Action Girls: The Women of Lonesome Dove, Part Four – Agostina Vega

Let’s get this out of the way first. I like Jon Voight a lot, but he’s not Tommy Lee Jones. Of all the non-Tommy Lee Jones actors to play Woodrow Call, Voight seems like he’s trying hardest to imitate Jones and it’s distracting. Watching him is kind of like watching George Lazenby in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. He does a pretty good job, but you can’t enjoy him properly because you keep wishing he was Sean Connery.

Fortunately though, Return to Lonesome Dove is six hours long, which was enough time for me to get used to Voight and start accepting him in the role. I’d still get twinges of regret along the way, but by the end I wasn’t constantly being sidetracked by it any more.

This is probably heresy to Lonesome Dove fans, but in many ways, Return to Lonesome Dove is my favorite mini-series in the saga. It’s certainly the most focused. Even Lonesome Dove, as excellent as it is, is pretty episodic in its portrayal of the cattle drive. Return has some of that as Call returns to Montana with a herd of wild horses and some new recruits (led by Lou Gossett Jr. and CSI’s William Petersen). They’re harried along the way by the coolest, nastiest villain yet in the saga: Cherokee Jack Jackson (Dennis Haysbert from 24 and The Unit). And they’re accompanied by a beautiful, Mexican woman named Agostina Vega (Nia Peeples). But more on her later.

What grounds Return is the story of Call’s illegitimate son Newt as he tries to run the Montana ranch in Call’s absence. I didn’t mention Newt much when I discussed Lonesome Dove, but he really is the heart of that story. Gus and Call dominate the saga up until that point, but Newt – a boy without any real peers and whose father doesn’t claim him – is the “lonesome dove.” And he’s the heart of Return to Lonesome Dove too. In fact, without Newt, the title doesn’t make any sense since no one actually returns to the town of Lonesome Dove in the mini-series. What happens is that Newt, who temporarily finds a home – first on his father’s ranch and then in the company of a neighboring cattleman named Dunnigan and his wife Ferris (Oliver Reed and Reese Witherspoon) – learns that he really is still all alone in the world. But that maybe that’s where he needs to be for a while.

It’s Newt’s adventures with Dunnigan and Ferris – and how that affects Call when he returns – that drive the story. It’s a much more traditional, straightforward Western that way, and maybe that’s why fans of the series don’t care for it, but I was ready for it after so much winding in the storytelling of the previous three mini-series. And it’s still powerfully told. Newt has always been a loyal character, so it’s captivating to watch his loyalty so convincingly divided between Call and Dunnigan.

Agostina’s story is a subplot to Newt and Call’s, but she’s still way cool, so I want to talk about her. She approaches Call in Texas and wants to join his drive back to Montana. Part of her motivation is that Call can provide work to Agostina’s poor village, but mostly she wants to stick close to Call and learn more about him and his former partner Gus McCrae. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why Agostina’s so interested in Gus. The clue is right there in her name. The mystery behind her is what she’s going to do once she learns what she wants to know. Is she going to kill Call? Hug him?

Nia Peeples does an awesome job at giving layers to Agostina. At first Agostina comes across as extremely tough. It wouldn’t be a Lonesome Dove mini-series without at least an attempted rape, but when it started to look like Agostina might be the victim, I wasn’t worried. “She can take care of herself,” I thought. And I was glad to be able to think it. That’s the first time I was able to do that since starting the saga.

And, it turns out, she could take care of herself. But I was surprised to see how the experience shook her. She’s an Action Girl, but she’s a vulnerable one. Not only in her reaction to being attacked, but also in her confusion about what to do once she learned more about Gus. She’s a complicated woman. I don’t expect her to show up in either the Lonesome Dove TV series or the Streets of Laredo mini-series, and that makes watching both of those less appealing. Especially since she starts a relationship with one of my other favorite characters from the saga, Chris Cooper’s July Johnson.

Since I spent so much time talking about Clara in the last couple of posts, I should probably follow up on her here. Barbara Hershey does as good a job with her as Anjelica Huston did, though the character has changed yet again with this mini-series. And not necessarily for the better.

Clara was a dark character in Lonesome Dove, but she’s even more tragic here. If she was starting to reach the end of her rope at the end of Lonesome Dove, she’s hanging from it by one hand in Return. In spite of that, there’s not much development for her though. She’s already proven herself a strong woman, so piling more and more heartache on her just to show that she can take it seems kind of pointless and cruel.

Still, it’s good to see her relationship with Call change from where it was in Lonesome Dove. Even if she’s not as vital a character as she once was, she’s still an interesting, valuable part of the story.

Four out of five butt-kicking Mexican gals.

Firefly webcomic

Dark Horse's online comic Dark Horse Presents has got a free Firefly story up.

I wish they'd quit making pre-Serenity comics with spacey River and do some where she's all butt-kicking, but I'll take what I can get.

Vampirella ReVamp

I like Vampirella. I think she's a cool character with a lot of history and there have been some fantastic writers producing her adventures over the years. People like Archie Goodwin, Kurt Busiek, James Robinson, Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, Ben Raab, Brian Wood, and Josh Fialkov.

Unfortunately, a lot of people dismiss her as nothing more than a T&A character and you can't always blame them. I mean, you can because those writers aren't known for making vapid T&A books, but there's still that costume. It's difficult to get past that Vampirella isn't a comic that I can unreservedly show to just anyone. Regardless of how well-crafted the story, people look at the costume and eyebrows are raised. Smirks are given.

So, I think it's really cool that Harris Comics is joining forces with Project: Rooftop on a contest to redesign Vampirella's look. As far as I can tell, Harris isn't looking to use the winning design as an official new look for the character, but it means something to me that they're using this approach as a way to promote their book. On some level it's an acknowledgment that there's room for an update to the character's design. It's a small step, but it's a step.

Action Girls: The Women of Lonesome Dove, Part Three – Clara Allen

Lonesome Dove is a classic for a reason. Even though the titles of these posts say that I’m concentrating on the women of the saga, you can’t really talk about any of the mini-series without looking closely at Gus and Call. And I’m not convinced that that’s just because they’re the main characters. I think it has as least as much to do with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones’ portrayal of them.

Robert Duvall gives Gus such charm and humor that both David Arquette and Steve Zahn thought it best to just imitate him when they took their turns at the character. Gus is a lazy, womanizing old coot, but you can’t help but love him for his gentleness and respect of other people. He can be damn tough when he needs to be, but most of the time you just want to hang out and listen to him talk. Unfortunately, a lot of that charm was lost in Dead Man’s Walk and Comanche Moon, but I blame the writing for that more than I do the actors. Gus was more annoying than charismatic as a youth, but maybe that’s the way it needed to be. A person’s most irritating traits can become endearing once they’ve mellowed out a little with age and had a chance to work on you.

Call is even harder to get right. Tommy Lee Jones makes it look easy to balance Call’s gloomy orneriness with his obvious affection for Gus and the rest of his friends. Even while he’s cursing Gus out for not helping around the ranch, you never doubt that he loves him. Jonny Lee Miller never did manage to get that right. His Call always seemed to be barely tolerating Gus. Karl Urban did a better job, but there’s still some uneasiness between his Call and Zahn’s Gus that isn’t there with Jones and Duvall. Again, that might be because the characters themselves have grown more comfortable with and fond of each other over the years.

But even if that’s true – even if the parts I don’t like from the two prequels are necessary to show character development – I think it illustrates a point about the relationship of those two mini-series to the original. Lonesome Dove is so good and so winning that Dead Man’s Walk and Comanche Moon only have value as they relate to it. They don’t stand on their own. We don’t like the characters enough and as I’ve said before, certain parts of them just don’t make sense unless you also know the Lonesome Dove story.

The one exception to that is the character of Clara. I didn’t care much for her in Dead Man’s Walk, but I grew to admire her in Comanche Moon. In Lonesome Dove, she’s moved away from Texas with her husband and kids to live in Nebraska, so she doesn’t appear onscreen until about halfway through the mini-series. Her presence is felt the entire mini-series though. She’s still the great love of Gus’ life and he can’t wait to see her again on the way to Montana. And we can’t either.

Anjelica Huston’s Clara doesn’t disappoint. Her husband has been kicked in the head by a horse and is in a coma, but Clara and her girls stand faithfully by him and take care of his needs. But having lost two boys to illness and now this with her husband, Clara’s weakening by the time Gus shows up. The effect his visit has on her – especially since he’s traveling with a prostitute who’s obviously in love with him – is spectacular.

In contrast, the prostitute Lorie (Diane Lane) is so very weak. She has a record of trusting untrustworthy men while ignoring people who genuinely care about her. When that leads her to hook up with Jake Spoon (Robert Urich), he deserts her on the way to California and she’s abducted by Blue Duck, Buffalo Hump's son who was starting to cause trouble in Comanche Moon. Fortunately, Gus learns about the kidnapping quickly and immediately sets out to rescue her. Unfortunately, by the time he gets there she’s already been raped – possibly numerous times.

That brings up something I’ve forgotten to talk about before now. There’s a lot of rape in the Lonesome Dove saga and it’s not always handled very well. Lorie’s rape is a powerful event in Lonesome Dove, so I wonder if that’s why we get other rapes in the prequels. Are they trying to recapture that impact? If so, it doesn’t work.

In Dead Man’s Walk, it’s used just to show us how evil Buffalo Hump and his men are. In Comanche Moon, the rape of a Ranger’s wife is all about its effect on him. She hates that it happened to her, but her main fear is that he won’t love her anymore when he finds out. And when he does eventually find out about it, the story’s focus once again goes right on him and how he responds.

At least in Lonesome Dove, Lorie’s rape is all about her. We learn something about Gus by watching him help her through it, but it’s always Lorie’s story. Unfortunately, the event reveals her to be as weak as she’s always appeared to be. She’s always liked Gus, but has never shown an interest in him until he rescues her and nurses her back to both physical and emotional health. After that though, she’s suddenly truly madly deeply in love with him. I’m not qualified to comment on the appropriateness of a woman’s reaction to being raped, but I certainly wish that Lorie had been made stronger by the experience.

Eventually Lorie does become stronger, but it’s all due to Clara and it mostly happens off-camera in between Lonesome Dove and Return to Lonesome Dove, where - like Matty in Comanche Moon - we don't see her, but get an update in dialogue that she's doing okay for herself further West. We’ll look more at Return to Lonesome Dove at tomorrow.

Four out of five water moccasin attacks.

Adventureblog Gallery: Shadow Lass and She-Hulk

Shadow Lass



By Gene Gonzales.

I'm sure this reveals some kind of weird fetish, but Shadow Lass is easily my favorite character from the Legion of Super Heroes and it's got a lot to do with the blue skin. It's also got a lot to do with how she was drawn and portrayed in the Legion Lost mini-series, which is where I first started reading about the Legion. She was all goth and badass, but with an awesome '30s or '40s hairstyle.

Crap. I quit reading Legion of Super Heroes a while ago and now I've got myself wanting to go back to it again.

She-Hulk



More evidence that I may have a thing for brightly-colored skin.

Monsterpocalypse: The Comic

I don't play Collectible Card Games anymore. There's something I don't like about a game where the person with the most disposable income is able to buy rarer, more powerful cards and dominate. So, while I'm tempted by the concept and the gorgeous art I've seen so far, I won't be playing the Monsterpocalypse card game.

I will however be reading the comic book. It sounds a lot like Kill All Monsters!, but I say there's room for everyone's giant robots vs. giant monsters comics.

The Atlantis Journal: Nim's Island, real-life pirates, aquatic superheroes, and more

Nim's Island on DVD



I know it looks like a kids' movie, but I found a lot to love about it as an adult too. It's all about love, being brave, and keeping promises. And like I said before, it made me wish there really was a series of Alex Rover books. Plus: Jodie Foster.

Anyway, it's on DVD now and I'm getting it.

Pirate Map



I once found myself in the weird position of having to justify my fondness for pirates to someone who really wanted me to understand that piracy is a horrible, modern, real-world problem. Well, of course it is. And I'm sure I wouldn't have enjoyed hanging out with real pirates 300 years ago.

I'm also sure that I wouldn't want to ride a real, live T-Rex, but it doesn't stop me from thinking that dinosaurs are pretty darn cool. There are awesome, fantasy versions and there are horrifying, real-life versions. I prefer the fantasy versions, but this International Maritime Bureau map of 2008 piracy attacks is really interesting and educational.

I can't help but notice though that there's not a whole lot of high seas piracy going on here. Mostly its very close to shore. I also notice that one attack about a month ago occured pretty much in port at Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Knowing what I do about recent events in Haiti, I wonder how much that attack was motivated by greed versus a desperate attempt to get some food.

Not that I'm at all excusing any use of violence to take something that doesn't belong to you; I'm just questioning how many of these acts are actually committed by what we'd think of as traditional, merciless, professional pirates.

Pirate Hotel East

Back to the cool pirates though: if you're looking to stay in a pirate-themed hotel, but aren't headed to California: good news. Walt Disney World is opening their own, pirate-themed rooms at the Caribbean Beach Resort.

Pirate wagon

Want to know how to convert your kids' wagon into a pirate ship? About.com tells you.

Lego pirates



The Pirate Shack has links to a couple of sites focused on Lego pirate sets.

Marquette Pirate Festival

If it weren't seven hours away, I'd head over the the Pirate Festival in Marquette, Michigan this week. It goes until the 18th and includes treasure hunts, a carnival, a play, and a pirate ball. None of the information I found mentions a specific tie between piracy and the town's heritage, but I'm sure there must have been pirates of some kind on Lake Superior at some point. Even if it's completely arbitrary though, it sounds like a lot of fun.

Flynn


Otis Frampton has been talking about and showing concept art from the pirate/fantasy graphic novel he's working on. It's called Flynn and it's about a young girl in a world inhabited by dragons, steel airships, and cat people.

Mermaid end table

I wouldn't want it in my living room, but the sculpt on this mermaid table is cool enough that it's worth pointing out.

Sub-Mariner: The Depths



I don't know why I haven't been more interested in aquatic superheroes than I have. You'd think I'd be all over Sub-Mariner and Aquaman comics, but I've never cared that much about them.

I think that's mostly because writers have seen them as standard superheroes (or occasionally, in Sub-Mariner's case, a supervillain). They've focused on the water-based powers, but stick the characters in New York or outer space or wherever else you typically find superheroes. No wonder most folks think these guys are lame; Sub-Mariner slightly less so because at least he has an interesting, volatile personality.

Since I've been thinking so much about ocean adventures lately, I'm getting curious about checking out some Sub-Mariner and Aquaman comics. I know there've been some that focus on the undersea lives of these guys, but I've ignored them because of my perception that I just didn't care for the characters. I think it's time to give them another look.

One that looks good is Marvel's upcoming Sub-Mariner mini-series The Depths. It's written by Peter Milligan (Human Target) and will be illustrated by Esad Ribic (The Mighty Thor: Loki). It's about a legendary, Indiana Jones-like explorer who gets it into his head to go find Atlantis, but runs up against the city's lord and protector once he gets there. That sounds like a good story with or without a Marvel superhero in it.

Adventureblog Theater: Pirate Kitteh and IMAX Sea Monsters

Pirate Kitteh...

...boreds ur ship.



Thanks, Videosift!

Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure

IMAX, here I come.



Thanks, Robert Hood!

Adventureblog Gallery: Sea Monsters and Aliens

Black Monster



Why must Schiani Ledo be so awesome?

The Metal Doom



By Leo Morey.

Doc Savage vs. the Creature from the Black Lagoon



By Keith "Kez" Wilson. You've got to check out the rest of his gallery too. He pits Doc Savage against everyone from Godzilla to Doctor Who. It's a beautiful thing.

Slaves of the Fish Men



By J Allen St. John.

Monsters and Heroes



By Al Williamson.

Writing is Hard: Author websites

This is mostly a bookmark because I've found myself going back to a couple of articles that literary agent Rachel Vater posted earlier this year about author websites. The first is a collection of her thoughts on the subject; the second is her responses to reader questions about it.

So far, I think mine's doing okay - especially at this stage of my career - but Vater's thoughts are a good reminder of what an author website is supposed to be for. That's why I'll keep going back and rereading them.

Action Girls: The Women of Lonesome Dove, Part Two – Clara Forsythe

Like David Arquette before him in Dead Man’s Walk, Steve Zahn looks like he’s imitating Robert Duvall in Comanche Moon more than he is acting. But he does such a good job of it that you don’t care.

And like Jonny Lee Miller, Karl Urban doesn’t try to imitate Tommy Lee Jones, but just plays the character. It feels like Urban’s got a lot more to work with than Miller did though. I don’t know how much time is supposed to have lapsed between the two mini-series, but Urban’s Woodrow Call is a lot more grim than Miller’s was. Some of that is undoubtedly Urban’s natural broodiness versus Miller’s gentler appearance. Miller did a fine job, but let’s face it: Urban is perfect for the role.

The story is more interesting than Dead Man’s Walk, but it still tends to ramble. The first two acts are mostly about the capture and rescue of Captain Scull (Val Kilmer), who leads the Rangers. Before his capture though, we see a lot of the Rangers coming and going in and out of Austin, much like they did in Dead Man’s Walk. Gus and Clara (played this time by Linda Cardellini, aka Velma from the live-action Scooby Doo movies) are still in love, but are also still struggling to commit to each other. Gus’ job takes him away from Clara far too often for her liking and she’s not going to marry him until he can quit Rangering and settle down. Which he won’t do.

Buffalo Hump, the villain from Dead Man’s Walk, is played by Wes Studi this time and is a lot more settled down. Apart from one notable exception, he pretty much stays in camp and criticizes his son Blue Duck, who’s the real troublemaker of the mini-series. So, we mostly get a lot of slice-of-life episodes of Ranger life, punctuated by important events like Scull’s capture at the hands of an old enemy and the Rangers’ attempts to first ransom him, and when that fails, rescue him.

During the ransoming attempt, the Rangers go down to a little town on the Rio Grande called Lonesome Dove where a wealthy rancher has set up shop. They try to persuade the rancher to donate cattle for the ransom, but he refuses. It’s a fruitless side-trip meant only to get Gus and Call to Lonesome Dove so they can talk about maybe retiring there one day. The mini-series is full of that kind of stuff: meandering side-trips that don’t progress the story, but are only there to hit particular beats and move the characters closer to where they’re supposed to be in Lonesome Dove.

That’s not to say it's boring though. The production values of Comanche Moon are a lot more engaging than Dead Man’s Walk was. I don’t know if it’s the use of music or the camera angles or a lot of stuff mixed together, but I stayed entertained throughout Comanche Moon and that’s something that I can’t say about its predecessor.

Val Kilmer, for example, absolutely immerses himself in the role of Captain Scull. Scull is a charismatic leader who uses a combination of humor and spunk to prevail in the harsh, Texas wilderness. He’s as much fun to watch as Gus and Call.

Also fun is Scull’s vain, horny wife Inez who loves having so many of her husband’s handsome, young Rangers living nearby. She’s fun because we hate her, but she’s still fun.

Much less fun is her conquest at the beginning of the story, a young Ranger named Jake Spoon. Jake’s easily manipulated and has terrible judgment. This will, of course, make him much more interesting when he’s given some power (and charisma) and played by Robert Urich in Lonesome Dove, but here – at least starting out – he’s just a pawn in Inez’s game. He does one, attention-grabbing thing the entire mini-series and that’s to hit a prostitute. But as soon as he’s done it he pretty much quits being a player in the story. He’s still around, but he fades into the background. I’ll explain.

The prostitute he hits is the girl Call exchanges looks with at the end of Dead Man’s Walk. Her name is Maggie Tilton, which is really unfortunate because it sounds so similar to Matty, the prostitute in Call’s life during most of the first mini-series. In fact, with so much recasting being done between the two mini-series, it took me a while to figure out that Maggie and Matty were two separate characters. And even then it was because someone finally mentioned that Matty had moved further West and was doing pretty good for herself.

It’s too bad because I like Matty a lot more than Maggie. We don’t learn much about Maggie other than that she’s a prostitute and that she seems to have a crush on Call. He seems to like her too, but he’s careful about it and obviously doesn’t see a future for the two of them. You never get a real clear understanding of why. She's sweet as can be, she's beautiful, and she obviously dotes on Call. There's a lot to like about her.

By the time Jake hits Maggie, it’s obvious that things are going nowhere for her with Call, so she ends up letting Jake stick around. I sort of hated her for that, but she makes a convincing argument at one point that she needs a man around and she’d rather have Jake than no one. She’s no Action Girl, that Maggie. She’s a good woman, and supportive of her friends, but dang I hate that she let Jake stay.

Jake’s presence in Maggie’s life keeps him in the story after that, but just barely. It’s more the idea of him that makes him important than it is anything he does. When Maggie becomes pregnant, she claims that Call is the father, but Call doesn’t believe her. The baby could very well be Jake’s. Maggie insists that it’s Call’s, but really, we don’t have any more reason to believe her than Call does. We’re supposed to accept that “a woman knows these things.” In Lonesome Dove, everyone believes the baby is Call’s except for Call. I don’t know how that happened from the flimsy evidence presented in Comanche Moon.

There’s other stuff that doesn’t match up between Comanche Moon and Lonesome Dove too. Lonesome Dove describes Maggie as spending her days watching a saloon door waiting for Call. In Comanche Moon, Maggie works out of her house, not a saloon. In fact, she doesn’t set foot in a saloon at all during the entire mini-series. Lonesome Dove also says that Maggie dies in the town of Lonesome Dove, not Austin as she does in Comanche Moon. Sloppy.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The last third of Comanche Moon takes place seven years after the first two thirds. That’s to give Maggie’s son Newt time to grow up enough that he can become a sort of mascot to the Rangers. There’s not much more reason for it than that. Like I said before, they’re obviously just hitting the beats and showing the important pieces of the backstory.

We hear that Jake’s real good to Newt and Maggie, but we never see it. Jake’s pretty much been written out of the story by now. He’s just another excuse for Call to stay distant from Maggie. Call does try to get close a couple of times, but his refusal to accept Newt as his son gets in the way and Maggie eventually breaks things off with him. Another major difference from the way Lonesome Dove suggests things happened.

And then there’s Clara. In Lonesome Dove we’re told that Clara and Gus never got their act together because they couldn’t commit to each other, and that’s mostly how it was portrayed in Dead Man’s Walk. But in Comanche Moon, it’s obvious for a while that they love each other so much that eventually they will commit and get married. It takes the meddling of Inez Scull – who wants Gus for herself, at least for a while – to break them up for good. While Clara’s out of town, Inez tells Gus that Clara’s married another suitor, a young rancher named Bob Allen. That emotionally frees Gus to start sleeping with Inez and when Clara finds out about it, that ends things.

It’s lame because Gus never questions Inez’s story. He knows her to be manipulative, but he just sort of takes her word for it and jumps into bed (although grieving over Clara while he’s at it).

Clara comes out looking pretty good though. Her parents die during Comanche Moon and she bravely takes over their business. Unlike Maggie with Jake, Clara hooks up with Bob Allen (and eventually does marry him) because he genuinely loves her and she sees that she could be happy with him in ways that she can’t with Gus. Especially since Gus is so stupid and gullible (something that he definitely was not in Lonesome Dove). We never feel like Clara needs a man, but she’d definitely be happier with one and Bob’s a good guy.

I liked Clara a lot in Comanche Moon. You can see elements of both the capricious girl from Dead Man’s Walk and the unwavering frontier woman of Lonesome Dove. That’s hard to pull off, but they sure did it. Comanche Moon has a lot of problems, but it succeeds in two things: being entertaining and moving Clara’s story forward. I finished Comanche Moon eager to see more of her.

Three out of five snake-eating madmen.