Friday, April 01, 2005

Like Going Back to Mother Superior

CBC is going to begin running episodes of the new Doctor Who Tuesday, and words fail how excited I am that the show has made it over from England and will be aired where I can get view it from Seattle.

Doctor Who was a massive part of my childhood. I can still remember when my babysitter switched it on one night. It was "Hand of Fear." A Tom Baker episode, where the severed hand of an ancient alien was revived by radiation and began to possess people to do its bidding. It was stuffed with bad acting, cheesy costumes, terrible special effects, but damn I ate it up. I collected the novelizations, begged to stay up late Sunday nights to watch the episodes on Channel 11 Chicago, had episodes on tape, went to conventions, wrote fan fiction (shut up, I was 11). I was obsessed. I was an Whovian addict.

I know very little about this new version, but I'm hoping that it'll be in the same vein as the new version of Battlestar Galactica: sleeker, meaner, smarter than its older version, yet possessing a respectful nod to the source material. Akin to how Pierce Bronsan was 90s reflection of Sean Connery in the Bond series, future and the past in one.

And what good timing. The season finale of BSG is tonight. I'll have the new episodes of Who to look forward to after a long night of writing class.
The Blood-Soaked Pretty Inch

"Sitting through the thing, watching scene after scene in which I was being asked to be entertained by the spectacle of helpless people being tortured, I kept thinking of those clean-cut young American guards at Abu Ghraib. That is exactly the mentality Rodriguez is celebrating here. "Sin City" is their movie."


That's from the movie review of "Sin City," as found in my local newspaper (note: also my employer, so there you go).

To me, there's stylized noir a la "Maltese Falcon" and "Chinatown" and then there's the video game variety in "Sin City." The former works on the notion of hidden dances of dialogue, of what's said and what's implied. It's about betrayal, a mountain of lies around every corner, people who you ally with but can't trust. It's about one man against a mosaic of corruption, and in the end the man finds the machinations of deceit and crime will keep going no matter what, so he crawls into the nearest bottle to convince himself he won something. "Sin City"? It's what Lucky Charms is to nutrition. Colorful, kinetic in the bloodstream, but ultimately empty as a simulation of food, not the real deal.

I've read from the volumes of "Sin City," which I don't recommend you do all at one on a rainy Saturday afternoon. While provocative and wildly drawn, it begins to blur with the acres of violence and gallons of blood. It's relentlessly one-note in delivery, albeit explosive. Here's a better allegory: Go down to your local gun range and listen to the rounds being fired for an hour. Without ear protection. That's "Sin City."

I'm staying away from the film because of that. I've seen the trade paperbacks of Miller's opus, and the film literally staples the images from the pages to the screen and zips you along to death and carnage. Compare this to John Huston making Hammett's "Falcon" into film. Huston took the words and gave them life, filled rooms with people and gave them emotions and consequences. Huston let Hammett talk in the film, giving Bogart his classic "If they hang you..." speech. For the life of me, I can't remember one good monologue out of Miller's work. It's MOOD with STYLE. It's Violence as the Story. It's why I've careened away from first-person shooter in video games. Eventually, the story is irrelevant, and everything is a killing spree.

There's little doubt in my mind that "Sin City" won't appeal to that lizardian sector of the brain that craves violence and explosions and sexy women in scraps of clothing. Just reading the names attached. Quentin Tarantino, Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez, Bruce Willis. It's code to boys and men with the heart of boys to go sit down and watch a noir version of the "Itchy and Scratchy" movie if done by Dario Argento's evil relatives. And that's the problem with it for me. I know Miller's work. I have seen Willis in action. Quentin and Robert? Oh yeah, been there, done that. Sex, violence, brutality, profanity...mile wide, inch deep. But it's a right pretty inch. You laugh despite yourself when the head explodes from the bullet.

I have to agree with the Seattle Weekly's assessment that, in the end, the film is going to drag in the comic book faithful and be lost on the rest of us. It'll have a good couple weeks, maybe a month or so from the hardcore fans, and then "Episode 3" will obliterate everything in its path. Not just because it's the last Star Wars film, but because it'll appeal to the casuals as well as the fanboys. Hyperviolence? May have worked at the Roman Coliseum. May work for CNN. But seeing recreational bloodshed at $8-$10 a pop? No, the die-hards do that. The casuals will wait for action and plot. Humor's good, too. If there's any justice, the odd-ball "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" will swamp the splatter of "Sin City."

Here's my prediction:

The Pope will die this weekend.

Terri Schiavo will still be a big deal.

"Sin City" will top the box office.

All will be heavily watched events because we Americans are drawn to the bizarre and the morbid. If busybodies can give up a month of their life to protest the death of a woman who died 15 years ago, then anything's possible. "Sin City" comes out at just the right time for Americans. After being dragged through the grueling process of watching the cruel dance of death for a Florida woman, moviegoers can go in and decompress with irrelevant blood and gore. Heroes surviving mortal wounds while ripping apart foes. Doesn't matter if its the antihero. It's even better that way, just get me out of this world and let me live without morals on screen. All this and popcorn, too.

Thursday, March 31, 2005

Memento Mori

Good night sweet brain-dead media celebrity*

And flights of hyperpious busybodies and vapid pundits sing thee to thy rest.

The bitter irony of this whole Terri Schiavo deal is, she was blissfully unaware to the media circus going on around her**, right up to the mortal end.

Lucky woman.

* As opposed to, say, Paris Hilton.
** Unlike, say, Paris Hilton.

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

I'm a Critic, Bitch! *smack*

The alpha film critic at the newspaper I work at filed his review of "Sin City," and it's not a review as much as it's a beating. His analysis is a work of art, cruel and beautiful at once. Imagine Cate Blanchett in a top-drawer Oscar De la Renta and wielding an executioner's axe. Smile on her porcelain face, Rwanda-sized murder in mind.

I've always had a question about the fascism-flirt that runs Frank Miller's engine, and looks like ol' Franky outs himself as 2-D as the page he draws on as a comic book auteur. Sex and blood, in vastly overdone, immature doses in order to make men out of the children in the target demographic.

I'll link it when it goes live on Friday, assuming Blogger gets its act together. "Sin City" really sounds like a cinematic car wreck. Please use alternate routes.
Need Change My Driver's License

My Wu-Name: Tough Professional

Fo' shizzle, bi-yotch.

My wife: Erratic Artist (no fair, I wanted that one)
Our older, distinguished cat: Mad Enchanter (yep, makes sense)
Our younger, insane hell-beast of a cat: Pesty Conqueror

Dang that's eerie.

P.S. Blogger needs some fiber in its diet. Very slow processing as of late.
Brief Music News

Downloaded the new Nine Inch Nails single, "The Hand That Feeds." Despite it sounding thematically like an inside-out version of Trent Reznor's/NIN's previous smash, "Head Like a Hole," it's epically cool. Pain and beauty, anger and honesty. It's a return to the visceral blam! of NIN's "Downward Spiral," as "Hail to the Thief" was a return to the grinding notes/surreal words combo plate of Radiohead.

It's also the first single for the band's upcoming "The Teeth," which comes out May 3 (in America, at least). Violent, angry, heartfelt, emotionally raw. What 50 Cent and Eminem is (was?) to a bunch of disaffected wannabe nihilists with white skin and black aspirations, Trent Reznor is to me. Trent is the cosmic votive candle that Chuck Palahniuk prayed to get inspiration for Fight Club. Trent is anger with a purpose, a scathing rebuke of holier-than-thou hypocrisy while being shattered into a million pieces over a broken heart.

In 1994, I sat in a high balcony watching Trent beat his keyboard racks into submission during a tour for "Downward Spiral." Unlike the suitors who followed in his wake (Limp Bizkit, Korn, et al), Trent doesn't pose as much as he unleashes what the rest of us would rather keep bottled up. We are buffeted by the sing-screech of metal and primal rage mixed into layers deep enough to resemble the caustic and tiered atmosphere of Jupiter. But there's a poetry there, a wanton balance between hope and oblivion, searching for any sort of feeling. And come May 3, I'm downloading it, putting it on my Shuffle, and wandering the rainy streets of my town seeing the world through Trent's eyes.

Monday, March 28, 2005

A Long, Overdue Nap

"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture,"
-Pastor Roy Mummert, who isn't too keen on evolution.

The good pastor should know something about the whole evolution/creation fight. While believing in an all-powerful God who is at the helm of everything (running the scene as if playing "SimUniverse") can be comforting to the fearful and pious, it's terrible science. Here's where evolution vs. creation falls apart. While evolution is a theory, it's a theory that can be tested in a lab. It's a theory that's been observed in the wild. It happens in nature, and while not completely perfect, it works.

Creationism, on the other hand, can't be verified. You can't back up the universe into your lab and replicate the creation of Life, the Universe, and Everything in seven days or less. It's a nice idea, but it's a piece of mythology, just as the idea that Athena sprouted from the head of Zeus. Try doing a peer review of God's handiwork sometime, and not start a holy war. It's impossible, because God, that clever rascal, didn't leave behind a copy of his/her intelligent design blueprints for us to decipher. All we have left is trying to guess what God meant, what God was up to, and for centuries we beat ourselves to death over a turn of phrase. Meanwhile, here comes evolution, getting the job done in explaining how we got to where we were. Again it's not perfect, but about 150 years after Darwin comes along the hands-on practice of genome testing, which does handily fill in the gaps of explaining how organisms grow or die.

Of course the grand irony of all this is for scientists to prove God did create the universe, they'd need some bad-ass science experiment to pull off. And once you have the gear to replicate what God did, once you have the power to create a universe and terraform planets in less than a week, God becomes irrelevant.

But of course, the pious don't want people in the reality-based community to poke holes in the fabric of divine tapestry. Having science chew through scripture makes the flock realize the Holy Book is just a set of stories and not the iron law of society. When people start thinking, religion gets nervous. Here in America, we've been deluged with anti-intellectualism and power faith since 2000. As firebrand cartoonist Ted Rall recently put it, "After the 2000 election, it's the dumb and the mean lording it over the smart and the nice." We have a media that tolerates and promotes lies. We have leaders who prop up the brain dead for political means. We have wars based on falsehoods. We have a giant ignorance field set up in this nation where the opponents get shouted down and the dissenter gets firebombed within a 24-hour news cycle. It's heresy to poke holes in the comfy little tapestry that says everything is okay. Torture is necessary. Nothing we do is illegal. Don't worry about soldiers coming home in the middle of the night without limbs, without health care, without jobs.. In the arts, we have banality as far as the eye can see: from "American Idol" to Jessica Simpson to faux-outrages to "reality" shows to generic sitcoms where you know the punchline from 100 yards out. No discussion, just a feed from the blue glow keeping the Happy-Happy Tapestry up and running.

In the April (fools?) edition of Scientific American, the editors get into the act, writing a tongue-in-cheek mea culpa: "Okay, We Give Up."

There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.

In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

It's insidious, but in the past five years, you feel this sort of mission creep come over your soul where you want to just hide out in your home or stop being creative. Irony is dead, satire is irrelevant, compassion is a dirty word unless you use to invade a country or keep a brain-dead human alive a little longer to appease your base. It's the March of the Stupid that we rational Americans have had to deal with in the past five years, and we'd love for it to just go away. We're a patient lot, us rationalists. We know no system can sustain itself forever. Oceans ebb and flow, clouds form and break, empires rise and fall. Eventually, the March of the Stupid will get tired, the movement will falter, that so-called "tipping point" will be reached and -zap- the sun rises and everything returns to a reasonable shade of normal.

But it gets tiring as the zealots in charge keep finding a way from not falling out of power. Maybe that's why they hate science. Maybe they know an end comes to everything, and like children, if they pretend they aren't sleepy, maybe they won't be put down for a nap.

Battle Stations

OneWord.com is not operational as of this post. Their domain name has expired, and I hope they get back on the air soon. If we lose them, we're going to lose a great 60-second tap into the soul.