Venture Bros: a closer look
mcbrennan posted this lengthy, well-considered analysis of The Venture Bros in response to my entry on last week’s “Victor-Echo-November” episode. I thought it was worth bumping up to a new entry. She starts with quoting a paragraph of mine, then heads straight into the core of the show, which becomes more interesting the more you examine it.
Take it away, Cait:
“In a way the whole show is about arrested adolescence, with each character presenting their own take on the concept, and that includes Mr. Brisby. Hank and Dean are the most clinical and literal of Team Venture, being seemingly unable to make it out of adolescence alive. Dr. Venture’s more mature self literally made its break from his body to go live on Spider-Skull Island (or is Jonas his less mature self, living his playboy lifestyle?). Phantom Limb may be a sophisticate, dealing in bureaucracy and insurance and masterpieces of Western art, but in a way there’s more than a touch of Felix Unger in him, a fuss-budget who uses his sophistication to hold the world at arm’s length so that he doesn’t have to deal with the messier aspects of adult life, like maintaining a stable relationship or taking responsibility for his actions.”
There’s so much truth to this. I’m not sure if it’s arrested adolescence or just pervasive failure–failure to live up to impossible standards or to fulfil early promise, especially. Whether it’s Rusty’s boy-adventurer pedigree, Billy’s boy-genius, Brock’s football career, or the Monarch’s blueblooded trust fund origins, so many of these characters were destined for greatness and got stuck. Another specific theme I connect with is how the…the knowledge and expertise and talents of all these characters are essentially useless outside their insular little world of adventuring and “cosplay” (or costume business, in deference to the Monarch); the 60s/70s backgrounds and social “rules” are no accident. The world they learned how to live in has passed them by; The idealism of the original Team Venture is as obsolete as Rusty’s speed suits. Brock’s cold war is over; even his mentor has left it all behind, including his gender. The Guild is in league with the police. Faced with the prospect of trying to make normal human connections and fit in with the contemporary world we know (if such a thing even exists for them), Dr. Venture, the Monarch and company instead spend their time riding the carcasses of the dead past, reenacting costume dramas to keep them from going insane with boredom or despair. The scale of their “adventures” is telling: There are no world-changing inventions and no world-domination schemes. And for all the Marvel-inspired costumed supervillains, there arealmost no heroes left, certainly none in costume (outside of that ethically dubious blowhard Richard Impossible, whose entire empire sits on the rubble of Ventures past). I think that’s one of the reasons that Brock in particular can be so emotionally engaging–he’s the heart of the show, trying to hold the universe together as it spins off its axis, protecting the family he loves and trying to safeguard the next generation so that someday, things will be different. He lives by a code of honor, something maybe only the Guild still recognizes. Orpheus plays much the same role for Triana, though she and Kim are more a product of our world, and more able to see the Venture family and their nemesis as anachronisms. Triana feels for the boys, but she won’t end up like them. We hope.
Interesting also that in this world where family is so key, all the mothers are missing (Hank and Dean’s? Rusty and Jonas Jr’s? Triana’s? The Monarch’s? Just for starters…) Interesting also that the strongest female character on the show may or may not have arrived at womanhood through unconventional means, and we certainly know that the man who was like a father to Brock is now more of a mother-figure (of course, the transgender thing may be just a red herring where Dr. Girlfriend is concerned, but leave me my illusions.)
As a more or less failed child prodigy myself, I feel for these characters even as I fear I’m probably going to share their fate. I suppose sitting up at 3am writing a 5000 word essay on a cartoon is not going to change that. 🙂 But the Venture Bros. is of course much more than a cartoon, and I’m not kidding when I say it’s the best show on television. It’s a privilege to live in a time where you get to experience firsthand something that is both great art and great fun in pop culture. There’s so much going on here, so much to think about, that it’s just a delight to watch every week.
Venture Bros: Love Bheits
Random thoughts while tripping through the fragrant copse of tonight’s episode:
*The guy at the beginning of the show, standing on the volcanic landscape, turns to the camera and, for the aide of the illiterate, announces “Underland,” with a gesture as though he were ushering us into a swank restaurant. More establishing shots should be like this. I’d love to see a shot of Central Park, with the Empire State Building in the background, and a title that says “New York City,” and THEN have a guy, a cab driver or homeless guy, come on screen and say “New York City,” with the same kind of maitre-d gesture.
* Just yesterday I was thinking to myself, “I wonder where you would go to get a Slave Leia costume?” (The answer, for those interested, is here.)
*Oh hey, Luke and Leia are twins, just like Hank and Dean! And I have a feeling that Hank and Dean may not have yet met their “real father” yet either.
*So, wait. I don’t get it. You can say “Chewbacca” in an episode, but you can’t say “Batman?”
*Little miniature timberwolves. Are they bred that way, or do they naturally come in that size in Underland, perhaps because of the lack of food available? Or are they, shudder, timberwolf puppies?
*I was delighted to see Catclops, Manic 8-Ball and Girl Hitler again. I wish we had seen that Manic 8-Ball got a position in the new government at the end. Don’t tell me he died in confinement! The “tiger bomb” couldn’t kill him!
*The “cat hair in the glass of drinking water” beat took two viewings to land for me. The first time I just went “Huh?” when the Baron drinks the water and gets a weird look on his face. And sometimes the dialogue goes by so fast it takes me two or even three viewings just to catch all the lines.
*Brock’s tender mentoring of Hank makes me think, again, that Brock and Hank have a relationship that perhaps even Dr. Venture doesn’t know about.
REFERENCES I CAUGHT:
Return of the Jedi (obviously), my favorite shot being the one where Girl Hitler adjusts her mask so that her moustache can see, an exact parallel to where Lando does the same thing.
Die Another Day for the shots of the X2 being forced down by super-magnet, with pieces breaking off and flying away.
Empire Strikes Back with the thing Underbheit lives in, and the shot of the toupee being lowered down on a thoroughly unnecessary apparatus to attach itself to his head.
Fantastic Four and Underbheit’s taste in the hooded robes of dictators of fictional Eastern Bloc nations.
Simpsons Comic Book Guy for “Lamest. Villain. Ever.”
Dr. Stranglove for urbaniak‘s “German Guy” accent on the henchman who can stop tonguing the slit (boy does that sound dirtier than it is).
Sin City for the row of women’s heads mounted to the wall.
Silence of the Lambs for the shot of the fingernails imbedded in the chair arm.
All this, and a sly comment on gay marriage too. Bravo!
Found this.
Devil’s Advocate
One of my favorite underrated scripts, by Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy (who later went on to write two more of my favorite scripts, The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy), my favorite Taylor Hackford film and, probably, my favorite Keanu Reeves performance (it’s been a while since I’ve seen Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but I remember last time it made me cry). Plus it’s got Charlize Theron so young she’s still got baby fat.
It seems, plainly, to be a cross between The Firm and Rosemary’s Baby, and while it doesn’t quite reach the heights of the latter, it pretty easily clears the bar (sorry) of the former. It is flatly ridiculous but also well-observed dramatically and morally complex.
It’s not an unusually long movie, but because it’s structurally a little odd it can sometimes feel that way. There’s a fourteen-minute prologue set in Florida, the second act kicks in at 57 minutes, third at 1:38 or so, the movie winding up at 2:16 or so. Because the plot is complex and multi-leveled, it seems like it has too many climaxes, but by the end you can see how all of those things were part of the whole picture (and there was, apparently, more that got cut).
The strength of the script is that it shows, in mostly credible and behavioral terms, the way souls become corrupted. It shows that in real life, there is no midnight meeting at the crossroads with the devil, there is only a series of tiny decisions to be made, day after day after day, that take you further away from “good” and closer to “bad.” Thing is, it doesn’t even really say “bad:” in Pacino’s big monologue at the climax, he explains that all Satan wants is for humans to be happy. And to be happy, humanity only has to give up its guilt. “Guilt is a sack of bricks,” says Satan. “All you have to do is set it down.” Or, as Charlize puts it at one point after a traumatic day of shopping, “Everything is a goddamned test!”
For Charlize, temptation comes in the form of sophistication. In some of the best scenes in the movie, the other wives at the law firm gently pressure her into being hipper, more jaded, more “cool.” The unease that small-town gal Charlize feels thrust into the world of New York highlife is palpable. Just small little choices like getting a new haircut or going against your instincts on decorating ideas become weighted with unexpected morality.
For Keanu, the tempation comes in the form of advancement. If he just gets this job, if he just wins this case, if he just spends this one night away from his wife, then he’ll have what he wants and can be the person he needs to be. There’s one scene toward the end of Act II where he explains all this to Pacino, who suddenly gets a wistful, faraway look in his eye, probably thinking about his performance of these exact same ideas in (the admittedly superior) Godfather Part II.
Then there’s Pacino, drawing the curtain on his “volcanic” phase. He’s mostly delicious in this movie, only really pulling out the stops for the big speech at the end. The scene where he goes through the roof and into the stratosphere, however, requires him to a) tell Keanu that he’s The Devil, b) “explain” a whole bunch of stuff about God, Free Will and Man’s Place in the Universe, and c) convince him to have sex with Connie Nielsen, right there, on a table, in the room, right now. You can see where Pacino might have figured that soft-pedalling the delivery might not have properly sold the scene.
And I have to say, I’m a red-blooded man like anyone else, but I don’t think I could perform sexually, with Connie Nielsen or anyone else, while Al Pacino was standing next to me ranting about God at the top of his lungs. Or anywhere in the room, honestly, doing anything.
I’m a big fan of Charlize Theron in this movie. She’s quite believable and poignant, although she is also saddled with a scene that requires her to tearfully blurt out “They took my ovaries!”
The special effects, like those of many movies made in 1997, have not aged well. Saddest of all is the sculpture over Pacino’s desk that “comes to life” during the climax. The failure of this effect must be at least, in part, due to what I consider a painfully stupid foulup in the clearances dept at WB. They built a whole scene around this sculpture, which they copied from a church in Washington, DC, then found out that the sculpture was a copyrighted work and the sculptor (and the church) didn’t particularly appreciate having it hang over Satan’s desk and didn’t particularly want to be “compensated” for the infringement. The statue had to be airbrushed over in early scenes and significantly altered in later scenes for the video release. Copyright infringement fans can read about the case here.
Late Spring
A young woman takes care of her widowed father. Everyone thinks that the daughter should get married. But the daughter is happy just taking care of her father. That is, until the father announces that he intends to remarry and the daughter is forced to make a decision.
And that’s it, that’s the plot of Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring. Oh, there’s a third-act “surprise,” but plot isn’t really the point of Ozu’s films.
The polar opposite of Kurosawa’s operatic dramas and the popular samurai epics of the time, Ozu’s domestic dramas are minimalist, realist, quiet and reserved. In fact, they are in many ways about being reserved. Observational and behavioral in the extreme, they don’t feel like any other Japanese movies I know of. Instead they remind me of Austen and Chekhov, Raymond Carver and Jim Jarmusch.
Like Jarmusch, Ozu’s dramatic strategy sometimes takes a little getting used to. His films may appear to be “boring” for the first half-hour or so as you watch people in mid-20th-century Japan go about their daily lives, cooking and working and eating and gossiping. You’re waiting for the movie to start. Then, as the first act edges into the second and patterns start to repeat themselves, you begin to realize that you weren’t just watching random behavior, you were watching very specific, emblematic behavior, tiny little actions as simple as folding a napkin or raising a drinking glass that, if you had been paying attention, would have told you all you need to know about the characters you’ve been watching. Ozu’s dramas are, in fact, about the way tiny little actions become habit, habit becomes identity, and identity is threatened by change. And as you start to become aware of the “plot,” these tiny little actions start to take on more and more significance. So suddenly, the way someone walks or talks or eats a piece of cake becomes terribly important, as it may contain a vital clue to the character’s inner life, and by the middle half-hour you’re on tenterhooks trying to figure out if people are really saying what they mean, if they’re hiding some terrible secret, if they’re ever going to give their domineering parents what for, if they’re ever going to be happy. Then, by the third act, the accumulated drama, during which no one ever speaks above a conversational tone, invariably becomes almost unbearably moving. Then, typically, a character must face some sort of universal human truth, like, say, everyone has to grow up, or everyone has to pursue their own happiness, or everyone has to die. “That’s just the way human life is,” a character will often sigh near the end of an Ozu picture. And those ideas aren’t new or revelatory, but in the context of Ozu’s pictures they take on the weight of heartbreaking profundity.
Ozu, in addition to being a hugely skilled dramatist, has an utterly unique shooting style as well. He has, essentially, one setup: the camera at the eye-level of a person sitting cross-legged on the floor. This setup remains essentially unchanged whether it’s an interior, exterior, dialogue scene, action scene (well, “action” having a very tiny definition here — a stack of magazines sliding off a chair constitutes an “action” beat in Late Spring), even establishing shots will be shot from the same angle. He also rarely moves the camera at all. I can’t remember a single tilt, pan or dolly in one of his movies, or even a zoom. There are a total of four tracking shots in Late Spring, all of which are used for “walk and talk” scenes, and all keeping the “Ozu angle” intact, as though we are watching the shots from the POV of a man sitting in a Radio Flyer wagon being pulled by a slowly moving car. In addition, he will sometimes have entire dialogue scenes covered in POV shots, with characters delivering their lines directly to camera. It creates an almost unnerving intensity; as actors zero in on you, you want to look away from their gaze in embarrassment. Jonathan Demme used the same technique for an important scene in Silence of the Lambs.
Ozu also used the same actors throughout his entire career. The two leads here, Chisu Ryu and Setsuko Hara are in most of the Ozu pictures I’ve seen, and they never fail to astound. They use an acting vocabulary so different from what I’m used to as an American that I can’t even think of American equivalents to compare them to. Ryu’s permanent little twisted smile and Hara’s ever-heartbreaking hope and despair get under your skin in ways that even great stars like Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai do not. Those guys are movie stars, but Ryu and Hara seem like real people.
My love affair with Ozu began with Tokyo Story, which is him at his heaviest for him. For lighter fare, there is the comedy Good Morning. But my personal favorite is Floating Weeds, which is about a traveling actor who swing by a seaside town for the first time in fifteen years and finds that he long ago fathered a child by a woman he had slept with for a night.
One more thing I should say is that the Criterion Collection has changed my life. I have something in my brain that does not allow me to pay proper attention to bad prints of old movies with corrupted soundtracks. Classics like Dracula and His Girl Friday and It Happened One Night went unwatched by me because I couldn’t watch the terrible murky prints they showed on television. But give me a restored print and a fine, crackling soundtrack and I can watch just about anything, I don’t know why but it really makes a difference to me. So I owe my interest in Ozu, Kurosawa, Bergman, Renoir and countless other great directors to the work done by Criterion.
Oh, and the projector is fixed, obviously. Hurray!
If Sir Isaac Newton Had Been Born A Cat
click for readable view
Arrest made in Jon Benet Ramsey murder
I strongly disapprove of child murder, but I gotta say I appreciate it when the guy who confesses actually looks like a child murderer. It gives me faith in the Hollywood casting process.
UPDATE: collisionwork: He’s doing Spacey. He’s doing Spacey at the end of Seven. Swear to god.
Who, me?
This entry brought to you by the Wacom Tablet ™
My son loves the Justice League like you wouldn’t believe. So one of the “father and son bonding activities” we do is take extreme close-up photos of his 4.5-inch Justice League collection. Here’s one such image.
To get myself used to drawing with the Wacom tablet, I put this image into Photoshop, added a “new layer” and simply traced over it with the Wacom tablet. There’s a trick to getting used to the stylus, since you’re not drawing directly to paper. There’s a weird hand-eye thing that you have to acclimate to.
To give it the feeling of a spontaneous drawing, I limited my “tools” to the Photoshop “pencil” tool and kept it at the same pixel-breadth throughout. That gave me the same limitation as though I had only a piece of paper and, say, a warm, fat grease pencil (which is exactly what the stylus feels like on the tablet surface. I also tried to limit the amount of erasure and keep myself to the kind of marks I would make if I were “live” in art class instead of working with an infinitely malleable digital artwork.
When I felt like the drawing was done, I saved only the top layer and voila! Hawkgirl!
Click for larger view. For those blessed with Firefox, MUCH larger view.
And, using the same technique, here is ol’ gloomy-puss himself, Martian Manhunter:
Venture Bros: Victor. Echo. November.
Here’s my own attempt to fix Triana’s face. Automatoid gave it a good try but stopped at her eyeball. It is also her brow that needs to be fixed. He is anal but I am analler.
Now, if he will be so kind as to instruct me as to how to put a jpeg into a comment…
Meanwhile, there is a stunning new episode of The Venture Bros. to discuss.
My local cable company lists the programming information of “Victor. Echo. November.” as “Dr. Girlfriend and The Phantom Limb go on a double date with The Monarch and a girl he met on the internet. New.”
Understatement of the year. Outside of the context of actually seeing the show, that reads like the word salad of a man with advanced Alzheimer’s.
Poor Triana. She loses everybody she cares about to this insanity. She’s the only pure character on the show, the only one who refuses to live in a state of arrested adolescence. Or hasn’t figured out that life is more fun that way. Which makes it especially ironic that she gets dating advice from Dr. Orpheus.
And then her face melts.
This episode does the best job yet of mixing together the mundane and exotic, with a plot simultaneously so complex and static that when Brock showed up in Dr. Venture’s lounge, naked, covered in blood and holding a severed head, it took me a moment to figure out what was going on.
The voice work on the show continues to astonish, predictably along thematic lines, taking the exoticism of the characters and welding it to the mundanity of their emotional lives. Mr. Urbaniak’s takes on Dr. Venture as the superscientist who is also a clueless emotional dork and Phantom Limb as a brilliant sophisticate who dresses in a purple leotard, both voices playing against the absurdity of the situation to arrive at rich characters in their own rights. Mr. McCulloch as The Monarch becomes more and more subtle as the layers of his personality get stripped away. In this episode he almost trades places with Dr. Girlfriend in terms of self-awareness, realizing how idiotic he looks while at the same time unable to give up his dream of supervillainy. We’ve come so far from the image of the Monarch masturbating while watching Dr. Girlfriend pretend to woo Dr. Venture. But it’s Patrick Warburton as Brock that really makes my jaw drop week after week, adding impressive depth and nuance to what could have easily been a standard Warburton beefcake part. I’ve always enjoyed his work (I’m one of the few adults who enjoyed The Emperor’s New Groove) but the way he consistently plays past the character’s brutality to hit at something more human and, well, caring, continues to touch me in ways I’ve never been touched before by a heartless assassin. And Ms. Nina Hellman as the new teenage supervillain is a beguiling, subtle creation light-years ahead from the cameos she’s delivered heretofore.
Indeed, it’s her character who casts a certain light not just on the absurd world of The Venture Bros but on our own as well. She’s already living in a state of arrested adolescence (the character, not Ms. Hellman), it’s just one beginning now instead of in 1965 so it looks relatively normal to us. Our own world routinely offers teenagers the chance to remain teenagers for the rest of their lives; The Monarch and his Henchmen are only the most extreme examples of it. The reason Dr. Girlfriend continues to beguile is that she is smart enough to do without all this supervillain nonsense, but another part of her continues to put on the outfits and date the costume-clad losers because, well, probably because it makes her feel sexy.
In a way the whole show is about arrested adolescence, with each character presenting their own take on the concept, and that includes Mr. Brisby. Hank and Dean are the most clinical and literal of Team Venture, being seemingly unable to make it out of adolescence alive. Dr. Venture’s more mature self literally made its break from his body to go live on Spider-Skull Island (or is Jonas his less mature self, living his playboy lifestyle?). Phantom Limb may be a sophisticate, dealing in bureaucracy and insurance and masterpieces of Western art, but in a way there’s more than a touch of Felix Unger in him, a fuss-budget who uses his sophistication to hold the world at arm’s length so that he doesn’t have to deal with the messier aspects of adult life, like maintaining a stable relationship or taking responsibility for his actions.
Speaking of which, of the stories offered this episode for the Phantom Limb’s origin, I hope Hank’s is the real one.
It’s this quality that makes Venture Bros stand out among the typically moronic Adult Swim block, critiquing the very quality the block tries to promote.
A couple of weeks ago I was discussing Adult Swim with a middle-aged friend of mine, and we got on the subject of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. I mentioned that I had tried to watch it recently and couldn’t get through a whole episode. My friend shrugged and said “Well, my developmentally disabled teenage sons like it.” And I laughed and then remembered that my friend actually has two developmentally disabled sons.
Speaking of arrested adolescence, I couldn’t help giving Triana’s face another try. This time I shifted all of her features to the right, making it more of a three-quarter profile. I’m learning Photoshop!
And, unable to leave well-enough alone, making her a little more anatomically correct and giving her a cheekbone. I’ll be a 10-year-old Korean boy yet!
