Park of the Monsters

I came across a link to the Gardens of Bomarzo, aka Parco dei Mostri (Park of the Monsters)  while looking for something entirely unrelated, and I love living in a world where such a place exists.

Supergirl, a celebration, not a subversion

It’s been over twenty-five years since 1986, but with this Supergirl trailer, superheroes have finally come full circle.

1986 was the year Watchmen and the Dark Knight Returns were released, two comics that continue to be the overwhelmingly dominant influence on the conception of superheroes to this day.

They gave us heroes who were flawed, and violent and nasty, who fought crime because it gave them an excuse to hurt people. Anyone who believed in anything greater than themselves was a simp or a dupe. (I like complicated characters, but being a jerk doesn’t make you a Byronic hero. Sometimes it just makes you an asshole.)

How refreshing, then, to see this trailer for Supergirl. I like my heroes to be heroes, and that’s what we get with Supergirl, someone optimistic and compassionate and refreshingly free of angst, who acts as a hero because that’s the way she can help the most people. We’ve reached the point where it’s a subversion of the prevailing paradigm to show a superhero acting heroically.

.

I’ll list the three little things I didn’t like about the trailer, then I’ll return to gush some more about it.

We get a scene where Kara bursts into her boss’s office and exclaims that they can’t call this new hero “Supergirl”. Her boss, Cat Grant, played by Calista Flockhart, defends the use of the “girl” in Supergirl by self-identifying as a "girl" and listing off her own many admirable traits.

Sorry, no. I don’t buy it. I would never call my women friends “girls”. (I usually say “dudes”, “ladies”, or “lady dudes”) Context matters, but all things being equal, if the male counterpart is named SuperMAN and the distaff version is named SuperGIRL, then it’s a problem. This was largely unavoidable, as Supergirl is a marketable and recognizable name which they certainly want to retain, but still, I think they could have done this a lot better. My friend Greg had the uncharacteristically cogent observation that a better solution would have been to have Flockhart say that they’re going to reclaim the word “girl”.

Jimmy Olsen is right up there with Krypto the Superdog, Beppo the Supermonkey and the Bottle City of Kandor when it comes to iconic parts of the Superman Mythology. I’m cool with Jimmy Olsen being a black guy. That’s fine. I’m less cool with him being a black guy who happens to be confident, self-assured, seven feet tall, super ripped, and incredibly handsome. He doesn’t feel like Jimmy Olsen any more.

And Supergirl goes to work for a government organization at the end of the trailer. I’m hoping that the show subverts this too, because in modern Superhero culture, it seems like any kind of government organization is feckless at best, and actively malevolent at worst. I want an agency staffed by smart dedicated people who are good at their job, and who pit Supergirl against supervillains not because they want to reverse engineer their powers or steal their alien tech, but simply because they want to protect people from those things.

Of course, this is the DEO, which, in the DCU proper, is run by an animated skeleton who kills people with his poisonous touch, so maybe I’ve chosen the wrong hill to die on for this particular element.

Stuff I liked. Everything else. I liked Smallville and Buffy at first, but they each degenerated to a bunch of poor, poor pitiful me, “I’m a poor attractive healthy teen with superpowers, and my life is terrible” wangst at the end of their run. The Legend of Korra did it right, when in first episode, Korra comes right out and says something along the lines of “Yeah, being a bender is pretty much the best thing ever”. I promise you here, but if I get superpowers, I will not mope about it.

 I said this about the piece I got from Rags Morales at the Phillipsburg Comic Con, where Superman looks like he enjoys being Superman. I want to see a show about a superhero who likes being a superhero, and I think we’re getting that here.

The scenes went by too fast for me to see for myself, but I am told by people on the internets that Helen Slater (80s Supergirl) is Kara’s adopted mom, and Dean Cain (Superman in Lois and Clark) is her dad. On some level, I have to chuckle how incestuous the Superman community is (Annette O’toole played Lana Lang in Superman 3, and Clark’s mom in Smallville), but on the other, that’s all kinds of awesome.

I've always liked the "S" Chevron as the crest of House of El.


I like the bit at the end of the trailer where Superman gives Kara his cape by way of Jimmy Olsen. She asks Jimmy James why Clark didn’t push her to become a hero, since it’s clearly what he would have wanted, and he says that Clark wanted it to be her choice. That’s just the best, and it’s a part of what I love about Superman. It reminds me of the framing panels from Superman: Peace on Earth.

I’m fond of saying that the best Superman stories don’t ask if he can do something, but if he should, which is why I like this so much. As a parent, I feel this more and more. Of course he wants her to use her powers for the greater good, but he doesn’t want to force her into it. She’s got to be free to make her own choices and her own mistakes.

I’m feeling very good about this show.

This promises to be the second best interpretation of Supergirl ever!

Stuff Josh Likes: WHYY Commercial

Since starting my new job, I'm listening to my old Public Radio station out of Philly in the car again. I'd probably be better off listening to my local affiliate, as I'd get traffic updates that pertain to me, but I just can't quit you, Marty Moss-Coane!

I don't know if it was a deliberate choice, or if they were short of underwriters for the slots before the show, but instead of getting something like "Hipster Table is brought to you by Archer Daniels Midland. Archer Daniels Midland, supermarket to the world!" we get a brief promo for the station itself.

We open on a young couple, with the young man meeting his girlfriend's family for the first time at Thanksgiving Dinner. Everybody's getting along, everything's delicious, they start talking about what they're thankful for. Everything is going swimmingly, until their gelatinous, offensive uncle warbles "I'm thankful that ISIS hasn't destroyed us with their Ebola bombs! They're massing at the border!"

The new boyfriend shuts him down by asking him if it's the border we share with Syria.

Obligatory

Uncle Racist backs off, and mumbles that he guesses that he's thankful for pumpkin pie, while boyfriend drops the mic and walks away.  The ending voiceover exhorts, "Be informed. Be the hero."

All right. I don't talk politics with my family. I can't talk politics with them, because they're proceeding from an entirely different set of assumptions, and we usually even disagree on what the facts are, so there's no point of departure to get an exchange going. If I'd offered a bon mot about "Which border?", I'm sure the answer would be "The BORDER with Mexico! ISIS has infiltrated the country! Didn't you hear about the Muslim Prayer rugs on the border?! That's why Barack HUSSEIN Obama wants to let them into our country!"

Also, I don't know about my fellow totebaggers, but I generally avoid picking fights with members of my significant other's family. I certainly wouldn't do it the first time I met them, as was the case in this commercial. I might be dumb, but I'm not that dumb.

The thing, the commercial cracks me up every time. The delivery and the statement from the uncle are both so wonderfully ridiculous.

Stuff Josh Likes: Period Pieces

As the title suggests, I enjoy period pieces. It's no coincidence that my two Lonesome October stories The Great and Groovy Game and Mother of Monsters  are both period pieces, being set in 1974 and 1955. (Single White Necromancer is set in 2001, but there is nothing really to indicate this beyond the days of the week).

I was watching Mad Men recently, and I don't think I'd like it nearly as much as I do if it were set in modern times. 

I also like the movies Jet Li did back before he came to Hollywood, the crazy colonial China martial arts epics. I suppose a big part of the fun is discovering things about the past ("The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.") Period pieces seem richer in meaning somehow, because everything has a meaning. I always like discovering new things, and there is always ample opportunity. For instance, Mad Men had a throwaway line about a Unitarian Minster who was killed in Selma. That was enough information to find James Reeb, a figure in American history of whom I would have otherwise been ignorant.

It also enables tricks you can't play with contemporary stories, like in Shada, when the Doctor brings a cassette of Bonnie Tyler's greatest hits back to 1974,  

In general, period pieces tend to be crafted with fussy, meticulous care, which is something I like in a story, and which is why I give them an edge of their non-period counterparts. 

Stuff Josh Likes: Death Note

Back in my day, we'd have to drive twenty miles to the mall to get the latest anime release on VHS from Suncoast Video on VHS. I'd plunk down my thirty bucks for whatever shitty OVA they got as soon as they got it.

Kids these days have an abundance of anime to choose from. The biggest problem is observing Sturgeon's Law, and not watching the 90% of anime that, like 90% of everything, is crap.

I forget if my baby brother or my best friend originally recommended Death Note.  The idea is that a high school student namd Light Yagami acquires a notebook that will kill the person whose name is written in it if the writer also knows their face. He initially uses it to kill criminals, but, when he realizes that that he's being investigated, uses it to kill a umber of innocent people investigating him.

That's the thing I like about Death Note. Light is a monster, and the show never lampshades it, but nor do they flinch away from it.

There's a scene where Light gets an ID from an FBI agent investigating him after he murdered her boyfriend. The first thing he tried to do on meeting her was write her name in the Death Note and get her to die as a suicide, but that didn't work, because she had an idea of how things functioned, and she gave him a fake name.

He writes her real name into the Death Note, and she goes on to kill herself at his command, even when offered the chance to call the director of the investigation directly.

It's deeply disturbing, and intentionally so. Some shows say "Let's be bad guys," and show meaningless rebellion against impotent paper tigers. Death Note depicts someone monstrously, horribly evil, but he's never shown as a hero.

Stuff Josh Likes: His daughter

I talk about Lily quite a bit here.

Before she was born, I knew that I would love her, but I didn't know if I would like her. What if she, despite our best efforts, turned out as a bully, or vain, or shallow, or mean?

She hasn't yet, and I don't think she will. Sometimes, she's bratty, or sulky, or way too smart for her own good.

But she's kind more often than she's not. She wrote this essay for school, after her teachers recommended that she skip second grade and go directly to third, and it was a significant factor in their decision to let her move forward.

I think it's extremely well structured, better than a lot of writing I see from adults. It tells a story in a meaningful way, and the end calls back to the beginning. I'm very proud of her.

One nice August day

One nice August day, a long time ago, a miracle came wandering to our house. My parents and I were sitting in the backyard, just relaxing when…BAM! We heard a huge crash against the shed.

My dad walked over with a broom in his hand, then a beautiful little cat peeked out from behind the shed. She was very skinny and I instantly fell in love with that cat.

We shooed her out, but she casually walked back in to our backyard again. My mom walked over and picked the cat up by the fur on her neck and carried her all the way up the street! The cat ran under someone’s garage and came bounding back again!

After a few days, I finally asked my mom: “Can we name that cat Losey?”

My mom said maybe, and I answered, “Please, please, please, please, pllleeeaaase?”

And my answer was still maybe.

The cat tried and tried to get in the next day. She kept trying until she succeeded, then got kicked out of the house.

By that point, she was eating cat food and drinking fresh water from us. She was getting fatter, but not all from the food.

The neighbor’s knew and my mom didn’t want to believe it, but that cat was pregnant.

About a week later, I was about to leave for school, and we were looking for Losey. My mom looked in a box, and Losey was not the only one in there. Five tiny tails were wiggling around. Losey had kittens!

One was a girl. That was the first we named Losey Junior. Then there is Flash, Blackbeard. Patch and Champ. Bleardbeard was given away first, then Flash, and Patch and Champ went together. Losey Junior and her mom are now free inside and outside of the house.

My dad used to be allergic to cats, but his body figured out that cats are not bad for you. They are great! Now you know about the miracle that came to our house one nice August day.

Stuff Josh Likes: Leverage

LEVERAGE

I first heard about Leverage shortly after it started airing in 2008. I happened upon the blog of one of the writers, and the show sounded kind of stupid. The main character is an insurance investigator whose company denied his son life-saving treatment. The son dies, and the hero vows revenge on the Bernie Madoffs of the world. He assembles a team of experts, and they pull con jobs on the wealthy and corrupt. It just sounded outstandingly lame.

Too nuanced a villain for Leverage

I tend to really dislike revenge porn to begin with, and it seemed like they were going the cheap and lazy route by making their adversaries such caricatures. I mean, everybody in America hates someone who would deny a kid medical treatment/knowingly market toxic drugs/skin dalmatians to make a coat.

So, I had no interest, and an overall negative impression when I found it while flipping through the channels one night. I stopped because I recognized Christian Kane from Angel, the spin off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I usually like his stuff. (He was also great in Secondhand Lions).  So we watched an episode and we really enjoyed it. Here's why:

The Crew 

 

It's no coincidence that John Rogers, one of the principle creators and writers of the show, has worked in Role Playing Games. (He wrote some 4th edition stuff, and he writes the ongoing D&D comic now.)

The team functions like a group of adventurers, though far more competent (I've heard the series described as "Competence Porn", which is a turn of phrase that I like) than any group of which I've been a part.

We have Timothy Hutton as Nate Ford, the Brains: I actually prefer "Mastermind", the term used in the RPG, and earlier episodes to "Brains", which makes him seem like he's a zombie hungry for Brains. I understand that they did it for symmetry  in the titles, but it's still a pretty weak substitute.

 Before the show begin, he's a big shot investigator for an insurance company. They deny life-saving treatment to his son, who dies. Nate implodes and descends into alcoholism, which costs him his marriage and his career.

He's the one who recruits the team and plans their missions. I really like Nate, in large part because of his flaws. (Lily always tells me that I only like people who make mistakes.) Something inside him is broken in a fundamental way, but he's still trying to help other people, even though he believes he's beyond help. ("The muscle I hustle is real for my friends/but the muscle I keep for myself is pretend.") He begins the series as a functioning alcoholic, a type of character almost invisible in entertainment.



Gina Bellman is Sophie Devereaux, the Grifter: 

I read once that actors who are only familiar with theater work are prone to broad gestures when acting, because they've been taught to make those exaggerated gestures so that the people in the rear of the audience can see what they're doing.

I think something similar applies to actors on a television show. They were brought on board to play characters, but now they're just playing caricatures, with one or two broad and extremely simplified character traits.

This is a really meaty role. In essence, Gina Bellman gets to play a new character every episode. She's playing Sophie playing an heiress, or a southern belle or a record exec or world class athlete. I love the interplay between Sophie and Nate, where Nate feeds her some generic instructions and Sophie transmogrifies then into the perfect words to move the mark. She's an extremely talented performer, and it's very cool to see a woman older than 22 in such a substantial role.

Aldis Hodge is Alec Hardison, "The Hacker":
"Are there other black nerds, or is it just you and Urkel?" I love Hardison. He's like the platonic ideal of the nerd. "I'm going to show you how smart I am...in the stupidest way possible."

Hardison is a lot of fun, and as close to the point of view character as we get on the show.He's this unapologetic giant geek, and the show lets him give a bunch of winking acknowledgements to the audience.

Also, at the end of the pilot, he made everyone millionaires. I like that everyone on the team is doing what they do not in anticipation of some big score, but because they want to help people who can't help themselves.



Christian Kane is Eliot Spencer, "The Hitter"

Elliot has a trait in the RPG, "Smarter than he looks". Elliot really is my friend Frederick. He never starts a fight. He doesn't say more than he has to. He sticks up for the little guy.  I remember an episode where their cover is blown early on, and they try to bluff their way out and evade security, instead of just sending Elliot out to shoot everyone in the face. Like everyone else in the show, there's a profound decency about the man, and more than anyone else, he's the team's moral center.




Beth Riesgraf is Parker, "The Thief" She's really attractive, but so is Gina Bellman. And so is almost every mainstream actress, really. Physical attractiveness is not exactly raretonium in Hollywood.  But I really like her...vitality. I remember an old post of Kungfu Monkey, where John Rogers gave everyone D&D stats. He assigned a lower than average charisma to Parker, who is amazingly super hot, but who is also distanced from normal people that she makes them uneasy.

Star Trek

 

Jeri Ryan filled in when Gina Bellman was pregnant, Wil Wheaton was a rival hacker, Johnathan Frakes directed several episodes, including one involving a court case with Quark as an expert witness. It was like watching an episode of Gargoyles!

 

 

 Politics 

 

I'm pretty aggressively Anti-Libertarian. I don't think that every person is bad, but enough are that society requires a strong, neutral arbiter to prevent the strong from preying on the weak. I remember something a professor said in college. Part of the agreement of living in a civilized society is that you give up the right to personally settle grievances with those who have wronged you. Society does this on your behalf.

Those who punish the wrongdoers are not the Leverage team, nor those who have been victimized. Almost every time, the civil authorities are the ones who take custody of , and punish the wrongdoers. Bad people did bad things. They got away with their crimes for a little while, but now they're being punished for it.

Did I call it "Competence Porn"? Maybe I meant "Populist Porn" instead.

The Theme of the Show

 

I'm not talking about the musical theme, though I think it's extremely distinctive and very well done, but the ideals involved.I think it comes down to one word: Empathy

When I expressed interest in Leverage during its original run, a friend told me to watch Burn Notice instead, which he said told the same stories, but better. I don't think it did, though.

And I do realize  that, to a large extent, the human interest stories that serve to move the plot are only framing mechanisms for a one hour heist movie, but I don't think you can dismiss them entirely.  Leverage wanted to be perceived as a show about finding justice for the weak and the powerless, and it was.

Justice is a human concept.

"Justice?You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law."

"The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately, man must reside in the universe."

I may have a dim view of humanity, but I think that when most people say they want justice, they mean they want vengeance. I've been wronged, and now the person who wronged me is going to pay. Leverage is one of those rare shows that attempts to rise above this.

That's as perfect a summary as Leverage as you're likely to find.