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May 9, 2013

Chin Music #1

I don’t like to write a review that merely disses the material it was made in response to, for a number of reasons: firstly doing so would imply that I didn’t enjoy the piece, which is never preferable; secondly I only tend to buy and consume things that I feel pretty confident that I will enjoy, so finding something entirely absent of enjoyment would be off task but thirdly it just seems like a sort of sucky thing to do, especially when so much effort has surely gone into the making of it. I’m not here to harm, I’m not out for blood but I do expect the best from things. Chin Music, however, presents an opportunity beyond the usual pedantic pessimism of a negative review and so although the book did nothing for me I will say a few words about why; if only to lend some credence through comparison to the rave reviews that usually get put up.

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May 8, 2013

Red Handed: The Fine Art of Strange Crimes

Unless I really disliked something I normally tend to bury the negative points of my response deep in the review, to give the art and the artist a better chance of still winning people over but with this book, the latest from Mind MGMT auteur Matt Kindt, I have to begin with my one big criticism: the man is a genius. Worse still he writes here seemingly unedited – First Second Publishing perhaps even smarter for allowing him to do so – so that sections of his mind are smeared on each page I turn to exactly as he must have envisioned them originally, in their full genius. This is a criticism because I, alas, am not so gifted, I am not as smart a man as Matt and so much of his work in Red Handed must gone above my mere mortal’s mind.

The book is definitely a mental challenge, it’s arguably the most complicated work yet from comic’s most complicated artist, and although I probably only just passed its tests – earning a B-minus, maybe – what I caught of it then, of that cross-section that I could grasp was,well… genius both in its education and in its entertainment. It is a great, engrossing and greatly effecting read; the sort you can’t put down once you’ve started reading, nor when you’ve finished, nor can you get it out of your mind even after the second swing through the twisted world of Red Wheel Barrow, through the unadulterated mind of a master at play.

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May 6, 2013

Mad Men – For Immediate Release

One question likely enters the mind of most who read these reactionary essays of mine: Are episode titles really that important? Should so much attention be paid to them? Well it seems so since this, the sixth episode of season six, was released to certain Australians four days early because of what the writer – Matt Weiner himself – decided to title it. The boffins at Apple’s iTunes headquarters saw the words that Peggy writes in the press release that closes the show and took them as a literal instruction, in much the same way as I oft seem to take them as a metaphorical one. It’s a funny story, mostly because Matt Weiner is such a notorious spoilerphobe – disallowing critics from mentioning most elements of the episodes in advance reviews, from the important to the arbitrary, like the existence of the staircase which proved this worth this week – but also because it, you guessed it, surmises much of what the episode itself was about.

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May 2, 2013

The Americans – The Colonel

A lot of the shows whose premieres I recently reviewed have had finales over the past few weeks, most of which I intended to write something about but never did. Mostly this was due to me succumbing to time pressures and/or laziness, but I was also inhibited a little by a part of me thinking that such posts were simply inessential. Vikings, Broadchurch and Top of the Lake ran and ended much as they began and so for the most part what I said about their starts stood up just as well in relation to how they finished. The Americans though is a show that no longer resembles itself and so I feel that I now need say a few more words about just what it has become.

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May 2, 2013

Ten Grand #1

The title of this book, the debut series from Image imprint Joe’s Comics, comes form the amount that its protagonist, the aptly titled Joe Fitzgerald, charges for his services as a paranormal private investigator. He doesn’t do it for the money though, his real reasons for working established later, the charge is simply to “weed out the kooks, the clowns, the whackos, the feebs, the creeps [and] the game-players”; strangely then that is exactly who Ten Grand seems to focus on.

When we hear tales told of the divine war, of heaven, of hell and the rapture the characters within them are usually high and distinguished, the Dramatis personæ. Here though the characters are conflicted, the settings seedy and behavior by both sides far too human: here Angels inhabit the bodies of strippers – that popular pseudonyms brought ingloriously to life – while demon’s possess PC’s not protected by walls of divine fire. Its an iteration of a comforting story told using the things we’d all rather not see.

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May 2, 2013

The Movement #1

Billed as the first blow in a one-two punch of bracingly contemporary comics, DC taking a fittingly partisan tact to the current political landscape, The Movement is meant to represent the revolutionary side of the current social slate. It does this by amalgamating a number of real life traditions like the Tea Party, the Occupy Movement and the digital guerrillas Anonymous, then straining them through a more traditional superhero team narrative. Going in this was all I knew to expect and I’m very glad of that because there is something troubling about the experience of reading this book semi-blind that made it much more effective than it may have been had I known more.

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April 30, 2013

Adventures of Superman – Violent Minds

Now, I’m no Lex Luthor but I do have a bit of a beef with Superman. I’ve simply never been a fan and so his status and the love of those who are has always baffled me somewhat. I am however a fan of DC’s Digital First lines and the creative team that they chose for the first comic in this one – lead by Jeff Parker and Chris Samnee – so I thought that, given the year, I should give the old Kryptonian a chance to win me over and win is exactly what Superman always does.

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April 29, 2013

Mad Men – The Flood

Mad Men is not necessarily a very nice show, it’s inspired but not so much inspirational, and so when real life historical events intrude upon the show’s storytelling they tend to be the sadder ones, the ‘catastrophes’ as one character puts it or the floods as the title does. Tonight’s catastrophe was of course the assassination of Martin Luther King, his passing the breaking of a wave that would continue to crash and spill through American cities over the following days. A simpler show would have taken this time to show us the way that their colored characters reacted to the tragedy, they would have used it as an obvious jumping off point for a civil rights debate but Mad Men has never been such a show and so it instead took this time to convey a more complicated idea, one that Dr.King famously preached: the identicality and inversions inherent in man, that though we are all different we’re also all the same.

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April 28, 2013

Upstream Color

The slight budgeted but densely scripted sci-fi film Primer was praised for the truthful physics, potent technicality and unadulterated complexity with which it treated its core treatise of time travel. Having heard this hype Primer was a film that I quickly became excited for and while I eventually respected the result it turns out that those traits are not what I most look for in a movie and so the picture was one that I could never quite care for like so many fans do. For me it was an amazing visualization of a chapter in some cool textbook more than it was a living, breathing movie. Now, nine odd years later, comes the follow-up, the second feature from Primer auteur Shane Carruth; the intriguingly titled Upstream Color. Given our history my hopes for it were lower, and maybe that helped, but boy did I love the result; a film as frenetic and feeling as it is funly frustrating to figure out.

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April 24, 2013

Iron Man 3

Yes, that is the official title according to the film’s credits (not a numeral in sight) which then proceed to close out the picture with a compilation of footage from all of the Iron Man movies, making this really feel like the end of a trilogy; as Downey has suggested it is, the role now done for him ( give or take a few Avengers films). Given the past progression of the series, the steep dive it took with the second film, Three really isn’t a bad way for it to go out; a high for the series, if not a highlight. But perhaps the end isn’t the best place to begin, lets go back a bit and see why it worked as well as it did but no better.

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