Better Late... Favorite Films of 2007 - Pt. I

Why Now?
In an era when the average American makes fewer than five trips to the cinema in a calendar year, even those of us whose personal statics are some seven, ten times that number or more are unlikely to have seen every film that would interest us released in a twelve-month span. We'll never see everything or even "everything", not even on home video, not even in revival houses. As our interests change and develop, as tastes bloom and wither, we'll still be catching up with 2007, 2006, 1977, 1947, 1907 until the timer runs out and we spin off into the zoetrope blur of eternity. While the rest of the Internet-verse is prepping their 2008 Best Ofs, Favorites, and Annual Excuse for Lists, Exploding Kinetoscope, counterproductive as always, proudly presents its Favorite Films of 2007.

Taking this moment to list what I found to be standout features of 2007 affords a measure of perspective, a chance for films to gestate in the imagination, to rise or drop in personal esteem. It would seem likely that any viewer who absorbed three times as many 2007 releases in 2008 (according to my records, that's about right) would have found some cinematic pearls washed onto the beach of the subsequent year, but apart from sliding some titles up and down the list I don't believe my Ten Fave selections have changed since January. As far as I'm concerned, rankings in a year like 2007 are meaningless, until we get to number one.

There is very little on either of these lists (an impending "Ten Favorites" and the below 11-20 unruly children) that is not a major American studio release with multi-million dollar advertising budgets. Very few titles unassociated with pop genre filmmaking, and/or with modern auteur-heroes behind the camera, writers and/or directors who have previously turned my head. The lists are half composed of those things everyone saw, and for the most part, enjoyed. I don't know what to make of that. While it says something about the state of film distribution that most of us probably squander our fewer-than-five theater trips on a pool of the same seven blockbusters, the truth is I'm simply not partial to documentary, realistic drama that doesn't have crime, rayguns or weirdness in it, or the noodlings of independently financed first-timers telling stories about their grandmothers. Still, there are multiple indies, docos and imports below. Most of them just have monsters, drugs or murders in them.

The Règle of the Jeu

The lists are restricted to films I first had reasonable opportunity to see in 2007. That means 2007 American wide releases, and limited releases that included Los Angeles. Foreign films, independent films that did not have theatrical releases, and festival debuts are considered partly on U.S. release date and partly by my own cruel whim. The lists are of feature films as categorized only by length, without division between narrative, non-narrative, fiction, documentary, animation or country of origin.

Short Stacks: Nearly Great Films On Icarus Wings

The runners-up party is ofttimes more interesting than the winner's circle (can one "win" at making art? Hmm). This is a round-up of ten films severely hobbled, either stumbling somewhere up the mountain or turning back halfway, voluntarily. Plus a few with no hairs seriously out of place, edged out because of the arbitrary tradition of Top Ten lists. All are worthy of time and attention, and it is not as if my ten favorites are flawless precious gems. Some deserve defense, some are in sore need of cutting-down, some should be better celebrated. These near bulls-eyes, almost-theres and lovable fuck-ups are in no particular order.

River of Crime!: Zodiac (dir. Fincher, scr. James Vanderbilt)
Here's an unfortunate case. David Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt document the frustrations and myriad dead-ends of the Zodiac killer investigation as a parable of how data flows through the world, a raw force indifferent to interpretation, and what happens as players are inevitably swept up in the path of the unwinnable game. Citizens of late '60s Northern California are murdered and terrorized without clear motivation. The unidentified criminal taunts the police and media and ducks out of sight at will, never to be apprehended. The screenplay is constructed with narrative gaps leapfrogging over dramatizations of major biographical events in characters' lives, over years, to land back in their company as the Zodiac case develops. It is a nearly an experiment in narratology: here are the unrefined events of Story. This happened, and this happened, and this happened. How far can narrative organization be pruned? Is plot-making a natural function of the audience's brain? The tone of chilly detachment appears to use little but the bare-bones facts of the case, a sort of late '60s Forensic Failure Files, a post-mortem examination on events with no clear mortem, a connect-the-dots puzzle with fuzzy, hypothetical dots. And therein is a gaping, problematic hole in Zodiac.

Robert Graysmith, on whose book Zodiac is based, is the gaping hole. Graysmith is, in his two books on the murders and in extensive media appearances ever since, a self-promoter, poor writer, and irresponsible journalist. The standards of documentation in the true crime book market are exceedingly low. This deficiency combined with the author's depiction of himself as integral to the investigation, thus providing his book with insider-cache and a clear everyman protagonist, has made Graysmith's Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked the staple bookshelf-fillers on the subject. Graysmith's canny and immoral slight-of-hand leaves most readers -- and indeed most viewers of Zodiac -- with the impression that the writer was indispensable or at least deeply involved with the investigation. In fact, none of Graysmith's amateur sleuthing amounted to any solid leads, furthered no aspect of the investigation, and he arguably hindered it by pestering Detective Dave Toschi and directing public attention to suspects later cleared of any involvement. By way of random example, the Zodiac ciphers were solved by high school teacher Donald Harden and his wife, Bettye Harden. Both book and film blow through this fact to spend more time with Graysmith's fruitless fumbling with the coded letters, the real detective work shrugged off with an air of "oh yeah, and then someone else actually figured it out." The film toys with the crime picture cliché tale of the Investigator Driven to Obsessive Madness, mainly by sketching Graysmith's self-immolating Zodiac fixation in shorthand, but it's still the same old song, and the reality is less colorful. So too, the unarticulated notion that Zodiac, as Alan Moore said of Jack the Ripper, is less an individual who may be identified to "solve" a crime than a superposition from which we may proceed outward to innumerable outcomes for all the players, for society, for the world: Zodiac hints at the thesis, but its final statement seems to largely support Graysmith's specious theory (which forms the bulk of Zodiac Unmasked) that Chester Leigh Allen was the culprit. Fincher's film certainly allows for other possibilities, but goes far out of its way to underline Allen and imply that this most obvious villain slipped through the cracks. The reality is that the DNA on the Zodiac envelopes was tested in 2002. It did not match Allen. You know, just like his fingerprints and handwriting. Did you not know that? You wouldn't, not from Zodiac. Allen was not, in all likelihood, the Zodiac.

Sleepy-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal as Graysmith slurs the embarrassing, aggrandizing boast that he is good at puzzles. Real Life Graysmith is no such thing, spending chapter after chapter chasing non-leads to silent movie theaters (?), lying about dates, reconfiguring geography. The fact is, Robert Graysmith had nothing to do with the Zodiac case. The truth is, he shoehorned himself into Zodiac history after the fact, and continues blabbing about how integral he was to the investigation until his noise drowns out all useful signal, and now the tale of his self-invented heroism is the subject of a major motion picture. In increasing bizarre delusion, Greysmith's recent books tout the author as "the man who solved the Zodiac murders," and he now claims to have been a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. This is not Ed Wood or Amedeus playing fast and loose with biographical fact to weave a fiction that is "true" at it's core. It would not have been outside Fincher's project to tell this story, of the crafty, opportunist cartoonist worming his way into the legend of a murderer. Or of the deluded fictionalized Graysmith as he writes about himself, who seems so assured that his nonsensical, invented theories are solid clues that the police are failing to properly follow up on. Instead, Zodiac preserves not just a list of facts that don't add up to a solution, it also preserves the outright lies of Robert Graysmith, mythologizing the con man in the process. Pity no one involved had the smarts to differentiate.

Girl Spy Adventure: Black Book (dir. Paul Verhoeven, scr. Gerard Soeteman, Verhoeven)
Between the covers of the Black Book are cracking WWII espionage action-adventure stories of the sort best embodied in syrupy-tough American studio films of a bygone period and exhilarating Italian exploitation pictures. Paul Verhoeven, like Roman Polanski with The Pianist before him, fills in the holes missing in the soles and souls of the well-heeled subject. Namely the voices of those Europeans whose nations were savaged by the war and women, who never get anything bad-ass to do in loaded-to-the-gills cliffhanger war stories. It is to the credit of Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean films that they actively work to hand a third of the swashbuckling duties to Kiera Knightley; it is problematic that to make such adventure palatable she negotiates an imaginary culture of cuddly slob pirates with no interest in murder, pillaging and rape. Black Book shoots up the war adventure with an infusion of grim sickness and unglamorous, complex moral dilemma, personal, public, political.

In great Dutch art tradition, Paul Verhoeven crams his films full of stuff. In his American genre satires of the '80s and '90s the director's vulgar American excesses are a necessary component of the greater project, the dumb/sick-gilded form is the content. In Black Book Verhoeven cannot possibly in good conscience outdo the exploitationeers who have gone before; there are multiple sub-subgenres of Nazisploitation on this planet, for those brave/foolhardy enough to explore the back alleys of the video store. Verhoeven's streak of perversity is more Pasolinian than Ken Russellesque in Black Book, extreme and despairing with the purpose of plumbing the bizarre and appalling recesses of human cruelty in extreme situations. This action suspenser about a Jewish singer who goes undercover for the Dutch resistance and infiltrates the Gestapo twists into a survival and revenge tale, still thrilling even as at its core it is about the economics of war, sex, and power, the seemingly inescapable trap of all human beings to use others as means to an end. For that, it is not so different from 2007's Tim Burton adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, but never falls into the pit of overblown moralizing historical drama; there are no fallen angels or innocents compromised or ogre-Nazis grimacing in dastardly delight. Black Book does not make grand, earnest, embarrassing Statements, but is lean, unflinching, and about the moral bewilderment of every player on every stage at every moment.

Do Your Dirty, Sinful Business: The Simpsons Movie (dir. David Silverman, scr. by like 11 people)
Bombastic, colorful Carnival comedy, built like a floodwall containing every kind of joke known to man, The Simpsons Movie, tries to be all things to all people. The show has always had a heart of warm marshmallow, its decades-spanning satire of American moronitude is barbed with Teflon thorns. And that's not a complaint. The Simpsons is reverent about familial love, positive ethical lessons, and mostly understanding and humanistic. It's always reserved true irreverence and fury for the act of joke-writing itself. The apex of the series felt the shaping hands of three fathers: Matt Groening's caustic/shaggy misanthropy, James L. Brooks' fuzzy empathy for flawed dum-dums, and the MAD Magazine insanity of a writer's room turning on itself with teeth bared. So The Simpsons Movie grafts an environmental apocalypse plot onto a family emotional crisis and moment to moment exists in a deluge of world-class gag writing, the best of which have nothing to do with anything but the insular joke world of Springfield, U.S.A.

The narrative structure of Simpsons episodes beyond season 3 is so meandering that in its finer moments it has been "about" the breakdown of plot logic (as his daughter groped for the moral one week, Homer once groused wisely "it's just a bunch of stuff that happened"); perhaps that is to your liking, perhaps not. My favorite episodes end up thousands of miles from where they began, so if the story doesn't hang together that is acceptable, though some of the character arcs are duds. Lisa in particular has a D-plot that walks her through a kiddie romance; she has been through these paces before, often to greater effect. The twining A stories -- a conversion narrative about Homer's self-centered tendencies, a domestic drama about Marge and Homer's relationship -- are warmed-over as well, but are central story-problems of the series, and merit revisitation once in awhile.

A certain thread of popular thinking goes that The Simpsons leap to feature film arrives some ten years too late, and that is true, unless one believes it arrives twelve years too late or perhaps fourteen. Variable mileage taken into account, the television program has long been boiled down to a series of stitched-together gags and comic setpieces, as if the writing staff had exhausted all story possibilities besides "The Simpsons go somewhere" and "The Simpsons embark on a new faddish business venture" and "We used this plot before, but... meh, who cares?" It is this writer's opinion that such an (de)evolution lead to moments of true glory in television comedy, sustained until the clothesline of jokes simply wasn't funny. The happy news is that the runner about Bart skateboarding nude is funnier than the whole of season 16.

Kierkegaardian Commandments: The Ten (dir. David Wain, scr. Ken Marino, Wain)

Speaking of the strength and magic of The Joke, here are ten sketches and interstitials supposedly about the Ten Commandments of Judeo-Christian tradition, but which are really an excuse for 96 minutes of absurdist, downright alien humor. I would love to stick up for The Ten at length, and it sits at 39% Fresh on Ye Olde Tomatey-ometer, but the deal pares down to either finding all this silliness hilarious or none of it slightly amusing.

For those that do not Get It, or fear they do not get it, or fear they are missing something esoteric, snide or intellectual (and I've talked to lots of those people), the comic Rosetta Stone for the humor of David Wain and cohorts (Stella, The State, Wet Hot American Summer, SEX aka Weiners and Boobs) is simplicity itself: you're not missing the joke. It's really that dumb. It's very, very simple. The jokes are honestly malapropisms, gibberish, non sequiturs, farts, people falling down, even cutting flubbed takes into scenes without further comment. If there is any second, "higher" level to this stuff it is that smart, hip comic performers are telling stupid jokes to make themselves laugh. If it were not supremely foul-mouthed and Winona Ryder were not vividly (hilariously) miming sexual congress with a ventriloquist dummy, this would be completely accessible to pre-verbal children. If God loves a fool, it is a safe assumption He must have adored The Ten.

Speaking of which...

The Idiot Boys: D-War: Dragon Wars (dir., scr. Shim Hyung-rae)
Ghost Rider (dir., scr. Mark Steven Johnson)
A small segment of the population may be disappointed after seeing D-War: Dragon Wars. The only reason to feel let-down is that the title is potentially misleading. The film actually only features a few sparing moments of dragons proper. Fear not, for the majority of the running time is indeed spent fighting a creature-packed battle regarding dragons, specifically which of two massive serpentine Imoogi will become a dragon (either Buraki or The Good Imoogi... I was personally rooting for The Good Imoogi). The dragons don't fight until the very end of the movie. But the Imoogi Buraki messes up some parking ramps and kills zoo animals with startling frankness for a movie about Imoogis loose in Los Angeles. Plus there are sundry Bulcos, Sharconnes and Dawdlers at the command of the evil Atrox Army. If you don't know, those are different kinds of fantastic reptilian monster things, and the Dawdlers have rocket launchers on their backs, and the leader of the Atrox has the special power of walking through metal, even though he gets hit by cars on more than one occasion (both incidents only minutes apart and theoretically unrelated). I failed to mention that the Imoogis are also fighting over a mystical reincarnated lady from ancient Korea, because they want to eat her and turn into Korean dragons.

If this sounds terribly complicated, don't worry, because Robert Forester playing Antiques Jack, who is like 1000 years old and can morph into other people and knows martial arts, tells a little boy the story in a series of flashbacks within flashbacks. He drinks a hot bowl of soup that materializes in his hands between shots while he tells the story. During the soup-slurping and storytelling, at least two characters in D-War respond with blank stares and demand to know "What are you talking about?" If you have to ask, then D-War may not be your bowl of soup. If you are a creature brought any measure of automatic joy by the sight of an Imoogi destroying Los Angeles' Library Tower, and that emotion is only intensified by characters referring to the structure as the "Liberty Building", please let your voice be heard. The world is malnourished by weak nonsense like Transformers. D-War is a dose of the strong stuff.

No effects-spurting blockbuster of 2007 was incorrect in quite the same ways as the tone-deaf, convoluted, Frankenstein beast of Spider-Man 3. Where Sam Raimi's Marvel picture failed to realize that it was too self-serious about silly stuff, and simultaneously disrespectful of the goofy pleasures of superhero books, the antidote is Ghost Rider. Grinning wide, headlights beaming, Ghost Rider does not pussyfoot about, and is proud to be about a guy whose head turns into a flaming skull while he drives around on a Hell-motorcycle and whips monsters with a magic chain. Ghost Rider works double-time to think of a dozen cool, funny, outrageous things to do with that flame-skull, Hell-chopper and chain. Ghost Rider does not make pretense to being Sophisticated Adult Entertainment, or fuss about how Johnny Blaze's superpowers might be written as a fable for homosexual teenagers to relate to, because it is quite busy showing you things like Nicolas Cage trying to do a ramp jump over six twirling helicopter blades. Ghost Rider is for the part of you that wants to see this, and say aloud: "Awesome." If you do not have that part in you anymore, than you are dead inside and may go enjoy Atonement or something.

It is a weak compliment to praise a movie for what it does not do, but unlike every single superhero picture since X-Men (save the special freak-show case of Hellboy), Ghost Rider does not commit the head-scratch-worthy sin of condescending to its source material... to itself? The audience? The source material? How does one put this? This is a strange paradox that modern superhero films have created: they are embarrassed at what they are about. In reflection, I was far more enthusiastic about the film last spring, before summer 2008 changed the rules for comic book movies. Not because of the clench-jawed, The Dark Knight, but because of Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. Ghost Rider at least captures the eagerness to please and anything-goes mode of juvenile fantasy in pre-Bronze Marvel comics. Until the all-ages joyride of Iron Man, it seemed hopeless that given the business realities and necessity of catering to a broad audience of variable comics savviness, a huge expensive movie could duplicate the sense of a populated, bustling world, drastically altered by superpowers and super-geniuses that makes Marvel Universe stories special. The movies will never nail it on the head -- another key element is the pleasures of long-form continuity, and the impact of The Fantastic Four, mutants and aliens are critical missing components for which there is no substitute -- but Marvel Studios has taken major, heartening steps toward Doing It Right in 2008.

Storytellers Gone Haywire: Beowulf (dir. Robert Zemeckis, scr. Neil Gaiman, Roger Avary)

Robert Zemeckis, who was once blessed with the breeziest knacks for story and comedy in popular cinema, lost his confidence and sense of wonder, and nearly fifteen years ago strayed into dark woods never to be seen again. Maybe the Zemeckis who made Who Framed Roger Rabbit got eaten by a tiger or something. It seems doubtful we will get him back.

Beowulf was a prime opportunity for Zemeckis to reemerge from a decade and a half in a cocoon of Oscar-fishing moribund drama and limpid genre whiffles bloated with too many names and monies and not enough wit or passion. Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary have provided Beowulf with a beautiful engine, a spry, energized screenplay that begins with the Old English epic fantasy of Scandinavia, and immediately spirals off into, well, Neil Gaiman territory. The Beowulf screenplay is about those themes Gaiman cannot keep from turning over in his hands like a worry stone: the purpose, glories and pitfalls of storytelling, the nature of myth, the lonesome death of the old tale. As in most of the writer's work, when he revisits an ancient story, it is to revitalize it by pointing to the magic it always possessed and never lost, but modern audiences may have forgotten.

With Beowulf, Gaiman and Avary are interested in the source material's blood, thunder, beasts and warped fantastical sense of history and culture, then promptly set about subverting the original, and maybe Beowulf had it coming. The writers turn all the warriors and kings into liars and fakes scrambling for immortality. With every Big Man unable to put up the slightest resistance to the temptations of the flesh, and screwing up their own legacies, the tough guys instead try to preserve a legend of themselves. In a sense, the ultimate gag is that Beowulf itself is a lovely, inspiring, imaginative fraud. As written, here is a funny, literate, potentially moving criticism and meditation on the epic poem, and a sweet-and-sour statement on immortality.

That's how Beowulf is written. It has then been realized/entombed in a shockingly expensive, hideously ugly computer motion capture process by Mr. Zemeckis, for reasons he has yet to articulate in any way that makes sense. Whatever the baffling motivation, Zemeckis has gone to enormous effort, crammed Beowulf with camera moves, long takes, and choreography impossible to capture with anything but a virtual camera, but all the digital fandancing is neither the most elegant nor visually articulate way wield the weapon of motion picture storytelling. There are moments in the finished Beowulf, especially (maybe only) in IMAX 3D, which achieve the scorching terror-beauty of hallucinatory state. I mean that literally. The movie looks tactile/disembodied, real/fake, awkward/elegant in ways that sort of look like the ickiest disorientation of an acid trip. The greasy, wooden skin-jackets of men, horses, dragons seemingly infested of some malicious animating demon. The impossibly deep focus that mimics neither human eye nor kino-eye. The upside that keeps you from freaking out is that you know it's a movie. The downside is that it has nothing to do with the work of telling the story, and is partly a byproduct of technological failure.

Creature Feature: The Mist (dir., scr. Frank Darabont)

Frank Darabont believes the capacity for hope in bleak circumstances, even when pushed beyond all rational limit, is the finest of human qualities. I find myself at philosophical loggerheads with that sentiment specifically, and with Darabont's squishy brand of sentimentalism in general. It taints his better storytelling impulses. It is his Great Theme, and he tends it like a hothouse flower through all his films. Even in The Mist.

Among regular adaptors of Stephen King's writing for the screen, Darabont is an exceptional case; he respects the source material, tries not to futz around with the mechanical parts that make the stories light up and go, and takes it seriously. Those qualities alone are a rarity at this late date, more than thirty years since the first King adaptation, Brian DePalma's Carrie (1976). Darabont understands what makes King's books tick and readers respond. The keys to the car aren't the jump scares, gross-outs, the creepies and psychos -- though those things are fun -- but the characters. Stephen King loves to write about people. Loves to write whole lazy, boring, silly, mean, lovable towns and states and nations full of characters. He gives them names, histories, bad habits, personal traumas and pet colloquialisms. And yes, then he usually sics a terrible beast upon them. Darabont has demonstrated, in all his adaptations, an affection for King's sprawling world, for the deep-worming into lives and motivations of his characters, for the epic grandeur with which King paints everyday horrors. Frank Darabont understands the broad strokes of Stephen King.

Where Darabont misses, is when he takes it too seriously. The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999) are too-handsome, solemn films, sacrificing any semblance of King's sweat-stained, sailor-vocabulary prose. As to whether the filmmaker comprehends or can pay service to King's greater vision and deeper concerns, Darabont is 0 for 3, though The Mist is hit and miss. The Mist, novella and film, is a focused, ant-farm look at one of King's favorite topics. What happens to the heart and soul when the niceties of society are stripped away, when civilized behavior must be forsaken in the name of survival, when the safety net snaps? He is fascinated with the speed and fury at which we can be reduced to efficient, primal drives, both the good and the not-so-good. This, Darabont grasps in basic, and delivers The Mist as a swift, tooth-cracking punch of a movie, a tense monster attack siege drama about the hundred ways we turn into animals when the tentacles hit the fan . But his pet themes, which are not King's, twist the novella into something else via subtle rewrites that have the appearance of innocently streamlining the story and providing closure to the novella's open ending. Darabont's omission of plot points and new finale ultimately invert the power and pain of the original. Rather than an observational horror story about how people behave under duress, we're left with a sick joke sermon about what happens when we commit the sin of giving up hope (which we are apparently not to do even in the face of apocalypse, and driven to the brink of madness).

Points, however for gratifyingly inside Stephen King nerd-jokes (there are namechecks for King's radio stations WZON and WKIT). Better than a joke, concrete references to tie The Mist's military experiment The Arrowhead Project to Dark Tower mythos, where all prior adaptations have done their damnedest to avoid the subject, even Hearts in Atlantis (2001), though it's source story, "Low Men in Yellow Coats", is nothing but a Dark Tower story.

And man! Skull-face spiders! That stuff hits me where I live.

Dicks, Rest & Motion: Superbad (dir. Greg Mottola, scr. Seth Rogan, Evan Goldberg)

Story: two high school boys want to get some beer and pussy, and fail upwards in this most noble mission. Execution: a little too sweet when Messers Jonah Hill (babbling, fat) and Michael Cera (hangdog, scrawny) are charming enough that it could've been far uglier. Gentleness, however, is The Point. A little too meandering, though that is likely another Point, it misses being epic. And the rules of levels of reality seem bent according to the needs of jokes and setpieces, rather than the story and enterprise as a cohesive whole. What I'm getting at is I'm not sure if comic sidetrack episodes like McLovin' and The Cops or Seth's Disease Where He Compulsively Draws Penises at all jibe with the naturalistic, behavior-based milieu. That Superbad is a bit lumpy, awkward and has its heart dripping all over the place is sort of another point.

Truly do I love a teen sex comedy, and every generation deserves to reinvent the genre for their own. The angels alone know what the hell is wrong with adolescent boys, for by the time we emerge from that private Hell we are all too embarrassed to speak aloud what we have seen. Whatever was wrong with them when they wrote Superbad at 15 years old, thank Rogan and Goldberg for sharing this document with the world.

Eastern Promises (dir. David Cronenberg, scr. Steven Knight)
A clutch of lower echelon gangsters examine a corpse they made and of which they must dispose, and Nikolai steps forward and gets down to the business of chopping off the fingers with garden shears. That's what has to be done, that's how you do it, and Nikolai is unflinching and good at it. That is rather the attitude of Eastern Promises, icy, unblinking and possessed of a straightforward grace about the business of telling a crime tale of the Russian mob at work in London, and how they butt up against, infect and are generated by the public life of the city. The filmmaking is classically elegant, tough and sinewed, all cogent metaphors are cool, cutting and clear;Eastern Promises begs comparison with blades, vodka, cold London air. Viggo Mortensen seems to have climbed inside a big raw body that is not his own, decorated it with scars, tattoos and looks out through portals in Nikolai's sunken eyes as if something ancient and dead is longing to hatch a renewed and fresh life.

Nikolai, clean-up man and driver, works his way up the ranks of the Vory v zakone. A well-meaning midwife (Naomi Watts) tries to find a home for a mob-orphaned baby. The psychopathic, repressed son (Vincent Cassel) of the boss (Armin Mueller-Stahl, playing as a wistful, contented bear best left unperturbed) falls out of favor. And Cronenberg strides through these underworld saga corridors where we have walked before, believing that we may have heard this story, but there is pleasure and power in the tale well-told. The director sometimes makes movies with his subtext hanging inside-out, horror films outré because their metaphors are made manifest. Eastern Promises still probes favorite realms of Cronenbergian exploration: the irreparable alteration of the soul when one lives in a constant state of violent excitement, the peculiar shapes taken by psychic ills when they burst through the membrane into physical form. With Promises and his previous film, A History of Violence (2005), Cronenberg and company work in service of the story, a hard-earned lesson of Old Hollywood narrative cinema. It is worth consideration that the most talked-about, vicious and visceral action setpiece of the year is a bathhouse knife fight, in which nude, vulnerable Mortensen faces off against linoleum-cutter armed thugs. In your sternum, you feel the impact of bone on tile, metal through flesh, know the space, fear the worst. If there is a Trick to the craft of this fight scene, it is not staccato disorienting cuts between blurry frenetic shots of who-can-really-say, but restraint. Sustained shots, confident editing, geographic anchors in place, Cronenberg's camera movies like invisible liquid, in which the fighters bob and crunch against each other, the dance of choreography and performance carried along on the tide.

Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Kaiju

Click for giant ass-rocketing turtle-size!

See the show, laugh the laughs, drink the beers, buy some comics. It is everything fun about an L.A. Friday night, except for the bad drugs, awful club music and catching venereal disease from phony scenesters!

And yes, I know Gamera the Brave isn't the twelfth in a proper series. And that Gamera doesn't fight any of those monsters in the movie. Well, except Gyaos. Look, I just wanted to draw them. I'm sure you understand.

"Get That Weak Shit Off My Track!": SPEED RACER (2008)

I vowed to myself I wasn't going to post any writing until I'd finished the comic (see posts below). I didn't post a 2007 Favorites list, didn't post a memorial for John Polonia, didn't post for a new Winona Ryder movie (and that's dedication, friends! I mean, it even had a nude scene!). But I want you to do something. I want you to go save Speed Racer.

Rescuing a film from disappointing box office drop returns is probably not possible, particularly in this case, and not something I normally care about one whit. But you can save Speed Racer from the foolish, needless critical nose-thwacking it received this month. The world's going to eventually be embarrassed about how it treated The Matrix trilogy. There's still time to see Speed Racer as the pagan gods of color and sound and communal ritual intended. Still time to post overstated raves on your blogs.

This is casual and chatty and still high on celluloid fumes, and mostly just rehashed from a post I made to Mobius Home Video Forum. I'll write more on the film at a later date, but something needs to be said about this remarkable film in the here-and-now.

Dear God, they're never going to let these weirdoes make a movie again, are they? Speed Racer is just about the craziest goddamn thing I've ever seen, title previously held by The Matrix Revolutions. Studios keep giving Larry and Andy Wachowski bottomless buffets of money, no supervision, telling them to go nuts, and then when the result is certifiably nuts... well. Why is anyone surprised? Will they behave themselves if attempt is made to rein in the Wachowskis' wildest impulses? Can it be done, or is that how you get Dune?

The Matrix's runaway-train success was a fluke. That movie is plenty too fetishistic, brainy, brain-fried and stylized that the people-we-pretend-are-other-people should've stayed away in droves. It's as if Neon Genesis Evangelion were rewritten by Philip K. Dick and filmed by the Coen brothers, and that is not a cocktail that makes for a format catapulting DVD unit-shifter. So: fluke. The completed trilogy is downright dangerously beautiful and freakish, had only The Matrix given them eyes to see. Alas, you can't make the people see the golden code through Neo, if they don't want to see. As result, Speed Racer is received as the expectedly idiotic and outlandish end-product of the Wachowskis' diminishing returns, rather than a fresh triumph from filmmakers who have grown more fascinating with each project.

Admittedly I'm prime target audience for this Speed Racer movie: Wachowski diehard, most delighted when they're at their nerdiest, most obsessive, wacked out. I like children's entertainment that pushes the boundaries of what's acceptable to adults. I like vintage anime -- "Speed Racer" in particular -- abstract animation, CGI which strives for psychedelia over photorealism, and artists without the phrase "over the top" in their lexicon. And I still don't know what I saw. I felt like I ate a color wheel. That's a good thing. Not "over"stimulated, Speed Racer just hit a lot of pleasure buttons simultaneously, forcefully, repeatedly. I also like to get drunk and watch the Main Street Electrical Parade. In a lineage of sense-saturating, giddy, brazenly joyous and deeply perverse entertainments, Speed Racer is brother to The Mask of Fu Manchu, Tokyo Drifter, Diabolik, and Kill Bill.

It's not "Mach GoGoGo", all clean lines, strong but sensible colors and uncluttered composition. But the film builds from the anime a whirring, jittery, buzzing next-gen machine ; new frame, same reliable engine. The TV show's a good starting point for plugging into Speed Racer, as the movie geometrically expands the Wachowski's visual vocabulary of techniques learned, adopted, mutated from anime and manga: metaphorical backdrops, characters frozen like animation reduced to key poses, streaking POV motion lines, symbolic frame adornment, busy backgrounds drawing the eye to boldly outlined figures, halting the movement on striking, eccentric or important action beats to give rhythm, clarity, elegance to complicated set-pieces that might otherwise be too fast to mentally process. We can go on and on. To get a bead on the sensibility, and presuming one respects animation, consider that Speed Racer is not a "live action" adaptation of a cartoon. It is an extremely detailed computer animated feature which integrates flesh and blood performances. Not cartoony. It is a cartoon.

Not all of that Japanese cartooning technique is "Speed Racer" specific, or grows from the TV series or Yoshida Tatsuo's manga. Not all of it's new, but it's a reference point to get you through the door. Were the film striking a sweeter chord with critics, it could assist in a reevaluation of the Matrix trilogy. Because where mecha gets philosophical, where superhero meets cyberpunk, where spiritual angst butts against impossible sf action overdrive, that's where The Matrix Revolutions lives, and the skeleton key was always in anime.

Anyway, Speed Racer, real fast: Christina Ricci looks like a possessed sex toy. John Goodman is a national treasure, and paints Pops Racer with dignity and good humor -- he brings it like he wants a do-over for The Flintstones (1994). Goodman and Ricci are Lazarus taxon actors who have popped out of some '40s screwball thing with Franklin Pangborn and Joan Davis. Besides just their beautiful, interesting faces, they use their bodies like trained cartoonists, twisting into broad, indicative postures here, finding funny, observed human behavior there, and caricaturing it in clever ways.

The Mach 5 and Racer X's Shooting Star look cool in three dimensions. Would've been fun to see Speed hit buttons E and F. Jokes uniformly goony, all hilarious, reminding the world why we need trained chimps and fat kid comedy teams. I want the baby blue, white-striped zippered jacket that Speed wears a couple times. The look, sound, editing, writing and acting are meticulously, carefully stylized; every element of the film is a strong, exaggerated choice, and nobody can make you like it. Feel free to find it all ugly, assaultive, stupid, and bludgeoning. For those sitting on the flip side, Speed Racer is pretty gorgeous, rapturous, smart and freeing. Your milage will depend on your transponder.

Perhaps line-walking between utter, shameless sincerity and defensive irony is a generational quirk one must either share and therefore empathize with, or find endearing and intriguing. Which is, one supposes, why some ears only hear Mr. Cobain's anger and cynicism and not his sorrow and romance, see Mr. Tarantino's pastiche and dirty mouth and not his soul. Few middle-aged critics want to admit it, and fewer want to believe it's heartfelt, and just maybe Speed Racer's notes are pitched so only the 13th Generation can hear the healing message.

Because Speed Racer is about something; about something moving and important. It's a pep talk for artists. Not for race car drivers, athletes, or Everybody, but specifically addressed to artists. Speed Racer is about art and commerce, though the stand-ins are racing-constantly-compared-to-art and patronage in the form of corporate driver sponsorship, with Speed Racer as a virtuoso whose work in content and form reduces crowds to tears of ecstacy. It's about accepting that your art exists in a commercial sphere, that money and power are in the balance, from sponsor on down to spectator... but the artist needs to do what the artist does, and ignore all that. Listen to what the car needs. When you turn in something bizarre and startling, garish and strange -- even when it gets upsetting and your mom has to look away -- as long as you drove as hard as you could, you did your goddamn job. Speed Racer is expensive commercial pop art and intended blockbuster. But that's Joel Silver's job to worry about. The Wachowskis are encouraging artists who can't help but make the weird new things they make, to be bold, proud. When it's in your blood, you have no choice anyhow. Speed Racer himself finally throws down the gauntlet to anyone in it for the money: get that weak shit off my track.

Also: The, er, climax of the Grand Prix race is the greatest subjective depiction of the human orgasm ever captured on film. Title previously held by The Matrix Reloaded and that digital slice of chocolate cake.

Movie of the year. Contenders all sucking exhaust.

Air Ducted

As Agent Dana Scully explores the Eurisko building's ventilation system, as detailed in the X-Files episode "Ghost in the Machine", we witness a special instance of three personal pet peeves coinciding in a single moment.

1. Air Ducts
Have you, valued reader, ever been in an air duct? You have not. Don't get confused by hazy memories based on a pazillion movies and TV shows, but have you ever really seen such an air duct? You've probably never fired two guns at once, been attacked by a killer you presumed was dead, or dangled off a building, either, but at those exciting action/adventure cliches are fun in the moment, and based on recognizable real-world objects and events you have witnessed. But look around the room. Do you see an air duct? Do buildngs, even offices, military instalations, or abandoned factories converted into cocaine manufacturing plants have air ducts large enough to house a full-grown adult? While we all posess some small degree of latant claustrophobia, is it thrilling to watch people wriggle around in these imaginary silver tubes, which seem to have no correlative?

I hate air duct scenes.

2. Killer Computer Episode
Every fantasy, sf, or horror program will get around to the Killer Computer episode, if left to its own devices long enough. There's nothing inherently wrong with contemplative sf asking tough, orginal, informed questions about AI... but obviously most Killer Computer episodes fail the basic driving test. As Mr. S.L. Jackson once said, I hate this hacker crap, and worse, I hate hearing fake compu-gobbledygook. "Ghost in the Machine" brings up the important issue of "what if a computer was like a crazy panther and when threatened, started biting people?" The answer is: Scully would have to climb into an air duct.

The X-Files managed to squeeze one in by episode seven! At least Buffy the Vampire Slayer was refined enough to hold off till episode eight. "Ghost in the Machine" is fair-to-poor as the show finds its sea legs, and chock-a-block with rips from 2001 and Gremlins 2 (including... AIR DUCTS!), but sadly is only the first of The X-Files half-dozen Killer Computer episodes in nine seasons. Snore-baiting as the surfeit of demonic microprocessors may be, for sheer numbers it runs well behind such X-Files Mad Libs episode templates as Revengy Ghost (easily the winner), Supernatural M.O.'d Serial Killer (also uncountable), Idyllic Small Town Where Something Isn't Right and its frequent twin Occult Murder Club Confidential. This brings us to...

3. Mytharc Vs. Monster of the Week: How to Watch The X-Files
This one's X-F specific. The strong public preference for the scarier, less-convuluted MOTW X-Files is evident once more, as news/discussion/indifference spreads of the impending second feature film spin-off. Conventional wisdom is that either the Mytharc episodes - those detailing a baroque government conspiracy and its connection to various and sundry UFO-stuffs - were either boring to begin with, or eventually became coy with their secrets, jumbled in logic, or petered out due to poor planning. And therefore the stand-aloneish episodes are superior. And nearly every fan-favorite list will be populated by the same two dozen highlights of the scariest, funniest, and most innovative episodes.

But that's just the peeve that I've gotta pet. Conservatively, the Mytharc is a third of the series. Realistically, the continuing mystery of the Consortium, the nature of alien phenomena, and the quest for Samantha Mulder is what fueled the popular frenzy over the program for the first several years, and set it apart from the pack as more than a handsomly photographed Kolchack: The Night Stalker variation. It is the heart and soul of the series narrative. Undeniably botched and confusing as the yarn became as it tangled into unrecognizable knots, the mishandling of the Mytharc is symptomatic of the entire series. Character arcs became illogical, plot points were dropped or revised, storytelling was mud-clear as a matter of course not just over the Mytharc, but during dozens of individual episodes, including Monster of the Week installments. For every beloved "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'" and "War of the Coprophages" there are two "Sanguinarium"s. Two "Ghost in the Machine". You say you don't like the Mytharc, and you're denying yourself the operatic heights of "The Red and the Black", and "The Sixth Extinction" and the most intimate character moments of "One Breath", "The Blessing Way", and "Gethsemane" - some of the best writing the series has to offer.

The Myth, see, it isn't just about keeping track of alien factions and wondering what the hell happened to the morphing bounty hunters. That story, as a story is irresponsibly handled. They broke it, if you buy it, try not to cut your fingers on the jagged edges. Instead, focus on the moment-to-moment, the only way The X-Files can hang together, and see the whole nine-season thing is Mytharc. In the end, Mytharc episodes are just as stand-alone as any other; the show is crafted to work scene to scene, act break to act break. It's about how thrilling, suspenseful, intriguing, funny, scary or sweet the moment can be, even if it's to be negated in the next scene. The MOTW episodes reenforce the Arc, because it's about the characters on what passes for a journey, beat to beat. So those romantic moments where Scully and Mulder sit on the rock together in the middle of a lake and talk about Moby-Dick in "Quagmire", a fine Low-Rent Loch Ness Monster of the Week: that's Mytharc in a sense. The Arc brought them there.

Performance and Image/ Circle and Diagonal

Strange visual resonance found on the covers of two upcoming Criterion Collection releases.

What can it mean? Will you close your eyes and refuse this disconcerting correlation? Or like the churchgoers faced with the mural of destruction in The Seventh Seal, will you look and think upon it until it becomes more frightening? The bottom image appears when the two covers are laid upon one another. Otherwise polarized, the nodes where the photos connect allow both covers full 360-degree transformation. The motionless wet-wool blanket sky of the Bergman set (fast inside, slow outside), the sickened buzz-blur of the Two-Lane Blacktop landscape (slow inside, fast outside). Both fine snapshot summaries of the respective films, now both images roil and fuzz out, with the friction of their opposite approaches to the same existential conundrum. The sea and pavement become rippling solid. A man perches atop a spinning wheel. The '55 Chevy points off to contemplate an empty

Echo Chamber - Antonioni Moving, Reflecting, Passing

Our place in the world is unnecessary. Roving sparks of dying energy, bouncing like aimless, dimming embers against the cold, hard planes and the streaming seas of numbers that comprise the planet's surface. Retracting into ennui, or reaching out in desperation, humanity makes its own mysteries.

Michelangelo Antonioni's films document those deepest mysteries of human existence; what space lies beyond a draped picture window, behind each pillar, around each corner; the inability to leave imprint where we have walked, loved, quarrelled, wept, moved. The mystery of L'avventura is not an unresolved disappearance but the unresolved continued existence of everything, of form and of void. The puzzle of Blow-Up is not a beguiling amateur sleuth story, but a genre implosion, demolishing the entrance and exit points of detection drama.

Not anti-mystery: ur-Mystery.


If we say Antonioni died on July 30, 2007, or was born September 29, 1912, it is to trace a narrative with selectivity. It speaks to a compulsion to give shape to a matterless tour through one plane of sight, sound, experience. But the sands of a red desert are at once unintegrated granules, restless and shifting, and members of a vast, open, sun-blasted expanse; the unified field image of a photograph at once the objective frieze of a moment in time and space, and a death-mask reproduction, built of microscopic chemical blobs, depthless, unmoving. The harder we insist on giving them shape, imbuing them with meaning, the greater the margin of slippage, until, indeed, in the fluoroscopic light off the eclipsed sun, it may be said that Antonioni was never here at all.


The master image of Antonioni's filmmaking is the glacial mask-face of Monica Vitti, staring into some middle distance, beyond herself, and back into herself. Feeling too much (Red Desert) or too little (L'avventura), the space she occupies simultaneously a non-space hole where a woman was-not / is soon to not-be, and the inside-out nexus of her body, molecules in continuum with the architecture, the landscape, the universe, the net of maths stretched into the infinite. What moves behind those black eyes, what world can be shut out by the drawn draperies, what fracture can there be between lovers, when they are all isolated, but intrinsically connected? Like the subatomic push-pull that unites/tugs at all things, mirrored large scale by the bind of gravity, the looping orbit of astronomical objects bound on track but never meeting , the affirmation of 1, negation of 0, Antonioni pierces the illusory continuity of a life-as-narrative, of the character as collected traits moving to resolution, of the cinema as the device to capture a world in motion, and finds beyond the veil, a deeper continuity; mystery surviving resolution, unresolvable.


Mastroianni and Moreau on the flat, ordered stage of a golf course in La Notte, wander the corridors of their marriage, and land in the soft, disordred hazard zone of a sandtrap. She reads a love letter, plucked out of a lost pocket in a version of their story that could-have-been. He asks who wrote it, and she tells him: "You did," and they are lost and found, all possibilities and dead threads of their story before and continuing beyond the film at once preserved, and gone in the loose doom of the sandtrap.

The all but wordless romantic breakup that opens L'eclisse is the death of a relationship, but to join the stream as it closes existence indicates it once existed. Alain Delon and Vitti in languor, posed in pain, moving only long enough to freeze once more, but the undulating trees outside the window, the oscillating electric fan, signal invisible movement the audience cannot see or feel: air, moving in time, around the eroding bodies and objects on the motion picture screen.


Monica Vitti sat on this sofa. This street lamp stood upon this corner. This loaf of bread filled this movie screen in Zabriskie Point. Michelangelo Antonioni was born 1912, died 2007. These grains of sand surrounded this pool of oily water in this desert. And BOOM, they were gone. Some were chosen for documentation as they passed through, but none were Truer than the others. Which caused the others? Which stories are over? Where are they now? To isolate the image, movement, object, life, drains it of context; to imply its place in even an unfathomably large whole is to superimpose a beginning, end, solve it, reduce it, conscribe it to history. To say Michelangelo Antonioni is gone is to say : Michelangelo Antonioni was here, and thus always here. Time shuffled the molecules of Michelangelo Antonioni into form, and pressed outward on that form until they dissipated once more.

WATCHERS' COUNCIL: The Long Way Home

Here's the sitch: The Watchers' Council is Exploding Kinetoscope's newly designated slot where I'll be holding forth at length about Buffy the Vampire Slayer-and-Angel-related topics. Why would someone give themselves a column in their own undernourished free-form blog? Because that's how we do things around here. It also lets you know that whether review, exegesis, analysis, or op-ed, Watchers' Council makes assumptions of fan-level fluency.

This installment: Buffy Season 8: The Long Way Home. The first chapter in the Dark Horse comic book series is complete, with issue #4. The arc will be assembled in a collection on November 14, 2007, along with the more stand-aloney issue #5, but as of this writing, second printings of all issues are available at fine comic shoppes everywhere. Here's a first take on "Long Way Home".

"The thing about changing the world... After you do it, everything is all different." Nobody could quite put it like Buffy Summers, whose opening line to Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Season 8: The Long Way Home packs a lot of layers, some she does not intend, into that silly attempt at profundity. It's wistful on one hand, because Sarah Michelle Gellar is not saying the words, however clearly we may hear her voice. The medium, thus the world, well, it's different. Thrilling as it is to have new canonical Buffyverse stories, it is also a little sad. The story of how Buffy changed the world had an ending. A beautiful, important ending, probably TV's greatest ending. Now, as they said in Sunnydale, not so much. Because Season 8 shifts to Dark Horse comics, even if creator-guy Joss Whedon says they are Officially For-Reals Season 8, the series ending isn't undone. It can't ever be undone, from the perspective that BtVS was the collective endeavor of its writers, cast and crew: they built that world. Now, in comics, it is re-created by Georges Jeanty's pencils, and even with Whedon personally writing the first arc of the series, it's all different. Question becomes: can you deal?

BtVS ends properly with Buffy directly addressing some problems with Slayerdom as a female empowerment metaphor (e.g.- why's she got all the powers? Don't other girls need powers?) spreading her abilities to any girl in the world who needs strength. From a writer's perspective, it does not leave the Chosen One or her world in a ship-shape spot for telling stories of the nature it was designed. From the perspective of fans of the program satisfied by the daring ending, maybe we should not have more stories. Whedon Storytelling Rule #Made-up-Number goes that the artist has a responsibility to give the audience not what they Want, but what they Need. We may want this to go on and on forever, but deep down, that may not be good for us.

Conflicted as we may be about the cruel lonely weight of Slayerdom having been thrust upon Buffy, it is doubtful anyone has been itching for tales of a Slayer army. It's the one funny, resilient blonde girl we like, not a sea of anonymous faces; if the fan ambivalence over Season 7's surfeit of Potentials taught us anything, it's that too many Slayers spoils the cake. Or some mixy-metaphor like that. One facet of the Slayer metaphor has always been that those teen girls with magic kung-fu powers that place them difficult positions represent how we all choose to use our agency and power, or abuse it, as we walk alone through the world. So it's an aspect of the Chosen One left in the cold by "Long Way Home"; it was lost at the end of "Chosen", but sacrificed to a greater good, for the more central, specifically feminist message... which was also okay because after the last episode, no writers or actors need Buffy to be a singular presence anymore.

Here is the Buffyverse Unleashed. No limits on budget and scope, restrained only by Whedon and Jeanty's imaginations. Jo Chen's striking portrait gallery of cover paintings, stylized, idealized, mythic-toned visions of the Scoobies, are a beautiful wrapping and properly indicate the best qualities of the contents: heightened, and fantasy-rich. The ability to visualize creatures, battles, mystical realms and Willow in tight leather pants without a platoon of technicians is a double-edged axe-stake-thing. BtVS, as borne out by the slicker, more sophisticated filmmaking of Angel, intentionally restrained its scope, in exchange for intimacy. It was the right choice, for there is little in the woolly, globetrotting adventures of "Long Way Home" as emotional, poignant, or even character-oriented as the TV show. Bluntly, there is nothing in the first comics arc to make one weep, and BtVS was Cry Central Station for seven years. Season 8 did not have to be an action-driven comic. Comics, hand-held, a one-on-one interface that must be undertaken alone, with images able to be pored over, is the perfect medium for intimate storytelling. A choice was made, and the choice was to use the opportunity to tell the over-the-top monster-ass-kicking superheroine stories that could not be told on TV. Now: can you deal?

Buffy is a military general now, for all intents and purps, which sort of means she's failed to live the normal life she always wanted. So score one for the fight against Evil-doers, and one against the California girl who wants to go shopping. This is both disappointing - are Buffy fans really into military strikes? - and feels right. The Chosen One remains surrounded by people who care, but essentially alone. That maddening skill for shuttling between self-reliance and self-pity makes the girl tick. It's partly what draws Buffy to Angel and also what drove them apart. These notes obviously focus on the stingily parcelled out character drama, so, crucial moment in "Long Road Home": Buffy waxing wistful in soliloquy that she misses sex and churros.

Xander has moved into Command Central as the Slay Squad's de facto Watcher, which maintains his place as Buffy's Eyes and/or Heart. But sadly the action is now so perilous, the Everyman is relegated to watching a bank of video monitors in a Scottish castle stronghold (?). Willow has apparently been MIA for a year, not even bothering to call her BFFs, and can click between her world-destroying dark and light powers with as much consequence as flipping a light switch. This seriously steps on the toes of Willow's series arc, in which she learned to find healing strength in herself and her friends, not to use black magicks to avoid emotional pain. It was arguably a botched story on the show, but "Long Way Home" make mincemeat of Willow's journey from nerd to goddess nerd. So far. Because again, the last moment we had with her, that was her Ending. She'd Become. That's how Willow's story was supposed to end, and damn it, damn it, I miss her too. But it's want versus need. Can you deal?

"I used to be a Watcher," reflects Giles in his brief appearance. Now he sort-of trains unprepared Slayers, but the rules are so changed, the world so new, that Buffy knows more about preparing the girls for battle than Giles. He cannot love them all like daughters, and they do not need him to. Giles used to be a Watcher, but that seems a million years ago, in a town that is dead and buried. What is he now? Giles now has more Slayers to "watch" than ever, and is possibly feeling more useless than he did when he left Sunnydale way back in "Tabula Rasa". Hands full, but slate blank.

Dawn Summers, having likely lost her virginity to some magical being called a Thricewise, finds her growing pains have literally inflated her to giant size. Dawn's supersizing is one of Whedon's fine metaphors-made-flesh. The greatest point of pain in "Long Way Home" comes when Dawn refuses to confide in Buffy, instead pining for Willow to return: "I don't mean to slam you... But Will's like a mom to me." Ouch. Score another one against the Buffster. The younger Summers girl's perpetual whining is grating, but it is, all things said, the Definition of Dawn. No matter what sacrifices are made for her - and Buffy has literally died for her sister - Dawn never appreciates it, never believes or remembers it, never feels loved. Dawn's put herself in trouble's path? It must be Tuesday.

It is, however, a BtVS tradition to begin the season in an uncomfortable, unfamiliar place: Seasons 1 and 2 with Buffy disoriented and arriving in Sunnydale, Season 3 with Buffy reluctantly reclaiming the Slayer mantle, Season 4 with an alienating, intimidating entry into college life, Season 5 a battle with Dracula starts silly and becomes frightening, plus the shock-reveal of Dawn, Season 6 with Buffy dead, and Season 7 with everything turned upside down. Bearing this in mind, the slippery footing on which "Long Way Home" begins is probably intentional, and why it begins with the epigram about newly changed worlds. We want Sunnydale, but it's gone. It was nothing but a zone of trouble for Buffy, but there she is, looking out over the Scottish moors and wishing she were back in demon-infested So Cal.

However disconcerting, those season openers are stories in carefully pitched tone. So what's the story here? It's difficult to say, as like all BtVS season arcs, it's a slow build, with a surplus of misdirects. For e.g.'s.- a race of giant reptilian demons is on the rampage, but that's too rote as a Big Bad. More compelling but even less exotic, it seems the U.S. military has declared war on the superpowered teen girls. The military-industrial complex, in the form of the Initiative, got squarely roundhouse-kicked in the jaw by the supernatural way back in Season 4. In real world logic, it's only natural the government would reopen the X-File on the Slayer after she, say, demolishes an entire city. In story logic, it may feel like you've Been Here Before. Or maybe that's what "Long Way Home" means. This plot could play out as a snappy/complex head-on engagement of patriarchy vs. female empowerment issues that the series skirts around, toys with, or grapples on an ideological level, but rarely allowed to crystallize in the drama. "Long Way Home" is too busy playing catch-up with the cast to elaborate, but that's a forgivable choice when any and every reader cares about these characters so deeply.

Reemergences of Ethan Rayne, Amy Madison, and, frustratingly, Warren Mears, are momentarily thrilling for the long-haul fan, but are all problematic. Whedon dispatches the no-goodnik Chaos magician Rayne with a prosaic bullet to the brain, as if to add heft to the new Big Bad military man General Voll, but it is an inglorious end to a long-long-time favorite minor menace. Not that Ethan Rayne has a destiny to complete, but he dies with no final showdown and/or reconciliation with Giles, which seems sloppy and let-downy. Though he assists Buffy by guiding her through her own brain's dreamspace while she's gone Briar Rose-snoozy under Amy's enchantment, it's hard to get warm fuzzies from Ethan's change of heart, because unless rationale is forthcoming, it comes out of nowhere. Whether his motivations become clear later in the season, it is still Ethan's implied history with Giles, not Buffy, which lends him any mystique, and links him to the core story in a meaningful way.

Amy Madison's Long Way has been intertwining with the Scoobie Gang's since the very thirdest episode, "Witch". Her slow ascendance into powerful villainy from victimization has struck some Season 8 readers as desperate recycling, but it can also be seen as a natural story to tell, picking up one of the few loose threads left accessible in the cataclysm at the end of "Chosen". The rest of those threads are just buried under too much rubble.

The resurrection of Warren Mears is a different matter altogether. Yanked out of the Hellmouth, and striking a deal with General Voll, Amy lures and incapacitated Willow to her new paramour's lair. Whedon gives the undead, still skinless S6 Big Bad a killer entrance, and a truly great monologue. Warren asks Willow, whom he's strapped to an operating table, and about to go Injury-To-The-Eye-Motif on with a scalpel: "I wonder... are you 'bored now'?" reminding the witch of her cavalier blow-off as she once had him bound and pleading for his life. But the crux of the problem is that Warren needs to be dead. Willow needs to have killed him. Whatever esoteric magical explanation may be in the wings, likely that he's "technically still dead" in some way (Warren gives a lovely poetic explanation: "her magic is my skin"),the metaphor and Willow’s terrible act of murder are partially undone. Divisive as it may be, the power of the controversial sixth season is in the inexorable slide into despair and the difficult crawl back to the light. To earn the strength she finds in "Chosen", Willow needed, in storytelling, emotional and mythic terms, to have killed Warren. It is the ultimate transgression against her religion, power, her friends, the memory of Tara, and Buffy's duty; Willow murdering Warren is the climactic moment of losing the girl we loved. This resurrection nonsense has Buffyverse precedent, of course, with Anya being ultimately "let off the hook" after getting sworded in "Selfless", with Angel's return from Hell, with Spike's rematerialization on Angel, to say nothing of the Slayers' own life sacrifices. While it is hard to begrudge those slights-of-hand, because they provided opportunity for fine stories, all those Lazarus tales work at the expense of definitive moments of the series. But frankly those characters weren't truly finished; Warren's tale was well-served by his ending but the troubling thing is how it subtly twists Willow's journey over the series.

Warren's greatest function was as illustration of the banal but real evil that is waiting line with you at the comic book store or sitting in the basement playing video games: petty, small, juvenile, unexotic misogyny and violence. That's why he was a startling, great villain. Now he's running around with powers and no skin and a souped-up tech-witch girlfriend. In the emotional math of story construction, Warren Mears' death was the balancing of an equation in the tale of The Worst Thing Willow Ever Did; while grief-blind Willow thought (didn't think exactly, but felt) she was righting the scale of cosmic justice for Tara, that's not what was going on. The universe was repossessing on a debt Willow owed for resurrecting Buffy. It happened all Season 6 long, as Willow fled down dark alleys to avoid emotional pain, and ironically caused nothing but worse, fresh agony in her wake. It's scary and fucked-up that Willow killed a man in cold blood. We don't want it to have happened, but we needed it.

Whedon is investing the kind of personal attention in the comic he should have given the last years of the show, so S8 could be a perfect opportunity to sort out some of the damage inflicted on the stories and characters in the flummoxed Season 7. Or it's a chance to throw whatever he doesn't like into the crater where Sunnydale used to stand. It was never possible to judge a BtVS season until it was complete, so it goes with Season 8; serialized fiction is only a serial the first time through. Unable to nail down what plot points are mysteries and which are dump-areas, or how the shape of the season looks from a balcony vantage, issue to issue, some moments are hair-raising, some frustrating, all tantalizing enough to keep one antsy for the next installment. There are enough interesting irons in the fire to expect good things of the finished season, but the comics structure is All Different from television. Thus far S8 hasn't dipped into the kind of self-contained chapters and episodes within/working toward a season arc that made BtVS such a structural marvel. Issues 1-4 feel like maybe two "episodes" - or one of the two-parter season openers - though the massive battle action, beasts, and army of zombies in kilts blow two seasons of budget, including Gellar's salary, on special effects alone. Series editor Scott Allie reports there could be fifty-plus issues comprising Season 8, originally announced as only 25. That sounds like a canvas as ample as any 22 TV episodes, though one prays publication can be sped up, because commercial breaks between acts are one thing, and multiple month gaps are quite another.

Could be "Long Way Home" is supposed to come out of the gate, hooves pounding, eyes popping and snorting fire. It's been four years, after all, so some heraldry, trumpets, kilt-zombies may be in order. Otherwise, Whedon's got the superhero comics writing knack, knowing you can Do Anything. So besides just action spectacle, he plunges us into demon dimensions, multiple mystical non-corporeal planes (yipes, what is this, Angel or somep'n?), and beads out smart page and panel breaks and reveals: funny cutaway panel of Andrew bored at a Slayer slumber party, surrounded by nubile super-teens in teddies... and an already-notorious splash panel torn from inside a sex dream far more insane than any Angel/Spike/Buffy three-way fanfic you've ever read. Mostly because there's a nurse uniform involved. Here's to hoping the pace can slow, and characters can begin sharing real scenes, not just a few panels. Promising story leads in this direction: Gojira-Dawn's problems are already more interesting than anything she's done since Season 5. Apparently Kennedy sorta-died off-stage, straining her romance with Willow, which gives one hope. Xander's got a mutual bone on for Renee, one of the Slaylings, though it's hard to tell where his heart's at right now. It is all breathless-fast and vague, but most intriguing is a complicated subplot romantic-mystery involving Buffy receiving a magic wake-up kiss of True Love (no, for real), tell-tale cinnamon lip-gloss, and Satsu, a Japanese Slayer (finally), who is obviously in love with the boss-lady. It's adorable. It plays out over a handful of panels through the story thus far, so delicate casual readers may not notice. And it is about minutia and people painting themselves into emotional corners. Y'know: the stuff Buffy is about.

In "Long Way Home"'s final moments, Buffy is told that from the military's perspective, she and her Slayers-in-Training are at war with the human race. That from General Voll's vantage, they are in effect no longer human beings. It is a question that has been a long time coming. The Slayer line was produced by inhumane means and for questionable purpose: a prehistoric girl, bound hand and foot to the Well of the Slayer, raped by the essence of a demon, all of it engineered by the first patriarchal Watcher prototypes, the Shadow Men, too chickenshit to fight their own battles, foisting the blessing/curse on the unwilling heroine. Human in physiology, mind and soul, or not, the calling of the Slayer is to protect the human race. If Buffy has renegotiated all the other terms of her contract, why not this one, too? Voll tells her "it's you against the world." Taken aback, she bleats "Oh..."

She thinks about it for a beat, darkens, and finishes: "'Kay."
Well, nobody could quite put it like Buffy Summers.

The COBRA WOMAN Codices: Drafting a Psychic Map of Cobra Island

The Door
A soft blue rectangle beyond a door in High Priestess Naja's orange chambers indicates the sky outside. The door leads to a balcony, and perhaps is only a window when seen from the opposite side. The balcony overhangs a courtyard in the palace. The courtyard is sometimes open to the public throngs, but impossible to access once inside the building. Outside, sometimes it is night, sometimes day, but in the orange room the sky remains perpetually powder blue. The menacing environs of the jungle island outside and the dangerous royal intrigues within are separated and/or united by the irrational, impossible space between, leaving nowhere in the geography of Cobra Woman as safe ground.

Set in a thick forest of matte paintings, projected ocean waves and secondary-color keyed slabs of curlicue set dressing, loomed over by a tiny-huge volcano that exists in eternal midday, the terrain of Cobra Woman is seared by dream-fever, coast to coast. Native Indian sidekick Kado (Sabu) feigns sleepwalking to eavesdrop on his pal Ramu (John Hall)'s plans to visit Cobra Island, but a day later indicates he was really in thrall of a visionary dream. Has he ever truly awoken? Has the spectator?


The Somnambulist
A small rocky hill is, in the eyes of Kado, a great black wall enclosing a lost world — the same he encountered in his dream — but it grows between shots to a pointed yellow mountain. As Kado and Ramu scale the peak, the rock bends like rubber to leave Kado dangling precariously, though strong Ramu is able to suspend his companion's weight while bent at the waist and without tumbling down the precipice. Where these yellow-black wall-mountains are located cannot be surmised. Though they render the island inaccessible in the unreliable dialogue, travellers during the film and in its unseen backstory go to and fro with little difficulty. Fire Mountain, omnipresent punishing god/volcano, is visible at the same angle from every window of the palace. Ramu is advised not to voyage to Cobra Island by his future father-in-law MacDonald (Moroni Olsen) but in the same conversation MacDonald shows him exactly where the lost world is located on a map, in close up.

The twisted DNA-bound saga of separated twins Tollea and Naja (Maria Montez, Maria Montez) locked in power struggle over the title of High Priestess of Cobra Island has infected the land, the sea, the air, the people and animals, the celluloid itself; the sparks between the sisters fly off, creating new aberrant twins wherever the fire lights. This is the logic of the double-traced map of Cobra Woman: everything has its twin, identical but reversed, sharing space with itself. Every character, prop, setting, line of dialogue, event, operates while cooled in the shadow of its opposite; often these twins are created by throwing all gears in reverse, negating their own existence. Hava (Lon Chaney, Jr.), mute flunky of the Cobra Island queen, feigns blindness as he travels to Tollea's village though his plan does not require it, and the blind-Hava that should not exist on seeing-Hava's mission tips off Kado that something is amiss. Hava's task is to abduct Tollea, but is in more properly to re-abduct her to her forgotten birthplace, Cobra Island; in effect to remove her from her home that he may bring her home. By the climax, Fire Mountain erupts, only to be declared permanently dormant seconds later.


The Sisters
If Tollea/Naja embody splits between unwitting savior and gleeful murderer, between skeptic and religious zealot, between, simply, nice and mean, they are also divided by strength and weakness, for nothing Tollea specifically does, short of show up on Cobra Island against her will, actually contributes to Naja's downfall. Theirs is not simple a dichotomy of good and evil, but of will and circumstance, too. The high priestess even causes her own death as she backs over the unlikely balcony wielding a spear in Tollea's direction, a blurred defensive/offensive posture. To complete the proper opposition of forces, Naja's bloody dictatorship does not give way to benevolent rule by her twin, but dissolves into off-screen anarchy: in the coda, Tollea flees the throne to return to her man, leaving Cobra Island with no leadership.

Like the omnipresent Fire Mountain, the pliable rock walls, and the mutable courtyard space, which all bend to the necessity of situation, the populace of Cobra Woman's world find themselves shuttled from location to location by means none can explain. Kado arrives with much effort and swinging from ledges at precisely the correct dungeon window where Ramu is being imprisoned, though there is no way to identify the chamber from outside the palace. The entire plot hinges on the backstory conceit that infant Tollea was smuggled off Cobra Island aboard MacDonald's boat, when he chanced to visit the island at the same time the baby was supposed to be put to death. But the tale goes that MacDonald was knocked unconscious and woke up on his vessel with the Cobranian stowaway. Who placed her there, when, and why are subjects never broached. Ramu steals the robes of High Priest Martok (Edgar Barrier), and walks undetected past palace guards, but how he locates Naja's quarters in the vast building cannot be known. Friendly chimp Koko materializes inexplicably on Cobra Island, but the tale of her journey from India by separate means from the Hava/Tollea and Ramu/Kado boats is never to be told. Duty calls, and so: there they are, just as one may look up anywhere on Cobra Island, and see Fire Mountain, smoldering against the blue sky. There it is.


The Mountain
Here then is Cobra Woman as the genre theorist's perfect text, in which characters' movements, the shape of the universe, and order of events to not stem from internal motivation of free-willed characters, but are at the mercy of the unyielding dictates of external story, diamond hard, immobile in place, before the players took the stage. Why do they keep coming? How can so many continue to arrive on the rocky shores of this forbidden, secret home to a lost civilization? Cobra Island draws all fish into its golden net. There is no resisting its irrational pull.