In Which I Finally Crack

Or “Well, that got out of hand quick”

A Review AvP #4

Part Fourteen of "James Versus Fire and Stone"

The nightmare is over. We have reached the end of the tunnel and there is light. Alien Versus Predator did not bury us, but sometimes I wish it had.

In many ways AvP #4 is worse than I could have imagined. The one-liners seem to have been written by a child. The art is lazy and muddy in new and stupid ways. The story. . . well, it actually makes sense, so there's that. Yet, despite all of this it's also the funniest released so far. AvP #4 is the issue in which is has passed through the vortex and emerged on the other side as “So Bad It's Good,” as opposed to “So Bad It Should Be Sealed Away in a Vault Forever and Ever.” Congrats, Sebela and Olivetti. You did it.

All that said, don't buy this run of Aliens Versus Predator. Don't read it. Don't even think about it. Speak not its name. Know not its horrors. With all of that said, I have this horrible feeling in the back of my head that tells me that my life is going to be ironically saved by this final issue somehow, and, honestly,, I don't know if death is better.

“Consumer” is an ugly word, isn't it? I'm no communist, but it is certainly revealing of what the people in charge of production think of us, doesn't it? What do you do? Do you enjoy? Do you ruminate? Do you meditate? Do you absorb? No. You consume. It's a reduction of a human being to a medium that moves money.

It's part of a trend, or at least a change in our perception of what art is. It's a devaluing of what it is. You see it all over and, unlike being a consumer, you actually see

I guess it's probably always been this way. I mean, how old is that "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" essay? Gotta be pushing a hundred, right? The modern twist is that we seem to have accepted just how crappy things can be. This is a crappiness not thrust upon us, but a crappiness we have taken into our hearts.

You see this with how we watch TV. We don't watch it any more, we "binge watch." It's depressing. Besides it taking its terminology from one of the more decadent mental dysfunctions we've drummed up as human beings-- is that it has helped eliminate the idea that we should pause and take any time to think about anything. Want to think about what this means for Walt and Skyler's relationship? Maybe? Fuck it, put the next one on. There's no breathing room. There is no time for (Japanese word for “breathing room”). There's just non-stop noise. A wall to wall assault on the senses

What'd you do with Breaking Bad? I consumed it. Great. I'm sure that's what Vince Gilligan and everybody wanted you to do with their art. Then again, maybe they did. I'm sure the paycheck doesn't look any different.

It is as though, at some point, we all watched They Live, smiled, nodded, and then put on another episode of Friends (now on Instant Watch!). Sometimes, some of us need a Trashcan of Reason to the head. I paw through AvP, desperately trying to make sense of it, and I think that Trashcan has finally arrived at my head.And if you're not a consumer, it's not like you get upgraded. Instead, what are you? You're a fan. Great!

“Fan” is an equally ugly little word. It comes from fanatic. I supposed being a fanatic of Transformers is a vertical move away from the type of cave dweller that flies planes into buildings, but the connotation is there. I mean, nobody likes fanatics, do they?

I look at Aliens Versus Predator, and the trend our media is stuck in in general and I think “God. Can't we do better than this?” We're science fiction nerds. We supported Star Trek and Richard Matheson and Harlan Ellison and Kurt Vonnegut. We watched Twilight Zone when it was more than just a marathon on Thanksgiving Day. We believe in ideas. We like weird shit. Now what do we foam at the mouth at? A Jurassic Park sequel? Another Disney movie based on a ride (based on a retro-future)? Is this the future we were building for ourselves? Do we somehow deserve this?

The depressing capper on all of this is a realization I had about Steven Spielberg. Twenty-some years ago he made Jurassic Park. If he was an up and coming film maker today, he would be relegated to a Jurassic Park reboot. Or a fucking monkey movie reboot sequel and you fucks think you're going to break me? And, yeah, most of those movies are fine, some better than fine, but, really, what would you rather have? Jurassic Park or another Jurassic Park sequel?

So Dark Horse pumps out bullshit like Aliens Versus Predator and it sells. And it has for decades. To quote a film executive in the early 90's, “I could piss on a wall for two hours and call it Alien 3 and it would make sixty million dollars.” Names sell. Divorced of even its source, we still lap it up and, why? Because we're consumers. We're fans. It's what they expect of us because it's the easy thing to do. And, fuck that. It's a marketing strategy that takes us for saps.

But there's hope. There are people doing right by us, people that aren't looking for another inch of flesh to fuck us in. In comics we have Jonathan Hickman, for one. Between East of West and Manhattan Projects, he's making some of the craziest, most interesting sci-fi out there (and that isn't to mention his work for Marvel, of which I have only read Agents of SHIELD, which was, well, a book of questionable quality and purpose). He's a man who is swings for the fences and connects most of the time. He's a writer who is worth spending some time with.

Then there's Matt Fraction, Fionna Staples, Grant Morrison, Ales Kot, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and Brian K. Vaughn. John Arcudi, Guy Davis, and Mike Mignola are still doing their crazy apocalytic stuff with Hellboy and the BPRD with the same publisher that shoveled AvP out into the street. There's also Brandon Graham and his legion of artist and writer collaborators, who are playing DM with the Prophet license (proving that you can take a terrible license and make it into something wonderful). Hell, if we want to let Brian Wood back out of the cold, he's doing some solid work with The Massive. Then there's the legion of small publishers and indie artists doing their thing under the radar. It's not all gloom.

Now that I think about it, if you're into that sort of thing, even licensed comics seem to be pretty good nowadays. So, I don't know. There's hope. We just have to accept it. As consumers, as fans, as binge watchers, it's up to us to us to determine what the marketplace looks like. Or, god forbid, a gallery space. What's the Against Me lyric? "Be the bands you want to hear."

Overall, I look at the way we look at art and the way it's presented to us is done so in the most crass, disposable fashion. We aren't aficionados. We're consumers. Or we're fans. We don't appreciate thing. We binge on it. And we are expected to move on to the next thing. I don't think that's the way to look at good art and I don't think that it's the way we should be looking at art. Like I said, we're better than that.

Life is short and miserable enough without going out of your way to fill it with bad stuff. It's an exhausting way to live. That's the only lesson I think I can impart to you: Seek out the things you love and go love them. Try to make sure that the things you fill your life with and spend your money on aren't crass and disposable. You're better than that. Unless you just want to live in garbage, because the universe will always find a place for simple people with too much money in their hands.

What does AvP #4 get? ONE OUT OF FIVE CHESTBURSTERS. It's barely a book. It's barely a story. It's terrible. Read anything else, because the odds are good that even if it sucks, it'll be better than this piece of shit. The only pleasure I got from the book was when it was done. And even that was tinged with annoyance.

Ack. I need a musical break.




You can read the previous installments of "James Versus Fire and Stone" below:
Predator #3
Aliens #4
Prometheus #4
Alien Versus Predator #3
Aliens #3
Predator #2
Prometheus #3
Alien Versus Predator #2
Aliens #2
Predator #1

Prometheus #2

Alien Versus Predator #1

Alien #1 and Prometheus #1

James Kislingbury is a writer and a podcaster and a big game hunter. If you like what you read, you can support his podcasting endeavors by going to his Patreon. Or don't. Whatever. Be that way.

The Vampire Hit the Street Junksick

The Vampire Hit the Street Junksick:

Some thoughts on Only Lovers Left Alive

For some reason the need to watch a movie about people blowing up aliens has gone right out of me.
Instead, I want to see a movie about people. I want to see a movie that somebody actually wanted to make. What I don't want to see is something that was made to pad out a conglomerate's figures on the tertiary market. Over the past few years I have made great strides to avoid being a snob. I have no problem with popular cinema. I'm just tired of it. I want to see movies about emotions and things that I haven't felt or seen before.

So I went and saw a vampire movie.

As far as genres go, it'd be hard to think of a more dessicated one than the vampire movie.

Jim Jarmusch, as you might recall, is a great filmmaker and side steps all of the typical pitfalls of the vampire legend by instead re-framing it within the context of music legend. Instead of Bram Stoker and Anne Rice, we get Link Wray and Iggy Pop. There is a club scene in the film, but it's about as far away from The Hunger or Blade as you could imagine. It looks like a real place inhabited by real people who have real emotions, but a few of them just happen to be vampires.

As much as the movie is a reflection of other works of art (it name checks Byron and Mary Shelly to name but a few), it stands on its own. It's a kind of film that, like Le Samourai, a movie he paid homage to in Ghost Dog, doesn't emulate any sort of scene. It is the invention of a scene. To say that it is a "cool" movie makes it slightly trite. It makes it sound as though it's the kind of movie that people in their early 20's enjoy and no one else. As it is more than a vampire movie, it is more than a cool movie. It's a literate movie about people trying to make sense of their lives. They just happen to be really cool. And vampires.


One of the other aspects that makes Only Lovers Left Alive stand apart from the other genres in its bloodline is that it is proper art. And not because it's good or because it's slow and has some subtitles or that a movie with a flaming crossbow can't be art. This movie is art because it's thoughtful in both an emotional and intellectual sense. It has something to say about human (or vampire) relationships and how they change over time. It has something to say about the state of the world and about the many things we fill our minds with to keep from thinking about death. It's about more than that, as well. It's the kind of movie that you talk to your friend at a party after you've had too much red wine.

Only Lovers Left Alive is, like The Limits of Control and Broken Flowers, a movie for the patient. It takes its sweet time and it doesn't particularly care whether or not you're following along. Like everything that is truly cool (and I think that we can all accept the premise that Jim Jarmusch is a cool man, I mean, just look at him), it doesn't feel the need to help you along. It doesn't need to rush anything. Instead it convinces you that you're right there with it, that you're hip enough to know what's going on at all times. It's a trick of cinema and a testament to Jarmusch's skill that you are convinced right up until the last frame.

More than skill, though, one of the admirable aspects on display in Only Lovers Left Alive is Jarmusch's love of making movies. Another line of his that I cary around with me is that he doesn't see himself as a professional, but as a amateur. He doesn't make movies to make money. He makes movies becuase he loves them. Even in his worst film you can see this drive at work. In Only Lovers Left Alive, you not only see it, you feel it. This movie comes from a place of love as much as it is about love.

Towards the end of the film John Hurt, playing the long-since-thought-dead Christopher Marlow, says to his adopted family that "Humility will get you nowhere." It's clearly posed as an ironic statement (and not a spoiler, incidentally). There's a smile at the edges of John Hurt's mouth in a way that only he can that tells you that there is something more to his words. It's a line that encapsulates the depths that the movie possesses. It's melancholy, yet slightly funny. It speaks to a larger world, yet is also about a few people having a moment. It also sums up the man who wrote it.


Unlike the Marlow of this film Jim Jarmusch is in no danger of suffering the same fate. While many other indie directors have changed course or become massive stars or simply faded away, Jarmusch is still there, quietly being the artist that we would all like to be. Humility, it seems, has gotten him somewhere.

This is the coolest vampire movie I've seen since Near Dark. It defines itself in a different manner. Near Dark is about violence and family. Only Lovers Left Alive is about guitars. And it's also about books. And all of the albums you talked about with your first girlfriend. It's about all of the emotions you invest in these things criss-crossing with one another. Most of all, though, it's about love and what that does to people over the long term. It's a movie that you're surprised that no one has made before. It seems to fully formed, so fully thought out, that it seems like it's always been there. It's the kind of movie that only Jim Jarmusch could make.

(Because, at a certain point in this movie, Adam and Eve have a full-blown junkie lean going on. You'll know it when you see it.)

James Kislingbury writes comics and podcasts. You can follow him on Twitter @kislingtwits.

Sex: It's What People Do

Author's Note: It's been pointed out to me that this has a lot of, shall we say, unfinished sentences? While I appreciate the effort I am well aware of my lack of a copy-editor that isn't my cat. The following is a second go at this article.

As discussed in a previously post, I went on a bit of a comic book buying binge. I blame Christmas. And my poor impulse control. And a lot of things.

Speaking of which, one of the comics I bought is Sex.

I don't know that I've ever read a Joe Casey comic before. There was a time when I wanted to pick up Butcher Baker the Righteous Maker, but since that violently imploded, I think I'll take the long way around to checking out that book. From my understanding Mr. Casey is a man who takes superheroes and pits them against situations that are completely opposed to superheroics or situations that are the ultimate conclusion of the superheroing business. (Trade? Practice?)

That's a fine way to go about things. It's also as much a part of the comic landscape as the straight stories about people in capes. He seems far less pleased with his ideas than a guy like Mark Millar does and he also seems far more talented than the kind of "But what if Batman was in real life!?' type of nonsense that pours out of the Preview pages.

Sex's particular take on superheroes is "What if Batman quit being Batman? Also, what if everyone in Gotham City was a sexual maniac? Also, what if costumes were a poorly explored metaphor about sexual dysfunction?" And then it goes from there. Kind of. In its defense it doesn't feel cheap or exploitative. Maybe it's because I'm so jaded and cynical, but I never batted an eye at the sexual content of the book.

Then again maybe that's also a problem. If I'm not batting an eye at the contents of a book that was sold with the tagline "IMAGE WANTS YOU TO BUY SEX" then maybe something has gone wrong somewhere along the lines.

Though, the boners and the tits are there. My reaction is sort of tempered by the fact that they are there and they are sticking up at you. If that's the sort of book you were looking for-- and I thought I was-- then Sex will deliver.

The main problem with the book is that as good looking as it is, it is listless. Appropriately listless considering the theme. Or one of the themes. I'm not sure I care to parse them out. Our main character is primarily defined by the fact that he doesn't do anything. He has a thrilling past and one full of trauma and psychological conclusion, yet we're stuck in the present with this white goofus who seems to have the acting range of an opium addled Keanu Reeves.

Like scenes like this? Well, don't get used to them.

Ennui isn't an emotion that moves stories forward. That's a lesson we never quite learned from the French.

This lack of drive carries over to Sex's world building. In works like Watchmen or The Winter Men or any number of other books in this vein we have fully realized worlds that are as much a part of the story as the characters or the dialogue. Batman has had 70 years to throw a world together, but as readers we know what Gotham City is. It's a place that is alive and that has real weight. As a writer Joe Casey is making an analogue of Gotham City without any of the texture of that city. In Sex we're treated to a lot of men in suits and skyscrapers. Saturn City doesn't feel like a real place and that's important if your main characters aren't exactly leaping off of the page.

As far as Sex's supporting characters, we have the Alpha Brothers (the world's one and only Sebastian O cosplay gang), The Old Man, Keenan, and this world's Catwoman stand in, each weaving in and out of each others' lives, trying to make a living in a world without Batman the Armored Saint. Yet, by the end of the trade the only thing that's changed in any of their lives is that Not Catwoman had to get glasses. Which she thinks makes her look old. Considering that Lisa Ann is the world's most popular porn star and she's known for dressing up like another well known MILF, I can't help but feel that Not Catwoman can't see the forest for the trees. You know. Literally in this case.

Plus the main character has a goatee and what the fuck is that in 2014?

Overall, though, the book is rather humorless. I mean. It's called Sex. I'm not looking for Benny Hill here, but if you're going to have superheroes standing around not being superheroes, at least make me smile. I mean, Lord almighty nobody is having fun in this book. I'll go watch Shame if I wanted that. (I don't.)

All in all I'm excited that Hayao Miyazaki is making comics again. I want to read something nice.



WELCOME TO THE AD GAUNTLET--

I came out with a comic book myself. It's called  Old College Comics Presents and it's pretty fucking exciting. The cover looks great. The paper stock is solid. Some of the words and drawings together are pretty decent, too. If you're not interested in picking up the new comic, we also have an old one (It's called The Freshman Fifteen. Get it?). Either way, who are you to resist?

(It seems our website hasn't been updated. . . Huh. That'll have to be resolved rather soon. . .)

I do a podcast with my actor friend Cruz Flores. It's called White Guys, Square Glasses. It is a title that is 75% accurate. If you like the kind of nonsense I've written in the above article you might like the kind of nonsense that falls out of my mouth on our show. It's about media and pop culture and rambling on about whatever catches our fancy. In short: It's a podcast. But it's one from me.

Let's Rap About Fast Five

Thanks to my friend Rachel (and about a dozen other caring people) I was made aware of one of Criterion's 50 Percent Off Sales. After deliberation that's probably lasted a year or so, I decided to purchase one of Stanley Kubrick's lesser known masterpieces Paths of Glory. It arrived this week so, naturally come Saturday night I watched Fast Five.

And let me tell you that Fast Five is quite a movie.
 

"PROTECT PRESIDENT CAR! HE'S THE ONLY ONE WHO KNOWS THE CODES!"

There has been a lot dedicated to this particular moving picture, from How Did This Get Made to Jordan, Jesse Go! to Giant Bomb as well as quite a few others (like my friend who shall remain anonymous who works in the JET program who showed it in his class to, I don't know, teach kids about American euphemisms). Knowing that I am not going to waste your time blathering on just how good or bad it is. It is. It's pretty bad and it's pretty good and in the end it has some of the craziest car sequences that you will ever damn see.

So, anyways, Fast Five, what is it? Who is it? What make car go? Who is rock? Why make crime? These are all good questions and I hope to answer them in turn.

This movie stars a bunch of people, only one of them is Vin Diesel (Boiler Room, Saving Private Ryan) and only another one of them is The Rock (The Rundown, DOOM), but most of them are pretty and at least one of them is Paul Walker (Flags of Our Fathers, That Movie Where the Guy Gets Shot With a Shotgun in the Trailer and Flies like a Million Feet).

Nothing about what this movie is makes sense to me and that's sort of the magic. This all starts with the cast. You've got one of the leads,Vin Diesel, who was once known for being something of an indy breakout actor in the late ninties and early two-thousands who then ended up in the Riddick films-- excuse me-- the Riddick Saga and then finally scoring his much sought after yacht fund with the Fast-cum-Furious flicks.

In Fast Five he play a fat guy who everyone in this world is too polite to call "chubby and kind of old and sad," which naturally means that he's a deadly criminal who is really good at cars and, like everyone else, really good at showing up or having people show up at the exact right moment to save the day. Also, he's really good at cars.

Then there's Sir Paul Walker. In this movie he plays a white guy with a t-shirt with a hot girlfriend/baby-mamma (SPOILER!!!). Despite common belief Paul Walker is not the same person Stephen Dorf. In this movie he plays the white guy that doesn't seem to offend anybody by appearing on screen. He's also important because he's the one guy in this movie that we're 100% sure is full-blooded honky.

Then there's the Asian Guy (Better Luck Tomorrow, Fast and Furious 6). His purpose is to bone Tall Natalie Portman. His job in the crew is supposed to be to blend in and be an everyman, which he proves by being Asian man in Fast Five that drives a car super well and is inserted into this film with the specific purpose of boning Tall Natalie Portman. You know, a real everyman. He also, like, looks at a thing once and maybe understands what they are once, which I guess makes him a super-valuable heist team member or a guy with Asperger's. Not exactly justifying his placement on the crew, but then again he does get up in Tall Queen Amadala, so I can see why one would fly two thousand miles on such short notice.

Tall Natalie Portman is their "muscle," whatever the fuck that means. I mean a good half of their crew is yoked to the point of being a poster on the wall of a confused male teenager's wall, but she's their muscle, because I guess they said so. She is notable for not providing muscle at any point in the entire picture. But she does manage to pull the palm print of a criminal off of her ass. Like Asian Guy, she is just kind of there. And that's well enough because the men are just sort of there, as well. Everyone is just sort of there. Black. White. Asian. Latino. Miscellaneous. We are the United Colors of Pointlessness.

Because someone has to make those cars go.

Two dudes just chilling straightly.

The LGBT community is completely unrepresented in this movie except in subtext-- but I'll get to that in a second here-- because gay people require a level of complexity that is simply beyond this movie. The proof of this is that straight people are barely even there. Unless you can do something with a car in this movie (getting married, passing, or whatever else), it doesn't appear as anything more complex than something that could fit on a Post-it.

Then again, I complain a lot about how movies go out of their way to say what's going on. It's why I think Downton Abbey is such a big hit, because nobody ever says what they want or what they're thinking and that simple technique is drama. So, with that said I don't know that we need to establish any homosexual characters when one of the big draws of this film is two sweaty, bald men grappling with each other.

GET IT!?

The Fastiverse is a sexless, hateless universe that exists to drive machines with no feelings about your hormone treatment, the president's birth certificate, police brutality, or anything else. In many ways it's as old fashioned of a movie as there is, yet it is rife with Hispanics, the ethnically ambiguous, black people, the casually bilingual, and Asians and dead people and everyone else and none of that matters because they're all here to drive cars real quick like.

To me that is amazing. Fast Five, like the guy in Shine, has somehow managed to allow both some of the most secretly progressive ideas into the film and, yet, manages to make none of them an issue by making their ability to make cars go fast more important. Can you make a car drift? Go get married. Can you make this car jump this ramp? You qualify for a tax deduction. Can you make this car go real, real, real fast? Good. Because I'd be proud to have you as my neighbor.

It works because the film has no idea what it's doing. Hell, for that matter, it isn't just post-racial, it's post-human.

Don't worry they're fine. They landed on some poor people.

It's a thing that is everywhere. It's what society is built around. It's what we got in our hearts. It's what pirates hide and children giggle about. What I'm talking about is butts.

We like butts. We love butts. Some people-- often boring people-- want to look at butts. We were bred to do this.

More than that, it's what we want to see in movies right next to nice beaches, gothic manors, gothic manners, space, and sweet rides. As much as that is what we want to see and as much as that can go south, Fast Five is rather demur. Like James Bond movies, though, this movie can be shocking just how quaint it can be about the human body.

While it does have the obligitory ass shots and bikini clad babes that come from shooting a movie Rio de Janero it is a movie that is, importantly, shot in Rio de Janero. That's how people dress over there. It's a beach town in a hot and humid location and it's Brazil, I'm pretty sure even the president wears a bikini. There's a certain amount of casual half-nudity that comes with the territory.

So, in a movie in which Riddick and Paul Walker swing a bank vault into roughly a thousand cops and where Americans can storm into a former colony and shoot everyone that can be shot, this movie still has some sense of semblance of decency about showing a woman's breasts. Or, yeah that ass. Or, God help us, front cleavage.

Is it there, yeah? It's kind of weird when you see it, yet it doesn't ever treat any of the female characters as a nice ass except in the case of one very silly plot point. Women in this film are mothers, sisters, wives baby mommas, drag racers, cops, commandos, and, yes, damnit, career women. There is a franchise in which women are having it all and it isn't directed by Tina Faye.

As bad or as good as it is it could have been so much worse and it isn't and when you consider pornographic bilge like Transfomers 3, you should realize that this is a pretty good case that our society might not completely and utterly hate women. It might be that we like them and we want them to hang out with us and help us, and, yeah, it isn't exactly Waitress, but, then again, what is?

It is meathead cinema at its pinnacle and it still doesn't treat women like pieces of meat. Sure, they're still hot and super capable "professionals" with nothing to do in their lives but rob banks, but they aren't these objects of desire or points of leverage for the plot. They're women. They get shit done. In that sense they're just like the men. There's no equivocation, there's no discussion, there's just chicks in cars moving the plot along.

And they make the cars go vroom real good, so what other qualifications do you want?

In 2011 you will believe man can walk. . . real slow while looking into the middle distance.

People in this movie are cogs to movie the plot along to the next bit of fetishism. I was trying to describe this feeling to my friend Kevin and the best parallel I could come up with was a body builder talking about his hobbies. He says he's into French cooking or gardening or going to the movies, but we all know what his real passion is: It's body building. We all know where the heart of Fast Five is and it isn't in what people feel about fatherhood.

Because as much as Transformers is about selling toys to people or Pirates of the Caribbean is about selling illeteracy, this movie is just about cars. These cars do things.They get results. More importantly cars are really kind of rad.



Fast 6 has come and gone and it's basically a preconceived notion that this series will go on, hopefully, forever. I just want to put my foot in the door now with what I think Fast 8 (AKA Hard Eight With Cars This Time) should be--

VIN DIESEL
Looks like we've got to bring in another driver, the best there is. One I've been trying to forget about. . . UNTIL NOW.

PAUL WALKER
Who's that?

VIN RIDDICK
A ghost.

A SHELBY VIPER drives TOWARD THE CAMERA and drifts a few inches from the camera. A driver emerges from the driver's side door. He is wearing a helmet. He removes his helmet to reveal:

CGI STEVE MCQUEEN (as played by Army Hammer).

STEVE MCQUEEN
I heard you guys needed a driver.

BOOM.

FAST EIGHT.

BOOM.

IN 3D IMAX.

BOOM.

DUBSTEP.

WUB.

SUMMER.

BOOM.

YOU'RE WELCOME.

Come on! You know you want it!

I could apologize forever about this dumb, dumb, DUMB piece of cinema (and I do that a lot), but you know what? I don't care.

For once I'm free of all of the shame and irony and anything else you could make me feel about liking something this colossally stupid. I could talk about how cars are in America's DNA as deep as guns or unsolicited flag waving (I saw several American flags waving during a report of the announcement of the new Pope, so there you go), but in the end the reason I am talking about this movie is simple: I had fun.

You should have fun, too. That's why we watch movies. Maybe that fun is different sometimes and maybe we all have different ideas of fun, but we movies don't move us because we hate them. That's fun sometimes, yeah, I'll admit. That isn't what keeps us coming back. Sometimes it's a great piece of storytelling, something emotionally effecting, or great acting or all three. Sometimes its dumb people driving cars. Sometimes that is all that it has to be.

Fast Five did what it wanted to do. It made me have fun watching cars go over, under, and around things that cars should try their hardest to avoid for insurance reasons. It's why I watched Bullitt, it's one of the primary reasons why I love Ronin, it's why French Connection is burned to brightly in my mind, it's a dozen other films that made me remember them. It's the fact that Fast Five, for all of its many blindingly obvious faults, is a movie that uses machinery in novel ways to make something worth seeing.

You don't need me to tell you that that is a pretty good movie.

And Overdue Comic Book Thing

for the past month or so I've had almost a dozen books sitting in my peripheral vision every time I jump on the computer. It's long overdue that I actually address the reason they are there: I want to talk about them. I want to write about them. I'd like you to listen to me.

There will be no pictures.

Here are the comic books I've read in the past three months or so are as follows (in more or less chronological order)--

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 2009--
This to me felt like a step back in the right direction of the League series (which I will never abreviate as LXG, thank you very much), which seemed to want to meander into minor points about metatext or imagination or whatever and not really deal with the nut meat of what made the first two volumes so grand, which was folks you know (and some folks you don't) all getting together and having an adventure.

Of course my main problem with this is that it revolves around Orlando, a character which I never liked. She/he always felt like an interloper into a story which was about everyone else but her/him. Orlando brings a lot of interesting things to the table, especially when you think of her as this sort of Bond-like cudgel that exists more to get things done and to bring out the interesting things of people around her. I don't know. I guess I just liked the Victorian adventure aspects of Alan Moore's story than did I enjoy the counter-cultural pansexuality bits. One seemed far more in keeping with the work than the other, but that's just me.

So, it's better than 1910, but I'm going to side with 1969 being the best of the bunch if only because it involves a prolonged reference to Performance and for once I think I understood something that no one else did. It also has Harry Potter pissing lightning, so, I don't know, if that doesn't sell you then I don't know what else to say.

Dinopopolus--
This is the most fun and energetic book this side of King City (see several paragraphs from now for my King City review). If I had to describe this book, it is somewhere between She and Adventure Time, which is to say that it relentlessly loves treasure hunting in equal measure to it being English (which to me is basically only calling cookies "biscuits." Weird.). It reminds me of the kind of wonder you used to get by looking at a Legend of Zelda instruction manual. It comes from a place of pure energy and wonder and it's a nice bit of fantasy to counteract the books that I usually read. It is also gorgeous. This dude can draw dinos is what I am saying.

War Stories Vol. 1--
It's not much of a category, but as far as war comic writers go Garth Ennis is the best there is (who else is there? Greg Rucka? Jason Palmiotti, maybe? Jason Aaron? He likes 'Nam, right?). This collection came out a long time ago and its spiritual continuation exists in the Dynamite Comics series Battlefields. I would say that these are a classic group of comic book war stories, but then again it is Garth Ennis, of course it is. My favorite story is "The Reivers", which is about the SAS' involvment with the LRDG during WWII. I won't spoil it, but it has everything a Garth Ennis war story needs: The SAS, metaphysics, hats, and things getting bollocked (bollocksed?) up. In short: A masterpiece.

Baltimore: The Curse Bells--
This whole arc, as beautiful and fun as it could have been fell flat. I don't know what it is. Perhaps it is the fact that this little story wants to be, on one end, a fun little one-off in the classic comic-book sense and on the other end it wants to be a much more involved continuing story. I think. I guess the main problem is that the adventure doesn't quite work as it stands. You've got Madam Blavatsky and the Theosophy movement on the one hand and on the other hand you have the Grand Wizard Hitler and somewhere between that chasm my efforts to care got lost. I think it might have hit its head on something. The point is we haven't seen it since. We assume it dead, but maybe crab monsters might bring it back. Only patience and prayer will see this dark time out.

Parker: The Score--
It's Darwyn Cooke doing his Darwyn Cooke thing. So, yeah, it's pretty stellar, thanks for asking.

BUY IT.

Also, just a thought, but if I said this "Darwyn Cooke is the world's best cover artist that just happened to work in comic books", would you get mad at me?

Guerillas Vol. 2--
If I didn't talk to you about the first volume of this book, I appoligize. For those who don't know what this is, Guerillas is a book about a platoon of AWOL chimps during the Vietnam War and the Nazi scientist who is tasked to catch them. It really is everything I want in a comic book and all wrapped in a wonderfully illustrated package. I really, truly hope that this book makes it to its conclusion, because it deserves it. Comic books about ape soldiers in Vietnam is the exact purpose comic books were created.

Sweet Tooth Vol. 1--
Sweet Tooth, in my mind, is one of the great sleeper books that Vertigo has put out in the past five years. It's a sweet book that manages to take place in an Apocalypse somewhere between The Stand and Huckleberry Finn. As rough as the art may be, the book has a lot of heart. As brutal as this world is and as frequent as the violence may be, it is a book that is generally sweet on the people in it. . .even if terrible things keep on happening to them. It's a less sadistic book than is The Walking Dead and it also has a much more arresting mythology.

So, with that I haven't re-read it, but the fifth volume is coming out soon, so believe me when I say that I've got some homework to do. . . And so do you for that matter.

Fatale Vol. 1--
I can't say that I get this book. It's the same team that made one of my favorite books, Criminal, and yet it doesn't have the same punch, which is odd. As high as the body counts may be and as gruesome as the takes might become it seems to have less impact that Criminal had during its best moments. As the scope widened, the impact lessened. I guess there's something to be learned in all of this.

There are a lot of flashbacks and parallels and unreliable narrators and so forth bouncing around between the covers and yet none of that seems to come to a head in the way that it should. I mean, if you're going to use a frame device-- a horror device going back to Frankenstein-- wouldn't you do something else with it besides use it because it's a horror device dating back to Frankenstein?

It's a better book than The Curse Bells because it didn't leave me quite as flat. I wish it was a much better book than it actually is. . . Oh well, at least the cover is awesome. Oh well. At least we still got Incognito. . . OH SHIT THERE'S A HARDCOVER COLLECTION!?

The Sixth Gun Vol. 2 and Vol. 3--
As we speak I am about to dig into the third volume of this lovely little book. . . Alright. I dug through it. This book is great. While it doesn't have the highs or the hard-end of the first arc, it still has the energy, the artistry, and the overall sense of adventure that it had. It also has manny more mummies and mudman action in the second and third arc than does the first one, so there is that to consider. Mudmen. Mummies. Ghost slaves. A Vincet Price look-alike. . So, yeah, Why aren't you buying this? It's great. The fact that it has lasted this long is nothing short of a miracle. I mean, it's a Western book in the paranormal stylings of a comic book you would use as rolling paper in 1977 and it's going to hit at least 30 issues. That is incredible.

(PS: BUY IT.)

King City-- 
King City is like the cousin of Dinopopolous that got it high after that one family reunion. It's a bit of a trouble-maker and a bit rough around the edges, but there is a clear and important genetic link. It is a madcap and energetic work that deals out sex and references to Sega in equal measure. It is the kind of comic that I am sure we're going to get a lot more of (Scott Pilgrim jumps to mind for many reasons). In terms of storytelling it isn't a perfect book, but I'd like to think that it is the perfect example of what an indie comic book should be.

It is an uncompromised piece of work that indulges itself and goes off in tangents in ways that a mainstream and "commercial" book will not or cannot go. It's a rough, book, too, but that is part of the charm. You can see the evolution in the art and you can see the problem of not having an editor hitting you with a measuring stick every three days reminding you of the fundamentals. King City is too much fun for any of those prickly problems to matter. Even though I realized that half of the crazy ideas in this book are puns what remains is an insane book that has to be read to be believed.

I mean, the book revolves around a twenty-something cat master (that is a man who has a specially trained cat that can become anything through special injections) fighting some kind of evil hell-master and his machinist friend and his ex-GF that is dating a drug addict veteran of the zombie war. THIS IS A BOOK THAT EXISTS AND IT IS MAGICAL.

Also: It was really good weed. King City is not going to push that stank schwag on you, my gentle homies.

Single issues that I have read (in brief)--

The Goon #40 and #41--
I love The Goon. Even with Watchmen and Preacher and League and Sandman, Eric Powell's junkyard magnum opus is what got me back into comics. It's a story with all of the heart and beauty of the soft-focused 1940's with all of the grim horror that you knew was going on just behind the scenes. The Goon is a comic book written by a Jimmy Stewart movie that after a showing went home and beat its wife. While The Goon hasn't quite been what it was (at least in my hazy memory), it is still a great looking book with a fine sense of humor and more than enough knives finding their way into people's ocular sockets to keep me satisfied for another forty-one issues.


The Massive #1--
As a rule Brian Wood's insistance on bringing his reactionary liberal politics into things irks me to no end, this book seems like the Brian Wood other people are always talking about (ie: The one that can write very good comic books).

Personally I thought DMZ was a fine premise and a fun book that devolved into a raving mess, Demo I found to be indie nonsense, and Northlanders was a pretty good, if spotty book*. That is not to say that his work didn't have something in them. I mean, he is clearly not an imbecile, it's just that I got the sense that he wanted to talk more about an issue than he wanted to tell a story. The Massive is interesting because the issue really is the plot. Maybe he's found a way of tricking the Republican part of my reptilian brain. Who knows? All I know is that The Massive is a good book from what I have read.

This is the Brian Wood that made me believe in DMZ and I'm sure it is the Brian Wood that many others see. It is only one issue and maybe it'll go tits up by issue 16 like DMZ, but maybe he can take his bleeding heart off of his sleeve for a moment and get down to making some more awesome comic books (that are also about things of a political nature).

Oh, no, wait, his Conan book is pretty fun so far.

Prophet #27 and #28-- 
I honestly have no idea what the hell this book is about any more and after reading King City I get the impression that this is at least partially the style of Mr. Graham. This sense of confusion and transitory curtain pulls is more Graham's style than it is a disfuction. That is encouraging, but I would really like more from this book. The first arc was great and so were the odd little epic side-stories that we have got since then. That doesn't mean that it couldn't use more of a story (which, to be fair, seems to be what this current arc is about). Even if it doesn't all coalesce, though, what you have in this book is one of the raddest pieces of science fiction I've ever seen in comic books. Good for everyone.

Graveyard of Empires #4--
I have no idea what went wrong with this book. For a zombie book I enjoyed it mightily because it had some well constructed characters, some amazing art and lay-outs, and a real attempt at warming over the zombie genre. This issue has none of that. It is clearly an issue put together over too long of a period of time and was constructed out of a need to finish

It is too cluttered, too unclear, and nonsensical to the point of it resembling a clip show of a graphic novel. I liked this book. I liked its covers and I liked its premise. It's a shame that it so badly undoes all of that with this (presumably) final installment.

Fuck this book makes me angry. It also makes me sad as all get out. This is why I am afraid to write or to draw. I'm sure it's the same for you people. If these people, who do not seem to be fools, can put all of this effort into a work and have it get mangled so poorly what can we do? Can you not see your own future being borne out so poorly? Christ. My comic is even about Afghanistan. Jesus. Is this the world it's going to live in?

Fucking shit.

Just go read Prophet instead, would you? It is apparently under threat of being cancelled. The first trade is out now and available for only ten bucks! What a steal!

SIDE NOTE: Since actually finishing this entry I've read a whole new heap of books. This is a rough game, this graphic novel business.

SIDE SIDE NOTE: I used a British English affectation in this article! Try to figure out which one it is! I'll be waiting anxiously!

*Oh, wait, shit. The Couriers was a vulgar dogshit sack, as well-- not the contents of the bag, I mean. I actually do mean the bag itself was vulgar for its purpose. The Couriers read like someone cast a magic spell on a high schoolers margin doodles during his Econ class. What is worse is that I was recommened that book by someone. . . I'm going to say Wizard. Fuck you, Wizard.