BBC Breakfast Watch! World Of Warcraft Will Kill You Stone Dead

I've not watched BBC Breakfast for a while, replacing the misery of watching Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams (aka Mail-tuttery-personified) with the endurance test that is Atlas Shrugged. Well, I say that, but I will admit to taking a break from that as well, so that I could binge on Ed Brubaker's genius run on Captain America (surely the classic Cap run) and Ultimate Spider-Man by Bendis (on top form, thankfully) and Stuart Immonen. I know! I should end that frigging book, but I needed to see the new Captain America kick some right-wingers around, especially now that they're feeling so down. Obama's got a mandate, bitches! A mandate! Suck it up!

Anyway, this morning I paid more attention to BBC Breakfast than is healthy, primarily because today some evil corporate bastards have unleashed a new weapon against humanity, striking against our precious children by chaining them to an artificial reality in order to drain them of their resources, their souls, their potential. Such an apocalyptic event deserved full expression of their dismay, as they tried valiantly to prevent the theft of an entire generation. Yes, though it sickens me to say it, Blizzard released another WoW expansion pack. Those evil mind-controlling motherfuckers! Save the children from that thing we don't quite understand but will distrust anyway just to be on the safe side!


As soon as I saw the two disapproving parent-archetypes sitting on their sofa with all of the moral authority of two angry bags of compost, announcing the imminent discussion with all of the severity their little brains could muster, my heart sank. As I have said before when railing against this most insultingly alarmist show, I understand that early morning TV is meant to be light, but surely the release of an MMORPG expansion pack for one of the most successful, popular, and beloved games in the world is not going to bring about the death of childhood, and so acting like it is is surely the antithesis of "light chatter". I missed the start of the show, but Canyon informed me that even before their little snippy piece about the game began, they predictably brought up the death of a South Korean gamer from exhaustion which, in traditional BBC Breakfast style, was linked to World of Warcraft when, in fact, the guy died playing Starcraft. A small point, but indicative of the rigour with which the disapproving Luddites had researched the piece.

I almost didn't watch. It's been a while since I spent time watching Bill and Sian, simply because they make me so mad I can barely stand it. For all I know they have been railing against gaming with miserable regularity. "The release of a game called The Force Unleashed has raised concerns that children may turn to the Dark Side after playing it." "This game, Spore, encourages children to cultivate and eat diseases!" "Your children are at threat from LittleBigPlanet, which might make your children sew themselves into sacks!" Of course, this morning they were particularly terrible, using their stern faces to register disgust over the thought of anyone daring to play computer games which corrupt minds and destroy lives and many other imaginary things.

Though they've done this before, and even though they were talking (down) to three WoW fans instead of having some typically ineffectual and token balanced debate (which is usually conducted with the inclusion of some non-gaming crazy person with a head full of suspicion and fear), their behaviour this morning was even more snotty and dismissive as usual, probably because they resented wasting their time discussing something as "silly" as a game when OMG! They had the thrill of introducing a previously filmed clip of a BBC journo on a press junket interviewing Angelina Jolie about Changeling! The glamour of presenting BBC Breakfast should never be sullied with something as decadent and corrupting as a mere game. Get off our sofa, worthless fools, I could imagine Sian saying, as Bill sits and devours numerous custard creams while humming the theme to Dixon of Dock Green.


I felt especially bad for one player, Marijke Jensen, who was still clad in the Night Elf costume she had been wearing to the special release event at HMV Oxford Circus last night. It was a cool costume, and after Bill had expressed a somewhat unhealthy interest in it, she seemed to not expect his sneering "Whyyyyyyyyyyy?" because, you know, you don't think a TV presenter would be openly rude and dismissive like that, though she was friendly enough to defuse the moment with a genial acknowledgement that wearing something like that might seem extreme to, say, a trad-dad square from the McCarthy era magically transported to W1, 2008. The other guests, a hardcore player (Ben West) who had also attended the launch, and Tim Edwards from PC Gamer Magazine, then had to put up with Bill and Sian stumbling to understand what the game involves, not to mention returning to the same goddamn question, over and over again, about how long people play it. The poor guy who attended the launch, who had waited 36 hours in line, was mocked by Bill for waiting so long, but at least he tried to explain that he did it for the feeling of being a part of something, a community of like-minded people, that playing the game is a social thing and leads to real friendships (as regular Shades of Caruso visitor Jaredan can attest to). It's something Bill can't understand, as the only community he belongs to is Daily Mail Island, and they despise the BBC. It must be horribly depressing for him.

The piece continued for only a few minutes, but it felt like a million years, with both presenters tut-tutting at the amount of time devoted players spent on the game, and then reading out one viewer email from a Concerned Mother who complained at her 18-year old son's daily WoW marathons (12 hours a day, which seems excessive and probably exaggerated for effect), stating that he has no friends. Of course, anyone who plays the game will know that it's very easy to make friends online, and the game depends on social interaction and cooperation, but parents (and Bill and Sian, obviously) won't accept that because internet friends can't possibly exist or mean anything to their children, oblivious to the fact that they are probably grateful to meet people with the same hobby as them, who don't judge them for doing something they enjoy. After that single negative email Sian deigned to read a positive one, prefaced with the dismissive and frustrated bleat, "I have to say, the majority have been positive because they do play the game," which is the perfect example of how her mind remains closed against new information. Closed, because otherwise all of the Hypothetical Idiots she has invented will come spilling out, babbling hysterically, running into traffic, or eating quicklime, or maybe even playing a computer game for eight days without a break and then dying from dehydration.


As I said earlier, this anti-gaming suspicion is something I've gone on about before, and it's a really silly thing to get annoyed about, but the Today Programme is also getting in on the technophobia with a depressingly one-sided report, and the BBC News homepage features this special report, which makes me suspect the corporation is secretly really pissed at the failure of Fightbox. (Night Elf Marijke is on the far left on the homepage picture.)

Still, despite the depressing blanket suspicion across the BBC's coverage, I'm most incensed by Bill and Sian's obnoxious behaviour, telling their guests off for playing WoW for any amount of time (Bill kept tutting, "That's still a lot" no matter what the response), frowning constantly and belittling them for having an interest in something they don't understand. With the only "professional" interviewed being a young journalist, they felt free to treat their guests like ill-behaved delinquents, sniping at them and their hobby with distasteful arrogance. Even Bill's "jokes" about the Night Elf's ears were framed as a nasty side-effect of playing too long.

Obviously there is an issue about compulsive playing there; I'd be crazy to deny it (probably driven crazy by obsessive gaming!). However, any pursuit can potentially create obsessive behaviour in those who follow it, and many of the complaints about WoW are coming from parents whose children, who have retreated into what they see as a pointless fantasy world, would probably retreat into some other world away from their parents if they weren't gaming. It's called adolescence, and is a fact of life. Nevertheless, that coverage is not what annoys me. It's the distrustful attitude of much of the mainstream media, possibly resentful that young eyeballs are being stolen by gaming (or whatever the dehumanising term for viewing figure decline is this week), that gaming is always framed in terms of the harm it must do to children, that it is never seen as a positive thing or a potential source of much artistic value, that the fact that it brings people together is treated with much amusement by commentators stuck in their 20th Century world and unable to believe that social networking via any new form of technology can be enormously empowering and, at its most base level, a lot of fun. Families are being formed or brought together because of these developments. It's not threatening our way of life, it's enhancing it. Embrace our machine friends!

Most immediately, though, I'm furious about the rude attitude of Bill and Sian, who acted like stern parents to these total strangers, all of whom are over the age of 18 and surely deserving of some respect. It was bordering on bullying behaviour, to be honest, and I'm sick of seeing gamers treated like potentially unstable children. Even worse, I feel especially bad for gamers who have been up all night, filled with excitement about the release of a long-awaited expansion pack and happy to have been part of a joyful event populated by people who share the same interests as them, turning up to a BBC studio to enthuse about their hobby only to be treated like delusional freaks or criminals by the sub-moronic presenters of this appalling, amateurish, poorly researched piece of shit show.


Compare Bill and Sian's awful treatment of the three gamers with their fawning interview of singer and sentient oil slick Jonathan Ansell, whose oleaginous insincerity was only matched by their boundless delight at his dreary anecdotes about how wonderful he is. A truly nauseating display. If I could I'd organise a boycott of the show by bombarding gamer and legendary literary leviathan Charlie Brooker with incensed all-caps emails, but that's just the fatigue-induced temporary insanity talking, and has nothing to do with my recent Civilisation Revolution binges, which have lasted for up to five hours. Nothing to do with that at all.

Still, it was not all misery. They also had Dragon's Den judge Duncan Bannatyne on. I've yet to express my immense frustration at these pompous, self-aggrandising sinkholes who have convinced the BBC, a publicly funded corporation, to air a show that allows them to interview inventors and cherry-pick the best ideas for investment, from which they then make a fat wad of cash. Truly imaginative entrepreneurial thinking, there. Of course, I take great pleasure every time I hear that one of their rejects, usually dismissed with derision and laughter, has become a huge success without their minimal investment (usually offered in exchange for almost punitive shares in the new businesses). If I came up with a solid idea, the last thing I would do is give these crooks a chance to absorb my profits with their rapacious plundering.


Anyway, Bannatyne was on, and looking grumpier than usual. I wonder why? (There was a copy of the Sun sitting around the studio earlier in the show, during the sports news, and I can imagine it was whisked away and hidden with a quickness once they were done with it. Poor Duncan.)

ETA: Good to see I'm not the only one annoyed by Sian and Bill's arrogant embrace of technological ignorance, and worded with far more elegance than I can muster to boot.

What's So Great About The Dark Knight?

It's been over a week since I saw The Dark Knight, and yet I have not blogged about it, mostly because of the bizarre reactions to the movie as expressed all over the internet. It's the fastest backlash I've ever seen, which garnered an equally fast backlash against the backlash. As of now, with a worldwide box office gross that stands at the approximate figure of $597,387,000 after seventeen days (after being released in only a few countries), and IMDb users voting it the best movie of all time (as of today's date), there are seemingly only two available opinions about it: "it's a masterpiece", and "no it's not".

Warning to the four people who have yet to see The Dark Knight: Spoilers ahoy!


From my obsessive trawl through the heated debate which is popping up everywhere like weeds in a poorly tended garden, the opinion of the blogospherical joint consciousness seems to be bouncing back to an overall negative view of the movie's merits. Over the last couple of days I've seen The Dark Knight lambasted for not featuring enough Joker, for showing too much Joker and not enough Batman, for rushing Harvey Dent's transformation, for being too violent, for not being violent enough, for spending too much time on Dent at the expense of the Joker, for being too long, for not developing its ideas far enough, for not explaining the Joker properly, for smelling of rotten eggs, for being too loud (because Christopher Nolan is going from screen to screen adjusting the volume), for being badly lit (!!!!!), for not generating genital-obliteringly powerful spontaneous orgasms in those who see it like we were all promised, etc. etc. etc.

As a result of the excitement and enthusiasm of the fanboy massive, the drubbings have been especially vicious. Armond White's increasingly notorious panning (during which he suggests only 21 year olds could be enthusiastic about it, and compares it poorly against De Palma’s vapid and messy Black Dahlia, of all films) and Kevin Uhlich’s dissection of the film are especially forthright, coming early and thus gathering the majority of internet hatred like some much hatey pollen to a bee’s leg, much of which is so knee-jerk and poorly written that it does the fanbase a terrible disservice. There was more to come; Patrick Goldstein from the LA Times comments on the rapidly growing phenomenon here, and this Cinematical article followed the growing online controversy here, at the bottom of which you will find comments from critic David Edelstein, commenting on being flamed by many Batfans. It’s all depressing, but, as Cinematical points out, at least there’s this excellent response to Keith Uhlich and Stephanie Zacharek's reviews at Only The Cinema. It is possible to engage with the critics in an intelligent, non-flamy manner, and that proves it.

The question I pose myself, though, is can I do that? If some critics had an overwhelmingly negative reaction to the movie, then that's the experience they had. Obviously there's nothing wrong with that. And yet, my gut response to these criticisms, from paid reviewers and unpaid bloggers, is "What the fuck is wrong with these people? It's a work of unbelievable integrity, vision, and genius!!!" I'm not leaving insulting and poorly written comments on people's blogs, but still, I've been pissed. It's only once I've stopped gripping my Batman action figures with all the force of my frustration that I realise I've gone fucking crazy. What is going on here? Why have I taken leave of my senses in the same way that the Batman fanbase has? And why would I do that when Batman isn't even my favourite superhero? Or even in my top ten? It's deeply worrying, and a few days ruminating on it leads me to believe we (the fanboys) are all being silly, losing our perspective, but that we do have reason to be irked by some of the negative remarks, i.e. those that have been made from either a position of ignorance or snobbery. The problem with that is, how can I tell genuine, justifiable dislike from expressions of that critic's bias against movies of this type?

First, I'll address my craziness. One of my fears (an unprovable one) is that the negativity is just a reaction to the crazy praise it was getting prior to release. If this is one explanation, I understand, considering Peter "Shill" Travers was first out of the gate with the line "the haunting and visionary Dark Knight soars on the wings of untamed imagination", which is beyond parody. The IMDb vote craziness certainly justifies a slapped forehead of horror, even if you really loved the movie. Not that it matters much in the scheme of things, but it can make a viewer predisposed to disliking the film just because the fanboys are crazy (I gather this is one of the reasons people reject Joss Whedon; his fans are often seen as too enthusiastic). As I say, there's no way I can prove this, but it happens.


Another part of my frustration is definitely rooted in my nerdiness, and the reflexive defensiveness I have towards myself and those of my ilk (I make it sound like we're a put-upon ethnic group, for crying out loud), hoping for some validation from the critical establishment that the superhero genre (or the sci fi genre, or the horror genre, etc.) that I love so much is not just treated as the low-quality flotsam and jetsam of modern culture, that they are understood to be tools and canvasses for telling stories and exploring modern life, and not just whizz-bang-zoom spectacles that overload the eye but avoid the heart and brain. I realise that that defensiveness is my problem, not anyone else's. However, how can I take the thoughts of a critic seriously is his or her dislike of a genre is not backed up by anything other than a sense that it is not worthy of serious appraisal?

I get that critics might have biases against filmmakers; hell, I get angered to the point of localised space/time warpage at Lars Von Trier's experiments in audience baiting. But an entire genre? Canyon and I once had a long conversation about romantic comedies, and she made me see how crazy it is to dismiss every movie in a genre just because it doesn't appeal to me. She was right. We both think the genre has been ill-served over the last few years, but that's not the genre's fault. The movies have just often been uninspiring. That's not a criticism that can be levelled at the superhero genre (which bleeds into the action and sci fi genres, or the crime genre as in The Dark Knight). This year has already seen the vastly entertaining Iron Man and the bold failure Hancock (which tried to approach the genre from a different angle, though it didn't really succeed the way I had hoped), though the unambitious but amusing Incredible Hulk didn't help my argument. Luckily, The Dark Knight reaches higher than all of them. Which is where the difference of opinion seems to fall most often.

Sure, a lot of people are down on the movie for the filming of the action. To be honest, I only had a problem in the hostage sequence toward the end of the movie, though that could have been because I was trying to get my head around the moral quandary at the heart of the scene and I was freaking out a little (because, emotionally, I'm like a small child). Others think some actors didn't get much to do (I'd say Gyllenhaal definitely got the short end of the stick), and that Batman was sidelined (I'm not sure about that, but if that's your take on it, then... well... that's your take on it, I guess). Some hated the palette (totally! It really needed some garish reds and oranges and maybe some lemon yellows!). I'm sure someone out there hated it because the Scarecrow didn't get enough to do, or Killer Croc wasn't introduced, or because Batman contradicted something he said in a Denny O'Neil issue from the 70s. I would be crazy to have a problem with any of that opinion (except the palette criticism).

That’s not the kind of thing I want to rail against, though. I don’t agree with much of that, but it’s someone else’s opinion. However, what really does gall me is that UK critics seem to hate the movie mostly for trying to expand its ambition beyond the parameters of the superhero genre that they have decided upon, thinking it incapable of being more than a reductive and nuance-free depiction of a black and white battle between opposing forces. If you think no critic would ever dismiss an entire genre like that, read this wilfully nasty and unfair review by Michael Atkinson.

Somehow the entirety of American culture, young and middle-yeared and old, is embracing the childish universe of superheroes – which is structured around the easily-distracted worldview of kids, not around the reasoned, complex worldview we would hope children would grow into. Does America need that badly a post-post-9/11 big Daddy to vanquish danger so we can slumber in our cradles? The much-lamented infantilization of the mass populace continues, and at what cost?

As you can imagine, I have no truck with that opinion, nor with the rest of his pissy review, especially his comments about there being no story there, which baffle me. He must have been scribbling “HATE HATE HATE” in his notebook during it and forgot to watch it. That said, fair play to him for nailing his colours to the mast. UK critics exhibit similar bias, but don’t go as far in expressing their hatred. Superhero movies represent the most obvious example of dumbing-down in modern culture? Is he serious? The wish-fulfilment aspect of the genre is definitely an important part of it, but it’s not the most important, especially when a movie like The Dark Knight comes along and challenges that specific notion. Is he angry because once the genre is legitimised by this and, hopefully, Watchmen, he will have to go to the trouble of finding a new knee-jerk enemy of culture to hate on (I doubt this would happen, somehow)?


If you have read this blog before, you'll know that I have a bee in my BatBonnet about possible bias against genre movies (and all of the Shades of Caruso team has a problem with the possible bias against genre TV). I had hoped that The Dark Knight, directed by a Brit, would avoid that kind of thoughtless dismissal, but sadly not. I'm not saying the UK reviews are proof of a definite bias, and I'm certainly not saying it amounts to any more than a hill of biased beans in this crazy mixed-up world, but if I'm ever going to take the work of a critic seriously, I don't want to have to work around their preconceptions about an entire genre. Michael Atkinson in particular is someone I cannot bring myself to read again, not because he insulted me and my brethren, but because he is incapable of seeing the merits of a large proportion of popular culture, the best examples of which often become cultural signifiers or benchmarks of artistic quality over time. It’s not I'm having a hissy-fit just because his worldview doesn’t tally with mine 100%; whose does? It’s that he refuses to grapple with these pop-culture phenomena in a serious manner. I may not like comedies that do little more than spoof other movies in the most flat and obvious way possible, but I’ll at least engage with them, a position that once led to an unexpected fit of giggles experienced while watching Scary Movie 4 (bravo, Anna Faris. Bravo).

Anyway, here are some examples of what I see as an obnoxious bias against the superhero genre in the UK press, which was far more negative than the US press. Sukhdev Sandhu, in the Daily Telegraph, liked the movie, and yet still had to get a dig in [from this point on, italics mine]:

anyone who prefers their entertainment with less rather than more of a message may wish to shield their ears during the dialogue about the "cost of power"... Other reservations: shouldn't Nolan, marvellous as his directing here is, be creating original films rather than rebooting and retooling franchise fare? Why can't Hollywood put a tenth as much of the craft and vim into its average releases as it does into what is ultimately only a superhero movie?

Philip French seemed to like it more than most, but also said:

The Dark Knight is a clever, loud, technically brilliant film, superbly designed by Nathan Crowley and dramatically lit by Wally Pfister. Whether such a movie can bear the increasing moral weight imposed upon it is another matter.

Peter Bradshaw, whose Iron Man review annoyed me earlier this year, seemed to thoroughly enjoy The Dark Knight, but even so, is under the impression Christopher Nolan is doomed to do nothing but make nothing but summer superhero movies for the rest of his life:

Nolan has made an enormously profitable smash with the Batman franchise, but at the risk of sounding priggish, I can't help thinking it may be a bit of a career blind-alley for the talented director who gave us brilliant and disquieting movies like Following (1998) and Memento (2000), whose inventions still linger in the mind. The Dark Knight's massive box-office success has surely given Nolan the means to write his own cheque, and in addition something sweeter still - clout. I hope that he will use it to cultivate movies that are smaller and more manoeuvrable than that great armoured Batmobile.

Anthony Quinn thought it average, but when he gets the chronology of the film wrong you tend to think he wasn't really paying attention:

Art and entertainment feel locked in a deadly struggle, which accounts for the movie's peculiar schizoid personality. Just when it poses its most heart-stopping question – how do you tell a loved one facing imminent death that "everything's going to be all right"? – it swerves into a maniacal car chase, with our hero now hot-rodding a vehicle known as a Batpod, a kind of monster-truck tyre with a seat. The ear-lacerating volume and the automotive mayhem that attend these action sequences seem to be doing everything possible to shake whatever subtleties that may have entered one ear straight out of the other.

Dude! The shots of the BatPod racing through the streets are not part of a chase, but a tension-cranking cross-cut between the imminent death of two characters and Batman's attempts to save one of them. Surely this is self-evident, unless you're trying to score points against it. Fellow Independent reviewer Jonathan Romney also seems to have not been paying attention:

Played again by Christian Bale, he now speaks, when masked, in a gravelly synthetic bass; he also has an eerie habit of suddenly appearing out of and vanishing into shadows.

He now speaks and hides in shadows? What was he doing in the first movie, then? His comments about the Batmobile in the next paragraph suggest he didn’t see Batman Begins at all:

This is an impressive film in many ways, and Nolan directs with real confidence, yet the overall result feels cumbersome. The tenor is set by Nolan's conception of the Batmobile – a clanking all-terrain engine of war, a chunk of brutalist engineering that manifestly weighs tons. There's something comparably tank-like about the film, and despite several genuinely head-spinning moments, it all comes to feel grimly overwhelming, a vision of total war you fear will never end.

For goodness' sake, no one expected a return to Adam West and bad puns, but this cocktail of ultraviolence, artillery and pessimism makes for a gruelling, even depressing experience. Perhaps Warner Bros could offer the next episode to Werner Herzog, just to cheer things up a bit.

We see a genre damned for being fluffy, or damned for trying to do something more ambitious. Why did Nolan bother? Especially when Britain has its very own Michael Atkinson, except with a tiny IQ and a fear of the modern. Christopher Tookey, you win some kind of horrible internet award for being an out-of-touch Toryboy waggling a miserly fist at a world you can’t even be bothered to try to understand:

You can take a character out of a comic-strip, but you can't take the comic-strip out of the character. Batman is not a tragic hero at all, but an adolescent action-figure with the kind of problems most of us can only dream of having. This may make him good box-office - especially among males who feel ineffectual, impoverished and lacking in even one personality - but it doesn't give him the depth of Hamlet.

Oh Tookey, you little bitch!

This summer blockbuster explores grand themes: whether it can be right to use torture on terrorists; the conflict between public and private morality; and whether the public prefers to be told lies rather than deal with the truth. The Nolan brothers are clearly determined not to be confused with the Nolan Sisters [ZING!]. I appreciate their ambition, but they've over-reached - and lost their sense of humour... Their film is compromised by the perceived demands of its audience. It's grimly sadistic. It doesn't fight terror, it embraces it. Ledger becomes, in a curiously twisted way, the moral centre of the film, and this makes The Dark Knight an unintentionally sick spectacle, pretending to justify law and justice, but in reality celebrating violence and chaos.

Perhaps when you're a critic sitting in the dark with a bunch of similarly disgruntled men and women whose heads have been filled with talk of movie genius, it's easy to think that, but how does that account for the reaction of the audience I saw it with, comprising a demographic of men and women of differing ages, ethnicities, and cultural expectations, who reacted most strongly to Tiny Lister's disposal of the detonator during the ferry scene. I know I choked up at his decision, and the room erupted into applause and cheering. Sorry, Tookey. The Joker actually lost completely, both in Gotham and the real world. Rail against the Hypothetical Idiot all you like, but he/she is HYPOTHETICAL! Get used to it.

It wasn’t all bad. While this incoherent rant on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free section does little to dispel the suspicion that CiF is The Great Blogging Graveyard, this blog from The Times is endearingly nerdy and filled with good points . In fact, James Christopher is the only UK critic that seemed to really love it, though Cosmo Landesman's point-missing Sunday Times drubbing made up for that. The FT’s magnificent critic, Nigel Andrews, wasn’t crazy about it either, but at least his review was well-written and contained many good points, as always.

So is it just a knee-jerk dismissal of the genre? Surely something like that would have been universally applied across transatlantic lines, and while I’ve linked to some reviews that have just sneered, “superheroes are for kids”, most critics embraced the film for taking the genre seriously and showing what it is capable of illuminating. Jenny McCartney, who also rails against its rating in a dramatic piece full of Daily Mail-esque "WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN!?!?!?!!?? panic, also says in her dismissive review:

This is essentially an adult action thriller, in which the action itself is often difficult to discern from the darkened screen, a roaring tangle of crashes and explosions and muttered imprecations. Added to this is a jumbled sprinkling of philosophy on the nature of heroism, villainy and the necessary lies it takes to keep the public believing in something grander than selfish survival.

If the meaning behind the mayhem is difficult for an adult to perceive, it would be well nigh impossible for a child. But then, despite the heavy marketing and the almost inconceivably indulgent 12A rating (meaning that any under-12 can see it with an adult) this is not a film that pre-adolescent children should watch.

The Independent ran a piece about the rating that put the BBFC's decision in a clearer light, but I'm still pissed that the BBFC chose to do that (either in a fit of liberalism or due to pressure from Warner Bros.), if only because this adult movie now ends up being treated as Public Enemy No. 1 Child Corrupter (knocking Grand Theft Auto IV off its perch of evil) when it is plain to see it is not a movie for children. It's an adult movie dealing with adult themes (in a manner I found easy to follow, UK film critics, and I'm not alone in that judgment, I'm sure), and that it came during the summer months, when film critics froth at the mouth at the lack of substance to Hollywood movies, has served to confuse panicky critics who were expecting nothing more than BOOM BANG.


Yet what do we get? Relief that it is possible to fuse serious subject matter with the expected number of WOW moments? Of course not. Just anger that something from such a tawdry genre, designed merely to appeal to children, would be crazy enough to try to address a serious subject in a thoughtful manner, when it should only be full of explosions and bright colours and two-dimensional motivations and not be seen by anyone who has the complete Bergman collection at home, because liking genre movies means you are a simpleton and emotional retard who is incapable of seeing more than two sides to a conflict.

Of course, if The Dark Knight was like that it would be hated for not having any ambition, but what are you going to do? American culture is morally corrupt and intellectually dead, anyway. Oh, if only Christopher Nolan could return to the country that recognised his talent and threw money at it all those years ago! Then he could make another version of Northanger Abbey or Jane Eyre! Or a comedy about two mis-matched Islington professionals trying to find love in the middle of a multicultural city that conspicuously fails to show any significant characters of non-white ethnicity! Or Happy-Go-Fucking-Lucky!

Even worse than all of that, some writers are reading the film as a pro-Bush, pro-rendition, pro-phone-tapping argument. It's not pro-phone tapping or rendition. These actions undertaken by Batman are shown to have negative effects. Lao, captured by Batman and dragged back to Gotham to testify against Maroni, is brought into immediate danger and killed by The Joker. Batman raises the game with his bold actions and loses the love of his life, the way out of his psychic torment (though he was deluding himself all along with that), and even his support from the world, having to paint himself as a villain, a martyrdom that must have been borrowed from the little bits of messianic symbolism left over from Wall*E.

Yes, Batman prevails, but the Joker is still around, and to just capture him he has to betray himself and isolate himself from everyone, symbolised by the switching off of the phone-tapping program (which I thought was a nice nod to Brother Eye). If it is a straight reading from this to America and the War on Terror, it's saying, "if you're going to play as dirty as the bad guys, you're going to have to give up everything that you are and everything that you have, and even then you're not going to win. The only way the battle can be won is if we all agree to not lose our heads, to remember on an individual level that we are human". The battle rages between two men high above the city, but it is won with two simple choices by two "mortal" men, one “evil”, one “good”.

That's how it is done. We're not meant to approve of Batman's actions; Morgan Freeman, as the audience surrogate, proves that with his displeasure over "Brother Eye". Critics seem to have missed that point, thinking that because it's a superhero, he is the one we should be automatically applauding, which means the Nolans are expecting us to accept his immoral tactics, but that's not the case. We're meant to be horrified. Considering all of this talk about the movie not being as deep as people thought, it seems it was too deep for those who couldn't appreciate that glaringly obvious fact. The only writer who seemed to understand that the movie was loosely playing with War on Terror tropes without actually transposing them directly from our world to the world of Batman was Moriarty’s customarily excellent take from AICN. Some of the other cultural commentators would do well to read that.


Why should I care what anyone else thinks? Why would I get so monstrously obsessed with the experiences of people I'll never meet, and I regularly both agree and disagree with? And, perhaps most pertinently, why would I doubt the opinions of others, thinking them the product of some innate snobbery or inherited bias, and not just their actual opinion made from a point of view that is merely different from mine and not caused by some form of voluntary cultural myopia? Possibly because of all of the films I've seen recently, this was the one that moved me the most, more than almost any movie I have seen in the last few years. Believe me, I was as annoyed by the relentless hype as anyone, and tried to keep as open a mind as possible, fully expecting to like the movie but not love it, especially after a pre-Dark Knight viewing of Batman Begins revealed that I had increased reservations about it since it was first released.

Those efforts were futile. The Dark Knight amazed me more than I could ever have hoped, leaving me emotionally drained even before the final, heartbreaking scene. The escalation of The Joker's campaign of psychological torture, the city's response to it, and Batman's final sacrifice shattered me. Is that merely because I love superheroes and superhero movies? Maybe, but for the most part I forgot I was watching one. It was more like watching L.A. Confidential than a "popcorn flick".

Was it because I saw it in IMAX? Possibly. We were lucky enough to see it at the Leows IMAX in New York, with a mostly fantastic audience (except for the shrieky woman sitting in front of us who refused to turn off her phone and tried to kill the guy who asked her). Every big moment in the movie was greeted with laughter or applause; the pencil trick, the BatPod, the end of the big chase sequence, The Joker shuffling out of the hospital, and best of all, Tiny Lister and the detonator. I'm not ashamed to say that made me cry. What I suspect would have already been an overwhelming moment was made even more moving by the elation around me.

While critics have carped about the action scenes and what they consider to be faux-profundity, the only flaw in the movie that I could see was that Heath Ledger’s performance was of such an otherworldly nature that it overshadowed Aaron Eckhart’s excellent work as the inspirational Harvey Dent, and the twisted psychotic Two-Face. In the middle of a superb cast taking the subject matter as seriously as possible, he was a stand-out. Even better, those incredible IMAX shots of Gotham, shot with glorious precision by Wally Pfister, took our breath away. On that vast screen it was like looking through a window at a real world (I know it was filmed in Chicago, but surely there were buildings added in post-production). As we left Loews and walked around New York, it felt like we were still in the movie, so much so that I expected Batman to zoom past at any moment.


That feeling lasted all day, keeping the movie running through my head long after we left, riding past a construction site covered in signs featuring the word Gotham, and on to the Lincoln Tunnel, with its art deco spires. I didn't just see a movie; I had an amazing experience, and New York was only half of it. I've proselytised about IMAX before, and been obnoxious about it on message boards, but really, if you want to see The Dark Knight in such a way as to make it hard to care about the flaws or shortcomings of the film, you need to see it on a bigass screen. Maybe it won't work for me on a small screen. Maybe in time my high opinion of it will fade over time just as it has for Batman Begins. Perhaps critics who were agnostic about it would love it in IMAX, seen with an enthusiastic audience, especially one that isn't baying for blood like The Hapless Tookey imagines. Who can say? All I know is that for now at least, it might not be the best film I've ever seen, but I can't imagine 2008 offering up anything superior. It was everything I had hoped for and much much more. Now we have to see if it holds up to further viewings, as soon as IMAX Waterloo has some tickets spare.

Adventures In Awesome: Howard The Duck: Media Duckling

A while back I came to the defence of the much-derided movie Howard The Duck, explaining that residual fondness for the Marvel Comics character and love of ILM's amazing work had been strong enough for me to look past the lack of satirical bite, but had a bit of a dig at the most recent Marvel incarnation of Howard the Duck, as written by Ty Templeton and Juan Bobillo:

Marvel have recently started rehabilitating the character, firstly with a Max mini-series a few years back, and now again with Ty Templeton and Juan Bobillo setting him in the modern era, with all of its attendant satirical fodder. Sadly, Templeton is a good writer, but doesn't have the anger that Gerber had, so the first issue of the latest mini is certainly brash but not quite as biting as it could have been... Let's hope the character can shake off the crap surrounding it and be used as an astute commentator on the nonsense of modern life, especially since Warren Ellis stopped writing Spider Jerusalem.

Seems I shouldn't have spoken so soon. I just saw this interview Templeton did with Newsarama this interview Templeton did with Newsarama, during which he not only admits to liking the movie as well, but has this to say of the criticism levelled at him for taking on the project:

I'm very aware of a large group of Howard fans who consider anyone who isn't named Steve Gerber working on the Duck, a form of blasphemy. Obviously I don't consider it blasphemous, or I wouldn't have taken the gig, but I get where these uber-Howard fans are coming from, and I'm disappointed I won't be able to reach them with this story. I think, they might actually like it when it's all said and done. The four issues build slowly (the first issue is fairly tame compared to what's coming up) and we're heading towards a big finale that Howard fans should enjoy.

And how. When I wrote my original Howard post I had only read that first issue, which had seemed mild in tone compared to Gerber's furious work. The following issues are full of satire, righteous anger, comic in-jokes, smut, and anarchic energy. Howard battles the evil M.O.D.O.T. (Mobile/Mental Organism Designed Only for Talking), based on the original, evil M.O.D.O.K. (Mobile/Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing), who has attempted to take over the minds of Americans everywhere by using his enormous brain and a series of radio and TV talk show host-robots to generate a never-ending stream of useless trivia that distorts our perception of serious issues around the world.


Templeton skewers the ridiculous media and its trivial preoccupations, as well as gun control issues, the war on terror, immigration paranoia, and a million other things that need satirising. Plus, Bobillo's art is just as good, if not better, than his work on Dan Slott's magnificent She-Hulk, and there's even a bit of fourth-wall japery added for good measure, as Ink Destroyed My Brush points out here. It was exactly the Howard we need in this century. Apologies to Templeton for doubting him (I'm sure he's read this [/delusion]). Get this book! It's one of the best things Marvel has put out in years.

Insert Predictable DC Crisis Joke Here

If I had to make a choice of which comics company I liked the most, I'd probably, after much agonising (as I love them both), pick DC over Marvel (sorry Fantagraphics, Dark Horse, Oni Press, etc.), simply because I seemed to have more luck finding original DC comics and nifty paperback size reprints of Justice League comics when I was young than I did Marvel stuff. Yeah, Marvel did this thing where they would reprint their US comics in UK formats, such as Rampage or Star Wars Weekly, but those reprints would manage to drag the 22 pages of a normal comic out over two to four normal issues, mixed in with other stuff. With Rampage it took about two years to get from Giant Size X-Men #1 to Phoenix's birth, which wasn't good enough. With DC, I seemed to get a better idea of what was going on there. Plus, I was crazy about Green Lantern, and even perennial childhood favourite Spider-Man couldn't compete with someone flying around with a wish-fulfilling ring. Truth.

So it is with great sadness that I see DC getting its ass handed to it by Marvel, according to these comic sales figures. What's worse, the big DC event, Final Crisis #1, seems to have been outsold by the second issue of Secret Invasion, Marvel's summer "blockbuster", by about 41,000 issues. Much has been made of Final Crisis writer Grant Morrison's interview with Newsarama where he confirms that his grand plan for the title was partially ruined by other writers not seeding his plans properly, which has been seen to be a failure of nerve on the part of Dan DiDio, current DC editor-in-chief, but then Morrison has had this problem before, coming up with a revolutionary set of plot-threads for the troubled X-Men line when he was at Marvel, only for Joe Quesada to stick Chuck Austen on his titles and clumsily retcon a lot of it. I mean, what the hell was Xorn still doing around? Didn't he turn out to be the brother of a character that had never existed? Or was he a figment of the Scarlet Witch's imagination? Sorry, when Morrison left the title I kinda lost track of it all, because zzzzzzzzzzz.

So is the failure of Final Crisis attributable to what seems to be a weak editorial line from the top, which might have put readers off? Certainly Marvel's editors (and star writer Brian Michael Bendis) have been strongly pushing controversial storylines and sticking to their guns, which pissed a lot of people off, what with Iron Man became a fascist, Peter Parker signed a deal with the devil that saved his aunt and retconned his marriage, and Tigra got beaten up a lot while wearing very little or nothing at all. Even when J. Michael Straczynski spoke out about the One More Day/Brand New Day changes in Spider-Man, the editors didn't seem to care. Of course, this now seems to have been more about keeping the Marvel Universe going long enough to bring about Secret Invasion, which has already dealt with some of the recent poor choices (the return of Captain Marvel, who is actually a Skrull who has Mar-Vell's memories and heroism) and amusingly clouded others (is Tony Stark an asshole or not?!?!?). So perhaps the last couple of years of reader baiting was just Marvel plotting something all along and keeping readers in the dark with glib statements designed to provoke. Or Marvel is run by obnoxious bullies and this was seen as a way to retcon both the Marvel Universe and the actual universe all at the same time. "See? When we were being rude to you all, it was because we were planning a big story for ages! Now please stop calling us misogynist idiots."

That might be one of the reasons why Secret Invasion is a big hit, the other reason being that it is filled with fightypunchboom from the get-go. I've not yet had a chance to read Final Crisis yet, but knowing Morrison's need to tell a million stories at once, and considering how complicated DC continuity has become, it's bound to be a lot less appealing a prospect to the casual reader. Hell, I'm a DC fan, but even so I still read the odd issue of DC comics and get to the final page reveal of a bad guy, and go, "Who's this jerk in a hoodie?" To someone who is soaked in DC trivia, it's a big deal, but I often feel lost. To anyone else, and certainly to some of the DC haters I know, Final Crisis is just not a priority. In contrast, Secret Invasion is all splash pages of characters hitting Skrulls. There is a universal appeal in that, along with the mystery of who is a shape-changing alien and who is just now an asshole, according to Marvel editorial (please not Reed Richards! His encrappening really annoyed me).

Of course the irony of this is that I love complex continuity, but even so we're talking about decades of it, and even I have limits. That's not to say I won't read it. I love Grant Morrison (or perhaps the right word is "worship") and am looking forward to it. I'm just saying it was never going to be a big success. It's kind like the Bhagavad Gita, while Secret Invasion is more like an episode of 24. Both are great, but only one is going to have mass appeal. So even though Morrison's plans seem to have been tainted by loss of nerve and/or jealous tinkering from other writers (who have previously been annoyed with his plans, such as when he came up with the DC One Million event), it's good that DiDio still gave it the go-ahead long ago. And yet, even though this could just be a bad week for DC that will change over time, following John Nee's resignation from Wildstorm, rumours of DiDio's imminent resignation (perhaps really imminent) still abound. Guess we'll have to wait and see.

(Apologies for inaccuracies; I'm in a hurry and will go over this again later. Oh, the pressures of blogging!)

Adventures In Awesome: Local by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly

Another small post, not amounting to much, but I wanted to commemorate the closing chapter of one of the very best comics released this decade; Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly's Local. Following a young woman around America over the course of several years in a series of bittersweet vignettes, Wood and Kelly have created an emotionally honest, episodic tale touching on familial bonds, adolescent mistakes, personal growth, loneliness, isolation, and love. It's absolutely essential reading for everyone. Canyon does not often read comics (other than Dan Slott's She-Hulk and Buffy season eight), but upon reading the eleventh issue of Local (which I had left in the water closet like a sort of mind-trap), she was pretty much hooked.


The last issue was released today in the US, tomorrow in the UK, and I'll be making a special trip to Orbital Comics to find out what happens to Megan McKeenan when she finally returns home. Though it's not awesome that it is over, it is awesome that it is being released in hardcover in September (hopefully with all of the supplemental material printed at the end of each issue), giving everyone plenty of time to save up so that they can buy it. If you love great storytelling, this is an absolutely essential purchase. It will make your life 100% better, I promise. Those aches and pains you suffer from? Gone, in a flash. The asshole at work who keeps making fun of you? Deported. Your home? Suddenly free from dirt and dust as if by magic. It can cure the afflicted! It's made of pure pheromones and diamond dust! I'm serious, you have to buy it.

Lazy Post Courtesy of Coverbrowser.com

While futzing about on the internet in an effort to keep my weary head from crashing into my desk like a paperweight dropped from a great height, I stumbled across a site that's pretty famous but passed me by completely: Cover Browser, which archives old comic covers so that good people can marvel at these pop culture relics, and lazy bloggers (i.e. me) can nick them and make jokes about them that have probably already been told.

I note that years before DC's Minx imprint, they had already experimented with capturing the female market with Girls' Love Stories, which dealt with such issues as birth control, emancipation, wage inequalities, and body issues. I mean, I guess that's what they were about. I could only find covers where the female protagonists agonised over boys, for some reason.


Silly. Didn't your mother tell you monochrome men will just use you for sex?


Chronic flatulence?


And with that humiliation, Ayn Rand decided to leave her unfaithful husband and move to Russia, aka Nosmilingrad.


Who whoa whoa! Watch the man parts there, lady! Seriously, if she connected with that much force he'd be wearing them as bruised and battered earrings.


"When I first met Mindy on the beach I thought the overwhelming stench was coming from the sea, but boy was I ever wrong!"

Of course, most comics were aimed squarely at men, with even less subtlety. Check it out: Fight Comics! This week: fights!


He totally punched that guy's head off! As a man, I find that enormously appealing. Actually, if you go to the page where I got that from, you'll find a more apt name for that title would have been Bondage Comics. I can imagine William Moulton Marston was a big fan.

You hear a lot about dumbing down these days, and it's always nice to see that pop culture has gone through this before. It's not a straight line down, it's a churn, with dumbing down, up, sideways. we'll be fine. Still, the wonderfully named Crime SuspenStories went from something as intricate and wacky and imaginative as this...


...to this less complex concept several months later.


Despite that sledgehammer nonsense, the covers for the anthology titles of old have a lot more charm than the current crop of character-led comics, most of which just show poses of Wolverine growling and brandishing his claws, and that's not necessarily on X-Men comics. Back in the day, they had to tell a story.


Though I can't imagine what the hell this story could be like. I reckon the writer once overheard someone talking about "a jury of my peers" and misheard it as being "a jury of my bees", and went with it. I know I've had stupider ideas thanks to my lousy hearing.


Sorry dude, Lost just started. I'll be with you in a bit.


"If I am crowned Miss Doom 1954, I promise that I will use my title to promote hatred, misery and intolerance around the world, and will aid in the subjugation of the masses by dictators, mad scientists, and evil geniuses of every creed and colour. You puny scum." ::applause::

Some of those House of Mystery covers are incredibly odd and original, but every so often they just phoned it in.


I've lost count of the number of covers I've seen featuring a bat-shaped kite being laden with jewels by mysterious ghostly hands while a guy in a helicopter hovers nearby. Disappointing.


But Egypt looked away, impassive and uncaring. After all, Lost was about to start.

It's not just old timey suspense and horror comics on that site; more traditional comics turn up as well. I found one that adequately depicts the struggle I had with the kitchen floor yesterday.


Double cream + Mr. Muscle Kitchen Cleaner = The Glob.

I love almost all of the covers I've seen tonight, but some are done by artists whose brilliance surpasses even that, and have passed into legend. This is my favourite of the night.


Frank Frazetta, ladies and gentlemen.

Five Random Things That Make Me Very Very Happy (2)

1: Doctor Orpheus from The Venture Brothers.


There are lots of things to love about The Venture Brothers, which is pretty much the funniest animated series on TV right now, but the thing that is 100% guaranteed to make me laugh is Doctor Orpheus. He's an obvious spoof of Marvel Comics' Sorceror Supreme, Doctor Strange, but whereas that character is a confident and worldly force for good, Orpheus is plagued by insecurity, desperate for the friendship of Dr. Venture, and miserable over his inability to gain the attentions of an arch-enemy. Scared that his best years are behind him, and stuck looking after his grumpy goth daughter Trianna (who he loves but doesn't understand), he rents a spacious room in the Venture compound and tries desperately to gain the acceptance of his landlord, even though Dr. Venture is an absolute dick. In the second season he reforms his superteam, The Order of the Triad, but even that is not enough to satisfy him.

He would be a great character anyway, but the hilariously overwrought voicework by Steven Rattazzi pushes him right over the top. There are many ways to deliver the line "Do not be too hasty in entering that room. I had Taco Bell for lunch!" upon exiting a toilet, but the way he bellows it as if delivering a hammy piece of Shakespearean verse is genius. Sadly Adult Swim are good at taking down footage from their shows from YouTube, so if you want to see him in action, I suggest you buy the DVDs. Strongly suggest, in fact. Actually, I order you. Immediately. You won't regret it.

There's only one drawback to this. I'm currently reading Austin Grossman's fantastic novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible (an awesome birthday gift from Canyon), and the main superteam, The Champions, has on its roster a sorceror called Mister Mystic. Whenever he talks, all I can hear is that hilarious voice. I'm sure the character is meant to be taken seriously, but it's just impossible. BTW, you should also buy this book. It's fabtriffic.

2: The news that production on Mad Max: Fury Road has begun again.


When I was but a little boy, of the age where I would skip to school whilst wearing shorts and a cap, eagerly on the lookout for conkers while starlings and blue tits chirped in the trees, I really really enjoyed coming home and rewatching my knackered video copy of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, just to see the Feral Child chop off a guy's fingers with a razor boomerang, or Humongous flexing his outrageous muscles like something out of a Roman gladiator movie, or Vernon Wells getting killed in a head-on collision between a tanker truck and a car.

Okay, I tell a lie. I was actually a teenager. The stuff about shorts and caps and conkers is true though. Maybe that's why the cool kids kept throwing stuff at my head. I also remember playing Car Wars, the Steve Jackson game that emulated the same post-apocalyptic car battle scenarios. Many hours would be spent pushing tiny slivers of cardboard around a flimsy map, trying to beat my game-obsessed cousin, who was older than me and actually knew the rules, thus putting me at a disadvantage. Ah, memories. The worst part of this exposure to all the grimy angry vroom-vroom is that I now think that such a future is not only entirely plausible but inevitable. And I don't even know how to drive! Man, when the world falls apart, I am so screwed. That said, I have a really bad arthritic knee and grey wings in my hair, so I've got that part of the Max Rockatansky shtick going for me.

Loving Road Warrior is not exactly controversial, but some of the guys I knew who were in the year above thought I was mad for also liking Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, as it featured kids and was therefore not as hardcore as Road Warrior. Perhaps they had a point. If I went back to it now I'd probably agree, but at the time it just made me want to live in a post-apocalyptic world as part of a community of warrior children and hang out with a murderous Mel Gibson while trying to avoid Tina Turner. She was on Radio 1 all the time when I was a kid, so I reckon it would have been a common fantasy.


It's been years since I've seen them (mostly because Warner Brothers have not bothered to release proper DVDs, opting instead for barebones cheap-ass versions instead), but I still remember them fondly, and kept wishing directorial maestro George Miller would get the fourth film underway. Sadly for the fans, the project has had its fair share of bad luck over the years: Miller directing one of the biggest flops in film history (Babe 2: Pig In The City) and then being ostracised by the industry; budget trouble; African location shooting proving problematic; Mel proclaiming loudly that the Jews are responsible for all the world's ills (I wonder if he thinks the Californian fires that menaced his house were a plot) and thus expending every last bit of good will I had towards him (until I saw the very entertaining Apocalypto, which has thrown me for a loop). I'd given up on it, especially as Miller is now working on the Justice League movie, but Moviehole have revealed the project is going ahead again, sans Gibson, and pre-production will be done during the Justice League shoot.

Miller is one of my all-time heroes. The closest he's got to making a bad movie was The Witches of Eastwick; when people complain about the Hollywoodisation of a book I get so mad at the implicit snobbery in that phrase, but there is no other word for Michael Christofer's adaptation of John Updike's bizarre novel. All of the risk has been surgically removed, and the only thing that redeems the movie is Miller's muscular direction. I still love it, and have seen it a trillion times, but it's not the movie it should have been. Other than that, he's made some great stuff. Lorenzo's Oil, Babe 2, the Mad Max movies; all great. I even enjoyed Happy Feet lots and lots, and think it gets a ton of unfair criticism. Whatever. The master is back now he has an Oscar in his hand, and hopefully this second wind will see him restoring his reputation as one of the great storytellers of our age (and if you think I'm gonna apologise for the hyperbole, you can forget it), as well as making a movie set in a world that is more relevant than ever. I really cannot wait. Plus, the release of the new movie might spur Warner into giving the original movies a proper big DVD re-release, with all the bells and whistles! ZOMG!

Until then, check out Ain't It Cool's coverage; Merrick has been nice enough to put clips of the final chase sequence from Road Warrior. It's not a clean, speedy scene with nimble cars doing outrageous things; it's more a war of attrition, with outrageous violence and masterful stunts. Cinema at its best.

3: Frank Caliendo imitating John Madden on Letterman:

My only real exposure to John Madden is through playing the game, but you don't need to know what the real guy is like. This works beautifully anyway. The fact that it's an uncannily accurate impression is just a bonus. As with great Moments in Presidential speeches, this never fails to amuse.



4. Vern's work in the field of Seagalogy.

Speaking of Ain't It Cool, one of the site's more entertaining features are the reviews by Outlaw Vern, which are works of chaotic, grammatically dodgy brilliance. For years he has been working on a book of Seagalogy, and it finally got printed this week (I think; well, I found it today, so I'm sticking with that). Criticism can often be such a perfunctory thing that when you come across someone with a singular voice, it doesn't matter if you often disagree with them. It's just good to find entertaining and thoughtful writing about pop culture. Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times, Stephanie Zacharek and Andrew O'Hehir of Salon, Moriarty from AICN, the AV Club guys; I head straight to them every week.

While they will review most things released, Vern focuses on the long discredited action genre, and treats it with the respect it needs. His particular area of expertise, obviously, is the filmography of Steven Seagal, and he has the same love/hate relationship with him that I do with David Caruso. All you need to know about his credentials is that he thinks Out For Justice is Seagal's masterpiece, and it is, so he gets full marks for accuracy. Yes, I have often disagreed with him, but he makes me laugh even while I think he is horribly horribly wrong.

His entertainingly incoherent writing (almost certainly a pose, a bit like the wonderful Ami Angelwings) can be bought as real actual books or downloads from Lulu, and I heartily recommend them. Wow, I'm really trying to shill stuff out today.

5: We Both Reached For The Gun by Kander and Ebb, from Rob Marshall's Chicago:

Canyon recently recommended I watch Rob Marshall's film version of Chicago, and though a few years ago I would have said, "But the NO!!!", this time I jumped at the chance. Since seeing Once More With Feeling and Guys and Dolls (with Ewan McGregor and Jane Krakowski), I've started to love the genre. Chicago was better than I had expected, and I wonder if the lukewarm reviews it occasionally got at the time had more to do with the garishness of the visuals compared to the starkness of the stage version. As far as I could tell, Marshall did a pretty good job of mimicking Bob Fosse's directorial style, and though it was a little flashier, it worked very well.

Of all the songs in the show, We Both Reached For The Gun is my favourite (with Mister Cellophane coming close behind), but it was the scene itself, with the conceit of Roxie and the attendant press corps as puppets at the whim of Billy Flynn, that appealed to me most. If I'd give the movie an 8, this scene gets an 11. It's just genius.

Mission statement

Years after the rest of the world has joined the blogosphere, and with only the vaguest idea of what it means to join that group, I'm here to blurt observations about pop culture and random events, and make the odd ill-informed comment about comics continuity that will reveal the lack of knowledge I have on the subject.

I will also occasionally give praise to David Caruso, enigmatic leading man and inventor of the Caruso Two-Step, the most dynamic and dramatic method of leaving the frame yet devised. If you've avoided CSI: Miami thanks to its reputation as an ineptly written, over-directed, straight-faced semi-parody of the procedural genre, and haven't seen this powerful acting move, then shame on you, for you have not fully lived.