Vampires and Roulette

Two bad movies, three good comics and an experimental new feature of the newsletter.

Vampire movies! Nobody asks for them but the studios will never stop making them and we are required by law to watch.

I liked Blade II when it was first released and was disappointed with it this time. Guillermo del Toro's background and interests as a filmmaker make him a well-suited hired gun for this comic book adaptation franchise and Wesley Snipes is evergreen as the "daywalker" who uses his unique abilities and arsenal to wage war on the underground vampire nation. Del Toro's regular collaborator Ron Perlman never makes a film worse with his oddball swagger, though he doesn't have much interesting stuff to do onscreen in Blade II. The CGI effects, as CGI effects will unfailingly do after just a few years, look painfully dated in 2021 and the script has several miswritten moments where a narrative powder keg fails to ignite and the movie recedes drearily into something boring or needlessly sentimental when it should explode into a sequence of violent catharsis. Actually by present standards it turns out that most of the movie is pretty boring; even the action has a sense of deflated resignation. Late in the picture one of the main bad guys remarks of a significant plot revelation that “I would have thought that was obvious by this point,” which felt like an epitaph for the whole enterprise.

From Dusk Till Dawn was written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Robert Rodriguez following on their respective breakout successes with Pulp Fiction and Desperado. It has a title sequence that is photocopied from Pulp Fiction, down to precisely the same fonts and graphic effects for the opening credits, and a few other shots and gimmicks taken straight from other Tarantino and Rodriguez pictures. An excellent opening scene juxtaposes a young John Hawkes, a great actor who went on to do fine work on the HBO programs Deadwood and Eastbound & Down, with legendary cool-guy television actor Michael Parks brilliantly playing a fun character he revived in Tarantino's Kill Bill project. They collide with criminal brothers played by Tarantino and George Clooney, and if the whole movie had the charm, confidence and vampirelessness of this first scene I believe it would have been pretty good overall. But halfway through it abruptly turns into a vampire movie and stops being any fun for me. Salma Hayek steals a nifty scene unlike anything else in the picture which is meant to make less jarring the transition between its two halves but ends up feeling like a contrivance Tarantino intentionally scripted to get a bikini-clad Hayek's foot in his mouth (everything always comes around to feet with that guy). Hayek accomplishes a lot without dialogue and I bet she would have made a great silent film star if she'd been born in the right era. I don't think she's a bad actor in talkies, but she can do a lot just with eyes and body movement and has beautiful, expressive features that would have looked cool in high-contrast, expressionistic black and white. Anyway, Clooney is a little miscast but he and Tarantino have a good time playing outlaw antiheroes in what should have remained a thriller-killer exploitation action/road movie. When it deteriorates into a camp vampire picture I lose interest. These were my same thoughts the first time I watched it about twenty-five years ago, so now it's clear that I got whatever little there ever was to get with this one.

I’m reading Dick Tracy comics by Chester Gould from 1956 that I have never read before and Matt Groening comics from The Big Book of Hell that I have read many times before. I’m also keeping close at hand my copy of Kevin Barry’s flashy new book Brainfazer. Barry’s comics have the logic of a nightmare and smell amazing, which is what I wrote when he asked me to blurb the book for him, something I was pleased to do because I like him as a friend but wouldn’t have done if I didn’t also genuinely love and respect him as a working cartoonist. Brainfazer was just published by First to Knock and while I won’t waste ink trying to describe it in detail, you’ll find that you can flip to any page and be impressed, engrossed and unsettled by whatever you come across. I’d recommend this highly even if I didn’t know the guy.

For this entry I’m going to test-spin a new feature I’m calling Roulette. Surveying the list of books I’ve read from the beginning of 2011 to the present, I’ll use a random number generator to make three selections and write about whatever turns up. The only rule is that the selections will truly be random — no “accidentally” slipping and landing on something I really want to write about or taking a mulligan on something I don’t. The three publications that come up will generate a lightning round of notes from me, and if I have trouble remembering the texts or have nothing interesting to say, it will present an interesting challenge to somehow make do. Let’s give it a try.

How Do Dinosaurs Get Well Soon? by Jane Yolen, illustrated by Mark Teague, read in 2020. This is the second of three books I have read in Yolen and Teague’s How Do Dinosaurs series. I read How Do Dinosaurs Say I Love You? in 2016 and How Do Dinosaurs Eat Their Food? in 2021. These children’s books are structured in a way that makes them fun and easy to read; each turn of the page reveals a different dinosaur in a situation that a child can relate to, and the dinosaurs are rendered convincingly and at something approximating the right scale next to their human “parents” who want the dinosaurs to eat their vegetables or behave well at a doctor’s appointment and so on. The illustrations are really professional-looking and charming and the end-pages always feature a menagerie with the names of all the dinosaurs featured throughout (and for a subtle Waldo-type gimmick, each dinosaur name is almost always cleverly hidden somewhere in that dinosaur’s respective illustration). These books are conceptually simple but I really respect them for their craftsmanship and positivity.

Dinosaur’s Halloween by Liza Donnelly, read in 2021. In the spirit of this Roulette experiment, I assure you this wasn’t planned; it’s just that I always have and still do read a fair amount of children’s books about dinosaurs, so this is where probability and serendipity meet. Dinosaur’s Halloween was something I came across in a Little Free Library which was written and drawn by a New Yorker cartoonist who has a relaxed, playful style. The book is simple and straightforward and I liked it. With New Yorker cartoonists I tend to have either strong affinity or near-total indifference or ignorance, and while Donnelly is someone whose work I haven’t read much of before, I should probably make a point to spend some time with her comics.

Mome Winter 2006, read in 2012. This is an installment in a now-defunct comics anthology from the illustrious publisher Fantagraphics. I don’t remember reading this one at all. Perhaps this is partly because, as some internet research seems to indicate, there aren’t a lot of comics artists in it that I particularly like. A noteworthy stand-out is Anders Nilsen, and while I can’t recall anything about what he contributed to Mome Winter 2006, my signed copy of his great book Poetry is Useless abides resolutely in the comics section of my shelves. It’s interesting for me to reflect that I didn’t know back in 2012 when reading this comics anthology that about five years later I would be working on several projects with Fantagraphics, including a contribution to an issue of NOW, the successor anthology to Mome. I also had no idea I would be writing about that this morning, and I guess that healthy discomfort is part of the point of this Roulette feature of the newsletter. I have no idea how frequently Roulette will recur and how my luck will run, so we’ll see if I manage to stay at the table and break even.