CulturePulp.

CORT AND FATBOY: 'Green Zone' and 'She's Out of My League'

During the Friday, March 12 "Cort & Fatboy" podcast, we talked about "Green Zone" and "She's Out of My League." Also -- inspired by my good friend Ryan's recent visit -- I shared true tales of royal housesitting and learning to cry on cue.

(Pictured at right: some photographic proof of the absolutely ridiculous-sounding story that kicks off today's show. Click to enlarge.)

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, March 12, 2010)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'She's Out of My League'

Movie review in today's Oregonian....

"She's Out of My League" is a comedy filled with lies.

If this weaksauce ripoff of "There's Something About Mary" had actually managed to be funny, I'd forgive its many falsehoods. But as with the recent rom-coms "I Love You, Beth Cooper" and "Splinterheads," the filmmaker's flop-sweat is the audience's water torture. So let's focus on the deceit.

But first: The movie introduces us to a no-ambition weenie in Pittsburgh named Kirk (played by Jay Baruchel, a good actor who's done vastly better variations on this character in projects inlcuding Judd Apatow's "Undeclared"). Kirk works security at the least-secure airport in movie history. Everyone tells him he's "funny," but the evidence onscreen suggests he's actually "dithering."

Then, for reasons barely explained (a fetish for the unactualized, perhaps?), a blandly hot event planner (Alice Eve) starts asking Kirk on dates.

Cue wacky free-swearing best friends, based on the wacky free-swearing best friends in better movies (including the wacky free-swearing best friend played by Baruchel in "Knocked Up"). Cue endless discussions of what it means when a "five" hooks up with a "ten" that play like the screenwriters have experienced the company of women largely in theory. Cue sexual mortification, endless whining, grand gestures and nutty climactic chases -- all of it generating an almost overpowering audience urge to reach into the screen, smack Kirk about the pate and yell, "For the love of God, you sad-sack, do something worthy of this woman's interest for ten blessed seconds!"

Now: Contained within this scenario are the following untruths, which (again) would be somewhat pardonable if they were explored in a way that made me laugh:

1. Blandly hot women will see "who you really are inside" -- even if you make no effort to exhibit appeal or personality.

2. Blandly hot women exist as projections of your personal ideals and should be placed on pedestals for worship. (Except when you get angry, at which point they should be knocked off.) Also, these women will blithely ignore every offensive, unfunny thing said around them if it doesn't serve the narrative.

3. All relationship problems can be solved with a single big speech or grand gesture by the dweeb -- especially if it's bookended by a crazy chase through, say, an airport.

4. Sex is primarily a vehicle for fear and embarrassment.

5. Your friends will happily shave you anywhere.

6. Audiences don't need to see the actual conversations that build relationships and make them vaguely comprehensible. These conversations are difficult to write, and are best dispensed of in wordless montages.

All that said, T. J. Miller and Krysten Ritter are somewhat amusing in their underwritten roles as Diet Jason Lee and Diet Zooey Deschanel. Otherwise, the movie stinks. Its gormless, assertion-free protagonist offends as a role model for idiot youths, and, even worse, offends as drama. Instead, I'd suggest renting the original "There's Something About Mary" or -- even better -- renting "(500) Days of Summer," which gleefully shoves a few dynamite sticks under the very myths "Out of My League" embraces.
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(104 min., rated R for language and sexual content) Grade: D

'She's Out of My League' (The Oregonian, Friday, March 12, 2010)

CORT AND FATBOY: 'Alice in Wonderland,' 'Brooklyn's Finest,' the Oscars and a Benadryl hangover

During today's "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, we discussed the good-looking/story-weak "Alice in Wonderland" and "Brooklyn's Finest," and fail to work up much excitement over the Oscars.

Also: "Cort signs on with a raging Benadryl/Vodka hangover after a long night battling hives; kids smoking incense with vomitous consequences; Doogie Smurf collects a paycheck; what really killed the Dinosaurs; Fatty rants passionately about something stupid; Gladiator Owls -- the movie; a hidden link between the Blues Brothers and the Coen Brothers; and TFAW's rather awesome coloring contest"

And don't forget: Tonight's Cort and Fatboy Midnight Movie is "The Blues Brothers" -- with a pre-show concert by Target for Tomorrow. Bagdad Theater, $3, 21 and over, doors at 10 p.m.
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Cort and Fatboy (Friday, March 5, 2010)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Brooklyn's Finest'

Movie review in today's Oregonian....

The half-successful crime drama "Brooklyn's Finest" introduces us to three burned-out New York cops, beaten down (respectively) by age, lies and financial need.

Eddie (Richard Gere) is drunk, borderline suicidal and pathetically in love with a prostitute (Shannon Kane). He's seven days from retirement and copes with his job by refusing to care about it, to the disgust of his rookie trainees.

Tango (Don Cheadle) has been undercover in a housing-project drug ring for so long, he finds himself more concerned about the aging gangster who saved his life (Wesley Snipes) than the imperatives of his unpleasant law-enforcement handlers (Will Patton, Ellen Barkin).

And Sal (Ethan Hawke) is a desperate drug-squad detective who recently started robbing and murdering dealers so he can make a down payment on a bigger house for his pregnant-with-twins, asthmatic wife (Lili Taylor) and their already sizeable brood.

"Brooklyn's Finest" is directed by Antoine Fuqua ("Training Day," "Shooter," "King Arthur") from a first screenplay by Michael C. Martin -- who reportedly wrote the script as a contest entry in 2005 while recovering from a car wreck. To his credit, Martin certainly swung for the fences with his debut: The story is told as a grim crime epic, with the Eddie/Tango/Sal stories barely overlapping as the principals weave in and out of a Brooklyn housing project brimming with unrest. And Fuqua films it all in a dark, '70s-inflected style that suffuses everything with an oddly beautiful dread.

Unfortunately, this is one of those painful-to-write-about films where I admired the ambition and sincerity of the project while having a few too many problems with the particulars of execution. Fine moments, images and performances stand cheek-by-jowl with the clichéd, the on-the-nose and the slightly dopey.

For example: Gere and Snipes are fairly subtle and wonderful here -- it's fantastic to see Snipes return to Hollywood drama after a string of direct-to-video action flicks shot in Bulgaria. But the normally great Hawke falls into that thespian trap where he's playing the "actorly" version of a troubled cop -- all sweat and stubble and mannerisms and tattoos and shoving his colleagues around while yelling at the top of his lungs and dropping what I'm guessing were improvised f-bombs between Noo-Yawk-accented syllables.

And while the movie's plot structure is reasonably inventive, individual moments in Martin's script clunk or fail the common-sense test. Again for example: Hawke's character is presented as having only two options: Kill drug dealers for house-payment money or let his pregnant asthmatic wife suffer and maybe lose a twin in their current mold-filled home. Couldn't the wife maybe ride out the pregnancy at Sal's sister's house, were Sal was already threatening to send their daughter?

Also, did Lili Taylor really need to say the line, "I don't need anything -- just you, babe"? And did we really need an introductory scene where Gere not only wakes up with a start, but then immediately pours himself a shot of Irish whiskey and sticks a pistol in his mouth?

Still, for all the clunkiness, "Brooklyn's Finest" has an undeniable momentum and earns a few dramatic surprises. I was emotionally involved in the film's final showdowns. It's a shame this involvement is largely earned by Gere, Snipes and Fuqua in spite of some false moments on the page that hold the film back from the greatness it craves.
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(140 min., rated R for bloody violence throughout, strong sexuality, nudity, drug content and pervasive language) Grade: C

'Brooklyn's Finest' (The Oregonian, Friday, March 5, 2010)

THE CULTUREPULP Q&A: Mike Russell

So a couple of weeks ago, Dr. Amy K. Nyberg -- a journalism professor, author and student-newspaper advisor at Seton Hall University -- wrote me with the following (I'm paraphrasing slightly):

On March 14, I'll be helping give a presentation about comics reportage at the College Media Adviser’s convention in New York. Our goal is to show them some of the ways the comics form has been used in journalism beyond editorial cartoons. I've looked at all of the archived CulturePulp strips, and I was wondering if you’d be willing to take a few minutes to answer some questions.

Following are my answers to those questions. It's the closest thing I've ever given to a history of the CulturePulp pop-reportage comic strip.

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1. Can you give me some background about yourself and how you got started in comics, in journalism and in comics journalism?

I've been drawing comics since I was in grade school; I had a four-issue comic-book series (about robots, natch) in my elementary-school library for fellow students to check out.

I later wrote and drew a couple of narrative comic strips for various student publications at the University of Oregon and self-published them as books.

(I also majored in Magazine Journalism at U of O, and wrote for and edited high-school and college student publications.)

I did experiment a little with journalism in a comic-strip format during my college senior year -- collaborating on a cartoon feature in which my college comic-strip character interviewed two other college-comic-strip characters drawn by two other students.

I more or less let my cartooning career languish after I left college in 1992 -- tackling the medium in little fits and starts ("Santa's Lil' Gimp" is the standout), but putting most of my energy into running a couple of community newspapers and writing movie reviews on the Internet. Then, in 2004, I was hired on as a film critic at The Oregonian on the strength of my Web writing.

In March 2004, I had made a nonfiction comic strip for A&E about the history of superhero comics -- but I'd been kicking around an idea for YEARS about doing a comic strip in which I was the lead character, a strip that chronicled me doing weird/funny stuff as a pop-cultural reporter. And so, needing extra income, I simply walked up to my then-editor Grant Butler and pitched the idea a few months into my Oregonian gig. He said, "Make a prototype," and sent me to a zydeco concert. I made this comic, and to my surprise, Grant published that prototype and basically gave me a space in A&E every couple of weeks to do nearly anything I wanted. I was VERY lucky to have an editor willing to take that risk.

From there, I enjoyed the singularly terrifying experience of learning to do non-fiction pop-reportage comics in public.

I presented some of my ideas on the form at a journalism conference in Denver in (I think) 2005, and since then, I've also done a couple of journalism/semi-journalism strips for the Boston Globe: "A History of Aeon Flux" and an interview with filmmaker Richard Linklater.

2. I know that your strip CulturePulp appears in The Oregonian. What is your relationship with them? Are you a freelancer?

Yes. I've been freelancing with The Oregonian as a film reviewer/interviewer and as a cartoonist since Feb. 2004. This works out well; under the terms of my freelance contract, I own the copyright to all my comics in the paper 24 hours after publication.

2a. I’m interested in finding out more about the print version. What size does it run in the paper? What kind of play does it get in the section?

CulturePulp (and "Mr. Do & Mr. Don't") comics generally appear monthly in the front-of-the-book section of The Oregonian's Friday arts section, A&E. A couple of special strips were done for Sunday arts sections, as I recall. The A&E strips take up an entire roughly tabloid-sized page of the section -- about 9.5" wide by 10.5" tall.

(It's a really generous news hole, actually, given the ever-shrinking size of comic strips on other pages.) When I started doing the strip, it was half that size, and I had a LOT more trouble with cramped art and making everything fit.

I rearrange the panels for the online version of the strip.

In recent years, time constraints have me taking breaks from the journalism/reportage comics to do a far less research-intensive humor strip called "Mr. Do  & Mr. Don't" -- a spoof of "Goofus & Gallant" in which two "instructional cartoon characters" teach Portlanders how to behave at various cultural events.

(After you tally the reporting, transcribing, distilling, scriptwriting, layout, drawing, lettering, editing, and post-production tweaking, each CulturePulp journalism comic takes about 30 hours to make. And that's been with considerable inking assistance by my good friend Bill Mudron and digital coloring by the likes of Mudron and the talented animator Chad Essley.)

3. Beyond the artist/writers usually associated with comics journalism (Sacco, Rall, Kuper, Burford, Bagge), are there other cartoonists who have done journalism in comics form?

There are several. Newspapers have experimented with the form here and there. Here are a few I like, in papers and elsewhere:

• "Phables" by Brad Guigar
• "Framed" by Chris Lowrance
• David Chelsea (autobio/textbook)
• Dennis Eichhorn (autobio)
• Khris Soden's "City of Roses" history-of-Portland comics
• Ryan Alexander-Tanner, who did a one-panel journalism comic for a rival paper in town called Willamette Week. (Ryan and I actually were pitted against each other in an art battle, depicted here.)
• I'm also a HUGE fan of Kate Beaton's history and autobio comics, which stretch the definition of "journalism" but are also brilliant. (She did an amazing strip about her years working off her student loans in a Canadian oil-field office, but it's not online.)

4. What do you think is gained from creating a comic about an event rather than simply writing about it?

Honestly, I'm not sure my thoughts on the matter are terribly complicated: I just thought it was a funny/unusual/attention-getting way to cover Portland's weirder subcultural corners while giving myself a cool excuse to do stuff like ride a Segway. Doing it in comics form often allows you to play up the subjectivity and comedy in a way that not even video can match.

5. Taking photographs can be done in seconds, but drawing panels is quite laborious and time-consuming. Why is creating a comic worth the extra time? What does the comics form offer that traditional story-plus-photographs does not?

See above. I guess maybe I'd put it this way:

Comics are the hardest form of writing for the easiest form of reading, which makes it interesting to me as a formal experiment. A lot of people could film themselves doing the sorts of things I do in these strips; a lot of people could write about doing the sorts of things I do in these strips. Very few people would choose to make comic strips along those lines, however -- and none of those comics would look quite like mine. (Most of them would probably look BETTER than mine, but that's another story.)

My point being: This personal authorial stamp provided by the comics form is interesting to me -- not just in my own pop-culture-centered work, but in all nonfiction-comics work, especially by masters like Sacco.

I think what you gain from chronicling a pop-culture event in comics form is that you lend the experience an extremely subjective personal stamp that can be vivid and funny in ways that other mediums can't.

Also, as I once heard Art Spiegelman say (I'm paraphrasing), comics work like the human mind -- distilling information into quicks bursts of words and images. They can be incredibly effective as a journalism vehicle.

6. Like many comics journalists, you usually choose first person for your work. Can you explain why?

Well, I can't speak for hard-core masters of the form like Sacco or Crumb. But for me, I make myself a character because

(a) it ensures I always have something to make fun of, i.e., myself, and

(b) I started the strip without having a lead character as a guide, and it just wasn't as fun to read as it was when I provided the reader with a little first-person everyman who can act as the reader's entrée (and anchor) into whatever world we're visiting. I'd argue it's not narcissism so much as satisfying the reader's need for a protagonist. TV-news reports have anchors and correspondents; why not comics? 

7. In the online versions of CulturePulp, you always include “Endnotes and Digressions.” Do those appear in the print version, as well? Why do you feel the endnotes are necessary?

There are endnotes in the print version, but I usually expand them for the online version. I do this partly because I love footnotes (I'm a HUGE fan of David Foster Wallace's nonfiction work) -- but also because supplementing the comic with hotlinks and denser textual information just makes the reading experience richer, and gives a greater sense that the piece was actually reported. I try to make each comic a sort of multimedia "information meal," and the endnotes are a big part of that.

8. Obviously, these questions just scratch the surface of comics journalism. Is there anything else you’d like to add for our college audience?

Mostly, I'd just love to see more people trying to do pop-culture journalism comics. I started mine because I'd always wanted to read one in a newspaper. By all means feel free to make yours better-drawn, funnier and/or more insightful than mine.

9. May we quote from your comments in our paper/presentation?

Only if I haven't made a complete jackass of myself.

-- Mike Russell

CORT AND FATBOY: 'Shutter Island,' 'Waking Sleeping Beauty' and my boxes of twentysomething failure

During the Friday, Feb. 19 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, we talked about "Shutter Island" and the surprisingly dishy Disney-animation documentary "Waking Sleeping Beauty."

Also: I have "a slight case of the grumpies after a week's worth of pawing through cardboard containers of wadded-up dreams. Tales of stalled-out sitcoms are told.... How Seth McFarlane just became the left's Karl Rove; the last straw with 'Twilight' fans, and how Kid Rock is personally responsible for the decline of Detroit, Michigan."

All this plus an ancient unicorn burial ground and my stepdaughter's fantasy playlist of heavy-metal covers of Disney songs.

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, Feb. 19, 2010)

PIFF Week 2: 'Waking Sleeping Beauty'

The Oregonian's coverage of The Portland International Film Festival continues. Here's this week's contribution from yours truly; click here to read the film team's complete Week 2 roundup.

"Waking Sleeping Beauty"

Given that it's financed and distributed by Disney, this behind-the-scenes look at Disney's "animation renaissance" of 1984-94 is something of a pleasant surprise -- because it's a fairly warts-and-all portrait of the creative and ego clashes that gave rise to "The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast," "Aladdin" and "The Lion King."

Director (and "Lion King" producer) Don Hahn uses a combination of home movies, news reports, interviews, half-finished production footage and even mean caricatures drawn by angry animators to recount the massive upheaval that started in 1984 -- when Roy Disney, Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, Jeffrey Katzenberg and others began the traumatic process of upending Disney's creaky animation division to turn it back into a hugely profitable hit machine.

It's a fast-moving, funny and occasionally sad look at the overworked intersection of the boardroom and drawing table; the behind-the-scenes footage alone makes this a must-see for animation nuts.

B; United States; 86 min. Playing at:

• 1:30 p.m. Saturday (Feb. 20), Broadway;
• 9:30 p.m. Monday (Feb. 22), Broadway

PIFF coverage: Week 2 (The Oregonian, Feb. 19, 2010)

CORT AND FATBOY: 'The Wolfman' and BAM Fest, with special guest Aaron Mesh

During the Friday, Feb. 12 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, Willamette Week film critic Aaron Mesh joined us as we discussed "The Wolfman" and Mesh's really quite awesome Beer And Movie Fest (Feb. 10-26).

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, Feb. 12, 2010)

'The Mr. Do & Mr. Don't Valentine's Day Romance Guide.'

Service journalism at its finest! In their latest comic-strip appearance, beloved instructional characters Mr. Do and Mr. Don't teach Portlanders how to delight their sweethearts on Valentine's Day. Sort of.

(Bill Mudron and I believe this comic may contain the most repulsive Mr. Don't drawing thus far. Guess which one. Hint: It's available in the strip's endnotes as a desktop wallpaper.)

The Mr. Do & Mr. Don't Valentine's Day Romance Guide (Webcomics Nation)

Complete CulturePulp comics archives at WCN

PIFF Week 1: 'Protector,' 'Home' and 'The Good, The Bad, The Weird'

The Oregonian's coverage of The Portland International Film Festival kicked off today (Feb. 12). Here are the contributions from yours truly; click here to read the film team's complete Week 1 roundup.

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"The Good, The Bad, The Weird"

This barmy-cool "Eastern Western" pits a cowboy, a murderer, a train-robbing goofball and various armies and bandit hordes against each other while chasing a treasure map across 1930s Manchuria.

The movie's a funny, fast-moving pastiche of Spielberg, Woo, Leone and George Miller, but it's a must-see for its three big action set pieces -- which go on for a million years each and become almost hallucinatory. Did you really just watch a cowboy endlessly swing 100 feet above an open-air market on a rope, picking off bandits with a rifle? Did you really just watch 50 guys on trucks and horses blast each other to bits while chasing one guy on a motorcycle?

You did.

And it was awesome.

B-plus; South Korea; 130 min. Playing at:

• 9 p.m. Saturday (Feb. 13), Broadway;
• 4 p.m. Monday (Feb. 15), Whitsell;
• 9:15 p.m. Wednesday (Feb. 17), Broadway

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"Protector"

This ruthless, great-looking Czech World War II drama charts betrayals both national and marital.

After the Nazis roll into Prague, a radio personality (Marek Daniel) is forced to spew German propaganda to protect his Jewish wife (Jana Plodková). Meanwhile, the wife -- bored to tears after her movie-star career is cut short by anti-Semitic edict -- sneaks out of their apartment to flirt with a dashing, drug-abusing projectionist and engages in minor acts of artistic rebellion.

Director/co-writer Marek Najbrt does a beautiful, careful and relentless job tallying the increasing compromises and acts of unfaithfulness by all parties -- painting marriages, careers and nation-states into horrible corners.

B-plus; Czech Republic; 98 min. Playing at:

• 12:45 p.m. Sunday (Feb. 14), Broadway;
• 2 p.m. Monday (Feb. 15), Broadway;
• 7:45 p.m. Monday (Feb. 15), Broadway

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"Home"

Director/co-writer Ursula Meier crafts a compelling (if not particularly subtle) micro-study of the effects of modern life on the family.

A husband (Olivier Gourmet), wife (Isabelle Huppert) and three kids enjoy a quiet, cuddly existence in a house by an empty, long-unfinished highway, which they use as their epic front yard. Then the government finishes that highway -- and within days, the intrusion of pollution, noise and gawking humanity inflicts every urban stress on the family at once, driving them wall-up-the-windows crazy.

"Home" is carried by strong performances that (mostly) make you sympathize with people completely unprepared for the inevitable, and Meier's clever frame compositions really make you feel the vehicular intrusion.

B-minus; Switzerland; 95 min. Playing at:

• 8:30 p.m. Saturday (Feb. 13), Broadway;
• 3:15 p.m. Sunday (Feb. 14), Broadway;
• 8 p.m. Monday (Feb. 15), Broadway

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PIFF Week 1 coverage (The Oregonian, Feb. 12, 2010)