CulturePulp.

THE AICN Q&A: 'Bloom County Library' editor Scott Dunbier.

I met Scott Dunbier in kind of a strange way.

I was devouring IDW's "Bloom County: The Complete Library, Volume One (1980-1982)" -- the first of five hardbound books collecting every last installment of Berkeley Breathed's popular, reckless, influential newspaper comic. I was, to put it mildly, obsessed with this strip as a kid -- "Bloom County," along with "Calvin & Hobbes" and "The Far Side," marks the last time newspaper funnies were an actual destination for me. I'd argue (as I do at Ain't It Cool News) that it's the closest a comic strip ever got to capturing Chuck Jones' comic timing in print. I've been wanting a complete collection of this series forever. I noticed the top tiers of two Sunday strips (out of about 600 strips in the book) were missing some art. Wondering why, I pointed this out on Twitter (here and here), sent a few e-mails, and went back to my book and bourbon.

The next morning, I got an e-mail: "Saw your tweet about 'Bloom County.' Would you be available to talk a little later today, so I can fill you in?... Scott Dunbier, Special Projects Editor, IDW Publishing." (He apparently made a similar overture to another guy who found a few wording variations and posted them on Amazon.)

I called him. "My nemesis!" he said, and laughed. And Mr. Dunbier -- who's also edited books by Alan Moore ("League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," "Top 10"), Darwyn Cooke ("The Hunter"), and Dave Stevens ("The Complete Rocketeer") -- proceeded to tell me about his real nemesis: the frustrating scavenger hunt (detailed below) that was required to pull together this first collection....

Read the whole epic interview at Ain't It Cool News.

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Mike Russell Traipses Through The BLOOM COUNTY Library With Editor Scott Dunbier! (Ain't It Cool News, Nov. 2, 2009)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Fourth Kind'

Movie review in today's Oregonian....

As movie-selling huckster gimmicks go, "The Fourth Kind" has a fairly good one.

Let's see if we can explain this. The film opens as star Milla Jovovich walks up to the camera, introduces herself as "actress Milla Jovovich," and tells us we're about to watch a docudrama about a real alien-abduction researcher named Dr. Abigail Tyler.

Jovovich then spends the rest of the movie as Tyler, a woman who comes to believe that aliens are terrorizing Nome, Alaska residents, including her. Among the skeptics is the county sheriff, played by Will Patton, who gives the same furious ham-and-cheese performance he rocked in "The Postman."
This supposed re-enactment is intercut with supposed "actual interviews" and "archived audio," recorded by the supposedly real Dr. Tyler. There's even an "actual" video Q&A with Tyler, supposedly recorded years after the Alaskan events. The poor doctor is as pale as an actor slathered in makeup, and speaks in a traumatized monotone that might be mistaken for an on-the-nose line reading if it weren't, you know, "real."

Anyhoo. Get past the distracting "Is it or isn't it?" nonsense (which gets debunked rather nicely at this link), and "Fourth Kind" has its moments. There are some slightly unnerving shots of owls and a couple of hypnotic-regression sessions gone bone-snappingly wrong. I like very much that writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi has no intention of giving us a clear look at his alien menace; he also has some meta-fun with a few split-screen shots that contrast his "documentary" and "re-enacted" footage.

Unfortunately, the story finally gets way too silly to believe, even if you Want to Believe. There's too much unnecessary, psychologically muddled stuff involving the death of Tyler's husband -- plus some final-act foolishness that's basically the equivalent of a doctor who treats broken necks asking someone to break her neck so she can better understand the injury.

The movie's carnival-barker hard sell is that it's after The Truth. It's really after an opening-weekend gross, of course. It's sporadically clever and chilling, but I'll be shocked if it endures as a "Blair Witch"-style horror-vérité phenomenon.
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(98 min.; rated PG-13 for violent/disturbing images, some terror, thematic elements and brief sexuality) Grade: C

'The Fourth Kind' (The Oregonian, Friday, November 6, 2009)

'Cort and Fatboy' and 'Rick Emerson' get the axe. And a ton of love.

So on Friday, Oct. 23, "The Cort and Fatboy Show" was calmly, unceremoniously cancelled by KUFO's new owners. The show's hosts -- Cort Webber and Bobby "Fatboy" Roberts -- were shown the door. Later that day, word got out that the much-loved "Rick Emerson Show" got the axe, too.

Cort and Fats have become good friends over the past three-and-a-half years of Friday movie-gab appearances. Maybe the highest compliment I can pay them is that they're the same funny, generous, big-hearted, down-to-earth nerds off the air as they are on the air -- a rarity. I've also developed a sincere respect for their radio craft, which is so much harder than they make it sound. (I even made a comic strip about it.) I love these guys, I love their love of Portland, and I loved being on their show and tagging along while they were putting together amazing communal experiences like "Firefly at the Mission" and "Battlestar at the Bagdad."

And I'm hardly alone in that love. I think it's telling that within hours of their firing, the following things happened:

• Dozens of media geeks and pros from several different local outlets converged on the Horse Brass for an impromptu "cancellation wake." Here's a picture.
• Popular local podcaster "PDX Sucks" threw together a stunningly angry online tribute that kicked off with a relentless stream of supportive voicemails from listeners. (And they're still leaving messages, apparently.)
• And a bunch of fans had a new non-KUFO message board up and running by the end of the weekend -- and were trying to back up the entire online history of both cancelled radio shows for safekeeping before KUFO decides to wipe it from cultural memory.

I'm biased. Two friends of mine just lost their livelihoods in yet another ruthlessly zero-notice (if fairly polite) broadcast-industry firing. But I'm not going to rail too much against KUFO's new owners. It's their train set. If they want to crow about how "local" their new ownership of KUFO is going to be, and then a few months later replace two of the most local, well-liked radio shows in Portland with a new staff that includes a guy from Philly fired for playing a racist song parody; a fellow from San Diego named "Ditch" who specializes in prank calls; a dude from Seattle named "The Ricker" who started a band there called "Courtney Killed Kurt," says "bro-ski" entirely too often, and apparently got in trouble in 1999 for some politically incorrect shenanigans of his own; and a local jock who once engaged in one of the most mind-blowing examples of on-air recklessness in radio history ... well, hey, KUFO's new owners totally get to do that.

And furthermore: If KUFO's new owners want to follow their firings of well-liked locals with an aggressive, weird publicity-stunt campaign that depicts their "new and improved" station as a maurauding, flesh-eating alien horde descending on our city, well, um, that's a really interesting choice. (It's certainly more interesting than when the new owners put TVs playing nothing but Fox News Channel in every broadcast studio in the building. That was just annoying.)

And finally: If the new KUFO wants to piss off the local media right out of the gate by giving out the newsroom phone numbers of TV stations and alternative publications as an on-air prank? Hey. Go nuts.

And by all means, KUFO: Feel free to let a Twitter account that wants to represent you make fun of DJs you just fired and, while it's dishing out insults, make fun of DJs who were recently fired by other local stations. You stay classy. (UPDATE: "KUFORules" tells me that those last two tweets were part of a prank spoofing KUFO, and that he is very disappointed in me as a reporter. Huh. UPDATE 2: Have since called KUFO's Susan Reynolds; she tells me "KUFORules" is not an official KUFO Twitter account. Let's replace "huh" with "whoops"; feelings about friends made me careless.)

  Anyway. Cort and Fatboy announced on KGW's "Studio @ The Square" tonight that they plan to keep podcasting. They've already moved their URL, which they own. And they're still hosting midnight movie screenings. Their next one is "Raising Arizona," Nov. 6 at the Bagdad. I hope they find a new media berth soon. They deserve it. The rest of this post is an unsorted list of links to media coverage and online listener response to the firings of my friends, which I've been collecting over the past few days. It's an overwhelming reaction -- Portland media has seldom seen the like. I hope other radio stations in town are paying attention. If anyone else finds anything to add, feel free to link it in the comments or drop me a line. -- Cheers, Mike Russell.

"Cort and Fatboy in first full interview since KUFO massacre" -- Oregon Media Central

Cort and Fatboy's final podcast (mp3)

The fan-made "Mehfugees" replacement message-board forums for C&F and Emerson listeners

The "Mehfugees" news and archive page

Talk Box: Fired KUFO DJ's on the new direction of media -- KGW's Studio @ The Square (video)

Twitter search: "cort fatboy"

Twitter search: "@kufo"

Twitter search: "rick emerson"

Well, Fuck. Cort and Fatboy Just Got Fired. -- Portland Mercury

Dead air update: KUFO’s Rick Emerson Show crew fired. Cort and Fatboy fired. KUFO responds. -- Willamette Week

Shake-up at KUFO leaves Emerson and his crew off the air -- The Oregonian

The PDX Sucks instant podcast tribute/rage session, with voicemails from angry listeners

Save the Rick Emerson Show

"The Cort and Fatboy Appreciation Thread" -- Mehfugees forum

"The Rick Emerson Show Appreciation Thread" - Mehfugees forum

The KUFO Facebook page -- at this writing, the wall posts by Emerson and "Cort and Fatboy" fans have a remarkably vitriolic tone.

Photos from the impromptu "Cort and Fatboy Cancellation Wake" at the Horse Brass: [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ] [ 7 ] [ 8 ]

Swedish "Cort and Fatboy" fan @annosuperstar offers a sweet farewell to the lads

Cort offers a post-firing message to his listeners: Read it here or here

Nice post about the "Cort and Fatboy" cancellation from Rhode Island fan @momlovesfilm

Three DamnPortlanders posts on the KUFO shuffle: [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] 

Listener @veraciously on "Cort and Fatboy": "the german and the movie douche"

Chris Walsh reports from the Cancellation Wake

Posts tagged "kufo" at Oregon Media Central. 

@pdxsucks keeps collecting Cort & Fatboy response voicemails. Nice. And not-nice.

Urban Dictionary definitions for "KUFO"

PDX Sucks goes off on KUFO. Again.

Say the Call Letters Backward -- OurPDX

In memoriam: The Cort & Fatboy Show 

Cort and Fatboy: Just not enough hair on their chests for new KUFO. -- Willamette Week

J-Dubb's Theatre: The Day the Radio Died

Oops, it happened again! -- Tim Reilly's Press Club

Live like a Mehfugee! -- Geek in the City

Cort and Fatboy We Will Miss You!!!! -- videolog entry by erikolson100

"MSPaint comic inspired by KUFO's 'refueling.'" -- by "therealthing"

"Boycott KUFO for firing Cort and Fatboy!" Facebook group

Posts tagged "kufo" at Oregon Media Central

twitter.com/ofuck

"The Beast Must Flee" -- remix of the KUFO viral-marketing video.

Facebook: The Rick Emerson Show Bottom Line Brigade

"Portland Airwaves Dumbed Down Again." -- The Age of Geek

"The Future of Radio" -- Wet Oregonian

"Radio Gaga" -- Willamette Week, Oct. 28, 2009

"Boycott KUFO for firing Cort & Fatboy!" Facebook group

"The New KUFO: Cue Tool's Eulogy" -- OurPDX

New KUFO PD: 'We're just here to have fun, man' -- Oregon Media Central

"Hitler Learns of Alpha Broadasting's Firing on KUFO" -- Why yes, it IS a YouTube "Downfall" remix full of Portland-media in-jokes.

"Rick Emerson returns to radio -- for an hour" -- Oregon Media Central

"K-U-F-Oh, holy crap." -- Live Wire! Radio

Cort and Fatboy talk about their new lives on the PDXSucks podcast

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant'

From the Friday, Oct. 23 Oregonian...

This may come as a shock, but Hollywood is once again making a grab for the "Harry Potter" filmgoing dollar with a lower-budgeted knockoff.

"Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant" adapts the first three books in Darren Shan's young-adult series. In a major deviation from the "Potter" storytelling mold, it concerns a bright young boy who develops supernatural powers and is invited to join a semi-secret magical community, where he quickly gets caught up in a larger conflict and is forced to embrace his hero's destiny. Oh, wait: No, the major deviation is that "Cirque du Freak" also makes a grab for the vampire-craze dollar by making the boy a half-vampire instead of a wizard, and replaces the boarding school for wizards with a really cool traveling freak show.

As directed by Paul Weitz ("In Good Company") and co-written by Brian Helgeland ("L.A. Confidential"), the film is competent without being particularly spectacular or thrilling. There are a few dryly funny variations on the usual vampire lore, but only the freak-show elements -- which include a bearded Salma Hayek, an ultra-skinny Orlando Jones, a buck-toothed Kristen Schaal, Willem Dafoe doing his best Vincent Price impression and some amusing practical makeup work -- have any sort of original kick. Unfortunately, the leads are far less interesting, including, I'm sad to report, the usually great John C. Reilly, who plays a centuries-old vampire mentor and chooses to deliver all his lines with a mannered sameness.

I suspect little kids will enjoy "Cirque du Freak" quite a bit, and their parents will have to amuse themselves by charting its parallels with other, stronger hero's-journey family films.
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(108 min., rated PG-13 for sequences of intense supernatural violence and action, disturbing images, thematic elements and some language) Grade: C

'Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant' (The Oregonian, Friday, Oct. 23, 2009)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Law Abiding Citizen'

From the Friday, Oct. 16 Oregonian....

The vigilante thriller "Law Abiding Citizen" gets so overblown and ridiculous by the end, it might as well be science fiction. But before it devolves into total nonsense, the filmmakers do have a little nasty fun playing with your expectations.

Within three minutes of the studio logo, an inventor named Clyde (Gerard Butler) has watched his entire family die during a home-invasion robbery. Justice isn't served because the politically savvy deputy DA., Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), isn't sure he can win the case and cuts a plea deal with the nastiest of the home invaders.

Clyde does not take this sitting down, to put it mildly. He spends the next decade transforming himself into a cross between The Punisher and The Jigsaw Killer, and plots a revenge scheme so elaborate and high-tech, he's even able to orchestrate it from behind bars, after Nick arrests him for the remarkably creative murders that kick off that scheme.

What's interesting -- for a while, anyway -- is the way screenwriter Kurt Wimmer and director F. Gary Gray screw with audience sympathy. Clyde's revenge scheme is fun to watch when the victims are plainly evil and/or sleazy, or when he's gaming the legal system just so he can grandstand against the casually corrupt. But then he keeps going and going and going, and the primal thrill of the revenge picture gets more complicated as his victims become more peripheral and innocent.

That might make for a pretty cool genre twist ... if "Law Abiding Citizen" didn't also get so bloody silly at the same time it's pulling its sympathy switcheroo.

The scope of Clyde's plan finally gets too enormous to believe. It relies too heavily on coincidence, cutting-edge technology, massive construction projects, and perfect guesstimates of timing and human and bureaucratic behavior, not to mention hilarious amounts of money. The movie starts out as a potboiler with a troubling character arc; unfortunately, it ends up bcoming a goofy, story-overwhelming Rube Goldberg contraption that would make the producers of the "Saw" series blush.

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(108 min., rated R for strong bloody brutal violence and torture, a scene of rape, and pervasive language) Grade: C-minus

'Law Abiding Citizen' (The Oregonian, Friday, Oct. 16, 2009)

CORT AND FATBOY: 'Trick 'r Treat,' 'A Serious Man,' and the Eisenberg/Cera debate

During the Friday, Oct. 9 "Cort and Fatboy" broadcast, we talked about "Trick 'r Treat" -- a really well-made homage to '80s horror-anthology flicks that inexplicably went straight to home video. (I remember talking briefly with writer/director Michael Dougherty about this project way back in 2006.)

Also discussed: the Coen Bros.' latest, "A Serious Man" -- plus "Adventureland," "Anvil!," Jesse Eisenberg vs. Michael Cera, and my sad inability to get much interested in "Dollhouse."

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Cort and Fatboy (Friday, Oct. 9, 2009) [ mp3 ] [ streaming ] [ iTunes ]

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CORT AND FATBOY: 'Zombieland,' 'Whip It,' 'The Invention of Lying' and designer cupcakes

During the Friday, Oct. 2 "Cort and Fatboy" broadcast, we discuss "Zombieland," "Whip It," and "The Invention of Lying."

I also attempt to explain the appeal of the comics series "The Umbrella Academy," and I win the designer-cupcake wars with help from special guest Anno Superstar.

I turn up around 55:45, As usual, the whole show's well worth a listen.
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Cort and Fatboy (Friday, Oct. 2, 2009) [ mp3 ] [ streaming ] [ iTunes ]

The Mr. Do & Mr. Don't Fall Activities Guide.

In their latest comic-strip outing, beloved instructional characters Mr. Do and Mr. Don't teach Portlanders how to behave at various fall cultural events -- including a science exhibit, a costume ball, and a concert of video-game music.

The last panel may be my favorite drawing of Mr. Don't ever.
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The Mr. Do & Mr. Don't Fall Activities Guide (Webcomics Nation)

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MOVIE REVIEW: 'Whip It'

From today's Oregonian....

I can offer no higher praise for "Whip It" than the following: This terrific little flick feels a little like my all-time favorite sports movie, 1979's "Breaking Away," only with roller-derby instead of bike racing as the sport.

I don't think this is remotely accidental. Both movies are comedy-dramas about smart teens embracing offbeat athletic pursuits as they try to escape their small towns. Both movies are shot in a low-key, unpretentious style, and are as fascinated with failure and human comedy as they are with the Big Game. And "Whip It" director Drew Barrymore just goes ahead and makes the parallels explicit by casting "Breaking Away"'s guitar-strumming dork, Daniel Stern, as the father of her protagonist, Bliss (Ellen Page).

Bliss is a meek 17-year-old alterna-dork languishing in Bodeen, Texas. She favors thrift-store combat boots and a Stryper t-shirt that she wears, you know,  ironically. She works at a kitschy BBQ joint with her best friend (Alia Shawkat). Her blue-collar family loves her dearly, but her postal-worker mom (Marcia Gay Harden) keeps shoving Bliss onto the pageant-circuit stage.

Bliss' journey into quiet desperation is suddenly derailed when a bunch of ferocious, tattooed roller-derby women roll into the Austin thrift store she's patronizing and slap a DIY flyer on the counter. Bliss goes to a match -- and the sight of women strapping on pads, taking on nicknames like "Bloody Holly," rejecting the conventions of polite society, and turning into awesomely foul-mouthed warriors promptly blows her mind.

Bliss joins the worst team in the league, the Hurl Scouts, but tells her folks she's getting special SAT tutoring. What could possibly go wrong?

I loved this movie. It put a big grin on my face, and I think it was partially a grin of relief. "Whip It" is funny, joyful and humane. It gives women actual dialogue to say (and lets them kick ass with their real, imperfect bodies) instead of just having them dither about boys for a couple of hours. It understands the subculture it covers -- a rarity. And while it takes the structure of a sports movie, in execution it refutes several of the stupid lies Hollywood usually tells us in rom-coms and sports flicks. There's a lot of "victory in failure" in "Whip It," and no character quite fits into a strict category -- e.g, Harden's pageant-mom is also a postal worker who's funny and tough and caring and nuanced and sneaks a cigarette every once in a while, and at least one roller-derby teammate has grown-up insights that call Bliss on her self-centeredness. And while Bliss enjoys a romance with a cute musician (Landon Pigg), it never becomes the key to her identity.

In a movie full of pleasant surprises, maybe the most pleasant is how confident Drew Barrymore is as a director. Adapting the young-adult novel by Shauna Cross (who also wrote the screenplay), Barrymore films the movie -- and especially the marvelous roller-derby sequences -- in a low-key, take-your-time handheld style with more than a twinge of the '70s to it. She also seems to have digested the nuances, self-effacing humor and underlying psychology of 21st-century roller derby; given that the sport is a careful mix of gladiator combat, sex-positive feminism and indie-rock comic stylings, I can't imagine that was an easy task.

And Barrymore is terrific with her actors, finding moments for even the smallest supporting players. The Hurl Scouts team lineup is like an alt-culture "Dirty Dozen," featuring Barrymore, "SNL" star Kristen Wiig, New Zealand stuntwoman Zoe Bell and hip-hop star Eve -- all of them doing several of their own stunts and reveling in their loserdom, even as the brilliant performance-art plays designed by their coach (Andrew Wilson, brother of Luke and Owen) start moving them up the league ranks. And Juliette Lewis is all snarling rock-and-roll menace as Bliss' chief derby rival.

The benefit of Barrymore's hard work is that you completely understand why a young woman would be entranced by the roller-derby scene, even if you're a boring schmuck completely outside its core demographic. Like me. For teenage girls, I could see "Whip It" being a minor revelation. I hope they see it in droves.
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(111 min., PG-13, multiple locations) Grade: B-plus

'Whip It' (The Oregonian, Oct. 2, 2009)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Zombieland'

From today's Oregonian....

If there's one moment that perfectly encapsulates the vibe of the horror-comedy "Zombieland," it's probably this: Woody Harrelson in a cowboy hat, whooping and hollering, picking off zombies with a gun ... from a moving roller coaster.

The movie's a ride, basically. It's a slick, funny buddy-flick confection about a dork (Jesse Eisenberg), a Twinkie-loving hick (Harrelson), a hottie (Emma Stone) and a sassy kid (Abigail Breslin) who bicker and bond as they drive cross-country after a zombie plague. They're each looking for a safe haven they pretty much know they won't find, they don't seem too busted up about it, and they periodically stop along the way to break into celebrity mansions and/or smash things for fun.

There isn't any deeper message to the thing beyond "Family is where you find it." If it weren't for the R rating for gore and swearing, you could almost describe the movie as family-friendly.

Now, I tend to like my zombie films with some sort of glaringly obvious social commentary -- whether it's a satire of consumerism (1978's "Dawn of the Dead") or a riff on 30-year-old boys who need to grow up ("Shaun of the Dead"). "Zombieland" has none of that, but it won me over anyway. It just kind of kicks its feet up and says, "Let's have some low-key fun with this whole postapocalyptic-undead thing," then does so with consumer-grade professionalism and polish. I could see it becoming a medium-sized hit.

Director Ruben Fleischer has a decent visual wit -- particularly when he plays with slow motion, litters the frame with title cards listing Eisenberg's survival tips, or stops the film cold to show you the "Zombie Kill of the Week." The cast is adorable, especially Eisenberg, taking his second trip this year to an amusement park in a movie ending in "-land." His Michael Cera-esque readings of lines like "I'm just kind of a Sancho Panza character" clash nicely with Harrelson and the flesh-munching wasteland.

And without spoiling anything, I'll just say that "Zombieland" has one hell of an extended celebrity cameo. (Don't spoil yourself beforehand; it's funnier that way.)
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(81 min., R, multiple locations) Grade: B

'Zombieland' (The Oregonian, Friday, Oct. 2, 2009)