Yup, I know… For one thing, it’s been ages since I last posted an entry. Shame on me. For another, April 1 has been and gone, so this is pretty late. Still, it bears reposting for the sheer geeky awesomeness: comic book publisher Top Shelf posted the following update on Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen last Thursday. Shame it’s a joke.
Here’s the blurb they came up with:
When war-hero-turned-handyman Kesuke Miyagi is found drained of blood, it becomes clear that the occult gang known as the Lost Boys are targeting the only individuals that can stop them from complete domination of America. It’s the perfect case for the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen–except that their government contact, Oscar Goldman, disbanded the team in 1979 after they defeated Mr. Han’s army of the living dead.
Now, disgraced scientist Emmet Brown has to put together a new team to combat the growing threat of the Lost Boys and their leader, a newly resurrected vampire kingpin Tony Montana: Transportation specialist Jack Burton, ex-commando B.A. Baracus, tech wizard Angus MacGyver and the mysteriously powerful femme fatale known only as “Lisa.” But will Brown be able to stop the Lost Boys before time runs out?
On a somewhat less fun note, apparently the next real chapter of LOEG has been delayed until 2011. Bother.
We’re getting close to the end of The Sopranos. Both Rome and Carnivale only have one more season to offer us. And at the speed at which we’re going through West Wing, President Bartlett will have finished his second term in record time.
How to find good, new series? Used to be, I could pretty much get three out of four HBO series on DVD and be happy for the next year or so. Even if some of them found an untimely end, the journey was absolutely worth it.
Now, though? Can’t say I’m all that interested in Hung, and I’m not sure I would enjoy Big Love (which may be due to my lack of trust in Bill Paxton’s acting abilities – “Game over, man!”, indeed…). What about all these new series starting on other channels, though? The Elmore Leonard series Justified sounds like it might be fun, and I’m definitely hoping to get Caprica, provided that it doesn’t get cancelled after one series.
However, HBO seems to be stepping up its game, with not one but three series premiering this year. The one I’m currently most excited about is the one I only found out about five minutes ago: Boardwalk Empire, by Sopranos alum Terence Winter and Martin Scorsese – yes, you read that right, the Raging Bull of mob cinema himself! Check out the trailer, which looks like the murderous bastard child of Once Upon a Time in America and The Sopranos:
Also looking quite promising, although in a more Norman-Rockwell-meets-Interracial-Slaughter way: The Pacific, which seems to be a sort of companion piece to Band of Brothers. Oh, and it stars the little kid from Jurassic Park, all grown up. Listen, boy, you should know better than to return to island jungles! (Cue bad “Doyouthinkhesaurus?” jokes about jungle warfare…) Again, let me peruse YouTube:
Finally, the creators of my favourite series (it shares the pedestal with Six Feet Under) are doing a new show on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It’s called Treme and it’s got the usual awesome cast of actors, including Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters. It’ll be good to see Lester Freamon and Bunk Moreland back in action!
Warning: if you’re not interested in my video game musings, you may want to skip to the end of this post. And now on with the regular programme…
Who doesn’t like a good post-apocalypse? There’s something about nuclear wastelands peopled with desperate survivors and mutated wildlife that brings a radioactive glow to the most hardened geek’s heart. And The Day After has been a topic dear to computer gamers ever since the heady old days of Wasteland, and it’s produced one of the most memorable games of the last five years.
In the ’90s, two spiritual successors of Wasteland, the original (and highly pixellated) post-apocalyptic CRPG (computer role-playing games, for those of you who aren’t fluent in nerd), came out, called Fallout and (somewhat uninventively) Fallout 2. They were ugly beasts at first, with a forbidding user interface and graphics the colour and consistency of irradiated cow dung. However, they were crafted with a wicked sense of humour and created an atmospheric world that was basically the mutant offspring of ’50s sci-fi, the “Duck and Cover” lies of the early Cold War and Mad Max, with Robbie-the-Robots and cathode ray computers sitting side by side with two-headed cattle, wasteland scavengers and slavers. And Fallout 2 had one of my favourite ever ironic uses of music – Louis Armstrong’s A Kiss to Build a Dream On.
Fallout also introduced one of video gaming’s most iconic phrases, delivered by none other than “Stupido Salavtore”, Hellboy, Beast: Ron Perlman himself. If I think of the world after the nuclear bombs have fallen, what comes to my mind isn’t a very young Mel Gibson pulling a Rorschach on the men who killed his wife, or even a touchingly naive elderly couple drawn by Raymond Briggs. No, what comes to my mind is this: War. War never changes. (Do it in a Ron Perlman voice and it suddenly changes from a trite phrase to- Well, listen for yourselves.)
So what’s brought on this attack of love for Fallout? It’s this: I’ve recently started playing Fallout 3, a monster of a computer game. I’m probably a dozen hours into the game and I’ve barely scratched the parched surface of the wasteland. I’ve already disarmed an unexploded nuke in the charming scrapmetal town of Megaton, I’ve ended a plague of firebreathing ants, I’ve faced mutants and feral dogs and giant scorpions. And I’ve lost my dad, as voiced by Liam Neeson, which makes me think that I must be some nucular Leo DiCaprio scouring the irradiated desert in search of a post-apocalyptic Bill the Butcher. It’s weird, but I haven’t enjoyed myself this much in a game in a long time. (Oh, and if you want an explanation of the title of this post, this video should help.)
Ahem. If you skipped all the rest of this post because you’re not interested in video games, I hope that you’re at least a fan of Rube Goldberg machines. If not, I’m afraid I haven’t got the slightest clue why you’d be reading this blog… Anyway, here’s the video of OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass” – enjoy!
As I’ve written before, I like The West Wing. Admittedly, season 2 lacks some of the urgency of the first season (except in the double episode that starts off year 2 of the series), but it’s still a witty, well written and acted, greatly enjoyable 42 minutes per episode. I appreciate its politics and the idealism of its characters, tempered as it is by an appreciation that there’s a gap between ideals and reality that needs to be negotiated almost constantly.
Every now and then, though, the series does something that strikes me as uniquely American, and it annoys the hell out of me: it goes into Pledge of Allegiance Mode. A typical example of this is at the end of the season 2 episode “Midterms”:
To give you a bit of context: after an assassination attempt by a white-supremacist group Toby, perhaps the character on the series who is furthest left-wing (and one of my favourites, the grumpy old Eeyore that he is), spends most of the episode desperately trying to find ways of legally restricting the constitutional rights of such groups. Obviously the Constitution is sacrosanct, this being the United States, but Toby’s take is that there may be things more important than a piece of paper, however old and revered that piece of paper is. By the end of the episode he comes around to believing that perhaps it isn’t all that bad that the government protects the rights even of those who try to bring it down. His “God bless America” is earned, it comes out of a process. I may or may not agree with the sentiment, but Toby’s not made this easy on himself.
The others, though? They’re basically joining in the choir, cheapening the sentiment. It’s not idealism in the face of ambivalence and reality: it’s facile, slogany patriotism. Now, I have to admit that patriotism is something my brain fails to comprehend in general, but I can accept that the main characters on The West Wing are patriots. At the series best I can almost grasp that when these people talk about the United States of America, they mean an almost mythical construct, a symbol of perfect democracy, and that they’re aware that there is, and always will be, a huge distance between the symbol and the reality. But when they go into cheerleading slogans, with everyone in the round repeating the words, there’s something disturbing about it to me. With every repetition it’s stripped of the self-awareness, meaning and complexity that a character like Toby brings to it and becomes something insultingly, childishly simple and chauvinistic. It’s this belief that the ideal, the symbol and the actual country are close enough to one another that allows for crusader-style action around the globe – hey, if your country is the embodiment of all that is good and just, then your actions must be good and just by definition, right?
To be fair, those moments on The West Wing are just that: moments. By and large, the series remains firmly aware of the clash between ideals and reality, and of the fact that it is practically impossible to negotiate the two without despairing that you’ll never get to where you’re going, that you’ll always be compromising your ideals in the end – but that, in the face of compromise, you can still keep fighting for your ideals and achieving small victories every now and then. I just wish they could do without the “Rah, rah, USA!” moments altogether, because they just feel tacky.
Okay, and after all this heavy stuff, dude, here’s a fun little something for those of you waiting for or already watching the final season of Lost. (Don’t worry, there aren’t any spoilers.)
Okay, I’m afraid this is another cross-link with little input from myself – but I thought this was one of the more intriguing film blog entries I’ve seen lately. Have any of you seen Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions? I haven’t… yet. The DVD’s on my shelf, but somehow it hasn’t actually made it into the player so far. In any case, here’s the trailer:
The FilmSchoolRejects site has posted suggestions for ten films (and directors) that von Trier should obstruct, which makes for geeky though fascinating reading. Personally I’m not a big fan of von Trier, but there are some cool ideas in there. And yes, there are a number of directors who should be shaken, kicked and dragged out of their rut – by force, if necessary.
Yes, I know. I’ve been pretty absent lately, for which I apologise. In the last few weeks I’ve had a couple of blog entries half-formed in my head, but no time and/or energy to commit them to the screen and the depths of the internet. Here’s hoping that writing about my blogging anxiety might make me pull myself together and actually write a damn blog entry. That is, one that goes beyond a semi-interesting link. Talking of which:
If it features Travis Bickle and Rorschach joining up to fight crime, one dead pimp at a time, I might just about watch it. Two psychopaths, both alike in’sanity…
Since Switzerland is behind the rest of the world in all things pop culture, we’ve only just finished watching the first season of True Blood. Now, for those of you who have been following my HBO fetishism for a while, this will come as a bit of a surprise, but… I thought that True Blood was nothing much to write home about. It was entertaining enough, but I wouldn’t give the best episode of the series for the worst of Deadwood, The Wire or Six Feet Under, that other Alan Ball series. (I might be willing to exchange any episode of True Blood for that episode of The Sopranos where Tony meets his father’s mistress. Shudder…)
One major problem with the series, at least from my point of view, is that the main characters are much less interesting than the side characters that wander in for a couple of episodes. Bill and Sookie (or “Sookaaah!”, as Bill might put it) are okay, as are Sam, Tara, Jason and all the others, but I never really cared all that much about what was going to happen to them. On the other hand, I cared about poor, shlubby, gay vampire Eddie, I cared about psychotic, sexy hippie/murderess Amy, and I definitely wouldn’t mind seeing more of Kurt Kobain lookalike Eric (a charismatic performance by Alexander “Iceman” Skarsgard) or the Magister as played by Zeljko Ivanek.
At the same time, True Blood is almost perfect fare for a tired evening after a day at the office. It’s fun, it’s nice to look at, and that title tune always gets my toes twitching. Now, if only it was on offer as a downloadable track for Rock Band…
We’re also almost at the end of the first season of The West Wing. It took me an episode or two to forget that the guy playing the President had also been Greg Stillson in David Cronenberg’s film version of The Dead Zone, i.e. not a man you’d want anywhere near the White House, but now I’m okay with Prez Jed Bartlett sitting in the Oval Office.
So far I’m enjoying the series a lot, although it’s pretty much the opposite of True Blood – intelligent writing, heavy on words and ideas, and very little in the way of graphic sex, fangs, shapeshifters and blood. It does, however, have Allison Janney, an actress who I’ve come to like a lot. If I had to single out one of the characters from the series as my favourite one, it’d be her C.J. Gregg. Janney is as pitch-perfect with scenes of political drama as she is with understated humour and outright goofiness.
It’s amazing, though, how bad most of the characters on the series are when it comes to interpersonal relationships that aren’t primarily defined by work. They make great colleagues (when they’re not making vicious fun of you after a root canal) – they seem to make for lousy boy- and girlfriends (though mostly boyfriends). Déformation professionelle, I guess.
I’m not a big fan of Meryl Streep. Obviously she’s a good actress and has done some very fine work – but I find it difficult to watch many of her performances without thinking that they are too visible, too clearly acted for my tastes. Streep is too much of an institution to vanish behind her roles, something that I also feel with respect to many of Robert de Niro’s performances in the last ten years or so.
Having said that, though, I very much liked Streep’s performance in the HBO miniseries Angels in America – or should I say, her performances? As was the case in the original stage play by Tony Kushner, most of the roles were doubled, with actors playing two or three different parts. It’s something I enjoy in stage plays, but it rarely works in film, which tends to be too caught up in presenting a realistic surface while sneaking the most outrageously unrealistic plot elements by us. Angels in America, Part I: “Millennium Approaches” starts with a funeral sermon delivered by an ancient, doddering rabbi, played by Ms. Streep. Yes, it’s showy – we can make up one of the preeminent American actresses so she looks like nothing like herself! – but it works.
There’s a lot about “Millennium Approaches” that works. The cast is pretty much perfect, my favourites probably being Patrick Wilson’s Joe (I’ve liked him in every role I’ve seen him in so far), Mary Louise Parker’s Harper and Jeffrey Wright’s Belize. Under Mike Nichols’ direction the play translates very well to the small screen; the humour and the pathos are all there and highly effective. After watching the first part, I was all geared up for part II, “Perestroika”.
I’d read both plays years ago; I did an amateur production of “Millennium Approaches” in 2000, and afterwards we did a reading of “Perestroika”. Back then I thought it was the weaker of the two, failing to do a satisfying pay-off to the cliffhanger ending of the first play. However, I didn’t expect “Perestroika” to fall on its face with quite as resounding a thud. Yes, there were elements of camp melodrama in the first three hours of Angels in America, but they were pulled off well. Part II, however, descends into scenes that would have made Ken Russell embarrassed. The actors try their best, but some scenes – especially the ones featuring the angel whose appearance “Millennium Approaches” leads up to – are cringeworthy. There may be some way to make lines such as “The blood-pump of creation! Holy estrus! Holy orifice!” and groin-bumping scenes between Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson work, but if there is, Nichols hasn’t found it.
It’s not just the HBO production, mind you; Kushner’s original play falters badly in the second part. There are still some strong scenes (especially the ones that eschew operatic metaphysics), but the script becomes prone to hamfisted speechifying.
I’ve rarely seen a play, film or series that does so well in the first part and fails so badly in the second part. And based on what I’ve seen, I am very glad that we decided to leave it at the evocative cliffhanger at the end of “Millennium Approaches”. The thought of making people I like deliver those lines… Nothing angelic about that.
P.S.: One thing I liked from beginning to end, though: Thomas Newman’s score.
Now tell me, in 500 words or less: why? Why oh why?
I’m usually a champion of remakes in the hands of interesting directors… but what the fuck is this? I’m not even sure whether they’re being clever or just complete dicks by recasting Peter Dinklage in exactly the same part.
And dude, please… Going from Alan “Wash” Tudyk to James “Just how boring can they make Cyclops?” Marsden?
As Frank Oz might say, “Not amused I am.”
P.S.: The title of this entry is a hint at coming attractions…
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 