Barry Lyndon × 21 Savage
— flanthippe (@flanthippe) January 25, 2024
"a lot" pic.twitter.com/rJd3jLCQO4
There has been no more exciting news in all of comics so far this year than hearing that John Wagner has written a Judge Dredd story called 'Death of a Judge', with the extremely capable Mike Perkins on artwork.
I honestly don't think this will be the death of Judge Dredd story that has to happen sooner or later, (I've been expecting it for a while) but having Wagner write any Dredd is such a rare treat these days, and such a provocative title is already getting the thrillpower already pumping through my veins.
Luckily, while we're all waiting, Wagner is also telling his life story in a series of incredibly entertaining blog posts on his website, and I strongly recommend checking them out. His story of freelance life in castles and writing with mates in sheds are all well documented, but Wagner is giving a seriously new perspective on the old stories.
But there is still nothing I want to read more in all comics than 'Death of a Judge' right now. Nearly 50 years into the continuing adventures of Judge Joe Dredd, and it's still the greatest thrill in the galaxy.
The worst thing to read in any piece of film criticism - apart from the outright bigotry that sometimes boils to the surface - is when somebody talks about a movie having a poor script, and then they just leave it like that.
What does that even mean? Are they talking about the plot, or the dialogue, or the characterization? Is it just full of clichés, or just purely implausible? There are plenty of things that a script does in any movie, and it might do some things very well while falling flat on others.
I haven't done any serious film criticism in years now. It ruined my enjoyment of movies, sitting there in the dark, trying to think up a clever lede, instead of actually immersing in a story. But I still judge every film I ever see. Most of them have something worthwhile - even if its s single shot or a heartfelt performance, - and some are laughingly stupid (there is one I'll talk about next week sometime which actually baffled me with its foolishness).
And movies are complex thing, made by a shared forced consensus. Despite what a bunch of French cinephiles in the 1950s thought, cinema is the most collaborative of all the arts, and requires hundreds of people to make the most basic of movies.
This complexity is in the work itself, and there can be many things to like in a movie, and many things to be critical of in the same 90 minutes.
But when it comes to working out if I genuinely like a movie or not, I've boiled it down to five things that I judge all films on. They are:
1. Style
It's increasingly hard to see in these days of the beige digital look infecting everything, but a movie just has to look cool. Something that makes it stand out, something that makes it memorable.
It's not just the look, it's also use of music, which makes an enormous difference. I remain baffled by the filmmakers who use music as an incidental thing, instead of a crucial component. Some throbbing synth, or strange melodies giving you a proper earworm.
But overall, it just looks good, with use of colour, and scenery, and costuming. Groovy lighting and beautiful people doing awful things. Cool shit.
2. Humor
It can be dry as dust, or screaming in your face, but a little funny goes a long way. Making other human beings laugh is a truly great thing, and I am extremely fond of terrible movies that have one genuine laugh out loud moment.
Even films that take themselves deadly seriously can have the humour of the deadpan. Anything that is truly without any kind of wit - intended or otherwise - should be easily dismissed.
3. Charm
It's just the smile of a good actor, or a director at the height of their powers and swaggering across the screen. You just want to hang with these people, in the dark, for a couple of hours.
4. Tension
They say all drama comes from conflict, and it might be a knife-fight in a crowded nightclub, or the terrible emotions of a family breakdown, but a film needs a pulse, and the beats of action and thrills and sphincter-tightening provide the best throb.
All good thrillers and horrors and action films and disaster movies need it.
I fucking hate guns, but I love a good gunfight.
5. Intelligence
Some films make you feel smart, because they are made with obvious intelligence. Unexpected plot developments, the obvious merits of a new perspective.
And they don't treat you like a chump, and have some respect for the audience and don't spoon feed everything to you, because they know you are with you.
6. Emotion
It's just got to have a dose of humanity, you know? Something recognisable, something universal, something that makes a connection.
What else are we here for?
There's obviously more to it than that. For starters, all films come with their own context - both real world and within the story itself - and you have to judge films against others of its type, not something it's not trying to be.
But it is very, rare to find a film that achieves in all of the six pillars of my own special ratings, and any film has to have at least a couple to stand out from the crowd. And if it has four or more, it's a stone cold classic.
It can feel reductive, and extremely fucking nerdy to think about movies in this way. And sometimes you just have to go with a gut feeling, and not overthink it so much. But overthinking is what I do, and I don't think I'll ever stop picking apart films like it's a goddamn autopsy.
So the other week I went to get my eyes checked up, and the optometrist told me my vision was getting better and I felt quite chuffed about that, because that's the last thing you expect to hear from a health professional in the long, slow slide towards death, and they could have left it there, but no, they had to tell me that the vision was better because the slightly un-round shape of my eyeball was the thing that kept me from seeing things clearly, and as I was getting older, the back of the eyeball was starting to sag down with the inevitable force of entropy, and that was bringing things into clearer focus.
I didn't know metaphors were meant to be so fucking literal.
Some actors just annoy the hell out of you. I know people who can't watch anything with Tom Cruise in it (which is a shame, they are missing out on some excellent Impossible cinema), and I remain deeply, deeply ambivalent about Amy Adams. They might be great actors, but that doesn't mean everybody has to like them
I discovered this early on in life, when I fucking hated Alan Arkin. I hated him so, so much, and wouldn't watch any film where he showed up.
I'm not sure what it was, but looking back through his filmography, it's almost certainly The Return of Captain Invincible that did it. This was not the first superhero film I'd ever seen, (I definitely saw the first Superman movie in the cinema), but it was the first really disappointing one. I haven't seen it in more than 40 years, but I just remember it being cheap, boring and Australian. With terrible songs.
After watching it on rented video some time in the early 1980s, I hated it with every atom in my adolescent body, would not watch anything with Arkin in it from then on. Which feels a bit mean in retrospect, I didn't hold anything against Christopher Lee for his role in it, just the Arkin.
It took me years, but I eventually got over it, mainly because Arkin is actually a fantastic actor, with great charm and a undercurrent of shimmering rage - nobody lost their shit in the same way he did - and he always seemed to be on the verge of glorious hysteria, especially when he go quiet.
He made a terrific Yossarian in Catch-22, with a blend of sheer panic and cynical surrender; was unforgettably nasty in Wait Until Dark; and a force for good in a very dad way in Edward Scissorhands. He directed the excellent Little Murders, had a terrific late period of playing old affable duffers with a slight hint of menace, and I just discovered his middle name was Wolf. What a goddamn legend.
That weird childhood hatred is still there whenever I do see him in some old movie now, but it's been crushed by the weight of his wonderful, whiny brilliance over all those years. I didn't need Captain Invincible, not when I had all that.
Even four decades after it was first quietly published by Marvel, Longshot is a very strange series, and still feels like nothing else being put out by the company at the time.
It had a tone that was slightly off from the regular Marvel universe, something that was incredibly appealing in the wild days of the 1980s. It still had She-Hulk running around Manhattan in her wonderful bike pants, but there was also constant use of overlapping dialogue, and plotting that moved in deeply unexpected directions, and nightmare characters spinning between universes.
It all left the reader wrong-footed, just in the way it was a little bit off from the normal superheroics. Even the fact that the title character and many of his pals only had four fingers was a subtle sign of the weird, and his charming naivete only made him more different from self-assured Avengers.
It also, of course, has amazing pictures by Art Adams. There had been this kind of obsessive detailing in Marvel comics before, with artists like Michael Kaluta and Barry Windsor-Smith putting out some eye-catching and meticulous. But Adams had some real dynamic energy with his figurework, ands again, it all looked a bit off, a bit different from the clear, simple lines of the Romitas or Buscemas,
