This week, I visit Quincy

Apparently, Quincy wasn't looking for company.

I'm jumping on a jetplane and headed for Quincy, Massachusetts for a conference.  One I am not running, which is a relief.  It turns out Massachusetts is very far away from Texas, so basically all I am doing tomorrow is sitting on airplanes (my second favorite activity) and sitting at the airport (my FIRST favorite activity).

I can only pray someone in my row has a baby with colic or I get sat with the a guy really, really hitting on a girl as occurred during my flight back from Lubbock a while back (awwwkward).

Don't give me suggestions for the Boston area.  I'm just going to the conference and then coming home.  I'm not renting a car, and I'm not going to explore Quincy while I'm there.  Apparently the cab ride alone is setting the tax payers of Texas back more than I can believe, so I'm already more than a little out of sorts about this whole trip.

The Q thinks I need to just stay cool.

I'm sure it will be fine, I'm just ready to not be partaking in any events at the moment.  But the change of scenery will be nice, one supposes.  And I bet they still wear those fancy tri-corner hats in the Boston metro-area.

The deal lasts through Friday, so we'll be back on schedule as of Friday night or Saturday.  I dunno.

I wish I was just going to Boston like I thought when I signed up for this garfunkling conference.

Dan Didio, you mad, beautiful genius

Not that I'm paying much attention at the moment, but DC cancelled another handful of titles with plans to replace them with, in a Direct Market populated solely by comics readers from whom their is no alternative audience, ideas just about as promising as the books that they're cutting.

On the chopping block:
Captain Atom - a conspicuously Dr. Manhattanish take on Captain Atom, the character Alan Moore was riffing on when he created Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen.
Resurrection Man - a book that was never that popular back in the 90's, so why 2011 was the time to relaunch, what with nobody asking for it...
Voodoo - I forget the exact provenance of this book, but it was never DC and part of some other line at some point and was about a stripper alien?  Maybe?  I wasn't clear, but...  they fired the character's creator off the book and put on someone who actually understood the character or something... Nobody read this.  It's all moot now, I guess.
Justice League International - a book that was intended to build off the good will garnered over 5 years of great Justice League stories that don't exist...  Here's your whole problem with the "5 year leap" thing DC was trying to do with the New 52.  Dan Didio couldn't clap enough to make everyone believe that we weren't totally rebooting the DCU.

but now you can get:
Talon - well, I can't argue that a major event should generate a new character.  I haven't read one issue of Court of Owls, so this is lost on me.
Phantom Stranger - some characters just work better in the background as mysterious figures or in mini series.  Phantom Stranger and The Spectre are at the top of this list.
Sword of Sorcery - I predict a very small, very vocal group of fans who will complain about the right treatment of Amethyst, which is an hilarious thing to do.  This book will never see 2014.
Team Seven - it seems impossible to have cooked up a more generic idea, even in light of the failure of Blackhawks.  But somehow... a book featuring too many characters that nobody cares about wearing post John Byrne armor in gray and carrying silly looking weapons seems like the ur-New 52 book, so I think this may take off.

But that's not what made me slap my forehead.

Signal Watch Watches: Prometheus (2012)

Look, this thing is full of spoilers, so don't bother unless you've seen the movie.

Re-Watch: Trollhunter (2010)

Last night Jamie was out of town, so a few pals came by and our gameplan was to eat lousy Greek food, make a drink and then watch Crank 2.  Tragically, this was not to be.

I opened the NetFlix sleeve, popped in the disk and was ready to roll when we received an error message from the player.  The disk was for some PS3 game, and most certainly NOT for Crank 2.  So some poor 19 year old out there is wondering where his copy of Battlefield went.*

Plan B was to watch Troll 2, but that was deemed "@#$%ing unwatchable" by some in attendance, so Matt said "if we're going to watch something with trolls in it**, let's watch Trollhunter".

So we did.

Here's what I said about the movie when I caught it in the theater almost exactly a year ago.

I'm not sure I really sold the movie back then as well as I could have, but its a really fun flick, and not scary at all, if that's your concern.  Its just a fun time, and, as Matt said "definitely one of the best of these 'found film' movies."

I loved the discussion of the physiology of trolls, the shadowy Troll Security Service, etc...  all good stuff.

Anyway, its on Netflix Streaming, so check it out.



*I've got it!
**I'm not sure "trolls" was our only criteria, but it made sense at the time.

Signal Watch Watches: Stardust Memories (1980)

Interesting.

So, as some found horrifying, I didn't take to Allen's 1979 film Manhattan.  I've generally basically liked the Woody Allen movies I'd seen, so I gave Allen's follow-up, Stardust Memories (1980), a whirl and hopefully my positive reaction will get me back in your good graces as a watcher of cinemaaaah.

Basically, Stardust Memories solves the problems I had with Manhattan in many ways, or The Problem I had with Manhattan, which was that I finished the movie thinking "and so what?".  It seemed as if in Manhattan Allen had found he had a particular patter down from Annie Hall, found he could play himself in his own context, and it didn't really matter if the story went anywhere or was basically upperclass urbanites mistaking their high school-ish romantic tangles as interesting enough for the rest of us (yes, I got the thing that Allen's character could only connect with a high schooler.  All well and good til you consider his real life marital woes, which...), and the clumsy, flailing quest for something "deep" by self-medicating and spending too much on therapy that went nowhere as a pursuit unto itself.

Stardust Memories acknowledges all the questions, perhaps a bit too on the nose from time to time, but it at least tries to move beyond Allen in one of his stand-in roles, but challenges the character, adding on the layer of the frustrated artist at a crosspoint in his life of the guy who has made it, and all the expectation and responsibility inherent.  The trials of the filmmaker, piled on top of the usual hand wringing Allenisms over the allure and complications of women drive the character conflict, and create enough of an arc to give the movie the weight that Manhattan sought for but never achieved.

I guess if you're going to have a "character driven story", this is a pretty darn good example of what that can look like, even if its hard not to guess how close the "character" is, as pre-usual, just Allen casting himself against good looking women.

Watching the movie, I still grapple a bit with some of the line delivery and Allen-patter, and 70's-era signposts for intellectualism that had become a parody of themselves by the time I came of age, but I won't hold it against the film, especially as it pushes the narrative boundaries a bit, and effectively at that.  Further, while Manhattan is always the movie that gets the credit for the visual love letter to New York, I'll take the work in this movie.  Even without the dialog and banter, it seems to use the frame less to show and more to tell the story.

Anyway, fear not Woody Allen fans.  I have not sworn off the man's work.

Signal Watch Watches: Best Worst Movie (2009)

After a steady diet of terrible flicks over the past two decades, something I had somehow come to enjoy in my teen years, seeking out bad movies is something I'm now limiting in my intake as I realized a man can only watch R.O.T.O.R. so many times, and there's actually stuff you can enjoy because its actually worth watching.  But for a long, long time I felt like I was fairly well in tune with what we all considered the worst of the worst.

And yet, somehow, I'd missed the phenomenon of Troll 2.

Of course, I was also living in Phoenix when The Alamo figured out how to turn genre-film and midnight screening material into part of their bread and butter, getting people excited about movies that they had never seen, or getting them to pay good money to see movies they'd seen for a far more modest cost on late-night HBO a decade before.

The first time I ever heard the words "Troll 2" was, curiously, at an improv show performance where one of the actresses mistakenly believed that repeatedly making callbacks to a movie few people have not seen nor remember was comedic gold.  I swear she dropped the movie's name four times, hoping for a laugh.  She was greeted with stony silence, but the fact that she kept going back to the well made me realize "oh, this is one of those things today's hipster kids are into.  I get it.  But, seriously, naming something funny when you aren't doesn't draw a laugh.  STOP IT NOW.".

Best Worst Movie (2009) tracks the circa 2006 fad (I'll go ahead and call it that) of being really into Troll 2 from the perspective of the folks who participated in the creation of the movie, including the stars, writer, director, extras and, of course, some of the folks making midnight screenings happen.

The film's former wanna-be child star, Michael Stephenson, actually does an amazing job directing the documentary, collecting all the folks from the film together, getting them to talk honestly both about the film, where they are now, and how they related to the film then and now.  A lot of the questions I had left over at the end of Rock-afire Explosion are nowhere to be found in this film.  I mean, sure, you can still have some questions, but those might be of a nature that you can sort out for yourself.  Basically, the film doesn't raise more questions than it answers, and its pretty honest about what's going on.

Oh my GOSH, you guys! "The Keep" is now on Netflix Streaming!

Oh my gosh, you guys.

You say you've never seen The Keep (1983)?  You saw you've never even heard of it?

Well.
One night when I was about 14, this gem came on TV.  Directed by Michael Mann, starring Scott Glenn and Jurgen Prochnow, and featuring an amazing score by Tangerine Dream (a band unfortunately mostly lost to time and changing tastes), this was a supernatural thriller about Nazis getting in over their heads in a remote mountain town with a long-buried secret.

It also stars Ian McKellan, Gabriel Byrne and numerous others who never, ever talk about their participation in this flick.

The thing languished for years.  Michael Mann has disowned it, Scott Glenn never talked about it, and maybe only Tangerine Dream was out there mentioning it, trying to get people to buy the soundtrack.  Heck, when I saw it a few years ago at The Alamo, we saw the only print known to exist.  The studio doesn't even bother to own a copy other than the master.

Somehow I like this movie.  I mean, its terribly flawed, but I like what somebody involved was trying to do.  I like the clunky, slow pacing, and the fact that you know lots of people are going to get it because, hey, 1/2 the characters are Nazis.

The Keep is now on Netflix Streaming!  I cannot believe this turn of events.  So run, do not walk, to a computer (which you're probably already on), and watch this sort of good film!

Signal Watch Watches: A Shot in the Dark (1964)

Y'all, I finally watched A Shot in the Dark (1964)!  Please check one of those movies off the list that everybody else saw 20 years ago.

And, sure enough, it totally lived up to the hype.  I haven't ever seen that many Sellers movies or Blake
Edwards films, but, yeah, I get it.  Sorry it took me so long.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, before The Pink Panther, Blake Edwards directed a movie starring Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau.  A Shot in the Dark did well enough to spawn a sequel you may know as The Pink Panther.  This spawned not just several Pink Panther movies and a favorite movie theme by Henry Mancini, but a Pink Panther cartoon based upon the opening animation for the Clouseau movies (I watched the cartoon in repeats on WGN in middle school), a brand of pink insulation, and, eventually, a reboot of Clouseau under the Pink Panther banner, but with Steve Martin, which did better than you'd expect.

Sellers, of course, died far too young.

I won't go into too much detail, but its worth a watch some time.

TL; DR: Comics, Superheroes, Watchmen, and Authorship

Fine.  Let's talk about this.

This is going to be, I believe, my final word on the topic.  The topic of Before Watchmen.

I've raised my hand a few times over the last two or three years and tried to make various points about how I have felt that the current crop of 20-somethings approach comics fandom differently than how I came up as a reader and fan.  Most certainly, there's the internet and social media aspect that has become (I'd argue) more important than the comics themselves in many quarters.  And, of course, the level of fandom that seems to stem ultimately a whole lot more from being able to dress up as a character and wander around a Con for many of these "fans".  If I can be blunt, I can't shake the suspicion that they're not the same kind of fan that's sought out every appearance of a character.  And, given sales, I have to wonder if they're paying for comics at all.

There's also plenty of folks on Etsy making their own products featuring non-DC approved licensed characters, people making webcomics, etc...  In short, fan fiction is as much a part of the culture to the current target demo as the "legitimate" product.

In a way, that sort of sense of entitlement/ fan ownership could be seen as a mutant offshoot of the Big 2's insistence that the characters supersede the creators in importance.  If we aren't immediately associating Bill Finger with Batman, but some nebulous corporate entity that also owns TV, the news, the internet lines, AOL, Jerry Seinfeld, Bugs Bunny, and Six Flags...  it may be that Time Warner is simply big too see the contours.

Signal Watch Double Bill: Shock Corridor (1963) & The Naked Kiss (1964)

Holy hell, y'all.

I'm not familiar with the work of writer/ director/ producer Samuel Fuller, but he has one of those names you always hear.  And, I haven't had opportunity yet to visit the Paramount yet this summer for the summer series, nor had I ever been in the State Theater on Congress, side by side with the Paramount.  Wednesday night provided a great opportunity to knock some items off my list, and so I caught both Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964), two movies that earned their bonafides.

Of the two films, Shock Corridor may have dated more poorly, even if it still holds up very well from a narrative standpoint.  It follows a newspaper journalist who knows he can earn a Pulitzer by going undercover into an mental hospital to solve a murder the police have been unable to crack as the only three witnesses were hopelessly mentally ill.  He recruits his stripper girlfriend, played by the lovely Constance Towers, into posing as his sister who files charges of attempted sexual assault.  With training from a psychologist, Johnny Barrett sneaks in undetected.

And then learns that a mental hospital run under the common practices of mid-20th Century medicine was no picnic.

When they make my bio-pic, tell them this is exactly what I want the poster to look like, but with Jamie dancing in the corner.