Category Archives: Pop Culture

Back to the Batcave

Batman BeginsAlready, I’ve seen “Batman Begins” twice, which gives you some indication of how I feel about the movie. I wanted to write a long review of it, but time simply won’t permit it — and there’s no dearth of glowing reviews available elsewhere — so I thought instead I might comment on the context in which this new interpretation has debuted.

Watch the very end of Tim Burton’s 1989 version of “Batman” and you’ll see just one of many, many examples of why I found very little of redeeming value in the last major hurrah for this franchise. The scene provides that movie’s resolution: Jack Nicholson’s miscast and misplayed Joker has been vanquished (after a ridiculous showdown in which he shot down the titular hero’s plane with a handgun!). Gotham City’s mayor, district attorney and police chief are addressing a crowd on the steps of an overwrought City Hall set, publicly reassuring the citizenry that the danger has passed.

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Sith Time’s the Charm

Episode IIIIn the run-up to the final installment in the Star Wars canon, the franchise characters have recently been seen hocking everything from breakfast cereal to cell phones. It’s the customary level of endorsement pervasiveness that makes it hard to ignore this long-awaited but not necessarily highly anticipated final chapter. All of which conspired to convince me to set aside my surprising indifference and sit down to watch the two trailers available over at StarWars.com this afternoon. While I’m enthusiastic about seeing Wookies and the return of Darth Vader proper, overall it’s fair to say that I’m not particularly optimistic about “Episode III” at all.

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Sith Time’s the Charm

Episode IIIIn the run-up to the final installment in the Star Wars canon, the franchise characters have recently been seen hocking everything from breakfast cereal to cell phones. It’s the customary level of endorsement pervasiveness that makes it hard to ignore this long-awaited but not necessarily highly anticipated final chapter. All of which conspired to convince me to set aside my surprising indifference and sit down to watch the two trailers available over at StarWars.com this afternoon. While I’m enthusiastic about seeing Wookies and the return of Darth Vader proper, overall it’s fair to say that I’m not particularly optimistic about “Episode III” at all.

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New Logo for an Old Favorite

It’s going to take me a little while to really come to grips with the fact that DC Comics has changed its logo, obsolescing the long-standing, Milton Glaser-designed icon for something, well, different. The new mark includes forward-leaning “D.C.” initials against a swooshy, Saturn-like ring in a dimensional rendering, with a hint of Adobe Illustrator-style gradient along its edge. A curiously Captain America-like star, drawn in perspective, punctuates the whole thing.

Putting it bluntly, I don’t find it particularly attractive or probably as utilitarian as Glaser’s original triumph of compactness and visual exclamation. To the designers’ credit, it does attempt to rescue what’s good about its predecessor from the short-sighted imperatives of DC Comics’ current marketing strategy, but in doing so, it completely misinterprets the old mark’s substance for rather shallow style.

Old vs. New DC Comics Logos

The classic, Milton Glaser-designed logo, at left, and the new form, at right.

Don’t Make ’Em Like They Used To

Maybe this is just nostalgia, because I was an avid reader of DC Comics when I was a kid, and I still feel invested in their canon of heroes and pop mythology. As a function of my childhood, the old logo really represents something constant and reliable, even when the tonality of the comic books changed drastically. Just to get pretentious for a bit: the nature of the art and writing and even the economic reach of comic books has metamorphosed in a kind of parallel to my advancement from kickball games on blacktops to PowerPoint presentations in front of corporate officers, but that logo has been always the same, at least until now. It’s my sense of vanity and obstinacy speaking when I say that the new logo just isn’t worthy of the old logo’s legacy, but I really do mean it.

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A Matter of Perceptionists

The PerceptionistsThere’s a marketing person somewhere who should be proud of himself for pulling off a nice little feat at my expense yesterday. I subscribe to the email newsletters regularly pushed out by the folks at Definitive Jux Records, and because I rarely have time to properly read them, my usual pattern is to quickly scan their contents — perhaps without really retaining anything — before hitting the delete key. When I got the latest update yesterday, I noticed a big emphasis at the top of the email for the debut full-length album from The Perceptionists, this week’s hotly tipped hip-hop act. Being generally preoccupied with design and online geekery — and also being generally squarer than I was a decade ago — it was the first time I had heard of them.

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Hidden Agendas in Writing and Design

David MilchThe New Yorker’s 14 Feb double-issue features a profile of David Milch, co-creator of “NYPD Blue” and the man responsible for the riveting, foul-mouthed and thoroughly excellent HBO series “Deadwood,” an intensely brutal Western set in a real South Dakota boom town in the late 19th century. As is the New Yorker’s wont, the article is unavailable online — or if it was at one time, I was, as always, too late in catching up on my issues to be inspired to go seek out the online version.

If you can find a copy in your therapist’s waiting room, you could do worse than read this article on Milch; I’m not much of a fan of the magazine’s pieces on entertainment personalities because they seem lightweight and shallow compared to some of the genuinely interesting stuff the magazine continues to turn out even in its old age, but this one happens to be about an interesting fellow. Or, at least, Milch has some interesting things to say about how he writes.

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Winging It

Because I’ve invested so many hours into watching the preceding seasons of “The West Wing,” I’ve more or less felt compelled to watch its wandering, sometimes agonizingly listless course since the departure of creator Aaron Sorkin in 2003. Under the now exclusive guidance of Sorkin’s producing partner John Wells, the show has lost a lot of its crisp nature and has appeared, many times, to be wheezing along, looking for some new purpose, and in doing so, almost wantonly inflicting severe physical distress on its characters — torturous kidnappings, deadly explosions, heart attacks and advanced stages of multiple sclerosis, for example, have all been visited on familiar characters in the past two seasons — in the hopes of revealing some re-invigorating, ratings-friendly momentum.

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The Reading (and Waiting) List

Bel CantoIt’s not often that I read fiction anymore, unfortunately. I blame this on a schedule that imposes unhealthy restrictions on leisure reading in general and also the ‘always on’ nature of my home internet connection, which beckons me to read more and more blogs when I should be spending the evening on the couch with a good book. From time to time I’ll make a concerted effort to read something in ink and paper format, but more often than not, I’m drawn to non-fiction.

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That’s “Incredibles!”

The IncrediblesThere’s a lot to like in “The Incredibles,” which I just got around to seeing last Thursday night, and there are a lot more people than me who have the time on their hands to cogently explain what’s so good about this latest movie from the egghead animators’ trust at Pixar. So, rather than try and hobble together a half-baked review that’s little more than the sum of a series of random comments, I’ll offer up just the random comments here.

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The Escapist

Men of TomorrowIt’s fuckin’ gloomy around here. Everyone’s pissed off or depressed or angry or sulking. To get a little respite, I’m retreating to the fantasia of the comic book world with Gerard Jones’ “Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book.” I picked it up over the weekend while browsing the aisles at my local bookstore, stocking up on fodder for my culturally elitist reading list (my duty, as a citizen of a blue state). I’ve never really left behind the familiar comfort of comic books, in part because they almost bring me back to the less prickly reality of childhood, but these days I think I enjoy the idea of them more than anything; I’d rather read about comic books than actually read them.

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