Post-Op

Two full days on from the ear tube insertion, the little girl is doing extremely well. She was, in point of fact and as noted previously, doing much better in the days leading up to the visit to the surgery center, too, but of course that fact simply gave rise to the possibility that convalescing from the procedure would amount to something of a setback, somehow. But it didn’t! She’s been sleeping well at night, and during the day has been as bright and delighted and delightful as ever. There even seem to be some signs that she’s closer than ever to taking her first steps on her own or saying her first identifiable words; I mean, of course she’s closer than ever, the mere passage of time all but guarantees that, but getting over her back-to-back-to-back ear infections and receiving her tubes seems to have nudged her noticeably in that direction all at once. We shall see how long it takes to actually hit the milestones.

So, of course, I am tempted to declare us all fully out of the woods. The surgery did not take an odds-defyingly unpleasant turn, so in fact we are out of the stretch of trees where the little girl is under anesthesia and her mother and I are holding our collective breath. Similarly, our daughter is currently infection-free and that portion of the woods is behind us as well. The hope is that ear infections as a recurring and ongoing concern are a thing of the past, and more often than not we will be a family of four who all sleep through the night just fine, and peace and harmony will reign throughout the land. One would hope. We’ve at least been optimistic enough to put away the nebulizer and the humidifier and the various infant acetaminophen and infant ibuprofen dispensary syringes for now. Maybe it will turn out to be (yet another) magical silver bullet, maybe not, but things are good. Sometimes good news is no news, but at least that allows this post to be short and sweet.

Playing dumb (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes)

Once again it is time for the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die Blog Club to take centerstage (or, since this is a blog, take upscroll? Toppost?), and once again it is time to admit that my participation in said club has led directly to closing a gap in my general pop culture exposure which may be hard to believe ever existed in the first place: prior to watching Gentlemen Prefer Blondes I had never seen a Marilyn Monroe movie. Notwithstanding my well-known enchantment with lists and rankings and the fact that Some Like It Hot tends to come up at or near the top of any rundown of Greatest Comedy Films of All Time and the like, I hadn’t sat through any of the erstwhile Norma Jean’s filmography before.

Which of course – so of course that it is in the running for most goes-without-saying acknowledgment ever – has no bearing on my knowledge of Marilyn Monroe the legend, because being ignorant of that would be practically impossible, like not knowing who Elvis Presley or Mickey Mouse or George Washington or Superman are, even if you’re not a rockabilly fan/animation lover/history buff/comicbook aficionado. Except of course that Mickey and Supes exist entirely as products of certain media, and Elvis’s rock-n-roll records are more or less the point, as is George’s historical significance … whereas Marilyn Monroe seems to have come down through the ages as being famous for being gorgeous, and everything revolves around that: being Playboy’s first centerfold, her dalliances and marriages with famous men, the oft-(mis-)quoted trivia about her measurements and her dress size, her deconstruction by Warhol, &c. Oh yeah, and people put her in some movies, too, but those performances are more or less beside the point, right? The movies themselves yielded up some memorable imagery, to be sure, Marilyn in her white dress blown up by the steam vent, or in her pink gown and diamonds surrounded by tuxedoed suitors, but those are practically static freezeframes, not living performances. (For the record, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes has the latter one in it; the former is from The Seven Year Itch.)

But yes, the point being that Marilyn Monroe died eleven years before I was born and her unassailable status as prototypical sex symbol was long-established by the first time I encountered it (which would have been well before I could have really appreciated or even understood it, such is the way of the modern world) which makes it at least a semi-interesting proposition to go back and see some facet of how it all began. There’s also, I think, an interesting meditation to be had on causes and effects now that we’re multiple generations deep into the mass-media eras of civilization, namely did Marilyn Monroe tap into some collective understanding of what desirability always was, or do we now base our expectations of desirability on her specifically because she managed to be in the right place at the right time? (Not to mention the less-pleasant aspects of outright objectification, which I touched on yesterday so that I wouldn’t necessarily have to today, but again, I’m totally aware there’s an unseemliness to it all as well.)

I have to say, though, that despite girding myself with all kinds of socio-cultural questions like the above in order to get through what I expected to be a corny musical comedy from the square old 50’s, I didn’t find my mind turning to them all that often during Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I was too busy being genuinely entertained, even to the point of laughing out loud once or twice. I recently expressed some concerns to my wife that I may just be getting a little bit dumber myself (I laughed out loud at last week’s episode of The Office, too, and everyone knows that creaking hulk hasn’t been terribly funny in a while) but be that as it may, I’m willing to stand up for the charms of Howard Hawks’s work in this case. And Marilyn Monroe is more than a pretty face in it! I never once felt I had to overlook any bad acting on her part, and I didn’t think it was because Lorelei Lee was just Marilyn Monroe playing herself, either. Granted, it’s a broadly drawn character in a pretty broad farce, but she does land some solid punchlines with great delivery and timing.

Jane Russell steals the show with a lot more punchlines, though, and that was even more of a revelation. Her Dorothy Shaw is a fantastic counterpoint to Lorelei: cynical and smart where Lorelei is innocent and dumb (but not as dumb as she seems, as it turns out), but also hopelessly romantic and unconcerned about men’s money where Lorelei is pragmatic if not a downright golddigger (which, again, turns out to be a little more complicated than it seems at the outset – and I know I still sound like an ignorant ageist but I’m always pleasantly surprised and heartened when that depth of consideration shows itself in older entertainments which I expect to be as simple and straightforward as possible). Just the buddy-movie yin and yang of Dorothy and Lorelei would be worth the price of admission, and then in the climax of the movie Dorothy impersonates Lorelei in a Parisian criminal court, and Jane Russell absolutely slays with her Marilyn Monroe impression. Again, not hard given the breathy, cooing, exaggerated woman-child Monroe plays Lorelei as to begin with, but still superawesome.

There are aspects of the movie that are undeniably old-timey to many sensibilities, I’m sure. If you don’t like musicals, particularly ones which assault suspension of disbelief with choreographed musical numbers that break out in unlikely venues, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes probably won’t do much for you either. Likewise if retrograde marriage plots aren’t so much your thing. But if those elements are either not obstacles to begin with, or at the very least the kind you can work your way around, there are worse ways to spend a couple of hours than with this worthy addition to the Must See roster.

Great expense

I’m no stranger to guilt, so much so that you can pretty safely assume that there’s a moderately broad streak of the stuff running as subtextual undercurrent to everything I babble about here. If I grouse about the indignities of my 9-to-5 job, I simultaneously feel guilty about it because I know there are unemployed and underemployed people out there struggling to make ends meet and compared to whom I really have nothing to complain about. And if I vent about home repairs or yardwork or traffic or any other inconveniences, I’m acutely aware of the excruciatingly first-world, upper-middle-class bo-bo nature of these petty grievances. But that’s who I am, and this blog is about my life, and I just figure it would get real old real fast to put that boilerplate disclaimer in each and every post.

There’s actually a sharper edge to those concerns in this particular phase of my life, too, given the three-and-a-half year old little guy who lives in my house. My wife and I are trying to make the most of these formative years and teach him to be conscientious, or at the very least not egregiously wasteful. All well and good that he has internalized the importance of washing his hands after using the bathroom, but we often have to remind him not to spend forever doing it, the admonishment almost always taking the form “don’t waste water”. Same goes for his eating habits, whereby we’re rightfully proud of him for his willingness to eat a reasonably healthy array of fruits and vegetables and grains in addition to his staples of peanut butter and chicken nuggets, the only problem arising when he asks for food, is given a serving, has one bite and then asks for something completely different. “Don’t waste food” comes flying out right quick about then. And as far as the little guy is concerned, wasting something is bad primarily because mommy and daddy don’t like waste, period. Meanwhile in the back of my mind I’m thinking of countries suffering under famine conditions, or villages that don’t have ready access to clean drinking water, and in dire moments the places contending with both of those things at once and more.

Of course there’s a standard coping mechanism I’m very familiar with which basically says guilt isn’t necessarily the most appropriate response to the existence of deprivation elsewhere. I’m lucky I was born to well-off people in the developed world, I’m grateful to have been blessed with such luck, but I shouldn’t feel guilty about it because I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t do anything at all in creating those circumstances which gave rise to me, anymore than I personally did anything to create generations of wealth disparity and/or unbalanced resource allocation in the geopolitical reality we live in. It’s all a gross oversimplification, sure, but it can help one sleep at night.

But then there’s the matter of actively participating in doing harm, which shouldn’t really be separated from guilt at all, because that’s pretty If A And B Then C. And this too has been coming up more and more lately, and I find myself ill-equipped to answer it.

Again, in the realm of constant thematic underpinnings, maintaining a blog that’s really an outlet for all of my obsessive overthinking of popular culture is kind of a double-edged sword, as it gives me some needed space to air out my thoughts creatively, but I sometimes find myself feeling guilty for expending so much time and energy on it in the first place because, really, how does any of this actually matter? That line of thought certainly didn’t originate with the blog, either, since I’ve long struggled with reconciling a general feeling that the purpose of a life well-spent is to make the world a better place against my innate tendency to want nothing more than to lose myself in narratives, be it via a video game or a heavy metal opera or a multiplex blockbuster or a dog-eared comic book. Sometimes I’ve told myself that I’ve been known to tell a halfway decent story myself now and then, and if I can spread a little joy here and there, make the world a more magical place, or even simply generate a tolerable amount of distraction, I can take solace in that. But as a passive consumer of other people’s creations, the best that can be said about it is that at least it isn’t hurting anybody.

They say things often come in threes, and evidently that applies to counterexamples as well. Last week Junior Seau committed suicide, I watched Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for the 1001 Film Blog Club, and the Avengers movie opened in the states. Somehow all of those things became emblematic of how problematically complicated everything seems to be.

Let’s start with The Avengers, which I actually haven’t seen yet because I couldn’t justify going to a late-night movie and staying out until 2 a.m. when the little girl has been prone to waking up screaming in the middle of the night so much lately. (That’s an entirely different kettle of guilt-fish, and of course once I resolved to put off seeing the flick for a while, the little girl began sleeping through the night with very few problems, because of course she did.) And I almost certainly will go see the movie sooner rather than later, but I haven’t been entirely immune to an interesting line of conversation that’s been floating around the internet in the movie’s wake. Specifically, that the comic book industry’s business practices are kind of morally screwed up. They’ve gotten better this century, but especially at the dawn of the Golden Age they were less than admirable. Basically comic book companies facilitate the mass production and distribution of creative work, and the corporate entities reap massive profits and the responsible creative types get very little share of it. The person who has gotten the richest off the Harry Potter phenomenon is clearly J.K. Rowling, and that’s as it should be. The persons who have gotten richest off Superman are emphatically not (the estates of) Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the two guys who dreamed the character up and wrote and drew his earliest adventures. To a large extent that’s the difference between how things got done in the 1930’s and how they’re done now; back then, Joe and Jerry and lots of other young guys like them did work for hire at miniscule payrates, which all seemed appropriate because they were cranking out literally disposable entertainment for kids, and getting paid to do so at all seemed like a swell deal. Comics became a bigger and bigger (and more bankable) concern, but the ink on the contracts was long-since dried by then. And no corporate entity has ever said “We should really compensate these guys who breathed life into these creations beyond what we’re legally obligated to them for.” So basically when one buys a ticket for the Avengers one is giving money to the theater-owner, Walt Disney Pictures, Marvel Studios, and Marvel Comics, but not to the families of creators who worked on the source comics for the past fifty or so years, most notably Jack Kirby, the artist and co-plotter all the way back to issue number one. It’s all legal, it’s all very much “just the way it is”, but I admit it gives me pause.

(Some people have been suggesting that anyone who goes to see the movie might also make a donation to The Hero Initiative, which is a charity dedicated to helping ease the financial burdens of comic book industry vets. I can hardly argue with that formulation, and I gave. Not saying you must, as well, but there you go.)

So Marilyn Monroe has been on my mind recently, which might seem odd given how my pop culture universe has been about 78% cowboy westerns lately and that genre was not one in which Ms. Monroe operated. But there’s a larger rumination on Americana in general that’s been my brain-backdrop recently, and surely Marilyn Monroe deserves to be included in that just as much as the John Wayne and Clint Eastwood archetypes. I’ll talk more about her performance in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes tomorrow, but the connection here has to do with her iconic stature being reinforced by her untimely death. She may very well have been damaged goods before she ever made it to Hollywood, but getting there clearly didn’t help very much. It’s difficult to consider her at all without grappling with ideas of female exploitation – and frankly, it’s difficult these days to consume almost any pop culture at all without that kind of grappling. I’ve never claimed to be anything much above ape-like in terms of susceptibility to the allure of titillation, whether it’s the risible tween-friendly kind in evidence in Smallville’s shameless pandering or the (arguably) more artful but still prurient pay-cable nudity in Game of Thrones. But the older I get (or maybe more importantly, the more birthdays my very own daughter celebrates) the more I feel like the line between harmless and harmful exploitation is shifting on me.

And finally we come to the death of a football star, and the chilling realization that there seems to be a growing trend not just of former NFLers taking their own lives but of them choosing specifically to shoot themselves fatally in the chest so that their brains can be autopsied for ongoing investigation into repeated injuries and brain damage and so on. Which makes pulling the trigger out to be the mere culmination of a long, slow suicide that begins when a player is drafted. It makes professional football significantly less entertaining. (Behold my gift for understatement.) I know a lot of people summarily blow this whole topic off with an argument along the lines of “Those guys make millions and millions of dollars playing pro ball and thus get no sympathy from me” but that has really never held much sway in my mind. If we had voluntary gladiatorial bouts in this day and age, where people were willing to literally fight to the death on pay-per-view in exchange for millions of dollars for their families, would it be morally acceptable to be a paying member of the audience for same? Assuming the answer to that is “no”, how many shades away is the NFL’s body count now? Plus considering that, more and more as I get older, I’ve come to believe the leading research that posits human brain development (especially judgment re: self-preservation) isn’t fully complete until age 25 or so, and most football players go pro right around age 22 … to what extent is my enjoyment of a Sunday’s worth of gridiron contests unfairly exploitative? How much, exactly, should I hate myself for feeding the machinery?

I hadn’t even been vocalizing a lot of this stuff, but my wife (unsurprisingly) was right there with me, at least on the NFL question. She posed the question in equation terms: Seau’s death makes her feel pretty strongly that she could never let our son play football, because it wouldn’t be worth the risk to his health and well-being. On the other side, she’s always loved following professional football, rooting for the Steelers and generally appreciating the game enough to tune in for Sunday Night or Monday Night Football regardless of who’s playing. Can those two contradictory stances be reconciled? Is it fair to say “no child of mine” but complacently allow other people’s children to risk themselves for a technically non-essential diversion? My wife tried posing that question on Facebook but it seemed to get misinterpreted with a fair number of people not even addressing the question of whether or not to abandon the NFL but actually arguing the case that youth football isn’t that dangerous and the little guy should be allowed to suit up for Pop Warner or high school varsity or whatever if he so desires.

And I get that kneejerk reaction, I do. A wise man once told me that baseball may be our pastime, but football is our national sacrament; that’s why the Super Bowl gets played on Sunday. Saying you don’t follow the NFL because you’re just not a sports person is unusual, but forgivable; saying you don’t like pro football because the reckless physicality ruins young men’s brains forever makes you sound like an insufferably smug scold who nobody likes. So the choice seems to come down to hypocrisy versus party-poopery, which is never a fun set of options. I suppose a third option is to try, to whatever extent you can, to continue enjoying the things you enjoy while honestly (and quietly) working to change the things about them you have a problem with. Maybe fixing what’s already all around us is just as important as adding to it with brand new contributions. Maybe that can ease the guilt somewhat.

Fault not the machinery

Old security arrangement at my office: no access to the suite without holding a magnetized card up to a plate on the wall which would detect the … magna-code(?) … and unlock the door.

New security arrangement: no access to the suite without swiping the magnetized stripe of a DoD identification badge through an electronic reader, which unlocks the door. Said readers are somewhat sensitive and finicky, and it is entirely possible to swipe a totally valid badge through the reader and still get the red light signal of “access denied” because the badge was not swiped at the right velocity or somesuch.

This morning: I swiped my badge through the reader and got no light signal at all. No green for “door unlocked”, no red for “access denied”, nothing. I swiped again, nothing. I started wondering if maybe the door lock had not yet been switched over from nighttime mode, when it requires both a spin dial combination and a keypad combination as well as a swiped badge. Then I looked at the way I was holding my badge and realized I had been running blank plastic through the reader instead of the magnetized stripe. I flipped the badge around and let myself in.

What I’m saying is I’ve been a little tired and distracted lately.

I still have a heavier workload than normal this week, but there are numerous bright sides. First and foremost quite possibly being the fact that my first thought when my badge swipings were going for naught was not Well, they’ve finally caught on to the fact that I don’t do much around here and they’ve laid me off. Additionally, I believe I can see the light at the end of the tunnel in terms of working my way through to the end of the long to-do list lobbed at me last week. The changes and enhancements being requested have not ballooned uncontrollably into an impossibly never-ending and self-perpetuating scroll of demands, which is good. And although I was already thinking about where I had left off on Friday and would need to pick things up today as I fumbled the dumb side of my badge through the reader, those thoughts were not of the frantic variety (which I’ve had my share of in the past) that arise when I’ve left for the weekend having failed to meet a deadline because I hit a wall and still, even after brooding for 72 hours, don’t know how to get over. It’s just steady work, a little disruptive to the blogging schedule, maybe, but I really shouldn’t be complaining about that.

As previously mentioned, I definitely will not be at work tomorrow since the little girl is having her tubes inserted, thus (we fervently hope) ending the interminable ear infection and antibiotics misery-go-round. I may or may not check in here, but at the very latest regular programming will resume Wednesday with another 1001 Film Blog Club entry. Until next post, then!

A Great Disturbance in the Empire

Obviously I did not have the cognitive capacity to blog yesterday because my head a’sploded upon learning that a stupid, random batting practice injury had ended Mariano Rivera’s season and quite possibly his career. I’ve been bracing myself for the Yankees losing the Sandman for a couple of years now (dude’s not getting any younger) and wondering whether it would be better to have him retire with dignity at the top of his game, leaving us to ruefully ponder throughout the very next season if he had departed too soon, or if watching him grind out a final season which was clearly on the wrong side of one-too-many would somehow make it easier to let go. I admit I had not envisioned the “ruptured ACL while shagging ground balls” scenario, and thus was unprepared for it. Oh, Mo, you were magnificent, and probably for far longer than we had any right to expect. You will be missed.

OK, in all seriousness, my paying gig has actually been a bit ridiculously busy this week (at least relative to how my job usually reckons with workload, i.e. not at all) plus every time I tried to turn my thoughts toward child-related issues yesterday the major point to contend with was that the little girl has in fact been scheduled for a tympanostomy this coming Tuesday, which I recognize myself being way less freaked out about the second time around but is still something which needs to be kind of head-down bulldozed through until the moment when my daughter comes out from under anesthesia and the surgical nurse says everything’s going to be just fine, so let’s touch base on that front again next Thursday, shall we?

Objective validation

I tend to read a lot of reviews, although I often get the feeling that I do it differently than most everybody else. In theory, reviews exist primarily to help people decide where and when to spend their precious money and time. If a book or movie or album or whatever sounds good based on the review, the reader of said review is more likely to pick up a copy or shell out for a ticket &c. If the review is negative, and the reader identifies enough with the reviewer to suppose they too would not enjoy the work for the same reasons, then the person may reconsider going to all the trouble of checking it out for themselves. And I suspect that pretty frequently there are cases where a person is bound and determined to, for instance, go to the movies on Friday night and it just becomes a question of which movie to go see, with the respective reviews serving as a guide.

On the other hand, I very rarely go to the movies, and when I do it’s because there’s a very specific movie coming out which I would go watch no matter what kind of reviews it was getting (see: Green Lantern). And therefore I often don’t concern myself with the reviews of something I’m intending to check out, because it won’t make much difference anyway, at least not in terms of the go-see-it-or-don’t binary. It might make a difference as to how I perceive the movie, comparing my own thought processes with whatever I’ve internalized from the review, and that’s yet another reason to avoid the review in the first place. (Plus, it practically goes without saying, there’s the whole desire to see things as spoiler-free as possible in this day and age.) So no reviews, beforehand at any rate; I have been known to track down reviews after I see a movie and I’ve formed my own opinions about it, just to see how they align (or don’t) with others.

So all these reviews I’m reading are by and large for things I will never have time to see or read or listen to. They’re not for evaluation, but for information and entertainment. I like feeling like I at least know the basics of what’s out there in the multiplexes and bookstores and on the radio, and I enjoy a well-written reaction piece because that’s just the way my brain works. And it is something of a guilty pleasure to read the really catty takedowns, too. I love review sites that give letter grades in addition to 500-word write-ups, because I go straight for the D’s and F’s in search of some amusing examinations of how and why creative works fail.

Of course, all of the rules above are bound to have exceptions, and the one I’ve been slowly working my way towards concerns the newest installment of Stephen King’s Dark Tower (which, by the by, I got my copy of from Amazon on Monday). I ran across a review of The Wind Through the Keyhole at the beginning of the week and I went ahead and read it, simply because at this point I think I’m so immersed in my own Dark Tower quest (re-reading all seven original novels plus reading the latest and eighth-est) that the whole enterprise has acquired its own kind of gravity that just draws things in. As it turns out, I’m glad that I checked out the review, for a couple of reasons.

One is that the review was generally positive and, obsessive gravitational pull notwithstanding, that’s kind of a relief. The Dark Tower is the biggest of the three series in my re-visiting attempts for this year and I would hate to think I’m putting all that effort into something with continuously diminishing returns. The reviewer also acknowledged that The Dark Tower kind of loses its way a bit towards the end, never really derailing completely but never quite coming together as satisfyingly as one might hope. So it was certainly possible that Keyhole could have been yet another piece of evidence suggesting King should have quit while he was ahead. But apparently not, as the newest addition to the saga is a return to the more workable elements of the whole crazy cosmology.

The other benefit is that the review pinpointed exactly when I should plan on reading the new book. I already knew that Keyhole took place somewhere in the middle of The Dark Tower (without getting too much into specifics, the very nature of the story makes it exceedingly difficult to make much out of a prequel to the first book or a sequel to the seventh) but I wasn’t sure exactly how it was positioned. For all I knew, it could have fleshed out something that happened between any two of the seven previously-published volumes, or between two chapters in one of them. But now I know that it slots in between books four and five, which is good timing since I’m a couple of days away from finishing book three on the re-read. I might have been tempted to go straight from The Wastelands to The Wind Through the Keyhole if only to try to figure out if I had already gotten past the point of the journey the new book covers. Or, I might have convinced myself that I should read volumes one through seven contiguously, and then and only then move on to the most recent addition. But now I’m pretty sure Keyhole is intended to go in the middle (and if I’m wrong, it’s not like the endings of things can be spoiled for me, since I’ve already read the rest of the series once) so I can focus on finishing the third book, getting my hands on the fourth book, and reading that before cracking open the new stuff.

Just as well, really, because as I reminded myself this morning when I flipped to the last page of book three just to get a page count for how much I have left, I was reminded that book three literally ends in mid-scene with an unapologetic cliffhanger that resolves at the outset of book four. I remember the passage of about five years between the first time I read book three and book four finally coming out and making its way into my hands. I’m deeply thankful I don’t have to go through that part all over again.

The Trifecta (The Good, the Bad, the Weird)

It seems to me that one of two polar-opposite possibilities must be true. Either I have been sufficiently stressed out lately, and therefore desperately in need of escapist entertainment, that everything which recently has given me even a momentary respite has been subjectively bestowed with a radiant aura of pure and undiluted awesome. Or, I have been in a borderline maniacally good mood lately, and therefore more exquisitely receptive to escapist entertainment than usual, and so on with the aura of awesome and whatnot. On the third hand, I suppose there’s also the theory that I’ve just had a string of good luck lately and have been consuming nothing but top-shelf quality goods. For whatever reason, that last one strikes me as the least likely.

Nevertheless! I find myself once again bereft of snark, denied any gripe-worty targets. To recap: I started re-reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower a few weeks ago, and found it even better than I remembered (possibly because it starts strong and then goes downhill, but let’s save that for further reflection tomorrow). Then, while pausing between volumes of that series, I watched Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad & the Ugly as a thematic companion piece, and was blown away by it. Then, apropos of nothing except that it was out there, I went to see The Cabin in the Woods in the theater and pretty much went insane over that as well. (I seem to have broken off the urge to blog about it constantly for now, although I still have more to say, but for better or worse The Avengers comes out this coming weekend, so that will give me a new Whedonian object of obsession soon enough. There may have to be a Whedon Week this year after all.)

After Cabin, I turned back to my Netflix queue and watch The Good, the Bad, the Weird, a self-evident companion’s companion to the classic 60’s spaghetti western, this time filtered through Korean cinema of the late 00’s. And at the risk of sounding like a broken record (or at the very least like a relentless shill for the movie industry in general), I have to say that The Good, the Bad, the Weird is AMAZING. It’s not exactly a remake of The Good, the Bad & the Ugly but it’s unmistakably based on its predecessor, a combination of loving homage and riff in a slightly different direction. It’s still the story of three bandit types, a bounty hunter, a hired killer, and an opportunist (I suspect the latter was changed from “ugly” to “weird” because he’s significantly more sympathetic in the Korean take), and how all three of them come to be on the trail of buried treasure. And it’s still full of both archetypal western and mytho-historical tropes, although I admit I’m entirely ignorant of 1930’s Manchuria so I’m not the best judge of where the history ends and mythology begins. But beyond those parallels, The Good, the Bad, the Weird goes its own way playing out (and ultimately resolving) the premise.

I’ve copped to this before, and I’ll cop to it again: I’m a sucker for filmmaking that is modern and stylish. Leone’s spaghetti westerns have an undeniable grandeur about them but there’s a lot to enjoy in a movie from 2008 that can make full use of all the technological developments of the past few decades. After a brief prologue in which the Bad accepts his latest job, the movie starts off with a bang as the Bad is trying to hijack a train, which just happens to be in the process of being robbed by the Weird, who has the Good hot on his heels trying to collect the price on his head. The entire train sequence is absurdly over the top, with the action of gunplay and movement through the cars of the train perfectly complimented by the camerawork – the angle and clarity of every shot, the speed of the editing, etc. As is my wont, I started watching the film on the commute one day and had to stop at the end of one leg and start again the next. I found myself watching the full train sequence twice because I didn’t want to skip past it, and on second viewing I was pretty well convinced that the movie had peaked early and nothing else could possibly top that. Imagine then the exhilaration of not one but two more action sequences, a shootout in the Ghost Market in the middle and a chase scene involving horses, motorcycles, Army jeeps and numerous artillery explosions near the end, which come insanely close to outdoing the train sequence themselves.

Another thing I’m a sucker for is the outré and exotic. I’ve seen plenty of cop movies set in New York or L.A., and no doubt will see many more, so I enjoy a different backdrop now and then, and East Asian deserts are pretty far afield. I kept idly wondering if The Good, the Bad, the Weird was really supposed to be a historical western or if it was set in some post-apocalyptic future, because everything was a strange blend of the alien and the familiar-but-out-of-context. The Good dresses like an American cowboy, the Bad dresses like Eurotrash, and the Weird dresses in a crazy hodgepodge which at one point includes an antique diving helmet used as improvised armor in the Ghost Market shootout, and yeah, pretty much right there the movie had me won over completely. The soldiers look like modern soldiers, but the roving bandits look like thrift-store hipsters, and at least one of the Bad’s posse looks like a long-haired barbarian draped in furs and wielding a war hammer. None of which is a complaint, of course, as it all makes the movie that much more visually arresting. If half of that represents what Manchuria was like in the 30’s, I may have been born at the wrong time.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also commend The Good, the Bad, the Weird for its score, which is another element that is indebted in no small part to its cinematic forerunner (specifically Ennio Morricone) but also stands on its own. The music blends both eastern and western influences and produces something which has already taken up residence in my brain as the quintessential soundtrack to Asian Cowboy stories if ever there was one.

Years back, I watched The Host, which had come to my attention as Korean cinema’s answer to the monster movie, and I was glad to have watched it but felt like it didn’t quite resonate with me fully or match my expectations completely. The Good, the Bad, the Weird basically got on my queue as another swing, this time with an answer to the western, and this time the experiment was an unqualified success, exactly what I had been looking for and a fair amount of stuff that went above and beyond that. When I finish my current cowboy-mania, I can easily foresee tracking down more of Kim Ji-woon’s filmography.