Reading Comics: Free Talk on Monday Night

This Monday night I’ll be giving a free, casual talk at North Fitzroy library explaining once and for all: what’s so good about comic books, anyway? Here’s the details:

Reading Comics with Martyn Pedler

7pm, Monday August 9th

North Fitzroy library

240 St Georges Rd, North Fitzroy Vic 3068

In the spirit of Thunderdome, I’ll be splitting the night down the middle. Half on the best of the indie / alternative scene and the particular joys of the comic book medium, and half on how to wade into the regularly insane world of superhero comics. Feel free to come along and tell me about whatever favourites I’ve missed.

Some exclamation points to get you excited:

Doom Patrol! American Splendor! Hellboy! Astro City! Jimmy Corrigan! Batman: Year One! From Hell! Casanova! Bottomless Belly Button! All-Star Superman! Eddy Current! Sandman! David Boring! Zot! Probably some X-Men, too!

If anyone’s bored in Melbourne on Monday night, it’d be great to see you.

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Inception’s Dream Architecture

Sorry, Batman. Inception is probably Christopher Nolan’s best film.

So I’m especially pleased that it’s a success, both critically and at the early box office – because any time a non-franchise, non-remake, non-adapted blockbuster does well, it’s good for cinema in general. Weirdly, though, I’ve seen half a dozen reviews who take exception to one thing in particular: that Inception’s dream worlds don’t feel like dreams.

There’s a collection of these dream descriptions here: “curiously pedestrian”, “too literal-minded”, or reducing the human subconscious to “a routine action movie”.

Because dreams are, like, crazy! Why didn’t Nolan include a scene of my high school that also wasn’t my high school, you know? Or a clown, who’s just kind of there? Dude!

Inception features “dream architects”, deliberately constructing their own mental mazes, so it should be obvious these aren’t your usual, organic dreams. Inception’s characters project themselves inside them, or see their unconscious minds rushing in to fill their hypothetical spaces. It’s all more Wachowski than Freud, and Nolan has very little interest in the “Hey! Look! A backwards dancing dwarf!” non sequiturian style used by filmmakers like David Lynch to emulate dreaming on screen.

We barely even see the machine that allows them to network their dreams together – and why should we? What do we need to know other than when they press the button? And travelling between dream-states doesn’t come with swirling CGI tunnels like Avatar’s shifting consciousnesses. Nolan lets regular editing do all the work.

Over at IO9, Annalee Newitz says Inception will “change the way you watch movies”. Well, maybe. Maybe not. But she is dead right to suggest that Inception’s special effects sequences are “as much about how you stage an action scene as they are about the scenes themselves”.

For example: when dream-thief Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) asks his dream-victim Fischer (Cillian Murphy) why he can’t remember how they got here – how their scene actually began – it works as a quick flash of dream-illogic. But it also works much more powerfully as a reminder of how movies are edited. After all, we didn’t see the beginning of this scene, either. Like Buston Keaton in his masterpiece Sherlock Jr., we are all trapped between the edits, stitching the moments together as best we can.

Christopher Nolan has always been more of an architect than a storyteller, and sometimes that’s hurt his films. The Prestige, for instance, suffered from his determination to keep the three-act structure of a magic trick – because it meant leaving the big ta daaa! reveal until long after the audience had already guessed it. It benefited, however, from David Bowie playing Nikola Tesla, which is empirically awesome. See?

This time, Nolan’s obsession with structural puzzles don’t interfere with Inception’s story. They are its story. No matter what ambiguous concepts are whizzing around a scene, they’re in the service of one thing: action. Big, old-fashioned action. In fact, it contains numerous jaw-dropping action scenes – hardly “routine” – all constructed with real weight and gravity – and they cut through the film’s more pretentious moments like a hot bullet through butter.

That’s what makes this a more than worthy sequel to The Matrix – just ten years later than expected.

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Mama’s Got a Squeeze Box

I’ve recently been rewatching the short-lived and fondly remembered teen drama Freaks and Geeks. (If you haven’t, you really should. It’s great.)

In one episode, Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini) is trying to convince her parents to let her go to an upcoming concert by The Who. They decide to listen to one of the band’s albums first to see if they approve and, inevitably, find themselves interpreting the lyrics to Squeeze Box.

“Mama’s got a squeeze box, Daddy never sleeps at night /  She goes in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out…”

Her father isn’t impressed: “Just keep those boys away from your accordion!”

It got me thinking, though, about all the ways to secretly describe getting some in song. First some rules, though, because what’s sex talk without rules? (Chaos, that’s what.)  If we’re just talking about the sex act itself, then we disqualify other kinds of dirty euphemisms. All those songs that are bragging about a particular body part, for instance.

And we also discount artists who seem happier letting their lyrics stand naked than dressing them in metaphors. Missy Elliott’s Work It? Prince’s Mad Sex? I’m looking at you. I mean, hip-hop seemed to run out of metaphors – and spellcheckers – even before it reached Nelly’s Hot In Herre. “It’s gettin’ hot in here,” he crooned. “So take off all your clothes.”

(That’s just cause and effect, baby.)

What’s left is often A) edible, from 50 Cent’s Candy Shop to Warrant’s Cherry Pie. Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer asked us to “Open up your fruit cage / Where the fruit is as sweet as can be.”

Or B) automotive. R. Kelly – whose Bump and Grind became a part of everyday speech – gave us the unforgettable gift of Ignition. “Girl, please let me stick my key in your ignition”. “Girl, back that thing up so I can wax it, baby.” And Grace Jones’ post-disco classic Pull Up To The Bumper is hilariously dirty: “Pull up to my bumper baby / In your long black limousine / Pull up to my bumper baby / And drive it in between.”

If wikipedia is to be believed, Pull Up To The Bumper was used on a children’s TV channel in 2002, and no one seemed to care. The thinnest metaphorical veil is usually enough to get away with anything. Remember Madonna’s performance at the Haiti telethon? It marked the moment where the whole world seemed convinced that Like A Prayer is actually about, you know, praying.

Once enough time has gone by, you don’t even need to disguise your lyrics. Familiarity turns everything to muzak. I remember hearing Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side playing in my local supermarket. No one heard: “But she never lost her head / Even when she was giving head…”

Everyone heard: “Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo…”

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Love Exposure: jmag review

Despite my usual demands that every film should be 87 minutes long at most, I enjoyed the hell out of Sion Sono’s truly epic Love Exposure, coming out soon on DVD. Here’s my quick review from this month’s jmag – though I must admit that fitting four hours of oddness into a couple of paragraphs might’ve been beyond me.

LOVE EXPOSURE

(AI NO MUKIDASHI)

Directed by: Sion Sono

Starring: Takahiro Nishijima, Hikari Mitsushima, Sakura Ando

Country: Japan

Love Exposure is a four-hour movie about an expert upskirt photographer – so saying it’s Japanese is probably redundant, isn’t it?

It begins with Yu being forced into confession by his Catholic father. At first he invents his sins, but soon decides to actually commit them. After he’s told that everything he seeks can be found “between a woman’s legs”, he becomes an urban ninja of voyeur photography.

That’d be enough insanity for most films, but Love Exposure is more ambitious. It’s also a family farce, redemptive love story, cross-dressing kung fu comedy, and hysterical psychodrama. Its relentless exploration of how religion and sex combine gives it unexpected depth among the erection jokes. (It uses the word “pervert” so often that somewhere John Waters’ ears are burning.)

Could it’ve been shorter? Sure. But I have no idea what could’ve been cut. I just pretended it was a TV miniseries and watched it in three chunks. When you watch it – and you should – I suggest you do the same.

Other reviews this month: the less-painful-than-expected Shrek Forever After in cinemas; Tom Ford’s A Single Man and Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland on DVD.

Issue #41 is on sale now.

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