No more than a movie

Some movies don't need any kind of sequel, and many of them really do not need it to be multiple hours of television.

The phenomena of the unwanted sequel is still with us -  where one movie is perfectly good enough, and the follow-up can't help but disappoint. We all saw it recently when Ready Or Not 2 came out to a critical and commercial shrug, because that movie made its point pretty fucking well in the first one, and there really wasn't much more to add, except for mindless escalation.

And now we get the unwanted TV remakes, prequels and sequels, and they're not only unnecessary, they stretch out for hours and hours and hours.

They keep trying to sell me on the new Man on Fire, and while the original movie does have a much better reputation than it did at the time (critics always got dazzled by the style of Tony Scott films, and were blinded to the substance that could lurk beneath his glossiest of surfaces). But even with a fine cast in the TV version - that lead dude in the new series is usually pretty excellent - there's no Tony Scott, there's no Denzel, there is no way many hours of the new thing is going to be better than two hours with those deadset champions.

Now there is a long remake of Cape Fear, and lots of people I trust say it's actually pretty good, but I just don't want to spend 10 hours in that kind of nightmare. A tight two hours and eight minutes with prime Marty Scorsese was enough for me. 

There is so much out there it's easy to ignore a lot of it - there's no need to bother with the forthcoming Harry Potter (and when the creator is using the cash it gives her to cause real harm to real people, it's a moral imperative to shun it and you can rest assured it will never be mentioned on this blog again); it did take me two seasons to realise the new version of Interview with a Vampire is really not my bag; and I never had the slightest interest in seeing that series about a young Nurse Ratchet.

Because it doesn't feel like it's not being added to, it's more like it's being leeched off. It's a dilution, not a construction.

I'm such a fucking film snob. Even after all sorts of televisual brilliance over the years.  After a catastrophic failure of my movie cataloging for this year, I've been catching up on TV series and some of them are great and some of them are okay and all of them would be better as a two hour movie. If you can't tell a story in 120 minutes, maybe you shouldn't be telling a story, and not everything needs to be 10 hours.   

This is obviously not a hard rule - get some Dekalog into you, that shit is aces, and there is always the exception of Twin Peaks - but when so much talent so sucked up into a story that was already told with a lot more efficency, it all just feels so pointless. 

Hail Satan

A friend of mine occasionally sends me out of context comics panels from Jack Chick comics, and this one is definitely my favourite so far.

Grendel: Caring about Christine

When a comic character has been dead and gone for decades, one simple way to get the reader invested again is to show that character's raw emotions, and how they can carry a hurt that never dies. Christine Spar is back as Grendel and she is just as complex and angry as she ever was, but she's also devastatingly human.

Matt Wagner pulls off a fittingly neat and efficient narrative trick in the latest volume of Grendel. We're hundreds of years into the saga now, and Christine - a main character from the earliest days - has returned, cloned into new flesh. And the new Christine has work to do. This future world is run by leech-like vampires and she has to make it right, because Grendels fucking hate vampires, and this one most of all. 

Bringing back a new character as clone is the hoariest of cliches, but it takes less than an issue for this Christine to be established as a real person, because while she knows she is a copy of the original, she is still haunted by the death of her son, so long ago. 

It's the worst thing you could possibly imagine as a parent, to lose a kid. Christine's son was taken from her by a vampire Kabuki dancer hundreds of years ago, and she still feels his absence in the world, long after he would have turned to dust, even if he'd lived a full and rich life. 

All that lost potential will also be missed in Christine's world, wherever she is, and whatever flesh she is cloaked in.

It's a strong way to instantly give the character some weight and depth. It also helps to see her slice up some future fascist fucks in her first real outing - and Wagner's action sequences still sing with clarity and purpose - but it's the grief that makes her human, an ache that we all can recognise, if only in our worst nightmares.

The silent scream of getting old

There is a certain time in your life when you suddenly become very invested in how old Wilford Brimley was when he made Cocoon, and while he was playing someone vastly older than he was, there is some existential shock when you hit that age. 

Another moment like this that has stuck in my brain for decades is when Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise takes note of how old he is getting in the first TNG movie, and that he has come to terms with the idea that there were more days behind him than ahead of him, and I almost certainly crossed that particular threshold sometime in the post decade, and it is giving me the shits, man.  

Especially since it's been a blink of an eye since Malcolm McDowell killed Captain Kirk in that film, and it's somehow 30 years later. It's certainly comforting to see Sir Patrick still out there doing his thing in the X-Men, but he is much, much closer to that end he talked about with Deanna Troi, and it doesn't feel like he should be.

I do like being in my fifties, I'm far more well-adjusted and self-confident and plain old happier than ever before. I love my family and we just moved into our new home, after a lifetime of renting. I still love my day job, and while the world is in a general spiral of shit, all is right with the world around me.  

But it's also August already and I do feel time slipping through my fingers, like sloppy wet sand. And sometimes the sheer rage at how fast it is sliding by makes me want to scream in some kind of never-ending howl.

That's normal, right? One thing I can rely on in this uncertain world is that when it comes to aging, we're all in the same boat. We all feel life slipping away, even as we try to hold on. Time is a merciless bastard, and we all age together, and we're all silently screaming about it, and pushing it to the back of our minds so that we can just get through the day.

Even Jean-Luc Picard feels it, and his lack of a biological family gives more weight to the doubts he feels, even as his considerable accomplishments are immortalised in history. He'll be okay. After all, he's just a fictional character, and will live on long after I've merged with the infinite, which I still hope remains a long, long way off.

Bad Boy: Trying to escape.

- Bad Boy #1

Art by Simon Bisley

words by Frank Miller

Colours and letters by Angus McKie

One last hit from the past: A moment of Cassidy

- Originally published October 21 2014

I haven't woken up like this in a long, long time, but I'll never forget that feeling.

Here comes the past #31: Goodnight Kiwi, (and so to bed)

Whenever I find it hard to sleep, all I have to do is watch the above Goodnight Kiwi video - which ran for nearly 20 years on New Zealand TV - and it instantly makes me drowsy. Not because of that groovy, lounge-lizard version of Hine e Hine, or even because of the quiet, subdued animation. It makes me drowsy because that little clip is still telling me that the day is finished, and it's time to go to bed, because there is no more telly.

The idea of all-night TV was a totally foreign concept when I was a kid. There were only two TV stations in NZ until 1990, both part of the public broadcaster, and when the Goodnight Kiwi clip came on, usually just before midnight, it was followed by nothing, until TV started up again in the morning (although Breakfast TV was also a foreign concept).

When I was a teenager, and staying up as late as I could, that would generally mean the end of the day, and it was time for bed. You could always stay up later and watch a video, but when a beloved cartoon icon is settling down for the night, it makes sense to join him and his cat in slumber. 

That blessed closedown of the broadcast was eventually replaced by the cash grab of terrible, terrible infomercials, and night-owls and other insomniacs could watch awful steak-knife demonstrations all night long.

A screen full of nothing was better than that, and also brought some much needed closure to the day. When it feels like life is hectic and never-ending, there was something soothing about the nothingness that followed the full-stop of this little cartoon. It was time to recharge, and start up again tomorrow.

Goodnight, Kiwi. Goodnight everybody.

- Originally published 28 February 2020 

Good night.

Here comes the past #30: Who is the Man From LOVE?

This is the Man From LOVE:

#1. It all starts at the movies
#2. No shot
#3. All you need is dance
#4. A night off from saving the world
#5. Dinner with the Goodsons
#6. Cleaning up afterwards
#7. How to sign up
#8 A virtual certainty
#9. All will be well
#10. Wrong
#11. Don't look now
#12. Dealing with it
#13. Metaphysical manipulation for fun and profit
#14. Run fool, run
#15. This is not normal
#16. The man in the moon
#17. A nice glass of red
#18. The Trevor situation
#19. Left behind
#20. There is no Trevor
#21. This is not you
#22 Cross country
#23. Good morning
#24. Lost with the fairies
#25. Alone
#26. Fighting and fucking
#27. The House of Good
#28. How the world works
#29. Everything is everything
#30. Cool

The Man From LOVE was written for the NaNoWriMo thing a few years ago, which should be obvious due to its brevity and half-assed plotting. It was also born out of a general frustration that every attempt to do a 'secret agent for the 21st century' story was still mired in 20th century genre and cliche, and I wanted to do something that genuinely tried to update the conventions.

Like almost everything piece of fiction I ever write, I just wanted to do it for fun and did absolutely nothing with it when it was done. This was mainly because I couldn't even imagine anybody ever giving a shit about it, but also because it painfully exposes my crippling anxiety about mortality, which is a bit embarrassing.

But this has been a rough year, and I needed to take a break from writing about the latest dumb comics and movies for a while, so dug up this story from the depths of a half-dead hard drive and put it up. It's out there now, for all the world to see, and we can all move on. Normal service will resume later this week.

I should really get around to finishing The Woman From LOVE, a sequel which is more of the same, with added time travel and vampires and maybe even an explanation of what LOVE and HATE stand for. That'll probably appear here in another three or four years. You can't rush the meaning of life. 

- Originally published 1 September 2018 

That was the Man from LOVE. I became a dad almost immediately after posting this and have written very little fiction ever since, but did start writing the very last LOVE story a few months ago, because why would you ever stop?.

Here comes the past #29: For the love of Batman

“Batman’s rich history allows him to be interpreted in a multitude of ways. To be sure this is a lighter incarnation but it’s certainly no less valid and true to the character’s roots than the tortured avenger crying out for mommy and daddy.”

- Bat-Mite

The Brave and the Bold cartoon

Admit it, if you like superheroes, you fucking loved the Batman TV show as a kid. And then you hated it as a teenager. And then, if you grew up enough, you started to like it again.

 

The good bastards at the comic shop near my work put out a whole bunch of comic magazines on sale for $1 each. Issues of magazines I’d never seen before, many from the TwoMorrows publishing outfit – stuff like Alter Ego, Comic Book Artist and Back-Issue.

I had only seen a small handful of these magazines before, and was surprised how much I enjoyed their unashamed wallowing in nostalgia. The sheer amount of reproduced raw art is responsible for most of that enjoyment and a general tone of unabashed enthusiasm is highly contagious. After reading a long, rambling and highly enjoyable conversation between Dave Cockrum and Mike Grell, any reader will be convinced of the genuine worth of that mid-period Legion of Super-Heroes and that funk-tastic design sense.

But the writers often leave their inner fanboy showing a bit, most notably through their enthusiastic gushing over subjects few others care about. There is also the unfortunate tendency to dismiss the Adam West Batman as an unfortunate diversion from the true Batman which has tarnished the public’s perception of the character and pushed back any serious interpretations of the concept.

The inherent fanboy can be heard in the sneering. It’s obviously an embarrassment to all true Batman fans, a campy glitch in the history of the Dark Knight, the annoying uncle you have to acknowledge.

But it’s not. It’s brilliant. Turns out this annoying uncle actually has a good sense of humour and all sorts of stories to tell. The Batman TV show from the ‘60s is bright and colourful and cheerful and surprisingly ironic. It’s a bit stupid, but smart in ways that really matter. All those old showbiz hamming, chewing down on the gaudy scenery. Those catchphrases, those actors and that music, imprinted on generations. It’s brilliant.

When I was a little kid, the first television programmes I ever remember watching were Doctor Who and Batman.

That was my tastes rooted for life.

But I was genuinely excited about the Batman show when my brain was forming, and it was 20 years old then. There is something about that absolute deadpan that made it timeless.

Kids love it because it is loud and fun. It’s got a theme tune that is insanely catchy and these bright characters running around and having adventures. Its most obvious humour level is pitched somewhere around the eight year old’s level, so it always gets them laughing with the dumb joke.

I’ve seen kids in the 21st century fall over themselves in excitement when the Batman TV show was on television. They were eating that stuff up and asking for seconds. Their parents didn’t understand.

And then you get older and a girl catches you reading something meaty like The Killing Joke and laughs at you because she thinks it’s full of Fatman and Slobin and you’re like fuck that shit

I once had a lovely conversation with a girl who sometimes has to go out and do weather reports for breakfast television. They make her do the stupidest things, any old excuse to drag the waking eyes over to a TV screen.

She said she knows it’s all horribly embarrassing and tacky and cheesy, but if you show an inch of that knowledge, it just doesn’t work. The only way to avoid being embarrassed is to be as embarrassing as possible. Otherwise you just look stilted and awkward, and that’s much, much worse.

That’s how the television Batman works. There was just enough winking to show they were all in the joke, but not enough to be mean about it.

I watched it again in my early twenties and it was just stupid, so I filed it away as something best forgotten. Comics are serious business for serious young men. There will be no camp here.

And then I watched an episode with those kids I was talking about earlier, and it was bloody fantastic. The whole programme was dripping with deadpan irony and still played well – four decades after it was made.

It looked crisp and clear in a way that 70s television shows never do. It remains timeless and I can handle a Batman that digs the day.

That’s not everybody’s Batman. Many remain convinced that the tortured avenger of the night is the only valid interpretation of a cultural icon that is deserving of the respect its history deserves. Other people just like a Batman who grimaces and throws bad guys into meat grinders.

Others like a Batman who can be a bit competitive, while always fair. Who isn’t afraid to show others how it’s done and can do it with a laugh.

There have been a lot of thoughtful and genuinely mature stories about Batman that have been absolutely fantastic. There have also been a lot of goofy and funny stories that have been so enjoyable.

They’re all valid interpretations.

Nananananananana! Nananananananana! Batman! Batman! BATMAN! Nananananananana!

I still know loads of people who love reading comics, but wouldn’t be caught dead with them in public. While there are more people reading Sandman on the train than ever before, it’s still perceived as a child’s medium in western eyes. If you like it, you must be immature.

Well, so what? What’s wrong with liking a kid’s product if it’s smart and funny enough? It doesn’t do any harm. If people laugh at you because you get a bit over-excited about Batman and Robin, that’s their problem. It shouldn’t taint my enjoyment of it.

It took me fuckin’ years to figure this out.

- Originally published March 10, 2010

I got a boxset of all the Batman episodes for dirt cheap recently, and have been watching them with the kids. They love the punching, I love the female villains. Everyone is having a good time.