How to make a straight man give up sex for the rest of his life

Just wear the Steve Buscemi dress.

Summer Monday Music: Keep your business in your pocket cuz that's where it belongs

Memory is like a stenographer with delusions of creativity. It records what happens, but somewhere between the actual recording and the version that gets logged into your mental library, the stenographer starts editing things to make it more bearable, less hurtful, more flattering, less forgettable. Or just more fun. And to hell with what really happened.

Case in point: I have a very clear picture in my head of a bunch of women singing along to Rickie Lee Jones back in the days when my friend Tom lived on Norwood Ave in Newton. I can’t pin the memory down to a particular party, or an actual date. But it’s there nevertheless. I can clearly see Debbie and Sue and Donna and Tom bending over at the waist and swaying their shoulders to Rickie singing “Chicken in the pot, chicken in the pot, chicken in the pot.” And right there with them is Sue’s sister Debbie, and Liz, and Rita, and--here’s where it gets crazy--Cheryl (who never went to one of those parties), and Jewel (who I didn’t meet till I got to New York) and Jan and Tracy and Stacy and Susan, and at various times over the last couple of decades, pretty much every woman I call my friend and every waitress and bartender from every local I’ve ever downed a pint at. Plus Tom's two daughters.

Which is insane. Those daughters weren't born and I didn’t meet half those other women till long after Tom moved out of Newton. None of them were there in real life. But I can see them in the living room.  It's about one in the morning.  Half the people there are smoking Newport 100's.  "Danny's All-Star Joint" comes on the mix tape (mix tapes!) and when the first notes play, everybody starts bopping.  The ones who were there and remember. The ones who weren't there that I remember, that I can see as clearly as if they were, because it's that kind of moment, at that kind of party. 

And you’re there too.

Danny's All-Star Joint


Under the Boardwalk

Required Reading

Secret Origins 2 of 2: Green Lantern

(Continued from this post on X-Men:First Class)

While X-Men: First Class feels like it was created, Green Lantern feels like it was manufactured.  

It’s the third movie in as many months to contain a creation-of-the-universe segment (after Thor and Tree of Life), and it’s the least mystical of them all. Plotwise, we're told right from the top that a bunch of immortal blue aliens created a super police corps to enforce law in the universe with rings that channel and project will-based green energy. We’re introduced to the villain, who channels fear-based yellow energy and escapes from his prison and plots vengeance. We meet a couple of aliens called Abin Sur and Sinestro. Wounded and dying after the villain attacks him, Abin Sur crash lands on Planet Earth, and when he commands his ring to find a worthy successor, the ring, which is never wrong in its choices, picks hotshot test pilot Hal Jordan, who’s been introduced to us as a rule-breaking haunted-by-tragedy womanizer. 

I count three problems in that set-up.

1--Instead of learning about the Green Lantern Corps when Hal Jordan does, we're told about it. 

2--Introducing a character with a villain name like Sinestro, and then not making him the villain, is more than a little confusing if you don't know who he is. 

3--If the ring never makes a mistake, then why, when Jordan shows up for training, does Sinestro think he's unworthy of replacing Abin Sur? 

Sadly, the answer to problem number 3 points to the problem with the movie as a whole.  The premise of the ring’s infallibility is ignored because if it wasn’t, then the hero wouldn’t have to Prove Himself By Overcoming An Obstacle.  This is fake drama at its best, where you get connect-the-character-beats instead of a story.  Hal Jordan can’t just BE heroic--he has to overcome the doubts of his peers, the doubts of his girlfriend, and his own doubts, which stem from the fact that Hal's test-pilot father died in a plane crash when Hal was a kid--which is why he’s a test pilot in the first place.  (I don’t know about you, but if my test pilot dad died in a plane crash, I would become a bus driver.)  He also has to overcome two villains (shades of Spider-Man) and in his first public appearance, he prevents a helicopter crash (shades of Superman)--all of which, when you throw in the shades-of-Batman death-of-the-father, makes Green Lantern feel like its body parts were stitched together in an echo chamber for continuity-porn addicts.  

Continuty-porn example: Sinestro.  Like Magneto, Sinestro has a comic book backstory that established him as a good guy before he became a bad guy--but he goes by his bad guy name in the movie, which is all kinds of dumb.  Couldn't they have named him Nestro Natu or something?  It's like naming your kid Jack The Ripper; what the hell do you think he's going to grow up to be--a gardener?  (Which is a bad Green Lantern continuity-porn pun.)

Other thoughts: Mark Strong’s Sinestro will make a great villain if there’s ever a sequel, Ryan Reynolds does a better job as Hal than he does as GL (they should have made him wear a real costume instead of applying it digitally--it’s the Halloween Law, wearing a costume ALWAYS makes you embody it) and Blake Lively tries her best, but her part is as confusing as Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes. Is she an equal, an appendage, or just there to be rescued? (All three, actually.) The talk-to-action ratio feels like it's 7 to 3, which shows you how uninteresting the talk is. The score sounds like it was lifted from some low-budget 1980's Erik Estrada action flick. And for a movie about interstellar cops, we spend far too much time on planet Earth, which is like creating a fabulous city and then setting everything in a studio apartment.

So if you haven't seen Green Lantern, and you haven't seen X-Men: First Class, go see the X-Men movie, because in a way you already HAVE seen Green Lantern. The people who made it have forgotten the same thing that the people running DC Comics have forgotten--superheroes don't have character beats; superheroes have adventures.

Secret Origins 1 of 2: X-Men First Class

A few reflections on the two comic book movies that are still out there, before they vanish beneath the juggernaut that is Harry Potter The Last.

First, the label: comic book movie. That only fits one of these guys (Green Lantern) since the other (X-Men: First Class), while titled after a comic book, is actually a prequel of sorts to the previous 3 X-Men movies. So let’s call them superhero movies instead, if only to invite comparison with this spring’s Thor and next week’s Captain America.

Second, a little background: Green Lantern is from DC, home of Superman, Batman, and the Justice League of America. X-Men: First Class is from Marvel, home of Iron-Man, Thor, Captain America and The Avengers. And even though they’ve both been filtered through the Hollywood strainer, each movie reflects the culture of its parent company. To be blunt, X-Men: First Class, like a lot of Marvel comics, feels like it was created by a storyteller, while Green Lantern, like a lot of DC comics, feels like it was created by editorial insemination. This is not the only reason why XM:FC is more fun than GL, but it’s the main one. X-Men: First Class feels like something that holds together; Green Lantern feels like something that’s stitched together.

The premise of the X-Men movie: a bunch of outcasts with incredible powers band together to save humanity from another outcast. But there’s more than just plot going on here. One one level, we’re being invited to flash-backward from Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart to Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy. On another level, we’re invited to treat the mutants-in-the-60’s premise as an allegory for blacks in the 60’s. Which means that, on a third level, one that occurred to me while I was watching the film, we’re being shown the story of how Martin Luther King and Malcolm X took two different approaches to the same problem. I don’t think the racial analogy is stretching it, either. One of the weightier character subplots is centered around Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique, the shape-changer who constantly appears in human form instead of displaying her natural blue scaly skin. Fassbender’s Magneto makes a powerful point about how she’s, in effect, “passing” whenever she does this, like a high blue instead of a high yella. Can you get more obvious, without being “obvious?” I don’t think so.

The central character subplot is that between McAvoy’s Charles Xavier and Fassbender’s Erik Lehnsherr, and it’s worth noting, for comparison purposes with Green Lantern, that their backstory, with Erik as a concentration camp survivor and Erik and Charles meeting as friends, did not become part of the X-Men canon until about 20 years after the series began. But it’s logical, and it embodies both the political and the personal, with Magneto the chief beneficiary. A bad guy who does evil because he likes it and a bad guy who does evil because he believes in the words “Never again!” are two completely different characters. In fact, it’s safe to say that one of them isn’t really a character at all, while the other one, the one who does evil for a good motive and then has to live with it, is THE political character of the 20th century. (Yeah, I exaggerate, but hmm--who or what would embody the political history of the 20th century?  Somebody who does evil and then justifies it?  Somebody who goes along with the crowd?  People lined up against a wall waiting to be shot?  Let me mull it over and get back to you.)

Other thoughts: Michael Fassbender makes Magneto live.  He’s at the top of the acting pyramid in this one, with Kevin Bacon and McAvoy a close second, and January Jones, who is clad as scantily as she is talented, at the bottom.  The 60’s setting is cleverly done (although the sideburns are 1972, not 1962), and noticeably  James Bondy (an unavoidable echo when the Bad Guy has his own private nuclear submarine), as well as blatantly sexist.  It’s too bad Jones can’t act, because she gets some choice moments to show what could have been priceless reactions to the male behavior around her, and she stone-faces every single one of them.  (Fashion note: in 1962, women wore fake eyelashes, bright lipstick, and bras that looked like upside-down ice-cream cones.  Get it right for the sequel, okay?)  And there are a couple of totally unexpected cameos that, if you're familiar with the previous X-Men movies, will definitely make you squee.

Which is something you will not do during Green Lantern.

(To be continued)

Summer Monday Music: Now I know a lot of you are out there thinkin "Man, are those girls fools?"

Folls?  Hell no.  Not judging by their music, and not judging by this picture, either.  Those are the five things I want to do while I'm taking a bath.  And with maybe only two or three different people.

Seriously though: is there anything that says "Summer's here!" better than the three songs below?

Our Lips Are Sealed


Vacation


We Got The Beat

Answer: Nope.

Enjoy.

Nicole Atkins - Music Hall of Williamsburg, 7/8/11

Happy Birthday, Ester

An ester is what makes the rose smell sweet --
   A compound gushing from the labyrinth
Of bud and bloom to make a fragrant treat
   Of cowslip, marigold or hyacinth.
There’s one for every iris that you see:
   It’s in there, making scents out of the blue,
Slaving away at the olfactory--
   But not one works its magic more than you,
My Ester, with your own complex bouquet --
   Tender and heady; soothing, sharp and lush.
With lily’s grace and orchid’s bold display,
  The oak’s integrity, the lilac’s blush,
      This life’s a damask rose beyond compare
      Because within it blossoms Ester Clare.

 Copyright 2011 Matthew J Wells

4th of July

We are not living in America

We are living in a definition of America
that has replaced America
and become the America
that everyone thinks is America
because it’s what the people who argue about America
mean when they say America

And every time we use the word “America”
even to say it’s not America
we start by pointing out that your America
is not and never will be our America
which is the victory of their America
and leaves us with nothing but a lost America:

a country that’s been kidnapped, and must be
rescued by us--

a nation splintered by
a standing civil war about a word--

the bastard son of Jefferson and Heminges--
an Edmund who (great thing of us forgot)
will kill the innocent Cordelia
in all of us, and then salute the flag.


Copyright 2011 Matthew J Wells

"What are you doing this 4th of July weekend?"

"What I do every 4th of July weekend, Pinky--watching this --

-- and reading this."