Maakies by Tony Millionaire (2000)
review by Joshua Glenn

Since 1994, undeserving alt.weeklies across the country have been publishing cartoonist Tony Millionaire's comic strip "Maakies," which chronicles the drunken adventures—the adventures in drinking—of Uncle Gabby, the monkey bo'sun of the good ship Maak, and his nephew, the freeloading Drinky Crow. Drinky, who's in love with Phoebe, a bespectacled gull whom Gabby describes as a "penguiny-lookin' broad," and Gabby, who's in love with Fucky, the pneumatic daughter of Cap'n Maak and a kraken, are—they remember whenever they start seeing pink elephants—alcoholics. They drown their sorrows with great DOOK DOOK DOOKs of rum and whiskey, blurt out one awful truth or another, then blow their brains out. Unless they've already been killed by someone else. Like their Trickster predecessors, Gabby and Drinky are promiscuous with their bodily fluids, their limbs are detachable, they die and are reborn: all to get a laugh from us, the kind of laugh which breaks the stranglehold of The Way Things Just Are Now—even if only for a moment or two. Thanks to Fantagraphics for publishing six years of "Maakies" in this new volume.

PS: Beneath each "Maakies" strip is a four-panel running joke about—what else?—guys, dames, and booze. (SHE: I would like you better if you didn't like me. HE: Baby, I am your DREAM DATE!) Also I should mention here that nobody alive draws better sailing ships, sea battles, woolly mammoths, runaway brains, or Pasteurella Pestis than Tony Millionaire.

PPS: Some people, who would have you understand that they've forgotten more about cartoons than you'll ever know, write things like: "There is poetry in every panel of so-and-so's comics." Forget those people. There literally is poetry in every panel of "Maakies." DRINKY: "I've babbled a communiqué in my inebriated way/Because I couldn't find a less embarrassing display/Of life and love and all the things we are/(I am) a crow."

Nurse Betty by Neil LaBute (2000)
review by Chris Fujiwara

Neil LaBute's Nurse Betty is an entertaining, slightly-more-than-halfway-decent movie that wants to be all things to all people. The Morgan Freeman-Chris Rock hitmen-pair are hipster neo-noir artifacts; no matter how well played (Freeman gives what is by far the film's juiciest performance; Rock is fun), these characters constantly seem hugged by quotation marks and bring an air of triteness with them at each appearance. This is so despite the fact that they have the best lines. At one point, Freeman advises Rock, "Three in the head, you know they're dead." Rock: "That's a good motto." Freeman: "I'll give you a bumper sticker."

Then there's the candy-colored Americana starring Renée Zellweger as a bovine Kansas waitress with a talent for refilling coffee cups backhanded while staring up at a TV set. Traumatized after eavesdropping on the gory murder of her shitheel used-car-salesman husband, she thinks she's the former lover of a doctor on a soap opera and drives to LA (capital of Kansas, as Richard Meltzer pointed out) to find him. The trauma-delusion gimmick and the unbelievable way she's cured of it make up the soft center of Nurse Betty. The movie wants to give us the glowing feeling that comes from seeing dreams come true, so it allows Zellweger to meet and wow her dreamboat (Greg Kinnear, who looks more like a game-show host than a soap heartthrob), but it doesn't want to be accused of saying that dreams come true, so it has Kinnear turn out to be an insensitive careerist. In short, the movie wants but doesn't want to tear down Zellweger's cathode-soaked romanticism. I find it interesting that the film felt compelled to call in hitmen to help deliver its mixed message. Can there be any lingering doubt, after Nurse Betty, that hitmen embody the sentimentality of our era?

The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime by Miles Harvey (2000)
reviewed by Matthew Battles

The Island of Lost Maps tells the story of map thief Gilbert Bland—ah, that name—who over the course of several years stole cartographic treasures from America's greatest libraries. Author Miles Harvey weaves journeyman reportage of Bland's crimes together with disquisitions on cartography's many charms, reminding us along the way that maps can enchant us even as they disenchant the physical world. But his travel-writerly method, obsessively retracing the movements of his main character, feels contrived. And I wish that the book had been published in a larger format—world-atlas size, say—and had been more profusely illustrated. This would have given the reader ample opportunity to relish all the esoteric delights of maps that Harvey describes.

For instance, it turns out that when cartographers draft their maps, they traditionally include an imaginary street—perhaps "just a cul-de-sac at the end of some development"—in order to thwart plagiarists. This, to me, is a spot of inspiring whimsy. It reminds me of my fifth grade geography lessons: hundreds of maps printed on laminated cards which, for all their detail, depicted wholly fictional places. At the time, I was intrigued by the secret contiguities of their world. Did the maps fit together to comprise an enormous cartographic puzzle? Or did they show the same places across time, expressing a different continuity? And now, having read Harvey's book, I wonder: were those maps in fact a compilation of all the secret places hidden in the cartographers' "real" maps? Or did the mapmakers hide a solitary real place among all those false dead ends, phantom country roads, and imaginary creeks? One real place in fictional exhile, hidden away safely in a fantasy landscape, marooned in a sea of fictions—this is the map I wish I had stolen.

The Tao of Steve by Jenniphr Goodman (2000)
reviewed by Clarke Cooper

Yet another refreshing indie, which as Run Lola Run did has been lingering for an inexplicably long time at theaters near me. Quirky characters, central gimmick, copied and pasted from the writer's actual life—it's déj&3224;a vu all over me. The featured quirk is that an oaf (Donal Logue) has discovered a trick of getting laid by acting as though he's actually not an asshole. He subsequently falls in love with the director's sister and learns the true meaning. The gimmick is spurious references to Great Philosophers, adduced in support of the non-asshole pretense; there's an equal number of references to the cartoons and gameshows of the characters' childhood.

It's very bad, but to be fair it doesn't have the evil disingenousness of a Kevin Smith picture. In fact it believes its own premise to the extent that while the oaf is still a jerk we're expected to share his ironic self-satisfaction, and then when he wises up we also share in his epiphany. Me, I wouldn't have slept with him.

I liked the oaf's protégé a little; he reminded me of a guy I used to work with.

Fiend without a Face by Arthur Crabtree (1958), and WuChon House potato salad (Somerville, Mass.)
reviewed by A. S. Hamrah

The Korean word for potato is kamja, but there's no word in Korean for potato salad. That doesn't stop the WuChon House in Somerville, Mass., from serving it as a side dish. At first it looks like ordinary American potato salad, the kind you find at picnics. Look more closely—it's different. The WuChon potato salad has raisins in it. The raisins, hidden as they are under mayonnaise and vinegar, immediately call Arthur Crabtree's 1958 black-and-white British science-fiction movie Fiend without a Face to mind. Why? Because the raisins look like tiny, oozing brains that have propelled themselves unexpectedly into the third act of the bland genre exercise potato salad too often is.

Fiend without a Face is a British film that at first glance seems American. It's set on and around an American Air Force base in Manitoba, where the US government has built an atomic reactor to boost its anti-Soviet radar capability. Mixing American and British actors (including the mysterious Kim Parker) playing, willy-nilly, Americans, Canadians, and English people; it's another culture's version of a favorite recipe.

For its first 5/6ths, Fiend wavers between the insomniac and the groggy. The initially invisible brain creatures (which can eventually be seen as an assault on thinking itself, or a confused metaphor for the ways movies inhabit our minds and vice versa, or a blotchy indictment of big science and the military) are curiosities of stop-motion. The larval organs, snail-like, sperm-like, wait in the trees outside a house where the characters are trapped, then fly in and attach themsleves to their spines.

The professor responsible finally comes clean. The brain creatures need "to drain the intellect to survive and multiply" he explains. The brain is "sucked out like an egg through these two holes," a coroner had informed the military brass earlier in the film, pointing to the back of a dead man's neck. The mention of an egg recalls potato salad. Nothing peps up potato salad like a hardboiled egg, just like nothing sets it off like the addition of a few raisins. It's the same with low-budget English science-fiction films set in Canada. Their perfect blandness appears in startling relief when you toss in kinetic human brains.

Hermenaut also recommends:

One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy, by Thomas Frank (Doubleday, 2000)
We live in an era in which it's apparently no longer OK to say no to the way things are. Anyone who does is accused of elitism—by the right, the left, and the so-called post-ideological, to boot. Here Tom Frank demonstrates, in minute detail, just exactly how this came to be the case.—JLG

Evel Incarnate: The Life and Legend of Evel Knievel, by Steve Mandich (Sidgwick & Jackson, 2000)
The creator of the Evel Knievel-oriented zine Heinous has stared for years into the vertiginous abyss of the world's greatest daredevil's life and lived to tell about it. Mandich's index entry for "Knievel, Evel"—e.g., as actor, alcohol, as artist, assault on Saltman [Knievel's previous unauthorized biographer], clothing, collectibles, debts, depression, gambling, imitations, influence on children, injuries, jewelry, lifestyle, liver transplant, petty crimes, philandering, prison, relations with mother, rivalry with son, violence, and weapons possession—reveals the fact that this is not just an exhaustive unauthorized biography of Knievel, but an exhaustive unauthorized biography of America, in the 1970s, itself.—JLG

Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen
Melodrama red in tooth and claw.—CC

Axel's Castle by Edmund Wilson
I don't know from Symbolism, but Wilson's criticism is as convinced with the positives as it is with the negatives; especially good with Proust.—CC