Latest viewing experience: D.E.B.S.
The trailer is a bit of a bait and switch; what we really have here is a cheerful lesbian coming-of-age story. The superspy stuff is an overlay. The two lovers are, respectively, a superspy and a supercriminal who are supposed to be thwarting one another, not sneaking around and dating, and the tale of treachery and betrayal serves as an objective correlative for the socially imposed tensions of the love that still dare not speak its name in many quarters.
It's a nifty idea, this stitching together of different misbehaviors to illuminate the unnecessary dangers of same-sex love, but what makes sense in theory fails in practice because the superspy genre elements mostly just lie there. Lots of candy colors and outsized props strive for cartoonish low camp but just look stagy, and the writer-director doesn't generate any thrilling thriller tension. Cat-and-mouse sequences are carpeted with techno music that's clearly meant to drive the energy, but someone chose chill house music instead of edgy tracks, so the chases are way too relaxing. In one scene there's an extensive establishing shot of a fancy restaurant that mimics the upward tracking shot of the opera house in Citizen Kane, showing us just how immense and fancy this restaurant is, but then the scene that plays out is a conventional restaurant scene that makes no use of all that fanciness. Then there's a long sequence in which the protagonists navigate a road-to-the-batcave route to a secret exclusive dangerous nightclub... that just seems like any old nightclub. People dancing, hanging, having fun. Lots of mohawks and spikes, but it still seems as safe as an after-church reception.
So why am I hammering on this mediocre movie? I watched it because the writer-director, one Angela Robinson, wrote (several years after making D.E.B.S.) some of the best episodes of True Blood. Her scripts blended and interconnected comedy, action, drama and suspense with acrobatic alacrity. She earned her money and how. Her scripts were jim dandy.
Alan Ball (The auteur of True Blood) and company saw and nurtured something in Robinson that, on the basis of D.E.B.S., most of us would never have guessed was there. How does one spot the potential lurking behind a failure? Clearly the producers of a campy vampire soap opera know something about talent spotting that eludes most of us.
About Me
- Aaron White
- Go out with you? Why not... Do I like to dance? Of course! Take a walk along the beach tonight? I'd love to. But don't try to touch me. Don't try to touch me. Because that will never happen again. "Past, Present and Future"-The Shangri-Las
Monday, December 16, 2013
Monday, December 09, 2013
The Studio Albums of Yes, Part 2
Fragile, 1971. If you can't imagine any Yes album being essential, this one just might change your mind. Band tracks are interspersed with short solo pieces, and while the solos are hit and miss, they demonstrate what each member brings to the mix. Lead singer Jon Anderson's tape-loop-heavy concoction demonstrates, probably, a fondness for Revolution #9, but maybe also Steve Reich; Anderson's pseudo-koan lyrics are front and center. on those tape loops. Bassist Chris Squire's spot may be more notable for the work ethic involved in multitracking a zillion bass lines than for anything else. Keyboardist Rick Wakeman tries to do a Wendy Carlos thing with some Brahms, demonstrating that he should probably create, in Brian Eno's phrase, frames for other peoples' pictures, (as he did with his delightful piano work on David Bowie's album Hunky Dory) rather than pictures of his own (bear this in mind before buying any of Wakeman's showoffy solo albums). Guitarist Steve Howe does a lovely tribute to Jose Feliciano. One of the things I find most invigorating about Howe is that he crafted a rock guitar sound that was rooted in everything BUT the blues. Drummer Bill Bruford's brief burst of rhythmic danger is titled "Five Percent For Nothing" in honor of a former manager with a contractually obligated cut of the band's take, but it could be titled "Audition For King Crimson," the edgier band for which Bruford would soon leave Yes.
But the group efforts are what make the album. Roundabout is the signature song, but South Side of the Sky, which could have coasted all the way on its rollicking riffs, includes a lyrical (but lyricless) piano-and-voice interlude and some thoughtful lyrics about death that I still find reassuring. Long Distance Runaround could almost pass for a Thelonius Monk composition.
Close to the Edge, 1972. When I discovered this album I spent a lot of time around high leafy trees, craggy cliffs, organs, choirs, sailboats, yellowing fantasy paperbacks, bibles and Beatles albums, sunbeams and moonmist. This album seemed to pack it all together in 40 minutes of Stravinsky-loving symphonic rock. The cheerful obscurantist lyrics bring a bit of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons to the mix, and some lines wouldn't seem out of place in John Ashbury. If you only buy one Yes album, this is the one.
Tales From Topographic Oceans, 1973. An Anglo attempt at a Bitch's Brew that seems to go down smoother with stoners than it does with the rest of us, this blend of english folk and Epcot multiethnic jazzless jazzing around is 2 LPs long, but doesn't have 2 LPs worth of inspiration; merely 2 LPs worth of ambition (and rawk star ego). I can relate. Its repetitions have grown on me over the decades; by turns simpleminded and convoluted, struggling for expansiveness yet bound up in indulgence, it mirrors my own mind.
Relayer, 1974. This album cast a spell on me once, and I came to regard it as the last Great Yes Album. Now I see the seeds of everything I don't like about Yes sending up shoots here. The lyrics are plainspoken but banal (We go sailing down the calming stream/Drifting endlessly by the bridge... did they hire Thomas Kinkaide as a consultant?) and the straightforward ideology (war is bad, mystical illumination is good) doesn't enrich the music the way the bewildering lyrics of prior recordings did. Perhaps the irritable public reaction to Topographic Oceans put them off modernist verse. Much of one song is just a syke-a-delick guitar solo, skillfully done but not an interesting solution to an interesting problem. There's a lot to love, though. The music is lush yet jarring, Telecaster instead of Les Paul, jazz touches instead of classical flourishes. It's producer Eddie Offord's last full album with them, and he weaves a rich tapestry of layered sounds. The closing sung passage has incomprehensible lyrics (by which I don't mean I defy anyone to explain them, but that I can't make out the words) that weren't documented on the lyrics sheet; a welcome final burst of inscrutability.
But the group efforts are what make the album. Roundabout is the signature song, but South Side of the Sky, which could have coasted all the way on its rollicking riffs, includes a lyrical (but lyricless) piano-and-voice interlude and some thoughtful lyrics about death that I still find reassuring. Long Distance Runaround could almost pass for a Thelonius Monk composition.
Close to the Edge, 1972. When I discovered this album I spent a lot of time around high leafy trees, craggy cliffs, organs, choirs, sailboats, yellowing fantasy paperbacks, bibles and Beatles albums, sunbeams and moonmist. This album seemed to pack it all together in 40 minutes of Stravinsky-loving symphonic rock. The cheerful obscurantist lyrics bring a bit of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons to the mix, and some lines wouldn't seem out of place in John Ashbury. If you only buy one Yes album, this is the one.
Tales From Topographic Oceans, 1973. An Anglo attempt at a Bitch's Brew that seems to go down smoother with stoners than it does with the rest of us, this blend of english folk and Epcot multiethnic jazzless jazzing around is 2 LPs long, but doesn't have 2 LPs worth of inspiration; merely 2 LPs worth of ambition (and rawk star ego). I can relate. Its repetitions have grown on me over the decades; by turns simpleminded and convoluted, struggling for expansiveness yet bound up in indulgence, it mirrors my own mind.
Relayer, 1974. This album cast a spell on me once, and I came to regard it as the last Great Yes Album. Now I see the seeds of everything I don't like about Yes sending up shoots here. The lyrics are plainspoken but banal (We go sailing down the calming stream/Drifting endlessly by the bridge... did they hire Thomas Kinkaide as a consultant?) and the straightforward ideology (war is bad, mystical illumination is good) doesn't enrich the music the way the bewildering lyrics of prior recordings did. Perhaps the irritable public reaction to Topographic Oceans put them off modernist verse. Much of one song is just a syke-a-delick guitar solo, skillfully done but not an interesting solution to an interesting problem. There's a lot to love, though. The music is lush yet jarring, Telecaster instead of Les Paul, jazz touches instead of classical flourishes. It's producer Eddie Offord's last full album with them, and he weaves a rich tapestry of layered sounds. The closing sung passage has incomprehensible lyrics (by which I don't mean I defy anyone to explain them, but that I can't make out the words) that weren't documented on the lyrics sheet; a welcome final burst of inscrutability.
Tuesday, December 03, 2013
The Studio Albums of Yes, Part 1
I'm going to comment on each of Yes's studio albums. It's my blog, and my life, and this is what I choose to do with it.
Yes, 1969. I've read multiple testimonies that the original lineup of Yes could delight crowds, but this album doesn't reflect such power. In an interview (Source: something I read somewhere) guitarist Peter Banks said that neither the producer nor the editor assigned to work on the album was accustomed to working with rock bands, and kept telling them to turn it down. They refused to believe that if you're playing rock loud, you're doing it right. Perhaps this blunted the results. There is something this uneven but charming post-Beatles recording does demonstrate, though: one of Yes's big breaks came when Sly and the Family Stone couldn't make a show, and Yes filled in. Even though Sly Stone has more funk in his earwax than Yes has in its entire discography, the two bands had more in common than is obvious. Sly's band was integrated along racial and gender lines, while Yes was all white guys, but both bands integrated an array of popular musical modes into ambitious, multifaceted songs without seeming like dilettantes.
Yes, 1969. I've read multiple testimonies that the original lineup of Yes could delight crowds, but this album doesn't reflect such power. In an interview (Source: something I read somewhere) guitarist Peter Banks said that neither the producer nor the editor assigned to work on the album was accustomed to working with rock bands, and kept telling them to turn it down. They refused to believe that if you're playing rock loud, you're doing it right. Perhaps this blunted the results. There is something this uneven but charming post-Beatles recording does demonstrate, though: one of Yes's big breaks came when Sly and the Family Stone couldn't make a show, and Yes filled in. Even though Sly Stone has more funk in his earwax than Yes has in its entire discography, the two bands had more in common than is obvious. Sly's band was integrated along racial and gender lines, while Yes was all white guys, but both bands integrated an array of popular musical modes into ambitious, multifaceted songs without seeming like dilettantes.
Time and a Word, 1970. Guitarist Peter Banks told interviewers that he had a quarrel with the producer of this album; being a young man Peter did the only honorable thing and threw a guitar at the guy. It's no surprise that large chunks of Peter's guitar work got replaced with orchestration on the finished album. and that Peter was fired. According to Wikipedia, his last band was named Consolation in Isolation, which was also the title of an instrumental he recorded a couple decades before his death. We can surmise he had a tougher life than he might have had if he hadn't thrown the guitar.
The Yes Album, 1970. New guitarist, new producer, new success. I used to assume this was the first really successful Yes album because of guitarist Steve Howe, but now I think the arrival of producer Eddie Offord was the exponential upgrade. Offord midwifed their best work. This time out, Yes expanded their ambitious suite song structures and crafted some of their concert chestnuts, like Starship Trooper, which ends on a riff that can be expanded, inflated, and fiddled with all night. One can measure Yes's artistic decline by how long and bombastic Starship Trooper became in concert. My favorite ditty from this album is Perpetual Change, which mixes its musical themes, tempos and moods with aplomb, and includes some of the most cogent, tough-minded lyrics they'd ever write. Tough-minded lyrics were not to be a Yes mainstay, but they did it once.
Friday, September 27, 2013
Casual Maxx Squad: Some leftovers from a misspent decade.
That's from a comic book titled The Maxx, issue #10. It's the first issue I bought; the first comic I bought in my college career. That image tells you why. Lushly pretty, dense, narrative art with a cartoony base. It suggested ways of blending traditional comics and fine art in ways I'd never seen before. Further, the story, despite walk-on appearances by a boo-hiss supervillian and a superhero (drawn in a hybrid of 90s superhero muscle-mass and early-comics bigfoot comedy), focused on a normal girl's childhood trauma, and the way it shaped her as a grownup. This blend of nerd-friendly tropes and Bergmanesque thematic concerns instantly turned me into a Maxx fan. I returned to the comics shop to buy issues # 1-9. Had I been better educated in recent comics nerd material I would have known that the lovely page there was not exactly unprecedented; a fellow named Bill Sienkiewicz had set the example for this kind of cartooning with his Klimt-goes-Pomo art for comics miniseries such as Electra:Assassin and Stray Toasters. But knowing that wouldn't have blunted my appetite for more Maxx.
So what does that pretty page and that nice daddy have to do with the story? Not much. Daddy's of dubious dramaturgical importance to the story: It's a pretty basic childhood trauma narrative. Girl rescues crippled bunny, tries to nurse it but it's too far gone, Mommy kills the bunny, and the girl's traumatized for life.
So here's a page from the first issue. That ridiculously dressed woman is Julie, the adult version of the traumatized little girl in issue #10. Now, this comic was written by two men: Sam Keith (the artist) and William Messner-Loebs (who's credited with the dialogue). I don't know what their collaborative process was, but I'm guessing it was "Marvel-style," meaning they talked the story over, the artist drew some pictures, and the writer tried to come up with dialogue that matched/made sense of/made up for the art. On this page we're confronted with a social worker who, unlike actual social workers I've known, doesn't believe in minimizing sexual cues. This leaves Messner-Loebs with an interesting challenge; this character clearly dresses the way she does because the artist likes drawing women like this, but if you're trying to create something like a characterization, how do you make sense of this? By making her nasty, apparently, and not in a Janet Jackson sense. That blanket crack at the end suggests, if her wardrobe doesn't, that social work may not be the career path for her. Issue #10, then, is what comics calls an "Origin story," the explanation of how she got this way. She's afraid of the painful consequences of caring, so covers it up with a bitter attitude. I only have a few issues of The Maxx left in my collection. I gave most of them away. Notice that I haven't shown you The Maxx himself yet. The Maxx is a pseudo-superhero who ocillates between being Julie's Spirit Animal (turns out he's a bunny beneath his mask) or the deluded homeless guy she can't help nurturing (in which case he's a human beneath the mask). This slippage accompanies Maxx and Julie's vacillation between two worlds: the real one, and the Outback, Julie's fantasy world. I'll not delve much deeper into that, partly because I don't remember it all, but mostly because Keith and Messner-Leobs were clearly making it up as they went and it ended up a tangle.
Eventually they ended (not resolved) the story, and the comic continued as a succession of minimally connected tales, now written in full by the artist, Sam Keith. Let's see what he came up with!
Got all that? Sheesh, look at that type. Compare and contrast to the hand-lettering in the first couple pages I posted. Although I wasn't aware of it at the time, I think the main reason I lost my enthusiasm for The Maxx wasn't because the lumbering improvisation of the narrative kept stumbling (Keith wound up explaining a lot of plot points in the letters pages instead of in the comic proper) or because Keith decided to take over the textual end of writing, or because the main characters disappeared for months at a time. It was because the letterer quit and got replaced by a font, along with too much text, resulting in big indigestible chunks of wordwordswords. Kind of like this blog... That purple guy's The Maxx, btw. Sometimes Keith drew him big and imposing, sometimes Keith drew him like this. Maxx is tonally flexible in a way most costumed heroes aren't.
Anyway, the schmaltz of panel 3 is probably indicative of Keith's shortcomings as a crafter of Deep Human Narratives. Portraying creepy horror/erotica? He brings it. Portraying simple happiness? He falls back on greeting-card hand-me-downs. This reminds me of the show Lost, which tried to turn its tricksy elements into the backdrop for O. Henry tales of human folly and growth, but lacked enough human insight to pull it off. Lost's attempts at character-centered drama often left me wondering if the writers had ever actually met a human.
But in a panel here, a page there, Keith's outpouring of lush doodles helped me enjoy the 90s a bit more than I might have otherwise, and Messner-Loebs wrote one passage of dialogue (no longer in my collection, I'm afraid) that still matters, even if paraphrased from memory. Maxx comforts a teenager (Sara, the brunette in the page above) with the insight that growing up is, in large measure, a matter of learning to manage pain. That idea helped me through a lot of sorrows and frustrations.
Let's switch to a different oddball 90s comic now:
Oz Squad! Two guys who aspire to pick up where John. R. Neill and Ruth Plumly Thompson left off, (or perhaps March Laumer was more the idea) draw upon X-Men/Teen Titans methodology to plug the gaps in their own youthful artistic problem solving toolkits, and behold the zap-kblam results. Don't worry, Toto there's a repairable robot dog. And all ends well, as the following panels make clear:
Hanging out at the mall, with big-headed Mulder and Scully (so 90s!) and... some other characters. What happier ending could there be?
Yeah, suck it, McDonalds! We're not gonna tolerate some crass corporate entity moving in on our shopping mall. Oz Mall! I hate to admit it, but the idea of Oz as a mall probably would have gone down pretty smooth with L. Frank Baum if he'd still been around.
Look at that lion's eyes, particularly in the second-to-last panel. If I were sitting by a lion, I'd want it to be sedated, but that lion is BAKED. Just another stoner at the mall.
And in closing, a quick glimpse of Casual Heroes! As far as I can tell, only one issue ever got published. And while it's not likely to make any nostalgia-monger's top 100 list, it's one of my personal talismans of 90s-ness.
Kirby swipes. Bold colors. Ripped stockings and cutoffs. This utterly derivative title tries to goose typical superhero schtick with slacker banter, and when I close my eyes and think "90s," this is how it looks, only less aggro and no sausage lips. In the letters page (yes, first issues had letters pages, thanks to friends of the artists) the guy behind this comic talks about swipes (the fine art of copying other artists, like oh say Jack Kirby) the way DJs talk about sampling. It's a kind of comics bricolage, or could be if it got past this Colorforms level.
I turn 40 in a few days, and this is still what I spend my mental energy on. Bye now.
Thursday, July 18, 2013
In Passamaquoddy No One Can Hear You Scream
After more or less enjoying Prometheus I've been watching the Alien movies, excepting the Alien Vs Predator movies because enough is enough.
Part of what makes the original Alien so great is that it's full of unfolding mystery. The alien keeps shifting, revealing new aspects of itself and new dangers. You can't pin it down. It's death itself, lethal, heartless, mindless; yet crafty, unpredictable, and unstoppable. The lesson is that the cosmos is not exactly full of love for the Human, and you shouldn't mess with some things.
Aliens retorts that you can mess with any damn thing you please, so LOCK AND LOAD. Director James Cameron, the Vincente Minnelli of monster movies, replaces the tension engendered by the polymorphing parasite's continual astonishments with the suspense of "Who will survive and what will be left of them?" That suspense was part of the first film, too, but here it's the mainspring. There's a bit of an addition to the aliens' characteristics, but it's more a reasonable extrapolation of what we knew (aliens have mommies too) than the nightmare twists of the original. Furthermore, the escalation from alien to aliens robs the creature of its dreadful uniqueness (though it didn't need to; such are the urgencies of the action genre), reducing the Cosmic Godling to creepy cannon fodder.
Alien3 offers no surprises regarding the alien creature itself, other than that it can look awfully unthreatening in 90s CGI that resembles a Colorform slapped onto the cinematic image. Also, the Alien's POV resembles an old camcorder with dubious filters. Director David Fincher would soon do much better.
The surprises in the film (aside from "Boo!" surprises) come from the convicts with whom heroine Ripley must work; their alien religious motivations replace the unfolding of Alien characteristics. The alien itself is thoroughly banalized by now; the Lovecraftian awe of the original film is reduced to "There's a rabid hippopotamus loose in the high school!" Each of these films has fine ensemble work, but all the sequels feature overt thesping, while the original was nearly Altmanesque in its casual approach to line readings, etc.
At one point in the third film, a guy refers to the alien as a dragon, which inspired me to spend the rest of the film pretending the alien is actually Pete's Dragon.
This exponentially boosted the film's entertainment value.
Alien Resurrection, the last of the Sigourney Alien films, has the look of a particularly glossy Heavy Metal magazine comic. The unfolding mystery in this film is as much about Ripley, newly reborn from hybrid human and alien DNA, as it is about the pureblood beasts. Sigourney Weaver's cool delight in playing a bad-girl version of Ripley is one of the chief joys I found in this film. Wynona Ryder is, as always, fun to look at, but her bitter-pixy appearance can't quite compensate for her undistinguished voice work, especially in the context of her costars. Sigourney and Brad Dourif have marvelous vocal instruments, next to which poor pretty Wynona sounds like a randomly selected person off the street. If only she'd brought back her comical British accent from Dracula! Brad Dourif is one of the few actors who could pull off his scenes of sensuosity with an Alien, though that's just a warmup for later developments.
Underwater aliens are fun, and we get them here, but the real return of Alien mystery comes when Ripley is lowered into a pit of distinct yet inchoate Alien anatomy in a glorious homage to Alien designer H. R. Giger's grotesque tableaus (too bad he didn't get a check or a credit for this film tho) and proceeds to have sex with an alien. It's all presented with White-Elephant arty tastefulness, since who could bear to watch a hard-core version of such a thing? Somebody, probably, but no one I want to have lunch with. The death of the offspring of this union depressed me; as cloying as the creature was, it reminded me of the death of Tink; a creature that never had a chance at life, put to death to spare it further misery.
I didn't like the idea of humans and aliens merging and mating; it further undercuts the evident theme of the original film, that cosmic indifference trumps manifest destiny. This film returns humanity to the center of the universe by showing that we can harmonize with the Alien, but better still if we kill the product of our miscegenation (not the first time inadvertent racism has crept into the franchise, as the many critics of Aliens' black-mother-with-too-many-kids can attest).
One more thing; most of the ensemble in this film seems to be a dry run for screenwriter Joss Whedon's nerd-favorite show Firefly. I thought Firefly seemed like an advertisement for its own adorableness, so with this film I enjoyed pretending that it really was the crew of the Serenity getting gutted by monsters. It's a sad testimony that I have to pretend absurd things while watching films that are meant to take the burden of that responsibility off my shoulders, but that's franchise entertainment for you.
Prometheus, whatever its flaws, put the mystery back into the story by showing us Aliens that sprang from alternate hybrid pairings and, aside from certain basic hungers, are not like the on-model, canonical, in-continuity aliens that had become as exhausted as any other franchised monster. Since the sense of wonder I experienced when the aliens came out looking wrong and strange and new is what I want from Science Fiction, I'm going to say that, for my purposes, Prometheus is the best of the Alien sequels.
Part of what makes the original Alien so great is that it's full of unfolding mystery. The alien keeps shifting, revealing new aspects of itself and new dangers. You can't pin it down. It's death itself, lethal, heartless, mindless; yet crafty, unpredictable, and unstoppable. The lesson is that the cosmos is not exactly full of love for the Human, and you shouldn't mess with some things.
Aliens retorts that you can mess with any damn thing you please, so LOCK AND LOAD. Director James Cameron, the Vincente Minnelli of monster movies, replaces the tension engendered by the polymorphing parasite's continual astonishments with the suspense of "Who will survive and what will be left of them?" That suspense was part of the first film, too, but here it's the mainspring. There's a bit of an addition to the aliens' characteristics, but it's more a reasonable extrapolation of what we knew (aliens have mommies too) than the nightmare twists of the original. Furthermore, the escalation from alien to aliens robs the creature of its dreadful uniqueness (though it didn't need to; such are the urgencies of the action genre), reducing the Cosmic Godling to creepy cannon fodder.
Alien3 offers no surprises regarding the alien creature itself, other than that it can look awfully unthreatening in 90s CGI that resembles a Colorform slapped onto the cinematic image. Also, the Alien's POV resembles an old camcorder with dubious filters. Director David Fincher would soon do much better.
The surprises in the film (aside from "Boo!" surprises) come from the convicts with whom heroine Ripley must work; their alien religious motivations replace the unfolding of Alien characteristics. The alien itself is thoroughly banalized by now; the Lovecraftian awe of the original film is reduced to "There's a rabid hippopotamus loose in the high school!" Each of these films has fine ensemble work, but all the sequels feature overt thesping, while the original was nearly Altmanesque in its casual approach to line readings, etc.
At one point in the third film, a guy refers to the alien as a dragon, which inspired me to spend the rest of the film pretending the alien is actually Pete's Dragon.
This exponentially boosted the film's entertainment value.
Alien Resurrection, the last of the Sigourney Alien films, has the look of a particularly glossy Heavy Metal magazine comic. The unfolding mystery in this film is as much about Ripley, newly reborn from hybrid human and alien DNA, as it is about the pureblood beasts. Sigourney Weaver's cool delight in playing a bad-girl version of Ripley is one of the chief joys I found in this film. Wynona Ryder is, as always, fun to look at, but her bitter-pixy appearance can't quite compensate for her undistinguished voice work, especially in the context of her costars. Sigourney and Brad Dourif have marvelous vocal instruments, next to which poor pretty Wynona sounds like a randomly selected person off the street. If only she'd brought back her comical British accent from Dracula! Brad Dourif is one of the few actors who could pull off his scenes of sensuosity with an Alien, though that's just a warmup for later developments.
Underwater aliens are fun, and we get them here, but the real return of Alien mystery comes when Ripley is lowered into a pit of distinct yet inchoate Alien anatomy in a glorious homage to Alien designer H. R. Giger's grotesque tableaus (too bad he didn't get a check or a credit for this film tho) and proceeds to have sex with an alien. It's all presented with White-Elephant arty tastefulness, since who could bear to watch a hard-core version of such a thing? Somebody, probably, but no one I want to have lunch with. The death of the offspring of this union depressed me; as cloying as the creature was, it reminded me of the death of Tink; a creature that never had a chance at life, put to death to spare it further misery.
I didn't like the idea of humans and aliens merging and mating; it further undercuts the evident theme of the original film, that cosmic indifference trumps manifest destiny. This film returns humanity to the center of the universe by showing that we can harmonize with the Alien, but better still if we kill the product of our miscegenation (not the first time inadvertent racism has crept into the franchise, as the many critics of Aliens' black-mother-with-too-many-kids can attest).
One more thing; most of the ensemble in this film seems to be a dry run for screenwriter Joss Whedon's nerd-favorite show Firefly. I thought Firefly seemed like an advertisement for its own adorableness, so with this film I enjoyed pretending that it really was the crew of the Serenity getting gutted by monsters. It's a sad testimony that I have to pretend absurd things while watching films that are meant to take the burden of that responsibility off my shoulders, but that's franchise entertainment for you.
Prometheus, whatever its flaws, put the mystery back into the story by showing us Aliens that sprang from alternate hybrid pairings and, aside from certain basic hungers, are not like the on-model, canonical, in-continuity aliens that had become as exhausted as any other franchised monster. Since the sense of wonder I experienced when the aliens came out looking wrong and strange and new is what I want from Science Fiction, I'm going to say that, for my purposes, Prometheus is the best of the Alien sequels.
Friday, July 05, 2013
Hands on Shoulders
As I approach my 40th birthday and my fourth anniversary, I recall something a friend told me on graduation day in 1996. At 22, I was utterly out of ideas about how to make my way in the world, and I told her so.
"We'll have it figured out by the time we're 35," she said.
Over the years I clung to that like a talisman. And at the age of 35, I began dating the woman who is now my wife. Good stuff.
***
New topic: we saw a couple episodes of True Blood recently. It's a soap about extravagant, camp vampires. In the first of the episodes in question (Season 5, episode 3) we learn in flashback how two vampires, Eric and Pam, met; how Pam persuaded Eric to make her a vampire; why she wanted to be a vampire at all; and how they became a couple. It's no spoiler to say that it involves some outlandish behavior, grandiloquent gestures, ultimatums, and lots of blood.
In the next episode we see how Eric and Pam formally sever their relationship. It involves hands on shoulders; sensitive, quiet conversation; and a little tearing up. Talk about a dropoff.
I'm an Eric Rohmer fan, so it's not like I'm averse to restrained, dialogue-driven relationship stories, but I can get hands on shoulders and restrained tears from a hundred lesser shows. The writer or someone misunderstood what we come to this show for.
I suppose you could spin it as a demonstration of how the characters have matured over the years, but anyone who's watched the show this far know the characters have done anything but mature. They're vicious, deadly hotheads. That's why they're fun.
True Blood is produced by the creator of Six Feet Under, a more realistic soap that is special to me, and it had its fair share of hands on shoulders moments, but the show was calibrated that way. For a while I was frustrated that True Blood wasn't Bride of Six Feet Under, but now I've learned to appreciate the depths that can be plumbed within the Pop Kabuki format of this show.
"We'll have it figured out by the time we're 35," she said.
Over the years I clung to that like a talisman. And at the age of 35, I began dating the woman who is now my wife. Good stuff.
***
New topic: we saw a couple episodes of True Blood recently. It's a soap about extravagant, camp vampires. In the first of the episodes in question (Season 5, episode 3) we learn in flashback how two vampires, Eric and Pam, met; how Pam persuaded Eric to make her a vampire; why she wanted to be a vampire at all; and how they became a couple. It's no spoiler to say that it involves some outlandish behavior, grandiloquent gestures, ultimatums, and lots of blood.
In the next episode we see how Eric and Pam formally sever their relationship. It involves hands on shoulders; sensitive, quiet conversation; and a little tearing up. Talk about a dropoff.
I'm an Eric Rohmer fan, so it's not like I'm averse to restrained, dialogue-driven relationship stories, but I can get hands on shoulders and restrained tears from a hundred lesser shows. The writer or someone misunderstood what we come to this show for.
I suppose you could spin it as a demonstration of how the characters have matured over the years, but anyone who's watched the show this far know the characters have done anything but mature. They're vicious, deadly hotheads. That's why they're fun.
True Blood is produced by the creator of Six Feet Under, a more realistic soap that is special to me, and it had its fair share of hands on shoulders moments, but the show was calibrated that way. For a while I was frustrated that True Blood wasn't Bride of Six Feet Under, but now I've learned to appreciate the depths that can be plumbed within the Pop Kabuki format of this show.
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Food Building
In the late 90s I worked for a carpet cleaning company. We would occasionally get sent to a town called Bessemer, which was generally the only time I ever went to Bessemer. It was unfamiliar terrain to me, and I got lost a lot.
One day my partner and I were trying to find a house that was lost down one of the squirrelly little roads that capillary their way off the main streets through the town, and it wasn't going well. Understand that GPS was not on the map, so to speak. All we had was a big dusty map book, and Bessemer was shell-gaming us, sneaking that little road past us at each turn.
Eventually we'd stop at a gas station, buy some Corn Nuts (my staple diet at the time) and beg for directions.
"Just go on up that way till you pass the Piggly Wiggly..."
"All you gotta do is hang left when you see the Piggly Wiggly..."
"When you see the Piggly Wiggly, take a right..."
Everybody's directions (And we asked a representative sampling of Bessemer residents) hinged on the Piggly Wiggly.
After about an hour of this we finally accepted that the big not-Piggly Wiggly grocery we kept passing as we zigzagged along the grain of peoples' directions must have once been a Piggly Wiggly before leaving the franchise and renaming itself Food Building or We Got Groceries or whatever. Everyone's directions made perfect sense from there and we found the client's house instantly. At this time Bessemer was not a flourishing economic center, and I find myself wondering if that stagnation was cause or effect of the locked-in folkways that prevented the Good People of Bessemer from informing us of the "Piggly Wiggly's" binary identity.
A few months later I was in Bessemer again. This time I was alone, tooling around the back roads, searching for an even more obscure address. It was night. I got lost in the woods, and something went awry. What was it? Did I just veer off the road into a ditch? Or was there a more robust mechanical failure? You tell me. Those vans broke down all the time; the cleaning gear was in fine shape, but the vehicles were old and strained, and at least one got towed to the repair shop every day. Anyway, I try to remember the details of what went wrong and it's a smear.
But the van was in a syrupy ditch, and the wheels would cut no traction into that mess. The road was virtually dirt. It was dark outside my headlights. Surrounded by woods, with little desperate dwellings here and there.
We had CBs that we used to communicate with base, but in that dead zone I couldn't get a signal through. I had, as it were, no bars. My only option was to walk till I found a phone. I'd passed a little gas station some ways back, so I hoofed it.
At one point I passed a little watering hole. Rough customers stood outside talking loud, then went silent as I passed. There was a pay phone out front, but the scowls of the locals inspired me to press on.
I got to the (well lit) gas station and placed my call. Home base told me to go back to the van and wait for the tow truck. A handsome young man was waiting by the phone. "Don't go back there," he told me. "This is a BAD neighborhood at night. I'm waiting on some friends to get me out of here. You tell them to come here and pick you up." (Let me point out that he was of the same race as the locals, and I was not).
Why didn't I take his advice? Or why didn't I beg him to get his friends to drive me to my truck? Look, if I'd been a problem solver, I wouldn't have been working where I was. Marry a problem solver like I did (a decade later), folks, so you can learn like I have.
So the guy's friends arrived and took him away, leaving me alone outside a closed gas station. His uneasy company had been some comfort, but the florescent light was bleak now.
A dutiful dope of a drudge, I walked back, through the dark, skirting around the watering hole. Then I sat in the van, worried and frustrated. Like a schmuck, I ran the engine, grinding it, the tires shrilling and spewing mud; loud, loud, worthless effort.
A tense-looking middle-aged man came out a door, glowered at me in silence for several minutes. It was pretty late. I prayed he'd offer me some help, but he just stood in the porch light like an icon of justifiably angry poverty. Then he went back inside and the light went out.
Somehow I got the truck on the road. Did I push it? Did I rock it? I dunno. Was the trip complicated by a flat tire, a wobbly wheel, a twist of some snarled mechanism or other? I got no clue. I was frantic. I got to a different gas station, an open one near the highway. I contacted base (with the CB this time) and they rerouted the tow guy, who fussed at me for not staying put.
Next week I did something I'd been yearning to do for the entire year I'd worked there. I quit.
You know why I worked there as long as I did? Because at my interview they laid a guilt trip on me about how they didn't want to hire people only to have them quit after a month. They expected me to work there at least a year or two. That's why I stayed.
Suffice it to say I don't sell my own happiness so short now.
One day my partner and I were trying to find a house that was lost down one of the squirrelly little roads that capillary their way off the main streets through the town, and it wasn't going well. Understand that GPS was not on the map, so to speak. All we had was a big dusty map book, and Bessemer was shell-gaming us, sneaking that little road past us at each turn.
Eventually we'd stop at a gas station, buy some Corn Nuts (my staple diet at the time) and beg for directions.
"Just go on up that way till you pass the Piggly Wiggly..."
"All you gotta do is hang left when you see the Piggly Wiggly..."
"When you see the Piggly Wiggly, take a right..."
Everybody's directions (And we asked a representative sampling of Bessemer residents) hinged on the Piggly Wiggly.
After about an hour of this we finally accepted that the big not-Piggly Wiggly grocery we kept passing as we zigzagged along the grain of peoples' directions must have once been a Piggly Wiggly before leaving the franchise and renaming itself Food Building or We Got Groceries or whatever. Everyone's directions made perfect sense from there and we found the client's house instantly. At this time Bessemer was not a flourishing economic center, and I find myself wondering if that stagnation was cause or effect of the locked-in folkways that prevented the Good People of Bessemer from informing us of the "Piggly Wiggly's" binary identity.
A few months later I was in Bessemer again. This time I was alone, tooling around the back roads, searching for an even more obscure address. It was night. I got lost in the woods, and something went awry. What was it? Did I just veer off the road into a ditch? Or was there a more robust mechanical failure? You tell me. Those vans broke down all the time; the cleaning gear was in fine shape, but the vehicles were old and strained, and at least one got towed to the repair shop every day. Anyway, I try to remember the details of what went wrong and it's a smear.
But the van was in a syrupy ditch, and the wheels would cut no traction into that mess. The road was virtually dirt. It was dark outside my headlights. Surrounded by woods, with little desperate dwellings here and there.
We had CBs that we used to communicate with base, but in that dead zone I couldn't get a signal through. I had, as it were, no bars. My only option was to walk till I found a phone. I'd passed a little gas station some ways back, so I hoofed it.
At one point I passed a little watering hole. Rough customers stood outside talking loud, then went silent as I passed. There was a pay phone out front, but the scowls of the locals inspired me to press on.
I got to the (well lit) gas station and placed my call. Home base told me to go back to the van and wait for the tow truck. A handsome young man was waiting by the phone. "Don't go back there," he told me. "This is a BAD neighborhood at night. I'm waiting on some friends to get me out of here. You tell them to come here and pick you up." (Let me point out that he was of the same race as the locals, and I was not).
Why didn't I take his advice? Or why didn't I beg him to get his friends to drive me to my truck? Look, if I'd been a problem solver, I wouldn't have been working where I was. Marry a problem solver like I did (a decade later), folks, so you can learn like I have.
So the guy's friends arrived and took him away, leaving me alone outside a closed gas station. His uneasy company had been some comfort, but the florescent light was bleak now.
A dutiful dope of a drudge, I walked back, through the dark, skirting around the watering hole. Then I sat in the van, worried and frustrated. Like a schmuck, I ran the engine, grinding it, the tires shrilling and spewing mud; loud, loud, worthless effort.
A tense-looking middle-aged man came out a door, glowered at me in silence for several minutes. It was pretty late. I prayed he'd offer me some help, but he just stood in the porch light like an icon of justifiably angry poverty. Then he went back inside and the light went out.
Somehow I got the truck on the road. Did I push it? Did I rock it? I dunno. Was the trip complicated by a flat tire, a wobbly wheel, a twist of some snarled mechanism or other? I got no clue. I was frantic. I got to a different gas station, an open one near the highway. I contacted base (with the CB this time) and they rerouted the tow guy, who fussed at me for not staying put.
Next week I did something I'd been yearning to do for the entire year I'd worked there. I quit.
You know why I worked there as long as I did? Because at my interview they laid a guilt trip on me about how they didn't want to hire people only to have them quit after a month. They expected me to work there at least a year or two. That's why I stayed.
Suffice it to say I don't sell my own happiness so short now.
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