June 2022 – Nik Dirga

Baz Luhrmann’s frantic Elvis shows why the King got his crown

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” – The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is a delirious, caffeinated roller-coaster of a music biopic, taking the essence of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll and shaking it up like a jug of Mountain Dew. It isn’t entirely true, nor does it try to be, but for much of its epic 159-minute running time, it’s vastly entertaining.

Like the director’s Moulin Rouge and Great Gatsby, Elvis is all about style and razzle-dazzle. It’s bold, loud and occasionally bad but it captures the kinetic shock of Elvis’ impact on pop culture better than any other biopic of the man has done. It’s about Elvis as legend, really, a fable imagining the life of the boy from Tupelo.

Luhrmann does cast an eye over the scope of Elvis’ brief 42 years on Earth, but in a fragmented, kaleidoscopic fashion. Like his Gatsby, Baz mixes in modern hip-hop and rock sounds to attempt to show a through-line from Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right Mama” to Doja Cat and Diplo. We flash back to Elvis’ impoverished boyhood, his love for Black music and his devil’s bargain with Colonel Tom Parker, the man who would guide – and some say crush the creativity out of – his career. We’ve seen Elvis slowly get reclaimed from the land of fat jokes the past decade or two, and Baz takes him seriously.

Elvis, a god-fearing mama’s boy, was also a precursor of punk rock – shaking up the system and terrifying the powers that be with his hip-shaking, lip-curling presence. Austin Butler at first seems a bit too pretty and polished to be Elvis, but he really grows on you, especially when he hits the stage for some utterly dynamic numbers. From his first appearances on the Louisiana Hayride to his comeback special to his final sad, dazed shows in Vegas, Luhrmann delivers astonishingly visceral recreations. There are moments when Butler’s on stage miming the King that I honestly couldn’t tell him and Presley apart.

Tom Hanks’s scenery-chewing Colonel is a love-it or hate-it creation, speaking in a strange whispery, sing-songy carny barker’s tone and draped in a distracting fat suit. And yet, I liked Hanks, because he understands that to play this character you’ve got to go campy and broad, to embrace the Mephistophelean hold that Parker had on Elvis. Whispering promises and lies like an Iago to Elvis’ Othello, in real life Parker was actually a Dutch native who fled to America under a cloud of scandal and reinvented himself as a huckster. (The excellent biography The Colonel by Alanna Nash goes far more into depth about who Parker really was, which the movie only really alludes to.)

If Elvis peaks during the astounding recreations of his musical numbers, it falters a bit during sappy family drama, and despite its length it tends to zip through the life story, dispatching his time in the Army and movie career in about five minutes. Nobody other than Elvis and the Colonel is given much depth in the movie (Priscilla Presley suffers particularly) and for all the gloss the rise-and-fall-and-rise drama of Elvis apes a million other cinematic biographies.

And this is a fable, make no mistake – Elvis painted as a victim and the less savoury parts of his character brushed aside. The movie leans into his appreciation and inspirations from Black music (which he did have, although the movie exaggerates that a little too much) and ignores questioning the questions that raises about authenticity. It acts as if he wasn’t also a huge fan of white country and gospel artists. I don’t think Elvis was a fierce racist as some do, but he was also very much a product of his time, dirt-poor Mississippi.

There’s a lot of fun-house distortion of history here, but I don’t think this film is trying to ape, say, the thoroughness of the definitive Elvis biography by Peter Guralnick. It’s all about the spectacle in the end, and that’s where Elvis truly delivers. I wouldn’t point this movie at anyone who wants a high-fidelity biography of the man, but if you want to imagine the impact he had, the seismic force of those wiggles and moans on stage almost 70 years ago now and why it still matters today, it’s not a bad place to start.

The sweet, sentimental sounds of Orthodontist Office Music

I spent an awful lot of my early teenage years stuck in a chair, staring at the ceiling, while an orthodontist laboured mightily to straighten out my cursed teeth.

Soft rock music piped through on the office stereo as my bicuspids were shifted and molars manipulated at great cost to my parents, and the greatest inoffensive hits of the early 1980s drifted through my brain.

Some of it was blandly saccharine – Christopher Cross, Air Supply, Toto – some of it was grand pop – Hall and Oates, Sade, Phil Collins. I was just a wee young lad who listened obsessively to FM102 in the glory days of Prince, Madonna and Jacko, who was only beginning to figure out his own musical tastes. So as anodyne as Orthodontist Music was, it still left an impression in my sponge-like ears.

I never particularly cared for Cross’ so-soft-rock-it’s-liquid hit “Sailing,” but it’s permanently tattooed on my brain because of Orthodontist Music. A comics nerd even then, I got a nerdy kick out of whenever Joey Scarbury’s inspirational “Believe It Or Not” theme song to The Greatest American Hero came on in rotation. I heard it all, again and again, from Spandau Ballet’s “True” to Starship’s “Sara.”

Nothing too manic or antic on this forgotten radio station, lest the dentists’ tools slip. Even the soaring drum kicks of Collins’ “In The Air Tonight” were a bit too fist-pumping.

I wore braces or headgear or some awful contraption for a good 5-6 years of the early 1980s, and even as my tastes matured into slightly edgier Depeche Mode and Peter Gabriel, every time I went back to the orthodontist I got a good dose of the soft, sweet stuff.

I pat myself on the back for my omnivorous musical taste now, but I’ll admit years of Orthodontist Music at such an impressionable age left its mark. The quavering tones of Peter Cetera evoke the ‘80s gloss of pre-teen first love, I’ve got a soft spot for a little bit of Journey’s power balladry, and look – I bow in my unironic love for ‘80s Phil Collins to nobody, no matter how much time I might listen to Can and Captain Beefheart and The Fall now.

Decades later, my teeth are more or less straight, but every time I hear one of these damned songs, I’m right back there in the chair. It’s not the worst place to be – rarely painful, the endless orthodontist visits were just boring and tedious, and I sort of entered a zen state of calm staring at the same ceiling over and over. Even now, I close my eyes, and far in the distance I hear Christopher Cross, on a ship somewhere, crooning… “Saaaaaaaaailing / Takes me aaaaaaway to where I’ve always heard it could be / Just a dream and the wind to carry me / And soon I will be free.”

And I know, I will never be free of Orthodontist Music.

Great Scott! It’s Amoeba Adventures #31!

Face front, true believers – I’ve got a new comic out, Amoeba Adventures #31, and it’s here for you to download as a FREE digital edition!

This issue, the spotlight turns to villainy, as several of Amoeba Adventures’ biggest bad guys make a return appearance, and there’s a shocking twist for one of our main characters. Heck, it’s so darned shocking I can’t even tell you the TITLE of this story, amigos!

Hasten ye to the click button and download it right here:

Download Amoeba Adventures #31

And don’t forget, you can download 50 other comics published by me dating back to the 1990s including all 31 issues of Amoeba Adventures right here!

Believe it or not, it’s now been nearly 32 years since I put out the first issue of Amoeba Adventures, and this is the FOURTH all-new issue since I revived the story of Prometheus, Ninja Ant, Rambunny and the gang in 2020. Don’t say I’m not committed to this comics business!

Once again I’ll be producing a limited-edition print version which will be available for a mere $7.50 shipped anywhere in the entire world to you in July. You can pre-order that by paypalling some cash to dirgas@gmail.com with your mailing details.

If you haven’t yet, be sure to give my Amoeba Adventures Facebook page a like to keep in the loop, and thanks for reading!

Jonah Hex and comic book covers you just can’t pass up

I’ve written before my sad laments about how boring comic book covers have become in recent years.

Overly mannered painted artwork, stiff poster poses and dull piles of spandex-clad bodies… that’s what you see these days on a rack of comics.

Unfortunately, the days of comics on newsstands and spinner racks are pretty much gone. Back then, comics had to attract attention, with crazy set-ups, screaming speech balloons and bombastic slogans. I miss those comics.

I recently scored a big pile of vintage ‘80s Jonah Hex comics for a song, and boy, did that gunslingin’ Jonah Hex know how to sell a comic book.

Dynamic, snarling and mean, they’re like posters for Clint Eastwood westerns that never were, and often darned edgy for their era. Hex was on his way out when some of these were published, as I wrote about recently when looking at comic final issues. But like any good gunfighter, he went down shootin’.

Keep on Trekkin’: How Strange New Worlds brings the fun back to Star Trek

Someone finally remembered to put the Trek back into Star Trek, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has arrived just in time for weary fans of the franchise.

Star Trek has had a mixed decade or so – ever since the Star Trek: The Next Generation movies faded out with the underwhelming Nemesis, there’s been a growing sense that Star Trek isn’t quite sure what it wants to be.

Will it reboot and start over entirely, like the three Chris Pine-led movies? Will it boldly go in a new direction like the ballyhooed Star Trek: Discovery, or return to well-loved old friends like Star Trek: Picard? Will it make a hard swerve into animated satire like Lower Decks? With the latest spin-off – the eighth live-action Star Trek series, if you’re counting – Star Trek goes back to the basics, and Strange New Worlds is all the better for it.

Retro without being camp, Strange New Worlds is set on the USS Enterprise several years before Kirk became its captain. It follows Captain Christopher Pike (first seen in a few episodes of the ‘60s series) and his science officer Spock as the ship boldly goes to explore strange new… well, you get the idea.

Although it’s a prequel and weighed down by existing canon (including Pike’s grim ultimate fate), so far it’s a breezy ride that evokes the spirit of TOS – the original series – far more successfully than anything since The Next Generation.

I maintain that one of the worst developments for television series was Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s embrace of the serialised “Big Bad,” in which the entire season leads up to a final confrontation with some menace. While Buffy was pretty great, it didn’t mean every single series needed to have a ‘Big Bad.’ The ‘Big Bad’ has become a plague on serialised television. Its bad influence can be seen in shows like the Arrow-verse superhero franchises, which were weakened by Big Bad envy and a constant desire to top themselves and up the menace. ST: Discovery and Picard are both guilty of this too (along with other flaws) and it’s kept these shows from living up to their predecessors.

I gave up on Discovery after the third season, where despite a lot of potential, the show seemed determined to be “the Michael Burnham Show” and never let any other characters have a chance to breathe, never let up from its bludgeoning insistence that it was deep and it mattered. It wasn’t fun.

Strange New Worlds is fun. We’re only five episodes in, but already it feels like the best Trek in years. The rainbow-coloured uniforms inspired by the original series set the tone from the start. Anson Mount’s Captain Pike is charismatic and stalwart, while Ethan Peck has the hard job of shadowing Leonard Nimoy’s inimitable Spock, but pulls it off pretty well. The crew is a mix of familiar characters – a very young Uhura, a spunky Nurse Chapel – and new, like Rebecca Romjin’s dynamic Number One and Christina Chong‘s La’an Noonien Singh, who shares an ancestry with a very famous Trek villain.

Strange New Worlds is confident about what kind of Star Trek it wants to be from the word “engage.” Unlike Discovery, which flailed and reinvents itself each season, SNW is fully formed. In five episodes, we’ve already learned more about the crew’s bridge characters than I did over three seasons of Discovery. Star Trek is about the entire crew, not just a captain, and so far the old-school Enterprise’s team are an enjoyable group of well-worn Starfleet cliches and intriguing newcomers.

What’s wrong with a good done-in-one story, anyway? So far, SNW has had a blast on the “mission of the week” stories The Next Generation and original series excelled at – miniature action movies with hefty doses of character development, humour and an epic sense of wonder.

After 50-plus years, it’s hard to find new life in a franchise. While excavating the past and nostalgia are prime reason for Strange New Worlds’ existence, it wouldn’t work if the show itself wasn’t so darned endearing. It may stumble – after all, it’s only halfway through its first season – but at the moment, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is roaring along at warp speed.

Gut-wrenching final issue! When comic books are cancelled

The problem with never-ending serialised fiction is just that – it never ends. Unless a meteor finally hits the planet, you’ll probably never really see a truly final adventure of Superman, Spider-Man or Batman. Sure, there’s plenty of possible final stories and alternative histories out there – but the powers that be will never let the underlying intellectual property go truly dormant.

Heck, even stories we once thought were over, such as Star Wars circa 1985, have been prequeled and sequeled and sidequeled and likely will until they run out of steam until the inevitable next reboot circa 2045.

There are comics characters I love, but I no longer obsessively follow their every adventure. I’ll always have a special place in my heart for Spider-Man and Batman, but you know, you’ve seen Bats punch out the Joker once, you’ve seen it all. Sometimes, you just want a sense of closure.

I guess that’s why I have a nerdy fascination with picking up the final issues of long-running comics series, because it feels like a definite ending to the story. It doesn’t really happen much anymore, because there’s always another reboot, but for a while in the mid-1980s, Marvel was kind of OK with wrapping up entirely the stories of characters who had reached the end of the line – Ghost Rider, Master of Kung Fu and ROM among them, while rival DC Comics cancelled almost every non-superhero comic they had in a massive genre purge in the early 1980s, as well as long-running series like Flash and Wonder Woman in favour of reboots.

A cover trumpeting “final issue” teases the reader that this story really, truly matters, unlike the more common “stealth cancellation” tactic these days where a comic book just quietly vanishes.

The ending of these stories could be uplifting – Ghost Rider finally breaks his demonic curse to walk off into the sunset, ROM gets his humanity returned after winning the Dire Wraith war – or surprisingly bleak, when Iron Fist is shockingly murdered in the final 125th issue of Power Man And Iron Fist, ending what had been an entertaining bi-racial buddy superhero tale on a note of discordant tragedy. (Iron Fist came back from the dead, of course, but it wasn’t for several years.)

Other final issues serve as a farewell to dying comic book genres – Jonah Hex #92 puts a capstone on the western saga’s classic years, while G.I. Combat #288 was one of the last war comics in a once-dominant subsector of comics. From the mid-’70s on, one by one the popularity of long-running horror, western, war and romance comics faded so that by 1985, from House of Mystery to Young Romance, almost none of them were left. Sometimes the endings were pretty abrupt – the saga of the bizarre “Creature Commandos” is wrapped up in an utterly slapdash one-page story in final issue Weird War Tales #124 that just shoots them off into outer space forever!

Some got a happy ending that stuck – ROM ended his series in 1985 and while there have been a few revivals at other comics companies of the basic concept, the Marvel version of ROM has never returned – not for creative reasons, but because of tangled copyright wrangling. I do like the idea that the spaceknight got to just walk off into the sunset for good.

I know few characters stay dead when there’s valuable intellectual property to mine – pretty much all of the characters mentioned above have come back in some form or another – but the end of a series after 100, 200 or 300 issues still feels like a pretty firm full stop on a comic’s history. The modern revivals, even when they’re great, often feel like echoes of the past rather than something truly new.

People have been predicting the death of print comic books for ages, and it’s still shocking to see how low sales figures for print comics are these days when their stars go on to headline multi-zillion-dollar movie franchises. But I’m hoping they stick around as long as I do. I do like a final issue, but I also don’t want to see the gut-wrenching collector’s item last issue of Action Comics or Amazing Spider-Man anytime soon.