Frasier (1993) s07e12 – RDWRER

Despite the unfestive title, RDWRER is the third “Frasier” in a row to do a holiday. Two episodes ago, it was a birthday episode (sort of) for Kelsey Grammer, then last episode was a Christmas episode, and now this episode is the New Year’s. There’s no specific mention of the new elephant—Jane Leeves knows David Hyde Pierce had a crush on her, but he doesn’t know she knows. Instead, it’s a Crane Boys episode; Grammer, Hyde Pierce, and Mahoney go on a wacky adventure.

The episode starts with Grammer and Peri Gilpin talking about their respective New Year’s. Grammer’s requires a flashback (and the entire episode). He and Hyde Pierce’s plans have fallen through, so they finagle an invite to a Wine Country party; they just need to get there. Good thing dad Mahoney’s custom plates—RDWRER (Road Warrior, sound it out)—have just arrived for his Winnebago. After a short scene with Leeves (she gets one bit then exits), it’s a road trip episode, with Grammer and Mahoney never letting Hyde Pierce drive.

New-to-the-show-this-season credited writers Sam Johnson and Chris Marcil do a great job, and Grammer delivers on the directing front. As per usual, he showcases his fellow actors over himself—Leeves’s outburst about late Christmas cards, Mahoney getting into it with a rural cop, Hyde Pierce convinced he’s been kidnapped. Then Grammer lets himself have a great showcase talking to Hyde Pierce—telephonically—about the kidnapping. It’s an “event” holiday episode, much more than the preceding two. The show’s not letting the mega-plot get in the way of an episode this time.

There are a couple fun and weird bits. First, Mahoney’s obsessed with Austin Powers, even though Grammer assures him he’s missed the pop culture moment. It’s silly and ages awkwardly—if they were really betting on Mike Myers being ubiquitous, they bet wrong—but it gives Mahoney some absurd lines to deliver well. Then Rebecca Schull guest stars. She was on “Wings,” which takes place in the same universe as “Cheers.” I can’t remember if there was ever any post-“Cheers” crossing over with “Frasier,” but… it’s a good bit part. She and Anthony Zerbe are an old couple also on the road in a Winnebago.

I think there was an episode of “Wings” where Schull had an evil twin. Maybe she’s playing the third sister here.

Anyway.

Excellent episode. Clock’s ticking, though. The clock is ticking.

Luba (1998) #5

This issue’s got three stories, but thanks to creator Beto Hernandez’s structure of the second one, it feels like four stories.

The first story is the Luba story, though something in story two (and a half) calls back to one of her solo stories even though she’s not actually in it.

Beto just opens with a cast list again, including little relevant details to catch up with the characters’ current storylines.

All right, the Luba story. Luba takes daughter Socorro to visit a gifted school. There’s great mother and daughter stuff for Luba, but while they’re gone, the other kids get it in their heads Ofelia’s writing a book about Luba. So the story starts with this great mom and daughter stuff, then becomes this great Luba and Ofelia thing, with the undercurrent about Luba’s other daughter, Doralis, coming out as queer (and how seemingly all Luba’s kids but one are gay).

Beto ends the story on this beautiful, perfect note; it’s a divine five pages.

The second story is all about the drama behind Doralis’s TV show; Doralis doesn’t figure in, rather Luba’s other daughter, Guadalupe, but more her husband, Gato. Everyone’s just found out Gato sold Pipo (who produces the show) out to the media, and now he’s writing a book about her. The story’s from Boots’s perspective. Boots is the new accountant and an inspired new character from Beto. She’s an inherently funny character, which carries over even to her narration (she’s writing about the drama, not participating until the last page).

But this story is where Beto sneaks in the half story, with Boots doing a flashback to the first time Pipo and her son, Sergio, came to the United States. At the time, Pipo was still married to Gato, so he came with them, but they were separated, so when she ends up with a stud, it’s all right.

It just turns out we’ve already met the stud before, as some years in the future—or recent issues’ present—he’s going to hook up with Luba. And this issue reveals some of the background to that liaison, full of mystical realism but urban.

It’s outstanding stuff. And it’s never a distraction from it being Pipo’s story, right up until it becomes Guadalupe’s story.

Like the first story, Beto finds a sublime finish for it.

Then comes Socorro’s story, which might be the best in the issue. The three stories do very different things and work in unison; they’re not competing. But this story’s particularly fantastic.

Socorro and little brother Joselito follow Luba out one night after their father has stormed out (post-Luba fight, though we never know what they’re arguing about). They steal a neighbor’s car, leading to a hilarious but dangerous sequence with little kids driving a car.

Only Socorro’s a genius, so she’s got very good, very reasoned observations.

Beto then changes the perspective over to a different character, some punker who’s just broken up with his girlfriend, and she kicked him out of his own place. Too high to go home (he’s crashing at his parents), he wanders around. Simultaneously, Socorro is trying to get Joselito home safely.

It’s a fanciful, verbose story—with Beto using much thinner lines than usual, giving the art some tension—with another great conclusion. It’s a slice of life colliding with comic strip hijinks.

The color one-pager on the back cover is a lovely formal thing with Fritz doing ballet. Beto plays around with colors and movement.

Once again, it’s an excellent issue; as usual, Beto takes entirely unexpected routes to that greatness. During the first story, it doesn’t seem like anything will be better than the second story engenders a similar reaction, but then the third—not even about the regular cast—blows the first two away.

It’s exceptional comics.

Luba (1998) #4

Luba4

I was initially lukewarm about this issue—well, as lukewarm as one can get about an expertly executed, inspiredly plotted comic—but I’ve come around. Sort of. The issue’s got two big features, with the Luba one coming in at fourteen pages (give or take a splash page), which is the most space creator Beto Hernandez has given anything in the series so far. It also does a whole bunch, as Beto looses Luba on her family. They’ve been apart for most of the series, and the reuniting last issue was about seeing the little ones and husband Khamo.

In her story this issue, Luba discovers all the soap opera drama the adults have gotten themselves into while she’s been away.

Beto uses Luba’s daughter Doralis’s variety show for structure. Doralis is showing her mom the rough cut of a very special episode, all about Luba and her history. The story then slips into Luba’s daily experiences, like meeting up with Khamo for a quickie after he gets done informing on drug connections (a requirement of getting him into the U.S.). Luba also hangs out with her sisters, Petra and Fritz, and comes away exasperated at their lives. Next, she’s got a lovely scene with daughter Guadalupe, who’s very sweet but also bores Luba. Finally, Beto gets in a scene for estranged daughter Maricela; she’s on the phone with Ofelia (Luba’s cousin and life guardian). Their conversation rattles the fourth wall while the entire story fuzzies the narrative distances.

It’s an outstanding fourteen (or thirteen minus the splash) pages. Beto plays with history, memory, relationships, all of it. After letting the supporting cast run rampant, he firmly re-establishes Luba as the protagonist. Except it’s also the story where Doralis comes out to her mom, something the comic’s been plotting all of this Luba series and way back to Love and Rockets. Lots of culminating; Beto does a fantastic job with it.

So for the first couple of pages of the following story, there’s a lull. There’s no filler between the stories; it’s the end of this long chapter in Luba and her family’s life; immediately, it’s the fallout from Pipo’s perspective. Pipo produces Doralis’s show, and the gossip columns already know she’s coming out before the episode’s aired.

The story doesn’t have a protagonist; it floats (with intention) between Pipo and her supporting cast. Her son Sergio says he’s in love with Guadalupe but is dating Guadalupe’s aunt, Fritz. Pipo confesses a crush on Fritz to her new accountant, Boots (who’s kind of the protagonist, but also not). Pipo used to be married to Guadalupe’s husband, Gato, who’s also Pipo’s former accountant and hangs around to give Boots advice on things. Boots has taken it upon herself to find out who’s leaking the information to the gossip rags, which it turns out calls back to the New Love series.

It’s another very complicated story, with exceptional plotting from Beto, both visually and narratively. Even better than Luba’s feature, which doesn’t seem possible. Beto creates a singular comics montage system in the first story, with the second story then expanding on its potential. Breathtaking work.

So when the last interior comic is a one-pager about Guadalupe and Luba, a daughter and mom piece, it has a deflating effect. Beto got over the lull between features through masterful comics. Unfortunately, there’s no time to get over the second story in the one-pager. There’s just not room. Even though it’s a lovely strip for Guadalupe, who narrates.

The back cover color comic is Fritz and Sergio playing in the snow with her nieces, which leans into the color format more than Beto’s done with the color strips before. It’s delightful and charming, which is pretty much the reaction from the characters too.

The features are exceptional. There just isn’t any way to compliment them with one-page strips.

Beto’s also very prescient about digital backdrops in live-action media, albeit ten or fifteen years early. For the special, Doralis keeps explaining they’re using CGI to create the settings, which was magic through technology at the time—though, Star Wars: Episode One—but it’s now standard.

Anyway.

Truly great comic. Even if it sits awkwardly in the end.

Penny Century (1997) #7

Penny Century 7

Part of me wants to know how creator Jaime Hernandez came up with Penny Century’s arc. The series began with the return of Ray Dominguez, revealing he had a previously unrevealed history with Penny Century, going halfway through Love and Rockets: Volume One. Throughout the series, which mainly dealt with the death of H.R. Costigan, Jaime kept threatening to reunite Ray with Maggie.

Only then Ray disappeared, and Jaime revealed Maggie’s been married and is now getting a divorce. Over the next issue or two, Jaime turned that surprise reveal into a plot point, as one character or another was surprised Maggie had been married at all.

This issue has a single story—Maggie and now ex-husband Tony’s divorce party, which Hopey’s throwing at the bar where she works. Hopey’s hanging out with Maggie Christmas (the first cameo of many), who wants to know the story of Maggie and Tony’s marriage since no one knew she was married. And no one can figure out why Hopey’s so okay with it.

Maybe because it turns out Hopey’s had a girlfriend for Penny Century too. Rosie. Jaime introduced Rosie a couple issues ago; she and Hopey went over to Maggie’s to comfort her after finding out about the divorce. Rosie just seemed like a mutual friend in the supporting cast. Nope, she’s Hopey’s girl. At least enough of one, she gets jealous of Hopey.

There are some other big questions (and also not because it’s Maggie and Hopey), like them hooking up a few issues ago before the divorce and marriage reveals. And then there’s how any of it fits into Love and Rockets: Volume One. Maggie met husband-to-be, Tony, way back when, before Love and Rockets #1. The issue’s got a bunch of background music with citations, and based on the earliest flashback, they met in the late seventies (back before Maggie cut her hair—for Rockets #1). I promised myself I wasn’t going to do all the googling. Just the one song. No God by the Germs.

Anyway.

Hopey tells the story of Maggie having a punk rock meet-cute with Tony. Maggie and Hopey lived in Hoppers, Tony in L.A. They’d see each other at concerts and parties. Tony mad crushed on Maggie, Maggie at least liked him, but much of the flashback is his perspective. I just now realized it doesn’t work with Hopey playing narrator, but it also doesn’t matter. Tony’s very sympathetic from go.

Eventually, their romance peters out, and Maggie goes off to have her adventures as a mechanic and so on.

Oh, I forgot—Terry’s also in one of the flashbacks. Another cameo. Daffy’s the third, closer to the present, because Jaime finally reveals something about what happens immediately after Love and Rockets: Volume One ends. Maggie and Hopey are living in L.A., and Maggie’s been in a funk for three months. So Hopey drags her to a pool party, introducing her to Norma and Negra (who don’t exactly count as cameos). But there, Maggie sees Tony again, and they almost immediately get horizontal.

Maggie’s worried Hopey’s not going to be okay with it, but Hopey’s fine (and already shagging if not dating Rosie). Daffy’s cameo is telling Hopey about the wedding.

The story’s a rush of retcon reveals, but Jaime keeps it very tight, getting everything in place for this touching finish with Hopey and Tony. Penny shows up for an epilogue, setting Maggie up for the next chapter in her life, even though this last chapter happened almost entirely off-page.

There’s a color one-pager on the back cover; it’s a quick, surprisingly emotive “Space Queen,” which fits the main story.

Jaime uses thinner lines than usual with a lot of the art. It doesn’t feel as inky as it could. Though he’s also doing a bunch of panels. Most of the pages have eight panels; if they don’t, it’s six. And he’s covering days, weeks, and decades between panels sometimes. It’s a vast but meticulously constrained story. It’s exquisite and probably the most ambitious character development move Jaime’s ever made for both Maggie and Hopey.

There’s also the implication Maggie reading a Beto comic–Beto Mess—causes an emotional breakdown directly resulting in the marriage.

The story’s not the comic’s biggest surprise. Jaime’s had so many of them. But it definitely showcases his ability to work the surprise throughout, not just stunt reveal it. It’s also really fun to see him age the characters all in one story, how he maintains the energy (and humor) regardless of era.

I’m already missing this comic.

Hitman: Closing Time (1999-2007)

Hitman vol 07

Hitman: Closing Time opens the only way it can (or should) following the previous collection’s gut-wrenching conclusion, which saw Tommy’s surrogate father, Sean, die protecting him. It starts with a Lobo crossover. And writer Garth Ennis spends the entire issue shitting on Lobo. It’s a done-in-one crossover with art from Doug Mahnke. The art’s perfectly excessive, starting with Tommy and Sean (there’s an editor’s note explaining it takes place in the past) spitting in Lobo’s beer. Lobo’s in Gotham on an interstellar bounty hunt and stops by the bar, initially annoying everyone but then becoming a problem when he starts picking on Sixpack.

Thanks to his mind-reading superpower, Tommy knows how Lobo’s super-healing works and concocts a way to take him on. It becomes a foot chase of destruction through Hitman’s Gotham, complete with gangsters and Section 8 (Sixpack’s super-team). Lots of blood, lots of laughs (almost all of them at Lobo’s expense), and a lot of nice art from Mahnke.

Sure, the resolution gag is definitionally homophobic, but if you squint and look at it from a certain point of view, it’s fine… ish. It’s also just the resolution gag; the comic needs a way to wrap up, given Tommy can’t take on an indestructible space mutant forever. The rest of the jokes are just about Lobo being a stupid character. The crossover politics of DC Comics and Hitman must be a great story.

Then there’s a short story about Sixpack’s drunk-dream adventures with Superman, art by Nelson DeCastro (pencils) and Jimmy Palmiotti (inks). It’s from a Superman 80-Page Giant and is entirely for laughs, with Sixpack arguing about superhero morality with Superman, opting for killing the bad guys. Or trying to kill them, with Big Blue having to curb Sixpack’s enthusiasm. It’s very classy art for a comic where Lex Luthor gets gut-punched for a gag.

The story placement also sets up Sixpack as a significant player in Closing Time. The Lobo crossover kicks off because of Sixpack, has him bring in Section 8, then the Superman “crossover” is entirely his story. The following story–as Closing Time starts collecting Hitman proper—is also Sixpack-focused. Sure, Tommy and Natt are chasing a naked guy through the Cauldron, but the drama is about Section 8 giving up on Sixpack’s dream of a super-team. If only there were something he could do to prove himself.

Luckily, Natt and Tommy aren’t chasing just any naked guy. He’s a lab assistant at the Injun Peak Research Center. Thanks to demonic dealings, some scientist turned him into a tesseract (the infinitely vast container variety, not the Avengers MacGuffin). The first part of the story’s split between Tommy and Natt chasing the naked guy (who can pull pretty much anything he wants right out of his you-know-what), Sixpack and his colleagues arguing about their super-team efficacy, and the bean counter discovering worse and worse details in the scientist’s practices. The science talk has Ennis’s most inventive writing, while Tommy and Natt’s chase gives artists John McCrea and Garry Leach a nice absurd, slightly gross-out comedy action sequence.

The second half of the story has more gross-out comedy action, but also actual gore as interdimensional demons find a toe-hold in our universe. Ennis does horror, comedy, heart, and action with it, finding a rather nice resolution while also revealing it’s a story out of time. While not set in the past like the opening Lobo one, it’s detached from the overall Hitman narrative. Ennis is just doing a Sixpack story in Hitman, not fitting Sixpack into a Tommy story.

The three and a half issue starting bookend and then a two-issue closer will set Closing Time’s main arc (appropriately titled Closing Time) apart from the rest of the collection, which is appropriate. The Closing Time arc, an eight-issue epic closing off the series and its so far surviving cast, is a doozy.

Mainly having resolved all the mob stuff last collection—there’s still a bounty on Tommy and Natt’s heads, but the mob itself isn’t a villain, just its hopeful hitmen—Ennis goes back to the start to find strings to tie up the series. Though he takes his time revealing where all those strings come from. Instead, he sticks to the first one he introduces–the mom who lost her kid to the vampires a while back. She’s in trouble and, if you’re lucky enough to know him, there’s no one better to help you with trouble than Tommy Monaghan. It’s a nice way to open the story, with Ennis then putting in an echoing device. That echoing device is a quick, devastating rumination on the series’s overall tragedy; great stuff. But Closing Time is just a series of great stuffs.

Starting with giving Tommy’s on-again-off-again girlfriend Tiegel a character development subplot for the arc. She doesn’t get in on the action this time, with Ennis bringing back a rogue female CIA agent as Tommy’s love interest and he and Natt’s third. The rogue CIA agent, McAllister, is one of Ennis’s archetypes—the capable female espionage agent–with McAllister being both softer and harder than he’ll go with the template in the future. It’s particularly interesting because she’s a deus ex machina too early in the plot. Most of Closing Time is about her bonding with Tommy and Natt and the supporting cast. She gets to be a regular cast member faster than anyone else in the comic ever has (though I guess Ennis never really tried with anyone else).

The story’s villain will turn out to be an evil CIA guy trying to make government superheroes with alien technology from the Bloodlines. The experiments aren’t going well, though there’s actually a lot less with the flesh-eating human monsters than I was expecting. Ennis contains most of the gore to a subplot with the lead scientist. The villain, Truman, is another returning character. McAllister’s back from the Green Lantern crossover issue, Truman’s back from early on, then there’s the main hitman nemesis, the son of a vanquished baddie. Not to mention the mom in trouble. Or the Dirty Harry-esque cop who’s promised to protect Tommy against any enemy. Lots of return appearances, all tied together thanks to Tommy. No one can escape the Cauldron.

Ennis also does a bunch of flashbacks, setting up Tommy and Natt as teenagers in the Marines and Tommy growing up in the Cauldron, which means some old Sean and Pat appearances. Ennis writes Hitman to be binge-read, not just for the callbacks to earlier in the series. The Closing Time arc is paced for a single reading. It must’ve been very frustrating DC took forever to collect it.

The Closing Time story has a good three-act structure throughout the eight installments, with some big action set pieces throughout and a whole lot of heart. Everyone gets their appropriate farewell in the comic, with Ennis grabbing the heartstrings and yanking as hard as he can. There are some hints the story’s a rushed conclusion, the occasional plot detail Ennis has to push too hard on to make fit, the things he wasn’t done exploring. But they make it work. It’s a lovely finish for the comic.

So it not being the last story in the collection is initially a little odd, especially since the coda is a JLA crossover, originally intended for the JLA Classified anthology series, which got canceled before the Hitman one ran. So instead of a four-parter, it’s a two-parter, set six years after the main series, when everyone’s fate has cemented, and an intrepid reporter has some questions about Superman’s relationship with professional hitman Tommy Monaghan, a known killer, and man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition. The reporter—named Kirby, with Ennis showing his soft side—interviews Superman’s de facto press agent, one Clark Kent.

At some point in the past, the Bloodlines aliens came back, and the JLA needed someone who they’d give powers for scientific reasons. So they go get Tommy and bring him to the moon, where Kyle Rayner Green Lantern’s embarrassed to know him, and Batman takes delight in telling Superman about Tommy’s profession. Ennis balances the alien threat with Superman reconciling being emotionally invested in a “bad guy” and Tommy having a blast in a superhero crossover. Some excellent writing on the characters from Ennis, who might not have wanted to write DC superheroes, but it’s too bad they didn’t convince him to do more of it.

The conclusion works as a rumination for the whole series.

McCrea pencils and inks the JLA crossover, busting ass to give it a unique, distinct feel from the regular series. Especially after Closing Time, it’s kind of hard to imagine Hitman without Leach inking McCrea. But then the crossover isn’t a Hitman comic; it’s a Superman story about Hitman.

And it just makes you want to read the whole comic, all sixty issues plus crossovers, all seven trades, all 1,600 pages, all over again. Ennis, McCrea, and Leach do one hell of a job.

Hotel Splendide (2000, Terence Gross)

Hotel Splendide is based on a novel by Marie Redonnet. She doesn’t get any credit in the film, director Gross instead taking the full writing credit. Guess the WGA is good, actually.

The film having a novel source explains a few things, principally why Hugh O’Conor is narrating the movie. O’Conor’s ostensibly an aquaphobic staying at the titular hotel, a sanitarium set up on a remote island. I say ostensibly aquaphobic because the film implies, time and again, O’Conor’s really there for something else, and everyone’s been lying to him about his fear of water. There’s even the implication the hotel staff intentionally gave him aquaphobia to take his mind off his real problem, which—based on O’Conor’s character otherwise being entirely devoted to peeping on sexual congresses and playing solitaire with nudie cards—seems to have been him being a sexually frustrated serial killer.

Doesn’t matter because O’Conor disappears in the second act when the film finally gets around to letting Daniel Craig have some agency, only to bring O’Conor back to screw up the finish.

And it’s impressive Splendide’s gotten to a point where O’Conor can drag it back down. The film rallies big time when it really shouldn’t be, including turning Stephen Tompkinson into a dangerous villain when he’s previously just been a simpering mama’s boy without a mama. The mother ran the hotel, dying a year before the present action kicked off. Toni Collette has returned from the outside world, having left five years before when the mother disapproved of her and Craig’s love affair.

Someone—not Craig, who starts the film enraged at Collette for abandoning him—wrote Collette to beckon her back. Her arrival will ruin Tompkinson’s control over the hotel, which is killing off its residents and not getting any new ones since no one who’s been off the island still thinks eating nothing but eel and seaweed stew to constipate yourself and require daily enemas is a good idea anymore. Or at least, one would hope. Splendide requires a bunch of suspension of disbelief, like how the family running the hotel—who’ve presumably never lived anywhere else—have such good vocabularies or how they get power (they get gas by converting residents’ shit into methane to fuel the hotel forever, with the furnace being an angry stand-in for the departed mom), or why they seem to have new clothes. Maybe the novel explains it. Or perhaps the novel’s good enough it doesn’t have to explain it. Or perhaps the novel just avoids it like the movie.

The film starts with director Gross overestimating how charming quirky can be, especially since the quirkiness is laden with ableism, misogyny, and… icky. O’Conor’s icky without being dangerous, while Tompkinson is odious and potentially dangerous (though when the dangerous comes out, Gross makes it ableist to further villainize him, which is a lot). But the person who has it worst—other than maybe actually physically abused kitchen staff Toby Jones—is the sister, Katrin Cartlidge.

Tompkinson manages the hotel, Craig runs the kitchen, Cartlidge handles the physical therapy whether she likes it or not, and retired since his widowing dad Peter Vaughan just hanging around. The film presents Vaughan as a sympathetic old dodderer, too weak to stand up to the dead wife, but then has all these terrible details about him as he perpetuates a bunch of abuse. Gross seems entirely unaware because it involves women, and they aren’t really characters in Hotel Splendide, like when top-billed Collette essentially becomes Craig’s accessory for the second act.

At times, both Collette and Craig are quite good. Unfortunately, usually not in their scenes together. If they aren’t bickering about Collette literally not wanting to be abused by Craig’s family, Collette’s just silent when Craig does things. The third act doesn’t completely whiff their relationship development, but it comes pretty close. Then the denouement makes them irrelevant. It’s very messy.

Besides Collette and Craig, there are good performances from Cartlidge, Joerg Stadler, and Helen McCrory. Everyone else is fine, save Tompkinson and O’Conor, who are both terrible, though it’s unclear how much is Tompkinson’s fault and not just Gross’s script or directing. O’Conor’s, unfortunately, a charisma vacuum, with or without Gross.

Technically, Splendide hasn’t got much going for it. Gross’s direction of actors is slightly better than his composition, which wouldn’t matter if it were better because Gyula Pados’s photography is terrible. Though not as bad as Michael Ellis’s editing or, especially, Mark Tschanz’s music. The film relies on Tschanz’s score more than anything else, and, even with O’Conor’s annoying narrator, better music probably would’ve saved the day.

For a while, it seems like Splendide will end up being a mildly compelling oddity for Collette, Craig, and Cartlidge. Sadly, it doesn’t. Though it doesn’t fail Collette or Craig anywhere near as much as Cartlidge. It fails her something fierce.

Hitman: For Tomorrow (1999-2000)

Back in the early days of comics collections—and I'm talking mid-to-late eighties, pre-Dark Knight Returns, pre-Watchmen—there were occasionally collections on themes. Hitman: For Tomorrow feels very much like a collection of Hitman comics based on the theme. It's writer Garth Ennis leaning in on taking Tommy and friends out of their comfort zones but into ones potentially more familiar to the reader. Then Ennis forces the potentially unsuited zone into Hitman. Like the two-part opener with Tommy having to fight vampires, or later on, there's a 2000 AD homage with a dinosaur, then one of Ennis's first war stories. Ennis is getting a lot more ambitious, asking a lot more from penciler John McCrea and inker Garry Leach. Not just the dinosaur one, but also a four-part John Woo homage. Tommy's romantic problems with Tiegel and general interpersonal relationship problems with everyone else run underneath it all, breaking through to find Ennis waiting for them, ready to incorporate them into the greater narrative.

For Tomorrow collects fourteen issues. There's a two-parter, a four-parter, a done-in-one, then a three-parter, and finally another four-parters. It's a lot of comics, with the general theme being Tommy's recovery from the last collection. This one starts with Tommy having sequestered himself in his apartment to think about his horrific family backstory while he gets drunker and drunker. Natt the Hat comes to pull him out of it, leading to the two having a solemn talk about things. And Ennis, McCrea, and Leach explore the idea of a pitch-black Hitman; Tommy's tragic, and he's doing stoicism to avoid having to feel. Better to keep Tiegel away than share it with her, better to ignore his friends, better to avoid surrogate father Sean entirely rather than confront him about a lifetime's worth of lies.

Luckily, Tommy and friends live in Gotham City, which is going through the No Man's Land crossover, only for Hitman, Ennis does vampires. Vampires have decided Tommy's neighborhood, the Cauldron, is perfect for a vampire paradise, especially since it's full of despicable hitmen who'll no doubt supply the vampires with fresh food. Little do the vampires realize what's in store for them.

Though the entire thing hinges on the vampires not being willing to destroy a Catholic Church because it's shelter and Tommy and pals being thrilled to tear it down. It's really effective, but it also feels very much against the Irish Catholic grain Ennis has been incorporating into the comic from the start. It's a good two-parter; the vampires are appropriately evil and determined but also not as wise as Tommy when they need to be. And it does an excellent job getting Tommy through his personal darkness.

In the background of that two-parter, Sean—bartender to the hitmen and Tommy's surrogate dad—is feeling the strain on their relationship and finding a friend in hitman Ringo Lam.

Since Ennis introduced Ringo way back in Hitman, there's always been discussion of him and Tommy having a shootout to see who's the better gunsel. I'm misusing gunsel intentionally for effect. It's always unclear who's the better killer, and when Tommy bumps into Ringo and his girlfriend, it seems like they're going to find out. Over a woman. Because the girlfriend is Wendy, who dumped Tommy for being a hitman back in issue #6. And she's figured out what Ringo does for a living now too.

Ennis sets up the story with Ringo as the protagonist, quickly leaning into a John Woo homage. I can't figure out if Ringo is more a Chow Yun-fat type or a Tony Leung. Ringo soon finds himself in trouble for a hit he made, and Tommy's around, so the bad guys are after both of them now. And Wendy's in danger. So it's a Hong Kong action movie, albeit one with a superpowered villain (I feel like Ennis would've written a mean Wolverine if they could've gotten him to do it straight); it's a buddy movie, full of heart, full of character development. When Tommy and Ringo are captured, Ringo tells Tommy (and the reader) his life story. Whether Tommy wants to hear it or not.

It ends up being a very nice examination of male friendships and their shortcomings. Ennis writes the hell out of it, all without breaking the genre rules. Though it helps there's a lot of heart in John Woo's Hong Kong action epics. And McCrea and Leach ably handle all the action, which isn't the Hitman normal, if there is such a thing. The series's visual motifs have not been a John Woo movie until this point, and then there are four issues where they have to immediately adapt; McCrea and Leach handle the transition ably. I'm curious how much direction Ennis gave them in the script.

After that four-parter, Ennis takes an issue to get Tommy in trouble with Tiegel and find some resolution with Sean. There's some action and humor, but it's all pretty serious character development stuff. Ennis is very thoughtful with the Sean and Tommy stuff and not with the Tiegel stuff. It all builds to a punchline for Tiegel, but not… really? Ennis, McCrea, and Leach put Tiegel through the objectification ringer—physically and mentally—and then give her a comedy gag punchline. It's memorable for the punchline and the Sean stuff, but it's almost like Ennis needed two issues to get it done. Or maybe just not to have ginned up the Tiegel drama to get her and Tommy on the outs again.

Though there's no time for love in the next arc, which has Tommy and Natt accidentally going on a time-traveling safari to the Jurassic period, messing it up, and letting a bunch of hungry dinosaurs invade Gotham in the present. One of the dinosaurs, a Tyrannosaurus rex, gets close third-person narration (which is where it just feels the most like 2000 AD). Also, a great white hunter dipshit is trying to kill Tommy before the dinosaurs; the hunter led the time travel safari and is mad Tommy screwed it up.

It's a big action story with dinosaurs. It's great. Awesome art. There's not much more to say about it. They go back in time, get to see dinosaurs, bring them back to the future, dinosaurs start eating people. But it's still No Man's Land Gotham, so it's up to Tommy and friends to stop them. It's a bunch of fun without ever being silly. And it's able to get away with never being silly because Ennis, McCrea, and Leach lean into it so much. Until the run in this trade, Ennis was a lot less assured at incorporating the absurdities of a superhero universe into Hitman. He made fun of it, no less. But For Tomorrow's got vampires, unalluring mutants, and dinosaurs. There's lots of absurdity, only they've figured out how to embrace it.

Then it's time for the tour de force finale, which opens with Sean telling the boys at the bar a war story. Only it's from when he was a kid during World War II. There's more background to Sean before Gotham City and bartending (Ennis also doesn't get into the nun he's been carrying on with for decades) throughout the arc, but nothing's ever quite as effective as the first one. Maybe because Sean's a kid and more vulnerable, but also maybe because it's the earliest real Ennis war story I've seen. Or at least, remember seeing. Also, maybe just in the context of the collection—For Tomorrow is often very fantastical, and the finale's very, very grounded.

Sure, the story's about a mob princess wanting Tommy's head on a spike for her wedding present and a legendary hitman—for a while, I was thinking Christopher Walken, but then less him—is going to get it for her. This hitman, Benito Gallo, will stop at nothing, including targeting Tommy's friends. And thanks to Tommy's continued pursuit of Tiegel, she's in the mix too.

Aside from icky stuff with the mob princess and Benito, who's her uncle, the story's all about Tommy, Sean, Tiegel, and the rest bar cast. They're all still sensitive from recent losses and faced with an endless onslaught of bad guys. It becomes a siege situation, which Ennis used in the vampires story; only the mobsters are impervious to sunlight. Plus, Tommy's got everyone he can call in a jam in the jam with him.

It's kind of amazing how much traction Ennis got over Tommy stumbling into a mob meeting where he had to shoot his way out, forever pissing off the mob and leading to this eventual story arc. It's not really intricate plotting, just Ennis knowing how to match the series's momentum with significant events.

Then there's an epilogue issue—which I thought was the last issue because I knew Hitman was always a bubble book and figured they canceled it on them early, so they did a quick wrap-up, but no, there are another ten issues. So the epilogue issue is sort of a repudiation of that DC One Million crossover issue, like Ennis did it again but with a straight face and found the heart underneath it all.

It's a great arc. Excellent character work, possibly a little too much objectification of Tiegel as she reluctantly becomes a badass with the rest of the hitmen, expressive, moody art. The ending—pre-epilogue—has this beautiful, perfectly awful moment for Tommy thanks to his "powers." It'll be hard for the actual series finale to top this one.

But I'm confident Ennis, McCrea, and Leach will do it because they've figured out how to make great Hitman comics, and they're not slowing down.

Best in Show (2000, Christopher Guest)

Best in Show is a masterpiece of editing. Guest’s direction is spectacular as well—the way he creates space for the performances—but it’s all about how Guest and editor Robert Leighton construct the narrative. Even in the second half, when Best in Show becomes a singular tour de force of buffoonery from Fred Willard, it’s all about the editing.

The film opens with an introduction to its cast–Show is a mockumentary about a fictional dog show, specifically the contestants (well, their humans) in the “Best in Show” category. For the first act, Show is going to go through a variety of comedic tones, ranging from the very acerbic (super-yuppies Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock) to the nearly absurdist (Floridians Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy, with the Florida doing a lot of the lifting). Posey and Hitchcock are trying to get their Weimaraner (Sporting Group) mentally prepared for the big show (the dog’s been in a rut since walking in on them in the bedroom apparently), while O’Hara and Levy’s biggest problem is O’Hara running into one of her numerous ex-boyfriends, which causes Levy intense jealousy. Their dog, a Norwich (Terrier Group), probably has the least to do in the film.

Then there’s John Michael Higgins and Michael McKean, who have a Shih Tzu (Toy Group). They don’t have much melodrama in their story—I misremembered them at one point running into McKean’s ex-wife (who he left for Higgins), but no—and it’s mostly just Higgins being hilarious and McKean providing support for him. The dog’s adorable. They will be the most aware of the competition aspect of the prizes, with the previous winner their clear nemesis. The previous winner is a Standard Poodle (Non-Sporting Group), owned by trophy wife Jennifer Coolidge. Coolidge doesn’t do the training, instead having handler Jane Lynch do it. Since Coolidge and Lynch won the last two years, the film follows them the most of any of the groups once it’s dog show time.

Finally, there’s director Guest, who’s got the Bloodhound (Hound Group).

The first half of the film is the lead-up to the dog show, tracking the eventual contestants as they prepare and travel to the show. It’s a showcase for each of the actors, with Guest careful not to showoff his own performance too much. Technically, Guest playing a Southerner who loves his dog is probably the best technical performance. It’s seamless and sincere; Show’s very careful in how it joshes dog ownership. With Guest in particular, then probably Higgins and McKean, it does convey the emotional regard the owners have for the animals—no one’s going to be worse than Posey and Hitchcock (the scenes with Hitchcock berating the dog are simultaneously hilarious and horrifying to the point you hope the dog was deaf). Show’s very good at how it jokes about its characters and their eccentricities.

Other first half interviewees include Bob Balaban as the dog show president, Don Lake as the show floor supervisor, and Ed Begley Jr. as the hotel manager. Begley gets some of the best material in the film—as the only person outside the dog show world who isn’t an ex perving on O’Hara in front of Levy, he’s got the angle closest to—presumably—the viewer (not sure how Show plays to dog show contestants, though outside the the interviewees, everyone seems “normal”). But Begley gets to intersect with various characters; otherwise it’s chance encounters.

Once they get to the show proper, the film brings in Willard as one of the announcers—Jim Piddock is his hilariously suffering straight man—and Best in Show becomes the “Fred Willard Show,” in the best possible way. Willard’s profoundly, intentionally unaware host knows less about the dog show than anyone who’s watched the first half of the film; all the procedure and absurdity focuses on Willard and reflects out, with Willard’s ignorance giving the viewer a chance to know more about dog shows than the announcer. It’s a relatively easy idea but Willard’s so spectacular it becomes singular.

All of the performances are good, with O’Hara and Levy the standout couple—at one point they both have to do physical comedy and are superb—with Guest, Higgins, and Lynch all fantastic solo performances. Coolidge and Hitchcock are on the next tier, just based on material (though Coolidge’s lack of material is part of her joke), then I guess Posey and McKean. They’re both good, they just don’t have the best parts in their couples.

Guest’s direction—and the importance of the editing—comes through most in the first half, before the film can rely on Willard to move mountains; again, Best in Show is a comedy masterpiece, with Guest leveraging the cast’s abilities (not to mention his own) and he and Leighton’s phenomenal editing of the material. Roberto Schaefer’s photography is also excellent, although not as consequential to the film’s big successes. Some of the lighting is so good you wish the interview segment could go on longer just to showcase it.

While it may very well be possible for a comedy mockumentary to be better than Best in Show… it seems very unlikely. The film’s a (quietly) remarkable achievement.

Ginger Snaps (2000, John Fawcett)

Ginger Snaps is almost there. Karen Walton’s script is almost there, Fawcett’s direction is almost there, Emily Perkins’s lead performance is almost there, Katharine Isabelle’s is… okay, it’s not almost there by the end, when Isabelle’s acting through latex makeup, but she’s good in the first act. Ginger Snaps coasts on the first act for quite a while.

It’s just a little long. The third act drags as Perkins and Isabelle go from points A to B to C as the movie tries to finally get to the ending. Ginger Snaps is a werewolf movie, with some of the tropes but not all of them. It rejects a few of them, embraces a few others. Isabelle is the werewolf-to-be, Perkins is the sister who tries to fix all the problems resulting from Isabelle’s lycanthropy, escalating from dead neighborhood dogs and scary nails to dead classmates and a tail growing out of Isabelle’s spine. Perkins and Isabelle never find a Maria Ouspenskaya; they’re on their own figuring out Ginger Snaps’s werewolf rules, with Perkins getting some neighborhood drug dealer Kris Lemche. See, after the werewolf bites Isabelle—on the night of her first period, which seems like it ought to be way more symbolic than it plays in the movie (like, seriously, read Swamp Thing #40)—it chases her and Perkins and Lemche hits it with his truck. Perkins and Isabelle don’t stick around to see Lemche discover he’d hit a some kind of Canis lupus… just one with a circumcised human penis, which does not get enough of a close-up when he finds it. I can’t actually remember if it’s even distinct in the shot.

But the period stuff isn’t the only place Walton’s script drops the proverbial subplot ball, the film also ditches—for all intents and purposes—the sisters’ suicide pact. Even though it’s never quite clear exactly how serious they are about it. The opening credits are all these images of Perkins and Isabelle dead from suicide in creative uses of suburban symbolism. Turns out it’s for a class assignment about living in their crappy suburb, which the first act also suggests is going to be more of a thing. Metaphors for suburban malaise. By the end of the movie, whenever there’s even a nod to the earlier material—like the suicide pact—it doesn’t play because Isabelle is literally inhuman (and eating people) and Perkins is past believing she can save her sister. There are a bunch of opportunities for the movie to have some pay-off with the subplots, never takes them. Not a one.

Especially not anti-helicopter parents Mimi Rogers and John Bourgeois. Rogers gets a whole arc about discovering her daughters’ are hiding a bigger secret than just Isabelle getting her first period and it goes absolutely nowhere. The clues Rogers keeps dropping suggesting she too might be a werewolf—the sisters get their periods late, apparently at sixteen—so Isabelle, while Perkins is a year younger, skipping a grade because smart–and if it’s a metaphor, well, there’d be some maternal connection. Right?

The movie’s a tad tedious, especially in the third act, but Perkins is a solid lead. Lemche would be a lot better with just a little bit better direction. Isabelle just needs a better arc. The movie gives her enough time to not just be “the beast” but then gives her nothing else to do but be the beast. Not counting her horny teen werewolf-to-be thing, which elevates Jesse Moss from background bro to supporting player. He’s not very good. Danielle Hampton’s an excellent mean girl.

It’d help if Mike Shields’s music were better or Thom Best’s photography. Brett Sullivan’s editing is all right. And the final werewolf isn’t groundbreaking or startling but it could be a lot worse.

Even when it’s not at its best, Ginger Snaps could be a whole lot worse.

The Watcher (2000, Joe Charbanic)

I do not regret watching The Watcher, which features Keanu Reeves as a serial killer who sees the world like a shitty late nineties video camera. It might not even be a video camera. The shots might just be through a shitty video viewfinder. There’s a lot of… competency on display in the film, but it’s never from director Charbanic. Charbanic’s hilariously incompetent. Well, sort of hilariously. Sometimes the bad goes on too long and gets tiring. The therapy sessions haunted ex-FBI agent James Spader has with Marisa Tomei are always tedious; the writing (from David Elliot and Clay Ayers) is godawful, but Tomei also looks like someone’s pointing a pistol at her dog offscreen to keep her on set. Given how Charbanic doesn’t do establishing shots, there’s sometimes no evidence Spader and Tomei are on set together. Spader can handle it. Tomei cannot.

Because until the last act, when Reeves kidnaps Tomei and Spader, it’s Spader’s movie. It’s about this guy who has moved to Chicago from L.A., on full disability after he ran into a burning house to save his lover (Yvonne Niami). Only then we find out through flashbacks Spader left Miami tied up to go chase Reeves. His lasting damage from the rescue attempt doesn’t always allow him to remember the fire. Tragic.

For more reasons than one. Niami seems awkwardly filmed. Maybe it’s because she’s one of the producers’ wives. The shlock producer. The film has three. Two seem legit, the third—Nile Niami—did a bunch of low budget action crap. The Watcher feels like low budget action crap, but filmed on location. Because even though there’s the interesting behind the scenes story about how Reeves was buds with director Charbanic from when Reeves toured with his crappy band instead of doing Speed 2 and verbally agreed to do this shitty script and then some assistant forged Reeves’s name on an actual contract and Reeves was trapped—even though there’s that story, whatever the deal with the Chicago location shooting is far more compelling. Because they go all out shooting in Chicago. It looks terrible, because Charbanic sucks and Matthew Chapman’s cinematography looks like a syndicated TV cop show and Richard Nord’s editing is atrocious, but whoever coordinated and managed all that location stuff—great job. The CG explosions look like crap, but the real ones look awesome… well, look awesomely executed. They don’t look awesome because the direction’s bad. Though the big explosion shot is one of the better, more approaching competence moments.

They’ve got a gazillion cop cars, they’ve got helicopters flying into the city from over Lake Michigan–the movie goes all out as a Chicago travelogue. At first it seems like it’s some kind of promotional video to shoot in Chicago, then it seems like it’s some crappy action movie just shot in Chicago—like a Chicago investor or something—but apparently it’s something else entirely. Kind of interesting. Far more interesting than the movie. And the Reeves casting intrigue. Because Reeves is just bad. He’s really bad at playing the serial killer. The script’s dumb, Charbanic’s a suck director, but Reeves is still just bad.

Spader… works it. Sometimes you can just pass the time watching Spader figure out how he’s going to essay this crap role. It’s like watching the performance occur to him. It’s not a great performance by any means—the script’s crap, characterization’s crap, part’s crap—but it’s interesting to watch Spader. Less Tomei. Chris Ellis is really good as Spader’s Chicago PD sidekick. Ellis doesn’t have a single acceptably written line but somehow he makes it work. He’s very enthusiastic. Like somehow he’d convinced himself The Watcher was going to be the next Matrix. It has Keanu Reeves in a leather jacket all the time after all.

Marco Beltrami’s score isn’t good—Nord’s cutting for music, Beltrami or the light metal soundtrack selections is terrible—but Beltrami works it too. He’s got some good technique, but there’s no way the final product is going to come across.

The Watcher’s atrocious. You shouldn’t watch it.

Though, if you’re interested in the Chicago area and seeing an expansively but poorly shot film showcasing it… you probably can’t do better than The Watcher? But also don’t watch it. It’s terrible.