Robin Hood

Robin Hood (5/5)

            Most people have that one Disney film that follows him or her into adulthood.  Of course, the persistence of Disney’s films can be chalked up to cultural omnipresence or clever marketing, but I wouldn’t underestimate the fact that in its heyday the Disney factory managed to pump out one classic after another.  There’s a reason why Walt Disney has garnered the admiration of great artists like Sergei Eisenstein, John Updike, and Roy Lichtenstein: because, at his best, Walt Disney created great art.  For me, the single Disney film that never seems to exhaust itself—no matter how accurately I can recite each line word for word—the one Disney film that seems to renew itself with each passing decade is without a doubt their version of Robin Hood.

            For my money, Disney’s Robin Hood is the best adaptation of the medieval folk tale ever put to screen (sorry, Kevin Costner).  While everyone knows the basic elements that make up the Robin Hood legend, from the Sheriff of Nottingham to Sherwood Forest to Robin’s band of merry men, some of the most famous aspects of the folk tale have been haphazardly added to the story over the course of centuries.  Maid Marion, for instance, wasn’t included in Robin Hood’s legend until several hundred years after his earliest folk tales.  This loose, disparate formation of the Robin Hood tale has actually helped it survive over the centuries.  Because there is no single authoritative Robin Hood story, artists have been able to highlight and tweak different parts of the myth to their liking, mixing and matching whatever suits their particular purposes.

            Disney’s Robin Hood seems keenly aware of the mythic nature of the title character, and the film is introduced by minstrel singer Alan-a-Dale who, while leaning on the letters of an oversized book about Robin Hood, informs the audience that “My job is to tell it like it is, or was, or whatever.”  The layered, self-consciously formulated style of this introduction—the fact that Alan-a-Dale is breaking the fourth wall to tell us a story that he appears in and is also surrounded by a large print version of the same story—tells the audience that the filmmakers are aware of the ways in which legends and heroes are not born but rather made by those who choose to cobble truth and fiction together and pass it on to the next generation so they can do the same. 

 

And for his part, the director, Wolfgang Reitherman, and his team chose some of the best elements of the Robin Hood mythos.  This version of Robin Hood takes place during King Richard’s crusade.  While Richard is abroad fighting a hopeless war, England has been under the boot of his weasely brother, Prince John who has nearly taxed the already impoverished people into starvation.  In one particularly great scene (and the movie is filled with great scenes), the Sheriff of Nottingham waltzes into Friar Tuck’s church, opens up the donation box, and takes whatever change he happens to find.  When Friar Tuck protests that he is taking from the “poor box,” the Sheriff replies that he’s just taking it for “poor Prince John.”  The villains are particularly nasty in Robin Hood, not because they represent the essence of evil, but because they seem awfully close to anyone who takes immense pleasure in basking in their own power. 

The relationship between Robin and Marion also comes across as surprisingly effective, especially when you considered that they’re two anthropomorphized foxes.  As a child my least favorite part of the film was always Robin and Marion’s retreat to the waterfall after he whisks her away from the archery contest.  As I’ve grown with the film, the movie itself appears to change ever so slightly, and I’ve come to love this scene just as much as the rest of the film.  It serves as a well needed respite from one of the film’s most extensive action sequences, which begins with an archery contest and devolves into a big tent, three ring circus of chaos. 

But what truly sets this film apart from all other Disney animated films is the vibrant voice acting.  Phil Harris, who had previously played Baloo in The Jungle Book, reproduces his baritone here as Little John, who in this version serves as Robin Hood’s best bud and advisor in romance.  And for his part Brian Bedford puts in a great performance as the title character, and his delicate British accent seems to fit Robin’s wiry frame.  The filmmakers even got country singer Roger Miller, who is most famous for his song “King of the Road,” to voice Alan-a-Dale.  And it is, in part, because of the fine ensemble cast that the movie manages to make every one of its dozen or so talking characters seem alive despite the fact that the film barely makes it past the 80 minute mark.  Thanks to both the voice actors and the way in which the animators formed each animal around a few key associated personality traits (the rabbits are energetic, the foxes are lithe and quick, and the bears are lumbering and forceful), we feel as if each character, even if he or she has only a line or two, are a full fleshed personality.  Even ancillary characters, like the alligator who sounds like Tom Waits, feel as if they have a history behind them, a story we haven’t yet heard.

Of all the fine voice acting, I have to make special mention of Peter Ustinov’s Prince John, who, in my opinion, is one of the all time great villains.  The genius behind Ustinov’s performance is that Prince John can veer wildly between a childish buffoon who sucks his thumb calling for his mother and a nasty villain who takes pleasure in hurting others.  And these two sides of his personality seem to reinforce one another.  He is like that kid with godlike powers from the Twilight Zone episode, “It’s a Good Life,” or, more recently, like King Joffrey from Game of Thrones.  Power may corrupt absolutely, but it can also create an eternal infancy.  And while there are an abundance of great lines in the film, somehow Prince John gets the best of them, from “Forgive me a cruel chuckle” to “I’ve got a dirty thumb.” 

Ustinov’s great performance is likely a result of his time in theater where his flexible voice would have been even more of an asset than in film.  And listening to him recently in Robin Hood reminded me of one of my least favorite aspects of modern day animation: celebrity voice actors.  Fair warning: I’m going into a full fledged rant.  Too often animation studios will hire big name stars to voice a few characters so that they can paste some recognizable names on the marquee, and the stars are willing to cash the check because it’s an easy gig.  In fact, at the Oscars Chris Rock recently poked fun at how “easy” voice acting is.  But the thing is, I’ve listened to Chris Rock voicing a character, and he’s terrible at it. In fact, most of his Hollywood friends have a hard time actually acting when they are voicing an animated character.  The exception to this rule is, of course, Pixar who chooses voice actors because they fit the role not because their schedule happened to be free and…why not.  Pixar then expects their talent to do some acting.  When I listen to Woody and Buzz rarely do I stop to think that they’re really Tom Hanks and Tim Allen.  But the worst offender has to be the recent Dr. Seuss adaptations that have been purposefully built around a big Hollywood star.  Once the big draw has been established, the studio cynically plugs in actors and pop musicians who will appeal to different demographics in order to have their bases covered when it’s time to market the film.  In Horton Hears a Who, for example, there is no character who actually resembles Horton from Dr. Seuss’s classic.  Instead it’s merely Jim Carrey under the guise of an elephant yelling a lot.  And what’s truly terrible is that because, as Chris Rock suggests, voice acting doesn’t take much time out of your day, wealthy Hollywood actors have been pushing out truly talented people who specialize in voice acting for a living.  Okay, that’s the end of my rant.  My point is, these animation studios could learn a lot from Robin Hood where each voice actor effortlessly captures the persona of his or her character in a way that’s becoming increasingly rare in contemporary animation.

But as I mentioned early on, Robin Hood the movie, and the legend itself, seems to renew itself with each passing year.  Disney’s Robin Hood seems to be both of its time and yet one step out of it.  The film was released in 1973 and it contains a healthy distrust of government as well as a story that pits the haves against the have nots.  The 60s counterculture obviously had a huge impact on this film.  When Alan-a-Dale introduces himself at the beginning of the film, he tells us that he’s a minstrel, which he defines as sort of like “an old time folk singer.”  And what are these woodland versions of classic characters but a bunch of hippies who hide out in the woods singing protest songs.  One song, “The Phony King of England,” is so catchy that Prince John’s right hand serpent, Sir Hiss, is caught singing it in front of his boss, a testament to ways in which music can spread both an unrelenting melody and anti-authoritarian message.  But these same issues seem even more prevalent today.  The film makes it a point to suggest that King Richard has been hypnotized by Hiss so that he would leave England to fight the Crusades, a hopeless war in the Middle East.  While the king is more concerned with foreign affairs, England falls apart.  Thankfully, we have evolved past these issues in the last millennium or so.  With the collapse of the global economy and the subsequent rise of the Occupy Wall Street protests the myth of Robin Hood seems more than a little applicable today.  At one point Prince John inverts Robin Hood’s famous motto, telling his that he plans to “rob the poor to give to the rich.”  And as we have seen wealth trickle upwards over the past thirty years, this seems like an apt phrase to explain what has happened to our once robust economy.

Unfortunately, Robin Hood didn’t have a great reputation upon its release.  Apparently, the studio wasn’t pleased with the animation, which has a rougher edge than some of Disney’s earlier films (although, I would argue that this nicely fits with its scraggy hero).  The film’s critical reception has suffered as well.  On the critic aggregation site Rottentomatoes, Robin Hood currently has only a 55% positive rating.  And yet I don’t know a single person who doesn’t love this film.  Tellingly, 78% of the same website’s users give the film a positive score, which is pretty good for a bunch of internet cynics.  Somehow I find it fitting that, while the critical elites look down on the film, the populace still loves Robin Hood as much as ever.   

The Square

The Square (4/5)

The Australian film, The Square, is well versed in the long and storied history of film noir.  It takes its basic narrative outline from Gilda, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Double Indemnity—the kind of films familiar to non-film buffs, even if it is second hand information gathered through parodies and borrowed snippets in other films.  And while the story is nothing new, the film orchestrates each bad decision with such craft that it’s hard not to be won over by such a well made film.

Like some of the above films, The Square begins with an illicit tryst.  As the movie begins, Ray and Carla appear to have been carrying on an affair for some time.  There is an age and class difference between the two.  Ray manages a construction site and has slipped into a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle, where Carla, while not poor, is married to a low level gangster.  Ray appears to be about a decade Carla’s senior, and while it isn’t entirely clear what Ray finds so mundane about his typical middle class existence, I’m sure Carla’s age is part of her allure.  The two have been talking about running away together for some months, and an opportunity arises when Carla comes across a duffel bag full of cash hidden in the crawl space of her house.  The two plan to steal the bag, hire someone to burn down the house in order to hide the theft, and then run off together.

The director, Nash Edgarton (brother to the Joel Edgarton, actor and screenwriter), smartly avoids too much exposition.  We don’t need to know what problems Ray has been having with his wife, or what it is exactly that Carla’s husband, Greg, does that makes it necessary for him to have a coterie of seedy friends, so the filmmakers don’t tell us.  The movie is appropriately streamlined.  Obviously, the plan to steal the duffel bag full of money and burn down Carla’s house doesn’t work as planned, which sets each character against the other.  Part of the appeal of film noir is the manner in which choices veer off into unforeseen consequences.  A major theme of the genre tends to be our own lack of control, how we are often carried along the stream of life and when we attempt to change course we too often encounter eddies and currents that override our intentions.  The Square is a film about the irrevocability of choices.

The Edgarton brothers are mostly known for work in front of the camera than behind it (director Nash has done both acting and stunt work while his brother Joel has started making inroads acting in large Hollywood fare).  But judging by the well crafted nature of The Square, these two should team up more often as a writing and directing team.  Film noir is often the chosen genre for eager young directors who are looking to prove themselves.  There’s a reason why Quentin Tarantino, Brian Singer, and, of course, the Cohen Brothers (who would go on to make film noir their own little playground for years to come) started their careers by making taunt film noir thrillers: film noir is the perfect test of a director’s skills.  Early film noir established a clear visual style, and since its inception in the mid-forties, the genre has had a sense of formalism about it.  In order to master the genre, you had to first show that you understood how the language of film worked while simultaneously applying your own spin on the themes of love, lust, murder, and the underside of capitalism.  Likewise, Nash Edgarton understands the genre well, and he convinces us that each small decision these characters make, which appear reasonable on their own, could spiral into unthinkable mistakes.  He also tells the story visually, never wasting words when a subtle camera movement will do.  For us outsiders, Australia is often viewed as a rugged desert full of sun hardened men and women.  I can think of fewer settings more suitable to film noir. 

Green Lantern

Green Lantern (3/5)

Over the last decade, the summer and holiday months have been littered with the cast off remains of failed franchises.  Eager for the consistent influx of cash that popular series like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, or Twilight bring in over the course of years, or even decades, studios have been caught counting their chickens long before they have hatched, hoping that whatever rebooted 80s cartoon, young adult novel, or underused superhero will leaven the strain of actually producing new material.  Some of these failures have taken on the veneer of cult success (I would argue this in the case of the Wachowski’s Speed Racer or Joe Johnston’s The Rocketeer), where others fail to live up to the promise of their source material (such as Jonah Hex or The Golden Compass), and still others should never have been put into production in the first place (Prince of Persia, Battlefield Earth).  And while there have been rumors of a Green Lantern sequel, I have the feeling that the first film’s poor showing at the box office will dissuade the bean counters from risking another go at DC’s space cop.  And that’s a shame, not because the first film was such a triumph, but because, despite plenty of flaws, there’s a lot of potential in the Green Lantern, even if much of it is squandered by the movie’s end.

I watched Green Lantern after reading some damning reviews, so imagine my surprise when, for at least the first half of the film, the movie turned out to be an engaging balance of sci-fi spectacle and carefully executed character building.  We begin the film in the far reaches of space where some alien astronauts stumble upon a trapped entity known as Parallax who feeds on these victims and escapes.  Parallax proceeds to chase down and mortally wound the Green Lantern who had trapped him in the first place, Abin Sur.  Sur manages to escape from Parallax and crash land on Earth where he, knowing how little time he has left, instructs his ring, the source of a Green Lantern’s power, to find a suitable replacement. 

The ring eventually chooses Hal Jordan, a test pilot for experimental aircraft.  Hal’s portrayed as a womanizer whose talents as a pilot far outstrip his discipline.  He works for Ferris Aircraft and has some romantic history with the boss’s daughter, Carol Ferris, who also happens to balance her career helping run the family business with her roles as a test pilot along with Hal.  The two must run a demonstration for the government in hopes that Uncle Sam will buy their non-manned fighter pilot drones (take that China!).  While the ultimate goal of this demonstration is to show how good the drones are, Hal decides to break the rules of engagement by taking his jet much higher than permitted, which allows him to take out the drones, but also forces him to crash his plane in the process.  Naturally, Carol is upset when Hal not only uncovers flaws in their product but also trashes a multi-million dollar piece of equipment. 

Hal is played by Ryan Reynolds, who got his start as a cartoony wiseass in sitcoms and teen comedies but has since attempted to break his way into marginally more serious action work, and he has spent years trying to prove himself as a potential blockbuster lead.  Here his ability to crack a joke not only serves to accentuate his character’s freewheeling nature, but also helps ground the more absurdist aspects of a comic book character who was created fifty years ago.  The movie manages to be funny without becoming jokey.  Reynolds also happens to have great chemistry with love interest Carol Ferris, played by Blake Lively.  The two of them have a surprisingly emotionally complicated scene at a local bar for pilots that could have been sliced into a more dramatic film without much trouble.  The central love story reminded me of the scenes in another film by directors Martin Campbell, the James Bond reboot Casino Royale, whose romance between Bond and Vesper served as the heart of the film. 

It’s not long after he downs the company jet that Hal is swept away by Abin Sur’s ring and taken to the crash site of Sur’s escape pod where the dying alien tells him how to use the ring.  After figuring out the basics Hal is whisked away to the planet Oa, the headquarters of the Guardians, a race of blue aliens who forged the Green Lantern rings in order to form the Green Lantern Corps, a group tasked with policing the entire universe.  The planet Oa is beautifully filmed, a strange mixture of darkened crags, smooth surfaces of technology, and tasteful waves of color.  It is as if an aurora borealis went off in an Apple store after hours.  Here Hal learns of the history of the Green Lanterns and begins his training with Kilowog, a beast of an alien with the face of a pig, the body of a brick wall, and the voice, conveniently enough, of Michael Clark Duncan. 

It’s at this point in the movie where I excitedly awaited for the film to really take off.  Until now there had been some exciting action and nice character work.  Hal had been firmly established as a screw up, adrift in life, hoping for something bigger, and now that fate has handed him the chance to join the Green Lantern Corps, he presumably has a chance to right his course in life.  But in an incredibly contrived moment, he decides that he’s not up to snuff, quits the corps and returns to Earth (although, strangely enough, he is allowed to keep the ring).  Instead of the epic space opera I was expecting, the filmmakers decides on something far more quotidian: a superhero movie.  The rest of the film goes through the usual superhero motions: the main character reveals himself to the public by bravely saving hundreds of people and afterwards visits the love interest/damsel in distress.  Green Lantern is a decidedly schizophrenic movie.  Where the first half of the film provides the perfect set up for the “hero’s journey,” a story about one character being plucked from the mundane world and lifted into an exciting realm of adventure, the second half of the film seems content on playing superhero connect the dots.  There is even a second villain, a scientist who becomes infected by Parallax, who is obviously there to make sure the action doesn’t stray too far from Earth. 

I’m convinced that the studio didn’t really know what they had with the Green Lantern.  Unlike Batman, Spider-Man, or even Superman, the Green Lantern Corps lends itself to interplanetary superheroics more in the vein of Star Wars and Flash Gordon than Iron Man.  But this is also what makes the character exciting.  Where we have seen the basic outline of a superhero movie time and again, Green Lantern offers the chance of more science fiction tropes, which could potentially differentiate him from the glut of other superhero movies.  Instead of shying away from the imaginatively bizarre, the filmmakers should have embraced the alien aspects of the Green Lantern mythos.  Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Green Lantern is that it represents a missed opportunity.  The few moments we spend in space are exciting because of their promise of the weird, and because they are one of the few images of space made by people who have actually looked at photographs from the Hubble Telescope.  Instead of peregrine flights of fancy, the movie clings tight to formula, and suffered for it, both artistically and at the box office.

Cloud Nothings - Attack on Memory

Cloud Nothings – Attack on Memory (4.5/5)

            Cloud Nothings’s songwriter and at one time only member, Dylan Baldi has made the claim in interviews that his latest album, Attack on Memory, felt like such a departure from his earlier, lo-fi static-pop sound that he considered recording under an entirely new name.  Dylan’s right that Attack on Memory marks a shift in style for Cloud Nothings, but he’s wrong to claim that this is a complete departure from his first two full length releases.  A shadow of doubt and remorse hangs over the album, and while Attack on Memory’s darker themes leads to a rearrangement in sonic textures, ultimately Dylan’s ear for a catchy riff or a snaking guitar line makes it clear that Attack on Memory was written by the same artist who penned the bouncy “Understand at All.”

            The opening track, “No Future/No Past,” attempts to strike a clear demarcation between Attack on Memory and Dylan’s earlier four track bedroom recordings.  The song, a slow marching dirge, builds from a whisper to a throat searing scream, and it helps form the atmosphere of the rest of the album.  But despite this new approach, Dylan can’t help but write some surprisingly catchy tunes.  Sure, he’s traded in much of his nasally delivery for a scream that seems to start and stop in his trachea, but underneath the self-torment lies a talented songwriter.  In fact, a couple of the songs, such as “Fall In” and “Stay Useless,” could have easily have slid into one of his earlier albums without causing much disruption. 

            Attack on Memory relies on two elements to truly differentiate itself from Cloud Nothings’s first two full lengths: a full band and Steve Albini’s production.  The centerpiece of the entire album, the nearly nine-minute long “Wasted Days,” could never have been pulled off as a bedroom recording.  The song’s energy depends on multiple guitar dynamics and clear shifts from one movement to the other.  This fuller sound is only enhanced by Albini’s steel hard production sound.  Albini is famous for his hands off approach to producing, allowing the sound of his studio to do all the work for him.  Like Bruce Lee, he relies on the “style of no style.”  And here much of the album feels as if it were recording in an ancient cave, the band surrounded by long forgotten glyphs.  And what better environment for Dylan’s intonation of easy self-disgust.  At times the album recalls Albini’s most famous production work, Nirvana’s In Utero.  And while Dylan doesn’t have Cobain’s gift for layers of irony and somersaulting wordplay, he takes advantage of Albini’s skills to evoke elemental feelings of anger and distrust that can be found in the common 20-year-old American male. 

John Carter of Mars

John Carter of Mars (4/5)

Buried within Edgar Rice Burroughs’s original series of Barsoom novels hides the DNA of some of the most successful blockbusters of the past forty years.  Films like Star Wars and Avatar wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the fact that Burroughs had already laid the groundwork in the early decades of the twentieth century.  So despite the fact that John Carter’s Martian adventures are a precursor to modern sci-fi and fantasy films, the first major movie adaptation of Burroughs’s work can’t help but feel like somewhat of a rehash.  But it is also difficult to hold this against a film that largely delivers on its promise of uncomplicated thrills. 

John Carter opens using a framing technique similar to the novel on which it is based, A Princess of Mars.  In the tradition of the “found text” narrative, Burroughs represented his novel as an extended story written down by his uncle, John Carter.  In the film, Burroughs is informed that his uncle has died, and he is summoned to his wealthy uncle’s sizable estate.  Upon arriving, Burroughs is told that he has become the executor of his uncle’s trust and is given a manuscript to pore over.  This manuscript, as you might surmise, is a recounting of Carter’s adventures on the red planet, or Barsoom, as the Martians call it.  Carter, it turns out, was once a prospector looking to strike it rich near Apache country.  Because of his former role in the Confederate cavalry, a local Indian fighter, Captain Powell, attempts to re-enlist him in his efforts to put down Apache resistance. 

The sit down between Powell and Carter turns into one of the film’s best visual gags, and the first indication that the director, Andrew Stanton, also helmed the Pixar classics Finding Nemo and Wall-E.  Carter eventually escapes from the cavalry fort and becomes embroiled in a firefight with a band of Apaches.  In his escape, Carter finds shelter in a cave where he encounters a Martian, and, after snatching a metallic piece of Martian technology, is whisked away out of the Arizona desert into the deserts of Barsoom.  The framing technique is somewhat convoluted, since we are first introduced to John Carter through Burroughs and then introduced to Carter proper on the frontier before he finally finds his way to Mars.  But it was smart for the filmmakers to keep the 19^th century time frame.  In most science fiction films, the audience must suspend disbelief, but in a film based on early works of fantastical fiction like John Carter, there is a second layer of suspension of disbelief where the audience not only must believe in the fantastical, but they must also believe that the kind of absurdity we see in these stories is the sort of material for which a contemporary audience would have been willing to suspend disbelief. 

And once we get to Mars, there is, like in the novel, some enjoyably goofy conceits.  Because of Mars’s weak gravity, Carter finds himself capable of leaping across the landscape, and his denser bone and muscle mass make him an even more formidable fighter than the vicious Barsoomian natives.  John Carter first encounters the Tharks, a ruthless four armed warrior race.  The leader of the Tharks, Tars Tarkas, played energetically by Willem Defoe in CGI garb, sees in Carter a weapon he can turn against the other denizens of Barsoom, and instead of shooting him on sight decides to tie him up for later use. 

In addition to the Tharks, Barsoom houses the Red Martians who look pretty much like Earthlings who forgot to put on enough SPF during their Florida vacation.  The Red Martians control several city-states that are at war with one another.  The city of Helium has been under siege by the city of Zodanga and cannot hold out for much longer. The leader of Zodanga, Sab Than, has been able to keep his rivals on the ropes thanks to technology he received from a mysterious group of secretive people known as the Therns.  In a desperate last bid for peace, the ruler of Helium has agreed to marry off his daughter, the Princess Dejah Thoris, to Sab Than, but when she learns of her fathers plan, Dejah jets off.  The Zodanga airships catch up with her near the encampment of Tars Tarkas and his tribe where Carter rescues her from plunging to her death.  Dejah, of course, wishes to recruit Carter to her cause in defending Helium against the onslaught of Zodanga.

The plot itself is somewhat tortuous, thanks in part to the insertion of the mysterious Therns, who did not appear in the first book and whose inclusion adds just one more twisted convolution.  And while the politics could have easily been more of a chore, Stanton, like all Pixar directors, has such a fantastic sense of pacing that we never have to suffer through much political posturing.  The audience is given as much information as they need, and then we move on.  But not surprisingly the most engaging parts of the film take place among the Tharks.  The movie is smart enough not to blunt the violent aspect of Thark society—Thark children are hatched in communal incubators and those who do not break from their egg in time and summarily killed—while at the same time the filmmakers shave off some of the racism of Burroughs’s original story.  (In the novel, the Tharks stand in for the American-Indians Carter is fighting before being transported across space and time).  For a Disney movie John Carter is surprisingly violent, and Carter finds himself covered in Martian blood on more than one occasion. 

 

The joys of John Carter are ultimately slight, but this is also the movie’s strength.  While other blockbusters have become increasingly bloated, John Carter feels invigoratingly light-footed.  True, the movie’s running time exceeds two hours, but it never feels long.  Just as Carter himself is a man out of time and place, John Carter the movie also feels out of step with its fellow big budgeted adventure films.  At its heart, and when it is at its very best, John Carter feels like an Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks flick—Captain Blood with more special effects.  Many people have questioned whether or not sci-fi fantasy film set on Mars at the end of the 19^th century can recoup its substantial cost in 2012.  I’m the last person who should try and predict public tastes, but I can say that John Carter is that rare breed of sci-fi spectacle that, when it hits its stride, actually thrills. 

Let Rock and Roll Die

Recently there has been plenty of anguish in the wind about the state of rock music in today’s cultural and economic marketplace.  At the Grammies Dave Grohl felt the need to come out and defend “the human element of music,” which, to some, meant he was dissing electronica.  (This goes to show that rock music may be dying, but fans of electronic music will always have thin skin).  Over at The Guardian, Michael Hann argues that all rock and roll music needs is a large flagship band to rally around.  But others aren’t so optimistic.  In the New York Times, JonCaramanica decries the artistic stagnation that has barnacled its way around modern rock and roll radio.  I think, at the very least, we can all agree that modern rock radio sucks.  In my town of origin, Cleveland, which also happens to be the home of the Rock Hall of Fame, the station that once played contemporary rock music has now been replaced by sports talk.  Of course, the radio station in question defined contemporary rock music as a bunch of stuff from the 90s plus the warmed over grunge imitators of today, so it wasn’t much of a loss.

The Apocalypse

There’s plenty to quibble with when it comes to these prognostications of death.  In the case of Caramanica’s New York Times article, he is smart enough to define his subject not as rock music as a whole, but as rock music on a major label that is played on a major radio station.  But he’s also dumb enough to claim that the Black Keys’s newest album is nothing more than “one long airless, swingless jam,” whatever that is supposed to mean.  I suppose part of his argument is that rock music is so in love with revivalism, whether what they’re reviving is classic blues based rock or nineties grunge, that they haven’t moved the art form forward.  But is this really a phenomenon located only in rock music?  Plenty of people have argued that the last fifteen or so years have been a time of cultural stagnation, and they are not only pointing to rock music.  The songs of Lady Gaga or Katy Perry could easily fit within the milieu of the late 90s.  Their brand of revivalism just happens to be more popular.

But, at the same time, Caramanica might have a point.  With the exception of the Black Keys, most of the bands Caramanica sites as examples of rock and roll’s stagnation are pretty convincing.  In fact, modern rock radio has been a wasteland for the past fifteen years or so.  I have a solution to this problem: let rock and roll die.  Now, let me walk that statement back a little.  I don’t actually want to kill of the genre of rock music.  But I do think that the manner in which these articles are defining rock music seems just as old fashioned and out of date as some of the music they are decrying.  Here is how Caramanica defines the subject of his piece: “For the purposes of this article, that’s [rock music] more or less rock released on American major labels, regardless of origin, and played on mainstream rock radio stations.”  He’s only looking at music that has been played on the radio.  When was the last time you’ve actually listened to music on the radio?  For many of us it has been years.  And when I do listen to music on the radio, I’m much more likely to tune in to local college radio stations than something funded by a large corporate conglomerate.  This begs the question, why do we even care about the health of rock and roll music in the mainstream? 

Rock music has been around since the mid-twentieth century, and in that time it has evolved to the point where it looks a whole lot different from the music that was made by Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley.  While rock music’s most famous signifiers of rebellion and drugs came about in late sixties and early seventies, I would argue that it didn’t become a truly vibrant artistic vibrant until the late seventies and early eighties during the punk and new wave movements.  It was during this time that rock musicians decided that they couldn’t make the kind of music they wanted if they still relied on the old forms of music production and distribution, leading many to create their own music labels.  From that time forward, few artistically viable rock bands made it onto rock radio, but if you picked up the nearest rock you might find a bunch of squirming hardcore punkers taking pains to destroy rock music, and in the process reinventing it.  With the exception of a brief boom in the early to mid 1990s, great rock music hasn’t been found on the radio.  But there has always been a vibrant subculture that has played with the form and influences of the genre. 

What was true in the 80s onward is true now.  It is amazing that these music critics seem so concerned with the economic health of rock music in a day and age when thousands of new rock bands can be heard free through a myriad number of internet sources, from Spotify to Youtube.  If you are looking for great new music through your radio dial, then you’re looking in the wrong place.  Sure, rock musicians could probably construct songs that would be palatable to large swaths of the American public, but do we really want a new Phil Collins for the 21^st century?  Besides, thanks to the long tail, even popular music isn’t terribly popular by the standards of the pre-Napster age.  Now, with this new world of easy and instant access comes plenty of other questions.  How do musicians make money off of their hard word?  How can music fans cut through the millions of mediocre to bad songs in order to get to the good stuff?  The one question most people are not asking, other than culture critics at large magazines and newspapers, is whether or not there’s anything good on the radio.  I have no worries about the artistic viability of rock music.  In fact there are too many great rock bands out there for me to keep up with.  What we need to do now, as fans of art, is to make sure we are supporting musicians who provide the soundtrack to our morning commute and our Friday night debauchery. 

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

 The Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (3.5/5)

The original Pirates of the Caribbean had the element of surprise on its side.  No one suspected that a film based on an antiquated attraction at Disney World would foster much entertainment value, and certainly no one thought it would become such a cultural juggernaut that it would spawn three sequels and catapult Johnny Depp to the top of the Hollywood A-list food chain, making him an international star.  I had been a Depp fan since childhood and had enjoyed his status as an idiosyncratic outsider, content to play dress up with his friends, and when I first saw a preview for Pirates of the Caribbean, I must admit that my eyes rolled and asked myself, what the hell is Depp thinking?  And then the movie came out.  Not only was the film filled with clever conceits, thanks in part to a screenplay that felt like the intricate work of an old fashioned clockmaker, but Depp turned in a surprisingly rousing performance as the effete, possibly insane pirate, Jack Sparrow.  Here was a multi-million dollar film and in the center stood a character fueled by pure id, stabbing other characters in the back in a moments notice while never letting the audience in on whether he does so out of a sense of self preservation or as part of a grander, more heroic scheme.  If there is a Falstaff for the 21^st century, then his name is Jack Sparrow.

And then the sequels happened.  Weighted down by their ever expanding mythology, Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End limped through their expanding running time while dragging along enough subplots for at least five more films.  At the beginning of the first film we are concerned with Depp’s attempts to reclaim his ship and the romance between Will and Elizabeth, but by the end of the third movie a major plot point pivoted around the unrequited love of Calypso, a tertiary character who would have been mostly forgettable if she weren’t played by the immensely talented Naomie Harris.  Where The Curse of the Black Pearl’s tight plotting and clearly established supernatural rules made it seem shorter than its two hours and fifteen minutes, the two sequels felt much, much longer than their already bloated running times.  I understand that the filmmakers were trying to give us a bang for our buck, but they also needed to learn how to leave the audience wanting more.

It is with these widely held critiques in mind that the filmmakers went into the fourth Pirates movie, On Stranger Tides.  And there are several elements that tell us that the movie is attempting to swing all the way back around to the original film in hopes of bottling a little of the magic that made the first film a runaway success.  First, Will and Elizabeth have been jettisoned from the film.  This is good news because these two characters seemed unnecessary in the last two movies, and it increasingly felt as if the actors had merely wandered onto the set because they had nowhere else to go.  Second, the film is only tenuously connected to the byzantine mythology of the last few films.  Sure, characters like Captain Barbossa show up, but it is not necessary to be intimately familiar with the details of his curse, death and resurrection from the other three films.  Both of these choices allow the film to focus on what really matters: the character of Jack Sparrow.

So, does the film actually accomplish what it set out to do?  Is On Stranger Tides a return to form?  In a word, no.  But that doesn’t mean that it’s not a good time, and the film bodes well for the inevitable sequels coming our way.  Plenty of film critics have taken On Stranger Tides to task for not living up to the promises of the first film, and while their complaints are not without merit, I strongly believe the movie largely delivers. 

On Stranger Tides follows multiple entities as they each lie, steal and cheat in order to make their way to the elusive Fountain of Youth, first discovered and then re-lost by Ponce De Leon nearly two centuries previous.  The entries into this mad, mad chase are the Spanish government, a coldly calculating participant, the British government, lead by former pirate Barbossa, the cutthroat Blackbeard, and of course Jack Sparrow himself.  After a rousing opening escape from the clutches of the British, Jack finds himself tracking down rumors of another Jack Sparrow who’s gathering a crew in London.  The Jack Sparrow impersonator happens to be an old flame, Angelica, in costume, a play on Jack’s effeminate mannerisms as well as the plethora of Jack Sparrow wannabes that walk the street on Halloween.  A nun who broke her vow of chastity to Jack, Angelica doesn’t quite trust the pirate, but she needs the map to the Fountain of Youth, which happens to be in Jack Sparrow’s possession. 

Of course, there are a plethora of double and triple crosses that occur throughout the film.  Like a good magician, the film does a lot with just a little slight of hand.  Angelica can not exactly be trusted (or can she?), and Jack winds up in the forced servitude of the pirate Blackbeard, played with suave menace by Ian McShane.  Concerned about a prophecy about his impending death, Blackbeard is also searching out the Fountain of Youth, but in order to actually use the fountain, he must procure a tear drop from a mermaid.  In the world of the Pirates movies, mermaids are vicious creatures who put on a doe eyed veneer in order to, like the sirens, lure men to their death.  The mermaid segment is particularly well executed.  The director, Rob Marshall, uses beautiful underwater shots of the small boats that have gone out to lure the mermaids, while ratcheting up the tension.  We know from the reactions of the sailors that the mermaids are dangerous and they could strike at any moment, creating an air pregnant with tension. 

 

With the inclusion of the mermaids, however, comes one of the film’s failings, an unnecessary subplot that often tries the audience’s patience.  A young missionary character who has been captured by Blackbeard is dropped like a cannonball into the middle of the film for no particular reason.  We are told who he is thanks to some leaden exposition by Angelica, and when they do finally capture a mermaid, her and the missionary start making googly eyes at one another.  The mermaid and the missionary seem like they’re replacements for Will and Elizabeth, but unlike those two characters the audience has little investment in this couple.  The movie has a few other flaws as well.  The filmmakers regularly break the show not tell rule.  Captain Barbossa, for example, explains to Jack about how he lost the ship, The Black Pearl, to Blackbeard, telling him that Blackbeard’s magic turned the ship against its own men, its ropes cutting down the Pearl’s crew.  While he told this story, I couldn’t help but think, that would have been cool to actually see, but thanks for sharing anyway Barbossa. 

But despite these flaws, On Stranger Tides is a film whose desire to please is evident.  All the main actors do a fantastic job, even if McShane is elbowed out of much of the film by some unnecessary subplots.  There are also some great twists throughout the movie.  I won’t spoil them for you here, but let us just say that not everyone is searching for the Fountain of Youth for eternal life.  So even when the movie stumbles, it still entertains.  On Stranger Tides is not the return to form it so desperately wants to be, but it is a nice indicator that if we are going to get at least two more of these Pirates movies, then at the very least they will serve as good summer diversions. 

Violent Femmes - Hallowed Ground

Violent Femmes – Hallowed Ground (5/5)

There are few bands who have released debut albums as fully formed as the Violent Femmes’s eponymous release.  In the decades since its first appearance in 1983, Violent Femmes has become somewhat iconic, and the album seems to constantly spawn a new life for itself with each new generation of listeners thanks to the way in which it delves into seemingly universal themes of alienation, anxiety, and frustration (or at least universal to every wave of American teenagers from the 1950s onward).  And while it is possible to place the Violent Femmes’s sound within a historical context, mostly as a precursor to “alternative” music along with their peers R.E.M., the unique arrangement of their influences, a strange mash up of punk, folk, and jazz, has confounded any potential imitators, making their original debut sound just as energetic and new today as it did nearly thirty years ago. 

In fact, the Femmes’s debut cast such a long shadow that each subsequent released couldn’t really escape it.  The conundrum of a successful first album can be heard in the Violent Femme’s second LP, Hallowed Ground.  For a second album, plenty of bands choose to make an inferior copy of the first, often by digging up some b-sides and calling it a day.  But for Hallowed Ground the Violent Femmes delved deep into their well of influences and offered up an album that, while clearly the work of the same three musicians, subsumes plenty of unexpected genres.  The Femmes delved into country, bluegrass and folk for some eerily Christian themed songs.  The lead singer, Gordan Gano, was raised by a devout Baptist minister, and he apparently held onto his faith despite the conflicted nature of Hallowed Ground’s songs.  The other two members of the Violent Femmes, Brian Ritchie and Victor DeLorenzo, were atheists at the time the group recorded Hallowed Ground, and at first were uncomfortable with the religious nature of the second album.  The album itself is tonally conflicted, not only swerving from one genre to another, but also swinging back and forth from religious condemnation to spiritual euphoria.

In the end, Ritchi and DeLorenzo had little to fear from this batch of songs.  This is not the music of a blindly following zealot, but of a man who feels disgust for religion even as he seemingly holds it firmly to his chest.  The first track off the album, “Country Death Song,” tells a Southern Gothic style narrative of a man who murders his entire family before hanging himself in his barn.  Told from the point of view of the husband and father, the protagonist whispers religious aphorisms to his daughters before plunging them down a well, telling them “Kiss your mother good night and remember that God saves” and later, “You know your papa loves you, good children go to heaven.”  The songs often touch upon bible-black topics like death, destruction and apocalypse, a subject that would have taken on new resonance during the cold war where potential nuclear destruction seemed to linger in everyone’s thoughts.  Tellingly, several songs, like “I Hear the Rain” and “It’s Gonna Rain,” invoke the story of Noah and the flooding of the earth.  But the centerpiece of the entire album must be the title track, which brings these themes of nuclear holocaust out from subtext.  The song begins with a spoken word invocation in the style of the King James Bible and plays with such atomic imagery as “Everyone's tryin’ to decide/where to go when there’s no place to hide/I follow the bombs as they’re coming down” and “Burn up the clouds block out the sun.”  A rising and falling piano melody leads us through the track, all the way to the end where it devolves into in a three way instrumental ruckus.  In fact several songs kick up a row in their later half, a strong disagreement between guitar, bass, and drums that perhaps signifies the conflicted nature of the album itself.

But there are also genuine gospel songs on the album, freed from any winking irony or tangled doubt.  And yet Hallowed Ground still feels like a Violent Femmes album through and through.  In part that’s because the songs are still written by the same three players who made their debut album such a classic and still include Gano’s recognizable bratty vocals and a one of the greatest series of bass lines in rock in roll.  In a sense Hallowed Ground allows us to reread the Violent Femmes’s eponymous album, forcing us to take a step back and reassess the psychosexual frustration that permeated those songs.  Instead of reading the first album as the ranting of a bored and randy kid, we might instead interpret those songs as the result of a teenager whose body was telling him something completely opposed to his upbringing.  And it is this difference between nature and religion that results in the dark night of the soul style questioning in Hallowed Ground.  Ultimately it’s because Gano’s religion is sufficiently suffused with doubt that no matter what your background, from agnostic to Episcopalian, there’s plenty in these songs that should resonate.  After all, no matter one’s ideological or religious grounding, if we do not struggle with at least some misgivings, then we have given ourselves up to someone else’s beliefs, not our own.   

About that Before Watcmen announcement...

This Wednesday the comic book loving world gave a collective sigh of inevitability when DC Comics threatened us with the release of a series of prequel comics to the beloved Alan Moore comic book The Watchmen. There's not a single comic-loving individual who didn't react strongly to the idea that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's immaculate vision might be sullied at the hands of a company more interested in a quick cash grab than in the artistic legacy of one of its most heralded accomplishments. Hell, even DC Comics seem aware of the firestorm they might set off, describing the new series, Before Watchmen, as both "highly anticipated" and "controversial," as if to say, "yeah, maybe we're pissing all over Moore's work, but what are you going to do, not read the series?" This statement would then be followed by a cigar chomping executive releasing a belly-shaking laugh.

Voices across the internet have reacted in a variety of manner, and there are some obvious objections to Before Watchmen. Over at NPR they ruminated on how prequels might ruin the cultural capital that The Watchmen has built for not only itself but for comics as a medium. Others have, understandably, treated the original book as sacrosanct, suggesting that no one should ever mess with Moore's artistic vision (most notably, Moore himself falls into this latter camp). But I would like to discuss two things: first, the idea of prequels and second, the idea of artistic fidelity.

Prequels are a tricky proposition in any medium. On the one hand, we should probably be thankful that we are only getting prequels and not actual sequels to The Watchmen, which ended on a wonderfully unsettled note. But of course prequel stories come with built in problems of their own. The most obvious problem is that we already know what will happen. A great writer can use this to his or her advantage. Greek tragedies, for example, got plenty of mileage out of the fact that the audience knew things were going to end poorly for the characters on stage. But for whatever reason, from the Star Wars prequels to that Wolverine movie, prequels have been unable to take advantage the audience's prescient like knowledge. Instead, these prequels have played out like the opening of Indiana Jone and the Last Crusade, showing us where every little personality trait and quirk came from over the course of a single story.

The Watchmen is as fully realized a fantasy world as Narnia, Middle Earth, Neverland, Utopia, Oz, and even DC Comics own world of superheroes. But in order to fashion a world that seems real and lived in, you have to allow for some unknowns. The author Michael Chabon writes that when reading Tolkien, like most of us, he was always intrigued by those blank places on the map, places named but where characters never actually visited. I'm of the mind that those blank places make a fantasy world feel huge and lived in, because whatever is going on with our heroes and their quest, we know that there are a million other stories that are not being told. This is why one of my favorite details about the original Star Wars movies was the inclusion of ancillary characters like Wedge Antilles, the pilot that seemed to always be around for the major battles, but who never had more than a few lines in each film. We knew that this character must have had some incredible adventures over the course of those three films, but we also knew that we were only seeing snippets of them.

To fill in the blank areas in The Watchmen books would only make the universe seem smaller and less unruly. Besides, the original book already does a fine job of fleshing out these characters. What more do we need to know? I guess these comics could elaborate on what Ozymandias's weird bio-engineered tiger thought of his master's solution to nuclear war.

The next issue I have with Before Watchmen is a little trickier. One of the announced authors of the series, J. Michael Straczynski, notes that Moore himself built a career of appropriating the work of others, whether he was working on Swamp Thing or playing in the world of Victorian literature in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series. So what's good for the Moore is good for the Straczynski? Besides, even The Watchmen was based, in part, on characters from Charleton Comics, which DC had bought just prior to when Moore embarked on writing the Watchmen series. And even I have to admit that DC managed to wrangle some impressive talent to write this series. I'm more than a little curious about what a Rorschach series written by Brian Azzarello or a Minutemen series written by Darwyne Cooke will read like.

First, I would answer that characters like Batman, Superman, and Swamp Thing (all of which Moore has worked with) were designed from the beginning to continue as long as people want to read stories about these characters. So they're a different breed than Night Owl or even Allan Quatermain and Sherlock Holmes. Just like Moore, Sir Author Conan Doyle became famously incensed when the French author and Doyle contemporary Maurice Leblanc put Holmes into one of his Arsene Lupin stories. So what's the difference between Leblanc stealing Holmes and Moore stealing Holmes? In a world where appropriation has now become established as a legitimately creative act, can we really blame the authors of Before Watchmen?

A cop out answer would be that Doyle was still around when Leblanc borrowed his creation, just as Moore is around to see his characters taken from him. Although I have decried DC's decision from the beginning, I don't necessarily think that it is unfair to borrow Moore's work. Unlike Moore himself, who famously hates on any sort of film adaptation of his work, I have always approached movies like V for Vendetta and The Watchmen with a certain amount of curiosity. Of course, none of these films have ever been successful adaptations, but that doesn't mean there will never be a successful adaptation of an Alan Moore comic. Instead, I think that the single biggest issue that will prevent a great appropriation of Moore's work is fidelity to the source material.

I know that the common reaction to any adaptation is to claim that if only the artist were faithful to the "original" vision, then maybe the end results will achieve the same kind of greatness. This was the mantra when The Watchmen movies was about to arrive. And that film was far more faithful to its source than any expected. It was also a slog and a bore. There are plenty of problems with The Watchmen film, and its slavish devotion to the source material is one of those problems. The director, Zack Snyer, who isn't a terribly smart fellow, didn't realize that what works in a comic book doesn't work on film. Conversely, Moore hasn't been terribly devoted to immaculately recreating the vision of the authors who he is taking from. Instead, he uses the work of others as a jumping off point to go in whatever direction he wants.

What scares me the most about Before Watchmen is that the original book has become so sacrosanct that the artists will do little than ape Moore and collect a paycheck. There might be someone out there who could do something interesting with The Watchmen characters, who could put their own spin on that universe. But judging from what I've seen of DC's decision, I doubt this will be the case. Maybe in fifty years or more, a young upstart will take Ozymandias, Rorschach, Night Owl and the rest and create something truly fantastic and unique with those characters. But until then, we should probably leave Moore's creation alone.

I must admit that my favorite part of any news story about an Alan Moore adaptation is the inevitable quote from Moore himself. And of course he doesn't disappoint in this regard. Reached for comment, Moore stated, “I tend to take this latest development as a kind of eager confirmation that they are still apparently dependent on ideas that I had 25 years ago.” This little jab, although wonderful in its curmudgeonly execution, isn't true exactly. Much of the comic book world has moved on from the cynical brand of deconstruction popular in the 80s and 90s. This is evident when books like Kick Ass unsuccessfully attempt to return to the well dug by artists of the 80s and 90s, and that book in particular has served as the nadir of deconstructionist trend, lacking the craftsmanship and wit found in a book like The Watchmen. Instead, some of the most interesting work in the world of comic books (specifically those of the superhero variety) have come from authors who, instead of running away from the unserious nature of comic books, have embraced the absurdist stories of the silver age. Authors like Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns have done a fine job of finally breaking away from the deathly seriousness of the 80s and 90s. Since a good deal of the comic book community has moved on from the influence of The Watchmen, it seems like an unnecessary retreat to return to that time and place. But, I suppose it could be worse. A lot worse:

American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar

American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar (5/5)

“Cleveland: You’ve Got to Be Tough”: this unofficial slogan of that industrial city off the shores of Lake Erie was smattered across t-shirts in the 1970s. In the following decades a lot has changed, but the one thing that has remained constant is our perpetual underdog status. Our sports teams don’t win championships and even several decades removed from the collapse of America’s industrial engine, we’re still the butt of jokes. But that’s not to say that we don’t take pride in the city. Fully expecting to lose, every year plenty of Cleveland sports fans crowd into the Jake or the Browns Stadium. We also have our share of famous artists from the region that we like to name check from time to time, from Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison to Oscar winner Trent Reznor. But perhaps no single artist better epitomizes the city than indie cartoonist Harvey Pekar.

Harvey Pekar was a lifelong resident of Cleveland. As recounted in the collection American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar, he first became interested in the medium of comic books after striking up a friendship with underground cartoonist, and occasional greeting card artist, R. Crumb. But unlike Crumb and other underground comic book artists who found their way to the one of the coasts where they found a reasonable amount of recognition, Pekar remained in Cleveland his entire life, toiling away as a file clerk in a local VA hospital while managing to pump out a series of often understated, always brilliant autobiographical comic shorts.

In some sense, Pekar is Cleveland and Cleveland is Pekar. Much like his home city, Pekar is a perpetual goat, slogging through the years and struggling to maintain a grip on himself. Most of the comics written for American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar were published in the 1970s and 80s, a time when the wide open possibilities found in the 60s counterculture were beginning to collapse. Likewise, Cleveland’s economy, which had once helped fuel the postwar boom, had capsized.

So we often find Pekar pontificating on the different racial factions of Cleveland and the rise to power of conservatives following civil rights. In one particularly affecting comic, Pekar relates the story of Emil, a European immigrant who worked in Cleveland’s steel mills. Emil begins his time in Cleveland as a union radical, but as white flight and economic depression take over the city, his attitudes change displaced by a racist view of the white and black culture clash of the 70s. Pekar of course sees Emil’s views on race as absurd and more than a little naïve. Emil doesn’t seem to realize the sort of racial tension that have built up in the African-American community over segregation and discrimination. But he tells Emil’s story empathetically as a missed chance for shared understanding. In a later story, “Jury Duty,” Pekar recounts his experience being chosen for everyone’s least favorite civic duty. He finds himself being co-opted by an out of control judicial system that overlooks crimes of the wealthy and powerful while judges have become increasingly draconian on the poor and powerless. Pekar decides that he cannot be a part of this out of balance system and stymies the judge and prosecution by telling them that he wouldn’t feel right determining someone’s guilt when he has no control over what punishment is dished out. In these moments his life as a sixties radical peeks through the grey of oil shortages and Reaganomics.

But Pekar isn’t normally cited for his views on large socio-economic issues. He is instead well known for looking at the quotidian aspects of life that seem to be constantly nipping at his heels. Pekar’s narratives often eschew the traditional structure of the short story, which are often comprised of three acts, a climax, and a denouement. Some of his shorter works, which are usually around a page or two, consist of mundane small talk heard on the bus or around the office. He might take on the subject of the punishingly long hours of a weekend with nothing to do where he dreads work on Monday morning but still cannot stand the lost time of the weekend. Mundane trips to the grocery store or helping a friend move can sometimes transform into a meditation on art and commerce or an existentialist crisis. Or these trips might just include a wry observation or two. Pekar feels no need to provide a clear justification for why these narratives exist. Instead, many of them feel as if they are little moments cut from a much larger reel of his life. And when a stray observation is used to tie up the end of the narrative, it’s thrown out there as nothing more than a possibility, as if Pekar is telling us, “This might be the moral of the story. Take it or leave it.”

Because of its everyday subject matter and occasional pontifications, the arc of Pekar’s work is impossible to parse with just one or two comics. These larger collections of American Splendor, then, are an ideal format for really digging into Pekar’s work, and The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar is an especially helpful starting point. While the American Splendor series consistently returns to subjects that directly affect Pekar’s life, the comics gets a lot of mileage out of these limited topics, and often his own life becomes merely a jumping off point for a whole host of issues. Pekar himself is not an artist, and has had to rely on wrangling others to illustrate his work. This has actually helped bring out the many facets of American Splendor in a way that a single artist would be insufficient. And each artist seems better suited to different aspects of Pekar’s work. R. Crumb, perhaps his most famous collaborator, brings out Pekar’s interest in racial, linguistic and cultural difference among the disparate ethnic groups of Cleveland, from Jews, African-Americans, Eastern Europeans, and Italians. Greg Budgett and Gary Dumm do a fantastic job of illustrating the nooks and crannies of urban life in Cleveland. Gerry Shamray, perhaps my favorite artist in the collection, delves into Pekar’s mental state, portraying a man at odds with himself, a man who is capable of great insight while at the same time unable to fully clamp down on his emotional distress.

And it’s this contradictory nature of Pekar that makes him a fascinating subject, despite the fact that he lacks the obvious trauma or grand life narrative that characterizes most memoirs and autobiographies. Pekar often pits his words and images against one another. In one story, “Ripoff Chick,” he describes a frustrating courtship of a somewhat daffy girl who’s unselfconsciously new age. While Pekar’s actions towards this woman are often troubling and always hilarious, he’s increasingly critical of his own behavior. Pekar freely admits that his disdain for this woman is at odds with his goals of, essentially, making his way into her pants. And so this split between Pekar the desperate curmudgeon barely containing his rage and disdain towards others brushes up against his exacting critical eye. This contradiction is easy to relate to. We aren’t all word boxes floating above our lives commenting on the world, just as we are not brains disconnected from our bodies. Instead, in our daily lives we are a bundle of emotions and energy that we sometimes have little control over. It is only in reflection that we can maintain a measure of repose. It is to Pekar’s credit that he puts himself in the crosshairs, dissecting not only those around him but his own anxieties as well.

But what is arguably the greatest achievement of Pekar’s work can be found in his somewhat ironic title. Most artistic works that use “American” in their title, or merely take on the mantle of an essentialized American experience, play in the arena of the upper middle class. Think American Beauty or American Pastoral, or even works by authors like Jonathan Franzen or John Updike. As a college dropout who purposefully chooses a tedious day job so that he can actually own his free time, Pekar does not easily fit into the normalized view of who the “idealized” American is. Instead, Pekar undercuts the totalizing effect of American as an adjective by linking it to his largely idiosyncratic life that, paradoxically, ties into experiences shared by many in the United States but are largely invisible in American art. And that’s the genius of Pekar’s work. The mundane, individualized aspects of Pekar’s art feed into universal existentialist questions that we all must confront. Somewhere between Anton Chekov and Jerry Seinfeld lies Harvey Pekar. And the world is much better for his having lived in it.