“Ninety percent of everything is crud.” – Theodore Sturgeon
Greetings and welcome to another installment of The Ten Percent, a space where Ensley F. Guffey and I take a look at the inverse of Sturgeon’s Law; in other words, the small portion of everything which is not crud. Viewed as a whole, Sturgeon was, sadly, right – the vast majority of movies, television, writing, art, and so on really is crud – but there has always been that slim slice of sublime. The Ten Percent isn’t limited by genre – I think our previous columns have proven that point – and that’s because these rare gems are high quality productions which demand more of their viewer than simple passive reception.
This column is a little different, since the focus is not going to be on a single item, but rather on a service that I urge you – yes, YOU – to take nigh-immediate advantage of. Fathom Events is a content provider owned by the AMC and Regal movie theater chains which is devoted to using satellite feeds to bring extremely-limited screenings (one-night stands, usually) to theaters across the United States. The choices offered through Fathom range dramatically – I’ve seen Rifftrax screenings of extraordinarily bad movies and short films, as well as true classics like Casablanca, since Fathom and Turner Classic Movies have teamed up to get cinematic gems back on the silver screen. And let me tell you – it’s completely different from seeing these movies in the comfort of your own living room. When Ingrid Bergman is twenty feet tall, you understand what all the fuss is about – that woman is so luminous she fairly glows. Fathom also has an arrangement with the Metropolitan Opera in New York to broadcast encore shows this summer – and trust me, if you have never seen an opera, it’s not stuffy and dull as you might have been told. Opera is blood-and-guts, passion-and-revenge writ extra-large when it’s simply on stage – put that on the big silver screen and WOW!
What makes a Fathom event special is also the audience – when Ensley and I last went to Casablanca, there was one gentleman wearing a white dinner jacket, as if he had just come from Rick’s. (I suspect he had letters of transit tucked safely in the inner pocket of his jacket.) You’re part of a crowd who loves movies and who had to do some planning to get there. It’s congenial, fun, and joyous.
For us, the closest theaters that are part of Fathom event screenings are about an hour’s drive away, so we make a “date night” out of it. Tickets are a few dollars more (only a few) than a usual night showing of a movie and you’ll have tales to tell.
Fathom isn’t limited to the high-brow. (Seriously – Fast Times at Ridgemont High is scheduled for the end of July. Oh, Spicoli!) They include sporting events, inspirational documentaries (one devoted to Steve McQueen’s search for meaning is on the schedule for September!), and anime. (Really, you should check out Studio Ghibli Fest – Kiki’s Delivery Service is scheduled for this month.) There’s even a chance for you to score a foam shark hat if you go see Shark Week on the big screen! Or, if you prefer the fine arts, Fathom has you covered with broadcasts of the upcoming Bolshoi Ballet season as well as the new production of Kushner’s Angels in America being staged by London’s National Theatre. Or why not give the color and energy of Bollywood a try?
And don’t forget that later this year, it’s The Princess Bride which you know you need to go to.
Make plans – you won’t regret it!
Ensley F. Guffey and K. Dale Koontz are co-authors of Wanna Cook? The Complete, Unofficial Companion to Breaking Bad, and of the forthcoming Dreams Given Form: The Unofficial Companion to the Babylon 5 Universe (September 2017). You can find Dale online at her blog unfetteredbrilliance.blogspot.com and on Twitter as @KDaleKoontz. Ensley hangs out at solomonmaos.com and on Twitter as @EnsleyFGuffey.
“Ninety percent of everything is crud.” – Theodore Sturgeon
Greetings and welcome to another installment of The Ten Percent! Every two weeks (well, roughly), Ensley F. Guffey and I use this space to take a look at the inverse of Sturgeon’s Law; in other words, the small portion of everything which is not crud. Viewed as a whole, Sturgeon was, sadly, right – the vast majority of movies, television, writing, art, and so on really is crud (trust me on this, I just saw Baywatch for the movie show I co-host) – but there has always been that slim li’l piece of heaven. The Ten Percent crosses genre boundaries, mostly because these rare gems are high quality productions which demand more of their viewer than just passive reception.
In my last column, I discussed Neil Gaiman’s American Gods which, at the time, was just about to begin its run on the Starz network. I am currently caught up on episodes and am also avidly following the comic version. American Gods just makes me smile and the high quality of the work in multiple Media (hi, Gillian Anderson!) is a revelation of how magnificent storytelling can completely transcend genre. The show has already been renewed for a second season, which reassures me that they’ll take their time telling this convoluted tale.
Much of Gaiman’s work belongs in the Ten Percent.* The last column touched on his best-known work, Vertigo’s Sandman, and if you haven’t read that (slowly, thoughtfully, and with great deliberate intent), you have an amazing treat in store for you and I’m jealous that you get to experience the Endless for the first time. However, I wanted to bring your attention to several other works of Gaiman’s that you might not know about. Yes, he’s written for Babylon 5, Doctor Who, and several of his works have been adapted for the silver screen with more on the way. But why wait?
I suggest beginning with Smoke and Mirrors, Gaiman’s first collection of short pieces. Early in his career, Gaiman would write for just about anyone who would help him pay his rent and he was honing his craft. Good short stories are actually devilishly difficult to write, because you don’t have the space and word count to mess around. Smoke and Mirrors actually contains several of my favorite pieces, including a fascinating story about one of Arthur’s knights who finds the Grail in the least likely (and most English) of places. There’s also an incredible story of old Hollywood, magic, and the grind of writing for the movies that’s not to be missed.
If you’re ready for a longer work, try starting with Neverwhere. I much prefer the book to the BBC adaptation or any of the other versions. (It’s been a comic and both a radio play and a stage play.) If I were being hard-nosed about it, I could argue that Neverwhere is very, very good, but not Gaiman’s best work. However, it is my favorite and this tale of the colorful denizens of London Below likely always will be. It helps that Gaiman has recently announced that his next work, The Seven Sisters, will be a sequel to Neverwhere. And I’m glad to the point of splitting – I’ve got a fistful of questions I want answered.
If you loved Sandman want to stay in the world of comics, pick up the four-issue version of Stardust. This was made into a film that gave Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer some juicy roles to play with, but honestly – the film is only so-so. While you could read the novelized version, I suggest the comic, which features exquisite painted illustrations by Charles Vess, a longtime Gaiman collaborator. His style perfectly complements Gaiman’s Victorian-era fairytale of a boy, a girl, and a fallen star.
Gaiman’s first novel was actually a two-person effort. Written with the late, truly great Sir Terry Pratchett, Good Omens will delight fans of Pratchett’s twisted Discworld as well as Gaiman folks. Imagine what would happen if those two got together, got silly, and decided to take a crack at The Omen and you’re ready to get started. An adaptation of this retelling of the misplaced Antichrist of the Apocalypse is coming to Amazon in 2018, so go ahead and brush up on it now.
Gaiman is a devourer of tales and myth (his latest book, Norse Mythology, is a retelling of the legends of that part of the world) and his love for these tales permeates his work. (I often wonder what a dinner party involving both Gaiman and Joseph “Monomyth” Campbell would be like, then I shake my head and decide that’s just too bizarre.) He has the rare gift of being able to write in a variety of styles and use source material without coming across as a mere copyist. Nowhere is that more evident than in his retelling of Kipling’s Jungle Book. This book, simply titled The Graveyard Book, restores the eerie qualities inherent in a tale of a child being raised by benevolent, yet unnatural, guardians that was Disney-fied out of the original Kipling. (Hey, I love “Bare Necessities” as much as the next gal, but Kipling had something far darker in mind.) Gaiman’s story never feels as if he was forcing a point to make it “fit” the Kipling version – he’s content to let his story spin on its own axle and the result is dreamlike in its perfection.
There’s more, of course. Gaiman has written for a variety of audiences, including the youngsters – even down to the picture book level. My First Big Book of Gaiman will vary by the age of the reader – for very small ones, try Chu’s Day; for the slightly older, Coraline. That one will probably be read under the covers by a few children and result in a couple of evenings with a higher electric bill than usual as the young fry keep the lights on – just in case.
He’s a treasure and Hollywood is finally discovering his unsettling, yet oddly moral, works so soon the rest of the world will be claiming they’ve been fans of his since Woodstock. Beat the rush and start reading him now. You won’t be sorry.
*Plus, he’s just a good guy. Patient and funny with his fans, and willing to do strange things for a good cause. Case in point, his willingness to read the entire Cheesecake Factory menu to raise money to help displaced refugees. Really, you want to donate to that – and you have about three weeks to do so.
“Ninety percent of everything is crud.” – Theodore Sturgeon
Greetings and welcome to another installment of The Ten Percent! Every two weeks (well, roughly), Ensley F. Guffey and I use this space to take a look at the inverse of Sturgeon’s Law; in other words, the small portion of everything which is not crud. Viewed as a whole, Sturgeon was, sadly, right – the vast majority of movies, television, writing, art, and so on really is crud – but there has always been that slim slice of sublime. The Ten Percent isn’t limited by genre – I think our previous columns have proven that point – and that’s because these rare gems are high quality productions which demand more of their viewer than simple passive reception.
I have, on occasion, discussed an entry that makes the cut on The Ten Percent in more than one category, such as a book and the movie made from the book. It’s hard enough to create ONE fantastic thing; to create a Ten-Percent-worthy work in more than a single medium is truly catching lightning in a bottle.
Which brings me to Neil Gaiman, an author I’ve been a fan for 25 years. Seriously – the first time I met him, he was kind enough to sign my Tori Amos Little Earthquakes CD, which now sports “Hi by the way” in gold Sharpie. If you don’t get that, well, click here.
An avid reader from early childhood, Gaiman was influenced by writers such as Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis, Rudyard Kipling, and Michael Moorcock. Gaiman honed his skills first as a journalist and, like most everyone trying to make his bones, there are a few early works that were simply done to pay the rent. But it was a serendipitous encounter with an issue of Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing that first put Gaiman’s feet on the path of seeing that comics could be sharply and smartly written. He eventually began working for DC Comics and, after reading his work on Black Orchid in 1987, Gaiman was offered a chance to re-create an old DC character with his own unique spin.
Thus began both the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics and Gaiman’s astonishing run on The Sandman. Far from the B-grade title it had once been, Gaiman’s Sandman quickly earned legendary status for its rich storytelling, incredible art, and unforgettable characters. Much could be written just about Gaiman’s work during this period, but I’ll just mention one item. In 1991, Gaiman was awarded the World Fantasy Award in the short story category for issue #19, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Comics were never intended to be eligible for that category and the organization, which issues on of the top prizes for fantasy fiction, has seen to it that no comic has been nominated in that category since Gaiman’s win. Nevertheless, Gaiman is one of the rare authors who has won all three of the trifecta – the World Fantasy Award, multiple Hugo Awards for best science fiction/fantasy writing in a given year, and multiple Nebula Awards for best science fiction/fantasy published in the United States.
While Neverwhere has and always will have a soft spot in my heart, with American Gods (first published in 2001 and the recipient of both the Hugo and the Nebula – the man’s no slouch!) Gaiman went in an entirely new direction. This novel is huge, sprawling, and jaw-droppingly good. Like almost all great books, this one can hook you with just a couple of “what if?” questions – First, What if, when immigrants came to America to settle, they brought their gods with them? And second, What happens when new gods rise and want their own piece of the Divinity pie?
Gaiman is English by birth and he brings an outsider’s point of view to this examination of the boisterous crazy-quilt of a country that is America. In Sandman, Gaiman created the Endless – a family of seven siblings who embody particular universal functions. They operate much like gods in that they bicker among themselves, are rarely comfortable outside of their own sphere of influence, but reign supreme within their own territory. With American Gods, Gaiman stepped up his already-impressive game to show readers a relatively-young country crammed with gods. Old gods, whose names are now nearly forgotten, were brought over by the first settlers of America, but as the country changed, they were left behind and they are quite unhappy about being pushed aside – especially being pushed aside by these new, brash gods created by modern American society, who have no respect for the old ways and plan to rewrite reality to best suit themselves. Ritual and worship take many forms in American Gods and the old ways have not been totally forgotten. Quite frankly, I doubt anyone else could have written this lush tale and I’m feverishly glad that Gaiman did.
Honestly, that would have been enough for me. But unlike some of Gaiman’s other work (still waiting for a Death movie), American Gods has been adapted and will be available as a TV series on the Starz network beginning on April 30. In connection with the series, a 27-issue comic series adapting the novel is being released by Dark Horse. This series will be comprised of three arcs and the first issue was released in mid-March. If you’re a Gaiman fan, run, don’t walk, to your comic retailer and get this on your pull list. It’s faithful to the source novel and the artwork is enough to make you swoon.
As to the Starz series – I’ve only seen the two trailers and they had me punching the air in anticipation and delight. Ricky Whittle as Shadow seems to hit just the right balance between wariness and curiosity and Ian McShane is spot-on perfect as Mister Wednesday.
Ensley F. Guffey and K. Dale Koontz are co-authors of Wanna Cook? The Complete, Unofficial Companion to Breaking Bad, and of the forthcoming Dreams Given Form: The Unofficial Companion to the Babylon 5 Universe (September 2017). You can find Dale online at her blog unfetteredbrilliance.blogspot.com and on Twitter as @KDaleKoontz. Ensley hangs out at solomonmaos.com and on Twitter as @EnsleyFGuffey.
“Ninety percent of everything is crud.” – Theodore Sturgeon
Welcome back to “The Ten Percent,” a regular column where every other week K. Dale Koontz and I take a look at the inverse of Sturgeon’s Law; in other words, the small portion of everything which is not crud. So many films premiere each year, but only a very few are remembered and revered years later. That’s not a matter of genre – the Ten Percent is a big tent, with plenty of room for comedy, drama, horror, animation, musical, science fiction and many more. But admission into the tent is not easy to come by. Films in this category last because they are high quality productions which demand more of their viewer than simple passive reception.
Elim Klimov’s Come and See (1985) takes its place in an unusual corner of the Ten Percent. A place for works of art that are so powerful, so honest, and so terrible that they absolutely must be seen, but which are also so psychologically and emotionally intense that they are revisited only rarely. The late Roger Ebert wrote that Come and See “is one of the most devastating films ever about anything, and in it, the survivors must envy the dead,” while Mark Cousins called Come and See “the greatest war film ever made.” Both are correct.
The film follows a young, teenage boy named Florya (Alexi Kravchenko) who joins an anti-German partisan group in Belarus in 1943. He meets a beautiful girl, Glasha (Olga Mironova), just two or three years older than he, and the two become separated from Florya’s unit as it is attacked by German dive bombers. Come and See then follows the two teens as they journey into an unrelenting hell. Historians believe that Belarus (at that time called the Byelorussian SSR) was the hardest hit of the Soviet Republics in World War Two, with the Germans destroying 209 of the regions 290 cities, 85% of its industry, and killing between 2 and 3 million people (a quarter to one-third of the total population) between 1941 and 1944. 90% of Belarus’s Jewish population was murdered in the Holocaust. As the Red Army inexorably began to push the Germans back through Belarus, the Wehrmacht and various SS units, including the notorious 36th Waffen SS Grenadier Division, the “Dirlewanger Brigade,” engaged in a scorched earth policy that eradicated farms, villages, cities, crops, animals, and humans by the tens of thousands.
Glasha (Olga Mironova) and Florya (Alexi Kravchenko) in Come and See.
This is where Florya and Glasha, still innocents despite the world around them, walk. Step by step, everything that is good, beautiful, pure, and innocent in the world is ruthlessly brutalized and then slaughtered by the war, including Florya and Glasha, although both physically survive their experiences. Come and See is horror at its most sublime, and is likely the closest any film has yet come to capturing the realities of war, particularly as it was fought in the Eastern European Theater.
The film’s title is taken from the Book of Revelation 6: 7-8:
And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, “Come and See.” And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
And this is exactly what the film invites the viewer to see – an utter apocalypse that devours everyone and everything in its path. By the time the end credits roll, Florya and Glasha have learned that things like love and morality and goodness are just tissue-paper in a firestorm, consumed without even being noticed, while ideals of meaning or God are laughable illusions in the naked face of war. There are no other films like Come and See, and the number which can even come close to its unflinching gaze into reality can be counted on one hand with digits to spare. It is a work of art that is almost too painful to endure. It is required viewing – even if only once, for it lies in the darkest part of the Ten Percent.
“Ninety percent of everything is crud.” – Theodore Sturgeon
Welcome back to “The Ten Percent,” a regular column where every other week K. Dale Koontz and I take a look at the inverse of Sturgeon’s Law; in other words, the small portion of everything which is not crud. So many films premiere each year, but only a very few are remembered and revered years later. That’s not a matter of genre – the Ten Percent is a big tent, with plenty of room for comedy, drama, horror, animation, musical, science fiction and many more. But admission into the tent is not easy to come by. Films in this category last because they are high quality productions which demand more of their viewer than simple passive reception.
Before I talk about why 1963’s The Great Escape belongs in the Ten Percent, it’s worth taking the time to point out the film’s flaws. First, neither bicycles nor motorcycles were used in the 1943 escape from Stalag Luft III. Second, the “Great Escape” of 76 Allied POWs took place in unseasonably cold weather during one of the worst winters seen in Eastern Poland in 30 years. Third, there were no Americans among the escapees who were mostly British and Canadian. Finally, there was never any regulation which stated that Allied prisoners were duty-bound to attempt to escape. In fact, many, perhaps most, American and British POWs were generally leery of escape attempts.
Yet despite the heaping helping of historical inaccuracies, The Great Escape is a fantastic film, and a prime example of the star-studded, blockbuster World War II movies that were produced in the 1960s. Starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, David McCallum, and Donald Pleasence to name a few, The Great Escape is a Who’s Who of male action heroes. Above all, the movie is cool (difficult not to be when both McQueen and Garner are involved).
The film’s pace is always fast, even manic at times, and is off and running from the get-go as truckloads of POWs arrive at a newly constructed high-security camp and immediately begin attempting to escape. In a great, and pleasantly brief, bit of exposition, the viewer learns that the new inmates are the worst of the worst, each having attempted to escape several times before and many having had to be recaptured once they broke out of other camps. So the Luftwaffe (all of the POWs are fliers) has decided to put them all in one basket, and to watch that basket carefully (seriously, that’s pretty close to a direct quote form the camp commandant, played by Hannes Messemer).
Of course, that doesn’t stop anything, particularly McQueen who’s lanky, sly-smiled, aw-shucks-who-me? attitude carries him through about five different escape attempts in the course of the movie while the British, led by Attenborough as the master strategist, concentrate on digging a 300+ yard tunnel for a mass break-out. The tunnel excavation and inevitable last-minute problems provide an increasing tension for most of the film, and the means by which Garner, McQueen and Coburn escape are the stuff from which action-movie dreams are made (and just about as realistic). The film is a romp, and keeps the viewer hooked from the beginning, and there really is not much in American film that is as cool as Steve McQueen jumping a stolen Nazi motorcycle over a barbed wire fence in an attempt to get to Switzerland. All in glorious Technicolor.
The movie is also notable in that the escape is unsuccessful for all but a handful of men – not the expected ending to this kind of film. Indeed, in this The Great Escape actually lines up with history, including the 50 unarmed, recaptured POWs who were executed by the Gestapo under direct orders from Adolf Hitler, a war crime for which 18 men were convicted at the Nuremberg Trials, and for which 13 of them were hanged in 1948. Even so, the ending is oddly triumphant, and the viewer is left with the clear impression that Steve McQueen, James Garner, and the other prisoners who were returned alive to the camp are far from done trying to escape, and the feeling that, eventually, they will succeed.
All in all The Great Escape is lifted to the Ten Percent by great pacing, an ensemble that is so implausibly cool, collected, and competent that you are completely sucked in, and just enough of an amazing true story at its core to provide a bit of verisimilitude. Plus, Steve McQueen doing his own motorcycle stunts as he attempts to jump a barbed wire fence into Switzerland. It really just doesn’t get much better.
“Ninety percent of everything is crud.” – Theodore Sturgeon
Happy 2017 and welcome to another installment of “The Ten Percent,” a regular column – well, last year it was more of a semi-regular column, but we’re resolved to change that, now that one gigantic project is wrapping up. Ahem. Let’s start again . . .
. . . “The Ten Percent,” a regular column where every other week we’ll take a look at the inverse of Sturgeon’s Law; in other words, the small portion of everything which is not crud. So many films premiere each year, but only a very few are remembered and revered years later. That’s not a matter of genre – the Ten Percent is a big tent, with plenty of room for comedy, drama, horror, animation, musical, science fiction and many more. But admission into the tent is not easy to come by. Films in this category last because they are high quality productions which demand more of their viewer than simple passive reception.
Equally at home writing poetry and novels, painting, sculpting and making films, Jean Cocteau (1889 – 1963) was one of France’s leading intellectual lights, particularly in the time between the two World Wars. His version of Beauty and the Beast (1946) is an absolute must-see for the film buff.
While certain elements (a heroine named “Belle,” some very strange wall sconces in the Beast’s castle, and several aspects of the design of the Beast) are echoed in the 1991 Disney version, Cocteau’s version is dreamy, surreal, and altogether unique. Here, Belle is a daughter in a family of four children. She is dedicated to tending to her father and is modest and self-sacrificing while her brother is a wastrel lay-about and her sisters are vain and superficial. When someone has to go be the sacrifice to the Beast, it is Belle who sneaks into the stable to ride the Beast’s magical horse back to the castle.
The Beast is – well, beastly. He hunts and rips his prey to bits. He drinks from a forest pool by lapping at the water like a cat. And yet, his first words to Belle are, “You are in no danger.”
What truly sets Cocteau’s film apart is the fact that it is a true fairy tale in that it is suitable for children to watch, yet is not intended for them. Fairy tales are cautionary tales with life lessons embedded in the narrative. From Little Red Riding Hood, we learn the perils of leaving the path. From Rumpelstiltskin, we learn the power of names. And from Beauty and the Beast, we learn what can turn a man into a beast and what can turn him back.
Cocteau claimed that one lesson of his film was that anyone who had an unhappy childhood could become a beast – truly a horrifying lesson in post-WW2 Europe, which was overrun with children whose childhoods had been snatched away from them. But the hope lies in the fact that spells can be cast, yes, but they can also be broken and that true love is a mighty tonic indeed.
The film is astonishingly gorgeous. Remembering that this is decades before CGI, Cocteau’s accomplishments become even more noteworthy. He felt he lacked the technical expertise to carry off the trick photography he wanted to use in order to create the rich fantasy world of the Beast’s castle, so he brought aboard acclaimed director Rene Clement as his technical adviser, along with cameraman Henri Alekan to bring the trick shots to fruition. The elaborate Gustave Dore-inspired costumes were created by theatrical designer Christian Berard and were intended to be “as much as the actors could stand up in.”
All of this comes together so beautifully. Just watch as the Beast gently carries Belle into the castle and her clothes transform in the space of a doorway from the sturdy working clothes of a peasant girl to the bejeweled confections of a queen. The world of the Beast is a dream world and is a world where true love actually can grow, develop, and change the hearts of the lovers.
When the real world of Beauty’s family collides with the dream world, we see the terrible results. Yet, as in all the very best of fairy tales, virtue is rewarded and Beauty finds happiness with her prince in the end.
Beauty and the Beast is worth seeing for the sheer gorgeousness of the film. Cocteau was an artist and his source material was rich for overlaying with Freudian symbolism and off-putting magic. His actors – notably Josette Day as Belle and Cocteau’s lover Jean Marais in the triple role of Avenant/Beast/Prince Ardent – play the roles absolutely straight, which brings a heightened sense of magic to the film. The smallest details – glitter in the horse’s mane, magic mirrors, the shadows cast by the magic glove the Beast gives to Beauty – are crafted with care.
I have seen a number of extraordinary films and I have seen a number of beautiful films, but seldom are the two matched to such perfection as they are in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. Truly, this vision is part of the Ten Percent.
“Ninety percent of everything is crud.” – Theodore Sturgeon
Hello, and welcome back for another installment of “The Ten Percent,” the bi-weekly column here at BiffBamPop.com where K. Dale Koontz and I take a look at the inverse of Sturgeon’s Law (quoted above) and examine the cultural productions that fall in that elusive 10% of things that are not crud. The Ten Percent is the place where all of the films, TV shows, comics, novels, visual arts, etc. that stand the test of time live. These are the things that are not forgotten, and continue to inspire us generation after generation and decade after decade.
Yet the 90% is comprised of a hell of a lot of (generally forgettable) stuff, and in the modern era, more and more of it has been and is being preserved for some theoretical posterity. In a way, the crud becomes grist for the larger cultural mill, and that means that – in theory at least – it should be possible to take some of the 90% and transform it into a part of the Ten Percent. This is exactly what Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) did from 1988 – 1999, and threatens to do once again when it returns in 2017 with a new season and a cast featuring geek royalty Patton Oswalt and Felicia Day.
The show premiered on KTMA in Minneapolis back in the days when local stations actually had a slate of their own programming. The idea behind MST3K was simple: as an affiliate TV station, KTMA had access to a catalogue of public domain (or cheaply licensed) movies, the best of which were B-movies, while more than a few hovered around the X, Y, or Z level. Creator Joel Hodgson and his friends and co-writers Trace Beaulieu and Josh Weinstein decided to make use of all of these old films as fodder for a show that was all about riffing on bad movies. Constructing a paper-thin plot wherein Joel was sent into orbit by a pair of mad scientists (Beaulieu and Weinstein) as part of an experiment where he was subjected to really terrible movies while the “Mads” monitored his reactions – the goal being to see how long it took Joel to break. To help him survive this cruelty, Joel created several robot friends, including Tom Servo, Crow T. Robot, and Gypsy. As for the show itself, it consisted of one of the bad movies shown in its entirety, while Joel and the ‘bots were seen in as silhouettes in a row of theater seats at the bottom of the screen, wisecracking about the movie.
The series became a cult classic, and began to spread nationwide largely due to VCRs and video tapes becoming affordable and widespread. Fans in the KTMA broadcast area would record the shows and send tapes to others outside of the stations radius. A year after its debut, MST3K became one of the first two shows picked up by the new Comedy Central cable network, and its fame grew rapidly. Running for a total of 11 seasons (1 on KTMA [1988-89], 7 on Comedy Central [1989 – 1996], and 3 on the Sci-Fi Channel [1997 – 1999]) plus one feature film release, and despite (or perhaps because of) a changing cast, the series garnered an intensely loyal fan-base. After the series was cancelled in 1999, MST3K entered a second-life of thriving DVD sales in which relatively inexpensive box sets of episodes from various seasons attracted new fans. As of this writing, 38 four-disc DVD sets have been released since 2002, with number 39 scheduled for 2017.
While often described as quirky, and always self-deprecatingly silly, MST3K’s humor was also quick-witted, sometimes obscure, and often incisively intelligent. Indeed, this is a very smart show with references pulled from an astonishing range of pop-culture, literature, film, music, and – of course – Minnesotan sources. It is also an incredible resource for learning about filmmaking, as many of the movies MST3K mocks are using special effects, lighting, and camerawork that are integral to movie production – they’re just doing it really, really badly. After all, what’s a 1950’s giant, radioactive creature-feature without the use of forced-perspective? Or stop-motion photography? The MST3K Gang, in all its iterations, knew the medium backwards and forwards, and kept a skeptical and rather walleyed view on the politics and culture of the world around them, while rooting their riffs firmly in material that withstands the passage of time, and ages very well.
Part satire, part stand up, part scripted comedy, Mystery Science Theater 3000 remains astonishingly fresh, and even relevant today, and is still some of the sharpest comedy to ever grace the small screen, giving it a firm place in The Ten Percent.
Ensley F. Guffey and K. Dale Koontz are co-authors of Wanna Cook? The Complete, Unofficial Companion to Breaking Bad, and of the forthcoming Dreams Given Form: The Unofficial Companion to the Universe of Babylon 5(fall 2017). You can find Dale online at her blog unfetteredbrilliance.blogspot.com and on Twitter as @KDaleKoontz. Ensley hangs out at solomonmaos.com and on Twitter as @EnsleyFGuffey.
“Ninety percent of everything is crud.” – Theodore Sturgeon
Hello and welcome back to “The Ten Percent,” a regular column here on Biff Bam Pop! where every other week K. Dale Koontz and I take a look at the inverse of Sturgeon’s Law; in other words, the ten percent of everything which is not crud. Sometimes it can be hard to remember that for each film or television show that gets people talking years after its premiere, there are hundreds of others that barely cleared the horizon before being (thankfully) shot down. The works that soar above the rest – well, those are the works that stand the test of time.
The American West has been a place of myth, violence, and wonder ever since the first Europeans looked up from their toehold on the east coast and gazed towards the distant Appalachian Mountains. As the young United States once again expanded in the aftermath of the Civil War, coming into direct contact and conflict with the great horse peoples of the plains, and with the often brutal realities of life in often marginal environments between the Mississippi and the Rockies, the Western myth only grew. William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his Wild West Show began framing the mythic space into the shape we know today, and The Great Train Robbery (1903), one of the first American movies ever made, opened the door to an era of cinematic American mythopoeia that continues to this day.
The myth is epic. Vast open spaces, scrub desert, and red dust against the primordial background of John Ford’s greatest discovery: Monument Valley. It is a space of violence and bravery, endurance and reduction, with heroes and villains who rival the legends of Arthur or the pen of Shakespeare. It is an immigrant story, and of the men who stood above them for good or ill by virtue of their guns and their deadly willingness to use them. It is a racist myth, where white skin is ascendant while red and brown are in degraded decline. It is difficult to overestimate how much of American mythic culture is bound up in the Western, yet it is somehow appropriate that the director to take the genre, and the myth of the West, to its highest cinematic summits, was an Italian: Sergio Leone.
Publicity photo. Left to right: Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, Sergio Leone, Charles Bronson, and Jason Robards.
Perhaps best known for his “Dollars Trilogy” starring Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name, Leone was the great director of the “spaghetti western.” These films were made relatively cheap and fast, using a mix of American and European actors, used Cinecitta sets, and Italian and Spanish exteriors to create a (for the time) hyper-violent, heavily symbolic version of an already legendary West. The films found international success, even in America, and helped to launch Eastwood’s career as a star and a director. With scores by the ever-brilliant Ennio Morricone, Leone’s westerns reinterpreted the genre for audiences of the mid- and late-1960s as Europe and the US convulsed in unprecedented peacetime social and political upheavals. Despite a desire to move away from Westerns, his Dollar Trilogy was so popular in the States that Leone found that before he would be able to direct something new, he would have to create one last western – only this time, he would be able to film in Monument Valley.
The result is Once Upon a Time in the West, one of the greatest westerns of all time, and truly the apotheosis of the mythic West in film. At the height of his powers, Leone’s mise-en-scene is almost obsessive. There are no accidents in composition here, and every scene, every sequence partakes of a detail and a slow devotion to telling the story that creates frame-by-frame works of art. Leone’s use of both ambient sound and Morricone’s score is brilliant, and his trademark close-ups show every dusty crease and pore, and allow every pair of eyes its own revelations, right from the opening sequence of the film.
Once Upon a Time in the West is operatic in scope and scale, and cries out to be seen on the largest possible screen. The tale centers on a former prostitute, Jill, played by the staggeringly gorgeous Claudia Cardinale. She has travelled into the West to join her husband, only to arrive hours after the massacre of him and his children by a group of ruthless, duster wearing outlaws led by Frank, played with true malevolence and dark joy by Henry Fonda.
This may be the most brilliant stroke of the film. At the time, and even today, Fonda is known for playing good guys, and his entrance, every bit as dramatic as Charles Bronson’s still chills. Indeed, this intertextual effect was exactly what Leone wanted to achieve. When Fonda arrived on set with brown contacts and a moustache he’d grown for the role, Leone ordered that both be removed – he wanted to shock of an immediately recognizable Fonda in the role, and he wanted those sharp blue eyes. Frank and his employer, railroad magnate Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti) want the widowed Jill’s land, but the Man with the Harmonica (Bronson want’s Frank, as does the infamous outlaw Cheyenne, who’s given a perfect comic edge by a scruffy Jason Robards. The two combine forces to protect Jill and, through her to get to Frank and Morton. Interwoven with the drama are the themes of technological and social change, of the coming of civil order into formerly untamed spaces, and destruction of a world.
It’s a pretty standard plot, but the meat lies in the telling of the tale, and Leone and his cast elevate the story into something so tightly choreographed that the grime, murder, greed, heat, lust, and hatred come together to transcend the usual limits of the genre, and catapult the story into the realm of pure myth, where something like demi-gods, or Jungian archetypes stride across the screen, their every twitch a symbol – of power, of inevitable change, of resistance and revenge.
There really is nothing quite like Once Upon a Time in the West. The film mesmerizes, and takes over the space in which it is viewed. Taken out of Leone’s hands for editing for US release, the movie failed at the box office, but the uncut, international release gained widespread acclaim and is now the standard version for DVD and Blu-Ray. Leone’s film is superb, but there is more to it than mere mastery of craft, artistic talent, and decades of experience. One Upon a Time in the West is myth making, a tale passed down around fires lit against the darkness in which failed and fallible gods walk and limp and dance and kill. It is, without a shadow of a doubt, part of the Ten Percent.
“Ninety percent of everything is crud.” – Theodore Sturgeon
Hello, and welcome to another installment of “The Ten Percent,” a regular column where every other week we’ll take a look at the inverse of Sturgeon’s Law; in other words, the small portion of everything which is not crud. Remember, for each film or television show that gets people talking years or even decades after its premiere, there are hundreds of others that peeked out just once and then (thankfully) disappeared. Those are the 90%, but the remaining Ten Percent are the works that stand the test of time.
What do you get when you produce a television show across three continents, combining financing and “notes” from three very different networks in three very different time zones? What if this show was also an intricately plotted space opera — with puppets? Well, if you’re Rockne S. O’Bannon and Brian Henson, you get Farscape. In the US the series ran from 1999 – 2003 on the Sci-Fi channel, with a follow-up mini-series, Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars airing in 2004. Starring Ben Browder (John Crichton) and Claudia Black (Aeryn Sun), Farscape traces the (mis)adventures of American astronaut Crichton, who is inadvertently catapulted into the distant reaches of the galaxy while test-piloting his experimental space engine. Crichton finds himself a true stranger in a strange land, surrounded by species that are technologically far in advance of Earth, and generally much, much older than humanity.
Ben Browder & Claudia Black as John Crichton and Aeryn Sun
So far, so not-so-unusual. Yet Farscape quickly becomes something more than a standard, episodic, good-guys v. bad-guys space show. It turns out that real life, even in the vastness of space, isn’t nearly that clear cut, and shades of grey predominate. Despite undeniable technological advances, and supposed socio-cultural ones, the strange alien polities Crichton finds himself in the middle of have the same old problems: arms races, cold wars, greed, corruption, and special interests abound, and in-between are billions of people on thousands of small worlds who become conquests or colonies of hungry empires, or proxies in their conflict, or are simply ground underfoot, unnoticed as titans clash.
Crichton and his new pals are definitely in this latter category. A group of escaped supposed criminals aboard a living ship which was itself enslaved as a prison barge, they are the definition of flotsam and jetsam in this wider universe, people with little or no value to the galactic superpowers, but priceless to themselves and each other. Much like Firefly (about which much more later!), Farscape is about chosen family, and about the capacity for change inherent in even the most twisted of souls. The main cast (for seasons 1 – 3) is rounded out by Anthony Simcoe as Ka D’Ago, a Luxan warrior prone to hyper-rage; Gigi Edgley as the sensuous and dangerous grey-skinned Chiana; and Virginia Hey as Pa’u Zotoh Zhaan, a blue-fleshed priestess, but not always a gentle one.
Then there are the puppets, brought to brilliant life by the puppeteers at the Jim Henson Company. Several generations removed from Jim Henson’s original felt-covered creations, the Farscape puppets are incredibly intricate, often enormous constructs requiring multiple puppeteers to operate. The most central of such are Pilot, the, well, pilot of the living ship Moya, multi-limbed, with a massive head and carapace, Pilot is literally gown into the ship. Voiced by Lani John Tupu, Pilot is the crew’s direct line of communication to Moya, and the heart of the fragile family. At times teacher, confidant, confessor, or scold, Pilot is the moral center of the series, dedicated to the protection of Moya, and therefore the only character whose core motivation is the preservation of another’s life. Perhaps Pilot’s polar opposite is Dominar Rygel XVI a stubby, rotund ex-monarch and kleptomaniac. Given a royally entitled voice and personality by Jonathan Hardy, Rygel looks out for himself before all others, and often to the exclusion of everyone else.
Pilot and Rygel XVI
Some of the crew will leave, and other will arrive, but all share the same fate of being lost, of looking for home, or for something like it. Each eventually will find that place aboard Moya, at least for a time, and discover that chosen family can be much stronger than one cast together by the randomness of DNA. The crew moves through dangerous spaces in dangerous times, and slowly becomes the obsessive interest of great powers for knowledge they are believed to possess, knowledge that can supposedly bring final victory and dominance for whichever power controls it. Such knowledge is worth having at any cost, particularly when it comes to the lives of Crichton and the crew, and their desires are inconsequential, particularly when it comes to a preference not to be dominated by anyone.
Farscape is the Cold War writ large, where something called “Mutually Assured Destruction” seems to be a viable and desirable policy, even if it means the destruction of entire planets. It is also a look at how the machinations of the powerful can all too often become divorced from the goals of civilization, and how the really important things: love, family, a productive life lived in peace can wind up being considered not just tertiary concerns, but irrelevant in the face of “larger issues.” Ultimately, however, Farscape is also about the power that the really important things actually have, and how dangerous the ignored can be when they are forced to fight for them. Farscape tells these tales with true style, incredible performances, effects, and writing, and uses the genre of science fiction to ask some really big questions and postulate some answers along the way. It is intricate, beautiful, gripping, sexy, and intensely moving, and that is why it is part of The Ten Percent.
Hello again Readers Mine, and welcome to another installment of "Tuesdays with Mollari!" This is the place where I natter on about the greatness that is Babylon 5, and the various adventures associated with writing a book about the show. We're calling the project Dreams Given Form: The Unofficial Companion to the Universe of Babylon 5, and we're looking at a publication date in the fall of 2017, but we may manage to be ready to go earlier. Our publisher is ECW Press out of Toronto, and this will be our second book with them, following Wanna Cook? The Complete, Unofficial Companion to Breaking Bad (available wherever fine books are sold, and probably in some other places too!)
First off, I want to give a big Centauri shout out ("VALTOOOOOOO!!!!") to the UK's own John Joshua. You'll remember in my last post about the B5 comics, I mentioned that I have been unable to obtain a copy of the tribute mini-comic Beyond the Rim. Well, the day that post went live, John e-mailed me and offered to send me hi-res scans of his copy, which were in my inbox the next day. That was really, really awesome, and you can bet we'll be thanking him in the book and sending a signed copy across the pond come the day! Thanks very much, John!
Marshall Teague as Nelson Drake in "Infection" (1.04).
Babylon 5 is rightly hailed for bringing the long, or grand arc to television, but not every episode was so directly dedicated to advancing the overarching stories of the series. Straczynski balanced his grand arc with episodes that were far more traditional and episodic, where a problem arises, is dealt with by the protagonists, and at the end of the episode things pretty much reset to the status quo. Babylon 5 even did this differently, however, as the series had a memory, and viewers were often asked to remember events in previous episodes in order to fully understand what was happening at a given point in the show. Even seemingly non-arc episodes.
The formula of grand arc/season arc/and episodic storytelling would be refined a few years later in Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997 - 2003), and fans of that show would coin the term "monster-of-the-week episode" to denote an episode that really did nothing to advance the larger season or series arcs, and were almost entirely focused on Buffy and the Scoobies taking down a random threat o' the week. So when I began to sit down and write the episode guides for Dreams Given Form I expected to use the "monster-of-the-week" phrase relatively frequently when dealing with episodes like "TKO" (1.14), "GROPOS" (2.10) "Grey 17 Is Missing" (3.19), etc. I figured these would be relatively short write ups along the lines of "well, a few titbits for the larger story were scattered here and there, but basically this one is a monster-of-the-week" and then move on.
The thing is, it is turning out that I'm wrong. Thus far, in any given episode written by J. Michael Straczynski (an important caveat), information that is either deeply relevant or even fundamental to the larger arcs is included. Take "Infection" (1.04) for example. At first it seems like a placeholder episode, but when you look at it critically with an eye to the entire series, several really important things become clear. Interplanetary Expeditions (IPX) is introduced in this episode. Non-human biomechanical technology is first mentioned (Shadows, anyone?). The fact that Earth is looking for alien tech to turn into weapons is dropped into a conversation, and this is the episode where JMS introduces his recurring themes of ideology, militarism, and fanaticism v. science, faith, and lawful armsbearing. All in this easily overlooked episode about a guy who gets gobbled up by bad CGI and tries to kill everybody for the thinnest of reasons.
Again and again, the intricacy of JMS's plotting and storytelling, the sheer painstaking details of his arc continue to astound me, and I am reminded of why I study television. That's it for this go-round, folks. For all of the latest B5 and pop-culture news that comes across my screen, be sure and follow me on Twitter or Facebook, and check out our bi-weekly column, "The Ten Percent" over at Biff Bam Pop! Until next time...
Hello Readers Mine! After yet another hiatus, I have returned! (Seriously, you should follow me on the various medias of sociability if you want daily doses of me. Linkage to the top right of this page.) This week, I thought I'd take a closer look at a sometimes disparaged part of Babylon 5's groundbreaking transmedia storytelling: the Babylon 5 comics!
Babylon 5 numbers 1 - 11, DC Comics, 1994-1995.
As season 2 of Babylon 5 kicked off, so too did the briefly-lived regular Babylon 5 comic book series from DC. Issue 1, "In Darkness Find Me" was written by Straczynski, while issues 2 - 8 and 11 were plotted by JMS with Mark Moretti and Tim DeHaas fleshing things out. Issues 9 and 10 were scripted by David Gerrold, and are considered only semi-canonical, but feature Garibaldi and G'Kar in a race against mechanical death which requires them to sacrifice their clothing a piece at a time, so you don't want to miss 'em.
The comics fill in some important gaps in the larger B5 plot, and also connect with some of the canonical novels. Issues 1 -4 detail Sinclair's adventures on Earth after his recall, and during his first few months as Earth's ambassador to Minbar, with issue 1 taking place between "Crysalis" (1.22) and "Points of Departure" (2.01) and 3-4 between "Revelations" (2.02) and "The Geometry of Shadows" (2.3). The events in this first comic arc also ties into the canonical novel To Dream in the City of Sorrows, by Kathryn M. Drennan, who also wrote the episode "By Any means Necessary" (1.12), and was married to Straczynski from 1983 - 2002.
Issues 5-8 take place before "The Coming of Shadows" (2.09), and provide details about Garibaldi's first meeting with Sinclair and more details about his encounter with the Shadow vessels on Mars as seen in "Messages from Earth" (3.08). Issue 11 "Silent Enemies" even drops a bit of foreshadowing about the horrific past of Talia Winters, the culmination of which is revealed in "Divided Loyalties" (2.19). The details surrounding Garibaldi's first encounter with Shadow vessels is especially interesting as the issues were published between 5 and 8 months before "Messages from Earth" first aired, though the episode may well have been plotted/written/in production at the time JMS plotted the comics. Straczynski's famous long-rage plotting of B5 again allowed him to take advantage of transmedia storytelling in ways that broadened the canon and deepened the story, making the comics canon, rather than the usual licensed-but-unofficial storytelling common in the comic adaptations of SF shows like Battlestar Galactica (the original series) and Star Wars.
Babylon 5: The Lost Tales mini-comic.
Besides DC's monthly series, in 1998 JMS also wrote the first issue and plotted the rest (with Peter David completing the scripts) of the three-issue miniseries In Valen's Name, which takes place after "Into the Fire" (4.06) and recounts the final fate of Babylon 4 and fills in some of the history of Valen and the previous Shadow War. Finally, in 2007, a special mini-comic, "Beyond the Rim," was released with the Babylon 5: The Lost Tales DVD when purchased from Best Buy. "Beyond the Rim" is a kind of tribute to Richard Biggs (Dr. Franklin) and Andreas Katsulas (G'kar), and recounts the galaxy-spanning adventures of the two men after the time of Babylon 5 and between G'Kar's return from deep space with Lyta Alexander, but before his final meeting with Londo on Centauri Prime.
On a side note, I was able to get a really great deal on the floppies of both the monthly DC series and In Valen's Name (thanks Atomik Comiks!), but I have as yet been unable to acquire a copy of the Lost Tales mini-comic. So if you have one you might be willing to part with for a reasonable price, let me know!)
The Babylon 5 comics are thus not a side-note, but an integral part of the Babylon 5 universe that allowed JMS to greatly expand his overall narrative, and bring new stories to fans who remain hungry for more tales to this day. Who knows, with talk of a big-screen B5 reboot, and JMS's own award-winning comic writing experience, we may yet be treated to a further expansion of the four-color canon. I certainly hope so. Until then, and until next time -
Everyone has strengths and weakness. One of my weakness is the seeming inability to maintain a regular posting schedule on my own blog. Dale, on the other hand, is the Queen of Blogging, so while "Tuesdays with Mollari" has been missing in hyperspace, "Third Age Thursday" has been going strong over at Unfettered Brilliance. Nonetheless, people can change, so I promise to try and get back into a regular groove over here of a post every other week - but we shall see. In any event, on to Babylon 5!
So right from the start let me just say "YAY! JOHN SHERIDAN IS HERE!!!!!!" While rewatching Season 1 with a close critical eye for our forthcoming book Dreams Given Form: The Unofficial Companion to the Universe of Babylon 5gave me a greater appreciation of Sinclair (and of Michael O'Hare's acting - particularly in the wake of JMS's revelations about his struggle with mental illness), Sheridan is still my main man. I just don't think I would have bought O'Hare as the lead in Seasons 2 through 5 the way I buy Bruce Boxleitner's Captain Sheridan.
Of course, I am also aware that, had O'Hare remained, the story arc of Babylon 5 would have been considerably different. After the often bumpy Season 1, JMS & Co. had begun to know their own strengths and weaknesses and Straczynski wrote to those of the actors and characters brilliantly. He also wisely resisted any temptation to make Sheridan a kind of Sinclair redux. The break is clean. Where Sinclair is primarily a soft-spoken diplomat, Sheridan makes no bones about being a soldier, through his service as a ship's captain on the Rim, far away from Earthdome's advice and interference, has given him wide experience with alien races and a shrewd diplomatic mind in his own right. Where Sinclair usually seemed to manage Babylon 5, Sheridan commands it.
Yet it is always a bit mind-blowing to return to Season 2 and see Sheridan as a newcomer to B5, with his almost boyish delight in fresh oranges, and an oddly innocent sense of wonder about the whole set-up. Which is what makes his arc work, and why JMS is the master of character development. Sheridan, Ivanova, Delenn, Londo, G'Kar, Vir, etc, etc. all change as the series continues they shrink and grow and fail and triumph. None of them are cardboard cutouts - ever.
For my money, Babylon 5 needed the change to Boxleitner and Sheridan. He brings an edge to things that was lacking in Sinclair, and a feeling that things are going to start really happening. He is a soldier coming into a time that needs soldiers, and the leader who can stand the coming fires. Plus, he was one of the toppers on my wedding cake. No, seriously:
When fandoms wed: Capt. John Sheridan and Buffy Summers gracing the top of our wedding cake back in 2010.
So yeah, I may be biased, but bring on the Starkiller!
