Once again, I have fallen behind in linking to my Spot-on columns.
The BBC was caught up in a series of scandals earlier this year, which also raised issues about presenting “reality” on TV. If the devil is in the details, then we may be Dancing with the Devil.
I’ve missed a lot of movies this summer, but I did catch the latest Bourne thriller, The Bourne Ultimatum. The Bourne movies are generally popcorn action flicks, but done in an intelligent fashion. Remember The World Is Not Enough (1999), where James Bond drives a speed boat through the streets of London and Denise Richards is a nuclear physicist? Smarter than that. What I found interesting about The Bourne Ultimatum is how much it reflected real-life misdeeds by our government, so I focused on that issue in Let’s Go to the Movies.
Warren Ellis’ debut novel Crooked Little Vein had a lot of pre-release buzz, so I got it right after it came out. In Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, I discussed Ellis’ portrait of an America gone wild.
Finally, two news stories last week caught my eye: one on guitars and one on comic books. Ah, $weet No$talgia; Your Memorie$ For $ale makes the connection between these two cultural icons and is another sign of my new trend of writing about comics.
More on this last one… I was irked by a company that could permanently seal a comic book in a plastic box. That led to this bit:
Famed comic book writer/artist Frank Miller (Sin City, 300) has suggested that that perhaps he could just sell comic books with covers and blank pages within.
I didn’t really get into it, given space constraints and focus, but there are bigger issues that plague the comic book industry and hold it back as an artform. Here are two relevant quotes.
First, writer Brian Michael Bendis talks about what it was like to work in a comic book store as he was starting out and describes the hysteria of the early Nineties of comic book speculation:
I remember some dude coming in with, I think, X-Men #1, with Jim Lee, you know, and he’d bought it off the Home Shopping Network. And he said, “Hey, give me $200 for this.” And we’re like, “Nah, that’s okay, man.” And he goes, “No, no, it’s worth $200.” And we’re like, “No, it really isn’t worth anything.” And he goes, “But I have this Certificate Of Authenticity.” And my manager pulls out this long-box of X-Men that were unsold, and he goes, “No, we’re good.” And the guy got mad at us, he goes, “You’re lying to me.” And we go, “We’re not taking the comic book, we’re not trying to buy from you. We’re being as honest as anyone could be, we don’t want anything from you. The lie would be, we’re trying to get it for $10. It’s not worth anything.” And I did feel like, “This is gonna be bad.” And it got bad real fast.
Next, writer Grant Morrison nicely points out the big trouble with comics, one that has kept me out (as I noted previously):
If we still can’t sell well-written, well-drawn books at a time when everybody in the world is watching superhero movies and eating superhero cereals, it’s because the pricing, format, promotion and availability of comic books is preventing us from cracking the glass ceiling. Comics used to be available everywhere.
One Response
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Dave Arnott Says:
So someone just told me this, which proves I’m somewhat of a lazy viewer (and also losing some memory as I approach my middle 40′s), but in the second Bourne movie (Supremacy), there’s a scene near the end where Joan Allen’s character tells Bourne his real name over the phone.
This scene is also in the new movie. The exact scene, which they didn’t pull, they redid the whole thing, shot for shot, word for word… except they added that address clue thingie (I think).
How cool is that? That the third movie essentially lives nested inside the second movie, and/or keeps the Bourne continuum in line.
Hey… The Bourne Continuum. That has a nice ring to it.