Spotted Minds

Posted on | April 11, 2004 at 7:03 pm | Comments Off

Time for the latest media reviews. I get into Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (slight spoilers included) and the comic book (not the TV show) Alias. Read on, if you dare (care?)…

This week’s movie was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Even though I like Charlie Kaufman’s stuff (witness the quote from Adaptationat the top of the page), I was a little leery of this one because of 1) Jim Carrey, and 2) the purported fact that most of the movie takes place within his mind. I’m not a big Jim Carrey fan, and I’m not a big fan of movies that aren’t “real”. However, the filmmakers managed to do okay with the material anyway, keeping it interesting. As a kind of backwards psychological dissection of a relationship, it works well. And I felt a real sense of peril or suspense, since I kept wondering if Joel will succeed in fighting the conditioning and perserving his memories of Clementine. I loved the ending, and it really made me want to know what happens next. Even though the plot in general was a bit unbelievable, I went with it as long as my mind maintained it was just a device for examining the relationship. The one thing I had trouble with is that it seemed like Mary was able to send out those files awful quickly at the end. It seemed like only one day had passed.

Anyway, thumbs up. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet both did wonderful jobs. You could see how these people could be attracted to each other even though they seemed so different, and you could also see how both simultaneously fragile and strong that relationship was.

Another thing I’ve been trying to do lately is catch up on some of my comic book reading. I finally finished off the run of Marvel’s Alias series (no relation to the TV show of the same name) by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos. This was a series in Marvel’s MAX line, for “mature” readers. The heroine of the book is Jessica Jones, a failed costumed superhero turned private investigator. She’s something of an alcoholic, sexually promiscuous, and boy does she swear like someone on Deadwood. Even though it takes place in the mainstream Marvel universe (she runs into people like Captain America), I think the book is part of the MAX line primarily because of the cursing. She actually ends up in some of the seedier, shadowy corners of the Marvel universe, which, along with her abrasive (yet helpful, caring) personality is what makes the book interesting.

When the story first starts out, you have no idea of Jessica’s background – what her superhero identity was, why she quit, why she became a private eye, etc. But by the end of the 28 issues, you know pretty much everything. Bendis does a good job of building the suspense and making you wonder just what happened to her to turn her into this person, which is pretty shocking. I only have two complaints. One is the art – it took awhile for me to warm to Gaydos’s style, especially since he does a lot of repeated/copied panels. But his grimy style does fit the material. The other thing I didn’t like was that there was a plot development near the end (during the ultimate, Purple Man storyline) which veered a bit too closely into Grant Morrison/Animal Man territory (i.e. one of the characters seems to know he’s just a character in a comic book). Luckily, that didn’t really play into things as much as I feared it would.

The comic was canceled after 28 issues, supposedly because Bendis was done telling the story he wanted to tell. And I have to admit the run is solid and provides closure. However, Jessica’s story is continuing in a new bi-monthly comic called The Pulse, which is not part of Marvel’s mature readers line. So Jessica can’t swear any more. There’s only two issues of that out so far, and I haven’t read the second yet. It looks like it has potential.

The entire run of Alias is collected as a series of four trade paperbacks, which you can get for around $12 -$15 a piece. Worth seeking out if you’re into something a little different in the comic world. Here’s the links for the books at Amazon:

Alias, Book 1
Come Home (Alias, Book 2)
The Underneath (Alias, Book 3)
The Secret Origins of Jessica Jones (Alias, Book 4)

In TV news, the SciFi channel has officially scheduled the Farscape mini-series, which is supposed to wrap up the storyline they were in the middle of when the channel canceled the series. It will be nice to get some closure on that, though I still wish it hadn’t been canceled in the first place. You just can’t beat SF shows where some of the main characters are puppets.

Also, inevitably, a campaign has surfaced to resurrect Wonderfalls…

Latre.