Lowering the Bar

I'm of two minds of the recent decision to lower the passing grade of the 2007 Bar Exams. On the one hand, I thank God the Supreme Court saved all those people from the sadism of one or more of the examiners, but on the other hand, I wonder if they haven't done the profession a disservice in the process.

Of course, this is not the first time the bar grade has been lowered.

When he was alive, my grandfather never got tired of telling me how lucky he was to have passed the bar because the grade was lowered in order to accommodate a high profile examinee at the time (I will refrain from giving names). He told me he got something like a 73 or a 74 at a time when the passing grade was kicked down to 70.

That's just one other instance of grade-tweaking in the nearly 100 years of the bar exam, and from what I hear not the only one.

The thing is, I know how absolutely power-drunk and completely unreasonable some law school professors can be, giving students a hard time for no other reason than that they can, no matter what they might tell other people. A lot of bar examiners are cut from the same cloth, and unlike law professors, they cannot be approached after the exam is done and be begged for mercy or reconsideration.

All these things taken into account, yes, the Supreme Court did the right thing.

The question is, if next year, with a whole new batch of examiners, the un-'tweaked' results of the bar are still the same, will the decision to change things around still have been a good one?

And of those who benefitted from the adjustment, how many people actually deserved it?

None of these issues is of any real concern to me, but part of me can't help but wonder either way.

No More Excuses

I've been on moratorium from collecting toy cars for the last six months or so. The moratorium first came into force after I spent in excess of three thousand pesos, or over eighty US dollars, on a 1/18 scale toy version of the Ferrari F2007 that Kimi Raikkonen drove to victory. Since then I've been able to sneak in the occasional P100 Hot Wheels or Matchbox, and last month I managed a P250 purchase of a Shelby Mustang, but my expenses have yet to scale such towering heights again, and will not do so for a little while to come. As far as anything above P500 is concerned it's a big fat nyet.

Fortunately I had settled into "Holy Grail" mode, meaning, that I would save up for that next big push, in this case a 1/18 scale Audi R8 by Kyosho. I'm more than willing to bide my time on this one, because I know there aren't a whole lot of people willing to pony up that kind of money for this thing.

Oddly enough, I comforted myself with the thought that, even while saving up for this glorious coup, I would still be on the lookout for less pricey stuff, namely the Audi R8 and the Porsche 911 GT3, both rendered by Matchbox in gloriously affordable 1/64. I figured that the hunt for these would keep me nice and happy till the big day, whenever that may be.

Well, yesterday I found both Matchbox cars in one fell swoop, and in true fanboy/collector tradition, bought two of each; one to save and one to open.

I'm so deliriously happy with the way the GT3 was done that I even posted a product review of it over on my multiply page. I was of course happy to find the Audi R8, but found the paint job a little disappointing considering that the car has a somewhat patented look with one color for its body and another, highly contrasting color for the aluminum blades covering the massive cooling vents on either side of the car, for example, white body, blue blades, or blue body, silver blades. Matchbox eschewed any such color combinations and just colored the car a plain silver, even though the casting of the car itself is still topnotch for something so small.

I guess my 'problem' now is that I really have no excuse left from swearing off collecting and saving up for 'the big one.' Ah, well...

Metafiction...Sort of...

I've never had any bones about borrowing from my own personal experience/angst when writing short fiction. I did it a lot when I was younger, and I continue to do so to a more limited extent nowadays, and I'll probably keep on doing it in one form or another depending on the kind of story I'm writing.

But now is the first time I've tried to write with someone else, namely my recently deceased dear friend Jay Tan, as a template, and I've been repeatedly surprised by how hard a task it is proving to be.

Oddly enough, it's not because I'm concerned he might look bad. No, my concern is that he might come across as a two-dimensional, namby-pamby goody-two shoes whose sole cause of misery in life is that the author (me) wants to pile a whole series of misfortunes on him. No, what I hope to do is to borrow a little bit from Shakespeare and create a character who very much shapes his own destiny, in that when things go wrong he has himself to blame and when things go right...well, it's because he did something right. I don't want someone who just gets buffeted about by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune because he's too nice a guy to do anything about it. To create such an insipid character out of such a wonderfully nuanced human being would be a supreme insult, almost as much as if I just made the guy a flat-out asshole.

Even though the character is only loosely based on Jay, and is so unlike him in many respects, (for example, he won't even talk like he did), I still find myself tortured by the thought of creating a pasteboard character one way or the other who doesn't deserve the fate I have in store for him at the end of the story (ah ah aaaahhh, you'll have to read it once it's done...talesfrommasutra.blogspot.com).

Consequently I've done the unthinkable; unable to fully fathom the depth's of Jay's mind, which is now lost to me for the rest of this lifetime, I've infused a little bit of my romantic history into the narrative...my frustrations, my angst.

The original 'inspired by' template now feels a tad tainted, or at the very least diluted, but from where I stand it felt like a necessary evil because I felt like I was up against a creative brick wall.

I'm eleven pages into what I envision to be about a hundred-plus-page novella which I plan to break up into smaller installments to be published online, and I have yet to introduce the other lead character. I can't spend too much time dawdling on this one guy or I'll shoot myself in the foot for sure.

The result, as sick as this may sound, currently feels like a Jay Tan-Jim Arroyo inspired hybrid, or our love child, for those of you whose minds are perpetually in the gutter.

In the end, I'm not trying to create a character that everyone will love because he's such a nice guy or that everyone will hate because he's such an asshole, but someone who people will be able to understand and relate to, no matter how good or bad his actions may be. If I get this across, then I will have honored Jay through this creation.

Why I Stopped Collecting Comic Books

It's funny; I actually mentioned the reason why I stopped collecting in my multiply blog, but that was only incidental to a review I wrote of Arnold Arre's "The Mythology Class." Considering I've been a fairly regular comic book collector for over twenty years by now, though, I figure I could expound on the topic a little more than that.

There was a time when mainstream comics were a storytelling medium, and to be honest, it wasn't even that long ago. Marvel Comics put out a lot of good stories, such as both volumes of The Ultimates, Mark Millar's 12-issue run on Spider-Man, Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men, and about the first two years of J. Michael Straczynski's run on Amazing Spider-Man, to name a few. Sometime around 2004 or 2005, however, the mandate over at Marvel comics changed, and I can only say for the worse.

Events took precedence over actual storytelling, and suddenly the overriding concern at editorial appeared to be to either establish new status quos, or completely destroy long standing ones. There's nothing wrong with this, per se, except that in doing so, they basically destroyed a simple principle of storytelling that says that any story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

No, three major Marvel 'event' miniseries (and possibly more that I haven't really kept track of) basically followed the pattern of beginning-middle-total anticlimax. Civil War was unabashedly designed to 'change the face of the Marvel Universe' and in that it did its job, but ending on a rather unsatisfying note, with the now-dead Captain America basically copping out of the fight. Of course, this gave rise to several dozen "Civil War Aftermath" and "Civil War Initiative" books, only one of which I actually enjoyed (Dan Slott's Avengers: The Initiative, which I reviewed here). World War Hulk, which started with everyone's favorite green giant dishing out some much-deserved ass-kicking around the Marvel Universe, ended with a similar cop-out, that is, with some half-hearted explanation on how Hulk's misery wasn't really the fault of Marvel's 'heroes' Tony Stark, Reed Richards, Stephen Strange and Black Bolt.

Oh, and Hulk ultimately lost his 'world war,' mainly by default. Similarly, a plethora of new books were launched from the non-ending of this series as well.

Probably the most heinous example of a narrative anti-climax I've seen, however, has to be Neil Gaiman's take on the Eternals, a miniseries which is beautifully drawn and peppered with some lovely dialogue...but in which PRACTICALLY NOTHING HAPPENS. There's long been talk about a sequel/ongoing series to follow this story up, but it severely disappointed me that someone like Gaiman would even agree to write a story that would basically just "set up" the characters without actually having them DO anything. Thinking about it, Gaiman's name on the series was just one big marketing push for an obscure property that Marvel's been unable to sell for years. Eternals didn't have to be some big marketing push the way Marvel's other properties were, but it sure as hell read like one.

So in short, comic books of the last three years are no longer created with the intent of telling a story and keeping the fans entertained, but with ensuring that the stories are so open-ended and thoroughly unsatisfying that people will HAVE to come back for more. Well, I for one am getting off this particular bandwagon. Oh, wait, I already have.

Sure, there are a lot of comics out there that aren't guilty of this shameless ploy, like All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, which apparently tells stories in single or two-issue arcs and will do so until its twelfth issue hits stands sometime in 2010 (which is sad considering it started in 2005), or The Twelve by J. Michael Straczynski and Chris Weston, or even Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's take on The Fantastic Four, but I'm not in any hurry to pick them up because I've really been worn down by all the stunts. The beauty about ASS is that the back issues aren't that hard to scrounge up, and well, as far as the two Marvel series are concerned, they'll probably look even better when collected.

Though I still sporadically collect toy cars, now I'm more into my blogs (including this one), my writing, and my multiply account. It's always nicer to create things rather than just consume goods, all things considered.

My New Favorite Place

I figured that I needed to write a post that would take me away from all of the grief, frustration and anger that has characterized my life for the last several months, a series of lows and lowers (as opposed to the usual highs and lows paradigm) that only just recently started to taper off.

I'd like to write about my new haven; the place where I go to on a regular basis to find inner peace: the Santa Cruz church.

I've been working at my new job in Binondo for nearly two months now, but for some reason I've formed no real connection with the Binondo church, as beautifully ornate as it may be. With its aged and crumbly gray finish, the Binondo church should theoretically appeal more to me, a self-confessed fan of old churches (who practically went into orgasmic ecstasy two years ago when we, my family and I, did an extended tour of the north, which as everyone knows is the place to find old, Spanish era churches here in the Philippines).

The Sta. Cruz Church, however, does not appeal to the old church lover in me. Although the basic structure itself is over two hundred years old, it's pretty much been maintained and updated through the years. The current exterior finish is an arguably somewhat bland coat of white paint, while the roofing is, I think, green galvanized iron. Granted, rare is the church, even in the Ilocos, that still maintains the old tile roofing, but the combination of plaster, white paint and green roofing can make people forget that they're looking at a structure that's nearly a quarter of a millenium old, even despite the classical Spanish era facade with the bell tower and everything.

But that's not the point.

What I hands-down love about the church is the austerity of it. It's actually very bare inside, in an almost Zen-kind of way. The hallmark of many an old church, including some of my favorites, is the huge structure behind the altar which houses either a central icon like a miraculous image of the Virgin Mary or the Baby Jesus, or two hundred million saints. There's nothing like that in Sta. Cruz; just a mosaic of a lamb and a stream of water flowing down from it (no, it's not taking a leak), which ends on the tabernacle. It's so very simple and yet so powerful. There are a couple of statues in the side naves, sure, but nothing too ostentatious. Most of the images are found in little alcoves near the entrance to the church, and as a result the people who want to pay homage to them are free to visit their favorite saint while the casual churchgoer is free to sit in the pews and just pray without having his senses bombarded by this statue or that statue. Also, the paucity of plaster images means that the Sacred Host, which is set on the altar for display during most hours of the day, gets all of the attention.

I think what I love about the place is how much easier it is for me to commune with God there. The architecture, and the whole "look at me, I'm beautiful" aura that usually surrounds and even sometimes saturates old churches doesn't distract me from what's really important about setting foot in the house of the Lord.

My wife tells me she also used to like going there, many years ago, when she was teaching in a Chinese School in the area. There's a certain poetry in that, I think. Maybe some day we can renew our wedding vows there or something. Or we could have our next kid (assuming there is one) baptized there. And lunch or dinner or merienda sena will be at a nice Chinese restaurant nearby. Whatever.

The point is I love going to that Church to find inner peace. It's nice to have a "special place" and while I consider Bohol the most serene place I've been to, at least I don't have fly a thousand kilometers or so to get to the place that settles my mind and spirit.

Naked Grief

A few years ago comic-book writer J.M. DeMatteis put Spider-Man into a murderous rage against one of his long-time foes, the chameleon. He was basically fit to kill. At the end, however, Chameleon had some kind of nervous breakdown, and as a result Spider-Man couldn't push through with clobbering him with the huge tombstone he'd been about to use to bash the guy's head in. The rationale the writer gave was that 'such naked anguish is hard to look upon.' I don't know whether or not DeMatteis coined the phrase, but it left quite an impact on my mind, such that fourteen years after reading that comic book, I find myself revisiting, if not slightly altering it to describe the collective experience of mourning Jay Tan.

The outpouring of grief during his wake and funeral mass was unlike any I'd ever seen, and although I'm not what I'd call a regular at such events, I've been to more than my fair share. Of course, considering how dear Jay was to me it was fairly easily for me to be swept up in the tide of grief; though I had cried a fair bit in the first few nights of the wake, it turned out, a bit to my surprise, that I was basically just warming up for the grand finale on the day of his funeral. Even through my own tears I could see how many others were being shed for such a dear friend, a son, a brother, a cousin...a great person in general.

Grief does strange things to people; during the last night of his wake a large number of people ranging from his co-workers to his friends to his immediate family had quite a few stories to share and some of them would have been pretty embarrassing to the speakers themselves under any other circumstances, but it didn't really matter. This was the last hurrah, on this earth anyway, of someone whom everyone gathered had loved in one way or another.

DeMatteis' choice of words, i.e. 'naked' and a word equated to profound sorrow, just feels completely appropriate; other writers may have used 'stark' or 'pure' but 'naked' just works so much better because of the things associated with the word: vulnerability, shame, discomfort among other things. People (theoretically) get naked with and in front of someone with whom they feel an emotional bond.

There we were...a whole bunch of naked people. Some were less comfortable about it than others, but even those most determined not to show too much emotion found themselves crying. In one instance, I consoled a friend who had been hell-bent on keeping in the tears...but failed. I said, "it's all right; it's for Jay anyway."

Just as Jay would have wanted, we will get over him; the healing process has already begun. But it's certainly going to take awhile. I hardly think Jay will begrudge us that.

I Can't Say This Enough Right Now...

I miss you, Jay. I know I'm not the only one. I know you wouldn't want me to be all sad and mopey, but here I am.

My friend says you're in a better place, and I know this to be true, but just as I knew there was a very real chance that you wouldn't survive your transplant for very long yet refused to believe it, so I feel terrible about your being gone even though I know you're in a place where nothing can harm you anymore, where all you'll ever feel is joy and God's loving embrace.

John Julian M. Tan III

He went by a lot of names: J.J., Jay, Budoy and the Bounce. I called him friend. For the longest time my best friend, but never anything less than one of my closest friends in this life, the kind of friend a lot of people go through their whole lives without ever having.

Last Monday, he died. On Tuesday, I eulogized him on our barkada's blog. It was unrelentingly maudlin, which made sense, but what annoyed me upon re-reading it was how it read like some kind of posthumous resume, like I was making some lame attempt to endorse Jay to the Big Guy upstairs. Of course it was all about praise and his legacy and his contribution to society in such a short span of time on top of being a great friend, son, brother, uncle and all of that feel-good, bittersweet dreck, and it may all have been true, but it didn't stop me from feeling that I had written something utterly puerile.

The death of someone this important in my life deserves something much more than I can put into words. This much grief can't simply be the subject of sound bytes like "he lived well" or "he was a good man" without profoundly insulting the deceased. It's like I said to another of my close friends and my kumare when Jay's family was reduced to tears again after last night's mass: with so much love comes so much pain.

I'm living out that particular truism right now. I cried at breakfast this morning. I've never, in my entire thirty-two years of living, cried at breakfast, not even when I was a whiny, spoiled kid. In my adult life I can count on my hands the number of times I've really cried (excluding tearing up at sappy movies, which doesn't even happen that often). I cried after being on either end of a "this relationship isn't going to happen" speech. I cried when I failed the bar exams after my first attempt. I cried on other occasions I don't care to name, but in no instance did I weep during breakfast. None. Oh, and since Jay died, I've lost count of the times I've cried as an adult.

Oddly enough, I find myself laughing maniacally when I think of all the times I spent with Jay. There's no shortage of anecdotes, whether it's the sight of him dressed up as steel-bra era Madonna during our class's Halloween Party back in 2006 or the time he and I were in the back of a pickup, I started choking on a chunk of ice cream, at which point he looked at me nonchalantly and said "Jim, if you die, can I have your comic books?" or any of the bazillions of times I called him up or visited him at home and shot the breeze over everything from comic books to politics to his massive collection (just under 1,000 I think) of bootleg DVDs. I loved having discovered Will Ferrell with him in A Night At the Roxbury, to which there should definitely be a sequel considering how huge Ferrell is now. Any and every Will Ferrell movie I enjoy henceforth will always remind me of Jay.

Recently, I had what I thought was a keeper of a friendship go sour, and although at no point was I about to trade up my real friends for this new one (hey, one cannot have too many friends), the first person to whom I expressed my disappointment was Jay. He didn't hit me with "I told you so" (that was my wife's job), but did what he did best; he reminded me, through his gentle words and reassurance, of how, in a world where things and people are too often not what they seem to be, our friendship was the real deal, and would last till the end.

I didn't figure that, scant weeks after, the end would come.

Even though the chain of events that led to his eventual passing began as early as last May 2007 and there were red flags galore all throughout the ordeal, and even though someone who had buried two loved ones, a mother and a brother, who had expired from kidney failure told me, in no uncertain terms, not to get my hopes up, I hoped against all hope that Jay would make it through. Even when my brain was telling me he was a goner, even when the Saturday before he died he looked like a corpse-in-waiting with his face blackened from the drugs they were pumping into him, ironically enough, to keep him alive, I was still hoping.

Irony seems to be the order of the day here. Though the magnanimity of Jay's spirit was unparalleled, he didn't really live the healthiest lifestyle around. He sort of embodied the credo of one of his favorite films, if not his all-time favorite, Dead Poets Society: Carpe Diem, or seize the day. He seized the day, all right, and scarfed it down with a side order of fries. Oh yeah, he was a big eater, and a big guy as a result. He smoked like a chimney when he started working in advertising nearly a decade or so ago. He worked really late, always consumed with the passion of coming up with some truly magnificent copy. And yet...and yet...what actually took out his kidneys and resulted in the transplant and the anti-rejection medication which left him vulnerable to the infection that ultimately took his life was a virus he had had the misfortune of not having developed an immunity to, unlike 90% of the Filipino population. In short, it had absolutely nothing to do with the way he had lived his life. To put it glibly, a statistical aberration killed my friend. Before I understood this, I remember how, when I was sitting right next to him during one of his dialysis sessions, I chewed him out for the way he had lived his life. I felt like such an asshole afterwards. I can't say with one hundred per cent certainty if, had it been up to him, Jay would have made the sacrifices necessary to basically save his own life, but I do know that leading up to and after his operation, he managed to shed at least over twenty kilos of body weight. The will to live was definitely there.

The irony of how he died is part of what fuels my rage. Yes, I'm going through the whole "stages of loss" cliche, but what's particularly painful is how I seem to be feeling everything at once. Every time the denial instinct kicks in my mind instantly flashes the image of Jay's inert body lying on the hospital bed where he breathed his last, an image that will probably haunt me for quite a while.

The rage part, though, is surprisingly easy. I feel rage, first and foremost, at myself, for feeling sorry for myself for the better part of last year without appreciating nearly as much as I should have how precious and magnificent the gift of life is. I feel rage at how, on top of everything else, Jay managed to pull a Cyrano De Bergerac and die without letting the object of his affection really know how he felt. She was there last night, and for some reason I thought of Penelope Cruz in the last few scenes of Vanilla Sky, where it is revealed that she looked for Tom Cruise's character, interested in him, but upon failing to find him left with a vague sense of regret, a sense of 'now I'll never know what could have been.'

Thoughts and emotions are colliding in my mind and heart every nanosecond. I gagged on the cup of water I was drinking just now while my head was swirling with all of these emotions. How prosaic: I'm choking on my grief.

I would love to end this post with some uplifting reflection like "rather than dwell on the pain of his loss; I should think how lucky I was to have him in my life as long as I did," but it would feel altogether insincere and, in a word, saccharine.

I'm selfish. I'm small. I'm low on emotional quotient. I want my friend back against all logic and rationality. Of course, not in a George Romero kind of way (haha, see Jay? Another movie reference!).

What hurts the most of all is that the guy who was best at comforting me in times like this... is the guy I'm now mourning.

I know you probably hate what I'm doing right now, Jay, and I may well have to watch myself every time I drink a glass of water. It's just...so hard right now.

There's nothing else left to say right now...numbness (another state of being that comes calling way too often these days) has set in so I can't bitch and moan any more than I already have.

Still and all, I think it must be said: Adam Sandler's death scene in Click was still lame, Jay. Before you haunt my dreams forever, let me explain; the guy's performance was just devoid of all dignity. If Sandler had wanted to know how to portray someone at the end of his rope with his respectability completely intact, he should have given you a call.

Rolling Disasters Waiting to Happen

There's been a lot to blog about these days, from the sudden and tragic death of Oscar-nominated Australian actor Heath Ledger to the abject humiliation suffered by multiple-term speaker of the House of Representatives Jose de Venecia, to the way a Filipino on American Idol dressed like a chicken became the next William Hung, but the thing about tragedies and downfalls and other forms of personal disaster is that they tend to become footnotes in history considering that once the terrible thing has happened there really isn't much else to talk about.

What I want to talk about is essentially a "sequel" to an earlier post I made about those idiots on scooters that they pay for at the rate of something like five pesos a day. Since making that post I have heard that no less than the Asian Development Bank has conducted a study on the death rate of these motorized primates and has come to the conclusion that it is of epidemic proportions.

These guys still raise my blood pressure every time I'm on the road, and even when I'm walking on the sidewalk as quite a few of them seem to view it as an extension of the road they can drive on. Tricycle drivers aggravate me similarly but somehow I've learned how to live with them. At least with tricycle drivers there's no danger that I might accidentally kill one on the road; they're too big and too slow to make a move sudden enough that might result in my running over them.

The problem with these two-wheeled menaces is that at all times they pose a danger to themselves, pedestrians and motorists. Every single day is a potential new disaster with hundreds of these things (and counting) on the road.

What I think people should know is that we don't have to sit here helpless to do anything about it. We can prepare petitions, breathe down the necks of our legislators and tell them that enough is enough; it's time to get these things off major highways and sidewalks. Let's have them impose prohibitive taxes on the sons of bitches who hawk these things. It's easy enough; all they'd have to do in the face of accusations of draconian legislation is invoke the time-honored principle of POLICE POWER (a legal term; look it up). They would merely have to slap the massive and growing statistics of DEATH in the face of any interest group inclined to protect these chimpanzees' right to roam the streets and say that the need to save lives is more important than anyone's right to act like he owns the road.

I'm serious here; on the one hand it's something of a blessing that all of these pieces of dog turd are getting wiped out as it's a form of natural selection. The smart survive and the stupid end up roadkill. The problem is that the people who run over these blights on humanity are inevitably the ones who end up paying the price; they're the ones that have to go to court and suffer wrongful prosecution and even assuming this doesn't push through, they're the ones who have to live with knowing that they were in an accident that killed someone, regardles of whose fault it is.
Quite frankly, considering the paucity of comments on this blog in the last eight months or so I'm pretty sure nobody really reads it, or that very few people do. Can't say I'm surprised as most of the time I don't really write anything of consequence.

THIS time, though, I exhort my one or two regular readers and the odd person who stumbles onto this blog: please get the word out about these disasters-around-the-corner. Create a link to this post if you're too lazy to expound. Get legislation written! Get these bastards OFF THE MAJOR ROADS AND THE SIDEWALKS!

The sooner these things can get done, the sooner we can stop worrying about having the blood of these fools on our bumpers.

A Good Start to A Brand New Day

With the last issue of the first arc of Amazing Spider-Man: Brand New Day having just come out, I figured it would be a good time to weigh in one last time on the issue of Spider-Man's marriage before I bid adieu to the character for a little while. While unfortunately, Erik Larsen may have beaten me to the punch in his One Fan's Opinion Column on comicbookresources.com, I have a slightly different perspective on the matter which, as a fanboy, I'd like to make known.

Historically, One More Day marks the third time in the last fourteen years or so that Marvel editorial have tried to 'un-marry' Spider-Man. The first, and up until One More Day most contentious attempt took place during the infamous Clone Saga, where it was essentially declared that the Peter Parker whose adventures everyone had been following for twenty one years or so was a clone, a fake, a copy of the real Peter Parker, who in Marvel time had been gone five years. The set-up for this idea took a full two years, but the backlash was so bad that this publicly regarded impostor, renamed "Ben Reilly" to distinguish him, absurdly enough, from Peter "clone" Parker, was so widely rejected by readership that rather than let him fade quietly into the background with the possibility of reintroducing him at a later date, editorial killed the poor guy within a year of his having donned the Spider-Man outfit. The poor Spider-clone was killed twice.

The second time took place during the similarly reviled tenure of Howard Mackie and John Byrne, under the editorial watch of chief Bob Harras. Their solution was more and less drastic at the same time: Mary Jane Parker was apparently blown up in a plane by some guy who was stalking her. Of course, her "death" was loaded with ambiguity and in the end it felt rather half-assed even before it was revealed to have been a fake-out; having learned from the debacle of the Clone Saga, which took years to set up but less than a year to unravel, Marvel decided a "safer" route which would enable them to resurrect MJ at the drop of the hat if fan reaction was unfavorable.

Oddly enough, credit goes to the current regime at Marvel for having the balls to throw their full weight behind this initiative, Clone-Saga style, fully aware that reader could react as violently to this story as they did to Ben Reilly, as many of them in fact have.

While as I've often said, I have a problem with the whole Faustian Pact thing (Joe Quesada's defense of the methodology notwithstanding), I see the logic of un-marrying Spider-Man, which I've already discussed.

In fact, I'll go one step further than Joey Q and address all of the people who've said "but anyone who wants a swinging (pardon the pun) single Spider-Man can always read Ultimate Spider-Man or Spider-Man Adventures."

Well, the Q would never, ever put down one of the books his company puts out, but bound by no such compunctions, I can say that the way things are, both those books are currently second-class citizens in Marvel's publishing scheme.

Spider-Man Adventures isn't even designed for the mainstream, direct market; it's a kid's book designed to sell in bookstores, and everything in it is essentially a re-hash of old Lee/Ditko or Lee/Romita stories.

As for Ultimate Spider-Man, well, as far as I can tell it's served its initial purpose, which was to revitalize interest in Spidey by making him "relevant" to younger audiences. There was a time when this title was regularly outselling the flagship one, but those days are long gone and USM hasn't even been selling in the top ten for years now.

The idea, in short was to increase readership on the core Spider-Man book, to the extent that all other Spidey books, Sensational and Friendly Neighborhood, were axed to make way for the thrice-monthly, rotating creators publishing scheme.

Having finished that scheme's first storyarc, I think Marvel may be on the right track here.

It was a marketing coup on Marvel's part to have Civil War alumnus Steve McNiven draw the launching arc. His art looks livelier in Amazing Spider-Man #548 than it ever has, and quite frankly not even the previously partially-true accusations of his people looking 'plasticky' can stick here. I think the switch from regular colorist Morry Hollowell to reliever Dave Stewart may have something to do with it. The art is absolutely brilliant, and bristles with much more kinetic energy than I've ever seen in McNiven's pencils. There is no way any of the artists following McNiven on this title, at least four of whom have already been named, can match this standard of quality in my eyes, so it's still adieu for me.

I must say, before I go, that writer Dan Slott sets a tone for this new direction that seems a lot easier to swallow than the idea of Peter Parker being counterfeit or the idea of Mary Jane lying in a million pieces at the bottom of the sea. A new villain (albeit one with the somewhat prosaic name of "Mr. Negative") has been introduced and established, with powers and an origin yet to be fully revealed, a nice little monkeywrench has been thrown in the works for the Daily Bugle, and Peter Parker is back to the down-on-his-luck loser he was created to be...a concept that got diluted several times over, especially when he moved into the New Avengers' tower.

Last time I thanked Marvel for making the decision for me to leave easier and less tainted with bitterness over One More Day. Now I'd like to thank Dan Slott and Steve McNiven for making me believe that, however bad OMD may have been, Brand New Day is actually a pretty good idea.

Homecoming

After a little over a year and a half after I bid the halls of the Supreme Court a very fond farewell, I find myself back in the city to which I have written more than one ode.

I find myself exposed to a different part of Manila this time; I'm working out of Binondo, and in a law firm at that, so I've been a little too busy to take in my new surroundings.

That said, though, I have taken the opportunity to walk along the Escolta, to hear a mass at Sta. Cruz and to say a prayer at the Binondo church. The other day I spent my lunch break walking through the streets of Binondo looking to see what kind of shops they had, and wound up in Divisoria.

I have to say that I'm not one for teeming streets; give me old architecture any day and a nice "old world" vibe, but considering that I'm someone who's repeatedly professed love for this city it's nice to have seen another few parts of it, like Binondo, Sta. Cruz, and even the stretch along Recto between the LRT2 station and these places.

Of course, my homecoming wouldn't have been complete without a leisurely stroll through Luneta Park ;)

Spider-Man's New Status Quo: The End Which Justifies the Means?

This week the second issue of Marvel's newest experiment, the thrice-weekly shipping of Amazing Spider-Man came out. True to my resolution to finish the first arc before quitting the series for the foreseeable future, I bought the issue, ASM #547, and to my surprise was thoroughly impressed by what I saw.

Am I backpedaling on my decision to put buying Spidey on indefinite hiatus? Not really, considering I still need the money and considering the team behind this story arc will only last until next issue, but I have to say that while I still disagree with the methodology used to bring about this new status quo, I am starting to see why Joe Quesada was willing to brave fanboy ire, online and offline, to establish it.

Recently a friend of mine briefly discussed one of my posts here with me, in particular asking why Marvel felt the need to "un-marry" Spider-Man, saying that between the two of us, we led pretty interesting lives even though we were already married.

Now, I value my friend's opinion quite a bit but I have to say I understand the logic here; Spider-Man was created for a young audience, for the teenagers and twenty-somethings still trying to come to grips with the fact that the world more often than not doesn't work the way they want it to, and a Spider-Man married to a supermodel somehow damaged that paradigm. How could Peter Parker be a lovable loser when he's married to one of the hottest women in the Marvel Universe? And, more crucially, could kids and college students, many of whom are hard-pressed to get a date at that point in their lives, really relate to a married guy, let alone a guy hitched to and regularly boinking a supermodel?

Marvel's plan to void Spider-Man's marriage was, although problematic for me, not my main beef with them, but rather how they pulled it off. This matter has been discussed in this blog and elsewhere ad nauseam, so there's really no point to rehashing any of those old diatribes here.

What I will say is that, after the tumultuous "reboot," the creative team of writer Dan Slott and penciler Steve McNiven, inker Dexter Vines and colorist Morry Hollowell (the art team collectively known as "Team Civil War") pretty much hit the ground running. Had the first couple of issues been scripted as ineptly as the epilogue to One More Day, for which Joe Quesada has accepted blame, this "new" Spider-Man would almost certainly be stumbling out of the gate. That is definitely NOT the case here.

To wax cliche, Slott demonstrates that he was born to write Spider-Man. From Peter's character moments to Spider-Man's battle banter, Slott seems to have everything about him down pat. As much as I enjoyed my issues of JMS' run, I have to admit his take on Peter was pretty short on the witty comments, which is pretty essential to the whole affair. Slott hearkens back to the old Stan Lee days of snappy patter without the goofy, anachronistic tone from which Lee's recent writing efforts (e.g. The Last Fantastic Four Story) have suffered.

That Slott is not quite able to completely remove the bad taste that One More Day has left in my mouth is through no fault of his own; it's simply been too soon since that storytelling debacle. I have to say, though, that with the second issue, Slott manages to come a lot closer to making me forget One More Day than I thought possible.

As impressive as Slott's writing is, however, the main reason for my loving this story arc is the reason my resolve to drop this book remains, which is that there is no way, barring a change of editorial heart, that Amazing Spider-Man will ever look this good again, at least in the near future, because McNiven is, quite frankly, a penciling god, and upon his departure from the book after next issue, he will be SORELY missed.

The quality of McNiven's pencils, ably abetted by Vines and Hollowell offers stark testimony to the advantage of giving artists buckets of lead time to prepare their work; it's better than it's been in years. The last time I enjoyed his art this much was when he had just started on Marvel Knights 4. In the projects he had done for Marvel since then he was either hamstrung with scripts that didn't exploit his talent properly (his run on New Avengers) or rushed into meeting deadlines (Civil War), such that his work, while still better than that of 80% of most other mainstream artists noticeably dipped in overall quality.

For two issues out of three, however, this has not been the case for ol' Stevie. McNiven has long said he's wanted to do Spider-Man and his love for the character absolutely shines through here. He even pulls a bit of a surprise and channels Todd McFarlane for one glorious splash page. Looking at the page from afar my father thought the art had been digitally rendered rather than hand-drawn. That's how good the guy is.

Marvel, however, have been pretty candid that McNiven is kind of a marketing hook to whet readers' appetites for Spider-Man's new direction; after #548 ships next week he's off to join Civil War collaborator Mark Millar on a yet-undisclosed project, undoubtedly to the anguish of many a Spider-fan who may have hoped he'd draw Peter Parker's adventures forever. After he leaves, with due respect to the artists they've got lined up, including my sentimental favorite John Romita, Jr., the book will simply not look as good.

So while I'm still taking my indefinite break from the title after McNiven leaves, at least now I'm leaving with a lot less bitterness.

My wallet thanks you, Marvel, and now I can say I thank you for seeing me (and possibly a lot of other readers) off with a great story, and some absolutely stellar art.

The Legend of Will

I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a connoisseur of the sub-genre of literature known as speculative fiction, but I am familiar with the central premise of one of its landmark works, the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend. Essentially, it's about how an ordinary man, Robert Neville, becomes a legend in a world full of vampires for his ferocious ability to kill them, essentially turning the concept of vampires being legendary among men on its head. As fascinating as this book is, it is unabashedly bleak in is storytelling approach, and not exactly the stuff of box-office fireworks, although it was made into two movies, The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price and The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston.

Trust Will Smith to prove everyone wrong.

Will's version of the movie, scripted by Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman and directed by Francis Lawrence, is the first film adaptation to actually use the book's title, although from what I understand it has more in common with Heston's Omega Man (which I haven't seen) than the actual book.

In it, Robert Neville (Smith) is not an ordinary man but in fact a military scientist, and the world is not populated by vampires (at least not nominally) but by humans who have been mutated by a virus that was engineered by a scientist named Dr. Alice Krippen (played by an uncredited Emma Thompson) as a cure for cancer. The virus has wiped out most of the world's population, and of the remainder who have survived an overwhelming majority have transformed into these beasts (referred to late in the film as "dark seekers"), while the immune remainder basically serve as their food.

Neville is, to his knowledge the one remaining immune person in the world. He lives in New York City, which was essentially ground zero for the infection, and spends his days searching for survivors, hunting for food, and experimenting with infected rats using his own immune blood in hopes of finding a cure. He spends his nights holed up in his brownstone with steel shutters, hoping the dark seekers won't come for him. His only companion throughout majority of the movie is a German Shepherd named Sam.

Without giving away too much, I can say that at some point he does, in fact, encounter these mutants, and in fact he captures one for experimentation purposes. Any other revelation would lead to spoilers.

I will say, though, that while the movie strives to maintain the bleak nature of the book, Matheson's conceit eventually gives way to a somewhat more upbeat ending than originally envisioned, and the reason for Neville's becoming the titular "Legend" is altered somewhat.

Much has been said about this film, particularly Smith's performance as Neville, which has been rightfully likened to Tom Hanks' Oscar-nominated take as a marooned FedEx employee in Cast Away. Truth be told, Smith is astonishing as Neville, creating the full range of emotions his character feels; desolation, despair, regret and even fear, all without any co-stars to play off. This is his movie to carry, and without him, no amount of suspenseful music, tight camera angles or shadowy lighting could create the atmosphere he does by his mere presence. In short, he pulls it off superbly.

Much has also been said about the special effects, most of it bad. Well, to my mind the filmmakers' greatest achievement was turning New York City into a deserted wasteland, which was no mean feat considering how populated it is in real life (and they did shoot on location). The effects used to create the zombie/vampire creatures in the movie is serviceable, and though it could have been better I would not really say it was the worst I've ever seen.

But even dodgy effects cannot detract from the manner in which Smith successfully sells this property. It is an amazing tour de force for an actor who has already reaped both box-office glory and critical acclaim. Only the two Toms, Hanks and Cruise, can claim to have achieved more than Will, and notably, both of their movies this year have floundered, leaving Will the last man standing, as it were.

At this rate, Smith could probably sell a movie about him reading the phone book (an unfortunate cliche, but an entirely apt one, I think), though as canny as he is, he'll probably come up with an even more successful project next time around.

Legend indeed.

Goodbye, Spider-Man...

I've decided to give Marvel Comics' new direction for its flagship character, Spider-Man a shot; last week I bought the first of three issues of Amazing Spider-Man to be published this January, which prosaically enough bears the caption "Brand New Day."

Having suffered through the contrivance of One More Day and its ham-handed tabula rasa treatment of Spider-Man continuity, I couldn't help but groan at how Marvel is essentially trying to sell us a bill of goods by telling us that the Marvel Universe is essentially the same place it's been all this time, except that Peter Parker is no longer married to Mary Jane, Aunt May doesn't remember who Peter Parker is, and, oh Harry Osborn, who died quite poignantly in Spectacular Spider-Man 200, is inexplicably alive. As a comic fan I understand that contrivance is very much the name of the game, but that doesn't excuse a lack of creativity.

Oddly enough, I, a married man, even understand the logic behind 'un-marrying' Peter, but find the way it was done so slipshod that I simply cannot give my long-term support to the damage it's done to the last twenty or so years of Spider-Man's mythos. Oh, sure, Marvel editorial have done a great deal of online damage control saying that they've gone over Spider-Man's history and have figured out how this is all going to work, but frankly I'm no longer interested in waiting around to find out how.

I can't stand, first and foremost, that Peter and Aunt May's relationship, which had evolved quite beautifully under J. Michael Straczynski's tenure, has been reset to her not knowing his secret identity. Issue #38 of ASM Vol. II, the issue where May and Peter have it out about his long-kept secret, and easily my favorite issue of JMS's seven-year run on the title, has just been rendered null and void, as well as all of the other touching issues where Aunt May shows how strong she really is. Sure, the new Spider crew tries to show the audience that this isn't your daddy's Aunt May--she's a proactive, tough-as-nails member of the community, helping out in soup kitchens and election campaigns--but it feels like it's too little, too late. The point is that Peter is still bullshitting her, and not only that, he's now a bum to boot. Parker luck my ass.

I find the 'mysterious' superheroine Jackpot (to whom I was introduced as early as last May's Free Comic Book Day issue of ASM) similarly wince-inducing, and hope, most likely in vain, that it isn't Mary Jane under the tights because I can't possibly think of a worse conceptualization for a superhero. Where'd she get her super powers? Mephisto? Shouldn't she be on fire or something?

Most jarring of all is the return of Harry, whose death way back in 1993 was handled with such sensitivity and finesse that I was sure his demise would go on to be Spidey canon, like Gwen Stacy, Jean De Wolffe, or Kraven. I found particularly crass how Joe Quesada basically said "come on, you just have to have Harry back, it makes everything more fun" or something like that, basically showing that the only reason Harry's back is because he thinks it's a good idea.

I'm not even going to go into the hypergeekness that has fandom picking away at how One More Day and Brand New Day represent essentially a huge tear in Marvel's space time continuum as a whole. I don't even read that many comics, as big a comic fan as I may have been.

All I know is that Joe Quesada and company have whipped out their wangs and pissed on, by and large, my experience of reading Spider-Man comic books. I'm going to finish the first three issues of this new direction, and then I am going to swear off Spider-Man in general...not a hard thing to do considering 1) I hadn't been regularly collecting ASM since John Romita Jr. left the book and 2) I really do have to make some spending cutbacks in the next few months, so this is a good place to start.

It made me happy to see Marvel Comics dominating sales for two years in a row following DC's several years of dominance riding on the shoulders of Jim Lee, Michael Turner, and event comics with the word "Crisis" attached to it, but now I'm just depressed because I really get the impression that Joe Quesada thinks he can get away with murder.

Well, Joe, I can now honestly say that although I've enjoyed a lot, and I mean a LOT of the comic books that came out under your watch as Marvel E-I-C, I'm done letting you walk all over my favorite comic book character.

I'll be back if and when all of this new dreck is retconned out of existence.

The Year's First Guilty Pleasure

National Treasure: Book of Secrets
directed by Jon Turtletaub
starring Nicolas Cage, Jon Voight, Helen Mirren, Ed Harris, Diane Kruger, Justin Bartha

As risible as many of my movie-loving friends may find the idea, I genuinely enjoyed the first National Treasure movie when I saw it three years ago. I had walked into it with next to no expectations considering the penchant of both its star, Nicolas Cage, and its producer, Jerry Bruckheimer for some really trashy movies, and given that I wasn't too impressed with what I had seen in the trailers. It had therefore come as a really pleasant surprise. There was a lot about the movie that worked and this is relevant to the evaluation of its follow-up, Book of Secrets, because essentially the makers of the movie transplanted everything successful (or which they believed successful) about the first movie into this new installment.

The first, most important aspect of the first Treasure movie is that unlike the rather self-important story and movie on which it is widely believed to have been based, The Da Vinci Code, it does not have any aspirations or pretensions towards being taken seriously. It is in many ways, a fun romp, as is evident in everything from the dialogue to the lighting.

A lot of the fun was in "seeing clues" on such mundane items as hundred-dollar bills. The ability of Benjamin Gates (Cage) to unearth important clues in the most unexpected places was integral to the original movie's charm.

The second movie tries to follow suit by planting clues on other historical landmarks but using a remote-control helicopter to see a clue on the statue of liberty's smaller duplicate in Paris is nowhere near as engaging and novel as seeing hidden symbols and meaning on something as ordinary as paper money.

The first movie was also refreshing for the fact that it could sustain a moving story with action, but with little to no violence. The first movie had a minimal body count and it was entirely from people falling down a deep hole rather than the traditional, human inflicted death that takes place in Hollywood productions. It did have a car chase, as does the second, but both are fairly disposable affairs, especially after the Bourne movies set the bar for such chase scenes so high.

Finally, both movies' enormous set pieces, as unbelievable as they may be to anyone who thinks about it, are really a lot of fun.

The first movie was about unearthing the treasure of the Knights Templar, while this one is about unearthing a City of Gold which the Confederate Army had intended to use during the Civil War in order to overthrow the Union. The twist is that Ben Gates and company must unearth the treasure because it's the only way to clear the name of their ancestor, Thomas Gates, who was implicated in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by a shady character played by Ed Harris. The path to this treasure takes our heroes around the world, well, "across the pond" anyway, to Paris and London, to find clues. Maybe next time they could head somewhere in Asia and give the movie a truly global sensibility.

There are a couple of welcome additions to the film, like the inclusion of new cast members Helen Mirren as Ben Gates' mom, and Harris. Jon Voight is still a delight as Patrick Gates, Ben's dad, who had a ball with the role in the first movie and still does here. Mirren gets to let her hair down as well with this movie, having a lot of fun as Native American history expert Emma gates.

The sequel, to be sure, lacks the novelty of the first movie, which basically caught me off guard with how enjoyable it was. Fortunately, the chemistry between Cage and his original costars, like Voight, and Justin Bartha as his sidekick Riley Poole and Diane Kruger as Abigail Chase (with an improved accent) is still quite evident, and this helps propel the movie through some of its clunkier moments.

Admittedly, the producers really had quite a challenge in store for themselves when they decided to stretch a pretty thin plotline into another movie, but all things considered they still made a movie that was worth two hours and four minutes of my time.

Though I still preferred the original, the box office of this film would suggest that other people feel differently, so I guess another sequel is inevitable. I think it would be cool if, for a change, Ben Gates and company had to hunt for clues all over Asia as well. Then maybe we could catch a glimpse of genuine hottie Kruger filming her scenes here in the Philippines. Rowrr!!!

Wanted: Cultural Champions

I recently spent some time in Cebu with my family. As a tourist attraction, it hadn't received the hype often lavished on choice tourist locations like Boracay, Palawan or, more recently Bohol, but it did boast the most development of any province outside of Manila.

Now I won't argue with the numbers that Cebu's denizens have proudly posted for the public at large; I won't argue that they're earning more as a province than any other, or that their development is at this stage or that, but I will say that whatever it is they're earning, they sure as hell aren't spending it beautifying their city.

I came to Cebu eager to see things like their cathedral and the legendary Magellan's cross, only to be profoundly disappointed by both. Magellan's cross in particular was a real let down; from the pictures I was inexplicably so certain that I would find the thing atop a hill or surrounded by something like a lavishly landscaped garden. Imagine how I felt when I found it sitting in the middle of some stinking (literally) square in front of Cebu City Hall. After the disappointment that the cathedral turned out to be, I had been buoyed by the well-maintained, sumptuously decorated Basilica de Santo Nino, and expected the romanticized vision of the cross that the pictures had inspired in my imagination.

So are we to understand that, for all this progress and money, the provincial government doesn't even see fit to preserve some of its greatest historical treasures?

I hope that's not the case.

Cebu could, with all of the richness of its history, definitely use its own version of the Intramuros administration, or even its own Carlos Celdran.

I love what Celdran has done for old Manila. I went on one of his tours in 2002 and was delighted to see how much ink he's gotten over the years; he seems to have become a fixture in the tourist scene. Here's a guy who, as far as I can tell, has literally made a living doing his own thing, and living out his obvious passion for the Philippines' oldest city.

My wife and I aren't exactly cultural slouches; aside from our shared love for Intramuros, we went on, like I said, Celdran's tour of the Escolta area in 2002, and did the rounds in the Ilocos, visiting nearly a dozen old churches from Vigan to Pagudpud (that's a lot of wishes, if you believe the superstitions about stepping into churches for the first time) and we made it a point to get a map of Cebu so we would know where to go for the sights and sounds beyond the local mall. We know that Cebu has just as much history behind it as Manila, and yet the only things that were even vaguely attractive about it to us were SM and the Ayala Mall.

To my mind, and I am loath to say this, it seems that this is because the people responsible for the upkeep of the city and its cultural monuments don't really seem to give a shit.

Cebuanos who should stumble on this may want to pillory me, but like I said, I don't dispute the numbers or the claims to prosperity; I only call it like I see it.

As the starting point of the Philippines' colonization by Spain, among other things, Cebu has a lot to attract people besides freaking Plantation Bay, and I think it's really sad that the local government hasn't thought to make the most out of it.

The Year That Was 2007

In the past, oddly enough, I've had years which I could categorically classify as "good," or "bad," based on my net satisfaction index (pretentious, isn't it?) with the way the year went. Simply put, if I was happy more often than I was miserable in the course of a year, it was good, and if not, it was bad. It didn't even depend on the things that would happen to me; just how I dealt with them.

1998, for example, was a bad year, though by rights it shouldn't have been considering that I graduated from college with honors that year. A bad romantic interlude followed by an even worse start to my law school life, however, made me a prisoner of my own angst and frustration. There was nothing in particular that happened to me that should have made me feel that that was a particularly bad year, but I took everything so badly that it turned out to be one, just for that reason.

2004, in contrast, was probably the best year I enjoyed in recent memory, even though I spent six months out of the year without gainful employment, even though it was the year I found out I would have to re-take (as I actually did re-take) the bar exams, even though my wife needed an operation to remove a baseball-sized cyst from one of her ovaries. I've said it before to others; I honestly felt that 2004 was the year that the 'reset' button was pushed, and all of my mistakes in judgment were simply washed away and I was allowed to start anew, which was particularly the case when I started working at the Supreme Court in October 2004 of that year.

Even by this standard, though, 2007 is a somewhat harder year to classify. Without going into the specifics, it's been a rather tumultuous year for me, but there's been so much good that has happened, and so many positive realizations and reflections on my part, that I can't readily pigeonhole it one way or the other.

2007 was the first time I saw the face of evil. I don't mean Pol-Pot, Adolf Hitler kind of evil, but more like the kind that infests our government. I'd never really had any enemies before this year, just people I didn't like or who didn't like me, rightly or wrongly. My life was a lot simpler this way, but this was the first year, to my knowledge anyway, that I have had someone actively seeking to harm me in any real way.

At the same time I made, about half a dozen new, very good friends for whom I am immeasurably grateful. These are friendships I hope and intend to nurture well after this year; some of these people I hope to count among my pantheon of my truly good friends.

I learned a lot of important things about life, too, about myself and the world in general, a lot of which I already knew but didn't fully appreciate until now.

There's a lot I want for myself in 2008, but I think I can name a few things here and now.

I think, the first and most important thing I want for myself is to be able to spend more quality time with my family, and I don't necessarily mean more time as much as I do better time, as it were. Anyone who knows me well knows that I have been pretty hands-on in my role as a father, but there's always room for improvement and considering how rapidly kids change as they grow older I should probably adapt as quickly as possible.

Another thing I want to do is explore the possibilities of my profession a little more closely. Up until today, being a lawyer has been a question of either "corporate or litigation," "law firm or government" or "employed or self-employed." I'm hoping to explore some different permutations of these concepts and be the richer for it, both in terms of experience and financial rewards.

Another thing I really, really want for myself is to find the inspiration to write creatively again, whether it's my long-gestating book about my bar experience to those short stories I used to churn out just for the fun of it, I want to express myself and to finally find an audience for that expression.

I also want to find more joy in things I don't have to buy, like the love of my wife and kids. 2007 was actually a step in that direction considering I watched something like six or seven movies in the theater last year as opposed to the nearly twenty (including multiple viewings) I used to do when I was younger. Sure, hobbies are fun (even though my current one of collecting toy cars has tapered off somewhat) but in the end I think the best times I've had this year were those spent with Theia, Apel and Tala, and that's something I was to cultivate even more.

In many ways, 2007 was the year I got closer to my family, and I want to continue to explore that in 2008. From what I see I have a couple of really sweet kids, and I really want to pay more attention to the way they're growing up, especially considering how fast it is.

At the same time, though, I want to well and truly start defining my career and its direction; though I don't plan to make the mistakes of Adam Sandler's character in Click, I do deserve to have a career and I hope to make the most out of it, especially if it means I'll be able to provide for my family.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't really want to go back to the way things were in 2004; I loved how safe and sound I felt back then, with my future still ahead of me as opposed to these days when I feel like I'm still treading water in what I had hoped was that future. But the truth is I can't live on the brink of something forever.

I guess if anything will change about this blog in 2008, it'll be that I'll be posting a little more about little vignettes of life than comic books, movies, or even more banal things like local politics.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Spider-Man According to Joe Quesada

With the conclusion of the J. Michael Straczynski swansong on the Amazing Spider-Man title entitled One More Day Marvel has boldly pushed the reset/retcon button on its most beloved character, Peter Parker, a.k.a. Spider-Man, in a plot twist so thin and threadbare that the issue can be summarized in one sentence.

Essentially, both Peter Parker and Mary Jane after a few pages of agonizing and soul-searching give in to Mephisto (Marvel's version of Satan) and agree to give up the very existence of their marriage in exchange for saving the dying Aunt May's life. As a result, Spider-Man continuity is so radically reset that not only are Peter and Mary Jane not married nor have they ever been married, but inexplicably, Harry Osborn, who died in the most poignant manner imaginable in 1993, is alive.

I have been a Spider-Man fan since reading The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man over twenty years ago, and began collecting intermittently in 1988, collecting whole runs of the series in the early 2000s, and I can say, categorically, that I simply cannot remember being more disappointed with a Spider-Man story in my life.

This story is essentially undoing 90 percent of the stories I collected just so Joe Quesada can fulfill his dream of having Spider-Man "unmarried." I don't even want to dwell on how bad this idea is because right now I have so much else going on my life that quite frankly, the best way to deal with this is simply to drop Amazing Spider-Man altogether...but not before posting my two-cents on this storytelling debacle.

The funny thing about this story is how JMS seems to be fighting Joe Quesada every step of the way on how the whole thing turns out. His dialogue (which may not even entirely be his in my opinion considering that the weird "ah-heeeh," "ah-huuuh" speech tics used exclusively by Paul Jenkins somehow found their way into the script) in its most moving moment, talks about how the love that brought them together is stronger than any force that would strive to undo it, stronger than God or the devil...or, in the subtext, than Joe Quesada.

I foresee JMS leaving Marvel not too far down the line. He's always spoken out against micro-management of his writing, and with this having been rammed down his throat, as well as the Sins Past storyline which he had originally conceived as a way to have Peter's children come back to try and kill him, but which was rewritten to have NORMAN OSBORN sire children by GWEN STACY, he may well have been pushed past his breaking point, or just up to its brink.

What makes me even sadder is how this is, in my opinion, one of the best-illustrated Spider-Man stories EVER. Quesada pulls out all of the stops as an artist and channels, even while maintaining his own distinct style, Romita Sr., Todd McFarlane and some of the best artists of 45 years of Spider-Man's history. I'll always have a special place in my heart for John Romita Jr. as the best Spider-Man artist ever but in terms of sheer draftsmanship Joe is just in a class of his own. I guess it goes to show how profoundly Joe believes in the agenda he's pushing in this story, to the extent that he is credited as co-writer and is, I believe, responsible for the last eight or nine pages of the script which, incidentally, is godawful.

I honestly hope Spider-Man fans the world over let Joe Quesada know exactly how they feel about his selfish and rather heavy handed attempt to dictate how Spider-Man should be presented as a character. Unmarrying Spider-Man is one thing, but retconning dead characters into the mix? Joe has crossed even more lines than people were dreading he would.

If there's any consolation I can derive from this, it's that there seems to be lot of room for yet another "reset" down the line, even without a whole lot of retconning. To use an analogy, it seems to have been designed as a knot that can be untied with a single tug, such that if the reaction of fandom is to well and truly reject this new status quo, it will unravel even more quickly than Peter's replacement by Ben Reilly during the infamous Clone Saga. Anyway, anything done magically in the Marvel U is fairly easily undone...I hope.

Until then, well, if I buy comic books, they won't be those starring Spider-Man. Steve McNiven of Civil War may...and only just may...keep me on board for three issues, but I'm not coming back unless and until the mess of One More Day is definitively undone.

Epics and Fairy Tales

The winter movie season is officially on in the U.S., with studios pulling out both their award contenders and their late year charges for box office supremacy. Last weekend I was able to catch two such offerings: Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf and Kevin Lima's Enchanted.

Beowulf
directed by Robert Zemeckis
starring (in motion capture and voice performances)
Ray Winstone, Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins and Robin Wright Penn

It seems to me that since the dawn of the iMax 3-D format, no other director of feature-length films has pushed the envelope further than Robert Zemeckis, who started out strong three years ago with The Polar Express, and who bludgeons audiences again this year with an adaptation of the old English epic, Beowulf.

I say this not because I actually saw the film in iMax 3-D, but because watching the story unfold it occurred to me how the fillmmaker's principal imperative was to string together a bunch of iconic images and action scenes, with character development and even story logic being secondary. I know this is an adaptation, but it is my understanding that the writers made certain interpretations of the text of the original poem that translate into liberties. As a I discuss the plot points, be advised that SPOILERS ABOUND.

The main players are all there, with Beowulf (voiced to gravelly perfection by Ray Winstone) arriving on the shores of Denmark to rid King Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) of a monster, Grendel (Crispin Glover), who has slain many of his faithful subjects during a night of drunken debauchery. Quite simply, he gets the job done albeit in a rather unorthodox fashion by stripping naked and fighting the creature with nothing more than his bare hands, killing it by repeatedly punching what appears to be a cross-between its ear and its temple and then ripping its arm off, but not before Grendel is able to crawl home to his mother (Angelina Jolie) and tell her who killed him.

Enraged, the demon sorceress comes to Beowulf in a dream, disguised as Hrothgar's wife (Robin Wright Penn, in her first Zemeckis film since Forrest Gump) whom Beowulf has grown to fancy. When Beowulf awakes, he finds to his consternation that almost all of his men have been slain. Hrothgar informs him that Grendel's mother is responsible for the carnage, showing somewhat unusual knowledge about her which leads us to believe that it was, in fact, he who sired the creature.

Beowulf journey's to the creature's lair, only to find that she looks just like a naked Angelina Jolie, with the more sensitive parts obscured as she seduces him with not only her body but with promises of power and glory which Beowulf rather quickly swallows up. They end up having a one night stand, and her promises made to him of having his own kingdom, in exchange for giving her a son, come true after Hrothgar, who despite Beowulf's exclamations that he has slain her, divines the truth and then after declaring that "she is no longer my curse," kills himself.

Flash forward to what appears to be many, many years later, with Beowulf an aged and weary king, devoid of any purpose or happiness in life.

At one point, however, a crucial part of his bargain with Grendel's mother (who really doesn't go by any other name in the story) is broken, and suddenly, her vengeance, their son, descends upon Beowulf's kingdom. This time, rather than a grotesque humanoid monster, it is a dragon that seeks to destroy the kingdom. After a rather thrilling chase sequence which was, again, no doubt conceived for the benefit of 3D viewers, Beowulf performs an act of supreme self-sacrifice, which gruesomely involves self-mutilation through which he is able to slay the dragon by ripping out its heart. Having killed his own son, he has thus redeemed himself for his moment of weakness many years before.

Now, I would be a complete and utter liar if I didn't say I was rather unhappy with what happened next, considering it apparently wasn't the most literal interpretation of the poem's ending.

Essentially, Beowulf is given a hero's funeral, and suddenly, Grendel's mother, not only shows up, but then proceeds to tempt the man who has succeeded Beowulf as king, leaving the film somewhat open-ended.

The plot of both Hrothgar and Beowulf sleeping with Grendel's mother and siring children by her was apparently something added on by screenwriters Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, and to my mind it isn't a particularly welcome one, especially since storywise, the destruction of Beowulf's kingdom by the dragon becomes his fault, when it isn't even so in the poem. Beowulf's heroism in slaying the dragon is then diminished; in the poem he dies saving his kingdom from a dragon, but in the movie he dies cleaning up his own mess.

And worst of all, this little plot device, avowedly intended to bridge the gap of 50 years from the time Beowulf kills Grendel to the time he fights the dragon, does not service the story particularly well.

This movie still suffers from the affliction of Polar Express which felt like a string of illogical action sequences meant to keep 3D audiences enthralled and obviously character development is the main casualty. And to think, I didn't even get to see it in 3D.

My problems with the film are mostly thematic and story-related, and I really did love the visualization of the movie. The dragon chase sequence at the end is particularly awesome to behold.

Now that Zemeckis, with three moderately successful motion-capture movies under his belt (including last year's Monster House, which he produced but didn't direct), I think it's safe to say that Hollywood now has a new, viable way of telling stories that are a little too daunting, budget-wise, for live-action filming. While I wasn't particularly excited about these films, I now eagerly await the release of Steven Spielberg's and Peter Jackson's Tintin trilogy, which, it is said, will be made using this same technique.

Enchanted
directed by Kevin Lima
starring Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey and James Marsden

With the exception of The Little Mermaid, I am a huge fan of the Menken-era Disney musical. I loved the songs and the production numbers and in some cases their wonderful, tear jerker qualities.

While lately these films, and Disney films in general, have been thoroughly lampooned by the Shrek films (produced by ex-Disney honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg), Disney has, itself, decided to poke fun at some of its quainter storytelling conventions as well in the charming Enchanted.

Giselle (Adams) is a peasant girl dreaming of finding her prince charming. Prince Edward (Marsden), is a handsome prince with a penchant for taking down giants and ogres who is in search of a beautiful maiden to marry. They meet, fall in love, and decide to marry the next day.

This is the perfect setup for a Disney animated movie (and the first few minutes of the film are done in the traditional, hand-drawn style) and in true Disney tradition, the villain of the story, Edward's evil stepmother, the queen, steps into the picture, tricking Giselle and pushing her down a well (sort of) which is actually a magical portal to place where there are "no happily ever afters." That place just happens to be Manhattan, and it is at this point that the story ceases to be animated but instead takes place in live action.

Giselle, wandering through New York and thoroughly distraught and disoriented, then meets handsome but cynical divorce lawyer Robert Philips (Dempsey) who lives alone with his daughter. What follows is truly zany sequence of events, with Prince Edward jumping down the same "well" in pursuit of Giselle, with a chipmunk named Pip and a loyal manservant named Nathanael (Timothy Spall) in tow.

Of course, this is a love story, so it's pretty much a foregone conclusion who Giselle will fall in love with before the credits roll, but there are some wonderfully surprising character moments, such as when she gets fed up with Robert's cynicism and tells him so. There are a lot of wonderful little character insights, mostly to do with Giselle, that accompany her trip to happily ever after. And like any Disney movie, it's happily ever after for everyone, from Giselle and Robert, to Prince Edward and Robert's girlfriend Nancy (Idina Menzel of Rent, who apparently had a lovely song number with James Marsden that didn't make the final cut) and Nathanael. Of course, we all know what, in a Disney movie, happily ever after means for the villain...

Now, lampooning Disney cliches is nothing new and it was, quite frankly, done ad nauseam in three Shrek movies, but this movie doesn't quite beat the audience over the head with its tongue-in-cheek references. Rather, it pays homage to all of those creations of old, and transplants them, however absurdly, into the 'real world'. For example, the forest animals who help tidy up the cottage become a cadre of pigeons, rats, cockroaches and flies cleaning up Robert's apartment, all to the tune of an Alan Menken song! It's touches like this that set this movie apart from yet another would-be spoof.

Of course, the conceit would still have fallen flat on its face were it not for the conviction of Amy Adams' performance. To any extent, James Marsden as the literally and figuratively two-dimensional Prince Edward also adds a lot to the story's narrative pep, but this is wholly Adams' movie. Thank God Lima didn't go with Lindsay Lohan, who was whispered to have been considered for the part at one point.

The movie is just pure delight from start to finish, and not because there's anything particularly new or insightful about it, but that its execution is really magnificent. It's a deconstruction of the Disney musical without the toilet humor or blatant pop culture references. It's wonderful how, after years of being overshadowed by Dreamworks and their increasingly cookie-cutter computer generated cartoons, Disney has once again come out to show them the way creatively.

Not that the movie is without its flaws. For one thing, one unfortunate inevitability of a movie with characters as zany as Giselle and Prince Edward is that there has to be a 'straight man' to keep things on an even keel, and Dempsey plays Robert as straight as they come, largely because of a script that really doesn't give him anything to do but react to Giselle on one hand and be cynical on the other. Oh, and he's meant to look good in a suit for his legions of Grey's Anatomy fans. His character was somewhat condemned by, ironically enough, a Disney story convention, to not be very interesting, just like the princes Disney lampoons. I mean, at least James Marsden's Edward was laugh-out-loud funny. Idina Menzel is given an even more thankless role than Dempsey, and considering her song number was cut out one wonders why they even kept her character around. Also, I felt that both the cinematographer and makeup artist did Adams a true injustice; I remember seeing her only a year ago in Will Ferrell's Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, and I distinctly remember that she looked pretty good there. Here, she looked disconcertingly old, and rather pallid. Fortunately, her performance transcends the shortcomings of the people who prepped and shot her scenes.

Flaws aside, though, and there are, mercifully, very few of them, this is easily one of the most enjoyable movies I've seen all year, and I heartily recommend it to whoever reads this.

The Reset Button

This past week, part 3 of J. Michael Straczynski's Spider-Man swansong, One More Day, finally hit stores, and finally settled the question of just how Marvel, through artist and editor-in-chief Joe Quesada was planning to put a sledgehammer to Peter Parker's marriage to Mary Jane Watson, (not that it was that much of a mystery leading up to this issue): Peter and Mary Jane make a deal with the devil, known in the Marvel Universe as Mephisto, to save the dying Aunt May.

There's really not much to say about this issue other than that it is among the most heavy-handed, clunkily-narrated comic books starring Spider-Man which I have ever had the misfortune of reading. In this issue the reader can see the all-powerful hand of Marvel's editorial, led by Quesada himself, guiding Straczynski's pen, and it's come out that JMS himself wanted to remove his name from the last two books altogether. Well, when he has to write lines as utterly putrid as "I want that which gives you joy...I want your marriage," it's hard to blame him. The story would have worked better at this point had Joe Quesada simply drawn his own face instead of Mephisto's; everyone knows this was pretty much his idea.

Now, I understand the logic behind "undoing" the marriage; marrying two young leads is something best done at the end of a movie or movie franchise, or even at the end of a long-running TV series. It's not something someone should do in the context of a serialized comic book with an indefinite shelf-life. Spider-Man was introduced to his first generation of readers as young and single, and Quesada's beef, like that of editors that came before him, was that rather than remain as such for succeeding generations, which can actually be accomplished in the comic book world, he aged along with that first audience, to the point where he got married and was, at one point, about to have a kid. There is a point to this argument; Peter and Mary Jane may always be eternally young, but once they're married they will not eternally be newlyweds. In short, it can be argued that the decision to have them get married was a mistake.

But like the old saying goes, "two wrongs don't make a right," and this story is most definitely, indubitably wrong.

This is, in my opinion a crying shame because each issue of this book boasts some of the best artwork I've ever seen in any of Spider-Man's books, and Joe Quesada's best work EVER. I liked his work on the latter issues of Daredevil: Father with the sixth issue being one of my favorites, and this series just completely eclipses that one in terms of the sheer quality of the draftsmanship. If I may wax cliche, Joe is on top of his game artwise.

However, just as Todd McFarlane's art couldn't save the piss-poor writing in his fifteen-issue run on the Spider-Man title he launched nearly two decades ago, Quesada's art simply cannot redeem a story so bad that not even its writer wants to be identified with it.

Brand New Day had better be really, really good and even then I only plan on buying the stuff Steve McNiven draws...