Count to Ten, Lars

commentary and criticism, film, tv, video

Congratulations to Nicolas Winding Refn for winning best director at Cannes. Well done, I’m looking forward to Drive, just as I hope to catch Terence Malick’s Palm-winner Tree of Life. I did however find shameful Refn’s callous disavowal — he was “repulsed” — of his mentor Lars von Trier’s extremely ill-advised, but ultimately harmless comments that got him banned from the festival earlier in the week.

Look, what Trier said was clearly offensive, if taken at face value, and the press being the press of course immediately did so, reducing it to out-of-context soundbytes — “Trier admits to being a Nazi,” and so on. He did no such thing, and Refn of all people should understand Nordic irony when he hears it. This is a deeply ingrained way of joking in Scandinavia, and anybody who has followed Trier just a little bit, at his Cannes press conferences perhaps more than anywhere, would know that he relishes this kind of humor, and has a tendency to talk out of his ass. Refn is right when he says that Danes can be parochial and insensitive — witness the Muhammad cartoons — but how about sticking up for your embattled colleague instead of choosing the easy way out?

The real disgrace in all this, however, is the festival board of directors’ decision to expel Trier.

Comics of the Decade: Chester Brown’s Louis Riel

comics, comics and cartooning


This is part of a Metabunker series celebrating a great decade in comics with Rackham by reprinting select reviews of the decades’ best comics from the Rackham archive, along with a number of new pieces.

I
There is an extraordinary moment near the beginning of Chester Brown’s historical reconstruction, Louis Riel: the newly, ad hoc-elected eponymous popular leader sends his troops into the nearby-situated Fort Garry to secure the provisions and weapons stored there, before they fall into the hands of their pro-Canadian adversaries. A scout is sent ahead and finds the fort deserted, after which he signals his brethren to advance through the open gate.

Picks of the Week

comics and cartooning, culture, current affairs, film, tv, video, hype & linkage, music

The picks of the week from around the web.

  • The Daily Show on the “Common Controversy,” parts one and two. Wednesday, Jon Stewart performed an epic takedown of the ridiculous hype machine that is Fox News. Extra hilarity ensured by the fact that the source of it all is one of the most anodyne rappers working today. First segment above, click through to the second once you’ve seen it! Also, Stewart’s crew pulled out the funniest scene from the underrated hip hop Spinal Tap spoof CB4 for their opening segment on Thursday.
  • Speaking of takedowns, this skewering of 90s po-mo and the ‘cultural turn’ by Kevin Mattson writing for Dissent Magazine is an instructive, if surely tendentious history lesson, that may seem to have it in for Andrew Ross, but actually proves redemptive too (thanks Andreas!).
  • Tezuka shorts. The ever trusty MetaFilter provides links to a handful of the great Tezuka Osamu’s short animation films.
  • Finally, I enjoyed Matt Seneca’s examination of a bunch of comics as criticism. Some good ideas and observations in there.

    • Comics of the Decade: Dominique Goblet’s Faire semblant c’est mentir

    comics and cartooning, commentary and criticism


    This is part of a Metabunker series celebrating a great decade in comics with Rackham by reprinting select reviews of the decades’ best comics from the Rackham archive, along with a number of new pieces.

    Dominique Goblet depicts her father as a late medieval Madonna, nurturing his child, right hand in blessing. Drawn on disparate, pasted-together pieces of paper accompanied by shakily calligraphed Gothic handwriting, it is simultaneously a mockery and an illumination.

    The image is from Goblet’s Faire semblant c’est mentir (‘To Pretend Is to Lie,’ 2007), a work that the author spent more than a decade creating. In it, she recounts episodes in her life to explicate, or at least represent, truthfully parts of its relational structure and emotional involvement.

    Picks of the Week

    commentary and criticism, current affairs, hype & linkage


    What a strange week. Osama bin Laden’s assassination provoked a surprising range of reactions, not the least in thus country. Understandably cathartic for many, it raised the question of how one expresses such feelings. No matter how well I understood the widespread triumphant reactions and the connotations of righteous revenge expressed in many places, for example, I couldn’t quite get over a slight discomfort in reacting in such a way to a killing, no matter how justified. And Obama’s description of it as a ‘great accomplishment’ on par with American prosperity and civil rights was just bizarre. Even disregarding any broader geopolitical effects of these reactions, it’s just the basic human truth of it that I’ve found hard to address. I feel it, but it doesn’t feel entirely right.

    And then that pathetic video of a graying Osama wrapped in blanket, watching himself on TV behind a blacked-out window, is fascinating. The Free World’s great scourge and one-time playboy as an arthritic recluse, confined to his luxurious, but still fairly limiting, de-wired Abottabad compound (and why is he constantly adjusting the channel and volume?). A reality check in several ways, and one that speaks to the wages of making mortal enemies of half the world for reasons that remain largely nebulous to an even greater part of it. The asymmetry is arresting, on several levels.

    Though much of it is pretty familiar material, I’ve appreciated the comments by Nicholas Kristof, Chris Hedges, and Glenn Greenwald, as well as this look at the Navy SEAL team that executed the assassination. And this photo, which everyone has surely seen many times already, is still amazing.

    Reads: Mister Wonderful

    comics and cartooning, commentary and criticism


    Apart from hopefully lining his wallet a bit, Dan Clowes isn’t doing himself any favors by repackaging this story. His most lightweight effort in more than a decade, it was a pandering trifle to begin with and it only suffers from being given the book treatment.

    Originally published in the New York Times Magazine in 2008 and now labeled “a midlife romance,” it’s basically a wish-fulfillment story written for what Clowes’ imagined would be the typical Times readership: the kind of intellectual but lonely middle-aged white male, on retreat from the social world, who has been populating his comics for a while now. Rather hilariously, he has cited the estimable but also slightly smug filmmaker Errol Morris as the model for Marshall, the hapless protagonist of this tale.

    Anyway, it seems to me that Clowes spent way too much time thinking of this imaginary Errol and too little listening to his redoubtable storytelling instincts when he writing Mister Wonderful.

    Thank You, Bill Blackbeard

    journal

    I have a perfect memory of sitting in my tiny New York room in the winter of 2003 overlooking a snow-covered Sakura Park, reading Krazy Kat, a cup of steaming coffee at my side. This memory now prompts a quiet, heartfelt “Thank you, Bill.”

    For those of you who read Danish, here’s my obituary at Nummer9.

    Image from George Herriman’s Krazy Kat.