Comic Con - Thursday and Friday

The disparate cultural spheres of modern day America - the blogosphere, the classical mamas-basement and postmodern hipster-nerd strains of geekery, kids pulling bored parents, white trash strippers modelling Wonder Woman wardrobe advertising for the bar down on Market street, shysters advertising third-strain derivations of pseudo-popular buzz comics (a retro-future for every retro genre - steampunk, neo-Victoriana, wizards on spaceships, Huck Finn fights the aliens, future noir, Romeo and Juliet with robots), barely-famous actors seeking a second life on the geek circuit - was that David Arquette appearing live to promote his new film, directed by him for the massmarket direct-to-video audience?

Comic Con has nothing to do with comics and everything to do with the world that comics have created. Most of the biggest stands inside of the massive San Diego Convention Center are big corporations advertising megabudget TV, Film, or Video Games - there's the Sci-Fi channel's trademark actual-size spaceship, with little plasma screens scattered around advertising the mass of crap that is Sci-Fi original content (with the exception of "Battlestar Galactica," the great American TV show cursed with an unmarketable name and an awful network). There's ABC's giant "Heroes" stand - "Vote Petrelli" pins are everywhere by early Thursday afternoon, finalizing "Heroes' " arrival as the great Nerd-Pop object of the moment; the sundry "Dharma" paraphernalia feels immediately out-of-date, and the free-handout "Bionic Woman" t-shirts seem entirely too-soon.

"Vote Petrelli" - it's the kind of in-joke that could be fan-generated, so what matters that it's also cheap advertising for the one show that's saving NBC corporate? It's a bit like the popular baseball caps with "FRAK" written on the front - it's advertising for people who already watch, an in-joke inviting people to understand it, at once the proud mark of a cultish believer and an invitation to an outsider.


"Battlestar Galactica" was never a comic book; neither was "Heroes," but both shows feel like a natural part of Comic Con, just like all the video game companies peddling their next-gen wares. There are several bestubbled nerds wandering around in Metal Gear Solid "Snake" outfits - impressive, though not as intense as the various Jack Sparrows who went the distance with the weirdo facial hair and the movie-precise dirty Pirate garb (though watching them try to imitate Johnny Depp's drunk-fop sashay is painful - a bit like seeing a kid move his middle fingers toward his wrist and say "thwip!" in imitation of web-swinging - what seems so cool and exotic onscreen (or indeed, in a comic) seems so horribly lame in real life).

Comic books aren't very important to Comic Con anymore. Not to say that the actual practice of printing stories in graphic panel form has been forgotten - one half of the Convention Center is still covered with small press publishers - but comics are about as important to the comic book industry as movies are to the movie industry - they're a foundation for other, more profitable media. A movie is really just an advertisement for the DVD, the theme park ride, the action figures, and the merchandise; a comic book is the advertisement for the movie. Most of the indie comics that you see aren't really telling you a story - they're illustrating a concept which can be rewritten into oblivion by a cabal of poorly-paid screenwriters, directed by a crapp director, and released briefly onto movie screens before finding a new life on the low-budget direct-to-DVD cartoon series market.

I got handed a free comic book called "Cowboys and Aliens" which illustrates this idea perfectly. It's the kind of high-concept idiocy that we used to lambast studio execs for - "it's "Red River" meets "battlefield Earth." It's less an actual story than a chemical compound of two visual aesthetics - six-shooters and laser guns, horses chasing space ships. It's such a shameless advertisement for itself, a graphic novel that doubles as a treatment. Creating a comic book today is really about recombining two existing aesthetics. Watch, I'll give you some free ideas for new comic books: Ninja Priest, Baseball Samurai, Space Janitor, Futuristic Western Anthropomorphized-Lizard Noir. By the time I finish this sentence, two of those will be comic books, and one of them will have a first-look film deal.

Most people don't read comics, but everyone understands them, because everyone has either a) played a video game or b) seen a summer blockbuster in the last few years. Comics, videogames, and blockbusters, though vastly different media, all share a defining storytelling style - atmosphere is more important than character, mythology is more important than plot. The actual storyline of most RPGs is unrepentantly lame - tattoo "true love conquers all" on your eyeballs - but it's the window dressing that separates the great from the poor. "Pirates of the Caribbean" demonstrates this most of all - based on a theme park, it feels less like a movie than a catalogue of cool places with ever-more elaborate decoration. You could freeze frame any part of the "Pirates" movies and have an awesome picture; you could watch any scene without Johnny Depp and feel simultaneously bored, confused, and angry.

I went to the "Lost Season 4" presentation. If you were looking for the intersection of high geek culture and low white trash podunkery, this was the place - it was like a Dungeons and Dragons competition sponsored by Nascar. There onstage were Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, the ubernerds of geektopia, the great mythologizers of the modern age, drinking in the adoration of a capacity crowd. "Lost" is either the smart show for stupid people or the stupid show for smart people, a kitchen-sink comedy-drama-SF-romance-adventure-satire that titillates you with time travel and mind control while keeping things just realist enough so your girlfriend can watch without shame.

Oh yeah, the girls. There are alot of them here - and, shockingly, many of them are hot. As I walk past yet another ugly balding man holding hands with a cute girl, I am left to ponder - how many nerds have gotten laid because of Seth Cohen? "The OC" made nerd culture cool - comics, manga, HK karate films, cartoons - and Seth Cohen put a handsome-hipster-carefree face on a nation of megageeks. Seth didn't just convince a hot girl to fall in love with him - he convinced hot girls everywhere to fall in love with what he represented. And he convinced nerdy guys everywhere that they could get the girl by just being themselves - but crucially, he also convinced nerds that "being themselves" meant being cool.

In Defense of Sopranos Season 6 - Spoiler Alert

Considering how much of modern television is based on mindbending twists and oh-shit surprise cliffhangers, it's remarkable to consider how genuinely distinctive the series finale of "Sopranos" was. The door opens, Tony looks up, cut to black silence forever after. What happened? Did he die? Did we die? Did he keep on muddling through his pointless existence, and in that last close-up did David Chase suddenly hold a mirror up to society, condemning us to a life without closure? Colbert spoofed it. Hillary retooled it into a Youtube campaign ad, proving yet again that politicians (and, indeed, most people over 30) simply do not quite understand Youtube.

So attention-grabbing were those final moments that it's easy to forget how low-key the whole episode was. The penultimate episode left viewers ready for a bloodbath - Tony, all alone with his machine gun, his closest friends dead and comatose. But there was just one onscreen death in the finale - one long-expected, and handled with that precise "Sopranos" dark humor. There were no big moments. Tony didn't cry. Dr Melfi didn't even show up. The choice for "Don't Stop Believing" as the last song is like a sadistic joke - the loudest and cheesiest song in history, and it plays over quiet, bored family conversation.

"Sopranos" used to be attention-grabbing TV, but most people weren't huge fans of season 6. It was slow. The first half of the season, 12 episodes that ran in 2006, lacked any clear narrative center - whereas earlier seasons turned on Tony's relationship with his Mother, or with his cousin Tony B., or his closest friend and traitor Big Pussy, those first 12 episodes seemed to spin in all kinds of directions. Tony gets shot, has a dream of purgatory in a coma, then wakes up. Vito is gay and races off to have a romance with a handlebar-mustached firefighter-cook. Carmela, who had been such a force in Season 5 - exploring life on her own - spent the whole season waiting for Tony to lean on the building inspector so she could work on her spec house. The Spec House plot sums up most of the first half of Season 6 - lying half-finished, waiting for someone to either fix it up or just start over. What a bizarre place for the show to leave off, we all thought - the Sopranos celebrating Christmas, quietly, and mostly happy.

Yet now, with the full 21 episode expanse of Season 6 complete, the full equation becomes clear. It begins with the worst thing to ever happen to Tony - shot by his uncle, near-death. Then, magically, he is back to life - "Every day is a gift," he says. Tony is risen. He is ascended into a new grace. He stops cheating on Carmela, and seeks peace with Phil Leotardo. The end of the first half of the season is as close as "The Sopranos" has ever come to a happy ending.

Of course, it's not over. "Soprano Home Movies" was the beginning of the last nine episodes, and it provides, in miniature, a perfect signpost for what's to come. Tony, Carmela, Janice, and Bobby are playing Monopoly. They are laughing and chit-chatting, and yet the scene is fraught with unbearable tension - the camera holds just a little bit too long on Tony and Janice, sincerity shades delicately into sarcasm. Tony makes jokes about Janice's childhood promiscuity. Bobby asks him to stop. Tony doesn't. A fight breaks out - not a family scuffle, a brawl between two gigantic grizzly bears. In just a few minutes, a quiet domestic scene moves into a bloody, angry, vengeful fight.

That scene captures everything great about the final season of Sopranos, a season which had nothing left to prove and so rewrote the rules of television one last time. Because there are no commercials, each episode of "Sopranos" finds the time to focus in one quiet little moments - and no actor plays silence better than James Gandolfini, inhaling deeply into Tony Soprano's profound gut, by turns confused by and angry at the whole world. That scene set the tone for season 6 - because, by all rights, Tony should be happy, and yet he is living in hell.

The final episodes focus in on Tony's relationships with the men who should be his closest friends, and find nothing but mistrust, repressed hostility, and finally, death. In "Remember When," Tony travels with Paulie to Miami, and appears very close to murdering him - out of what appears to be sheer annoyance. His old friend Hesh wants Tony to pay off an old debt - leading Tony to make anti-semitic Shylock jokes. Tony kills his nephew - a man with whom, earlier in the season, he had shared a drunken man-hug, saying, "I love you."

Futility is the final theme of "Sopranos." Dr Melfi reads a psychiatric study which claims sociopaths do not benefit from therapy - and what a wonderful moment, for those of us who have watched the series from the beginning, when the study notes that such men often show a great affinity for "animals." Far away, the ducks quack quack quack, and Pie-O-My winnies from horse heaven. Christopher, forever fighting off his addiction, seeks forgiveness from his AA sponsor - and then murders him for telling the essential truth, "You're in the mafia." They chose this life.

The season began with strangulation - Gene, a heretofore minor character, finds himself trapped by the mob, the FBI, and his own dysfunctional family, and hangs himself. We left Johnny Sack gasping for breath out of his cancerous lungs, moments before death. Tony just covers Christopher's nose and mouth, sending his nephew into the next life coughing blood. AJ tries to drown himself in the pool. Asphyxiation is the perfect metaphor for season 6 - it is a slow, painful way to die, not fast like a gunshot, not quiet like natural causes. It gives you time to truly consider what it means to be alive - see Gene struggling with his rope, suddenly desperate for more air; or Christopher, when the shock of realization hits his eyes that Tony isn't trying to help him. When Tony rescues AJ, he cries, "My baby, my baby" - it is the last truly tender moment in the series.

One can sense that Season 6 could have been much shorter - with only 13 episodes, perhaps Vito's storyline wouldn't have been so central; Tony wouldn't have been in a coma for so long; one can see episodes like Johnny Sack's death, Tony and Carmela's visit to Bobby's cabin, the Feast of St. Elzear and Carmela's trip to Paris might have been eliminated entirely. Yet with the extra time, you can sense Chase and his writers stretching to include everything - the War on Terror, the advance of corporate America, religion, Hollywood, homosexuality, marriage, funerals, death, life. What other show would get so much mileage out of a poem by Yeats?

There's nothing more exciting than a new episode of "24," and there's nothing more boring than an old episode of "24." In this post-iTunes, post-TiVo landscape, "Sopranos" Season 6 feels like a lost relic from a television era that never really existed - a meditative TV, moving at its own delicate pace. There are stretches of episodes in season 6 that bear comparison to Antonioni - with all the positive (depth of emotion) and negative (slow to the point of insanity) aspects that comparison demands. I am reminded of something Roger Ebert writes about the closing 45 minutes of Visconti's "The Leopard" - "We have grown to know the prince's personality and his ideas, and now we enter, almost unaware, into his emotions. The cinema at its best can give us the illusion of living another life, and that's what happen here."

The latter half of the season is truly depressing TV, because we feel precisely what Tony feels - a clinical sense of detachment from the world around us. Our closest friends are our worst enemies. We just want it to end, one way or another - but it doesn't end. Death is not a swelling of the orchestral music - it is an interruption in the middle of the a cheesy Journey song, and the rest is silence.

The Tomlady

Kara Thrace likes to drink too much and screw too often. She’s great at her job and hates her job. Her pop ditched her and her mom beat her. She hurts people who love her and pisses off everybody else. For one brief shining moment she found true love, then ditched the guy in the morning for a quickie marriage with a man she regularly cuckolds. She is without a doubt the most passionate, insane, terribly real person on TV, even if she lives on a spaceship, worships Athena, and can’t go two minutes without saying the expletive “Frak” and its derivatives.

She isn’t hot, per se. The hot women on “Battlestar Galactica” are robots, identical duplicates played by the same Maxim-ready actresses (the adolescent boymind racing with octuplet fantasies). Six, the main hottie-cylon, is a joke of physical perfection: a blonde-haired blue-eyed plastic supermodel goddess wearing a perpetually slinky red dress. She’s always talking about God’s plan, whispering sermons in your ear like some buxom Born Again Creationist teasing you with her own innocence. She could strangle a man with one hand and playfully tickle his beard with the other. She’s the Fem Nazi as Prom Queen, a fiercely powerful woman who dominates men and occasionally lets them screw her circuits out.

Next to that, Kara’s worse than average. She’s got big eyes, an abrupt chin, short mannish hair. She’s a tomboy gone to bootcamp, a fighter pilot who drinks like a man and gambles like a drunk. She wears tank tops when she’s not in uniform. Whereas Six carries her strength with a poised runway rhythm, Kara’s a scrapper, devoted to full contact sports, perpetually covered with mud and spaceship grime.

And yet, by the fourth or fifth episode, you are in love with Kara Thrace. Full props to Katee Sackhoff, whose acting contains just the right mix of boyish jock and girlish glee. Like the women in the old Howard Hawks movies, Kara makes sexuality playful – she doesn’t hide her faults, but rather, makes her imperfections part of the attraction. In one episode she dolled up in a lime green dress just to show how nicely she can clean up, but she looked so much better in an episode this season, wearing trim military gym wear, hair mussed with sweat, fighting the man she loved (and ditched) in a boxing match that ended with the two of them, beaten and bloodied, quietly and passionately embracing.

Kara represents a new wave of women on TV – neurotic, intelligent, markedly and explicitly less attractive than other female characters, yet often responsible for carrying most of the show’s emotional weight. Think of Pam on “The Office,” quiet and dressed in tasteful secretary attire, placed next to Karen, her tan, exotically mixed-race rival dressed in classy business attire. Or Tina Fey on “30 Rock,” quick witted, sharp-featured, a goofy “Star Wars” geek in post-Wintour New York City.

Or think of Callie on “Grey’s Anatomy,” a second season addition to the show who probably weighs two Meredith Greys. I mean that as a compliment to Sara Ramirez and a meaningful exhortation to Ellen Pompeo: good god, woman, eat a hamburger! Because Callie is curvy in a voluptuous sense, recalling classical visions of beauty that occupy the opposite end of the spectrum from Nicole Richie’s prominent rib cage. Callie is the anti-Meredith: spunky and assertive, an orthopedist who cracks bones back into place like Superman crushing a particularly annoying building. She’s outside the main circle of girlfriends – lucky for her, since Meredith, Izzie, and Christina edge ever further from playful narcissists to selfish ingrates.

“Grey’s” is probably the first number one show in TV history to feature a titular protagonist who pretty much everyone, both on the show and watching at home, hates. The deck is somewhat stacked against Ellen Pompeo, saddled with the horrific narration that bookends the show, which invariably follows the formula, “[famous dead guy] once said [clichéd quotation], but he never counted on [idiotic moral rejoinder to clichéd quotation which signposts themes of episode with the subtlety of a fire-breathing T. Rex].” Many critics have accused Meredith Gray of Ally McBeal syndrome: an attractive, highly-paid young professional crying woe is me because she doesn’t have the perfect man in her life. There are also echoes of “The OC”’s Marissa Cooper, another supposedly troubled character who quickly became the least believable and most uninteresting part of the show (look, Mischa Barton’s trying to act drunk!)

Pompeo, Barton and their spiritual mama Calista Flockhart are all thin, of course, still the fashion a decade after Kate Moss taught schoolgirls how to look heroin-chic with a cocaine diet. The cultural importance placed upon the pixie-ish curve-free female body represents all sorts of strange Freudian impulses in modern-day America: the tendency toward self-destruction, denying ourselves the most basic human necessities (food) in a fanatically ill-advised push toward perfection; the belief that science can make us perfect (counting carbs, losing calories, if all else fails go under the knife); the post-feminist, post-gay, post-metrosexual cultural shift towards androgyny, and the dovetailing suspicion that our country is repressing a whole lot of strange things in our head (a woman without curves is an exceptionally pretty boy).

Actresses always had to be attractive in Hollywood, but now they have to be supermodels. Halle Berry and Charlize Theron won Oscars for looking ugly, then instantly transformed into superwomen in form-fitting dominatrix costumes: Halle bared a midriff and grew claws for Catwoman, Charlize zipped up for Aeon Flux. Both films were horrible and made shit money. Neither woman has starred in anything substantive since winning the Oscar; both have appeared in a Lad Mag Hot 25 list, Berry in FHM, Charlize in Maxim.

And there’s Nicole Kidman. Flash back to 2002, and she was just about the reigning queen of the world. Out of Tom Cruise’s shadow, and Oscar-nominated two consecutive years for radically different performances: dancing up a po-mo jukebox storm in Moulin Rouge!, then writing stream-of-consciousness literature in The Hours. In the latter, she rocked a giant nose prosthetic; ever since, she’s been hyper-glam, a fashion icon, both on and off the screen. Once a quietly malicious actress (see her sly ball-breakers in To Die For and Eyes Wide Shut), has become beautiful to the point of distraction: plenty of critics said she was just too hot for Cold Mountain, especially next to a muddy Renee Zellweger. Nobody ever accused Katharine Hepburn of being too attractive, because she wasn’t attractive, because her whole persona was based on worrying about more important things, which is why when she died the whole world wept.

Kidman is turning 40 this year; Berry, 41. There is a whole generation entering adulthood (my own) raised on the societal norm that Thinner is Better. But Hotness doesn’t last forever for the individual, and its contents (What makes Hot Hot) are constantly in flux. Last summer, all the gossip rags tossed around a picture of Nicole Richie jogging in a bikini, bones protruding out of near-transparent skin, far from forgiving club lights. It’s not just that she looked ugly. She looked old. She looked decrepit. She looked elderly. Whatever eating disorder she’s cultivated, it’s reached the breaking point, when the side effects (weak bones, missed periods, all kinds of fun stuff) start to hit.

TV is always more ahead of the game than movies, and it’s tempting to read the tea leaves and hope that the signs are positive. Lost kills off eye candy like Shannon and Nikki but holds onto athletic Kate (a tremendously inappropriate friend explained to me that she has man legs). Ugly Betty sides definitively with brace-and-acne crowd, and giggles people who think you can’t notice their botox forehead. The Office taught a nation how to fall in love with the quiet girl. Then again, Entourage, the great American Male Wet Dream, is a revolving door of hotties-next-door; it’s the gender counterattack to the Sex and the City world, assuring men that, if you search hard enough, there is a Victoria’s Secret model waiting at the end of the rainbow, ready to give you the one-night-stand of a lifetime.

Kara could tear apart all the guys on Entourage. She’s smart, sporty, obsessively focused on her job and self-destructive in every other aspect of her life. She wears whatever she puts on, doesn’t fuss with her hair, rarely wears make-up, never lets her guard down. Kara, Callie, Pam, Liz Lemon; the new hotness.

JJ Abrams and The Beta Genius

JJ Abrams is everything that Hollywood loves right now: a talented writer-director who wants to make movies with Roman Numerals in the title. Hot on the heels of "Mission: Impossible III" comes "Star Trek XI,"and you get the feeling that if anyone would care to pay a slight retainer fee, then Abrams has all sorts of ideas for James Bond and Superman. Abrams paid his dues in Hollywood on forgettables like "Regarding Henry" and "The Pallbearer" (back when he was known as "Jeffrey"); he was a writer for "Joy Ride," a wonderful little gem which exemplifies Abrams' ability to turn low-grade stupid shlock into darkly-comic fun; he was also a writer for "Armageddon," which is a one of the stupidest movies ever made, until you compare it to that OTHER space-rocks-crashing-to-earth-'98 movie, "Deep Impact," which was as dumb as Armageddon and slow to boot. "Armageddon" is never slow. Neither is JJ Abrams. On his TV shows, this is a virtue; in movies, a potential vice.

"Felicity" was his first foray into television - a charming little show about young people going to college in New York City. The show wasn't as attention grabbing as "Dawson's Creek," but a decade later, its the one that fans remember. Who could've guessed what was next? "Alias" took everybody by surprise - just as "CSI" was franchising and Reality TV was booming, here came a mega-sized thriller that was like every fan boy's dream of a spy show. Right from the start, "Alias" showed how well Abrams could thread the needle of smart and stupid, shallow and deep. Sydney Bristow is a hot smart chick who solves complex mysteries in elaborately kinky wardrobes (Jennifer Garner, meanwhile, was a hot chick who won a Golden Globe). The series was light-witted James Bond funny and apocalyptic world-ending serious. It recombined elements of soap opera, serial adventure, and boom-boom action - LCD genres - and churned out a show that critics could rave about.

Few people ever really watched. This was the Dark Age for ABC - "Millionare" was dried up, the one-two-three castaway-housewife-doctor punch was three years away, and "Alias" had the critics on its side. (It might be the great tragedy of JJ Abrams' existence that he spent many years making "Alias" a seminal piece of popular art, and it was never very popular) . But you cannot deny its influence. Premiering just a month before "24," "Alias" led the charge into a new age of massively-serialized long-running stories, reinvigorating broadcast TV with its kitchen-sink aesthetic. "Alias" made instant fossils of so much else on TV - it's hard to watch any drama from the 90s now (except perhaps "The X-Files") without a bit of nostalgia, embarrassment, and boredom.

Broadcast TV was dying. HBO had all the buzz with "Sopranos." Broadcast TV couldn't match cable for anything - not for sex and violence, not for budget, and only rarely for depth of storytelling (it is a far different thing to make 13 episodes every couple years than to make 24 episodes in one year - this is why British TV has always been better, and less plentiful, than American). "Alias" showed a new way. A big cast. A big story. And for god's sakes, don't slow down for anything.

Hence, "Lost." Abrams wasn't the sole creator of the show - besides Damon Lindelof and Jeffrey Lieber, credit must go to Lloyd Braun, ABC's then-Chairman. It would be wrong to paint Braun entirely as a studio suit - he also helped with "The Sopranos" - but it is a telling fact about the sort of age we live in that Abrams and Lindelof could hear a ludicrous high-concept proposition from an executive - "It's "Survivor" in real life, guys..." - and set their minds racing.

The first episode of "Lost" was incredibly costly - 14 million dollars, more than most indie films - and yet it is unimpeachably great, from the eerie opening reveal (why is this man lying in a bush? where'd that dog come from? what's all that screaming?) straight through to the still unanswered question, "Where are we?" It's striking how much was in place right from the beginning: the fleet-footed intermixing of the flashbacks (how exciting did a show that was half-flashback sound three years ago?), the able weaving of mysteries (who's that french woman on the radio?) and absurdities (polar bear?). Above all, right from the start, Abrams made it clear that things could change in a heartbeat, and that we could never suspect that we knew everything about our beloved castaways: sweet-looking Kate is a convict, puppydog Charlie is a heroin addict, hottie Shannon can speak French.

"Lost" tends to model its old-fashioned SF influences, but stylistically, its always been the zippy inheritor of the "Memento" mod - that millenial noir that turned time on its side to create a new kind of thriller. According to Hitchcock, suspense was waiting for a bomb to go off. After "Memento," suspense was learning why the bomb went off. That's the pleasure of "Lost" - many of its plot elements are hackneyed or downright cliche, but the whole presentation is jazz-pumped with nifty twists and pitch-perfect presentation. Better writers and actors are working in science-fiction than ever before - it's as if Laurence Oliver had starred in "I Married a Monster!" for Nicholas Ray.

"Lost" is not truly original the way that "Sopranos" was original, but it takes the dregs of genre and remakes it into something immeasurably grand. Everything Abrams touches is at least half-farce, because the plots are so ridiculous, but when we laugh at a megatwist on "Lost," it's not out of sarcasm, but out of madcap pleasure - unlike Gen-X, which sneered at soap operatics, we can't wait to see how much more preposterous it can get.

Abrams mostly left "Lost" during the second season to write and direct "Mission Impossible 3." This may be one of the great creative missteps of our age. You have to understand that Tom Cruise loved "Mission Impossible." He was like some latter-day Selznick, with M:I3 his "Gone With the Wind." He shepherded it through long years of pre-production, first with David Fincher, then with Joe Carnahan - young directors of considerable talent.

The "Mission Impossible" franchise is a strange one indeed. Few sequels are more dissimilar to their progenitor than was "Mission Impossible 2." The first movie was a labyrinthine series of obfuscations with that immortal hanging-upside-down-to-hack-the-CIA scene. It was bargain-basement Brian de Palma, and if it's aged well, its only because most pre-Matrix action movies seem lovably antiquated now. Whereas 2 was John Woo at his wooziest - a plot that was basically "Notorious" in slow motion, with Cary Grant's charm replaced by Tom Cruise's flowy hair.

2 is a great movie to watch when you're stoned because John Woo was smart enough to make the whole thing ridiculously simple - unlike the first one, drowning in plot contortions and computer hacks and pseudonyms, 2 keeps it so simple that anyone could follow it. Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt isn't really a character - he's a vehicle for watching Tom Cruise kick ass.

To Abrams' credit, he tried to do something different with 3. He gave Cruise a fiancé and a vengeance storyline (in a shout out to Abrams' quieter past, the bad guys kill Felicity). But 3 was an awful movie. And oddly, it was bad for many of the same reasons that Abrams' TV shows were so good. From Lost, you got the opening flash-forward and the shaky-hand close-up aesthetic; From Alias, you got the juggling act of Superman spy life and Clark Kent domesticity, and the unabashed pleasure of seeing a hot spy girl work undercover magic with her legs. And there was the same speed. God, how the movie zips everywhere: from Berlin to the Vatican to Shanghai in under an hour and a half.

But what seems vital and thrilling on the small screen quickly seemed shrill and overwrought on the big. What was missing? Well, characters, for one thing: whereas his TV works present huge casts of multilayered characters who reveal ever-twistier dark sides of their personality, 3 gives us one single traitor, a bunch of people who are unequivocally good, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who's evil to the point of rudeness. Really, there was a sense of been-there-done-that to the whole movie - the traitor is being evil For The Good Of America, which is a plot you've seen almost every week on 24. One imagines that Abrams wanted to explore the human side of Ethan Hunt, which is kind of like Michael Bay exploring the human side of "Transformers."

Still, in the middle of this mishmash of a bad movie, there's the Vatican City sequence, featuring Tom Cruise in a monk's robe and Philip Seymour Hoffman punching Philip Seymour Hoffman. It was a zesty little scene, and it showed that, if nothing else, Abrams was having a lot of fun with this thing. Times are changing. Who wouldn't want to make a threequel?

So how about an elevenquel? Or a reboot, or a remake, or whatever "Star Trek XI" is going to be. Abrams has already signed his "Lost" buddy Damon Lindelof on to co-produce. Lindelof is an avowed fan of geek arcana - comic books, SF, Stephen King. You can imagine the two of them making the ultimate Star Trek movie. Original? Maybe not. How can you tell a truly original story after four TV series, 10 films, and hundreds of books and comic books and fanfictions? Of course, that's what makes Abrams the perfect Hollywood auteur right now. Like Tarantino, he reassembles old cliches into zesty new models; unlike Tarantino, he wants to sell those models to a mass audience.

Abrams is a Beta Genius - not to say lesser (compared to an Alpha Genius), but more focused on refining existing product rather than creating a new one - he's the 2.0 model. Abrams wouldn't have made "Star Wars," but you could see him working on "The Empire Strikes Back." True, the first movie invented the world, but "Empire" showed everyone how to play in it - a funnier, faster, more exciting, more grand movie in every way. Hollywood loves the Beta Genius, because that means sequels and remakes. Peter Jackson's "King Kong" was a gigantic mash note to the first movie, at once a thousand times better and entirely unnecessary (the roar of biplanes at the end works so well because we know exactly what's going to happen). Or think of the new "Battlestar Galactica" - a remake of a horrible TV show becomes one of the most vital, topical, well-acted, ingenious creations in history.

I'm not saying that Abrams is a hack - far from it. His HBO project on cancer victims sounds like it will completely burst the mold on our expectations for him; his top-secret "Cloverfield" film could usher in a new era of corporate viral marketing; and anyone who tries to adapt Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" deserves a spot in filmmaker heaven (right next to Terry "Watchmen" Gilliam).

But one does wonder just how far the guy can go. He was indisputably important to the creation of "Lost," but the show didn't suffer from his absence - in fact, you could argue that it was in his absence that the show really started to flower, delving ever deeper into its central mythology, opening up strange new areas of Island life that still haven't been explained. Season 2 was slower than the first - one finds it hard to believe that Abrams would have spent so much time down there in the hatch. Season 3 started off even slower, with the fall-season stint in Othersville. Yet both Seasons paid off - you can sense that Lindelof and his writing partner Carlton Cuse are moving ever more toward the HBO-style, where each season comes together like a video novel, building towards a devastating finish.

Abrams' other TV projects have been beyond lame - he produced "What About Brian?" and "Six Degrees," and although he seems to have not been very involved with the shows, some blame has to go to him for giving Barry Watson work, and for wasting good actors like Campbell Scott and Hope Davis and Bridget Moynahan's legs. He may be finished with TV - his "Star Trek" may well revitalize the franchise; his "Dark Tower" could be amazing, though Abrams seems far too PG-13 for such a bleak, apocalyptic piece. Still, Abrams is only 41, and looks barely 12. He may surprise us with something new. Or he may just keep surprising us with something old.

Michael Bay's "Transformers" - Not The End of Western Civilization

"Transformers" possesses everything that is great and awful about Michael Bay. This makes it the director's best movie, since all his other movies were just awful. "The Rock" is fun mostly because of Sean Connery, and is nowhere near as good as anyone remembers it. "Armageddon" is a career-worst for every talented actor Bay roped in - and summons up all kinds of troublesome flashbacks to a time when the world made Ben Affleck a megastar. "Pearl Harbor" is an abortion. "Bad Boys 2" traded in the considerable charm of the first movie for pumped-up guns-n-ammo megafarce --- and had the merciless dull wit to end at Guantanamo Bay. "The Island" showed a new maturity - it took nearly an hour to get to the explosions - but squandered the considerable talents of Ewan McGregor and the considerable lips of Scarlett Johansson on a plot so bad, a crappy B-Movie from the 70s sued for copyright infringement. "The Island" didn't make any money (though the foreign cash made it almost profitable - don't you hate the foreigners sometimes?), but at least Bay got to screw Scarlett Johansson. You need to appreciate the finer things in life.

There was one great scene in "The Island." Ewan McGregor, playing a blank-faced clone, meets Ewan McGregor, playing the clone's smarmy-sneered template. What should be a b-grade stunt - think Van Damme playing off himself in "Double Impact" - becomes a delicate one-man comedy. It's so funny, and so completely unlike anything else that Bay has ever done, that you have to figure he was sick that day, and he just left Ewan a list of instructions: 1) Act. 2) Smile occasionally.

But then you have a scene in "Transformers" which may just be the funniest shit that will hit the cinema this year. The suburban-teen protagonist (Shia LaBoeuf - he would already be a superstar, if he just listened to his agent and changed his name to Rick Powell) is trying to find his great-grandpa's spectacles (don't ask), and doesn't want his parents to know that there are five gigantic autobots lurking in his backyard. The scene goes on for a long time, but it doesn't feel forced - if anything, it recalls an old Marx Brothers skit, steadily building towards ever greater absurdity. Bay is giving his characters some room to breathe - even the robots. I suspect that longtime "Transformers" fans will find the scene a tad insulting - Autobots aren't klutzes! Optimus Prime wouldn't say "My Bad!" WHINE! - but let's face it, "Transformers" fanboys are the bottom feeders on the pop mythology totem pole. And this scene has a bit of that old "ET" sense of genuine wonder - what kid doesn't want a bunch of twenty-foot tall robots in their backyard?

Speaking of "ET," many people in the theater were bemused to notice that Steven Spielberg produced the movie. According to this interview, Spielberg worked with the screenwriters on that suburban tone: Bay, by his own words, "added a stronger military thing at the beginning to make it more, I guess, badass." Coincidentally, the military thing is the worst part of the movie - and the part which feels most like vintage Bay. See! Bland Josh Duhamel imitate Bland Ben Affleck from "Pearl Harbor." See! Jon Voight look confused as a military leader, just like in "Pearl Harbor." See! The camera settle on the Hottie Blond Australian computer hacker whose backstory and name are never quite established, who Michael Bay almost certainly doffed between takes.

Here's Bay on realism:"I would never put actors at a Burger King, but it's what people do, you know what I mean?" Here's Bay on shooting inside the lead character's suburban home: "It's not a sexy house. But it's identifiable, and more accessible." Ladies and Gentlement, here you have a man fiercely at war with his best instincts. A sexy house?

But the suburban stuff is far and away the best part of the movie - light, whimsical, and above all, charming. Even with all the cutaways to the military, the first half of "Transformers" is the best work Bay has ever done - and shows that the influence of Spielberg (after "Island," this is his second film with Bay) is doing a considerable job of erasing years of bad lessons learned from Jerry Bruckheimer.

Then comes the last half hour of the movie, when Michael Bay gets to destroy an entire city with Autobots and Decepticons. I shit you not. He even has a bunch of planes flying through and occasionally into buildings. Sigh.

What Happened To Charm?

Bruce Willis has made a whole bunch of crappy movies this past decade. Bandits, Hart's War, Hostage, Lucky Number Slevin, one after the other, lame lame lame. He's made a couple good movies - "Tears of the Sun" is three-quarters a great action flick and one-quarter a cut-rate African "Schindler's List"; "The Sixth Sense" features probably the most normal character Willis will ever play (except for that one thing); "Unbreakable" is Shyamalan at the height of his gifts, right before his arrogance destroyed him, and Willis finds the perfect mix of existential dread and lovable loser. "Grindhouse" and "Sin City" are good movies, but both films also demonstrate everything wrong about pretty much everything Willis has done since "The Fifth Element" - he's so damned serious. Robert Rodriguez is a wizard at casting, but you get the feeling he doesn't give the actors a whole lot of direction - Willis basically wears the same stonefaced look in both movies, like he's got a bad case of James Dean syphilis.

In most of these bad movies, Willis plays a man of great reputation - a colonel, or a top cop, or a shadowy contract killer, or a famous thief. Important men. Men you can count on. This is problem number one. Willis is not particularly good at playing confident. And he's so wonderful at playing confusion. People tend to lump him in with other aging 80s action stars, but Willis never had the super-pumped athletic quality that made Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Van Damme such big stars - a good thing, since that meant he wasn't let down by the ravages of age like they all were (look at Stallone now - botox to keep him young, steroids to keep him strong, sequels to pay the bills...)

There was always an element of self-mockery, and amusement; but there was also a wonderful befuddlement. And there was just a touch of fear. In the Die Hard trilogy, there was always that John McClane scream - when someone was shooting at him, or when he narrowly avoided an explosion. (Jason Bourne never screams. Hell, Jason Bourne barely ever talks.) There's a great scene in "Die Hard 2" when McClane is hiding inside a plane. The bad guys throw in a grenade. And another one. And a couple dozen more. Willis's eyes widen. He ejects just in time, and as the plane explodes underneath him, he breathlessly yells "Oh, Shit!" It's a classic Willis moment - he's frightened, but he's also juiced by his own ridiculosity. You can tell he's having fun.


Modern action heroes carry the weight of the world on their shoulder. Superheroes almost never crack a smile, no matter what kind of cool shit they do - Batman grimaces, Spidey cries, Superman stares blankly into space. Post 9/11, we have the Serious Action Hero - replace smirky Pierce Brosnan with killer-eye Daniel Craig. But it's not just the characters - the whole aesthetic of action movies has shifted towards the gritty, with handheld cameras and bleached out colors. It leaves you to wonder - whatever happened to charm? You know, that zesty pleasure you get from watching interesting people on the big screen. "Spider-Man 3" is generally regarded as a failure - too overstuffed on its own grandiosity - but it has some of the funniest scenes in recent memory that hint that Sam Raimi could be the first great screwball comedy director in generations if he could just set aside the webs.

Anytime that J. Jonah Jameson is onscreen, everyone in the theater almost breaks down laughing - there's something about J. K. Simmons' deadpan lightning delivery that recalls nothing so much as Cary Grant in "His Girl Friday" - couldn't there be a great movie made about the office of "The Daily Bugle?" And then there's Bruce Campbell, Raimi's old "Evil Dead" star who cameoed in all three movies. Watching Tobey Maguire play off Campbell (especially in 2, as the "Snooty Usher") is like watching two worlds of acting collide - there's Maguire, all flustered-nerd romantic, and there's Campbell, letting his chin do the talking. Maguire is a fine actor, but especially in 3, you can sense that he's trying just a little bit too hard. You can see the effort. Cambell makes it look effortless. No accident that he was cast as a mustachioed Errol Flynn type in "The Majestic."

Most of the great superhero movies are comedies in disguise. Think of Iceman cooling Wolverine's Dr. Pepper, or Hellboy ordering more pancakes, or Lex Luthor seducing a wealthy old great grandmother, or pretty much anything Michael Caine says in "Batman Begins". It's not that they're mocking the genre, like the horrific "Batman and Robin" - they're just taking a break from all the end-of-the-world portension and letting the characters breathe a little. It's little moments of humanity, what used to be called acting. I love the "Bourne" movies, but it's no accident that the main character is quite literally a cipher, a man without an identity - and although Damon is wonderful at playing a man in search of himself, Bourne might be the first man whose existential crisis leads him into a car chase.

By contrast, consider "Ronin," a nice little gem which might just be the great action movie of the 90s, mainly because it feels like it comes straight out of the 60s. "Ronin" is the anti-event movie: a bunch of middle-aged guys drive through France trying to get a suitcase, whose contents are never revealed. But it's a film of such pokerfaced wonder - "You ever kill a man?" "I hurt somebody's feelings once." Compare the end of Ronin - a couple dudes talk, joke, drink coffee, leave - to the end of Spiderman 3 - Spidey cries, Mary Jane cries, the Goblin cries, the Sandman cries, and the sun rises over New York.