Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

consume

Crushing On: Dollhouse, Season 2

by

Let’s talk about how much I love this crazy promo image, which evokes Jim Steranko comic art for me.

I have a vendetta against television.

It stems from my pre-adolescent years. I had such a television schedule – every night a list of can’t-miss shows. I remember once, for a social studies class, we had to furnish a full schedule of our television viewing habits. Mine was absurd – 6:30 to 12:30 on some nights.

Eventually the internet and guitar supplanted all but Buffy and X-Files, and I’ve never gone back to appointment television since the pair went off the air. In fact, we don’t even have broadcast teevee in our house – a fact oft-lamented by co-workers and friends.

(Frankly, I think that makes people look a little… uh… unintellectual. Just putting that out there. Can you really not live without cable and the evening news?)

The thing about television is it doesn’t keep its promises. You might go all in for a show that starts really strong. Well, like a first album from a new artist, those show creators had their whole freaking lives to dream up that strong start. What’s the season finale going to be like? Season two? Season nine?

Point being, if the latter years of a show are going to suck, why bother investing at the start? That’s my new philosophy – I want to see a proven track record of excellence at least three seasons deep before I’ll deign to sample something. Otherwise, you just get burnt (Heroes) when a series can’t stick (Glee) the landing (Battlestar), or meanders on too long (ER).

Eliza Dushku is much more watchable in the second season, partially because she doesn’t have to carry entire episodes on her shoulders, but also because Sierra (Dichen Lachman) and, especially, Victor (Enver Gjokaj) are doing some extraordinary supporting work.

I watched the first season of Dollhouse on Hulu and found it mostly inert despite a thrilling concept and solid supporting cast. With that in mind, and with Joss Whedon’s accumulated good will in full effect, recently E and I watched the first three episodes of Dollhouse Season Two on Netflix streaming.

They sucked. They were stultifyingly bad and, since Dollhouse had relatively little good faith from me to begin with, I wrote the series off as dead (putting a dent into Joss’s good will).

Thankfully, this weekend E cajoled me into watching the fourth episode and… well… WOW.

Dollhouse went from borderline-embarrassing to an insane five-episode sprint into total must-watch madness of genre-bending plots, double-crossing paranoia, and restructuring the entire concept of the show – answering the unsettling promise of the season one “Epitaph” DVD-only episode.

The show finally gets around to asking the question underlying its premise: if you can change the architecture of the mind, what’s stopping you from bending the entire world to your whim? And, what happens when dissension in the ranks leads to two different whims? Would anyone be able to call their mind their own?

Admittedly, after the five stellar episodes it took a brief break and then pushed through a rushed two-part finale. But that quintet, plus the heart-rending epilogue, are some of the strongest television I’ve selectively watched in the past few years. The supporting cast is scorching and Eliza Dushku, freed from carrying the show on her own, is much more compelling than in the first season.

If you gave up on Dollhouse after the first season, please nab the final disc of season one and then take a chance on season two.

Review: Black Swan

by

Black Swan is a finely-made, multi-layered, genre-straddling smash with a few minor flaws in its finish. Centered on a stunning, controlled performance from Natalie Portman, the film is a character study, a performance documentary, an allegory, and also a credible horror movie.

Portman utterly inhabits Nina Sayers, a ballerina in her prime who is still very much a little girl. She unflinchingly bows to the pressures of her mother and her director while widely skirting the objects of her obsession – including a unstable prima ballerina and a transgressive new soloist, Lily.

Mila Kunis as Lily is magnetic, tearing through relatively few scenes with offhand sexuality that further amplifies the tour de force from Portman. Also, it must be said that the score and sound design is virtually a third lead character. Quotes of Tchaikovsky are set off by electronic throbs, and Nina’s movements are often accompanied by an unsettling fluttering of feathers.

While the movie is unquestionably strong, the dissonance between its competing genres renders the final product slightly unsatisfying. The character study of Nina is never entirely fulfilled as the movie transitions to sheer performance and terror. The allegory paints many of the secondary characters as simplistic cliches who never seem credible in the wake of Portman and Kunis. Barbara Hershey, in particular, seems clownish by comparison. Even as the movie turns into a literal ballet, the performance documentary aspect seems to fizzle, with relatively little actual dance as payoff to the attention paid to Portman’s preparation (though, what we do see of the ballet is as visceral as it is visually sumptuous).

All three of those genre labels could also be assigned to Aronofsky’s prior film, The Wrestler, a similarly flawed movie framed around a standout performance. However, Black Swan benefits from the addition of horror, because it’s the scary movie that wins out. After subtle background teases, the terror bares its teeth in a sequence of events that plays out like a sickening fever-dream.

It’s those frightening thrills that see the movie through to its resolution, even as threads dangle from the character piece, the allegory, and the performance. Thanks to the horror, the dangling is good dangling – talked about in the car on the way home loose ends, not the untread paths of an incomplete film.

These minor flaws – mere chinks – mount to prevent Black Swan from becoming a more grand, sweeping movie. Aronofsky is as much a part of the problem as he is the orchestrator of success. Too often he errs too gritty and too handheld, staying in the style of The Wrestler when Swan begged for the painterly beauty of The Fountain. And, though Portman and Kunis shine, the flatness of the supporting cast is only excusable if the film is read as purely allegorical. Winona Ryder, in particular, is wasted – all along it feels like we’ve missed a crucial scene with her.

The result is still thrilling, and still awards-caliber in direction, cinematography, and Natalie Portman’s performance. However, even as Aronofsky exerts yet more control over his end product, it falls just short of being a modern day classic on the order of Requiem for a Dream, and even the oft-maligned The Fountain.

National something something Month

by

This is the fifth year I’ve claimed to participate in National Blog Posting Month AKA NaBloPoMo, and the third time I’ve failed at it.

In 2007 when I failed I got engaged. In 2009 I failed less spectacularly, but wrote an EP of new songs I’ve been playing ever since.

This year I wrote another EP of songs!

Oh, and as of 3:30 a.m. this morning, AN ENTIRE FRIGGING BOOK.

Behold this dancing monkey as he informs you that I wrote a frigging novel.

Yes, if you’ve been keeping up with the tiny graphic on the sidebar or my endless authorial ramblings on the Twitters, you would know that I’ve been hard at daily work on a novel for National Novel Writing Month AKA NaNoWriMo, which charges you with penning 50,000 words of fictional first draft in 30 days – 1,667 a day.

I found myself 10k words in the hole a day after Thanksgiving, but I was less worried about making up the missed words than I was that my natural stopping point in the story wouldn’t carry me past the 50k mark. However, last night the final chapter of my plot just kept going and going across 8+ hours of writing until I finally finished it at 4,500 words (9% of the entire book, at this first draft stage), sobbing on my couch at 2:30am with 50,227 words.

Then I plugged the whole thing into NaNoWriMo’s word counter, which counted me about 1k short. I expected that, since my counts have always been about 2% short when I use the website, but I was secretly hoping that it would resolve itself magically when I submitted my final text.

Nope.

Winner. Yep, that's my name.

Luckily, I’ve had a clear-as-a-bell vision of an epilogue for a week now, and I spent the hour deliberately dashing it off in one solid peal of writing to qualify for the official 50k mark on the site without having to make any serious expansions to the rest of the text, aside from a quick reread of the final chapter to catch obvious errors (come on, this is me, there’s no such thing as ‘no editing’).

There’s been a fair amount of polemic against NaNoWriMo, claiming it generates wasted time, false hope, and bad manuscripts. Well, sure. But, dudes, I wrote a book – actually, just a third of the entire story I want to tell, but still weighing in at roughly 243 paperback pages even in first draft.

I’ve always had the ability to write, and the intent to write, but this is still my single longest piece of actual, non-hypothetical, well-past the outline stages fictional writing by a factor of at least three (even as CK has swelled to over a million words – 20 NaNoWriMos worth of text).

So, was it a waste of time? Maybe. Isn’t everything? Why do I blog or play music? Why do people who I look down my nose at for watching television watch television every night? We all have our reasons.

What matters this weary morning is that last night I finally finished the first draft of book I’ve been conceiving and reconcieving since I was riding the 2 bus in 7th grade. Not only did I finish a first draft, I finished one of my current five big goals in life (having already taken a pass on having abs in 2010), and NaNoWriMo helped to inspire that.

So, my thoughts on National Novel Writing Month? In a word?

AWESOME.

PS: Many of you have kindly and without any regard for your own time or sanity asked to read some form of this novel. I absolutely will be posting an excerpt sometime soon, but not the entire thing as, theoretically, it is just a third of said entire thing, which means I have as many as 100k words left to write, as this was never really plotted as a standalone piece.

Of course, neither was A New Hope, so there is some precedent for this sort of thing. (Not that I’m comparing it to Star Wars.)

Fear not. The end goal is definitely to serialize the entire thing in some form here on CK, possibly as a podcast or graphic novel. (Do you like to draw, animate, and/or photograph such things? Because I don’t. So leave me a comment.)

In short, ask me again after I get more than three consecutive hours of sleep.

How Eric Smith rocked my world.

by

Story time.

A few weeks ago Britt Miller, my partner in all things FAME, posted a link to the first segment of Eric Smith‘s “podiobook” – a podcasted audiobook version of his forthcoming novel Textual Healing with Britt contributing a special voice-acting appearance.

Eric Smith was one of those people that everyone I know knew, but I did not. Still, I occasionally followed his adventures on Twitter, which is what one does these days when you don’t know someone everyone else knows and you want to know why they all knew him already.

It turns out they mostly know him from running Geekadelphia, editing uwishunu, and working for Quirk Books (of Pride and Predjudice and Zombies fame). Eric’s also a professor and a music photographer who spent time touring with a number of bands.

I knew about a lot of those things separately, but didn’t know Eric connected them. I was intrigued – by Eric, by the idea of the advance podiobook, by Britt’s appearance in it, and by hearing Eric’s voice read his work – so I listened. And in the span of about an hour of my on-and-off listening to the podcast, a song popped out…


(watch the video on Facebook, where I sometimes demo sneak peeks of new tunes before releasing them anywhere else)

…so, doing what any DIY songwriter would do after midnight having just moments ago written a new song for a book by someone he knew only through his extended circle of friends, I recorded my first run-through, posted it to my Facebook page at two in the morning, and tagged Eric in it – off-handedly suggesting it was the first of a number of songs I’d write for his novel.

That resulted in Eric commenting “?!” about eight hours later, which in turn lead to an email exchanges with the extremely genial Mr. Smith, who now I suppose I finally know directly instead of just knowing of via the knowledge of other people I know. Eric sent me an advance copy of Textual Healing and I am now committed (personally, not by contract or gentleman’s agreement or anything) to write at least four songs for the soundtrack of his book.

I just finished my second tune a few minutes ago, but this time there’ll be no insta-video. The phrases are so darn long that I’ll need to do voice exercise for a few days before I can get from breath mark to breath mark on the verses.

I’m happy to finally know who Eric is, and to have his passion project inspire some passion mirrored in me. Head to his blog, Eric Smith Rocks, to catch up on the first few episodes of the podiobook, and keep your eyes and ears open here for more tunes.

PS: About ten minutes after I posted this I wrote another song. Three down! One to go!

But I Regress, pt. 7

by

60s X-Men

Last time I decided to catch up on X-Men comic books only to discover that nowhere on the entire internet existed a definitive guide to collecting X-Men as trade paperbacks.

I decided to write it myself.

I am not exaggerating when I say the undertaking was harder than my Senior Project in college. No reference books, just sparse ISBN numbers and internet hearsay.

Finding a starting point was like grabbing a toe-hold in quicksand – there have been dozens of X-Men titles accounting for thousands of issues, and my intimate knowledge of them ended almost fifteen years ago.

80s X-Men

I started chipping away every night. First I plotted out Uncanny X-Men from issue #1 to present, puzzling together the different means of buying it in book form. Black and white Essentials, premium color Masterworks, dozens of crossover collections, and more regular volumes of the post-2000 books (but, mostly out of print!)

Then I moved to adjectiveless X-Men. Excalibur. X-Factor. X-Force. Oh god, was I really going to try to summarize Wolverine?

As I made progress on my guide I started to get excited about stories I had missed out on. How did Wolverine get his adamantium back? How did Emma Frost wind up as Cyclop’s lover? Where had Rogue been all this time, and how come she can touch people now? Who were X-23 and Daken?

90s X-Men

I had resolved to E that I would get something delivered to the new house every day for the first few weeks we lived there – even if it was something small. I just wanted to relish living somewhere where I could get packages delivered for the first time in my life.

So I hatched a plan. A schedule. Through assembling my guide I had my own library of links to all of the TPBs ever printed with the word X-Men on them. Not only that, but now I knew where on the internet they were the cheapest. I could get through entire runs in book form for under $1.65 an issue … sometimes way under.

Two hundred dollar would buy me into years of missed comics continuity. A few months hiatus from going out to lunch and buying new CDs could catch me up on over a decade of X-Men.

00s X-Men

Well, as we learned from my dalliance with City of Heroes, restraint has never been my strong suit. Three months after my first trio of books were delivered to my new doorstep I have every X-TPB – both in and out of print, from 1996 forward, with barely an exception.

Four months into our new house and I’ve gone from responsible adult all the way back to my teenage levels of geeky obsession. MikeyIl even convinced me to buy Starcraft II, but it was boring – I hate spending time in someone else’s sandbox.

The comics are different than both City of Heroes and Starcraft. I’m not writing fan-fic or putting time into someone else’s universe. I got something I love – the world of comic book continuity – and I found an outlet for it I can own – my best-on-the-net guide to collecting X-Men comic books as trade paperbacks.

How do I know it’s the best on the net? Because I used it to buy every damn book there is, will be, or was before, and no one else’s guide helped me do that.

That’s the difference between high school geek me and present day regression to geekdom: with my own house and CK, now I have my own set of sandboxes to play in.

I like it this way.