We Got Arrested at Night

Recent thoughts...

Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore

Expectations can be weird.  I had heard that this book told a continuing tale that stretched across centuries, and that is technically true but not the whole picture.  Moore tackling similar spanning agendas in works like From Hell and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen fixated my mind a combined tale of resounding mythological and mystical significance with allusions to everyone and everything that happened within those time periods. 

But that's not how it plays out, even if what happens is related.  In From Hell, Moore was talking about the 20th century through his version of Jack the Ripper.  But Voice of the Fire starts out in 4000 BC and ends up in the 1995 AD.  Each of the 12 chapters moves the story forward into differing time periods.  However, far from making the story more grandiose, it instead makes it more personal.  In From Hell, all the stops were pulled out to show this single period in time and how it was manifested, along with Moore showing off, which he does all the time.  Voice of the Fire is like the greatest hits of Moore's hometown and residence of Northampton.  Each vignette takes on the air of meaning solely for the people affected within the story.  Those occurrences and meanings certainly resonate later, but not in a cause and effect way.  Unlike League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where Moore really wants you to know he's being clever while throwing around his commentary, there is a not a need and/or desire for annotations.  Instead, all the references are as blatant as can be.  Moore often calls attention to them vividly that I wondered what was going on.  But as I said before, this is due to the expectation that Moore's previous work had left me with.  Before the last chapter, I wasn't sure what I had read.  I got that Moore was looking at myths, psycho-geography, and to put it too simply, how things change but still stay the same.

But then I got to the final chapter and things coalesced.  Removing the writing from the story and into Moore's own life (apparently, as it's obvious Moore is working subjectively with parts throughout the whole book), Moore finishes wrapping up Northampton, filling in the details from the previous chapter's endpoint of 1931, up to 1995.  It's a depressing endpoint, Moore laying out a ruined, wasteland-esque town of inadequate council housing, faceless corporate-enveloping sprawl, random acts of deadly violence, and several occurrences relating back to the previous chapters, the town still progressing through time by spinning its wheels.  In effect, Moore's book functions as a history of Northampton, prosed up to provide a record of how the town developed into the morass he sees today. His tone in the last chapter is a mix of caring elitism and incredulous scorn.  Moore makes sure to mention the laborious nature of the research put into the book, tomes and records dug up that have lost all relevance in their obscurity.  But at the same time, Moore goes to ask his uncle about a certain historical event, in of all places, a bingo hall.  But then he maintains that he cannot really describe the book to him.  Is Moore saying that all the information he dug up is really contained within the unsuspecting people of the town?  Yet, somehow they do not have the capacity to understand or utilize it?  Does he connect this back to how the denigrating town, and by extension the modern world, has no room for the supernatural or the occult?  Or is Moore even talking about any of this?  Outside the explanations and recounting, how you feel about the end probably speaks to your ability to tolerate good old fashioned bitching, none more so than when Moore tunes into the television broadcast to crucify all the content it can conjure.  Then again, if I had written through Northampton's cycle, fueled by death, deceit, subjugation, misery, decapitation, limping, loss, razing, and burning, I might bitch a little myself.  Moore is trapped between revealing the wonders inherent in his environment while being able to manage the horrifying traits of the people, places, and things manifest.  I'll let him blow off some steam.

Oh, and the first chapter is written from the perspective of how Moore thought a caveman would process his thoughts.  It's equally enlivening and frustrating, and the book has a hard time ever reaching that level of insanity thereafter.


Vanishing Point, directed by Richard Sarafian

Not a whole lot to say.  Good car chases, some potentially interesting character dynamics get annihilated by retreaded and awkward exposition dumps, and the landscape of the early 1970s gets equally handled and fumbled, as the movie uses the functional tabula rasa of the main character to throw current events at him.  Props to Barry Newman still, who plays the lead like the manufactured and purposefully decent megalomaniac he is, smiling straight into California on Benzedrine, making sure he gives them a hell of a challenge if they're going to grant him his way out.

Elektra: Assassin by Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz

Take a trip back in time to a period in comics you might have thought you had figured out from reading Watchmen and Miller's own Dark Knight Returns.  Those works are far from the insanity on display here.  The book is clearly a tug of war between the creators.  You have the steady capsule-gridded panels that Miller flooded Dark Knight with on one page, opposite the functional splash images Sienkiewicz packs into all the panels, splash page or not.  Miller often bluntly describes what is happening or what will happen on the page with the narration.  It leads to an admirable quality of comprehension mixed with the frenzied metal of Sienkiewicz, but possibly a less interesting comic in the end?  I mean, it reads well but Sienkiewicz almost feels throttled, even when he's speeding, like he's on rails.  Which makes sense, he's drawing at some basic level from a script, no matter how he develops and presents it.  Not to remove Miller's contributions, but Sienkiewicz's style is one that screams for his singular output (yet he's mostly been a collaborator, so what do I know).  Then again, the comic is often at it's best when Miller begins to drop in manic, staccato narrative information in disjointed bits that Sienkiewicz distills into images of crushing weight and impact.  Two hundred miles an hour is still two hundred miles an hour, no matter if the path is preset or not.  Ostensibly chocked with "meaning" given the setting and particulars (Cold War, military industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, US intervention, governmental misconduct), the whole thing instead is a gigantic indictment that never went to trial because all the particulars would've rigged the system if they hadn't blown it to hell beforehand.  Forget relevance, says Miller, and look in wonder at how gloriously hatefucked the world is.  Revel in the glory and ridiculousness before man initiates judgement day. 

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, directed by Steven Spielberg

The Nazis are back ya'll and we threw the Satan slavers to the curb.  This is a reboot film for a series that never had any real continuity, following Temple of Doom, which in hindsight went a little too far into brutality according to Spielberg.  All because George Lucas got dumped.  Way to go George Lucas's wife, you ruined it for us all!  Not really, because this is still pretty solid.  It unfortunately comes across as a compromise that might even be the right one, sure, but not the best one overall.  Nothing here can match the aforementioned misanthropy and organ removal of Temple of Doom, nor the airplane fight scene or the swordman shooting "gag", or really any scene from Raiders.  Connery is fine but the familial dynamic is Spielberg ramming how these guys are the same person yet hate each other yet love each other eventually down your throat.  See George, don't give up yet!  *back slap*  Still, the opening sequence is excellent and the Nazi turncoat woman's name is Elsa, which is close to Ilsa, which is a non-turncoat Nazi woman's name in Hellboy, which an awesome comic series that I need to re-read daily.  The Last Crusade is good on it's own, but can't hold up to what came before.

Akira Volume 3 by Katsuhiro Otomo

It's a ballsy move when you're close to 600 pages in to basically drop the clear focus of the series in Tetsuo.  But that's what Otomo does here.  Maybe it suffers a bit, as there's no real mystery over whether or not Tetsuo is dead, but that's not what Otomo is really going for.  Instead, every other character gets pushed ahead and motivations are revealed, culminating in the back half of the book being a a meeting point of everyone involved through lots and lots of violence.  Unsurprisingly, the storytelling and the action sequencing are excellent, with Otomo solidifying his ability to perfectly lead the eye across the page.  But it's the climax that makes it.  After spending such a huge amount of time hyping the potential of Akira up, with plenty of moments that were already insanely powerful on their own, Otomo had a lot to deliver on.  So he responds by going off for about 20 pages with nothing but wholesale destruction on a city-wide level, splashes and huge panels only.  Each page is a pinnacle for him to supersede on the next, until there's nothing left.  Except for Tetsuo to show back up on the last page now that Akira is awake.  Delivered.

Ghostbusters II, directed by Ivan Reitman

Everyone always talked about Murray as Peter Vankman, but where the hell is the love for Rick Moranis?  Ghosts show up and get busted and the writing is good enough to where everyone can be consistently funny and sometimes downright hilarious.  And these guys are still having a hell of a time acting this shit.  But Rick Moranis?  Not a line wasted.  These movies are funny and entertaining and there's plenty of room for that. 

Akira Volume 4 by Katsuhiro Otomo

Volume 3 dropped Tetsuo and this volume drops Kaneda, which means a huge part of this massive story loses its two main characters for large periods of time but this is different.  You always knew Tetsuo was coming back, but when he did it wasn't necessarily what was expected, but that's to Otomo's credit, and it's crystal clear why it's that way when Akira's magnitude is finally revealed.  Likewise, it's easy to see that Kaneda is coming back, but he doesn't have the resilience of Tetsuo.  So when he reemerges in the supernatural/out of body method, it's...odd, with no indication.  When Tetsuo came back, Otomo didn't need to say anything yet ended up just off enough.  Further, Kaneda's absence made me realize how much I missed the guy.  I've never been a big fan of non-stop wisecracking characters, especially in something as ridiculously catastrophic as Akira.  But it turns out Otomo was better off with Kaneda because of the levity he brings to the proceedings.  That is the biggest cliche as I'm looking at it on the page, but it rings true because he's such a ludicrous contrast to everyone else that he grounds everything.  Instead, lackluster ciphers like Chiyoko get more attention, her entire character being that of a resilient he-woman on the journey of killings.  The start of the book is still really strong, as the story jumps forward and everything is just a bit off-kilter, owing to Otomo holding back details that later get fleshed out.  Despite the bombastic art being the real draw of this comic, Otomo can nail the smaller moments, like he does with the Colonel throughout the whole volume.  And the art is as amazing as ever.  While previous editions showed Otomo drawing a dilapidated and degrading cityscape, the constant backdrop to his intimate action sequences, here we have the aftermath of cataclysmic destruction of a whole city.  It's a whole new form of architecture porn and Otomo is the tenth dan.  This volume wraps up with a classic "storm the castle" scene that alternates between ragtag machine gunners, heat seeking missiles, and the always welcome psychic showdowns.  But, Kaneda?  Yeah, I miss the dude and this volume drags some because he's MIA.  It's not like I'm going to pack it in without getting to the finish, but I could use a re-up.