Heh.

Salon's Labour Day review of 'Alien':

What happens when you put the financial well-being of a company ahead of rational self-interest? You end up flat on your back in an operating room with a giant lobster creature on your face and a razor-toothed eel gestating in your belly. Happy Labor Day!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

My pop culture blog Bourbon and Bongwater got linked to by one of the big comics news sites this morning for my photos from Calgary's big comic convention this weekend. Note to self, running photos of attractive young ladies in chain-mail bikinis will increase readership.

A lot.

Oddly enough.

Maintenance

Some time this afternoon Rusty Idols will hit the 75,000 hits mark.

Rusty Idols now cross-posts to Twitter and Open Salon and via a little headline widget to Live Journal and Myspace.

Rusty Idols features political and cultural commentary, sarcasm, snark and angry rants. Occasionally also music and humour. Drop by and say hello.

Frank Miller's Charlie Brown

For the comic book fans, hat tip to Andrew Sullivan:Frank Miller is the comic book artist and writer behind The Dark Knight, a bunch of great Daredevil comics, Sin City and 300. He got into film when director Robert Rodriguez invited him to co-direct the film adaptation of Sin City (Well he also wrote the screenplay for Robocop 2 twenty years ago, but the less said about that the better.), the most faithful adaptation of a comic book ever. Miller went on to direct the overwhelmingly panned Spirit movie - as one fan of the Spirit comics said when they heard Miller would be adapting it "But the Spirit isn't about whores!" Well, it didn't used to be.

He was at one point, one of the most brilliant, cutting edge, transgressive artists working in the comics medium but has spiraled into bizarre self parody and Ayn Randian Islamaphobic crankiness in recent years. Doubtless though, he's making enough movie moolah that he doesn't care what I think.

Movie WTF moment

So I was watching Deathproof again the other night. One of Tarantino's better films actually, on a purely vicarious crowd pleasing level.

For those who haven't seen it, it's a vicious little revenge thriller both shot, and then the film carefully distressed to resemble a 1970's grindhouse midnight movie. It has great music, the signature Tarantino extended and looping dialogue, some very attractive young ladies featuring the signature Tarantino preoccupation with womens feet and what are some of the best fast car stunt sequences ever filmed.

It also has one of the all time most jaw-dropping WTF moments in cinema:
After mind you, insinuating to the scary redneck that the pretty sleeping girl in the cheerleader outfit works in porn.

Still a good, if occasionally baffling movie.

Anyone else got some WTF moments in cinema? Preferably, but not necessarily illustrated with a snarky photoshop illo?

Open Thread.

Found my Daemon

I love the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. It's probably one of the best young adult fantasy series of the last twenty years, and yes I'm putting it up against Harry Potter. In terms of sheer literary power and quality of writing I give the edge to Dark Materials.

The first book The Golden Compass is about to become a movie and so far looks pretty good. One good thing about the huge success of the Lord of the Rings films, the Potter movies and the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe may be the message to film-makers that following the books as closely as possible is the avenue to artistic and commercial success.

The His Dark Materials trilogy is in many ways the anti-Narnia. While Narnia was very strongly a Christian allegory - despite C.S. Lewis's denials - the world of His Dark Materials is very definitely not. There are enough cogent critiques of the organized religion mentality in this series to put it on the top of your average fanatic's bonfire list.

In the world of The Golden Compass, human souls are externally projected in the form of daemons, animal spirits almost always the opposite gender from their human with strong personalities of their own. At the film site for The Golden Compass you can do a quick personality test and get a daemon of your own. Here's where to get yours:

Question

Here's a joke: What do you call an eight-year-old Iraqi kid with no arms, surviving family members, or unblackened skin below his waist? I don't know. I was shouting at the TV and I didn't catch his name. Don't worry if you don't get it. We'll no doubt be telling it again in another dozen years or so. And still not getting it.

-So begins Alan Moore's Rolling Commentary, an essay originally published in Arthur No. 5 (July 2003)
and recently re-printed in Yuggoth Cultures.

In this furious but rigorously precise run-down of the historical interaction between the Western and Islamic worlds, Moore lays out the thuggery, deception and slaughter that has been the two cultures preferred means of conversing with each other. Its as good a run down of the whole sorry mess as you'll find anywhere and only months after the 'shock and awe' Moore predicts the pinned down insurgency war of years and decades the 'serious' thinkers among western policy makers insisted couldn't happen.

He also wrote a Swamp Thing comic back in the mid-eighties that featured an evil corporation made up of damned souls who had escaped from the bowels of Hell called, wait for it, Blackwater.

Appropo of nothing:

The rest of Yuggoth Cultures is some previously under-collected short works by Moore, some interviews and some visual adaptations of Moore prose that was never intended to be so adapted, but fair warning: More than half the thick trade paperback volume is a competent but uninspired Lovecraft pastiche written by someone named Antony Johnston. Competent but uninspired work really doesn't belong between the same covers with the work of Mr Moore. It can only suffer by comparison.

Still worth getting the book though.

Crooked Little Vein

Read it. Loved it. Was left wanting more.

Prolific Graphic novel writer Warren Ellis's first prose novel is a marvelous piece of grimy reportage from the most extreme frontiers a weird nation can offer. It's the kind of clear-eyed look at sensation crazed America that probably only a foreigner could write. There's some Burroughs here, in a shotgun perversity reminiscent of Naked Lunch, but with Hunter S. Thompson's fiercely ethical observational judgment to give it a thematic skeleton.

It's also, despite being about the essential moral and aesthetic terror that is the only sane response to some of the extremes of human obsession, a bizarrely affectionate take for the weird yet quintessentially American spirit underneath all the Godzilla fetishism, saline infusion parties and bloody sputum. Ellis trades here in horror and disgust shading over into wearily cynical mockery, yet he has no patience for masturbatory nostalgia for a mythical 'simpler time'.

Burned out detective and self described 'shit magnet' Mike McGill is given an assignment by the reptilian, heroin addicted White House Chief of Staff to quest across America to find the secret other constitution of the United States, a quasi mythical 'reset button' for a nation grown dangerously strange, plunging him into a horrifying and bizarre journey into the surreal heart of the blackest most perverse American Dream ever put to paper.

If the book has a message, and I think it does, it's this is who we are now so we should look at subculture at it's most extreme with honest recognition and self awareness. The Splatterpunk horror pioneers Skipp and Spector jointly presented their law that if you can find it in a mall, it's not underground anymore.

Ellis explicitly makes the same argument, just substituting the internet for the mall. The tagline for Planetary, his graphic series tribute to our pulp dreams seems apropos here too: "It's a strange world, let's keep it that way."

Ellis covers a lot of the same territory he did in his brilliant gonzo cyberpunk graphic novel saga Transmetropolitan but benefits from leaving behind the trappings of the far future and from an undeniably greater maturity of insight. This book is the culmination of literally years of extensive freak monitoring chronicled in his graphic works and vast web presence.

This isn't some alien science fiction underground, this is the moral, sexual and cultural world we live in - very much in the tradition of the science fiction of the now explored by William Gibson in his increasingly near near future SF - culminating with his latest novels Pattern Recognition and Spook Country set in science fiction today.

Did I mention Crooked Little Vein is also hilarious, suspenseful, compulsively readable and, yes, freakishly charming? It is. It's also a tightly plotted and slyly quip heavy 276 pages that leaves you wishing it was longer.

It is grotesquely unfair and yet almost unavoidable to compare Crooked Little Vein to another literary love note to the American Road Novel by a British comic book writer: American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Next to Gaiman's bloated and rather twee magical realist take on an American underworld of ancient and modern gods battling for supremacy, Crooked Little Vein is a leanly written, ferociously hungry dark mirror held up to our own strange world.

And far more aware and unflinchingly honest about the dangerously crazy yet hypnotic glint in America's mad eyes.

History of an alternate universe UK Prime Minister

As Tony Blair's reign draws to a close I find myself thinking of another UK Labour Prime Minister.

Harry Perkins.

Never heard of him? Well he exists only in A Very British Coup, a novel by a former Labour cabinet minister and an excellent British TV miniseries.
Harry Perkins is the anti-Blair. Where Blair moved Labour sharply to the right and championed a relationship with the US President that can only be described as obsequious, Harry Perkins, a third generation steel worker, trade unionist and socialist leads a left wing Britain out of Margaret Thatcher's worst nightmares.

His administration is elected on a program of social spending, public ownership, nuclear disarmament and kicking American military bases out of Britain. The program gets him elected with a huge majority and Perkins begins to radically transform British society. It seems an unimaginable legislative program from a Labour PM after ten years of Blair.

Perkins is Chavez without the authoritarian tendencies and the scarier rhetoric - but he has the same predatory right wing media using propaganda to make him look scary.

There's even a Tony Blair-ish character in Wainwright, the token Labour right winger on the cabinet who enters a conspiracy to overthrow Perkins with British Secret Service, a Murdoch/Maxwell analogue right wing media baron and the American government. The assembled British and American elites resort to bugging, blackmail, and other skulduggery to try to bring Perkins down. This by the way written by Chris Mullin, who was a cabinet member in Harold Wilson's Labour government, and Mullin wrote Coup before former MI5 Assistant Director Peter Wright revealed in Spycatcher that pretty much exactly these tactics were used against Wilson in the 70's.

The miniseries is compelling and suspenseful TV, if very much a product of it's times, and it's worth seeing.

In the end, A Very British Coup is perhaps best seen not as a conspiracy thriller, but as a political fantasy: a story of politicians, not plotting amongst themselves, but trying to do the best for their country and its working-class population, in a world increasingly hostile to the will of the people.

Doctor Who returns!

Starting in less than three hours, CBC brings back the relaunched Doctor Who for his third season of science fiction adventure.
The longest running Science Fiction show ever, the original run of the series lasted almost thirty years. The clever science fiction explanation that the alien hero could cheat imminent death by 'regenerating' and changing every cell in his body allowed multiple actors to play the role while keeping all it's long rich history.

The relaunch two years ago accomplished the almost impossible task of pleasing both old school fans of the original series run and new-comers who had never encountered the Doctor or his mysterious blue box before.

I confess, I'm catching the BBC run and I'm already ten episodes into the season just starting on CBC tonight. Don't look at me like that, I'll also be watching it on CBC and buying the DVDs - I already have season 1 and 2 - so I don't feel particularly guilty for my lack of patience.

All you need to know is that this is in some ways the strongest season yet, Freema Ageyman is no replacement for Rose Tyler and wisely doesn't try to be, giving us with Martha Jones a worthy companion for The Doctor. Played with note perfect understanding of the character, David Tennant presents the first serious competition to Tom Baker's position as the most archetypal Doctor.

The premiere tonight is a killer piece of grand scale Science fiction, there are some great episodes in the weeks ahead particularly, spoiler warning of course - really, fair warning, the return of a character on the same scale of pay-off for the long time fans as last season's episode featuring Sarah Jane and K-9. Another gift to the old school fans in a story that will grip people who have no idea how big a deal it is to the history of the show.

Enjoy some great SF designed to appeal to both kids and adults.

Masterminds, maniacal villains and magnificent bastards

The anarchic spirit of cinema in the late 60's early 70's found expression in stories of malcontents, clowns and rogues. Most were characters rebelling from within the system, or diminishing it's power by simply making it look ridiculous. Altman's M.A.S.H. is a perfect example.

But a strange mutant strain of movies celebrating the master criminal is part of the same movement. Films about the villain who regards the status quo as his hunting ground and the traditional heroes of police and government as prey became a mini-movement, creating some spectacularly strange film classics.

The Assassination Bureau featured a suavely dangerous young Oliver Reed as the leader of an international band of assassins with a bizarrely moral belief in the redemptive power of murder. The marvelous Diana Rigg, Mrs Peel from the Avengers, plays a reporter trying to expose him. She challenges him by asking him to make himself a target of his own murderous crew - a challenge he happily accepts believing his organization needs a shake-up. Thus begins a cheerfully nihilistic race across across Europe as assassin battles assassin with guns, poison and bombs. Oliver Reed is perfect as Ivan Dragimoff and Telly Savalas makes a great sinister and oily villain.

The Abominable Dr Phibes and Dr Phibes Rises Again are campy and surreal phantasmagorias each featuring a scarred and expressionless but wild-eyed Vincent Price. In a series of increasingly elaborate murders Dr Phibes seeks vengeance on the doctors he blames for the death of his beloved wife. Decades before Se7en, The Abominable Dr Phibes originated the idea of a serial killer basing a series of murders on a biblical theme, in this case the plagues of Egypt. The highlight is probably the death by unicorn and its blackly hilarious aftermath. The sequel Dr Phibes Rises Again follows a band of disreputable rouges on a quest to the dessert to find the secret of immortality with yet more grotesque deathtraps set by Dr Phibes - each more diabolical than the last. Both movies can be found in the affordable Midnight Movies DVD series which has allowed me to indulge my Vincent Price obsession without going broke. You can find the movies separately or in one double-sided disc.

Danger: Diabolik is a minor masterpiece of over the top camp and surreal action. Like a 60's James Bond film on a whole lot of acid. Diabolik is a sinister master criminal in a one against all war with the police, the government and the mob. He steals millions just so he can make love to his beautiful girlfriend on huge piles of cash in his vast underground headquarters, pulls off elaborate crimes just to make the authorities look foolish and wages war on other criminals and the state itself. He's cool, brilliant and cheerfully murderous. A nifty extra feature of this surprisingly affordable DVD is a documentary by comic book artist Stephen R. Bissette who argues convincingly that Danger: Diablolik, adapted from an Italian comic book is the most successful comic book adaptation to date.

There have been other cinematic celebrations of villainy, but the only thing in recent years to really approach the level of charm and nihilistic glee of the villainographies of the 60's and 70's was the short lived TV series Profit.

Profit featured Adrian Pasdar as a psychopathic shark in a suit climbing up the corporate ladder and keeping just one step ahead of a hapless supporting cast trying to stop his murderous rise to power. Profit was a bizarre, surprisingly perverse TV offering that encouraged identification with it's homicidal anti-hero. It was deeply odd, suspenseful and subversive TV. So it was cancelled after only one season of course. It could have gone longer but the last episode in the set works as an ambiguous coda to the whole story.