Spooky Friday and some scary DVD reviews!. I watched "Van Helsing" so you don't have to.

‘Van Helsing’
“Van Helsing” wants to be a goofy monster mash — instead, it’s a soggy monster mush.
This movie’s failure to entertain on almost every level offends me, because I’m a big fan of the old Universal 1930s and ’40s monster movies this draws so much inspiration from. Just like a vampire, “Van Helsing” sucks out the brains, mood and heart from those movies and replaces it with nonstop computerized mayhem.
What really irks is that it’s not a bad idea for a movie, updating those classic characters for a new era. But did it have to be done in such a hyperactive, uninvolving way?
Hugh Jackman is Van Helsing, a mysterious monster-slayer working for the Catholic church in the late 1800s. He’s sent to Transylvania, where the evil Count Dracula (Richard Roxburgh) is working on a nasty plot to create millions of new vampires, using Frankenstein’s Monster (Shuler Hensley) and a werewolf (Will Kemp) as tools. Van Helsing teams up with vampire-hater Anna (Kate Beckinsale) as mayhem breaks out.
Most of the blame for “Van Helsing’s” failure can be laid squarely at the feet of writer/director Stephen Sommers. Sommers is also responsible for the recent “Mummy” movies, the first one of which was decent popcorn fun, the second overblown and exhausting wall-to-wall computer tomfoolery.
Sommers obviously didn’t learn anything from “The Mummy Returns,” because “Van Helsing” has all that flick’s problems and then some. You’ve got an incoherent script (the Frankenstein monster is being used to bring baby vampires to life — huh?) and uniformly terrible, plastic-looking and fake special effects.
“Van Helsing” also features some of the worst acting I’ve seen in a movie this year. Beckinsale and Roxburgh are particularly horrible — Roxburgh’s swishy Dracula is more campy than frightening — and Jackman appears to be sleepwalking through the flick for the paycheck. The dangerous menace of his Wolverine in the “X-Men” movies is sorely missed.
“Van Helsing” is so relentlessly over-the-top that it might’ve worked as parody, or the “so bad it’s good” realm. But Sommers takes this slop so seriously that it’s hard for an intelligent person to watch the movie without laughing.
Frankly, I’d rather watch a non-computerized, spooky old classic like 1931’s “Frankenstein” for the tenth time than this vapid, brainless nonsense again.
* of four

‘The Day After Tomorrow’
“Global warming” might not be the most terrifying monster to ever stalk the screen. But in “The Day After Tomorrow,” it’s got horrible consequences.
Climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) has discovered evidence that man’s actions are going to create a new Ice Age. But disaster strikes a lot sooner than Hall expects, as sudden changes in climate devastate North America, with tornadoes in Los Angeles, icebergs in New York.
But for Hall, nothing’s more important than reuniting with his teenage son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal), trapped in an ice-bound Manhattan.
“Tomorrow” is openly a B-grade disaster movie, and I have a soft spot for skyscrapers toppling and landmarks being wiped out. The template is straight from ’70s flicks like “Earthquake!” There’s some pretty jaw-droppingly cool effects as Los Angeles is erased and New York is submerged.
However, “Tomorrow” also slows down enough to involve you in the story. I enjoyed seeing Quaid and Gyllenhaal, neither of whom are traditional action-hero material. They bring solid heft to even the silliest of scenes.
“Tomorrow” blows stuff up in highly entertaining ways, but it doesn’t hold together very well. There’s some attempts to give the story an environmental moral, and the vice president of the United States is a clear ringer for Dick Cheney, but “Tomorrow” lacks teeth.
The climate changes we see don’t really hold up to serious thought. And as is typical for one of these movies where millions of people supposedly are killed, there’s no real sense of loss or trauma.
Like director Roland Emmerich’s “Independence Day” or “Godzilla,” “Tomorrow” can’t follow through a decent buildup with a good resolution. Things get more and more ridiculous (one word: wolves) and the disastrous climate change is never really “fixed.” It feels unfinished.
It’s a shame, because it takes what has been a pretty entertaining movie and makes it unfulfilling in the end.
**1/2 of four

Spider-Man glut: Well, it's no great loss to the comics world, I guess, but Spectacular Spider-Man has been cancelled -- again. This poor title has been the "second banana" of Spider-Man titles for a while, after the flagship "Amazing Spider-Man" and upstart "Ultimate Spider-Man." Under one title or another, "Peter Parker: Spectacular Spider-Man" has been cancelled and restarted at least three times in the past few years. This new run barely made it 25 issues. The last made it 60 or so.

It originally began back in the late '70s as "Peter Parker: Spectacular Spider-Man" and for a while there in the early '80s, the stories by Roger Stern and Bill Mantlo were as good as any Spidey stories ever were, gritty and realistic without being grim. The title always traditionally focused more on Peter Parker's life, hence the name, and started to lose its way when it became just another Spider-Man action comic. It was cancelled, for the first time, around issue 260. The more recent stories, written by Paul Jenkins, were really great for a while there (the story of a young African American inner city kid who idolizes Spider-Man to escape his miserable home life, a story that didn't even feature Spider-Man at all, is one of the best superhero tales of recent years). But for the past year or two, the book has been on a downhill slide, with mediocre stories I only bought about 25% of the time and utterly miscast, spastic art by Humberto Ramos.



The novelty of a second monthly Spider-Man title faded long ago. Take a look at the January 2005 Marvel solicitations -- there are 12 Spider-Man books out there, including his appearance in "New Avengers" #3. Of those I'll buy probably three. Flooding the market isn't unique to Spider-Man. There are a staggering 21 "X-Men" or "X-Men" related title up in January 2005. And there's a dozen or so "Batman" family books coming. Who can -- or wants -- to buy all this stuff?



I have nothing against Spider-Man or X-Men comics. I love them, when they're good. But the failure of "Spectacular Spider-Man," again, shows that there's a need for quality control. A good, solid monthly secondary "Spider-Man" title could still work, in theory, but with the clutter from endless miniseries and the very good "Ultimate Spider-Man" line competition, it doesn't seem necessary at all anymore. Maybe "Spectacular Spider-Man" should just be allowed to die for a while.

Ten years on: 1994 nostalgia! Nineteen ninety-four was a pivotal year for yours truly — last year of college, a summer internship in big-city New Yawk at Billboard magazine, got my first job at a real-live newspaper and never looked back. The music of 1994 made a big impact on me, and other sites are dredging up their own "Best Of 1994" lists. Made me think of my own.
Maybe it's misty hindsight talking, but 1994 still seems like an uncommonly good year for music, 10 years on. Maybe it was working at Billboard for the summer, where comp CDs rained down like confetti upon the staff, and getting a chance to explore more tunes than I knew existed.



Cool albums from '94 that I still listen to on a regular basis:
• Guided By Voices - Bee Thousand - Not just the best album of 1994, but one of my top 5 albums ever. Quirky, alien post-pop that hums and shudders like rock from another planet. Get it now and be saved.
• Nirvana - Unplugged In New York - Undeniably tragic, but also perhaps their finest hour.
• Elvis Costello - Brutal Youth - Great vintage EC, overlooked and very angry.
• Freedy Johnston - This Perfect World - Utterly gorgeous, lost-love ballads that sting sweetly. An artist who deserved to be bigger than he was.
• Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral- Too bleak to listen to often, but a high-water mark in sheer rage.
• Soundgarden- Superunknown- Hey, kids, remember the grunge?
• Weezer - The Blue Album- For some reason I lost my copy of this and keep meaning to pick up the new "special edition" when I have some cash. But it's great pop.
• Green Day - Dookie - Whatever happened to these guys?
• Pavement - Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain - Released 10 years before its time. Just now re-released with extra goodness.
• Beastie Boys - Ill Communication - "I can't stand it I know you planned it / But I'm gonna set it straight, this Watergate!"

And to top it off... 1994 albums that I used to own that are embarassing to see on ANY "Best of" list:
The Rolling Stones - Voodoo Lounge. What was I thinking?
Counting Crows - August And Everything After. I like "Mr. Jones" but the rest of the CD now seems like high-school poetry set to bad music.
Live - Throwing Copper - And this is bad "goth" high-school poetry set to grunge. Overwrought and pretentious as all get out, in hindsight.

Peter decided he'd rather wear his pants on his head.

I suffer from a curious condition. Call it punditblogomania. I'm thoroughly sick of the election, yet, I cannot help myself from spending far too much time browsing endless political blogs and web sites. I don't watch TV punditry much anymore (FOX News and Bob Novak make me break out in hives), but I find myself hideously drawn to Internet flim-flammery about the pending election, a mere week away now. I'm on tentative eggshells about how it will all come out (and not looking forward to a very hectic few days at the paper next week), have already voted myself, but the polls (he's up! he's down! Bush inches ahead in Wisconsin! Kerry owns the Jewish southcentral Ohio vote! Hawaii is tied!) are compulsive reading.

Part of it I guess is the desire to know, to figure out the answer before the election, as if that were possible. Unlike TV news, too, I can find much more rational discourse online. The essential site for political numbers geekery is the awesome Electoral Vote Predictor. Check it out and stare for hours at Alabama poll numbers. Amazing undertaking. Favorite talking (writing?) heads of mine include the nonpartisan analysis at Columbia Journalism Review, left-leaning thinker Eric Alterman, Howard Kurtz at The Washington Post, and here in Oregon, this guy Basie! gives good bloggery. There's many others, of course, but in the end, they're all saying pretty much the same thing -- we don't know what will happen, but we're more than willing to guess... Gonna be a long week...

Can't believe I missed this: John Peel is dead. One of the most influential DJs of all time -- right up there with Wolfman Jack, Alan Freed and Murray the K "the fifth Beatle." Peel had a huge impact on pioneering British music and, particularly, as an advocate of punk rock. Whenever an act appeared on BBC Radio for a "Peel session" on his show, you could guarantee you'd hear some of their best work. Among my favorite Peel sessions I own are discs from David Bowie, Joy Division and The White Stripes. The man constantly challenged his listeners by promoting new acts and breaking boundaries.
“If it wasn’t for John Peel, there would be no Joy Division and no New Order,” band member Bernard Sumner said. “He was one of the few people to give bands that played alternative music a chance to get heard, and he continued to be a champion of cutting-edge music throughout his life.” Read more about the man here or here.
Peel's death reminds us the radio can actually matter sometimes. I don't think I've actually regularly listened to any non-NPR radio since college, and that's because most radio stations in the U.S. today are timid, corporate owned mouthpieces with playlists determined by some boardroom somewhere. I loved our radio station in college, where the DJs could actually choose what music they wanted to play. Peel promoted reggae, hip-hop and punk on the sometimes conservative BBC, and championed acts ranging from Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie to The Smiths, The Fall, Pulp and Northern Irish punks The Undertones, whose “Teenage Kicks” Peel rated his favorite song. Peel was the world's most influential modern DJ. It's a shame the radio industry apparently wasn't listening.

The doctor is in: Hunter S. Thompson emerges from the mist and unleashes a nice rant against the Dubya you can read over here at Rolling Stone. HST is a favorite of mine, although he's been professionally kind of a shadow of his vigorous kill-em-all-and-eat-their-brains gonzo self since about 1980 or so. But for every lazy hackwork essay he does, he still occasionally turns out a gem like this:
Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. . . . I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President," and then I felt ashamed.
I only hope he's right about the end.

Picked up the new Tom Waits and the lamentable final Elliott Smith CDs this week. Through a quirk of the cash register, I actually got one of them for free! The pimple-faced dude behind the counter apparently only rang one of them up, and I didn't realize it until I was in the parking lot, it was raining, I'm unscrupulous and so forth... I stuck it to the man. Anyway, they're good stuff, totally opposite of course. I'm working on an actual review of Smith's "from a basement on a hill" for the paper and will post eventually.
Waits' "Real Gone" is a gutbucket blast, though, all tearing engine-driven punk blues, louder and more hardcore than anything Waits has done in a long time. It lacks the saloon lullaby feel some of his work has but makes up for that in sheer noise. Good stuff to listen to in the car as you screech through traffic and knock down old ladies.

Quick comics reviews!

Identity Crisis #5 Wow. Things are picking up speed in this seven-part murder mystery miniseries, and I think this might be the best issue to date. The search continues for the serial killer who's picking off the loved ones of DC's superheroes, and the body count begins to rise. A longtime superhero apparently dies this issue in a rather abrupt fashion, but the real meat of this issue is the stunning climax sequence, a tension-filled, beautifully staged and tragic scene that raises the ante of the series. Hard to write without spoilers to give it all away, but suffice to say this issue gets back a little bit of lost momentum from the last issue. The harsh brutality of this series has a lot of old-school fans up in arms, but the sheer craft of an issue like this redeems that for me at least. It's grim, but it works for me. I'm only curious to see if it can be wrapped up in two more issues without copping out. Grade: A

Ocean #1 Another week, another Warren Ellis miniseries. I'm a big fan of Ellis' hard-edged sci-fi noir, but I have to say I haven't been blown away by his slow-moving "Ultimate Nightmare" or "Ultimate Fantastic Four" work recently. Fortunately, "Ocean" moves a little faster than those, although the first issue is still mostly setup. Something mysterious is happening on Jupiter's moon of Europa in this futuristic tale, as a dour investigator is sent to investigate. This issue sets up the future of space travel, has some brief ultra-violence, and makes you want to read #2. Great art by Chris Sprouse and a building sense of mystery and menace, it's one of Ellis's better recent works and holds a lot of promise. Grade: B+

Spider Man/Doctor Octopus: Year One #1-3 What the world needs now is probably not another Spider-Man miniseries, or another Doctor Octopus story. I'm a Spidey buff but I rarely buy the thin cash-in spinoffs that proliferate like flies in a web. Still, this one, written by Zeb Wells and with art by Kaare Andrews, had gotten good reviews, so I decided I'd pick up the first three (of five) issues. If it's not essential, it's still a remarkably good look into the psyche of Spider-villain Dr. Octopus (despite the Spider-dude's name above the title, this is definitely more of a Doc Ock solo tale than anything). I never thought I'd be interested in learning about Doc Ock's tragic childhood, but Wells does a remarkable job at getting into the head of a lonely, dweebish child who grows up to be filled with arrogance and a fatalistic hatred. Picture Norman Bates as a supervillain. It's a very solid piece of back story that explains why Doctor Octopus is such a psychopath today, and Andrews produces some great, expressionistic art that's like a cross between Keith Giffen and Alex Toth. There's still way too much Spider-product cluttering up the racks today, which is a shame because it keeps a genuinely good one like this from being noticed. Check it out if you can, and look for the final two issues. Grade: A-

Hey, here's a video review!

‘Super Size Me’
Imagine eating at McDonald’s for every meal of every day. If you were 7 years old, that might sound a lot like heaven. But for documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, it ended up a lot like hell.
Spurlock, a Manhattan filmmaker, saw constant reports on America’s obesity problem, and news of lawsuits filed by hefty customers against McDonald’s. He wondered just how bad fast food is for you, and decided to find out by eating nothing but Big Macs and Chicken Nuggets for thirty days.
The result is a witty, startling and insightful look at pop culture and what we’re eating.
Spurlock undergoes a startling transformation. He starts out looking like a pretty healthy guy — but soon his face goes gray, his eyes cloud, and by month’s end he’s gained a shocking 25 pounds. It’s clear the speed of his decay under a diet of French fries and milkshakes surprises even him. The doctors he consulted with at the start are soon begging him to quit as his internal organs suffer and his cholesterol skyrockets.
A lot of what makes “Super Size Me” work is Spurlock’s amiable, goofy presence. It’s hard not to feel for him as his health suffers over the course of his 30-day experiment.
Obviously, nobody sane would have a three-meal-a-day McDonald’s diet, but the results of Spurlock’s experiment are still shocking.
“Super Size Me” doesn’t quite condemn the very idea of fast food, but clearly takes a stand against the corporate mentality that rules the market, or pushing fast food to kids (one telling sequence shows a group of schoolchildren who don’t recognize George Washington or Jesus Christ, but know right away the merry Ronald McDonald).
Spurlock looks at the food kids are getting in schools, at McDonald’s junkies and talks to various nutrition experts. It goes without saying that Spurlock’s girlfriend, a vegan chef, is horrified at his new diet.
As a novice filmmaker, Spurlock does occasionally lack focus. There’s a lengthy, grotesque sequence of a gastric bypass surgery that seems gratuitous.
Documentaries like “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “Super Size Me,” whatever their flaws, do engage the audience, and forcefully attack apathy wherever it’s found.
Sometimes they even make a difference — shortly after “Super Size Me” premiered, McDonald’s decided to eliminate the oversized meal options the movie gets its very title from.
*** of four

As a fan of both alternate history and self-loathing Jewish authors, I enjoyed the venerable Philip Roth's latest novel, 'The Plot Against America'. It's getting more press than some of Roth's other recent works for its fascinating premise — during the chaotic, isolationist days leading up to America's entry into World War II, the famed pilot and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh makes a surprise rise for president, defeating FDR in the 1940 election. Under Lindbergh's leadership, America not only avoids entry into World War II, but anti-Semitic policies gain strength. "Voluntary" relocation programs are created, aimed at breaking up Jewish communities by sending families to places like Montana and Kentucky. Roth extrapolates Lindbergh's aim from historical fact about the pilot's admiration for Hitler; he takes it to an extreme, of course, but shows the potential ease in which a fascist government could arise.

"Plot" chooses to follow one Jewish New Jersey family's experience under the Lindbergh administration. Roth actually makes his own family the main characters, and himself, as an 8-year-old boy, the protagonist, in a kind of "what-if" imagining. It's a smart choice that gives real emotional heft as young Philip deals with a cousin being wounded after he joins Canada's army to fight the Nazis, his older brother becoming a poster boy for Jewish "assimilation" and his parents' outrage, worries and fear under President Lindbergh. The novel features Roth's usual great characterization and dialogue. The alternate history never feels forced, and the war vs. peace, liberty vs. oppression arguments are just as strong today (I don't think, however, Lindbergh is meant to be a straight analogy for George Bush). It may not be Roth's best book, but you're talking about a man who's written a dozen classics, and it's certainly an excellent read.

Where it fails a bit is in the ending, where the credible alternate history suddenly dissolves into a series of fantastic developments, pushing the edge of believability and getting a bit absurd. It'd work if the rest of the novel had this farcical tone, but it seems a bit abrupt. Weak climax aside, "The Plot Against America" is well worth reading.