SmartRemarks

I’m off to an Oscar party this evening, and what fun are the Oscars without a scorecard? I’ve seen most (but not all) of the nominated films, and done some reading on the various other honors handed out during “awards season,” so let me toss my hat in amongst the many, many other sites offering analysis and predictions, and go on the record with my own expectations.

(Which are not the same as my wishes:  what I think will win and what I think deserves to win are often different things. But that’s nothing new.)

Taking it from the top:

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Tags: 2009, Academy Awards, Benjamin Button, Dark Knight, Milk, movies, Oscars, Slumdog Millionaire

It’s a nice refreshing tingly feeling, isn’t it, to watch a president who clearly not only understands complex economic concepts, but is even capable of boiling them down into simplified versions for the press? (Even if he’s occasionally visibly frustrated by the need to do so.) Bush always came across as just barely in command of the PowerPoint version of reality some adviser had walked him through, and painfully incapable of going into greater depth about anything.

The corporate media, of course (at least so far as I saw on NBC), was preoccupied with the fleeting meme that strategically speaking, Obama should have done this a week ago. That, however, utterly misses every point worth getting.

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Tags: economy, media, Obama, television

It’s been far longer than I intended since my last post. Sometimes time just runs away from you. So let me just toss off a few ideas that have crossed my mind in recent days, and get caught up…

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First off:  the wrangling in Washington over the new “economic stimulus package” has been interesting to watch. Obama has gone out of his way to be as “post-partisan” as promised, extending an olive branch to Republicans the likes of which Dems never saw under eight years of Bush, wining and dining them, inviting input… and in response they basically gave him the finger. (Although, anxious not to alienate a public who likes him, they tried to shift their ire toward the Democratic leadership.) And the usual suspects in the punditocracy backed them up.

Basically, the GOP’s goal right now seems to be to shrink the stimulus bill down to something so small and weak that it won’t be effective… and then to blame their opponents for its ineffectiveness. All while the country at large continues to suffer, of course.

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Tags: Battlestar Galactica, Congress, Dan DiDio, DC Comics, economy, Final Crisis, House of Representatives, Illinois, Legion, Obama, Republicans, Senate, super-heroes, television, Tom Geoghegan, unemployment

What.

The fuck.

Was that?

Seriously. Final Crisis #7 was every bit as crashingly disappointing as I feared it would be, and more so. Grant Morrison’s reach clearly far, far exceeded his grasp.

It certainly did exemplify a writing style he earlier described (warned? threatened?) as “channel-zapping,” though, and gods willing no one will ever be tempted to try such a style again. Morrison seems not to have considered just why the practice evolved in the first place—i.e.,  when people keep clicking that remote, it’s typically because they’re not interested in the random snippets they zap through along the way, but rather because they’re hoping (usually in vain) that something better will turn up that merits ongoing attention.

Further self-descriptions of his work? Well, there’s this…

I had the idea to develop an approach to comic narrative that would actually benefit from becoming entangled in internet fan speculation, gossip and research… I’ve always liked to leave resonant spaces, gaps and hints in stories, where readers can do their own work and find clues or insert their own wild and often brilliant theories. I’m often trying to create a kind of fuzzy quantum uncertainty or narrative equivalent of a Rorschach Blot Test effect, which invites interpretation.

and this…

Superhero comics should have an ‘event’ in every panel! We all know this instinctively. Who cares ‘how?’ as long as it feels right and looks brilliant ? …

I found myself wondering what it would be like if comics’ storytelling stopped aping film or TV and tried a few tricks from opera, for instance. How about dense, allusive, hermetic comics that read more like poetry than prose? How about comics loaded with multiple, prismatic meanings and possibilities? Comics composed like music? In a marketplace dominated by ‘left brain’ books, I thought it might be refreshing to offer an unashamedly ‘right brain’ alternative.

Never a model of humility, in the same interviews Morrison attempts to compare his writing to TV and film works like Lost and Donnie Darko, and dismisses the critics of his recent work as “lazier readers” and/or “a particularly jaded minority on the internet.” Sorry, but I count myself as part of the large and devoted fan followings of the examples he names, and of many similarly “complex” works—not because they’re stylistically complex, though, but because they tell well-structured, emotionally compelling stories—and FC isn’t even in the same ballpark. “Disjointed” is the word that’s come up more than any other in reviews of Morrison’s writing in recent months, but this issue takes the adjective to a whole new level. Morrison’s effect—indeed, apparently his intent—was to have his story swallowed up by its own lacunae, and that simply doesn’t make for a satisfying reading experience.

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Tags: continuity, Darkseid, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Grant Morrison, super-heroes, Superman

In front of a movie a couple of weeks ago, one of the now-ubiquitous ads to which the captive audience was subjected was for the fifth season premiere of Lost, which aired tonight. I recall thinking that the scope and tone and visual style of the show seemed remarkably well suited to the big screen.

At the same time, though, the show offers something more than any single two-hour movie. My posts about comics should certainly make it clear that I enjoy serial fiction… such a format is really the only way something as episodic as television (or comics) can approach the depth and texture of a novel. Moreover, I’ve written before about how much I enjoy intelligent, imaginative science fiction, which Lost certainly offers in spades.

And for the record, I’m also a sucker for a good predestination-paradox time travel story. So, as of tonight, I’m more hooked than ever.

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Tags: Lost, television, time travel

My single overwhelming impression of this issue:

Wow, that was crap.

Again.

I kind of enjoyed issue #5, enough to be hoping for an upward trend as this story neared the home stretch. Apparently that was too much to hope for, though. (Which perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise, given the book’s multifarious agenda to be simultaneously a big accessible “event” story, a sequel to Jack Kirby’s New Gods work, a sequel to the classic Crisis on Infinite Earths, a thematic capstone to Grant Morrison’s body of super-hero work, and a thematic capstone to Dan DiDio’s chaotic tenure as DC’s executive editor.)

What did we actually get in this penultimate issue? Well…

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Tags: Batman, continuity, Darkseid, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Grant Morrison, Green Lantern, Legion, super-heroes, Superman

Okay, it came out over the holidays, but I’m just getting to writing about it now.

This issue and the previous one have to fill a number of slots:  they make up “What The Butler Saw,” Grant Morrison’s installment of the “Last Rites” short tales closing out the current era of the Bat-titles; they’re Morrison’s coda to his own current run on the character, and a sequel (of sorts) to “Batman R.I.P.”; they’re a summary of the entire career history of the Batman, and an examination of his motivations along the way; and they’re a crossover with Final Crisis, detailing what happens to Batman therein and leading back into issue #6 of said Big Event.

And they work satisfyingly on every one of those levels. I’ve been critical of much of Morrison’s recent work, on Batman and elsewhere, but I very much enjoyed this story.

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Tags: Batman, continuity, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Grant Morrison, super-heroes

What, another top ten list? Sure, why not. It’s that time of year. Everybody’s doing it.

These are selected only from among films released in Chicago in calendar 2008, and (far narrower than that) from films I’ve actually seen—which is far from all of them, since no one’s paying me to be a critic (more’s the pity). Spoiler Warning: plot points may be revealed below.

Caveats:  this is an entirely personal and subjective list (of course).  2008 was a bit of a mixed bag, cinema-wise; there were a handful of great films, but not very many good ones, so assembling this list took a bit of effort. No guarantee of entertainment value for any third party is intended or should be inferred, and the author specifically disclaims responsibility for any time or money readers may consider to have been wasted on any of these movies. In other words, you’ll probably disagree with me about something. Tough! That’s what the comments section is for.

1) Milk

It begins with death, ends with death, and has death in-between, along with significant portions of prejudice and injustice. The one thing it doesn’t have is despair:  this is one of the most life-affirming movies I’ve seen in ages. Gus Van Sant captures 1970s San Francisco with what feels like easy naturalism, and Sean Penn turns in a brilliant, affecting performance way outside his usual type in the title role.

2) Wall-E

Pixar scores again. In many ways this film, especially the near-silent first half, evokes the terrific silent-era work of Charlie Chaplin, with the good-hearted but hapless hero contending with outrageous circumstances increasingly beyond his control. That the hero happens to be a trash compactor seems almost incidental. It’s irrestistably funny, moving, suspenseful, and (of course) beautiful to look at. Along the way, it also offers gentle lessons for kids and adults both about the undesirable consequences of rampant consumerism.

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Tags: Dark Knight, Iron Man, movies, super-heroes, Top 10 lists

The first six pages of Final Crisis #5 were the highlight of the series so far for me. They take us to Oa, following up on the status of Green Lantern Hal Jordan (not seen since issue #3 back in August). Unlike the brief, hit-and-run scenes that have characterized so much of this series to date, the sequence stays with its subjects long enough to clarify why and how Hal was framed and arrested, and to clear his name in a dramatic confrontation with Alpha Lantern Kraken (possessed by Granny Goodness), moving the plot markedly forward with some spot-on character moments along the way. It all leads up to a classic line—melodramatic but oh-so-evocative—as a Guardian enjoins him, “You have 24 hours to save the universe, Lantern Jordan.”

This is why I love comics.

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Tags: Darkseid, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Grant Morrison, Lex Luthor, super-heroes

I vaguely remember, from my childhood, the news stories about the murder of George Moscone and Harvey Milk. I never really knew nor understood the backstory, though, that made the event so significant.

Gus Van Sant’s Milk, with Sean Penn in the title role, is a wonderful film, the best I’ve seen in months. It fills in that information gap, and inspires as it does so.

It reminds us that we’re all in this together, that gay rights are human rights. And it’s a very human story, in the most authentic sense. It doesn’t succumb to the light skimming over the surface of events that afflicts so many biopics; we feel what drives these characters.

All the little details ring true, with a vivid sense of how much has changed in our culture in 30 years, and how much remains the same. And it doesn’t recite its message with a heavy hand; instead it shows us:  none of us is perfect, but we all deserve the chance to be who we are, to make the most of our potential in life.

Anyone who cannot relate to this film, and the man at the center of it, has a heart of stone. See it.

Tags: Milk