Snappy Valentine's Day!

I'm sorry. (Especially if someone's done this joke before and I missed it.)

EXCLUSIVE(ish?): Ben Caldwell's Atlantean war machines

It's probably obvious by now that I'm a big fan of Ben Caldwell's work. From his All-Action Classics comics (especially Dracula!) to his Wonder Woman story for Wednesday Comics to his recent re-release of The Dare Detectives, I can't get enough of his energetic, imaginative, animated style. So I got very excited when he emailed me this concept art for a new story he's working on in addition to his other gigs.

As Ben explained it, it's "about a superhero from Atlantis. This is how the Atlanteans depict two of their ancient war machines. Like everything else I do, it would involve violence-prone girls and lost civilizations and secret societies with super-weapons. Thought you might enjoy them." He knows me well.

Anyway, I thought you might enjoy them too, so I asked if I could share them and Ben said, "Sure!" Like I said, Ben's working on this around other projects, so there's no planned completion date or anything, but it's yet another awesome comic to look forward to.

Song of the Week | "Stay Gold" by The Big Pink

Jungle Empress PSA: Stereotyping women makes them CRAZY!

Four-Color Shadows has this Zegra, Jungle Empress story and it's pretty awesome. Shortly after an earthquake uncovers a hidden temple in Zegra's part of the jungle...



The director of the museum patronizes his top anthropologist for being a woman and sneaks in a lecture about - of all things - gossiping. Because those women sure do like to gossip, don't they fellas? Dr Morgan responds professionally, as does young Peter Brooks, the guy who's chosen to be her assistant on this important dig. But secretly? He hates that bitch for being "a little queer in the head." This, by the way, is the good guy.

Once they get to the site, they discover a huge trove of...



Now, I'm no archaeologist, but I suspect that most would be pretty thrilled at discovering hundreds of intact mummies from a previously unknown civilization all in one place. Our hero Brooks though: suspects his boss of sinister motives beyond her justifiable excitement over the fortune and glory this is going to bring her. After all, from her "long experience" she must see stuff like this every day. Idiot.

When he finds out that she's also discovered how to re-animate mummies (for the purpose of documenting their first-hand experiences with their ancient and mysterious culture, mind you), Brooks freaks out, declares Morgan insane, and runs to get Zegra so they can shut Morgan's operation down.

To be fair, Morgan does then try to shoot Brooks as he's running into the jungle, but is that because she has a secret plan that he's discovered? Or because she's had about enough of his crap? There's no evidence of a secret plan up to this point (even in a comic that's very free with showing us what people - including Morgan - are thinking), so it looks to me like she just snapped.

And snapped but good. Brooks finds Zegra, but...



Kill all you meet?!

I'm not sure what the moral is here. I think maybe we shouldn't dismiss women and their accomplishments or stereotype them as childish gossips. 'Cause if we do, they'll go nuts and lead their mummy hordes into battle in a mad vendetta of vengeance.



And knowing is half the battle.

The Toilers of the Sea will Hate Cephalopods in 3...2...1...

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League of Extraordinary Bloggers | Saturday afternoon comfort movies

Brian at the Cool and Collected blog had a cool idea he's calling The League of Extraordinary Bloggers. It's sort of a bloggers' version of a group sketch blog where every week Brian will announce a topic and participants write about it. Sounds fun, right?

The first topic is about "Go To" Saturday Matinees, or as Brian explains it:

What movie is, or was, your “go to” Saturday matinee — the comfort movie you always popped into the VCR on a rainy Saturday afternoon, the movie you watched over and over again, driving your parents crazy while you recited the lines along with the characters on the screen?

This is a hard one for me because I'm old enough to have grown up without a VCR in the house. We didn't get one until I hit high school, so as a kid my Saturday afternoons were spent on whatever old movies the local TV stations decided to run. That was usually Tarzan or monster movies, which was cool, but honestly, by Saturday afternoon my mom was sick of my brothers and I having spent the entire morning in front of the TV with cartoons. Come noon, she shooed us out the door to spend some time outside.

By the time we got a VCR, I was working most Saturdays. Lucky for me, that job was in a video store, so I still got to watch movies (or at least be aware of them on in the background while I talked to customers). One of my favorites was Pee Wee's Big Adventure, a movie I somehow missed in the theater, but craved like crack on VHS. And I shared it like crack, too. I took it home, converted my brothers to it, and the three of us fulfilled the part of Brian's criteria above about driving our parents crazy with constant imitations of Pee Wee's laugh and recitations of "I pity the poor fool who don't eat my cereal," "Let's talk about your big butt, Simone," "Paging Mr. Herman" (in the appropriate voice), and singing "Deep In the Heart of Texas."

How in the world have I not shared this with my ten-year-old by this point in his life? Bad parenting.

Excuse me, I need to go to Amazon. And if you've never seen Pee Wee's Big Adventure, so do you.

Twin Cities Adventure | National Geographic's Real Pirates exhibit

My Cownt Tales cohort and Sister from Another Mister, Jessica Hickman emailed to remind me that National Geographic's Real Pirates exhibit is coming to the Science Museum on 18 February (it'll run through 3 September).

The full name of the traveling exhibit is Real Pirates: The Untold Story of the Whydah from Slave Ship to Pirate Ship, so it focuses on Sam Bellamy's Whydah:

One of the most technologically advanced vessels of her day, the Whydah was built and launched as a slave ship and captured on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic by legendary pirate Sam Bellamy and his crew. After a few alterations and a quick hoist of the Jolly Roger, the Whydah became the flagship of Bellamy's flotilla, leading raids throughout Caribbean waters and up the Atlantic coastline.

Visitors will be able to touch real pirate gold, board a recreated pirate ship, learn to tie knots, look at pirate art (like Gregory Manchess' painting above), and talk to piratey role-players about life on the seven seas. There's even a contest (ending Friday!) to design a new Jolly Roger to be displayed with the exhibit.

Who wants to go?

The Problem with Marnie

When I finished watching Marnie last week, my first impulse was to tweet something snarky about it like, “James Bond uses his rape-powers to cure mental illness” or to note how lack of sex makes you crazy. But the more I think about this deeply flawed story – especially Tippi Hedren’s convincing performance – the more I realize it needs some real analysis.

If you haven’t seen it, you’re probably not reading even this far, but just in case: Marnie is the story of Marnie Edgar (Hedren), a young woman who goes from job to job – changing identities each time – in order to gain her employers’ trust and ultimately rob them blind. She also freaks out anytime she sees the color red and has horrible dreams about hearing a knocking sound and being cold and something about her mother. This is somehow connected to her mother’s withholding affection from her her whole life (while shockingly lavishing it on a young neighbor girl). Marnie’s got problems. Deep ones.

Enter Sean Connery as Mark Rutland, the owner of the latest company Marnie’s targeted. He’s also a client of one of her earlier victims and has met her before, but the movie’s secretive for a while about whether or not he recognizes her, or vice versa. Ultimately, he falls in love with her and slowly begins to discover her issues. The rest of the movie becomes about whether or not he can fix her, while also uncovering the mystery about the event that traumatized her as a child.



Rutland claims that he’s doing this out of love for her, but it’s a weird kind of love. Connery’s in full, smoldering James Bond mode here: all suave and masculine; not really showing any emotion, but claiming that he loves Marnie and by God you’d better believe it or else. Since she won’t accept his help right away, he blackmails her into marrying him and holds her hostage; first on a Honeymoon cruise where he rapes her (she attempts suicide the next morning), and then on his massive estate. It’s a horrible, tumultuous relationship, made only slightly bearable by a scene in which an exhausted Marnie temporarily break-downs and begs for help. Hedren’s so convincing in that moment that she sells the idea that this is the real Marnie, so whatever Rutland is doing must be working. That’s a problem for me, because it means that Rutland’s not just a mean character who I can despise while taking in the rest of the movie. It means that the movie itself is endorsing his behavior.

Listen, Marnie’s no innocent victim here. I mean, she was at one point, but she’s a grownup now and she’s unwilling to take responsibility for her actions. I don’t want to describe her as a saint whom Rutland tortures while twirling his moustache. It’s a complicated relationship and I don’t know what I would have done in Rutland’s shoes. I certainly wouldn’t have done what he does, but if I was in love with a disturbed woman who refused all help? I reckon that movie would look more like Blue Valentine than Marnie. Oddly (and sort of unforgivably), Marnie is the one with the happy ending.

Something else that’s difficult to take is the movie’s attitude about sex. And by “the movie,” I really mean “society in the ‘60s.” Marnie’s lying and stealing are occasional activities, so while they affect her negatively, the message of the film is that they’re not her most important problem. That would be her aversion to sex; what people used to call “frigidity.” Unkind people in Marnie make puns about her being cold and how it’s Rutland’s job to warm her up. They don’t know how deep her aversion goes, but they know something’s wrong. Women are supposed to at least have the decency to pretend to like sex. Withholding from your husband – even a blackmailing one – is just weird.



Mad Men gets a lot of praise for its exploration of gender roles in the ‘60s and I imagine it’s deserved. I haven’t seen it yet, in part because I’m not sure I want to be reminded about gender roles of the 1960s. I probably should anyway though. If it’s a good discussion with some insightful points, that’s actually right in my wheelhouse. What I’m afraid of is that it’s just going to say, “Look how bad it was for women back then,” which is something I’m already pretty aware of and want to move away from rather than dwelling on it. It’s that frustration at thinking about women trapped that way that makes me so irritated by Marnie. With men like Rutland, it’s no wonder she was so fond of her horse.

(I was going to let that be the last sentence, but thinking about Marnie’s relationship with her horse led to my realizing that her hairstyle says a lot about her in the movie. Most of the time, when she’s in polite society, her hair is up; very formal. When she rides, away from people, she lets it down; feeling complete and finally able to be herself. I think I may have fallen in love with her too.)

Singing Saturday | "Runaway" by Imperial Teen

Trying something new. I love discovering new music, so on Saturdays - when possible - I'll share a song. As much as I can, I'll make it something I've discovered that week, but I'll probably sneak some old favorites in too from time to time. This one is brand new though.

Haywire (2012)

I don't need to talk about spoilers to recommend Haywire. Its awesomeness isn't in its plot twists. In fact, the plot is one of the weaknesses of the film – that and Gina Carano’s acting – but neither of those things hurt the movie in a significant way. If you’re a fan of ‘60s and ‘70s action movies, you’re going to be just fine with Haywire. Likewise if you enjoyed Hanna or Drive or other artful takes on the action genre. Carano’s a new actor with some learning to do, but she’s better than most of the army of other action stars I’ve been giving passes to my whole life. And while the plot may not be anything new or unique, the way it unfolds in the movie – and especially the way Steven Soderbergh shoots it – is. The film is simultaneously familiar and fascinatingly different from anything I’ve seen before.

You find out the plot in the first few minutes of the movie. Mallory Kane (Carano) is a contract soldier on the run after a mission went wrong. If you’ve seen the trailer, you know the scene in the diner where she talks to a colleague named Aaron (Channing Tatum) about coming in. She’s not sure if she can trust him, so she only mentions a few details: Barcelona, Dublin, and someone named Paul. If you’ve seen the trailer, you also know how that conversation ends. The film then flashes back to the mission to connect those details with each other, but doesn’t yet reveal what went wrong because Kane’s not sure of that herself. The rest of the movie is her figuring it out, which I loved watching her do.

The revelations aren’t stunning; they’re actually pretty easy to figure out. Everything makes perfect sense at the end, but there’s no moment where I went, “Oh! I didn’t see that coming!” And though I liked Kane, I never felt like the stakes were all that high for her. That may be because Carano couldn’t give me a reason or maybe it was problem with the script, but while I loved watching her work and wanted her to succeed, I never felt emotionally invested. That’s a criticism I can give to most action movies; it’s just that as great as the rest of Haywire is, I wanted that part to be great too.

What’s great about the film starts with Mallory Kane. Gina Carano has a perfect look. I don’t mean that she’s attractive (though she is); I mean that she looks like a real person and not a movie star. I love Angelina Jolie action movies, but I can’t lose myself in them. I’m always aware that I’m watching Angelina Jolie. In Haywire, I was just watching Mallory Kane. I’m sure that has a lot to do with this being Carano’s first film, but it also has to do with her body type and just the way she carries herself. She feels authentic.

In fact, “authentic” is a word I thought of a lot as I watched this movie. As cliché as the plot can be, Soderbergh brings it to life and makes it genuine. The fight scenes are brutal and awesomely choreographed, but more important than that, they play out with no music and minimal sound effects. When Carano punches someone (or just as often, someone punches her), it sounds like someone’s really getting hit. I didn’t feel like I was watching a fight scene in a movie; I felt like I was in a diner or hotel room watching two people try to kill each other.

Soderbergh does other things like that too. When Carano hijacks a car and its owner, Soderbergh puts the camera in the back seat for a continuous shot of Carano’s driving. Looking over the actors’ shoulders at the dashboard and the road ahead, I could practically smell the newness of the car. There’s also a great foot chase where the camera stays in front of Carano, focused on her as she runs and breathes. I’ve never noticed an action star’s breathing before, but I’ve done enough running to know that breathing is an important part of it. That detail adds so much to making that scene sincere. As do Carano’s actions in another scene in which she’s being chased. Most action heroes always know what they’re going to do next, but Carano occasionally has to stop and look around her to figure out her next move. She had me looking around too, wondering what she was going to do next.

And of course it’s especially nice to see Haywire star a woman and to treat her so well. Mallory Kane is a sexual character, but she’s never sexualized. And she’s not just a man recast as a woman. I’m thinking especially of her relationship with her dad (Bill Paxton) and how that feels like a real father-daughter relationship, but there are other points in the movie where she’s particularly feminine. But then she’ll command a mission or there’ll be a fight and she’s as tough as any man.

I admit to some discomfort watching her get beat up, especially when her male opponents hit first. The old playground rule, “Boys don’t hit girls” kept popping into my head, but I’m not the only one. In the film, a male assassin looks uneasy as he accepts a contract on Kane. “I’ve never done a woman before.”

The person hiring him delivers my favorite line from the movie. “You shouldn’t think of her as a woman,” he says. “No, that would be a mistake.” It's not that she's at all masculine; it's that if you think of women as people with an inherent need for protection and gentle handling, you've got the wrong idea about Mallory Kane.

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