In which I choose to judge a book by its cover

This may be the greatest cover to a book I've ever seen. Well, maybe not the greatest, but it speaks to me.

Picture of Young Joan Crawford kind of freakin' me out

I stumbled onto this last night, and now I can't quit looking at it. Young Joan Crawford looks like she really wants to stab someone.  I recommend you not look directly at the picture for too long.  Use one of those boxes you're supposed to make to look at the eclipse.  In this way, you are less likely to find yourself driven to madness.

As terrifying as I find Young Joan Crawford staring impassively into the camera, if she broke into a smile, I think I might pee myself a little.

No Post Monday

Last night we had a little to-do here at League HQ.  I had a blast, and I hope all of you Leaguers who made it had as good a time as I did.  If you didn't make it, I hope you can make some future shindig.

Heck, The Dug will be here in pretty short order, and that seems like reason enough to raise a glass or three (and possibly screen Birdemic while hangin' out with my family).

Anyway, rather than beat around the bush, this is about it for my post tonight.  I've got some other things on tap, and I'm a bit tired.  So here's something for you to ponder:

Signal Watch Reads: The Sixth Gun - Volume 1

We've talked a bit before about The Sixth Gun, a western/ fantasy/ horror book from Oni Press. Unfortunately for somebody in the equation, The Sixth Gun was one of the books I moved to my "will read in Trade format" during last year's re-think on how I was consuming my comics. For this post to feel more useful, I'd definitely hop back to that first post at the link above, and consider this a follow up.

Finally getting to Sixth Gun's first trade comes on the heels of me finally exploring a bit of Palmiotti and Gray's version of Jonah Hex, likely the best selling western comic in the US comics scene. Fortunately, just as movie westerns are really a big tent for all sorts of sub-genres, so, too, are comics westerns. Where we can get our Spaghetti Western on in the pages of Hex, Sixth Gun is telling aan adventure/horror tale of walking dead men, ancient evils and man's pivotal place in that scheme, circa 1870's America.

Bunn and Hurtt's comic shouldn't read as well as it does. By that I mean - there are a lot of comics on the stands that are mash-ups of two or more pop-culture concepts (seriously, you can't keep up), be it "Werewolf Zombie-Killer", "Chtulu High School", or "Spacefaring Vampire Superheroes" or whatever. And most of them are a kind of cute/ high concept idea with a neat cover and character designs, and then absolutely no ability to actually execute on a story.

Sixth Gun mixes concepts, and its hard to say its anything new, exactly, which is why it seems like this should fail.  But here at The Signal Watch, we say: it works.  The pacing, dialog, characters, etc...  may not be cut from new cloth, but Bunn and Hurtt seem to have that alchemy at their fingertips that can take those concepts and  breathe new life into them, pushing the story forward via well-conveyed character motivation and making the elements pulled from other sources fit like gears.

Bunn understands the spirit of the Southern culture he's depicting (I believe he's from Missouri, which puts him pretty neatly there below the Mason-Dixon line), and the misplaced honor and grandeur of the Old South which produces characters like our heroes and villains, and the expansion into the west as a sort of post-war purgatory where towns could burn to ashes and that was simply that.  And he knows what's actually scary about the concepts he's pulling into play.

Add in a set of a half-dozen guns-of-the-damned granting the carriers with supernatural properties, beasts from American mythology, and nightmare-inspired bar brawls, and Sixth Gun makes for a pretty darn good read.

As is now site policy, I'm going to wait to see how Volume 2 pans out before I give this book a "Signal Watch Official Seal of Recommended Reading".  I'd like to see where Bunn takes the protagonists, who showed signs of character, but seems to be on the slow boil model of character revelation.  Frankly, there's enough going on in the first volume with world setting, conflict establishment, etc...  that I didn't really feel like I was missing much until I began thinking about what we know about the rakish Drake Sinclair and Becky, the preacher's daughter who seems to have a bit of iron in her that precludes a standard-issue damsel in distress that a less creative writer might have put in her place. 

Hurtt's animation-friendly artistic style still works remarkably well for me, and I'll take it over any number of high-gloss, improbable anatomy wielding, no-understanding of action-framing artists out there working on high-profile books.  The terrain of the West, the mixing of western and wild mythology, etc...  blend very well under his pencil. 

Anyhow, we'll be back to talk Volume 2 when that edition arrives.

Baby, You're My Angel

New York Times steps on geek culture landmine, triggers wrath of Geek Girls

Not long ago I made mention of the welcome change I think the influx of Geek Girls has had on comics (and I guess sci-fi, but that's less an area where I mentally hang out). 

It seems The New York Times published a review of the upcoming HBO series Game of Thrones, a fantasy/ sword & shield epic based upon a series of novels by favored fantasy writer George RR Martin.  Truthfully, I'm not much of a fantasy-novel guy, and thanks to a decade of bad SyFy movies, I don't even remember if I have an opinion on fantasy movies that doesn't come with snarky detachment.

Anyway, it seems the reviewer in the New York Times has really tweaked the Geek Girl audience with the following:

While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half. 

Well, here we go.  Ginia Bellafonte, you know not what you hath wrought.

Frankly, I'm a little shocked this is what passes for a review in the NYT, not because its clear Bellafante has mistaken her own tastes in genre fiction for critical criteria, but because the review reads a bit more like an undergrad who hasn't really thought through her arguments against something they didn't like, but they've had a glass or two of wine and they can't quite articulate what they're thinking.  Again, I am not a fan of Martin's work, nor am I particularly enthused about Game of Thrones, but, srsly, NYT?

Nerdybird of Has Boobs, Reads Comics (a popular comics blog) has gathered up some of the reactions online.  Through the red anger-haze, I'm not sure all of the columns actually read what Bellafante was saying accurately, but that one troublesome paragraph is hard to miss, and hard to read incorrectly.

Unconsciously, Bellafante just called out the hordes of female sci-fi, fantasy and comics fans and suggested that they weren't, you know, "real girls".

This, I am sure, will horrify her.  She's a NYT reviewer and no doubt prides herself on her feminist ideals.  But, instead, she decided to go snob high schooler, casting generalizations over both the entirety of the human species, and dismissed anyone who basically doesn't share the taste of she and her pals.  Kind of weird, that, in a NYT review.

In some ways, its a bitter reminder that despite the mainstream embracing of aspects of geek culture into popular, prime time worthy entertainment, most folks just shrug at sci-fi or fantasy and will consume it if it comes across their plate (sort of like, "I don't really love mushrooms on my pizza, but if that's what's left on the buffet, that's what I'm eatin'"), while others are still a little miffed that not only do people seem to just consume what's put in front of them, but can you believe this Star Wars Klingon crap?  Gawd.  It's clearly no Brothers and Sisters. 

The interesting bit is that while guy geeks of my generation and older took it for granted that somehow devoting oneself to watching professional sports and wearing the colors of a pro-sports franchise is seen as totally normal adult behavior, routinely watching Star Trek should mean you're justly denied the affections of a woman and deserve ridicule for reading this type of book versus that type of book.*   This, of course, made no damn sense to me as a kid, and it makes less sense to me now.   

Fortunately, the Geek Girl movement is anything but quiet within the geek-o-sphere, and this seems like an interesting salvo to move beyond even just the geek-o-sphere and not taking any of that crap, thank you.

Bellafante seems a bit puzzled that "oh, hey, sex" occurs in fantasy fiction and reacts with a sort of prudish disbelief. 

What's fascinating and telling is that, from her comments, Bellafante no doubt considers herself up on what constitutes mature and appropriately lurid television and movies, indicating there's a rubric that constitutes "adult depictions of sex" in modern fiction or polite society that she's pretty sure she can approve or disapprove.  And, of course, that quote above?  It actually starts off with the following sentence:

The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise.

Wow.  Just...  There's so many things wrong in that sentence and contradictory (oh, so now we're condemning perverted women for making the wrong kind of sex happen on TV...) that its just flat out amazing this thing saw print.  

On the plus side, you just rallied a whole lot of women who maybe weren't going to watch the show just to stick it to the NYT.

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to seeing how Ms. Bellafante's weekend goes. 


*that isn't to say all books are just as good, but the cheerful ridicule of genre by someone ignorant of what they are reading and perhaps why its a useful read within the genre is probably one of the most damn irritating things I can think of.

I really don't know how I CAN'T go see the new "Apes" movie

My Apes obsession crescendoed in the days prior to any blogging or social media. Circa 1998 - 2001, I was all about Planet of the Apes and its sequels. Somewhere, I still have a Charlton Heston action figure and 12" dolls of Cornelius and Dr. Zaius.  Now that I think on it, once, when Jamie was in the hospital, I left her there to go catch a screening of POTA at the original location of the Alamo (with her permission).

My favorite of the series, of course, was the original, which Tim Burton remade into a mess of a surprisingly boring film about 10 years ago. My second favorite was always Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, in which you learn about the early days of the ape revolt, which had been hinted at in the previous films.  Its a sort of cautionary tale/ leninist fantasy of the beleagured apes rising up and striking back at their tormentors (us a-hole humans) who have basically been treating apes as slave labor in the context of the film.

@#$% is about to get real, yo

The trailer above is quite different from Conquest, so its a new story that seems to give a faux-scientific plausible explanation for how the ape revolt could have ever happened. In some ways, its a bit like introducing midichlorians, but after the goofy mutants of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, I'm not sure the franchise maintained the same credibility with even the fans that Star Wars carried for so long.

Everyone who comes to Planet of the Apes has a different perspective,  because (a) its not a series built on a cheery proposition and (b) my own wife just gets creeped out by the make-up, so she won't watch the films even when I can prove that Kim Hunter as Zira is just awesome (she appears in the first 3 Apes films).

see!  even Cheston loves Zira.  Maybe too much.

As a kid, I remember watching the Apes movies when WGN or our local UHF station would have "Ape Week" (5 Apes movies in 5 nights.  It was as good as "Godzilla Week".  Man, UHF ruled.), but unlike Tron or Star Wars I do remember having to work pretty hard to grok the Apes movies.  In a lot of ways, the social commentary and criticism of the movies that I thought pretty clever in 1998 just wasn't apparent to me as a kid.  But, you know, apes.  You had to watch.

The original novel of Planet of the Apes is actually quite a bit different from the 1960's version of the movie, and vastly different from the Mark Wahlberg-starring version, although there's a bit of the "suprise ending" in all three.   Its worth noting that Rod Serling, Mr. Twilight Zone himself was part of the brains behind the movie of Planet of the Apes (1968), which makes total sense if you've seen the movie. 

Anyhow, I'm up for an Apes movie.  This looks properly ridiculous.

Dames to Watch Out For: Gloria Grahame

Its my birthday as I begin this post, so I'm going to indulge myself and return to that old standby of "Dames In the Media the League Once Dug", which at this URL, we call "Dames to Watch Out For".

In this edition: Ms. Gloria Grahame

You may think you don't know Gloria Grahame, but if you owned a TV in the 1980's and 90's in the month of December, it means you saw It's a Wonderful Life.  Grahame played Violet Bick, the woman who seems a lot more interesting than Donna Reed who George gives some money to so that she can leave town and start a new life (its also shown she had eyes for George Bailey, and he had no idea.  We think George may have missed the boat on that one.)

see, you know this person

She also appeared in Oklahoma! as Ado Annie, a sort of naive, man-crazy problem-child.  Grahame was in her 30's by the time the movie was released, but was playing someone around 17 or 18, I'd guess.  Go figure.

If you've seen Oklahoma!, she's the crazy one who is often seen in a terrible hat.

the hat alone should warn the farmers and the cow mans that she's 10 kinds of crazy

But that's not the Grahame we're here to talk about.  Today, we want to discuss the Noir-centric Gloria Grahame.

Grahame gives Ford a couple of things to think about

In doing my research I stumbled across a great post about Grahame at Bright Lights Film Journal, and I'd recommend it as a good read.

I haven't seen all that many films with Grahame, but its hard to ignore her in either Crossfire or The Big Heat.

It seems Grahame actually received accolades for her work in Crossfire, and its not hard to see why.  Its a heartbreaking role as a taxi dancer, caught up in the murder of a Jewish US Soldier.  Ginny's role isn't the focus, although pivotal, and Grahame breathes a lot of life into the character, worn out and tired, and rightfully certain she's barely counted as a person any more.

I'll discuss Crossfire at another point.  I've seen it twice, and while somewhat dated in its approach, its still a great, tight film and uses the genre to share messages that were on the mind of America in the wake of World War II.

Also like a loaded gun?  A loaded gun.

Grahame would receive an Academy Award nomination, but it wouldn't lead to her becoming part of the Hollywood Pantheon of stars best remembered from the eras she crossed, from Hayworth to Monroe, or their later peers.

I have discussed The Big Heat, which I'll reiterate here is just a terrific movie.

this fills so many check boxes for me on a great noir scene, my brain is kind of exploding

For me, the standout role for Grahame is likely in The Big Heat, which is the source of the image above.  This is a movie about tough/ righteous police, corrupt cops and their spouses, sociopathic henchmen, ruthless mobsters, etc...  and Grahame manages to go toe-to-toe with all of them.  Including Lee Marvin.  Lee.  Marvin.

Grahame's character (a bit like descriptions I've read of Grahame herself) is a particularly bright woman who also likes to have a pretty darn good time.  She may intellectually know she's hanging out with hoodlums, but it seems to be working out pretty well for her.  The character takes a drastic turn, and Grahame handles the metamorphosis terribly well for what could have been an awkwardly melodramatic performance in lesser hands.  It may not be a femme fatale role, but its also an interesting female role from the era (as many are once you head into the world of noir).

publicity still from "The Big Heat"

Unfortunately, as with her peers such as Veronica Lake, Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe, Grahame's personal life seemed fit for its own big screen treatment if it hadn't featured a lot of material that likely wouldn't have met production codes back in the day.

Grahame had her fair share of romantic entanglements and married four times (including to Nicholas Ray and, later, Ray's son, so....  yeah, there's a story there), and died at the age of only 57.

For my birthday I received a film noir box set from Jamie featuring Human Desire from 1954.  Its one of the movies up next in my queue, so expect to see more Grahame in the near future.

Taking the Night Off

Its my birthday.  Here's Cyd Charisse.

Today I am 36. Dammit.

No.  I don't want to talk about it.  As I did at League of Melbotis on each birthday, I shall share with you a song that sums up the annual rite.


"In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" - Neutral Milk Hotel

What a beautiful face 
I have found in this place
That is circling all round the sun
What a beautiful dream
That could flash on the screen
In a blink of an eye and be gone from me
Soft and sweet
Let me hold it close and keep it here with me

And one day we will die
And our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea
But for now we are young
Let us lay in the sun 
And count every beautiful thing we can see
Love to be 
In the arms of all I'm keeping here with me

Anna's ghost all around 
Hear her voice as it's rolling and ringing through me
Soft and sweet
How the notes all bend and reach above the trees   

Now how I remember you 
How I would push my fingers through
Your mouth to make those muscles move
That made your voice so smooth and sweet
And now we keep where we don't know
All secrets sleep in winter clothes
With one you loved so long ago
Now he don't even know his name 

What a beautiful face
I have found in this place 
That is circling all round the sun
And when we meet on a cloud
I'll be laughing out loud
I'll be laughing with everyone I see
Can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all