The Fractal Hall Journal

You know what I want? A hardcover edition of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns with the original lightning-jump image on the front and without the god awful Strikes Again stapled onto the end of it, as if DC’s marketing department thought that including several sheets of used bogroll was a selling point.

The paperback version I’ve got is absolutely wrecked, from years of re-reading and the crappy binding that passed for professional bookmaking about fifteen years ago. The Absolute edition suffers from the aforementioned unwanted extra, and the standalones I’ve seen have the kind of half-arsed cover work that passes for Modern Miller’s style. Sure, I’m being picky, but if I’m going to drop twenty quid on something I already have I’d rather have it in a form that a little bit of thought went into. If not, then I can live with having the last forty pages or so detached from the body of the work.

Both Marvel and DC do a good job with their collections, these days. The Absolute Sandmans (Sandmen?) are works of art in their own right, and I’ve already written about Brubaker’s Deadly Genesis not too long ago. At this point, the only monthlies I’m picking up are the Lantern issues, so I’m starting to look at which collections to be picking up next.

I like Geoff Johns’ stuff a lot, and his Action Comics work comes highly recommended, so I’m thinking I might sell the issue I have of the Last Son arc and pick it up in hardcover. The Busiek issues have long been sold- I really don’t see why so many people seem to like them, and that’s no reflection on Busiek. Of all creators, I really think he got the biggest shaft from whatever was going on at the company with regard to delays and Countdown and everything else. I suspect that a Superman run that consists of Up, Up and Away, Last Son, and Bizarro World (which I’m pretty sure I do have all the parts to) through to the Legion and Braniac stories in collected form will be pretty solid. And as for Batman, I think I’ll wait for the dust to settle from the Crisis/RIP crossovers to decide how to follow the story. And like I’ve mentioned before, I’m never picking up another fill-in on anything ever again, so no Paul Dini means no Detective for me.

Marvel-wise, now I don’t get any ongoing series it’s fair to say I’m disconnected enough not to care about Secret Invasion and all its iterations. With the X-titles being as self-contained as they have been since House of M and with Brubaker working on them, I’m quite looking forward to catching up with them. I can live without the Mike Carey stuff (which isn’t to say I don’t think he’s a good writer, it’s just that his work has never really clicked with me and I’d just rather pick up other titles first), so I think I’ll follow the Shi’ar arcs first, then maybe Whedon’s Astonishing now that it’s complete rather than forever delayed. And I still need to pick up Bendis’ last Daredevil volume (The run must be complete! The run must be complete!).

If we hop over to Dark Horse for a second (with the rant from a couple of weeks ago in mind) I notice that they’re starting to do Absolute-esque Hellboy editions. The first one includes the two initial arcs, so at some point I think I’ll flog them and pick this one up. No rush, mind, so I’ll probably do that after I pick up the later volumes, the contents of which I haven’t got round to getting yet. I’m not sure if they’ll be doing the same thing with BPRD, but I’ve already got most of them as monthlies, so I’ll plug in whatever gaps I have with paperbacks (The run must be complete!). What I’m damned sure to get is the Umbrella Academy collection. I didn’t pick them up on the first run, but I’ve read through the first couple of issues and I was pretty taken with it.

Sorry folks, I just realised that I’ve spent the whole post discussing the various elements of a shopping list. Well, at least it makes a change from the X-Files, eh?

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If I’m counting right (which is by no means guaranteed), then today is the two hundredth post at the Fractal Hall Journal. Coincidentally, it’s exactly one month after the kind-of anniversary of the first post here.

That one passed by without note for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I’m about two weeks ahead in posts at the moment (which is also why the adding-up may be suspect) so I didn’t notice I’d gone past the 2nd of June. Secondly, it’s doesn’t really count as a whole year of gibbering into the void as regular posting didn’t start until the 15th of October, and we’re still a little way from that (although it’s getting closer).

It’s interesting to reflect, though. Well, interesting for me. For your good selves, not so much. It’s been a lot of fun, and if it wasn’t, well, I wouldn’t still be doing it. Two hundred posts is a lot of words, after all. If I average at about five hundred words a post, that’s 100,000 words. Which is- actually, that’s a novel.

Bastard internet.

Nah, just kidding. Part of what’s been fun is the discipline of posting five times a week, give or take. It’s fair to say I have something of an issue with focus. I mean, the last incarnation of the Journal was a lot different to this bloggy form, but I was working on that for a couple of years and not really getting anything done. Stripping it all out and starting again was the best idea I ever had.

I’d like to start adding more stuff around here, one day. Alhazred Heights makes a nice change, and sometimes I’d like to do a longer run with it, or something like it. But like I said, I’m a lot more aware of the focus that’s needed with any endeavour, even if it is only amateur internet noodling.

A few not hugely significant things have changed recently. I’ve given up putting exhaustive tags on every post, because while they’re occasionally useful their usefulness balances against getting bored halfway through tagging a post that mentions damn near every comic writer in existence. And I’ve tried to get the word count of every post to creep up a bit.

I’m not sure what the optimum post length is, really. I know the ones I tend to enjoy most in other people’s work are longer length posts, such as internet-chum Plok’s, or the occasional webcomics reviews at Websnark (the latter, actually, is one of the first blogs I ever read, and indirectly responsible for me setting up shop here and talking at you). On the other hand internet ‘culture’ is all about keeping things bite-sized and besides, there’s no way I could manage a two and a half thousand word screed everyday.

The five-hundred-ish word post has been the target so far, which is why the X-Files stuff has gone up in bits. I know it really should go up in one big chunk, but it’s been handy to cheat, if only to get the two-week buffer back. Even so, I’m thinking of aiming at the seven to eight-hundred word range from now on. It’s not much more per day, and it’s a little shorter than the point where I’d give in to temptation, split the post in two and go drinkin’ instead.

Anyway, final and most important point of this post: thanks to everyone who comes here to take a look at whatever I’m venting on any given day. It’s a nerdy kind of thrill to keep an eye on the visitor stats of the blog, and it’s absolutely true that knowing people are happy to come back and have a read is the best motivation for pulling your trousers up and focussing. As it were.

So, mighty thanks, and onwards through the next hundred.

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Superman Returns was a little like a chameleon squatting on the Mona Lisa, and if that’s not the oddest simile you’ve read today, I’ll eat my hat. My blue, Superman-shield-displaying hat.

I liked the film, but I’m not under any illusions that it’s any good, not in the way Singer’s second X-Men film, say, was good. What I mean by the opening statement is that while a chamaleon with a Da Vinci masterpiece on its skin would be interesting, quirky, maybe even disseminated over the internet with an hilariously ungrammatical slogan over it, beyond the mechanics of the thing it’s in no way as impressive as what’s being copied. There’s no artistry involved, no meaning to be found. It’s all instinct.

Maybe that’s not quite fair. I think Singer probably did have something to say with his film. It’s about alienation and otherness, sure. It’s about fathers and sons and family bonds. Problem is, it’s a tale told through the medium of the first Superman film specifically, the character himself generally. By using the former as a focus for his message, Singer ends up stripping everything the original was trying to say, and not quite replacing it with his own message; take the bit where Luthor mentions his own father’s view of the value of land. It’s a pretty clumsy way to tie the bald guy into the theme. Outside of Smallville, when has Lex’s father ever been important? He’s certainly of no interest in Donner’s original, and so carries no thematic weight.

But that’s just a throwaway line, and relly should be discounted. Except, if distant fathers of many stripes are the theme of the film, then that should be reflected in the antagonist. If it isn’t (and, let’s face it, it’s not), then the writers fail on a really basic storytelling level.

I suppose what I’m saying is if Singer wanted to make that film, then that’s what he should have done. Instead, he remade the Donner flick. Of course if he had made a film about the responsibility of legacy, of family bonds, then that wouldn’t really have been a Superman film. The Flash, sure. Maybe even Batman, if you really have to get into the interminable extended Batfamily (and I’d rather you didn’t). But not Superman.

Superman Returns didn’t fail as a spectacle. It didn’t fail at a casting level (yes, Kate Bosworth was awful, but Hollywood doesn’t employ good, or even adequate, actresses anymore, so what are you going to do?), and as a purely technical exercise there was nothing wrong with the directing. All the problems occur in the writing.

Take the young Clark stuff at the beginning of both films. In Donner’s, you learn everything you need to know about him within half an hour. Hell, within five minutes. In Singer’s, you find out he can jump really far. And that’s it. Do we ever really learn anything at all about him, as Clark Kent or as Superman, in the entire film? I suppose you can get away with saying that Superman is whatever you bring into the cinema with you. He’s a big-I Icon, after all. Then again he’s not exactly like any other version of Superman we’ve ever seen before, what with the kid and the funny-coloured suit and the emo-ness, so even that doesn’t hold water.

I guess Returns needed to be different. Batman Begins gave the average cinema-goer a Batman- a Bruce Wayne- they’d never seen before. Even we Batnerds had never seen such a distillation of the character, creating something new even as we recognised so much that was familiar. Singer just gave us a retread of Donner’s film with meaning removed and funkier effects.

I don’t know the answer to this one. I think Singer could still make a great film, and I think Routh is the right actor for the role. The script just needs a damned good shake up, to be crafted as a concentration of everything that’s great about Superman, the comics and movies. More bad guys, sure, and a Superman that can kick Luthor’s backside, even de-powered and stabbed full of kryptonite. But more Clark Kent too. And most of all, a story that needs to be told, a tale that could only be told with Superman.

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Not too long ago, The Sun had a front-page bit on a UFO being seen above Cardiff, before being chased by a Police helicopter across the Bristol Channel and disappearing.

I was irrationally excited about this. The reason I liked the X-Files so much, and by extension the reason I’ve been inflicting a couple of hundred episodes’ worth of meandering commentary on your good selves about it over the past few months, is due to a fascination with UFOs (and ghosts, and lake monsters, and other paranormal weirdness) I had when I was a kid. So a local sighting is pretty cool, and not just for making pithy Torchwood gags.

The BBC news, of course, has to go and piss on everyone’s chips by soberly reporting that, yes, a flying object was spotted that wasn’t immediately identified by the crew of the helicopter, but that there’s plenty of boring regular stuff up there that a crew wouldn’t necessarily be able to identify straight off the bat and anyway, the rules say they’re not allowed to go haring off over the River Severn on a jolly, so they didn’t. At least the Beeb reported it. The other news sources didn’t bother, which just tells me they’re All In It Together, Suppressing The Truth.

It’s not the first time UFOs have been seen in my neck of the woods, actually. Back before the First World War, when things were gearing up for conflict and the populace were aware of the Germans building huge balloon thingies, and were somewhat concerned about the possibility of using them to drop stuff on British cities (a fear that, as history tells us, wasn’t what you could call unfounded), many reports were recorded of zeppelins being sighted around the country.

Here’s a question: do humans really see odd shit in the sky, or is there just a widespread psychological fault that makes us think we see odd shit in the sky? Whatever the origins of the odd shit, back at the turn of the last century the little green men of popular culture hadn’t quite taken hold yet, so the oddness was attributed, as is the cultural habit of the British, to the Germans.

I’ve got a ton of books on the supernatural. Whenever I go on holiday, I always pick up a couple of tourist targeted volumes. You know the kind. Local, small-press stuff, with questionable proof-reading values, glossy paper, stuffed into spinner rack in the Visitor’s Centre with titles like “The Ghosts of Alberta” in a spooky wobbly font. I’ve also got a load of large-page hardback titles, a format not unlike the Beano and Dandy annuals, picked up on the cheap from remainder book stores. In fact, if I recall correctly, Brother Paul has a stack, too, all filled with the kind of deadly serious matter-of-fact articles about abductions and devil dogs that are terrifying when you’re twelve. I find them terrifying now, but then I’m a soft-touch scaredy cat who was reduced to quivering jelly by “An American Haunting”, so I may not be the most objective commentator.

A mention of your home town in books like this is going to stick with you. As part of an overview of the Mystery Zeppelin phenomena, one of the articles told the story of a man who saw one of these craft land on Caerffili Mountain, and got close enough to hear the occupants speak in a foreign language he didn’t recognise before scurrying back to the balloon and heading off over Cardiff. Classic UFO encounter.

The reason I bring this up, is that last week The Sun runs another UFO story, a full front-pager this time, on UFOs being sighted over a military base. This made me think two things: firstly, that’s a few slow news weeks we’ve been getting. Secondly, that’s nicely timed, considering there’s a new X-Files movie coming out in a few weeks’ time.

The last thought chilled me. Really. Because The Sun is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who in turn owns Fox- who produce the X-Files.

I’m not saying the aliens are here and are in league with News Corp (or am I?), but it’s no bloody coincidence that this stuff is getting on their front page- is getting a prominent, dedicated section of The Sun’s website, in fact (no link to The Scum from here, though, oh no. No clicky for Rupert)- on the run-up to the new movie. That kind of blatant manipulation really is spooky.

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The Incredible Hulk

Much like Iron Man, I’ve got nothing to say that hasn’t been said. I thought it was fantastic, everything I wanted in a Hulk film, and with a really consistant tone to the previous cinematic Marvel U film. There’s so much potential here for an Avengers series, and I’m pretty excited about that. In comments here not too long ago, the possibility of the Hulk being the bad guy in the Avengers film was mentioned. I’m not sure that’s quite what will happen (the theme of this film was the possibility of the Hulk being a hero, after all), but the Stark cameo could suggest that they’re putting a team together and they either want the Hulk to join, or they want to take him down. If I was to make a guess, I’d say the Avengers film will have the team hunting the Hulk in Act One, only for them to need him in the climactic battle.

The other thing I wanted to mention was the shot of the cylinder holding the Super Soldier serum that shows is labelled “Weapon Plus”. I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere (but then again, I wouldn’t have because I’ve been avoiding spoilers), but wasn’t this Grant Morrison’s name for the various iterations of Weapon X, in that Wolverine was part of the Super Soldier programme’s 10th (”X”) generation? A sneaky connection to the contractually isolated mutant movies is pretty cool, but then the whole film is packed full of injokes.

Roundtable

Brian K. Vaughan has apparently sold a film script for a huge amount of dosh that deals with a resurrected Merlin trying to gather a group of modern-day knights in order to, and this is the quote from Aint It Cool News, “defend England against a magical foe.” Hmm, yes. Defend England. Of course.

I’m a big fan of Vaughan. And I’m sure the script is brilliant; it’s already being described as having a Ghostbusters style vibe. It’s a great concept, as modern-day knights are, of course, athletes and businessmen and actors, not exactly dark age warrior material.

Some of you may remember a post a little while back about my problem with adaptations of Arthurian legends (here, in fact). What it amounts to is cultural theft, willful ignorance on the part of writers and film producers regarding the Welsh origins of these myths. Look, I know it’s a dumb thing to annoyed about, really I do. In fact, I may be about the only person who does get irritated by this. But it really, down to my bones, pisses me off.

Put it this way: imagine a hugely successful series of books and films based on Native American legends (or, for that matter, African legends, or Chinese legends, or whatever), jam packed full of Native American characters, yet these characters were never once played by, or referred to as, Native Americans. In fact, every character is played by a white American, and the very tales themselves are attributed to the colonists.

Well, that would be an ignorant thing to do, wouldn’t it?

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Not every funny episode is utter shite, mind. “Arcadia”, where Mulder and Scully go undercover as husband and wife in a planned community, is genius. The humour flows from the believable way Mulder tries to piss his neighbours off in an attempt to provoke them into revealing who (or what) the monster-of-the-week is. For once, it’s a funny episode that relies on the recognisable characteristics of the leads, rather than in trying to subvert them or the series as a whole.

I was going to write a long bit on “Milagro”, the episode that has Scully oddly attracted to a writer who’s moved in next to Mulder, but it annoys me a little too much to spend time on it. Like “Never Again” a couple of seasons ago, Scully is written out of character, and I’m not sure I buy what they’re trying to say about her personality. Essentially, she finds herself falling for someone who follows her around and knows a little too much about her, in such a way that suggests Carter, Shiban and Spotnitz have never spoken to a grown woman and confuse “erotically charged” with “creepy stalker”. And to make it even more excruciating, the character voice-over explains all the amazing skills and insights writers have about everything. Put it away, gents, no one wants to see you doing that in public.

“Field Trip” is a groan-worthy pun of a title, what with Mulder and Scully getting doped by an hallucinogenic fungus and then slowly digested underground. It’s a call-back to other lost-in-the-woods episodes like “Detour” and “Darkness Falls”, complete with hospital time at the end to go along with the whole nightmarish false-awakening sequence that suggests that they may still be under the ground. Never mind the amount of people these two have shot, what the hell does their medical bill look like? I mean, not just physical hospital bed time; how many times have either of them had to consult with a shrink? Who’s paying for all of this? There’s three things I should have kept a tally of when I started watching these episodes- hospitalisations, body counts, and the amount of time Mulder cries. Seriously, he bawls his eyes out more times than he makes witty quips.

There aren’t many arc episodes in the series, but the ones that do turn up are very good, and important. “Two Fathers/One Son” sees the rebel faction of aliens killing the last members of the Syndicate, leaving Cancer Man and Agent Fowley to escape. It’s obviously the production staff’s way of sweeping away all the needlessly complex crap that’s accumulated over the series’ run, in a suitably dramatic fashion. Problem is, as we’ll see next season, it all gets a bit odd again very quickly. Agent Spender is apparently killed, shot by his father in the basement office. I say apparently because we never see it happen, it isn’t mentioned at all in any of the episodes that follow (and you’d think something like that would be big news), and Mulder’s quite happy to pootle along as usual when he gets his room back. I assume this gets cleared up (along with Spender’s brains) in a later series.

“Biogenesis” is certainly a strange end-of-series episode, in that it ends with Mulder gibbering away in an asylum and Scully digging up a bible-quotation covered UFO in Africa. It makes a little bit more sense in the two episodes that kick off S7, but frankly not much. I’ll go into that next time, when the show gets crazy metaphysical.

So, to recap, the global conspiracy appears to have ended, Scully may be immortal, and the two of them could be hallucinating the rest of the series while being digested by a big mushroom. The nostalgia trip’s two-thirds over, and (as of writing) there’s six weeks until the new film’s released. Let’s get this done.

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“How The Ghosts Stole Christmas” really annoyed me first time I saw it, although I couldn’t quite recall why. Oh, it all comes flooding back now. The problem is, the opening twenty-odd minutes are brilliant, The X-Files meets The Haunting. You can almost believe we’re going to get a classic MR James Christmas ghost story. But no, instead the ghosts turn up, psychoanalyse the leads a bit, then give us a needlessly bloody/it-was-all-an-illusion climax. I don’t care if one of the ghosts was played by comic fan and rare American socialist Ed Asner. Actually, I do care, because that’s pretty awesome. As annoying a missed opportunity as the episode is, it’s redeemed a little bit by a surprisingly touching ending, where Mulder and Scully really come across as close friends; it works because the program seems to spend a lot of time in later series separating them. It’s a reminder of why we care enough about these characters to, well, watch a couple of hundred of episodes, in order, years after the programme finished.

But, as it turns out, it isn’t the worst of the comedy episodes, nor the worst episode of the season. Oh no, that award- along with award for worst episode of the entire show- goes to “The Rain King”. Fuck me backwards, I didn’t think it was possible to be more tedious than “The Field Where I Died”, or more nonsensical than “Soft Light”. This episode is an absolute bucket of shit. The investigation has something to do with a man who controls the weather, unconsciously, but the actual episode is about gently-comedic simple folk falling in love. It’s the very first time, in all of these episodes, that I wanted to switch off. Christ, it’s like an episode of- no, there’s nothing to compare it too. It’s a fucking car crash.

It also commits the sin, shared with same-series episode “Agua Mala”, of comedy based on backwards country cretin stereotypes. I’ve got a very low tolerance for classist shit at the best of times. In a show as intelligently written as this, there’s no fucking excuse. About they only thing they didn’t do was a gag about sheep-fuckin’, cos them country-folk love their sheep-fuckin’ (hellooooo Google users).

“Agua Mala” gets a partial out because it’s a fairly spooky (if comedic) monster-of-the-week that reintroduces Arthur Dales. Of course, his character goes on to get the shaft in yet another comedic episode, “The Unnatural”.

Before I get on to that, does anyone remember the issue of Peter Parker: Spider-Man that’s about how much Peter Parker loves baseball? It’s set in the past, when he was a kid and Uncle Ben took him to see whatever that team is they have in New York. I didn’t really like that issue, although I understand a lot of fans who loved it. I think it’s because I have zero interest in baseball, but also because, as far as I understood it, Parker isn’t a baseball fan. Or a fan of any sports. Isn’t he one of us?. Isn’t he the One True Nerd Hero? Don’t we get sport-worship in every other conceivable corner of our lives, whether we want it or not? Must I read about it in Spider-Man? Dear God, can nothing be pure?

Ahem.

What I mean is, it didn’t ring true to me. It looked like a writer projecting a little bit of autobiography on a character, when nothing in the character’s history suggested that kind of history. Then I realised the writer was Paul Jenkins. Paul Jenkins. The Welshman. Which, perhaps without justification, made me think that the story wasn’t even heartfelt, just a way of layering a bit of gooey American-ness in to appeal to the stars-n-stripes-n-apple-pie crowd (in much the same way, I suspect Scotsman Mark Millar’s A-Don’t-Stand-For-France thing in Ultimates wasn’t anything more than a calculated appeal to the jingoistic amongst us).

So with all that in mind, believe me when I say David Duchovny’s love letter to hitting stuff with longer stuff does absolutely nothing for me. It’s not that it’s badly written; quite the opposite. It’s sufficiently witty where it needs to be, and all the characters are likeable enough. But in fanguish terms, a lot of important things to do with the arc story are shat out here for laughs. This is the episode where we see the alien Greys interact with humans fully for the first time, and they’re in deliberately crap costumes. This is the episode where we find out they’re all shape-shifters, that the bounty hunter is in fact a Grey. This is where they decide to undermine the otherwise fantastic character of Arthur Dales by writing in that his brother (and maybe sister) has exactly the same name as him, and play the whole history of the X-Files for a laugh.

I don’t care whether it’s supposed to be in continuity, or if it “all depends on perspective”. Dropping revelations like this in a comedy episode, when the audience (i.e. me) has spent this long waiting for answers is a shitty way to go about things. And ultimately, I think this is why the audience went away. If the creators don’t take their show seriously, why should the viewers? I mean, a handful of comedy episodes is fair enough. Practically a whole series is ridiculous.

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A bit of a change in format this time around. I won’t bother breaking the post into the usual four headings. Apart from anything else, “That Was Then” is going to be irrelevant for the last three series because I’ve hardly seen any of them. I’ll still split the post into three updates because, hey, three days’ worth of content. But anyway, onwards with Series 6.

We’re in the very heart of comedy country, now, which balances out the near-nihilism of inevitable invasion in the arc stories. I remember this one as being fairly enjoyable as the Syndicate plotline- and the Syndicate themselves- are cut down to a more manageable size. My strongest memory is the comedy episodes that feature Spinal Tap’s Mike McKean being good, and the bloody ghost episode being shit.

The season kicks off with “The Beginning”, a surprisingly clumsy effort to fit Gibson Praise into the storylines generated in the movie. The initial scene is pretty gory and evocative of the film, but ultimately it’s easy to see how the big-budgetness has had to have been reduced. Thanks to the show’s move away from Vancouver to California, there’s a lot more deserty scenes as the agents head to places like Nevada.

“Triangle” is an ambitious episode, with three long apparently-continuous scenes and a split-screen finale covering Mulder facing off against Nazis in a time-shifted Bermuda Triangle. That plot isn’t quite as awesome as it sounds, and the best bit is actually Scully searching for a way of helping him in the FBI building. While that sounds a little boring, in fact it’s great to finally see how the building fits together as she heads from the various Directors’ offices down to the X-Files in the basement. Rather than having several static scenes, having things unfold in real time gives a funny kind of insight to how the character reacts in normal(ish) situation, like waiting for a lift, and is surprisingly endearing. The whole episode doesn’t quite hold together, but for once the fact that the show tried something different really raises an otherwise run-of-the-mill episode.

The “Dreamland” two-parter is just as funny as I remembered, about a middle-aged military conspirator working at Area 51 who swaps bodies with Mulder and, amongst other things, repurposes the agent’s junk-filled spare room into an amorous boudoir. McKean’s character, Morris Fletcher, will show up again more than once, including a hilarious cameo with an intoxicated Scully in the superb Lone Gunmen episode “Three Of A Kind”. The latter is a great showcase for the bit-players, almost a pilot for the later spin-off, and not only do we get closure to the earlier Gunmen episode but we also see how the characters have changed since their first meeting (Frohike in particular). Bruce Campbell also has a role in “Terms of Endearment”, an episode I remember as being a comedy one, but actually turns out to be pretty horrific (as in gory rather than crap).

“Tithonus” is an odd little episode where a man appears to be immortal because he turned his eyes from Death, so Death ignored him. It’s a nondescript story that I only note because, at the end, Scully gets shot but the immortal guy dies instead of her. Which presumably means that after this, Scully can’t die either. Weird.

Senator Matheson returns in “SR 819″, and although it’s a nice nod to previous episodes it’s a little ambiguous as to whether he’s gone completely over to the dark side or what. Ambiguity is usually intriguing in any series, but with so many unanswered questions the X-Files is unfortunately more likely to be frustrating than anything. That said, Krycek is back in thoroughly evil mode and it’s a great Skinner episode, showing a little of more of the man’s psychology. It’s has a real emotional punch too, after he wishes he could do more to help Mulder and Scully while he thinks he’s dying, only to be blackmailed into aiding Krycek because the rogue agent controls the nanotechnology he’s been poisoned with

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I’ve been getting through Dennis Lehane’s first four books recently, finishing the last one in time to catch the film version’s UK release this weekend (well, two weeks ago now, what with the restored post buffer).

They’re all very well-written, readable crime dramas, if not quite as good as Mystic River. Of course, he had about ten years to improve between that one and the first. In fact, it’s easy to see how the former is a culmination of all the things he learned from his previous work, as if he had to figure out what his style was before writing a whole book in that mode.

Because the Kenzie and Gennaro adventures can be summed up, in a way, like film pitches. A Drink, Before The War, with its gang storyline and shady city politics, is like The Shield set in Boston (though it predates the series by a fair bit of time). Darkness, Take My Hand is a typical serial killer whodunit, and Sacred is a Robert Mitchum-type noir. And if Gone Baby Gone is anything, it’s a Hollywood kidnapping thriller, complete with gunfights and action sequences.

Of course, it’s the only one that’s actually been adapted into a Hollywood thriller, but in such a way that it’s not a typical thriller at all.

A lot of people get shot in the book series, which isn’t unusual for the genre. What makes it a little odd is the setting. Because Lehane does a brilliant job of capturing working class life in Boston (I have no idea how accurate it is, only that it feels sufficiently realistic), it’s a bit of a jolt to get into the action sequences that are also a big part of the books. There’s one character in particular, Bubba Rogowski, a psychotic arms dealer who wires up his apartment with antipersonel mines instead of a burglar alarm, who seems completely out of place, and I wondered how they’d handle him in the film. The answer is, he’s downgraded to a minor-league drug dealer.

A lot of things get that kind of low-key downgrading in the film, whether simplifying the chaotic plot of the novel, the scope of the final conspiracy, or the shootouts. But it’s all necessary, as the tack director Ben Affleck chooses to take is more the realistic portrayal of life in Dorchester, and that’s always been the most interesting part of Lehane’s books. What he keeps in are the impossible dilemmas that face all the characters.

A key scene in the book and the film is the execution of a child molester by Kenzie. Even though the scene is described far more brutally in the book than is shown in the film, the latter is still more horrific. If anything, it’s easier to understand Kenzie’s motivation in the film without his inner monologue. We don’t really need to know why he did what he did, because we’ve seen it for ourselves. Put in the same position as him, it’s easy to see how anyone would do the same thing, regardless of whether the person gunned down was unarmed or harmless. Kenzie’s guilt, however understandable his actions were, effect his judgement for the rest of the film, facing another impossible decision of leaving the missing girl with her kidnappers and a happy, promising future, or returning her to a neighbourhood that has destroyed so many other lives.

The film benefits from not being one of a series, like the books are. It’s the first time we see Patrick Kenzie, so we don’t know all the other tragic things that have happened to him. We don’t know his history with his father, or that he’s had to kill before (I’d assume that, continuity wise, film-Kenzie doesn’t have the baggage of the books), so we find it that much easier to identify with him, although we do get hints of his uncontrollable anger when he pistol-whips a guy in a bar towards the beginning. And even though Casey Affleck’s accent is damn near impenetrable.

It’s a grown-up film for grown-ups, so it’s not necessarily and easy watch. The whole cast are great, and the setting seems really authentic. The only character who gets a little short-changed is Angie Gennaro. In the book she’s explicitly dangerous, not only tough on her own terms but also the grandaughter of an old Boston mob boss. In the film, she just kind of cries a lot, and moans at Kenzie. The whole cast is so brilliant, it’s a fucking shame that they decided to cast the second most important character in the film by essentially looking for the next moderately famous attractive young actress to wander along. In a film so non-Hollywood, it’s typical that the Hollywood mentality still had to piss on the chips, even a little bit.

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So, the question of whether or not children’s books should carry suggested age markers has come up recently. It shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows me that I have a little trouble with this concept.

I have a lot of trouble with the idea of censorship. I know the argument is that no-one’s asking the authors to change their work. The problem is you see something like this, and you wonder at which point that will start happening anyway. It’s easy for any regulating body to say ‘Oh, of course we’ll never use our powers for evil. Never ever.’ But sooner or later someone starts power tripping and that’s exactly what happens.

I mean, is there an epidemic of adults buying the wrong books for children? Of children utterly confused by which books they shouldn’t buy? Why is this happening now? What worries me is the motives behind something like this. I don’t like not knowing why something’s happening, particularly if it’s going to turn out ten years down the line that there’s vested interests involved. Not like that’s never happened before.

I’m just as susceptable to cranky paranoia as anyone brought up on the X-Files, but it’s not necessarily a shadowy Right-wing fundementalist conspiracy to regulate the reading habits of a generation of children. Simple economic factors may cause an action like this to effect the commercial viability of some books. Just look at the fucking disaster the film rating system is. Thanks to the burning need to maximise profit through ensuring most films get a 12A/PG-13 certificate, we don’t bother making films for grown-ups anymore.

And the film ratings system is a mess. 12A was brought into existence because the first Spider-Man film couldn’t get a PG rating. I remember reading an article from a high court judge arguing how ridiculous it was that the BBFC thought children would have trouble with fantasy violence between the hero and a guy called the Green Goblin. The real problem, of course, was that Spider-Man’s face got messed up in the last scene. Which is completely appropriate, if you ask me, because as Paul C (whom I quote here often on these matters) pointed out, I think children need to understand that there are consequences to going round pounding on peoples faces, and that if you punch someone, you will damage them and it’s going to hurt. And I think that lesson’s appropriate even if you’re under 12.

And it’s not just the lower ratings that are fucked beyond use. In the UK, as of writing, at 16 years old you can legally have sex, get married, squeeze out a sprog and buy yourself a big, fat cigar to celebrate. But the BBFC will eagerly protect you from watching, say, Doomsday. Do we really feel this is an admirable system to emulate in the book trade?

A counter-argument is that the above things are legal but not advisable, and some argue with a lot of justification that it should be changed. The thing is, there’s a reason why these things are set at 16 and not 18, and not just because of dirty hippie judges. And this point ties in with why a book rating system is next to useless.

There’s a concept in British law called Gillick competency, from a case of the same name. The specific facts aren’t important for our purposes, but the concept amounts to the idea that a children develop at different speeds, and that in any given case a child of a certain age may be competent to make decisions about their own medical treatment while another child of the same age may not. By the same token, the influence a parent has over the child isn’t completely absolute till the the very first second of their 16th birthday, when suddenly they’re cut loose on their own. Instead, gradually over time, the child grows into accepting more responsibility over themselves. Essentially, the reason it’s pointless to outlaw some things for 16-year-olds is that by the time they’ve reached that age, there’s not a whole fucking lot anyone can do to stop them.

So we come back to suggest reading age, a concept utterly without meaning. The reading ability of every human on the planet varies wildly. The idea it can be pinned down to 5-plus, 9-plus, 12-plus or whatever is nonsense. Where do we fit Jane Austen into this scale? Jules Verne? To Kill A Mockingbird deals implicitly with sexual violence, and that book should be read by damn near everyone as soon as possible. By the time I was 12 I was reading Stephen King, never mind whatever was in the teen section of the book shop. And as for films, well, you want to check how many people born around 1980 had seen Robocop or Aliens before the decade was out?

And never mind differing reading ability, how about differing parental viewpoints? Who decides what’s appropriate for an age group to be reading about? Maybe we can agree on naughty words; but then, maybe not, in that I’ve meant plenty of people who think breaking the Third Commandment is worse than calling someone a motherfucking chunk of monkey-spunk. I don’t think this is going to make it easier to choose a book for a child. I think it’s a way of removing parental responsibility for being aware of what your child is reading. No thought required, just pick up one that’s been deemed safe and give it to your loved one. I can’t wait for the first case of someone complaining that their child has read something they shouldn’t have, just because their personal standards differ to the norm.

The biggest threat here, I think, is that it will end up discouraging children from reading. Kids get enough crap from other kids for having less of an ability in something as it is. Do we really want to be advertising on the cover of a book that someone has a subjective reading age lower than their actual age? Should we be discouraging a nine-year-old from reading a ten-year-old’s book? Because that’s how it works. If a book says 10+ on the cover, a child will likely think there’s something wrong with them reading it.

The thing is, I suppose I have a personal bias in this because I remember being incredibly reluctant as a kid to head into the Adult section of Caerffili Library. There was a general feeling that I’d be told off for going there, even though there wasn’t much left in the kids’ section to interest me. Seriously, it was almost like as soon as you crossed the threshold you’d be surrounded by bongo mags and guns. I know I’m not the only person who thought there was something wrong with heading down to that part of the library, and as an adult I feel strongly that no part of a library should be off-limits to anyone, whatever their age, and that if any kid is smart enough to know they need to be heading over to the adult section because they’ve outgrown the little plastic chairs then they should be encouraged to do so, not patronised and sent back to flick through a sanitised piece of dross with an appropriately coloured banding on the cover.

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