Category Archives: culture

Straw men

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Mila Kunis, pre-Wicked, in Oz: The Great and Powerful

Mila Kunis: that ’30s show.

As a warm-up for my grapple with Jack the Giant Slayer and subsequent sacrificing of a pigeon for Bryan Singer, the two hours and change spent with Oz The Great and Powerful were not unbearably horrid; it’s a mark of where we are with fantasy cinema that poster quotes like that will have to do, even while lovers of The Wizard of Oz rummage for their pitchforks. My affection for The Gift is undying and I blame the Spider-Man franchise for the damage done since then to the vigour of the old-model Sam Raimi, but that gentleman’s endearingly messy love of the movie-making tool box crops up in Oz intermittently. A nostalgia for Technicolor and zoetropes breathes behind Oz’s opening ten minutes of Academy-ratio sepia, a prologue that feels like the work of a man directing from an armchair. Plus there’s the sight of the broom-propelled Wicked Witch given a black smoke trail of the purest diesel, the kind of thing Raimi’s earlier demons could have sported while putting the wind up Bruce Campbell.

The rest occupies that dodgy ground where parody and market-forces coincide. Old Oz was about home and childhood and parents and innocence, even if you don’t subscribe to any of the thousand theories concerning cinema and politics and Jung and the Universe. Modern cinema has no truck with all that, so New Oz is stuck with the Hero’s Journey template in its thirty-something form, the one about angst and parentage and the kind of atonement which barely atones for anything. It’s about getting the thirty-something blonde and withstanding the wrath of the brunettes, and it’s conspicuously about never ever going home again. It’s about itself and its own potency; Onan the great and powerful.

Down digital way

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Quick thoughts on two films:

Taking a leaf from the Steven Soderbergh book of aggressive aesthetics, Pablo Larrain films the whole of No in 4:3 on venerable videotape, turning it into a grainy slurry of images clinging onto 525 lines for grim death while the colour bleed changes with the wind. Inside this fuzzbox the Yes and No campaigns of the 1988 Pinochet referendum do their work, a tactic allowing for some splendid splicing of reality with fiction; almost enough to camouflage that nothing else is actually happening. No is mostly history as inaction, at least on the part of Gael Garcia Bernal as a taciturn protagonist who barely lifts a finger. Artistic mastermind of the No campaign, Bernal occupies his time casting a few withering comments about the ads made by other people and calling for more merry rainbow choirs, before skateboarding off down the road in the company of a moppet son and the Scraggly Beard Of Truth. There are a few faint flickers of menace and threat – Bernal’s ex-girlfriend gets beaten up at regular intervals, events he registers with a slight downward curl of the beard – but the meat of it is the unease between Bernal and Alfredo Castro, the former Tony Manero, as his weaselly opposite number. Larrain paints a nice scenario out of the pair being once and future co-workers, both squeezed at the beck and call of powers above and beyond. Or perhaps both just rendered equally inert; there’s a very mordant laugh to be had at the way they end up working together again when the dust settles, eying each other warily, or at least wearily. There’s another giggle from the contemporaneous messages of support from the likes of Jane Fonda and Richard Dreyfuss, presented in a context that seems pretty ambivalent about the likes of Jane Fonda and Richard Dreyfuss.

Visual aesthetics also to the fore in Side by Side, although only by omission. Keanu Reeves and Chris Kenneally’s well-intentioned ramble through the history of digital filming shapes up to be a more rigourous inquiry than eventually emerges, partly since the advocates of the digital way have an evangelical air about them that makes refuseniks seem like sourpusses left behind by history, but mainly since it leaves the aesthetics well alone. Apart from a plaintive cry early on that digital doesn’t have the punch and zip of celluloid, no one dares to try and express exactly what that punch and zip might look like. The rest of the film’s language is of economics and workflow and process, with plentiful clips from Soderbergh and Danny Boyle to prove that zip need not in fact be in short supply down Digital Way. Having recently realised that Zack Snyder is an adherent to the 35mm cause, I’m more convinced than ever that original source material is not the issue, as one look at images from Che and The Social Network confirms. David Fincher, in fact, might be the key witness in the case, since his transition from film to video over the years remains endlessly fascinating. So is Michael Mann’s, and discussion of Mann without aesthetics is no discussion at all. These issues are best approached through feeling and colour theory and emotion, rather than history and heritage and halide chemistry. What oceans of implication are contained in the phrase “the blacks aren’t quite as deep”? If only film had a Robert Hughes around to bend his mighty intellect to the task. George Lucas is around, and turns up here to be duly hit over the head by no less a sourpuss than Vilmos Zsigmond about Lucas’s long-ago claim that film was dead. Guffaws from grown men sat in my vicinity apparently mean some still believe Lucas raped their childhood; a lifetime in a lift with the Sucker Punch soundtrack to them.

American visions

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No one caught in my vicinity when the subject of Strange Days comes up is in any doubt about my views on Kathryn Bigelow films. I reviewed Zero Dark Thirty here for Critic’s Notebook. The substantial differences between it and The Hurt Locker speak directly to her skills as a film maker, given the potential for the two films to be viewed as a conjoined pair; but not as much as does that fractured barrage of the final raid, the first reminder for a while of this director’s feel for abstract imagery and violence. Folks detecting an endorsement of waterboarding seem to me to be filling in the gaps that the film deliberately leaves there for contemplative purposes, gaps which can just as easily produce opinions facing 180 degrees in the opposite direction. This is not a flaw, or even a terrible failing of the film; not when it’s done without the condescension that most mainstream films have trouble keeping out of the mix, and surely not when it’s dealing with the historical record rather an invented fantasy. ZD30 dives headlong into the deep complexities that stew in films portraying actual history and half-real people, from the simplest bio-pic on up. At the very least, ZD30 requires you to make up your own mind about something, which, unusually for the times, means it’s engaged in a conversation with its audience. I’m not sure what else a conscientious film maker is supposed to be doing, if not that.

Lincoln: Or maybe Washington Behind Closed Drapes. Steven Spielberg throttles everything back so far that the film becomes a chamber piece, probably his most low key film for a decade, and one with Oscar stamped through it like a watermark. But the film does not fly. Unfairly or not, some of us are condemned to never see a screen White House without pondering Jed Bartlet’s, and the gap between Aaron Sorkin’s essential optimism and Tony Kushner’s sense of a disinterested god at the wheel can be tough to chew, even though Kushner’s drama feeds ultimately on the humanity of Mr and Mrs Lincoln. There’s a certain Sorkin too in the wash of dialogue that surges over everything, although the fairly lovable and cuddly version of Lincoln that the director puts on screen seems to tap more directly into Spielberg’s own interest in parental dramas. The balance between woody worthiness and rhetorical persuasion creaks a bit under the weight of all that set-dressing, but the cast is full of actors worth following into any number of constitutional footnotes, the likes of Dakin Mathews and Jackie Earle Haley and David Strathairn. And especially James Spader as Lincoln’s chief off-the-books fixer William Bilbo, best viewed as an ancestor of the redoubtable Alan Shore.

Django Unchained: The best Quentin Tarantino films feel heady and high; this one feels like the hangover you had before the party got started. Has any other Tarantino film contained as many attempts at actual jokes? His movies can be witty as hell, but usually it’s some relevant form of high irony or the inherent fun of wordplay; instead there are bits of business in Django Unchained that arrive dressed as laughs and flop straight onto the floor, laughs at the expense of clods and dimwits and heavy-set fellows. Is this comment or caricature? Laura Cayouette’s tiny cameo in Kill Bill: Vol 2 had me furiously scribbling Who’s That? in the notebook, but her departure from Django Unchained sideways at 100 mph with a bullet in the belly is a desultory sight gag, a punchline from which all life has fled.

The audacity involved in drawing a line between black slavery and blaxploitation movies and using one to interrogate the other is another version of the ambiguous engagement I was praising higher up the page, and this film certainly counts as a more direct engagement with serious issues than Inglourious Basterds ever got round to. But the lingering impression is that the director is thrown off-balance by the seriousness and blows a fuse trying to process it. The people guffawing inappropriately around me in the audience had clearly found a few certainties that might have been best left alone. The guffawing reached its climax when Samuel L Jackson arrived, in a performance deliberately engineered to have watching white liberals digging fingernails into flesh. Jackson’s acting here is powerful enough to rock you backwards on your casters, a vast atrocious ogre of a character that shunts Django Unchained into such a state of heightened intensity that the fabric of the film is promptly ripped into long shreds. It’s off balance already, Tarantino having neglected to write any interesting female characters while engaged in a parable in which the only person against slavery is a European dentist and all other white men deserve to have their gonads shot off in vast swashes of raspberry. Then SLJ arrives as the wickedest most manipulative monster on display, a black man presumably either brutalized into psychopathy or born that way. He’s the Other from another planet.

All the troubles in the world

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Tales of the city: Anna Paquin in MargaretFor a minute there, a discussion kicked off in 2012 about whether film culture was dead, dying, comatose, reviving or healthy. But this is a vast, indigestible, daunting topic, the kind of sprawling landscape that only shows its true nature from thirty thousand feet, the same way climate change doesn’t depend on the weather forecast. And so the conversation took the easy way out and turned into list-making instead.

Trying to assess film culture by ranking the current films and forgetting the culture is looking through the wrong end of the telescope, and lists aren’t the tool for turning it around. It’s understandable that list-making is currently the proof-of-life ritual by which movie commentators show their potency, but diminishing returns set in once the number of lists on offer passes the first five thousand or so, not least since it swamps the casual audience clear out of the conversation and leaves us talking to ourselves. A better analysis will have to account for the fact that while we were waving our shopping lists at each other, mainstream movie escapism squirmed and morphed again in its role as the biggest cultural drug-delivery system on the books, and $365-million-worth of real people went to Taken 2.

In other words, a snapshot of film culture in my neck of the woods will need to include that my favorite film of the year was twelve years old and shown at a festival to a few hundred people; and that I read reviews of Killer Joe which thought it was written by a woman. Let’s not even get started on how Project X is not a teen comedy.

My shopping list for the year:

Anna Karenina
I had my say here.

Cosmopolis
Some earlier thoughts here. I like it more now than I did then.

Damsels in Distress
In which Richard Strauss composed the waltzes and the twist was popularized by someone named Chubbard Checker. Having belatedly spotted that Last Days of Disco is a stone-cold masterpiece, Damsels strikes me as quirk of a high American blend and another examination of Whit Stillman’s favorite people, those caught on the horns of doubt vs certainty. Once again the static is eventually released as song and dance; no surprise that for someone as perfectly attuned to verbal wit as Whit, musical numbers are a superior form of discourse, communication at a pitch so pure only dogs can hear it.

Dredd
Reviewed here.

Elena
Andrei Zvyagintsev’s piece of needling unease about a homely well-meaning wife who finds herself in need of her older husband’s money and ends up pondering the poisoner’s handbook has subtexts that are not exactly opaque: weep for Mother Russia, again or still. Exquisitely acted, especially by Elena Lyadova as a spark of brunette fire in the gloomy landscape, the magic touch is the addition of existing Philip Glass music, a cerebral way to generate unease without cheapening the mix with anything as superfluous as authentic noir. Any film operating under Glass has actual respiration going on, and this one breathes deeply.

Haywire
Up the amazon, says my notebook. Haywire is very knowing about what transpires when performers who ply their trade in other physical disciplines turn up as actors. In this case what transpires is Gina Carano’s posture and the striking balance of her running action, which Steven Soderbergh features in long uncut shots as the camera-car tries to keep up. Plus the film is fascinating to watch, full of space and light and color planes that prove what skilled cameramen like “Peter Andrews” can do with the RED, and expertly paced thanks to the subtle editing finesse of “Mary Ann Bernard.” What a team they make.

Margaret
Broadly speaking, Margaret looks exactly like what it is: a film by a playwright kept awake by 9/11 who wrote a script with a million words in it, found himself unable to complete, got sued, got depressed, and watched Martin Scorsese wade into the footage until something emerged that had all the rhythms and cross-cuts and rapid jags of the Scorsese experience. But broadly-speaking is no way to tackle this thing. Margaret is a New York film to the core, wracked with the dire unease of a city undergoing a painful crisis of existence but not knowing what to do about it, which is exactly what its lead character endures too. Kenneth Lonergan’s efforts have yielded my favorite type of movie, the kind powered by the belief that actors talking to each other is the sweetest sight of all. And no praise is too high for Anna Paquin, screaming and scheming and self-deluding in a fog of personal confusion. It never occurred to me before how well Ms. Paquin’s off-kilter air would suit an elliptical editing style in the Scorsese manner, but she seems to be jerking with life’s electricity. (The biggest disappointment of the re-edited longer version is that this current is largely quenched.) The mind boggles at what might have happened if Margaret had come out on schedule just a few years after 25th Hour, in which Ms. Paquin incarnated an entirely different pole of the post-Ground Zero experience with equal fire. She could have written her own ticket to the Moon.

Room 237
The tendency of documentary makers to be coolly aloof on matters of pop culture lets Room 237 adopt a serious expression without ever actually presenting a coherent position on its own topic. But more to the point, and pace Jonathan Rosenbaum, the film perfectly explores one vein of modern film reviewing: the idea that art should not be allowed to ripple outwards and become internalized to influence and cajole, but is instead something to burrow into and unlock and nudge in the ribs about its cool in-jokes. Much cobblers to that.

Rust and Bone
The state-of-the-art in CGI limb removal is impressive, but it’s Marion Cotillard’s physicality, heaving and hauling her useless body across the floor and the look in her eyes when she does it, that stings. Plus the film syncs neatly with Jacques Audiard’s earlier The Beat That My Heart Skipped and the frustrations of Romain Duris’ disobedient fingers.

Silver Linings Playbook
Not a great film, but clearly Jennifer Lawrence’s time has come. I guess not many people saw The Burning Plain, or her time would have come in 2008. Her kohl-eyed petulance is the second-best thing seen in Silver Linings Playbook; the best thing is the brief glimpse of a cinema marquee advertising Midnight Meat Train, which makes me think I’ve misjudged someone in this film’s chain of command completely.

And my Film Of The Year, the year in question being 2000: Kaza-hana
Courtesy of the Edinburgh Film Festival’s Shinji Sômai retrospective this year, another humane tumult, but an interior kind, with more compassion and less dread. Kyôko Koizumi, bracelets jangling, dances around her depression on a gorgeously photographed cross-country jaunt before finally succumbing to the void next to an icy river. By that point you would have given a lot to stop that from happening. Luckily Tadanobu Asano takes care of it instead, thus getting his atonement for Battleship in twelve years early.

Other films deserving mentions honorable and otherwise:

John Carter: Barsoom blitz. All sympathies to Lynn Collins, stuck with invoking Dune for an in-joke.
Holy Motors: bonjour tristesse.
Killer Joe: malice, texas. Reviewed here.
Flying Blind: for featuring my neighborhood at its most cinematic.
Le Havre: for featuring Jean-Pierre Darroussin as an individual somewhere between Inspector Clouseau and one half of George and Mildred.
The Avengers: Operation Galactic Shit-Storm. Paging Bryan Singer, again.

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And fair’s fair: one place to be for discussion of film culture that included the culture was the Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival, covered this year here and here.

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Bodies, rest and motion: Gina Carano in Haywire

Pax Britannica

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James Bond and M in Scotland. I would have paid actual money to make Bond turn to his boss at this point and say “It is now that time of day that I have set apart for Debussy.”

I reviewed Skyfall for Critic’s Notebook. It is a handsome film, shot and scored by master craftsmen; there’s no limit to the fun of seeing James Bond breathing the musical air of Thomas Newman’s fabulous Gil Evans deep chords, for those scant few seconds where that happens.

On the other hand, the film does nothing – can do nothing – to solve the dilemma of what Bond is supposed to be like in an era where a thousand other armed orphans have crowded in on his act, and opts to throw up its hands in surrender. It pretends not to care, and perhaps genuinely doesn’t; but the result seems more like an extension of 007′s eternal screen identity crisis rather than a solution. It’s been a few years since I remembered that Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor was routinely derided as a Bond villain, and I rather wish it hadn’t been Skyfall that reminded me. Plus the statute of limitations on further misuse of John Lee Hooker’s Boom Boom is never.

The review is here.

Also: mentioned by David Hudson at Fandor.

Paul Grist: serious funny books

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(This interview with Paul Grist was originally destined for another venue and presented here as-is, house style and chronology intact. See also this companion post.)

The first port of call for a lesson in why readers respond to simplified art and non-realistic drawings in comic strips is still Understanding Comics, in which Scott McCloud digs into the matter and ends up on his knees worshipping the power of cartoons.

Alternatively you can read Paul Grist comics.

Since 1986 Grist has produced a steady, if sometimes erratically scheduled, sequence of inventive and deceptively low-key British comics, developing his combination of expressive cartoon figure work, energetic layouts and dense plotting into a striking personal style.

“I wear my ‘I am a cartoonist’ badge with pride,” Grist says. “I’ve never really understood why cartoony is used as a derogatory term by some comic readers. Are there people out there who think that the only thing that stopped Bill Watterson being successful was that he didn’t draw a realistic tiger? I just try to generate a readability, an immediacy, something that can be recognized and identified with.”

After a childhood following artists such as Mike Noble, Frank Bellamy and Gerry Haylock, Grist broke into comics via the UK’s small-press scene. His first effort, Short Stories, came to the attention of DC Thomson’s girls’ comics group, and the publisher offered him work within a week – a contrast to his failure to catch the eye of Marvel and 2000AD, which were proving to be tougher nuts.

“Perhaps the lesson is that it’s a lot easier to get into those comics that not many other people are aiming for. DC Thomson were great and kept me busy for a couple of years, working primarily on Nikki. I did short humour strips, quiz illustrations, and drew the cover strip for a year or so.”

A higher profile arrived in 1989 when Grist illustrated Grant Morrison’s St. Swithin’s Day, originally for Trident and later reprinted by Oni Press. Morrison’s deliberately provocative mix of youthful unrest and anti-Thatcherite bile grabbed some headlines, but at least as much impact comes from the ink-heavy art and its unnerving high contrast. Grist’s cartooning does exactly what McCloud describes, turning the troubled protagonist into an ambiguous, queasy mirror.

LIVING IN EDEN
Kane, the self-published story of New Eden’s 39th Precinct and its officers, is where everything clicked. A long-form police procedural, with constant flashbacks to trip up the unwary and sub-plots that looked all set to tumble on forever, the shadowy past of Detective Kane was a sprawling canvas for Grist’s imagination to work with.

When it appeared in 1993, the comparisons were with David Lapham’s Stray Bullets and Frank Miller’s Sin City – Grist affectionately ribbed Miller’s stories several times as he went along – but Kane was a chillier, more humane, and more effective strip. And for readers who found that New Eden’s moustachioed SWAT team leader and his taste for excessive violence rang a bell, the strongest influence was clearly from another medium altogether.

“Hill Street Blues is very much the template for Kane: multiple storylines with a wide-ranging cast, and a mix of drama and comedy,” agrees Grist. “I loved doing Kane. I think in general if you’re not working on your favourite comic then you’re probably doing it wrong, and it certainly helped get me noticed within the industry.”

Grist’s storytelling efforts in Kane were certainly noticeable, since he worked the page hard. One issue is told from a fixed vantage point on the rear seat of a patrol car; another makes do without speech or captions. A gangster speaks in a style on loan from Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone, via phonetic speech balloons to be unpicked at leisure; Kane himself often says hardly anything. Officer Kate Felix, ever the voice of reason, gets one of the great stand-alone issues of any comic, a childhood incident and present-day crisis running in parallel.

“I just try to make the page visually interesting,” comments Grist. “Comics are a visual medium, so when people just put one square panel after another, I think they’re really not using the medium to its full potential. To me that seems like dancing but not moving your feet.”

Kane was the definition of a cult hit, with vocal champions but not a huge readership. The book’s narrative became extended by publication delays and threatened to grind to a halt, and some felt that the flashback structure was too hard to follow. “Kane was very popular with the people who liked it, but sadly there weren’t that many of them,” says Grist looking back. “Ultimately it just wasn’t selling enough for me to be able to continue.”

THE PAST IS NEVER DEAD
As Kane showed signs of fatigue, Grist responded with Jack Staff, originally aiming to attract readers and then draw them over to Kane. Hence a change of tack: from an American cop to a British superhero. But the tone was recognisably from the same pen.

“I tend to see my comics as being a mix of the sombre and the humorous,” explains Grist. “Serious funny books. Or funny serious books. Jack Staff is all about cause and effect, rather than nostalgia, but it’s also about ageing and death. Jack Staff is someone who is alive forever; Becky Burdock, vampire girl reporter, is dead forever. And together they’re facing the End of Everything. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. You can still have a bit of fun along the road.”

If Kane was Americana, then Jack Staff is British to the core, loosely formatted in the style of past British action weeklies and seasoned with business from the UK’s collective memory. A flashback to 1940 allows for a walk-on by the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard, while the ambiguously spectral Helen Morgan addresses the reader from limbo and views the world through the Play School windows.

“I just throw in things that amuse me, really,” comments her creator. “None of the in-jokes or references to old British comic characters are important in terms of the story, it’s just an extra layer for British readers of a certain age. I hope the story holds up in and of itself, and the fact that readers elsewhere can get it gives me some confidence that it does.”

The Americans at Image Comics got it, and picked up the book as a continuing series, leading not only to greater visibility for the strip, but also to a transition into colour.

As it turns out, colour transforms the effect of Grist’s art. The black-and-white Jack Staff is a contemplative, moody strip, sometimes given to introspection. The Image version is a full-colour Hellzapoppin’, in which anything goes, the layouts fizz, and the next figure around the corner may be demon, ghoul or giant talking goldfish.

“Eric Stephenson contacted me out of the blue and asked if I had ever thought about publishing Jack Staff at Image, to which the only honest answer was no. It  was only when they said that they wanted to publish it as a full-colour comic that it made sense to do it, since that gave me an opportunity to do something that I couldn’t do with my own resources. Image also allows me to have everything in print at the same time, which as a self-publisher was something that was proving a bit of a juggling act.”

Grist had always wanted to include colour in Jack Staff: “After all, it’s a superhero comic, and superhero comics are always in colour. I like to think of the original series as being a colour comic with a lot of black-and-white pages. But I do still find myself in the mindset of drawing black-and-white pages which are then coloured in. I don’t think a black-and-white page is simply a colour page without colour. That’s a common mistake in comics, I think.”

A PAPER MEDIUM
“In 1993 when I started doing Kane there were two big distributors plus several smaller ones, and there were less people actively making comics, so it was a bit easier to get noticed,” says Grist. “Now there is a single distributor which has tightened up a lot on what it will distribute, and which expects bar codes and all sorts of other professional malarkey that wasn’t asked for in my day. I’m not saying it is a bad thing that Diamond expects to approve the comics that they solicit for, but it makes it just a bit more difficult to get a new comic out there.”

On the other hand, the rise of the internet means it has become easier to get work seen by potential readers – whether or not the work is any good, or profitable. But fittingly for an artist with a taste for wrangling the fixed dimensions of a paper page, Grist feels no great urge to decamp onto the internet or create a web comic.

“As far as I’m concerned, comics are a paper medium,” he says. “This may well be an age thing. I don’t find reading comics on screen to be that interesting, so web comics are not something that I’m really planning on exploring in the near future. I did serialise a comic I published, The Eternal Conflicts of the Cosmic Warrior, in a blog, but that was more a case of putting a paper comic on-screen than actually doing a comic for the web.

“After years as an active self-publisher, I’ve now been published by Image for longer than I spent putting out my own books, so I’m really out of the loop as far as self-publishing goes nowadays. But one of the encouraging things about going to comic shows around the UK is that there are new, young people putting out their own comics. Twenty years ago you’d go to the London Convention and the small-press section would be in a corridor leading through to the main hall. Now they’ve become a main event in their own right. There’s a lot of creativity out there, which is very encouraging to see.”

(art by Paul Grist, scanned for review purposes. Copyright the respective publishers.)

Paul Grist: white panel blues

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(An interview with British cartoonist Paul Grist about his work and in particular Kane and Jack Staff will, very probably, appear here shortly. At one point I wrote an introduction to that interview, which has since become, very probably, surplus to requirements. This is what it said.)

Seventeen years after the thought to do it first crossed my mind, I finally interviewed Paul Grist.

Back then it was because I wanted to gush about Kane, a comic strip whose energetic layouts and clear understanding of how cartooning actually works had felt like a slap in the face, just at the time when mainstream comics and I were calling it quits due to irreconcilable boredom.

Plus it was conspicuously full of love for Hill Street Blues, and any friend of Lieutenant Howard Hunter is all right by me.

Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics landed on my coffee table at about the same time, complete with McCloud’s theories about the effect of cartoons on the human mind, their power locked in place even before someone first scratched a figure onto the wall of a cave. Ten minutes of reflection on my part was enough to spot that Grist had proved the point beyond all refutation, by latching the impact of cartoon figures and the drama inherent in creative page layouts onto an ongoing cop opera, and then absorbing the bathos-rich tactics of Steven Bochco – apparently through his skin.

Witness Kane, a story fully stocked with ambiguous, shady characters of dubious criminality and unclear motivations, many of whom happen to be serving police officers in the city of New Eden. In a move almost radical for the mid-1990s, Grist opted out of reliance on all the damp erotic frustrations and black widows that would have dragged his book into conventional noir country. He certainly declined to dive head first into the soft source as Frank Miller’s Sin City had done, the biggest single reason why reviewers trying to yoke the two books together could find themselves tied in knots.

Instead of such simple pastiche, Kane set about doing something more interesting. The glory of Kane’s high contrast black-and-white artwork is that despite the million watts of illumination apparently blazing down from the gantry, everything stays as murky as ever. Sharply delineated individuals of messy and unclear morality; such a potent mix for drama.

This is the currency of Grist at his best: anxiety, focused by the lines of perspective and accumulating in the space the artist chooses not to touch. One great beauty of comics storytelling lies in all the undrawn bits between panels, and in Grist’s art that ambiguity gets absorbed back into the panels themselves. It lurks behind the eyes of the unfortunate Mister Ween thanks to the artful caricature, but more to the point it hangs in the air around him in all that pitiless negative space. Grist taps this vein consistently; the fear of a white panel.

Kane looked all set to roll on forever, a nest of shifting allegiances in which the plot could be misdirected onto a new path at any point its creator required, just by the reveal that yet another established character had feet of clay. But things never came to a head. Whatever Grist’s final destination was, it was receding into the distance one issue at a time. The last issue, suitably titled Killing The Hero, looped the story’s flashback structure further into the past than ever, pausing on the way to repeat an earlier affectionate dig at costumed superheroes as the products of mildly unhealthy minds and a mildly unhealthy business. Kane duly ended with the most emphatically Hill Street-flavoured episode of all.

All of which I had wanted to say years ago.

These days, I wanted to ask about the inevitable compromises involved in Grist’s transformation from mainstay of the British small-press scene to long-term fixture at Image Comics, the US publisher whose house-style lay behind all the comics I was excitedly declining to look at in 1995.

This one turned out to be easily answered: He hardly compromised at all.

If Kane is Sin City policed by Frank Furillo, then Jack Staff is Hellzapoppin’ rebooted by Galton and Simpson.

The family resemblance is clear enough; all the parallel storytelling and shifting viewpoints and wry discontent, plus a hefty helping of the barmy, are present. But this time the mood is a fever, especially when the strip shifted into colour.  All the white space and looming blocks of black ink, last seen pushing Detective Kane into tight shadowy corners where his id was lurking, became tilt-a-whirl slabs of primary colours and perspectives slipping sideways off the leash, while Grist’s cast continually adjust their bewilderment threshold.

Hints of the bizarre used to turn up all the time in Kane, but it was mostly the madness of the urban nightmare, the skin-crawling unpleasantness of rotten tenements and rats in babies’ cradles, however cartoonishly rendered.

In Jack Staff, the universe is simply out of whack, built to the wrong blueprint, and the designer seems to have finally noticed. The series is a trippy, mournful hangover; it’s an underground comic from a more interesting Britain, one where Dreams Of The Rarebit Fiend somehow wound up in the back of Eagle.

Despite having more jokes per page than Kane, Jack Staff is even more clearly a serious product from a serious creator. It perfectly embodies another of Scott McCloud’s points: that cartooning can also be camouflage. The art is a giggle, the sight gags are a blast, the appearance of Dad’s Army in a World War Two flashback a moment of inspiration. But the style is also a beckoning trap-door into a story where getting away from your own history is so impossible that living embodiments of time itself turn up just to clock you over the head about it.

Where Kane is a punchy, emphatic treatment of sophisticated themes, a story about adults making bad decisions, Jack Staff is almost the reverse. Under Grist’s pen, a superhero strip is a fractured ramble through a universal idea, the one that says the past isn’t even past, for characters who seem stuck in a perpetual adolescence.

All of which is to say that Paul Grist is up there in the top flight of inventive comics creators. Almost a couple of decades later than planned, I got the chance to tell him.

(art by Paul Grist, scanned for review purposes. Copyright the respective publishers.)

Titanic

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My editor at Critic’s Notebook requested a review of Prometheus that didn’t hold back on the spoilers. Here is that very thing. As with certain other Ridley Scott films, characters are framed in visual environments that make you doubt your own eyes, while saying things that make you put your fingers in your ears. One day cinema will reclaim the further shores of sci-fi from television, strip away the small screen’s thin characterizations and habitual pacing in 20-minute units, and learn to take deep breaths again. This is not that day, although the look on Noomi Rapace’s face when she got to page 90 or so of the script must have been a peach.

To add: The most illuminating realization about Prometheus and its weaknesses.

Prometheus prayer

That this image, having been in every trailer for months, of Rapace bloodied and stripped and seemingly praying in desperation in the face of a universe wreaking disgraceful havoc on her beliefs and her uterus, surely the absolute crux point for the character’s every fibre and principle, isn’t there. It’s been left out, apparently superfluous.

I can’t believe it’s not the Justice League

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Three thoughts about the Avengers movie:

One punch. Again

Joss Whedon’s debt to the 1980s Keith Giffen and JM DeMatteis approach, for the kind of writing that has since become linked to him by name, has never been more clear.

The whole all-you-can-eat green-screen approach, whereby any time the camera pans round behind someone to show what they’re looking at they’re clearly looking at the insides of a warehouse in a far-off and cheaper state, must truly be a dead loss if a DP as great as Seamus McGarvey can’t figure out a way to make it breathe.

Needless to say, if Janet van Dyne eventually turns up in this flavour of the Marvel Universe and carries on like this, I am going to have some kind of coronary incident.

For the birds

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xkcd knows the scoreI reviewed The Raven for Critic’s Notebook. I did this mostly because I remember coming out of The Sure Thing in 1985 convinced that John Cusack was a superhuman actor equipped for any film genre dreamed up by man, and wanted to see if the theory still held water. Which it does, if you charitably call the current model of 15-year-old-friendly un-horrific horror films a genre.

The film makers never actually bring up the name of Alan Moore, but they hardly need to. The man’s shadow will loom automatically over a film in which a historical literary figure adopts contemporary mannerisms and lands himself in a tale so self-reflexive that it feels like its own graphic novel. The fact that The Raven also manages to look a lot like a cross between From Hell and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, filmed in the well-known Baltimore suburbs of Belgrade and Budapest on sets lighted by the output of one small firefly, and by the man who made V for Vendetta to boot, just makes the wizard of Northampton’s presence more palpable.

Any resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe is coincidence, but Mr Cusack can still get the acting job well and truly done. The review is here over at Critic’s Notebook, and yes, once I realized that “Nevermore” rhymes with “Alan Moore,” one thing led to another.

Meanwhile…

Four thousand miles east and forty-five years later, Georges Duroy rides again in the new version of Bel Ami. This time the general air of Now is more considered, since these are actors with distinctly modern ways of going about their business, and the plot’s interests in desert wars and press corruption are kept on the boil between all the un-corseting and de-girdling.

It also shows three composed and seemingly self-possessed woman drawn helplessly into bed with a floppy-haired youth at very little urging, leaving the story open to its most misogynist reading. Robert Pattinson gamely submitting to a fine bout of joyless sex isn’t really enough to balance the books, and I can think of several folk who might hate it, for reasons both warranted and not.

Whether Bel Ami’s tweaks and mannerisms energize the historical-drama trade or leave it looking a bit rootless is a murky question, but all the right texts have been studied. A film that remembers how Uma Thurman is naturally built for period drama is setting off on the right lines, and this one goes on to hire Anthony Higgins and Christopher Fulford for cameos of several seconds each. If only it could have wheeled the three of them into the same drawing room for a shouting match. That review is here, at the same venue .