john and jana

Danger Brigade 8

Percy Gloom by Cathy Malkasian

This graphic novel tells an archetypal tale — innocent goes to big city and must overcome the evil that lurks there, as well as femme fatales. In Malkasian’s version, the innocent hero is a diminutive, big-eared, mother-dominated man named Percy Gloom, who faints from hunger unless someone feeds him the only food he can really digest — buckwheat muffins. Gloom’s calling in life is to write safety warnings, so he’s obviously thrilled when he gets a job interview at the prestigious Safely Now Cautionary Writing Institute.

Gloom gets a position there just barely, but while he has devoted his life to documenting how innocuous items like hair brushes can be fatal, there is real danger brewing involving a strange woman named Tammy, who insists on mating with him, children who are trying to send the city tumbling by pulling a magic stone from the pavement, talking goats, mystical yoga-like cults and secret underground movements of other big-ear, diminutive people.

What is required of Gloom is a leap of faith — he must push back his demons, he must act with decisiveness and he must do things that would go against any safety warning he might write. In other words, this small lump of a thing must become a hero — that is the archetype he is destined for, whether he seems cut out for the work or not.

The landscape that Malkasian has Gloom inhabit is like some dark, absurdist European village straight out of Kafka or Stoker — but the dialogue is existential shtick, both hilarious and profound. Ren-dered in a sepia-tinged sketch style, Malkasian’s background may come as a surprise to some readers — she was director on TV’s “Rugrats” and “The Wild Thornberrys Movie.” “Percy Gloom” is her debut graphic novel and it’s a strong one, creating not only a solid tone, but a fantasy world that hints at greater depths than presented in this one volume, much like the city that Malkasian renders in the book, filled with tunnels and corners and hidden parts.

It’s like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang without a car.

I hope that Malkasian chooses to explore further pockets of memory within the Gloom tapestry — her approach to the fantasy genre is as old fashioned as it is fresh. It falls into the gothic category of so much young readers books these days, but does not rest on its laurels through affectations — it’s exactly what it doesn’t have to be, a magical shot of absurd surrealism.

Bruce Geisler - Free Spirits

The documentary “Free Spirits” functions an amazing window to a lost world, infiltrating the lives and minds of participants in an actual hippie commune, created in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts the late 1960s by Mike Metelica, prone to childhood visions and an interest in being a rock and roll bad boy.

The commune — originally known as the Brotherhood of the Spirit and later as the Renaissance Community — began as a treehouse in Leyton, Massachusetts, that attracted other kids to hang out — it blossomed into a naïve but fully-formed alternative society of young adults that imagined itself poised to transform the world into a new era of beautiful socialization and peace. The story, however, is not that simple — this meticulously gathered oral history reveals the ups and downs of the community, the challenges of the many to function as one, the trials of Metelica to live up to his initial reputation as a spiritual leader.

At its peak, the community had around 400 residents, all fulfilling various functions and rising to the occasions that needs demanded — if they need a building, members learned how to construct one; if they need bathroom facilities, members taught themselves plumbing. They also had plenty of time for artistic and spiritual exploration — and sexual as well — but no society can remain stagnant and the community was no exception. Their extended vacation from the harsh realities of modern America was to send them on a nosedive involving finances and drugs and rock and roll and a cult of personality that divides the community and, eventually, causes it to dissipate into the smallest pockets.

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Danger Brigade 7

Milk Teeth by Julie Morstad

As presented in “Milk Teeth,” there’s no denying the talent of Vancouver artist Julie Morstad.
Her thin and busy line work moves like a thread through her drawings, fashioning images witty and precious and grim and affected.

Morstad’s wit is a surrealist one of floating heads, millions of bees escaping from a girl’s ear, and children hiding from stalking tigers behind piles of books. She’s extremely interested in hair, it seems — winding around faces and on beds, bursting out of houses and acting as the stomping ground for various visitors on people’s heads.

It all, unfortunately, adds up to nothing.

One reason is that for all the obvious technical skill, the presentation in the book — part of Drawn and Quarterly’s Petits Livres series — accentuates the fact that Morstad’s images are not standalone gallery art and, therefore, isn’t well-served by the same translation into book form. Her work is illustration through and through. Illustration works best in a context as part of a collaboration with words but there are none in this book.

Though stories are implied, the illustrations don’t work as pantomime and the pages seem naked without the other half of the team. Whereas words or context might lend a power to the images, put in succession in book form, the collection seems more like a vanity press sketchbook.

One easy bit of text could have been something actually explaining who the artist is, actually talking about the artist’s work. As it is, the reason the work is there in a book is a bit of a mystery — the significance of the images aren’t very apparent and the book isn’t keen to divulge anything.

You are left guessing and the first impression you get is that the artist spent much of her time copying Edward Gorey with precision. With dozens of sad-faced art deco girls populating the pages, with grim and goth frameworks accentuating the morbid and absurd moods that underlie them, it looks like Morstad sat down with a pile of Gorey books and taught herself how to draw.

One thing that wasn’t learned from Gorey, though, was his presentation — Gorey’s art is easily the big draw in his books, but his narratives, usually spare, offer some structure to the presentation, particularly in a book like “The Ghastlycrumb Tinies.” Morstad’s illustrations are just as unrelated, with nothing to bind them but the fact that they were chosen to be in this book.

In the context of releasing books that are showcases for derivative work, Morstad is missing the important lessons of her apparent idol. Rather than copy his lines, it would be nice if she found herself and her own style instead — I would love to see what Morstad is capable of without Gorey taking charge of her drawing hand.

Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer has made text the focus of her art for the last three decades, with a mischievous inclination towards the use of public spaces as part of it — her work has appeared on signs, stickers, and T-shirts.

One of her most famous works is her compilation of truisms — simple statements that she displays in various places, including the LED sign in Time Square.

Most recently, Holzer’s installation “Projections” is feature at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. In it, the artist projects words onto the walls, ceiling, and floor of the football field-sized gallery, while patrons are invited to lounge in giant silver bean bag chairs and take it all in.

Holzer is also showing a number of her silkscreen paintings of declassified government documents which were premiered at the 2007 Venice Biennale. These are Holzer’s first paintings in about 30 years.

JM: Using images and documents and general use of words in your work, one of the complaints of the current administration is the use of language.

JH: What I’ve been thinking about it is that Orwell nailed this a long time ago, that’s what I’ve been thinking. My work is a pale applause, but a real applause. Oddly enough, I found a number of documents about Orwell in the FBI files, including a bunch of heavily redacted ones that say at the bottom “There is no mention of George Orwell or any A.K.A. on this page.” After doing a number of the autopsy documents, interrogation ones, it’s good to go back to the sad, dark, funny of those. the Orwells.

JM: How long did it take you to go through documents and decide which ones interested you?

JH: I’ve been doing this rather constantly and compulsively for three years.

It started fairly innocently when I was asked by Wired to think about what I would put on the Google start page. I couldn’t come up with anything and then I thought ‘Oh, I’d like to see a secret every time I log on.’ Or at least a recently revealed something or other. I started looking around for examples of secrets and stumbled across a funny document from Ken Lay to then governor Bush and some back and forth about some piece of western art work that one man had given to the other, I think it was Lay to Bush and then a thank you back. Those were funny secret documents about artwork. Then I started looking in the FBI archives for old ones about Viet Nam period things and things like the Orwell, and things like the FBI following Brecht around, spending tax dollars on noticing that he was often in his pajamas at his typewriter. Really good stuff that’ll keep us all safe.
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Betsy and Me by Jack Cole

Cartoonist Jack Cole is best known in comics for his work on “Plastic Man,” while out in the real world, he defined what we think of when we envision a Playboy cartoon. Cole’s work was fluid and energetic, filled with visual wit. In the collection “Betsy and Me,” Fantagraphics gathers his final major work, a weekly comic strip that was by all accounts the pinnacle of his career — how odd it was that he should commit suicide after completely only two and a half months worth of the strip.

While this bit of background is not mandatory to the enjoyment of the strip, it does give it a dark edge that wouldn’t be apparent otherwise — on the surface, the whole thing seems so innocent, so sprightly suburban, so 1950s. No one characterized it better than Art Speigelman, that with the knowledge of Cole’s untimely end, the strip “reads like a suicide note delivered in daily installments.”

Indeed, it does at times, but this isn’t necessarily unusual — comedians are humorists often the darkest of creatures and there was certainly something haunting Jack Cole.

But what of “Betsy and Me” without the grim epilogue?

Cole’s strip involves a fellow named Chet Tibbet as he rattles off small talk about his daily life to the cartoon-reading audience. During the course of the strip, Tibbet covers his engagement and marriage and the subsequent birth of his son, a child genius. While rendered in the traditional three panels — and certainly delivering some level of punchline at the end of each strip — Cole lays the topics and themes across days and days of entries. The arcs might have to do with purchasing a car or dealing with their friends or moving to the suburbs, and by doing this Cole creates very interesting hybrid — part Blondie, part Mary Worth.

Coles jokes are calm, his art airy. For all the compilations of “Plastic Man,” here he has stripped down his work to fewer lines, though extremely well-chosen. One curve speaks volumes here and as the strip continues, the art becomes more spare, yet more precise.

“Betsy and Me” comes off as a good-humored strip and reminiscent of some of the television comedy at the time, with its apparent gentle jabs at middle class living. The problem is that the jabs here aren’t that gentle at all — in fact, they’re downright subversive. Tibbet is presented as a man on a track that he can’t quite get off of once he eyes the right girl — and a victim of life, though a genial one. Not that his existence is horrible — it’s just not an exciting one and Tibbet is left to make it seem so by telling tall tales that, through the miracle of cartooning, he often comes off as the rube of his wife, his child, his boss, his neighbors.

Is Chet Tibbet another everyman — or is there a little bit of Jack Cole in there?

As R.C. Harvey’s thorough and fascinating forward flat-out states, there’s a lot of speculation, but far fewer answers. What is left is “Betsy and Me,” amusing and friendly, what seems like an example of someone laughing in the darkness — except Jack Cole stopped laughing and, therefore, so did Chet Tibbet.

Danger Brigade 6

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

One thing that has always surprised me about the Harry Potter films is that they are any good at all — it’s even more of a shock that some are great. Add to that the amazing blow that some are great even as they dispense of most of the books they are adapting to screen.

So it is with “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” an extremely well-directed (by David Yates), written, and acted fantasy adventure that literally covers about a third of the story in the book from which it was adapted.

The bare bones plot that both book and movie share are this — Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) becomes involved with the secretive Order of the Phoenix, a group of heroic wizarding personalities devoted to countering the salvos of the evil Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes). At the same time, Hogwarts is at the mercy of a Ministry of Magic placed agent — Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton)— who is determined to play out the corrupt and vacuous policies of the government in the school playing field. At the same time, Dementors have become active in the Muggle world, even attacking Harry in front of loathsome cousin Dudley (Harry Melling).

Oh, and there’s a great evil, racist elf named Kreacher (Timothy Bateson), a good bit of Snape (Alan Rickman), and plenty of Fred and George (James and Oliver Phelps), including their lively, rock and roll exit from Hogwarts.

As a book, this story unfolds in a sprawling, historical manner, with a good portion of it devoting itself to political thriller and allegory —  and the best character parts are reserved for the personalities in the Order, particularly the real Mad Eye Moody and the lovable Tonks. In the film, though this is all abbreviated. You probably won’t notice it if you’ve never read the book, but to those who have, it’s astonishing that it can be followed and understood without some knowledge of the source material.

And so, a review of the film is separate from the larger issues at hand. Yes, I thought it was the best of the series and easily the tightest of the bunch. And, as usual with each Harry Potter movie, I question this sickness we have that everything - even things that are inappropriate as movie adaptations - must be made into a movie.

My feeling, though, is that if they are to be adapted at all, Harry Potter books are most appropriate for the British TV form - seven series of seven one hour episodes each. Only then will the adaptations have a life of their own and not function as shorthand for the actual stories.

By strange - and unfortunate - coincidence, I also saw “Eregon” this year and thought it was a dreadful movie. I was curious about how it stacked up against the book and found - after the briefest glance on IMDB - that it threw about roughly 70% of the book. I think it still sounds very derivative and annoying in its full form, but it seems to me that a writer and director are not hired to reinvent the book, they are hired to adapt it.

I began to ask myself — why was “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” so faithful to the book? Because it was so short. They actually had to add an action sequence to draw it out. And it was a fine movie, but not really any sort of revelation — it added nothing in its existence and had a third of the charm of the clunky BBC adaptations done a decade ago. What was the major reason? The CGI show. It’s an excuse to make things look as realistic as possible.

Animation used to be about stylizing — sometimes, CGI is about that — look at Brad Bird’s films - but more often than not, as utilized in the tiresome run of children’s epic fantasies, it’s like looking at a very realistic video game. It all looks the same. It’s dull. It’s streamlined our visions of fantasy by asking nothing of the audience but to sit there and look.

I used to worry — as many people did and do — that movie versions of books, kids’ books in particular, overtook the book in the popular memory. “The Wizard of Oz” is always the prime example. What I realized was that “The Wizard of Oz” is in the minority. The books seem to outlive the movies at a good rate, you just need to give it time. The reasons? Well, the obvious one is that the book may pop up in a school setting and I have often found, in my own life, in the lives of friends, and in my kids’ lives, that’s a very important thing to laying the groundwork of which books people love and how much they stay with them.

The second reason is best illustrated through Harry Potter — because reading a book is a much more personal experience than seeing a movie, a much more proactive one, requiring action on the part of the entertained. When the new Harry Potter book comes out, so the news stories go, kids take them home and read them through, no matter what their length is, they force themselves to stay awake and read it all. And then they read it again. They carry it with them and take it places and eat up every word and the subtlety of the language and plots. There will always be a segment of the population that is more familiar with the movie version of anything, there is always a group that does not read or does not hold any great value in the experience. But there is always a strong segment of the world population who, for thousands of years, have carried stories as the major form of communication. Film, movies, television, they’re all great in their way, but when you’re alone in bed at night, or laying on the beach, or camping, or visiting a relative and seeking some private time, or sitting on a subway, books are the way you meditate — despite iPods.

The subtle genius of E.B. White’s “Stuart Little” will long outlast the crass movie adaptations.

And that last Harry Potter movie is going to seem pretty anticlimactic compared to the anticipation of the book that is currently in the air. A fun little side note to the real event. I think that pretty much says it all.

Which is all to say, by all means, see “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.” It’s a very good movie, I highly recommend it, actually. But don’t forget to read the book afterwards, it’ll stay with you in the end.

White Rapids by Pascal Blanchet

When it comes to picture books, industrialism just isn’t cool anymore — environmental concerns have taken over.

There was a time, however, when the archetypes of industry were scattered throughout children’s books — just take a look at the landscape as viewed by Scuffy the Tugboat in the old Golden Book of the same title. Steamshovels, factories, lighthouses made to feel small next to sprawling bridges that heralded in the engineering triumphs of the new age of man — all these things were routinely celebrated in picture books of old.

Revisiting that territory is Pascal Blanchet’s “White Rapids.” Blanchet, a Quebecois cartoonist, has fashioned a stylistically impressive tale of the communities raised and destroyed by the movements of industry. There is no animated, sentient heavy equipment here — instead, a dam, power plant and workers’ community built on the St. Maurice River, making mankind’s stamp on the wilderness in a haughty attempt to tame it for our comfort. It does not go as expected — but rather than a disaster, mankind’s failure is a whimper and a retreat.

Blanchet’s artwork is gloriously retro, but stylized with a smart hindsight that straddles affection with a knowing glance. He can tread the same territory as any other illustrator who depicts the pre-1960s world of commercial style and suburban socialization, but the breathtaking moments here are reserved for the trappings of big business — the retro-futuristic control room at the dam, the tunnel and township maps, boardrooms, train bridges, skyscrapers — all as exotic in their presentation as the wilds of Canada. This frontier, however, is tamed by outdoorsmen brandishing the latest gear, by housewives and block parties, by modern products flying off the grocery store shelves, of that old chestnut of a word that we don’t think about anymore because it’s no longer a novelty, progress.

Blanchet’s work is a paean to progress as nostalgia, a time when industry was a code for mankind moving forward, an era when the future was an exciting fad for people to buy into. The ultimate lesson is that we dream big and build big, but the mammoths of our ambitions are actually as delicate as the nature we trample over in our fury to move ever onward.

Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing and the Erosion of Integrity by Anne Elizabeth Moore

Many of us goofy alternative types have had that moment when we realize that the counter culture is being swallowed up by the mainstream. For someone of my age and strata, it may well have been in the early ’90s when all the music we listened to in the ’80s that never hit the charts was suddenly deemed an acceptable and successful form when put under the market demographic “alternative music.” Of course, there were other moments — the first housewife I saw with spiky hair, the first time I noticed that ordinary teens were getting tattooed and piercing body parts, the first time I noticed mall stores Doc Marten knock-offs, the first time I notice punk rock and metal in television commercials. It goes on. All the scariest things from my childhood were becoming acceptable to the very people they were meant to freak out.

As I got older, I realized that it has always been this way, since the first white record producer hired a white guy to sing black music — was that in the ’30s, 40s or ’50s? I lose track. Watered-down counter culture sells — everyone wants to be a little different, no one likes to be exactly the same, even if they say they do. Everyone has personal style and many pull that style from the culture at large. The popular culture, as fueled by popular media, is constantly sniffing out new things and to do this, their hunting grounds are the underground and counter cultures. The process was well-documented in John Waters’ “Hairspray,” a humble alternative film that has been strip-mined for the epitome of the mainstream, Broadway — a circumstance ironic to this conversation.

In her book “Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing and the Erosion of Integrity” Anne Elizabeth Moore gives an informative and pithy account of several case studies in which corporate entities have intentionally used underground cultural methods in order to advertise — they use it to get publicity, any publicity, by any means. It’s also nice to get their message out to the very people who won’t listen, who don’t trust big media or corporate products — if they don’t watch TV, where can a company get their ads seen? As graffiti on an urban wall, perhaps.

Although charmingly self-deprecating, there is a level to which Moore’s presentation can at moments come on like a haughty dismissal that no one is quite underground enough to fit in with some of the DIYers she speaks with for the book. It makes you want to apologize for having a job, for taking freelance work, for doing anything that might compromise the purity of that era of society. I think that may be a perceived value judgment that is impossible to avoid given the topic and the personalities involved. In fact, it may just be hopeless that most people are really capable of reaching that level of purity in their efforts to not sell out, to not be a walking corporate shill.

In some ways, the book functions as an extended cautionary tale to underground artists who want to try and make the move into the more mainstream freelance world — surprise, you may find yourself working for a corporation and, surprise, they may ask for some tweaks on your work. In the real world of paying bills and doing what you’re good at for a living, that’s just inevitable — but it’s probably best that some guy doing mini-comics or graffiti knows that upfront before getting a harsh slap upside the head when a work-for-hire doesn’t necessarily offer the same creative freedom as work-for-self does.

Even Moore admits to falling into this trap and seems to expect nothing more of others than what she expects from herself. None of this, however, detracts from the book’s examination and documentation of how advertising works in our world, how corporations fund creativity with an agenda and how today’s cutting edge marketers are yesterday’s skate punks. It’s a riveting look at the trickle-up movement of our culture, how the mainstream always looks to the gutter to scoop out some grit to add to their smooth sales techniques.

Some of the case studies presented by Moore are merely innocent idiocy, such as the zine used by a person in Lucasfilm to promote “Revenge of the Sith.” Some, however, are eye-poppingly sleazy, like Nike utilizing copyright infringement on the work the band Minor Threat in order to seize the skateboard market, or Sony BMG’s funding a TV show — “Love Monkey” — designed to sell their products even while masquerading as an endorsement of independent labels and an indictment of the majors.

And Moore’s chapter on people signing up for programs that ask them to slip product endorsements into their personal conversations reveals — rather depressingly — the extent to which commercial culture has invaded our lives.

History tells us that co-opting non-mainstream culture works — again and again and again — and Moore’s book is at least an informed step to understanding that mechanism. It’s an invaluable tool of enlightenment to surviving in a world where everyone is trying to sell you something all the time.

Fletcher Hanks: I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets

There’s an aesthetic in film known as “so bad it’s good,” and what that really means is that you’ve found something to make fun of. This was the central tenet of the show “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ and I’ll state right here that I never could stand that mentality — especially when the typical Vince Vaughn movie is far more bereft of originality than any given Ed Wood venture, not to mention sincerity.

Sincerity really is the key there. When it comes to bad, incompetent films, there are certainly ones that might be worthy of ridicule, but when you make that a sweeping response to creative efforts that may fall short of what is considered professional, you miss out on some revealing honesty that can, at times, be far more mesmerizing than slick entertainment.

For a filmmaker like Ed Wood — and his equals in other mediums — the work is born of a personal sincerity and the strange talent of being able to conceive of complicated, singular ideas without the means with which to express them. Guys like him try damn hard and come up with something perhaps not technically good, but by no means standard. That’s not something to laugh at, that’s something to be fascinated by. That’s psychology.

Comic books have found their Ed Wood, a gentleman by the name of Fletcher Hanks who plied his trade for some time in American comic books around World War 2 and then disappeared from the annals of history. Not only did the creator drop off the face of the earth — his comic stories almost didn’t make it, either. Compiler Paul Karasik has provided the world with a treasury of outsider comics that are so original, so bizarre, so from their own place, that I don’t think I have ever read anything quite like them — or more fascinating.

The best way to get the work across is to just go through one of the plots, point by point. Stardust is “the Super Wizard,” a man who has “vast knowledge of interplanetary science” that has “made him the most remarkable man that ever lived.” Stardust uses these amazing powers for “crime-busting.” This means he sits on his faraway planet watching crooks and goons plot bank robberies on his “simplified television unit” (we call the iPods). Stardust utilizes his “tubular special” to go to earth and stop the evil doers.

In one story, Stardust goes head to head against a “gigantic fifth column” that is “preparing for the total destruction of the American government.” The leader resembles Dick Cheney and says things like “We must end democracy and civilization forever.” Actually, that’s a lot like the real Dick Cheney, isn’t it? This guy’s name is Yew Bee, though, whatever that means. Yew Bee’s gang gets “traitor officers” to take over military craft on the coast, as well as airplanes and other weaponry, while they hide in their “secret bomb-proof room.” Their forces head to New York City and Yew Bee gloats that the planes are “especially built to ruin New York.”

Stardust, however, causes Yew Bee’s weaponry to attack each other and crash land. He then turns into a giant flaming star that transforms a bunch of the gangsters into icicles that melt away — others are turned into “monster rats” that are chased into the river by a panther that Stardust conjures out of the star. Yew Bee, however, is saved — Stardust makes sure that while he retains his head, Yew Bee has a rat’s body. He takes Yew Bee to the F.B.I., who hunts down other criminals. Stardust then warns the country with a message of “luminous dust” over the skies of New York City: “America beware of the Fifth Column.”

This story is typical of Hanks’ concern that spies are going to take over America — Stardust adventures are filled with gangsters, terrorists, and spies who plan to not only take down the country, but civilization itself, and they will do so utilizing an array of villainous weapons; typhoid germs, poison gas, “hot-x fusing liquid,” an atom smasher, “new shredding guns,” time bombs and even an “anti-solar ray” which will “destroy the power of Earth’s gravity” and send everyone flying into space, except for the crafty criminals who have chained themselves down.

Hanks reveals himself as a strict - and somewhat warped — disciplinarian. In one adventure featuring Fantomah, Mystery Woman of the Jungle, the villain is “ensnared” by jungle grass and devoured by a giant spider. In another, Fantomah transforms the bad guy — who, admittedly, had planned to “wreck civilization,” proclaiming it a failure and demanding society “return to primitive living” — into a caveman beset by bloodthirsty panthers.

Throughout the book, Hanks plays out his paranoid psychological issues through a series of facile superhero adventures, realized through clunky, surreal comic book depictions. Fellini has nothing on Hanks.

What makes this volume extra special is the concluding story, in which editor Paul Karasik crafts a short comic story about his search for Hanks — and for his meeting with Hanks’ son. Within this tale is only a glimpse at the mind that created these bizarre fantasies — what answers that revealed lead to only more mysteries that will remain forever unsolved.

In reviewer’s parlance, I am totally prepared to name this the book of the year. There is nothing quite like it and few things with as much depth hidden in such shallow territory. This is why I don’t often feel like making fun of inept but sincere creations — just because someone isn’t particularly good at the method of expression they work in, it doesn’t mean that what they are saying isn’t fascinating. Hanks is fascinating — and horrible and stupid and pathetic and magnetic and honest— and his work should not be passed by.