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Children's fantasy literature and cinema: five years of failure

If there's one thing you can count on Hollywood to do, it's seizing any halfway profitable cinematic trend and proceeding to run the poor sod into the ever-loving ground. Tinseltown's flirtation with star-studded disaster flicks in the '70s is probably the archetypal example -- galvanised by the success of movies like Airport (1970), The Poseidon Adventure ('72) and Towering Inferno ('74), Hollywood execs cashed in by greenlighting a succession of flicks built around increasingly outlandish "disasters", including the legendarily awful The Swarm (killer bees menace Texas!), Airport '77 (art thieves sink airplane in the Bermuda Triangle for fun and profit!), and City of Fire (disgruntled employee burns down major metropolis after being -- ahem -- fired!). By '79, the dud trifecta of Meteor, Airport '79: The Concorde, and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure confirmed what many already suspected: America's appetite for big-name catastrophes had finally been curbed. After a brief revival in the '90s, the disaster genre now mostly means made-for-TV schlock like Atomic Twister, populated by failed movie stars and C-list television actors.

It's been a long time in coming, but last week's numbers for Inkheart may well bang the final nail into the coffin lid of Hollywood's most recent big obsession: children's fantasy adaptations. In hindsight, it was pretty predictable: suits salivating over the fat stacks of cash J. K. Rowling and co. were making off a certain boy wizard's over-padded adventures charged into their local B&N and optioned any multi-volume kiddie saga sitting on the YA shelf. “Foolproof!” they thought.

Problem is, while Harry continues to do boffo BO five movies in, the "me-too" crush of kiddie genre flicks haven't really lived up to the expectations for their backers. To get a sense of how badly disappointed studios must be, bear two things in mind:

1. Every one of these licensed books had sequels, meaning that they were originally licensed with franchise ambitions. Execs were hoping to be able to pull two, three sequels out of each of these movies, if not more.

2. To qualify for a sequel, the general rule of thumb is that the first movie has to make two and a half times its budget in domestic ticket sales. The Lord of the Rings movies qualified handily, with each installment making back over three times its budget in the US alone. The Harry Potter movies generally earn back twice their budget, but have plenty of international leg as well. The rest of the pack? Not so much. Consider the contenders:

A Series of Unfortunate Events (2005)
The earliest of the wannabe-Potters, this rambling Jim Carrey mugfest scored over $118 million domestic in ‘05, but with a budget of $150, even triple-digit returns weren't enough to justify a follow-up.

Eragon (2006)
Based on the Wonderbread fantasy drivel of Christopher Paolini, this Fox production sported a budget of $100 million -- as much as the Rings films -- but only made a modest $80 million at home before sinking without a trace, mercifully scuppering plans for a sequel.

Bridge to Terabithia (2007)
After cashing in on C. S. Lewis, Walden Media branched out with an adaptation of Katherine Paterson's Newbery-winning 1977 novel. With an extremely modest budget -- estimated around $25 million -- and international takings of $136m, it distinguished itself as the only non-Narnia kiddie flick to even turn a respectable profit.

The Golden Compass (2007)
New Line's $180 million adaptation is one of the genre's most notorious failures. The movie underperformed by a spectacular degree Stateside, and while international BO was strong, the fact that New Line sold off the overseas rights to fund the troubled production in the first place meant that almost none of that money trickled back to the studio. As a result, Compass is perhaps the first "bomb" to rake in over $370 million worldwide -- proof, if anything, that Hollywood's accounting is stranger than its fiction. New Line, which bet the farm on the success of this movie, was forced to restructure in the wake of the debacle, killing any chance of The Subtle Knife ever making it to cinema screens.

The Spiderwick Chronicles (2007)
This listless Nickelodeon production made $71 million at the US box office -- about as much as Compass -- but only $91 million internationally. A comparatively economical budget of $90 million prevented it from crashing as badly as its ill-fated brethren, but meant suits walked away unhappy all the same.

The Seeker (2007)
A bastardised retelling of Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising, The Seeker was a critical and commercial failure of the highest magnitude, grossing a laughable $8.7 million during its entire US run despite opening in a whopping 3,141 theatres. The movie flopped so badly, in fact, that its opening weekend revenues didn't even cover the cost of the film prints.

The Water Horse (2007)
Having made good money off of Bridge to Terabithia, Walden Media's next project was an $45 million adaptation of a children's book by the questionably-monickered Dick King-Smith. Unfortunately, despite glowing reviews from superstar critics like Maxim's Pete Hammond, The Water Horse finished with a US take just short of $41 million. Shame, really.

Prince Caspian (2008)
Make no mistake: out of the gate, Walden Media's Narnia movies looked like a serious rival to Peter Jackson's Tolkien trilogy: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe ended up raking in $291 million in the US alone. But after a strong start, the series stumbled; Prince Caspian dramatically underperformed, failing to recoup its bloated $200 million budget domestically and making only half the cash of its predecessor worldwide. The fallout led to a parting of ways between Walden Media and distributors Disney, who opted out of the Michael Apted-directed Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

City of Ember (2008)
If The Seeker bombed, City of Ember dropped like Little Man. Produced by Tom Hanks, this post-apocalyptic romp couldn't even crack $8 million domestic and fell short of $18 million worldwide -- a bare fraction of the $55 million it cost to shoot in the first place. The fourth Ember book just hit shelves last August; the next Ember movie will be in cinemas approximately... never.

As with many Hollywood fads, the ultimate failure of the Potter-spawn boils down to two things. One was the simple nature of the movies in question: without a brand name like Potter's, these big, splashy, effects-heavy productions were often left jostling for attention amid a mass of other would-be “event flicks” and paid the price. The other? Quality, or an almost cynical lack of it. Make no mistake: the vast majority of these films simply stunk, regardless of whether they were busy making a hash of their source material (The Seeker) or working from garbage to begin with (Eragon). Without even good word of mouth to boost already anemic ticket sales, the laws of the market took their inevitable course.

We're not entirely clear yet -- even if Inkheart fails, the genre won't meet its formal Waterloo until next year's Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. But it's safe to say that enough studios have been burned on this little escapade that kiddie fantasy adaptations will be rare as horsefeathers for the next decade. Normally, I'd be elated by this, but thanks to Twilight's ridiculous BO and the success of TV's True Blood, it's not hard to guess which genre Hollywood will be raiding next: vampire porn “supernatural romance”, books that make even Paolini look like Pulitzer fodder. Lord help us all.

There's a war on, and it's being waged on my ability to eat three square meals a day. The first victim was a toaster waffle I'd forgotten on my rush out the door one morning, discovered on the floor several hours later with a handful of ragged chunks chewed out and a dusting of white hair. This in itself wasn't unexpected - Bucky (AKA Jabba the Cat) has, after all, tested his fearsomely undiscriminating appetite on everything from kiwis to rosemary bread over the past six months. Just last week, we caught him hoovering up stale popcorn crumbs in the living room like the chunky billygoat he is, showing neither remorse nor hesitation.

But now he's gone too damn far. This morning, I had prepared a roast beef sandwich for lunch, and had wrapped it up before I hit the shower. Fifteen minutes later, I emerge - just in time to see Jabba run off with something flat and brownish clutched in his little lion mouth. I look over, and lo and behold, my sandwich was lying on the table with its top slice neatly laid aside and nary but two sad little pieces of swiss cheese left of its former meaty glories.

Cursing, I grab fresh slices of beef, reassemble the wretched thing, and wedge it under a container to discourage any fuzzy bandits lurking in the vicinity. Satisfied, I head up to get dressed - and not five minutes later I'm back in the kitchen, staring at a pair of rapidly-retreating kittens and a sandwich once again innocent of even the faintest hint of animal protein.

At this stage, I'm afraid I was swearing loudly and vigorously enough to wake my housemates, but can you honestly blame me?

Since it's now a standing Christmas tradition that I jet back to the fatherland for Yuletide to spend quality time with the immediate family in merry Ansbach, Germany (population 40,000, give or take a few), I've spent the past few days doing precisely that. And barring a hairy departure (complete with 1+ hours sat on the runway in a howling snowstorm and a lung-busting jog through Charles De Gaulle, recently voted Satan's own airport by discerning travelers worldwide), it's been a real tonic: three square meals a day, acres of sleep, and all the brain-scrapingly awful British television any right-thinking human can stomach.

Though Ansbach might be a wee low on balls-to-the-wall excitement, there's still a bit of that special small-town amusement to savor, from pageants of metrosexual gangstas crowding out local shopping malls to deeply dubious local businesses (really, would you trust your locks to a salon called Hair Killer?) And if that doesn't do it for you, you can quite literally while away the hours watching passing traffic to see how many of Ansbach's fair townsfolk were unlucky enough to end up with a license plate reading "ANAL" (two to date and counting). Merry Christmas!

The Verve - "Love is Noise" Or to give the song's full title, "Love is an Incessantly Irritating Electronic 'Uh-Oh, Uh-Oh, Uh-Oh' That Ruins an Otherwise Unremarkable Comeback Single with Majestic Precision". This reunion can't be over fast enough.


The Last Shadow Puppets - "Standing Next to Me" Taking a break from helming one of the most inexplicably acclaimed bands of recent years, Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner has now teamed up with Rascals lead singer Miles Kane to knock out this string-heavy slice of '60s nostalgia -- a bittersweet piece of throwback music so lovingly authentic that The Coral undoubtedly have their lawyers on speed-dial even as we speak.


Spiritualized - "You Lie, You Cheat" If anybody ever gets around to writing a "How Not To" guide for music production, the murky, unlistenable fuzz smothering Jason Pierce's latest will undoubtedly take pride of place. Until then, the recording industry has kindly decided to inflict it on the listening public at large, presumably as punishment for all of those illegal MP3s we downloaded back in the day. Thanks for nothing, you schmucks.

Left: Bucky. Right: Lulu. Not pictured: hellraising, paintbrush-stealing, general all-round troublemaking.

BECK - Modern Guilt
Color me enturbulated.

It's the curse of every trendsetter that the world catches up to them sooner or later; stumble once, and you'll be playing catch-up for years or -- worse -- irrelevant overnight. Since dropping the classic Odelay back in '96, Beck stayed one step ahead of the pack by virtue of a series of dramatic, unexpected shifts in tone and content from album to album, keeping his pursuers guessing by bouncing from party-hard sampledelica to earnest Americana to Stax-flecked funk without even breaking a sweat.

After the majestic Sea Change, however, Beck seemed to have lost his running legs, backtracking over old and worn territory with an album that played like an abbreviated showreel. Since then, it's been all downhill; the wispy, insubstantial electronica of 2006's The Information marked a late career low only further stretched out by recent single "Chemtrails", a forgettable drone that read -- and played -- like the Hubbard hipster had fallen asleep in the middle of a particularly bad X-Files episode while blasted out of his mind on grade A California skunk.

Sadly, that miserable comeback is the perfect showpiece for everything wrong with Modern Guilt, Beck's tenth album proper and the first to see release since his departure from Interscope. According to the promo, Guilt was written in a mere two and a half months, and boy howdy, does it show -- what's here is the barest outline of a long player, a sloppy meander of C-list material dashed off between recording sessions in the name of... what? Artists will occasionally rush-record an album to capture the "freshness" and "spontaneity" in their songwriting process, but Beck's best work always had a deliberate craft to it; even the relatively speedy Mutations drew on years' worth of songwriting. Here, the artificial pressure only succeeds in hamstringing him, forcing him to commit concepts to tape that all but beg for more time to gestate.

At moments, the craftsman still shines through; opener "Orphans", with its fractured take on British psychedelica, comes closest to recapturing the old magic. But it's little compensation for the parade of joyless, forgettable stinkers that follows, a lineup that makes even the desperately uneven Guero feel like the height of quality control.

If Beck's efforts seem half-baked, though, producer Dangermouse seems almost too engaged, using every production trick in the book in an effort to pump some life back into the party. But in doing so, he overplays his hand; when it isn't actively attacking the listener, the album's spastic, hectic production blinks on and off like a giant "look at me" sign desperately trying to draw attention away from the anemic material underneath. To be fair, the addition of a new producer helps push things into unfamiliar sonic territory, even if the surprises aren't always pleasant -- if you've ever wondered what would happen if Beck attempted to tackle Queens of the Stone Age, Modern Guilt's title track is all the answer you need, while the tail-chasing cod-oriental flavor of "Walls" may well be the worst thing our man has recorded in the last decade.

And while Dangermouse has justly earned his hitmaker reputation, it's hard to be too impressed with his offerings here; too often, noisy percussion creeps to the front and center, obliterating everything else in the process. Even the flow seems off; songs don't so much come to a conclusion as simply stop dead, no doubt contributing to the album's miserly 33-minute running time. It's a hell of a comedown for both parties involved, but it's Beck who loses more in the process, having now churned out two lackluster albums back-to-back at a time when his music desperately needs to overshadow his dubious personal beliefs. As it stands, the only guilt to be felt here is from paying good money for this abortion of an LP -- though if there's any justice in the world, the music reviewers who sang this album's hosannahs should be feeling pretty damned ashamed right about now.

2

Last week, we lost one of our own: Pestilence (AKA "Huggy", "Mr. Mungus", "Snugglebeast", "Stompy Washington", "Clawmonster", "Catbear", "Furmudgeon", "Master Bad", "Squeezy", "Paddy Cannonballs", "Thumpy", and a hundred other nicknames, each equally undignified), our 13-year old half-feral Russian Blue, finally succumbed to the sad combination of hyperthyroidism and cancer. A tumor in his digestive system -- very likely the result of tainted Chinese pet food -- had been slowing him down for months now, but when the pain finally hit a point where he refused to eat outright, we knew it was only a matter of time before we'd have to take him in to the vet for that final shot. To watch him waste away in spite of every effort to feed and force-feed was one of the most pitiable experiences imaginable; to see a cat that once had us in fear of random, unexpected attacks every time we prepared to leave the house, staggering around with only the barest minimum of mobility was the very definition of that German word Schattendasein -- a shadowy existence, scarcely a life.

For days afterwards, there was that strange feeling one gets when a creature whose daily life transformed the very space you lived in is suddenly snatched away; even now, I still come home with every expectation of finding Pest curled up on my laundry bag, or staring intently at his reflection in the oven door. In this house, he was as much a part of our living environment as the furniture, the wallpaper, the doors and stairs; always cropping up in unexpected places, as if to declare in his own quiet way that his domain extended further than we could ever reach. One night, I went down to the kitchen for a late snack and turned on the lights, only to find Pest staring down at me from the top of our cupboards, perched a good 10 feet off the ground between glass bowls and vases. In hindsight, it wasn't that unlikely; using the kitchen table as a base, he could have easily reached the counter, vaulted onto the refrigerator and used it as a launch pad to reach the cupboards proper. At the time it was a different story; here I was at 2 in the morning, staring at a cat who'd managed to magically materialise at the very highest point in the house and was acting for all the world like this was business as usual.

So today we took a rental car up to Methuen in response to a Craigslist post; a woman who'd been left with an unexpected litter after wrongly being assured that yes, her female cat had been spayed. We ended up meeting at a strip-mall Starbucks in blistering 102-degree weather and, after the barest of soul-searching, drove off with two longhair kittens; one orange-and-white male, one female money cat. Both are currently hiding under a bed, poking their heads out every once in a while and darting back to cover the second they notice our presence. After Pest's borderline mania and Aurora's heart-defect docility, these timid little puffballs are entirely new ground of all of us; right now, we're just hoping and praying that they'll pull through and be with us a good long time.

I'd considered myself lucky to survive Boston's flu epidemic after a mere nine days of being confined to the family couch as an effective invalid, but no such luck -- I came home from work Wednesday night drifting through deep space with a temperature spiking at 103.1. The alternating chills and bursts of insane heat would be bad enough without the feeling that your brain has split into a hundred different warring factions; after two nights of lying awake tracking the progress of some hellish, invisible military quagmire in the privacy of my skull, I'm already sick to my back teeth of this thing. Meanwhile, my coordination has gone down the crapper -- quite literally, as I managed to drop my copy of The Scar straight in the bowl in a moment of feverish insanity. Now, this might have stung less if I wasn't in the middle of reading and now have to wait a week for a replacement copy, but as it stands, this is definitely not one of my prouder moments. Stay healthy, kids.

With my housemates now making a habit of crawling into bed by 10, I'm spending a lot more time with the TV on for company. Recently, I've discovered that the Sci-Fi channel screens syndicated episodes of The X-Files in the wee hours of the morning -- presumably to stretch out the progamming so that there's more money left over for SFC's spate of cinematic masterpieces, including such future classics as Rock Monster, Frankenfish, and Disaster Zone: Volcano in New York.

Now, in the interests of disclosure: about fifteen years ago, I thought The X-Files was one of the greatest things on television. Sure, David Duchovny's acting made him seem like a robot whose drama circuits had gotten permanently stuck on "bored monotone," but for a 14-year-old kid who'd just discovered the library copy of Chariots of the Gods, the show's smorgasbord of ghosts, mutants, and little green men was just about everything you could want out of a television drama. Still, as cool as the bits about liver-eating mutants, mass murderers and psychic amputees were, what really kept me watching was the overarching plot, the show's "mythology" -- a web of cover-ups and conspiracies spun over the course of decades that dropped Mulder and Scully right into the midst of a shadowy power struggle involving aliens, humans, and betrayal at every level.

It's appropriate, then, that the mythology was precisely what broke my patience with the show. In early episodes, it made sense that the writers would avoid dishing out too much of the 'truth' at once -- the reveals felt slow but careful, and there were enough big revelations and shocks along the way to make up for every rote monster-of-the-week episode it took to get there. But after season four rolled around and our dynamic duo still seemed no closer to an actual resolution, it became starkly obvious that the much-vaunted "conspiracy plot" was being stretched out as thinly as possible by network execs eager to milk the supernatural cash cow for all it was worth. And if that seems exaggerated, consider this: out of some 200 produced episodes, roughly 30% of them actually advanced the plot in any way. Two-thirds of The X-Files was effectively filler. I tuned out, went to college, and remained blissfully ignorant of the fact that The X-Files was still running until I one day discovered a review for the series finale. Five seasons later, Chris Carter had finally remembered to wrap things up. (Sort of. After all, there's still that sequel movie doing the rounds, and god only knows Gillian Anderson needs the work.) At the time, my reaction could have been summed up as "cue much rolling of eyes" -- if I'd have known I was going to be jerked around for nine seasons, I'd probably have bailed out much sooner.

Still, that was then, and this is now, and I'm finding there's some oddly nostalgic pleasures in watching two familiar characters go through their paces. But god only knows they're not making it easy. The very first episode I sat through, "The Goldberg Variation," involved a schlub with improbable luck that turned to dire misfortune for those around him. Written like comedy without actually being funny -- sort of like a Larry the Cable Guy stand-up special -- "Variation" made it abundantly clear that the early seasons' greatest asset was to present ridiculous concepts in a way that forced viewers to take them seriously. When the show can't even put up the pretense of a straight face, the whole thing falls apart.

Next week's episode, "Orison," returned to more familiar territory but suffered from an overstuffed plot involving a psychic priest and a necrophiliac killer who may or may not be demonic in origin. Either one would have carried a fine episode; both together felt ludicrous. Two-parter "Sein und Zeit"/"Closure" starts with an arresting premise -- children disappear without a trace after their mothers unconsciously write threatening ransom notes appended with the bizarre phrase "Nobody shoots at Santa Claus!" But when the focus swings to tying up the plot thread involving Mulder's missing sister, Samantha, the setup is simply dropped as an afterthought; the writers attempt to cover their tracks by introducing an actual Santa Claus-impersonating serial killer, but he's no X-File, just a pervert with a barnful of camera feeds. That the half-hearted sendoff the Samantha subplot gets -- she's dead, but it's OK because she was spirited away by kindly ghosts or somesuch; we waited six seasons for this? -- isn't the most dispiriting aspect of this entire exercise can be chalked up entirely to the fact that Mulder's mother goes and commits suicide off-screen halfway through. Yep, she doesn't even get the dignity of an on-camera death -- we see her leave a message on Mulder's answering machine, and the next thing we know, we're told she overdosed on medication. Fantastic.

The throwing-hands-up-in-the-air desperation with which the writers attack the mythology's loose ends might seem justified if the show hadn't gone on for two more seasons after this. But tonight's episode topped even that. The title, "X-COPS," can only give you the barest hint of the idiocy within:

A filming of an episode of COPS gets in the way of the investigation by Mulder and Scully of a monster that feeds on fear. While Mulder embraces the publicity, Scully is not so sure...

Yeah. An entire episode of The X-Files filmed in COPS-style documentary fashion. This might have worked better if Comedy Central's Reno 911! hadn't effectively turned the inherently ludicrous format of Fox's proto-reality powerhouse into one giant joke -- as it stood, I spent twenty minutes waiting for the punchline, five more minutes watching with the sound off, and then finally lost patience at the thirty-minute mark.

And here's what I have to look forward to tomorrow:

The Lone Gunmen summon Mulder and Scully to a virtual reality firm when the new game they have helped design is thwarted by a bizarre female computer character whose power is much more than virtual.

That's "First Person Shooter," widely regarded as one of the most aggressively stupid episodes of The X-Files ever made. Hell, just read the opening act.

We see three young men wearing futuristic costumes. They are preparing for a battle and take automatic weapons. They seem to have a lot of fun. It turns out that their battlefield is in fact a virtual reality game. In a control room, Ivan and Phoebe, the workers of First Person Shooter Company, are monitoring the players' vital signs. Suddenly, motorcycles appear in the game. Three men shoot at them and the motorcycles explode. One of the players encounters a beautiful female warrior in a sexy leather outfit. She says "I am Maitreya. This is my game." and then kills him.

Later on, Scully and Mulder strap on virtual reality gear and get all Counterstrike on our asses. The fact that this was scripted by William Gibson only makes the whole thing more despairingly hilarious. Shockingly, Gibson's first episode is just as idiotic:

Mulder and Scully find the container. When they approach it a girl runs out of it but Scully catches her. The container is full of state-of-the-art computer equipment. The girl warns the agents that an armed Department of Defense satellite has pinpointed their location. They leave the place immediately. A green laser descends from the sky and destroys the container. Inside the car, the girl admits that she is Invisigoth (her real name is Esther Nairn) and Mulder realizes that Gelman has created artificial intelligence, thus fulfilling his dream. Invisigoth describes how the AI works - it monitors all communication and recognizes her voice so she cannot make any phone calls. Moreover, once the AI locates its enemy it destroys them using the satellite.

Looking back on the episode listings, it starts becoming clear just how much the later seasons were floundering. Hell, we got almost two full seasons without Mulder after David Duchovny got it in his head that he actually could kick-start a movie career by standing around droning like a man rudely awakened from just three hours of sleep. But seriously, consider the following synopses:

Doggett and Scully encounter a dead man who is still living - only somewhat changed. What they discover is a man made of metal, enacting vengeance on those he believes created him.

I like the "somewhat changed" here, as if being made of metal is no big deal. This is apparently an overly elaborate way to set up an in-joke involving one of Robert (Doggett) Patrick's previous roles, the T-1000.

Mulder and Scully find a man and his dim-bulbed, wheelchair-bound brother who choose three wishes which backfire increasingly. The cause of which is an indifferent genie whose willingness to grant wishes belies a deeper motive.

I've read fan fiction synopses with more convincing plots than this.

On Christmas Eve, Mulder convinces Scully to put aside her gift wrapping and stake out a reputed haunted house. But they discover a pair of lovelorn spectres living inside the house who are determined to prove how lonely the holidays can be.

One of these spectres is Ed Asner. No joke.

In a small town plagued by drought, Mulder and Scully come upon a man who claims to be able to control the weather — at a hefty profit. Yet the agents discover a force of nature at work even more powerful than the weather, and just as unpredictable.

That force is love. They proceed to give the titular Rain King the romantic advice he needs to get over himself. X-Files fans continue to switch off in droves.

An entrepreneurial Hollywood producer, and college friend of Skinner, picks up the idea for a film based on the X-Files, however the agents find that the level of realism in their fictional portrayal is somewhat questionable.

Know what would be a fun game? Mixing genuine X-Files fan fiction summaries with synopses of actual episodes and letting people guess which is which. Apropos of nothing, this was written by David Duchovny.

While working in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, young cop Arthur Dales (the brother of the Arthur Dales who started the X-Files) stumbles across a “negro” baseball player who is actually an alien with a love of the game hiding among humans.

So was this, apparently after Mr. Duchovny watched Men In Black. You'd think the showrunners would have learned their lesson the first time around.

The world is trapped in a time loop, and only one woman seems to know. A bank robbery is committed over and over again until Mulder and Scully can make it go right.

You know a show's in trouble when they resort to ripping off plotlines from Bill Murray comedies. You know a show's in even bigger trouble when Xena: Warrior Princess beat them to the punch by over two years.

Filmed in black-and-white, The Post-Modern Prometheus chronicles Mulder and Scully’s investigation when a letter from a single mother leads them to a small mid-Western town where a modern-day version of Frankenstein's monster lurks, Jerry Springer is an obsession, and Cher plays a significant part.

Thankfully, I've already missed this one.

While protecting a man due to testify against the Morley cigarette company, Skinner is horrified when the witness dies mysteriously. What the agents soon discover is that a new brand of cigarette has a dangerous secret...

Because cigarettes are, y'know, evil, and there's no harm in slathering that message on nice and thick.

The agents cross paths with a pair of doppelgangers whose close proximity leaves a trail of destruction.

This synopsis may not sound too terrible. The episode it's attached to, however, was voted the worst in the series by X-Files fans, mainly because the doppelgangers in question are played by Kathy Griffin and are fighting for the affections of a semi-professional wrestler. Shamefully, series creator Chris Carter penned this drivel, which includes also includes the disturbingly memorable line "I yankee doodled into a plastic cup!"

The fact that many of the episodes listed here will be hitting my TV in the coming weeks makes me seriously reconsider this whole "nostalgia trip" thing.

Beck - "Timebomb" iTunes-only singles seem to be the fad du jour for artists who fancy themselves on the cutting edge, so it's perhaps somewhat inevitable that Beck would jump on the bandwagon sooner or later. Shame, then, that this is as underwhelming as anything off the wretched The Information; some three minutes of fuzzed out electropop chasing its own tail before eventually succumbing to exhaustion. When the Kaiser Chiefs sang "Every Day I Love You Less and Less," I think they were talking about the two of us, Beck.

The Verve - "Slide Away" Yes, it's old. And no, I don't care -- simply put, the guitar work here pisses gallons on the fumble-fingered crap that jokers like Babyshambles see fit to dump onto the airwaves these days. Chilled out and anthemic -- heck, it's just about good enough to earn Richard Ashcroft's spectacularly inane lyrics a pass this time around.

Belle and Sebastian - "Step Into My Office, Baby" A slightly more recent vintage, this. B&S catch a fair deal of flak for writing impossibly cuddly indie candyfloss so sugary that repeat listens may melt your teeth outright, and to be fair, "Office" is all just a bit twee, what with oh-so-clever lyrics like "Want to give you the job/With chance of overtime/Say, my place at nine?" and more bouncy woodwinds than should strictly be legal outside of children's television. But I like it, so nyah.

The Kooks - "Always Where I Need to Be" I don't, however, like this. Maybe it's the fact that it's more of that damnable British indie guitar gubbins, so utterly generic that you wouldn't be surprised to discover that some sadistic bastard computer cranked it out in between denial of service attacks on I Can Has Cheezburger? Maybe it's the fact that a band has the temerity to call itself "The Kooks" and still expect to be taken seriously. Maybe it's those sad little "doo doo doo-dut-dut-dut-dut doo"s in the chorus flailing around like an inbred Hanson. Regardless: it's got to stop.

Young Galaxy - "Come and See" A wispy little slice of noveau-shoegaze, with vocals floating around in the mix like the aural equivalent of actors in front of a Vaseline-smeared camera lens. Not bad but perhaps a little too innocuous for its own good, it's barely more than a sort of musical shrug that neatly passes in one ear and out the other with a minimum of fuss.

And sometimes the weather report does make good on its promises -- as today, "showers in the afternoon" translated to a good ten hours of unremitting drizzle drumming down on the rooftops. The prevailing opinion is that I'm a touch naive for expecting New England weather to exercise any kind of consistency, but I'd be a good deal happier if it could at least pick a season and stick with it. Instead, snow turns into rain turns into snow again and temperatures seesaw from 10 to 50 degrees in the space of just five days without rhyme or reason. I suspect I jinxed things when I told Carl that the worst of the winter was behind us -- for that impudence, we got smacked with a proper blizzard. Go figure.

On things that are not the weather.
Elbow's jobbing the upcoming release of their fourth album, The Seldom Seen Kid, with an oddly compelling little flash-based puzzle that involves you clicking on panels of a Rubik's Cube in search of snippets of music. Each subsequent snippet adds another layer, which is a massively roundabout way of hearing what ultimately boils down to a 10-second preview of an album track, but does give you an appreciation of just how much is buried in the mix. As possibly the last great British band still recording, Album #4 has a lot to prove, but the previews at least confirm that Elbow's fluid style-hopping and intimate songwriting are still well and alive.

Elsewhere, D&D godhead Gary Gygax died yesterday -- on GM's Day, no less -- at the age of 69. It's a news item I'm trying my hardest not to feel ambivalent about -- I've never played D&D in any incarnation and found Gygax's approach to world-building somewhat maddening, but all the same, this is a man who's second only to H. G. Wells in terms of impact on my hobbies, and 69 is far too young an age for anybody to pass on.

As anybody who spends a lot of time moving knows, the science of packing is never the most exact. As much as you may try to keep things clean and orderly, by the time you get around to emptying desk drawers and other collections of random junk, you're far enough gone that you throw all ideas of organisation into the wind and just dump everything in a box before calling it a day. In this case, I speak entirely from experience -- when we started packing up our life in Malaysia almost ten years ago, most of my possession were up-ended haphazardly into plastic containers and then left almost untouched for the next half-decade. Last week, I started looking at the stuff again for the first time in memory -- partially because I actually had things I wanted to get out of storage and couldn't find because of my piss-poor packing skills, partially out of morbid curiosity. And while I'll be damned if I can find the stuff, the other odds and ends I've encountered have really been an embarrassment of riches.

Well, actually just an embarrassment, per se, since most of what's been boxed in effectively represents some of the most desperately uncool years of my life. Finding a decade-old tube of Clearasil and a KFC receipt from 1999 in the same box probably qualifies as some kind of ironic juxtaposition, but I can't really find any nice way to dress up stuff like Star Trek bookmarks or ancient, rambling plot outlines for fan fiction that never saw the light of day. Then there's the abortive attempts at hobbies -- two big stamp albums full of weird and probably worthless material, old Citadel acrylics that had degraded to toxic waste in the meantime, more empty drawing pads than I'll ever use in my lifetime... it's kind of sad, really, even if it's the perfect testament to the classic ADD lifestyle.

*****

A few days before Christmas, we sat down to watch footage of Kuala Lumpur my parents had taken during their vacation earlier in the year. It was sobering stuff, not least of all because I barely recognised a fraction of it; many of the hangouts where I'd spent so much of my schoolyears had either been warped beyond recognition or disappeared altogether, and the city scale had altered beyond all recognition. High rises have sprung up everywhere, highways soar over the cityscape, new light rail and monorail lines abound. Central Market is shuttered, a horrendous roof looms over Petaling Street, Ampang Point has turned from shopping center to up-scale bazaar.

But there were exceptions: Kelab Darul Esan with its swimming pools, icy air-conditioned buffet tables and omnipresent bad jazz, all alive and looking no different than the day I first set foor there back in '92. Naan Corner, that little curious row of shops I passed on the way to school every day for the best part of nine years, might as well have been frozen in stasis; seeing the supermarket owner actually recognising my parents after all this time was oddly touching. And that little house at Jalan 1/4, with its unassuming green gate and bathtowel-sized garden... barring a discreet satellite dish on the balcony and the BMW in the driveway, it's still the same place we left all those years ago. Seeing it again has been kind of bittersweet, but I hope it'll be as good to the next generation of renters as it was to us.

*****

On a tear -- and no doubt motivated by misplaced by newly welling reserves of nostalgia -- I decided to try and use the power of the internet to track down my small cadre of old friends from my Malaysia days. I don't hold much truck with the whole 'alumni' thing, and barring one exception, I haven't had significant contact to any of them in years; still, maybe '08 is the year to get things in order and redevelop some of those old connections. Pity Google wasn't up to playing ball; of the four, I could only track down significant information on two, and those hits were limited to a neglected Friendster profile and a wedding album -- and as radiant as they look, what is it with everybody I know getting married of late? Still, it's good to know that they're kicking around out there somewhere and haven't gotten so fabulously successful that my self-esteem ends up taking lumps.

As the seasoned international traveler knows, after more than 24 hours on the wing, any sense of time tends to go right out the window -- what's left is the feeling of being adrift in some chronological limbo where hours and days have no meaning and day and night become arbitrary things at best.

Of course, flying back to Germany on the cheap seats was never going to be a day spa, but despite packing light, it was still grinding stuff; a step up from wrestling multiple suitcases through the Tube, but having to deal with surly NWA stewards sure has a way of putting a sting in travel. After a quick layover in Detroit, I barely slept en route to Europe, passing the time by browsing Skymall for the most ridiculous pieces of money-spinning -- this year's clear-cut winner being the animatronic Elvis bust with iPod compatibility -- and finally getting around to finishing Saving the Sun (a fantastic treatment of Japan's mind-boggling banking problems) some eight months after having first bought it.

Having spent almost twenty-five years flying affords the luxury of being able to follow the evolution of in-flight entertainment on a year-by-year basis, and the latest round of innovations -- fast-forward options for movies, the ability to build your own playlists -- also helped pass the time. Listening to music on a crowded commercial flight is kind of a non-starter, but at least I managed to get through The Darjeeling Limited (and half of Fantastic Four before realising that even playing it in German wasn't assuaging the movie's aggressive dumbness) before hitting the ground.

By the time I got off the plane in Amsterdam, I was sufficiently strung out on sleep deprivation and general travel-weariness that the five-hour layover was practically welcome respite. A good four hours were spent in more or less fitful sleep in one of the departure lounges, and good thing too -- Schiphol is one of those nasty, new-fangled megamall airports, all chain stores and glossy signage without the faintest sense of verve or architectural elan (let alone the bilingual weirdness of Detroit). Admittedly, it's a step up from Changi, Charles de Gaulle, or old-school Heathrow, but that's not really saying much.

So here we are. The drive home was faster than expected, but I was out for the count just an hour after arriving. Still feeling somewhat put through the wringer, but I figure the small-town idyll will salve that before long. We'll see, I guess.

The Cribs - "Our Bovine Public"/"Don't You Wanna Be Relevant?" Hilarious stuff this, coming from a band with barely enough talent to fill a thimble but seemingly endless levels of self-delusion. The Cribs have always lurked at the very bottom of the indie-guitar barrel, and despite the combative titles, this double single does little to change the status quo; "Public" is unlistenable dross, while "Relevant" almost threatens to be catchy before the tone-deaf singer opens his gob and rumbles the whole scam.

Babyshambles - "You Talk" Pete Doherty apparently liked the Knack-thieving bit out of "Delivery" so much that he's only gone and slapped it square in the middle of the follow-up single as well. Alas, the rest of it is one of those oddly formless jams Pete can churn out in his sleep these days, a rambling sequence of chord and tone shifts that goes everywhere and nowhere at once.

Dizzee Rascal - "Flex" Much of Dizzee Rascal's second album sounded like he was rapping to a pre-programmed Casio; this time around, he goes even further down the technological ladder, busting rhymes over a smorgasbord of crude bleeps and boops straight out of the sound chips of an elderly NES. It'd be almost endearing if the whole exercise wasn't so damned disposable; compared to the heavy menace of "Sirens," "Flex" doesn't even qualify as a welterweight.

The Killers - "Tranquilize" How a song that features Lou Reed and a children's choir in the space of the same two minutes can still feel so insubstantial has to rank as one of music's great mysteries, but here you go. Like much of the Killers' second album, "Tranquilize" is big on bombast but short on brains, striving to scale the lofty heights of Freddie Mercury but barely getting a leg up on Nightwish. Undoubtedly, devotees of Brandon Flowers and his newly-grown blue collar beard will relish the murky histronics, but folks who want more from their music than empty sincerity are better off giving this one a pass.

New Young Pony Club - "Get Lucky" Chilled out to levels you could use to store meat, "Lucky" is a definite step up from the ubiquitious but vaguely annoying "Ice Cream," though the real treat is the remix; rather than drastically reimagine the song, "Get Dancey" merely isolates all the best bits from the original track while shamelessly jettisoning everything that doesn't work. Smart.

MIT is responsible for some of the ugliest, most painful excuses for architecture currently stinking up central Boston, so it's something of a picker-upper to find out that they are currently in the process of suing Frank Gehry. Bone of contention: the Stata Center, a nightmarish jumble of surrealist droppings that should have stayed in the '20s horror movie that spawned it. As it turns out, however, the Center is as architecturally unsound as it is aesthetically heinous: "The school alleges the center, completed in spring 2004, has persistent leaks, drainage problems and mold growing on its brick exterior. It says accumulations of snow and ice have fallen dangerously from window boxes and other areas of its roofs, blocking emergency exits and causing damage."

With any luck, they'll get their money back and demolish this eyesore.

Surefire sign the seasons finally turned: a whole day of rain, pissing down from great and choking sheets of clouds that blanket the city like factory smoke. All in all, a good time to stay indoors, were it not for that whole "work" thing. Fortunately, we managed to grind through Disc 2 of Zipang before I had to catch the commute -- it's a show that's rapidly growing on me despite misgivings about the fact that it filches the central plot of '80s time travel flick The Final Countdown, then drapes it in the Rising Sun with nary a wink or nod. Sure, jingoism is a sticky thing in almost any creative work, but hardcore Japanese nationalism in a World War II setting? Fortunately, Zipang keeps a fairly even keel; creator Kaiji Kawaguchi already courted controversy for flirting with overt militarism via The Silent Service back in the '80s, but the rah-rah flag waving stays at a relative minimum here. Indeed, given how shamelessly Countdown demonised the Japanese, Zipang's barely-glimpsed American characters are painted with remarkable fairness and humanity; in a neat twist, it's the Japanese Empire, not the Allies, who poses the biggest threat to the time-displaced Mirai and her crew.

Mind you, six episodes in is perhaps not the best time to draw conclusions; considering that the original manga is still ongoing, there's still plenty of time for the whole business to go south. But for the moment, it's a tautly written, honest-to-goodness adult series that underscores the fact that anime can aspire to so much more than the gaudy shonen crap clogging up the back end of Adult Swim these days. And with Stewart and Colbert deep-sixed by the writer's strike, there'll be plenty of time to catch up on the rest of the series in the coming weeks.

Currently getting reacquainted with the expression "brutally sick," something I last brushed with back in '05 when a weird stomach virus effectively, left me bedridden and insomniac for the best part of a week. Thankfully, this latest outing has turned out to be rather more benign, little more than some kind of amped-up flu. At this stage, the laundry list of aches and pains has shrunk down from "feeling like your now-nonexistent wisdom teeth are on the verge of exploding" to "general blah," so I might even be returning to upright status in a day or two.

On the plus side, all this downtime has given me a chance to grind through Beyond Good and Evil, Ubisoft's short-but-sweet melange of beatdowns, sneakery, Rasta rhinos, investigative photography, and hovercraft heroics. Say what one will about the French -- and I know certain members of my readership already have -- but those wily Gauls do know their gaming.

There's been a lot going on in the past two months, and I could ramble at length to make up for all little updates I should have been pounding out in that time span. But since people probably have better things to do and I'm too lazy to write in an LJ-cut, here's the salient bits:

Work. I'm a store manager over here now, and it's accounting for a lot of my spare time these days. It's the first job I've ever worked where there's never a dull moment to speak of, though there is a healthy dose of heartache and frustration in the whole enterprise. Comes with the territory, I s'ppose.
Kitten. Aurora is currently 7 to 8 months old, and loves sleeping on any horizontal surface she can find, no matter how large or small. Pest has mostly stopped hissing at her, but the silence is probably more indicative of one of those Cold War-style standoffs where the nukes are only minutes away from sailing towards the furry, kittenish Kremlin.
Being old. The prospect of voluntarily eating oatmeal for breakfast and drinking V8 at regular intervals has made me realise that my best years are probably already behind me.
Being young. In completely unrelated matters, I'm currently getting back into hobbies I last dabbled in in high school, namely miniatures and Magic. Go regression. Unfortunately, it's not an unqualified success; I started watching odd episodes of The X-Files, a show I adored at fourteen, and coming away rather dismayed. Maybe it's the whole getting-old thing, but I don't recall the dialogue being this rotten back in '95. And the acting? "Wooden" ain't the half of it. Of course, it's easier to dismiss the whole exercise now that it's a known fact that Chris Carter was flying by the seat of his pants in developing the show's famous mythology -- sometimes hindsight really is 20/20.

RADIOHEAD - IN RAINBOWS
They did it to themselves.

The most damning thing I can say about Radiohead's latest opus is this: I paid nothing, and still felt ripped off. If nothing else, I at least want my time and bandwidth back.

For those of us who boarded S. S. Radiohead back in the salad days of The Bends and its world-conquering follow-up, OK Computer, the career slump that's followed has been somewhere between mortifying and infuriating. With the willful perversity only a perpetual outsider could muster, Thom Yorke and company have spent each successive album drifting further and further away from the muscular, polished indie rock that made them a hallmark name in the first place, gradually metamorphosing from a Grade A guitar band to a Grade D electronica outfit in the process. For those who didn't have the good fortune of hearing "Just" or "Paranoid Android" the first time around, the adoration this band continues to command must be nothing short of mystifying, but in all honesty: without the awesome reputation of those two blockbuster albums behind it, the aimless noodling of late-model Radiohead would have long since disappeared into obscurity.

Given the long preamble-cum-history lesson, it probably shouldn't come as any great surprise that In Rainbows doesn't reverse this trend. Indeed, it's the least satisfying in a long line of increasingly underwhelming LPs, a collection of songs with all the heft and substance of an all-you-can-eat styrofoam buffet; the ultimate in empty musical calories. Structure, form, melody, rhythm -- all these things have been sacrificed on the altar of avant-garde, leaving a scant forty-five minutes of underproduced musical doodles smothered by brittle, almost robotic percussion that just won't quit.

If any of it sticks in the immediate brain for longer than five minutes, it's because it's accidentally, coincidentally reminiscent of something that's real music, albeit music bled of all semblance of passion, warmth, and life. "Bodysnatchers" is Oasis getting into a drunken brawl, breaking an amp, then attempting to cover "Within You Without You" on its shattered remains; "Reckoner" is eerily reminiscent of early Bronski Beat; closer "Videotape" sounds like a supremely botched cover of the 'Head's own "Pyramid Song." Some tracks will drive you to hit the 'Skip' button, others simply bore you into submission; either way, it's hard to imagine a less engaging record making the rounds this year. Even Yorke sounds apathetic in places, mumbling inane lyrics over equally inane music or just mewling to fill up dead air; there's nothing here even scraping within spitting distance of the goggle-eyed fury of "Electioneering" or -- hell -- "Myxomatosis" from Hail to the Thief.

Inevitably, In Rainbows will find its defenders; Pitchfork Media's laughably detailed guide to this wispy collection of post-musical ephemera is nothing if not representative of the power the Radiohead name still wields. But the hell with it. The Emperor is naked, and life is too short to waste time pretending otherwise; not while there's still bands with real passion and vigor making the rounds who deserve that love and support tenfold.

2

Manic Street Preachers - "Indian Summer" For a band that used to be all revolutionary spitfire and ill-advised glam gloss, it's almost shocking just how boring Bradfield and company have gotten. "Indian Summer," the third anodyne single from an album nobody needed, can't even shore up the often hilarious reserves of misplaced idealism that patched over some of the rougher spots in the late-era Manics discography -- this is the sound of a band that sailed past relevance date years ago and is only just starting to cotton on the fact.

Oasis - "Lord Don't Slow Me Down" Speaking of has-beens, Oasis return with their first new material since Don't Believe the Truth. And... well, it's an Oasis single, naggingly familiar both in its shameless appropriation of rock cliches and in the simple fact that Noel Gallagher ran out of new chord progressions back in '95 and has resorted to cribbing bandmate Andy Bell's "Turn Up the Sun" to create a queasy approximation of Sheryl Crow's "A Change Would Do You Good" waking up in an airport lounge with a hangover. Shameful.

The Hives - "Tick Tick Boom" Bouncing off the walls with nowhere to go, "Tick Tick Boom" is the ugly end result of the Hives' once-novel cartoon rock finally expiring. For a taster of an album that features such decidedly un-Hivesy flourishes as piano-driven tracks and Pharrell Williams, it's hard to imagine a more conventional lead single; even a forensics lab would be hard-pressed to find much practical difference between this and anything the Hives have recorded since 2000, except for the simple fact that the novelty of watching grown men named Dr. Matt Destruction blasting out retro-tinged tracks with names like "What's That Spell?...Go to Hell!" is long gone.

The Alones - "Silver" In the post-talent scene that's flourished in Britain like a bacterial growth since the Strokes' amateurish excuse for rock made it big, big, big, new bands capable of putting together a coherent song or producing a track that actually sounds professional are like a national treasure. "Silver" wouldn't have even made a blip on the musical radar back in '95 or '00, but in this day and age, that icy indie rock is like a briny, faintly smelly oasis in a vast desert of unabashed crap.

Lethal Bizzle - "Police On My Back" Back in the day when the So Solid Crew had yet to make the transition from chart force to punchline, the British garage scene was overrun with "Crews" and "Cartels" looking to make the leap from council estate to cash money millionaires the honest way: dole-line gangsta rap, the desperate and often willfully annoying genre that would later be legimitised as "grime." Among those was the More Fire Crew, whose hit "Oi!" took "irritatingly catchy" to an entirely new level; built around a refrain of "Oi! Where dat More Fire Crew?" that burrowed into your brain like some kind of horrible alien parasite and refused to budge for weeks on end. And while MFC may have vanished into the ether when the garage scene finally collapsed under its own pompous weight, former More Fire Boy Lethal Bizzle does his old comrades proud by releasing a joint that's not only impossible to get out of your head, but also samples The Clash for that extra bit of crossover appeal. Top stuff.

The Young Knives - "Terra Firma" In which three men who look like they should be teaching geography to fifth graders tackle post-punk New Wave. Perversely, it's probably the most compellingly addictive thing to come out of Britain in a long time.