The Funhouse Journal

Went to a Stephen Greenblatt lecture recently that was titled something like The Strange Case of Cardenio. I was expecting a lecture about Shakespeare & Fletcher's lost play but it was actually an account of Greenblatt's collaboration with Charles Mee to create a modern version of what Cardenio with some reference back to what the Elizabetheans might have thought about it. The most interesting part is Greenblatt commissioning productions in other countries and giving them license to adapt the play to that culture. He discussed versions in India and Japan though according to another source there were also Russian and Croatian productions.

At this rate I may write more about books I abandon than ones I finish. (Cue Calvino reference.) Maybe it's just because I keep thinking to do something more elaborate with the ones that are done and typically just never get around to it.

Any way, the one that's easy to peg is Mary Lee Settle's Spanish Recognitions: The Roads to the Present (2004). Saw this on a remainder table and it looked like the kind of personal recollection and historical recap that suckers me in, so I checked it out of the library. In the end I only got about 60 pages (out of 350) before giving up. For a travel writer, Settle is remarkably uninterested in her travels, giving only abstract descriptions and in what I read (and a bit of skimming ahead) not mentioning any individual person, especially never naming anybody. Except, that is, for the long-gone writers and artists that she rather tediously writes about (Teresa of Avila is "a writer of pure honesty and essential truth, however obscured by the language and metaphors of her time"). Settle seems to want to write about Spanish culture with some sniffy NPR tone instead of Spain on the ground - not only could she easily have written this book (again based on just the portion I read) without visiting Spain but in fact I'm not entirely sure she did. How odd for a novelist to have so little interest in people and not only did I give this one up but now will never read anything else by her.

Tore Janson's A Natural History of Latin (2002, English translation 2004) is also the work of a sloppy thinker but I got through almost a third of this book just because of inertial interest in the subject. A big red flag came early on when he writes that Julius Caesar was "reputed" to have said "Et tu, Brute" and then commences on an analysis of that phrase. How can any classicist not know this is a complete Shakespeare invention and that Caesar's actual final words were either in Greek (Suetonius) or only silence (Plutarch)? Janson also makes odd comments like comparing Roman war in Gaul to genocide, apparently based purely on the numbers that he doesn't question. I had this aside for a couple of weeks and was deciding whether it was worth finishing when I heard about Nicolas Ostler's Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin which seems both more fun and more substantial. So bye bye Janson.

http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=142267

Most people have been spared the atrocity of One More Day but not the folk who've posted 28 pages in a day (& counting) of commentary. Out of, what, five billion people on the planet only one was annoyed about Spider-Man's marriage and since he happened to be Marvel's Editor-In-Chief he decided to do something about it. The resulting OMD story was the kind of thing that gives superhero comics such a bad rep, so bad that even Straczynski who already created the worst single comic book ever (the 9/11 "tribute" in Amazing Spider-Man) claims that he was asking Marvel if his name could be removed from the story. It's not just that OMD was turgid and devoid of any dramatic conflict but that it was presented as the deepest soul searching as if we'd believe that just on somebody's say. Yeah, DC also backed off on the grim control-freak version of Batman and that wasn't a bad move--it doesn't take long before such narrow characterization runs its course--but Spider-Man stories were just starting to get really interesting. Now it appears we're in for more Marvel deja vu all over again.

So why are comic fans upset? Because basically Marvel reverted to SM status quo of about 20+ years ago and for no reason that anybody can see. It's a Bobby in the shower moment. Sure most readers expected that at some point Marvel was going to reset SM so that his secret identity was still secret (I actually liked the story potentials that revelation opened up) but putting everything back that far is more than a little odd. We already have Ultimate Spider-Man and the Marvel Adventures version so why go with yet another teen heroes & villains story? And with just one SM title that comes out three times a month making it a little tricky to keep track this may be the time many readers bail.

When I first heard about Thomas Andrae’s Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book: Unmasking the Myth of Modernity (2006) I was pretty excited. A substantial critical book on Barks? I almost bought it on the spot but held back and now that I’ve read it am glad I did so. Andrae wasn’t trying to produce a biography of Barks and though he seems to have enough material to have done so he gets that part out of the way fairly quickly. Instead he’s more focused on critical explication (that myth of modernity in the title) and along with the biography relegates any historical information about the Disney comic book or comics in general to a supporting role. Political and social history comes in whenever he needs a support for an argument which is when we get little potted, nearly cliched stories about, say, atomic bomb malaise.

The problem is that he really doesn’t have enough critical engagement for a book of almost 400 pages. If this book had been cherry-picked for about 50 pages of the best, most apt material and then used in a study that probed the development of Barks’ art, the industrial factors that influenced it, the culture of the comic book, the funny animal genre, etc then we might have had a book of some substance. (Though perhaps needless to point out that such a broad view is probably unthinkable for most academics.) The basic theme is that Barks’ stories critique modern culture and while I think that’s true to some degree, Andrae seems to find the critique under every rock. Again and again he brings up a Barks story and then goes into detail about how it is a satire or parody (those two words and variations must appear on half the pages) of the American dream or race relations or post-War economics (no really). After a while Andrae almost becomes the boy who cried wolf – he finds such consistent and detailed attacks in Barks that you’d think Andrae was writing about Adorno. But it’s not just that repetition since Andrae also tends to stretch this past the point of plausibility.

Take one example, not chosen completely at random but certainly representative. On page 95-6 he discusses the 1953 story “Some Heir Over the Rainbow.” Scrooge has decided to determine his heir by having a competition between Donald, the nephews and Gladstone by hiding three pots of gold and then seeing what they do with the money. At the end of his analysis Andrae sums it up as “The story thus again reveals capitalism’s contradictions.” The catch, though, is that there’s nothing capitalist about this since it’s purely a contest about the distribution of wealth. Such a contest could have been held in almost any society and it’s easy to imagine the same thing done with, say, a Roman emperor, a medieval Chinese warlord, a Renaissance Pope, an African leader (not in reality perhaps but then this is a story about talking ducks). In fact the story it most strongly suggests is King Lear which came from a pre-capitalist society.

It’s not just that Andrae doesn’t understand what capitalism is (or at the least doesn’t apply it correctly to this story) but time and again his analysis feels like he’s reaching for anything that could be claimed as subversive. Perhaps it’s no surprise that his analysis is almost always on the literary/story level and rarely probes into the structural, into how a story is told and that meaning created. In some sense this is odd because he is listed as a film professor at San Francisco State University and you’d think he’d be more in tune to the visual elements but not on the evidence of this book. At one point he does bring up cinematic deep focus and though he gets that one right his application to comics isn’t entirely apt. Most comics actually already have fore and backgrounds in “focus” leaving artists to come up with alternate methods to handle this such as abstracted backgrounds or viewpoints that minimize the potential confusion. (One of the main flaws of such early 90s future-Image artists such as Jim Lee is that they didn’t grasp this fundamental principle of comics storytelling and packed their images so full of undifferentiated detail that the foreground might as well have been the back. George Perez can get away with it as a sometimes inspired hack, not a meretricious one.) I suppose this is the point where I’m supposed to bring up the author’s academic jargon but really Andrae is pretty light with that and anyway that’s just the language academics use – if you can’t handle it that’s generally your problem, not the writer’s.

And finally why is there a filmography but no bibliography at all? At the very least a page or two about where to track down reprints of much material or even further reading (Carl Barks: Conversations came out in 2003 from the same publisher).

It’s 1958. The Big Brother government (from 1984) has recently collapsed. A young James Bond is tricked by the long-lived Mina Harper and Allan Quatermain, leading to a chase involving Bulldog Drummond, Emma Peel and Harry Lime. They travel through an England where faeries were run out in the 17th century and now a functioning spaceport is a tourist attraction. The title’s black dossier describes exploits of some earlier Leagues as well as a French and German counterpart.

Almost exactly a year after its original publication date, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier makes its appearance. Typically Moore blames the folk at DC for the delay and unspecified behind-the-scenes shenanigans (clearly including the omission of the much anticipated 45rpm record that’s even mentioned in the text as being present) though by now I tend to think this stuff is as real as that snake god he’d like us to believe he worships.

Whatever the case, Black Dossier wasn’t entirely worth the wait. Oh, it’s loads of fun and more imaginative than most current comics/novels/TV/take-your-pick but far too much is just thrown together and feels like background material that should have been left back. A somewhat lengthy text piece tries to tie Lovecraftian gods to other forms of mythology, something that seemed cliched decades ago and is no more complex in the dossier telling than in my single sentence here. A faux-Shakespeare play is easily the weakest thing in the book since it seems almost as if Moore has never encountered anything Elizabethan, though a nearly unreadable Burroughs (W.S. not E.R.) pastiche is perhaps as bad. Maybe imitations are not Moore’s strength though I think this lapse is a bit broader in that he’s not really comfortable enough in straight prose to sustain such writing for any length. I suspect he would be a top-notch playwright or scriptwriter if he didn't enjoy complaining about the business folk in such businesses.

It also occurred to me that Moore is basically a re-writer in that nearly all his major and most minor work is him revising something that already exists: Swamp Thing, Miracle/Marvelman, Watchmen, From Hell, LOEG, Lost Girls. Even Top 10, Promethea, the ABC books and the various superhero stories draw from a pool of shared material much as folk and blues songs do. Certainly this shouldn’t be pushed too far--Watchmen for instance owes pretty much nothing to the Charlton originals and of course there’s always V for Vendetta and other odds ‘n’ sods that sprang (or occasionally crawled) from his brow.

Black Dossier is structured as that basic chase story with the contents of the diegetic dossier strewen throughout. As mentioned, some of this is more labored than interesting (or even well done) and it’s disappointing that Moore didn’t take at least one technique from Conan Doyle and fill the text with passing references to adventures or characters that we don’t otherwise know about. Yes, there are some new stories here but the long history of Orlando is almost more connect-the-dots in the worst manner of the back-up material to LOEG 2. In other words, each piece should either stand on its own more effectively or create a mosaic rather than simply elaborating something we already know. And it’s odd that we’re expected to take all the dossier contents more or less at face value – Moore is a big Sopranos fan so couldn’t he have learned the dramatic value of deceptive characters?

This time there’s a lot more British pop culture than before and without Jess Nevin’s annotations I would have gotten very little of it (even including Emma Peel’s identification). Most spectacularly a character who appears towards the end that I think most Americans will have the same stupefied, mindboggled reaction that I did, though apparently nearly all Brits will know exactly who this is. (Yes, I’m being deliberately vague.) Not a complaint but it does create an interesting feel, almost like I'm missing a joke which I suppose is exactly what's happening. There are also a few echoes of Lost Girls as if Moore had some aftershocks and I can’t help but think that a lot of the references are shoved in there just to have a reference. Admittedly that’s part of the appeal but at one point he draws from a book that if Nevins has IDed it right seems to have never been translated into English and there’s a lot of similar obscurities that you think he’s just combing reference works for this stuff.

So while I will re-read the original LOEG (and own the Absolute edition) and just the story but not backing material of LOEG 2, Black Dossier is not something worth returning to.

Jess Nevins has again done indispensable annotations for the new LOEG book Black Dossier. Below are my own suggestions & additions:

P12, panel 3 – Probably coincidence but there’s a 1950 film called Odette about a female spy.

P12, panel 7 – Perhaps the statue being taken down is Churchill? Might be worth noting for some Americans that the guy with the raised fingers isn’t flashing a victory sign but the British equivalent of giving somebody the finger. Perhaps at the Giles Grandmother?

P13, panel 1 – Maybe “anti-sex league” also refers to Amis’ Anti-Death League?

P16, panel 8 – My first thought of “-ipley” was Ripley’s Believe It or Not though that doesn’t seem to have any obvious connection. Maybe Titus Cobbett also refers to Brian Lumley’s Titus Crow? And of course real-world writer William Cobbett (Rural Rides) would be likely to have written on “inland revenue”.

Panel 9 – “Atrocity pamphlet” might also refer to the propaganda practice of creating atrocity stories involving the enemy. My first thought for “Harry Blake” was the character Harry Palmer but can’t see any reason for the name change. It’s a long-shot but “Harry Blake” might refer to a work of what seems to be fanfic by Robert Douglas at http://www.alternatehistory.com/gateway/contributions/Kaliscount.html. It refers to a Harold Blake who discovers a “magical substance”. For the stylized letter on the folder if you turn it upside down it resembles a pound sign. I wondered if the folder at the bottom was supposed to say “spy cars” but “-oy cars” makes more sense since everything else is upper-case. Note that the black dossier Allan is holding is like our real-world book without the dust jacket.

P20 – Is it just me or does the landlady resemble Judy from Punch & fame?

P21 – Not sure about Prof Donnol either but “donnol” is an anagram for London. “Lifting you on wings of song” – On Wings of Song is a Thomas Disch novel.

P23 – Note Mina’s comment that Bond “wasn’t very tanned” for having visited Jamaica.

P24 – Gloriana replaces Elizabeth in LOEG and then Jacob for James I.

P29 – Kevin O’Neill was born in 1953, maybe August 22 is his birthday? I can’t find a reference. Moore was same year but November. // The film director is more likely to be De Mille. See photos at http://www.classicmoviefavorites.com/demille/awards.html and with Krazy Kat at http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a44/moxievision/fairbanks-demille-felix.jpg.

P30 – The robot with 1937 is on its chest seems to be taunting us. There was a 1937 Donald Duck cartoon with a robot and that year also a Li’l Abner strip but none resemble this one. There was also a real-world robot called Elektro which also has no resemblence. // It may be important considering Orlando’s history that Tiresias was given the forced sex change because he intervened in an argument between Hera and Zeus about whether men or women have the most pleasure from sex.

P33 – Some of these events are also described in the Aeneid which is also a founding story for Rome.

P35 – That image in your annotations will certainly have some familiarity to viewers of anime. // Romulus supposedly founded Rome in 753 BC and that’s when Romans dated their calendar (or at least part of it anyway).

P37 – The real-world followers of Spartacus were crucified by the thousands along the Appian Way, however not including Spartacus himself who seems to have been killed in battle.

P38 – “charlatan snake cultist” could be a reference to Moore himself. Though it doesn’t mean anything Heliogabalus is mentioned in Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Modern Major General”.

P47, panel 1 – Note the jet plane in the background.

P49 – Faerie’s Fortunes Founded echoes Love’s Labour Lost which had a perhaps apocryphals sequel Love’s Labour Won (scholars disagree over whether it’s a lost play, an alternate title for another play or just a mistake). Don’t know if it means anything but this is dated three years before the actual First Folio (1620 before 1623). I don’t think there were any illustrations in the First Folio or indeed of folio or quarto editions of the time but could be wrong.

P52 top – Lots of puns about maleness (orchid having derived from the Greek word for testicle). Mistaken identities are also common in Shakespeare – The Comedy of Errors is pretty much completely built of that.

P83 panel 3 – Is “Larkin” on the building a reference to Philip Larkin? Can’t think of any reason that would be so.

P88 – Doctor Carrot seems more likely but I couldn’t help but wonder if this may be Flaming Carrot.

P90 – The license plate 0211731 might be the date November 2, 1973 (or in American order February 11) with an extra digit but I can’t connect that to anything. The initial zero might actually be a “D” but that doesn’t help either. You think it must mean something because it’s such an odd thing to have there (unless British cycles are different?).

P93 – Could “Secret of Paris” refer to Sue’s Mysteries of Paris? For “Joycamp Harlots” the band Joy Division took their name from what was supposedly the prostitution section of concentration camps during WW2. I’ve never found any reference to support that and think it’s probably something they saw in passing. Do you think the magazine right in front of Allan is called “Antichrist”? “John Bull” of course is the British equivalent of Uncle Sam.

P93 panel 4 – The door has 23 which is supposedly a mystical number in some forms of magic(k).

P96 – In boxes at bottom left note box on furthest right has a “23” in Roman numerals. 1666 was the date of The Blazing World but also of the Great Fire in London.

P104 – Maybe too obvious to point out but the cutaway of the Nautilus is a tip of the hat to all the similar ones in Silver Age comics where you could see plans for the Batmobile or Fortress of Solitude.

P113 – The figure in top hat probably is Caligari but might also be combined with Svengali from the du Maurier novel Trilby. See for instance http://hubpages.com/u/104524_f260.jpg but some images of the Barrymore version also show him with white gloves.

P115 – There are similarities to Graveyard of Unwritten Books in the novels of Jasper Fforde and to some degree in Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind (though the latter makes little use of it).

P151 – “Vanness Avenue” is Van Ness Ave in SF. “descend into Maya” – Maya is the Buddhist term for this material world (if I have that right).

P155 – Ginsberg recorded an album of Blake poems.

P169 – Did anybody point out that Black Dossier is set in 1958, same year that the novel Dr. No came out?

P179, panel 1 – At the bottom on the ramp is a Cthulhu-looking character. Also a mermaid to the left.

Once upon a time I finished every book I started. Can't remember now if there was any particular reason for this other than I had a lot of time and only chose books that seemed interesting in some way. Which seems kinda obvious but one benefit of true nerd-dom is a lack of peer pressure to keep up with whatever you "should" be doing. (And of course is why I hit college with a phenomenal amount of SF and fantasy under my belt but not much in the way of classics or mainstream reading, a situation that's pretty much reversed in the couple of decades since then.) Though I'm sure somewhere there must have been books long forgotten that I never finished the first I remember deliberately giving up was Huxley's Point Counterpoint which was assigned for a class when I was a college sophmore or junior. Though I think it's something I might like now, at the time it seemed turgid and pointless so I dug up some reviews and critical pieces, synthesized that into my own paper and got a "B" for it.

The reason this comes up is that I just gave up on Carlo Emilio Gadda's That Awful Mess on Via Merulana after making it about 80 pages (of nearly 400). This sounded like My Kind of Book: a philosophical mystery compared to Joyce with lots of local color and obscure references. I'm a sucker for mysteries with that high-brow art attitude: Eco, Auster, early Peter Dickinson, even Chesterton. And that description of Awful Mess is more or less true except that I didn't get to much philosophy. One problem is that all the characters blurred together even though I stopped and actually started over which sorted some of them out but now they seemed like pretty much just names (perhaps more proto-Barthesean than it should have been). And though the multiplicity-of-voices approach does seem promising in practice it was just too much work reading for very little payoff. So I didn't stop reading because it's "bad"--for all I know another 30 pages and it would all click into place--but because I realized it wasn't entertaining/interesting ("entertaining" being the lowbrow and "interesting" the middlebrow words for the same thing) enough to give up that time when something else could be in its place, and because I'm not gaining anything by finishing it.

This past summer I similarly gave up on W.J. Cash's The Mind of the South for somewhat the same reasons. This is a book I'd wanted to read for years and finally in one of those inexplicable moments took it out of the library and started. This one was even more clear cut because as pure writing it was neither here nor there so it came down to what did I hope to gain by finishing it? All Cash's talk of Cavaliers and hill folk was removed from any kind of reality I've seen in 40+ years as a Southerner or could even match in any meaningful way to even more imaginative discourses so in the end it seemed like all I would learn is a piece in the story of how the South has been perceived and even created as a conceptual category. Which, really, I don't much care about.

And if the rest are like this they can stay lost. Thank you, I’ll be here all week; don’t forget to tip your waitress. Even offstage, I can’t help but think that Straczynski had all these years to prepare and this is the best he has to offer? There’s a short exorcism tale so embarrassingly clumsy that few people would have thought it worth releasing and then a longer moral-choice story that while it works overall is definitely slim.

Let’s start with the exorcism and certainly that subject sounds odd for B5. I remember hearing a story that Straczynski was annoyed by the supernatural elements in Neil Gaiman’s script but can’t find any verification so let’s just leave that as an unsubstantiated and possibly wrong rumor. In any case, Straczynski seems to have gone that route himself and “seems” because you can always posit the demon as some kind of utterly natural alien though there’s not the slightest hint of that in the episode.

Which may or may not matter considering how embarrassing this segment is. The entire opening is pretty much nothing but two characters spouting exposition at each other, nothing dramatic about it and a voice over or text crawl could have served the same purpose just as ineptly but much lower on the annoyance factor. Actually, there’s a brief scene just before the exposition-a-rama showing an unknown man falling down in what appears to be a warehouse area. A bit is shot through some kind of circular object, perhaps with the idea of adding some visual interest though it’s so completely unmotivated that’s really just distracting. Maybe he was trying to indicate the character is trapped but I sincerely hope not. (Straczynski is the credited director though the IMDB also lists Sara Barnes.)

So the point is that Catholicism (or Christianity in general?) has been declining since humans reached the stars and found no angels, not even Vorlons. The priest goes on (and on) about this while Lochley lays out her problem. (Tracy Scoggins is as wooden an actor as you can find.) Seems the guy from the first short scene is possibly possessed by a demonic entity and when he’s finished his crumpets could Mr. Priest please have a look-see? Admittedly there’s a bit of spark to the priest-possessee dialogues though overall they don’t amount to much. In the end it’s tossed away by having Lochley jump up from a sleepless night having realized the “secret” and then she then gets to deliver a cringe-worthy monologue at full volume. The entire segment has no subtlety, no depth, no brains, no nothin’.

The second and longer segment revolves around whether Sheridan will save Earth from a disastrous attack by assassinating the prince who will grow up to lead said attack. This story is much better, partly because the cast is stronger but also even though the conflict is quite schematic at least it has some substance. The impact is reduced by having some out-of-the-blue disaster that relies on Sheridan believing that a vision he has is actually of the future and not some hallucination or illusion (a line of dialogue even addresses this, though in a somewhat improbable “I know what’s real” tone). And then the prince volunteers personal info to Sheridan that it’s hard to imagine anybody in such a cut-throat court doing. Even worse is a scene with a news reporter that shows Sheridan playing a mean practical joke but actually comes across as misogynist. Was this intended to display another side to Sheridan or did Straczynski actually think this might be funny? (The misogyny seems completely unintentional though still hard to deny.)

In the end the second segment relies on Sheridan thinking of an unexpected alternate solution which is perfectly fine even if it mostly sidesteps the moral dilemma. The unfortunate capper, though, is a bit where Sheridan accuses the technomage of perhaps manipulating him to do the this alternate solution which the technomage had wanted all along. This doesn’t even really make much sense and you’d have to really stretch the earlier scenes to make that fit. But then that possibility is never resolved anyway so it feels completely tacked on.

Editor Richard Burt opens with an introduction that’s so moddish academic that if it’s not a parody (and there’s no indication of tongues anywhere near cheeks) then I almost didn’t want to go any further. And that title: “after mass media”?

But there’s some good work here and it’s just easiest to go down the list. Most of this is at its best doing real archive work rather than criticism which is nice to see since that’s almost been overwhelmed by a tendency toward analysis unfettered by any facts. (Somebody just finishing their doctoral dissertation in film told me that he met with resistance because it was based on a lot of primary research.)

Donald K. Hecrick – Covers some uses of Shakespeare in business books and a few other consumer items. Mildly interesting.

Peter S. Donaldson – Good close reading of Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet adaptation.

Mark Thornton Burnett – Decent overview of Branagh’s career weighted down by smugness despite this having almost nothing beyond that overview. As he says “arguing that they can only properly be understood when discussed as a corpus”. Ah, so Mr. Burnett has the only proper key to understanding so if you connected in any way to these films then you’re wrong, wrong he tells you.

Diane E. Henderson – Shakespearean tourist recreations, obvious and really only has a page or two worth of material.

Laurie E. Osborne – Shakespeare in Harlequin etc romances. One of the best pieces here even if there’s little “real” use made of Shakespeare this does probe at some real pop cultural elements.

Josh Heuman & Richard Burt – Shakespeare in comics. Good overview.

Craig Dionne – Shakespeare in Star Trek. Solid.

Douglas Lanier – Shakespeare in American radio. Another outstanding piece.

Fran Teague – Shakespeare musicals. Another good overview.

Stephen M. Buhler – Romeo and Juliet in pop songs. Merely a survey with nothing of interest backing it up.

DJ Hopkins & Bryan Reynolds – Somewhat turgid essay about a Robert Wilson deconstruction of Hamlet. Also seems like a parody of academia at times.

Helen M. Whall – Shakespeare quotations in Bartlett’s. Interesting and admirably short.

Richard Burt – The editor closes with a piece about Taymor’s Titus and other adaptations that starts off badly (somebody please let him know that puns in this context are more embarassing than any kind of linguistic short circuiting) but pulls together towards the end. Maybe he should read more Mencken or Edmund Wilson.

CNN just had a piece (Web-only I think) about sex on TV. It focused on one HBO show, one Showtime and in passing a network series and had very little that made this seem like anything unusual so it was clearly a non-story. But that's not the story that was the real focus. CNN had a TV Guide and a Newsweek critic on different sides of whether the sex scenes were important to the shows' stories; since they were only discussing generalities there's no way to reach a conclusion and a cynic (not me, I'm a stoic) would suspect that's exactly what CNN wanted. The TV Guide critic took the usual line that the sex scenes are acceptable if they're needed for the story though shortly afterwards she gave the game away by saying she wouldn't want her mother or her daughter to walk in and see such scenes. Of course they would have no idea whether this was part of the story or not so in other words as far as she's concerned it's irrelevant whether such scenes are important to the story.

But why do the sex scenes have to be necessary for the story? Do we care so much about "the story" that nothing else matters? Films like Lone Star and Oldboy definitely need fairly explicit sex scenes because major elements of the story require that viewers have absolutely no doubt that this took place. And apart from that, so what? Violence is also frequently subjected to the story-necessity idea but few people would argue that the violence in CSI and its kin are required by the story; well the violence yes because you can't have a murder mystery without a murder but the display not really. But I think you see where I'm going with this. Car chases in a cop show aren't really needed for the story. Soap operas can do without all the conversation. Musicals aren't advanced one bit by the songs. Sports film, why go through The Big Game but just tell us who won? In fact we should just listen to radio where some announcer can tell us the story in a few minutes and we don't have to be distracted by actors or dialogue or movement or locations. We can get the real story. Because apparently nothing else matters.

Late as usual but might as well add this:

Cannibal Apocalypse (Antonio Margheriti 1980) - Saw this some twenty-something years ago under the title Invasion of the Flesh Hunters and remembered it as a pretty nifty zombie thriller. Boy, I couldn't have been more wrong. It's sloppy, lax and mindless; the kind of film where a guy way inside a building shoots a shotgun and blows out the window of a police car in the parking lot. There's not much apocalypse and few cannibals and little of note. I was very interested in the DVD bonus about shooting locations since I recognized the Decatur courthouse and I thought another spot or two but the bonus was mostly a botch. Should be very easy, just show the locations in their current state and talk about them a bit but instead there are some "what were they thinking" comedy bits and other misguided bits.

The Invisible Ray (Lambert Hillyer 1936) - Without Lugosi & Karloff this would have faded into obscurity or at least as obscure as any horror film gets. Opens with some almost competely nonsensical sequence about viewing Earth from space before eventually moving to a routine mad-scientist/killer story where nearly all the bad stuff happens off screen (save fx budget). Duller 'n dirt.

The Brides of Dracula (Terence Fisher 1960) - Moderately effective Hammer film with Cushing as Van Helsing, a girls school, an overbearing vampire mom, a castle, frightened villagers, etc.

Saw (James Wan 2004) - Quite dumb and shows filmmakers who didn't really have a good idea of what they were trying to do. That's until perhaps the most mindbogglingly stupid surprise ending since Pieces. You just wonder what Fulci might have done with this premise.

How to Make a Monster (Herbert L. Strock 1958) - Mild behind-the-scenes film about a make-up man seeking revenge.

Sisters of Death (Joseph Mazzuca 1977) - This kind of film fascinates me. It's not good, not even in a "so bad it's" way, and looks like a tax shelter effort that nobody expected to see theatres until co-star Claudia Jennings appeared in Playboy. I could be wrong but that's what it looks like. There's a meandering story and for a film of that era very little visible violence or sex (perhaps they were going after the TV market?). You can almost imagine some guys with a couple of weeks and some film stock deciding they'd make a movie which would account for the home movie feel of some scenes and the limited locations.

Dust Devil: The Final Cut (Richard Stanley 1992 & 2006?) - Fairly effective, almost-surreal outing about a woman in southern Africa who picks up a hitchhiker who may or may not be The Devil or a devil or a demon or something. The original release had most of the supernatural elements removed so this version is considered the director's final say.

Oasis of the Zombies (Jess Franco 1981) - Almost completely worthless but hey what else would you expect from a Franco film? Even by his standards this is tedious and poorly done.

Homecoming (Joe Dante 2005) - The political point is heavy-handed and even for an hour-long film Dante hasn't completely thought it through but still it's a decent addition to his filmography. When he's not on the main point, Dante has a good satirical eye (I particularly like the preacher who has a different opinion of the zombies when their true purpose is revealed) and the skill to keep it moving.

Pick Me Up (Larry Cohen 2005) - Cohen pits two serial killers against each other in a tight and pretty interesting story, marred primarily by a murder scene that seems mostly misogynist.

Apart from my usual slackness, some 60+ hour weeks at work has ground pretty much everything else to a halt. But today was a big mail day: the monthly shipment from Discount Comic Book Service, the annual box from WFMU and the once-in-a-lifetime arrival of Tim Lucas' Bava biography. The Lucas/Bava book is stunning with an amazing amount of illustrations (one-sheets, behind-the-scenes photos, ad slicks, stills, etc) and enough text to fill possibly two books. It's also probably the heaviest book I own (my shipping scale only goes up to five pounds so I can't weigh it). This and Stephen Thrower's Nightmare USA are going to be top priority when I get some free time and finish my TCM assignments. The DCBS shipment had the first volume of the Terry & the Pirates release and a blind buy of The Mammoth Book of War Stories which seems more interesting than I expected. It has Eisner's Vietnam story, a manga about Hiroshima, some British comics, a Toth pilot story, some undergrounds and modern indies and even what appear to be Charlton reprints. Man, what I wouldn't give for some Essentials/Showcase-style Charlton books; if they're doing Harvey then why not? More details later. The FMU stuff included a tour of James Brown tributes, Irwin's latest calypso explorations, a disc of strange country and a couple that I don't remember choosing but probably did. Also, We Jam Econo. And of course super-cool t-shirts.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/31/news/china.php

Some titles of Chinese Potter knock-offs:

Harry Potter and the Hiking Dragon
Harry Potter and the Chinese Empire
Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Harry Potter
Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-up-to-Dragon
Harry Potter and the Big Funnel
Harry Potter and the Crystal Vase

I suspect that the series doesn’t have the sturdiness to last more than two or three decades, the amount of time for kids currently reading to try to force it on their own offspring. Rowling does manage to maintain a forward momentum that most writers never quite nail—as Terry Gilliam puts it “she keeps the pages turning”—but the entire thing is too ramshackle and padded, too second-rate really no matter how entertaining. At most this should have been a trilogy, possibly even a single book would have been sufficient considering how much is basically just sitting around and waiting. The entire fifth book, for instance, feels like it should have been a few pages in one of the others but Rowling committed to seven books and that’s what she was gonna produce.

The most troubling aspect though isn’t the technical issues but the treatment of Muggles. Though anti-Muggle thinking is considered wrong by the right-thinking characters and is in fact a minor plot issue in the final book (“minor” in how it actually functions though clearly intended to be much more significant) such focus is only superficial. The books themselves (ie Rowling) consistently show a smug contempt for Muggles. The non-magic-users are either bad folk or befuddled simpletons who have nothing to offer wizards and witches. One of the most telling moments is in Deathly Hallows when a roll call of the dead comes to an entire Muggle family that Rowling doesn’t even bother to name. Think this is over-reacting? Replace “Muggle” with “Jew” or “Asian” and then the books would immediately and correctly be considered racist. Several commentators have pointed out how Voldemort (notice the uh clever “mort”) resembles some quasi-fascist demagogue but considering that nobody else has any interest in Muggles, and only lipservice compassion, he’s merely the same as all the other characters only a bit more extreme. Just notice that at the end even the Malfoys who wanted to help enslave and murder thousands of people are given group-hug redemption but that the Dursleys, child abusers though they were, are completely ignored.

There was a point at the end of the fourth book where I thought the entire series was coming into focus not as a good vs evil story but instead about making the choice. What immediately sprang to mind was Babylon 5, how so much of the first season seemed like amusing stories much as the early Potter books until you saw that there is a big conflict and pretty much the entire show is about choices. It’s interesting to note in B5 how often characters claim they have no choice in something but it’s almost always how they justify a decision they’ve already made. (Extra credit: Compare and contrast to 24 where people who have no choice frequently don’t. Does 24 suffer from this rigidity? What are the political implications?) B5 eventually upends the entire good vs evil concept, not in any philosophical make-a-point way but more quietly in a Renoir-ian “everybody has their reasons” way. Voldemort acts the way he does because he’s Evil but on B5 the Shadows have a perfectly legitimate reason, even if one that most of us will oppose, and even the closest to an Evil Character, Bester, behaves plausibly and even has a moment of humanity. The Potter books, though, get by with a lot because they’re children’s books, as if that was a blanket excuse.

Handling magic in books is always tricky because of the way it undermines narrative operations and Rowling wasn’t up to the task. Though magic doesn’t have to operate with explicit and unyielding laws it does need some consistency or the story will lurch when it shouldn’t. Rowling too often offers up “oh by the way” types of comments. Harry’s “death” is an obvious example – “oh yeah if he really intended to die then he won’t really.” Admittedly this is hard to prepare the groundwork without tipping off the ending but it feels too much like a cheat, just like the appearance of a “dead” Dumbledore to explain the missing backstory or elsewhere the labored explanation of why wizards can’t conjure up food (an “Exception” don’t cha know). After a while I felt that Hogswart itself was just some giant catch all where characters can get anything they need from the Room of Requiring (no further comment) to one of the Horcruxes its own bad self. Just compare to a lot of “children’s” fantasy from Le Guin to Wynne Jones to Pullman to see what I mean. Even stuff as deliberately haphazard as the Xanth or Discworld books are more narratively plausible.

Considering that Rowling had to pad seven lengthy books and clearly has no Dickensian imagination (or for that matter Tolkenian, Leiberian, Moorcockian, etc) then there’s going to be a lot of jerry-rigged backstory. Perhaps her major plotting weakness and one so severe that even the characters in the book comment on it is that she too often relies on withheld information. Dumbledore lets out only dribbles whenever convenient even though he seems to know the entire deal and much of the books consist of Potter trying to discover information that somebody could easily have told him. This gets tiresome very quickly and the justifications (protecting Potter, letting him discover for himself) are nearly nonsensical. Rowling’s abilities are also why right into Deathly Hallows I realized that Potter couldn’t die – killing off a point of view character is tricky even for a skillful writer and while Rowling is nowhere near capable enough to do it properly she also seems aware enough to realize at least some of her limitations (and pumped up the body count to compensate). To her credit Rowling didn’t make the final book easy for the screenwriters. Apart from the sheer length it’s very nearly an array of different voices. Numerous characters stop to unburden themselves of some story or another and in addition we get newspaper articles, excerpts from a pop biography, a fairy tale, flashbacks, overheard conversation (very convenient that Potter is in the British wilderness at the same location as passing fugitives) and so on. And here’s where I might as well add that while the sentimental epilogue seems to have been the most criticized aspect of Deathly Hallows I thought it was perfectly pitched and almost necessary. The somewhat flubbed final battle is a different matterl I had to go back and re-read parts because I thought something was missing. It’s almost as if Rowling got to the end and just went “Whew, Potter kills Voldemort. I’m off to the beach.”

The entire focus on endings and surprises was unfortunate because it can’t help but have deformed response. Does Harry or Hermione or Ron die was such a focus of discussion that it tended to make Deathly Hallows almost a reading race to the end, kinda the reverse of a mystery where you want to find out whodunnit but here will it be dun. Not that Rowling or Scholastic could have done much about that but still.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2123271,00.html

Well, this is strange. I'm about halfway through Engleby, the new novel by Sebastian Faulks when the announcement comes that he's written the forthcoming James Bond book. Strange because Faulks seems a quite unlikely choice given that he's more self-consciously literary and mostly interested in psychology (Engleby is Holden Caulfield if he was British and possibly or possibly not a murderer). Or as the Guardian imagining of Faulks' story goes "For now Bond had an appointment with M to discuss his new role as the unreliable narrator." Then again Kingsley Amis and John Gardner had previously been tapped so this is a minor tradition but just imagine what we could have seen from Martin Amis or George MacDonald Fraser or Philip Hensher or even Zadie Smith just to stay with Brits.

At one point I thought I'd be so cool and post about each episode of 24 just like a real blogger instead of the sporadic quasi-sequiturs that otherwise mark this Funhouse. But as much as we all pretended otherwise this past season started bad and just went downhill from there. I knew the pre-season hype about it being the redemption of Jack was just fluff - he's barely even a character and the writers have never shown the slightest interest in anything other than pure plotting. By episode 4 it was obviously all up. The death of Curtis was so badly botched that what should have been well not shattering but at least unnerving moment was just tossed off. Just think of what they could have done with Curtis alive and involved but nobody quite trusting each other. Again, pure plot, pure effect. Same as last season when the Peter Weller character was introduced and the prospect of Jack working with somebody who may or may not have been wronged opened up. But then once again any ambiguity was shut down immediately; in the same episode Weller first appeared if I remember right. And then episode 4 ended with a nuclear bomb explosion in L.A. Surprising certainly but then where do they go from there? More bombs? Something bigger? (I was half-convinced that the terrorist scheme involved detonating enough bombs to trigger an earthquake which seemed like a stupid idea at the time but I now wish they'd used.)

But I honestly think that when the ratings weren't at the top the writers just threw up their hands and let the pieces fall where they might. There was one point about a month from the finale when I literally couldn't remember what the story was; weren't the terrorists already dead? One producer even admitted that they start filming without having determined the ending or even mapping out much of the season's story. That at least explains the slapdash feel to nearly all seasons and even the poorly done finale to Season Four (where stopping a missile depended on whether CTU hackers could recover info from a smashed PDA - hardly a tension building device). This writerly indifference would explain why there are so many rehashes of previous story devices not to mention why it's nearly impossible to figure out just what a major character like Jack's dad actually wants.

By the time the story reached the point where Chinese-hired mercenaries entered CTU headquarters through a sewer gate it had started to look like the worst Mad parody ever. After being bombed, gassed and infiltrated by double agents you'd think CTU would be darn near a fortress. And in the middle of a major incident have more than just a few rent-a-cops around; if I was CTU boss I'd have National Guard or at least SWAT. But at least this invasion finally got something going. How about the investigators from Division who showed up near the end (fourth episode from last? fifth?), set up shop in CTU, promised to be watching and then were never seen again? Or what about the brother of the dead agent who shows up an episode later (yeah it's no security breach to allow uncleared people inside a major government agency devoted entirely to stopping a world war) and then--my last boldface, promise--vanished! Like Chloe turns around and he's gone like some magic trick.

And let's not even get into Jack being the one who almost started the war due to his arrogance about tricking the Chinese but only one person even bothers to call him on this; the offshore oil rigs being by a beach within walking distance of the Secretary of Defense's vacation house; the complete pointlessness of the former president story line (and how did he know about all this anyway?); the fact that a freakin' NUCLEAR BOMB goes off but it only ties up traffic for a couple of hours; the needless complexity of stealing drones when terrorists could have just driven to another target; the probability that nobody else will ever want to be president in the 24verse considering they barely outlive mayflies; the odd fact that apparently all CTU agents are trained helicopter pilots; the Russians moving troops in a few hours rather than the days it takes in reality; and on and on. I don't expect plausibility in 24 any more than I would in a Marx Bros movie but at some point you just don't care.

I'll certainly watch the opening of the next season but won't be giving them the benefit of the doubt again.