Da Da Da Da Da Da Da Da BATMAN Can You Hear Me

Dear Imaginary Reader:

I have recently- through entirely legal means!- acquired a complete collection of "Batman" and "Detective Comics." That's upwards of 1500 books there :-p Will I read them all? Not even remotely. But will I enjoy the 200 or so I probably WILL read? HELLZ TO THE YEAH! To celebrate here's The Who! with their 1966 cover of the Batman theme song.

Glen Fiquarra - John Recqua - "I Love You Phillip Morris"

In a classic episode of "The Simpsons," Lisa gets a glimpse into a near future where the films of Jim Carrey are revered at film festivals, and you know what? I can see that happening. Not everyone gets Carrey's manic humor, or appreciates that he's the most physical of our performers. To most people he's merely "that weird guy who talks with his butt and comes on to Emma Stone" but if you could stand back and look at his filmography you would be surprised at the variety of his characters, or his dedication to the role even in mediocre films. I don't know if they'll have film festivals for him one day. But if they do, I'll show up.



"I Love You Phillip Morris" is a very good flick that got swept under America's homophobic rug. (See, "Brokeback Mountain" passed because its characters were all troubled and conflicted by their gayness. Finding homosexualityy a troublesome conflict is now okey dokey with the masses. Accepting homosexuality and not thinking of it as a big sinful deal? That's still ahead of us.) Carrey plays a gay conman- and the emphasis is in CONMAN- who winds up in jail, falls in love with the titular Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor) and... Forget about what happens after. It is a TRUE STORY, we're told, and it is also truly unbelievable and even exhilarating. I recommend watching it if you're not put off by the extremes to which love can take us, but be aware that it's not an out and out comedy.

Haha. I said "out."

"Greek" Season 1

I know, I know, but here's the moment in the pilot of "Greek" that won me over:

"I don't wanna be a social piranha!"
"Pariah! The word is pariah! Why would it be piranha?"
"Because no one wants to have dinner with a piranha!"

Of course you're afraid ABC Family might be for homilies, but "Greek" was a much more likable and sharply written show than you think. It got the tone exactly right in that while it never walked into the reality of college fraternities, (reality has much more sweat, and is considerably less scripted) it never sanitized itself down to pure Disney Channel inanity.



The winning character, of course, is Clark Duke ("Sex Drive," "Kick-Ass", "Hot Tub Time Machine") as Dale. He has a Confederate flag on his dorm room, is an ultra-conservative self-righteous Bible-thumper, a Creationist... and a sweet, brilliant science nerd. Yes, he's a TV construct meant to assuage middle America, and he makes absolutely no psychological sense: [people who actually understand science aren't Creationists; there aren't that many tolerant, racially-accepting racist Confederate-flag lovers.) But Dale is really lovable!

What'd You Say? - Kindness

KINDNESS



"It is better to be 'kind', than to be 'kind of'."- Epictetus, 250 B. C.

"Be kind to all ye meet, and ye shall live a long, happy, healthy live with no legal problems whatsoever." - Jesus Christ, 32 A. D.

"Be kind. Rewind." - VHS Tape, circa 1991 A.D.

New Feature! "What'd You Say?"

3-EP is officially disbanding, just like Paramore said they were gonna. From now on, any songs you see here are admittedly my fault, or else me getting all emo and quoting Paramore lyrics. To replace 3-EP, here's a new feature called "What'd You Say". We'll share inspiring, motivational and otherwise mystifying quotes from some of the greatest minds of all time like St. Augustine, Montaigne, Albert Einstein, and the chick from Paramore. God, I really like Hayley Williams, can you tell? She's got that whole "Abstinence Rally Hook-Up" thing going on for her.



HAPPINESS:

"Happiness is the bird at the end of the rainbow. No, wait, those are leprechauns. I'm sorry, I'm from Tibet, half of the time I don't know what I'm saying."- The Dalai Lama.

"True happiness is not for sale! It does, however, provide escort services for a nominal fee. What you arrange afterwards is entirely private, and no one needs to know about it."- Charlie Sheen

"Show me a person who's never felt happiness and I'll show you my penis. No, don't bother looking, I'll show you my penis anyway."- Pope Clement VI

"Happiness is like an ice cream cone. If you stab someone in the eye with it, they're going to scream really loud."- Walt Disney

"The key to happiness lies within your own heart. Here's a rusty scalpel. Start digging."- Jigsaw.

Becky Thatcher, Mon Amour

From Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer":


"What's your name?"

"Becky Thatcher. What's yours? Oh, I know. It's Thomas Sawyer."

"That's the name they lick me by. I'm Tom when I'm good. You call me Tom, will you?"

"Yes."

Now Tom began to scrawl something on his slate, hiding the words from the girl. She begged to see. Tom said:

"Oh, it ain't anything."

"Yes it is."

"No it ain't. You don't want to see."

"Yes I do, indeed I do. Please let me."

"You'll tell."

"No, I won't! Deed and deed and double deed won't!"

"You won't tell anybody at all? Ever, as long as you live?"

"No, I won't ever tell anybody. Now let me."

"Oh, you don't want to see!"

"Now that you treat me so, I will see." And she put her small hand upon his and a little scuffle ensued, Tom pretending to resist in earnest but letting his hand slip by degrees till these words were revealed: "I LOVE YOU."

"Oh, you bad thing!" And she hit his hand a smart rap, but reddened and looked pleased, nevertheless.

---

Becky Thatcher was my first love, and she'll likely outlast all others. One of the biggest injustices of American literature is how Tom Sawyer got overshadowed by Huckleberry Finn.

"Daybreakers" - "Carriers"

Two horror tales of the way things may be. "Daybreakers" has it that bats infected everyone with vampirism, vampires have become the status quo, and the human population is rapidly dwindling, so Ethan Hawke must team up with Willem Dafoe for a last stab at humanity. Oh, HA, I just realized "stab" is "bats" backwards! That amused me more than this movie. Better was "Carriers" with Chris Pine and Piper Perabo, a surprisingly well executed post-apocalyptic tale that fans of the genre should not dismiss just because it doesn't splurt zombies every ten minutes.

Albert Brooks - "2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America"

Older readers have reacted very positively to the (not at all funny) future Albert Brooks envisions in "2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America." After cancer gets cured and old age gets permanently extended, the "youngs" find themselves working in perpetuity to support their never-dying parents: Social Security Fail! And the government is bankrupt! And then there's an earthquake! (Prescient!) This must read like news to people who've given up on America.

My problem with this book has nothing to do with the plot or premise: at least thought and urgency were put into those. But I found the writing uninvolving and so full of exposition it reminded me of H. G. Wells and Robert Heinlein at their worst. Each line is a declarative sentence telling us things it can't be bothered to show us. I missed Brooks' trademark humor (the wit begins and ends with the 20/30 pun in the title). It's not that Brooks MUST be pegged as a funny guy. But this material needed to be treated lightly so it didn't sound like a 3 A. M. Fox News communique. Much as I love Brooks, this is a draft for a screenplay no one wanted to invest on.

I've never read "Brave New World," you know? I could have done that instead. Or I can just wait for the actual year 2030 to roll around.

Debra Granik - "Down to the Bone"

Before director Debra Granik tackled meth in the Ozarks with "Winter's Bone," she was dealing with addiction in Upstate New York in "Down to the Bone." Starring Vera Farmiga as Irene, a coke-fiending mother of two who tries to go clean, "Down to the Bone" is affecting and realistic, but it lacks the compelling plot of Granik's more recent effort. As for Farmiga, her talent is here, not in her bigger Hollywood roles. Her outrageous good looks are toned down, and so are the histrionics: there isn't a lot of crazy in this character for the drugs to unlock. She's just an unremarkable supermarket check-out woman in pain, trying to flounder out of an impossible chemical trap.

Worst moment: An actual snake is introduced to symbolize whatever it is that snakes always symbolize.

Best moment: Irene's enervating supervisor at the supermarket needles her about why her "job performance has suffered." Pushed, Irene admits she used to be coked-up at work and so was good at it, but now that she's off drugs, she just can't stand how fucking boring it is. And THAT'S why her "job performance has suffered." It made me wonder how many smiling greeters at Walmart are keeping themselves just high enough that they don't feel like throwing themselves in front of my shopping cart.

---

Also, thought I should mention I've been watching missing episodes of "Bones." While we were on the skeletal.

The Police - "Message in a Box: The Complete Recordings" - And How P. Diddy Performed a Valuable Public Service

A Tale of Musical Discovery.

You're about to enter the musical mind-set of an ignorant teenager in an urban, mostly Latin high school.

It's 1997. South Florida. Miami, specifically. Enjoy.



Before he became the prototype of the self-righteous d-bag, Sting was sooo cool. You can't recall, I realize. But try! Try! The Police was one of the first respectable bands I got into, and I am not ashamed to admit that it was P-Diddy who educated me. Oh wait, I meant to say I AM ashamed, but not ashamed enough to NOT talk about it.

I remember 1997 like it was yesterday. Picture me, wearing some rock T-shirt. Let's make it a Marilyn Manson shirt. I guess I DON'T remember it like it was yesterday, but I do remember it was a rocking dark shirt- the darker the better- and it was what I had on when I walked in on my brother listening to "I'll Be Missing You." I hated whatever my brother listened to, and what my brother always listened to was "rap." I haaaated rap. I would get very vocal about it whenever he played Biggie and 2Pac, which was often, and would put on my headphones and listen to Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Guns 'N Roses on my own maddening loop. Notice this wasn't the same schism in the rock kingdom that was playing out throughout America, between classic and heavy and grunge and industrial and alternative and goth and alt country or what not. No no no. In my ghetto Miami high school, this was a more generalized battle, and it involved the minority (Rock) vs. the all-consuming RAP, (with pop being an uninteresting, banal middle ground only the "normies" could care about.)



If you wanted to signal you were in the ghetto but not OF the ghetto, rock was it, the heavier the better. Metallica! Pantera! Sepultura! Things that ended with A! It wasn't a racist thing: our school was uniformly Hispanic. Jimmi Hendrix was a god to the circle I ended up in, for instance. Blues and soul and jazz music were never even remotely hated on. No. It was an "embrace the ghetto"/ "feel alienated in the ghetto" thing. Alienation was clearly the right choice for my peeps! And we hated rap: the way it was repetitive and didn't have enough guitar solos. Worst, it seemed to be specifically about being black, shooting niggaz down, drug-dealing and fucking women. That's four activities from which this non-thug felt excluded: the first by genetics, the next two by morals, and the fourth by crippling nerdiness.

The point is you had to pick sides then, and I naturally went rock. My brother went rap. It was a house divided by stereo. Pretty much the only thing linking my brother and I was a last name, the same living locale, and Run-DMC's take on Aerosmith's "Walk This Way," stretching between us like the rope in our tug-o-war.

But one spring day in 1997, this ignorant young man with the Marilyn Manson t-shirt wanders into a full-on "I'll Be Missing You" crying party. My brother is like: "BIGGIE IS DEAD! This song is about Biggie being dead! It's sooooo beautiful!" And I was listening, and going like: "Damn, this song IS kind of beautiful! But it can't be! I can't allow that to happen! I can't like a rap song, damn it! Why am I finding this song beautiful?!? No way this is coming from that loser Puff Daddy!" (as we then knew Diddy to be called) "The beauty is coming from somewhere else!"



Yup, I had no idea that the Police or "Every Breath You Take" existed. I was 2 in 1983! Don't mock me!

So this exchange took place in my school's rock freak corner:

Me: "Hey, dude, you know that new Puff Daddy song, 'bout Biggie's death? I kind of like it."
Other Rock Guy: "It's because those fuckers stole from the Police!"
Me: "Really? It's that what happened? You think the police did it? I heard it was Tupac's people!"
Other Rock Guy: "No! I mean song is stolen from THE POLICE! The rock band! With Sting!"
Me: "Sting? You mean the actor from 'Dune'?!?"
Other Rock Guy: "You don't know who The Police are?"
Me: "..."

And so Other Rock Guy turned me on to the Police. And two days later, "Synchronicity"- with "Every Breath You Take"- was playing on my house loudly. And my brother came out, with HIS dark T-shirt that was honoring the Notorious B. I. G.- and I triumphantly watched while he had to admit that maybe, just maybe, the success of Puff Daddy was somewhat over-reliant on other people's actual musical accomplishments. I was so thoroughly converted into The Police than less than two weeks later I actually brought a recording of "Don't Stand So Close to Me" to my English class as an example of "allusions to literature in pop culture."

Yeah. Probably not the best song to play in a classroom.

But hey, I hadn't read Nabokov then! Sting led me to Nabokov! And it all started with P. Diddy.



Many, many years have passed and the Police- and Sting- rank significantly lower in my personal totem pole. I see Sting as an able songwriter but a chilly, boring performer, and I abhor his New-Agey phase so much so that I burst out laughing this one time I heard someone at a party actually say: "It doesn't matter how much of a man you think you are, [Sting's] 'Soul Cages' will bring you to your knees crying." (Which was me being a dick, because that album probably HAD brought that guy to his knees crying- and probably about the loss of his father, which is the album's theme. Which is quite an ok thing to cry about. I feel bad for laughing, Guy at a Party! Sorry!)

But thank you, Other Rock Guy, and thank you, P. Diddy, because here I am listening to "Message in a Box: The Complete Recordings" and loving it, noticing that, at their very best, The Police brought a refinement and literacy to the pop singles chart that I sorely miss.

And to my brother: PWNED! ROCK > RAP!

(My brother fittingly replies: "Fuck Tha Police!")

Fucked Up - "David Comes To Life"

Hardcore is not my go-to genre, (in so far as I have a "go-to" genre). The anger and social uncertainties it best expresses are not my own. At some point in high school they could have been, if I haven't been too busy just trying to absorb the entirety of English-language pop music, 1959 to 1996, like the studious immigrant I was. Hardcore was fine and all, but when I was first memorizing the chords to "Back in Black," Black Flag was not exactly a sonic priority.

Just when I think it's too late for me, when I think I'm content just hearing mellow, old-guy crap like Death Cab for Cutie, along comes Fucked Up's "David Comes to Life"! I can still rock! I can still fuck some shit up! Fuck you, The Man, and fuck your bullshit system with its repressive faux narrative!


Above: This picture of the band is suitably fucked up.

Now, this is a fine, fine hardcore album, a rocking masterpiece that feels like 70 guitars going off at once on your brain, but it's also that precious little Green Day -ish thing: a "concept album," a "rock opera," what have you. The concept must be extricated through hard work- and looking up the lyrics: there's no way on this corrupt Earth you'll make anything out of the growling of front-man Pink Eyes without online assistance. Once you get the concept, it's not impressive. This dude, David, has his political conscience awakened by a Manic Pixie Rock and Roll Dream Girl called Veronica, (who is basically Whatsername or Gloria from Green Day's "American Idiot" and "21st Century Breakdown" but even more of a blank.) Not to worry: Veronica dies in an explosion pretty soon, leaving David to scream about his loss for almost 80 minutes, with some meta-narrator business thrown in.

But this is Fucked Up. You can't really get any of that from the album- even knowing the lyrics won't exactly clarify the ambitions of the concept. If I may interject an objection that is entirely beside the point, the lyrics buried in the growl are divided between relative cleverness: (Swans mate for life or so I've heard/ Which is fitting, because that shit's for the birds"); pretentious grabs for the thesaurus that fail: ("I could FEIGN stories of regret and woe/ But morals IMPLORE me to share the truth that I know") and sententious bits of "wisdom" that mean very little: ("The hunger for a resolution manifests the end." Sure it does!) And they're all delivered in the same exactly metered barks throughout.

But who cares? Who can hear that? I told ya: 70 guitars going off at once! The human growl can't compete! Not even Pink Eyes can do it!

Like Pulp would say, this is hardcore.

Watch "Queen of Hearts".

Silvio Soldini - "Days and Clouds" - "Come Undone"

Alba Rohrwacher, who played the dissenting lesbian daughter in "I Am Love" is not, to my eyes, a particularly enticing sex symbol. Sophia Loren likely won't be alarmed, but Rohrwacher's tiny avian face and a fleshless little body, (which you often see naked in Silvio Soldini's "Come Undone"), along with a waify charm, are somehow quickly earning her a place in Italian cinema. Soldini uses her to varying effect in two serious dramas that, nonetheless, return to his pet theme of mid-class people caught in mid-life crises. In "Come Undone," Rohrwacher is a bored woman who (without better dramatic reasons than an inconvenient horniness) starts an affair with a married man (Pierfrancesco Favino). The two visit lots of motel rooms in Milan, but their affair seems as repetitious as her previous love life, and goes nowhere, as does the movie.

Much better is "Days and Clouds," where Rohrwacher plays the daughter to a well-off couple (Antonio Albanese, Margherita Buy) who suddenly find themselves not so well-off after the husband is pushed out of his own company. It may be set in the grey-tinted streets of Genoa, but many Americans will find "Days and Clouds" uncomfortably relevant, as it exposes the fragility of the finances of many a professional middle-class family. Forced to down-size their lifestyle habits, the couple squabbles over money, and their perfect marriage is exposed as a business agreement. Can even the truest love survive the failure of a business agreement gone sour?

Three Poems About Black Roses

I
The Certainty of my Aloneness is,
Perhaps,
The Reason why I distrust you even now.
I'm waiting for the Gotcha, the Pig's Blood at Prom Night,
The bidding of Byes, the Bloom off the Rose,
(You yourself intimated You prefer black Roses)
In short, my Friend, I'm waiting for the Eye-opener,
For the Rug pulled from under one unworthy Shoe,
For the other Shoe to drop into the Well of your Laughter.
And for me to Echo down there, where you've lowered me to your Darkness.

II
"A rose by any other name," yells out Juliet
But what does she know? She's just thirteen! Not even legal yet!
"Oh no,"
says Romeo over the chatter:
"A black rose is a whole different matter."

The Valentine's Day killer leaves a clue with every victim:
A red rose that reminds him of the first woman who pricked 'im.
"Watch out!"
Says a cop cleaning the splatter:
"A black rose is a whole different matter."

Alice in the garden with a paint brush and a bucket:
"I'm painting all the roses black, so Wonderland can suck it!"
"Oh no,"
Says the Queen to the Mad Hatter:
"A black rose is a whole different matter."

But I'm just trying hard to catch your eye for half an hour.
I've got no roses for you and my heart is losing power.
Watch out.
It's about to shatter.
A black rose is a whole different matter.

III
You suggested a black Rose and I, knowing little about Gardens
Except that Bees and Cherubims there do Murder,
Asked a neighbor Florist who said no such Thing was given out by Nature.
"They're just red Roses bred into their Darkness.
It's a false Color."

I could paint a Rose black for you,
But instead here are Words.
They're typed-out Black,
But, like the Rose, they began Red.
Like the Rose, these Words will Tremble under your Fingers.
You decide if they deserve mockery,
Eye-rolling,
or a bestial plucking.
I would prefer that You water them
With some Sentiment of your own,
That You turn to Them
When You think of me, if ever,
And watch them bloom, indefatigable.
I think a Poem better than a Rose.

But I know little about Gardens.
Love, do You know about Poetry?

Stephen Poliakoff - "Glorious 39"

'39 must indeed have been a glorious year to be an affluent Brit, with the war still a fun thing to debate during lavish dinners. There's an interesting movie to be made about that, and about England's shameful Hitler-appeasing movement of the time, but "Glorious 39" is not it. Torn between being a historical drama or a murder mystery- and too afraid to function as the great scary movie it could have been- "39" ends up being a polite made-for-TV diversion in a nice period setting. It does feature a heavy cast, (with the likes of Bill Nighy, Jeremy Northam and Christopher Lee) and a nice lead performance by Romola Garai as the girl who discovers not everything is as it seems in her world of luxury. It's not her fault the movie fails: blame the hesitant script which for some ridiculous reason tries to establish a parallel between the plight of abandoned house pets and the Holocaust. That's not offensive, it ain't! And the ridiculous end reveal has got to be one of the most embarrassing movie miscalculations in ages.

Alfred Bester - "The Stars My Destination"

In the 1960s it was not unusual to see Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination" high on any sci-fi novel list; Samuel Delany praised it highly, and though its shine has dimmed with time, you can still see its concepts pop on every corporate-nightmare dystopian satire. The name of the fiercely anti-heroic Gully Foyle may suggest Swiftian inclinations, (and one visit to a satellite of primitive "Scientists" might have kept Gulliver busy), but the novel is actually a fast-paced futuristic reworking of Alexandre Dumas' "The Count of Montecristo." Swearing revenge to the shadowy forces that left him marooned in a drifting spaceship, Foyle transforms from a lowly brute with a bestially tattooed face to a refined social climber, all the while hiding his sinister intentions. Bester's sci-fi ideas come quick, and they haven't significantly dated: the tele-portation that provides the novel's main conceit is still in the future. I cannot wait for it! It's the changes the citizen of 1956 couldn't predict that make the modern reader squirm. I for one cringed at the casual "hard-boiled" way in which Foyle rapes a "lovely light-skinned Negro girl" without the slightest hesitation. Ugh.

Hey, That's No Way to Say Hello to My Little Friend

Dear Imaginary Reader:



This is how bad my blindness situation is. I'm going down the street in a not-ideal neighborhood and seeing this girl walk toward me with a Leonard Cohen t-shirt, and I'm just filled with joy and hope for the new generations. This made everything better: here was a youth in whom poetry was not wasted, a carrier of taste, one person that had not been entirely failed by the educational system.

Then she gets closer and she's all ghetto and I realize it's yet another Tony Montana shirt. Fuck our collective lives.

Takashi Miike - "13 Assassins"

It's not that Takashi Miike has mellowed in his old age. "13 Assassins" has one of the highest movie body counts of all time and some wash-your-eyeballs images (a frail woman whose limbs have been amputated by the dastardly villain will probably feature in my nightmares to come.) But all the same, this is a serious movie, from a film-maker who is suddenly eyeing the Kurosawa throne or, at the very least, international awards. In olden days Miike might have suddenly decided, halfway through this historical saga of 13 assassins recruited to kill an unwanted Shogun's army, to have an animated dinosaur appear of nowhere and stomp on history while tap-dancing to J-pop.

But not here. Serious movie, like I said.

Most people prefer "serious" and will tell you this is Miike's best. They're not exactly wrong. I for one found the historical aspects slow and uninvolving, but the final 50 minutes of sustained ass-kicking are worth the wait, and will certainly merit a paragraph on any future history of samurai movies.



But I really miss that giddy "is this movie really happening?" feel from "The Happiness of the Katakuris" or "Audition" or "Dead or Alive." I already get to see quite a lot of serious movies, and not that many that make me wonder if I'm just HALLUCINAting them. Get back to being weird again, Miike!

"Sondheim! The Birthday Concert"

"Company" is the only Stephen Sondheim show I love without reservations, but he's still the single most undeniable figure in American musicals (Rodgers & Hammerstein? Two people!) Still there at 80, this must-watch concert from March 2010 is chock-full of divas in varying decrepitude: Bernadette Peters, Patti Lupone, Joanna Gleason, Elaine Stritch. Everyone is aged and there's a lot of candles making that Sondheim cake sag, but the songs, (musically challenging and always several intellectual rungs ahead of everyone else's) stay timeless, partly because they were never OF the '70s as much as they were of an alternate Sondheim world.

One comment: no one's missing the less-loved Sondheim musicals like "Passion," but not a single song from "Gypsy"?

Here's what may be Sondheim's prettiest song, the atypically romantic "Johanna" from "Sweeney Todd."



I feel you, Johanna
I feel you...
I was half convinced I'd waken,
satisfied enough to dream you
Happily I was mistaken
Johanna, Johanna...

I'll steal you, Johanna
I'll steal you...
Do they think that walls can hide you?
Even now I'm at your window
I am in the dark beside you
Buried sweetly in your yellow hair...

I feel you, Johanna
and one day, I'll steal you,
'Til I'm with you then, I'm with you there,
buried sweetly in your yellow hair

"Birdy the Mighty: Decode" - Season 1

Although there is some bait and switch to "Birdy the Mighty: Decode" (with the pilot looking three times as good as the rest of the series) this 2008 re-telling of the manga and OVA by "Patlabor" creator Masami Yuumi is nice sci-fi fare. The story is simple: sexy space-hero Birdy is out to stop a McGuffin from destroying the Earth- while being forced to share a body with a teenage boy. The series is brief, with lots of comedic opportunities lost (neither the gender-bending idea nor Birdy's moon-lightning as a modeling pop-star are put to any good use) but the easy-to-follow plot may be a relief to those exhausted by the dozens of characters (BACCANO!) and needless convolutions of today's mainstream anime.

Erick Zonca - "Julia"

I didn't fall for "I Am Love," but I'm glad that it led me to Tilda Swinton's performance in "Julia." Somehow this movie slipped by me, but this is one I love, and you should GO WATCH NOW! Erick Zonca, (who's not very prolific but directed the equally gripping "Dreamlife of Angels") managed to pull the greatest trick any story-teller can pull: he made me feel like I was watching something entirely new, original and unpredictable, while, of course, telling the old familiar story about "the simple crime that goes wrong," the "kidnapping that turns out to be a lesson about bonding." These are tropes I particularly hate.

But sometimes the right person comes along and shakes them up into nice new shapes.

Erick Zonca shakes things up here. Him and Tilda Swinton. It's no secret that she's one of the best actresses ever, but what she does in "Julia" is astonishing. She's taken this drunken monster of a character and made us understand her delusions and made us care for her using absolutely no sentimental cliches. Julia Harris is an alcoholic wreck who greedily latches on to a clearly insane kidnapping plot, and things go and get worse from there on out. I don't want to say more because this is one of those movies that is best arrived at without introductions. All I can say is that "Julia" should be the villain of the movie- this is an entirely reprehensible human being- but Tilda Swinton makes her a hero in a harrowing journey. You might feel repulsed by her, or you might feel the movie's perception of Mexicans is ridiculously nightmarish, but I was convinced and compelled and by the end I was shaking and hoping that things would turn out alright for Julia and her retarded schemes.

Awwww, thanks for the help.

"How To Read Literature Like a Professor" was a rather cute book by Thomas Foster, informing us of how sometimes novels reference Shakespeare, the Bible, Greek myths, and other such obviousities.

"Raising The Bar"

ABOVE: "This is so embarrassing! You know we're going to get cancelled quickly!" "Sure, but it's TNT, no one will notice! Just keep smiling."

It's Zack Morris! From "Saved By the Bell"! But in Steven Bochco's "Raising the Bar"! He's a lawyer in his mid-30s but somehow his hair is all grungy! Yeah, nobody cared. But this wasn't a terrible lawyer show. Merely an unnecessary lawyer show.

Ralph Bakshi - Frank Frazetta - "Fire and Ice"

Not the George R. R. Martin fantasy series! The attempt by adult animateur Ralph Bakshi to make Frank Frazetta's primal, voluptuous paintings come to live. The result is fluid and inventive as far as low-budget He-Man-imation goes, but only for the hardcore. "Fire and Ice" is an escapee from "Heavy Metal" in its heyday, damned to stoner cultism from the go. The elemental world (Fire? Meet Ice!) doesn't make sense: The ice creatures are naked and green and the fire creatures are covered in furs, except for Teegra, who's minimally attired. And really, about 70% of this movie is about Teegra "presenting," as anthropologists would put it.

China Mieville - "King Rat"

China Mieville's first novel, "King Rat" is one of the urban underground, and, like "Gregor the Overlander," features rats as symbols of rebellion, here with proletarianism in the whiskers, because of course Mieville's is a deeper book. The inspiring tale here is not "Alice in Wonderland," but the Pied Piper of Hammelin, (one of my favorites). Samuel Garamond finds his father dead, himself a suspect, and his only help in the form of a mysterious creature called the King Rat. Meanwhile, his drum 'n bass loving friends meet an equally mysterious flute-playing fellow.

You can see the confrontation coming.

Mieville's debut is not as fully realized as his later novels, and the fanciful language undermines the directness of the story. The first half in particular borders on the painful as the author brings out all the big words he's ever encountered and jams them into the narrative out of sheer insecurity. People "hiss spuriously" or have "inchoate feelings." That sort of thing. But as he gets confidence, (or runs out of big words) the inept displays of verbosity disappear and the story gets going. No classic, but a nice beginning.

Goro Miyazaki - "Tales from Earthsea"

"My father is a great man. And I stabbed him. I have failed my father. I have failed myself."

So says Prince Arren in Studio Ghibli's infamous anime "Tales From Earthsea," but that could very easily be writer/director Goro Miyazaki's embarrassed admission to the world.



ABOVE: "Why does everyone hate us so much? Is it because our designs are so generic?"

Goro is the son of Hayao Miyazaki, who is maybe second to the Emperor in the esteem of the Japanese people. "Tales from Earthsea" was supposed to signal the passing of the crown from one generation to the next, the continuation of a tradition of magical film-making, the survival of the very best Japanese animation had to offer.



Instead, "Tales from Earthsea" is a boring, incoherent, mediocre, familiar anime. Now, that usually wouldn't be a big deal: boring, incoherent, mediocre, familiar anime clogs the Tokyo sewers.

Out of context, "Tales from Earthsea" merely provokes a shrug, an "It's ok". Long in the making, slow in the release, "Tales" is only loosely connected to the Earthsea world of Ursula K. LeGuin's philosophical fantasy series. Good luck surviving all the dull, preachy monologues. 80% of the soundtrack is the "medieval fair music" from "Chrono Trigger," but then the orchestra swells and insists we should be awed at the sights. We're not. The designs are plain and cheap-looking, Manga 101 stuff. It's like a cut-scene from a generic JRPG circa 1999. It short, it looks like what it is: someone stealing character designs, ideas, and even entire scenes from all the previous "good" Miyazaki movies, and then being unable to back them up with Miyazaki's genius and attention to detail. No biggie. Merely mediocre.



ABOVE: "Are we in a scene from Nausicaa? Or Castle Laputa? Nooo, we're in Earthsea!"

That's out of context.

In context, though, "Tales of Earthsea" was the most anticipated movie of 2006 in Japan. EVERYBODY went to see it, ready to fall in love with Miyazaki the Second. Then they reacted like they were expecting the Holy Ghost to come down from the sky in the shape of a flaming dove, and instead the flaming dove had taken a giant shit on the audience. NOBODY liked it! "Tales" was named the Worst Movie of the Year at Japan's version of the Razzies. (Goro? "Worst director.") Ursula K. LeGuin was baffled by what Goro had done to her world. Her words: "This is what happens when too much responsibility is shouldered by someone not equipped for it." Hayao Miyazaki was all like: "You have dishonored family name. You no longer my son. Seppuku for you!"

Even Goro knew he'd fucked up. Again, his words- through his script:

"I have failed my father. I have failed myself."

So I feel bad for this merely mediocre movie. Bad enough to say: Give it a chance. There are things to like here. I just can't remember them now. (There aren't even the dragons promised by the cover! There's like, maybe, two dragon scenes!) The only thing I can fully recommend is Disney's typically superior dubbing, with voices from Timothy Dalton, Willem Dafoe, Cheech Marin, and Mariska Hargitay.



ABOVE: A very cool looking scene toward the end of "Tales from Earthsea."

Silvio Soldini - "Bread and Tulips" - "Agata and the Storm"

The films of Silvio Soldini play so well in festivals because, though few admit it, they come as an incredible relief when scheduled between must-be-praised behemoths like "I Am Love." Just like "I Am Love," Soldini's first two shots are Italian, intricate, colorful, with large casts, and about women finding themselves during mid-life crises. Unlike "I Am Love," they're light and void of pretension. "Bread and Tulips" and "Agata and the Storm" surround Licia Maglietta with a stable of recurring actors to tell more or less the same story, (one set in Venice, one in Genoa; one with an older lover, one with a younger lover) but what would pass for laziness from a less likable director here feels tolerable, like hearing a friend accidentally repeat the same cute story over two separate dinners.

Jonathan Lynn - "Wild Target"

Jonathan Lynn is not the most consistent of comedy directors, but he can extract charm from his actors as he has done in "My Cousin Vinny" and "Clue," and as he does in the unassuming hitman comedy "Wild Target." The movie stars Bill Nighy as one of those classy killers fiction unleashes on mankind; the always lovely Emily Blunt, (who, I just realized, is a couple of talented genes away from being Katy Perry) as his target; and Ronnie Weasley himself, Rupert Grint, as a hapless witness caught in the mix.

"Weeds" - Season 2 - D. W. Griffith- "Broken Blossoms"

"I need her to text-message me," says a kid in season 2 of "Weeds."

I was watching with my brother, so I turn to him: "'Text message me'? Who SAYS that? It's 'TEXT ME'! I need her to 'TEXT ME,' that's how the line should have gone!"

My brother, who is my idea of a very normal, earthy person who brings me down to the realities of life, says: "Hmmm, well, this show is, like, 5 years old. People were just starting to go crazy with texting then. It was a NEW thing. So they said things like "text-message" instead of "text me." Just like at some point someone asked for an electronic mail, instead of an e-mail. Things change. Why do you watch old stuff like season 2 of "Weeds" anyway? Just skip to the season 6 or 7. Mary-Louise Parker is probably still selling drugs, no? That stays the same."

Well, I watch old things BECAUSE things change even as they stay the same, and I'm curious about that process. I could skip to this week's episode of "Weeds," but then I would have missed Zooey Deschanel's kooky turn as an on-the-run wild child, and I wouldn't have cringed when Martin Donovan's DEA character went off character because the script said it was time for him to go away. And I dug Elizabeth Perkins and Kevin Nealon's Agrestic tryst far more than Justin Kirk's forced Rabbinate plot-line. Kirk always overacts weirdly, twitching like he hopes that maybe if people suspect he has a drug problem they'll be thrown off from the fact that he's not very convincing as an inveterate pussy-chaser.

Anyway, I don't care if a show is old, as long as it still works. It's new to me. You want to talk drugs and old, then how about pairing Season 2 of "Weeds" with the opium dens of London's Limehouse as presented in D. W. Griffith's "Broken Blossoms," from 1918?

---



ABOVE: "I told her not to take so much of the Pineapple Express!"

Feeling bad for having perpetuated stereotypes about "Negroes" in "Birth of a Nation" and about "Jews, Gays, Catholics, and Feminists" in "Intolerance," D. W. Griffith decided to make penance by showing that racism and cultural divisions are unimportant when it comes to love.

So he went and insulted the "Orientals."

"Broken Blossoms, or The Yellow Man and The Girl" is about interracial love!

He is the "Yellow" immigrant who wants to bring Buddha's Eastern Wisdom to London but falls into the opium dens of Gookiness! She's a poor London waif who calls him Chinky! Don't worry, he doesn't actually have sex with her! He's just allowed to worship her! And besides, it's understood she's probably got some Mick in her, because her dad is an abusive drunken boxer! So Mick and Chink together? That's fine! If you put a Mick and a Chink together, you almost get a real White Person!

See? Griffith was just trying to make everybody come together in racial harmony.



ABOVE: "That's as close as you get to her, Chinky!"

This is a syrupy, slow movie, with little of the impressive scope of "Intolerance" or "BOAN," and Richard Barthelmess as the "Chinese" hero is painfully unconvincing, but it IS heartbreaking when sad little Lillian Gish uses her fingers to push up the corners of her mouth into a tragic smile. The poetry of her face is what makes this movie work.

All the same, the world was once a very melodramatic place. I'm so glad we outgrow some things.



ABOVE: Conrad and Nancy can get it on in "Weeds." And it's cool. Change!

Suzanne Collins - "Gregor the Overlander" (The Underland Chronicles)

Alice keeps on falling down the rabbit hole.



Suzanne Collins, writer of the phenomenally successful "Hunger Games" trilogy, started with a YA series based on the premise that Alice in Wonderland was too bucolic: who falls down a rabbit hole these days? If you're a city person, you're gonna drop down a man hole and end up jabbering with roaches. "Gregor the Overlander" has an 11 year old "chosen boy" drop into a subterranean world of hurrying bats and scurrying rats, and naturally there's an ancient prophecy about him fighting forces of evil. The charm of "The Hunger Games" is in its depth and subversion of cliches, things lacking here. Younger readers will enjoy it. Me, I prophecy that I won't read the rest of the series, but I do need to finish the Hunger Games Trilogy already.

"Damages" - Season 2

"Damages" was such a neat trick- a season long mystery that kept on becoming more mysterious with every shocking revelation- that I kind of assumed it was a one-season miracle. It's now aiming for five seasons! Just caught up with Season 2, myself, and Rose Byrne as "Ellen Parsons" is still the "likable little lamb let loose in the lupine land of litigation." But now she's shooting a gun at us as the season begins. Who is she killing? What's going on? Is she just going to keep getting prettier with every episode?



We more or less wrap up the Frobisher case from season 1, although Ted Danson is still a recurring character, going goofily Zen after his downfall. ANOTHER evil corporation, UNR, takes the spotlight: this one may be dropping a dangerous chemical into the West Virginia water supply, ("Erin Brockovich," feel free to sue.) Patty Hewes (Glenn Close) is going after them, of course. The evil corporation may also have killed the wife of the scientist who was about to testify as to the toxicity levels. Maybe. There's a lot of maybes in this season. I WILL say that the scientist is played by William Hurt (four Academy Award nominations!) officially making this the most over-qualified cast EVER assembled for a cable TV show. (If you can think of the competition, let me know.) There's also Timothy Olyphant, who looks like he would be stonily lazy but is a hard-working dude (see also James Franco).



And there's Marcia Gay Harden and Tate Donovan and Mario Van Peebles and Kevin Corrigan and James Naughton and not one but TWO cast members from "The Wire," not to mention a continuous cavalcade of character actors that will get "It's that guy!" responses. But what makes "Damages" so good and so very unusual for me is that it may be a show about big shots in back-room deals, about sleazy political manoeuvers, with a cast that is full to the brim of old white guys wearing the right ties - and it still manages to center itself on two WOMEN.

A "guy show". With crimes, mysteries, power, and no talk about emotions or shoes.

Built around two women who aren't part of a love triangle. (They have no love object to fight about.)

They're also not in love with each other. They're not lesbians- that might have been daring, but a gimmick.

And they're not "buddies" working together against the "macho bullshit." They're not going to "bond" and "relate". They don't even like each other! Why should they? Are guys in TV shows expected to like other male characters just because they're male?

And get this, they're not desperately single and looking for love in Law-land. Their sex lives are normal and mediocre like everyone else's. The show is not about THAT.

Better yet, they're not role models and standard bearers. They're characters! Flawed, corrupt, selfish, evil at times, but always very very smart about it!

In short, "Damages" may the first great feminist show that doesn't bother putting up any soap box. Sorry, "Buffy," "Murphy Brown," "Mary Tyler Moore," you all had soap-boxes and you know it.
The soap box is gone. It doesn't matter. These women don't have time to talk about how everyone looks down on them for being women. Who COULD look down on them? They're moving too quickly for that. They're BUSY. They got shit to do.

Just like, you know, MEN.

Luca Guadagnino - "I Am Love"

Fine dining can be a little too fine. Say you're at the poshest of places, the very progressive edge of gastronomie, and you order a $60 plate of something called Gamberetto al Ragu di Caprioli con Fellini, and then it emerges from the kitchen with all fanfare and it looks absolutely beautiful but absurdly tiny, like the chef worked at it for weeks with the help of elves, and the elves used microscopes. You go to eat it and accidentally inhale it. You know what I mean. This kind of bullshit:



It's not nutrition!

I think that's more or less how I feel about Luca Guadagnino's "I Am Love." This is such an exquisite movie, so sumptuous, so beautifully acted, so intricate, put together with such a palpable sense of delicacy, that you're bound to "Oooooh" and "Awwwww" at its expensiveness as it comes out of the kitchen. Then you inhale too sharply, it goes up your nostril, and you realize: "Holy shit, this is one expensive, pretentious soap opera! The patriarch (Gabriele Ferzetti, from "L'Avventura") dividing his empire! The repressed socialite (Tilda Swinton, always great) having sex with the passionate commoner! The artistic girl (Alba Rohrwacher) discovering she's a lesbian! That's it! There's really NOTHING to this movie except some vague comment about how being beautiful and ultra rich is awesome, of course, but sometimes it's a little less awesome than other times!"

The dish really IS presented so beautifully that you might be called a Philistine for dismissing it. I am not in love with "I Am Love," but if you want to feel awe for Milan or San Remo, GO WATCH IT. Do it for the photography and the tasteful acting. Not the silly story. And have a burger or something on the way home.