Art: Straight from the horses mask.

Screamers and Screamettes, I don't know where this mania for gas masks came from, but if you'll humor me, I promise not to indulge more than once a month.

During the joyous rush to unleash chemical hell on to the battlefields of World War I, soldiers on all sides quickly learned that humans weren't the only beasties that needed protection. Enter gas masks for horses and dogs. Gas masks for horses didn't last much longer than the First World War, when horses themselves became less and less important to modern armies (though, as late as 1948, the U.S. Army Officer Corp fielded the U.S. Olympic equstrian team). Dogs, however, remain popular instruments of war and, as you can see, there are many Cold War and later doggie gas mask designs.

Comics: New moon. Go ahead Hachette, sue me.

One of the viral marketing campaigns for now cult fave Idiocracy involved a series of Youtube adds for the fictional power drink Brawndo: the Thirst Mutilator. Brawndo was basically the Gatorade of future. The ads for this drink deliver the ha-has by giving the viewers the sense that the ad's narrator has been told to just keep delivering the message that Brawndo is ninety-million times greater than awesome, but he hasn't been told how long the ad is. Consequently, the dude narrating the ads finds himself repeatedly painted into corners, forced to just keep shoveling on the awesome-sauce reductio ad absurdum.

The fun of Werewolves of the Moon: Versus Vampires follows the same entertainingly desperate logic. Even the title, with it's post-colon promise of vampire conflict, exhibits the same "but wait, there's more" carnival barker commitment to total entertainment: "Werewolves – right? – in space! But, on the moon, so they're always werewolves! But wait! Versus freakin' vampires! That's right!" And then there's the cover that shows a werewolf planting an American flag on the moon's surface, through the body of a vampire. If Michael Bay had made the Underworld movies, one imagines they would have been filled with shots that look like the cover of Werewolves on the Moon.

I can only assume that Dark Horse comics told the creators, Dave Land and the Fillbach Brothers, that they should save the attack by a ghost pirate ship full of zombie T. Rexes for the sequel.

Written with the same light, juvenile, and goofy logic of a contemporary Mad magazine parody, the book starts with a premise not unlike Steve Niles landmark vampire comic 30 Days of Night. In the distant future, a trio of werewolves attack a moon colony. (Whether they thought that it would just be fun to rampage through a closed system of human victims or they believed that being on the moon would up their power levels is unclear – the latter is implied but then dismissed by one of the characters.) Unlike 30 Days however, this story is played for laughs. There werewolves immediately run afoul Moon Base Alpha's tough-as-nails security captain, who locks them in the ship bay with all the passengers they've already bitten and turned into werewolves.

The story gets needlessly complicated when the moon's vampire population – a cult of preening goth hipsters living in caves on the dark side of the moon – decide to get involved. Their leader, the self-aggrandizing Lord Till, thinks the lycanthropic crisis is the perfect time to snatch away his immortal beloved, who is also, somehow, the tough-as-nails security chief.

This all sounds more complicated than it is. The narrative of the book isn't driven by logic so much as it is built out of system of gleefully daffy synecdoches. Being in the story is justification enough for any given element. We all know where we're going – the promised "versus" is on before the last page of the first issue – so as long as everything just tends towards that direction, the story bounces along. This lack of story logic is actually spoofed with in comic. After the first vampire attack, one of the werewolves questions why the vampires would attack them in the first place. He's told that vampires and werewolves are natural enemies, but that explanation is quickly undercut by the confession that said theory was devised when the werewolves thought vampires were fictional monsters and it was mostly said because it sounded awesome to lady werewolves.

The art is suitably cartoonish. The Bros. Fillbach have a good time with the canine expressiveness of their werewolf characters and they're up to the task of actually grounding the story in a sufficiently solid setting to prevent it from losing its way. If I have any complaint about the art, is the lack of "chicken fat." While the writing attempts to work some gag into almost every panel, the art takes a light, but straight forward approach that seem unnecessarily literal. If the backgrounds had been as busy with sight gags as the Mad parody that partially inform this work, it would have given the book a nicely anarchic edge.

Werewolves on the Moon: versus Vampires suffers somewhat from a hefty price tag: three and a half Washingtons. This is no small thing. Something as relentlessly silly as WotM:2V is best served format of the individual issue. Spread across three issues and served in little helpings, the comic never overstays it's welcome. Collected in a trade, the gags will start to grate. That said the $3.50 price tag is going to strike some folks as too much to pay for what is a breezy gag-book.

Stuff: "This lion is getting sleepy," or "The Victorian ancestor of the modern 'reverse cowgirl'."

Though it is now mostly confined the college circuit and rubs shoulders with prop comics and traveling improv groups, there was a time when hypnotism was a big ticket and masters of the mesmeric arts where A-listers.

The ephemera assemblyman blog gathers together an awesome collection of Victorian hypnosis show posters. This including several that were clearly template posters that any hypnotainer could slap his name on.

Some of these template posters (example below) are surreally wonderful. Representing an artist's notion of what a hypnotist might make people do, the suggested kinkiness – from the playful hints of transvestitism and homoerotic behavior to pony-boy D&S play – implies what the really allure of these shows was: the hope that, under the pseudo-scientific guise of a display of "animal magnetism," sexual norms would be flaunted.

Movies: Royale with cheese.

Konnichiha, Screamers and Screamettes!

Today, we're going to discuss Battle Royale 2, the cinematic blunder that put paid to the Battle Royale cross-platform Japanese sci-fi actioner juggernaut with a sizable cult in the States. But, before we get ready to royale, a little backstory . . .

The rise and fall of the Battle Royale franchise, the popular Japanese novel that became the cornerstone of a tiny multimedia fiefdom, is an interesting case study in how a work can shift and adapt as creators and audience members negotiate the essential meanings of a work. What makes Battle Royale so interesting is that, in this case, this mutability turned out to be the franchise's greatest strength and its complete undoing.

The Battle Royale franchise began in 1999 with the novel by Koushun Takami. The novel tracks the violent deconstruction of a class of junior high students caught up in the government's Battle Royale program: a surreal war game (which Japan – now the central nation of the Republic of Greater East Asia – has been running annually since 1947) that pits students against one another in a bloody, fatal combat. The students are armed and dumped on a desert island. They must kill one another until there is only one student left. Failure to follow the rules of the game is punishable by the detonation of a lethal collar each student has been fitted with. If the students fail to kill at least one of their classmates within a 24-hour time period, all the collars explode and everybody dies.

Packed with action, the book is a bizarre and ruthless thrill ride that manages to take time out for a few sex scenes (who wants to die a virgin, right?), some political ranting, and some less-than inspired pop-psychology. It's a bracing read that constantly teeters on the edge of collapsing into utter stupidity. The problems that threaten to undermine the book will last with series in all its incarnations.

First and foremost, the premise, while arresting, becomes unworkable on closer inspection. Why would anybody subject kids to this? The reason given in the book makes no sense. The BR program exists to "teach kids a lesson" about how the government can do whatever it wants to them. That's all good and well except that most of the kids you're teaching this lesson to are dead by the end of the program. Also, as the book makes clear, kids seem to be shocked when they find themselves part of the program. Let's ignore the weirdness of the fact that all children are subject to a death-lottery, but none of them seem to know it. Instead, ponder the futility of this death match in the face of what seems to be the kids' utter ignorance of the BR program. Furthermore, isn't it clear that the lesson that is really being taught is that the government is a bunch of sick bastards and you shouldn't trust them any further than you could throw the Shin Maru Biru? Every time the premise is revisited in later films and sequels, the reason for the BR program will be reworked; and yet, no filmmaker or writer will be able to cook up a notably better reason for the existence of the BR program. It's a deus ex machina: The BR program only really makes sense as an excuse to send a bunch of young children to their violent deaths.

The second major flaw sticks out most glaringly in the book and later manga adaptations, but it clings to the movie adaptations as well: In order to keep the action of the book cracking, Takami had to make his kids hyper-proficient in all manner of militaristic activity. Not only do surprising large percentage of the children in the novel seem suddenly proficient wielding all manner of weaponry, they manage to build explosives, they possess the knowledge to hotwire automobiles, and are otherwise are physically and mentally equipped to engage in full-on action hero daring-do.

These are major sticking points in the novel and it is a measure of the book's pulpy power that it is able to shoulder right past these completely reasonable objections. The stomach-churning spectacle of watching these children have at one another is enough to keep the reader focused. This dynamic will hold true for all later incarnations of the franchise.

Submitted for 1998 literary contest, the novel was ejected due to its controversial content. Released the next year, the book went on to become a sensation. Originally, Takami wrote the novel as an indictment of the youth of Japan. The post-war generations had, he felt, grown progressively softer and softer. The war had given the older generation a distinct sense of Japan's collective destiny and an appreciation of the importance of personal sacrifice. By contrast, Takami found the modern youth of Japan shallow, automaton consumers, with personalities borrowed on loan from cut-rate mass entertainments. Takami wasn't alone in this assessment. Called the "bean sprout generation," the Nipponese analog to our own Generation X was the subject of endless headshaking cultural studies and hysterical op-ed pieces. (Though, honestly, the Japanese didn't know how good they had it: While the 1990s was the nadir of a nation-wide economic crisis brought about by the boomer era corporate class, the Land of the Rising Sun didn't get the double-barrel pointblank blast to the face of the dotcom burst and the po-mo financial shenanigans that adult Gen Xer's aimed at America.)

This cynical take on Japanese youth culture was woven throughout the book. Most of the students are, by design, completely interchangeable. They speak in quotations from pop songs and films and television. Those students that are individuated are, more often than not, sinister. One is a nymphomaniac serial killer. The worst of the students – a brain-damaged sociopath who volunteered to be part of the game – is described as being literally without emotions or reasoning capacity. Even the good students are fairly vacuous. They are less moral beings than beings that happen to have absorbed messages that make them reluctant to kill, second hand pacifists who got their notions of non-violence from PC rock stars.

But, the ultimate meaning of any work depends on the reader as much as the writer. Battle Royale hit Japanese youth culture like a neutron bomb. They read the work as an elaborate metaphor for the crushing standardization crucial to the numbing hive-society of post-war Japan. In the naked social Darwinism of the BR game, Japan's young saw an allegory for the pressures of conformity. Despite his own "get off of my lawn"-ism, Takami and his novel became unlikely icons of a youth culture in revolt. It's scandalous connection to a mass stabbing – a madman wielding a short sword went ape in a crowded Tokyo shopping district credited it as an influence – actually boosted its status, giving it the gravitas that bloodshed instantly, if undeservedly, grants texts. (Remember, Screamers and Screamettes, the words of Oscar Wilde: "Dying for something does not make it true.") Takami quickly realized where his bank was and adapted to the role of youth spokesperson with admirable flexibility. If asked now about his book, he is quick to explain that its satiric target was always the square world of the adults. He's with the kids now.

Strangely, angry youth weren't the only ones who found the book spoke to their anti-authoritarian sensibilities. Kinji Fukasaku, veteran director of the legendary Yakuza Papers series, was reminded of his own war era youth. During the war, Japan would draft entire classes of school children to support the war effort. Fukasaku's class was drafted and put to work in a munitions factory. When that factory was destroyed in an attack, many of the children from Fukasaku's class were killed. For Fukasaku, the premise of the book was barely metaphorical.

Fukasaku's 2000 film Battle Royale is a film that rises above its novelistic source material. Although neither the screenwriters or the director were more able to make the BR Program makes sense than Takami was and their decision to create a more sympathetic teacher character that would connect the death game to the students' past falls flat, they elevated the role of the students and reframed the story to explicitly create a kids-versus-adults tale in which the kids are innocent victims of grotesque adult tyranny. The film is explicit in its pacifist sympathies (though the viewers could be forgiven if they find this philosophical viewpoint hard to swallow when it is served up with such a heaping helping of gory and explosively thrilling violence). References to the most sinister students get blunted. In the novel, for example, one of the students ran a Lolita prostitution and blackmailing racket prior to her selection for the game. In the novel, this same character has sex with several of the males in the class during the game as part of a black widow strategy for offing the better armed, stronger male competition. In the film, her overt sexuality and criminal background are toned down to the point that one really needs to have read the book to pick up on any hint to her past. This softens the students and helps build audience sympathy. The film also cleverly tweaks the rules of the game to add a countdown dynamic to the conflict: In the film, there must be only one student left at the end of three days or everybody dies. These changes make the film both dramatically and thematically stronger.

This first film is, for my money, the high point of the franchise. Despite some awkward CGI blood splatter, the action in the film is grabbing. The teacher subplot is a dead end, by the restrained surrealism of Beat Takeshi's performance as the program director gives his scenes some needed irony. The film's overt sympathy with the children not only give the film a heart, but it allows the director to fashion them into heroes. Finally, this same sympathy takes the books stunted characterizations and reworks it into a often moving representation of young people in the grips of something so large and horrific that their inarticulateness is sign of poignant vulnerability. Battle Royale is a very good film.

Though the film opened to decidedly mixed reviews – including strongly worded attacks from government officials who saw the film in a special screening prior to its release – it made bank and ended up getting nominated for best picture at the Japanese Academy Awards. (It won the JAA Audience Popularity Award, but failed to take home best picture.)

The franchise's next incarnation was a 15 volume manga adaptation. Started in the winter of 2000, the manga was originally conceived as a faithful adaptation of the novel. For example, the sympathetic teacher-figure is replaced by a leering, sadistic creep that is more reminiscent of (though more extreme) the program leader in novel. However, as work progressed, the manga's creative team started taking the work in its own direction. Allegedly, the manga creators' started to roam off the reservation because they "cared for the characters." This popular reading of the manga is supported by the fact that much of the manga is dedicated to fleshing out the backstories of the students, with several volumes-worth of work dedicated to events that occurred before the students were selected for the game. I personally find this reading unconvincing. What is really notable about the manga is how thoroughly it embraces the grotesque and exploitative aspects of the original concept. In the original novel and the film, for example, the fate of the woman who runs the orphanage that is home to two of the students is never discussed. In the manga, she objects to the use of her young charges in the program. For her insolence, the program director rapes her and then has his soldiers kill her. This despite the fact that he snatched the kids on a school trip, so there's no reason whatsoever that he would ever have to confront the woman who runs the orphanage; that he's got the law on his side and can draft whoever he wishes, so her objection is irrelevant; and that presumably nobody wants their kids drafted, but we don't see the program director rape and kill his way through every set of parents involved.

Turning the program director in a clearly insane madman is typical of the "this goes to eleven" approach that appears throughout the manga series. Where the novel treated the students as mini-adults without much interior life and the movie accented their horrible awkward vulnerability, the manga relishes ripping them apart, stripping them of their clothes, and otherwise shoving the taboo breaking nature of the work in front of the reader. In fact, there are several scenes that, given current US laws concerning the illegality of even drawn representations of explicit underage sex, make the book too questionable to risk owning, in my opinion.

(As an aside, another reason not to buy the manga is that Tokyopop, the company responsible for its American publication, took extreme liberties with its translation. Most notably, they used new dialogue to change the BR program from some weird "The Lottery"-ish blood sacrifice to the ever-hungry ghost of Japanese militarism into that lamest of cultural expressions: a reality TV show. Not only does this not work thematically – the idea that all these resources would be squandered on a reality show that also required 40-odd families a year sacrifice their children is the least believable and least resonant motive of all the various motives put forth for the program – but it does not even work on a literal basis as the plot requires that the children not be under constant visual surveillance. The mishandling of Battle Royale, and the subsequent revelation that many other titles were similarly botched, has been a PR fiasco that Tokyopop still has yet to completely live down.)

The manga was the beginning of the end for the Battle Royale franchise. A soulless exercise in shock schlock, it added a strain of pointless extremism to the franchise that poisoned the well and doomed further efforts to make the idea meaningful.

Which brings us to Battle Royale 2: the uneven and unsuccessful 2003 sequel to 2000 film. Humorless, self-important, wrong-headed, self-righteous, and dull, it is hard to think of a sequel that did a greater disservice to the original. Even the full title - Battle Royale 2: Requiem - smacks of the pompous pretension of the flick.

The second BR film opens with an explicit reference to the WTC attacks. After we get some exposition telling us that the survivors of previous BR programs have banded together and formed an anti-adult terror group, we watch them detonate and collapse several skyscrapers in Tokyo.

Then we get a short bit of the daughter of the program director form the original film. Apparently she holds a murderous grudge against the survivors of the first flick, whom she blames for the death of her father. This is, in fact, waste work since, as we'll see later, kids in these flicks are compelled to fight, so it doesn't matter what your motives are. Fight or die: Them's the rules and it doesn't take some tortured past to make these kids go at one another.

The action proper of BR2 starts much like previous film: a bus-load of school kids is shanghaied by the police state government for their death game program. Curiously, like the students of the first film, they seem to be oddly unaware of the BR program despite repeated scenes of media frenzy regarding the winners of the program. If you were a ninth-grader in this alternate history Japan, don't you think you'd avoid bus trips?

"Where's your field trip permission form Tajiri?"

"Oops, forgot it again. Tell you what: You guys should just go without me. I'll just stay here and read about, you know, not being stuck in some hellish hybrid of Sweet Valley High and The Running Man."

"I'm unfamiliar with your pop culture references. They seem uncharacteristic for a male junior high school student from contemporary Japan."

"We don't have junior high school either, teach."

"Touché. Box clever, I see."

Anyway, the panicky students are introduced to a new program director who, sadly, is pulled from the manga instead of a first film. A pill-popping doofus who seems to be doing an impersonation of Jim Carey impersonating an Elvis impersonator, the new director is painfully hard to watch. This new director explains that, under the new BR rules, the captured kids are going to be sent against the terrorist group, called the Wild Sevens after a popular brand of cigarettes. Why send kids? The director explains this by writing the name of every country the United States has bombed in the past 20 years. Waving to this list of American shame, the campy director announces, "Life is not fair." Seriously. That's the reason for the new BR program. We're not going to send highly trained commandos or nuke the terrorist camp from orbit (the only way to be sure, I'm told) because "life is not fair." This will be typical of the film's political insight. Not only does it immediately connect the Lost Boys terror cell to the Al Qaeda group that attacked New York. It will later connect them to the Taliban – the guys who used to whip women in the streets for having the temerity to be literate – and suggest that it is part of what makes them heroic. Anything not American = good. This simplistic moral calculus will reach its nadir when several characters discuss the fact that "that country" (in the future, Japan will talk about America the way people talk about their spouse's exes) is going to Tomahawk missile the island the terrorists live into rubble. They act like this represents some great disaster despite the fact that, by the end of the film, they will all have been responsible for sending more than 40 school children to die on that island. Really, had they just let America blow the island to atoms, they could have spared the entire class. But, hey, whatever, America is the bads.

The new director describes the new rules of the game – basically the same as the old rules with the twist that you're partnered up and if your partner dies than your necklace explodes (again, why does that help the government when it means that every death takes out another of your "troops"?) – and then suits up the kids. The children are sent to the terrorists' island hideout and, in a scene that riffs off of Saving Private Ryan, the kids land in a bloodbath. This moment, a breathless blur of gunfire and horror, is the film's highpoint. It's all downhill from here.

The kids fight one another for 20 minutes or so – really tearing the crap out of one another. The students are overpowered and subdued. Eventually, the surviving students join forces with terrorists. There's a lot of incomprehensible political talk, including several speeches from the leader of the terror group that sound as if some screenwriter just chopped up and recombined political manifestos he pulled off the Internet. There's something almost profound about how little sense these William S. Burroughs-ish speeches make. If it wasn't so clear that the filmmakers genuinely believed that they had something to say, Battle Royale 2 would rank as one of the greatest satires of "social issue" films.

Finally, the government comes to the shocking realization that, perhaps, the best way to deal with a nest of dangerous terrorist is to send in somebody other than a small crew of completely untrained school children. Plan B is, apparently, to flood the island with hundreds of actual soldiers. Why they even had a Plan A is a mystery. To say that this final battle includes an extended Wild Bunch reference is to imply that it is more interesting than it really is. There is a loopy scene in which the disgraced program director suddenly appears on the island in a rugby uniform and blows up. I kid not. I've given you about as much explanation as the film will. If it doesn't make sense now, seeing the flick won't help.

Eventually, perhaps out of boredom, "that country" blows the whole damn island sky high. The end? Not yet. Apparently the island, which was far enough away to rule out a full-scale military invasion, has a tunnel to the mainland. I'm serious. A tunnel under the ocean. An engineering feat that must have rivaled the construction of the Chunnel at the very least. And, natch, the government doesn't know anything about it.

So, several of our heroes escape to Afghanistan where, presumably, they will live happily ever after in utopia that the Taliban created in Afghanistan.

Ugh.

I can see a filmmaker wanting to make a film denouncing the imperial era in which, despite the change in management, we seem to be living. We deserve it. We have behaved and continue to behave like assholes. However, by attempting to rework what was, at its best, a deeply personal mediation on the sins of WWII era Japan into an indictment of US foreign policy, BR2 became a smug and incomprehensible disaster. The final result is less a parable of American abuses of power than a few disorganized jabs at American foreign policy that occur in the proximity of a parable that's been gutted of its moral core. If the manga represented the gleeful dumbing down of the franchise, BR2 gives viewers the sad spectacle of a moronic concept that doesn't know its moronic. Worse yet, it is insufferably dull. Give this one a pass.

(For the completists out there, the manga had a sequel too. In the second series a class of kids is snatched and shoved into the Navy's survival program. The same thing, but with boats. I have not bothered to follow it.)

Stuff: Ralph Waldo Emerson, vampire slayer?

Though I fear unto death the notion that I may give somebody their next schlocky high concept quality-lit-meets-genre-thrills concept, I have to mention this awesome new-to-me post by Caleb Crain, regular NY Times and The Nation contributor and the brilliant mind behind the exquisite Steamboats Are Ruining Everything Blog.

Combining a strange in curiously succinct entry in Ralph Waldo Emerson's diary with some info from The Encyclopedia of New England, Crain asks: Did Emerson think his first wife was a vampire?

From Crain's post:

New England vampires didn't speak in faux-Hungarian or lurch about, waggling unkempt fingernails. Without using the word "vampire," however, New Englanders did believe that people who died of consumption (i.e., tuberculosis) could suck the life out of those above ground who still loved them, especially those in their own family. To remove the threat, you had to dig up the corpse. You were looking for flesh still on the bones---and blood still in the heart. If you found it, you could turn the body face down and rebury it. Or you could burn the flesh off the skeleton and then re-inter the bones. For good measure, you might also arrange the bones in special patterns. Exhumations and reburials of recent consumption victims happened across small-town New England throughout the nineteenth century; the Encyclopedia of New England lists cases in 1793, 1794, 1796, 1799, 1807, 1810, 1817, 1827, 1830, 1854, 1874, 1889, and 1892, among other years.

Emerson's first wife was Ellen Louis Tucker. Ralph and Ellen were married in 1829. She was 18 years old. They were married for less than two years. In 1931, Ellen died of consumption (the old timey name for TB).

On March 29, 1831, Emerson wrote in his journal the cryptic and brief entry, "I visited Ellen's tomb and opened the coffin".

From Crain's blog again:

Here's my question: Did Emerson fear that his first wife was a vampire? Robert Richardson famously began his biography Emerson: The Mind on Fire with an account of Emerson opening the grave of Ellen Tucker Emerson on 29 March 1832. To Richardson, the act was a sample of Emerson's existential courage; it demonstrated his willingness to see all of life, including death. Richardson noted that the practice wasn't unheard of; Rufus Griswold and James Freeman Clarke also opened their wives' coffins. But the doing of a thing by Rufus Griswold is not much of an extenuation. (I can't quickly lay hands on whether Mrs. Griswold or Mrs. Clarke died of consumption, but if they did, I'm willing to include them too in my speculation.)

In Waldo Emerson: A Biography, Gay Wilson Allen saw the exhumation of the first Mrs. Emerson more darkly: "the act remains so unnatural as to seem almost insane."

…

In several respects, the Emerson case fits the profile. Ellen died of tuberculosis, and at the time that Emerson opened the coffin, his brothers Charles and Edward were endangered by the same disease. Emerson himself suffered greatly in his mourning of Ellen, and might have wondered about her hold on him. I doubt Emerson would have believed simple-mindedly in the New England vampire folklore, but I suspect he was aware of it, and it must have been part of the wider social context for his act.

Crain's question is intriguing. Still, it should be put in context. Weird as it sounds to modern ears, the exhumation of loved ones just to gaze upon them one more time is was not unheard of in the Nineteenth Century. As president, the famously fatalistic Abraham Lincoln had his son William Wallace "Willie" Lincoln exhumed for viewing. Contemporaries thought this was evidence of Lincoln's melancholy and sentimental nature, but they did not think it so odd as to label him crazy. That said, it wasn't like people did this sort of thing every day. It is a frustratingly open question as to just what Emerson was doing.

Music: Gone to seed.

Regular visitors will recall that we've been tracking the music blog Aquarium Drunkard's series on the first four albums of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. The last of these posts ends the Cave-a-polooza with a bang. First, we get an excellent reassessment of Cave and Co.'s fourth long-player: Your Funeral . . . My Trial:

Any great artist, from the Beatles to Jean Cocteau, will tell you that the best art begins the moment the artist slackens his grip and allows his creation to breathe on its own—this great mystery of any human creation that Cocteau went so far as to call l’Ange Heurtebise, knowing that “angel” was the only word that could begin to capture the nature of the big indescribable. Some artists think that all art comes from suffering, and that’s exactly half true; what births our greatest sounds is the pains of an artist relinquishing control.

Don’t think Nick Cave didn’t know it in the summer of 1986. Though he humorously titled Kicking Against the Pricks as a finger-flip to rock journalists, it’s not much of a stretch to hear him thrashing about at his own windmills on those early records. Put simply, Your Funeral…My Trial is the sound of one man dropping his sword. It’s a chronicle of giving up—not in the sense of walking away, but the giving up that comes with seeing that he could never control himself, much less his art. And so he stands naked, skinny, head slightly down. But his lips still move. This is a record full of mystery, of unanswered questions, of gazes. This is Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ first genuinely Great Record.

But wait, there's more! The review comes with an mp3 of the title track: "Your Funeral . . . My Trial." Now how much would you expect to pay?

Don't answer yet, because there's even more!

Maybe you're new to the whole Cave and Bad Seeds phenom and these articles have got you stoked. Maybe you're and long-time fan of NC&tBS and you're looking for something you haven't already played to death. Whatever you Cave needs, AD has got you covered. Friends, the fine folks at AD also have mp3s of Nick Cave and the Bad Seed live. That's right, their entire October 9, 1986 show: 12 big tracks, including their cover of the Velvet Undergrounds "All Tomorrow's Parties!"

Now how much would expect to pay. For, special friends of ANTSS, we're giving it away. That's right: cheap as free.

Just leave the folks at AD a nice thank you note to let them know you appreciate their good work. It's the right thing to do, and the right way to do it.

Movies: Re-[REC]-ed.

I have not actually seen [REC], the 2004 Spanish outbreak horror that provided the blueprint for 2008's Quarantine; but the idea of remaking a highly improvisational "you-are-there" subjective camera flick brings up an interesting conceptual problem. Namely, do you reshoot what ended up on the screen or do you try to recreate the conditions that produced the final film?

To clarify things, let's abstract this problem from the films at hand and look at a hypothetical situation. Pretend, for a moment, that you've been tapped for a remake of The Blair Witch Project that is "faithful" to the original. For now, ignore the question of whether or not the film should be remade and ignore the fact that, even in context of Hollywood's chronic novelty-drought, it's still too soon to be disinterring that particular flick. Instead, think about what it means to remake that original flick.

Famously, The Blair Witch Project was created by giving a trio of actors a couple of handheld cameras, giving them a character design rather than a script, dropping them off in the middle of the woods, and then messing around with them until the produced enough raw footage to make a movie in editing. As I see it, you've got two distinct and somewhat mutually exclusive choices before you.

Option 1: Reverse Engineer the Final Product
Your first option would be to take what ended up on the screen – which was a combination of improv and cutting room choices – and work backward to produce a script and storyboard that would lead, if followed, to a recreation of the finished original. This would, in essence, plan for the accidents and randomness that formed the first one. Unlike the original flick, your film would actually have minimal improv. The words the original actors made up on the spot would, in your version, be carefully scripted. Mercifully, you can also avoid hanging out in the woods and being miserable for several days: you won't have to just shoot the crap out of everything and dig a movie out of it all in post. This would give you finished product that was indisputably faithful to the final film; but, be honest, it seems kinda to miss the point, doesn't it? It is less a faithful remake than a sort of po-mo simulation: a perfect copy of an imperfect original that wipes out its imperfections. Arguably, there's nothing for viewers inside the original film itself to suggest its origin story. On a pragmatic level, our awareness that BWP is a sort of experimental, open-process flick is really a product of the marketing surrounding the film – making of docs, interviews, content from other reviews, etc, - rather than result of the content of the film itself. The original BWP could have just as easily been a cheapo indie horror with a tight script and deftly handled shakey-cam work, and the whole origin story could have just been another level of the film's Byzantine publicity machine that was, at the time, as famous and popular as the actual film was. Still, on a more emotive level, its hard not to say that this remake would be somehow both extremely accurate and completely wrong-headed.

Option 2: Recreate the Conditions that Produced the Original
This option involves finding three actors that are willing to be abused, loading them up with camera equipment and power bars, and the getting them lost in the words. You hassle them semi-randomly for a number of days, gather up their footage at the end, and then see what you can do with all that coverage in editing. On a literal level, this would pretty much ensure profound levels of "infidelity" on the big screen. Unless your actors were conspiring, of their own accord, to recreate scenes from the original film, then it is unlikely that you get much of the same dialogue, few of the same shots, and little of the improved "plot" that occurs in the first film. You could very well end up without, say, the famous hyper-close-up of the repentant and horrified Heather apologizing to viewer. That said, there is something about this approach that feels more true to the spirit of the original, regardless of the fact that it guarantees the lowest possible level of "accuracy."

Of course, you could try to fuse the two approaches. I think you'd find that the combo didn't work. I assume that the more you genuinely allowed for the second option, the harder you would find it to believably apply scripted segments to the flick. That's my guess anyway.

I bring all this up because I found this question the most involving thing about the well made, but very thin Quarantine.

For those who have seen neither version of this flick, the film involves a local news reporter, Angela, and her cameraman, Scott, on a gig profiling the firemen at a local station house. Angela is gamely played by Jennifer Carpenter – a.k.a. Dexter's sister – whose playful tomboyish looks work well throughout light-hearted set up of the flick, but work against her when the fit hits the shan. The two fireman leads are played by Johnathon Schaech, sporting a truly impressive 1970s-porn-star-worthy moustache, and Jay Hernandez, the dreamboat hero of the picture.

The firehouse tomfoolerly that gives the film an up opener comes to a screeching halt when the firemen and crew are called to respond to a medical emergency at a slightly decaying apartment building. Turns out an old lady in the apartment building has turned nutso. She attacks her rescuers, killing one of the cops who responded to the 911 and putting Mr. Moustache the Fireman on death's door. Seems that she's got a hyper-virulent form of rabies that makes you go all rage-virusy within minutes of contracting it (unless, apparently, it would be more dramatically powerful for you to inexplicably hang about with the sniffles for a little bit before becoming all nom-nom-nom on people flesh – the virus, oddly, has a real flair for building tension).

To make sure that the residents of the apartment complex are truly and thoroughly screwed, the CDC and slew of military types put the building under quarantine – truth in advertising! – with standing orders to meet any effort at escape with extreme prejudice. The CDC/military industrial complex also cuts their television cable, their power, and cell phone reception. You see, being trapped in a building full of rabid psychopaths isn't panic-inducing enough. The CDC really prefers its subject to be crawling-up-the-walls, brain-each-other-with-hammers crazy.

Once we've handled all the grunt work of establishing the cast and unleashing the virus, the flick kicks into overdrive. About two-thirds of the way in, Quarantine becomes a ruthless and minimalist plot engine. This relentless narrative drive is both a blessing and a curse for the movie. It's hard to deny that the film is compelling on a gut level. The seasickness of the camera work, the score-less soundtrack of breaking tings and people, the crying and vomiting – it all has a numbing, gripping power. The scares hit when they should and the occasionally successful human counter-attacks get the blood racing. The creature design is also properly creepy. Plus, we've got a rabid monster child – evil children are horror gold.

Unfortunately, what it isn't is involving. The moment director John Erick Dowdle takes the breaks off, we lose almost everything that pulls us into a movie: Characterization evaporates, most of the visuals become a frenzied blur of action, dialogue increasingly tends towards a wall of incomprehensible shouting the general volume of which becomes the chief method communicating the mental state of the characters. In fact, with its rigorously delineated field of play, concern with keys and weapons, literal use of higher and higher floors/levels, and the sense of an over-the-shoulder floating camera, the whole thing resembles a super-high rez survival horror video game.

Quarantine is like one of those angular, minimalist pop dance singles from the late 1990s. Dance-floor oddities like Missy Elliott's remake of "I Can't Stand the Rain." On one hand, the aggressive inorganic feel suggested some experimental post-rock work, but the ethos driving the thing was pure disposable pop. The same odd dynamic is at work in Quarantine. The meticulous simulation of subjective camera work (this film is more like Cloverfield in that it is a very carefully staged simulation of what BWP made its method) requires an almost absurdly fanatical attention to craft. In it methods – the lack of a score, the sequential shooting, the reliance on elaborate and subtle lighting schemes – the film flirts again and again with something truly weird. But all this curious flirtation with experimentalism doesn't distract it from its main goal, which is to act as a thrill ride. That it ends up a dance single and not a noise rock jam is, I suspect, a boon or a bust depending on each viewer's inclination and mood at the time. It's nothing game changing, but it's got a good beat and you can dance to it.

Comics: Roberts' rules.

The Roberts, a two-ish mini by the writing team of Justin Shady and Wayne Chinsang with art by Erik Rose, seems like a throw back to the serial killer chic of the mid-1980s to mid-1990s.

Pop culture fads - like the civilizations that spawn them or their upmarket analogs: art movements - run through four stages of development before before collapsing: primitive, classic, baroque, and decadent. In the case of serial killer chic, the exemplars of each stage remain with us: respectively, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, the Hannibal franchise that exploded with the film adaptation of Silence of the Lambs, the novel American Psycho, and Se7en. Though these were just the highest points of a vast continent of trendy serial killer junk that has, for the most part, been submerged by the waters of our fickle popular attention. We still recall Bret Easton Ellis's OCD satire of Wall Street greed and media violence, though we tend to forget, for example, that Paul Theroux also tried his hand at the exploitative genre. Always a handy figure for filmmakers, serial killers with over-the-top motives and methods pretty much carried the horror genre limping along until the mid-1990s slasher revival. This time period also gave us the bizarre spectacle of Oliver Stone following up his epic J.F.K. with the psychotronic, but vacuous Natural Born Killers. A little late to the party, even Spike Lee decided to crank out a serial killer pic. Shirts with Manson on the front could be found in Sam Goody's suburban record shops. The mainstream media happily ran inch-filling stories on whether or not serial killers represented an evolutionary adaptation to "modern life." The figure of the serial killer didn't vanish, of course. But the weird moment when figures like Hannibal were not only seen as icons, but as essentially realistic passed us by. Movie-goers have no problem with serial murder, what they can't stand is over-earnestness.

The high concept pitch of The Roberts is Cocoon meets Dexter. In the Shady Lanes Retirement Community, two aged serial killers, the Boston Strangler (they caught the wrong guy) and the Zodiac Killer, are whiling away their golden years, both hiding under the name Robert. They talk shop, boast a little, and eventually decide to hold a contest: who can knock of the well-meaning but mentally deficient old biddy that lives down the hall from both of them. Flush with new-found purpose and the youthful energy that only human predation can provide, one of the killers starts expanding the parameters of the game, threatening to bring the heat they've so long avoided crashing down on them.

Shady and Wayne settle on a very unusual structure for their story, dedicating pretty much the entire first issue to character building and serial killer small talk. In a very leisurely way, we watch the Strangler and Zodiac trade stories and put up with indignities of the old folks' home that live in. They are built like a comedy team: the Zodiac is verbose and friendly, but a little goofy. The Strangler is more sharp-witted, but more grim and gloomy. The Zodiac is always pulling the Strangler to awkward social functions, the Strangler is always deflating the Zodiac's curious notions of self importance. There's a particularly nice scene in which the two killers discuss movies that have been made about them. The Strangler hates what Tony Curtis did to his character, but the he still shames the Zodiac because he was most recently depicted by several nobodies. The joke here is the Strangler's flick is a relatively mediocre film while the Zodiac's film was an Oscar nominated de-romanticization of the whole serial killer figure. The reason for the flicks' differences is lost on them both; they just want to know who played them.

The entire "game" plot rolls mostly through the second issue and is handled efficiently. Playing off the reader expectations regarding the use of the Strangler's narration allows the writers to pull a clever bait-and-switch that gives the whole thing a twist that doesn't seem forced. It does feel unevenly "compressed" compared to the breathing room the characters previously enjoyed.

Rose's art has a scrawling, nervous, almost outsider art feel to it. His jittery lines render the ravages of old age with a particular violence. The Strangler, especially, appears to have his wrinkles carved into him. Rose isn't big on backgrounds, often dropping out detail or simply forgoing the backgrounds altogether. While this occasionally makes his blocking difficult to figure out and can obscure the flow of action, it does jibe nicely with the raging monomania of the Roberts.

Curiously, the book's obsession with serial killer minutia is the only drag. Part of what drove the serial killer chic era was the refusal to see grotesquely mundane aspects of serial killer. The killer's became mythological predators in a modern world that had become a jungle. Less was said about how, in general, most serial killers were barely functional individuals. Far from being evil geniuses, the records of the killers showed that community apathy and police blundering were more often than not the reason they could continue their murderous rampages. Like all good pop icons, the killers couldn't survive being outted as pathetic. The Roberts suffers from an overabundance of the romantic mentality without showing any understanding of the flip slide of that coin. The name-dropping and research would be made more palatable if the reader felt that the authors knew that their characters were, at base, just really shitty human beings. This is odd sense of killer-cool is further reinforced by the extras the team has packed into the trade, including copies of several letters from Charlie Manson and Richard Ramirez. It's unclear if we're supposed to laugh at the incomprehensible ravings of Manson or give the authors cred for communing with evil. In my opinion, neither result would justify even the slightest possibility of giving Manson the solace of knowing he's still thought about and discussed in world outside his prison.

That said, the original premise is fresh and the characterizations compelling. The art is striking in a suitably off-kilter way. The whole package hangs together well. The Roberts is a well done, inventive, and refreshingly low-key slow-burn thriller.