ShamOww!

Click here to read the Rider's Block Twitter page regarding Vince Shlomi's altercation with an alleged call girl.

Sorry I Crashed Your Black Panther Party

I'd heard excellent things about writer Christopher Priest's run on Black Panther back in 1998, but I didn't actually pay attention to the character until the series relaunched seven years later. I picked it up mainly because fan-favorite artist John Romita Jr. penciled the first arc, but also because writer Reginald Hudlin's take on the hero seemed intriguing.

Hudlin lost me shortly after J.R. took his leave. I forget the particulars; suffice it to say it was because of the writing, not the character.

My interest is renewed because of Marvel's Secret Invasion: Black Panther collection. At only three issues long, it's one of the shorter comic trades you'll find, but it managed to make me care about the character again.

There's something inherently right about an arrogant warrior-king who's always two steps ahead of the bad guys. This ain't your typical neurotic superhero fretting about where the money for his aunt's medication is coming from. He's an Oxford-educated physicist, an inventor, and a skilled military strategist. This cat (yeah I said it) rules an industrialized African country that's never been conquered by anyone. He's like Batman crossed with Tony Stark crossed with Dr. Doom. Who would dare mess with the guy--especially knowing he won't hesitate to run you through with his sword?

Aliens, it turns out.

Jason Aaron wrote this incredible tie-in to last year's Secret Invasion event. While the rest of the Marvel heroes had their asses handed to them by the invading Skrull armada, Black Panther formulated a plan before the green bastards even arrived in his kingdom of Wakanda.

They should've turned around as soon as they caught a glimpse of what the slack-jawed readers saw on page three.

It was a tight, action-packed read, and it left me wanting more. I'm going to order Christopher Priest's two trades from '98 for starters. (Come to think of it, that's all I can order since the rest of his run isn't collected.)

After Iron Man 2 and The Avengers, Rider would like to see Marvel Studios release a Black Panther movie. Just keep Hudlin away from the script and it could be great.

Rider Takes Public Transportation After Dark

This review is leaving the station and will take a turn down a dark tunnel to Hell. Don't despair, though, because I'll let you off at an unusual bus stop. You might even thank me.

Clive Barker is one of my writing influences, and many of the movie adaptations of his work have also left their mark on my subconscious. Images from Nightbreed to Candyman have stuck with me through the years. Even as recently as yesterday I was reminded of my favorite Andrew Robinson quote from Hellraiser: "It's never enough."

The director of The Midnight Meat Train, Ryûhei Kitamura, apparently echoes Robinson's claim--except in this film he isn't talking about the human condition...he's talking about the liberal use of blood on a movie set.

The sheer amount of gore here is almost a wonder to behold. It's absolutely gruesome. Even without it, this movie grips you by the back of the neck and drags you screaming into the black abyss. This isn't a horror flick for the casual viewer.

Keep in mind I love that kind of thing. I cheered during the lawnmower scene in Peter Jackson's Braindead (or Dead Alive, as I knew it when it was released in the U.S.). But that's how I roll. Your mileage may vary.

Vinnie Jones plays a sinister heavy named Mahogany who waits patiently on a subway bench, Forrest (Ackerman) Gump-like, for the first train after 2:00 AM. And pity the poor soul who happens to share a car with him once he reaches into his large black bag and retrieves his silver tenderizing mallet.

Just like any great Barker story, Meat Train doesn't flinch from the necessity of an inevitable, bleak ending. And, brother, it is bleak. How much more bleak could it be? None. None more bleak.

In other commuter news, here's a cool scene from the upcoming Fox Searchlight movie (500) Days of Summer. I'd buy a year-long pass for that bus ride. Wouldn't you?

Last stop, Rider's Block Station. Mind the gap.

We here on the Block would also encourage interested parties to check out The Midnight Meat Train's special feature "Cliver Barker: The Man Behind The Myth." Rider has never felt like more of a lazy jerk than he did upon seeing the staggering number of paintings Barker has completed--keeping in mind the man started painting at the age of 45. This image shows you how many canvases he considers "failures." They're kept in a tent and referred to as "the planet of the fucked-up." And even some of those were painted over five times.

Battlestar Gateway-ica

A preliminary note to Battlestar fanatics who stumbled upon this post while searching "Galactica kicks ass": This blog will only anger you. Stop reading now. Back-button and go away. You won't like what I'm about to say here in my little corner of the Innertubes.

If you read ahead anyway and are determined to label me a douche, allow me to take the wind out of your puffed-up chest right from the get-go by saying:

I'm an idiot. I write unentertaining things. Of the 200 posts I've published, none of my commenters has ever agreed with my ridonkulous positions on pop culture.

Buh-bye now.

Now--are my three regular readers still here?

Good.

This is for your eyes only:

Battlestar Galactica started out as a friggin' phenomenal show. Remember when I watched every episode, up through the second season, in an unemployment marathon screening one year ago? Remember how I said it was "truly one of the best examples of the science fiction genre, period"?

Well, it was.

It goddamn well was.

If someone offered me a kick in the nuts or free DVD copies of the first two seasons of Battlestar, guess which I'd choose?

But that's exactly where it stopped being unbelievably excellent and became...just slightly above average.

The show sputtered and flamed out halfway through the second season's last episode ("Lay Down Your Burdens"). No spoilers, but I'd thought that finale was just a dream. Then the third season picked up with that deflated turd of a twist, and I sat back on my couch with my head cocked to the side like a retarded Labrador and said, "Huh."

But I persisted. It was still better science fiction than Enterprise, and I watched that entire run with a vapid smile on my face. I plowed through the rest of the shows as they came out on DVD, finally catching up to the live ones just as the final season began. I enjoyed them enough to patiently wait out the mid-season hiatus, and, just as I was getting excited by the possible direction of the final ten installments...

...I just don't know what the point is anymore.

The series became anti-climactic 30 minutes into that premiere. Now it's literally crawling toward the finish line like Simon Pegg's character in Run Fatboy Run.

We're down to the last two episodes. One tonight. One next week.

I almost don't care to watch, though, because even if the producers manage to pull out of this screaming nose-dive with a fantastic finale, it doesn't make up for the fact that the series has become a shadow of what it promised to be. What's more, it's become a bad parody of itself.

Fer frak sake, I always accepted how much smoking and drinking was going on on that damn ship. I'm a liberal guy. I get it. When your civilization is wiped out and life sucks, one expects a few vices to surface. And they surfaced a lot. But last week Adama actually started toking weed.

I don't know how I expected the series to end, but I didn't think it would dovetail with the sensibilities of Pineapple Express or Half Baked.

I hear Adama's new first officer will be Tommy Chong.

Rider Watches Them, That's Who - Updated

I'll be honest: there's no way for me to write an objective Watchmen movie review without mentioning the comic. I considered several different directions to take this review, and they all came full-circle back to the source material. (Kinda like the first and last panels of the actual mini-series...and if you don't get that reference, you should stop now.)

I read the individual issues as they first came out in 1986, and I knew from the beginning that I was experiencing something way beyond the cookie-cutter superhero comics I'd been buying up until that point. Important and complex things were happening. By the twelfth issue, I didn't exactly consider the series bona fide literature--but that was only because I hadn't realized that comics could be literature.

I reread the hardcover collection in the weeks leading up to the movie's premiere, and there's no doubt in my mind that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons created a literary masterpiece. (I also listened to the entire series of Comic Geek Speak "Footnotes" podcasts recapping each issue, because I knew I'd missed themes and symbolism in the past. Those boys clued me in to stuff I hadn't even considered. Kudos to them.)

I wish I could tell you that if I weren't the comic book fan I am, that I would've loved the movie anyway. I wish I could, but it's impossible to be sure. At the bare minimum it succeeds in depicting an alternate world on the brink of nuclear Armageddon, populated by a handful of impotent heroes forced into retirement and/or employed as weapons by the military. The plot poses the mystery of who would eliminate these castrated heroes and why, then asks us to judge a Big Bad who uses a proverbial sword on a Gordian Knot in order to change everything. Going by a "this tale hasn't been told on film yet" level alone, it delivered the goods.

Zack Snyder compressed a lot of storytelling into his film, but it didn't feel like overkill. I summarily dismiss other critics' claims that he was a slave to the adaptation. It's nonsense. As much respect as I have for Gibbons' art, I wouldn't necessarily call his work dynamic. Snyder's visuals on this movie were dynamic; almost breathtaking at times. He lifted many panels from the comic, but you're an idiot if you didn't expect him to. He owned the look of this reality (only David Fincher could have done it better).

Snyder took liberties with a few plot elements, and many fans have, in turn, taken issue with those fixes. (The poor guy simply can't win...should he change shit or shouldn't he?) I can confirm that the ratio of what he left to what he noticeably changed is about 10 to 1. But the things he did tweak were necessary to the believability of the story. There are a lot more folks who'll see this movie that didn't read the comic than those who did, and they're not gonna notice a change in tone or sense something was deleted. And those of us who realize movies and sequential art are two intrinsically different art forms--and that some things simply don't translate well--just won't care. (Follow this minor spoiler footnote for the three "big" differences I noticed...and why they still don't change the tone of the film.*)

Watchmen was almost three hours long. Snyder took his time and paced it out. He let it breathe and didn't rush it. He loosely stuck to Moore's already loose two-issue-per-character exploration, but I could've gotten to know the characters even more--especially Rorschach and Silk Spectre II (the former being my favorite, and because the latter didn't have a real origin). None of the heroes were slighted, mind you, but I honestly wanted a longer movie.

I hear there's a director's cut in the works. That's a must-own. I'll strip naked and cover myself in blue paint while watching it.

What? That's what I did while reading it.

Note: I'll award a Rider's Block no-prize to the first commenter who tells me where Zack Snyder worked a 300 reference into Watchmen.

* Rorschach takes a more hands-on approach to dispatching a child killer than he did in the comic. So the hell what? It made his origin story all the more shocking.

In the comic, Dr. Manhattan is the only hero with actual powers, but in the movie the others are throwing thugs across rooms and breaking walls with their fists. This was probably done to appease mainstream audiences who need to see snapping bones in their R-rated action movies, along with comic fans who didn't "get" the subtle tone of the original story. I was cool with it, and I especially liked that the bad guy took a few licks...he needed to.

There's no space squid in the movie, and I don't care. I always thought that was the most outlandish element in Moore's plot. Snyder's change actually makes sense, and improves the story without altering the tone. The doomsday clock is stopped and gives a terrified world a chance to reflect and give peace a chance. Whether it's accomplished due to a psychic blast or [the movie's alternative], the outcome was never certain and ultimately open to interpretation.

Regarding Dolls and Escapism

I've only got two things to write about this afternoon, but the real reason for this post is to let you know I'm still sucking air and haven't abandoned the Block (or my Blogger duties).

First off, you should be watching Dollhouse on Fox. I'm as big a Joss Whedon fan as one can be without building a shrine and sacrificing farm animals, and I'm here to tell you: the man creates better episodic TV than anyone--including J.J. Abrams.

(I tried watching Fringe. I tried really hard. I even held my thumb over Joshua Jackson's face whenever it appeared onscreen to diminish the lameness he brought to the series. But you know what was missing from Fringe? That special Whedon touch.*)

I've heard fair-weather critics express doubt over what Whedon is doing in his latest production; that Dollhouse's premise is shaky and flies in the face of the strong-female-lead work he's done in the past. Because that's what it seems like with--what?--three episodes in the can.

But to those folks, I'll humbly point out that Mr. Whedon has always been a dude who writes toward an ending. He's got an entire mythology mapped out, and after seven seasons of Buffy and five of Angel, you should be ashamed of yourself if you think there's not more going on in the D-house than just hot babes serving as escorts.

I see the seeds being planted, and each episode has been better than the last. Were I the speculatin' type, I'd say we're witnessing Eliza Dushku's "Echo" about to go rogue from her mind-wiping overlords, and the show's premise will actually center around her bringing the Dollhouse down.

Watch last week's episode, "Stage Fright," over on Hulu, and tell me how it compared to any other hour-long drama you've been a slave to. Watch it for no other reason than to see what Echo does to an arrogant pop star with a folding chair. (I watched that scene three times, wishing the same for Beyoncé.)

The second reason for today's post is to let you know that my habits have changed recently. I'm gonna use a Revolutionary Road analogy to explain.

I like DiCaprio. I like Winslet. I like Mendes. But it'll be a cold day in hell when you catch me wasting my time on Revolutionary Road. I watch movies and read comics because of the escapism factor.

The world is a scary place right now. I know people who have lost--or are threatened with losing--their entire careers in the worst economic climate in a long time.

The day I choose to watch a movie about two beautiful people whining about their "horrible" jobs and abandoned dreams, rather than popping in Hellboy II on DVD, is a sad goddamn day indeed. (Perhaps one day I'll make an exception and watch Revolutionary Road and United 93 and maybe a little Old Yeller. Then I'll take a candlelit bath and pop in Pink Floyd The Wall on the CD player. Sure. I'll be just fine.)

That's a very long way of saying that I've been reading and writing other stuff. Escapist stuff. I'm still committed to the Block, of course. More than likely, what you'll see popping up here in the future will be movie and book reviews. (Possibly on deck in the weeks ahead: The Midnight Meat Train and Watchmen.)

If you've been paying attention these past few months, you've already been clued in on where to find my other projects.

If you haven't been paying attention, may I suggest a Joshua Jackson film marathon. Anything from 1998 to 2005, keeping in mind he peaked with Cursed.

* For example, Whedon would've killed off Josh Jackson within six episodes--just for the shock value. And he would've done it in a particularly nasty way that would've made me scream, "Take that! Fuckin' Pacey sack of shit!"