Goose Shit Lake

A review of THE WILD GOOSE LAKE (2019)
Written and Directed by Diao Yinan
Cinematography by Dong Jingsong
Score by B6
Staring Hu Ge, Liao Fan, Gwei Lun-Mei, and Wan Qian

Some months back I ran into the trailer for The Wild Goose Lake and I was instantly taken in. I wanted to see this movie bad. It had everything I wanted in a movie: Crime, dirtbags on motorcycles, a beheading, a tiger, brutalism, and maybe violence-centered disco? Lots of ideas on offer, all of them intriguing to me. Unfortunately is not what I had hoped for. Having braved the rain and a pandemic, I can say that I have a candidate for my worst movie of the year. I can also comfortably say that this is the second worst thing to be involved with Wuhan province to come out this year.

The Wild Goose Lake is a threadbare neo-noir centered around a man who made a mistake in a fit of desperation and the people in his orbit and then. . . I don't know stuff happens and the plot concludes. It's a film that takes a long time to get nowhere. It's also a film where the motives of its characters don't seem to be murky as they are underdeveloped. You can't tell if its characters are concealing something or if there just isn't anything there. Of course if you have to ask yourself what the director is getting at, you probably have the answer. . .

Also, there's a sexual assault towards the end of the film. And it's bad. Not just because it's supposed to be bad, but because it doesn't add anything. It's just there. It's this shocking bit of sexual violence that doesn't add anything and doesn't seem to say anything other than look what I can film.

And fuck that.

Having just watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a film completely without the male gaze, it was shocking and deeply unpleasant to watch The Wild Goose Lake needlessly assert itself remind me that misogyny is live and well in the entertainment industry. (Of course the cast of Portrait of a Lady on Fire knows all about that. . . )

It was at this point in the film that one of my five fellow film goers walked out of the theater. Good for him.


That said there are moments of actual sublimity in the movie. They are as follows:

• After taking down a suspect, a troupe of plainclothes cops assemble around the perp. Each one of the cops is wearing shoes with lights on the bottom, like they're a bunch of overgrown mall rats. I can't tell if it's supposed to be funny, but like all of the good moments in this movie, it feels out of place.
• A man gets murdered with an umbrella. It's a really strange moment, because it feels like something out of a Takashi Miike movie. Up until this point, as many moments of stylization (and violence) as there are,  The Wild Goose Lake seems to take place on planet Earth, not in the world of Asian Extreme. Still, as jarring as the moment is, it was fun and ridiculous and made me wonder where this movie had been for the entire time.
•  The noodles at the end of the movie look really, really good.

The Wild Goose Lake is a humorless film without characters, and it lacks the panache to make up for its shortcomings. It's a frustrating movie to watch, because there clearly seems to be some sort of talent and perspective behind it-- just none of it ends up on the screen-- at least not in one piece.

Overall, these rare few moments have all of the joy of picking the good stuff out of a salad. Except that the salad is wilted and the dressing is terrible and you just wished that you had ordered something else.

James Kislingbury is a writer, podcaster, and will see you next time, space cowboy. You can listen to him here and here. You can shovel piles of lucre at him here and here.

Your Buddy Dahmer

A REVIEW OF MY FRIEND DAHMER (2017)

True crime is having a moment. Online there's Serial and Criminal and My Favorite Murder and White Wine, True Crime, then there's Mindhunter (directed and partially produced by a guy famous for serial killer movie). I talk to ex-girlfriends about murders. I can’t sit down at dinner with my folks without Forensic Files coming on (mind you, this is after Frasier, who is also having a moment). It's only natural that Jeffery Dahmer would finally get his turn in the spotlight. 

My Friend Dahmer is an adaptation of the graphic novel of the same name. As a film, it’s a compelling blend of a portrait of a young madman with a regular horny teen comedy. And while those things sound anathema on paper, as you watch My Friend Dahmer you realize that these two things are actually closer fits than you might realize. That they might actually belong together and that the strangeness doesn’t come from the juxtaposition, but rather from the fact that nobody ever thought to pair these two things together in such a straightforward, forthright manner. More than that, the true horror of My Friend Dahmer isn’t how unusual a serial killer can be, but rather how perfectly mundane this man can be.

My Friend Dahmer performs an incredibly balancing act. It manages to make a sicko like Jeffery Dahmer into a sympathetic character without isolating him from the monster that he will become. You can feel sorry for the monster without feeling sorry for his monstrosities. It does not so much ask you to feel a certain way as it makes you aware that there are things in this world that are unknowable. There is never going to be a truly satisfying answer for a man like Jeffery Dahmer. The triumph of My Friend Dahmer is that it turns the annecdotal-- a year in high school-- into a project that is much more meaningful.

My Friend Dahmer is clever in that it never seeks to be clever. It simply is. Unlike the epic odes to ornate serial killers from David Fincher or the Millennium Trilogy, My Friend Dahmer is as straight forward and as po’ faced as can be. That’s too it’s credit. Marc Meyers and his cast and crew take what could very well be a crass or a cliched piece of entertainment and they made something unique and interesting that I cannot stop thinking about. It doesn’t hurt that every performance from top to bottom is pitch perfect. It's this careful combination of light and dark that allow the movie to be a simple story about a screwed up kid in high school, but also a study of Man's darkest urges.

My Friend Dahmer is a movie that is about cruelty by casual and active, both intentional and unintentional. In places, it's also really funny, and occasionally, it's even a little touching. It’s a movie that doesn’t judge and doesn’t preach and doesn’t bother to tart up what is already an incredible story. It simply stands there and shows life as it was. As it should not have been. Looking at the world, looking at movies now, sometimes you don’t need to explain everything. Sometimes the world enough is its own explanation.

James Kislingbury is a writer, a host, and a convicted criminal. You can listen to his news podcast. You can listen to his cult movie podcast. You can donate to both podcasts. But, seriously, don't try to blow up Margaret Thatcher, guys.

Current Mood:

For some reason this scene is becoming more and more topical as time goes on.

Zero Narc Thirty

A Review of Sicario (2015)

by James Kislingbury

I've been burnt by films like this before.

The Counselor leaps most readily to mind. It had a perfect cast, a great director, a screenplay from the English language's greatest living writer, and it was a disaster. Top to bottom blegh. A front to back conveyor belt of vomit and fish heads that is was so perfectly constructed, you almost have to wonder if Ridley Scott was entering into some kind of a Fat Tuesday-like purge of his baser artistic instincts. More recently True Detective Season 2 pops to mind, but the less energy spent on that thing the better.

I say this because expectations can be a terrible thing, especially when your expectations are not only not met, but pulled forcibly from your arms and thrown into a well. Even when a film is good, your expectations can often sabotage your appreciation of that film. "Well, it could have been better," you say, walking through the parking lot, glumly talking to no one.

Sicario defies this tradition. It's a fantastic film, one of the best I've seen this year. It is a film that not only meets my impossible to define, solipsistic expectations, but it, more importantly, it is a film that is as good, if not better, than the collection of talent behind it. The end result is a film that is as horrifying and compelling as anything you will see in 2015.

A shorthand description of Sicario would pit it as Zero Dark Thirty* meets The Counselor (but if The Counselor was good). It's a nihilistic procedural that collides with reality. In this case we follow FBI door kicker Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) as she is recruited into the War on Drugs. The film also stars Josh Brolin as a suspiciously laconic OGA spook and Benicio del Toro, who seems to have channeled all of his typical scenery chewing into being as imposing as possible. Along with Macer's partner played by Daniel Kaluuya**, the team charges headlong into the underworld of Mexican (and American) crime.

As you can imagine, things go poorly for everyone.

This is a movie that begins with the discovery of over forty bodies packed into the drywall of a cartel-owned house. It doesn't let up from there on out. Sicario is a film that manages to use this setting without exploiting it for shock value. The desecrated bodies that hang from Ciudad Juarez's freeways are not titillation, they're facts of life.

Few movies embraces Werner Herzog's concept that "The poet must not avert his eyes" as well as this one does. To show what the current war on drugs looks like is sure to turn off many and hopefully piss off a lot of other people, but it's a vision that works. The story requires its characters to walk through this underworld and, like us, they walk out changed. And maybe not for the better.

One of the reasons Sicario stands out as a film about drugs is that unlike Savages or Scarface, it's a movie that nails the double-think of the War on Drugs. In order to beat brutes, we must become brutes. In order to stop crime, we have to let it carry on. In order to bring things to light we have to hide them. It's a film with all of the glamor and sheen of a head on collision. And each collision is couched inside of a thrilling, perfectly put together action sequence. You can have your nihilism and eat it too.

It reminds me of Zero Dark Thirty, not because of the driven female lead or the deadly bearded men running around in military kit. Both are films that steadfastly refuse to give you an answer. It simply shows you. These are the facts. Here is what a human being suffocated and stuffed into a wall looks like. This is what your government is willing to do for the sake of. . . justice? This is what happens to a man who has lost everything. No judgment, no music cues, no twists just the facts. It isn't a film that is looking to meet you half-way, which is why I like it so much.

Another bit of grounding in the film is Emily Blunt's performance. I would say she was a revelation if it wasn't already clear that she's one of the coolest actors in the business. She's the female Tom Hardy, which is to say that Tom Hardy is the male Emily Blunt and that I would watch them both in any movie that they appear in. Also they should both be James Bond***.

If you haven't seen her in Live. Die. Repeat, All You Need is Kill, The Edge of Tomorrow, you should. It's the best video game movie ever made and she's the best thing about it. Sicario is a very different kind of a film, but she carries it in the same way that Tom Cruise carries The Edge of Tomorrow. She has charisma. As bad as things get in this movie, as abused as she may be, you want to hang out with her while she is going through this. As much as she carries you through this film, she also carries the burden of the story in a way that is somehow mundane to the core, yet heroic in a way that all lost causes are.

Drugs are all around us and as a culture, as a species, we still don't seem any closer with grappling it today than when we did, well, ever. Beyond being entertaining, Sicario is a way to digest this complex subject in some way. That's what great art does. It leaves us with something more interesting than answers.

Twenty minutes into Sicario, we see Blunt's Kate Macer washing the results of a particularly brutal SWAT raid on a house. That is a thesis statement of the entire film. It's what you'll want walking out of the film or maybe you'll agree with Kate later in the film “I need a drink.”

Amen to that.

Sicario isn't exactly a fun movie. It's packed with tension, it's thrilling in places, and even manages a few laughs, but it isn't fun. It doesn't provide answers or edification. It points its lens at the Abyss for two hours and let's the camera roll. Sicario deserves to be seen, not because it's an uncompromising look into the War on Drugs, but because it manages to be, on the one hand, suffocating and heartless, and on the other, completely and utterly gripping. It's a film that needs to be seen. No, it's more than that. Sicario a film that needs to be witnessed.

FOOTNOTES

* Coincidentally, Kathryn Bigelow produced a documentary about the border and vigilantism called Carteland this year. Obviously something is in the air and it's not just Don Winslow, who I imagine burns his typewriters after every novel to "free the demon.

** Oh, he's British? Of course he's fucking British.

***And also Idris Elba. Rotating Bonds. Can you dig it?

James Kislingbury is a writer, a podcaster, and DAREs to be drug free. You can check out his podcast A Quality Interruption here. You can support his creative endeavors on Pateron here. You can follow him on Twitter here. There are no wrong answers here.

"I'm a sweater, a sweat"

This demands sharing.

Is it awesome? Yes. Is it a bit too much to spend on a joke? Hell yes. Would I wear it in public? Maybe not, but boy would I love to be the kind of guy who does. Maybe some day. Get a cool dog with a mohawk, break up fights on the streets of New York, and wear a really dumb cardigan. . . Yeah. Some day.

Thinking on all that, I recently I read Driven.

James Sallis' sequel is the barest bones of a book. It's almost like reading stage directions. Yet, there's something compelling about that level of minimalism and there's something daring about being willing to write so few words. If it was me-- If I could be asked to finish a novel-- It'd be coming apart at the seems, it would be so swollen with words. Not James Sallis, though. He adverbs, adjectives, all that extra stuff can go get fucked. All he needs is a man, a car, and a direction.

I don't know. It's something to read in your brand new sweater.

The Limey: A Play in Three Rhyming Acts

I was going to write an entry on Ground Zeroes and then maybe Tomb Raider or, at least the Bioshock Infinite DLC. Instead I finally watched The Limey. Top notch relevant stuff on this blog and nothing but!

If you had to compare The Limey with a 1960's crime film-- and I think that we do-- It's much more Performance than it is Get Carter. Saying that now I realize that's exactly the kind of revenge movie the guy who made King of the Hill would make. It's soft and it's odd and it isn't quite what I was looking for. And that isn't a bad thing.

Instead of being this drama driven by anger and spite, it instead circles around the idea of a revenge film without ever actually becoming one. It takes this dreamy, scenic route through the margins of Hollywood and Los Angeles, and through the journey of an emotionally unstable man, and, yet, in the end, it ends up in the exact same place as a Death Wish or any other revenge movie (and, thankfully, without the cliche at the end about how violence never solved anything and "dig two graves" and blah blah blah).

There's a shoot out, there's catharsis, there's bloody resolution. In the end there's all the things you want, but they aren't the same because of the jounrey you took to get there.The Limey is a different kind of movie-- and I don't mean from a thriller, I mean from all movies. It's an odd duck, The Limey. It's probably why I'm so tepid on it. I can't be too enthusiastic about it because I'm still not sure what it is.

The one thing it does really well is shoot LA in a way that doesn't look like any other film I can think of. Well, maybe White Dog. There's a lot of LA mountains in both of these movies. Lots of scrub land.

It isn't glitzy and it isn't glamorous and it isn't the usual heap of B-roll of the western end of Melrose or Sunset. It isn't involved with Hollywood. There is nothing on parade for the tourists. Hollywood, though, touches on the fringes of this world. And like downtown LA in the background of Valentine's apartment, it's a hazy place many, many miles away.


You know what's a slightly better Terrance Stamp road/crime movie? The Hit. I don't remember too much about that one, but I do remember it being pretty good. I'd bet money that Steven Soderbergh feels the same way.

As for artsy genre movies and Steven Soderbergh movies go see Haywire. It's got a solid cast, a plot that doesn't get in the way of some serious ass kicking, and seems to embrace its genre far more than The Limey does.

I'm off to watch Le Duexieme Souffle next. It's a Jean-Pierre Melville movie, so it can only be so bad. I've also had Out of Sight sitting on top of my player for about a month, so maybe I'll finally get around to cracking that one. . . Plus I still have to watch Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill!

Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, somebody make a Performance sequel. Set in in the present. Someone get James Fox and Mick Jagger on the phone. Let's hash this thing out while I still think this isn't a terrible fucking idea.

***

AD ZONE

We've got a new episode of White Guys, Square Glasses up. This one is about the caper/high school/cyberpunk/whatever movie Hackers. There's no time better than now to jump on. . . right as we change the name of the show over to A Quality Interruption.

I have comics! My friends have comics! We make comics together! Our two indie anthologies, Old College Comics Presents and The Freshman Fifteen are on sale now in both physical and digital copies. Like my dumb podcast there is no time better than now to buy!

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I Guess Jack Reacher is Pretty Good?

Jack Reacher is the type of action movie I can watch and enjoy with my parents.

It's simple, straight-forward and is wrapped around the same kind of familiar, procedural drive that a good Law and Order episode has. All the while it delivers the kind of justified violence that you don't have to think about for longer than the length of the scene. It's good fun and, as Mark Kermode might describe it, is perfectly fine "Tab A into slot B fair."

It's an average movie with some truly excellent moments. The car chase in the middle is excellent, so is the comic turn of most of the film's goons. Then there's Werner Herzog, collecting more money for three days of shooting than he probably has for his last three films combined (and that's a cause worth supporting). There's a lot worth liking in this film. And it's on Instant Watch. What are you doing for two hours that's so important*?

At the end of all of this, beyond whether or not it's actually a good movie or if it contributes anything to the human experience besides a mild distraction against our inevitable oblivion, Jack Reacher is a film that is paying the mortgage of the guy who wrote and directed The Way of the Gun**.



That's a cause worth supporting. The Way of the Gun is one of my favorite, little underseen movies***. I think it made all of fifteen dollars at the box office and thanks to cult heroes like Ryan Philipe and that one teacher from Boston Public (you know, the one that kissed the hot chick who wouldn't wear a bra?) it's never really burned up the midnight movie circuit.

It's a brutal, mean little movie that has the energy of a Tarantino movie and the kind of gritty violence that Sam Peckinpaugh, for all his faults, had perfected. It also has bar-none one of the best gunfights in movie history. As much as the movie might be a bit too clever and a bit too self-aware, it's worth seeing, if only, for the fantastic showdown at the end. It combines all of the realistic geographic intensity of Heat with the fun of an old fashioned Wild West shoot-out. In a perfect world we'd see more of this type of scene, but because less people saw it than populated Andorra, we got berserker editing and slow-mo instead. Because the world is a son of a bitch.

I also spent a New Years Eve watching The Way of the Gun watching this with a girl instead of actually doing anything fun. I'm not saying it wasn't a good choice or a proud one in the long run, but that should be a testament to how much I like that movie. Or how much of a mess my own life is. Maybe both.

By the way, I'm still looking for the jacket Benicio Del Toro wears at the end of the movie, so if anybody has any ideas as to what it is, send them my way.

THE AD BLAST

I do a podcast called White Guys, Square Glasses. . . which will be changing its name to A Quality Interruption very shortly. WGSG/A Quality Interruption is a podcast about movies. Cruz and I focus on a single film for about an hour, picking it apart, and often getting side-tracked by our dopey ideas on narrative theory. It's a good time. Our newest episode is about Near Dark, another little Peckinpaugh-esque blast of darkness and horror.

I wrote some comics. You can pick up the stories I wrote in two anthologies: Old College Comics Presents and The Freshman Fifteen. It's got my stories, along with the entries of a whole lot of other, often more talented, people. It's good fun and you're supporting indie publishing. Buy one today!

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FOOTNOTES

*Also, Rosamund Pike is both talented and incredibly attractive! And we're supposed to believe that Richard Jenkins somehow had a hand in producing her!

**Christopher McQuarrie is writing and directing Mission: Impossible 5? Fuck yeah. Good work, Hollywood.

***I even wrote about it way back in 2008 for my college paper. There's a Two Girls, One Cup "joke" on the opposite page. Lord. Were we ever that young?

Donnybrook: No Longer Just the Misremembered Name of a Country Singer

Donnybrook isn't a good book. Go read Crimes in Southern Indiana instead. If I had stopped there, I would have been a happier man and I wouldn't have to write this screed. But that is a road not taken. Here I am. Angry. Bitter. And with the knowledge of so much wasted time burning at the back of my skull.

Donnybrook is never seemed like a book that would suffer from being too classy. It certainly begins with a fine impression. When we first meet each of the principle characters (a desperate, if well meaning good ol' boy-cum-family man, a troubled cop with a tragic past that doesn't matter, and a guy named 'Chainsaw'), we meet them doing what they do best. They are robbing, shooting, and cooking their way off of the page and into our hearts. The lives of these men is a hard-scrabble life at best. Life was never easy for these folks, especially not in this economy (a fact, I feel like we were told more than once, but maybe I am just misremembering my own questionable works of fiction). As a beginning, it's strong.



This all sour as soon as the plot begins in earnest. That is to say, it goes sour as soon as the lack of a plot develops. Because Donnybrook is not so much a story as it is a series of scenes cut at their most interesting point and inserted somewhere else. It is a technique that reminds me of the kind of movies we got in the 90's after Pulp Fiction had its moment in the sun. And like that great glut of movies, this story is found lacking. Instead we are reminded of better stories-- stories like the kind that made up Frank Bill's last book.

As a story, Donnybrook is nothing but smoke and mirrors. We bounce from scene to scene before we can get bored or notice that this scene makes no sense. Smoke and mirrors posing as a structure can still hold an audience captive, but the the bits between the smoke and the mirrors have to be interesting. Unfortunately, in this case, they are not. Instead we are given men named Chainsaw and a Chinese man named Fu, who might be the only named character of color in the entire book (though, luckily, minorities are spared the vomit-coated brush that Bill paints all of his white characters with). The Chinese man is named Fu. Do you want to guess what he is an expert in? I'll give you a hint: He doesn't own a restaurant and he doesn't run a laundry.

It is that special combination of gritty and trite that eventually tipped me over from mild boredom to full blown anger. I cannot pin point when this happened. It might have been when the back-country soothsayer was introduced. It might have been when I said "Fuck you" into the book. The two events might have been related. Of this I cannot be sure.

As a target of my annoyance, I eventually fixated on how taudry the book is, on how fascinated it seems to be with the most ugly things in the world. I became annoyed because it put a spotlight on these things not to tell a story or to make a point, but to show them because it could. These things are there to get a rise out of me for lack of anything better.

We couldn't get characters that we can have empathy for or enjoy the company of. Instead, like some smelly, drunken Richard Stark charicature, we get action after stupid, crap-slick action. An attempted rape? Sure. A racist cripple? Yeah, okay. Haven't seen that in a while. Another scene in a bar? I've never been to Indiana before, but I am willing to believe that it is made up solely of bars. Children literally biting the ankles of a terrible cop? Go on. What about underage prostitution? Toss that in there too! Secret incest family? Sure. What the hell!  It worked for that broad who wrote The Flowers in the Attic and she got at least two movies out of the deal!

Towards the end of the book there's a description of prize fighters huffing spray paint and I had to wonder, with so many other drugs readily available, why they would bother with such lame high school shit? Are they art major drop outs? Is Frank Bill including these scenes because he's playing a game of white trash bingo with himself? Do I actually care?

In black and white, as a list, these things all sound kind of cool. Even making fun of it, I have this thought in the back of my head that I missed how cool they really were. There is no reason that these horrible thing can't be fun ("fun" being, perhaps a relative term. . .).  We want to read about crankheads and bare knuckle boxers, to be enticed by a story, and to believe it if only for the beauty of the prose.

Writers like Cormac McCarthy, Jason Aaron, Garth Ennis, and sometimes even Nick Cave understand how to do this. These are men who write about violence, often in the same kind of back country that Bill sets this story in. They are different from Bill because they know how to forge these horrors into a story. Frank Bill puts forth these ideas like your cat puts forth a dead rat. There is no poetry to it.

Again: The problem is not the inclusion of these things. The problem is that all of this dope snorting, face punching, bear-trap snapping nonsense isn't attached to anything worthwhile. It's just stuff. It's just an ugly pile of stuff. It's a drunk man showing up at your door with a sack full of broken glass saying that he brought you a new window. It's exactly that.


The reason for all of this praise is likely down to Frank Bill being an example of the American dream. He's a guy who came out of nowhere, with his own voice, who wrote a book that, despite its flaws, does violently clip the reality of modern America. He is also a guy who seems like he would drive straight to Missouri and kick Daniel Woodrell's ass if he didn't get a good blurb out of the man.


Crimes in Southern Indiana might not be a great book, but it is a good one. It's solid as a rock. It has a unique voice and does suffer from the kind of sawed-off fragment sentences that litter Donnybrook ("Butted the hot barrel through Dote's hand" and "Released the man's arm. Listened to him grunt and thud into timber" are the kinds of sentences that seem to exist solely as a bloody-minded challenge to any copy-editor who will take them on).

Each chapter in Crimes is not so much a short story as it is a sharp slice through a brutal America. There is something tangible about those stories. And even if you don't quite believe them, they do not overstay their welcome. They are notable for being good stories about brutish things.

Donnybrook has all of the same energy as Bill's first book, yet this energy is going in all of the wrong directions. Instead of taking the kinds of scenes that made Crimes stick out and building a bigger world out of them, they are chopped up, tossed around, and garnished with a sprig of pubic hair. Its length, like its violence, exists merely to exist. It's a shame, because any writer that is this fascinated with having people step on fox traps is a guy who should be actively encouraged to write more. He seems like he should be my kind of writer.

All of this made me think of Mr. Rogers. Besides his impeccible sense of style, he a man who exists as a complete contrast to modern America. He is quiet and kind and has a kind of unimpunable sincerity that I find utterly baffling. Writing this review made me think of this quote:

I think that it’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger — much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire. - See more at: http://www.current.org/1969/05/i-give-an-expression-of-care-every-day-to-each-child/#sthash.Gf56XCaO.dpuf

I think it is much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger-- Much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire.

I think that it’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger — much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire. - See more at: http://www.current.org/1969/05/i-give-an-expression-of-care-every-day-to-each-child/#sthash.Gf56XCaO.dpuf

I think that it’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger — much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire. - See more at: http://www.current.org/1969/05/i-give-an-expression-of-care-every-day-to-each-child/#sthash.Gf56XCaO.dpuf

Mr. Rogers wrote a perfect review of this book before Frank Bill was even born.



FUCK YOU HERE COMES THE AD CANNON BETTER GRAB YOUR BUTT

I wrote some comics! I have two stories and they are collected in both Old College Comics Presents and The Freshman Fifteen (You can buy them here). They're all made by a collection of friends who like writing, who like comics, and do not have a patience for waiting for somebody else to publish their work. We're a little indy upstart and every single purchase lets us know that we're doing something right.

I also do a podcast called White Guys, Square Glasses. This one don't cost you anything but time. Which, to be fair, is something that you can't get back, so I don't blame you for not wanting to spend an hour or so listening to two dingbats ramble on about The Hunt for Red October or Danny Trejo's upcoming (fictional) magnum opus.

And while you're at it, why not follow my twitter?

The Only Other True Detective Theory That You Have to See

I was skeptical, but I'll tell you, now, after seeing this, my eyes are wide open.



There's no coming back from this, people. It's all out there now.

The One and Only True Detective Theory That You Need To Read

There's a lot of chatter on the ol' computer box about who-done-it in the HBO show True Detective. While this show is one of the most talked about programs on TV, one of most important points about the mystery has been ignored. People are focusing on the wrong details and spinning out into crazy conclusions and my theory would save all of those people-- and their readers-- a lot of heartache.

I've been through the episodes over and over again and I think I have a real handle on the TV show and where it's going. I'm no expert, so let know what you're thinking.

(MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD)

(YOU WERE WARNED TURN BACK NOW!)

Okay, here's my theory:

You all need to shut the fuck up and watch the fucking show.

You're not Poirot. You aren't even Miss Marple. Jesus fucking Christ, if you're anything, you're an Inspector Clouseau if he had taken to smoking industrial loads of ketamine instead of having his manservant randomly attack him. Knock it the fuck off and watch the fucking show. Nobody cares about you half-assed, cockamamy ramblings you've dressed up as a "theory." Remember Lost? Remember it? Remember nanobots? Do you? I can see it on your face that you do.

It's going to show its hand when shows its hand. Stop trying to outsmart it. Like solving the mystery before anyone else in the room does makes you enjoy the show any more. That it makes you understand it any more.

The only theory I have about the show and the mystery is that you're all wrong and you're driving me nuts. Shut the fuck up and just be grateful that we're living in the greatest age of television since. . . ever.

Alright. I'm sorry I yelled, but this is what you have brought me to. You think I'm happy about this?

(END SPOILERS!!!!!11!)

The Headhunter becomes the Headhunted!

I like Jo Nesbo.

He mixes the sublime with the vulgar in a way that the best genre writers should. The best stuff, though, that elevates the material. It takes something taudry or cliched-- like murder and greed and theft-- and it turns it into high art. Michael Chabon does it. Donald Westlake did it. Stephen King certainly does it. So does Jo Nesbo.


The adaptation of Headhunters does not do this and while I could go on and on as to why that is the case, I do enough of that here already. This is about being positive. It's about how Jo Nesbo can turn out a good yarn*.

On my podcast episode about the Headhunters film I kept on perseverating  on the idea that "the book was better." As a rule, I hate that phrase. It's lazy, it doesn't mean anything, and worse, it's pretentious. In this case, it happens to be true (which is the worst kind of cliche). While the movie a tolerable, competent thriller, the novel is an ecstatic celebration of that genre.

What makes it worth reading is the ending. It is not exceptional in its writing, Jo Nesbo, for all of his talent is not a Graham Greene or a Cormac McCarthy. Whether because of his translation** or because of his actual style, he's a straight shooter. What he excels at is not so much the prose as it is the form.

The back cover sells Headhunters as a Coen brothers like caper, which is rather disengenious as it's as straight as they come. There's a guy, he's a scum bag, and he commits crime. There is no irony. There is no distance. And there certainly isn't a tone (the Coen brothers, if anything, have that down). I don't now too much about the Norweigians, but I doubt that they have this dry of a humor. . . That is until the last chapter.


Until the last chapter where the narration changes and suddenly you realize that you haven't been reading a violent crime novel, but a comedy of errors. A joke, writ large, with the last chapter serving as the punchline. And what's more, as a twist, it works. It works really well. Because Jo Nesbo's been doing this sort of thing for a while. He knows his way around a murder or two. He also knows his way around a joke.

So, avoid the movie. Read the book. And if you're desperate for a Norwegian movie go watch Trollhunter instead. I mean, I guess.

I read Headhunters smack between Ledfeather and The Long Goodbye, which are two. . . very different books. I also read it on a road trip with my dad. Like the best crime books (the Stark series leaps to mind), it moves at a clipped pace. I doesn't have to fight to keep your attention, because it doesn't give you the time to get bored or annoyed. There's no ruminating, there's just action.

The trick Nesbo plays with Headhunters, especially at such a point in the story is something worth experiencing. . .or at least something to distract you from how boring Wyoming if it ever comes down to it.



THE AD GAUNTLET

I wrote a couple of comic book stories. They're collected in The Freshman Fifteen and Old College Comics Presents along with a lot of other stories from people much more talented than myself. I'm rather proud of the fact that these books came together and I am even more proud of the fact that they are pretty good.

You can listen to more of this type of nonsense on White Guys, Square Glasses. We sometimes talk about crime and we mostly talk mad shit. We just underwent a format change, so we'll be tackling movies like Headhunters more often. . . but hopefully, you know, like, better.


You can also follow my twitter. Hey. It's all optional. Nobody's forcing you, here.

*He's also the only point of connection I have with this attractive Norweigian woman that comes into my work, but that's neither here nor there.

**Then again, I've never made that excuse for Haruki Murakami, but then again, who knows?

Why Aren't I Making Movies?

I just.

Man.

I gotta do something while I'm here.

How Ill are Comics?

The Answer: Comic book are most ill.

As many comics as I have been buying and as many as I have been reading, my To Do List is getting higher and higher. Most of the time, when I buy one of these books-- or any book, really-- it's with the mental concession that I will either learn something about the craft or churn out a non-fiction piece of some kind on this blog. In that way it can do some actual, positive good in my life and not just entertain me, which, hey, I guess that is something. There's a lot of things out there that can't even manage that.

These are the following books that I have bought, but haven't read yet:

 Ghosted.

I'm always up for a good crime story. Supernatural stuff, though? It's about as attractive to me as a gay bar called the "Knife Wound." Even though something like Hellblazer or Hellboy will occasionally drop, you more often than not end up with the same shity paranormal investigator story ever written between 1993 and today excluding The X-Files (but not even all of The X-Files). It is a genre that has created an environment where RIPD could thrive.

Ghosted, luckily, isn't garbage. It seems very much aware of how overpopulated the genre is, as well as how underwhelming it usually is. The first two issues introduce you to a violent and vulgar world where a professional thief is tasked to steal Vincent Price a ghost. And then it gets weird. From what I have read, I liked. I'm looking forward to how this thing plays out.


Sex.

I've been wanting to read a Joe Casey book for a long while and since Butcher Baker is never getting a proper release or conclusion, I figured this is going to have to do. I've heard good things about this book, which allows me to ignore how loathsome I find that "But what if Batman was like this" type of bullshit that I imagine plagues Image's submission department. Plus, when I opened it up there was a lot of boners and tits and I realized that I haven't read a book like that in a long while and I figured the time had come.

Slayground.

Slayground is Darwyn Cooke's next installment in his run of Parker adaptations. There isn't much else to say about it other than the only reason that I haven't touched it yet is that, like a fine wine or a bottle of whiskey, I'm saving this up for the right moment.


Nowhere Men.

I've already read up to where this trade ends, so, really this is all about me re-reading the first arc of the story. I think I've already discussed this book, but it deserves a second mention, because it might be one of the coolest books on the market. It's also the coolest book that I'm reading where I still have no idea what it is that I'm reading.


Nowhere Men has managed to somehow  tell an interesting, clever story that still seems like it's just on the edge of getting started. The seed of the book seems to be "What if The Beatles were super-scientists." Yet by the end of the first issue, that idea has exploded into a kaleidoscope of side plots and ephemera that have still yet to link up or coalesce into a central idea. It's exciting to read where it can be this coy and still be this good. As lost as I might be, this book that has a clear vision and a clear direction and I'm perfectly fine with going along with the ride.

Judenhass.

I think 2014 is the year of me getting up the energy to finally read the graphic novel of the history of anti-Semitism. Finally.

There's a unifying theme in this list, which is that Image Comics is turning out some great work. I don't know what got into the water at Image HQ (which I imagine to be a trailer hidden away the in the mountains and when you knock on the door Erik Larsen comes to it with a shotgun and smelling of battery acid), but it's working. Whatever it is, somebody needs to pump some of it into the Marvel and DC HQs (a glittering skyscraper and a second-hand Soviet satellite, respectively).

The breadth and the quality of works that have come out of that company in the past year is astounding. Manhattan Projects. East of West. Zero. Saga. Satellite Sam. Prophet. Lazarus. Jupiter's Legacy. And those are just the comics that I'm reading. Thinks about how great those books are. Think how weird they are! Think about what this means!

They've got a wide array of books driven by talented people with a vision and that's exciting. It gives me hope. And it makes me think that maybe what's wrong with the world is that I'm just not paying enough attention. At the very least at 9.99 a pop, the price is right.

Now is an exciting time to be a comic book read. I'm glad for it. I'm glad for all of it. Because it'll be a cold day in Hell when I give a good shepherd's fuck about a Guardians of the Galaxy cross-over.

You know you're going to get burnt hanging out with a guy named "Digger"

Over the past few months, George V. Higgins has become something of a hero of mine. His books, like Donald "Richard "Insert Game of Thrones Joke Here" Stark" Westlake*, have a the apperance of being fascile. They seem to write books that just happen. They aren't labored over and they aren't pulled out of the author by pliers. They unfold, naturally, invisibly, and, more importantly, as worthy and interesting works of art. For a guy that wants to get paid to write that is a very appealing concept.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a perfect crime book and while The Digger's Game is a fine book, it doesn't quite reach the heights of Higgins' premiere novel. But maybe that's just because I can imagine Robert Mitchum delivering dialogue in the case of Eddie Coyle. Nobody can compete with that kind of talent.

Part of me suspects that it was written before The Friends of Eddie Coyle  and only came to be published after Higgins' initial success. As I understand this Higgins' career, that's entirely possible. It's also encouraging. The Digger's Game doesn't move as blithely as Higgins' first (published) novel, but it does share a lot of its positive qualities. There is enough shared blood to make Higgins' sophomore novel worth reading.

The first half of the book drags through the titular Digger's problems with, well, everyone, and his bookie's own set of problems. That goes on for a while. There's no real shape to it and its shapelessness doesn't have the same appealing qualities that The Friends of Eddie Coyle or the film Killing Them Softly has. When the novel kicks into high gear and we do get the crusty, complicated bits that made Eddie Coyle so much fun. The world of the entry-level criminal in Boston is an interesting one and The Digger's Game is best when it gets into all that.

After all, who doesn't like a couple of fat drunks talking about stealing fur coats in a dingy bar? Isn't that what we show up to this sort of thing for? Higgins' skill with dialogue is on full display in every scene and it's best when the dialogue is in service of the story at hand. . . or in service of everything else but the story, as many of his characters seem to be worrying about everything but the main story.

In one scene the Digger is more interested in commenting on a baseball game on the TV than he is with negotiating with his loan shark. It's a great detail and even without the rest of the scene, we know exactly where these two characters stand. It's the type of detail I'd like to rip-off. It's the type of detail that shows that, beyond dialogue, Higgins is quite the writer.


In George Higgins' world, and I imagine in the real world, organized crime is more a game of scraping by and bullshitting than it is one of high living and elaborate gunfights. The men of his world live at ground level and they're struggling to stay there. It's closer to my world than The Godfather is. Most of the people I spend time with are at the bottom wrung and, like the Digger, the few people I do know that live on a plinth, I find to be confounding.

The Digger's Game is a book well worth reading and, despite the cover's insistance, it has never been made into a movie. Someone should get on that.Hey, Affleck. Either one of you. Get in on this one. It might get you another Oscar. Because people love this shit.



*Darwyn Cooke just released his adaptation of the Stark novel Slayground, which details Parker's life and death struggle against mobsters in an amusement park after dark. This exists and some people still read bullshit about 

Child of Gluck: A mediocre review of a mediocre movie

Remember this poster? Well, this is at least better than The Savages.

Cormac McCarthy stories are almost guaranteed to bum you out in some way. From main characters being brutally murdered to people losing their innocence, his stories don't tend to comfort. In his universe hope is something to be extinguished. This is no less true of The Counselor, crime film that has more in common with a Greek tragedy than it does with film noir. Of course, that's the shame of it. It isn't trashy enough for noir and it isn't finely tuned enough for tragedy.

I went into this with no little anticipation. McCarthy is my favorite author and Ridley Scott is high in the running for my favorite director (despite his recent run of middle of the road features). Toss in an excellent cast on top of that and you have every reason to believe that this is going to be one of the best movies of the year. How could it not? As it turns out this particular Cormac McCarthy story bummed me out in a new and terrible way.

Sorry. I was just sighing there. Give me a moment. Alright. Let's get to it.

"Congrats! We get paid for this no matter what our Fresh Rating is!"

It's a film of interesting parts and interesting people that is somehow less than the sum of its parts. Somehow throwing all of these people together does not add up in any positive way. We look at McCarthy's name and Fassbender's face and we're only reminded of how much this film lacks. This collection of talent only mockingly reminds us of what could have been.


As much as The Counselor is a reflection on Classical tragedies or maybe the Drug Wars or maybe even the human soul. Or maybe it's just a bunch of assholes hoping that if they talk long enough they'll get to the point. In Blood Meridian this works. In No Country For Old Men this works. And even in Blade Runner you get the sense that somebody, somewhere, either on screen or off has something of note to say.

The film makers don't seem to know what the film is about, so how is the audience supposed to know? In opaque thrillers like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, we're given insight into a world that is completely unknowable to us, yet retains a dramatic spark because somebody in the play does. We're invited to discover what is happening along with the characters. In this case I don't even think the characters know what they had for breakfast. But they sure as hell want you to think that they know.

Maybe the problem isn't that the characters don't know what is going on. It's not their fault that they have no clue what is going on, it's the film makers. They want to make this work of high tragedy with all of the markings of trash pulp and, in the end, it doesn't end up satisfying either genre. Then again, looking at the talent, maybe they did know and they went ahead with it anyways. Now that's a scary thought. . .

All of these concerns aside, the problem real problem of the film is that The Counselor, if it is about anything, it is a movie about furniture.

With every new scene we are treated to a new set, impeccibly shot and designed and with every scene we're treated to another piece of the Herman-Miller collection. Or a French press. Or a computer. Or a cool bar. Or something that you're paying attention to instead of the story. And, oh hey, is that a motorcycle? Cool.


And that isn't a metaphor for the vacuousness of these people's lives. It isn't some sign of their misgotten gains. It isn't a plot point. It isn't mis en scene, for God's sake. It's the movie. It's a series of chairs and tables occasionally broken up by some fool whining endlessly about whatever new nonsense has kinked up their life. And then it goes on for two hours like that and then it ends and you realize that Cameron Diaz must have photos of somebody somewhere.

The movie's fixation with mid-century modern, while laudable is a sign of the film failing on just about every other level. Furniture shouldn't be something I am staring at. Characters should be something I am staring at. Unless I'm autistic and, in that case, that's just how my brain works. In this case I'm just bored. And a little bit angry.

Blade Runner is a movie that I can watch endlessly and, even having seen it probably twenty times, is a movie that still yields little details hiding in the background. It's the perfect example of a world that is fully realized, a world that feeds into the story as the story feeds into it. There isn't a hard line where the plot starts and the set begins, it is all a part of a piece and, like I said with Gravity, that is an incredible sight to see. When it works it is amazing. When it doesn't, it's Avatar.

Ridley Scott, at his best, can design these worlds and make them real in a way that George Lucas once knew how to do and Stanley Kubrick went insane attempting. Even in his less successful films (Kingdom of Heaven leaps to mind), he creates a world with real weight and texture.

A vision of a much better movie.

This isn't even Ridley Scott at his worst. I don't know what this is. It is polished mush. Not a turd, it isn't terrible. Despite how hilarious a scathing review can be, it isn't bad. It's worse than that. It's a shining, grey mess that the man who directed Black Hawk Down and Alien and Thelma and Louise should not be capable of creating.

After doing my time with The Counselor, I feel as though I've picked this movie clean of any hidden detail. And the details I've found are unremarkable in all aspects except for how unremarkable they are.


I have the Mark Kermode go-to line about a movie of this nature. That "There's a good 90 minute exploitation movie in there" and as much as I think there's truth in that line, I don't think there is in this case. There is something fundamentally wrong with this film and it cannot be solved by trimming it down. It was perhaps rotten at birth and should have been drowned at the earliest possibility. A lot of heartache and dollars could have been saved that way. Instead we have a fully grown monstrosity to deal with and we have to wonder to ourselves "How could this have gone so bad?"

The Counselor doesn't sadden me because it's awful or because of a widespread series of failures. It saddens me that the collective talents of Cormac McCarthy and Sir Ridley Scott and many others made a work of art that merits the phrase "It's alright."

Who saw that coming?



SIDE NOTES:

This was made for 25 million dollars? Alright. I am slightly more okay with this movie now. Slightly. Guardedly. Shamefully.

After walking out of this, I was left wanting a new, good McCarthy movie that I almost want to see Child of God. You hear that? Jesus Lord. The Counselor has wanted me to seek comfort in the arms of a necrophiliac tone poem adapted by a guy who could barely read a cue card at an awards show.

I'm still going to buy the screenplay. I have a collection to keep up. At the very least, it's always nice to have a cautionary tale that is concrete.

Maybe someone out there will pull a reverse No Country For Old Men and take an average movie and adapt it into a good book. SD Perry, you still working? I think we got a job for you.

I hate Salon, but this review is a delight.

THE AD ZONE: 

I just had a comic printed! It's 40 page comic that features a new, 22-page story, along with a ten pager that came out last year in the Freshman Fifteen. It's cheap. It's easy. It's fun and it keep me from dialing that assisted suicide guy that I found on Tor for one more month. It's not on Graphically yet (the old one is), but, in the mean time, think about it, won't you?


I also do a podcast with my friend Cruz (and, formerly, my friend Joe). It's called White Guys, Square Glasses and it's a lot of fun. I think so, anyways. If you like laughter and ribaldry and dirtbags sounding off about movies and stuff, maybe give it a listen? Or at least subscribe to it on iTunes and never listen to it. Either way, we win.

Shotgun Blast of White Trash

Killer Joe is not so much a crime film as it is a kaleidoscope of scum. And not your average scum, either. The kinds of scum that walk the earth of Killer Joe need to be scrubbed from the earth with chemical fire. If there was ever a film that would make you want to take a shower, this is the one.

A more snide director would look down on the target family of the film and a more exploitative one would look up to them, but Freidkin is far more intruiged by looking at them dead in the eyes. It isn't that he avoids judging them, it's that there'd be no point to it. It'd be like explainingthe meter of a sonnet to a pig eating a boot. Morality and judgement would be wasted on this family, and for that they are sort of likable. Sort of. In the same way dive bar vomit might have a kind of charm. We like them enough to see what horrid shit-pile they'll roll into next.

I was talking to a friend of mind and she said that after a certain point, she just stopped watching Kiler Joe. This strikes me as a sane response to this movie. For the rest of us, the ones who want to see humanity at its Biblical worst, this movie is the movie for you. Just, you know, make sure you have a luffa handy.

A scene that does not stick out in Killer Joe.

All of this is tied to together by Matthew McConaughey's titular character, a merciless man who seemed to have missed his calling as either a cult leader or a super-soldier made out of the husbands of 1970's porn actors. He's clean and competent and for that, he acts as a welcome respite from a universe that really needs a bath. Or a wetnap, at least.

Not to get off topic here, but it kind of reminds of The Great Gatsby. Yes, that The Great Gatsby. Now stick with me here.

To me Tom was always the least terrible of any of the character (which in the context of The Great Gatsby means that he least resembled a weapon's grade goat asshole). Sure he drank, cheated, had strong feelings about the dominance of the white race, and hit his wife, but at least we knew where he stood. There was something honest about him. Myrtle is run over he's the only one who seems to feel bad about it outside of how this dead body was going to eat into this mid-morning squash session. He's capable of love, while everyone else, from Nick to Daisy to Gatsby himself are self-obsessed, vapid bores who think that not having a soul can be made up for by having a really great head of hair.

This is what makes Killer Joe a kind of hero of the film. He's the most insidious and violent, yet he's the only one with any measure of honesty or competence. Everyone else is exactly who they appear to be (with one, notable exception). You sort of root for him, as much as you can root for a murderous, border-line sex criminal. That, if anything, indicates just what a morally bankrupt film that Friedkin and Letts have constructed.

As disgusting as this movie is, in the end, it manically and brutally wraps everything up with such suddenness that you feel as though someone was fucking with you the entire time, and instead of it being a moment of annoyance, there's this sense of pleasure that you've been fucked with by somebody who is really, really good at it. Killer Joe feels like what would happen if the Jackass guys were really into committing crime. I don't know that there are many other experiences like that in film.

As it turns out that's a good thing.

"More fuck-up than shoot out" sound about right. . .

I rented Savages because I was really in the mood to see some good, old fashioned brutal violence. I wasn't looking for intellectual stimulaiton or anything that would risk stirring my emotions. I just wanted to see some cartels-- OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON WITH JON TRAVOLTA'S HEAD

Savages is a movie that doesn't know what it is supposed to be. On the one hand it seems to want to position itself as a kind of light, poppy caper and on the other hand it wants to be a movie about doing business with professional decapitators. These are two completely different tones and in this case the film makers have failed to mix them together properly. It's not pulpy enough to be fun and it isn't serious enough to hit you where it hurts. This is made worse by the fact that the high school, drug culture jerk-off fantasy works about as well as the gritty level narco-drama.

Traffic this ain't.

This poster is by far and away the coolest thing about the movie.

If there's a line that universally measures the tone and pitch of a movie, on the one end it would have The Hudsucker Proxy and on the other hand there is No Country for Old Men. If Savages had to fall somewhere near No Country for Old Men. Then it would do a pump fake, make a run for Hudsucker, then trip right before it got to comedy, but then doubled-back, lost its nerve ten yards short of the goal line, and then have a seizure. At that point you wouldn't be able to figure out if this is serious and you should get help or if it's just part of the movie or if you should care at all.

Anyways, the point is that the Coen Brothers are very good at directing different kinds of movies and they're very good at mixing things together in a way that feels both new and, somehow, classic. They have a wide range of interests and skills and even when they stumble with a movie like Burn After Reading, at least it's interesting. At least they're swinging for the fences.  At least they have a clue what they're doing.

Other movies I should have watched instead include: Days of Heaven, The Sand Pebbles, and Lolita.

Then the movie references the ultimate version of this film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which is a reference that only serves to remind you of a much better film.Envoke a superior film at ye peril. I mean, Prometheus does this, a movie with some profound problems, but it only illicits the memory of Lawrence of Arabia, a movie that is so completely different from Prometheus that it almost (almost) doesn't matter. Then again maybe Oliver Stone thinks that kids today don't know what Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is and he thinks he's showing off. He seems to think that's the case with Iraq.

Butch Cassidy et al. is the exact sort of film that you shouldn't bring up in your film. Ever. Especially when what you're doing is a lesser version of the film you're quoting. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is the movie that Savages wishes it was. We all know and love that movie.  It's a movie with an incredible lightness of touch. With the exception of the bicycle scene, it never brings you out of the world it has set-up. It is one of the great pieces of cinema and even forty years later, it still feels and fresh and original as it ever did.

The problem is that Oliver Stone has the lightness of touch of a gorilla that has recently discovered needle drugs. He can't combine comedy and action or grit and froth. It's not what he does. Subtlety is not one of his strong suits. He's a director that goes loud and in one direction. For better or for worse that is what he does. Except that with Savages, the direction he has gone in is a grandpa trying to understand what Justin Bieber is and why she has a Twitter.

Besides Stone's disconnect with classic films, he doesn't seem to understand the modern world, either.
There's just something that uncompelling and sad about a famous leftist filmmaker trying to a movie about contemporary issues, especially when you consider the things he seems to be commenting on were old news five years ago. I mean, for fuck's sake, he's got a scene that involves Mexican gangsters watching The Hills.

Then the movie also throws in a rape for no reason and it has an ending that revolves around multiple suicides (that really isn't a spoiler). For those keeping track at home, rape and suicide are just about the laziest thing a writer can do to give a story weight. Then there's the fact that it is just plain leery.

If you want to write about rape and/or suicide, let me give you some advice: Don't. Please.

BEHOLD! The face of evil!

The most compelling thing about the movie is its view on evil. It doesn't exist as a preening Scarface-type. Instead, evil presents itself as either in a workman-like manner (as in Benecio Del Toro's character) or in the form of Salam Hayak's evil Anna Wintour. The movies view is that despite all of the drugs and the exoticism still bases its villains in a world that is incredibly mundane. They worry about their family and getting their job done and keeping their world together. They aren't out to hit the city with Joker gas or make a Bond villain speech in the war room. Sure it's a real world three or four steps removed from the realities of Mexico's current war on drugs, but it is one familiar to Americans.

It's odd, because Del Toro's character seems like he might exist somewhere on the planet Earth, which is something that cannot be said about anyone or anything else in this movie.

Then again, it goes out of its way to set our white boy drug dealers as real nice guys. They're positioned as a combination of Robin Hood and Bob Marley. Sure, they're drug dealers, but they're good guys, so it's okay to like them! I don't want to like them. What I want is to see a good movie. Do you ever think that Billy Wilder ever worried about whether somebody was going to like one of his charaters? Or John Huston? Or anyone who knows what they're doing? What a waste of energy. If they're worth liking, the audience will like them, they don't need to be told that they're good guys first. The same goes for the bad guys. That's what works the best in the movie: The bad things.

Over a thousand words and I didn't mention these fucking dreads once.

OTHER OBSERVATIONS:

*Blake Lively is a great set of skin and hair and not much else.

*"No, waiter, I'm sorry, I ordered the Hollywood Movie Star, this is Taylor Kitsch. Please send it back."

*I really want to watch Way of the Gun right now. Wash the taste of this Savages out of my mouth. Also, that is another movie that quotes Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid that isn't completely overshadowed by it.

*The word isn't "IED," the word is "bomb." All bombs are improvised. We've been using that word for a long time and nobody ever got confused as to what a bomb was. We were doing just fine without a goofy acronym. Further more, what kind of a fucking Navy SEAL says "We'll set up a few IEDs?" No Navy SEAL, that's who. Actually, no human. Even terrorists or insurgents wouldn't use the phrase "IED" while planting an IED.

*Nobody seems to live in any of the houses in this movie. I have never seen 20-something stoner's love den that well kept. I've seen model houses that are bigger messes than the places in this movie.

*A coked up lawyer making sushi at home? Does Oliver Stone think it's still 1985? Does he have that thing Liz Lemon's brother has?

*"There's a reason it's called a highjacking." Fuck you.

*"I get orgasms, he gets wargasms." Fuck you.

*"Every business has an origin story." Fuck you. EVERYTHING has an origin story. That is a nothing statement.

*"Just because I'm telling you this story, that I'm alive at the end. Yeah. It's that kind of a story." Fuck you. What does that even mean? Alright. I'm calm. Now imagine an alternate world where William Holden was forced to say that and now feel bad for everything in the world.

*"My ex-wife used to call me 'Sushi.' Cold fish." Fuck y-- Oh, wait, wrong monologue.

*"Savages." Fuck you to Hell.

"If your definition of a friend. . . "

". . . Is someone who tells you that a trailer for a Cormac McCarthy and Ridley Scott movie has been released, then you have no friends."



What the fuck, guys? Why were you holding this from me?

Gun Machine is Good Medicine

Gun Machine, like most of Warren Ellis' work is about shoving interesting people into a situation that is both familiar and chock full of  big ideas that one would never think to associate with something as pat and done as a murder mystery. Law and Order this is not.



With Ellis it's always been less about the results than it seems to be about this passage of time between the covers. There are exceptions to that, but you look at Planetary or Crecy and you see that the grand story takes a backseat to the plot. The moment is more important than the sum total. He is less interested in presenting the why of an interplanetary spaceship hidden underneath the pavement of New York City than he in presenting what that would do to a guy. The depths of his work come out of passing through the world and not out of some traditional conclusion. He rarely ever bothers with telling you that this all means something, instead he lets you sort it out from the puzzle pieces he left behind.

Gun Machine is very much in that style. It seems to be about what these characters are presently dealing with rather than how all of the pieces come together. It is about gears, not the machine. This approach to a procedural prevents the story and all of its threads getting in the way of its main characters. You see this the various history lessons it presents (that seem to have only a tangential baring on the plot) and you see it in how they go about solving the crime. There aren't any hard revelations, there is just the continuation of these characters putting work into this horrific murder contraption that spans New York City. Rather, there's just people dealing with their moment to moment problems. Sometimes those moments involve horrible, roccoco murders.

And you see this in the fact that the serial killer of the story doesn't even have a name (and it even says in the book that it doesn't seem to matter). It isn't about who he is or why he's doing it, the story is about what he is doing and how to stop him.

Another one of Ellis' strengths are his characters. While all great stories tend to have really memorable characters, there is just something special about characters like Spider Jerusalem or Jakita Wagner or just about anyone from Agents of HATE. He writes vulgar, violent characters that are fun to listen to and who you want to hang out with, even if they are utter maniacs and Gun Machine has all of that in spades, even if they aren't as cranked as high as the kind of characters that populate his comic book work (or even Crooked Little Vein, from what I remember).

Ellis' John Tallow, like James Bond, seems to have a name that is designed to be forgotten. He's a terminally uninteresting person and has spent much of his life working at that.

Ellis doesn't seem to be too interested in Tallow's life. That might be because he doesn't have one. The lifeless detective is a blanched human being just short of being a cipher. But being a cipher at least shows the hand of the author, however lazy, Tallow is just, well, he's just a nobody. He's a cop that, like so many people seems to be in the place he is because life carried him along like a piece of driftwood.

Another character that Tallow reminds me of is another sluggish, troubled detective, which is Jo Nesbo's Harry Hole

In that way he is different from the long tradition of troubled detectives. Tallow might not be as complex as a Harry Hole (by the very nature of Hole being featured in nearly 10 novels), but he also cannot be accused of being cliched, except by the laziest and, I'm sure, simple of critics. It certainly is brave to write a main character with no distinguishing personality and it's certaintly a sign of skill if the author can get away with it like Ellis does.

And I want to see the further adventures of John Tallow. Though, there is another difference, which is that Nesbo avoids giving his audience hard and definite ends to al of his book's crises because he has a series to continue and Hole has a life to live beyon this one book. Ellis, on the other hand, just doesn't seem that interested.

What Tallow and this world exists as is perfectly fine. Yet, I want to see more of the batshit insane CSU personnel and I want to see Ellis contrive a way to make Tallow into some kind of a human being, which is something that Tallow seems desperate to try and avoid.

In a way it doesn't matter as this book is all about present action. Seeing Tallow in the future where the past begins to creep into his life would be interesting to see, I also just want more lines like “I am a Crime Scene Unit detective for the New York City Police Department, you heinous fucking mongoloid and there is nothing I cannot do.” If that means that some of the quality of the story is going to suffer, then I guess I'll just have to be okay with that.

On the downside, too much of the story relies on coincidences that a first year screenwriting student would be forced to hack out.Then again it's these coincidences that keep the book from getting bogged down. They're depressingly convienient plot devices. While the plot and the characters are what stand out in this book, they also stand out because they have to do most of the heavy lifting. In many ways the story is an excuse to get their people into rooms with each other and to explain weird things about New York's crypto-geography and that's all well and good, but I don't know that's what the novels were built for.

I still wonder if the novel is Ellis' artform. I do not that even if it isn't one of his mastered mediums, he can still crank out a worthwhile novel that still has all of the massive ideas and creative cursing that you come to expect from the man who dreamed up Spider Jerusalem. Though, creative cursing isn't exactly what one goes to books for (or even comic books for that matter). Ellis is lacking something in this book. As much fun as it is and as many wonderful ideas are on display, none of it adds up to something more significant than just a kooky murder mystery. I guess I'm okay with that.

I just re-read Ennis' Global Frequency, which was recently re-printed in a single trade in its entirety. It's a fantastic comic book and a perfect example of what the medium can do. As a book it moves like a hyper-manic love child of Mission: Impossible and The Twilight Zone. This book introduces these amazing ideas and then casts them off as soon as the story moves along. It isn't in love with its own cleverness, just in telling the story. Besides being a good yarn, it also might make one wonder why the fuck the X-Men need 27 issues and four cross-over books to tell the same kind of story (but with less thrills, emotions, and cost).

I mention this book in the same breath as Gun Machine because, while they are completely different kind of books, they share the same DNA. They are both stories about ideas and these ideas, in turn, help move the plot. The only real difference is that Global Frequency doesn't ever feel like a character has shown up simply to let you know about something rad. There simply isn't enough space for that sort of thing.

Global Frequency reads like a form of Ellis' style and interests that has been boiled down to a crystal form that is either perfectly suited as a weapon or a high-quality narcotic. It takes all of the dark corners that Ellis' stories exists in and only shows us them in these fast-paced forms that are already half-way finished by the time we get to them.

They are almost all tinged with Ellis' unshakable sense of hope, as well. He isn't an optimist, not exactly, but he is a guy that seems to believe that if the right people are there they can outsmart, outfight, outkill, and outlive the worst that the universe has to offer.

While it is also infected with Ellis' hyper-competent, benevolent dictator/Nietzchian superman character that he loves so dearly (ie: Men and women so intensley skilled that you deserve to be murdered by a robot for even bothering to ask who they are and why they are yelling so loud. See: Spider Jersualem, Elijah Snow, and Miranda Zero and maybe the bad guy in Gun Machine if he wasn't, you know, a baddie). As a comic book archetype, there are worse people to spend time with. At least they help stop cyborgs or solve mysteries about angels or gouge out each others' eyeballs.

Reading these two books in such close proximity, though, reminds me why I like Ellis so much and why he is so well regarded in the comics community (or at least why he should be). This trade also serves as is another piece proving that Ellis is not only one of the great storytellers living, but he is also one of our great idea men.

(And not to end this on a love in Wolfskin and Black Summer are both swollen dog corpses that were drowned in a shit-bog. Avoid these comics at all cost. One is lifeless to the point of being offensive and the other is incoherent dreck only serves to remind one that there are stories that exist that have beheadings for a reason.)