(Being an occasional encomium to live entertainment that actually has something to do with comics; or, “Free Spider-Man Tickets, Please…”)

Fight Girl Battle World; HERE Arts Center, NYC; 7/17/09

This month you’ll read another batch of articles about Hollywood descending on Geek Nation at San Diego Comic-Con. The bigger news is the Vampire Cowboys theatre troupe’s ongoing project to commandeer Geek Universe and crash it into Broadway. The major studios may be out to drain what juice they can from the readymade fanboy & girl audience, but Vampire Cowboys bravely sucks back.

The riotous Fight Girl Battle World, risen from the dead for one week after an acclaimed run last year, makes sure the takeover goes in the right direction. Melissa Paladino is the title girl, E-V, a gladiator on a pugilistic planet in a universe that’s been cleansed of all humans but her in some cataclysmic conflict. A fog-of-war plot moves her from the arena to an interplanetary zoo to a galactic insurgency where she is to meet the only other human who turns out to have survived, in the hopes of restarting the race.

All cast members go 10 rounds, though standouts include Elena Chang (as an imperial assassin), who works the magic of making us think her line readings come as much of a shock to her as to us; Temar Underwood (as a venerable space-general), who masticates a cuisine of hammy consonants to help the scenery go down; Bonnie Sherman (as a transsexual warrior), whose demented conviction as always saves charismatic grandeur from the precipice of self-parody; and the reigning champion of this production, Paco Tolson, as a fussy robot from some animatronic Disneyplanet. Tolson first appears in silence and silhouette but I already knew it was him; this guy has the kinetic fingerprint of a Chaplin (and a bizarre chrome bo staff-twirling mannerism later in the show makes it literal).

The action is punctuated by profane puppetry at a number of important points, giving the effect of a kind of Sesame Alleyway. I may have said that last part somewhere else… I’m like the Native Americans, I use every part of the joke. But it’s only fitting, for these deathless theatrical spirits rise to the occasion again and again.

[www.vampirecowboys.com]

It’s been a while since I’ve written a review for our great site.  However, I’ve started to get back on the saddle and am hard at work on an overview/review of Terry Moore’s Echo.  In this article, I address the main reason why I have been away for some time.  Moore’s Echo is a main driver for pulling me back into a medium that I have loved and supported for several decades.  Soon after my review of Echo is done, I will begin an article on a  webstrip that also has a brother in comic book form.  This, too, has been instrumental in my slow creep back in.  I hope everyone has a great 4th of July holiday weekend!

(Being an occasional digression from comics to songs I can’t get out of my head)

The Tall Pines, “Campfire Songs” (self-released)

Like the last bearers of a secret history in a sci-fi film, the Tall Pines remember that the scattered tribes of country and boogie had a common ancestor — not only in the kinship of homegrown grooves from rural folk to city pop, but the funky stomp shared by shitkickers and soul-siblings alike. These tangled roots were recognizable in the early glam that forms the third corner of the Tall Pines’ holy trinity of influences, the wedge by which they reopen lost worlds of possibility. It unleashes fresh C&W&R&B from a forgotten canister of late-cold war cool, on a mission led by a classic sadder-but-wiser songwriter who’s channeling the unclaimed spirits of Lee Hazlewood and Jesse James, and fronted by a crazy Canadian country-girl who thinks she’s Aretha and, it turns, out, kinda is. The singular thing about the Pines among all such retro/rustic recombinators I love, from New Pornographers to Rasputina, is the absence of snark from the recipe of joy. The Pines may have no innocence but, uniquely, they have no irony either. It’s an antidote you don’t need when you can make it to the center of the backwoods and the concrete jungle to jack right back into the roots.

www.myspace.com/thetallpines

Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida have always been strong pop-culture sympathizers as writers and editors, so the New York Times Magazine’s comics page would’ve been a suitable home for the studied quirk and shorthand skits of their first screenplay, Away We Go. But the Times has gone back to not having any comics page, so the big screen it is.

It’s a great missed connection of form and function since, while several recent movies have managed to put three-dimensional flesh and blood on comic books, this is a film that keeps flattening out into one. Or more precisely, a comic *strip* — the script is written in short vignettes weighted toward predetermined punchlines. It’s that Diablo Cody, punk-sitcom feeling of repartee hatched in a writers’ room and put in the mouths of characters who can be very funny but sound nothing like anyone you’ve actually ever known. And it gives the strange feeling, from a pair of very insightful authors, of having been conceived by people who themselves haven’t ever known much of anybody.

Away We Go follows a pair of seldom-do-well young thirtysomethings who discover they’re having a baby and, upon hearing that the guy’s flaky parents are taking off for a midlife-crisis European relocation, try out a string of cities and acquaintances to see where they really want their kid (and themselves) to grow up. We’re given the hints of what these two do for a living, but not really where they get the money and employer forbearance to pack off for an indefinite globe-trot; one of many ways in which the story feels like a teenager’s version of how life after 20 works. There ensues a string of wackiness, with a few wedged-in tragedies that tend to make the script’s snappy dialogue go inarticulate and platitudinous. Much of the film sparkles but little rings true, leading to an emotional finale that has been built on no foundation you can much care about.

This is okay when deeper truths well up through a more consistently absurdist medium (Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity, say). It’s less okay in a movie which trumpets its downscale realism. But for stretches you can sit back and enjoy the surreal set pieces.

When the young couple set out on a trip to choose a permanent home and a ready set of friends and relatives which is really a fact-finding odyssey among personified models of adult-world dysfunction, it entertainingly plays like a dystopian Little Prince or The Point. The reverse-mentors they find — especially Catherine O’Hara’s quintessentially uncalled-for in-law, Allison Janney’s exhausting bipolar diva and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s thin-skinned new-age nutcase — are some of the most hilarious caricatures ever committed to film. But they’re not balanced by protagonists we ever really get to know, beyond a series of wisecracks and some sketched-in off-camera traumas.

Because of this, the film is left to Maya Rudolph, as the conflicted mom-to-be, to carry, and she does run away with it, bringing a brilliant naturalism, an inspired catalogue of appalled comic doubletakes, and a heartbreakingly expressed inner life of disappointments and uncertainties to a role which, for the most part, didn’t get written.

As every filmmaker, author, and fan of authors and filmmakers has heard a hundred times, Hemingway’s advice concerning Hollywood adaptations was to throw the book over the California border, take the money they throw back and drive fast in the other direction. Among the many things they’ve gotten wrong, Eggers and Vida seem to have left their books back home and thrown themselves over the fence, getting caught in some barbed wire on the way. What is the f*ck?