It's time again for the annual traditional self-flagellation of usually-respected film critics (and hangers-on such as myself) known as the White Elephant Blog-a-thon--usually held on April Fool's Day, writers on film the world over gather to subject themselves to metaphorical, and occasionally literal, footballs in the groin in the name of... science?

Everyone submits a bad movie, and everyone gets a bad movie to watch. Occasionally, there's a surprising nugget or two of interest buried in the dreck, and sometimes there isn't.

Taoism Drunkard (Or, Drunken Wu Tang)

In one line

If there is one line out of the many, in Mystery Science Theater 3000, one line that I've taken as my own in the way of the true fan, it would be this: In episode 511, while watching the agonizing Beverly Garland picture "Gunslinger," series creator Joel Hodgson lets a bit of sincerity slip out towards the end, just stating outright that "This movie is just sitting on my head and crushing it." I always thought it was the perfect turn of phrase for that feeling, of being trapped, of weathering something so inane and yet so depressing. I've used it during bad films ever since, often not even as a joking reference, just as a lament.

I was mumbling that line to myself from very early into this picture.

Yuen Wo-Ping made this as part of what I take to be a (loose?) trilogy of films. It's a comedy, sort of.

Story, of sorts

There's an evil wizard called Old Devil, who I think was a condemned man who rose back out of Hell? And he wants a secret and powerful writ for reasons that I think I missed--but it's clearly powerful, because it's in the control of a family of martial artists and mystics, including a nasty old granny and virginal Cha Le, who is in training in the house's labryinth of booby traps when he isn't romancing a local girl. Meanwhile, the titular drunkard has made such a mess of his brother's temple that he's charged with finding a "Cherry Boy," a virgin born on a particular date in order to perform a particular ritual. The two plots colliding is pretty much the only obvious thing that happens here; the rest is a mess of sidetracks and non sequiters, including a trio of corrupt tax collectors and a pair of adulterers who get tangled up in the whole thing.

Confession

I tried, I really did. I consider myself fairly sturdy, when it comes to cinematic disaster. It's true that I don't seek out what I don't think I'll enjoy (and I'm not a paid critic, so I can be as picky as I goddamn well want) but I grew up on MST3K and my wife and I own a pile of shitty-ass films purchased solely for the purposes of riffing on them, something that I've done with many friends over the years.

But what it's easy to forget, until you're "working," is how different it is to watch bad film alone. So yes, I tried, but my eyes kept wandering. The subtitles were atrocious to the point of cliche, and for an ostensible comedy, long sections of this thing dragged on and on. So I was not a perfectly attentive professional critic. This assignment was supposed to be fun, you bastards!

Rebuttal

Of course, I exaggerate for effect. I've seen worse. If anything, the only real problem is that bad shouldn't be boring, the real sin that Taoism Drunkard commits about 60% of the time. The other 40% though...

There's some fair so-bad-it's-good in here, and we'll get to that, and there's the what-the-fuck, and we'll get to that, but I've gotta give a shout out to my homeboy Shining Knight, who I swear fought his way tooth and nail from a better movie for the chance to save this one (failing miserably).

I couldn't find a picture of the real one from this movie, so here's Grant Morrison's to liven the article.

Anyway, Shining Knight is one of the tax collectors, partnered with an overweight woman whose martial arts moves consist largely of "sit on opponent," and he gets one of the only deliberately comedic moments to make me laugh, which was his "machine fist" style of fighting, in which he dances the robot. He also has a decent slapstick moment when he catapults himself by accident, and his "final battle" involves pulling his limbs inside his armor like a tortoise. It's not that Shining Knight is a brilliant character, or that his jokes are hilarious, it's that they're funny at all, and in a better movie I could see them fitting in better (sort of an understudy of a minor character in a Stephen Chow film).

So, speaking of the martial arts... it's fine, when it's happening (not often enough). Everything's rough, as befits a movie that must have been made for $8, but Yuen Wo-Ping is acclaimed for a reason, and so splitting down the middle... it's fine. Occasionally fun, occasionally blah. Certainly the only genuine highlights of the film.

East Side - West Side

What I kept thinking, while watching Taoism Drunkard, was how archetypal it felt to me. That might be an odd thing to think about a film where a man dresses as a penis, or where a demon uses a floating cannonball (filled with smaller floating cannonballs!) in battle, but honestly, there's something very obvious-seeming in between the ever-so-occasional grand flourishes. It was the prologue, if that's the right word, that did it for me, I think. This review runs down the details so that I don't have to. It's almost self-consciously bizarre, seemingly for its own sake, and the fight scene (while relatively engaging--many reviews cite it as the comparative high point for the film) is rote and arbitrary, with little build-up... I keep thinking of that old Simpsons parody of Bollywood films, which was both fair and unfair at the same time.

See, the thing about this "comedy," is that when it begins--and yes, part of this is no doubt the fault of the translators and their "Engrish" subtitles--is that you're not immediately sure that it is a comedy; it might just be, you know... "Asian." Hold on, now, let me finish.

There is a tension, not always spoken, sometimes over-spoken, in what I'm going to call "fan culture" for the sake of concision, in the West--this idea that things from the East are cool because they are from the East, and that the East is cool because of their cool things, and that's as far as the interest and the curiosity and the knowledge is ever going to go. Japan is where Naruto and Nintendo come from, and that's that, you know? I'm in that generation, I can say that. And my wife and I have piles of Tezuka and Urasawa, stacks of Evangelion and Satoshi Kon, Miyazaki, a Nintendo Wii and a DS, and I've spent a lot of time talking about that stuff here and elsewhere. We have martial arts films from Hong Kong, serious ones and silly ones. My friend Justin, who lives on and off in Tokyo, once told me a story about this Japanese girl he knew, she was dating a Western guy, and all he wanted to talk about was anime, which, you know, she wasn't actually interested in...

There's something sad and archetypal about this film, particularly in its opening scene, that gave me all kinds of creepy-crawlies.

Reactions

People seem to like it! Seems to be solely on the "What the Fuck" scale, but I scanned references to the film all over the 'net and there's an awful lot of thumbs-up for this. Is it just that it's a martial arts movie with weird shit in it? Is that really all it takes? See, this is what I'm talking about. Man, I quit.

Penis

This movie is obsessed with dick. Even for a lowbrow comedy, even for a lowbrow comedy set in a martial arts milieu with all its sledgehammer-obvious Freudian sword stuff, its obsession with the male member is a little too on-the-nose. I think it was the moment where our drunken "hero" is searching for Cherry Boys by examining the genitalia of young boys and is then "mistakenly" (?) believed to be a pervert, when I realized that maybe there was too much thinking about dick in this movie. The film even ends with a pregnancy--the "comedy" is over the second all this "dicking around" has consequences.

Which also leads into the last bit...

The only reason to see this movie

Watermelon Monster.

WATERMELON MONSTER.

WATERMELON MONSTER!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!

This film has given me nightmares. This thing has tentacles, by the way. And it makes disturbing, unheimlich noises of the damned. Oh, and it feeds on dick. Seriously. "Banana addict," Cha Le calls it. It's the embodiment of the castration nightmare. This thing is so terrifying that the evil wizard faces it and takes off, utterly flabbergasted. It is the "What the fuck" moment that justifies the film's existence (in a sense, anyway) and is the only thing that makes it notable. There's a short bit where the drunken martial artists rides around in a little wicker car shaped like a rat, but it's instantly forgotten in the face of this... face. I hate all of you for making me watch this movie.

Holiday's over, I guess. Back to work. Sigh.

• Tim O'Neil did a fantastic write-up on the values and drawbacks of the Mandarin as Iron Man's arch-nemesis, which is particularly relevant with his likely appearance in Iron Man 3.
• People venting on terrible working conditions at Diamond. Grain-of-salt reading, but not exactly hard to believe, either.
• I don't know why, out of all the silly pop thought articles I read a day, I was so taken with this note about the unhealthiest chain restaurant foods, maybe because I've noticed my weight not-so-steadily ballooning over the last two years, maybe because watching the KFC Double Down become a meme became tiresome very quickly.
• Speaking of memes, and aren't we always: another day, another Garfield thing. I thought this was cool: taking the color averages of a whole year's worth of strips and analyzing the pattern. The results, of course, will not surprise you.
• Shilling for someone I don't know: I first caught wind of the awesome craft work of Eyes5 over at the forums for MSPaint Adventures (about which more in this week's comics column), but their latest creation, dolls of Nu from Chrono Trigger, was so far up my alley that I couldn't help but point folks over to the sight.

It's been a really strange couple of months, and things haven't gone according to plan at all, but I am sincerely praying that the rough patch has passed. We'll see.

***

Speaking of Moore and Morrison, as that column continued to do, I just saw this post, which reaffirms some of the things I've said in the column thus far. Between this recent column and the earlier Gurren Lagann review, I've leaned on that Moore/Morrison thing a little hard lately, and I'm hoping to go someplace else in future columns. Morrison shows up a bit more than I planned in the next two installments, but it was a little unavoidable based on format--beyond those, I want to get a little further away before I'm permanently branded as an advocate of the same half-dozen comic people. The next column is in my editor's hands and the next is underway, but beyond that I'm not sure exactly where I want to go next.

***

I'm going out of town for a week--not sure if I'll be updating, even if the column's next installment goes up at the House in my absence (and I'm not sure exactly what the timetable on that is going to be). I'll be working on some reviews and things offline while I'm gone, but I might not be heard from until my return. That said, best way to reach me if necessary will probably be Twitter (see the sidebar). Let's meet back here next week, under the old oak tree.

Comics Column #5b: The Fragrance of Nostalgia

In which much hay is made out of two failed comic book movies, one from Hollywood and one from Japan.

"The argument over the importance of "authorial intent" has been waging since long before I was born, but it pales in the face of the idea this story represents: the narrative that we write ourselves about the art we experience or consume will override even the literal facts about that work.

[A cynic (like myself, unsurprisingly) could relate this to what feels like a growing resistance to empiricism in this country, one that feels culturally damaging. But this isn't an article about that, it's an article about my pithy response to comic book adaptation.]"

I've already sent the next column in, so it shouldn't be all that long before it drops, either. I can't promise they'll all be so regular, but not adhering to the original format is helping somewhat.

If you aren't trying to be this good every day:

...Then get the fuck out, because we don't need you.

Krigstein, "Master Race" (h/t Joe Bloke)

The plot point of the current arc revolves around a fake novel released in the "Tommy Taylor" series, and the publisher admits in the latest issue that the fake is poorly written cobbled together from stolen ideas, including from J.K. Rowling, and the real author of "Tommy Taylor" would never stoop so low. Except that "Tommy Taylor" is an unabashed pastiche of Rowling. That Tommy Taylor and Harry Potter are basically the same character works fine for the conceit of the series, but only if Rowling doesn't exist in the book's world, which until now seemed to be the case. But to say that Harry Potter exists in this world and the Tommy Taylor series is the exact same material, but written better and for longer, leading to an even more rabid fanbase, with no acknowledgement of their similarity--it shows a lack of self-awareness that I honestly thought writer Mike Carey was above. A shame.

Anyway, a real review:

***

Batman: Dark Knight, Dark City (Batman # 452-454) - Peter Milligan/ Kieron Dwyer

This old Batman arc has been talked up quite a bit lately, as it serves as direct influence and prologue for Morrison's current Batman saga (along with the divisive Starlin/Wrightson Batman: The Cult and Morrison's own Batman: Gothic - actually, Dark Knight, Dark City has never been collected, and it would fit well in a bound volume with Gothic, as they share similar ideas and conceits). It's a pretty well-liked series--even Tucker made a point of telling me on Twitter that he thought it was pretty rad when he read it.

And there's plenty to recommend it: the premise is a solid one, that there is a demon ("Barbathos") whose invocation cursed the fledgling Gotham City in the eighteenth century, leading to Gotham's blight of madness today, and also that the demon, as personified by Gotham City, created Batman as a means to free itself. That's some solid stuff right there, and the demon possessing Riddler as a means of getting Batman to go through the ritual that will free him is also a nice touch--could this be retconned as the reason that Riddler started taking the venom drug, to deal with his possession? Does the chronology work for that?

Milligan makes some missteps, however, which detract from the story's now-classic status. That Barbatos makes Riddler into a more bloodthirsty villain is fine, and it seems like it's fed into Morrison's current thesis--we're leading up to, one would think, a final confrontation with Barbathos via Simon Hurt, representing the reason for the poisonous darkening of Batman stories (cf Batman #666 via Seven Soldiers & Final Crisis)--but it's not established until the second of the three issues. In the first issue, Riddler's casual amorality comes off less like a mystery than a mishandling of the character that is explained after the fact, when Milligan is clearly smarter than that. Also, the literary reference motif he uses falls flat: In Cold Blood, The Trial, Seduction of the Innocent, The Crying of Lot 49, and A Clockwork Orange are all referenced in ways that feel out of place--the Pynchon one may be the worst offender, since it muddies the themes that Milligan seems to be getting at. More petty complaints come with John Costanza's lettering--there are overlapping sources of narration here, and in differentiating them, he uses an overly-muddy handwriting for the eighteenth-century diary and an oddly formal typeface for the demon/city. Also, in the classic "connecting dots on a map" bit, one of the dots appears to be in the wrong place in one panel, so that the pattern gets temporarily confused.

That said, what's fascinating going back to the story now is how fully prescient it seems to be. The Barbathos ritual is all about washing in blood, threatening babies, and battling zombies--2010 superhero decadence in microcosm. What Milligan does, of course, is make a point about the whole thing being out of character, out of tone, and poisonous, something Morrison is still trying to get across twenty years later. There's a distinct impression that Milligan, though, can't quite take the whole thing seriously to begin with, given the black humor that pervades (zombie robots, the bit where Batman almost can't brake the Batmobile fast enough to avoid running over a baby, and Dwyer has one panel with a Batarang held out in a phallic way which I hope is coincidence).

The similarities between the story and Gothic are notable, as well, and they came out in the same year. Both posit that Batman was formed by something from the underworld and despite his noble aims carries something of the avatar of evil. What's interesting, though, is that each ends the story differently--in Morrison's story, Batman casts the whole thing away and on some level denies the metaphysics of what he's gone through, and given the fact that some part of Gothic exists as a response to Arkham Asylum, which went so far (or too far) in the other direction, that makes sense. But Milligan's Batman largely just resigns himself to what may be true, deeming it unimportant in the face of his obsession. It's probably a more accurate take on the character for that, and I wonder somewhat if Morrison agreed, given the denial or acceptance of mystery is a large part of what fueled the whole "Black Casebook" bit and thus the core of Morrison's "incorporate it all" take on Batman in his current run.

***

Also: I recently put up a comics newspost on Mediaelites, regarding the Pat Lee thing and the webcomics app embarrassment and such--the permalink is here--but the site appears to be wacky as all Hell right now, and links aren't working right. Hopefully it'll get cleared up soon, but I'm not sure what's going on there.

The only problem seems to be the second half of that name. Comic-Con just sounds so… nerdy. At least, that’s how Comic-Con International seems to view it, as their efforts to push the comic book content out in favor of that fat Hollywood cash seem less subtle than ever.

"Shit sucks, film at eleven," that's my journalistic credo.

A favorite bit here:

By itself, in the isolated, insular world of comics, this makes perfect sense: If the characters of the '30s and '40s existed on a separate Earth from the characters of the '50s, then it makes perfect sense that characters created later would have existed on still another Earth. But the subtext here -- no matter how unintentional it is -- is that these newer characters don't belong in the DC Universe. They need to be somewhere else while the real characters, the ones who, by coincidence, aren't black or Italian or have Latino parents, have their real adventures.

It's the unintentional building of a cosmic-scale meta-textual ghetto.

Go, take a look. And for "fun," count off in the comments thread before someone outs themselves as ignorant - it, thankfully, takes a bit longer than usual, but not all that long.

• Matt Zoller Seitz, founder of The House Next Door, drops by Salon to point out that superhero films have proven themselves to be creatively bankrupt exercises that, as a genre, don't even aspire to as much as superhero comics.
• Over at The Comics Journal, Rob Clough takes a look at the Hicksville rerelease, including how retrospectively it seems to chart the trajctory of Horrocks's career, and also reminding us why the book is a modern classic.

I'm working on a handful of stuff over here, but things are going slowly. More hopefully soon.