I'm not cynical, I just know that people are terrible

Been out to watch that there Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, aka "Harry Notter", and like the tail end of the Potter movie series, this wasn't for me.  The world it inhabits makes no sense, and yes, I do know I am talking about a fictional reality wherein literally everything is the result of the actions of a wizard - but even so, when the film tells you that wizards hid themselves from humans by creating living stormclouds of rampaging murderous destruction "that would occasionally get out and cause havok", it's not unreasonable to ask how or why they thought this would aid them in their endeavors.  When one character - supposed to be evil - asks whom their magical apartheid serves, it's actually a pretty reasonable question that's never really answered by the film/franchise's own internal logic, and eventually I just had to accept that whoever this was aimed at, it wasn't me.

They're small, they're cheap, and until last week they were safe from bear attacks

I like to think it's my anarchic creative daredevilry that's made me too hot for mainstream comics to touch, but of late I've begun to wonder if perhaps it may have more to do with my lack of talent, bad temper, refusal to take direction or criticism, and my insistence on starting all emails with "greetings, fucker."
Been watching Amazon's season pilots, and while I haven't got around to the one I assumed I'd be in a rush to watch - The Tick, featuring as it does creative input from the property's originator and well-seasoned tv turd-polisher* Ben Edlund - I have managed to watch I Love Dick, which ironically, I did not love in any way, even though it stars Kevin Bacon as Kevin Bacon.  It's one of those shows where horrible people go about their lives being awful and we have to sit and watch it without ever knowing why we're doing so, but presumably in the hope that the hook or the leftfield swerve will be along any minute to turn everything we've seen so far on its head.  No such luck, sadly, this is just a half hour of unlikable people being varying degrees of pretentious.
As with Kevin Bacon, Jean Claude Van Damme plays Jean Claude Van Damme - though in this instance I mean he plays a fictional version of himself rather than simply displays a lack of range - in Jean Claude Van Johnson, and as with his previous foray into playing himself in 2008's JCVD, he plays a pathetic, lonely creature only just managing to live off his dwindling fame and finding no solace in occasionally turning that fame into hollow and meaningless sexual encounters.  Basically, all those years in the US making films where he jumping spin-kicked serial murderers in the head in slow motion never stopped Van Damme being European and he was always going to make something as depressing as this, it was only a matter of when - and that when is now.
Van Damme's yearning for validation forces him to return to making the terrible films which made his name in the hope he can rekindle a relationship with a makeup artist, but there's a catch: his terrible films were only ever an elaborate cover for his true trade as an international murderer-for-hire.  There are lots of references to those terrible films, and one good running gag about how Looper is just a poor copy of Timecop, but the laughs mainly come from seeing JCVD so willing to play himself as a wretched sadsack to the point he doesn't even mug for comic effect, he just lets his hangdog face sink ever lower with each new kick in the balls that life brings.
Admittedly I am its target audience - someone who grew up watching JCVD head-kicking people and now is older but won't have the good grace to die so a young family can take my flat and use it as something other than a repository for dog hair and PS2 games - but I found it highly enjoyable, as much as I can enjoy anything while waiting for death to claim me.


* He's worked on the likes of the dreadful Revolution, as well as the seemingly endless televisual purgatory that is the CW's Supernatural.

Watching HBO's Treme, I'm reminded of being so into any given scene - skateboarding, metal, mid-90s dance - that you just slip into the mindset with ease once you're surrounded by the people, a feeling captured in the opening scenes where the first Jazz parade post-katrina makes it's way through the Treme area of New Orleans accruing musicians and locals as it goes, but it continues throughout, be it in Steve Zahn's hand to mouth musician or the performance street-theatre of Mardis Gras Indians as some sort of badge of office, there's just this incredible sense of immersion in a time and place that if you step outside it for a moment and take note of the details of life there it may as well be another planet, and it's that immersion in a culture that crawls out of what's left of the Big Easy that makes Treme work.
You can believe John Goodman's offence at the suggestion that New Orleans isn't one of America's great cities much as you could believe it - warts and all - of the living, breathing entity that was Baltimore in HBO's The Wire, also made with the same staff and methods (local actors, knowledgeable locals as script consultants) as Treme, though the latter substitutes local musicians for the former's police department as the centerpiece of a sprawling ensemble, and while I enjoyed The Wire, I didn't feel quite as invested from the first episode as I do with Treme. It's just fantastic television.

Also Watching: Castle, Damage, ATHF

Stil robotting.

Watching: Justified, CSI: NY, Accidentally On Purpose, Outnumbered, Sons of Tucson, Clone Wars
Reading: Thor and the Warriors Four - in which Thor doesn't actually appear. Which is fine, actually, as he's probably going to be overexposed this year with the film and all, and this isn't actually a Thor book as much as it is the latest Power Pack miniseries, which is aimed at kids and thus naturally opens with the first third of the book dedicated to the main characters' grandmother slowly dying while people around her cry.
The story follows the super-rugrats as they seek out Thor and the city of Asgard in order to retrieve a golden apple that cures all sickness with which to return their dying grandmother to health, which if you think about it isn't so much childish naiveté as it is fair enough reasoning for kids who've fought alien tyrants and traveled in time. But this being comic books in the 21st century where Batgirl is stuck in a wheelchair because she doesn't know anyone who can fix a spine and we all nod and say "certainly, that makes perfect sense" rather than calling bullshit on a lack of imagination, there are two ways this story is going to pan out: 1) granny Power dies and an inevitable lesson about the transient nature of life is learned, or 2) granny Power gets a few more years and the bad things in life that we have to endure are kept at bay for a time and we get the happy ending that's increasingly rare in even our children's entertainment. Option 2 doesn't sound likely, does it?
A fun little book, all the same.

Checked out Sherlock Holmes over the holiday, and it was okay. Not great, but okay.
Ritchie has shown more of an interest in the idea of mockney Brit-cool than any deep love for the cultural weight of icons like Holmes, and it does show a little in a few sequences and moments when I thought more of Viz's 'Raffles the Gentleman Thug' than the inherently patriotic bohemian distracted by his own physical cravings that served as the lynchpin of Holmsian fandom for over a hundred years now. I also felt I wasn't even imagining the homoeroticism in some instances.

As I said before, not a great film, but far from a bad one.

Friday 25th September 2009

Telly season starting in earnest now, with new shows debuting and old favorites/habits returning. In no particular order, the current viewing season has brought us House, Community, Glee, Eastwick, Greek, NCIS: Los Angeles, CSI: Miami, Crash, Modern Family, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Fringe, Heroes, Mercy, Flashforward, the Forgotten, the Good Wife, the Vampire Diaries, Supernatural, Castle, Melrose Place, Bones, 90210 - pretty busy watching period for me. The only new show I'm wary of is Mercy, as me and medical dramas haven't got on since I tried to watch the first season of Grey's Anatomy and found it an aggressively smug and hateful show full of unlikable characters I would have little hesitation in punching in the mouth. Melrose Place I'm not sure what to make of, as I've never seen the original, though the name - via pop-cultural osmosis alone - brings up assumptions of glossy Los Angelinos and soap operatics about their privileged never worked an honest day in their life problems, but it started with a murder and that was enough to intrigue me, even if the rest actually is glossy Los Angelinos and soap operatics about their privileged never worked an honest day in their life problems - all it needs is a naive actress who swings both ways and it'd be complete trash. As it is, it's just kind of trashy and lacking in substance.
NCIS: Los Angeles is trash, however - absolute, unapologetic trash of the first order. I've never watched an episode of the parent series, so I'm at a loss why I gave this one a shot, but the credits revealed that it starred both Chris 'Batman And Robin' O'Donnel and LL Cool J, so my ass was watching this bitch just to see what kind of car crash occurred, and it was just terrible enough to be compelling in the same way that CSI: Miami and Bones are.
Good Wife is typical courtroom stuff but inoffensive enough that I'll probably watch another episode, while Flashforward is laughably derivative and stiff Sci-Fi Channel reject material that pads out the minutes with leaden plotting and shameless lifts of the establishing moments of Lost, and I honestly can't think why I'd watch another episode - none of it is particularly terrible, it's just that none of it is particularly good and there's not an ounce of originality on display.
Modern Family is cynical on the surface, but has a happy ending up it's sleeve in the form of a face turn for the homophobic dad played by Married With Children's Ed O'Niell, and while happy endings were once played-out on tv, they're now so rare that this comes across as a welcome bit of schmaltz that makes the rest of the cynicism and misanthropy more palatable in much the same way that House's season opening happy-ending moment of rare euphoria for the title character was.

All in all, the new season is off to a good start, but we'll see what I'm still watching in a month's time.

Still redrawing the sample pages of the GN, as they were the wrong resolution and dimensions - D'oh! Remarkable how crisp lines and a chance to fix some SHOCKINGLY POOR ANATOMY (that luckily didn't sink the submission) can keep me happy enough redrawing pages I thought I was done with.

Thoughts on rewatching Smallville season, 1 which I have on in the background to keep me amused while I scribble:

1) I'm struck by the generic 'menace of the week' format and lack of glaring story-arcs, but it seems to suit the format, not least because it doesn't make the show seem inaccessible and up its own ass like current seasons, which seem to start every installment with stuff exploding and people shouting even though most of this has little bearing on the actual plot of the episode that follows.
2) I was once asked by a younger family member of Clark/Lex "why are they friends?" and I had no answer then just as I have none now. For the most part it seems to be barely-sublimated attraction tinged with a bit of frisson created by neither character trusting the other, and this is slightly troubling because of how likable Michael Rosenbaum is in the role of Lex Luthor: despite later turning into a sneering panto queen before the character was killed-off Ernst Blofeld style in an exploding truck, you really get a vibe off the guy that he's trying to be a better man than his dad, and despite knowing metatextually how the Clark/Lex dynamic plays out in lore, there's no indication of Lex actually being evil within the confines of the Smallville show itself, he just seems to come from a bad home but is trying to be a good guy by fixing the damage his massive asshole of a father caused to a rural farming community. So when Pa Kent gives Lex the evil eye in early appearances, it's baffling to see that behavior from someone held up by the main cast as being a paragon of heartland American values, unless you're willing to stretch the homoerotic attraction subtext to read Pa's hostility as a dislike of what he sees as a growing attraction between his son and another man, but that would make Pa more than a little unlikeable, and he really doesn't need any more fuel for that fire, because one of the main things that struck me about early Smallville was that

3) Pa Kent is a self-righteous, sanctimonious prick. I don't just mean because he hates gays - though that doesn't help - but because he really is a stifling presence best summed up when he goes to one of Clark's football games after telling the boy that he didn't trust his son around other kids. Clark makes an effort to reach out to his dad by telling him that he's glad his father is there to see him play, only to be rebuffed with "I don't support your decision, I'm just here to see no-one gets hurt" in much the same way Dewey Cox's dad tells him that the wrong son died.
4) Clark isn't much of a hero. I don't mean because he doesn't have a costume or get into fights, but because he has to be guilted into acting by believing himself responsible for the deaths caused in the meteor storm that bore his starship to Earth from doomed Krypton. Before this, he's basically "fuck those armed robbers and that baby that's dying in a crackhouse fire - my dad wants me to hang at the farm" which is just bullshit. Superman can help people so he does: that's what makes him not only a hero in a long-running series of funnybooks, but in popular culture as the ideal American, acting out of good conscience rather than a guilty one, with nothing to gain and no guilty secrets to keep at bay with bravado and funny quips. In other words, the antithesis of that cocksucker Spider-Man, who I've never cared for and don't give a toss that the Devil showed up and gave a divorce in a comic one time that fans are still bitching about.

Watching: Smallville
Reading: Scott Pilgrim 3, X-Factor, Batman and Robin
Listening: player on shuffle
Playing: Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel