Come on, Christopher Doyle! Hero, a movie we've been waiting a handful of years to see on the big screen, is here at last in its Tarantino-sponsored American theatrical release, and it's been in the oven too long. The dramatic, moving story of some people who get in slow, really arbitrary fights for a murky, unexplained political justification, Hero has been acclaimed for, among other things, its caaaaaaarefully arranged visual presentation and Rashomon presentation. The two are tied together by roughly assigning a segment of story-retelling to a color palette depending on the character recounting it, its place on the truth-o-meter, and its theme. It doesn't work here, as it wouldn't have worked in Rashomon; in fact, it negates the point.

Crayola Presents: Hero is its own film and shouldn't be directly compared, but we can look at the telling-and-retelling motif the same way in both films. Would Rashomon have benefitted from a color wash on each segment? It's not an aesthetic argument, either - the idea is that without something literally or figuratively coloring the different stories, they take place in the same nebulous gray (neither black nor white, nor black-and-white) space of an unsubstantiated personal account, and if they all look the same to us, we don't know which version would have deserved to be impassioned red, nonjudgmental blue, fraudulent purple.

Now, Hero isn't trying to be eXistenZ. It's prepared to admit that some versions are true and some are false, but it's not entirely sure why. The concept of presenting a version of a story, illustrating the nuances of it, and then later retracting it isn't necessarily an unpleasant one. Presumably you might want to throw your audience off by giving them certain loyalties and interpretations, then causing them to reconsider their thoughts and choose to reverse their ideas later on. I'm not averse to trying to stimulate thought. Little of that is done here, though. Removing a scene that has been retold by a character is worthwhile, but Rashomon knows it teaches you about the character, not the scene. Watching a fight scene and then finding out it didn't occur - when the revelation means nothing to the development of the character beyond a very stock Surprise, It's a Twist! - means we have watched only a kata, a martial arts demonstration to show you what a fight might conceivably look like. If Hero starred Jackie Chan, okay, no problem, but a fight scene in a drama - especially an overblown, windy Zhang Yimou drama - must have some meaning and weight to it. This is to say nothing of sub-fight scenes, scenes (and there are several) that are tangential even to the fictional segments containing them. For a movie with pacing problems, this kind of padding is unforgivable; it seems Zhang Yimou was compelled to make a martial arts film where he really wanted a drama. This compelling force adds unnecessary fight after unnecessary fight, but no fight has any real energy or meaning.

If this wasn't bad enough, he slows them down. He slows them way down. He throws on color washes and computer graphics, but digitizing Jet Li into What Dreams May Come adds neither meaning nor all that much appeal. It's not without its moments, but enjoying a fight scene to find later that it didn't exist is not a way to get the crowd to like your characters, trust your storytelling, or warm...

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Topics: movies

I watch some of the movie. It seems like an easy movie to criticize for its subtext, though I reserve a feeling that by the end it will disavow the subtext in a wholesome, hard-to-argue-with, but for now I catalogue the things I find troubling in this body-swapper about a 13-year-old put into a statuesque frame and forced to deal with the consequences. We are invited to ogle the cleavage of a thirteen-year-old (though she is in a thirty-year-old body). Thirteen-year-old goes to a club and guys grab their d--ks at her. Thirteen-year-old gets smashed on mai tais or something. 13 does a dance from when she was three.*

*Thriller was released in 1982. If this girl is 13 in 2004 or so, the math indicates pretty clearly she was -9 or so when it came out. Maybe this is moot and maybe it isn't; her would-be colleagues at the club, the 30-30 club, would have been just about the right age, would have been 8 or so when Thriller came out, and so it's not surprising that they have fond memories; I'll even buy that they know the moves. The only trouble is that if they were 8 and she was -8, it's not the same as the sixteen-year difference between 13 and 29; there are thirteen-year-olds and twenty-nine-year-olds buying the same albums right now. Right now somewhere in this country there is a thirteen-year-old buying an album, and right now somewhere else a twenty-nine-year-old is buying the same album. This is okay. One's ahead, or one's behind, or both saw the same video; it doesn't matter much. The trouble is that it's not a sixteen-year difference; it's a negative version of the same age. One age is positive and one is negative, one exists and one does not exist. The kid wasn't born when Thriller came out, and this point is not meant to make anyone feel old, it's to explain that she doesn't share the same space or that same experience. The only part she has in Thriller is in recycling, in an attempt by an aging MTV special-block-programmer, a VH1 Best-Of weekend planner, a backward-reaching party or wedding DJ not to supply 13 with a weird, great song she missed but to remind other MTV programmers and VH1 planners of the experience both of those programmers shared. There's no objection to 13 seeing it - the programmer is well aware of the MTV demographic even on a special nostalgic block - but her interest is tangential. If she adopts it (which she obviously has through some circumstance) the programmer will be pleased to see it, and amused, but it will appear a novelty, a cuteness of a kid catching on who was well into the negative numbers when the original broke. There's no question it doesn't truly fit her and that her claim on it is illegitimate. Like clomping around in her father's shoes: cute, funny, always verging on implying some poignant statement on the proportionate or disproportionate aging of both parties, but they never become her shoes.

(I thought maybe she was supposed to have been 13 in the year when the 30-year-old would have been 13, making this not a body-swap but a time-traveller, but if Thriller didn't hit until 1982, then this hypothetical 1982 13-year-old would have hit a 35 or a minimum of 34 in 2004, and that's being generous with the birthday. So back to the original thesis.)

13 shimmies her chest at Mark Ruffalo. This is the only way she can get people to come out on the dance floor. Everyone does the dance. Some guy strips in 13's apartment. 13 has 30-friends to slumber party to show they are...

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Topics: movies

For those of you out there who are as overly committed (as I am)to watching every possible new fall show, you will have noticed that NBC, in an attempt to juice as much viewership as possible out of the Olympics, is flooding the airwaves with their new shows well in advance of the competition. While the numbers are good, NBC may have wanted to realize that getting a huge market share might not be beneficial when you really have nothing good to offer.

Aside from the exceedingly horrible Father of the Pride, NBC seems intent in wallowing in mediocrity this year - LAX being the latest example. Most of the show feels lifted from other, (arguably) better shows - lots of walking-and-talking shots (West Wing, ER), endless musical montages (Cold Case), assorted sexual tension among coworkers and pervasive wackiness among incidental characters (altogether too many to mention, let's go with Moonlighting, though that implies significantly too much quality) The show's grab-bag approach to tone applies to content, as the pilot contains about 5 or 6 plotlines, which seems a tad overambitious for a pilot episode.

I'm not sure if the overstuffed feeling of the episode is the reason I am complete disinterested in any of the characters here. Certainly, I would not consider myself a fan of either Heather Locklear or Blair Underwood. I'm not sure I've ever regularly watched a series of which Ms. Locklear was a cast member (aside from some occasional viewing of T.J. Hooker as a very young kid), so I don't bring the same baggage (negative or positive) that others might bring to the series. Without the trans-textual context, I find her to be barely acceptable as a protagonist of a series, particularly one who's supposed to be overly professional and competitive, since she aggressively exudes the air of a moron. Blair Underwood is fine, I guess, though utterly devoid of any personality or charisma (for all I know, he's a lively, likeable fellow in person, and his on-screen persona is a carefully crafted piece of acting) The supporting cast was, again, vaguely tolerable, but completely forgettable.

The really alarming aspect of all of this is that this is probably the third best new show NBC has aired so far this year.

Rating: C (Frantic, yet dull)

Topics: dramas, television

As a kid, pretty much every summer was spent in the back of a car with my dog and a stack of comics while we drove around the country. I was a pretty aggressive reader of superhero comics, which is why, in the summer of 1985, I was so incredibly pleased by the publication of Who's Who: The Definitive Directory to the DC Universe. For those who missed this, it was basically full or half-page descriptions of every character who had appeared in a DC publication, ever.

For a borderline obsessive like myself, these comics were incredibly addictive. I simply could not read enough about every obscure character, particularly those who I had never actually come across in my 8 years or so of reading comics. This led to some unfortunate purchases (e.g., the Ragman miniseries) but also led to some fantastic discoveries. Perhaps my favorite aspect of the series was the incredibly inclusive approach taken by the editors (Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, and Bob Greenberger, if you're curious); the A-list superheroes (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman) co-existed with one-shot villains (Firebug), Wild West sheriffs and cattle rustlers (Jonah Hex, Bat Lash), goofy 60's sci-fi heroes (Adam Strange, Space Cabbie) even characters as seemingly out of place as pirates and WW1 fighter pilots. Looking back on it now, the broad range of stories makes perfect sense, given the shifting tastes of a fickle comic-reading public, but at the time it seemed like it was one giant attempt to create the most incredibly fully realized parallel universe conceivable. Every era of history, every genre, seemed to be represented in these comics and, by placing them all side-by-side in Who's Who, established all of them in the same continuity.

Almost immediately after DC began publishing Who's Who, they proceeded to start mucking about with their own continuity in a truly wanton fashion. The topic is way too big to get into here (I highly recommend Scott Tipton's column for a proper explanation of Crisis on Infinite Earths), but the upshot is that DC felt that a complete reboot was in order and the wonderful sense of grand story implied by Who's Who was largely chucked out the window.

Which brings me around to Starman, James Robinson's 80-issue series regarding Jack Knight, the son of Ted Knight, aka Starman, a largely second-tier golden age hero. I had been hearing about the series for a while, and finally tracked down the first couple trade paperbacks. They were interesting, if a little ham-handedly written. The series opens with the death of the new Starman, Jack's brother David. Quite a lot of the first few issues deal with Jack's uneasy relationship with his father, his disinterest in assuming the role of Starman, guilt over his brother's death - all of which fall a little flat. Once the series gets the setup out of the way, the real appeal of the series starts to shine through.

Jack Knight is, when he's not the defender of Opal City, an antiques dealer, or, as his father derisively refers to it, a "junk collector." Fairly early on, it becomes apparent that, not only is the main character interested in collecting and appreciating junk, but so is Robinson. Not only does Robinson work every version of Starman (there have been 7 Starmen in the DC Universe - plus a Star Boy, who also shows up) into the series, but also a wide variety of discarded characters like...

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Rating: A

Topics: comics