Holy Smokes! 2010 is practically over with!

Whhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaattttt?

How did 2010 come to an end?  It seems like just yesterday I was holding a flaming Roman Candle in one hand and an American Flag and a cocktail in the other and celebrating America.

Wait...  that was yesterday.  Nevermind.

Anyhow, 2010 was NOT a year of big changes.  Hooray!  Sometimes you need a year where virtually nothing happens, I think.  No moves, no career change, no white knuckling about this or that...  maybe in 2011.

Now, that doesn't mean the folks around me didn't see some changes.  You know who you are and what you did.

I don't plan on any end-of-year lists because, well...  I'm not feeling the need to catalog that which you've all already read or seen here.  Or on Facebook or whatever.  And I don't know what I'd Top Ten this year, anyway.  Comics?  Movies?  I don't think I dealt with either enough to put together a useful list.

I have no idea what 2011 will bring.  I've got some resolutions, so we'll see if I keep them.  The Steans Boys are headed for London in April, so you can expect some cross-continental reporting and cultural confusion.  The Admiral and KareBear are set to move operations to Austin by this time next year. 

But, hey, yeah.  I just looked at the date on my computer and realized we're pretty much wrapped up here.  Another trip around El Sol and another year as determined by some Caesar 2000 years ago is done and done.

We're not doing much for New Years.  No big parties and I suspect I will be watching Snooki drop in the ball on New Year's Eve by myself once Jamie's turned in.  That's why I picked up a bottle of Welch's Sparkling Cider.  Drinking by myself in the dark on my way into 2011 just seemed...  well, let's not start the year off on the wrong foot.

Thanks for a great and strange year of blogging here at Signal Watch.  I appreciate you bearing with me through my stops and starts.  Now... on to 2011.

Some Film Noir Recommendations/ Discussion

This is kind of fun.  CanadianSimon has asked that I put together a list of recommendations for noir cinematic viewing.

I don't pretend to be an authority on Noir, and, in fact, feel like I'm just getting on the learning curve about the mega-genre.  At best, I feel like I've taken some noir classes at the community center, whereas I feel like I'm in my second year of PhD work if you wanted to talk Superman (or Masters level in DC Comics).  I feel like I'm just dipping my toes in the water here, so I'm very reluctant to say much more than "yeah, I liked that movie".

But its fun to talk about.

One thing that's become clear to me is that Noir isn't just lighting, it isn't just guys in natty hats and ties, it isn't just tough, good looking dames...  It definitely can have all those things (and good looking dames never hurt), but it seems its as much about a mood that was going on in the culture that a lot of cinema of the crucial 1940-1960ish era was pushing under the rug.  Its interesting that the push starts just prior to WWII, and less surprising that its at full boil as GI's came back from overseas and had ideas about what people might really be like that didn't fit in with the domesticity of post WWII America.

I also think there's a difference between a gangster or crime movie than Noir.  It doesn't mean that they can't share qualities or share a whole lot of real estate on a movie Venn Diagram, but a movie like, say...  Goodfellas doesn't say Noir to me (that doesn't mean I don't love Goodfellas, by the way).  Nor would I categorize The Godfather as Noir - and I think few would.  I think its interesting that when you get to the Warner Archive sets you can buy at Amazon, the WB curators clearly think there's a difference, too.  The Cagney movies show up as Gangster pictures (White Heat = Gangster picture.  The Roaring Twenties = Gangster Picture), whereas the Noir pictures tend to be a smaller scale and more personal (and rarely follow someone over years, Mildred Pierce as an obvious exception and reminder that Joan Crawford was a stunningly good actress.  Jamie and I fell into Mildred Pierce a few weeks ago on cable, and I'd forgotten how much I liked it.).

Here's Volume 1 of the Film Noir Classic Collection.
Here's Volume 1 of the Gangster Films Collection.

Detective pictures aren't, by default, Noir.  Clearly a lot are.  The Big Sleep seems to me to be a great place to show where the two genres synch up to the point where there's no real difference.  But you get near Sherlock Holmes territory or even The Thin Man, and not so much. 

Double Indemnity is often held up as a sort of quintessential Noir.  I like Stanwyck as much as the next guy, but it isn't a detective picture or gangster picture.  Its an insurance agent who falls for the wrong (married) girl and it ends poorly for everybody.  Similarly, Eddie Muller came to the Alamo this summer and lectured on The Prowler, and I'd say that movie still rattles around a bit in my head as a sort of archetypical noir, about an amoral cop using his position to get what he wants, everyone else be damned, but its not a detective or gangster movie.

So its hard to pin it down. 

In a lot of ways, asking "what is "Noir?" hits the same depths as when you say "what is a Western?".  Anyone who spent more than ten minutes with the genre knows that "Western" has a certain indefinable quality, but the plots and themes are all over the map.  Shane is not The Cowboys is not McClintock! is not High Noon is not Paint Your Wagon is not High Plains Drifter.

• The first list I'd turn to would be by the aforementioned Eddie Muller.  He's got 25 movies listed, and while I've only seen a fraction of these, and never heard of several, I have no doubt its the best place to start.
• IMDB has a list by votes of the best Noir.  That's certainly very interesting from a "People's Choice" sort of angle.   If I have a nit to pick (and I have many nits), its that there's a lot of Gangster thrown in here.  Good movies, but I don't know if we agree on our definitions.
•  AMC sponsors filmsite, and they have a great primer going on Noir with tons of recommendations.

I should also mention, I've read the original book of some Noir films and so I tend to get a bit confused by plot points if they deviate significantly (see:  The Big Clock), and some I've not ever seen the movie (They Shoot Horses, Don't They? - which, oh my gosh, great book, which is why I've avoided the movie).

Watching The Big Heat, it occurred to me that Noir presses a lot of the right buttons for me not just aesthetically, but as much as I like a good, character driven movie or TV show (see:  Mad Men) I also really like to see well constructed stories where the pieces are there for a reason and every part is used.  It may be that Noir comes up from short and often cheap books where a lot of story was packed into a limited amount of pages, or the writing flair of Chandler and Hammett to say everything you needed to know about a character in a cutting half-sentence, but a lot of these movies trade on the idea of narrative economy. 

Cross-pollination is also a lot of fun.  Ridley Scott's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to Blade Runner saw a sci-fi cop story make the full-blown transition to something resembling sci-fi Noir (its not a mistake the producers decided to add what was supposed to be a Marlowe-esque voice-over to the proceedings for the original theatrical release).  Stuff like that is kind of cool, or more subtle variations like The Big Lebowski's subversion of the genre.

So what do I like?

The Asphalt Jungle - a group heist flick, directed by the great John Huston.  I rented this in college and it broke my fragile little mind.
The Killing - the kind of movie that I think a lot of people think they're making, but somehow just can't seem to pull off.  Early Kubrick, by the way. 
The Killers - I rented this because I loved (LOVED) the Hemingway short story of the same name that it uses as its set-up.  And then the rest of the movie was good, too.  Maybe there's a secret noir story behind Hills Like White Elephants that I just haven't seen envisioned yet.
Sunset Blvd - A shame that I just saw this for the first time this year because...  wow.
The Big Sleep - probably a great place to start for your classic detective Noir story.
The Prowler - Which isn't available, so go rent Double Indemnity, which is as good as they say it is.

Signal Watch Watches "The Sniper"

3 things before we begin:

1)  A few years ago DC Comics had a monthly comic series going called Gotham Central which was about police work in Gotham City.  It took the look of a cop movie or TV police procedural with Michael Lark's illustrative art and it asked "what do the guys wearing ties and drinking coffee who have to do the paperwork when fighting crime do in a city with arch criminals in clown make-up?"

There was a great run (written either by Ed Brubaker or Greg Rucka... I was never sure.  They both got credit.) that had the Major Crimes Unit on red alert in the middle of the holiday shopping season as The Joker decided it would be "funny" to start randomly sniping people in the middle of a snow storm during the holiday buying season.  If you can find that collection: it is fantastic and disturbing.

2)  A few of you are going to jump up and down and say "Did you see the Homicide episodes about the sniper?"  No, I missed them, but they were apparently good enough that I've heard about them from several sources.

3)  If you ever want to know what sort of effect the random violence of a real-life sniper might have on a place, I work at the University of Texas and can see the UT Tower every day when I walk out the door of my building.

Look out for snipers, indeed.

The Sniper was included in the box set of Noir films Jason got me for Christmas, and its an interesting selection.  If you want to check its bona fides, (a) Scorsese discusses the film quite gleefully and (b) Noir historian Eddie Muller provides a running commentary track to the whole movie.  At first blush, I wasn't entirely clear how the picture tied in with my own concepts of what constitutes Noir.  There's not really the erasing of a secure world for a protagonist, no femme fatales per se...

But in the end, I think I get it (and I'm writing this without the benefit of having yet listened to Muller's commentary, which I will do this week).  It does feature a protagonist/antagonist for whom the world is slipping away and is in over his head.  A woman is involved, but its an abstraction by the time we catch up with the sniper.  And, absolutely there's no way out for our sniper.  Still, its an odd fit, right down to how the movie is shot.

The only actors in the movie I recognized were Marie Windsor* and Frank Faylen who played Ernie the cab driver in It's a Wonderful Life.  Our titular sniper, Eddie Miller, is played by Arthur Franz.

"So what's a nice sniper like you doing in a kitchen like this?"

Like many movies of the era, which was turning to science and psychology in new ways, Miller's psychosis is investigated for the audience by way of calm and understanding Voices of Authority as heard through the mouthpiece of the film's young psychologist. However, this movie makes a clear point that the public doesn't really care about the root causes or possible prevention of future outbreaks of violence from a societal and financial standpoint, and is happy to blame the police for not immediately solving random crimes. And, of course, a medical community that doesn't even understand what sorts of signs it should be looking for.

Certainly, the movie is using the story as a pulpit, but its interesting to see the gears of this kind of scenes working through these challenges play out, especially in a movie released in '52, from the dismissive nature of the cops wanting to work through things with a blunt instrument to the power players of the city strong arming political appointees to get results as if the police are sitting on their thumbs.

The movie is absolutely trying to make a statement about understanding violence and the psychology of aggression tied to sexual issues. The producers rightly work to dissolve accusations of exploitation with a pre-title sequence text message about the number of crimes against women in the country, which, in 1952, you have to assume was grossly under-reported. But the pre-credit message is still an interesting way to frame the movie for the audience.

From the first scenes, the movie is on a boil, with Miller a spring so tightly wound its just a matter of time before he snaps. Perhaps its not as masterfully executed as Psycho, and while you may sympathize with both main characters, at no point do you come into the odd place of cheering for the killer in The Sniper (except in sympathizing that the sniper actually does want to be caught), but its interesting to note that this movie precedes Psycho by a full 8 years. The tension starts high and just keeps going.

The film is shot seemingly mostly on location in San Francisco, so our Bay Area readers may get a kick out of seeing their hometown in 1950ish, including neighborhoods right underneath Coit Tower (I checked addresses mentioned in the movie, and they all appear to be fictional, so I was pleased when I saw the tower poking up in one shot to give some reference). The steep terrain is used to great effect, and I had a passing thought that somebody cleverly used the terrain to push the narrative forward as a sort of real-life, naturalistic backdrop that provides the same effect you might have seen in something like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but that may be me reading a bit much into the movie. Parts are shot almost as if from a documentary, including a chilling scene where the sniper is seen by someone working on the side of a tower, and absolutely the final shots of the movie. For some reason San Francisco just flat out works in Noir and crime movies as a backdrop in its own way and as a character just as much as LA and New York.

ironically, they can both see their houses from up here

It doesn't push the city scape to the same degree as Kubrick's Killer's Kiss from 1955, but it would be interesting to know if Kubrick had watched The Sniper.

Anyhow, I look forward to listening to Muller's commentary track. Its a fascinating movie, and I'd guess it has an interesting production history.



*whom I think I fell in love with just a little bit while watching Narrow Margin.

Reason #347 for why I'm not buying that many new comics these days: Stop With the "Death of" Stories Already

The most refreshing thing about the recent Death of Batman storyline was, of course, the crazy good story Grant Morrison wove across months and months of Batman comics.  But the second most refreshing thing was that within a few dozen pages of Batman "dying" in Final Crisis, we saw Batmas was actually and okay and doing landscape paintings or some such in a cave at the dawn of humanity.

It wasn't even particularly shocking in 1992 when DC "killed" Superman for a few months, as part of the meta-narrative all along was that the story was more of an exploration of what would happen if Superman died (your mileage will vary on the success of that mission), but we all knew DC wasn't actually killing off Big Blue.

The only deaths that were taken as "permanent" in comics, until a few years ago, were Uncle Ben in Spider-Man, Bucky in Captain America and Jason Todd in Batman comics.  Of those, only 1/3rd remain stone-cold chilling beneath the earth.  And I guarantee its a matter of time before some "edgy" writer and editor cook up a plan to bring back Uncle Ben, revealing that he didn't really die, but went to Europe where he plotted his revenge against Spider-Man.*  Or, if they're really edgy, he'll be resurrected as an undead cyborg thing that terrorizes Peter Parker and becomes a hot, hot property for intellectually challenged comic fans.

But...  hey, comic sales are slumping.  That "The Punisher is now a Frankenstein monster!" bit didn't pull you out of the hole.  Why not kill off both Spider-Man and 1/4 of the Fantastic Four in the same news cycle?

Le sigh.

Spider-Man is getting dead, at least in the parallel Ultimate universe.  (I so gave up on the Ultimate titles about four years ago.)

And I guess Marvel is going to kill Sue Storm, because, you know, emotional impact, yadda yadda.  At least that's what Vegas odds-makers are guessing.

I know I'm DC centric, but one small part of that is that I think DC is often a little quicker to stop running a particular idea into the ground, whereas the Quesada-era Marvel seems to think that you must beat a concept into the ground until someone begs for mercy.**

Word is that Didio and Co. kind of decided the Death of Batman thing was kind of it for them, and Blackest Night certainly indicated that they don't want to go any further with deaths and resurrections. And I hope that's true for a good, long while.

And while its possible the death of Spidey in the Ultimate Line could, in fact, be permanent, scientific polls suggest that absolutely nobody cares.  And absolutely nobody believes that any of the FF is actually off the board.  (And I'd argue that Marvel handles this stuff a lot more clumsily than DC.  I liked the Captain America stuff okay, but....  that return of Cap story was some pretty awkward stuff from Brubaker.  It felt far more deus ex machina than Morrison's extended albeit similar plot for Bats).

But:  Its done.  Its played out.  I can't even pretend this could be good anymore.

*because this is exactly what Marvel did with the Green Goblin after he'd been dead a good, long while
**Your shame-centers have to have been surgically removed to approve as many Deadpool titles as I see on the shelves these days, and...  really?  There's that kind of demand for Thor?  I'm not buying it.

Signal Watch Watches "The Big Heat"

Gloria Grahame cannot just come over to say "hi"

For Christmas Jason got me two Noir collections, and I kicked off watching them by, oddly, turning to the one movie I had previously seen, Fritz Lang's The Big Heat. I remembered having had watched this on cable a long time ago, that it had Gloria Grahame* and that I'd really liked it it, but I didn't remember: The Big Heat is a startlingly good movie, and not just in a "wow, that was a fun thing to watch" sort of way.

I don't think I need to tell anybody here that Fritz Lang knows how to put a movie together, but, holy smokes... if you're looking for a movie that fits together like the innards of a Swiss watch, its going to be tough to beat this one. Even the humdrum domestic situations shown are part of definite narrative and character arcs. And for a film from 1952, there's some pretty tough stuff that happens to all of our characters.

The movie follows the course of what happens when a good/ virtuous cop in a corrupt department investigates the suicide of a high-ranking police official. There's dames, gangsters, Lee Marvin, Glenn Ford and all kinds of good stuff in what's almost more a good cop thriller than true Film Noir.

Across the board, the actors playing our main characters put in solid performances.  Ford and Grahame have a lot of territory to cover from the start of their arcs to film's end, and you always believe them.  A young Lee Marvin shows signs of the ass-kicking Lee Marvin we'd all come to know and love.  Like a lot of Noir, but different from a lot of other movies of the era, the women in the movie are sharply written and are as much a part of the story as the men.

The Big Heat is a popular movie among a certain crowd, and so its no huge surprise that almost 60 years on its been imitated to the point where some of the shock value of the original is diluted.  But that doesn't mean it doesn't hold up to a viewing today.  And a darn good one at that.

Anyway, recommended.

Clark Kent's Dad will choke a lady for getting in his way!

*always a good reason to watch a movie

So what hath The Dug and K wrought this year? "Eclipse" and "Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny"

Twilight: Eclipse

A lot could be read into Stephanie Meyers' seemingly anti-introspective creation of the Twilight "Saga" with Meyers-cipher Bella Swan at the center of the mess.  And one could raise an eyebrow at what equates to a smashingly successful (financially) look into some version of an adolescent power/victim fantasy that blissfully surrenders the right to snark at what media studies classes sneer at as "adolescent male power fantasies" with this movie (are we at the dawn of the ineffectual victim fantasy genre?).

I can't imagine navigating this Mary Sue celebration of passivity and bad decision making without the power of RiffTrax and Bulleit.  Bad FX, a 22 minute plot strained out over two hours, a lack of direction more than bad direction, stale and stilted line delivery passing for acting...  it all makes for terrific fodder for the RiffTrax guys who guided us through the last two Twilight installments.

At the movie's finish, Jamie informed me that the final book (Breaking Dawn) will actually be split into two movies. When one considers how thin the plot was for Eclipse, a title which seemed to mean nothing more than "hey, that's a Moon-related word", its kind of mindboggling to imagine HALF of that plot smeared like too little cream cheese over two enormous bagels of movie


Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny

Were RiffTrax not to exist, its difficult to imagine why anyone would ever watch this movie, or, indeed, why this movie was made or how it was distributed.  But exist the movie does.

As near as I can tell, Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny was a promotional film intended to draw people to now-defunct Pirate's World, a Florida-based amusement park which opened an unfortunate handful of years prior to Walt Disney opening the doors of Walt Disney World a few hours' drive away.  Sort of how Uncle Walt staked out network time each week with the Disney Movie of the Week, which he'd introduce and use that time to plug the parks, perhaps the drunken buccaneers running Pirate's World believed they could create a similar vehicle to success in the greater Florida area.

Unlike Disney, however, how made his bones by synching sound with 1928's Steamboat Willie, this 1972-ish movie has a complete lack of synch sound, comedy, joy, production value or common sense. Its the true rare, utter failure of vision and competence.

And so, Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny follows what happens when Santa crash lands on a beach near Ft. Lauderdale and his reindeer, complete bastards all, abandon him on the beach and head home.  Santa lacks any sense of agency other than to telepathically summon neighborhood kids to make them solve his problem, which they fail to do (even after employing a guy in a gorilla suit).  Inexplicably, this leads Santa to tell the story of, as near as one can tell from the movie, a girl going to Pirate's World (which looks like a cross between a county fair and the lobby to the DMV) where she, in turn, hears the story of Thumbellina over a PA system.

Its not clear what any of this means, but the movie ends sometimes after Santa finishes telling about how the girl heard the story of Thumbellina at the DMV, the kids run off and return with the freakish and terrifying Ice Cream Bunny (a guy in a bunny suit who, in costume, drives a literal truck full of unbuckled kids down a bumpy road, occasionally swerving off the road and losing at least one kid.  I am not kidding), who saves the day by giving Santa a ride.

Loses a kid off the moving truck at:  4:35  (you can see his feet hit the ground as they go around the curve)
Almost hits dog around:  4:52
drives off the road at:  8:45
Generally freaks my shit:  duration of the video



Its a really, really good RiffTrax, and I can't recommend enough, if that sort of thing is your bag.

So...

You have your holiday traditions, we have ours. It was great seeing Dug and K, and god bless Dug-less for bringing only the finest in awfulness to my TV each and every holiday.

2010 Christmas Loot Wrap-Up

Anybody get their Red Ryder BB Gun with the compass in the stock and this thing which tells time?

Christmas has come and gone.  I haven't fully completed my present exchanges as I haven't seen my folks and brother since Christmas Eve, and I need to catch up with my Uncle, Cousin and Cousin's daughter.  We're going to do all that stuff tomorrow, I think.

Thus far, my Christmas Loot-Getting was all right on the money. 

My gift from Jamie was not a surprise.  I've needed a computer for a while, and in October I got the very laptop upon which I'm typing.  Merry Christmas to me from Jamie. 

Superman's plot to redistribute wealth?  No wonder the cape is red...

As the field of gift-giving and givers has narrowed over the years, the odd, wacky and unexplainable loot has dwindled to the point where, these days, I no longer am left looking at a nose hair trimmer or other such assorted gifts on Christmas morning wondering "how does one even write a thnk you note for this?".

Kind of sad in a way.  Those inexplicable gifts are always fun to ponder. 

Also got:

• Star Trek Movie Blu-Ray set - its the first six Trek movies with Shatner and Nimoy, plus a bonus disc
• A book:  Diary of a Lost Girl
• a gift certificate to Austin Books and Comics (I think I know how to use that)
• dog toys - and if you think, "oh that's for the dogs".  No.  Keeping dogs happy is one of my primary functions at home.  I am very pleased to find dog toys in my stocking.
• A sort of electronic pen that you can hook up to your PC that will digitally record everything you write or presumably draw.  Expect some experimentation to show up on this site in the near future.

We had also been sent to Wootstock about two months ago by The Dug, and that was a Christmas Gift. 

So, yeah, its been festive.

Non-Corpsman MattyM spent Christmas Eve with us, and it was great having him around.  A very lovely Christmas, all told. 

If you have time, write in and tell me (a) one outstanding or surprising gift and/ or (b) one "WTF?" generating gift.

Merry Christmas!

I hope you got just what you wanted!

I did.

Pretty good present each and every year

Happy Christmas Eve!

PREPARE THE MILK AND COOKIES!!!

The Big Man is coming!

This dude is totally wasted

Merry Christmas Eve, Signal Corps!

May your Christmas be jolly and bright!

Now get out there and listen for sleigh bells.

everyone in this picture needs less sugar

The Dug and I watched (and Tweeted) the Prequel to "Santa Buddies"

So, you may recall that last year The Dug, K, Jamie and myself watched and reviewed Disney's 9th or 10th installment in the Air Bud series, Santa Buddies.  No longer about a lively golden retriever who can shoot free throws (because this was an actual thing, and it was kind of neat), by the time Santa Buddies rolled around, the original Bud is out of the picture and The Buddies, his offspring, are now CGI'd little monsters who have been in space.  In Santa Buddies, they meet Santa, Santa Paws and Puppy Paws.

Read here.  Or, you know, here.

Well, today we watched Disney's Buddies-free Prequel to Santa Buddies and live-tweeted the movie.  And had a cocktail or three.

You can read our review at One Wall Cinema!