Well, as you can see in the latest issue of The Voice (Oct ‘07), a lot has been done on the XJ in a short amount of time. The steering needed serious attention if it was to be both strong and reliable, so upgrades were in order. What I found was a good cost-effective upgrade using OEM (original equipment manufacturer) replacement parts from a late model Jeep Grand Cherokee. The tie rod system on the ZJ is much stronger than the XJ and is a direct swap. This way is cheaper than the aftermarket replacements (although they are very nice as well), and helps keep a ceiling on the overall cost of the project. I used MOOG replacement parts from a local shop in Vancouver (RH long tie rod part #ds1312, LH short side part #es3096l, and the adjusting sleve part # es2079s). Easy install and is working well! More to come…

When you think performance brakes, sports cars are usually the first things that come to mind. But in almost any situation, high-quality brakes can make a difference! Doing a lift and putting larger tires on the Jeep mean that there is going to be more stress on the braking system as well. And the brake lines need to be changed to address the lift with the increased travel. Stock rotors usually are a good idea, most of the time, but with larger wheels and tires, I wanted something a little more. And what I found was a good, cost-effective answer with Baer Brakes Delca rotors, compared to Powerslot rotors available at most local tire stores, and most popular. These Baer Brake were slotted like the Powerslot units, but are also cross-drilled. (Not to mention the cheaper price by about 50 bucks.) As for the brake pads, I went with Wagner Thermo Quiet pads. They are a high-quality OEM replacement. They cost a bit more than generic pads, but safety is well worth the extra penny. And when we do brakes, it’s all about safety. And finally, for the brake lines; instead of using an after-market stainless braided line, I found that I could use the Wrangler YJ stock lines. This saved a small fortune in overall cost.

So, to keep things interesting and fun, I couldn’t wait to put on the Bushwacker cut-outs. Although I’m not hard-mounting them, so to speak, with paint in the works, I needed to get an idea of what they were going to look like. I have to say the product overall was a pleasure to work with. Good instructions and good tools made it easy. The hardest part of the entire install was removal of the factory fender flares. If this is a task you are thinking of doing yourself, I highly recommend the use of a die-grinder and sawzall to help with the removal of the factory flares. I tried to take them off nice and pretty to possibly put them on Craigslist, but after 10 minutes of fighting with the very first one, I learned this was a lost cause. Another 10 minutes with some power tools and the rest were off. Thanks to Trevor with Diamond K fabrications, he was a good hand with this install. A few guys from www.sore4×4.com made the trek to see what was going on and ended up helping as well. Thanks guys! Using a die grinder I made the most cuts up front. Also doing some clean up with a sawzall. The rear cut outs were done with help from Kenny with SORE4×4.com, he was able to make all the cuts with the saw.

More later…

If you are reading this on Thursday, September 27th, 2007, then you know that The Office begins its fourth season this evening on NBC at 9 PM. As I wrote over at MSN, the network has been in crisis mode for a few years, all because NBC no longer had Friends, Frasier, and Seinfeld.

NBC, it seems, has a sense of entitlement about TV comedy. If CBS is the diamond network known once upon a time for its news, and ABC is for kids, with the more recent Fox as the Page Three girl of the networks, then NBC prided itself on a “must see” Thursday string of highly polished sitcoms, going back to Cosby and Cheers. What they didn’t seem to notice at first, but which the Golden Globes and the Emmys have acknowledged to their credit, is that NBC has lucked into a whole new generation of great, quirky comedies for a Thursday line up. Their virtue to home viewers, which is probably their vice to the stuffy old timers who run the networks, is that these shows are offbeat and unpredictable, cynically up-to-date while also sentimental when they have to be. Another cool thing about the line up is that no one show is the anchor; they are all great in different ways.

The initial hook, though, was The Office, a very unusual sitcom for prime time American TV in that it was shot with a single camera as if it were a documentary, and in sporting dry, discomforting wit. Like many other shows, it was adapted from a much beloved but short-lived British version, and initially the American Office had to overcome comparisons to its GB progenitor (a funny American Office episode might be one in which the British office people … the original cast, including creator Ricky Gervais … come to America for a tour of US offices, and meet their stateside counterparts).

As I wrote at QuickStopEntertainment about the DVD of Season Two, “The essence of the show is, of course, Michael Scott, whose approach to life is like that of a professional comic’s. Though he wants everyone to laugh with him, unfortunately, they always end up laughing at him, primarily because his idea of comedy is from the 1950s. He takes an improv class, where as in life, he never listens to the instructor, and, like a Jerry Lewis, is always one for promoting causes, until he finds out how much they cost (Michael spends a lot of money in the show, including on a new house and a series of ‘togetherness’ photos). Like an Andy Kaufman routine, The Office traffics in discomfort, and the task of the cast is to take it as far as they can without alienating the audience. Thus in season two, some of the other Dunder-Mifflin employees, such as Jim and Pam, take pity on him and rescue Michael before he descends to some of the depths that tempt him.”

Season One was a trial balloon only six episodes long, while the fuller Season Two continued to chart the romance between officemates Pam and Jim, culminating in a kiss during an office party. Meanwhile, Michael became obsessed with the idea that he had a relationship with his boss, Jan. As Season Three opens, Jim has taken a new job at another branch, because the kiss with Pam did not lead to a romance. In reaction, Jim transfers to another branch, and we meet a whole bunch of new office types, including Ed Helms (like Steve Carell, a Daily Show alum) as Andy Bernard and Rashida Jones (who became Crush No. 1, just as her mother, Peggy Lipton was in the 1960s when The Mod Squad was on) as Karen Filippelli, who instantly pulls a Pam and falls for Jim. But as usual with “big changes” in a show, like plastic they revert back to their former shape. Thus, the two branches are merged and Jim, Andy, and Karen are transferred to the Scranton branch. Meanwhile, Pam has indeed canceled her wedding to Roy, and Michael, after a fling with Carol, does indeed end up in a non-imaginary relationship with Jan. As the season progresses, Jan (Melora Hardin, another crush) spirals downward and Ryan, the former anonymous temp, spirals upward.

The important thing is that, unlike most sitcoms, it is laugh out loud funny. I cite as a perfect example episode four, “Grief Counseling,” in which Michael goes into a tizzy over the death of his old boss Ed Truck (whose job Michael now has) and evolves into a bird funeral. Most sitcoms, you sit there in front of the TV dead, maybe laughing inwardly if you’re lucky. Instead with The Office you laugh out loud with a blend of recognition and emotional involvement. It’s the kind of magic only the best TV sitcoms can create.

We never see the people actually making the documentary about Dunder-Mifflin (one wonders what goes on in the “office” on their side of the cameras), but surely all the attention the constantly circulating cameras bring must make business much better at Dunder-Mifflin. No matter. The office may be failing, but The Office is a success. Each progressive seasonal set of The Office comes bearing increasingly abundant supplements commensurate with its aesthetic and material success. The Season Three Office set (Universal Studios Home Video, 4 discs, Digipak with Slipcase, Dolby Digital 5.1 English and Spanish subtitles, $49.95, street date September 9, 2007). Here there are eight cast-clogged audio commentary tracks (in the one for episode three, Ms. Jones and John Krasinski both met the real life counterparts of their characters. In addition there are a number of short segments, including “Kevin Cooks Stuff in the Office,” winning entries in a “Make Your Own Promo” contest, NBC promos, “Dwight Schrute Music Video,” a Joss Whedon interview, a blooper reel, the full “Lazy Scranton” video, Conan O’Brien’s inaction with the cast as part of the Emmy Awards broadcast, and no less than three hours of deleted scenes, which is the equivalent of another eight episodes. And it still won’t seem like enough.

In the arts, it’s not what you do, sometimes, but whom you know. And the much fêted Miranda July knows a lot of helpful people. In large part Ms. July’s success is dependent less upon people like you or me and more on everyone she knows.

Miranda July is the current darling of the Eastern cultural elites. Whatever she does, be it performance art (The Swan Tool, in which this author, weirdly, had a walk on), short films (Nest of Tens, one of many works that led to an embarrassing and incomprehensible rave in Film Comment), music videos (for Sleater-Kinney), websites, feature films (You and Me and Everyone We Know), or a collection of short stories, the doe-eyed brunette shortly thereafter lands on the covers of numerous slacker lifestyle magazines simultaneously. Critics and profilers tend to swallow whole what she has to offer, beguiled by what is inevitably called her fragile beauty and knack for the delicate admission. For example, Angela Ashman in the May 8th Village Voice reveals that the short stories in Ms. July’s new book, No One Belongs Here More Than You, are “often inspired by her own life and the people she sees around her (she’s an obsessive note-taker),” adding that “July is drawn to sad, heartbreaking scenes that get the better of her emotions. ‘My boyfriend,” she says, “is always stunned at how easily I’ll be crying at something.’”

One could be forgiven for thinking that Ms. July is a cunning self-marketer. But, then, it’s part of the family business. Her parents, Lindy Hough and Richard Grosinger, ran North Atlantic Book, a New Age publishing company. Now, as reported in the Guardian, Ms. July is the happy recipient of the 2007 Frank O’Connor award for achievement in short story writing. The prize comes with a cash award of some $42, 000 dollars American. Pat Cotter, the jury chairman, is described as having “defended” the shortlist (which also included Israeli writer Etgar Keret and New Zealand scribe Charlotte Grimshaw, reduced from a list that also originally included Alice Munro and David Malouf ) as a demonstration of the judges’ independence. The judges included American novelist Rick Moody.

Is one permitted to wonder out loud, however, at how objective Mr. Moody was in advocating this award? After all, it was Ms. Ashman who, back in May, wrote that, “It was author Rick Moody, a ‘family friend of a friend,’ who encouraged July to write.” It is a glorious day in literature indeed when a mentor can watch his little duckling finally reach maturity, and all he has to do is serve on the Frank O’Connor jury. One also wonders if Ms. July was taking notes as she received her bounteous check, weeping all the way to the bank.

No better proof of the superiority of British television to American is the broadcast last week of an episode that forms a part of the BBC’s current “Comics Britannia” season, this hour dedicated wholly to Steve Ditko. Who? Well, that’s why British TV is better: it demands that you know a thing or two. “Jonathan Ross In Search of Steve Ditko” proved to be one of the best hours of television, ever.

Ditko is the co-creator of Spider-Man. When Marvel Comics were given a new lease on life back in the early 1960s, head writer Stan Lee set about to create some popular superhero characters for the firm that had hitherto primarily trafficked in funny animal comics, romances, westerns, and horror stories, something of a decline from its golden age, when it introduced Captain America and Submariner to the world. When The Fantastic Four and The Incredible Hulk proved indeed to be popular, Lee (if I may offer a simplified version of the story) turned to staff artist Steve Ditko, a Pennsylvania mining town boy who came to the big city in 1953, to help him implement his latest idea, Spider-Man. They introduced the character in issue No. 15 of Amazing Fantasy in August of 1962, and the rest is history.

Except the early Spider-Man, as Mr. Ross’s show makes clear, was somewhat different from the later version. Ditko had a falling out with Lee and left the company after Spider-Man No. 39, abandoning both Spider-Man and another character he developed, Doctor Strange. Various interview subjects in the show make it clear that the man who took over Spider-Man, John Romita, helped turn the comic into the force it is today, basically by prettying up the characters. Romita had been a specialist in romance comics, while Ditko kept Spider-Man in the quotidian world of a grungy city whose citizens scraped by on meager incomes and where injustice reigned in Peter Parker’s school, job, and private life. Ditko’s world was a hardcore one of darkened buildings and water towers at night, or refuse and loneliness and dreams; Romita’s was a world of hipster slang and toothpaste ad bright teeth.

First off, the most remarkable feature of Jonathan Ross’s show is that it aired at all. It is the sort of program that is unimaginable on American television. Ross admits that he has a personal love of Ditko, and one sequence shows he and two other men browsing through his extensive and enviable comic book collection. Second, Ross manages to round up a succession of interview subjects who generally don’t find themselves on TV, among them Romita and the equally reclusive Alan Moore, the British comic book writer who drew upon the Ditko oeuvre to create his masterpiece, Watchmen (that comic’s Rorschach is a variation on the right-wing Ditko’s later law-and-order character Mr. A, just one of many Ditko-esque facets to Watchmen). Finally, Ditko doesn’t give interviews. At all. Ever. The Ayn Rand acolyte and occasional transmitter of angry bulletins to comic ‘zines won’t even let his photo be taken. Ross’s search for Ditko could easily prove fruitless. I won’t spoil the surprise ending, when Ross and comic book writer Neil Gaiman find themselves outside Ditko’s Manhattan office building (200 West 51st Street), but it is deeply satisfying.

Even if American television had strayed into the fascinating world of Steve Ditko, they would have messed it up some how. First, they would only have broadcast the piece if a corporation had something to sell, like a new Spider-Man movie. Second, it would be more fluffy and simpleminded and would have matched antagonists against each other for drama (curiously, which is also the world view of law-and-order, black-and-white Ditko). Thus, while in Mr. Ross’s show, Stan Lee is allowed to give a nuanced explanation for his role in the creation of Spider-Man, American TV would have emphasized the conflict between the two men. But the bottom line is that a full hour about Ditko on US broadcast is as unimaginable as a weekly TV series about an anti-theist.

I too am obsessed with Steve Ditko and all the early Marvel comics illustrators. I may not have the means of a Ross to indulge my obsession but it is of equal intensity. I grew up buying the early FFs, Hulks, Spider-Mans, Thors, and X-Mens as they were coming out, and the deepest sadness of my life is that I sold all my Marvels in 1971, and for the most flimsy of reasons, in order to “mature.” My regret is not financial, though I did sell the comic books for peanuts. I actually enjoyed them, and re-read them frequently. If I had them today, they wouldn’t be in plastic sheaths, but scattered around my bedstand for easy access.

In fact, I can still remember the day I bought Amazing Fantasy No. 15, at the end of summer in a little drugstore then located at NE 60th and Halsey, no longer in existence. It’s two comic book spinner racks were just inside the double doors to the left, and those racks were a portal to a new world better than the one I was living in, of cruel schools, bullies, and divorce. I was immediately struck by the look of all the Marvels, which were individual and not “corporate” looking like their rival DC comics. Ditko’s work, with his stiff-postured characters and his psychedelic backgrounds, was the most extreme of all the Marvel clan, which included individualists such as Jack Kirby, Bill Everett, Joe Orlando, and Don Heck, among numerous others. I can also still recall walking out of that drug store, bearing with me Amazing Fantasy No. 15 and the second issue of The Hulk, and into the August sun, with the sun blasting heat waves out of the asphalt streets, and feeling that all was right with the world.

Back in 2003, when the Post-911 wars started, I was flipping through Moby Dick, which was published in 1851, and struck by the phenomenon of Herman Melville’s prescience when the narrator surveys the headlines of a local paper and reads:

“GRAND CONTESTED ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES.
“WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.
“BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.

Little did I know at the time that poet Edgar Allan Poe was equally prescient, indeed that Poe had written a poem that anticipated the antics of Senator Larry Craig in the bathroom of the Minneapolis air port, and God knows how many other porcelain thrones across the land. Call, “The Stalls,” this previously unknown poem sounds uncannily like “The Bells.” Could it perhaps have been a first draft version of “The Bells”? Only time and the diligence of Poe scholars will tell. For now, though, the reader can simply enjoy its shocking anticipation and celebration of Senator Craig’s favorite pass time.

I

Hear the slamming doors in stalls -
Silver stalls!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How men tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While urinals oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
in a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a tapping Runic rhyme,
To the taptaptapulation that so musically wells
From the stalls, stalls, stalls, stalls,
Stalls, stalls, stalls -
From the jingling and the tinkling of the stalls.

II

Hear the mellow meeting stalls -
Golden stalls!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Through the balmy air of night
How they sound out their delight! -
From the molten - golden notes,
And all in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle - dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!
Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
How it swells!
How it dwells
On the Future! - how it tells
Of the rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the stalls, stalls, stalls -
Of the stalls, stalls, stalls, stalls,
Stalls, stalls, stalls -
To the rhyming and the chiming in the stalls!

III

Hear the loud alarum, stalls -
Policed stalls!
What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor
Now - now to sit, or never,
By the side of the pale - faced moon.
Oh, the stalls, stalls, stalls!
What a tale their terror tells
Of Despair!
How they clang, and clash and roar!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear, it fully knows,
By the twanging,
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows;
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling,
And the wrangling,
How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the stalls -
Of the stalls -
Of the stalls, stalls, stalls, stalls,
Stalls, stalls, stalls -
In the clamor and the clanging of the stalls!

IV

Hear the trawlling of the stalls -
Iron stalls!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night,
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people - ah, the people -
They that dwell up in the peep hole,
All alone,
And who, trolling, trolling, trolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone -
They are neither man nor woman -
They are neither brute nor human -
They are Ghouls: -
And their king it is who trolls: -
And he trolls, trolls, trolls,
Trolls
A paean from the stalls!
And his merry bosom swells
With the paean of the stalls!
And he dances, and he yells;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the paean of the stalls: -
Of the stalls:
Keeping time, time, time
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the stalls -
Of the stalls, stalls, stalls: -
To the sobbing of the stalls: -
Keeping time, time, time,
As he kneels, kneels, kneels,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the stalls -
Of the stalls, stalls, stalls -
To the trolling of the stalls -
Of the stalls, stalls, stalls, stalls,
Stalls, stalls, stalls, -
To the moaning and the groaning in the stalls.

The coincidence of several vigilante movies coming out at once offers a prime opportunity for sociological criticism. But the mere fact that these films have erupted is less interesting than the differences between them, factors which may account for why one was popular and the other bombed. The Brave One, directed by prestigious Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan and starring Jodie Foster, was number one at the box office last weekend; Death Sentence was directed by James Wan, one of the Saw directors, and word of mouth dictated that the film had the crudity of that horror series despite the presence of star Kevin Bacon, and do the movie bombed.

That Ms. Foster and Mr. Bacon would both consent to appear, at this time, in vigilante films is interesting in itself, since such crude exploitation fare is usually beneath people of their stature. Death Sentence is the more “traditional” of the two. In it, hockey dad Nick Hume (Bacon) is on his way home one night and makes the mistake of stopping at at gas station in a “bad” part of town; within minutes, his son is dead, and he is severely injured by a group of wilding youths. In the aftermath of this event, Hume ends up taking the law into his own hands, tracking down the gang who participated in killing his son, and later his wife, while the law appears to take the side of the criminals rather than the victims. Death Sentence is based on a novel by Brian Garfield, but the book was a 1975 sequel to his ‘72 novel Death Wish, which itself became a popular Charles Bronson franchise in the mid-1970s. Death Sentence makes the obvious point that by engaging in a vengeance project Hume “becomes” like his enemies. Ian Mackenzie Jeffers’s credited script, however, offers no alternative to the audience satisfying vigilante campaign since society’s guardians offer no help, which was the problem with the original vigilante cycle of films beginning with Billy Jack. Perhaps actor Bacon thought that this moral point was worth the effort of a movie filled with excessive blood, cruelty, and special gore effects.

Thirty years after starring in the first of the great modern vigilante films, Taxi Driver, Jodie Foster now weirdly stars in her own, in which she goes after the gang that attacked her in a park one night, killed her fianc…, and stole their dog. And the new film bears certain resemblances to Taxi Driver. Like Travis in Scorsese’s film, Jodie Foster’s Erica Bain makes her first kill in a bodega. Also similarly, there is an “interview” scene set in a diner, like the one in Taxi Driver, and Bain, like Travis, rescues a hooker. Bain’s second kill, on the other hand, takes place on a subway, like similar scenes in The Incident, Bananas and like Death Wish. Unlike Death Wish, however, in which Bronson never met up with the gang that killed his wife, Bain finds her victimizers (and gets her dog back). Death Sentence also has its Taxi Driver inspirations, by the way; Hume shoots a guy’s fingers off, is himself clipped in the neck at the end, and plops down on a couch post-bloodbath just like Travis. Death Sentence also echoes the recent Bourne Ultimatum in which a car falling off a building is used as a weapon.

The real difference between Death Sentence and The Brave One is the difference between a boys movie and a girls movie. Death Sentence is set up to provide a straightforward tale of vigilante justice with a patina of moralizing that is meant to divert the censors from the real purpose of the film. In reality, the males in the audience will feel a grim sense of satisfaction as Hume blows away the bad guys despite the fact that he ends up, as his final victim admits, looking just like them. The Brave One, on the other hand, is a chick flick action film, like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Bain is permitted to kick some vulgar scum ass, but then she has to talk afterwards.

Bain is a kind of female Jean Shepherd, the host of a radio show in which she gathers the “sounds” of New York City. This being a quasi Good Woman feminist tract, white males are anathema, so Bain’s fianc… is a doctor of foreign extraction (Naveen Andrews) and her subsequent protector is African-American (Terrence Howard), and all of her work-friends and neighbors are either African-American or females or both (though the city’s criminals are also a mix of ethnic identities). This transparent bid for the Good Woman market, with its book reading clubs, its Take Back the Night rallies, and its censorship causes, is at odds, however, with the bloodlust in the film. In other words, despite its feminist message, the film is advocating that women, indeed, act with all the crude aggression of a man, at least when it comes to justice. Unlike Death Sentence, the police are mostly helpful, with the cop (named Sean Mercer: a reference to John Wayne in Hatari?) really caring about all the city’s victims. Meanwhile the look of the film, under the guidance of director Jordan, is dense and gritty, unlike his usual fare. The camera tilts and weaves and bobs as if the whole city were underwater, or she is always being followed, an attempt, I guess, on his part to underscore the “uncertainty” and discombobulation of Bain’s life post-attack. Instead the style bifurcates the film, between its feminist tract line and its vigilante line, ultimately offering no satisfying version of either. In the end, Death Sentence is actually the better film, much more solid in its technique and less internally compromised in what it wants to say.

Like every self-respecting genre specialist across the land, I’m making my way through Tim Lucas’s 1000-plus page book about Mario Bava, the innovative Italian director. It’s an elegantly written and detailed book, and an enriching experience to read.

However, books march on, and since receiving the Bava I’ve been inundated with others, including the much-longed for On Kubrick, by one of my favorite film writers, James Naremore. A full review of the book will follow in a few weeks, but I played hooky on Bava today with Kubrick. Every page has some new insight about Kubrick and his films, some connection that links career from one end to another.

Yet reading the two books in tandem may prove to be a good thing. While looking through Mr. Naremore’s Kubrick book amid the pervading residue of the Bava book, I began to detect some visual cues in Kubrick’s films that have a distinct Bava quality. Bava doesn’t appear in Naremore’s index (nor Kubrick in the Bava book’s index), and I know of no mention of Bava by Kubrick in any interviews, so it may be a coincidence but there are a number of links between and visual motifs shared by the two directors.

If you look only at Bava’s credited films, the two made roughly the same number of feature films (although Mr. Lucas makes it clear that the workaholic Bava had a much more vast filmography than previously known). Each dabbled in a plethora of different genres. But more important there are visual similarities. Bava didn’t appear to be as addicted to the tracking shot as Kubrick, but in Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut, there are numerous echoes of Bava’s visual techniques. Mr. Naremore likens some aspects of Eyes Wide Shut to Kubrick’s lifelong interest in and influence from Viennese culture and European modernity, but Eyes Wide Shut’s use of color gels, masks, uncertain identities, and treks through ominous cityscapes, it feels very much like a Bava film. The similarities are definitely there, but is it “influence”? The greatest similarity is that both work in the field of the grotesque, which is easy to see in Bava’s output, but less obvious in Kubrick’s. Early in his book, Mr. Naremore makes a case that Kubrick was a practitioner of the art of the grotesque, a long and subtle argument that enriches Kubrick’s work and addresses the issue of his supposed “coldness” and hyper-intellectualism. Seen in that light, Kubrick’s films are even less distance from Bava’s. The confluence of these two books reminds us that Cinema is a vast evolving network where new connections constantly reveal themselves, and excavations in its terrain will never be over.

Where would NBC be without its cheerleaders?

I don’t mean its corporate fans or the ad salesmen or the execs on the board. I mean, literally, its cheerleaders. You’ve got Lyla Garrity (Minka Kelly) in Friday Night Lights and Claire Bennet (Hayden Panettiere) in Heroes, NBC’s most esteemed show and its most popular show in that order. Save the Cheerleader and Save the World was the tagline for Heroes but it might as well have been Save the Cheerleaders and Save NBC.

Friday Night Lights won a Peabody award this summer, Peabodys being the esteemed elder brother to the special needs Emmys, which ignored the show. Friday Night Lights has a fervid if small fan base, but the network to its credit remains behind it. I think that anyone who sits down with the DVD set for season one, which is now out from NBC-Universal ($29.99 [a bargain], 22 episodes on five discs, Dolby 5.1, English subtitles, released on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007), will be most eager to become a Friday Lighter when the second season commences on Friday, October 5 at 9 PM.

A nice little Jewish lady of my acquaintance rates Lights as one of her favorite shows. “Who’d think that I, of all people, would love a show about redneck white Christians in the south playing football?” That’s a fair summary of the show but it’s more than that, too. The series has almost dreamlike quality, possibly due to the Soderbergh-film-style music (either Bennett Salvay, who did the music for six of the show, or W.G. Snuffy Walden, who did 16 episodes; Cliff Martinez does the music for Soderbergh’s films), that exist conterminously with the raw realism provided by now-standard the hand-held camera, also a Soderbergh touch. In the first episode, the presence of a local news camera crew establishes the shaky cam, and henceforth, it is everywhere, even in the bedroom. Perhaps it takes a “Jewish sensibility” (outsidership, analytical intelligence, wit and a taste for ironies) to “see” this bedrock American material plain (Peter Berg, the creator of the show, and a prominent actor and director, happens to be Jewish), in the manner that the great studio chiefs of the 1930s created an America more American than the one Americans lived in.

The plot of the show, in brief, follows the family and career of the new Dillon High School football coach, on whom local pressure is brought to bear thanks to the obsession with football among the local gentry, and to family issues, such as his daughter dating the new quarterback and his wife taking a job as counselor at the high school and later possibly getting pregnant. The show also explores the lives of the players and their attendant families, mates, and assorted hangers on, plus occasional interlopers into the fragile sociology of the town, sending ripples of resentment or desire across its gentle surface.

Friday Night Lights is a surprisingly gripping show, more than just a soap opera or melodrama, and the game sequences are genuinely suspenseful. My only cavil is the paraplegic story line. One of the teen characters, Jason Street (Scott Porter) suffers an injury in the first episode and throughout the rest of the series revisits his situation, happening in a separate world. Like women in prison films and race car movies, paraplegic story lines are nearly always the same. The injured is at first disbelieving, then angry and tries to push away the girlfriend; the girlfriend is loyal, but then begins to drift; the injured falls in with other cynical disabled people who open up his eyes to the realities of his situation, and so forth. To its credit, the paraplegic story line in Lights goes in some unexpected directions near the end of the season.

What I like most about the show, however, is that it is a portrait of a perfect marriage
Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) is a good looking, competent, admirable man who manages to make good decisions in continually difficult situations. His wife Tami (Connie Britton, who also played the equivalent role in the source movie), is a sexy, rounded, intelligent woman who both takes the town football obsession seriously and cynically at the same time. Their relationship is a full one, with fights and reconciliations, intimacy and occasional estrangements, but always under the banner of the union’s solid strength. It’s the best marriage on TV.

The five-disc set comes with a promotional making of, “Behind the Lights: Creating the First Season of “Friday Night Lights” and most every episode has a few deleted scenes, which don’t necessarily enrich the story lines but do give the loyal viewer a few extras minutes with his favorite characters.

There have been very few truly accurate adaptations of the comic book spirit to the screen. In fact, I can only think of one, and I’ve been saying this since 1987: RoboCop is the only really great comic book adaptation, and it wasn’t even based on a real comic book. But it captures the spirit, the narrative flow, and even the body shapes, of the silver age Marvel comic books.

Well, finally, after many years, Heroes is the second one. A sort of variation on Marvel’s comic X-Men, the show is everything that the X-Men movies should and could have been but weren’t. And like the best shows on TV right now, such as The Wire, it as a complexity that demands the viewer pay attention. Maybe some people dropped out after the first two or three “confusing” and inconclusive episodes, but those who stayed turned the show into a hit. Since one of the few cultural pleasures on offer these days is the plot twists of good TV shows, I’m not going to say a word Heroes narrative line except to note that its creators are not afraid to knock off characters whom the viewer may have grown attached to.

Heroes comes in a great package ($59.95, 23 episodes on seven discs, Dolby 5.1, English subtitles, released on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007), with loads of extras. Under half the episodes has a commentary track, and most of them have deleted scenes. The yak track participants comprises a wide range of the show’s participants. For example, disc one features a commentary from show creator Tim Kring, which accompanies one of the main supplements, the un-aired 78-minute pilot. Disc four contains commentaries from Panettiere, with fellow cast member Greg Grunberg, along with one of the producers, on episode 13, while on disc six, episode 19 features its writer, Chuck Kim, and innovatively the assistants to Kring and one of the other producers. The seventh disc contains most of the supplementary material. It leads off with a 10-minute promotional making of, which is followed by a short piece about the special effects and another about the stunt work. More interesting is a profile of the show’s resident artist, Tim Sale, who in the real world has drawn everyone from Superman to Spider-Man. Equally interesting is a seven minute segment the show’s score and its composers, who happen to be bygone Prince collaborators Wendy (Melvoin) and Lisa (Coleman). A throwaway supplement is Mind Reader, a stupid “game” included on one of the middle discs. The (pricier) HD version of the set has even more features, which includes (minimal) web content access, U-Control, which allows the viewer to zoom in on things such as one of the character’s art work, and video versions of the commentaries. Heroes season one is a must have for comic book aficionados, comic book-to-film hopefuls, and fans of good, solid television. Heroes takes to the air again on Monday, September 24th.