Category: Columns

John Ostrander Gets The Lead Out

Larry Wilmore

Let’s get it right, hmm?

I was watching The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore as I usually do. I’ll watch Colbert depending on who he has on but, in general, I’ve been watching The Nightly Show. I know, I could tape one and watch the other later but the reality is I just don‘t get around to watching the taped show.

I like Wilmore and did when he was “Senior Black Correspondent” on The Daily Show. He’s been sharp and timely… most of the time.

On Tuesday night, Wilmore did a segment on the water situation in Flint, Michigan. Flint has been a hard-luck case for quite a while, often trading with Detroit the title of the murder capital of America and usually high on the list of the most dangerous cities in the U.S. They’ve also been broke for a lot of the time, teetering on bankruptcy such as Detroit went through. Michigan’s governor, Rick Snyder, appointed an Emergency Financial Manager.

EFMs, as they are known, have broad powers that supersede those of the elected officials. They can void contracts, sell off assets, and ignore the mayor and the city council. Citizens who have elected their politicians bare stuck as long as the EFM is in charge. The elected officials can’t do anything. Michigan voters thought this undemocratic and, through referendum, repealed the law authorizing it in 2012. Less than two months later, the Republican dominated legislature re-enacted it with a referendum busting addition and the Republican governor, Mr. Snyder, signed it. All of which was a great big “fuck you” to the Michigan voters.

Please note: I live less than a half-hour away from Flint, and a couple years ago I lived even closer.

Flint had been drinking clean water supplied by Detroit but that got cut off. It cost too much and EFMs like to find ways to economize. The new plan was to take water from Lake Huron but that would take three years to implement so, short term, it was decided to get water from the Flint River. Flint spent a couple of million updating the local water processing plant but the Flint River was far more corrosive than the water from Detroit. A simple additive costing $1990 a day would have corrected that but that, evidently, was a cost that the Power(s)-That- Were didn’t want to pay or felt was unnecessary.

Flint has a lot more lead pipes in homes and lead solder in the city’s water mains. The Flint River leeched a lot of lead from the pipes and passed it on to the citizens of Flint. That can have, and already has caused, permanent and enormous damage to the brain, especially in children. It will create massive learning disabilities and behavioral problems that will last a lifetime and cannot be cured. And they’ve been drinking this toxic water for two years without any choice or alternative, despite warnings that were posted about a year ago.

Wilmore covered the crisis in a Tuesday night segment and he did a bullshit job of it. He made it look like it was the fault of the citizens of Flint (the segment was called “The Larry People vs Flint”; clever but misleading). No mention was made of the role of the EFM or Governor Rick Snyder’s played in all this. Wilmore seemed appalled by a quote from the mayor of Flint citing ‘the democracy as we have it”. Larry, that means that the EFM was making the decisions, not him. Oh, and by the way, that was the former mayor, not the current one, that you quoted.

How bad is the situation? The National Guard is now handing out bottled water and faucet filters; the state has declared the situation an emergency and the President has declared Flint a disaster area. This means your tax dollars will go into fixing it. Snyder says he wasn’t really aware of the situation until October 1, but there is some question about that. There were warnings that were downplayed or ignored. The people of Flint were told the water was okay by both the governor and the then mayor of Flint when it was not. Snyder’s administration has been slow in taking steps to correct the situation.

Look, I get it – The Nightly Show is a comedy-news show. You’re a comedian, Larry, and not a reporter, but you’re also a social commentator. The situation is no joke. You did a lame fake interview with contributor Mike Yard pretending to be a Flint citizen when you could have been getting more of the facts out. The roles of the governor and the EFM weren’t mentioned, and that’s the real story here.

The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah also covered the story two days later and he did a slightly better job but he also missed Rick Snyder’s role Does it matter? There’s a lot of people who have cited The Daily Show and The Nightly Show as their principle source of news so, yes, you need to get the story right and not chop it to fit whatever joke you want to make.

Jon Stewart, as he left The Daily Show, admonished us all that “If you smell something, say something.” Well, I’m smelling something.

You didn’t keep it 100 percent, Larry. The segment was weak tea.

For a good and informative article on the Flint water crisis and the EFM, you might read Michigan’s Emergency Manager Law: What it is and Why You Should Care by Chad Phillips. And the Detroit Free Press is doing extensive coverage on this crisis. You can find them at http://www.freep.com/. Rachel Maddow has also been regularly covering the situation on her show. She can be found at http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show.

Where Is Marc?

GI JoeMarc’s not here.

When last seen, Marc was slinking around an abandoned shopping mall in Matteson, Illinois wearing nothing more than a vest, a do-rag, a bandolier, the lower half of a wet suit and swim fins, carrying a Kalashnikov automatic with several cartridges. On his way through the empty corridors, Marc copped a pair of mirrored sunglasses left behind by one of the mall’s last customers.

Marc was heard mumbling “I’ll get that Waldo, or my name ain’t Marc Alan Fishman,” knowing full-well that his real name is not Marc Alan Fishman.

ComicMix will be launching a crowdfunder right after Marc’s bail has been set.

The Law Is A Ass

Bob Ingersoll: The Law Is A Ass #378

BROADCHURCH’S LAWYERS COULDN’T HIT THE BROADSIDE OF A CHURCH

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Sometimes there’s nothing for it but to put the unpleasantness front and center. This is one of those times. So, here comes an unpleasant:

SPOILER WARNING!

I want to discuss the British police procedural TV show Broadchurch and there’s no way I can do that without massive spoilers on both seasons of the show. Spoilers along the lines of SPOILER ALERT! not just revealing that Darth Vader was Luke’s father but doing it before the Star Wars came out.

Broadchurch is set in the small, seaside British village of Broadchurch, which explains why the show wasn’t called Bexhill-On-Sea. The first season started with the murder of Danny Latimer, a local eleven-year-old local boy then centered on the investigation by Detective Inspector Alec Hardy and Detective Sargent Ellie Miller of said murder. (Wait, who said murder? I thought she only wrote it.) Broadchurch was not a pure procedural. It dealt as much with how the murder tore apart the small, close-knit community.

That tearing-apart aspect came fully into play in the final episode of the first season when DI Hardy learned that the murderer was SPOILER ALERT! Ellie’s husband, Joe. The town of Broadchurch in microcosm was torn apart after Ellie watched Joe’s filmed confession and SPOILER ALERT! beat him up in the police station. The town of Broadchurch in macrocosm was torn apart by the murder then torn apart again in the show’s second season, when SPOILER ALERT! Joe didn’t plead guilty and stood trial for Danny’s murder.

That’s where the law came in. So I guess it’s where I come in, too.

I won’t stress over the niggling legal mistakes that aren’t even worthy of a SPOILER ALERT! such as the fact that the trial judge was wearing a barrister’s wig instead of a judge’s wig, even if legal experts in England did. We’ve got wacking great errors to deal with.

Before the trial began, SPOILER ALERT! Joe’s defense lawyers had Danny Latimer’s body exhumed without telling anyone, even the Latimers. And on rather flimsy grounds. (That is, the grounds for the exhumation were flimsy. The ground of the cemetery was fine old English sod.) I realize things are different in the British criminal justice system; what with the wigs and the “M’luds,” and all. So I did some research. I found an article from the British paper The Daily Mail about Broadchurch’s second season. It answered my questions and confirmed my suspicions.

The body of an English murder victim belongs to the coroner. No coroner would have released Danny’s body without consulting the surviving family, unless said family were suspects in the case; which they weren’t. A spokesperson for England’s Ministry of Justice quoted in The Daily Mail said it was “inconceivable” that the body would have been exhumed in the way shown in the show. And I think the word did mean what he thought it meant.

But that was just the start. When Danny’s mother was cross-examined, defense counsel SPOILER ALERT! asked her about her sex life and her husband’s affair. In America such questions wouldn’t be permitted unless they went to the witness’s credibility. The fact that a woman’s husband was having an affair might affect her gullibility but not her credibility. Legal experts interviewed by The Daily Mail said the questions wouldn’t have been allowed in England either, as they had no connection to the case being tried.

During the trial, SPOILER ALERT! all the witnesses were in the courtroom when the other witnesses testified. Dramatic as hell; we got to see Danny’s parents agonized faces every time something went wrong. But inaccurate as a caveman eating brontoburgers. According to The Daily Mail, British courts, like American courts, require a separation of witnesses http://criminal.lawyers.com/criminal-law-basics/excluding-witnesses-from-the-courtroom.html. Witness aren’t permitted in the courtroom until they’ve testified. That way, no witnesses can hear what other witnesses say and change their testimony to conform it with what had been said before.

But the most egregious error was the SPOILER ALERT! motion to suppress Joe Miller’s confession. (The British called it excluding the statement, not suppressing. Silly Brits, can’t even get their own language right.) After DI Hardy testified about how he arrested Joe and obtained Joe’s confession, defense counsel SPOILER ALERT! got Hardy to admit that DS Miller physically assaulted Joe while he was in custody. Then counsel argued that the police had beaten the confession out of Joe, so it should be excluded.

DI Hardy had testified that Joe confessed before DS Miller assaulted him. Moreover, the confession was filmed, so the judge could see that Joe Miller didn’t have any signs of a physical assault at the time he confessed. Despite all this, SPOILER ALERT! the judge agreed she could not discount the possibility that the injuries were sustained before Joe Miller arrived at the police station, suppressed the confession, and ordered the jury to disregard it.

This whole proceeding was the Lex Luthor of dash; balderdash.

First there’s the matter of the suppression motion being heard in open court in front of the jury. Suppression motions are questions of law not evidentiary matter. No American suppression hearing would be held in front of the jury, the way it happened on Broadchurch. No English hearing would either according to the attorney interviewed by The Daily Mail.

More egregious was the timing of the suppression motion; after the trial started. In the United States, defense counsel wouldn’t even have been permitted to make a motion to suppress a confession after trial had started. Motions to suppress evidence must be filed before trial starts. See, if the trial has started and the prosecution loses the motion to suppress, it’s stuck. The trial court won’t grand a prosecution motion for a months-long continuance, while the prosecution takes an interlocutory appeal on the suppression ruling. But the prosecution can’t wait until the trial ends before appealing the suppression ruling. Assuming the prosecution lost the trial – a totally warranted assumption; if the prosecution won the trial, it would bother appealing – Double Jeopardy would prevent it from trying the defendant a second time, should it win the appeal. So defense attorneys are required to file motions to suppress before trial starts. That way, the prosecution can appeal the decision before jeopardy attaches and, should it win the appeal, still be able to try the defendant.

England, apparently, doesn’t have the same requirement. However, the lawyer interviewed by the ubiquitous Daily Mail said that the suppression matter would still have been settled before trial started. Neither the defense nor the prosecution would want to start a trial with this question mark over the case.

Most egregious was the fact that the judge granted the motion to suppress Joe’s confession. Judges don’t like to suppress confessions; especially confessions of confessed child killers. No judge in her right mind would agree with the defense counsel argument that “we cannot discount the possibility that the injuries were sustained before his arrival at the police station,” when the video evidence before her clearly showed that not only did Joe receive his injuries after he arrived at the station, he received them after he confessed.

Sure the judge was wearing a barrister’s wig instead of a judge’s wig. But that only means she wasn’t in her right wig, not that she wasn’t in her right mind. This ruling was shakier than a selfie in an earthquake.

You’ll be glad to know the attorney quoted in The Daily Mail agreed that no judge would have excluded Joe’s confession. Even if you’re not glad, I certainly am. I’d hate to think my grasp of the law was as tenuous as Broadchurch’s.

I had a problem with Broadchurch’s second season on from a legal point of view. I also had problems with it from a story point of view. An underlying subplot of Broadchurch’s first season was that SPOILER ALERT! DI Hardy was trying to restore his career after he failed to bring to justice a different child killer from an earlier case. Broadchurch’s first season was also a story of Hardy’s redemption when he solved the murder of Danny Latimer. However in the final episode of Broadchurch season two, SPOILER ALERT! the jury found Joe Miller not guilty. This demeaned the whole redeemed story of the first season, because, once again, DI Hardy failed to secure the conviction of a child murderer.

Still, Broadchurch’s second season wasn’t as bad as it could have been. It wasn’t, for example, Gracepoint, the American version of Broadchurch. Gracepoint managed to undercut all of the themes in Broadchurch, not just the redemption one, by SPOILER ALERT! having a completely different solution and a different murderer.

Broadchurch’s second season also wasn’t as bad as the second season of True Detective. Broadchurch’s second season only undercut the themes of the first season, True Detective’s second season tarnished the memory of the first season by being lousy.

Oops. Guess I should have put a SPOILER ALERT! there.

Martha Thomases: Selling Death

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About 20 years ago, I asked Batman editor Denny O’Neil if I could attend DC’s annual editorial retreat. I was their Publicity Manager at the time and I thought that if I could sit down and watch how the creative teams worked I could better promote the various Batman titles.

Denny was cool with it, and my boss was cool with it, so I went up to Tarrytown NY with them. It was a really interesting experience… for about a day. Then, for some reason, the big boss found out I was there and demanded I return.

His fears, as I understand them, were that, as part of the marketing department, I might interfere with the creative and editorial decisions. That was certainly not my intention. And it was also pretty insulting to Denny, to Alan Grant and Jo Duffy and Chuck Dixon and the others who were there who were more than willing to tell me to shut up if I overstepped my bounds.

Things have certainly changed since then.

Earlier this week, the New York Daily News ran a story by Ethan Sacks about the Marvel editorial summit. In attendance were Joe Quesada, Axel Alonso, James Robinson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Brian Michael Bendis, Emily Shaw, Sana Amanat, Nick Spencer, Sam Humphries, G. Willow Wilson, Dan Slott, Tom Brevoort, Dan Buckley, and probably a whole bunch more.

This is amazing. I can’t think of any other kinds of story meetings that involve the press. Did Matthew Weiner let reporters into the Mad Men writers’ room? Did Jann Wenner send someone to sit in with Lennon and McCartney?

The article did not say if any marketing people were there while they planned the next storylines which will, apparently, involve the death of a major character. According to the piece, this is something that Marvel plans to happen every quarter. Dan Buckley is quoted as saying “The death is a marketing hook,” although he goes on to say that the story has to pay off. Still, it seems pretty damning to me, and indicative of a thought process that seeks out the lowest common denominator.

To my mind, they did this backwards. They decide that some character has to die, and then try to figure out who it should be, and from there, what the story is. I think they should first have a story, see which characters make sense to be part of that story, then see if one of them dies in the course of events. I’m on record saying that I think death is over-used as a plot device. We know the character isn’t really dead. By going to that story-well four times a year, Marvel runs the risk of cheapening the death of heroes. It’s not special. It does not inspire awe for a hero’s self-sacrifice, or tears for the tragedy.

We know the character will come back to life in a few months or years. Hell, if there must be destruction, blow up an entire planet.

A wedding would be more engaging. A birth.

It’s encouraging to see that there were more kinds of people in the room than the usual white men. Some were even women. It is my hope that this is a trend that will continue and grow. That’s how you get new perspectives on the stories, and new ideas. Perhaps if Marvel invites a reporter to the next summit, they’ll permit the women to speak to the press, just like the boys do.

Dennis O’Neil and the Mighty Marvel Method!

 

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Back in the leafy days of yore, when I was freelancing as a journalist, short story writer and… what am I forgetting here? Pornographer? Something like that, something skeevy and disreputable – oh, of course. Comic book writer! A long time ago. Something north of a half century ago, in fact.

Anyway, in the mid-sixties, in Marvel Comics’ midtown Manhattan offices, I never heard the word “pitch,” nor was I ever asked to execute one. I was sometimes asked for a document that looked like a pitch, smelled like a pitch, tasted like a pitch… (Okay, maybe not that last. I don’t know. I never tried tasting one. Is it too late?) What these were, these pitchy rectangles of paper, were what we called plots. We’d bat one of these plots out on a (probably manual) typewriter, give it to an editor who gave it to a pencil artist who rendered the events mentioned in the plot into visuals – a whole lot of pictures…

Still with me? Okay. Deep breath and –

The pictures were returned to the writer who added words to the images and sacrificed a virgin at midnight and by golly, sooner or later all that effort resulted in a comic book. Millie the Model greets her fans! Kid Colt faces low-down ornery varmints!

But before the effort described above, the writer often (usually?) met with the editor and told the story he planned to write. And that meeting was the pitch. Which is?

The story. Spoken or written. Long or short. Plain or fancy.

It works pretty much the same way when one is writing for television, with maybe a tiny bit more emphasis on speaking rather than writing the story, but not much, and probably not always. (And when the writer is done talking, he may still have to write?)

What I just described came to be called “the Marvel method.” It was favored by Marvel’s Stan Lee and his artistic collaborators (especially Jack Kirby) because Stan was one busy dude and working this way saved him a minute here, an hour there.

So that’s the Marvel method and it isn’t much used these days. Current editorial practice seems to favor submitting a written story outline which contains all the pertinent story points, including the ending. And this is the pitch, millennial style. I don’t know that there’s any industry-wide standard format for these written pitches. Maybe individual editors have preferences and so it’s best to have a brief conversation with editor or editor’s representative before sitting at the keyboard and, you know, unleashing your genius upon the world.

I got away from what I first learned, the Marvel method, early in the game, partly for storytelling reasons and partly because when I got a job I wanted to get the damn thing done and out of the house and start on the next one before the guys in the midtown offices realize what a shopworn hack they’re dealing with.

More on this topic next week unless I come up with a really nifty idea between now and then.

Molly Jackson Is Cleaning House

Leaving Megalopolis - Surviving Megalopolis 001-001Remember that column I did a long time ago about getting control of my reading stack? Well, now is when it is actually happening. The New Year brings a lot of organizational needs put in me. I feel the need to get my house in order, literally and figuratively.

One of my first steps was to finally get another bookshelf. Bookshelves are important for the organizing process. Integral and much needed. Otherwise, your “organization” is just a stacks of books everywhere hoarder home.

Yes, I’ve got a lot of books. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a person on this site who doesn’t fit that description. I almost think it is a prerequisite to be a big comics fan.

While the process is still ongoing (and possibly never ending), it’s been a great way to locate all the things I e wanted to read but misplaced in the moment. Volume 2 of Letter 44 that I got in October? Found it. My copy of Curveball? Got that on a shelf and out of the stack.

So, you are probably thinking, why do I really care about this? Well, I’ve got two reasons for you. One, you should probably do this yourself. Organizing means rediscovering an old read that you can enjoy again. Or, if you are like me, finding that book you’ve been dying to read but misplaced.

Two, what is really good about reorganizing is once you catch up on everything, you start being able to check out the new stuff coming out. So far, I’ve been able to read new comics coming out today, like Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers #0 and Leaving Megalopolis: Surviving Megalopolis #1. Feeling free to jump into new series is totally worth it.

The real trick is going to be keeping up with organization. However, with all the new and interesting stories 2016 has to offer, at least now I have some incentive.

Mike Gold: Marvel, You’re Murdering Us!

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Holy crap! I can’t believe this! Marvel’s next big event series is going to be a sequel to their hit event series Civil War. It’s called … wait for it … Civil War II!

You’d think there was a big budget movie or something coming out. Well, you’d be wrong. Civil War II comes out several weeks after Captain America: Civil War. It’s just a coincidence, kids!

Rocky & BullwinkleEven more astonishing, if that’s at all possible, is the announcement that Marvel is going to actually kill off one of their characters in this series!

I can’t believe it. Such courage! Such originality! Such redundancy! The House of Idea polished off that one idea once again, slathered on another coat of lipstick, bought it a tuxedo for the red carpet interviews and proudly informed The New York Daily News that “A mysterious new Marvel character comes to the attention of the world, one who has the power to calculate the outcome of future events with a high degree of accuracy … This predictive power divides the Marvel heroes on how best to capitalize on this aggregated information, with Captain Marvel leading the charge to profile future crimes and attacks before they occur, and Iron Man adopting the position that the punishment cannot come before the crime.”

Hey, this time Iron Man is on the side of the angels! Well, that’s different, but only when compared to the original 2007 Civil War event.

I wonder if Marvel is going to kill off a character they haven’t killed off before. I wonder if that’s even possible. Hmmm … do you think it might be a character whose movie rights are controlled by 20th Century Fox?

When it comes to marketing and public relations, often there’s a fine line between being forthcoming and being cynical. As Marvel publisher Dan Buckley informed the Daily News “The death is the marketing hook … The thing that’s really compelling is whether or not there’s a story afterwards that’s going to connect with readers and sustain it.”

This is true, but it would help if you gave us something new, Dan.

Major character deaths have become more common to comic books than staples … and a lot less permanent. Do you know what was really cool during Marvel’s first couple of decades? They shook up the moribund American comics market with tits-to-the-wind power and a long ongoing blast of creativity and originality the likes of which had never been seen in the medium previously.

Do you know what Marvel’s latest high-energy attempt at creativity and originality is?

They bought a new Xerox® machine.

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ComicMix Six: Box Office Democracy’s Bottom 6 Movies of 2015

comicmixsix600-550x121-5283243As much as I loved my top 6 movies, I loathe these movies. The competition for worst movie of 2015 was so fierce I had to leave off The Last Witch Hunter, a movie so bad it made me dislike Vin Diesel, Hollywood’s most perfect man. That said, none of these movie are even close to as bad as that wretched animated Oz sequel from 2014, I won’t even name that movie for fear that the parade of angry Kickstarter backers will find me again.  

  1. Fantastic Four – There are a lot of good reasons to make a movie that costs $120 million but it’s quite apparent that spite isn’t one of them. Fantastic Four is a movie that only exists so Fox retains the rights to the franchise presumably so they can sell them back to Marvel for some insane price, because they clearly have no interest in making a good movie. Fantastic Four is a stunningly boring movie considering it’s supposed to be about dimensional rifts, super powers, and existential threats. The movie we got was directionless and drab, and you’ll never convince me that the ending wasn’t hastily written on the back of a napkin on a late day of reshoots.
  1. Tomorrowland – I’m aware that historically Disney theme park attractions have not made good movies— for every Pirates of the Caribbean there has been The Haunted Mansion, The Country Bears, and even a Tower of Terror. A good ride is pretty self-contained and probably shouldn’t leave the audience wanting a lot of extra backstory. Tomorrowland is a movie that is nothing but endless interminable backstory waiting for a moment of satisfying action that never comes. That a movie this boring came from the collaboration of Brad Bird and George Clooney is a crime against the entire film industry and I hope we’re free of this lazy style of creative malfeasance once and for all. (We are certainly not.)
  1. Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials – Holy cow, what a batch of hot nonsense this movie was. I’m generally okay with a sequel being a little hard to understand for people who haven’t seen the original movie; it lets the movie push some boundaries in exchange for not having to retread the same expositional grounds. What I’m not okay with is being completely lost while watching the sequel to a movie I saw the first time around. The Scorch Trials was a series of flimsily connected events that I never saw the narrative thread for. Why were there alien fish monsters in glass tubes? Why was the desert filled with zombies? Where were they ever going? Why did it take days and days to get from the city to the forest and 20 minutes to get back? The Scorch Trials has no interest in answering any of these questions and it’s only surprising performances by Giancarlo Esposito, Alan Tudyk, and some truly awful pieces of filmmaking keeping this from being much higher on this list.
  1. Home/Minions – Good children’s movies are some of my favorite things to watch but similarly I hold a special enmity for the bad ones that feel like cheap attempts to get easy money from parents who need two hours of relief. Home is a movie with nothing new to say and no interesting way to say it. The main character is Sheldon Cooper turned one notch higher and a little girl separated from her mother that never quite makes you feel badly for her. Pixar made me cry for the personification of human emotions and the plight of a dinosaur farmer this year but Home couldn’t even get me a little sad for the ruined life of a small child. That’s not an ok way to tell a story.

    While Home is a bad movie, Minions is the expression of a bad system. Minions exists to make money and sell toys and the quality of the movie is a distant afterthought. Minions is a commercial broken up with borrowed bits of slapstick (none more recent than Honey, I Blew Up the Kid) but is counting on the notion that none of their target audience has seen it before. I had more fun riding the tie-in ride at Universal Studios than I did sitting through Minions, but I suppose I didn’t have to sit and watch the ride for 91 minutes.

  1. Hot Pursuit – Hot Pursuit is a comedy that has neither a clever plot nor any funny jokes. I’m tempted to just stop there and move on to the next entry on this list because there’s really nothing else a comedy could give you after it fails at that but Hot Pursuit just kept on failing. Almost every character was completely unbelievable as a human being that exists on the planet earth and the only one that felt real was Sofia Vergara’s character and that’s not because it’s actually realistic but because she plays this exact same character so often that I’ve come to accept it as truth in some kind of bizarre pop culture Stockholm syndrome. Hot Pursuit felt like torture to watch at 87 minutes, long and that was despite shelling out extra money that week to see it in a theater with reclining seats and waiter service. Booze and a brownie sundae couldn’t save Hot Pursuit, and it’s a rare movie those won’t help at least a little.
  1. Pixels – There’s a time when I would consider Pixels a special kind of bad but it isn’t. It’s exactly the kind of bad that Happy Madison puts out on a consistent basis. In 16 years they’ve put out one mediocre movie (Funny People) and 37 pieces of unwatchable garbage. They share similar casts and similar jokes and never aspire to be anything even remotely substantive. I don’t think every movie needs to be some profound meditation on the human condition, but they could at least give me a new dick joke or something. Pixels is a cynical movie that seems to hate its target audience. It doesn’t treat its subject matter seriously. It makes Wreck-It Ralph look like Citizen Kane. It was excruciating to watch and I’m quite happy I’ll never have to watch it ever again.

Emily S. Whitten Reviews The Sherlock Holmes Book

Book Review: The Sherlock Holmes Book

Tis the season…for all of us to be enjoying whatever nifty new items we hopefully received for Christmas. For me this year, that includes The Sherlock Holmes Book, which came out on October 20, 2015 and is part of a series of “Big Ideas Simply Explained” books from DK Publishing. These are general reference books that use photographs, illustrations, atlases, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and manuals to explore their topics.

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I’m not done reading The Sherlock Holmes Book yet, but from what I’ve perused so far, it’s delightful. Even if you’ve been a Sherlockian for years and have enjoyed all of the canon multiple times, as I have, the book still serves as both a great reference book for summarizing the individual stories or refreshing the memory, and a fun source for supplementary knowledge beyond the canon.

It begins with a background on author Arthur Conan Doyle and on Holmes, his right-hand man Watson, and other main recurring characters in the stories before moving on to the canon itself, examining each individual story with relevant illustrations, historical photographs and images, maps, and small summaries of key characters. It also contains timelines of the stories, including of key events in the lives of Holmes and Watson, which I find particularly fun to flip through. Another neat feature are the summaries of historical events or inspirations for parts of some stories, and of the publishing and production history during Conan Doyle’s lifetime.

After covering the canon, the book moves beyond it to discuss in separate sections the myth and reality of the world portrayed in Sherlockian tales, the setting of the Victorian world and society, criminology and the forensic sciences, crime writing, fans of Sherlock Holmes, adaptations of the canon, and fan fiction (both amateur and professionally published). What I really like about this book is the way it examines the stories and world of Holmes from a number of different angles and presents, even to someone like me who is very familiar with the canon stories, new bits of information, connective tissue, and background on the Sherlockian world beyond the canon.

It really is a great reference book, presented in a colorful and dynamic way that engages the reader. It also, I must note, has a foreword from esteemed Sherlockian and member of the Baker Street Irregulars Les Klinger, author of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. I didn’t even realize this when I added it to my Christmas list, but it’s a further indication that this is a good Sherlockian resource to have (and maybe I will have to take it along to the BSI Weekend next weekend and get it signed!).

DK Publishing also has “Big Ideas” books for subjects like philosophy, Shakespeare, sociology, and science, and after seeing how well this book is done, I may have to add those to my next Christmas list. Until then, I shall keep perusing my newest cool Sherlockian book, and I hope you all Servo Lectio!

Joe Corallo: Sight and Sound

beaton-david-bowie-300x392-9272532So I had written this week’s column about Marvel’s next big event, Civil War II, and how they’re going to be killing off a major character. I wrote about how it’s unoriginal, uninspiring, and how I wish we could do better. I was even planning on titling it “Civil Disobedience.” Really clever stuff. Then I woke up at 5:30am on Monday, January 11th to news that I didn’t think I’d hear for many, many years to come: David Bowie has passed away. What I had written my column about no longer mattered to me, and I started writing a new one. This one. About how important David Bowie is to a great many people, including myself. I’m just one of those great many people. When I a kid, David Bowie wasn’t terribly important to me. I was aware of him. I heard the big hits on the radio. My dad liked songs like Rebel, Rebel, and my mom owned at least the vinyl of David Live when she was a teenager, if I’m remembering that correctly. None of my friends were really into his music at the time either. Once I entered into college and became more aware of myself, I became more aware of who David Bowie was. Early on in college, I picked up The Best of Bowie followed by The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. I absolutely loved it. David Bowie was the queer icon I needed at the time. I would later meet a guy named Jake who was barely a month older than me, whom we shared a Bowie obsession that we were delving into roughly around the same time in our lives. We would hunt down the different Rykodisc releases of his albums that had the bonus tracks on them. Those were good times and memories I still cherish. I would go on to consume his entire discography, dozens and dozens of bootlegs of concerts, b-sides and outtakes covering everything from The Laughing Gnome, Vampires of the Human Flesh, the unused tracks from Outside and far far more, and to burn more than a few Bowie mixes for my college friends and acquaintances on CD. David Bowie also led me to watch the film adaptation of the novel The Man Who Fell To Earth, which remains one of my favorite sci-fi films. The film stars David Bowie as someone who may or may not be an alien, who admits to being attracted to both men and women, and features a gay couple as well. It was the first time I had seen a sci-fi film tackle queerness, certainly that early on. It reinvigorated my love of sci-fi at a time in which it had been my favorite genre growing, but was starting to slip away from me as I identified less and less with it. I was just beginning to come into my own, grappling with my sexual identity and the ramifications of that. David Bowie was someone who was openly queer in varying degrees throughout his life, while also being a popstar and cultural icon beloved by people in both the straight and queer communities. That was a kind of reassurance I needed, and I’m grateful that he provided that for me. And the fact that someone who clearly identified so heavily with alienation could be revered by so many through multiple generations is incredibly rare and almost entirely unique in modern music history. His vocals ranged from haunting to awe-inspiring. We would see a great many bands rise from their feelings of alienation, but David Bowie made it cool. And he paved the way for all that came after him. That’s not to say that others didn’t attempt to do what he did before him, or that others before him weren’t successful, but none have permeated through our culture into every medium of entertainment the way that David Bowie has as singular entity. From his music to his acting career, which admittedly was not as successful as he had hoped, he had inspired storytellers. Even in comics, you’ll see many references to his work scattered over the decades. Bowie had even been considered for a part in Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and was even considered for the role of The Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman. Kate Beaton has done multiple David Bowie inspired comics like this one, as countless other artists have tackled him in comics as well, often playing up his sexuality. David Bowie’s sexuality wasn’t entirely clear. It didn’t have to be. Early in his career he had claimed he was gay, then moved into bisexuality. It should come as no surprise that as the world changed and entered into a more conservative time, championed by the likes of Thatcher and Reagan, that Bowie’s personas started to downplay his flamboyance for a time as he began to stay he was not really bisexual after all. He didn’t flat out deny his intimacy with men in the past, and did not reach beyond that to condemn those who were queer. Later on, his sexuality was simply ambiguous. How David Bowie handled his sexuality is important. He showed me, and I’m sure many others, that we don’t need to be a prisoner of our sexual preferences. Our sexualities can change, evolve, and become more complex as we age, just like everything else does in our lives. I went through my own journey of not thinking about sexuality early on in my life and defaulting as straight, then moving into bisexuality, then gay, and finally identifying most closely with the idea of being queer. People like David Bowie living in the public eye and going through his changes helped me understand myself in a way that few other people in the public eye have, and I’m thankful to have lived in a time where that was possible. I could go on about the impact he’s had on the world, but you probably all already know that, or have people who are more well versed in all of those things who have spent time with him and have the sort of insights that I’ll never have. Rather, I’d like to end this by saying thank you for entertaining me by reading my thoughts, reflections, and (mostly) coherent ramblings on a man that’s had a profound impact on my life, countless other lives, and perhaps your own life, and that I hope this may have given you some insight on me, people like me, and perhaps yourselves.

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