SmartRemarks

Up front: I liked it.

Sunday’s final episode of Lost, that is… a show I’ve been watching with fascination for five years now. (No, not six… I missed S1 when it aired, but got hooked by the DVDs.)

That’s not to say that I found it completely satisfying, especially on an intellectual level. But clearly the show was shooting for emotional catharsis in the finale, more than anything else, and on those terms it succeeded very effectively. It was true to the characters we’ve come to know and care about, hitting emotional beats that almost brought tears to my eyes more than once. And it didn’t do that by resorting to cheap sentimentality; it was well-earned sentiment. As a viewer, one had to have been following along with these characters through years of travail, had to understand who they were, what they’d experienced, what kind of redemption they’d been seeking, in order for those moments to work. When everything is weighed in the balance, I think that this will go down as one of the most ambitious, and artistically successful, shows in television history.

[Spoilers below.]

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Tags: Carlton Cuse, Damon Lindelof, Lost, television, writers

The critical reaction to the new movie Robin Hood, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe in the title role, has been decidedly mixed. It averages a mere 45% from critics compiled on RottenTomatoes.com, many of whom seem to have been cribbing from the same notes. They complain of the movie’s 140-minute length (apparently gleaned from a press kit rather than their own watches; the actual running time is just 130); they complain that the climactic beach battle evokes Saving Private Ryan; they complain that it’s an origin story seemingly designed to set up a “franchise”; most often, they complain that it’s not Errol Flynn, that it’s too short on swashbuckling merriment, that “the Robin Hood of myth and moviedom is for the most part AWOL,” as WaPo’s Michael O’Sullivan puts it.

Much of this carping seems to me not just wrong but fundamentally misguided. I’m a huge and unapologetic fan of Flynn’s classic 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood, but that movie’s already been made, and it’s out there on disc for anyone who wants to enjoy it again. This film isn’t an attempt to remake that, or the much more forgettable 1991 Kevin Costner version of the story, or any of the other literally dozens of film and TV adaptations to which the Robin Hood legends have been subjected. It’s not trying to give viewers the same old cereal in a new box. It’s trying to come up with a new take, a story different enough to be worth telling. In large part it succeeds, and taken on its own terms, it’s a heartily enjoyable film.

Neither the creative revisionism nor its success should be a surprise. Ridley Scott is the director who gave us such films as Blade Runner and the classic Thelma & Louise, not to mention—in previous work with Crowe—Gladiator, American Gangster, and Body of Lies. As for Crowe, those three films alone demonstrate his phenomenal range as an actor (nearly as much of a chameleon as Edward Norton), even without looking at his work in other roles as diverse as L.A. Confidential, his Oscar-nominated turn in The Insider, and his incredibly layered performance in the otherwise mediocre A Beautiful Mind. Both men are prolific, but neither is known for doing retreads of familiar work. Teamed with Brian Helgeland, the screenwriter behind L.A. Confidential and the recent and unjustly neglected Green Zone, Scott and Crowe have turned out a Robin Hood that does not attempt to cater, as Kenneth Turan observes, to “those expecting traditional Robin Hood satisfactions.” It’s more history than Hollywood—or at least a well-balanced compromise between the two.

[Spoilers ahead.]

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Tags: history, movies, Ridley Scott, Robin Hood, Russell Crowe

And now, a brief interlude from all the Sherlockiana for a bit of politics and economics. After hearing a radio interview today about a fascinating new book, I’ve done a bit of digging and realized I may have come a bit late to the game, for—at least in England—this book has been gathering serious attention for the better part of a year now. It deserves to do the same here in the U.S.

The interview was with Prof. Richard Wilkinson of Nottingham University, co-author (with Kate Pickett of York University) of The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. (The title is perhaps a bit less than apt; the authors apparently wanted to call it “Evidence-Based Politics,” which to my ear would have been superior.) Wilkinson and Pickett, epidemiologists both, started out studying data on public health outcomes and wound up with a project much larger than they had originally envisioned. Their data demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that economic inequality within a society, regardless of overall wealth, is the single biggest predictor of a wide range of other social ills, from life expectancy to violent crime and far, far more.

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Tags: books, economy, government, health care, inequality, Kate Pickett, Richard Wilkinson, The Spirit Level

Sherlock Holmes has been much in the public eye of late, thanks to the big-budget Hollywood movie starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law. (And it’s an enjoyable picture; if the overall style is a bit too frenetic and overblown, and a few obvious liberties are taken with the source material, still the filmmakers at least seem familiar with that source material… and the cast, especially Downey, does a terrific job of capturing the subtle quirks of their characters.)

Of course, Holmes has been a cultural icon for well over a century, and I’ve been a fan for some years. As it happens, around the same time my girlfriend and I acquired the DVD box set of the 1980s-’90s TV series with Jeremy Brett as Holmes, and have been watching it from beginning to end. It offers more faithful adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories than any other filmed version before or since, in a style that’s a closer match for the original sensibilities of the material (i.e., fewer chase scenes, fistfights, and explosions)… and Brett does an uncanny job of capturing the persona of the Great Detective (although in some scenes he seems, perhaps, just a bit too caustic and antisocial), ably abetted by first David Burke and later Edward Hardwicke as Dr. Watson. It’s a fantastic series, well worth watching.

Even the best adaptation is a mere interpretation of the original, though, and I found myself moved to turn my attention back to “The Canon,” the original four novels and fifty-six short stories by Conan Doyle, published between 1887 and 1927. I’m fortunate enough to own both annotations of the complete works, William Baring-Gould’s classic Annotated Sherlock Holmes from 1967, and Leslie Klinger’s New Annotated edition from 2004-’05. Both offer not only the original texts but a fascinating treasure-trove of scholarly exegesis, analysis, background information, and speculation about the characters, settings, and myriad other details of the stories.

The Holmes canon has been peculiarly attractive to armchair scholars almost from the beginning, perhaps due to the natural appeal of applying the Master’s own analytical methods to the source material in which we discover them. And the exercise is more enjoyable for the distinctive rules of the game, the set of underlying premises observed with scholarly solemnity when possible and with tongue clamped firmly in cheek when necessary: namely, that the Canon represents a true and genuine (if tantalizingly far from complete) account of the life and career of Sherlock Holmes, the world’s first consulting detective, as recorded by his friend and colleague Dr. John H. Watson, published under the auspices and (for reasons lost to history) under the name of Watson’s literary agent (and occasional editor), Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle. I respect and observe these rules.

There are as many facets of Sherlockian scholarship as there are enthusiasts ready to undertake it, but one area of longstanding controversy that I find particularly engaging (given my own deep-seated and frankly self-evident interest in narrative chronology) is the matter of how to date the cases. I’m coming late to the game, of course; there have been well over a dozen books published on the matter of chronologizing the Canon. Nevertheless, I think I have some insights and observations worth exploring… and this is the first in a series of posts in which I’ll share that exploration.

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Tags: chronology, Dr. Watson, genre, history, literature, Sherlock Holmes, timeline

No, I haven’t posted in several weeks, but no, I haven’t abandoned this blog, either. I’ve just been exceedingly preoccupied with other things. More on that at a later date. It’s starting to ease up, though, so for the moment I at least have the opportunity to offer a short new post.

About? Superman: Secret Origin #3, which shipped last week.

As I wrote at the time, I actually kind of enjoyed the first issue of this Geoff Johns-written revamp of Superman’s backstory; it didn’t really seem necessary, but at least it was being done reasonably well. I had some more reservations about the second issue (which elaborated on Lex Luthor’s origins in Smallville in a way that made it completely pointless to have transplanted him there in the first place, and which reinserted the Legion and a kinda-sorta Superboy career into Clark’s youth in a way designed to pluck all the most obvious emotional chords, but which still had some fun elements). The third issue, though? This one was an outright disappointment.

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Tags: continuity, DC Comics, Geoff Johns, super-heroes, Superman

In one sense, everyone knows Superman’s origin. At least the sound bite version: “strange visitor from another planet, who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men,” “rocketed to Earth as an infant from the dying planet Krypton,” and so forth.

The thing is, it’s really hard to build actual stories on a sound bite. And in another sense, hard as it may be to believe, Superman as seen in the comics hasn’t had a coherent origin for the better part of a decade now.

Superman’s backstory was fairly consistent for decades, from its first full telling in 1948’s Superman #53 to 1961’s classic Superman #146 all the way through 1986… notwithstanding lots of retroactive detail that got inserted over the years (especially under Mort Weisinger’s editorship in the ’60s) and a few minor tweaks to accommodate the Earth-1/Earth-2 split. The cumulative history was enough to justify a Superman Encyclopedia in the late ’70s compiling it all. Then all that was swept away in 1986, in the aftermath of the continuity-reshaping Crisis on Infinite Earths, with John Byrne’s Man of Steel mini-series and the simultaneous relaunch of all the Superman titles. It was controversial at the time—particularly for the way it retroactively erased Superboy—but it provided a clean slate on which to create new Superman stories in the new DCU continuity.

For a while.

Then in 2000, as part of a change of creative teams, Superman experienced a “time storm” that left his backstory in doubt. In 2003, DC published Mark Waid’s Superman: Birthright mini, which confused things even more, as it contradicted MoS in many respects but was never acknowledged as fully canonical either in-story or by the editorial PTB. In 2006, Infinite Crisis shook up the DCU again, though not as severely, and in the aftermath hints were dropped about a whole new set of changes to Superman’s backstory—nothing comprehensive, though, just various tweaks like another new look for Krypton here and a revised introduction for Mon-El there. The thing is, there was still a relatively unbroken sequence of stories tracing back to MoS in 1986, and characters and events from many of those stories were still being used or referenced regularly. Confusion reigned.

Now, after a seemingly interminable wait (for those of us who care about these things), comes Superman: Secret Origins—issue #1 was released this week—by writer Geoff Johns and artist Gary Frank. It’s the new Definitive Version. And it’s… not bad.

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Tags: continuity, Dan DiDio, DC Comics, Geoff Johns, Legion, Lex Luthor, super-heroes, Superman

Side note for my countless loyal fans (well, I haven’t counted ‘em, anyway):  today marks the one-year anniversary of my launch of this blog, and this is the 173rd post I’ve published in that time. Total cumulative visits to date are nearing 16,000. Not earth-shaking, but not a bad track record, I hope!…

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Anyway. Today’s topic. As a matter of personal disposition I’m a humanist, so I tend to enjoy works of art and storytelling that dovetail with that philosophical orientation. I believe that in the long run, for all our foibles and shortcomings, human culture moves in the direction of justice over injustice, cooperation over selfishness, integrity over expediency, wisdom over ignorance.

Art is a wonderful means of reminding us of the enduring power of these values and principles. It should come as no surprise, then, that my favorite films include life-affirming works like Holiday, It’s A Wonderful Life, Casablanca, and Inherit the Wind. Such idealistic fare is perhaps scarcer than it used to be—we live in a cynical age—but it’s not yet extinct; I think the Lord of the Rings trilogy qualifies, for instance.

However, I said all that by way of preface for this:  two of the best films I saw this summer were, philosophically speaking, the diametric opposite of life-affirming. They were very different in subject matter, but both were terrific, superbly executed, deeply satisfying movies… and both will leave you with the conviction that “human intelligence” and “human compassion” are oxymorons, and indeed that humanity is a thoroughly despicable species in general. I’m talking about In The Loop and District 9.

[Beware: spoilers ahead!]

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Tags: District 9, humanism, In The Loop, Iraq, movies, Neill Blomkamp, Peter Jackson, Sharlto Copely

The main Blackest Night series got off to a good start, as I’ve written, and I continue to enjoy it. The story slowed its pace a bit in the second issue, but it’s still compelling and suspenseful, shocking and poignant. The best “event” comic in years, frankly. (It’s clearly leading up to the return of Nekron, the villain from the 1981 Tales of the Green Lantern Corps mini-series… but hey, that’s fine by me! That’s a classic story, still a personal favorite.)

Moreover (unlike many comics crossovers), BN is very tightly and carefully interwoven with the crossover issues of related series, namely Green Lantern (also by Geoff Johns) and GL Corps (by Peter Tomasi).

However… the “second-tier” crossovers may be another story. For instance, the first issue (of three) of Blackest Night: Superman leaves me scratching my head a bit.

Herewith, some top-of-my-head reactions to the issue (written by Superman scribe James Robinson, drawn by Eddy Barrows):

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Tags: Blackest Night, DC Comics, super-heroes, Superman

Yes, I know that it was broadcast months ago… but I’ve been following BSG on DVD, and the second half of season four was just recently released. I watched it over the last week or so, culminating in the extended, nearly three-hour version of the finale just a couple of nights ago.

I discovered my reactions were somewhat mixed. I had gone out of my way to avoid spoilers, but fair warning: the commentary below is chock full of ‘em!…

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Tags: Battlestar Galactica, television

Yesterday saw the release of the first issue of this summer’s big “event” from DC Comics, Blackest Night, after approximately 93 years of heavy advance promotion. For ages now writer Geoff Johns has carefully dropped clues and bits of foreshadowing in his other titles, most prominently Green Lantern, while DC grand poobah Dan Didio dropped anvils (as is his wont) at every opportunity.

“The Dead Will Rise!” is the tag line. It evokes a zombie story, obviously (albeit one with a SF slant given the GL angle), which seems problematic both generally (zombies have been done to death in the last few years, no pun intended) and personally (I’ve just never found zombie stories very interesting).

Heaven knows there are plenty of dead characters to work with in the DC Universe, though. In fact it’s become a routine reader complaint in recent years, almost a running joke, that killing familiar characters is the most hackneyed way to goose a subpar storyline (at least, next to bringing them back). Last year’s offing of J’onn J’onzz and Batman (not to mention the return of Barry Allen) in the pages of Final Crisis are the most recent and obvious example, but far from the only one. Thus the premise runs the risk of descending into been-there-done-that cliché, or even worse, self-parody.

So: excessive hype; niche genre; story hook that treads overly familiar ground and risks being exploitative. All the ingredients for a massive disappointment. My expectations going in were not high.

Surprisingly, then, I have to say that the first issue actually of Blackest Night actually got the story off to a great start, with solid character notes, some touching emotional moments, a few surprises, and genuine suspense about what’s to come. (Not to mention terrific art.)

Spoilers below the fold.

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Tags: Barry Allen, Blackest Night, Dan DiDio, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Geoff Johns, Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, super-heroes