Comics this week (4/14/2021)?

Anonymous said: This weeks comics?

deathchrist2000 said: Thoughts on this week's comics?

Got mine a day late this week due to a traffic jam on the highway I take to my LCS yesterday, but worth the wait in the end.

Proctor Valley Road #2: So after trying some naturalism on for size with the first issue Morrison just went fuck it and went back to writing dialogue the way they always write dialogue, huh? Not a complaint other than being a bit jarring, it was just striking. Anyway it’s still Morrison having a hoot and Franquiz is still an outstanding talent I’m glad I’m finally being properly introduced to, so this is still good.

Home #1: Serious disappointment. I was hoping ‘detained asylum seekers mixed with superpowers’ would be a narrative handled with care that’d potentially tap into something interesting, but aside from the horror that inevitably comes from tapping into this subject matter with any degree of authenticity this feels really amateurish top to bottom. Even Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou’s lettering feels notably weaker than usual.

Home Sick Pilots #5: This is wholly a ‘I vibe with it but have no idea what’s going on or who any of these people are anymore’ book at this point, think I’ll be switching to trades.

The Picture of Everything Else #3: I still have the last story in Paper Menagerie to get to, but after that I’m finally sitting down and rereading The Picture of Dorian Gray so that I can fully appreciate this book, because this is simply spectacular work.

Rorschach #7: Huh. Well, so far I’m still largely continuing to enjoy it, though this isn’t doing anything at all to alleviate the accusations of poor taste that have hung over it since the first issue.

Wonder Woman #771: Continuing to be a pleasant surprise, and I’m glad we’ll be getting back to Olympian stuff in July so we can see how this team handles more traditional Wonder Woman elements - I suspect that’ll be when we’ll be able to fully tell how well this is going to hold up for the long haul.

Superman #30: A really good start to the run proper! While it didn’t go and outright blow me away - with the exception of the double-pager of Clark and Jon flying through space, which packed more emotion into their relationship than the entirety of the Rebirth era - there’s a density of concept and storytelling here that’s far too rare for modern superhero storytelling in general and especially for the mainline Superman titles. You’ve got space adventure and a giant monster and alien mythology and courtly drama and family stuff, and while it’s a bit weird seeing him work with the main cast now that I permanently associate him with the House of El cast, Godlewski is equally adept at every angle of that visually. The Tales of Metropolis backup’s a letdown, but in spite of that I think we’re in for a really good time. Looking forward to the other end in Action in a couple weeks.

The Joker #2: I guess this issue was technically mostly table-setting, but it sure didn’t play like it and I continue to be shocked this is working as well as it is - even Joker’s actual scene is as close as he’s come to being amusing in a (non-Tom King) regular Batman comic in the last decade; my only real complaint is the inevitable awkwardness of trying to clean up some continuity leftovers from the last Batgirl book, and that’s only so much Tynion’s fault. The Punchline backup isn’t as impressive, but at least now we’ve got Orca the Whale Woman in the mix, and that can’t do help but improve things.

Also I want someone to say “but Jim, you can’t kill the Joker...or else the toxin in his heart will turn YOU into the NEW Joker!”

Batman: Urban Legends #2: Wish Zdarsky hadn’t talked about that one scene on War Rocket Ajax, because that was one of the best Batman moments in a good long while. Good good shit. The backup stories all perfectly worth reading too, but the lead’s the lead and it definitely got us closer to what you basically want out of this team handling these characters.

Daredevil #29: This is probably about as ‘classic’ as this run has felt thus far, but this is the best possible version of that so it’s hardly a complaint. And fascinated to see what Elektra’s up to.

Spider-Man: Spider’s Shadow #1: Oh I am so very in for this horror show.

Non-Stop Spider-Man #2: Ehhh, the storytelling is still on-point but it doesn’t feel like there’s much of anything under the hood here. Maybe I’ll check it out of the library sometime but I don’t think I’m onboard for it as an ongoing.

Power Pack #5: A lovely end to a lovely mini.

Iron Man #8: Solid but frankly I’m borderline on dropping this if only because I’m more than ready to see what this has in mind once it gets past the Korvac of it all. If Cantwell ever does a Frog Man book though I’m there through thick and thin.

Guardians of the Galaxy #13: Suffers badly from being an artistic transition from Juann Cabal to nearly anyone who isn’t Juann Cabal, but Juan Frigeri does perfectly fine for himself and Ewing’s firing on all cylinders putting over the new concept and tone as this converts for the time being to something closer to a straight-take superhero book. And those last few pages? Gold standard.

How to make Cats a good movie.

I watched Cats, and once I got over the initial horror, I was actually pretty entertained and found myself enjoying the shit out of it. Like god bless it, for as nightmare-inducing as much as it was, Tom Hooper was clearly *committed* to his vision and you gotta give him credit for that. The scenery was actually really beautiful and the cinematography was frequently breathtaking. Like it really did have a lot of elements that really worked for it. But for every bit of genius, there was something terrible that the movie just couldn’t overcome. So let’s dive in.

First of all, you kind of have to understand Cats: the musical. It’s an adaptation of poems that T.S. Elliott of nihilistic lost generation fame wrote for his godchildren about cats. And the poetry is charming af and totally captures the nature of cats and why they’re so lovable. In the in the 1970s, Andrew Lloyd Webber did a shit ton of cocaine and decided to make a musical out of these poems. As a result, Cats has no plot. It’s a bunch of cats singing their songs about who they are and doing a lot of dancing. The thinnest of narrative devices is created with the “jellicle” ball and the deciding of which cat gets to ascend to heaven or some shit. So yeah. Cats is actually pretty controversial among theater nerds, it’s very much a you either love it or hate it thing. Is it stupid? Yes.  Is it going to make everyone happy? No. Does it lend itself well to film adaptation? fuck no. I get the feeling that Tom Hooper was really going for deep, meaningful poetic cinema here and trying to make another Les Mis (which was way overly long and ultimately sank under its own sheer weight as a movie and probably is better viewed as a play). I’m operating under the assumption that Hooper was going for ground-breaking cinema that would have made millions and swept up during awards season and cemented him as a legendary director and gone down in movie history, because every little detail of Cats is clearly meant for maximum impact. You kind of need to drop all expectations going into Cats, so once you’re there, you can have fun with it. So how do you make it a good film?

1. The HORRIBLE hyper-realistic cgi human-cat hybrids. YES, it’s a technical marvel, and the CGI artists who made it all deserve a ton of credit for the work they did. And I understand why the actors were kept in their human shapes: live dance is a huge part of what makes Cats work. One of the smart decisions made was hiring theater veterans for the filler roles in the cat chorus, so when you have the choreographed numbers, it’s really spectacular. It’s just the end result was way too uncanny valley and bizarre for any of the film’s good parts to ever rise above it. I think a minimalist approach would have actually worked best. Cat ears and simple costumes with clean lines that show off the dancer’s bodies. Go for the suggestion of cats, and kind of let the viewer’s imagination take over, and showcase the cat’s personality. A huge part of what I enjoyed was hearing the poetry and imagining these cats and how they all relate to cats I’ve known. The dance and the music helped heighten this experience, but hybrids kept reminding me of the joke: what do you get when you cross a human and a cat? An immediate cessation of funding and a stern rebuke from the ethics committee.

2. The schlocky, honestly amateurish attempts at slapstick humor. I’m gonna come out and say it and say that Hooper is pretty deeply entrenched in *dRaMa* and has no sense of how comedy works. There was a lot of added in comedic bits from Rebel Wilson and James Corden, and it was honestly terrible. I mean really, a crotch hit? That kind of lowbrow comedy is so crude and base that it’s actually really hard to pull it off well. Slapstick comedy actually lends itself to the whimsical tone, and slapstick done well can be utterly sublime, but Cats seemed satisfied that fat people falling over is the height of comedy and should be left at that. And a second note on the comedy? Weirdly fat-shame-y. A saw a post about how odd it is to see James Corden, who has been very frank about how he’s struggled with dieting and come to accept that his body is fat and can’t be made not fat, playing this role where fat is added to his body, his CGI vest strains at the buttons, and he’s literally stuffing his face with garbage. The theme of fat people as lazy, stupid, and slovenly carried over from Rebel Wilson’s role, in which she also plays a fat lazy cat who is leaned on heavily for comic relief. I know the role is about a fat cat, and gently laughing at a fat lazy cat who loves to eat is fine, but, speaking as a fat person myself, this felt like a gleeful exploitation of a nasty and cruel stereotype. James Corden and Rebel Wilson are both extraordinarily funny people who happen to be fat, and their comedic gifts were tremendously mis-used here, reducing them to simply two fat bodies to be laughed at.

3. Jennifer Hudson. She’s a talented actress who can sing and emote like a motherfucker. And emote she did. She was clearly GOING for that second Oscar. I really don’t want to call her performance bad. The same level of emotion, tears running and snot flowing, in another movie, would have been devastating (Hello, Viola Davis in Fences). But this isn’t Fences, it’s fucking Cats. You need a level of character depth and development that Cats doesn’t afford to make those tears hit. All the crying and misery was an odd maudlin and over-dramatic break in the fun and whimsy. With a subtler performance and a hint of self-awareness, it could have actually brought in an emotional anchor for this light-as-air film, but Cats doesn’t make any attempt at nuance, and as a result the scenes just hit you out of nowhere like a load of bricks. 

4. Francesca Hayward. Okay, before we go anywhere, I want to say that this girl is not un-talented. She’s the principal ballerina of the Royal Ballet, and has a very long list of ballets that she’s lead in. So it makes sense that she’d be hired for a role that’s primarily ballet. This girl is a really really great DANCER. But Cats was clearly trying to make an A-list actress out of her. They tried to make her into Florence Pugh, who has been acting for a while and is blowing up right now because she’s very talented. Like everything about Francesca’s role in the film said “This is a star-making role.” A new song was written just for her to sing as an addendum to Cats’s show-stopping signature song. But the song was just okay, it didn’t carry nearly the emotional weight or all-around beauty of “Memories,” and all in all felt wedged-in and totally unnecessary and really just felt like a grab at that “best original song” Oscar. Francesca’s voice is high, thin, and child-like. It’s not unpleasant, but next to the richness and depth of Jennifer Hudson’s voice, it crumbles, and it’s not the sort of voice that I want to seek out to listen to over and over again. As for her overall performance, she largely keeps the same look of wide-eyed wonder throughout her numerous close-ups, so much so that I found myself thinking of the the MST3K “dull surprise” sketch. But I don’t know if that’s really entirely her fault. There was an attempted romantic storyline with the magic cat, but again, because of the nature of Cats and its lack of real character development or depth, the chemistry fell flat. There really isn’t much of a chance to show off a lot of dramatic range, so to keep going back to her character, it kept reinforcing the one-notedness of her performance. Really, I just kept wanting to see Francesca dance. Ironically, I think they really blew an opportunity trying to make an A-list actress out of her. All she really need to make people want to see more of her is one spectacular dance number, but for some reason, she never really gets that show-stopping moment. 

5. Dignity? I guess this goes back to the whole CGI cat thing, but there were a lot of moments when I felt this tremendous wave of second-hand embarrassment hit me on behalf of the talented actors in this film. Watching Gandalf lap up milk from a saucer was a wholly uncomfortable experience, like come on, grant the great Ian McKellan some fucking DIGNITY here. Which goes back to whatI said earlier that a suggestion and interpretation of cats would have worked better than all-out just being a cat. Or it could again just be how much Cats just fails its attempts at comedy. But then again there was no fucking reason at all for Idris Elba to be that fucking NAKED. I guess they were trying to make him sexy? But his sexy smolder and just being Idris Elba wasn’t enough they had to make sure that we all saw his chiseled pecs and thick thighs. And then at the end when he’s dangling off of the rope of a hot air balloon and what’s supposed to be a funny scene, I think, I kept thinking “I’m so sorry this is happening to you, Idris.” 

There’s a bunch of other small, nit-picky things that I could go into. Those cockroaches would have worked so much better if they weren’t humans with an extra set of arms. Watching them get eaten was some horror movie shit. Taylor Swift’s Macavity song would have worked a lot better if the cat chorus full of cats we’ve gotten to know had sung it, but instead Taylor Swift is brought in as a new cat we don’t know whose only purpose is to sing the Macavity song? but of course a big oscar-bait movie needs to have that pop star that draws in the people who wouldn’t otherwise see it and making her a part of the cat chorus would have had her performing throughout the whole movie and she would have floundered the way pop stars tend to do when performing musical theater around a bunch of musical theater actors. So I guess I get why she was thrown in.

So.... yeah? Is there anyone else who found themselves enjoying it in spite of everything? I’m glad I have dogs and didn’t have to watch this mess with actual cats around me.