Meh.

I’ve normally got respect for Steven Soderberg, but this was a real misfire for me. Your mileage may vary, but this subject is done for me with this movie.

Read about this movie on lewrockwell.com – read an excellent synopsis there too.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/shirtz/shirtz18.1.html

It took some searching to find it, though (try Google) – my copy is on loan from a chap named Kaspar I met at McDonald’s.

It’s well-meaning film, but it’s hampered by the TV movie budget they must have had, even back in 1968, not to mention the anachronisms on display. Get past those, and you’ll find it pretty entertaining.

It’s especially amusing that Gene Hackman(!) is billed third in the movie, after John Forsyth and Jackie Cooper. I suppose you take what you can get early on – three years later, he got The French Connection, so I guess that makes up for it. Hackman is pretty good here, but when is he not?

At least one reviewer seems to think that this was a pilot for a TV show on ABC – I’m tending to agree, since the movie ends rather abruptly. In fact no less than J. Neil Schuman reviewed it there.

Saw this at the Milwaukee Film Festival (  http://www.milwaukee-film.org/home.shtml  ). Very entertaining – the short version of the plot – Britain’s most violent prisoner , Michael Gordon Peterson(Tom Hardy) narrates his life behind bars. Charles Bronson is the alias he takes while in the slammer.

Tom Hardy is the standout in this film – he gave a terrific performance in what would be a film without much story. (After all, the man spends years in solitary).  IMDB says chunks of this movie are non-factual, especially a sequence where Bronson is released and earns a living as something like a cage fighter, even fighting dogs at one point.  That’s sad, because I thought that was one of the points of the film where it made Bronson’s life seem little more than an animal’s.  Recommended.

Just for your enjoyment…

From this fine website…http://abstrusegoose.com

When riding up to the Tea Party yesterday (well before 3, when it was supposed to start), I hear a member of Oath Keepers http://www.oathkeepers.net/ (I’m sorry to say I don’t know who was speaking) speaking to the crowd.  He read the list of orders they won’t obey, and then invited the crowd to take the oath to the Constitution, which I did.

I took the oath in all seriousness, and was proud to have done so. Buto n the ride home, I thought to myself, Now how does the Oath apply to me?

No one’s sworn me into any militia (let’s let slide the fact I’m already supposed to be in it for now). How do I go about fulfilling this Oath, right now?  Cause for thought…

From Balko’s website – An Aussie takes us to task for being too tame when talking back to our political “betters”…

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/09/16/an-australian-take-on-joe-wilson/

That article just linked had a further link of some quotes from Pual J Keating critisizing the Australian opposition - the ones I like…

That you Jim? Paul Keating here. Just because you swallowed a fucking dictionary when you were about 15 doesn’t give you the right to pour a bucket of shit over the rest of us.”
- To Former Labour politician, Jim McClelland (on the phone)

Codd will be lucky to get a job cleaning shithouses if I ever become Prime Minister.
- On Mike Codd

…the brain-damaged Leader of the Opposition…
- On John Howard

Let me echo Balko – the country would be a better place if we told these bastards off once in a while.

Going to the Veteran’s Park Tea Party – it’s nice I can bike there from my house – wish they had gotten Claire Wolfe to speak rather than Michelle Malkin, though.

For those who haven’t heard, here’s the Wikipedia entry…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug

Having saved the lives of millions due to his research, memorials should be built to honor him. And if there is a God, this man now walks in Heaven.

I wish I could look back on my adult life, post-1970, and say something more optimistic than “if feminism hadn’t come along I never would have become this isolated, this distanced from human society and I would have felt no need to do three hundred issues of Cerebus”.  That isolation is so central to who I am and has been so critical to whatever progress I have made as an artist, writer, and publisher, I can’t even begin to conceive of where another path might have led me.

Dave Sim, Introduction to Women, Fourth Printing, September 1998

What is there to say about this work of Art (and make no mistake, it is Art)? Reading through it,and looking at the more-often-than-not gorgeous line art, I’m both amazed and frustrated by some of the choices he made.

Can Sim truthfully act surprised that his dissertation of the Books of Moshe (Latter Days), and his attempt to reconcile God with Einstein’s Unified Field theory, however well-reasoned, published within the confines of his mammoth graphic novel featuring a hermaphroditic talking aardvark*, would not make a stir?  Put another way – would Thomas Paine’s Common Sense have made any ripples had the main points been couched in a story about pirates seeking gold in “Death Cove”?

And his decision to publish 300 serialized issues – was there some sort of bargain he made with himself forbidding a change of heart?

Onion: From an artistic standpoint, do you regret the series having come to an end?

Dave Sim: No, not at all. It was pure guesswork on my part back in 1979 as to whether I would have the stamina to write, pencil, ink, letter, tone, and fill the back of a monthly comic book for 26 years. In retrospect, I should’ve said 250 issues.

Interview with Tasha Robinson, The Onion, March 31, 2004

Lacking any editor but himself, there was no one around to rein him in on his excesses (the decision of having his character Cerebus intrude on some really heartfelt dissertations on the artist’s path (Reads), Ernest Hemingway, (Form & Void) F. Scott Fitzgerald (Going Home), and Oscar Wilde (Jaka’s Story & Melmoth) just to name a few off the top of  my head). I also believe that the plan Sim had detailing the story arc of Cerebus was painted with wide brush strokes rather than a detail brush – something he himself confirms in the introduction of Minds…

‘Your turn.’

And after that simple two-word dialogue balloon, it was time for complete improvisation.

Dave Sim, Minds (Third Printing, June 1998)

Not that there’s anything wrong with that choice  of  ”broad strokes” – but it does make for a meandering plotline – especially if it takes 26 years to finally finish it.

As to two of the major points Sim made in the series run – well, he might as well have been talking to a brick wall when he made his pitch for God in the novel (me being an agnostic).  As for the charge of misogyny – I do not believe that Sim hates women in general (the characterization of Jaka in particular not being demonized, but rather seen as a human being with faults) but does hate feminism as a social movement (the treatment of the Cirinists in Latter Days is a misreading by most as misogynism, substituting Sim’s dislike for the matriarchal society he created with dislike for women in general).

And what does it say when a reader like myself gets bored with the major points Sim tried to get across (again, Latter Days analysis of the Books of Moshe as an example), and skips over to his comments on the work in the back (and often enjoyed them more than the Art itself)?

I give Sim credit though – Steve Ditko chose the Path Less Traveled as well as Sim did.  Sim seems to have a better handle on his Art and Life, as Sim is now working on Glamourpuss, and Ditko has faded from the public eye. Will Sim do the same?

To sum up – do I feel that this series was worth the time to go over in detail enough to write these reviews?  Yes, I do.  I just want to warn off the “casual” reader – this (and I mean the entire series’ run) wasn’t written for you.

* And published in the final issues of that mammoth graphic novel, no less.