Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: A Review

You are chained to a damp concrete floor in a room, blinded by remorseless, harsh spotlights that intermittently sputter and strobe in heart-stopping, insane rhythms. On a torn projector screen, a poorly-focused, off color image is flickering silently. A pair of inhumanly strong, cybernetically-operated severed hands clamp your fingers to a white-hot cast iron Playstation controller, forcing you to play through the first level of Tomb Raider 2 again and again, forcing you to die in the same place each time. A keening, idiot humming is coming from somewhere, the broken melody is familiar: Duhn da nuh NAHH, dun na NAH.

You feel something wet against your leg and you realize that you have shit yourself. It is not the honest shit of a sick person; it is the feces of shame. The reek of self-loathing and rotting childhood fills the air.

Indistinct figures loom above you. You can only make out beards at first, but in a sudden flaring of the spotlights, the silhouettes resolve into the leering, bearded faces of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. They are drinking Champipple from a baby's skull goblet and smoking PCP and laughing at you. And your mom is there, and she is laughing at you. And you can't help it and you gout out another jet of steaming diarrhea, and they laugh even louder. And you are weeping, and shitting, and they are laughing. Suddenly another figure is in front of you, silhouetted by the projector! That hat! Oh, it is Harrison Ford! Maybe he can save you! He leans in to the light and smiles at you. You know, that smile. Sorry kid. You wanted this. Not me.

Not if I Kill You First, Orphan Bitch!

I sat through the closing credits of Rob Minkoff's The Forbidden Kingdom in a state of amazement that so many people in at least five different countries combined forces to midwife this stinking heap of dogshit into the world. Who gave these guys so much money? It seems as if a little dust had settled on the junkheap of pop culture history, and so they decided to toss another on. I mean, I would say that this movie must have been written by a brain-damaged donkey with too much of a fondness for crème de menthe, but I have more respect for donkeys--Grasshopper-addled or not--than to make that statement. It was so bad that I imbd-ed to make sure it wasn't a vanity project. Minkoff is apparently responsible for The Lion King, and the writer John Fusco is the man who brought you such gems as Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and Loch Ness which I'm sure we all remember fondly. Okay, okay, he also wrote Young Guns and Thunderheart both of which films are not entirely awful. These guys are perfectly respectable laborers in the more commercial, more lowest-common-denominator mines of Hollywood. Bad work, maybe, but Hollywood-standard bad, not insultingly, monumentally, jaw-droppingly bad. How could they have made this film, this movie that stars both Jackie Chan and Jet Li so intensely bad? So bad indeed, that Chan, not exactly known for his great range as an actor, was quoted as saying that the script was nonsense, that he did it mostly for the experience of being in a film with Jet Li.

It's bad because it's a kung fu film strapped into a rejected little-boy's-fantasy-comes-to-life movie from the 80s, like The Last Starfighter or Cloak and Dagger. Cloak and Dagger had Dabney Coleman in dual roles, much like both Chan and Li in this film, but I gotta say, they just don't have the panache that old Dabney had. Scrolling down to the very bottom of John Fusco's list of accomplishments, we see that he wrote a little thing called Crossroads. Crossroads was a movie about a geeky East Coast white teenager (affably played by Ralph Macchio, who reprised this role in The Karate Kid) who is guided through the Land of the Blues by a Magical Negro (wonderfully played by Joe Seneca, who was replaced by Pat Morita as a Magical Nip in The Karate Kid). This movie is about a geeky East Coast teenager (played with slack-jawed ineptitude by some teenaged schlub called Michael Angarano) who is transported into a weakly-imagined fantasy China, guided by a duo of Magical Chinamen. These super-powered people that happen to not be white are in both films dee-lighted to help the white kid out in his hero quest, and happily step aside when it comes time for folk of European descent to shine. The big difference between the two films is that Walter Hill was a director with a knack for turning what could have been utter schlock into cinema with weight and power. Mr. Minkoff directed Stuart Little.

Mr. Chan and Mr. Li are awesome when they're fighting, and at they're best when they are brutalizing and humiliating their young student during the inevitable training sequences, with what I hope seems to be real relish. Chan moves with a sturdy grace that's amazing for a 54 year-old man, and Jet Li is his usual balletic bad self. As actors, well you know. Li is at his best looking determined and noble, and when he strays from this things can get a little hinky. His performance as the Monkey King is really annoying and giggly, but it seems that that's how Sun Wu Kung is usually portrayed. Jackie Chan is just being himself, you know, charming and one note, this time wearing an awesome wig. The plot is horseshit, and really really badly written. Angarano's character has a line during one of the training sequences where he blurts, "And you're just sitting there on that horse like the King of England!" at Mr. Chan. Not only has no contemporary teenager ever lived during the reign of a King of England, no one of any age would ever have used such a shitty simile. Why is a guy on a horse anything like the King of England? Golden Sparrow, the young lad's love interest (gamely played--against unspeakable odds-- by Liu Yifei), for no good reason whatsoever talks about herself in the third person for the whole goddamned movie. Mr. Chan, Mr. Li, and the rest of the characters who interact with Agarano's character inexplicably switch between Mandarin and English. Now people, I know the plot wouldn't have worked if nobody could speak to the fucking kid, he's the main character and all, but really, you could have made a joke about it at least, I mean gone a little metafilmic with it. Or not. You could have him drink a magic potion. Or that people with Kung Fu superpowers automatically have like a universal translator that gives them crash courses in language, like a super-Berlitz. Whatever. They don't do shit. The movie is a clinker, and not worth the time I've spent writing about it. But Jackie Chan and Jet Li have a great fight scene or two. Watch for it on YouTube.

Palookaville #19

So I have no idea why I keep buying Palookaville. Issues of this title are released so infrequently that I completely forget where I put the previous one by the time a new one is out. If I valued my sanity, I'd just wait until all of the Clyde Fans strips are collected. But I can't. Each issue is such a beautiful object. Seth may be one of the two or three best brushes in comics. Each line has that wonderful plasticity, that amazing "this can't be done by a human hand"-quality that he has absorbed from the best of the New Yorker guys. His design sense is perfect. Each page is a sublimely balanced composition. And nobody can rock one-color like Seth. Melded perfectly with this formidable graphic talent is a staggering storytelling ability. Clyde Fans has been one of the saddest things I've ever read. Seth has this way of making quiet, tragic moments searingly intense. He is such a master of the minimal moment, volumes conveyed in a single, virtuosic gesture. The last six pages, in which Simon Matchcard sits on the bed in his mother's room cataloging the objects around him are breathtaking. In five pages of 24 panels each, Matchcard considers the clutter of a lifetime and the memories attached to each part of it. His mother is senile, and the rest of this issue has shown Simon and his brother Abraham committing her to a home. Each object is simply but fetishistically rendered, and the accompanying narration assigns each its place in the mosaic of Mrs. Matchcard's life. Whoah Seth.

"My imagination is beyond the civilization in which we live"

My Name is Albert Ayler is one of the most beautiful and transformative films I have ever seen. It is very rare for a movie about an artist to enrich and deepen the viewers appreciation for its subject. This is precisely Kasper Collins's accomplishment. After seeing this film, Ayler's music makes more sense, what he was trying to accomplish becomes clearer. The world itself seems a somewhat different place, or maybe seeing it in the context of Ayler's music makes the world make a little more clear.

The film is a member of the class of documentaries that I think of as poetic. Although it has a good amount of biographical information, the focus is much more upon creating a visual space for Albert to explain himself to us--both through his music and in his own words, taken from radio interviews and other archival sources. His voice is gentle, almost shy. This makes even his most grandiose statements come across as simple truths. Music is the healing force of the universe. If people don't like it now, they will. His conviction is infectious. Interviews with friends and family root Albert's visionary musings fairly firmly in the context of his time. A wonderful device Collins utilizes is to show some of his interviewees wearing headphones, listening to the music we hear on the soundtrack, smiling and sometimes weeping. The film leaves several loose ends of biographic fact dangling, and it is almost entirely without any attempt to place Ayler's music in the greater context of jazz and how it reacted against that, but I don't find that to be a failing. Giving us more information would have gotten in the way of the music.

The visual fabric of the piece consists of a collage of television appearances, still photos, and vintage stock footage (to set the temporal and geographical tone), threaded in with the interviews, all given rhythm by the ubiquitous, repeated usage of the footage of Ayler from Michael Snow's New York Eye and Ear Control that the above still is taken from. A silent, shirtless Albert stands in front of a black background, staring at us, a gentle smile playing at his lips. This image is repeated in a manner reminiscent of the motives Ayler used in his compositions: out of the formless chaos of some of the most brutal, bleedingly free jazz playing of the sixties, the horns lock in together and bring out some gorgeous, golden bit of melody, often a quote from a march or other martial composition, anchoring the piece and giving it this beautiful texture of sanctity. Although it of course does not quite meet the heights that its subject achieved, the film manages a similar sort of structure.

Albert Ayler's music is about complexity and coherence, nature and the world. In the crashing morass of sound that his groups achieved is all the complexity of a dynamic system, the crash of surf or the flight patterns of starlings, in the bell-clear melodic passages all of the glorious beauty of a human being somehow managing to mean something more than meat, to ascend into sublimity. This movie helped me to appreciate that a little more, and it's something to treasure for that accomplishment.

For the two people who actually read this thing: Go see it at the Red Vic before it leaves. It's there until Tuesday.

well it was wednesday, and so i went to the comic book store (like i do) and i got some things and i thought i may as well write a little about them

The BOYS #16 So, The Boys is something I basically feel guilty about picking up every month. It is so much Garth Ennis at his very worst, dick-jokes, decapitation gags, sexual degradation--in other words, Ennis writes like a eight year-old boy on sugar overload after sneaking in some early '90s USA Up All Night. And yet. And yet. There is a heart here that keeps me coming back. At his best--his Hellblazer run, War Stories, some Hitman, Dan Dare--he has a real knack for capturing pathos and human dignity in his characterizations. Apart from Billy Butcher, who is shaping up to be yet another writer-from-the-British-Isles Brand HARD MAN^TM, the characters in this title are fairly well-written. Wee Hughie's blossoming (and no doubt, tragedy-bound) romance with a young superheroine is almost delicately written. The odd relationship between the Frenchman and the Female is actually developing into something almost touching. I'm still going to feel a little cheap every time I pick this title up, but I somehow keep doing it.

The Twelve #3 So the idea here is to dust off a couple of (well, twelve) WWII-era superheroes, mumble something about the Nazis having had them in suspended animation for 60 years, and plonk them down in the present. Well, in the Marvel Universe present, I suppose, but the Hulk hasn't stopped by yet. It's a cool idea, yeah, but with J. Michael Straczyski writing it could have just been another chunk of superhero soap opera, only with people getting called "Fella" a lot. Because dudes from the '40s call people fella. And, yeah, there's some kind-of-silly writing going on here. But Chris Weston is drawing it. And that makes it okay. Chris Weston draws a guy wearing a stupid costume, yelling about, i don't know, Zombie Masters or something, people shut up and listen. His rubbery faces and nice fabrics give the whole thing a certain gravitas. (Chris Weston draws people like they are animatronics, but with real fabric.) So yeah, this is working out for me.

Justice League: The New Frontier Classified So I will buy a book of Darwyn Cooke drawings of toast, maybe with the toast having little witty hard-boiled dialogs in speech bubbles. Darwyn Cooke is probably my favorite guy who does superheroes, and one of my favorite storytellers in the medium. This is a nice coda to The New Frontier, Cooke's glorious exploration of the major DC comics characters of the Silver Age in the context of the actual historical events of the time that spawned them. The first story, "The Greater Good" is basically a long Batman-Superman fight scene, with Wonder Woman acting as peacemaker, and how can you hate on that? The story also explores the murky morality at play in Superman's status as an avatar of Americanism. He really gets the big three DC characters, what makes them work and what makes us like them. And I love the way he draws Wonder Woman. The second story, "Dragstrip Riot" is a well-scripted teen hot-rod movie pastiche, starring Robin and Kid Flash, drawn by David Bullock. It's a nice attempt to break out of the main New Frontier style while remaining within the basic tone of the era. The last story, "Mother of the Movement" is a well-meaning attempt to confront the misogyny of the era, featuring an outraged Wonder Woman and a game Black Canary taking on a Playboy Bunny Club. This is the only dud in the book. Wonder Woman is scripted pretty flatly, coming across as obtuse and shrewish, and well, it's just a short gag strip that doesn't work out, although the J Bone art is nice, as usual.

Young Liars #1 David Lapham writes stories about interesting, mostly sympathetic if somewhat (scratch that, really) dangerous people to whom BAD THINGS ARE GOING TO HAPPEN. His Stray Bullets is basically a book about how being in danger of getting killed is pretty exciting, and Young Liars promises more of the same. Fights, chases, shennanigans, all drawn and scripted by David Lapham. This is going to be so good.