brood storyline for Storm, the values have been compromised because there is too much at stake. With so many people dead, and the mansion in a siege to protect the few who survive, they have no choice but to kill. It's a moral conundrum, and these issues raise things to war-level. No one is safe, and at the end of the storyline, Colossus, Kitty and Kurt and all left incapacitated. It's a really brutal storyline, and works wonderfully. I always love the storylines in ongoing narratives when everything is falling apart and the status quo is totally upended, and this is basically that for the X-Men.

One of the other chapters of the crossover is Power Pack, which is awful. However, the X-Factor and Thor issues are great. Thor is a book I'd never read but it was oddly compelling. Thor was this really magnetic character, a bit off, but rather jolly and committed to what he was doing. The end of his issue when he gives the Morlocks a Viking funeral is a highlight. The X-Factor stuff is great as well, as Scott ponders what he was doing by leaving his wife, all the while caught up in a siege of his own. I like the way they never meet the X-Men, but as a reader of both titles, you're aware of how close they come. The ending of the storyline in X-Factor is downbeat and sad, appropriate to what the storyline was about.

By raising the stakes in the human/mutant conflict, Claremont makes it so that the X-Men aren't so much fighting for good or ideals, they're just fighting to stay alive, and that's much more interesting. Watching everyone slowly lose faith in the dream is compelling, and after a brief downturn in the 180s-190s, the book is totally back, the best it's been since the Paul Smith era. I've got the next chunk of the book coming in in single issues from Ebay, so the journey will continue. I want to read to the end of Claremont's run and see where else Claremont is going to send these characters.

So, while I'm on the subject of X-Men, I want to talk about the Decimation event that is currently happening the X-Books. Following yet another alternate reality crossover, House of M, the 'real' Marvel universe has been altered so that there are only about 200 mutants. The idea behind this was that editorial felt that mutants were becoming too common and as a result were not a relatable metaphor for minorities, as they were intended to be. So, they invented this reality warp thing to change that and wipe out most of the mutants.

Now, this baffles me for a number of reasons. Most notably is the fact that if you want to get rid of a lot of mutants, why would you use an alternate reality to do this? Apparently editorial at Marvel has forgot that stories are supposed to have a thing called 'drama' and 'conflict' in them and in a longform narrative, they should build on the events that came before. So, why would you make this major dramatic event something that people won't even remember? But more important, why is something that has so much dramatic potential being done through this awful narrative device. The books have been hinting at this Days of Future Past future for years. There are too many mutants and they want to reduce the number, as well as make mutants feel like more of an oppressed minority. So why not just have the sentinels start up again and do another Mutant Massacre, taking out most of the mutants in the world, and leaving a small few left to fight back. Basically play out Days of Future Past, that story alone could last you three or four years, and would give you more of a sense of mutants as an oppressed minority. Plus, it has the potential to be phenomenal, to have the opportunity to do the definitive war between mutant and human storyline and not use it is ridiculous.

Or you could actually use the oft-discussed mutant cure, but leave a few mutants who could not be cured, making them an extreme minority. There's a lot of drama there, and it was already hinted at in Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men.

So, as a storyteller it offends me. To use a reality warp to do what could have been an amazing four or five year storyline is horrible. But now that I've been reading this old X-men stuff, it bothers me as a fan of the characters. This basically ends the world that Claremont created. After all the shit that happened in the 90s, Morrison was still able to produce a book that developed the characters and concept of X-Men, while still staying true to its core ideas. That's how stories are supposed to progress, there are some elements that are key, like on Buffy, Buffy's not all of a sudden going to open her own restaurant, but she can go through major character changes. What the House of M stuff does is invalidate the characters who had been developed in favor of an imposed editorial change. I don't want to sound like the typical fanboy here, but I think what Marvel's doing here is trying to mix things up rather than allowing changes to come organically out of the story. Claremont's run had a constantly changing status quo and a huge shifting ensemble cast, meaning that things always felt fresh. I've read 120 issues of his run on the book and I don't feel like he's repeated himself.

But what this gets down to is the fact that X-Men is at its core a corporate property. Claremont had a personal vision for it, and for 15 years was able to guide the books and keep them fresh and interesting, with real characters who changed, not corporate properties. However, after that, the books lost the sense of having a strong authorial vision, something that's inevitably a consequence of having 15 titles set in the universe. So, Marvel Editorial dictates how things go, they dumped Claremont the first time, and they made House of M now, and if the changes stick, you wind up with a major step backwards, or sideways, and in this world, you couldn't have someone like Morrison come along and move things forward again, picking up where Claremont left off. I am intrigued by what House of M did, but it's more from a sense of curiosity about the changes rather than a sense of involvement with the characters. That's what Claremont never did, Magneto turned from evil not becauuse of a mindwipe or reality warp, rather because of things that he and the other characters did. That's how a story should function.

So, for me, X-Men begins with Claremont, takes a break, then ends with Morrison. They took a corporate property and characters, and made them into emotional stories with fully realized people. After Emma Frost and Scott kiss at the graveyard, no more is needed.

Division Shadow Now Available

The first issue of the comic I've been working on for a while is finally out, and you can order it here. I wrote the book and I'm self publishing it. It's been a bit annoying to have to pay for and do all the work to get the book out, but it's rewarding too. It's a story I believe in and really wanted to tell, and if I'm going to work on anything, it might as well be that. I first came up with the story three years ago, so it's been a long journey to print, with a lot of starts and stops, but we're zipping along now, and the remaining five issues should be released monthly.

So, if you've read my reviews and said don't criticize something until you've done it yourself, well now I have, so if nothing else, this earns me the right to critique other peoples' work. You can get more information at www.divisionshadow.com and also read a thirteen page preview here. I think it's a cool book, perhaps you will too.

Last Days

The last review I did was of Domino, a film I praised for its absurdly quick cutting and constant visual stimulation. So, it's a big jump to this review, of Gus Van Sant's Last Days, a film that is extremely minimalistic, dwelling on the most mundane everyday things to build a unique atmosphere.

Last Days is the follow up to Van Sant's Elephant, a film I loved. Both films feature very little in the way of a traditional plot and are primarily about building a world and feeling that the characters inhabit. Elephant was a bit more focused, since everything led up to a big event at the end. Last Days also builds to something, but it's not as clear or impactful an ending.

It was widely noted in the press surrounding the film's release that the last days of the title are Kurt Cobain's, and knowing at least something about Kurt's life is essential to understanding the film. I suppose you could figure it out, but at no point in the film do they explicitly say that this guy is a huge rock star, or that his fame is likely the reason for the ennui he's experiencing now. I did some reading on Cobain after seeing the film, and it's made things a lot clearer, but the film itself gives you very little understanding of the circumstances of what's going on. Normally I'd say go into a film completely fresh, but this is one where some outside information is helpful. I think it might have been wise to give a bit more exposition on who this guy is and why he's feeling the way he does, but with the film there's a conscious decision to avoid the typical biopic structure, meaning that if you bring the information you need, this can go a lot deeper than a traditional biopic, because it's more about putting you in this guy's headspace than trying to convey objective facts.

The film's got a lot of funny moments, mainly playing on the mundanity of everyday life. I love Blake making mac and cheese and dumping the cheese pack into the water, or when Blake is having cereal and accidentally puts the cereal back in the fridge instead of the milk. Similarly, the awkward conversation with the yellow pages guy and the Mormons are highlights. Particularly with the yellow pages guy, it's unclear why Blake is placing an ad, or if this store even exists, but the scene itself is strangely compelling. It's the only time in the entire film that we see someone coaxing Blake out of his self imposed mental cocoon and out into the real world.

In the entire film Blake speaks about three intelligible lines, most of the time he's just mumbling and we can barely understand him. This is annoying at first, but once you realize that the narrative is irrelevant, it becomes clear that the way he's saying things is more important than what he's saying. The entire film gives you this weird feeling of living this shiftless life, functioning at a distance from the outside world. So, the most powerful moments come when Blake comes into contact with regular people, as in the afforementioned yellow pages scene, or notably the scene with Kim Gordon, who calls him out on his lifestyle. That's the most emotionally affecting scene in the piece. Another really interesting scene is when Blake wanders into the town and goes to the rock club.

I think the film's biggest problem is that, other than Blake, we really don't know who anyone is. In Elephant there was a huge cast, but they all played off of archetypes, here there's just a bunch of random people. It's unclear whether they're in the band or just his friends. One of them looks a lot like Dave Grohl, and I doubt that's coincidence, but the phone call early in the film seems to imply that his band is somewhere else. So, the scenes with these people are difficult to decipher, and generally end up as strands without meaning. You see this guy listening to 'Venus in Furs,' but there's no meaning beyond that. It's just the surface of things. I suppose the point is to show Blake's distance from the people in his life, but it's all kind of unclear.

The film isn't entertaining in the traditional sense, or even something particularly thought provoking, it's more like going on a drug trip, entering this alien headspace for a while. You're not sure exactly what's going on, but there's an odd feeling about everything going on. However, the film is a bit self indulgent and actively confronts the viewer with long shots of essentially nothing, and countless diversions from the barely there main point.

In the end, it's not like everything came together, but the image of Blake's soul leaving his body is striking, and provides an apt conclusion for things. Stuff just happens and we caught some of the end of this man's life. Is the film a success? It certainly acheives what it sets out to do, but I think more could have been done with the premise, without turning it into a conventional narrative. Van Sant's minimalism is so concrete as to alienate the viewer. It's not a good thing when you have to turn to wikipedia afterwards to understand the basic premise of the movie.

But still, it works as a completely unique cinematic experience. I finished the film and wasn't emotionally affected, but I felt different, I remained in that odd state of mind after the film was done, that's a powerful piece of cinema.

Domino

Domino has gotten some of the worst reviews of any film that's come out recently, but these reviews were interesting in the way that they seemed to contain a vehement anger at the film, and a film that creates this sort of anger usually means it at least tries something different. The Fog may have gotten worse reviews, but I didn't see anyone claiming it was a nadir of cinematic expression. And all these awful reviews seemed to point out the things that made the trailer so great as the flaws of the film, so I went to see the film, and ended up loving it. This film is a hyper-kinetic pop art object in which narrative and character are rendered completely irrelevant and the shooting and editing of the film itself becomes the primary attraction.

There's a lot of films out there that end up being awful, but are able to string together a great two minute trailer. XXX was one of these, very quick editing, cool looking characters and a lot of excess. Compressed into two minutes, it was a cool experience. Spread out over two hours, not so much. Domino never relents from that trailer pace, the film may set a new record for average shots per minute, there's an unbelievable number of cuts and nearly every shot is moving. This makes the film an incredible rush, and lends an energy to every scene.

This film is much closer to an art film than a mainstream film, in the sense that the joy is more in the construction than the narrative itself. The opening scenes that convey Domino's journey from troubled youth to bounty hunter are the only particularly interesting character work. From there on, the film follows a fairly standard heist plot. If you shoot this differently, it could have the relaxed flow of Ocean's Twelve, or more likely end up as just a conventional thriller that's ok, but nothing special. Domino is a film unlike anything else I've seen, and for that alone I can respect it.

Domino is almost always backed by music, and that music determines the rhythm of the scenes. Even in dialogue scenes, there's almost constant cutting and you end up watching the cutting more than the action. I'm not saying that every film should be like this, I can respect the slow pace of a film like In the Mood For Love, but the medium can do this, and it's riveting to watch the construction of the movie and its total saturation of visual extravagence.

Thus, it's tough to write about the film from a traditional narrative context. The story doesn't convey the experience of watching the movie, it becomes something else entirely. I think Keira Knightley's good in the movie, anchoring everything, but the star is really the style. The opening credits alone are more exciting than most films, with the great spiralling dominoes and crazy 70s music. The movie constantly goes so far over the top, you can't believe it. The Jerry Springer sequence is so ridiculous, you've got to laugh at it. And the quick cutting makes it even more funny, because this ridiculous sequence is being propelled at such speed. The Tom Waits appearance is another bizarre one, and the intercutting with the image of Jesus makes it even more over the top. By the end of the film, I thought there was nowhere left to go, but the shootout in the tower outshone everything else with its sheer excess.

I guess what makes the film so good is that it really uses the medium. You couldn't do this in a book, it's uniquely cinematic. When I was teaching the workshop this summer, I presented the theory that the visual in film should be engaging on its own terms, apart from the narrative. Basically, your shot shouldn't just show the character talking to forward the story, it should show the talking in an interesting way. The best films are the ones that feature a great visual style and narrative.

So, this theory would be a rebuke to the traditional idea of invisible film construction, the idea that the authorial hand should not be present in the film. I think watching a film that is a marvel of visual construction is just as invigorating as watching a well told story. The best films combine the two, and perhaps the best fusion is the kind exhibited by Magnolia, which uses the medium so well, but also tells a story that's brilliant on its own terms.

Domino focuses almost entirely on the visual style part of film, with the narrative occasionally getting lost. Most Hollywood films are all about the narrative, and at this point, it has to be a pretty amazing story to get by with a weak visual style. If the visual style was toned down, Domino wouldn't be a particularly special movie. I've seen a ton of good, but unremarkable movies in the crime genre.

However, by choosing to move completely away from narrative and embrace the visual style part of film so thoroughly, Scott creates a film that's more like a pop art object. You watch the film, but don't really engage with the characters. And yet, the film is so fun to watch, that doesn't matter. When Domino's comrades fall, she picks up two machine guns and fires on some advancing mobsters, choosing to kill for the first time. In a typical film, this would be an agonizing moral decision, and the payoff of the revenge would be the focus of the scene. That's there in Domino, but it's beneath the surface, the focus of the scene is on the visual spectacle of Keira with the guns, and on showing that from as many angles as possible.

In some respects, the film recalls Wong Kar-Wai's mid 90s hyperpop period, and Scott makes extensive use of the so called 'Chungking effect,' messing with the shutter speed. WKW used the stylistic excess of those films to display the emotions of the characters. Scott doesn't really do that here, it's just about the editing, and quite frankly, I think that's enough.

Now, you may say, what about your review of Batman Begins, where I said:

we'd need Batman to be in some physical danger, and we don't get that either, or more accurately, we can't tell if he is because of the way the fight is edited. You have no clue what's going on because cuts are used to convey action rather than the actors actually fighting. The best action scenes rely on us knowing exactly what's going and being able to easily follow things. Look at the lightsaber duel in The Phantom Menace, wide shots make it easy to follow the action. Here, it's all quick cuts and then somehow Batman has won, we don't know how. But, that's not just this movie, it's a problem with many action movies today.

So, how do I reconcile that commment with what I'm saying about Domino? Here's the difference, Batman Begins is a staid film that wallows in gray muck. It uses quick cutting, but this follows a traditionally edited film, and is accompanied by boring score. So, the quick cutting doesn't fit into the world the film has constructed. I would argue that for quick cutting to be successful, it has to be tied to music or heavy sound design, making it rhythmic rather than random. Batman Begins isn't a very pop movie, it's a heavy, oppressive thing, and as a result, you want a heavy, brutal fight, not a bunch of edits. Domino is a pop construction, and a result, the editing fits. You don't really care about the character, you're not supposed to, so let's just show things in as cool a way as possible. Batman Begins is worlds away from cool. Also I'd argue Domino's fight scenes, even with the extreme cutting, are still more intelligible than what we got in Begins, and a lot more enjoyable.

All that said, yes, there's parts of the story that don't work. The ironic use of celebrities, as with Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green, just isn't funny anymore, and considering the possibilities of the character, the fact that the story is such a conventional action structure seems like a missed opportunity. However, the film moves so fast, you can easily ignore the flaws and just revel in what is onscreen. It's a crazy, hyper-pop film art object that makes fuller use of the medium than anything else that's come out this year.

I'm normally someone who uses critical response as my primary barometer for whether or not to see a film, but in this case, the critics are off. This is a unique and riveting film that is definitely worth seeing. I loved it, and you should see it.

American Beauty and Six Feet Under: The World of Alan Ball

A couple of days ago I rewatched American Beauty for the first time since seeing the end of Six Feet Under. Before I go on, this article's going to go into stuff from the end of Six Feet Under, so if you haven't seen the whole series, don't read it.







But if you have seen the series, you've come to the right place. The thing that Six Feet Under and American Beauty have in common is the fact that both are works by Alan Ball, he wrote American Beauty and created/wrote/directed SFU. American Beauty is one of the rare films where I'd consider it as much a product of the writer as the director. I suppose that's mostly because Ball went on to make SFU, while Mendes has only done one film since, and it wasn't particularly thematically connected to American Beauty, whereas SFU has a lot of commonalities with American Beauty.

First off a bit about the film itself, this is a movie I've loved from the first time I saw it. It's probably the best film to ever receive the best picture Oscar, and the only best picture winner in the past ten years that was truly a great film. It's a film that some people find depressing, but is exhilirating to me. It's a movie that covers a lot of the themes present in my work, the need to stop messing around in a routine and start doing what you really want to do.

The film tells the story of a guy who starts living life how he wants to instead of how he's supposed to, and ultimately he dies, the implication being that society will not tolerate people who so blatantly flaunt its rules. If you compare Lester's arc to Nate's, there's a lot of interesting parallels, and also a lot of insight into the difference between the differences in story construction between film and television.

Both me follow the same basic arc. Numbed by the difficulties of family life and work, they find a female muse who reignites in them something that was lost, and pursue her, until they're struck down and suddenly killed. However, the morality of their actions are presented in opposite ways. The entire movie glorifies Lester's new outlook on life, whereas Nate's actions are presented as troubling at least, morally unforgivable at worst. I seriously doubt it's coincidence that his AVM strikes immediately after having sex with Maggie.

So, why is Lester a hero for what he does, while Nate is bad? A lot of it is in the fact that this is a pattern for Nate. Lester is someone who's been trapped in this life for years and just accepted it, whereas we'd already seen Nate struggle to adjust to married life. During the Lisa arc in year three, the implication was that Nate couldn't adjust to married life because he was in love with Brenda, and it was that sense of missed opportunity that stopped him from being happy. So, let's imagine that Lisa hadn't died and Nate had stuck with her for twenty years, growing more and more numb. Then, we could probably sympathize with Nate shirking responsibility in favor of getting what he wants.

However, the narrative of Six Feet Under seemed to be leading us towards a happy romantic resolution for Nate and Brenda. When Nate has sex with Maggie, it devestates the audience because it means that Nate doesn't live up to our expectations for the kind of man he should be. It's the same as when Brenda goes on her sexual journey in season two, she's pushing Nate away, except that Lisa's pregnancy takes away from us blaming her. At the end of season five Brenda is trying, and has overcome her demons. One of the most devestating images from the season is Brenda sitting alone in the Quaker church, while Nate and Maggie are at her apartment having sex. That really got to me, she was giving everything she had to Nate and he was behaving inexcusably.

But, is what Nate did really that different than what Lester did? Both of them saw a woman who would make them believe they were something they weren't. For Lester, Angela's youth and beauty would allow him to tap into an energy that he's long since lost. He saw her as someone with all the fire that Caroline has lost through the years.

For Nate, Maggie would allow him to recapture some of the idealism of his youth. Nate is someone who's spiritual, and I would imagine back in Seattle he was involved with all kinds of New Age and Buddhist stuff. Maggie, and her Quaker faith, would put him back in touch with this spirituality, and make him a part of something bigger than himself. As Brenda says, Nate wanted someone who could make him seem like a better man than he is. This came at a time when he was beginning to realize that Brenda wasn't what she used to be. She had lost some of the crazy fire that first attracted him to her. She grew out of the youthful restlessness that had dominated her life until her breakdown in season two, Nate never reached that breakdown point, he was always able to get by no matter what he did. In season three, Nate's little rebellions against Lisa could have eventually led to a breakdown, but he didn't reach that point until he slept with Maggie. That was the act that crossed the line, and he was appropriately punished.

Lester never actually crosses that line. When he's given the chance to have sex with Angela, the reality of who she is intrudes on the mental fantasy he has constructed for himself. The sexual temptress of his dreams turns out to be a virgin once her masks fall away. For Nate, Maggie was purity and goodness, an image that he destroys by having sex with her.

The joy of American Beauty is in watching Lester gleefullly trump societal taboos. It's basically a fantasy for people stuck in a routine, he tells off his boss, smokes pot when he wants, buys the car he wants and works a job so meaningless it becomes entertaining. He consciously chooses to live like he did when he was a teenager, and as a result is happier than he ever was before. In the entire Alan Ball-verse, Lester is the character who encounters the least problems, and in the time we see him, is almost always happy. He's able to accept death because he knows he's lived his life to the fullest, for Nate, death is something to fear, because he always feels like he's lost something by choosing to come back and work at the funeral home. He's lived the exact life he didn't want to lead, and that's what makes him forever restless.

Ball clearly supports Lester, but how does the work present the morality of Nate's actions? To my mind, Nate is a character with a fire for life and a constant desire to move forward and try to reach a utopian existence. This is the thing that keeps him forever moving forward, but it also prevents him from being happy in the moment. Lester is able to find joy in the little things, but Nate can never stop thinking about the big picture and the fact that on some level he considers his life a failure.

That's one of the most interesting things about Ball's work, the characters all have grand ambitions for their lives, but they're radically different. Nate has it all, but he can't stop wanting more, whereas his brother David wants is a normal life, family and kids. However, the fact that he is gay means that wanting this puts him into conflict with society. He has to struggle to get that which Nate takes for granted. Claire is more like Nate, she's always reaching for something more, yet she finds herself in danger when she takes a temp job at an office and finds herself getting increasingly drawn into the routine of office work. If she continued down that path, it's likely she would find it impossible to break out and return to her art. And then, what she abandoned would become a psychological cancer destroying her like missed opportunity ultimately destroyed Nate.

One of the other major themes the two works share is the characters' desire to be unique, as Angela says "There's nothing worse than being ordinary." This is the governing principle of Brenda and Claire's lives, even though they would never admit it, because to do so would imply that their uniqueness is a conscious effort rather than just how they are. Angela's situation is different from Brenda and Clarie's in that she sees being ordinary as blending into the background, whereas she always wants to be the center of attention. That's what grates her so much about Ricky being with Jane, he shows no interest in her, seeing through her glamourous mask to the inner beauty of Jane. Jane is a proto-Claire, with a similar attraction to slightly insane boys. She doesn't have that much depth though, I suppose her biggest act is her decision at the end of the film to abandon the pre-chosen societal path and go to New York with Ricky. Seeing what 'normal life' has turned her parents into, she decides that this isn't for her and instead chooses to run away and try something completely different.

Like Jane, Claire runs away to New York at the end, but because of the development that a series allows for, Claire has passed through that rebellious period and instead leaves for New York on good terms with her family. I like the fact that both Claire and Brenda, who were so obsessed with remaining unique, ultimately end up embracing traditional values, but doing it in their own way. So Brenda winds up with kids, and family has her top priority, but the family she's assembled is unique, I love the scene in the last episode with Olivier, Margaret, Billy and Brenda all gathered around Willa.

I think the ultimate rejection of the idea that being ordinary is so bad comes when Claire and Ted speak in the last episode. Claire pokes fun at Ted for his decidedly unhip musical tastes, to which Ted responds that being hip is a decidedly adolescent concern. He says he'll listen to what he likes and not care what anyone else thinks, as long as it makes him happy. So, Ted, even though he may be listening to what society tells him to, is actually following his own impulses more than Claire who struggles to remain above the mainstream, even though it alienates her.

There's a whole bunch of other parallels, but this is something to think about. Even though I love American Beauty, Six Feet Under is just so much deeper because of the time allowed to develop character. AB does so much in its running time, but Nate alone has richness enough to talk about for pages on end. Then again, American Beauty does have "Fuck me your majesty!" That makes up for something.

Ultimately, Alan Ball's work always touches on really interesting issues that no one else is talking about, issues of purpose in the modern world. I think he's one of the most talented and entertaining writers working today and I can't wait to see what he comes up with next.

Creator Control: The Magnificent Ambersons and Claremont's X-Men

For class yesterday, we watched The Magnificent Ambersons and read a bunch of articles about it. Ambersons was Orson Welles' followup to Citizen Kane, widely considered the greatest film ever made, and to this day, very few films have surpassed its awe inspiring cinematography. So, after dropping this film, Welles moved on to another ambitious project, an adaptation of the novel, The Magnificent Ambersons.

If one were to just watch the film, it would probably seem bizarrely disjointed, with some flashes of greatness, but a general lack of narrative cohesion. As is, the film is something like David Lynch's Dune, a film with a lot of good stuff in it, but one that never quite comes together as a finished product. The way it is now, Ambersons has a lot of bits that don't make much sense, and character arcs that aren't properly laid out, as well as a very cheesy ending.

However, perhaps more interesting than the film itself is the tragedy behind its production. Welles shot and edited together a 130 minute cut of the film then went to Brazil to shoot another project, at which point disasterous preview screenings led executives to recut the film, bringing it down to 88 minutes, and losing roughly 50 minutes of Welles footage in the process. Welles claimed that the film was even better than Kane. Looking at what is intact, I'd doubt that, but I'd imagine it would have been another masterpiece.

At this time there was no market for deleted scenes or director's cuts, so the footage was burned to make more storage space, and with that, the original Magnificent Ambersons was destroyed. This incident is probably the most grievous example of the perils of working within the Hollywood system, without final cut on a project. Welles had no ownership of the project, and because Kane was a box office failure, he had little influence over its direction. There was nothing he could do to protect the film from the editing because the director had no rights under the classical Hollywood system. And this continued for the rest of Welles' career, he was unable to get funding for projects, and had to make to do with lower budgets and inferior facilities.

Film is, unfortunately, a medium where you need a lot of money to realize a vision. Even with the proliferation of really good CG stuff, a certain base amount of money is needed to get a project going. For all its other merits, the way that digital is democratizing the medium is something to be thankful for. David Lynch is now able to make films on his own schedule, with no studio influence. However, working from self financing, he's not able to get the budget needed to do some things. So, he couldn't make a Dune on his own, those sort of ideas still require studio money, and with the money comes the ceeding of control.

I guess what bothers me so much about the Welles thing is that the footage is just gone. Somebody burned it and with that a work of art is out of this world forever. It's such a transient medium, and with one bad choice, an entire historical record is destroyed, never to return again. What was so briefly in this world, seen by only a few people, is now lost in time. In 'film heaven,' this is one movie that I'd like to see.

But beyond this awful situation, what does the Welles situation tell us about the role of creators vis a vis their creations? There's so many potentially great stories that were never told because the money didn't come through, or personnel dropped out. This is particularly true in comics where Alan Moore's Big Numbers only made it to two issues, and will never be finished. I haven't read it, but I've heard about the table size outline of the character arcs and that makes me sad it will never happen. Similarly, the end of Neil Gaiman's run on Miracleman is locked in legal limbo, and will hopefully make it back in a few years when the lawsuit with McFarlane is settled.

But, the greatest victims of corporate interference are people who work within a corporate system, like old Hollywood or big two comics. Chris Claremont created the X-Men. I know Stan Lee technically made the concept, Len Wein technically made the 'all new, all different team,' but that doesn't matter, because Claremont was the one who made the X-Men we know today. He built characters who have generated billions in merchandising revenue and his stories paved the way for the two films, as well as the thousands of comics made involving the characters.

And from 1974 to about 1985, he had total control over the direction of the X-Men's story. At first it was only one book, then he added New Mutants, a book that was still tightly integrated with the narrative of the main book. However, as the book became more popular, he became subject to more editorial pressure, culminating in an expanding world for the characters, one that forced Claremont to adjust his plans. The most notable affront to his work was bringing Jean Grey back, thus nullifying much of the impact of the original Phoenix saga storyline.

In the 80s, Claremont became more subject to the whims of the editors, and he was forced to indulge in a number of crossovers to build sales. Generally speaking, he made these crossovers work creatively, but in this environment, he was losing control of the world that he built, and the fearful executives forced him to move the characters back towards a more identifiable status quo. Hence Magento returns to being a villain, nullifying years of interesting character development.

The greatest affront to Claremont occurred in 1991 when he was thrown off the book he wrote for fifteen years, with no chance to resolve the plot lines, just left with nothing. It's mind boggling to think that this guy who was solely responsible for making the book into the biggest seller in comics could be let go with barely any notice. Ever since he left, the books had a big decline creatively, at least until the Morrison run in 2001.

So, the lesson of Claremont's experience is have control of what you create. He worked for fifteen years, making countless characters, but when he was fired from the book, he was left with nothing. That's likely why he willingly returned ten years later, because the characters still meant something to him. I find it unbelievable that he'd willingly return to the people who had previously screwed him over, but I guess that sometimes money trumps principle. Not everyone can be Alan Moore when it comes to burning bridges.

If Claremont hadn't been fired, I wonder if he would have ever left the book, or if he'd now be entering his thirtieth year on the title. I think he would have found it difficult to shake things up as he did in the 80s, now that the company sees itself more as a media licensing firm than a storytelling entity in and of itself. His success was ultimately Claremont's undoing, it's what turned one cohesive title into fifteen, and saw legitimate characters turn into static archetypes.

Work of Directors: First Impressions

Today I got the box set of the four new DVDs from the Work of Directors series, DVD collections that contain the music videos by a certain director. The original three (Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham) have been some of my most played DVDs, and Gondry's in particular has some awe inspiring videos. And now there's four more. I've only had a chance to look at a couple of videos on each, but here's my thoughts on them.

From what I've seen so far, Mark Romanek seems to be the standout in the collection. He directed the film One Hour Photo, which was good, but his strength seems to be in his ability to change styles to adapt to whoever he's doing the video for. I'd already seen his video Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt, and it's one of the most emotionally affecting videos I've ever seen, very powerful images. For the first time, I watched No Doubt's Hella Good, a song I love, and it has a very cool video. It's washed out black and white with the band going around an abandoned ship. The oversaturation of the image maes for some striking visuals.

Then I checked out Jay-Z's 99 Problems, another video I'd seen before and loved. I love the rhythm in the editing, and the intercutting of still and moving shots, particularly in the breakdown sequence with all the dancers, as well as the Rick Rubin appearances. Next was Fiona Apple's Criminal. I knew the song, but not the video, and it's one of the best I've seen, capturing this porn vibe. Apple was apparently only nineteen when this was shot, and she looks a lot younger, the video plays on the idea of her as a sexually abused child, or at least a girl who's in a relationship with an older man. It's slightly disturbing, but the atmosphere of the video is so unique, I deeply respect it.

Next up was Stephane Sednaoui. I only watched two videos from him. First was U2's Discotheque. I love the song, but I'd never seen the video. U2's videos usually aren't that good, but this one was the exception. It takes place inside a disco ball and has all kinds of crazy imagery, vivid colors and a lot of quick cutting. It's very cool. I also watched The Red Hot Chili Peppers' Give It Away, which was ok, it's got some cool stuff, but was ultimately a bit too long.

I followed this up with one video from Jonathan Glazer. He's only got eight videos on the disk, and I've already seen most of them. I rewatched Radiohead's Karma Police, a very cool video for a great song. The way he builds the car into a living thing is great.

Then I rounded things out with Anton Corbijn. So far, I'm not a big fan of his. The video for U2's One wasn't too interesting, a bunch of black and white photography of the band dressed as women. It didn't capture the scope of the song. Then I watched the video for U2's Electrical Storm, which had the exact same visual style as One. He loves the slightly grainy black and white stuff. It's a great song, and there's some cool stuff in the video, but on the whole it's not that great. After that was Depeche Mode's Enjoy the Silence, which was a pretty cool video, but another one that was a bit too long for what it should have been.

So, on the whole these disks are pretty solid. No one's on the level of Gondry, but there's certainly a lot worth watching.

Mirrormask

Mirrormask was a film I was really interested in seeing because it's made by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. Gaiman wrote the incredible comic series, Sandman, one of my favorite pieces of fiction. It's a landmark work in the history of comics and is certainly the best comic ever made that's not by someone named Moore or Morrison. McKean did the covers for Sandman and also has done some incredible comics art himself, including the great book Cages.

The film is very similar to their previous works, but the change of medium makes this forgivable. It's often difficult for artists to make the transition to directing film. If you've got a crew, it's pretty easy to shoot a film, but a lot of people moving to film from other mediums end up shooting stuff like Sin City, very static, sticking closely to storyboards and not really using what's uniquely cinematic. It's difficult to say how much input Frank Miller had into the direction of Sin City, but the film adds very little that wasn't already in the comic, so even though I enjoyed the film, I didn't feel like there was a particular reason to make it, other than to just get the stories out to more people.

McKean does not direct like Miller did, the film he makes has a lot of moments that are uniquely cinematic, and he created a really interesting cinematic world and style. The opening sequence is really well put together. I loved the cutting and visual saturation of everything. You were drenched in visual excess and that was very cool to experience. I liked the subtle use of split screen when Helena was speaking with her mother. And even though I don't generally like circus stuff, this was really interesting to watch. The filmmaking makes you experience the feeling of the circus more than just sticking the camera in one place and letting the people perform would.

This movie falls firmly into what I call the '80s Fantasy' genre, which consists of a teen protagonist who lives a boring life expressing a desire for something different, at which point they're taken into a a fantasy realm, where they have a whole bunch of adventures and return home with a new appreciation for their everyday life. In making this film, Gaiman and McKean set out to create a Labyrinth for the 21st century, and the influence is obvious, right from the sock puppet business at the beginning. The entire narrative structure is the same as Labyrinth.

The surprising thing about this film was how compelling the real world sequences were. Normally the filmmakers are trying to get into the fantasy as quickly as possible, but there was a lot of really interesting emotional stuff going on here. I actually wouldn't have minded if the entire film focused on the real world problems because McKean was able to shoot those segments in a really interesting way. I loved the setting outside the apartment, with the vast landscape off in the distance. Emotionally, these scenes were very strong and I really felt for Helena, and the mix of guilt and fear she carries.

Even though I love Gaiman's writing, he's got a lot of things that bother me that constantly pop up in his work. His strongest stories are the ones that are dark and serious, when he does whimsical stuff, the work frequently seems like it thinks it's more clever than it actually is, and he frequently gets in the habit of throwing out a bunch of wacky concepts rather than focusing on the emotional development of the characters. Most of Sandman stayed in a dark, serious place, meaning that the pieces that were comedy, like Delerium, worked well because they were the exception. When it's all this goofy comedy, it just doesn't work.

Mirrormask has a plot that's very similar to Coraline, his young adult novel about a girl who wanders into an alternate dimension. Both works are good, but the restrictions of a young target audience seem to lead to the works holding something back. Mirrormask has a lot really dark, great stuff, but isn't there consistently enough to be a truly great film.

I wasn't a fan of the sock puppet thing at the opening, that seemed like something that had been done too much, Labyrinth pulled off something similar, but twenty years have passed, and it's not fresh any more. However, after that, there's very little of the bad Gaiman tics. The opening chunk of the film is some of his most grounded, realistic writing and it's emotionally affecting.

For me, the beginning and ending of the film are great, it just suffers a lot in the middle. My biggest problem with most films in the '80s Fantasy' genre is the fact that there's not quite enough story to make a film, so they always rely on having the main character running into some wacky stuff along the way, some hilarious episodes that will show off the visual skill of the filmmakers. There's always that point where the film's sort of adrift, where the person's in this new world, but isn't sure what to do and just wanders around meeting strange things. I enjoy non-narrative filmmaking, but the problem is the things the filmmakers come up with usually aren't clever or entertaining enough to justify their screentime.

And sadly that's the case here. The first time the Sphinxes appear, they're very cool, and the book stuff is pure Gaiman, but by the time they get to the Sphinx with the riddles, I just wasn't dazzled by this stuff anymore. The film was progressing forward slowly without any emotional development for Helena.

Also, this was the only point in the film where I felt the presence of the green screen. In later scenes, the effects were completely seamless, but when the story was weak, I was taken out of the world. However, throughout the film, the acting is top notch, particularly from Stephanie Leonidas. It can't have been easy acting in a greenscreen world, but she pulled it off in a really top notch performance.

I will say that even though I thought the exploring the world section hurt the film, it was beautiful and very cool to see the McKean style in a film. I liked the fact that all the masks made the characters look like McKean drawings come to life, and on the whole, the effects were seamless. It's astonishing that they pulled this off with a 4 million dollar budget.

So, the film was losing me, but once Helena gets captured by the queen, it all picks up and up until the end is really great. I loved the 'Close to You' sequence, the combination of music and visual was perfect, making a really surreal moment. I loved the design on the jack in the box things. Also, I really liked Helena's goth fabulous wardrobe at the end, I'm sure a lot of Gaiman's fans who see this movie will be appropriating the style, that is if they don't already have lace up leather gloves.

As the film ends, it implies that the entire middle section is a dream, and if you view it that way, the conflict at the end, between the two Helenas, is essentially Helena confronting her guilt over what she said to her mother. Earlier, she said that she wanted to live a normal life and when Anti-Helena steals her life, she sees what that normal life would consist of. As a circus performer, they all hold on to something essentially childlike, a view of the world as full of wonder, something that's reflected in her drawings. However, Anti-Helena tears the drawings down and rather than existing in the realm of imagination, she lives on a purely physical. She smokes, she 'snogs' with boys and dresses in a cliched rebel teen style.

So when she looks through the windows she sees her wish fulfilled, and realizes that it's not what she reallly wants. This life repulses her and makes her appreciative of what she does have. So, at the end she has to consciously reject this lifestyle, and reclaim the life she did have, except now she knows that this is actuallly what she wants. She doesn't need to grow up so fast.

I'm a little hazy on what happens at the end to allow Helena to reclaim her life, but I figure that's the dream breaking down, so it doesn't have to make that much sense. Basically, the world is subject to Helena's will, and when she demands her life back, she gets it. And at the end, she's backk at the circus, only happy now instead of unappreciative.

The ending of the film raises some issues. Is it right for Helena to shy away from the adult world, most notably her quite repulsed reaction to seeing herself 'snogging'? I take it to be more that Helena is rejecting this accelerated development. Rather than having meaningless physical relations, she would want a relationship that goes deeper and fires her imagination. The most troubling thing for her is the destruction of her art, and by extension of the person that she is. She really likes the life she has, and the guilt she has over what she told her mother plagues her throughout the film.

The other thing that was great throughout the movie was the music. Reading Cages, you could tell that McKean was a big fan of jazz, and this film has a great score that's a combination of jazz and electronica. I love the trumpets and clarinets, it really helps to build the mood of the film, and is totally integrated into the storytelling. It's one of the most unique film scores I've ever heard, and it worked perfectly here, with the 'Close to You' scene as a highlight.

So, the film concluded on a real high note, and was generally top notch. Gaiman and McKean certainly made no concessions to the studio, this is a very pure hit of their vision. The problem with it lies in the second act, which makes the film good, instead of great. Of course, on a second viewing, maybe I'll appreciate it more, but we'll have to wait on that. On the whole though, they were completely successful in making a 'Labyrinth for the 21st century,' and I would argue this film actually surpasses Labyrinth, though I do miss the Bowie presence. However, in most other respects this film surpasses it, and I think it's that rare film where the cliche is actually true, it's got something for the whole family to enjoy.

U2 Live @ MSG

Yesterday I saw U2 live at Madison Square Garden. I've been a fan of the band for a while, but was never able to see them live, and considering their reputation as one of the best live acts around, I was very excited to get to see them. It took me five hours to make it from Middletown to Madison Square Garden, starting with an hour long bus delay, an hour wait for the train at New Haven and a trip along the entire New Haven line. Anyway, I got there about five minutes before U2 went on, so it was perfect timing, though I'd have preferred to have gotten there a bit earlier, so I wouldn't have to hurry so much.

This was the first concert I've been to where I wasn't in the GA section, and that was a change. I'm used to being in the mess of people, whereas here I was in a seat, near people, but not really caught up in that group mentality. I got the cheapest tickets (still rather expensive at $55), so my seats weren't the best. I was pretty close to the action, only slightly off the floor and not that far back, but I was behind the stage. So, I saw the backs of everyone as they performed, which was a bit odd. It put me at a distance from things.

But that doesn't mean that the show wasn't great. The level of charisma that they had far surpasses any other band I've seen live, there was such energy and assuredness in the way they played. The songs were all tight, but with enough variation to make the live show unique from the recorded version.

The way they had the stage set up worked great. It's a big circle, with the stage at once end, and a whole bunch of people in the middle, and the band members would walk around the circle at points during the show. The circle had all kinds of lights on it and they did some very cool effects throughout, with the lights setting a different mood for each song. They had a bunch of spotlights right in front of where I was, and it was interesting to see that they had a whole team of people sitting on these lighting structures suspended from the roof, operating the spotlights. That's got to be an annoying job, not one where you'd want a fear of heights.

Music wise, I was a bit disappointed in the song selection. There are songs that are essential to play, like Pride Where the Streets Have No Name, and songs from the new album they're definitely going to play, which leaves only a few spots for some of the less popular stuff. So, most of the variant songs here were from their early albums, with Electric Co. and Gloria, songs that aren't bad, but I'm not that big a fan of. There was only one song from Achtung Baby, one from Zooropa and none from Pop.

Even though the crowd was really into it throughout, this was clearly a group that knew the hits more than a thorough knowledge of the entire back catalog. When they went to a less popular song, like Miss Sarajevo or a lot of the stuff off the new album, the crowd just wasn't that into it, whereas on Sunday, Bloody Sunday or I Still Haven't Found what I'm Looking For, you could barely hear Bono because the crowd was so loud. On 'Still,' he stopped singing and the crowd did an entire verse on their own, which was very cool to hear. So, even though I'm not as a big a fan of those songs, hearing the crowd reaction to them, it's clear why they need to be played at the show. I think the new songs are actually better than most of the classics, but the crowd really wasn't giving much on them, or at least that's what it was in the area I was at. The crowd in the ellipse seemed to be a lot more into every song.

I was really impressed with the musical skill throughout. The guitar lines were great and there were a bunch of cool things, like having a seperate drum on 'Love And Peace Or Else,' that was probably the best song they did. That was another one that used the circle well.

Most of the songs in the encores were better than the stuff in the actual show. First Time was great, and the acoustic version of 'Stuck in a Moment' was even better than the album version, particularly when the bass and drum came in after nearly two songs dormant. And the combination of Yahweh and an amped up version of Vertigo to end the show was great.

On the whole, it's an astonishing thing to watch 19,000 people completely get caught up in this show, and the performance was that good. Seeing U2 from inside the circle would probably be the best show in the world, and even from behind the stage it was phenomenal. I'm thinking about trying to get tickets to their November show because I really want to see them again.

Top 10 U2 Songs

Tomorrow I'll be seeing U2 live. I've heard they're one of the best live acts out there today, so I'm psyched. To commemorate the occasion, here's a list of my top 10 U2 songs, if you've only heard their big hits, check out some of the more obscure tracks here, because they're brilliant.


#10. Until the End of the World (Achtung Baby) - One of U2's trademarks is the delay guitar and this song features one of their best riffs, essentially functioning as the song's chorus. After the lyrics about "the end of the world," there's a great instrumental part, with some non-lyric vocals. The final verse ("In my dreams I was drowning in sorrows...") is the highlight here. It's a great example of building a song primarily around an excellent guitar riff.

#9. Miss Sarajevo (Passengers) - This is a song off the album U2 did with Brian Eno, mostly ambient stuff that's ok, but this track is exceptional. The lyrics are great, particularly the repetition with the "There is a time for..." bits. The high point is the Pavarotti cameo, which takes the song beyond just a slow ballad and into the stratosphere.

#8. Discotheque (Pop) - This was the first single off the much maligned Pop album, an album that I'd rank among U2's best, and the opening track is the high point. This is a great example of a rock song built around dance rhythms, that uses a lot of repeitition within a few distinct sections. There's the verses, "You can...," the "Know you're chewing bubble gum" part, the chorus ("boom Discotheque") and finally the B section ("Looking for the man..."). All the sections are strong individually, but it's the combination and variation that makes it work. It's a song with a lot of hard edge, but with a pop structure. My favorite bit is the "Boom cha cha boom Discotheque" part.

#7. City of Blinding Lights (How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb) - When I first saw the track list for the new album, this one sounded instantly promising. I always love titles that involve light, and this sounded like it would be a huge, anthemic track, and upon listening, it was. I think this does everything that 'When the Streets Have No Name' does well and then goes beyond it by combining the anthemtic style of 80s U2 with the experimentation of 90s U2. I love the buildup in the first part of the song up to "I'm getting ready to leave the ground," which leads to a great instrumental section and the soaring chorus. The way the words are spaced out on "Oh you look so beautiful tonight," is another high point.

#6. One (Achtung Baby) - This song was huge for a reason, it's a great low key, yet driving track. This is probably Bono's best vocal, or at least most emotional vocal, on any U2 song, and the guitar line adds a lot. And in the interaction between the two you get magic, as in the segue from "Carry each other...one" into a great guitar part. That's consistently the most interesting thing in U2's music, the way the guitar and vocal compliment each other, such that each song seems like a duet. The crescendo at the end from "all you got is hurt" to the chorus stands out as well.

#5. Stay (Zooropa) - This is another song in the lo-fi lounge mode of One, but Stay goes even more loungetastic in its stylings. The interaction between vocal and guitar here is phenomenal, most notably in the chorus, the way "Then the night would give you up..." segues into a beautiful arching guitar line. I also love the way the verse segues into the chorus, the music building to the point that it's inevitable for something interesting to happen. The second chorus is the high point here, and it all dissipates in the comforting final verse. So the song takes you on a journey from this dark night to a bright morning.

#4. Walk On (All that You Can't Leave Behind) - This song has so many things I love about it. The slow opening, backed by some electronic sounds makes the bigger verse rewarding, and the chorus here is the best of U2's anthemic songs. But the best part is the ending with its repeated line of "All that..." phrases. I always love the repeating of stuff like that, such as on Pink Floyd's "Eclipse," and it works wonderfully here, particularly with the vocal interjections over the repeated phrases.

#3. Ultraviolet (Achtung Baby) - I'm mystified that this song was never released as a single because it's incredibly catchy and captures everything that the best U2 songs have. The guitar line is a phenomenal example of delay work, nicely dropping in after the a capella opening. I love the chorus here, with the repetition of "Baby, baby, baby light my way." It's such an exhilirating song, and the start of the phenomenal three song run that ends Achtung Baby.

2. Acrobat/Love is Blindness (Achtung Baby) - I know two songs sort of breaks the rule, but I see these as a suite since they flow into each other so well. This follows Ultraviolet on the album and it's the only U2 album that closes on a high note. They usually front stack their records, so the end just sort of fades out. However, here it ends on a great dark progression. I love the way Acrobat's opening verse builds within itself, and following it, the way the instruments echo "Don't let the bastards grind you down," with the keyboard progression repeating those notes. Also, the lyrics in this song are phenomenal. There's a desperation in the delivery that really sells it, and is complimented nicely by the hard edged guitar which cuts into the song following the choruses. Love is Blindness follows with more darkness, this time a low key, electronic track, and fades out on an eerie instrumental bit. The two of them together are beautifully dark and a great end to U2's best album.

1. Lemon (Zooropa) - This is a crazy song, another one built out of disparate parts. There's the verses ("She wore lemon..."), the "I feel like I'm slowly..." part, " the chorus ("Midnight is where the day begins...") and the b section with "Man paints a picture..." I love each of these individual parts and together they form the best song U2 ever recorded. The vocal goes to so many different places, from the soaring "Midnight" to the detached, almost monotone "Man makes a picture..." and it's all backed by similarly varying instruments. My favorite instrumental part is what's going on behind the "Midnight..." part. Listening to the song as a whole it's like nothing else I've ever heard, the combination of production and performance skill is unparalleled and the song itself cobbles together a bunch of disparate pieces into a great cohesive work. This is one you really have to hear for yourself to understand.

Well that's the top ten. It's exclusively stuff from U2 Phase 2 and U2 Phase 3. I don't dislike their early work, but there was a massive jump with Achtung Baby, and the stuff from then on eclipses what came before. Even though Achtung and Zooropa are my two favorite albums, I have liked the things they've done recently, when they've promoted a retreat from the experimental period. I think the past two albums have fused what worked about early U2 with what worked about experimental U2 and that's made them successful again. I would love to see more stuff like Zooropa, but it just doesn't seem to be happening, so I'll enjoy the top notch stuff they did on the most recent album.

Judging from the setlists online, there seems to be a fairly even spread through the eras. There's not much Zooropa or Pop, but there is a lot of Achtung, and Miss Sarajevo, which should be great. And perhaps they'll mix things up seeing as how this is their fifth New York show in a week.

Ghost World

Yesterday I watched the film Ghost World for the first time in about two a half years. I first saw the film in 2001. I loved it then and I still love it now, though it was a bit odd watching the film and being older than the characters in it. However, the thing that separates Ghost World from other 'teen movies' is the fact that here the characters just happen to be teenagers, but their concerns are universal. This is a film I always really relate to, it's quietly brilliant.

Ghost World is one of my top 20 films of all time, and the only film comprable to it within the twenty is Chasing Amy. Both are films that on the surface seem rather disposable, good, but not spectacular, either in terms of scope or filmmaking technique. While I think Ghost World is better shot than Chasing Amy, both films are extremely minimalist, relying almost exclusively on dialogue to forward the plot. Both films are about shifting relationships, the hazy line between friendship and romantic relationships, and the complications that emerge between friends. Even though neither one seems particularly ambitious in terms of plot, the character interactions are apocalyptic for those involved, and each film follows the total destruction of the status quo over the course of the film. And the other big similarity is the way both films seamlessly navigate between some of the funniest dialogue ever captured in film and utterly devestating emotional drama.

The sharpest writing in Ghost World comes in the early going as we get to know Enid and Rebecca. I love the opening sequence, both for the great music and visuals, and for what it says about our main character. Right from the beginning it sets Enid as someone who's so hip and cool she's spending her time watching 60s Indian movies. She places herself above the mainstream, and as we soon find out, clearly looks down on everything that mainstream culture stands for, something brilliantly articulated in her apalled reaction to the graduation speeches. And yet, even as she hates it, she wouldn't want it any other way, because her identity is composed as a reaction to the blandness of mainstream culture.

The party scene brilliantly captures the feeling of leaving high school, in that it's simultaneously something you've been waiting for forever, a great event, and a bit sad because it means you'll never again see all the people who were just there. What once was a group now splits into disparate individuals, all going on their own path. I love when Melora says they should get together over the summer and Enid says "That'll happen," knowing that that's something people say but don't really mean.

As the film moves along, we start to see conflict emerge between Rebecca and Enid. Recognizing that high school is over and it's time to start growing up, Rebecca makes plans to move towards mainstream society. In high school it's ok to be the crazy girl who hates everything, but when it's time, she recognizes that it's time to stop looking down at the people who work at the coffee shop and instead become one. This is further evident in the scene where she goes shopping with Enid and is picking out bland looking plasticware, much to the offense of Enid. Rebecca is less concerned with being hip than with ensuring that she's successful on her own.

However, Enid is much too self conscious to allow her to become so shamelessly mainstream. After Rebecca suggests that they should dress like yuppies in order to get an apartment, she goes out and dyes her hair green, totally rejecting the safe, mainstream image that Rebecca wanted to project. This probably stems from her jealousy of boys' attraction to Rebecca's blonde haired, blue eyed beauty, leaving her uncomfortably on the fringe. I think her fear is that Rebecca could leave her behind and live a normal life, as if the persona she had was just a construct, and the text would support that idea. At the beginning of the film, Rebecca's eager to follow the 'satanists,' but at the end she's most excited about a fold out ironing board, and this leaves Enid alone. She'd been able to be a defiant outsider because she had someone to support her, but when she's alone, her fears about being alone come to the surface.

This issue also comes up in her interaction with Seymour, most notably in the bar scene. In Seymour, she saw someone she could relate to. He's totally outside mainstream societal norms, and his obsession with kitsch objects fits her perfectly. Also, he's someone who needs her more than she needs him. She takes on the mission of finding him a date, but when she actually succeeds in putting him together with a woman in the bar, she finds herself uncomfortably alone, staring at people who are having a much better time than her.

The scene is genius in the way it conveys her simultaneous disdain for and jealousy of mainstream culture. She watches these people drinking beer and playing pool and hates them, yet they're having so much more fun than her, and they're connecting with others. She is too self conscious to allow herself the pleasures that other people take. She couldn't enjoy something so mainstream because to do so would be to lose some of that which makes her unique. She would rather confront societal expectations, as with the punk apparel, than conform to them, and that makes it impossible for her to fit in in that environment. She seems completely out of place, with her 50s style glasses, pale skin and dark hair, next to the tan, blonde people who populate the bar. This same dichotomy can be seen in the graduation party scene, when she looks at a jock type popular couple together, mocking them, but at the same time standing alone.

The film seems to set up blonde women as representative of mainstream society, with Enid as the deviation from that. Dana lures Seymour away from his unique lifestyle, and towards an existence that is more acceptably mainstream. He's someone who's so lonely, and has such a low opinion of himself, that he's willing to go along with this relationship, even though he has nothing in common with Dana. It's only when Enid expresses a sexual interest in him that he's able to end it with Dana. If she hadn't, it's unlikely that he would find the courage to reject her.

The film takes a mocking and elitist tone, clearly looking down on a lot of people, but at the same time, it recognizes that that stance is flawed. Enid finds herself alone at the end of the film because she has alienated everyone around her, and ruined the relationship she had with Seymour by making him think she would give him something she never could. She so strongly values her individuality that she's unable to compromise, and that puts her at odds with the world at large.

In the end, she sees Seymour as who she might be in thirty years, working a boring office job at Computer Station, collecting strange stuff, but ultimately disconnected from the world, unable to reconcile her disdain for the general populace with her strong desire to connect with other people. And that's the reason that she walks away from it all. In another place, she could get a fresh start and redefine herself, freed from the shackles of the identity she'd created. I don't think it would be a total redefinition, but it would be a chance to start relationships anew, and it's her willingness to leave the prescribed path and try something different that makes her so unique. Everyone else is pushing her towards college and a job, thinking of that as the only way. Instead, she chooses something different, and boards the bus, unsure of where she's going, but that doesn't matter, because all she wants is something different.

Watching the film this time it reminded me a lot of Six Feet Under. There's the obvious Thora Birch->American Beauty->Alan Ball connection, but there's also strong similarities between Enid and Claire and Brenda. It's the same defiance of mainstream norms and fear of being a cliche, subtly navigating the line between sincere and ironic. Enid's ironic commentary on 70s punk is quite similar to Claire dying her hair blue as an ironic commentary on blue hair. Plus, their pretentious art school misadventures are not far removed.

I've said it before in talking about Six Feet Under, but I think the navigation between original and cliche, sincere and ironic, mainstream and subcultural is full of dramatic potential. These are conflicts that don't lend themselves to easy resolutions, but can produce challenging stories.

Ghost World is one of the funniest movies ever made and also incredibly sad. I don't usually enjoy a film that's just funny, and that's because stuff like The Office and this film showed me how comedy can be used as a way to open deeper wounds and raise relevant issues about the direction of a person's life. This is a film I loved when I first saw it and watching it today, it's if anything, even more relevant.

X-Men 177-194

The journey through X-Men continues, and I've now read 100 issues Claremont's run on the book. 100 issues is a huge accomplishment, the only run on a book I know of that's longer than Claremont's on X-Men is Dave Sim on Cerebus, with his thirty year 300 issue journey. And at 100 issues, Claremont is still going strong, though in these issues, some of the problems that would plague the book down the line begin to emerge.

The first storyline in this chunk of the book concerns the X-Men's fight with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. This is rather unremarkable until the issue that closes the storyline, 179, where Kitty is forced to marry Caliban, the Morlock. It's a bizarre setup, perhaps best exemplified by the cover:



But the story itself is pretty sweet, as Kitty chooses to honor the bargain she made to save the X-Men back in the first Morlocks storyline, and Caliban recognizes that Kitty doesn't belong here and lets her go.

On the whole, this set of issues isn't as strong as the Paul Smith era. The characters are always split apart, and we only get a few moments of strong character development. Kitty and Wolverine barely appear, and only Storm has major changes.

A large part of this problem is the fact that a lot of storytelling is happening in other books, I feel like I'm missing a lot by not reading New Mutants, and I'd really like to see what happened in the Wolverine/Kitty Pryde miniseries. If this were the 80s, I'd definitely be picking up all these books, because Claremont seems to have done a great job of creating a coherent universe. So, when Wolverine appears in only one book a month, not seven, but that means that we miss out on what he's up to in this volume. Same thing with Kitty, she spends a bunch of time away, and that's tough because she's probably my favorite character at this point in the run. I wouldn't say this is a flaw in Claremont's writing, I know if I was reading both books I'd love the intertitle continuity, but reading in this format, it's difficult. I really wish they'd put out an Essential New Mutants book as companion to this.

This volume is interesting because it's the first time the idea of being "hated and feared" is really beocming essential to the story. There'd always been some anti-mutant prejudice in the title, but it's becoming much more important now, and nearly every issue has a scene with some government types talking about how something needs to be done about the mutant problem. It's really interesting stuff to read, that's the strength of the book, the conflict between the old and new.

However, even as these storylines work, the book is dragged down by a series of awful storylines. The stuff with the wraiths drags on for a whole bunch of issues and leads nowhere. But the worst offender is Kulan Gath, a three issue storyline that quite literally goes nowhere, because at the end it's wiped out of the time line. It's an apallingly bad storyline, with awful mystical stuff and the main focus is on the Avengers and New Mutants, not even the X-Men.

The storyline also sees the female characters frequently dressed up in lingerie and thigh high boots. I've got the feeling that Mrs. Claremont ends up wearing this stuff every once in a while because it turns in his work so much, it's not just coincidence. It's required wear for the Hellfire Club, and Rachel, Storm, Callisto, Selene and even Kitty end up wearing some variation of the outfit. This cover basically sums it up:



I bet there were a lot of awkward moments when kids tried to get their parents to buy them that comic. A lot of the time this stuff is probably subconscious, but it's clearly a motif in Claremont's work.

Anyway, while this stuff was rather crap, we do get some great material when Storm loses her powers. Over the course of thirty issues or so, Storm has gone through massive changes, first changing her appearance and when she loses her powers, it forces her to struggle to redefine herself outside of her role as an X-Man. This culminates in the brilliant issue Lifedeath, which consists almost entirely of one night's interaction between Storm and Forge, folllowing them as they grow closer together and then ultimate are torn apart. It's a brilliant issue, the best by far in this chunk of the series. There's very strong emotional tension and it's devestating when Storm rejects Forge. We want them to get together, and it's not really anyone's fault when they're torn apart.

Forge is someone I'd seen a bit of in the TV series, but never in the comics, and he's a compelling character in his appearance here. He fits in perfectly with the anti-mutant sentiment in the government, working as someone torn between the security of his work and the moral obligation to do what's right.

The other major new character in this stretch of the book is Rachel Summers. I think bringing her in was a mistake. Clearly she's designed to replace Jean Grey, but I don't think Jean needed any replacing, especially without Cyclops around. She's got some interesting issues as a result of her time in the Days of Future Past world, but she just makes things too complex, and starts the books on the path to numerous alternate future characters that would lead them away from the more grounded state of the Paul Smith era. Plus, she's not that interesting.

The thing I did really like seeing was Xavier in charge of the team on field missions. It's a great change in the status quo and puts everyone else in an uncomfortable position. Xavier at this point is one of the most interesting characters in the book, and I'm annoyed that he's spending so much of his time off in New Mutants.

So, these issues are still good, and there's a lot of interesting stuff going on, but the book's tight focus is starting to slip and the numerous mysitcal storylines take the focus away from the character interaction that's at the center of the book.