Boogie Nights

So, counting down my top 50 movies all time we come to 49, Boogie Nights. Now, this movie has an interesting reputation, due to its subject matter, the porn industry. This is a movie about the porn industry, but it's definitely not a porn itself, it's not even really about the porn industry, it's about a group of people who become a family for each other, and what happens to them. This movie is about porn in the same way that The Sopranos is about the mafia, yes, it's set in that world, but what makes it interesting is how their unique circumstances affect the characters. You're not watching to see Tony kill people, or to see Dirk filming, you're watching for the interactions between characters.

Boogie Nights has been compared to Goodfellas a lot, and I can see some similarities, but what Boogie Nights does that Goodfellas doesn't is create very strong characters. Paul Thomas Anderson is clearly interested in the porn industry itself, but he's more interested in creating characters. As he did in the brilliant Magnolia, this is a film that seems to be structured around character decisions rather than an artificially imposed plot. The best movies move along organically, with events occurring because of logical choices that the characters make. That's how this movie works. It's about a bunch of people, and they're all pretty interesting.

The movie feels very epic. It spans six years or so, and a ton of stuff happens. In some ways, it's the archetypal rise and fall story, but there's enough character stuff happening on the peripherary that it never feels cliche. I love movies with a lot of characters, and this movie has roughly twelve major characters. PTA's greatest talent is his ability to manage massive casts, and while this movie has a clear main character, it's still an ensemble piece, and everyone gets some interesting material to work with.

What makes the movie special is really in the way PTA makes it. The long shot that opens the movie is absolutely phenomenal, echoing and even surpassing A Touch of Evil in its scope. Another amazing shot is in the pool scene, when the camera does a five minute or so tracking shot, then follows a diver into the pool without a cut, goes underwater, then comes back up. Awe inspiring.

Anderson's use of music is similarly impressive. He breaks out a lot of the best songs of the 70s and fits them organically into the film. He does a bunch of montages, but they actually move the story forward, and are hugely entertaining. The "Jesse's Girl" scene with Alfred Molina is just one amazing use of music.

Pretty much everything clicks here, and this movie serves as a good warm up for PTA's Magnolia. It's the film that gave us Chest Rockwell, that should count for something.

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Lovage: Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By

Listening to the new Handsome Boy Modeling School album has prompted me to go back and listen to some of Dan the Automator's previous work, including his masterpiece, Lovage aka Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By. Now, the title is a bit doofy, and I was attracted to the album expecting something that'd be comedic. However, after listening to the album I found that it was hilarious at times, but it's actually a very dark, moody album, far removed from comedy. The album has a very specific atmosphere. It feels like it should be sung in a smoky lounge, with some neon lights, late at night.

The album has vocals by Mike Patton and Jennifer Charles, and the way they sing together is unlike anything I've heard before. It feels very intimate, particularly on the album's best tracks Book of the Month and Sex (I'm A). This is a very different sort of vocal styling from what Patton uses with Fantomas or Faith No More, and it's much more interesting.

The production just owns. Automator uses strings, horns and vocal samples to create a canvas of beats. Some of the best moments are the intro to 'To Catch a Thief' and the horn samples of 'Stroker Ace.' Another highlight of the album, which now includes basically everything about it, are the lyrics, which are both hilarious and so perfectly delivered. 'Book of Month' is a back and forth of metaphors between Patton and Charles, including classic lyrics like "You are the griddle, I am the meat" and my personal favorite lyric, in which Charles talks to Patton about her rotting body, saying "Jealous of the flies and the worms inside me"

The album is completely unique. It's lounge, but also trip hop. Just look at the cover art, clearly this is an awesome album.

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Was the Past Really Better? Part II

First, one thing about memory: everythings gets better as you become more distant from it. The bad things start to slip away, and you only remember the good things. That's why, even though I wasn't so much a fan of a lot of high school, I look back on it fondly now. We have a tendency to filter out the negative things. That's not to say that high school was bad, it's just that you tend to focus on the good things, and the boring moments slip off somewhere into the void of lost memories.

The same thing can happen with movies. If you haven't seen a movie for a while, you can build it up in your own mind, talking it up, remembering the great moments, and then when you go see it again, it's not as good as you remember it. Of course, you can be surprised by how good something is if you haven't seen it for awhile, but I'd say a slight disappointment occurs more often. Like, I saw Gladiator on Friday. Now, I hadn't seen it since 2000, and I remember it being a really great movie. However, watching it again, I was struck by how weak the dialogue was, to the point of really hurting the movie. And, the action scenes weren't as impressive either. I'm not really sure how that ended up winning the Oscar for best picture.

Anyway, you always hear people saying music wasn't as good as it used to be. Older people are more likely to say it's not as good as the 60s or 70s, sometimes you'll hear people my age talking about how the 90s were better. I'm going to go out on a limb here and concede that the popular music the 60s and 70s was better than what is popular now. Maybe it's just that I don't like most R 'n B type ballad songs that are so popular, nor do I like the noise-hard rock of bands like Korn, or even the angry rock of someone like Linkin Park. There are still some great popular songs, 'Hey Ya' was one of the absolute best pop songs of all time. However, I feel like in the 60s, bands that were breaking new ground were what was popular. That The Beatles, the most popular band in the world at the time, could put out an album as diverse and bizarre as The White Album, astonishes me. Each of their album somehow maintains a pop sound, while still goin really crazy with sonic experimentation. And it's not just The Beatles, all sorts of meaningful artists were putting out great songs that were also popular, and it was at this time that the full album length work came into vogue.

Today, music has changed a lot. It's not that it's gotten worse, it's just that the most popular bands are usually far from the best bands. The best thing about music today, as compared to the 60s, is the diversity of material available. Back then, it was mostly rock and jazz, now rock, trip hop, rap, etc. There's such a variety of stuff, and most notably, a new type of music, made by bands like Air and Massive Attack. These bands have no real stylistic equivalents in the 60s era, they're redefining music, and just because they're not popular, it doesn't mean there's not quality albums being put out. Almost all the stuff I listen to pre 1990 is rock, but I've got a huge variety of genres when it comes to recent stuff. You may have to look a little harder, but amazing albums are still being made. The Polyphonic Spree is one of my favorite bands of all time, and they didn't come about until a couple of years ago. When you look back, the crap songs slip away, and the best remains. That makes people inherently biased towards the past.

While I wouldn't say music is in a Golden Age today, comics definitely are, or if not now, have just finished one. The 1990s was the decade when the comic book became the graphic novel, and creators started to publish incredible finite series. Works like Sandman, Preacher, Transmetropolitan and of course, The Invisibles, told some of the biggest stories ever told in any medium, and more so than even Alan Moore's 80s work constitute a bibliography that's the best in comics history. People talk about the 60s as the best era of comics, they had nothing comprable to what went on recently. With the end of Transmetropolitan, an era ended as well in a lot of ways, but I think it's more that we're in an era when a lot of new talent is emerging. This is the equivalent of the late 80s, when people like Ennis, Ellis and Morrison were proving themselves on corporate titles before starting their magnum opi. Comics have never been better than in recent years.

Film is also in a great era of films, but it's more comprable to what I was talking about in music. In the 80s, Spielberg and Lucas almost singlehandedly invented the great blockbuster. Stuff like Star Wars and Indiana Jones set a standard in terms of quality works with blockbuster appeal. Lately, I'll admit most blockbuster movies have been pretty awful, but recently, we've seen a ton of new directors coming up and producing amazing works. In the last 10 years, we've seen the emergence of PT Anderson, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Darren Aronofsky and a lot of other great directors. While there may not be as many good blockbusters, 2004 has produced some of my favorite movies of all time. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kill Bill II, Garden State, Before Sunset and Dogville were all brilliant movies, the sort of timeless works of art that will become immortal.

So, maybe popular culture is going down hill, but as long as great works are being produced, it doesn't really matter what's popular. In both comics and film, auteurs have been getting more respect, and that's a great thing. And the thing is, even if you think pop culture is crap today, we've got a backlog of thousands of movies and albums, so whatever era's to your fancy, you can enjoy as you please.

Oh, and I forgot to mention TV. Other than Twin Peaks, basically all the series I really loved were made within the last 10 years, most of them even more recently. Buffy, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Office, Spaced. The auteur driven finite TV series has emerged, just like it did in comics, and this is without a doubt, the golden age of television.

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Was the Past Really Better? Part I

Well, the short answer is no, but that doesn't explain why, and the real answer to every question that we face in life is not in the answer itself, but in why what the answer is, is in fact that answer. A bit complex, that. Even I'm not really sure what I was talking about.

Anyway, so much of what people talk about seems to be just about how good things in the past were, and this idea really bothers me. I think there's two levels of past fetishization. One is the idea that things really were better then. Like, in the 60s, music meant something, and movies were the work of auteurs, not just the tripe you see now. People will talk about Hollywood's Golden Age, or comics' silver age, and really feel that the works being done back then were better. You see it in videogames too. So many classic game compilations have come out and been embraced because people are enamored with the idea that older games were better.

I'll admit that I subscribe to this school sometimes. I would have loved to have been around when The Beatles set the tone of popular music, rather than generic hip hop song of the month, and I am sort of jealous of that era. I prefer the popular music of then to the popular music of now. Similarly, I will often wax poetic about the days of the 2D game, back when things were simpler. I'd much rather play Final Fantasy III than Final Fantasy VII, but I don't think that's just a nostalgia thing, it's more about the fact that when FFVII was made, 3D games were in their infancy.

But, I digress. There's this one strain of thought that things in the past actually were better. However, recently, another strain of thought has come up. This is one that holds that old things were better, but takes a sort of ironic approach. This is the school of thought that gives us people still constantly talking about shit like Saved by the Bell. This was an awful show, as was Full House or any number of other series people will discuss, but they still watch them, in a sort of semi-ironic way, at once reveling in the badness and actually enjoying the show, becuase they feel so above it. TV is probably where this is most prominent, people who you could never get to watch an episode of Twin Peaks or The Sopranos, and say that 144 episodes of Buffy is too big a commitment, will gladly spend hours watchin really awful sitcoms, and go on to claim that TV today is going downhill.

You see this a lot in comics too. People will either say that back in the 60s, books were so much more imaginative and fresh, or that the 80s were the Golden Age and stuff today isn't as good. Alan Moore's Supreme series is all about revisiting 60s comics, and showing love to them. Thing is, these comics weren't really that good, it's just nostalgia. That's not to say that Supreme is bad, it's a really great book, but in a lot of respects, I'd rather see Alan moving forward with original material than just rehashing old things. I think Grant Morrison has a much better approach to nostalgia, wherein he's not trying to capture the actual style of 60s comics, but rather the feeling of awe and majesty that they gave to the kids who read them. The best example of this is the brilliant Flex Mentallo.

So, ironic nostalgia bad. You can see this a lot in music too. An entire industry has grown up around specials about bad early 90s music. Rather than focusing on albums from that era that were actually good, like U2's Acthung Baby!, they spend all their time on the same approved set of novelty songs. People always thrown on stuff like 'Ice, Ice Baby' or 'Can't Touch This' as opposed to playing a song that's actually good. Those songs were bad then and they're still bad now.

Basically, it really bothers me that people spend so much time focusing on trash culture from the past, particularly the early to mid 90s. There was some great stuff back then, it was the time that gave birth to Twin Peaks and Sandman, but that's never what's mentioned, it's always the novelty rap songs and bad sitcoms. I can see enjoying something ironically once in a while, but for a lot of people it seems they never enjoy something sincerely and fully. There's so much good stuff out there, don't waste you time watching or listening to crap.

So, what is good now, and how can love of the past be better put to use? That'll be part II.

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People Complex

People are so complex, yet we usually interact only on the surface. In your average day, you might run into a lot of people, but very rarely do you ever actually get deep and really communicate feelings and emotions. Why is this?

Back at home, Jordan, Steve, Cimmino and I frequently had "discussions" where we'd talk about all kinds of stuff and I use that as sort of my scale for judging interactions. I really got an idea of how they viewed the universe and what their priorities were. It's interesting to understand the intellectual backing that makes up a person's world view. I think we were all really influenced by The Invisibles, and even people I knew back home who didn't read it, heard so much about the concepts. The series formed sort of a base we used for exploration of metaphysics concepts.

So, it's interesting to talk about similar concepts with people here at Wesleyan, and get a completely different perspective on things. I just sort of took for granted the idea that we were moving towards some kind of major growht in consciousness, some event in which we would leap forward, transcend the physical and become purely mental beings. It might not be at 2012, but this was the direction of humanity. However, I found that idea challenged, and was forced to consider whether it really is where we're going.

Like, I talked about lucid dreaming with Jenna, and she called me a destroyer of dreams, basically implying that what dreams are supposed to do is let your mind work through the issues of the day, and lucid dreaming would instead further tax you, and prevent you from getting the rest that sleep is supposed to give you. I can see this point. Lucid dreaming is so much a dialogue with yourself, it can get you spun up in really intense self analysis, and some people probably don't want to go there. I find dream analysis really interesting because it's the closest thing you can get to an objective view of your own mind, but it's still just talking to yourself, and sometimes, it's better to get in touch with the outside world.

I guess for a lot of people the outside world is the only thing they have so that they don't, to quote Yes, "Don't surround yourself with yourself." The more you look at people, the more you see the things that have made them up, and the mental things that determine who they are. People feel obligations to do things, different things depending on what they've come from. Ultimately, I feel living life is like making a movie. Sure, you want it to be popular and critically acclaimed, and make the people you know happy, but if you're not happy with the finished product, it doesn't matter what other people think of it. It's your movie to make, your life to live.

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Taking some classes at Handsome Boy Modeling School

So, I listened to the new Handsome Boy Modeling School album, White People, today. I really liked So...How's Your Girl? It's not my favorite of Dan the Automator's albums, not as strong as Lovage, Deltron 3030, but it's probably stronger than Gorillaz. Anyway, there's not that much continuity between the two albums, because White People is mainly about spotlighting guest artists.

Del tha Funkee Homosapien returns on the track, "The World's Gone Mad," which is a really interesting mix of rap, reggae and rock. Some other standout tracks are "I've Been Thinking," "Breakdown" and "Class System," with Julee Cruise of Twin Peaks fame. Julee's track is probably the best on the album with some great, socially conscious lyrics, and a lot of the feeling of Automator's Lovage.

I love the fact that this album bounces between so many different styles. It's a hip hop album in theory, but it's got elements of all genres. I suppose a critique might be that it doesn't have any cohesion whatsoever, but all the tracks were pretty good, so I'm not complaining. Judging only from one listen, I'd say my biggest complain about the album is the rap side is lacking a bit. Del has a great verse, but there's nothing on the level of "The Projects" from the first album. Still, it's a really strong album, possibly even better than the original semester with Handsome Boy.

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So, there was an election

George Bush got reelected, which annoys me. It implies that the vast majority of people out there in the middle of the country completely ignored what he did as president and voted for him because he’s religious, and has “moral values.” He’s reactionary and the president should be guiding us into a new age, a better age, and Bush is only bringing us down. Humanity’s destiny is the stars, both literal, as in space, and metaphorical, as in the upper reaches of our mind. Bush is only pulling us down, trapping us in thousand year old conflicts, and not allowing science to move forward. Not that Kerry would have been a great leader necessarily, it’s just he wouldn’t get us embroiled in an unnecessary war, like Iraq. George Bush has a vision for the country, but it’s an awful vision, I want a president with a vision of a better country and a better world, not through fighting, but through the spreading of love and knowledge.

However, the whole thing seems impersonal and removed from me. History makes it easy to see trends, but when you’re living something, you don’t really become aware of how things work until you look at it in retrospect. A better world is easily within reach, and hopefully this is just a momentary step back before an explosion into a new world of higher consciousness. This division in the country recalls The Invisibles. Bush is essentially an archon, he’s a force for stagnation and violence. He’s not evil, just misguided. What his policies are doing is preventing us from moving forward because we’re caught up in this war in Iraq, and trying to curb the momentum of freedom in social issues. But what his presidency has done is create a whole group of people who are so disgusted by him that they have become active in trying to change things, overthrow the archons and make a better world. What the invisibles are trying to do is change the world and make it better, more forward thinking. It’s essentially a dichotomy between fear and hope, the conservatives fear a new world, while progressives are hoping to build a new and better world.

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Spaced: The First Series

So, I finished watching the first series of Spaced. This show was really brilliant, reminding me a lot of my other Brit-comedy favorite, The Office. The thing that makes these shows different from American comedy shows is the limited run. Rather than having to create a status quo that will have last for many years of 22 episodes, the Britcom is designed for a short run. The first season of Spaced was only seven episodes, and as a result they can have change happen to the characters.

The TV Comedy aka Britain shames America once again

I think it was Grant Morrison who said that after the British empire fell apart, they began to take over the world in a different way, namely by becoming the cutting edge leaders in art and culture. During the 60s, British rock groups were both popular and artistically phenomenal, from The Beatles to Pink Floyd to Led Zeppelin and so on. Mod culture spread across the globe. In the 80s, the British invaded America in another medium, namely comics. Alan Moore completely redefined what comics could do, and Grant Morrison followed up, and even surpassed the pioneer. Now, most of the top writers in the comics industry are British, andd by and large they do the best work.

So, British own comics, but what about comedy? Obviously there was Python and others 60s groups, but recent British sitcoms have been putting our own to shame. In the past two days, I watched the first episode of Spaced, a Britcom, and also the first episode I'd ever seen of Family Guy, an American show you probably know all too well. Now, I'd heard a lot about both series, they're both beloved by fans, however, one is great and one makes me ashamed to be part of a culture that could love it.

Spaced, the first episode, was very impressive. The movie Shaun of the Dead, that came out a while ago came out of Spaced, and the series and the film share a writer, director and cast. Now, Shaun was pretty good, but Spaced the series is already better than it. The show is a comedy, but it's shot in a really interesting way, very feature like. It's shot with one camera, that uses a lot of complex moves and scene transitions. Director Edgar Wright uses a lot of really interesting techniques to show the passage of time. A big part of the show is paying homage to other films, and this leads to a lot of highly stylized and expressive shots. The show, despite being about two people living in a house, feels very exciting, just becuase of the way it's made. One notable sequence was that in which Tim and Daisy are going over each other's past, still images, quick cuts, and voiceover are used to convey a lot of narrative information very quickly.

As I said before, the show makes a lot of homages to movies. Subtly dropping in the Han and Luke "Same as always," "That bad, huh?" exchange from Jedi into a scene got a big laugh from me, but it's inserted so subtly into the text that it works both as an homage and as just a line of dialogue. I'll admit I can't really approach the show without bias since the characters share so many of my interests. The main character, Tim, works at a comic book shop, wants to be a graphic artist, and goes off on pretentious speeches in defense of sci-fi TV shows and comics themselves. He feels like a real person, and I actually care about his plight. This is something I saw in The Office too, a creator who doesn't want to do just comedy, he wants to make real characters. So, I'm looking forward to the rest of Spaced.

I had to watch Family Guy for class. Now, I'd never watched the show, I'd heard so many people talk about it, and how good it was, but I never really had the desire to see it. Unfortunately, this class made me have to watch it. I feel bad for the animators who drew this thing, since the 20 minutes watching it were painful enough, I would not want to have had to slave over drawing it.

So, to use the food metaphor, this show wouldn't even qualify as a bag of chips, it's more like eating some paper, you get absolutely nothing out of it. If this show were to be made physical, it would be a gas that just dissipates in the atmosphere, without enough cohesion to even hold its own molecules together. I was astonished at how bad the show was. While the possible re-election of George W. Bush makes me scared of people out in the middle of the country, watching this show made me scared about the college type smart audience that's watching this show.

The episode I watched was about a camping trip that Peter and his son go on, which prompts them to break up. What's so bad about it? First off, all the jokes are really cliched, and predictable. Using Mr. T in a joke at this point is about as cliche as it gets. Half the jokes seemed to be a character says something ridiculous then they cut to that very thing. If you do that every single time someone says something ridiculous, it's not funny anymore, it's expected.

Also, the creators seemed to be taking such joy in "breaking the rules." There was a Little House on the Prarie parody that seemed to be trying to get a laugh by making fun of the blind. The thing is, the parody wasn't funny because it was just a blind person tripping over stuff. The Office uses parody like this, but places it in a context where people have to take responsibility for their prejudice. The humor isn't in making of a person, it's in the awkward moment when someone catches you making fun of them. The Office episode in which David is telling racist jokes, only to have a black guy interrupt him in the middle of one brilliantly illustrates this. The humor isn't in the joke itself, it's in seeing David squirm as he tries to come up with an alternate ending to the joke. Curb Your Enthusiasm's Affirmative Action episode also does this.

At the end of the episode, Peter and the son hit golfballs that apparently kill someone. It's not funny because there's no consequences. It would have worked better if they had to actually confront the death, but instead they go for shock value. To be honest, if you want to be shocking you have to go a lot further. I love humor that is politically incorrent and out of sync with society's values, but this whole show is more like what a ten year old would consider offensive than what an actual adult would be offended by.

What else doesn't work about the show? The characters are horribly cliched. All the men on the are lazy, shun intellectualism, and possibly outright retarded. The women are cliched sitcom characters. The baby and dog characters just don't work, it's another example of trying to break the rules so boldly that it ends up just going nowhere. Plus, the creators of the show have a thirty second attention span. Nothing is developed at all, it's just surface.

So, you may say, I don't watch it for depth, sometimes I like to just kick back with some comedy. However, this show is so popular, it's not just kicking back. This is all that people are watching, shows with no characters or depth, just instant fulfillment. People can justify it saying that it's not great, but it's entertaining enough. Here's the thing. You shouldn't settle for not great until you've watched at least all of Twin Peaks, Buffy, The Office, The Sopranos, Angel and Six Feet Under. These are shows that infinitely more fulfilling and entertaining than Family Guy ever could be, and they don't leave you feeling degraded.

So, what does the popularity of Family Guy indicate about our society? The show's really popular with a lot of smart people, and that bothers me, because it's symptomatic of a trend in society. People are so attracted to these shows that have no depth whatsoever. They're ironically above any notion of actually caring about things, taking such pleasure in ridiculing people who are actually doing stuff they care about, rather than just making fun of others. I don't mind criticizing and making fun of something, if you're offering something better. Joss Whedon insulting reality TV is perfectly justified becuase he's made amazing shows already, he's not just talking, he's out doing. Whereas Spaced uses reference to other works to supplement its narrative, in Family Guy, the parody is the narrative, and it's not even parody really. It's just recreating scenes and conventions from other stories and expecting people to laugh because they remember that movie.

How could people not only like the show, but actively tell others to watch it? How could you buy it on DVD when there's so much better stuff out there? There's enough stuff to not care about out here in the real world, do we really need to watch TV shows to tell us not to care about anything?

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Casablanca

I'm going to be counting down my top 50 favorite movies, writing up a little something about each of them. I have a list of 100 that I keep, but the bottom 50 changes enough so that by the time I finished writing about each of them, it would be different. However, the top 50 is pretty stable, so I can write about them. Anyway, number 50 is appropriately the classic Casablanca...

I've watched a lot of movies, and unfortunately most of the movies from before the 60s do not hold up. There's a number of reasons for this. First off, the production system back then wasn't designed to make art, it was more of an assembly line. The director didn't get a chance to really do what he wanted, there wasn't craft in the movie. The other reason these movies are tough to watch is becuase their sense of pacing is completely different from ours. A lot of movies, especially comedies, from this era just see glacial compared to today's stuff. That makes even a good movie tough to enjoy, becuase it just seems to go by so slowly.

However, there are a couple of exceptions, and one of them is Casablanca, the finest movie that the studio system produced. This movie has so many great things about it. The look takes full advantage of the black and white. It's very noir, from the expressive lighting to Humphrey Bogart's trenchcoat and fedora. The script is full of really memorable lines, and also very complex, full of interesting moral ambiguities.

The standout scene of the film is the dueling national anthems, which of a perfect example of using music and visual to convey a point rather than relying on dialogue. Props also have to be given to the flashback Paris sequence and the last scene, which is one of the most memorable in film history.

It's a really complex, challenging film, which at once transcends the studio system, and is helped by it. The AFI top 100 movies list called it the second greatest movie of all time, behind Citizen Kane. I'd give it the edge over Kane, because of the emotion of the movie. The characters are so well sketched, and set against this amazing chaotic background, you can't help but get caught up in the story.

Oldboy: Revenge Pop

Earlier today, I watched the movie Oldboy, a movie made in Korea, that's hugely popular there, but has yet to make it over here. The movie is about a man who is imprisoned for fifteen years, and when he gets out, wants revenge. Finding out who imprisoned him and why is what the movie is about, and the answers are rather surprising. I'd already had one of the big surprises of the plot sort of ruined for me, but I still loved the movie becuase it's not really a movie about plot, it's much more about style, making it a pop movie.

What's a pop movie, you ask? To me, a pop movie is something where the filmmaking itself is so cool, that you don't even need to care about the story or characters to enjoy the movie. This movie has a lot of energy, from the very first scene on. The imprisonment sequence is absolutely phenomenal, particularly the ant attack sequence. The score, voiceover and way of shooting keep you riveted. This isn't to say that it's not interesting story matter, because it is, but it's the director who is being spotlighted. Some other really pop sequences in the film include Dae-su fighting off a crowd of ten or fifteen people. Park shoots it in one take, with Dae-su on the right, and the crowd on the left. They each go to challenge him, only to be beaten, and by the end a crowd of bodies fills most of the screen, as Dae-su stands triumphant on the other side.

Another great thing about the movie was the camerawork. The camera was free of restrictions in a way that reminded me of Irreversible. Park was able to do really interesting moves, particularly during the prison sequence. He also used some great transitions, particularly during the green grass hypnosis scene. Some of the scene transitions looked a bit too obviously CG, but generally speaking, they were quite impressive and did a good job of conveying the characters' states of mind.

The movie's pretty nasty. You'll very rarely see the sort of violence in this movie here in America. There's a scene with a hammer that had me rather uncomfortable, and same for a scene with scissors at the end of the movie. Was the violence neccessary? Probably not to the degree it was present, but I think it was always motivated by the story, the violence served the story rather than the other way around.

I'll have to see this movie again before I give it a final verdict. Along the way, I had a bit of trouble following a couple of the plot points, and that took me out of the movie. I'm hoping that if I see it again, I can get completely absorbed in the story, because I already know the plot. However, the movie is almost wholly about uncovering this mystery, so I'm not sure if it will be as interesting the second time. I guess only time will tell.

But, overall, the movie was shot and scored brilliantly, and that alone makes it worth watching. Great nasty plot twist at the end, not so much the "big twist" but the very end of the movie, which leaves you very conflicted, and that is a good thing.

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The Marriage of Maria Braun

This week for class I had to watch the movie, The Marriage of Maria Braun. I actually had to watch for class last year too, so clearly it's the movie of choice for film scholars. Lately I've been watching a ton of foreign films, be it in German film class, or on my own with Wong Kar Wai's stuff and Cowboy Bebop. Well, this movie was foreign too, and it was great.

The movie's about a woman in post WWII Germany. Her husband is missing, presumed dead, and she has to go on with her life. It's a huge movie, spanning ten years, with a bunch of characters and subplots, which I love. The opening sequence is one of the most pop openings ever, especially impressive considering it's a film made in the 70s. It opens on a picture of Hitler which blown away, along with the wall it's hung on, revealing Maria getting married as the city is being bombed, papers flying in the air, buildings falling to the ground.

What makes the movie work is the direction. Fassbinder uses color brilliantly, and can expertly manipulate mood with his filmmaking. The movie feels extremely modern, despite being set in the 40s and made in the 70s. The story of the film is great, but it's the filmmaking that makes it a really special movie.

I've had to watch a lot of Fassbinder's movies for class, and this is easily the best of them. What this has that his previous movies didn't is scope. The personal relationships aren't that far removed from a movie like The Merchant of Four Seasons, but the difference is that this movie is set in a time of turmoil. When Maria seduces Oswald, it's not about feelings, it's about trying to survive. The entire movie is about seeing people dehumanized, forced to resort to their basest instincts in order to survive.

Just as the opening sequence is incredibly pop, the closing is too. This movie ends in such a way that you're sitting there just dazed, considering the implications of the ending. Any movie that leaves you so confused, not about what happened plotwise, but about what exactly motivated the characters to do it is worth watching. I'd rather be left thinking after a movie is over then having everything tied up perfectly neatly.

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Movie is to food as...

So, a while ago I was talking with Jordan, about movies, and he was saying something about how occasionally you just need a dumb movie, you can't always watch really high quality stuff. This prompted a lengthy discussion, in which I compared movies to food, the gist of which I'll replicate here.

Movies are like food, in that there are so many levels of quality, different types of food/movies, different ways to prepare and different ways to enjoy the movie/food. From a movie, you can get a bag of chips, which fills you up, but leaves you greasy and sort of nasty, a decent meal, or a gourmet dinner, with many courses, of impeccabe quality, the kind of meal that makes you think I've never even eaten before.

A good chunk of Hollywood movies fall into the bag of chips/fast food category. They're all basically the same, and you go in knowing what to expect. If you go to see Adam Sandler in a movie, it's like buying a bag of chips, you know exactly what you're going to get, there's no surprises, and it doesn't really fill you up. Most romantic comedies fall into this category too, very formulaic, the fast food of the movie world. Also, any Arnold/Van Damme/Stallone/Diesel type action movie falls into this category, just empty calories.
A movie like Love Actually works because it is like a buffet of fast food, you get a taste of many different foods, you're bound to find something you like. By giving you this variety, you're bound to find something you like, and the formulaic nature of some of the foods/plots is undermined by the fact that you're not only eating that one food. So, that's the bag of chips. you know what to expect, you're not surprised. Unfortunately, the vast majority of filmgoers prefer the bag of chips or fast food to a more filling meal. If you keep eating/watching this stuff, eventually you get a lot of fat on your mind, that's what happens when you don't exercise your mind.

Then, there's decent meal, maybe a diner type place. This is a movie that's pretty good, you leave fulfilled, something like Toy Story or Collateral. There's actual character development, a good story is told, and you leave the theater full. This isn't the kind of restaurant you'd neccessarily reccomend to your friends, but if it came up in conversation, you'd give it a good word. I'm usually satisfied with a meal/movie like this.

However, what any filmgoer lives for is the gourmet meal, the filet mingon of movies, something expertly prepared, with the best ingredients, and incredible presentation. When I hear that one of my favorite chefs has completed a new dish, I salivate, wondering what culinary delights have been prepared. This is the kind of meal that you tell your friends about, and if you have a dinner party, these would hopefully be the main dish. What are some gourmet meals? Magnolia is kind of my archetypal example. It's got all kinds of ingredients, brilliantly mixed together by master chef Paul Thomas Anderson. If you hang out with me for long enough, I've probably tried to serve you Magnolia at one time or another. The best meals compel you to share them with others. These are the meals that even if they aren't always to your taste, you still respect the effort put into making them.

Now, getting to the two flaws of the metaphor. One is, it costs you the same amount and takes the same amount of time to watch a great movie as it does to watch a bad one, which just isn't true of meals. It costs a lot more to go to a five star restaurant than to McDonald's. With movies you don't have that excuse. I understand that it's sometimes tough to get up for a movie like Requeim for a Dream, but it's so much more satisfying after you do watch it. So, no excuses for watching bad movies. One of the things that bothers me the most is people watching a movie that they know is not going to be any better than OK, when there's so many great ones out there.

What's the other flaw? Ironically, in food, I'm not really a fan of the gourmet meal.But, that's because I'm passionate about movies, and not about food. So, I can get people not liking the gourmet movie, it's unfortunate that they don't have the taste, but a food afficianado would probably be just as mad at me for not appreciating some higher cuisine.

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Twin Peaks

I wrote this back in May 2004, which was nearly a year after I finished the series. Twin Peaks is the best TV series of all time, you should all see it. And a side note, I'd point you to the entry on the side marked "Does liking something that's popular make you uncool?" You be the judge.

In terms of TV, Twin Peaks is definitely my favorite series. Just hearing the music and seeing the bird in the opening credits, it brings up so many emotions and associations. Similarly, seeing the sign and hearing the music in Fire Walk With Me, it’s like going home. Even though there’s a number of weak plots, the series on the whole just has an atmosphere completely its own. The music, the look of it, it’s unparalleled. And then the red room, the last episode is my favorite episode of TV ever, and my favorite David Lynch work. Similarly, with each viewing, Fire Walk With Me just gets better and better. The emotion in the film, coupled with the weird visuals, it’s exactly the sort of film I want to make. The last scenes are amazing brutal, but also beautiful. That juxtaposition is what makes Lynch’s work so unique. The first time I watched Fire Walk With Me, I was a bit disappointed by the opening sequence, which seemed completely pointless, but in recent times, I’m loving even that. The whole work is such a bold direction to take what could have been a formulaic TV movie. The ending brings everything full circle, and provides great emotional closure to the series. Though, I’m still annoyed at the series ending cliffhanger. The first time I watched it, I sat just staring at the TV for five minutes. I had read that it was a two hour series finale, so I was expecting another hour, when the tape ended, I was just in shock, and completely devastated, but also in awe of the episode I had just watched. It was one of the most affecting stories I’ve ever experienced.

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Cowboy Bebop: A Rockin' Show

So, recently I watched the show Cowboy Bebop. It's an anime, and I'm not usually a huge fan of anime, the high voices bother me, but luckily, there was only one character with an annoying voice on the show, and they acknowledged how annoying she was.

I loved the show because it had an amazing sense of style, combining Western, noir, sci-fi and action tropes into, what the show itself calls, "the show that will became a genre unto itself." It had a mainly standalone, episodic structure, which bothers me in somethings, but worked here. The reason for that is despite the fact that most of the plots were standalone, they still did a good job of developing the characters. An episode like 'My Funny Valentine,' in which a man from Faye's past appears is a good example of something that showed us a great deal about her, in what was essentially a standalone story.

I particularly liked the way that the character relationships were handled, which was really subtly. By the last episode, we can feel how close they all are, even though they never say it. You know it's killing Jet to let Spike go, and it's killing Faye too, but they don't come out and say, "I really care about you, Spike, and I think you're making a mistake." Instead they keep things internal, and I think that's much more true to life. The final episode was one of the best finales I've ever seen, recalling the brilliance of the last episode of The Prisoner. The scene where Spike goes through the syndicate building wielding grenades and guns, to the tune of "The Real Folk Blues," was pure brilliance, and the final scene was absolutely brutal.

I still think the single most brilliant sequence is Spike falling out of the building in 'Ballad of Fallen Angels.' Cutting between his memories and his fall in a way I'd never seen before, they created something completely new. And the choice of music is what made an already great scene perfect. A truly phenomenal series.

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Buffy Season Seven critique

Originally found here.

The First sucked. The things that they mocked in previous years with Spike, and his really pompous speeches they did for real with The First. It did absolutely nothing, and other than in Conversations, wasn't very threatening. It was a good idea in theory, but they had nothing to fight, and nothing to interact with on the evil front.

And Caleb was a retread of Warren, but without any of the interesting pieces. He's the most black and white villain since the Master. Seven's villains are definitely a reaction to what happened in six. It's the biggest, most evil foes the show has ever had, but also completely without personality, as well as totally impotent. The first does very little to actually hurt the group and Caleb wasn't particularly interesting. I can debate some things, but I think The First was a total failure, and the only weak villain the show ever did. Each previous villain built on what had came before in some way, the First went nowhere new.

Also, Buffy/Spike. I love what's done with the characters, it's just we have to go through so much cliffhangery bullshit to get to the real content. First, Spike is insane, so he's not himself for a while, then he might be evil, then he's under the possession of The First. I felt manipulated about what was going on with the character. When they finally get around to the frank discussion of the last few episodes of the series, it's brilliant. Spike just sleeping with Buffy is one of the most touching scenes in the show's entire run, and shows how much both he and Buffy have grown. It's also a great contrast to their scenes in season six. And, of course the discussion between them in the finale is great.

Anya. Selfless is obviously brilliant, and her sacrifice for Andrew at the end of the series is great, but for most of the middle of the season, she's without purpose and not really developed. She doesn't have much of a reason to be hanging out with Buffy and gang, but when she does get the spotlight, it's great.

Andrew makes me laugh with every line he says, and singlehandedly kept me going through the Bring on the Night/Showtime era. I love what they do with the character, particularly in Storyteller, where the comic relief becomes very serious. I really felt for the character, and I did in Chosen when he's talking about Anya too. Though I may crack on season seven, Andrew is a bright spot, and his evolution is probably my favorite thing about the season.

And, I would agree with you that Buffy is the star of season seven, but I think that's too much of a departure from where the show had been since at least season three. By six, it's a completely ensemble show, as the musical shows, each of these people has their own plot, and over the course of the season, all the stories are developed. In season seven, the other characters are reduced to sidekicks, in a way that they hadn't been for a number of years, and it just doesn't feel right.

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Mulholland Drive: Some Analysis

From Barbelith

I don't really see the limbo idea, because I think the first two thirds of the movie make the most sense when see from Betty/Diane's perspective. That whole sequence is about Diane's desire to both be, and to be with Camilla/Rita. She divorces Camilla from her role as a compettitor for roles (hence the creation of the new Camilla), and makes her into someone who needs Diane's help, rather than in reality, where Diane is the one in need of Camilla's help.

When Betty dresses her up in the wig, they look quite similar, to the point that once Betty has provided the box, she's not needed anymore, and just disappears. To me, the box is Betty's acceptance of death. In the diner, she asks "What does it open," and when it finally is opened, the dream/vision is over, and Betty dies. The Club Silencio scene is all about Betty coming to terms with the fact that her world is an illusion, a recording playing back the moments of her life, in a distorted manner. Realizing that, she finds the box, which is basically death, and opens it, and everything ends.

The most challenging part of the film is the moments after the box is opened, but before it goes int the real world segments. Aunt Ruth's entrance is tough. I think it's to show that Betty and Ria have merged, and are no longer in Aunt Ruth's apartment, they've been moved somewhere else. And then, we see the Cowboy telling her to wake up. Then, we see the dead body. I think by "wake up" he means leave the dream world, and go into the afterlife/actually die, basically to move on. And then, we go right into the real world, in an essentially seamless transition.

The thing I love about the real world sequences (last third of the movie) is the way that Lynch connects things not by linear time, but by feeling. The connection between Camilla telling Diane they can't see each other any more, "because of him," and then cutting immediately to Kesher and Camilla together.

Though even in the "real world" sequences, a lot of it is seen from Diane's point of view. Like the second love scene is in fact Diane's wank fantasy, the pain of Camilla rejecting her overtaking the pleasurable beginning of the scene, when they were together. If that scene is strict reality, it doesn't make much sense why Camillla would be choose to break up with Diane, while lying topless on her couch.

At the end of the movie, after a bit of the "real world" business, we go back to subjective narration. Diane, remembering the bum she saw behind Winkie's (an incident which is re-assigned to the other guy in the dream, perhaps because she didn't want to face it), imagines said bum unleashing the symbol of her Hollywood dreams, the old people (who are not her parents, but the judges of the Jitterbug contest, which she won back in Deep River), tormenting her, taunting her with how far she has fallen. The bum and the old people are opposites, one the symbol of her fears of what she could become, and the other, her hopes and dreams. The old people come out of the box, because it is connected to her death, they are the ones who drive her to kill herself.

Then, in the end, we see a representation of the first chunk of the film, Betty and Rita against the skyline, menaced by the bum. And finally, "silencio," as a mood appropriate closer. I like the idea above that the reliving of the real world may all have taken place at Club Silencio, though I'm not sure it fits into my view of the movie's chronology. I think the women is an extradimensional entity, like the Cowboy (or Bob, the Mystery Man or The Man from Another Place), and when she says "silencio," the dream world is closed, Diane "wakes" from the dream, into death.

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David Lynch's Dune, Surprisingly Good

Here's a review of David Lynch's Dune, originally posted to alt.tv.twin-peaks

I watched Dune yesterday, the only DL movie I hadn't seen yet. I don't know why I hadn't watched it, obviously being a huge Lynch fan, and also being a big fan of epic sci-fi. Just a note, I started the first book, but didn't really like it, and never made it all the way through. I think this may actually be the optimum condition for viewing the film, since I knew the basic characters, and setup, but wasn't attached the plot events. However, the reputation of the film led to a general apathy towards watching it. However, I watched it yesterday, and am really glad I did.

First off, I was shocked by how surreal the film was. The whispered thoughts device was Lynch's best move in making the film, since it cut down on massive exposition scenes, as well as giving us a good insight into the characters. It's something I've seen in some French New Wave films, but other than that, it's generally unused, but it's something that works really well if used right, as it was here.

And, for a mainstream film, the surreality of the whole thing was quite surprising. I expected it to be like The Elephant Man, in that you get occasional flashes of Lynch, but it's mainly a fairly straightforward film, but that wasn't the case here. There was a lot of strange stuff, and I saw
the roots of a number of Lynch ideas, seen in later films. The opening with Princess Irulan appearing against the background of the stars was phenomenal. The hand and dripping water dreams were very cool looking, and the repetition of the motif was very effective. The first scene with the baron was really nasty, and also quite cool.

I liked the whole 80's aesthetic of the film. It felt quite a bit like Blade Runner at times (Sean Young's voice probably did that), and I love that feeling of real sets, that you just don't get in current CG sci-fi movies. The spaceship effects may not have been the best, but I take it as a
stylistic choice, which makes for an even more surreal film. It was a visually dazzling film. Those hazmat uniforms on the enemy soldiers were amazing.

While it did feel like there were a lot of loose ends, the film held together. Rather than thinking of the plots that felt abrupt as problems, I see them as just snapshots of the world. I loved the ending with the rain, and Paul's sister.

Obviously, a lot of stuff didn't work. The Baron was awful, his cackling villainy was really inexcusable. And, I got the feeling that all the scenes with him were the same, he'd fly around, laugh awfully, and say he was going to kill Paul. And, since there were so many characters, you never really get attached to anyone, even Paul.

Stuff like the relationship with Channi was barely even developed, and I'd like to have seen a bit more of the Sting character (not in the bodily sense, that winged speedo was quite enough), but he was a much better villain than the Baron, and wasn't really featured. And also, considering
she was barely in the movie, I'm not sure why the Princess gave the opening narration.

I think David should really re-assess the film, since it's a great piece of work, and deserves a much better reputation than it has. So, after this, here's my ranking of Lynch's stuff.

Twin Peaks (Show)
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
Mulholland Drive
Lost Highway
Blue Velvet
Dune
Eraserhead
The Straight Story
The Elephant Man
Wild at Heart

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Vintage: Invisibles Reactions

This was posted on Barbelith a couple of days after I finished reading The Invisibles. My opinions have changed since then, but it's now available for you to read, enjoy.

Yes I know there's a bunch of threads on volume three already, but most of them were devoted to whether the trade was out, or there's the fiction suit one, which I've read and cleared up some things, but I still have questions that aren't related to that topic.

Anyway, I just finished rereading Volumes 1 and 2, and read Volume 3 for the first time. The first two volumes are indisputably brilliant, and are even better on the reread. I saw nearly everything come together, and it was nearly flawless.

Volume III felt a lot more disjointed. Particularly in the first eight issues, it felt very removed from the rest of the series. While I enjoy Mister Six and Sir Miles, I wasn't as interested in those characters as I was in what happened to our main five, and the near absence of them in the beginning was rather annoying. Still, the stories weren't bad, as both Satanstorm and Karmageddon had moments of great merit. The opening pages of the volume as Flint and Harper go after the Shoggoth were great, with the brillaint quote, "Division X! Get the Fucker in the back!" That bit made me long for a Division X ongoing.

The apperance of Mason in Karmageddon was nice, and Edith's procession to death was striking. Still, the Marquis de Sade story felt superfluous.

The worst decision of Volume III was to introduce Helga and have so much of the story go through a character who we didn't know at all. She had no real set apperance, seemingly changing from artist to artist, and had no real set character. It would have been nice to have an additional issue that gave her backstory, like each of the team got back in Volume I.

The Invisible Kingdom was crippled by the art. Earlier, I found the weak art annoying, especially when compared to the brilliant work of Jiminez and Weston in Volume II; here it often obscured the storytelling. IMO, it would have been better to have Yeowell, Thompson and Weston each do one issue of the storyline, instead of the schizophrenic switching. In the moment that should have been the climax of the series, I missed that Jack had ingested the archons, and only got that when they talked about it after the fact. It was a good idea in theory, but didn't really work.

However, the writing in that last storyline was excellent. King Mob's phone booth discussion with Jacqui was great, and the gathering of everyone together at the end worked. Also, Audrey Murray saving Mob was a brilliant touch. And, the final page (which incidentally featured better art than nearly all this storyline), was great. My only real complaint about this arc was that it may have got too out there, at the expense of the narrative, and there should have been at least one more page with John a Dreams, even if he doesn't give an explanation of what happened to him, to have him speak with King Mob would have been great.

Finally, Glitterdammerung had me rather confused, but I loved it. Even though I didn't get the specifics, I got the emotional significance. Mob's reunion with Robin was a great moment, and the final page was excellent. And the art was finally great.

Overall, I think it'll probably work better as a reread when I'm not looking forward to finding out what happens at the end, and can better appreciate the journey it takes to get there. I'd have loved to see more of our core team, and Mason, but I guess that wasn't to be. The counting down mechanism does accentuate some of the flaws, since as each issue passed it made me think more that we're getting so close to the end of the series, and we still haven't heard much from the main characters. Still, that's focusing on the negative. There were a lot of brilliant ideas in the book, and, like the rest of the series, will probably improve on the reread. And, I think that more than the other volumes, this really makes you think in different ways, and abandon all preconceptions of the universe in order to understand it, which is ultimately what Grant probably wanted to happen.

That said, I'm unclear on some things, and would appreciate it if someone could give me their opinion or the general thinking on the answers.

1. So, John a Dreams found a new kind of time machine that allowed you to completely leave the 3D and 4D planes and experience a new level of existence, in which you can inhabit multiple conciousnesses in multiple forms throughout different times? And through this, he became the gray spirit and was corrupted into Quimper, the Gnostic Satan, and Jack Flint?

2. It's probably impossible to answer this question, but what was "real" in the series? Was it all part of Robin's novel, or was it some massive multi-player game that people can tap into and experience certain characters, through a fiction suit? Or was Robin writing the novel some sort of view of the future, in that she somehow saw what would happen to her? And is "The Invisibles" mentioned in 2.20 the book written by Sir Miles? And if the story isn't a game, Mob just created a game based on his experience, and Jack plays some of it in the last issue?

3. How was Robin Edith? Were they both a manifestation of Barbelith, in that they are both essential parts of moving the race toward its higher evolution, and bringing about the new age of a sentient universe? I'm thinking that Edith's miscarriage could tie into the idea that Quimper is a representative of an abortion that Grant's girlfriend had. And one more thing, if Quimper is the baby that King Mob and Robin have, did they have him in his evil form, or was he born good, a manifestation of John a Dreams, and then corrupted into evil, or was he born evil? Or was Robin being pregnant, a comment on the birth of the universe?

4. On the last page of the series, is Jack returning to Barbelith, and returning home? Is that why he's the only person left in the white void? And on the last page of the previous issue, what point is being made concerning reality? I got the idea that Jack is saying that because we've read the book, it's as real as if it actually happened, and he's essentially recruiting someone who read the book to help him out, and she ultimately becomes Reynard of the last issue?

5. I know Morrison is outdated two-sided thinking is, and we have to expand, but what exactly is he advocating through the series, because both the Invisibles and the Archons are apparently fighting in vain, for nothing in particular.

6. If it's a rescue mission, who are they rescuing? And what's the deal with "Edith says to call on Buddha," in relative times, when is it first said, where is it distorted to, and when is it heard?

7. What has happened to Robin when she returns to the future. I take it that she understands the structure of time, that it all exists at once, and we are basically all in a time machine journeying slowly to the future, but what is meant by the comment about love she says to King Mob? I get the idea that love is supposed to be all that matters, but is there anything more specific? And, when they send her in the time machine, they send her to the end of the world, because she seems to have lost the machine? Or did she go to Barbelith, become enlightened and then come back for Mob?

8. And, what did Morrison think of the art in the Invisible Kingdom, obviously if he wanted the Ashley Wood pages redrawn, he knew there was a problem, but did he ever comment on the rest? Also, has Morrison ever commented on why the major characters of the series pretty much disappear in this volume? I've heard he said that he got lost in Volume II and this was going back to the original plans, but was there every anything more than that?

I know there's probably very few concrete answers for these, but any thoughts would be great, or if somebody could point me to interviews where Morrison talks about Volume III, that'd be awesome also. I've only seen interviews from pretty much before the series ended.

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Warren Ellis: Hypocrite?

This is about the comic book writer, Warren Ellis. Up until last year, he ran a web forum, where he preached waiting for the trade, instead of buying individual comics, and also was vehemently anti-superhero. Now, he has signed on to write Ultimate Fantastic Four.

From Barbelith

In response to a few things on the thread.

I think the WEF certainly hurt Ellis' output, and gave him this reputation as one of the top writers in the medium, when (other than Planetary, IMO) he's never produced anything truly great, certainly nothing on the level of Moore or Morrison's better work. It always amazed me that he had time to read every single post on the WEF, and reply to hundreds of them a week, yet he was so slow writing the script to Planetary 16 that Cassaday had to take on six issues of Captain America to fill his time.

By the end of the WEF, Ellis had only Transmet coming out on any kind of a regular basis, and while still good, it was so decompressed that what would have taken six issues at the beginning of the book took 12-18 by the end. Look at Back on the Street, or particularly Lust for Life, versus the end of the book. The beginning had some tightly structured stories, that were well told. By the end, there were so many essentially pointless splash pages that reading it in 22 page chunks was futile. Ellis' greatest contribution to the medium is probably the two page spread which contributes very little to the story, but takes up space.

I think Ellis' greatest problem is the hypocriscy inherent in his writing vs. his online commentary. Ellis spent years on the WEF disparaging "pamphlets," and basically creating the wait for the trade atmosphere. Then, he creates Global Frequency, a book designed to be read in singles, targetted at an audience that has been trained to disparage the single. Not to mention, encouraging people to buy that run of miniseries he did, which should have been put out as OGNs, but instead were packaged as three issue minis.

This isn't to mention the fact that while spending all his time disparaging superheroes, he goes out and writes a series of miniseries that are basically superheroes without the capes. And, then he brings out Ultimate FF, which is going against all he's been talking about for years.

I used to post to the WEF on occasion, and it was a really strong community, that I wish was still around. But, it also gave Ellis an inflated sense of self worth. It was not a good place to discuss his work, becuase any attempt to even suggest a flaw would be met with flaming, often from Ellis himself. So, now without his promotional machine, his sales have suffered.

As for the question of whether there can be really good writing in comics, I think the answer is undoubtedly yes. Work like Watchmen and The Invisibles represents a strong artistic vision from the writer, and accomplish feats that could not be accomplished in any other medium. Bad writers give comics a bad name, but at its core, it's a much easier medium for a writer to get their vision across than film.