Here’s an unranked list of three comics I read this year. All have my strongest recommendation.

Asterios Polyp by David Mazzuchelli

A comics masterpiece that people will still be talking about in 20 years. The book reads like a fusion of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Craig Thompson’s Blankets – the formalist mastery of the former, the emotional heft of the latter. Mazzuchelli is in absolute control of every page and panel, and te narrative builds to an emotional crescendo as surprising as it is powerful. The physical book itself deserves special attention; everything from the shape and texture of the binding and cover to the CYMK-focused color scheme of the art itself makes it an object of fetishistic beauty. When I finished the book, drained but happy, it was the endpapers that pushed me over the edge into tears. A must-read for anyone who likes words or pictures.

The Umbrella Academy: Dallas by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba

I’m on-record as to what a pleasant surprise I found the Umbrella Academy, but I still wasn’t prepared for the assured statement and good comics that is Dallas. This is a Great American Comic, willing to wrangle with big issues and bigger themes than anything else out there. Dallas is about the American obsession with (and desensitization to) violence, the psychic scars of Vietnam, and the assassination of JFK as the focal point around which the American 20th Century Experience revolves. Don’t worry, the comic still has men grafted to Martian monkeys, phase-shifting kung-fu six-year-olds, and more daddy issues than Oedipus Rex, but Dallas ups the stakes with time travel (within time travel (within time travel…)), French surrealism, and serial killers in Cinnamaroll masks. The emotional baggage of the characters gets mixed up with the emotional baggage of America and the result is a punchy, heady stew of mainstream comics at their best: fun-as-hell to read in an afternoon, but packed with ideas that resonate for weeks.

Nijigahara Holograph by Inio Asano

I read it, and then I read it again. Immediately, which I never do. Then I read it again the next day. That weekend, I bought it from Book-Off and I read it a fourth time, in Japanese. This is a good book and it deserves your attention. The level of craft and storytelling chops on display here is every bit the equal of Alan Moore at his mid-80s best – but the unification of author and artist as a single person gives this work a white-hot power beyond even Watchmen or From Hell. The tone is a cross between Mulholland Drive and It; the creature who lurks in darkness and cannot be challenged, the intrusion of the nightmare into daylight, how the sins of children become the sins of adults, and how no amount of time can ever forgive or forget the sins of the past. Also, there are lots of butterflies. There are images in this book that cannot be forgotten, juxtapositions of text and line that will explode your brain into that third place where comics happen.

Nijigahara Holograph is currently only available in scanlation and has yet to be licensed for the U.S. Read it now (then read this thread) and read it again.) Read it again when (if?) it comes to the U.S. You are going to be reading this comic for the rest of your life, and the sooner you get started, the better.

I lost 50 pounds between May and September, also Rannie died.

Buy Time Gentlemen, Please!

One of the sad facts of the game industry is that good writing – either original or localized flavor – is pathetically undervalued. Usually, a hapless artist or programmer (or worse, Orson Scott Card) is tasked with stitching some sort of plot together 18 months into the project – well after the levels, weapons, boss fights have become immutable and the characters models are etched in Mayan stone. This method works about as well as having your customer support department do your voice acting.

It’s a shame, too, because quality writing is the single cheapest way to improve a game. Compared to the cost of getting actors into the recording studio, fixing the writing up front is pennies on the dollar. This lack of focus is even more depressing when you look at the modern games that people love and adore – Valve’s Half-Life and Portal; 2K’s Bioshock; RPGs from Bioware, Obsidian and Bethesda; even Call of Duty 4. Yes, these games have a lot going for them, but the experience is held together by their stories – and their stories were written by writers. A good writer probably draws half the salary of a mid-level shader programmer, and yet it’s always seen as something “someone else can do.”

Well, someone else did do it, and they did it for as near to free as makes no odds. Ben and Dan’s Time Gentlemen, Please! is quite possibly the funniest adventure game I’ve ever played. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I really mean that. It’s funnier than any of the recent Telltale games. It’s funnier than Psychonauts and Grim Fandango. I would even say it’s funnier than any of the classic LucasArts titles – yes, I know; but like libel, it’s not blasphemy if it’s true. The Infocom Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game might be funnier, but it got to practice its material on the book, TV and radio circuits, first. Portal might be funnier, but it’s so short and scripted that it deftly avoid most of the problems caused by making humor interactive.

Anyway, even if it’s not the funniest game I’ve ever played, it’s certainly the snarkiest. And the…Britishiest. And hilariously, gloriously, adultly profane. This is the uncomfortable, soul-searing humor of Brass Eye and Peep Show. To complete the game, you must instruct protagonist Ben to do horrible, terrible things to animals, people, even his best friend Dan. It’s the same ludonarrative tension found in Shadow of the Colossus, only instead of slaying ancient beasts of wonder and beauty, you’re using objects with other, entirely inappropriate objects. You will do these things, laughing and cringing all the while: you are an Adventurer, which means the Needs of the Adventure trump social niceties, consequences be damned.

Time Gentlemen, Please! is 8-10 hours of the best old-school, LucasArts-style adventure gaming this side of 1993. It’s even improved on the old formula in a few subtle but important ways. First, there’s the OCD amount of text – any object (including Dan) can be used with any other object, any on-screen location, and any NPC for a unique response. Hilarious and informative in equal parts, this mountain of non sequiturs keeps the game from ever getting dull – you’re always laughing, being nudged towards the correct solution, or both. There’s a “magic map” which warps you to any in-game location, completely eliminating tedious backtracking. There’s a text speed slider.

Hell, there’s a racism slider. The game frequently references classic adventure gaming tropes without descending into navel-gazing fanboyisms. There’s a text adventure parody. There’s a SCUMM parody. There are puzzles with WITS, FISTS, and TEAM solutions. There’s an inventory transmogrifier. This game is $5. There’s a free demo too but this game is $5.

This game is simply a delight and would be a steal at ten times the price. It won’t be long before some forward-thinking studio asks Ben and Dan to help them turn their next title into a triple-A multimillion seller. But until that happens, you have a choice: either you buy Time Gentlemen, Please! right now or you are responsible for the death of gaming and can never complain about anything ever again. And I know how much you like complaining.

My first curry review went up at Americurry. Comments are welcome; preferably over there. I’ll be at Go! Go! tomorrow in New York City and will try to get a glamour shot of the staff with the site logo.

Oh, also, uh, if anyone lives in New York City: HI! Can I crash at your place.

Sorry for the delay. I was rereading The Invisibles. Now I’m rerereading it. As mentioned before, these posts are going to be my musings on the series at this point in my life, rather than a “deep” reading full of ne’er-before-seen insight. If it’s annotations you want, check out Barbelith’s The Bomb or the Disinformation Guide.

This post is entirely spoiler-free; later posts will be mostly so. Some parts of this overview may be misleading, others will be outright lies. If you want the unvarnished truth then go read the books. So:

There is an eternal war between the forces of Order and Chaos that has been going on for time immemorial. On the side traditionally thought of as “good,” less traditionally as Chaos, are The Invisibles – a loosely-knit group of ontological terrorist cells dedicated to overthrowing Status Quo, freeing mankind from the mental shackles of modern society, and shooting the ever-living hell out of any ultraterrestrial beings who make the mistake of invading our physical plane. Or at least those who work for said ultraterrestrials.

And in this corner, we have the nasty beasties of the Outer Church, servants of absolute Order, total control, and the enslavement of all mankind for all eternity, forever. For argument’s sake, we’ll call them the “bad guys.”

Also also: every conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard is true; all moments in time are simultaneous; there is a red, circular satellite called BARBELiTH orbiting the dark side of the moon and sometimes it beams messages into our brains; and the world is going to end on December 22, 2012, 8:00 A.M. GMT, as the walls between self and not-self break down and all of humanity is born into the higher state of unified consciousness that, because we have to call it something, we’ll call the Supercontext.

Get ready!

There are a lot of Invisibles, but our five core characters are:

• Jack Frost, a.k.a Dane McGowan, teenaged Liverpudlian hooligan, possibly the reincarnation of the Buddha, certainly a powerful sorcerer, maybe the most powerful. Doesn’t really give two shits, though. The newest recruit.
• King Mob, de facto leader of this Invisibles cell. Wears leather, shoots guns, behaves like life is an action movie and he’s the star.
• Ragged Robin, a clown-faced red-head, Has some psychic powers. Has some other powers.
• Lord Fanny, a powerful Brazilian shaman and a fabulous dancer. Also, a transvestite.
• Boy, who is a girl.

Okay, enough background.

Your head’s like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weigh of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous little cabinet? Little bokren things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune’s all we are.
- Tom O’Bedlam, to Dane McGowan

Our story begins with Jack and his initiation into the secret world of the Invisibles. I’ve always associated strongly with Jack; we were born in the same year (1980) and, as Invisibles was set in the “present” of the book’s publication, that means Jack was always my age. During the 90s, that is; reading this series in non-real time, I can’t help but notice how young he is. Not to mention a righteous wanker. What once seemed like youthful rebellion now just comes across like being an asshole. As Tom tells him, “you think you’re an outlaw but you just do what they want you to do”; his rebellion is trapped within the superstructure of how a young, violent rebel is expected to behave. At this point in his development, Jack isn’t actually rebelling, he just thinks he’s rebelling. Mostly, he just wants to break things.

I felt a lot more sympathy for the character of Tom O’Bedlam, the older, homeless sorcerer who oversees Jack’s initiation. My first few times through the series, I felt more like Jack: “Hurry up, old man! What’s all this prattling about the nature of things? When are we going to get to the good stuff?” Now, I find him to be one of the series wisest, most sympathetic characters – in great part because he’s willing to put up with Jack’s undercooked nonsense. Tom’s ramblings about reality aren’t just for Jack, they’re for the reader: Don’t let the world distract you from what’s important. Look with your heart, not with your eyes. You are a person and you can accomplish anything - so why settle for anything less?

Tom may be mad, but he’s sane where it counts. Like the best Fools, he can say what he does because he knows he won’t be believed. The irony, as always, is that he speaks nothing but the truth.

Jack soon passes through the first stage of his initiation, puts the bulk of his attitude problem (if not his foul mouth) behind him, and meets up with the rest of the cell. Then they go to a windmill in the middle of the English countryside and sit in a circle for five issues. Okay, not really, they’re actually travelling back in time to France’s Reign of Terror to bring a psychic projection of the Marquis de Sade back to the future where he can architect a new world order based on Absolute Freedom. And to hang out with Byron and the Shelleys, because, you’ve already gone to all the trouble of travelling back to 1794, so why not?

Thus begins the series’ infamous “Arcadia” arc that nearly got the series cancelled . Truth be told, it’s difficult stuff. There’s not much action; the main characters, in the present day, are literally in an immobile trance as they project back in time. There’s a lot of talking and philosophizing. On the other hand, it’s at least interestingly difficult and thematically coherent. Furthermore, like most second arcs in Morrison’s long-form comics, it provides a secret road map to the entire series to come.

My enjoyment was helped a lot by my own expanded pool of knowledge, this time around – I knew more about the French revolution, about the historical significance and symbolic import of the guillotine, and about the Marquis de Sade and 120 Days of Sodom – thanks, Keith. I was also more willing to approach each arc of The Invisibles on its own merits – does it accomplish what it’s trying to accomplish? I mean, there’s plenty of ultradimensional warfare and time-travelling hypernarratives in the issues to come. This arc – a philosophical treatise on human freedom, the subjectivity of prisons, and the false security of either-or, us-them Manichean dichotomies – succeeds mightily. Compare the Marquis’ freedom, even imprisoned, to the self-imposed incarceration of the libertines, or the stark difference between what Robin and the Ciphermen hear during glossolalia. There’s also the dalang, a most skillful puppeteer, and the Blind Chessman, playing both sides for want of a suitable opponent.

I used to think the Blind Chessman was Satan, given his penchant for apples and affiliation with the Outer Church, but this time around I considered him as the Gnostic Christ. He claims he is “not the god of your Fathers,” and that his stories were made heresy by the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. The idea of the Gnostic Christ – a spiritual Christ dwelling within a human host, rather than a Christ divine both in flesh and spirit – resonates strongly with the series’ recurring image of a person or creature from a higher state of existence becoming “trapped” in a lower. So, I’m going with that.

Comments, please!

Reading The Umbrella Academy, an Eisner-award winning 6-issue limited series from Dark Horse comics, was the most fun I’ve had with a comic in years. Period, full stop. I can’t summarize the book any better than the publisher already has, so:

In an inexplicable, worldwide event, forty-seven extraordinary children were spontaneously born by women who’d previously shown no signs of pregnancy. Millionaire inventor Reginald Hargreeves adopted seven of the children; when asked why, his only explanation was, “To save the world.” These seven children form The Umbrella Academy, a dysfunctional family of superheroes with bizarre powers. Their first adventure at the age of ten pits them against an erratic and deadly Eiffel Tower, piloted by the fearsome zombie-robot Gustave Eiffel. Nearly a decade later, the team disbands, but when Hargreeves unexpectedly dies, these disgruntled siblings reunite just in time to save the world once again.

Grant Morrison’s an unapologetic fan, and it’s easy to see why; no “superhero” book has been this consistency crazy and clever – not to be confused with Wacky! Zany! Fun! – since Morrison’s legendary Doom Patrol run. The comic’s quirky pacing, offbeat characterization, and attention to surreal detail make it read like a superhero movie as directed by Wes Anderson. Which, incidently, is exactly the tone the author was going for, so props to him.

No, more than props; an apology. See, the author of The Umbrella Chronicles is Gerard Way, lead singer of emo wunderband My Chemical Romance. And despite people whose opinions I respect speaking out in favor of The Umbrella Academy – despite the Eisner - I couldn’t bring myself to believe it was any good. It sounded too much like a rock star’s ridiculous vanity project, doomed to be mired in Coheed and Cambrian sound and fury. Well, I was wrong.

After finishing it, I went and read up on Way to try to figure out how a bratty emo kid could produce something so mind-blisteringly enjoyable. It turns out that Way holds a BA of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in NYC (check out that instructor list!), and that he spent the years before My Chemical Romance working as a comics store clerk. He clearly has the talent and the bonafides, so the fact he produced a great series shouldn’t be surprising. And yet it is.

So I feel bad that I’m prejudiced against famous people; that I assume that just because someone is on the cover of Spin and popular with 14-year-old girls he must be a vacuous, inartistic sellout. Bzzt! Celebrities are people too; if most of them are trite and boring and petty it’s only because the vast majority of people are so. But some of them are interesting, a few of them are nerds, and at least one of them had a great comic up there in his guylinered noggin. The good news is it managed to escape, so you can join me in having your preconceptions proven delightfully, ambitiously wrong.

Writing about of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life feels strangely superfluous; this 840-page manga autobiography, ten years in the making, was published last week and has already been codified as one of the masterpieces of the comic form – Japanese or otherwise. It’s really good, so if it sounds interesting, go buy it already. Twenty dollars for 840 pages of manga from one of the all-time greats is a ridiculous value.

Tatsumi’s autobiography covers the period of 1946 through 1960, from the first “postcard manga” contest submissions he drew in middle school, through his excitingly prolific high school years and early twenties, through his disillusionment with monthly “manga-for-hire” and the creation of the “gekiga” label for more serious works. Like Will Eisner and the “graphic novel,” Tatsumi was dissatisfied with the short, childish stories which dominated the medium and wanted to tell cinematic, long-form stories suitable for adults. This book is the story of his struggle to reach that point.

Tatsumi was fortunate enough to be at the ground-zero of manga’s cultural takeover of Japanese society, and his autobiography is full of dishy details. How many high school students got to hang out at Osamu Tezuka’s house and pore over pre-release prints of Jungle Emperor Leo? To work alongside a who’s who of Japanese manga artists in a thrillingly competitive publishing environment? His autobiography captures the “anything goes” excitement of people – teenagers, mostly – working in a new, barely understood medium, where every month was quite literally the new Best Month Ever for the form.

But what surprised me most about the book was the level of cultural detail placed around the edges of the narrative. The timeframe of Tatsumi’s story – 1946-1960 – are Japan’s “lost” years, between the end of World War II and the beginning of modern, post-occupation Japan. This is a period modern Japan tends to ignore (they were tough years, with little to be nostalgic about), but Tatsumi remembers the time in loving detail. His book wanders into stories about pop stars, movie theaters, memorable sporting events and professional wrestling matches, even the introduction of Japan’s first mechanical washing machine. For me, at least, it is these humanizing digressions that elevate the work from an excellent autobiography into an essential tome.

I watched two excellent movies this weekend.

The Great Happiness Space is a documentary set in Osaka’s most exclusive host club, where monied women spend hundreds – thousands! – of dollars for a few hours of male companionship. But it’s not prostitution – as with Japan’s male-oriented hostess bars, what’s being bought and sold here is emotional companionship, not physical favors. The movie does a great job exploring the brutally honest hosts, their deluded clientele, and how Japanese society got to the point that this seemed like a good idea. Even better, it does so without the holier-than-thou moralizing usually found in “Japanese sex shocker!” exposés. It’s not like you need someone pointing out that this is not healthy; as with the best documentaries, the people interviewed tell you everything you need to hear.

The Great Happiness Space is only 75 minutes long and available for free on Netflix streaming. If it sounds like something you might like, then you’ll probably love it.

Let the Right One In is the best movie I saw last year.

Set in 1982 Sweden, it’s a coming-of-age story disguised as a vampire flick, a boy-meets-girl story where the girl is a bloodthirsty creature of the night and it barely even matters. 12-year-old Oskar, ignored at home and bullied at school, finds a much-needed friend in Eli, the strange, pale girl next door. “I’ve been 12 for a long time,” she tells him, and in that statement we understand everything we need to know about her plight. Let the Right One In is a haunting, elegaic film as austere as the snow-covered Swedish countryside. It doesn’t just undo decades of ridiculous vampire romance fiction: it replaces them completely. This is the vampire movie. Put it up on the top shelf, between The Exorcist and The Shining.

I’ve had a 20th Century Boys post brewing in my head for the better part of a year. Now that the first volume has finally come out in English – nine years after it was first published in Japan – it seems as good a time as any to get started. This post is spoiler-free. Please keep the comments spoiler-free as well.

I’ve read all 22 volumes of 20th Century Boys in scanlations twice – once as it was being published (starting from about volume 13), and once again when the entire series was complete. It’s undoubtedly the best manga of the past ten years, a sprawling, twisting epic with dozens of plot threads and hundreds of characters. Sure, it gets a bit silly and falls apart at the eleventh hour – but then again, doesn’t Watchmen? (We’ll return to this later.)

20th Century Boys is the story of Kenji Endo, loveable loser and convenience store clerk. Kenji used to have dreams of rock stardom, but nowadays, he doesn’t even bother to keep his guitar tuned. He’s come to accept the hand fate dealt him: somewhere around high-card 10. His job has no future, his friendships are dwindling, and his sister ran off a few years ago, leaving Kenji to take care of her abandoned daughter. Kenji’s not the only one whose life isn’t all he hoped for; his childhood friends may have dreamed of being astronauts and superheroes, but they grew up to be businessmen and security officers. Life doesn’t suck, necessarily. Mostly, it’s just life.

And then two things happen to shake Kenji out of his placid acceptance of his fate. The first is the suicide of childhood friend Donkey, who grew up to be a science teacher. Kenji and Donkey had drifted out of touch, but Donkey never seemed like the kind to take his own life. The second is the appearance all over Japan of a strange symbol – a symbol created by Kenji and his friends in their “secret base” as children:

Like most kids, Kenji and his friends spent their days dreaming. They developed a convoluted mythology for how the world was going to end and wrote it down in a spiral-bound notebook. They created a symbol and a name for the person who would bring about this Armageddon: Friend.

And now it’s all coming true.

—

What’s 20th Century Boys about? Failure, mostly. Kenji and his friends are all living in a dream deferred. They wanted to grow up and save the world, only to discover that the world didn’t want or need their saving. They wanted to be famous and loved, but they ended up settling for something else. We see the characters not only in the present day but during their time as children, and we learn about the thousand tiny compromises they made along the way until, 25 years later, they became the worst thing a child could grow up to be: an adult.

But it’s also a story of redemption, of characters taken not just to the edge but over it, losing everything they have and more. It’s hard to believe what these characters go through, and still they find ways to carry on. How do you come back from the brink? How do you come back after that? Ultimately, it’s the passion they felt in childhood that brings them through Hell and out the other side; their ability to take what began as nostalgia and to hone it into a sharp-edged sword of belief.

This brings us to our thesis statement, then, which is not one I’ve seen articulated elsewhere: 20th Century Boys is to shonen manga what Watchmen is to Western superhero comics. It takes forty years of tropes and themes and distills them into a “serious” story that pays homage to the genre while relentlessly deconstructing it. If Kenji and his friends represent the good that can come from childhood innocence, then Friend represents the dangers of such a myopic worldview – and when it comes to the series’ narrative arc, Friend is the one calling the shots. Friend represents the ultimate otaku who refuses to grow up; the petulant fanboy who can’t understand why the world isn’t more like Gundam 0083.

The first stages of Friend’s shonen apocalypse are entertaining, in a shonen way – but as the stakes rapidly escalate, the situation becomes more and more unpleasant. It turns out that there’s only one way for Kenji and his friends to stop him: no matter how hard it might be or how long it might take … they have to grow up. And so, ultimately, do we.

The new Metric, Fantasies, is astounding.

Stream the entire album over at MySpace, then buy it in whatever size fits best.

This has been kicking around as a draft for a while. I figure that January 31 is the statute of limitations on 2008 retrospectives, so I’m throwing illuminating unifying theses out the window and going with the time-honored “alphabetical” fallback option. Also, I didn’t find as much music I liked as last year, and it’s hard to draw sweeping conclusions from such a small sample size. Too much interminable French house – there’s no good reason a song should ever be longer than November Rain – and as I noted to my friend John, “echoey reverb is the indie Auto-Tune.”

I did not include anything by Santogold, Cut Copy, or M83 because you already have those albums… right? I also added some singles I liked that Pitchfork left off, because this year was just that anemic.

Beyoncé, Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It), #23

I suppose it says something about how culturally sheltered from the mainstream I am that Pitchfork’s Top 100 was the first time I heard this monster single. It’s an amazing piece of anti-music; outside of the bridge, it’s barely even a song, just assorted squawks, chirps, and drones. Beyoncé’s voice is the only thing holding it together; amazingly, it does. (Aside: Chris of The Invincible Super Blog describes Beyoncé’s alter ego Sasha Fierce as “the Chris Gaines of R&B,” and that’s a meme needs spreading.)

Frightened Rabbit, The Twist, N/A

What happens when a Scottish indie band sings over LCD Soundsystem’s All My Friends? It’s pretty good, actually.

The Hold Steady, Constructive Summer, #25

A great solid rock song in the vein of The Replacements, with a strong and positive message about getting off your ass and doing something. Unsurprising, considering their album is called Stay Positive.

Ida Maria, Oh My God, #79

A Norwegian rock singer who rocks, hard and often. There’s not much to say about this song except that it completely, unapologetically, remorselessly rocks. Also: in previous years, I was a leading indicator for both Feist and Lykke Li, so if you want to hear the female songstress everyone will be talking about come August 2009 – here you go.

Keane, Spiralling, N/A

The chorus contains my favorite hook of 2008 – the way the rising staircase of notes are played against the plummeting vocals (and lyrical subject matter) is simply divine. A great video feels like the song could not exist without it.

Max Tundra, Which Song, #65

A full-frontal assault of chiptune chipperness. 8-bit is boringly ubiquitous these days, but Tundra shows us why we all fell in love with square, triangle, saw and noise in the first place. Apparently, if you string enough 6502s together, you can fly to the moon.

Sigur Rós, Gobbledigook, #70

Sigur Rós has always performed in the invented language of Hopelandic. But this song is the first time I believed there might actually be a Hopeland, somewhere, too.

T.I. (feat. Rihanna), Live Your Life, #40

Who says there are no second acts in American lives? Here’s Dragostea din tei, a song long ground into a post-parodic pulp, given new life as a Rihanna-driven hook. If this song works, then nothing is beyond redemption.

WHY?, Fatalist Palmistry, #94

My single favorite track from the Top 100 and, with the possible exception of L.E.S. Artistes, the best song I heard in 2008, period. Synaesthetic lyrics with a density I never thought I’d hear again after In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. I can’t think of a more beautiful description of love’s tension than the second verse. The vocals and music are perfectly counterbalanced, building and releasing tension as the song soars higher and higher… I can’t say enough good things about this song.

This three-day weekend I watched five previously-unseen movies.

My brother got me Pictures at a Revolution for Christmas, a book whose thesis is built around 1967’s five Best Picture nominees: In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Doctor Doolittle. Yes, that Doctor Doolittle. Two racially-charged dramas, two New Wave-inspired character studies, and a big-budget family musical disaster. Schitzophrenic, yes, but also indicative of the times, and thus a ripe foundation for a book.

I’m (re)watching the films before diving into the book; this weekend’s remedial film class was Bonnie and Clyde. It was surprising to see Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as young heartthrobs, not the respectable middle-age actors I knew them as. The movie itself was fairly nuanced – I was expecting the characters to exhibit Romeo + Juliet levels of youth/in love/invinciblity, but B&C are aware from the start that very few bank robbers get to retire with their riches. And all the film-school deconstruction in the world hasn’t managed to robbed the final scene of its gut punchiness.

From there, I moved on to Natural Born Killers, which was a goddamned mess. I knew going in that the film played around with film stock and aspect ratios, but I wasn’t expecting sixteen different formats, subliminal quick cuts and multi-take “vertical cutting.” Between the high-contrast colored lighting and the text on people and walls, it might as well have been Peter Greenaway film. That said, I liked it. I loved the first half, but was disappointed by the second, when the movie transitions from a spiritual serial killer road movie into a too-played media farce. Neither Robert Downey Jr.’s media mogul nor Tommy Lee Jones’ prison warden worked for me, though I hold the script and director responsible. Ultimately, it’s a movie I’m glad I saw, but I wish I had seen it 10 years ago. Network and The Truman Show do a better job of exploring the relationship of creator, createe, and audience in the media; Battle Royale, Fight Club, and A Clockwork Orange are a more nuanced consideration of the relationship of violence and freedom. Sure, several of those films were released after Natural Born Killers, but…

Next was the pilot to Twin Peaks. I’ve never given Lynch enough of a chance; for some reason, I’ve never seen anything beyond The Elephant Man (wonderful) and Eraserhead (student film). I’ve had the complete Twin Peaks for a while and decided it was finally time to give it a shot. The pilot is an excellent piece of television – it lacks the surrealism for which the series became famous, but it’s methodically paced (especially for television), uniquely shot, and packed with character moments equal parts bizarre and authentic. I look forward to starting Season One.

My appetite whet, I jumped straight into the deep end with Mulholland Dr. Now this is a movie. Beautiful shots, an amazing soundscape, and an atmosphere both dreamlike and nightmarish… Most importantly, despite the non-linear, mind-bending structure, the film successfully tells a layered, complex tale about what Los Angeles does to people. It may not be logical, but it’s entirely coherent. That said, I don’t think Lynch’s film would have resonated so strongly without my own complicated relationship with Southern California. Blue Velvet is on the way from Netflix.

The final movie I picked up was Time After Time, a movie that delivers every delight its far-out premise promises. H.G. Wells (Malcom McDowell) invents a time-machine – Jack the Ripper (David Warner) promptly steals it and escapes to the far-off future of San Francisco, 1979! Wells, horrified at the amoral creature he has loosed upon “utopia,” follows him. What follows is equal parts suspense thriller, time-travel flick, fish-out-of-water comedy, and romance – Wells falls for a cute bank teller soon after arriving in swinging San Francisco. The movie is simply delightful, and sadly mostly forgotten. But look at it this way: it’s a cult classic without the irritating cultists.