Sean T. Collins has written about comics and popular culture on this very blog since 2003, and also 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
* Apologies to this feature's three readers for its lateness this week.
* It took an episode full of Blair mugging while poking her head through curtains like a Muppet for me to realize it, but this was basically an episode of The Muppet Show, wasn't it? From the backstage shenanigans to the guest star to Blair's increasingly high-strung Miss Piggy-like narcissism and Children's Television Workshop facial expressions. I half expected Lew Zealand to show up and start throwing fish at Vanessa. (But then, I sort of hope that will happen in every episode.)
* So, that bit with Dan walking down the street at the beginning was a conscious homage to Peter Parker's evil "Stayin' Alive" routine in Spider-Man 3, right?
* This episode's threesome flashbacks are notable for the return of my favorite supporting character this season, Vanessa's Cleavage. Welcome back, old friend.
* If I were a high-ranking diplomat, I'd ask Chuck Bass to show my son around New York as well. Man, that was the sort of thing people asked me to do all the time when I was 18. If I had a nickel!
* Fun shots at James Frey and the Weinsteins and Eastwick. More of that sort of thing than usual, I thought.
* Another Muppet-y development: The evil theatre kids. This was a hoot for a couple of reasons. First, theatre kids really are horrible. In college dropped out of theatre and switched to a Film Studies major because that was actually the less pretentious crowd, if you can believe it. Second, I feel like I'm starting to wrap my head around how they're handling college: It's a fantasy land. This is like Quentin Tarantino's "movie-movie" version of college. I can dig it.
* With each new revelation about Vanessa's background, that character gets more exquisitely insufferable and funny. Of course she and Dan have had a "go throw gladiolas at Morrissey" since 7th grade. I wonder if her mom grew the gladiolas herself, next to the chicken coop.
* Uh, Trip was super-creepy in this episode, no? When he walked in on Serena as she was doing stuff in his office, I was waiting for him to ask her, "Ya like Huey Lewis and the News?"
* Speaking of that scene, what the fuck, shoulder pads? As the Missus said, NO. Not unless you're Bea Arthur.
* Damn, this show moves fast. After that scene in the office, I realized that they'd made Trip's wife evil so we wouldn't hate Serena for having her inevitable affair with a married congressman. (Though as the Missus pointed out, is she really evil? She staged the fake drowning to wrest control of Trip away from Grandfather, who's even worse. It was sort of a villain vs. villain deal. But I digress.) But as it turns out, we don't need to feel bad at all, because the show had Trip find out about his wife's scheme and separate from her before he and Serena could get down to bidness. They're always a couple steps ahead of me.
* That said, I think we can still question whether hooking up with a still-married man mere hours after he dumps his wife is a great idea. AIso we can scoff at Serena's majestically self-absorbed plea with Nate for support: "I thought I could count on you to support my having an extramarital affair with your married congressman cousin. I guess I was wrong." It's a hard knock life, Van der Woodsen!
* Nate's too good for Serena! Still, I feel bad that things didn't work out for him and Serena. His dejection as she and Trip talk at the bar was really priceless. Poor Nate, shit-on again.
* I'm sure lots of folks have lots to say about Dan's musical, but what struck me was the snippet of the preceding skit we saw, the thing about the Big Bad Wolf, emphasis on "Big." That's college theatre alright--self-congratulatory snickering at dick jokes.
* From my first listen to "Bad Romance," I was struck by how perfect the song would be for Gossip Girl, particularly the blend of really raw and childlike pathos with selfish spite in the way Lady GaGa sang "I don't wanna be friends" over and over again. Lo and behold! It's a shame that that was the least visually compelling Lady GaGa performance I've seen so far, but hey, you take what you can get. Still, all the banter about Cyrus Rose got my hopes up for a GaGa/Wallace Shawn meeting of the minds. Maybe someday.
* Finally, and most importantly, this episode saw the birth of the sensational character find of 2009: Chuck Bass: Crimefighter! He really is Batman.
* I'm pretty proud of the latest What The--?! video I co-wrote for Marvel. It's a Twilight parody. I can't speak for the rest of the gang, but as for me, I kid because I love.
Also, just to anticipate what I imagine will be a common complaint: Yes, we've seen the photoshop of Blade lurking behind the Twilight kids, but it's not like the idea of Blade killing the annoying vampire character wouldn't have occurred to us regardless. I mean, we write for Marvel. At any rate, the presence of Morbius, Man-Wolf, Dracula, Werewolf By Night, and Kitty Pryde is all us, baby. (PS: The Blade figure with his awesome Captain Britain & MI-13 haircut is a custom by our animator extraordinaire, Alex Kropinak--yet another Wizard alum, along with me and my co-writer Ben Morse.)
* It's no Cage Match, but in this case that's a good thing: Comics Comics' Dan Nadel, Tim Hodler, and Frank Santoro conduct a Round Table review of Al Columbia's masterful Pim & Francie. I was particularly struck by Dan's observation that the way the individual characters and scenes disappear into artifacts of the drawing process--erasures, tears, ink spills, burns, wrinkles, water damage--in effect "animates the page," creating an illusion of motion and the passage of time that traditional drawing couldn't match. Great stuff; read the whole thing and keep checking back for more.
* I've seen this YouTube montage of The Wire's 100 Greatest Quotes here, there and everywhere, but I didn't watch it until it showed up at Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog. I'm really glad I did, because my whole "Deadwood > The Wire" thing has clearly led me to forget just how strong the writing on The Wire could be. That frequently used "If [metaphor], then [some subordinate action related to that metaphor]" structure is really elegant.
Meanwhile, in the comment thread at TNC's post, I once again go through my arguments in favor of The Sopranos and Deadwood over The Wire, if you haven't seen them already. Coates attracts a high class of commenters, so there are probably some other worthwhile things to read in there if you're interested in those shows. Just watch out for True Blood spoilers!
This thick little minicomic does a lot of things right. First of all there's the format itself: cardstock pages, folded into a fat little brick, then cut, I believe, with a bandsaw. It's a delight to hold and let your fingers trace the bumpy edges of the pages; it's like the anti-newsprint. Then there's the idea for the concept itself, which won me over the second I figured out what it was: a chronicling of the contents and environs of his childhood home inspired by his mom's moving out of it. Most of the book is just a shot of a room, a door, a lamp, a tree, a driveway, a hose--one small drawing per page, so intimate I wonder if they were drawn from memory. Flipping through the book's thick stock ends up feeling like opening a tiny door into this house with each turn of the page. Moreover, McShane glides effortlessly in and out of deviations from the standard operating procedure--there's a funny sequence of him popping up into the dusty attic and wondering what the heck's up there (turns out to be nothing); an evocatively minimalist depiction of him and his mom strolling through the neighborhood, juxtaposing little suburban landscapes and still lifes with shots of the pair looking around against a blank background. Finally, McShane sticks the landing with a quietly bravura sequence in which his memories of the house begin to blend together even as he rakes its yard, with a tree suddenly appearing in front of a door and an obviously cherished duck-shaped lamp superimposing itself upon nearly everything, a focal point for years and years of lived experience. McShane's Porcellino-influenced style is a perfectly breezy and simple complement to this perfectly breezy and simple comic, which nails this specific set of circumstances and sensations just about as well as you could imagine. Very well done.
* So in 1993 Marvel launched a ton of crappy characters. Later in 1993, an official Marvel publication made fun of all those characters--and I mean really mercilessly mocked them. They don't make 'em like that anymore! (Via Robot 6.)
* T-Shirt of the Day, high-end edition: The great Michael Kupperman has created a t-shirt in honor of the addictively irascible Best Show on WFMU, available to those who pledge $75 or more in the station's emergency pledge drive today and tomorrow. (Via Matthew Perpetua.)
* T-Shirt of the Day, low-end edition: Look, I'm not gonna lie, I'm attracted to this drawing of a post-apocalyptic Velma by Travis Pitts, available as an $18 Threadless t-shirt. Pale knock-kneed girls, you make the rockin' world go 'round.
This book's a tough nut to crack, mostly, I think, because it doesn't work. There are plenty of familiar altcomix elements present here, from slacker/douchebag observational slice-of-life humor, to gross-out gags and dick jokes and sex comedy, to little fantasy creatures having incongruously realistic and vulgar misadventures, to stream-of-consciousness psychedelic transformations and explorations. All that stuff has been done a million times, and in variations of Moynihan's knowingly ramshackle black-and-white line to boot--you'll detect echoes of Matt Furie, Mat Brinkman, Brian Chippendale, Lisa Hanawalt, Alison Cole, Theo Ellsworth, and probably a lot more besides. That said, Follow Me doesn't feel derivative to me, thanks to Moynihan's strong, winningly lo-fi character designs and "acting." His main character, a little dude in a gnome hat, is a pleasure to watch as he's haplessly buffeted by his own venal impulses and his world's unpredictable metaphysical freak-outs; he gives Moynihan an opportunity for several standout moments, from his convincingly bewildered look as he gets sucked through a vortex to a goofy little dance he does in which his long shadow effortlessly creates a sense of harsh, bright lighting, a very cool effect.
And yet never does this self-evidently very personal vision burst through the "bubble" of its author's headspace and communicate its vision of the world to me. I'm sure you don't need to hear me repeat how much I enjoy comics whose impact is primarily emotional rather than logical, but in such cases I can at least make emotional sense out of what I'm reading due to visual continuity and a tonal through-line, or conversely a tonal juxtaposition,. Here I can do no such thing. Follow Me's elements sit awkwardly and uncommunicatively together. I have no idea what the "I can suck my own dick" gags and poop jokes have to do with extended visual riffs on death and multiple planes of existence. And rather than telling an emotional story, the too-frequent, too-abrupt transitions and extended visual extravaganzas just feel like a repeated "and then, and then, and then, and then, and then..." It feels less like daring and more like formlessness. Meanwhile there's one out-of-nowhere chapter that's as ill-advised a meditation on race as I've seen since David Heatley's My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down. Much more so than most of the comics that bear the name, this feels like a diary comic, meaning it's of value primarily to its maker. Which is fine, but caveat lector.
* Look, it's Young Hans Rickheit! His photo of himself at age 17 is adorable, and his illustrations from that period are disturbing. That's our Hans!
* Wanna rile up comment-thread nerds? Write a list called The 10 Longest and Awesomest Movie Fight Scenes of All Time for Topless Robot but leave off [INSERT YOUR FAVORITE LONG MOVIE FIGHT SCENE HERE], like my buddy TJ Dietsch just did.
* Joe Quesada says Immortal Iron Fist/Immortal Weapons is dunzo. :(
* I like The Killing Joke a lot, which is why I enjoyed David Wynne's apologia for the book for Trouble with Comics' Alan Moore Month. Wynne defends the book against its critics (including its writer!) by saying it's a powerful pacifist powerful. I myself like to look at it as a story about people locked in a relationship that brings out the absolute worst in both of them. It's also a good fucked-up Joker story. And I'm sure someone could (if someone hasn't already) draw some parallels between the shaggy-dog joke ending of Moore's book starring a character called the Comedian and the shaggy-dog joke ending of Moore's book starring a character called the Joker. Something for everyone! (Bolland's colors > Higgins's colors, though.)
Wow, the author of the "WHOSE RESPONSIBLE THIS?" entry at KnowYourMeme.com is passionately opposed to WHOSE RESPONSIBLE THIS?. Apparently the idea is that there's some sort of Heisenberg uncertainty principle attached to Internet nonsense, so that when I and others pointed out the memeworthiness of this phrase, we inherently delegitimized it. This is something up with which author Twyst will not put.
I'm not sure what's my favorite part of the entry. Is it saying "Sean T. Collins decided of his own accord that this phrase should become a meme," a move later characterized as "premature declaration"? Is it the assertion that "When fans of 'Whose Responsible This' tried to introduce it into the wild, it was killed on sight because of it's declarative nature"? Is it the use of multiple charts and graphs? I think I'll go with the repeated insinuation that this is some sort of concerted conspiracy by former Wizard employees. As commenter Chris Menning puts it, "'Whose responsible this' was a coordinated media effort." Our responsible this.
Reykjavik
Henrik Rehr, writer/artist
Fahrenheit, June 2009
48 pages, hardcover
I got it for the low low price of $5 at MoCCA Buy it from Fahrenheit...? I think?
FOOM! FWOOOSH! KRAKKA-DOOM! Abstract Comics contributor Henrik Rehr's Fahrenheit is like the purely visual equivalent of a sound effect. Utilizing chops earned through years of more traditional cartooning, Rehr seizes the canvas of abstract comics with a vengeance, crafting a dynamic and frequently stunning--dare I say it?--page-turner, with nary a narrative element to be found.
Rehr is working in pure black and white, reproduced on a slick page stock that gives its expansive visuals a deep and expensive look. His "story" is structured primarily from spread to spread, and in each, one can detect a particular visual inspiration: the whorls of a fingerprint, the activity of unicellular organisms, waves, fire, smoke, a jungle, and in the book's most memorable moment, a shattered pane of glass. There's even one spread that looked like ghosts to me, though in that case and all the others, nothing is recognizable as such--Rehr deploys just enough visual cues to get the idea across before riffing off into the stratosphere with them. The emphasis throughout is on motion, with the eye pushed, pulled, and even thrown from one end of the spread to the next by wafting forms, exploding panels, or great ribbonlike curves. At times it looks like nothing so much as the stormy sky of a Dore print blown up to unrecognizable size. The context is gone, but the dynamism removes. This book really puts the "action" back in "abstraction," and at five bucks--less than most minicomics!--it was an absolute steal. Snag it if you see it at a show.
* Vice magazine mustache enthusiast Nick Gazin's mostly-altcomix reviewrampages tickled me. Writing like Hipster Runoff's older brother on purpose gets a little old, but if you're gonna bang out short lulzy attention-grabbing reviews of comics, at least do it with comics that might actually be worth your time. (Via Mike Baehr.)
* Oh thank God, Stallone's no longer doing that Rambo: Monster Hunter movie. He's taking that idea and doing it with a different lead character--presumably a new one and not Cobra--and restoring the fifth Rambo movie to its original "Rambo goes to Ciudad Juarez" concept by the sound of it.
* Normally I write these things more or less in chronological order. This is because I've taken to jotting down notes on each episode as I watch it. (The Missus: "Whatcha writin'?" Sean: "I'm taking notes for my Gossip Girl review." The Missus: "And that is why this marriage works.") But, I mean, c'mon, can't do that this time. You know what you want.
* Now I know what I'm supposed to say: "You call that a threesome?!?! That ain't a threesome--that's a threesome" or some shit like that. But that's not how I feel at all. (Although you should click the link for the awesome threesome comic I wrote.) I mean, realistically, what more would we have gotten on network television? Some nude backs and people kissing each other's necks with their eyes closed and making moaning sounds? Unless we're gonna see Hilary Duff's nipples and Penn Badgley's rhythmically flexing asscheeks, I am not interested.
* What we got instead was the most erotic part of this particular sexual encounter, and I think of many sexual encounters outside the context of a committed relationship (though more about that later): The moments when the involved parties consciously choose pleasure. Watching the Duffster's eyes dart back and forth between Dan and Vanessa as she methodically kisses each of them was about a billion times hotter than whatever PG-13 sex scene we might have gotten out of the subsequent scenario. (Shit, I almost feel like they put us through the "OMG she did a sex scene in her vampire movie how can Dan STAND IT" nonsense a couple episodes back as an object lesson in how non-hot that kind of thing is.) Ditto however many years of will-they won't-they tension between Vanessa and Dan dissolving in, essentially, a dare, in a thought process that would be something like "I love this person and care about them as a friend, but they're also beautiful, so now we're going to use each other's beauty for our mutual enjoyment, and that's fine." That's sexy!
* And of course there's the added bonus that this went down as it has so many times in real life: In the context of relationships that will no doubt go down in fucking flames because of it. I don't think Gossip Girl is the place to go for the eroticized misery that these sorts of collegiate affairs engender, I don't think it's going to end up being a super-realistic depiction of how the people who've given you orgasms often rip your guts out before or after or even during that particular procedure, but the teaser for next week makes it clear that it's at least a catalyst for upending the Dan/Vanessa apple cart and causing mischief with Dan and Olivia. Should be a hoot to watch if nothing else.
* Okay, the rest of it:
* I don't buy the suddenness and totality of Jenny's transformation into Queen Bee of the Mean Girls.
* And yet I do buy the suddenness and totality of Chuck's transformation into the mature voice of reason.
* Maybe it's because the former development is annoying whereas the second is totally awesome? What else can you say about a guy acts more like Batman and dresses more like the Joker with each passing episode? His increasingly purple, sleepwear-based wardrobe is a joy to behold. And the second Serena and Blair got on the elevator, I knew he sabotaged it, I knew it! But the booze and cookies was a touch not even I anticipated. I guess that's why I'm Sean Collins and he's Chuck Bass. "If you two want to kiss, it won't count as cheating." Oh Chuck, you're my hero.
* Hey, that reminds me, I believe this episode contained our first real, mutually satisfactory same-sex kiss, correct? I know it was in the context of a trendy threesome and everything, but I'm still down with it because I don't think either girl was doing it for Dan's benefit. So good for them. Still, and perhaps therefore, every scene with Erik and Jonathan just pissed me off all the more. Make out! Make out, goddamn you! I'm so sick of these chaste kiss-less network-tv gay relationships. I wanna see some dudes swap spit for Chrissakes. I want the slap and tickle.
* Speaking of Erik, while I do support an Erik/Blair alliance centered on blackmailing some kid about shenanigans after lights-out at camp, Erik's behavior in this episode was even tougher to swallow than Jenny's. His instantaneous recourse to lying to both the mousy girl and to Jenny during the whole escort situation was not only out of character, it was indicative of how overused that device is by the show's writers. They do have the decency to expose the lies pretty quickly at this point--I don't think the "I've already got a date" text-message ruse lasted longer than one commercial break--but it's annoying and increasingly tough to swallow when even the good eggs start doing it as a matter of course.
* Regarding the escort, though, why is Nate such a coup? I love the kid, but did no one remember him publicly disgracing himself a week ago when he went on television and took the fall for attempting to rig a congressional election by staging a fake drowning on Election Day?
* What self-respecting male geek likes Twilight? You frakked up, writers.
* My favorite cut of the evening was from the nascent threesome to the Empire State Phallic Symbol.
* "Falafel at Mamoun's"! There's a Mamoun's up where I went to school too, and whenever I think of it I remember the time when one of my roommates was wandering around drunk as a lord at 3am with a couple of other people when he got the munchies. They were passing by Mamoun's and though it was dark, there was a light on in the back and the door was unlocked. Drunk enough to be undeterred by a closed sign, my buddy wanders through the darkened dining room and stumbles into the kitchen, where he sees a dude with slicked-back hair and a wife-beater, looking like a young Johnny Depp, counting out stacks of money. My friend apologizes for intruding and heads back out the way he came. "Hey!" yells the guy from the kitchen. "We have everything but falafel..." Just before my buddy can reply "Great--I'll have some baba ganoush!", his companions, who've by now come into the restaurant to retrieve him and realized just what kind of offer was being made here, thank the gentleman for his time and escort my friend out of the premises. Thus, when I heard Dan read this item from the list of things to do in college, I instinctively heard it with quotes around 'falafel.'
Funny Misshapen Body
Jeffrey Brown, writer/artist
Touchstone, 2009
320 pages
$16 Buy it from Amazon.com
It's a simple but effective tactic: Jeffrey Brown almost never draws his action straight-on. We see his autobiographical adventures at a three-quarter angle, or from slightly above and behind him, or with cuts to close-ups. When you factor in the seeming rapidity with which his tiny panels flash by, the effect, rather than one of sitting there watching actors, is like peering into a world, the space described with POV shifts and glimpses of corners and floors and rear walls and "extras." I know I'm sounding like a broken record here--I've reviewed a lot of Jeffrey Brown comics and said this sort of thing in most of those reviews--but it just feels necessary to point out as often as possible that there's a lot more going on, visually, than what's let on by even the back-cover blurbs of his own books, let alone by people who've got a special monogrammed hatchet they break out in his honor.
As is usually the case with Brown's nonfiction and memoir work, Funny Misshapen Body's carefully curated selection of topics and anecdotes belies the surface-level meandering and structurelessness of its narrative. Brown's basically telling two stories here: the stories of his physical and artistic/intellectual development. That in itself is a revelation, because it's not like the two intertwine or inform one another in any real way in the segments we see here. But to Brown, clearly his lifelong love of comics, his long and losing struggle to find a fulfilling artistic outlet, and the eureka moment(s) that bridged the two are just as fundamental to his physical existence as his Crohn's disease, his physical fitness or lack thereof, even going through puberty. (I get the feeling the sex stuff in here would be much more fleshed out if he hadn't already done several books on the topic.)
Maybe it's this focus on the basics that enables him to depict the events of his life with such a winning blend of dispassion and good humor. Brown tackles a lot of material here--middle-school bullying, romantic obsessions, creative triumphs and rejections, the onset of sex as a going concern, inebriated and intoxicated collegiate shenanigans--that quite frankly loom on my own personal mental landscape like fucking Stonehenge. It's almost bizarre to read a memoir that tackles these things from a seemingly undamaged place. But the two parallel narratives complement each other in such a way that it's quite convincing. Brown's story is one of seeking a compromise with the demands of his body and seeking no compromise with the demands of his art. He got to the finish line in both cases, and I guess I'd be pretty settled too, then. That it makes for perhaps his best book to date is just gravy.
* Hey, Deadwood fans: Did you know that the great Todd VanDerWerff of The House Next Door's Lost recaps spent all summer re-watching and reviewing Deadwood for the AV Club? Well break out the fuckin' canned peaches and kiss your evening goodbye, because that's what he did. For all eternity: Deadwood makes The Wire look like Hawaii 5-0.
* I haven't been following the weekly-ish Amazing Spider-Man comic, although I gave it a shot circa the John Romita Jr.-illustrated New Ways to Die arc and will do so again next week as the umbrella-event-whatever onslaught of classic Spidey villains The Gauntlet begins. Therefore I enjoyed Matt Wilson's lists of the 5 Best and 5 Worst Post-Brand New Day Spider-Man Villains at Topless Robot. The concepts are breezily hokey in the fashion of most of Spidey's rogues gallery, and though they're not all winners, they've at least showcased some gutsy design choices and lovely art by the likes of JRJR and Marcos Martin.
* Speaking of Topless Robot: You know, the end result of all the Watchmen DVD shenanigans is that I have yet to purchase Watchmen, a film I greatly enjoyed, on DVD, and don't really have any plans to do so. Last time this happened was with Let the Right One In and its shoddy subtitles. Did the version with proper theatrical subs ever come out, by the way?
* And speaking of weekly comics round-ups, I enjoyed Jog's this week just as I tend do. As usual he sneaks a juicy digression or two in there, this time around a post-mortem on Grant Morrison and Gene Ha's abortive Authority revival.
* I love the metal-up-your-ass imagery of the tumblelog Obsidian Obelisk, but like many Tumblrs (including my own!) it frequently doesn't credit the images it reposts. (I always used mine as basically a file folder you could display online.) So therefore I have no idea who created this wonderful image. Any help?
* As someone who's long felt hugely popular pop music should look and sound more like Mechanical Animals-era Marilyn Manson, I fully support Lady GaGa's "Bad Romance." This may be the moment where I became a GaGa Believer.
* Wow, that library worker who refused to allow a kid to check out Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's Black Dossierwas a grade-A asshole.
* My Twisted ToyFare Theater co-writers Justin Aclin, TJ Dietsch, Jon Gutierrez, and Rob "Topless Robot" Bricken were guests on the ISB's War Rocket Ajax podcast. Go listen to them explain how to be funny.
Refresh, Refresh
Danica Novgorodoff, writer/artist
adapted from the screenplay by James Ponsoldt
based on the short story by Benjamin Pierce
First Second, 2009
144 pages
$17.99 Buy it from Amazon.com
Beware of those epiphanies! They'll get you every time. Like Novogorodoff's previous book Slow Storm, Refresh Refresh creaks under the weight of meaning with which every scene is imbued. Every email from its latchkey-kid teenaged protagonist to his soldier father abroad is a poetic reverie about the emptiness of lives touched by war. Every conversation between his friend and his friend's kid brother is an object lesson in how violence and hierarchical power relationships infect those raised around it. Every bully, every cute girl, every wild animal is a metaphor first and foremost. Once again, there's a belief-beggaring twist involving violence that dances up to the edge of murderousness in a way that simply doesn't flow from what has come before, and in this case is actually difficult to parse logistically. And once again, there's one last desperate night where visions are had and this topsy-turvy world almost makes sense before it all fizzles out and fades away. By the end, I found I didn't care whether the book's trio of teen leads ever broke free of the stultifying pressures that were slowly crushing them, but I sure as heck wanted the author to!
That said, one thing that really surprised me about this book was the art. When I saw that Novgorodoff had (with the exception of one key sequence) subbed out her memorable gray watercolor washes for a more traditionally drawn style, complete with acidic colors by hired guns ("Color by Hilary Sycamore and Sky Blue Ink; lead colorist: Alex Campbell"), I shook my head in dismay. Here was the most distinctive thing about Novgorodoff's earlier book, and now it's gone? But Novgorodoff's got the chops for her pencil-and-ink work to stand on its own without the more dramatic painted style supplementing it. It makes for a fluid read, and in such cases as the predatory Army recruiter who intersects with our trio of heroes at several key junctures, it's a fine conveyor of character information.
I just wish it was being deployed in service of a story a little less beholden to the set-up of literary fiction at its most obligatorily portentous. You know what's a good point of comparison here? Gipi's Notes for a War Story. Both are bildungsromane about three teenage boys caught up in the moral, financial, and physical uncertainty of war. Both are drawn in a thin-line style that emphasizes the characters' awkwardness and vulnerability, but also makes moments of violence that much more impactful. Both are published by First Second. But one feels like a comic, while the other feels like a short story with drawings. Perhaps it's the "adaptation of an adaptation of a prose short story" set-up that's the problem, I dunno, but I do know the problem's there.
Mome Vol. 14: Spring 2009--Kaela Graham, Adam Grano, Derek Van Gieson, Laura Park, Olivier Schrauwen, Gilber Shelton, Pic, Dash Shaw, Ray Fenwick, Ben Jones, Frank Santoro, Jon Vermilyea, Sara Edward-Corbett, Conor O'Keefe, Emile Bravo, Lilli Carre, Hernan Migoya, Juaco Vizuete, Josh Simmons, writers/artists Vol. 15: Summer 2009--Kaela Graham, Andrice Arp, Tim Hensley, Sara Edward-Corbett, Ray Fenwick, Conor O'Keefe, T. Edward Bak, Gilbert Shelton, Pic, Nathan Neal, Noah Van Sciver, Robert Goodin, Dash Shaw, Paul Hornschemeier, Max, writers/artists Vol. 16: Fall 2009--Kaela Graham, Archer Prewitt, Ted Stearn, Dash Shaw, Lilli Carre, Conor O'Keefe, Ben Jones, Frank Santoro, Jon Vermilyea, Nicholas Mahler, Laura Park, Nate Neal, Renee French, Sara Edward-Corbett, T. Edward Bak, writers/artists
Eric Reynolds, Gary Groth, editors
Fantagraphics, 2009
Vol. 14: 120 pages
Vols. 15-16: 112 pages each
$14.99 each Buy them from Fantagraphics Buy them from Amazon.com
Things kinda went off the rails here, no?
Like, looking at that list of contributors, you can see some standouts: The Cold Heat material from Jones, Santoro, and Vermilyea is not the strongest Cold Heat material in the world but it's imaginative and, particularly with Vermilyea at the drawing table, sharply delineated, as is Vermilyea's delightfully sick solo material. Josh Simmons impresses with his blackly comic strips, particularly a memorable number involving homunculus-sized versions of Tom Cruise and Michael J. Fox grinning soullessly at the assembled paparazzi. Tim Hensley kills it as always with the concluding chapters in his Wally Gropius saga, featuring peerlessly communicated body language perhaps the greatest anti-climax in comics history. I think this is some of the tightest material we've seen yet from Sara Edward-Corbett--I love her white-on-black trees and her Ice Haven-esque children-adults. Lilli Carre is alarmingly good at depicting male lust. Nate Neal's not-so-instant-karma piece in Vol. 16 is explicit and haunting. Dash Shaw is a restless talent, albeit so restless he never seems to settle down even in the middle of any given strip.
But what is Mome at this point? Gone is the "recurring cast" model. Also gone is the Saturday Night Live style approach that replaced it--recurring cast featuring a couple of breakout stars with a celebrity guest each issue. Now it's just all over the place. Here's Gilbert Shelton's unfunny rock epic, here's Ray Fenwick and Archer Prewitt and Ted Stearn's unfunny funny-animal things, here's an astonishingly hamfisted political comic from Emile Bravo, here's some comics from Spain that are stiff and disjointed, here's some Conor O'Keefe stuff that's gorgeously McKay-ian but sort of amorphous, here's some awkwardly self-referential stuff from Laura Park and Nicholas Mahler, here's a T. Edward Bak cover version of Dan Simmons' The Terror and a Renee French piece that just get buried under the accumulated other, lesser contributions. I'm not sure what Mome is supposed to deliver anymore, and I'm not sure how receptive I am to whatever it is delivering.
* In the SPX Critics Roundtable transcript, when I wrote that Rob Clough and Chris Mautner's last names are pronounced "Clow" and "Mowtner," I meant that as in "rhymes with cow or Mao," not "rhymes with glow or mow-the-lawn." I'm gonna fix it so it's even clearer, but I've heard enough excitement over people finally learning to properly pronounce those dudes' names that I want to set the record straight.
* I have a Twitter account that you can follow: @theseantcollins.
* Just a couple of big Robot 6 posts and then I'm out for the day.
* First, I transcribed the Critics Roundtable panel from SPX. Get ready to wallow in the wisdom sprayed all over your computer monitor or iPod Touch screen by Rob Clough, Gary Groth, Bill Kartalopolous, Chris Mautner, Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, Douglas Wolk, and yours truly.
Captain America: Reborn #4
Ed Brubaker, writer
Bryan Hitch, artist
Marvel, November 2009
40 pages
$3.99
In which we learn that Sharon Carter is not just the Billy Pilgriming Captain America's "constant" in the Lost sense--she's literally a Cap magnet, pulling him toward her through the timestream thanks to some nanotech in her blood. Ain't Marvel Universe pseudoscience grand? That's really all I need to get me over what reservations I had about injecting a time-displacement angle into Brubaker's years-long top-drawer super-spy saga. And to be fair, the megastoryline kicked off with the Cosmic Cube, the wonkiest of all Marvel's made-up tech/mystic mumbo jumbo, while one of its best scenes to date involved Bucky's dismembered cybernetic arm springing to life and taking out a room full of SHIELD goons, so this is not without precedent. (There were some cool giant robots in there too, iirc.)
One of my favorite things about Brubaker's run--and in this he's been indispensably assisted by a solid stable of artists, led by Steve Epting and Mike Perkins and stood in for here by the slicker style and cantilevered action of Bryan Hitch, who in every other way is consistent with the established tone--is just how good he is at grouping various super-people together and having those groupings make visual and practical sense. Several times I've touted how he's established this sort of underbelly to the Marvel Universe involving super-powered espionage-based characters: Steve Rogers, Bucky, Black Widow, Union Jack, Crossbones, Agent 13, Nick Fury and so on all look like people you really could believe take advantage of whatever relatively slight super powers they have, put on some form-fitting garb and skullcaps, and go out and assault people in classified military installations. In this issue you see some new combos in that regard, most notably a Bucky-Cap/Black Widow/Ronin trio, who are put through the paces by Hitch in a memorable hit-and-run attack in Marvel's oft-destroyed Times Square. Elsewhere, Bru and Hitch take a trio of gaudier, more straightforwardly superheroic characters--Mister Fantastic, Hank Pym or whatever he's calling himself now, and the Vision--and, despite this being the least naturally resonant area of the Marvel U. for Brubaker's Cap, somehow make them click in that world as a braintrust tasked with cracking the enemy technology that's brought Cap low.
But the best such scene--the scene that made me want to write the book in the first place--occurs when Homeland Security Commissar Norman "The Green Goblin" Osborn's right-hand woman Victoria Hand (yup!) drags Sharon Carter, the brainwashed and disgraced Agent 13, in handcuffs into a secret lair. She looks down, and there looking back at her are Doctor Doom, the Red Skull (who's now trapped in a robot body with a Red Skull mask and an SS uniform), racist luchadore Crossbones, Skull's S&M daughter Sin, and the torso-themed robot Nazi mad scientist Doctor Arnim Zola. Sharon's reaction is more bugged-out disbelief than anything else, and it's entirely appropriate: As assembled by Brubaker, drawn by Hitch, and staged in a clever two-level set-up by the two of them, man oh man does this come across as a batshit-insane crew of lunatics. You really can't even begin to imagine what kind of crazy horrorshow they've got in store for whoever's unlucky to be dragged into that lab; it's like the scene in Blue Velvet where Dennis Hopper forces Kyle MacLachlan into Dean Stockwell's place, only with Doombots and time machines instead of overweight prostitutes and Roy Orbison songs.
And now that I'm writing about it, the scene reminds me in its weird, you-gotta-be-shitting-me way of a very different "here come the bad guys" reveal: that wonderful spread in the first issue of Geoff Johns and Phil Jimenez's Infinite Crisis where you realize that Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters are about to get their collective bell rung by Bizarro, Zoom, Cheetah, Sinestro, Black Adam, Deathstroke, Dr. Light, Psycho-Pirate, and that DC Magneto guy Dr. Polaris--just about as fearsome an array of opposite-numbers and cool power-sets as DC can offer. But while that was prime momentism, this is like anti-momentism--the staging peels back the "whoa" factor and transforms it into a sort of wordless shudder. This is the kind of thing you want every superhero comic you read to be able to deliver.
* A pair of heavy-hitters in the Strange Tales Spotlight today, in honor of the third and final issue's release: Paul Hornschemeier and Jeffrey Brown.
* Josh Simmons has changed my mind: Now I want someone to pay him six figures to adapt Stephen King's It. (Sorry, Al--you snooze, you lose!)
* Wow, this Steven Grant essay about how we've entered the Disco Age of comics (meant pejoratively) is just super-duper wrong about both disco then and comics now. And frustratingly, he tosses in a bit about how people who weren't around in the late '70s don't understand disco, so now I can't explain why it's wrong because I wasn't around then and therefore don't understand. Curses, foiled again!
* I'm a few days late on this, but Matt Zoller Seitz's video essay "Unreal Estate," a compilation of establishing shots of various buildings where bad things end up happening in horror movies and other films, is his best video essay yet. I even did pretty good at ID'ing the films. Barton Fink was a very welcome inclusion.
* Speaking of both Seitz and scares, he's a contributor to IFC's fine list of the 25 Scariest Moments in Non-Horror Movies. Chances are that if it just sprung into your mind, it's on the list. Seitz's highest-ranking write-up happens to be the only act of violence in a film that made me cry.
* My favorite line of the night actually came from the "previously on Gossip Girl" thing at the beginning of the episode, when Olivia said to Dan, "I lied because I care about you." That's Gossip Girl in a nutshell, this season more than ever. It should be tattooed on every character's forehead.
* Actually, my real favorite line of the night wasn't on the TV at all. It comes from The Missus, who when Dan and Olivia were snuggling in bed turned to me and asked "Do you think Dan's morning breath has integrity?" You bet it does, honey.
* "Van der Bilt"? Uh, okay. Van der Woodsen too. Van der Bass? Van der Waldorf?
* I liked the line about a Rasmussen poll having a Democrat in the lead. This really is a fantasy world!
* I enjoyed the lame actor character. More people need to answer doors and attend parties in their boxer briefs.
* The funniest bit of the night is Blair telling Serena about "my best friend Brandeis," whom she met that afternoon--perhaps the most literally childish thing Blair's done in a season full of Blair doing childish things. Please tell me I wasn't the only person who immediately thought of Eric Wareheim's new best friend Raz and Tim Heidecker's new best friend Tony...
Hey, who needs the hoes, right, Blair?
* I love that Blair was so mean to Serena, because the meanness was accurate. Serena is a slutty lush!
* Jimmy Fallon. Jesus Christ.
* Jenny looks cute with no make-up. She should get sick more often.
* I spent a long time baffled as to whether or not Nate actually did stage the drowning. I didn't know what the hell was going on until we got some seemingly superfluous shots of Trip's missus.
* Speaking of, how wonderful was her mustache-twirling exchange with Grandfather? Her: "This couldn't have worked any better if it was planned." Him: "You!" I like a good "you!"
I think that Space Beaver comic has served as a template as far as the kind of comics I'd like to create.
...
Muscles are cool. They represent power and strength, which are cool qualities.
...
I'd like to see superhero comics return to the male power fantasy. And that just makes me think of having muscles that would allow me to decimate any adversary.
Look: I get it. It's a horror comedy. True, the non-horror comedy parts were a bit shopworn. Of course the neurotic guy's phobias include clowns, and when a zombie clown finally appears, of course he says "Look at this fucking clown." Of course the redneck carries a banjo he uses as a weapon, and when he uses it to lure out zombies, of course he plays "Dueling Banjos" on it. And of course the junk food he's obsessed with is fucking Twinkies.
But the horror-comedy aspects were pretty top drawer. I'm sort of astonished by the credit sequence, for example. A series of shockingly gory kills, played for laughs, shot in super slow-mo so they look like a cross between one of those stagey horror photos by Whatsisname and that Spike Jonze video with the burning guy chasing the bus (referenced outright, by the way), and soundtracked by the ever-awesome "For Whom the Bell Tolls"? Add in the slightly overripe, saturated color palette that medium-budget studio efforts all seem to use these days, and the whole opening plays like an Opposite Sketches version of Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead. Hey, well played!
The four main characters, they're okay. Jesse Eisenberg must feel about Michael Cera the way Gollum feels about the Ring--he hates and loves him, as he hates and loves himself--but he's pretty game in this the second film in which he's a one-man Cera cover band who has some adventures in an amusement park. Woody Harrelson's genial shitkicker is woefully underbaked, a collection of pro forma cliches that coasts entirely on Harrelson's CV full of genial shitkickers, but that meant I could pretend this was an unofficial sequel to Natural Born Killers, which was a ton of fun. It's entirely plausible that Harrelson played this role while all the while thinking of himself as an older, slightly mellower, but no less lethal Mickey Knox. Abigail Breslin is spunky and seems to be aging into teen roles pretty gracefully, while the other girl they gave the raccoon-eye make-up to was fine in a cute tough girl with a soft streak kinda way. Mostly I like dark-haired girls in jeans and t-shirts with rock and roll make-up, so, you know, mission accomplished there.
And the movie had its moments. I liked the fourth-wall-busting use of Columbus's "rules," popping up and getting knocked around by the action. Riffs a little bit on Tarantino, presages what I'm assuming will happen in Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim movie, which you can't help but think about when you're watching a post-Shaun of the Dead zombie comedy starring a guy who'd play the other Michael Cera character if they did a new version of The Twelfth Night. Great bit with the girl from the next apartment. Some nice music on the soundtrack, "Oh Sweet Nothing," "Kingdom of Rust," " Everybody Wants Some." And though it was thoroughly spoiled for me by now, great cameo.
But then! They fucking kill the guy, act like it's no more big a deal than if they broke his television, crack jokes during his death, dump his body off his balcony, and carry on having target practice and goofing around and doing the romantic-comedy bit as though nothing had happened. FUCK that. I seriously almost walked out. Not because I was so ouuuuuutraaaaaaged or anything, but because how the fuck could I care about anything else that happened? Like I said, I get it: It's a horror comedy. But it's a horror comedy predicated on the notion that these four people grow to care about each other and act accordingly--I mean, you could see that ending coming a mile away. (Though its wonky timeline was a surprise.) And yet they run into another living person, a person that for reasons I won't spoil they already feel enormously attached to, a person who's being really, really nice to them--and, might I add, a person who was in a far better and more tonally consistent horror comedy!!! And then they fucking kill him and act like they don't care? Blam, there goes the whole movie. I was thrown so far out of it it was like someone hit the eject button. I didn't care about Tallahassee's tragic backstory anymore, I sure as shit didn't care about the romance, I didn't care about the pointless "big climactic battle" at the amusement park. Totally, utterly movie-ruining misstep. To paraphrase the movie itself, "[NAME REDACTED] was a photo in someone's wallet, too."
* Curt Purcell gives Blackest Night its midterm progress report. He's not that impressed. That's fine. What's irking me (and Curt's not guilty of this so much as the reviewers he links to, who fall all over themselves to find inventive new put-downs) is the fashionable new response to Johns's work among many comics critics, which is that he likes Hal Jordan too much and therefore he stinks. I'm sorry but the idea that he likes Hal Jordan more than, say, Grant Morrison likes Bruce Wayne or Kal-El is ludicrous.
* Jeet Heer discusses what he thinks The Comics Journal has done well lately, and by implication what it's done not-so-well. I think they're simply at the mercy of whoever wants to do reviews and criticism for that publication anymore. I love that they'll pay me to talk to Josh Cotter for an hour, but I'd rather read something and post a review of it that same day than read something that's a few months old and watch the review come out a few months after that. I'll be curious to see if the new site gets involved in the day-to-day discussion again.
At SPX this year, a friend of mine approached Al Columbia for a sketch in his themed sketchbook. Columbia started drawing, didn't like it, tore out the page, crumpled it up. Started drawing again, didn't like that one either, tore out the page, crumpled it up. Told my friend he couldn't do it with all the noise and distractions in the room. Stopped drawing sketches for anyone for the rest of the day, except for a tiny circle-dot-dot-curve smiley face next to his signature for anyone who purchased a copy of this book. After I heard this story I told it to a couple of friends. One remarked that if he'd been forced to concoct a story about what trying to get a sketch from Al Columbia would be like, this would have been it. Another said he'd agree with that assessment, but only if Columbia had been paid for the work first.
Al Columbia may be the closest alternative comics has come to producing a Syd Barrett, an Axl Rose, a Sly Stone, a Kevin Shields, a sandbox-era Brian Wilson, or heck, a Steve Ditko--a prodigious, world-beating talent chased off stage by his own...ugh, I don't want to say demons, but even if you ascribe Columbia's Big Numbers flameout and lack of published work post-Biologic Show to perfectionism, surely perfectionism that total and unforgiving is a demon of a kind.
The genius of Pim & Francie is harnessing the power of that demon--whatever it is or was that led Columbia to abandon his impossibly immaculate conceptions of monstrousness and murder half-drawn on the page time and time again--and deploying it as a conscious aesthetic decision. Reproducing unfinished roughs, penciled-in and scribbled-out dialogue, half-inked panels, torn-up and taped-together pages, even cropping what look like finished comics so that you can't see the whole thing, Columbia and his partners in the production of this book, Paul Baresh and Adam Grano, have produced a fractured masterpiece, a glimpse of the forbidden, an objet d'art noir. As I wrote on Robot 6 the other day:
my favorite thing about Columbia's comics--many of which can now be found in his new Fantagraphics hardcover Pim and Francie--is how they look like the product of some doomed and demented animation studio. It's as though a team of expert craftsmen became trapped in their office sometime during the Depression and were forgotten about for decades, reduced to inbreeding, feeding on their own dead, and making human sacrifices to the mimeograph machine, and when the authorities finally stumbled across their charnel-house lair, this stuff is what they were working on in the darkness.
The horror of Columbia's sickly-cute Pim & Francie vignettes--a zombie story, a serial-killer story, a witch-in-the-woods story, a haunted-forest story, a trio of chase sequences--is extraordinarily effective. And the stand-alone images both inside and outside those stories--the Beast of the Apocalypse as story-book fawn, a field of horrid man-things staring right at you, a broken-down theme park and the phrase "there's something wrong with grandpa," a forest of crying trees, some dreadful being of black flame running full-tilt down the basement stairs, zombie Grandma stopping her dishwashing and glancing up toward where the children sleep--are as close as comics have come (hate to keep using that formulation, but there you have it) to the girls at the end of the hall in The Shining, the chalk-white face of the demon flashing at us in Father Karras's dream in The Exorcist, the inscrutable motionlessness of characters in The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. The craft involved in their creation is simply remarkable, with Columbia's assuredness of line, faux-vintage aesthetic, and near-peerless use of blacks all actually gaining from his panels' frequent extreme-close-up enlargement throughout the collection.
But moreover, these scary stories and disturbing images are all so gorgeously awful that they appear to have corrupted the book itself. They look like they've emerged from the ether, seared or stained themselves partly onto the pages, then burned out, or been extinguished when the nominal author shut his sketchbook and hurled it across the room or tore up the pages in terror. It's comic book as Samara's video from The Ring, Lemarchand's box from Hellraiser, Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon from Lovecraft, the titular toy from Stephen King's "The Monkey"--an inherently horrific object. Bravo.
In the long list of things that Nigel Tufnel was right about, "there's a fine line between stupid and clever" is right up near the top. Which side of that line Paranormal Activity falls on has been bedeviling me since I (finally) saw it Halloween afternoon. Just by way of a for instance, while we chatted about the film in the lobby, I complained to the folks I saw it with about the demonologist who never barked. If the filmmakers were never going to actually put him in the movie, why introduce the concept in the first place? It left me with this weird sensation that either a chunk of the movie had gone missing, or the filmmakers just didn't have that much of a grasp on what they were doing. But then my wife theorized that maybe that truncated feeling was the point--the movie gets you believing that this demonologist will show up "in a few days," so when the end comes and he's still nowhere in sight, it's all the more shocking. Which got me to thinking about how I'd spent most of the movie believing the climax would come on the night of October 31st, only for the proceedings to stop short several weeks before then. Then there was my brother's paranormal-buff fiancee, who "explained" that this kind of haunting had to be "a demonic" rather than the work of a (formerly) human entity, so they needed to address this (the psychic telling them to hire a demonologist) without actually allowing it to fix the problem (Micah puts off calling him, and when Katie finally does, he's out of town). You could probably go back and forth about all the other loose ends--the house fire, Katie's sister, the haunting of Diane back in the '60s--in a similar fashion.
Ditto the believability of the two main characters. I found Micah's desire to get to the bottom of the haunting rather than wave the white flag, even when this ran counter to Katie's express wishes, a totally credible trait; amusingly, my wife found his behavior so dickish as to shatter her suspension of disbelief. On the flip side, I thought the seams really showed on Katie's performance during scenes where she was obviously required to express a certain sentiment or say a certain line; The Missus found her compelling and her story sad. That part we agree on, at least, which is why this post analogizing the story arc of Paranormal Activity to domestic violence has lodged itself in my head the way it has. Overall, again, it's difficult to say whether the shortcomings of the characters are simply the fault of them as characters or the result of poor choices by the filmmakers.
And the scares? As I alluded to the other day, the film shares with The Hurt Locker a structural advantage: The second you're placed in a certain environment (a mission/bedtime), you in the audience are prepped to have the shit scared out of you (by an explosion/by the haunting). Both films smartly let you do most of the work for them, letting you sit there, hearing the pounding of the blood in your ears, straining toward the screen to see what happens yet pushing back in your chair dreading it as well. Paranormal has the added advantage of doing for bedrooms what Psycho did for showers and Jaws did for beaches, transforming a familiar environment into a locus of horror--how much of the "scariest movie ever" buzz simply stems from people not being able to avoid their own bedrooms and therefore recalling the movie whether they want to or not? Ditto how deftly it works with the uncomfortable idea of being watched while you sleep--by a camera, by some malevolent entity, and (we'll get to this again later) even by someone you love.
The difference between the two set-ups, of course, is that Kathryn Bigelow pretty much delivers something memorable every time, from world-class action sequences to gorgeous scenery to those haunting extreme close-ups of falling shells or shockwaves. Director Oren Peli, on the other hand, can really only show you a static shot of a bedroom or a shakicam shot of a living room, in night vision; at times, the "action" disappears into the darkness where you're vaguely aware there's something going on--the tug of war between Micah and the demon after it drags Katie out of bed is the best example--but can't make it out. Once again, is this a deft use of parametric filmmaking or amateur hour?
With all these unsettled questions, there'd be no way I'd feel comfortable proclaiming this "the scariest movie ever made" even if I were inclined in that direction to begin with. Which (the moment you've been waiting for!) I'm not. With a couple of exceptions, there was nothing here you couldn't get out of a particularly well done episode of A Haunting; in fact I can think of a moment from that series that scared me and The Missus worse than anything here. Because of the film's abrupt ending, the sense of relentless pacing and crescendoing terror that characterizes (here it comes) The Blair Witch Project is absent. With it goes the gut-wrenching grinding down of the protagonists--Katie can collapse and cry on the floor all she wants, there's still nothing here that approaches that desperate conversation between Heather and Mike as they droolingly rattle off their favorite foods, knowing they'll probably never taste them again. There's no sense that Micah and Katie have been driven to that desperate a strait, even after the thing yanks her out of bed and bites her.
A big part of the problem is that just like Micah (and Katie, prior to her final under-the-influence decision to stay), we in the audience can't help but associate the haunting with the house. That's what a million haunted-house movies and stories have taught us to do since time immemorial. Even ones that aren't predicated on the location still tend to make tremendous use of it--cf. The Exorcist and how inseparable your memories of it are from that freezing cold, harshly illuminated bedroom. Paranormal Activity is similar: It does such a good job of violating domestic tranquility and transforming the bedroom, a place of comfort and refuge, into a horrorshow, that you can't help but want to scream at them "Check into a hotel and hang out in the lobby overnight! Go to a Walgreen's!" As hard as the movie works to establish that there's no escape, it also never shows them trying and failing to do so (budget limitations, perhaps?), so we're left wondering what-if and letting the air out of the scare. Heather, Josh, and Mike are lost in the woods; Micah and Katie could go grocery shopping or visit his mom or catch a flight to Hawaii if they wanted.
But all of this just keeps the movie from being an awesome stone-cold classic. I think it's still a fine film, and largely for the same reasons it's not a great one. All that ambiguity about the characters, the loose plot threads, whether or not they could have escaped--that's still very interesting, even if you can't nail it all down as a point in the film's favor for certain. I find myself thinking "What if he'd done this? What if she'd tried that?" It's giving me something to chew on.
And while nothing here genuinely freaked me out once I was in the comfort of my own home--something Blair Witch, The Exorcist, The Shining, and The Ring all managed to pull off, just to name a few--nor really traumatized me during the viewing--all those movies, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Birds, Psycho, Hostel, The Descent, Hellraiser, Hellbound, etc etc--I can say that there were a few world-class horror images in here. Not the grunts and footprings, not the mysterious photograph, not the ouija board, not the shattered photograph, at least not for me. What got me were two things. For some reason, the lights being flipped on and off really got me. They weren't flickering--something was walking around turning lights on and off. Not only was something else present in the house, it was basically using the house the way we would--only it was nothing like us in nature or intent. I dunno, that creeped me out pretty bad.
But best/worst of all were the two scenes where somnambulist Katie got out of bed, turned to face it, and just...stood there, for hours and hours. That's pure automaton Freudian uncanny, of course, and a monumental horror-image par excellence. And it's reminiscent of the original-edit ending of Blair Witch to boot--to this day the scariest thing I've ever seen in a movie--because there's just no reason for it to be happening. It hits all my buttons, hard, as does the resolution of that first scene, where she walks away and Micah finally wakes up, following her down and out into the backyard, where she's just swinging in a swing. These are actions that really have no inherent emotional or psychological content whatsoever. They're purely neutral. But when you have no idea why someone's doing them, even totally neutral actions can become sinister, almost intolerable. That much I'm sure about.
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