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The Influencing Machine

7 May

20130507-114902.jpgNPR host Brooke Gladstone presents an engaging history of journalism, discussing both how it has been a force for good and how it has been perverted (through politics and other means). I found myself getting a little bored with the history lessons but I was quite engaged by the ethical discussions and by Gladstone’s speculations about the future of reportage in a world where man and machine become increasingly intertwined.

The Influencing Machine works reasonably well as an instructional comic, with artist Josh Neufeld providing capable (albeit sometimes repetitive) illustration. I enjoyed the book overall, as a person who is interested in the news and media and has even done a little writing for newspapers but does not have the temperament for actual in-the-trenches reporting. I can also see it being useful for young people who are thinking about going into journalism and who want to get a feel for what the field is like.

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Iron Man Three (**1/2)

5 May

Robert Downey Jr. returns as adorable bad boy Tony Stark in the third, presumably final solo film about Marvel Comics’ Iron Man. The first film kicked off the current run of (mostly) enjoyable Marvel movies, after some letdowns in the form of X3, Spider-Man 3, the Fantastic Four and so on. The first Iron Man film proved that with the right cast and script and attitude, the public will embrace a character they don’t necessarily know as well as, say, Superman. The second Iron Man film proved that Downey was not enough.

The third is not as fresh and invigorating as the first – how could it be, really? – but it is a definite improvement over the second. Nor is it anywhere near as exciting as the Avengers film, which it references regularly, so if you are one of the few people on the planet who missed it, you might want to check it out first.

Some minor spoilers may follow, so be warned:

I had mixed feelings about this film by the end. There are some very fun moments, especially during the action set pieces, and Downey is on his game throughout. I also enjoyed how the plot is, in a way, a poke in the eye to The Dark Knight Rises, with Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin seeming at first to be an analogue for Bane’s weirdly-accented terrorist. The true villain is Guy Pearce as the chief of AIM (who are, disappointingly, not wearing yellow hazmat suits); he has developed a bioweapon called Extremis that allows people to become undetectable living bombs, detonating themselves at key moments.

When one of the bombs hurts a friend, the American public is eager for Tony Stark to strike back at the terrorists, and he obliges by challenging the Mandarin on camera. The Mandarin replies by sending some of his people to destroy Tony’s Malibu home, leading to a long middle sequence of rebuilding and investigating.

It is that middle where the film loses its way a bit. Tony befriends a young boy outside of Nashville, shares some ham-handed insights on absent fathers and standing up for yourself, and learns to cope with the post-traumatic stress that has dogged him since The Avengers. Meanwhile, I was checking my watch, and I don’t wear a watch.

On the bright side, the finish of Iron Man Three (and I’m not being cute by spelling it out that way; that’s how it is spelled in the titles) is stronger than the finish of Iron Man 1 or 2, both of which were clunky and confused. The conceit of Tony being able to control his suits remotely, and depend on Jarvis for situational awareness and quick changes, is used to good effect. I enjoyed seeing a swarm of different suits designed for different jobs.

But, on a less bright side, when the credits rolled and turned into a kind of victory lap for the series, I realized that the ensuing montage of clips was more engaging and energetic than most of the previous two hours. So, while Iron Man Three is certainly not the letdown that other third instalments have been from Marvel, it is something of a limp to the finish.

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Save The Date (***)

21 Apr

Lizzy Caplan and Alison Brie star as screwed-up sisters in this sort-of-romantic sort-of-comedy. After Sarah (Caplan) refuses an embarrassing public marriage proposal from her musician boyfriend Kevin (Geoffrey Arend), her rebound with incredibly nice guy Johnathan (Mark Webber) throws a wrench into the wedding plans being made by Beth (Brie) and Kevin’s bandmate and best friend Andrew (Martin Starr). Caplan is a cartoonist whose artwork is a dead ringer for that of Jeffrey Brown, who has a writing credit on the film that he shares with the screenwriter and director, Michael Mohan.

For a first feature, Mohan and his cast do a good job of creating a film about relationships that could have slipped into a maudlin twentysomethings-with-problems formula. Caplan and Webber are particularly solid as a couple of people with wounds from past relationships that are trying to figure out how to be together. As much as I love Alison Brie, she sometimes seemed inconsistent as Beth compared to her more famous roles. Martin Starr is a solid supporting player as always. The script is smart, with the exception of the very end, which is a bit of a confusing cop-out.

I found myself a bit distracted by the world the characters live in, which is like a west coast version of Friends; despite the occasional complaints about having lousy jobs, everyone seems to be pretty comfortable, lives in a nice apartment, can afford to dress well and eat out and so on. Even Kevin and Andrew’s goofy band and Sarah’s comics can draw large crowds at shows. All of which is fine to an extent, but if a film is going to depict serious relationship issues as this one does, it should avoid half-hearted subplots like the separation of the sisters’ parents and perhaps work harder to couch the leads in a universe that aligns with the potential outcomes of the plot.

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Evil Dead [2013] **

20 Apr

Mia (Jane Levy, Suburgatory) is a troubled teen who wants to kick her narcotics habit, but she has failed before and her friends fear that she will again. They enlist the help of her brother David (Shiloh Fernandez), who has been absent for a while but is determined to help his sister, even if it means locking her in a creepy old cabin belonging to their family somewhere in the Michigan woods.

Unfortunately for Mia, the cabin has become the site of some dark ritual, unleashing a demon that wants to consume innocent souls when it isn’t cutting or torturing bodies. It possesses her first, walking her into their midst to say “you’re all going to die tonight.” Spoilers follow, so read at your own risk.

This version of Evil Dead is of course a remake of the low-budget classic by Sam Raimi, starring Bruce Campbell, both of whom are executive producers on this version written and directed by newcomer Fede Alvarez. For a first feature, Alvarez does a good job under difficult circumstances, remaking a cult favourite that influenced a generation of filmmakers. In this respect he is far more successful than the directors of the remakes of films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Prom Night, Last House on the Left, Halloween… you name it.

The usual pattern for these remakes is to dress up the spare, low-budget original with more viscera, updated visual effects, and CW stars hoping to jump-start a film career. They fail, ultimately, because even a faithful adaptation has nothing new to offer either the jaded horror veteran or the novice; the movies just kind of lay there, trading on the fame of their predecessors but restricted by the same. Alvarez is sure to include all the little touches that the die-hards would expect, from Raimi’s old Plymouth to a tree rape to a scene with a chainsaw. I only minded these moments when it seemed like he was going through contortions to do so, which mostly happens in the finale. It is a gory film to be sure, but not gratuitously so, and perhaps not even as much as the original.

Unfortunately, it also just kind of lays there, and part of the reason for it this time is the lack of one element that was always going to be difficult to replace: Bruce Campbell as Ash. Campbell’s charisma, one-liners, and Three Stooges shtick made the original films as goofy as they were scary. That is what made those films work. Without that not so secret ingredient, this new attempt is not much different from any other dead-teenager movie; certainly no more enjoyable than, say, the remake of My Bloody Valentine.

There are fresh horror films out there, to be sure. Fans of the original Evil Dead films would almost certainly love both Cabin Fever films, as well other films by directors like Eli Roth or Ti West. Unfortunately, for all of its careful surface tribute, this update is just another addition to the pile of conservative corporate horror films, while the original was a groundbreaking poke in the eye of the Hollywood system. It has little energy, less joy, and no soul.

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Stoker (***)

15 Apr

Mia Wasikowska (Jane Eyre) stars as India, a girl who loses her beloved father (Dermot Mulroney) in a car accident on her 18th birthday. Her mother (Nicole Kidman) is comforted by the sudden arrival of uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), who has never visited before. Charlie is charistmatic and a little creepy, much like India herself. Both of them are able to hear sounds from much further away than other people, and see things from very far away as well.

The exact nature of India and Charlie’s apparent superhumanity is not really the point of the film; it is an eerie coming of age story masterfully told by director Chan-Wook Park (Oldboy) and screenwriter Wentworth Miller (Prison Break). We are constantly shown small moments of discovery which are revisited from a slightly (usually more sinister) angle later in the film, from the seemingly innocuous tradition of India’s new shoes for her birthday to the truth about uncle Charlie’s travels in Europe.

Stoker is a splendid, sumptuous, sometimes perverse film; it is the anti-Twilight. Catch it in theatres if you get a chance.

The Nao of Brown by Glyn Dillon

19 Feb

I’ve developed a fairly decent sense of restraint in my old age. Despite my ardent love of comics I will wait until a series is collected in trade paperback, or until I can find it at the library, or obtain it from my galley service. It’s not often that I glance through a book and immediately buy it because I must own it; but this is one of those books.

I had heard good things about it, of course, which is why I picked it up from the shelf in the first place. I knew that it had something to do with Buddhism, and that it had won lots of awards last year; but I hadn’t really properly seen it. And so last night, when I should have been working on my own comics, I devoured this one instead, and am better for it.

The Nao of Brown is the story of a young woman called Nao Brown; she is half-Japanese, half-British, and lives in London with a friend who is a nurse. Nao is a graphic designer in a bit of a downswing, recently dumped by her boyfriend and sacked from the job he had gotten her. She runs into an old friend from school who offers her a job in a geeky toy store that specializes in the kind of Japanese, anime-themed merchandise that Nao loves and knows about.

Nao has a Buddhist meditation practice and other strategies to help her combat her obsessive-compulsive disorder, which causes her to imagine violent things happening to others, especially those who are smaller than her (eg., children). Perhaps that is why she falls in love with Gregory, a burly appliance repairman who knows about Buddhism and Latin; but Gregory has issues of his own.

The Nao of Brown is not a perfect book, but it is so well-realized, from script to art to design. Like Blankets, Essex County, or Fun Home, it is an accomplished auteur piece that I would readily recommend to new readers or veterans alike.

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Comics by Sam Alden

15 Feb

Sam Alden is the real deal. I first noticed his work sometime last year, when a link to his comic Eighth Grade made the rounds. Unfortunately I don’t keep up with Tumblr as much as I should, so it was only recently that I caught up on the wealth of material he has online, including standouts like The Farmer’s Dilemma, which made its print debut at this year’s Angouleme festival.

Alden has a good command of brush and ink illustration and a fine colour sense, but what strikes me about his work is how he combines these traditional tools with the fluidity of an infinite canvas. He seems to be fascinated with the forms of the natural world and man’s (or at least his own) relationship with them. I admire his technical skill as well as his willingness to explore his emotions.

For a guy in his early 20s, Alden has built an impressive body of work with the aesthetic and approach of a fine artist who happens to make comics. I hope we get to keep him for a while.

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The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

14 Feb

Vancouver-born Patrick DeWitt’s award-winning second novel is the tale of Eli and Charlie Sisters, a pair of bad men at the twilight of the old west who have enough of a reputation to strike fear in the hearts of their targets, but not quite enough to prevent them from having to deal with a lot of trouble. The Sisters brothers are traveling from Oregon to San Francisco on behalf of their employer, a regional crime boss that Eli has come to despise. He worries that Charlie’s ambition is driving a wedge between them, and that the life of a hired gun is slowly robbing them both of their humanity.

The story is told from Eli’s viewpoint, with the exception of a couple of intermissions about a creepy young girl they meet during their travels. The construction of the novel is ingenious, starting with the road trip wherein the brothers meet a variety of characters and endure some dangerous and strange situations. The road trip section gives us the information we need about the brothers to understand the latter third of the book, when they arrive in San Francisco and locate their quarry, who has decided to join a scientist with a remarkable new invention.

I’ve always loved Westerns; not so much the formula oaters by Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour, but certainly the more imaginative and literary tales by Richard Matheson or Elmore Leonard. The Sisters Brothers fits on that shelf very neatly; Eli Sisters is not the handsomest or sharpest man, but he has a good heart and it is fascinating to follow his thoughts on family, justice, and the possibly unattainable wish to change one’s life. As I read the novel, the characters and situations were sometimes so fantastic that it felt like I was reading an as-yet-unfilmed screenplay by the Coen brothers. I rather hope that I was.

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Apple TV

6 Feb

I have been telling my son Jack for a while now that I would give him my Playstation 3; he uses it far more than I to play games, and ever since I moved to a smaller place I found I was really only using it for Netflix once in a while, and using the iPad more often to stream video or whatever else. Besides, Nicole has a PS3 that I can use up in Kingston if I feel like playing my few games for it.

So after doing some research, I picked up an Apple TV and am pretty impressed with it so far. It is easy to set up and accesses services like Netflix as well as whatever media I have on my MacBook. If you are like me and have replaced cable with watching torrents of TV shows, you have probably noticed that you are more likely to find torrents of shows in an iOS-friendly format than .avi files, so this has turned out to be good timing for that as well. (If you’re going to use iTunes to share your torrents, you may want to uncheck the “copy files to iTunes library” option in iTunes preferences to prevent your hard drive filling up; and check out the “Automatically add to iTunes” folder on your hard drive as a potential destination for downloads).

There is a cool function called AirPlay that allows you to mirror whatever is on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac on the TV; useful for presentations, other video formats, etc. Apple TV is compatible with the Unblock-US VPN service, so you can access the US version of Netflix and other services like Hulu Plus. You can also stream digital radio and podcasts like on other devices.

Apple TV is essentially the kind of digital hub that a lot of people use an old computer for, optimized to interact with other Apple devices. The only drawback I have encountered with it so far is that the remote is small and light and potentially easy to lose. Fortunately, if you have an iPhone or iPad, you can use the Remote app instead.

A new Apple TV costs $110; refurbished older models sell on the apple store for about $90. For some reason, people try to sell “jailbroken” older models that allow you to play other media formats and they are asking well over $200. I can’t imagine how that could be worth the price. But if you are like me and already have a bunch of other Apple devices for it to interact with, Apple TV is a bargain.

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Adonit Jot Touch

31 Jan

I posted the other day about how much I love using the iPad as a multipurpose device. As a cartoonist I use it for writing and editing my comics scripts in Celtx, keeping track of ideas in Evernote, reading webcomics and galleys and books, and so on; but the missing piece of the puzzle, until now, was the ability to actually create artwork. I bought a stylus along with the iPad a year ago, a $15 thing that was functional for replacing my fingertip and giving the feel of using a really thick pencil; but I never warmed to it as a device for actual drawing. Nor did I care for the art apps that I tried, most of which were either free or had been purchased for my iPhone a long time ago, scaling up poorly to the larger screen.

Meanwhile, my dear Nicole had bought me a nice Wacom Intuos 4 graphics tablet for Christmas not long before I got the iPad, and it was a revelation compared to the decade-old Graphire that I had been halfheartedly using to create the occasional short comic or illustration. The Wacom was the missing piece I needed to really create comics in digital form, from start to finish, on my Mac in Manga Studio EX. After scaling the learning curve I launched a webcomic with Nicole and have been happily cartooning and slowly improving since.

Of course, it’s not that simple. As the saying goes, mo’ comics, mo’ problems; spending more time drawing means more potential strain on my eyes, shoulder, back and so on. I had serious issues when I was younger with tendonitis in my shoulder and am not keen to repeat. That means it’s beneficial for me to be able to vary how I work, which includes kicking back with a sketchbook in my lap instead of a full-sized laptop. There have been several occasions where I have done roughs for the webcomic on paper, taken a picture of the rough with the iPad camera, shared the result with my MacBook via Dropbox, imported the roughs as a layer in Manga Studio, and kept working. Not the most elegant solution, but a start.

What I have started doing this week after buying the Adonit Jot Touch pressure-sensitive iPad stylus is drawing directly on the iPad screen, essentially skipping the step of drawing on paper and photographing it. Of course, I could have been drawing with a regular stylus all along, but the advantage of drawing with the Jot Touch (or its non-pressure-sensitive brother, the Jot Pro) is like drawing with a pencil in your bare hand instead of a crayon in a mitten. Your mileage may vary, but for me the Jot Touch is the deciding factor in whether or not I want to draw on the iPad at all.

There are other nice aspects to the Jot Touch; really well designed packaging, an ingenious magnetic USB charging base, a protective screw-on cap that covers the magnetic base when in use, and a spare pressure sensitive tip is included. Like the Jot Pro, the tip of the stylus is covered by a clear plastic disc which is required for the iPad to identify the stylus as a valid input device, but since it is clear your eye can focus on the actual tip of the stylus, resulting in greater precision when drawing.

Is it perfect? No. It’s never going to replace the Wacom for me, because the Intuos is much more sensitive and offers customization. The Jot Touch does have a couple of buttons like a Wacom stylus, but the software I have used with it so far (mainly Procreate and Sketchbook Pro) either does not use them or does not allow for customization. The charging/power indicator light is not as intuitive as it could be. There are limitations associated with using the iPad itself too, most notably whether or not an app offers “palm recognition”, which would allow the artist to rest his or her hand on the screen while drawing. Finally, a really annoying limitation of the Jot Touch is that because it uses Bluetooth, the iPad assumes it is some kind of audio device like a headset, and mutes Music and other audio apps when the stylus is turned on, which means you can’t listen to music or podcasts through the iPad while you draw.

Overall, though, most of the issues I have experienced are more to do with the drawing apps, which is out of Adonit’s hands. I don’t really feel like I can make a recommendation for drawing apps yet; so far I am preferring Procreate to Sketchbook Pro, but they both have their pros and cons.

The price of the Jot Touch is no small consideration as well. It lists for $100, which is pretty expensive for a stylus or any kind of niche tool (though by Wacom standards, it’s about what you would pay for some of their pens or accessories). I got it on sale for $75, and I feel it was worth that, because the difference it will make to my workflow and the potential for being able to do better and better work at the rough stage is worth it to me. I think it is probably quite possible for a cartoonist of sufficient skill to use the Jot Touch to make comics entirely on the iPad.

Again, your mileage may vary. If you are a brush and ink cartoonist who is just starting to think about digital tools, the Jot Touch is probably not for you; get a good Wacom tablet and put in the time with Manga Studio or Photoshop until you are over that learning curve. If you are already comfortable with digital tools and want to experience what is probably the closest you can get at this point to true drawing on the iPad, check out the Jot Touch.

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