Sean T. Collins has written about comics and popular culture professionally since 2001 and on this very blog since 2003. He has written for Maxim, The Comics Journal, Stuff, Wizard, A&F Quarterly, Comic Book Resources, Giant, ToyFare, The Onion, The Comics Reporter and more. His comics have been published by Top Shelf, Partyka, and Family Style. He blogs here and at Robot 6.
(Provided that I deem them suitably fabulous, your name and message will be considered eligible for publication unless you specify otherwise.) Review Copies Welcome
At The House Next Door, Ryland Walker Knight reviews The Mist. I'm perplexed by his assertions, which I've heard frequently elsewhere, that a) Mrs. Carmody and her religious nuts are scarier than the monsters, and b) the film is more interesting when the survivors interact than when the monsters attack. I think in both cases the answer is quite clearly "no, they're not" and "no, it's not," because of how stock the characters are in both cases. We've seen Mrs. Carmody a million times, and nothing interesting is done with her beyond casting Marcia Gay Harden. We've seen a disparate group of people thrown together and forced to cooperate to survive a post-apocalyptic world of danger two million times, and usually much more interestingly than this. As I alluded to before, compare this crew and what they do to, for example, the way Ben and Cooper's behavior and decisions challenge our preconceptions about their competence in Night of the Living Dead, or the warmly multifaceted interpersonal dynamics between Stephen, Peter, Roger, and Francine (including friendship, love, idolization, one-upsmanship, stoicism, panic, foolhardiness...) in the original Dawn of the Dead. Nothing at all like that is going on here; the one big shock is at the end, and as Knight points out, that shock is so sudden it feels like it undercuts the rest of the movie. Arguing that the characters are the best part and that the humans are the scariest part are the sorts of things one is supposed to say about a horror film, but in this case as in many, many others, including many good horror films, they're not true.
At The Forager, Jon Hastings reviews The Transformers. For the first time he's made me realize why I've been so reluctant to watch it: I was never a big Transformers kid--Star Wars, He-Man, G.I. Joe, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were my action figures/media tie-ins of choice, I think probably because the Transformers were really expensive--but in my experience their shows and their movie were really pretty weird. I remember the leaders of both sides dying and floating three-headed robot tribunals and a giant planet that ate other planets and stuff like that. Michael Bay's vanilla "hey we're all having fun here!!!!!!!" blockbuster mentality would never capture that weirdness and seriousness.
Censors don't read, but they do go to movie theaters.
--Bryan Alexander on the absurdity of protests against the years-old, highly successful His Dark Materials YA fantasy series by Philip Pullman only when its first installment, The Golden Compass, is being made into a motion picture. So you can add "illiterate" to the heap of vituperative adjectives I use to describe the Catholic League. (I went to a Catholic high school, man. Some things you don't forget.)
Former prisoners have reported that their captors were expert in two practices in particular: falaqa, or beating suspects on the soles of their feet with a truncheon and then, often, forcing them to walk barefoot and bloodied across a salt-covered floor; and farruj, or the "grilled chicken," in which prisoners are handcuffed behind their legs, hung upside down by a rod placed behind their knees, and beaten.
Three unconnected thoughts about four unconnected superhero comics
1) Due to a freelance assignment I reread Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's Batman: The Killing Joke today. As I did it I had in mind the oft-voiced criticism that the book has no relevance to real life, a line taken not just by reviewers but also by, and perhaps most vociferously by, and maybe originally by, Moore himself. I totally disagree. Even if you haven't been in one yourself, surely you know someone who's been locked into a mutually destructive love-hate relationship with someone that brings out the worst qualities in both parties. Perhaps you've also known someone who is or was, for lack of a better word, addicted to illness. I think there's at least as much personally relatable heft to the emotional core of this book as there is to, say, the Gordian Knot thing at the end of Watchmen. It's also a pretty great Batman story in which both he and the Joker are actually pretty scary, which is harder to pull off than most writers seem to think. And Brian Bolland can draw, boy howdy.
2) Over the past few months I've talked occasionally about the un-selfconscious craziness of '80s action movies like Rambo and Invasion U.S.A.. I wonder: are the slick, gratuitously violent superhero comics of today, like Countdown to Final Crisis or Mark Millar's Wanted, an equivalent entertainment? I mean, there's caveats in both cases, to be sure: Countdown has that sprawling "to be continued in the pages of Title X" would-be mega-crossover thing going on, and Wanted thinks it's Fight Club. But both appear to have that love of bloodshed and lack of self-awareness that characterize the slaughterfests of yore. I guess it just comes down to whether they succeed as entertainment, which, well, compared to Road House? Not so much. (I enjoy Wanted well enough, I guess, though the glib rape references leave a terrible taste in your mouth and like all Mark Millar comics the hero just starts winning at the end because it's time for the hero to start winning.)
3) So I guess it's now out there that Spider-Man is going to swap his marriage to Mary Jane for the life of Aunt May courtesy of Marvel's satanic stand-in Mephisto. I try not to comment on these "how dare they" superhero plot points because there are 40,000,000 other blogs where you can find that if you want and because there are more productive ways to spend one's blogging-about-comics time and energy, but I'll make an exception here because Spidey was my first superhero favorite as a little guy and because this is just so colossally wrong-headed that it practically demands scorn and derision, like that "rappin' John Wayne" song from the '80s.
For starters, it should be self-evident that having your flagship superhero, your exemplar of heroic values and morality, the guy whose book gave us the phrase "with great power comes great responsiblity," the most popular fictional character in the world whose name isn't Harry Potter, literally make a deal with the devil is just a terrible, terrible idea on the face of it. That he does so to scrap the romance at the center of his multi-billion-dollar, zeitgeist-bestriding film trilogy should probably have sent up a few red flags too.
But it's worse still because, much like all the mystical "avatar of the Spider-God" poppycock writer J. Michael Straczynski has shoehorned into the character's mythos--including his origin, which with Batman's and Superman's was among the most famous and note-perfect origins of any heroic character ever as-is--it runs counter to every core aspect of the character: his roots in science fiction, his role as the Marvel superhero community's everyman in the city, his nature as not some Chosen One blessed and cursed by the gods but just some loser teenager who got dealt a crazy hand by dumb luck.
The final, fatal, unforgivable flaw, of course, is that it doesn't even work from a standpoint of emotional realism. Simply put, if you ask any happily married couple to trade away their entire marriage, past present and future, to save the life of a septuagenarian mother figure, no matter how beloved, who probably is just a few years from dying anyway, the answer would be no.
Do you know what I'm talking about? I didn't think he did the first time I watched 28 Weeks Later, and I'm rewatching it and I still don't think so. But it was obviously in the promos, and I've heard people talk about it being in the movie too. Can anyone else out there with the DVD confirm or disconfirm this suspicion?
You know a review's going to be a doozy when it approvingly asserts in its second sentence that Slate's humorless killjoy of a film critic Dana Stevens "spoke for many" about, well, anything. Calling the review "Beowulf: War Porn Wrapped in a Chippendale Dancer's Body" is probably a tip-off too. And the straight-faced inclusion of the sentence "The three beasts in the film in fact line up pretty well as stand-ins for Iraq, North Korea and Iran" would be exhibit C.
But what really perplexes me about Alexander Zaitchik's Alternet piece on Beowulf is that it seems to argue that a movie whose main point is that warriors are about 60% bullshit and bluster, 30% greed, lust, and sloth, and MAYBE 10% bravery tops is some sort of paean to the glory of war, then goes on to support this argument, incomprehensibly enough, by calling attention to the film's anti-Christian strain--only to completely reverse itself in the final paragraph and wonder if the point of the movie is in fact that war is not all it's cracked up to be.
Looks like the ranks of those unhappy with J. Michael Straczynski's "One More Day" Spider-Man storyline include...J. Michael Straczynski, who's basically throwing "OMD" artist and Marvel Editor in Chief Joe Quesada under the bus for the arc and saying he came this close to asking for his name to be removed from its final two issues. He also cites wanting to have Peter Parker sire illegitimate children by Gwen Stacy as an example of his sound judgment, which is hilarious. (Via every comics blog everywhere.)
Aeron at Monster Brains brings us links to several photo galleries' worth of photos from Austria's Krampus festivals, celebrations of the mythical devil who hangs with Santa Claus and punishes the naughty children. Some of these costumes are weapons-grade scary.
Glenn Kenny and his commenteers are close-reading the bloody bejesus out of No Country for Old Men. I'm always torn when I see discussions like this going on. On the one hand it takes me back to my film school days, when similar bull sessions frequently lasted until dawn or sobriety intervened. And it's always fun to watch people geek out so unabashedly about something I love as much as I love film, particularly a great one (and No Country is a great film). On the other hand it edges a little too close to the parlor-game mentality whereby great art is seen to be not just appreciated or understood but decoded, like the Jumble in the funnypages. I don't think it works that way. I certainly hope it doesn't. At any rate I'm pretty sure that determining whether or not Chigurh is in a certain room or holding a certain weapon in a certain scene is not some magic key to understanding what it all means. Like, when you watch that movie, don't you just naturally come away understanding what it all means? Without having to resort to the equivalent of "the walrus was Paul"?
Finally, oh Marty, how I love you. (Bonus points for casting Simon Baker in the Hitchcock hero role. And for Thelma Schoonmaker on-screen. And for the ending.) (Via every movie blog everywhere.)
The Hellraiser remake has a release date: September 5, 2008. It's also apparently called Clive Barker Presents: Hellraiser, which is interesting--putting the imprimatur of the original creator on a remake in such an explicit fashion is an unusual move--but may also just be one of those bits of not-quite-accurate information that calcifies into Internet Factdom.
What is behind this popular and patently false critical suspicion that a "well-crafted" movie is automatically phony or inauthentic, while a film that is "unpolished" is considered genuine -- automatically real or truthful?
Great question. As I've noted, the proficiency-as-deficiency argument has been used most memorably against the likes of No Country for Old Men and Children of Men, but it's also popped up (with varying degrees of vehemence and slightly different points of attack) in discussions of Beowulf, 28 Weeks Later, even 300.* "Craft is the enemy" is a weird motto for film critics of all people to embrace.
Anyway, read the post and then stick around for the comment thread, which veers off into an engaging discussion of The Mist of all things. This very spoilery post ultimately goes somewhere I don't agree with, but it starts out by critiquing the film for answering several of the original novella's most haunting unanswered questions, which I definitely think works against the film.
(Via Ken Lowery, a leading light of ADDTF's burgeoning comment scene.)
* By linking these movies, I don't mean to imply that their skillful craftsmanship is deployed to uniform, or uniformly successful, effect.
Both times I've seen No Country for Old Men in the theater, this trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood has been attached. It is the best trailer I've ever seen.
It took me a while to find this on YouTube--when I looked after the first time I saw NCfOM I couldn't find it at all. I truly hope it's not one of those "you need to see it on the big screen" deals. But through a combination of the editing, Daniel Day-Lewis's manically committed performance (evident even in several-second snippets), Jonny Greenwood's preposterously ominous score, and the best tease of a title since The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, it's just about the most frightening trailer imaginable. I love it so.
By the way, the second best trailer I've ever seen is this:
What are your favorite trailers? Please post links if you've got 'em.
* My friend Rick Marshall talks about the trials and travails of sharing the same name as both a prime suspect in San Francisco's Zodiac murders and the dad from Land of the Lost.
* Publisher Alvin Buenaventura, Comic Art editor Todd Hignite, critic Ken Parille, and cartoonists Jonathan Bennett and Tim Hensley have started a group blog. (Via Eric Reynolds.)
* Tim O'Neil gives a thumbs up to the Marvel event miniseries World War Hulk, up to and including the inexplicably-panned-elsewhere ending. I liked it too. (So did NeilAlien.) Ever since I spent a dreary Thanksgiving weekend reading through about 60-odd issues of Savage Dragon back in 1999, I've held the belief that some comics are just tailor-made for reading all in a row rainy Saturdays, and I look forward to having a series of Planet Hulk and World War Hulk paperbacks to do that with one day. (Same with Geoff Johns' Green Lantern run. Same, I think, with Marvel's Annihilation series.)
* Sad news: While wrapping up "Scarred," his great series of mini-interviews with horror luminaries about their formative scary moments, Steven Wintle of The Horror Blog takes the opportunity to announce a scaled back blogging presence. That bums me out.
* Finally, I am completely infatuated with the trailer for Speed Racer. It's like an adaptation of the old Super Nintendo racing game F-Zero, or even Mario Kart. (Via AICN. Thanks to Jim Treacher for alerting me to how crazy this movie looks.)
Blogging is not hard, and don't believe anyone who says that it is. Blogging is easy. Getting all the way through the Dark Tower series was the hardest thing I've ever done bloggingwise, and it was still easy as pie compared to virtually anything else I've ever done that doesn't involve a blog--getting my driver's license, finding a good brand of store-bought salsa through trial and error, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, hooking up my TiVo, learning how to French kiss, waking up at 6 every morning to feed my cats, deciding which KMFDM CDs to leave on display and which ones to store once I ran out of room on my CD shelves, working in publishing, washing my face before I go to bed, buying tickets to the GZA show at the Knitting Factory next Friday, anything.
* The teaser poster for the next M. Night Shyamalan movie, a natural-disaster-apocalypse movie called The Happening, is out. Needless to say it hits my buttons.
Via Bloody Disgusting. And Jason Adams points out something about the poster's tagline that never even occurred to me.
* It's still Krampus Week over at Monster Brains, and this particular postcard of the Christmas devil is stunning. Dig that color design!
* Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell turn a skeptical eye to Beowulf, focusing on whether the tech really works. I disagree with many of their observations (duh) but it's the most thought-provoking negative review of the film I've read; the effects-based comparisons to The Lord of the Rings were particularly specific and illuminating.
* Jonathan Bennett brings our attention to HitchcockWiki's 1000 Frames of Hitchcock project, which breaks down every one of the Master's films into 1000 screen grabs.
* I love that Kevin Huizenga keeps posting his Powr Mastrs fan art. I really just love when any artist shows unabashed enthusiasm for the work of one of his contemporaries by creating homages to it (that's why I've been happy about the recent return to quick-response pop-music cover versions--for years and years I thought we were losing something by not having the equivalent of Joe Cocker's within-the-year Beatles covers, you know?) Anyway, his seemingly extradimensional Jellyfish Emperor is really blowing my mind.
* Apparently in response to the infamous Gordon Lee case, which at this point looks more likely to end in a misconduct conviction for the prosecutor than an obscenity conviction for the retailer, all Free Comic Book Day books must now be all-ages. I'm no retailer, and I dunno, maybe FCBD really is geared all-but-exclusively to children already. But my first instinct was that this is a profoundly dopey (and cowardly) decision equivalent to the film industry having a free-movie day that only includes PG-rated movies.
* For a glimpse of the kinds of things that went down before video-game culture fully calcified as a children's affair in the public mind, take a look at some naughty "adult" Atari games courtesy of Kotaku. (Link via the Daily Gut.) The combination of the ultra-lo-res graphics we associate with the game-playing experiences of our youth and the crassly pornographic subject matter leads to some fascinating cognitive dissonance.
* Finally, this week's Horror Roundtable is all about our best creative achievements of the past year. Come listen to us toot our own horns!
Normally I'd put this under the heading "The state of the beast" rather than under the title of the short story from which that phrase came, but in this case I'm making an exception for obvious reasons:
On the slaughterhouse floor at Quality Pork Processors Inc. is an area known as the "head table," but not because it is the place of honor. It is where workers cut up pigs' heads and then shoot compressed air into the skulls until the brains come spilling out.
But now the grisly practice has come under suspicion from health authorities.
Over eight months from last December through July, 11 workers at the plant all of them employed at the head table developed numbness, tingling or other neurological symptoms, and some scientists suspect inhaled airborne brain matter may have somehow triggered the illnesses.
A day earlier, [Georgina] Papin's three sisters cried and clutched each other's hands in court while the judge reviewed the testimony of witness Lynn Ellingson, who said she walked in on a blood-covered Pickton as Papin's body dangled from a chain in the farm's slaughterhouse.
Prosecution witness Andrew Bellwood had testified that Pickton told him how he strangled his alleged victims and fed their remains to his pigs.
Authorities plan on charging Robert "Willie" Pickton with a total of 26 murders, primarily of prostitutes and junkies; while in prison he boasted to an undercover police officer of committing 49.
* The Golden Compass reached number one at the box office but with a disappointing $26 million haul. I have a hard time thinking about this business story without also thinking about a number of disheartening factors: the naked desire of its studio, New Line, to replicate its Lord of the Rings franchise's success, all the more irksome given that same studio's treatment of the architects of that franchise; the leeching away of the source material's anti-theist philosophical oomph; the odious Catholic League riding shotgun; a possible glut of fantasy film set in CGI snow. Add it all up and it doesn't equal "good time at the movies," at least for me.
* Finally, after the recent Finnish school shooting involving a young man who posted videos implying his intentions on YouTube, resulting in the media making hay out of that fact although it really had nothing to do with the case itself, I noted that you never see headlines like "Massacre linked to pen and paper" when killers chronicle their thoughts in a more traditional fashion. Sadly, life, in the form of mall shooter Robert Hawkins, has provided us with proof. Note moreover that as far as I can gather, you're also not seeing voices from the Right decry the victims as exemplars of the feminization of America and the decline of the West this time around, perhaps because it's politically trickier to dance on the graves of Midwestern Christmas shoppers--or Christian missionaries and megachurch members--than on those of college students.
I should mention that I have a one-page-or-so piece on Lawless, the new collection of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips's series Criminal, in the equally new issue of Maxim. It's the issue with Mischa Barton on the cover; the piece is on page 34 IIRC. Enjoy!
Not so much a Carnival of Souls since I'm not sure any of them are horror-related, really. And while there's some comicsy stuff in there it's not a Comix and Match either, if you've been around long enough to remember what those were. Just some stuff of interest.
* Reading this description of author J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, which features three separate narratives arranged in tiers on each page between which readers may bounce at their discretion, made me think that the inherent aspect of comics that excites me the most that excites me the most is juxtaposition--words with images, one image with another.
* As recently as last week I was thinking that as a storyteller, you can pretty much get away with placing any kind of human behavior in the setting of a New York City subway. These non-stationary, non-transient spaces beneath the most fascinating city in the world are pretty much magic for readers--they can be staging grounds for serial killers feeding cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers, people can have sex on them, street gangs can rumble in them, people can breakdance in them, vigilantes can kill people in them, sad gay clowns can give speeches in them (I've actually seen this happen), and people will buy it. This story and video of hipster girls giving pole dances and lap dances on the subway for cash, which I saw a link to on CNN.com's front page a couple of days ago, seemed tailor-made to prove my point.
1) The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is the most important comics-related organization in America and you should donate to it.
2) Paul Pope was there and the story of Ron Paul (or "Ron Paul" via some savvy assistant) citing Paul (Pope)'s libertarian "Berlin Batman" as (Ron) Paul's favorite superhero was much bandied about, but it wasn't until I saw Andrew Sullivan blogging about it (complete with panel scans!) that I grokked that it had become quite a story.
* Finally, I was watching The Two Towers today and a wonderful piece of acting by Viggo Mortensen stood out to me: Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli are wandering through Fangorn Forest in search of Merry and Pippin. Suddenly Legolas halts them all and says "The White Wizard approaches," meaning the evil Saruman. The look on Mortensen's face in the subsequent shot radiates "Oh Jesus, am I about to have to hit out of my weight class or what" just as surely as if he'd started shivering and chattering like Shaggy and Scooby, but it's shot through with an inability not to at least try to physically defeat this entity, basically the second-most powerful being in all of Middle-earth. The look in his eyes and the line of his mouth basically says "I'm going to do this even though I'm scared shitless, but let's be honest, I'm a few seconds away from dying." It's fascinating.
The biggest thing I Am Legend has going against it is its title. Simply change the main character's name and call the movie something else (I dunno, Fresh Prince vs. the Vampires has a nice ring to it) and I'm pretty sure you'd see most of the objections being flung at it from the horror-cognoscenti corner evaporate. As it stands now, it takes someone who isn't attached to the source novella--someone like me, in other words--to appreciate that while as an adaptation of the book it's pretty terrible, as a post-apocalyptic survival-horror film it's pretty damn good.
As you've no doubt heard, the differences between Francis Lawrence's film, written by Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman, and Richard Matheson's iconic novella are not a case of "they cut Tom Bombadil and made Faramir a bit of a jerk." Goodness, no. With the exception of the title, the name of the protagonist, and the very basic concept--sole human survivor in a world full of people who've been transformed into monsters that want to kill him--virtually everything has changed, frequently radically, and in several crucial instances to the diametric opposite of what was present in the original. The setting has changed from the California suburbs to Manhattan. The hero, Robert Neville, has changed from just some guy to the scientist the world was counting on to stop the plague before it got out of control. The antagonists have changed from more-or-less intelligent, weak bloodsuckers to acrobatic engines of full-fledged cannibalistic destruction that come across like hybrids of the critters from The Descent and the infected from 28 Days/Weeks Later. Their origin shifts from largely mysterious with a few nods in a viral direction to being made clear in the film's opening scene (an experimental cancer cure involving rerouting the measles virus to attack cancerous cells ends up giving its recipients rabies-like symptoms that end up either killing them outright or turning them into monstrous, infectious killing machines themselves). Neville's reason for killing them has changed from a drive to exterminate to a drive to cure. Most fundamentally of all, the key plot twist, the ending, and the meaning of the title itself are all complete 180s from what they are in the book. It's honestly a bit baffling why they bothered to "adapt" the thing at all.
But as I mentioned, I'm not a huge devotee of the book. (I read it, enjoyed it, never thought much about it since.) Therefore my bafflement stems not from outrage on the original's behalf, but from a vain wish that the movie could have headed the inevitable objections from the book's partisans off at the pass by simply making the exact same movie they ended up making without waving the title around like a red flag in front of a bull. That's because the movie they made is a sophisticated, moving, and unique take on the post-apocalyptic genre, a bait-and-switch job that at first comes across like the ultimate survival-horror competence fantasy only to reveal itself as an examination of the massive psychological toll such competence takes.
The lynchpin here is obviously Will Smith's Robert Neville. For about 50% of the movie he's the closest cousin to James Bond or Batman the zombie(ish) genre has ever seen. He's a high-ranking Army officer, brilliant scientist, loving father and husband, loyal dog owner, stunning physical specimen (the ladies reacted to his shirtless workout like wolves from a Tex Avery cartoon), Bob Marley fanatic (a major plot point!), art aficionado (one of the film's best running visual gags (and it has several, including a big Times Square billboard for a Superman/Batman movie "coming soon") are that his walls are lined with masterpieces from abandoned NYC's museums), and ridiculously proficient survivalist all rolled into one. His house, with a lovely view of Washington Square Park, is tricked out with all the security devices of a brownstone-sized panic room, including a few square blocks' worth of booby traps and emergency lighting--not to mention a fully-stocked pantry and arsenal, keys to dozens of different vehicles arranged alphabetically, and its own supply of electricity and running water. He hunts for deer in Times Square, grows corn in Central Park, fishes in the reflecting pool in the Metropolitan Museum, and has every AM frequency in New York broadcasting a message for survivors to meet him at the South Street Seaport at midday, an appointment he keeps without fail even though no one's ever come. Best of all, he's got a basement laboratory where he continues his quest to derive a cure for the plague from his own natural immunity, and has capturing live specimens for his research down to a Rousseau-from-Lost-like science. The guy keeps busier as the last man on Earth than I do right now.
But there's a price to be paid for being on top of your game all day every day with no one to fall back on. At first it's glimpsed only in quirky, funny behavior like Neville's one-sided conversations with his dog (relatable to any pet owners; I myself actually provide the voices of my cats in such exchanges) and his slightly stranger yet understandable use of mannequins as the staff and patrons of the video store he visits every day to stay entertained. But where both the film and Smith--who's asked to carry about 70-80% of the movie as the only human being on screen, and pulls it off--are most impressive is when the competence cracks.
So much of Neville's skill as a survivor is predicated on routine. This obviously includes vital tasks such as waking at sunrise and shutting down his house at sunset, being at the potential survival rendez-vous point at midday, and of course the rigorous testing and experimentation involved in attempting to find the cure to the virus. But it also includes everything he does that passes for recreation: practicing his golf swing on the deck of the Intrepid, renting his way alphabetically through the video store, cycling through The Today Show's daily archival tapes, playfully bantering with his mannequin acquaintances. The film's astute visuals drive home the fact that everything must be in its right place, from the keys to his cars to the Polaroids of all his dead monster guinea pigs. So all it ultimately takes to put him on a crash course with disaster is for one of those mannequins to be mysteriously moved from its customary place outside the video store, so that Neville finds it standing, silent and eerie and wrong, at the steps of the Met. Within seconds he's hallucinating that it's looking at him, screaming denials and warnings at it, spraying it with machine-gun fire, strafing the surrounding buildings. Finally he makes moves that result in a sequence that's every bit as heartwrenching as you'd imagine it would be yet not as crass and manipulative as I feared when I initially detected where it was heading. (I won't spoil it.) From there it's a short trip to the best scene in the film, simultaneously its most moving and most disturbing, when Neville, stoned and half-incoherent thanks to a handful of antidepressants, literally begs one of the video-store mannequins to say hello back to him. Now, I'm sure it helps that the only Will Smith movies I've ever seen are dimly remembered viewings of the execrable Independence Day and the empty-calorie Men in Black back in high school, so I'm not associating his depiction of grief and misery here with his reaction to, I don't know, something that really upset him in Bad Boys 2. But he's all bloodshot eyes, slurred speech ("promised my friend" comes out like "I miss my friend," which I'm sure is intentional), and desperation in this scene, and it's lovely and sad.
That's actually the mood of most of the movie. With the exception of some flashbacks (which is where the bulk of the trailer and commercial pyrotechnics hail from) and the very occasional run-in with a monster and/or pride of lions, it's virtually a meditation on deserted New York City and all the awe and loneliness such images evoke. I for one have no idea how they pulled all those scenes off; it's got to be digital, I guess, and it's stunning. It also made for a great opening-night packed-theater New York City movie-watching experience, evoking laughs and gasps in equal measure any time a recognizable landmark or neighborhood was shown overgrown with vegetation and frequented by animals larger than squirrels, pigeons, and rats. (I saw it in that theater at Union Square, so a shot of the nearby subway entrance completely deserted practically got a standing ovation.) Heck, the poor woman next to me was practically manifesting some sort of pre-traumatic stress disorder every time you saw empty Midtown or decrepit Upper East Side, occasionally commenting to no one in particular that we're just a couple years and one dirty bomb away from just such a scene. It was a fun spectacle, but after a while it began to weigh on you, too.
It is in fact the use of Manhattan that's the film's most successful generator of chills. There's one memorably suspenseful cat-and-mouse game in which, like many similar, successful sequences, our vision is limited along with the character's, and one creepy image involving a hyperventilating "hive" of dormant creatures. But other than that, to be quite frank, the monsters kind of suck. Part of it is that we've seen their like before, and in more frightening movies, as I mentioned above. Part of it is a strange decision to do them in what looks like 100% CGI, and not the greatest at that. I'm sure it has something to do with the need to distort and amplify their physicality to the point where the filmmakers felt humans in suits and masks wouldn't do, but nuts to that action. If Neil Marshall can do The Descent--hell, if Peter Jackson can do the orcs and uruk-hai in The Lord of the Rings--this guaranteed blockbuster can do creatures that don't look like something you'd shoot in a Resident Evil game (and I'm not even talking about the infected dogs). Thankfully, the movie itself seems to realize its limitations, and the monsters probably get no more than fifteen minutes total screen time. I know I've given that line about how "the human stuff was the best part of this horror movie" the business recently, but boy was it ever true here.
And it remains true up until just before the very end. In fact the movie's most interesting exploration of the perils of competence come in its final quarter, when Neville is forced to by circumstance, in the form of a mysterious pair of fellow survivors, to radically reevaluate his view of the post-plague world. To the film's eternal credit it never beats you over the head with the fact that his repeated, heated insistence that "everyone, everyone, is dead" is ridiculous given that he's saying it to people who, like himself, are alive; they just hang there, uncommented upon, the words of someone who obviously would never accept information to the contrary even when it's literally staring him in the face. His initial attempts to interact with his newfound companions are at once vulnerable and bizarre, stripped of the sense of proportionate response that human interaction inculcates us with--he smashes the breakfast they prepare for him to pieces because of both their belief in a survivor colony up in Vermont and because (one of the film's big laugh lines) he'd been saving, for reasons delightfully unspecified, the bacon they cooked; he tries to win them back over by flawlessly reciting about two minutes' worth of dialogue from Shrek along with the movie as they watch it. The underlying emotion to the entire segment, I think, is fury. Fury that this woman and this child survived while his wife and his child did not. Fury that someone survived to bear witness to his failure at finding the cure, or "fixing this" as he constantly puts it. Fury that they stopped him from killing himself, and fury that he tried. Fury, perhaps, that anyone less competent than he survived at all, and fury that others might have survived completely independent of whether or not he succeeds in his quest for a cure. In the view of Neville, the apotheosis of survivor types, survival can only exist through him, with him, and, literally, in him.
He ends up being righter than he has any right to be, which is where the film falters--right at the end. A climactic monster attack suddenly has us in Signs-land, where a fortuitous coincidence gives Neville the sign he needs to do the right thing and restores his faith in God and the fundamental justness of the world. Now, this worked in Signs (I know, I know, your mileage may vary, but this is my blog) because that was the whole point of the film--Mel Gibson's character's bitterness and faithlessness, its effect on his family, and its ultimate reversal when heroism is called for. Here, however, that theme is slapped onto the film in the final reel, with the first mention of both belief in and denial of God taking place about ten minutes before the closing credits. (Timeline compresson trips up the film a bit elsewhere, actually, as Neville notices anomalous behavior from the monsters for the first time only one day before that anomalous behavior is shown to have evolved to a point beyond this brilliant scientist and tough customer's wildest expectations.) We've already been shown that his behavior is heroic, and through his impassioned exegesis of the music and message of his beloved Bob Marley we've even been shown that he has a boundless faith in humanity's ability to do the right thing, despite the virus's manmade origin (thanks, minute-long cameo by Emma Thompson as the well-meaning scientist who uses condescending metaphors to explain her innovation to the hoi polloi and accidentally wipes out humanity!). I know that those with deeper faith than mine might disagree, but gilding the lily by forcing a road-to-Damascus moment misses the point and throws the balance of the film ever so slightly out of whack at the last moment. All we really wanted to know is not if he can connect with the Almighty, but whether he can connect with anything at all that isn't himself. And yes, there's the kind of happy ending that should have people who love the book, hated the end of Spielberg's War of the Worlds, or both throwing their popcorn at the screen. (Soundtracked by church bells, no less!) I have no intrinsic problem with a happy ending, in fact I found Smith's Neville so likable that I was practically praying for one, but this was laying it on kinda thick.
That said, I feel like this is a film I'm much more likely to return to than, say, the recent and comparable The Mist. Actually, I tried to see that movie again yesterday, figuring I'd be able to enjoy the things I enjoyed about it more now that I know what to expect, but it's all but gone from theaters. That's probably not a fate you need to worry about befalling I Am Legend, in part because it stars Will Smith and has an ending in which the phrase "happily ever after" wouldn't feel entirely out of place, but only in part. Unlike the characters in The Mist, the character (no plural necessary) in I Am Legend surprises. He's something I hadn't seen before. And while, yes, that includes the film's ostensible source material, it sure would be a shame if you let that get in the way.
* This week's Horror Roundtable is about our favorite horror-related experiences of 2007. It was actually a pretty big year for horror, if not a pretty great one, so it was fun to cull through my memories to pick out the best.
* It's not where I'm coming from, but if you're interested in a review of I Am Legend written from the perspective of someone who really loves the book and is judging the film by how it matches up with it source material, you could do worse than Pete Mesling of FearFodder's take. (Note that he too compares the monsters unfavorably to video-game enemies.)
* Jeet Heer criticizes the embrace of libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises by Paul Pope and his Berlin Batman, recently touted as presidential candidate Ron Paul's favorite superhero.
* On Friday night I went to see the GZA/Genius at the Knitting Factory. Pitchfork has photos and a brief review of the previous night's gig.
A few weeks ago I noted the tendency of big horror websites to overstate the communal nature of horror. When Hostel: Part II tanked, for example, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about the future of "our genre" and not enough pointing out that it was a bad movie. Today we see the flipside, as the enormous box-office success of I Am Legend leads Bloody Digusting to wax rhapsodic in a post entitled "Horror Takes #1":
In the midst of all of that holiday garbage (Alvin and the Chipmunks, Golden Compass, Enchanted, The Perfect Holiday, Fred Claus, This Christmas and more) horror has proven that it's king of the world as Warner Bros. Pictures and their Will Smith starring post-apocalyptic thriller I Am Legend...took over the box office with an astounding estimated $76.5 million this weekend! If that's not cool enough, next week DreamWorks is releasing Sweeney Todd, so expect the top two slots to be horror! Only time will tell how 20th Century Fox's Aliens vs Predator: Requiem will do, but can you imagine horror taking over Christmas?
I hesitate to say "of course," but of course, Will Smith proved he's king of the world this past weekend. Horror proved no such thing, and one need look no further than to the similar The Mist for evidence there. Moreover, viewing the theoretical box-office triumph of three films as different in tone, origin, and intent as I Am Legend, Sweeney Todd, and Aliens vs. Predator 2 as a world-beating landmark for horror as a genre is just silly, like those posts you come across that lump together the success of Marvel's Dark Tower prequel and TV's Heroes and Drawn and Quarterly's Exit Wounds as "good for comics." The notion that AVPR or whatever they're calling it is inherently more worthy an effort than, I dunno, The Golden Compass--even in terms of the fortunes of genre filmmaking--makes no sense to me at all.
* Rob Humanick adds to the ever-popular "ostentatious display of virtuoso filmmaking equals emotionally false bullshit" genre, this time regarding the retreat at Dunkirk in Atonement.
* Giallo Fever's Keith Brown highlights an interesting-sounding book called After Hitchcock, a scholarly look at the Master's influence as seen in post-Psycho horror, giallo, '70s paranoia thrillers, The Silence of the Lambs, the work of Brian DePalma (duh), and more.
* "Rodents of unusual size? I don't think they exist." Wrong again!
* CNN's Ismael Estrada reports on how Missouri-based serial killer Timothy Krajcir used his education in criminal justice to evade police for years.
* Entertainment Weekly's Nicole Sperling breaks down the Hobbit movie deal between New Line, MGM, and the Peter Jackson camp with a mixture of fact and kind of sloppy speculation. Points covered include potential directors (Sam Raimi, Guillermo Del Toro, and Alfonso Cuaron are all mentioned, as usual with no real evidence to support any of them), the role the failure of The Golden Compass played or didn't play in the rapprochement, and the plot of the second planned film, inaccurately described as "imagined entirely by Jackson and [Fran] Walsh" (it's going to be drawn from supplemental materials and all the stuff that was going on off-screen during the events of The Hobbit, according to everything else I've read). (Via Jason Adams.)
* Matt Maxwell revisits Day of the Dead in a fascinating posts that tackles experiencing the "Reagan Era" of horror as a child, the fright potential of mockumentary and mockumentary-esque horror, military stereotypes, the difference between Day, Night, and Dawn, and the role of Bub the "smart" zombie.
* Rob Zombie is "seriously considering" making a full-length version of the movie from his Grindhouse trailer Werewolf Women of the S.S.. The existence of a movie touted with the phrase "Starring Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu" would constitute rock-solid evidence of a benevolent God.
Coalition forces found 26 bodies buried in mass graves and a bloodstained "torture complex" with chains hanging from walls and ceilings and a bed connected to an electrical system, the military said Wednesday.
The MPAA has rejected the one-sheet for Alex Gibney's documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side," which traces the pattern of torture practice from Afghanistan's Bagram prison to Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay....The image in question is a news photo of two U.S. soldiers walking away from the camera with a hooded detainee between them....According to ThinkFilm distribution prexy Mark Urman, the reason given by the Motion Picture Assn. of America for rejecting the poster is the image of the hood, which the MPAA deemed unacceptable in the context of such horror films as "Saw" and "Hostel."
After "Drag Me to Hell," Raimi is expected to go right back up the mountaintop and take the helm of "The Hobbit" films for New Line and MGM now that Peter Jackson has made it clear he won't direct.
* Douglas Wolk presents a brief album-by-album guide to the complete recordings of Led Zeppelin.
* Premiere's Glenn Kenny has one of the more likeable Top 25 Movies of the Year lists I've seen thus far.
* Tom Spurgeon interviews Tom Devlin, formerly of my all-time favorite publisher Highwater and currently of the also very good publisher Drawn & Quarterly.
Remember when I was talking about the magic of the New York subway system for anyone who writes fiction the other day? Thanks to my TiVo Suggestions I just watched a perfect example, the "Subway" episode of Seinfeld. Jerry strikes up a perfectly pleasant conversation with a completely naked man on the D to Coney Island, George gets seduced by a grifter who handcuffs him to a hotel bed in his underwear and robs him, Kramer picks up a can't miss horseracing tip and then gets mugged on the way home with his winnings only to be rescued by an undercover cop dressed as a blind busker, and Elaine becomes the weirdo in some old-time New York lady's subway story when she reveals she's the best man in a lesbian wedding, which she subsequently misses because the train gets stranded.
New York City subways are the Rick's Cafe, the Mos Eisley cantina, the Multiverse of fictional American life.
1) This is a good show.
2) I'm really upset that they're probably only going to show 8 episodes next season, both because it screws up their meticulously plotted three-sets-of-16-episodes plan and because it just means fewer episodes of Lost in the near future.
3) Cpl. Upham and Uncle Junior's sidekick are both up to no good again.
4) I'm surprised it took as long as it did for the "this show sucks!" crowd to show up in the comment thread over there. Before they did so it was the longest streak of unfettered enthusiasm about this show I've ever seen in a public online forum. In my experience, unfettered enthusiasm about this show is actually pretty common in real life, but as always the Internet brings out the asshole in everyone.
And in a year that saw the awesome, singed mythicism of 28 Weeks Later (itself one of the latest in the long line of films spawned by Matheson's novel), I Am Legend's digitized aesthetic is too clean to convey true social and moral rot, too processed for a storyline loaded with themes of death and destruction. Likewise, the hordes of mutant zombie/vampires are a disappointing use of CG technology. They're like digital superballs vying for menace, lacking a genuine physical presence and only superficially connected to their surroundings.
It's telling that the film works best when Neville is restricted to permeating solitude; the eerie suggestion of the unseen villains is a threat the film is unable to justly manifest in the flesh.
This week's Horror Roundtable is about our least-favorite horror experience of 2007. There's an obvious pun on that experience's title I could make here but won't.
If you click around the Top 10 film lists linked to by Matt Zoller Seitz and Green Cine Daily, one title that comes up a lot less often than you might expect it to--strikingly less often in fact--is No Country for Old Men. It's backlash time, apparently.
(Warning: Mild SPOILERS follow for Twin Peaks and Lost, but really only in the form of lists of names and discussion of time frames that won't really mean anything to you unless you've watched the shows and probably won't ruin them for you if you haven't. I certainly don't say who killed Laura Palmer or anything like that.)
On the flight out to Colorado to visit my in-laws today I watched some of the special features on the Twin Peaks: The Definitive Gold Box Edition DVD set, an early Christmas gift. Ironically, the feature-length making-of documentary "Secrets from Another Place" makes the best case I've ever heard for "Season 2 sucks," and right from the mouths of the cast and crew! I'd of course known that when the network forced David Lynch and Mark Frost to reveal the identity of Laura Palmer's killer early in Season 2, their hearts and the hearts of many viewers were no longer into it, and I knew that the network started shuffling the show around in the schedule, causing it to bleed audience like crazy. And while I noticed both a slight dropoff of quality and the presence of new, superfluous storylines that didn't tie into either Laura Palmer/Bob or the various schemes surrounding the Hornes and Packards--James Hurley's road trip, the egregious Andy/Lucy/Dick Tremayne love triangle and Little Nicky business--I was so compelled by the later episodes and the deepening supernatural elements that I've always been a pretty staunch Season 2 defender. But "Secrets" lays out a point by point indictment of the post-"Who killed Laura Palmer?" Peaks, including a lot of stuff I either didn't know or had never thought about in quite those terms.
* Both Lynch and Frost essentially abandoned the show to shoot movies after the first few episodes of Season 2 (Frost did Storyville and Lynch did my least favorite Lynch movie, Wild at Heart, and knowing this now makes me like it even less), leaving the creative reins in other hands. They both came back guns blazing for the final hours, but by then the show's decline and fall with the network and audience was a fait accompli.
* The outbreak of the first Gulf War preempted the show something like six times. I always thought the time frame for the show's collapse was portrayed as too rapid to make sense--a half a season was all it took to go from pop-culture phenomenon to the chopping block?--so the extra bumps in the schedule make that click for me a bit more now.
* The show unwisely expanded beyond its core cast to bring aboard guest star after guest star. Some of these were really just cameos, like the David Warner and David Duchovny characters, but others--Windom Earle, Annie, Evelyn Marsh, the aforementioned Dick Tremayne--ate up tons of screen time and added new elements to a show that pretty much had everything it needed in place already with its existing cast.
* It got jokey. The show was always very funny, but it wasn't silly until you started having things like Nadine joining the wrestling team, the crusade to save the pine weasel or whatever that was, (say it with me) Dick Tremayne, and so on.
* It also started attracting performers (and presumably crew) who thought of it as a chance to "be weird," which led to material that felt less like Twin Peaks and more like a parodic mischaracterization of it. Lynch, of course, never chooses to be weird--he simply can't help it.
* The creative team waited too long after the revelation of Laura Palmer's killer to introduce the second major antagonist, Earle, losing a lot of momentum. And when he did show up he was in the jokey/self-consciously scenery-chewing weird mold of late Peak, until perhaps his final episodes, where his old, erudite wild-man demeanor was finally harnessed as a frightening counterpoint to Cooper's young, intuitive straight-shooter.
Anyway, I was thinking about all of this in the context of another Christmas gift, Lost: The Complete Third Season. It seems like at a few key points, Lost zigged where Peaks zagged. First and foremost there's the brilliantly portrayed late-innings antagonist, Ben. I've said for a long time (and online, too, though I can't find the post) that it's hard to imagine how hard a hit the show would have taken had that character been written or played too broadly. In Kenneth Welsh's Windom Earle we have just such a counterfactual example.
Also, after they were forced to reveal Laura Palmer's killer, the creators of Twin Peaks basically gave up. As someone in the making-of doc put it, that was the spine of the show, and they had nothing to immediately replace it with; it was several crucial weeks before the magnitude of the Black Lodge issue became apparent, and by then it was too late. By contrast, Lost always has a whole new vista open up every time they pull the camera back to reveal the mystery at hand. You might find the new mysteries less interesting, but they're at least there, and usually there's a lot of them, and they tend to blow things wide open. Just think of how little we really knew about anything when the credits rolled at the end of Season One, and the explosion of information we received over the course of early Season Two. Hell, I think we've only just seen the show's Bob figure for the first time. This is not to say Lost never falters with its reveals--relegating the origin of the Numbers to that stupid ARG is almost unforgivable--but it learned from the fate of Peaks (by the creators' admission) to always have something else in store anytime a question is even close to answered. And to go to the mattresses with the network if need be, which was perhaps the most valuable lesson Twin Peaks ever taught anyone.
I largely agree with the selections on both ends. Down with the giant-face one-sheet!
* I Am Legend star Will Smith is angry that a recent comment of his about Adolf Hitler was misinterpreted. I know that's the sort of response you usually associate with someone whose comment was in fact interpreted quite correctly, but Smith is really in the right here.
* It's an Ana-Lucia Christmas: former Lost star Michelle Rodriguez has started her six-month prison sentence for violating her probation after a DUI conviction.
* Chris Mautner concludes his interview with comics critic Joe "Jog" McCulloch. Surely it's only a matter of time before a contrarian anti-Jogger emerges?
Biting the hand that feeds with two sets of mandibles
I was struck by this post on Bloody Disgusting declaring new release and major Bloody Disgusting advertiser Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem "horrible crap," because not only does it tell readers "please, please, please save your money," it also explicitly takes a shot at the presence of AVPR advertising on the site itself. I'm just not used to that kind of candor or courage in the context of fannish entertainment news media, I guess.
Comicdom's continuing enabling of Dave Sim astounds me, not necessarily because his beliefs are crazy and evil but because those crazy and evil beliefs so directly inform all his work. Actually, it's more than that: His work is about his crazy and evil beliefs. I'm not sure why otherwise bright people would "look forward" to a comic about women by a man who espouses any number of noxious, vile, misogynist, almost paranoid-schizophrenic beliefs about women. I wouldn't look forward to listening to an opera about the Jews by Wagner, either.
And that's without getting into the fact that his idea of fashion-based illustration apparently begins and ends with Patrick Nagel and the design of the book's promo piece looks like something from an RPG fanzine circa 1991.
The father of a teen who was killed by a tiger at the San Francisco Zoo questioned the facility's safety on Thursday, as police reportedly considered whether one of the victims taunted the deadly jungle cat.
Sources close to the investigation told the San Francisco Chronicle that police are probing whether one of the Siberian tiger's three victims climbed over a fence Christmas Day and then dangled a leg or other body part over the moat.
Police said Carlos Sousa, 17, of San Jose was killed just outside the tiger's enclosure. The two others, who were injured, were about 300 yards away by a cafe.
A shoe and blood were found between the fence and the moat, the Chronicle reported, and a footprint has been found on a metal fence at the zoo. The investigation is looking into the possibility that the tiger escaped by latching on to a leg or other body part, the paper reported.
"Somebody created a situation that really agitated [the tiger] and and gave her some method to break her out," zoo director Manuel Mollinedo told the Chronicle. "A couple of feet dangling over the edge could possibly have done it."
Video killed the Mario star, plus bonus thoughts and links
This charmingly lo-fi hack of the original Super Mario Bros. is the most hilariously mean-spirited video game I've ever seen. It's really a rather brilliant Bizarro take on the basic philosophy of gaming: Instead of rewarding exploration, this game punishes it.The sadistic booby traps make that Super Mario Bros. 2: The Lost Levels thing look like a game on your nephew's Leapfrog. When the floor dropped out from under the poor sap--that's when I lost it. And when he eventually starts maneuvering through the level with evident fear, well, you'll believe an avatar can cry.
Many more video clips can be found at Wiifanboy. Via the illustrious Justin Aclin.
Speaking of video games, I showed this astonishing unedited four-minute Tony Jaa steadicam slobberknocker to the Missus, who rather astutely pointed out that it's like a video game: the guy navigates a multi-tiered environment, battling the bad guys who pop out at set intervals and benefiting from clever use of the environment they fight in.
Apparently Ted Rall decided to reprise his "King Maus" shtick with regards to the comics that have been running in the New York Times, repeating his absurd hyperbolic accusations of censorship because someplace is running the kinds of comics he doesn't like as opposed to the comics made by him and his friends, and indulging in the sort of "altcomix are all navel-gazing stories about depressed white people for the New Yorker set" hogwash you'd expect from a Newsarama comment thread troll. Why are we acting like this argument is worth engaging? Why am I even posting about it? About the only worthwhile thing Rall's rant has to offer is that it might make other critics think twice the next time they're tempted to talk about how great "bombthrowing" or "just starting the conversation" is.
The other day I noted the absence of the lauded-to-the-heavens No Country for Old Men from many a year-end best-of list, a backlash seemingly in full effect. On a related note, There Will Be Blood tops a lot of them and is on many more. Now, over the past couple of months it was tough to find a critic capable of mentioning one of those movies without mentioning the other in the same breath, if only to say "Paul Thomas Anderson will have his work cut out for him to top the Coens" or what have you. So I wonder: Does Blood's Christmas release date keep it in the sweet spot for the year-ender lists--smack in the first major flush of adoration, before the emperor-has-no-clothes contingent has a chance to coalesce?
Giant flying reptiles, believe it or not, have routinely been sighted in the Olympic National Park’s rainforest in Washington State. I’ve been hearing about reports from there for decades.
"91 - FLIX - Evil Dead 2 - Sat 12/29 10:00pm-11:25pm - Rated R AL, GV - Horror (1987) [three stars] Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry, Dan Hicks. Cabin visitors fight protean spirits of the dead with a chainsaw, a shotgun and Egyptian incantations. (CC, Stereo, SAP, Letterbox)"
Last night me and the Missus watched the pilot and first episode of Twin Peaks (in her case for the first time!). In the opening minutes of the pilot, Laura Palmer's body is discovered, her mother realizes she's missing and frantically makes phone calls trying to find her, and then her father is notified of her death while speaking to her mother on the phone. As Mrs. Palmer's screams of grief faded to black for the first commercial break I was surprised to find myself in tears. I turned to the Missus, who was similarly shaken up, and said "Wow, that was tough to watch." She replied "I was just going to say it's refreshing to see a murder mystery that treats the murder this way." Indeed, I think that if the show hadn't started this way--treating Laura's death and its profound effect on her loved ones very very seriously--the whole thing wouldn't have worked. Beneath all the weirdness, humor, and glamour beats an emotional heart of genuine sadness.
For a movie with such a seismic impact in terms of marketing and production, The Blair Witch Project didn't really inspire any other films as far as I can tell--particularly compared to the other big horror hit of Summer '99, The Sixth Sense. So my question is this: Between Cloverfield (Blair Witch meets Godzilla), Diary of the Dead (Blair Witch meets Night of the Living Dead), and The Poughkeepsie Tapes (Blair Witch meets Hostel meets Henry), are we finally seeing the wide-scale birth of the Blair Subgenre?
And hey, did it take the rise of YouTube to ultimately make first-person docuhorror feasible?
I thought that in light of tonight's big Times Square soirée, this article by the New York Times' Sewell Chan on filmmakers' penchant for destroying New York City with aliens, monsters, natural disasters, nuclear war, terrorist attacks, rampant crime, marshmallow men, viral vampires, the passage of time and so on is all too appropriate. What's more, it references The Blair Witch Project when discussing Cloverfield, thus providing fodder for my Blair Witch trend post's lively comment thread.
One quote from the article perplexed me, however:
In contrast to "I Am Legend"--which like "The Omega Man" (1971) is based on a Richard Matheson novel--the "Cloverfield" images verge on being tasteless, [Celluloid Skyline author James] Sanders said. "They are playing on feelings not just about New York as civic symbol but on the shock of Sept. 11," he said. "To some degree, that's not fair ball."
Okay, first of all, I Am Legend did the exact same thing, believe me. I don't even think you needed to be in an opening-night screening in Union Square, listening to the uncomfortable laughter of your fellow New Yorkers as neighborhood after neighborhood and landmark after landmark is shown abandoned and destroyed, to figure that out. (Though it helped.) And Legend isn't even the first such post-9/11 horror film to go there--Spielberg's War of the Worlds, anybody? But the thing that really sticks out is Sanders's assertion that playing upon 9/11 anxiety is unfair for a genre filmmaker to do. That's really like saying it was unfair of, I dunno, Godzilla to play upon the Japanese people's experience with nuclear war. Maybe he means that Cloverfield is crassly exploiting 9/11, but that's not what he (or Chan, to be fair) actually said. It's simply an unsupportable position as articulated.
Via Fantagraphics' Eric Reynolds we find Al Columbia's take on Dario Argento's Suspiria.
See the whole thing--created at the behest of an open call for B-movie-based art submissions to "a film fest that combines fantasy, sci-fi, horror, action, live burlesque and a special art exhibit sponsored by Fantagraphics Books" calledSupertrash Fest; there's still two weeks left to submit, artists!--at Columbia's website.
Caveats
1. All these lists are in order of preference.
2. The comics lists are by no means intended to be a comprehensive overview. There are just so many books that came out this year that I didn't have a chance to read yet.
3. Every year, it seems like I end up listing my favorite comics in a different way. Sometimes it's in alphabetical order. Sometimes it's in order of preference with no regard to genre. Sometimes it's a no-nonsense list. Sometimes it's with explanations. This year it's in order of preference, separated into two different categories, Artsy and Genre-Ish. That just felt right to me. And I limited myself to 15 each.
4. The movie list isn't comprehensive either, because I never got to see There Will Be Blood or Control, to name a couple movies I think I might have liked a lot. No limit this time--I just listed the six movies I really liked.
5. The album and song lists aren't comprehensive either, but I say that mostly because I haven't gotten the new Wu-Tang Clan and Ghostface Killah records and haven't gotten a chance to really listen to the new Beirut and Jens Lekman albums. A lot of the kinds of albums you tend to see on these lists don't really interest me. I basically listed all the albums I really connected with; for songs, I stopped at 15.
6. There's kind of miles and miles between the first three items on my TV list, which are three of my all-time seven favorite shows, and the rest. I stopped at 10. And I've never watched The Wire, so that explains that. (I know, I know.)
7. A lot of the things I first experienced and really got a lot out of this year, from Children of Men to Amusement Parks on Fire's Out of the Angeles to Matt Furie's Boy's Club, actually came out earlier than 2007, so I didn't list them. It's all about '07 baby! Woo!
Sean T. Collins's Favorite [Blanks] of 2007
Comics (artsy)
1. The End, by Anders Nilsen
2. Asthma, by John Hankiewicz
3. Love & Rockets digests, by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez
4. Cold Heat, by BJ and Frank Santoro
5. Notes for a War Story, by Gipi
6. The Blot, by Tom Neely
7. Skyscrapers of the Midwest, by Josh Cotter
8. Garage Band, by Gipi
9. The Salon, by Nick Bertozzi
10. Mome, by various
11. Pulphope: The Art of Paul Pope, by Paul Pope
12. House, by Josh Simmons/Batman, by Josh Simmons
13. Johnny Ryan's XXX Scumbag Party, by Johnny Ryan/Blecky Yuckerella Vol. 2: Back in Bleck, by Johnny Ryan
14. The Monkey and the Crab, by Shawn Cheng and Sarah Edward-Corbett
15. Uptight, by Jordan Crane
Comics (genre-ish)
1. The Immortal Iron Fist, by Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, David Aja, and various artists
2. BPRD, by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, and Guy Davis
3. Captain America, by Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting, and Mike Perkins
4. All Star Superman, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
5. 52, by Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, Mark Waid, Keith Giffen, J.G. Jones, and various artists
6. Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus, by Jack Kirby
7. Jack Kirby's Silver Star, by Jack Kirby
8. Dragon Head, by Mochizuki Minetaro
9. I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets: The Comics of Fletcher Hanks, by Fletcher Hanks, edited by Paul Karasik
10. Green Lantern, by Geoff Johns, Ivan Reis, Ethan Van Sciver, and various artists
11. Daybreak, by Brian Ralph
12. Runaways, by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona
13. Criminal, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips
14. Daredevil, by Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark
15. The Perry Bible Fellowship, by Nicolas Gurewitch
Movies
1. No Country for Old Men
2. 28 Weeks Later
3. 300
4. Darkon
5. Eastern Promises
6. Beowulf
Television Programs
1. The Sopranos
2. Lost
3. Battlestar Galactica
4. The Soup
5. Dr. Phil
6. 120 Minutes
7. America's Next Top Model
8. Judge Judy
9. Scrubs
10. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
Albums
1. Underworld: Oblivion with Bells
2. LCD Soundsystem: Sound of Silver
3. Radiohead: In Rainbows
4. Robyn: Robyn [UK]
5. Muscles: Guns Babes Lemonade
6. Beirut: Lon Gisland
7. Nine Inch Nails: Year Zero
8. Klaxons: Myths of the Near Future
9. Editors: An End Has a Start
10. Digitalism: Idealism
11. Kylie Minogue: X [UK]
Songs
1. Underworld: Beautiful Burnout
2. Radiohead: All I Need
3. Gus Gus: Moss
4. LCD Soundsystem: Sound of Silver
5. Beirut: Scenic World
6. Maria Taylor: A Clean Getaway
7. Robyn: Should Have Known
8. Muscles: One Inch Badge Pin
9. Editors: An End Has a Start
10. Klaxons: Atlantis to Interzone
11. The Horrors: Count in Fives
12. Tori Amos: Bouncing Off Clouds
13. Rihanna: Umbrella
14. The White Stripes: Icky Thump
15. Kings of Leon: Arizona
![[rss]](/images/rss.gif "ATF RSS Feeds"){kind=small}
