Bitter Seeds is an alternate history take on World War II.  Germany has developed a new weapon, one that might change the course of history and lead to the Third Reich’s domination of Europe.  A group of children have been turned into technologically enhanced supermen, capable of incredible feats of power.  Pyromancy, invisibility, telekinesis and precognition have been drawn out of these children through Nazi experimentation.  Against them, England turns to the only power it can find that match Germany’s new weapons: warlocks.

English warlocks vs. Nazi supermen, all wrapped in the package of a spy novel? A premise like that should give an author plenty to do, even if the idea is a little silly on its face.  If you wanted to write something fun, you could get that, or if you wanted something dark and terrifying, you could go there, too.  While Bitter Seeds tries its hand at both of these things, it doesn’t actually succeed at either.

Of the three main characters – Marsh, the spy; Will, the warlock; and Klaus, one of the Nazi super soldiers – only Will comes across as close to a fully developed character.  Marsh’s motivations are clear, but he’s so defined by his role as a Spy Who Gets the Job Done that he never quite gels as a sympathetic lead.  And I never was able to figure out what drove Klaus to do anything.  He’s painted as wanting to please the Nazi doctor who is their tormentor and leader, but the story never gives us any reason why.

A lot of this may have been due to the other significant problem I had with Bitter Seeds: Gretel, the precognitive Nazi super soldier with questionable loyalty to her masters.  Gretel never, ever becomes a character.  She’s a plot device, and a frustrating one at that.  Her abilities are both faultless and limitless.  She knows when everything is going to happen, how it will happen and what specific consequences will arise.  So the entire story, and every character within, is basically a puppet under Gretel’s control.  It’s impossible for anyone to do anything that she doesn’t know about, and there isn’t anything she knows about that she doesn’t subvert.

It’s difficult to stay invested in characters that have no agency, that are at the mercy of some omniscient, manipulative child who is a poorly developed character in her own right.  It’s not that the idea of the story isn’t interesting, it’s that the story never grows organically out of those ideas.  I have logical problems with how much damage five super powered children are able to do in a war that involved millions of men, and the fact that they all seem invulnerable to everything except when Gretel wants one of them to die strains credulity.

What could have been a tense and enjoyable alternate history spy novel never allowed itself to build up momentum. Bitter Seeds is apparently the first book in a series, but I doubt I’ll read beyond this one.  I have some suspicions of what kinds of things we’ll see in the second novel, and I don’t know that I’m interested in them.  At the very least, I stopped caring what happened to the characters halfway though the first book, and that’s not something easily won back.

Sleeper

Woody Allen in his earlier, more slapstick period.  There’s lot of sped up running around and pratfalls and people acting all crazy because they just came out of goofy sci-fi machinery, but there’s enough of Allen’s quieter, sarcastic wit to make the film work.  I wouldn’t call this one of Allen’s best films by any measure, and I don’t even know if I’d recommend it outside of hardcore Woody Allen fans.  But it’s a pleasant film with a couple of really awesome gags.  Especially the robotic dog that repeats, “Woof!  Woof!  Woof! Hello! I’m Rags!” over and over again.

Je Tu Il Elle

I was taken enough by Chantal Akerman’s experimental films to pick up another one, this one starring the director herself.  Like her earlier films Hotel Monterey and News From Home , this one is not one to recommend lightly.  There are long moments of complete silence and stillness, especially as the main character sits, depressed and eating sugar from the bag, in her apartment.  There is little plot, but it works as a portrait of loneliness and desperate attempts to reach back out into the world.  I could describe the individual vignettes, but I think this is a film you do your best to experience or just ignore; an explanation would do nothing to describe what the film is.  All that said, I’m a fan.

Come Drink With Me

One of two Shaw Brothers kung fu films I watched over the past 2 months.  Of the two, this was the lesser of them.  A bandit company kidnaps the governor’s son and demands ransom, so the governor sends out his daughter Golden Swallow to rescue him and defeat the bandits.  The plot is a muddle, and the kung fu is only intermittently good.  There’s a fun character, the Drunken Cat, who of course has Backstory that ties into the plot, and a few cool moments, but its notable more for the groundbreaking use of a female lead in a kung fu flick than anything else.

The French Connection

William Friedkin’s memorable film about cops going after international drug dealers, this film holds up pretty well as a tight, suspenseful police thriller that doesn’t overplay its hand.  Gene Hackman is, of course, fantastic, as the lead police detective.  I don’t know that it’s classic, but it’s very good and has a impressively ambiguous final shot.  As American films of the 1970′s go – an era I admire far less than most film lovers – it was pretty good.   I dunno.  I guess I wished I was going to have more to say about it.

Raging Bull

Yeah, yeah, add it to the list of films it’s shocking I didn’t see until now.  I love Scorsese, I love DiNiro, so I don’t know why I never got here until now.  Now that I have?  Man, what a film.  A lot of movies that decide they want to use black and white photography for ARTISTIC PURPOSES!! just shoot the film as if it were color.  Not this.  The boxing scenes, especially, create an incredible feeling of isolation and distance within the ring; the clouds of cigarette smoke and reflected light surrounding the fighters like a wall is a subtle but impressive effect. I realized watching this that what I miss most in color versus black and white is the incredible solidity and texture smoke takes in b&w photography.  As for the film itself, that I haven’t bothered talking about?  Amazing, sad and painful; Jake LaMotta’s self destruction, his inability to overcome anger and jealousy and his own self-hatred is one of the post powerful takes on the subject.  And it’s probably the best performance you’ll ever see from Joe Pesci.

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin

Shaw Brothers film number 2.  This one?  Way, way, better.  In fact, it’s the best old school Kung Fu film I’ve ever seen, and possibly the best Kung Fu training you’re likely to see.  The plot is only muddled in the beginning and the end (as opposed to, y’know, all the time like in most other SB films), and the entire middle as the main character fights his way from chamber to chamber, learning excellent Kung Fu lessons as he goes is just awesome.  Gordon Liu, who you  may have seen as the sadistic Pai Mei in Kill Bill, is awesome as the lead.  If you see one Shaw Brothers film, see this.

Husbands and Wives

Now here’s a fantastic and classic Woody Allen film.  We follow two couples, both married for some time.  When one of the couples decides to call it quits, it leads the other to question whether there might be something wrong in their marriage as well.  Most of Allen’s films are about the way in which relationships come together and fall apart, but this might be his most mature examination of marriage itself, and what trying to stay with a person for the rest of your life means.  Judy Davis is especially fantastic.

Wild Strawberries

The first Ingmar Bergman film I’ve seen (and, at present, the only).  Wild Strawberries follows a retired professor as he travels back to his old school to be honored.  This basic plot structure is used, in its own way, in Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry, but pointing out parallels between Allen and Bergman is sort of an easy game, isn’t it?  I enjoyed the quiet, reflective way this film meandered through the professor’s memories, but I also had the same problem with it that I do with much of the French New Wave: something about the morose, straight ahead way they deal with human sadness seems inartful and simplistic.  I appreciate Woody Allen’s love of Bergman and how it inspired him, but the way Allen finds humor in the same sources of pain makes him a far more interesting filmmaker.

Three Days of the Condor

Man, remember when Robert Redford used to be awesome?  I know, if your still can’t shake the memory of The Horse Whisperer it can be hard, but trust me here.  And if you don’t want to trust me, watch this movie.  I love that this is a spy thriller involving a bookworm employee of the CIA, someone with no field training and no idea how to deal with life and death peril.  When his entire office is murdered, Redford goes on the run, trying to figure out why people in his own organization seem to want him dead.  Especially awesome is Max von Sydow as a cold, meticulous assassin.  Definitely worth your time.

M. Hulot’s Holiday

A breezy, affable film about a strange, but amusing man on holiday in a beach resort in France.  The film spends 20 minutes just setting up the rhythms of people arriving at the resort and beginning their stay before truly introducing M. Hulot, the main character.  There’s no plot to speak of, nor is it a laugh out loud kind of comedy.  But it earns your affection the longer it runs, becoming a kind of silly, fun portrait of silly, fun things happening at a seaside resort.  But never fear: the concluding scene involving fireworks going off is funny enough to call this film a comedy, if laughs are what you need.

Red Heat

It’s Arnold!  As a Russian!  Fighting drug dealers in America!  With a comedian playing a cop!  Ok, ok, this film is fluff, but it’s directed by Walter Hill, who’s really good at shooting action (wait, you haven’t seen The Warriors?!) .  The film is hardly an action classic, but it’s a good time, and it’s smarter than it has to be.  Possibly worth it for the kind of insane cast it has, but probably not worth going out of your way to see.  If you want this type of film, go for 48 Hours instead, by the same director and much, much better.

Many, though not all, of the problems of network television can be chalked up to an egotistical competitive streak shared by all of the networks.  It’s never enough to do well.  You have to do well in relation to your competition.  Profit?  Yeah, that’s nice, but it’s only comforting if your profit is bigger than their profit.  In fact, it’s not even all that satisfying if they’re making a profit at all; winning means them losing.

It’s Upfronts week, and that means the networks are all releasing their new schedules.  One of my favorite shows, Community, will continue to hang out at 8PM on Thursday.  It’s been successful there, and that’s good news for viewers; Community is the best new sitcom in years, and anything that keeps the show on the air is good by me.  Meanwhile, over at CBS, they’ve got their own successful, newish sitcom: Big Bang Theory.  It’s been showing on Monday until now, but as of next season, they’ll be moving it to Thursdays at 8PM, where it can compete for roughly the same audience as Community.

So rather than pick a time slot where it can compete against different shows, CBS has decided that its best strategy is to fracture that audience between two similar shows.  What’s the rational here?  Even if Big Bang Theory wins, which seems to be the prediction, what’s been gained here? The best case scenarios is, what, killing off a competitor’s success, hopefully at minimal expense of your own?  How is this better than putting a different show against Community, servicing an audience that show is not, and putting Big Bang Theory elsewhere, against, say, a Law and Order clone?

Because it’s a zero sum game, I suppose, and if NBC is having success with an audience that you also target, even if you’re doing so on a different day, well that shit can not stand, man.

The reality is, people who watch both shows will continue to do so, you just increase the likelihood that people will do so on DVR.  Heck, there’s a good chance you might convince a few people who hadn’t DVRed either show to this point to start doing it with one or both of them.  And you increase audiences overall frustration with a television model designed more to enable arm wrestling matches between few ambitious media executives than be financially successful by putting out successful shows.

So when HBO or TNT or AMC puts out another show that they air fifteen times in a week and put instantly on On Demand, doing everything they can so that you can catch their show regardless of what other shows you watch, you lose a little bit more. You lose audience who doesn’t trust you to do what you can to help a show succeed.  You lose writers and directors who are sick of seeing their shows become pieces on a chessboard.

And you continue lose money.  The supposed purpose of the whole enterprise.

All because a few people at a few companies can’t stand to see someone else succeed along with them.

That said, Telephone is a really horrible video.

I don’t have a problem, in theory, with a 10 minute short film masquerading as a music video. I’m sure there are a lot of directors trying to make their way into film through music videos. If they can snatch a budget big enough to do something more than shoot a couple of girls against a backdrop of fake smoke, I can’t blame them for going for it. But whatever it is you’re hoping for your career, you’ve got to, at the very least, still make sure there’s a music video buried in there somewhere.

There are a lot of things wrong with Telephone. It’s an exploitation film parody by someone who seems to be parodying other exploitation film parodies. If Jonas Acklund, the director of Telephone, is actually a fan of the films this is supposedly paying homage to, it doesn’t show. It’s also full of nonsensical, stylistic ticks that are, at best, distracting. It straight out steals the Pussy Wagon gag from Kill Bill, too, and it has so little to do with anything that I can’t really write it off as homage. Apparently the truck is owned by Quentin himself, so I can only hope that he at least got some cash for it. Either way, as a piece of film, it’s a hot mess.

None of that is really the problem.

The problem is that, unlike, say, Thriller, the “film” part of the video interrupts the song at the end of every verse. Just when the song is getting going, we get another pointless exploitation “homage” sequence. Yes, I think the film parts are bad. Maybe you think they’re good. But I’d bet money we both turned the video on to see a music video, not Jonas Acklund’s short film about Lady Gaga and Beyonce going on a costume party crime spree.

Thriller interrupts the song once, in the middle, but otherwise it’s a straight ahead showcase of a great pop song and awesome dancing. Yes, it’s also just a better shot piece of film. Yes, it’s directed by John Landis, who’s a fantastic filmmaker. But even if you hate the werewolf movie parts, you can get to the song part and run with it without being interrupted every 45 seconds with nonsense.

If you want to make a self indulgent piece of crap, go for it, but at least make a self indulgent piece of crap music video.

And sorry for making you watch Telephone. Here, I’ll make it up to you with Thriller.

You’ve probably heard of this film because of its classic car chase and little else.  That’s because the car chase is literally the only reason to see this movie.  It’s a brilliant scene wrapped in an utterly pedestrian police procedural.  There’s a mystery, but it’s nothing to write home about.  Or even write about, for that matter.  Fast forward to the car chase, then hit stop.

Play Misty For Me

The daddy of modern “I dated a woman and O Noes she’s psycho” films.  It’s also Clint Eastwood’s first film behind the camera.  He plays a radio DJ who’s getting calls every night from a woman who wants him to – see if you can guess – play Misty for her.  Then one day he runs into her in a bar, and the dating and sex begins.  Only the woman is unstable, and when Clint tries to break off the relationship, the stalking and terror begins.  Unlike later films in the genre, the film never hops the rails of reality and keeps its characters mostly plausible.  Also, it’s got a great sequence at the Monterey Jazz Festival.  Worth seeing for education reasons, but it’s not exactly a classic film.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

On the other hand, this is definitely a classic.  Deservedly so.  There were a lot of science fiction films in the 50′s, but most of them were cheesy horror romps made for quick double feature business.  The Day the Earth Stood Still is an exception. Directed by Robert Wise, with an honest to god SF story at its core, the film is a must see.  An alien and his robot come to Earth to deliver a message: Stop your warlike ways, or we will destroy you for the good of the galaxy if you try to leave your own planet.  It never becomes a mindless action film, but instead stays a quiet, contemplative film about a peaceful alien here on a mission of necessity.  Also: Klaatu Barada Nikto!

The Mouse That Roared

I was so impressed by Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove that I decided to grab another one of his films as soon as possible.  Why The Mouse That Roared? I think someone mentioned it once and it stuck in my head. So, no reason, basically.  It’s about a miniscule nation in Europe whose entire economy is based on selling wine to the United States.  When California wineries start making a cheap knockoff, the nation devises a plan to save the economy.  They’ll go to war with the US, lose, and in surrender will be economically rehabilitated by the nation on which their economy depends.  Hijinks ensue.  Not brilliant, but funny and cute, and it’s got Jean Seberg, for whom I crush hard.

La Chambre / Hotel Monterey / News from Home

I’m lumping these all together because they all came on the same DVD and I watched them all at once.  All three films are directed by Chantal Akerman, a Belgian director who moved to the States in the 70′s.  All three films are semi-experimental (ok, some of them are full out experimental) works made during that period.  La Chambre is a 10 minute pan around a single room.  Hotel Monterey is an hour of mostly silent shots of an old hotel in NYC, from the people moving through its lobby, to its rising and falling elevators and finally out the windows as the sun rises.  It’s amazing how, by the end of the film, the hotel has become a real, tangible place.  Finally there’s News From Home, in which the director reads letters from her mother over shots of NYC.  Since we never hear Akerman’s responses, just her mother’s letters, we can only speculate at how her time far away from home is affecting her.  If you’ve ever moved far away, there’s a lot in this film to recognize.  Its final shot, shot from a ferry of Manhattan slowly receding into the mist, has stayed with me since seeing it.

High and Low

Akira Kurasawa is best known for his period films, but his modern pieces are easily as strong as his best known Samurai epics.  High and Low plays almost as two films, linked by the same central plot.  The first half tells the story of Gondo, a business executive who’s staked his entire fortune on a bid to take of his employer.  But when kidnappers mistakenly abduct his chauffeur’s child, he’s forced to choose: does he pay the ransom and ruin himself, or deny responsibility for the kidnapping even when his own child was the target?  The second half of the film follows the police as they attempt to find the kidnapper.  The first half is the more compelling, but the second is a detailed and effective procedural investigation that gets downright intense by the time the police descend into the underworld of Tokyo.  Especially effective is the horror of Junkie Alley, which plays more as a vision of the underworld than a real place.  Like Ikiru, it’s a film with a challenging structure but is a brilliant film because of it.

Drums Along the Mohawk

Once again, I take a run at a John Ford film and bounce right off.  When I heard the description of this film – a newlywed couple moves to update New York and is besieged by attacking natives – it at least sounded like nice, tense setup.  But what I got was slow, disjointed and kind of boring.  If I’m going to get Old Hollywood racism, I’d at least like it wrapped in an enjoyable film.  This one really tried my patience.

Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom

Not everything in the Movie Education list is high art.  Or, even art at all, I suppose.  This is one of the most noted entries in the 1970′s Japanese “Pinku” genre.  That basically means it’s a Japanese exploitation film, in case you don’t feel like following the link.  A bunch of tough, gang girls are forced to go to a reform school run by corrupt vice principal and ruled over by a disciplinary club made up of the cruelest girls in the school.  What plays out is kind of a women in prison revenge film that’s really fun if you can get into that kind of thing.  Like Lady Snowblood, you can tell this was a big influence on Tarrantino, especially with Kill Bill. Worth it just for the strange dueling challenge where two women crouch and extend one hand to the side while reciting a formal greeting.  But remember: it’s exploitation, so if gratuitous sex and nudity are a problem for you, this isn’t the film for you.

The Breakfast Club

No, I’d never seen it before.  Let’s just assume if it’s an 80′s teen comedy, I missed it, ok?  This is only the second John Hughes movie of his classic era that I’ve seen, the first being Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I have to be honest, too.  I never liked Bueller that much.  But I figured it was my duty to finally catch up on The Breakfast Club, since its kind of a thing with people of my generation.  Like Bueller, I thought it was overrated and filled with unrealistic teen stereotypes.  Unlike Bueller, there were things I liked about the film despite that.  Ally Sheedy was both adorable and excellent in the role of the Weird Girl, and Anthony Michael Hall made a badly written geek part enjoyable.  The Breakfast Club proved to me that I was right to assume Hughes’ teen comedy traded more in cliche than insight, but this was a good film despite that.  I’ll be saying “I taped his buns together” on a daily basis.

Grand Illusion

I liked The Rules of the Game so much that I pushed the other major Renoir film I knew of to the top of my list.  It’s an quiet and deliberately paced story told about the impending breakdown of Europe’s class system in the First World War.  Well, it’s not really about that, but it’s the undercurrent for many of the film’s best scenes.  Two French officers – one an aristocrat, the other a working class engineer – are shot down over Germany and spend the film moved from officer’s camp to officer’s camp, waiting for their chance to escape.  It’s interesting that the film isn’t so much about class tensions as it is the way men of different social station relate to each other in a war that has leveled those differences.  There isn’t really one thing the film is saying, but each scene paints a picture of a changing world, a change that is coming whether these men can accept it or not.  It’s not quite the film that Rules of the Game is, in my mind, but it’s still fantastic.

The General

I really wanted to like this.  I’ve never seen a Buster Keaton film and everyone talks so highly about it.  To his credit, Keaton is every bit the genius at staging sequences everyone says he is.  Everything from the camerawork to his own stunts are top notch, and it’s worth seeing the film just to realize what a difference there is between Charlie Chaplin twirling a cane and Keaton’s ability to continue to perform while riding on the front of a train.  That doesn’t make The General an enjoyable film, though.  At least, it didn’t for me.  The plot was incoherent and characters nonexistent.  I’m also a little unsure what the make of the hero of the film being a Confederate soldier stopping a Union attack.  I’m glad I saw it, but I didn’t enjoy watching it.

Heat

I remember when Michael Mann’s Heat came out and the big draw was that Al Pacino and Robert Dinero would finally have a scene together.  You know, because they were in Godfather II together without sharing a scene, so that’s the big thing the moviegoing public needed from a film.  Unfortunately, they only share one scene together, so there was a bit of  backlash over the film that had nothing to do with whether or not it was any good.  And you know what?  It’s really good.  It builds slowly towards a big bank heist, and when it arrives and the balls-out action begins you realize that you’ve still got a full hour of movie to go, leaving you to guess at what the last act of the movie will bring.  I’ve said before how much I love that structure, where you point to a big moment as your climax, but hit it early and destroy expectations for the rest of the film, and it really works in Heat.  I’m dissatisfied with the very, very ending of the film, but that aside, it’s a classic.  Even if you hate the rest of the film, the mid-point bank heist is such a perfect tension build-and-release that it’s worth every single minute of film that surrounds it.

When it comes to Batman, my favorite graphic novel is, hands down, The Dark Knight Returns.  Besides being one of the best told Batman stories, it nails a version of the character that balances the many, turbulent pieces much better than anything else.  In film, it’s The Dark Knight, both because it’s an incredible piece of cinema and because, like Frank Miller’s work with the character, it just gets everything right.

Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke is regarded as one of the best – if not the best- Joker story in print.  Though at this point, it feels like everything that Alan Moore writes getting regarded as the best thing in print, so set your expectations somewhere near realistic.  For a short novel – I read it over a single lunch hour – it managed to paint a portrait of the Joker that’s stuck around ever since.  You can feel the Joker of The Killing Joke lurking in much of the really great Batman work that’s come since, and that’s because Moore’s Joker is a terrifying, distinct brand of psychopath.  If there’s something you like about the Joker in The Animated Series, The Dark Knight or any modern Batman comic, it probably gasped its first breath here.

The basic hook is perfect: The Joker believes that all that separates a good, sane man from a madman like himself is one bad day.  That’s it.  A single bad day is all that separates us from madness.  To prove it, he targets one of Gotham’s best men: Commissioner Jim Gordon.  He shoots and paralyzes Barbara Gordon (an event that would stay a part of Batman continuity), kidnaps Jim and subjects him to tortures both physical and psychological.  It’s ending is also a classic.  I don’t want to spoil the final joke that the Joker shares with Batman, but it’s memorable.

Yet for all of that, it’s not a classic graphic novel.  A lot of what makes it great is the impact it had.  But as a story, it’s lacking.  Compare Joker’s attempt to break Gordon with the far more horrifying escalation of terror and violence in The Dark Knight‘s version of the theme.  In The Dark Knight, you reach a point where you honestly believe the Joker might be right, that he might show Gotham that they’re all as sick and twisted as he is.  In The Killing Joke that never feels like a threat, since other than shooting Barbara the best the Joker’s got left is dressing Gordon up like an S&M slave and showing him naked pictures of his daughter.  A couple of weeks of that might smash him, but a day?  C’mon, now.

It also makes the odd choice of giving the Joker an origin.  This is probably not a good idea in any case, but when your origin is the least interesting part of the book, it’s become a liability.  The Dark Knight‘s play with the idea of his history being “multiple choice”, as the Joker says, is far more effective. Do you want to know how I got these scars?

The Long Halloween is technically a sequel to Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, which I have not read.  Nothing in the book refers directly back to it, though, so there’s no danger in picking this up first.  I need to get to Year One soon, though.  More Frank Miller Batman.  w00t.

Written by Jeph Loeb with art by Tim Sale, The Long Halloween is a sprawling tale of the fall of Gotham’s old school mobs and the rise of the freakshow that is Batman’s rogue’s gallery.  More than anything in the book, I liked that The Long Halloween showed how Batman’s presence might be changing the city without just saying, over and over again, “Hey, do you think these people are showing up because you did?”  There’s a distinct moment of transition near the end of the book that nails the change so well that perhaps people should consider the point made and move on.

It’s also the story of how Two Face came to be, and though there are shades of the Harvey Dent we see in The Dark Knight, this version of Two Face’s origin is as lacking in punch as the Joker’s plan was in The Killing Joke.  It works, I guess, and it plays some important notes that make you question if Dent has problems well before his face is scarred, but something about the break that sends him over the edge doesn’t have the impact I wanted.  It just doesn’t compare to to the horrifying trial the Joker puts him through with his fiancee in The Dark Knight.

Like The Killing Joke, this novel has a lot of great ideas and texture but misses something in the execution for me.  With The Killing Joke it was the thin plot.  In The Long Halloween, I think it’s the actual character writing.  Especially the dialog.  It’s not bad, but there are enough times when Batman’s morose narration seems overdone to break the illusion.  It’s a good version of Batman, but not a great one.

What is great is the use of Batman’s mob villains, Carmine Falcone and Salvatore Moroni.  I have to image a lot of what they did in this bled into Chris Nolan’s films, though to be fair I don’t know how much of this was set up in Year One.  Frank Miller may deserve more of the credit than Loeb, but nonetheless The Long Halloween uses more run of the mill organized crime very, very well.  It also sets up the Harvey/Gordon/Batman on the roof promising to take down the mob motif that worked so well in the film, and it works here almost as well.  It also has a great version of the Batman/Catwoman and Bruce/Selina relationship insanity, which it uses as character texture and not a brute force plot device.

I’d check both books out, flaws and all, though.  They’re strong Batman stories and they set up a lot of things other stories recycle mercilessly.  But then I’d probably watch The Dark Knight again, because dude, it’s awesome.

Unlike so many of the other Disney films of the late 90′s and early 2000′s, Mulan‘s got an actual plot and characters with personality.  It has a legit villain in Miguel Ferrer’s yellow-eyed Hun badass, mostly non-annoying side characters and some of Disney’s best design work.  Yes,  it’s also the one where Eddie Murphy is a dragon named Mu Shu, but watch how well that character works despite how out of place it is.  Mu Shu should sink the film, but he comes out as kind of likable.  The same can be said of the songs, which are not particularly great but don’t feel perfunctory like the ones in Hercules.

Mulan herself is perhaps Disney’s strongest female character in their entire filmography.  When she struggles to fight with the men, it’s less because she’s a woman than that she’s never done anything like this before in her life.  By the end of the film, she’s fighting with and outsmarting Hun warlords and saving the empire without a boyfriend coming to her rescue.  In Mulan, the heroine rescues the hero.  Even though Mulan kinda sorta becomes a princess at the end of the film like every Disney heroine, she earns it by saving the Empire, not by marrying a prince.  She comes home not with a dress but a sword as a trophy of her victory.  Mulan kicks ass.

Mulan is the film I wish Disney made every time up to bat.  It has character development, a great story without the pathetic emotional manipulation Disney tends to trade in and the thing by which I’ve always judged a great Disney film against the rest: a fantastic climax.  Look at, say, Hercules, which isn’t a horrible film by any measure. But look at how it ends:  The Titans beat up everyone, then Hercules gets a power-up that lets him easily slay them.  Mulan ends with a well paced action scene, ending with Mulan decisively beating a stronger opponent not through luck, but cunning.

Mulan should be on the list of great Disney films, but I fear it’s too far off the beaten path to get recognized.  For all people’s complaining about Disney movies having too many princesses and not enough role models, I see an awful lot of frilly lace and not that many Chinese swords.

I’ve been on this run of serial fiction lately, picking up collections of stuff that originally came out in Astounding Science Fiction or The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy.  I started with the original run of Elric stories, if for no other reason than that Amazon gave the Kindle edition away for free.  Something about the raw rush of energy really hit me, even through the dripping-with-emo aura of Moorcock’s albino hero.  It was something fantasy had not been to me in a long time: a really, really good time.

So I wanted more, naturally.  I considered Conan, but Brennen suggested something else: “Doc” E. E. Smith’s Lensman books.  Sure, I thought, why not? I have a severe Science Fiction deficit in my reader-ography, so why not start with the grandaddy of space opera?  I always thought the title Lensman sounded a bit goofy, but it wasn’t like that was a fair criticism of anything after I just finished four novellas about an albino with a soul stealing sword called Stormbringer.

I decided to start with Galactic Patrol, which isn’t exactly the first story in the series, but is the first with its central character, Kimball Kinnison, and covers his first battle with the Boskone pirates.  I wasn’t sure if it was even going to hit me, so rather than try and read the whole series straight through and end up potentially bored, I did something I usually don’t and started in the middle.  I’m glad I did.  Galactic Patrol is just a great, great time.  It’s filled with strange planets, bizarre creatures and insane space battles.  There are spy-beams and projectors and screens and all kinds of other pseudo-scientific things on display, most of which barely makes sense at first but eventually becomes part of the rhythm of the language.  Spy beams flicked out.  Screens gave off rainbow color under the force of the projectors.  Wacky stuff.  Fun.

If you liked Star Wars and can give some really clunky 1930′s dialogue a pass, I think you’d have to work not to have fun reading Galactic Patrol.

Now I’m onto the first book of The Chronicles of Amber, Nine Princes in Amber.  After that, I’ve got both Grey Lensman, the next book in Smith’s series, and The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane by Robert E. Howard.  Solomon Kane just got made into what’s supposedly a pretty awesome film, so before it hits in the U.S. I thought I should read some of the original stories of Howard’s Puritan demon hunter.  I mean, really; Puritan demon hunter.  That’s almost all you have to know.

Fletch

Thanks to Community, I’ve had a hankering to go back and check out old Chevy Chase stuff.  You know, from the days before he stopped being funny and started being banned by the Geneva Convention as an instrument of torture.  Fletch popped up on watch instantly and it seemed like as good a place to start as any.  Maybe it’s because of where Chase was in his career as I was growing up, but I expected one of those Buffoon-Who-Lucks-Into-Success plots that I hate.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that the main character of Fletch was clever, imaginative and witty.  If Chase had played more characters like this and less like Clark Griswold, he might not have needed Community to resurrect his career.  Also, this film was written by the guy who did the original The In-Laws, so you know it’s going to be funny.

Un Chien Andalou

Yeah, we’ve all at least heard of one shot of this movie.  You know the one, where the guy grabs the woman’s head and slits open her eyeball.  This is that film.  Salvadore Dali and Luis Bunuel partnered to create what is probably the single most famous piece of surrealist film (and one of the most famous surrealist works ever).  It’s only fifteen minutes long, and I doubt it could have gone on much longer without wearing out its welcome.  There is nearly no plot to speak of, though the film does center around two characters whose relationships as portrayed makes a weird sort of emotional sense.  There are a number of classic shots – apart from the eye slicing, there’s also a creepy bit with ants crawling out of a hole in a guy’s hand, and a sequence where he rubs a woman’s clothed breast, which then becomes unclothed, then becomes her butt – but the real impact comes from seeing how intricately it’s all strung together.  This is probably seen as a film school kind of thing to watch, but anyone who enjoys film at all should see what the medium can be like if it’s pried out of its typical narrative structure.

Excalibur

A lot of fantasy films came out around the time I was born, and I managed to see very few of them until I grew up.  I think the things that come out when you’re alive but too young to understand are the most awkward to pick up later, though I don’t know why.  We see older films and we see new films, but something about the familiarity of a film that you vaguely remember coming out but didn’t actually see breeds disinterest.  Excalibur gets a lot of praise as one of the few really good fantasy films, but after seeing it I cannot for the life of me see why.  It’s essentially a boring CliffsNotes version of the Arthurian legend, except when it veers off into straight out goofiness.  Over and over again I wondered if the director realized how open he had made himself to Monty Python and the Holy Grail jokes with his too-serious, overblown take on King Arthur.  When Mordred shows up in gold armor with nipples, it was clear nothing could save the movie.  This one hurt to watch.