Comic-Book Based Casting Coups

Obviously, the comic book movie on everyone's lips these days is Superman Returns, and how appropriate the casting of newcomer Brandon Routh is, given his striking resemblance to the late, great Christopher Reeve. Well, while the physical resemblance is undeniable, as well as the awkward acting, I dare say there have, in the last few years, been better casting decisions, in terms of how well the chosen actor fleshed out the character described in the comics and eventually envisioned in the script. By this standard, I feel that Routh is less a man of steel and more an actor of wood, and devoid of Reeve's charisma.

I've decided to skip the more obvious casting triumphs like Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker, which by common knowledge was a huge component of the franchise's success so far, or Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, or even Christian Bale as Batman, and highlight what I feel were some real gems over the last few years. I've even included supporting characters. In no particular order, they are:

1. Paul Giamatti as Harvey Pekar (American Splendor). This guy deserved, at the very least, an Oscar nomination for this role. Granted, it wasn't hard for him to play someone as schleppy as Pekar considering both his looks and his prior resume, but in coming up with this list I was less concerned about the effort it took to bring the character to life but the accuracy with which it was done. We have an instant point of comparison as by some self-indulgent script device Harvey Pekar appears frequently throughout Splendor to lend his thoughts to the viewer. This was some truly brilliant work, and it's nice to see Giamatti getting his due, with the lead role in M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water.

2. Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis as the Human Torch and the Thing, respectively (Fantastic Four). This movie has been widely reviled, by fanboys, viewers and critics alike, and yet one can't argue that for a relatively cheap budget, Fox and Marvel churned out a certified box office hit. I attribute this to the chemistry between the Thing and the Torch, which was, for me, taken right out of the comics. They're listed together because it is the way they play off each other that is something special to behold. Evans' cocky Johnny Storm played perfectly against Chiklis' gravelly Ben Grimm. These two guys saved the day for me, injecting an otherwise forgettable, cookie-cutter superhero movie with generous helpings of fun.

3. Cliff Robertson as Uncle Ben (Spider-Man). The man whose death transforms Peter Parker from self-absorbed teen to New York City's greatest hero is brought to life with haunting poignancy by Oscar-winner Robertson. While his toupee (at least that's what I think it is) is admittedly a little distracting, this guy plays the perfect father figure to Peter, and when he dies it hits the audiences every bit as hard as it hits Peter. Rosemary Harris' Aunt May is also pleasant to watch, but this guy's performance stands out.

4. Michael Caine as Alfred (Batman Begins). It's funny how Oscar-winning Caine and his Cider House Rules co-star Tobey Maguire went on to star in very different comic book movies, but at least each of them brings the appropriate heft to his respective role. It's truly pleasant how Caine breaks Alfred out of the English butler cliche and presents us instead with a more proactive vision of the guy, dumping the traditional, Bonny Prince Charlie enunciation for his trademark cockney accent. He is the perfect foil to Bale's brooding Bruce Wayne.

5. Linus Roache as Thomas Wayne (Batman Begins). This is notable for much the same reason that Cliff Robertson's Uncle Ben is memorable, but the difference here is that this role is considerable smaller. That notwithstanding, Roache (the gay priest in Priest) managed to give a lot of dimension to it. We know how pivotal the death of Bruce Wayne's parents is to the eventual decision he makes to become Batman, but Linus Roache makes us understand it.

6. J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson (Spider-Man). This one's so obvious I shouldn't even have to put it, although I didn't want anyone to think I'd forgotten him. 'Nuff said.

7. Sam Elliot as "Thunderbolt" Ross (Hulk). This is another movie that was widely reviled, and while I (as one of the three or four people on the planet who liked it) will concede that the casting of Bruce Banner and Betty Ross (as well as Nick Nolte) was less than ideal, I don't think anyone who has read the Hulk comics will argue with me when I say that Elliot was Ross personified from his imposing build down to his freaking mustache, down to his deep voice and scowl. The best part is how he added dimension to the character.

8. Jon Favreau as "Foggy" Nelson (Daredevil). The script of this movie sorely underutilized Foggy's character, which is sad considering how important a role he plays is the comics, but Favreau plays the character as best he can, being a lot more enjoyable to watch than Ben Affleck's wince-inducing Matt Murdock.

9. Kelsey Grammer as Hank "Beast" McCoy (X-Men 3: The Last Stand). Yeah, baby! A fan favorite that Bryan Singer couldn't make room for in two X-Men movies finally found his way into the franchise, thanks to aborted director Matthew Vaughn. While the casting of the whiny, irritating Ben Foster (Punisher, Six Feet Under) as Angel really pissed me off considering I would have wanted the role to go to someone a little more high profile, Grammer's inclusion in the last film made up for it. His delivery of the Beast's famous line, "oh my stars and garters" is one for the ages, really.

10. Shelly Duvall as Olive Oyl (Popeye). I know, where the fuck did that come from, right? Anyway, there wasn't really much for her to do, as the whole movie was camped up to the hilt, but she was a lot of fun to watch, all things considered.

Maybe next time I'll do the worst comic-book movie casting I can think of...

The Remake Disguised as A Sequel

Nineteen full years after the disastrous Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Warner Brothers pictures attempts to make the Man of Steel fly again. The question inevitably arises: does he?

Before I start this review I'd like to get something out of the way, a little thematic aspect of the movie that doesn't really have anything to do with its overall craftsmanship but which proves bothersome just the same. I hate the Jesus Christ take on Superman. I despise it, for reasons I don't think I have to explain. Well, there's one thing John Byrne and I have in common.

That aside, the movie is not the magnum opus I had hoped it would be.

It is by no means a bad movie, and is in fact head-and-shoulders better than X-Men 3, the movie that director Bryan Singer abandoned to do this. But there was so much that Singer set out to do that the movie pretty much gets out of hand midway through.

The plot is pretty much familiar to anyone who surfs the internet or even just browses the entertainment pages of any daily newspaper: after a trip to space to find his lost homeworld Krypton, Superman (Brandon Routh) returns home to Earth to find out that five years have passed, Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) has given birth to a son (some shaggy-haired kid who looks like yet another Culkin clone) and moved in with Perry White's nephew (James Marsden), and that the world apparently doesn't need him anymore.

This is the first Superman movie that's been released in nearly two decades. It's the first Superman movie to be released in the post Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, and even Spider-Man CGI era. There is so much that can be done that wasn't possible in the 70s or the 80s. This movie purports to be a sequel to Superman 2, thereby (wisely) abandoning the last two movies of the franchise, the last of which killed it. And yet, for a sequel, it has surprisingly little to say that's new.

The movie's single biggest stumbling block is the clumsy execution of the Lois-Superman love story. So much of the movie's marketing revolved around it, to the extent that one of the earliest production stills released was the close up of the two of them just before they fly off the Daily Planet and all around Metropolis. Bryan Singer even declared "this is the first chick flick I've ever made." The thing is, it all feels like a marketing stunt, because it just doesn't work.

Superman and Lois Lane have a very rich history together, in both the films and the comics. We're not talking about boy-meets-girl, young love here. It's a long time sort of thing, that is not at all reflected in the actor's performances. There is no regret, no sense of longing, no...forgive me for using the word...angst over love lost. There is no chemistry between them whatsoever. We're told that they should be in love, but we aren't given any convincing reason to believe it.

If Singer had wanted to establish a dynamic of people with such a storied romance, he shouldn't have gone for such young stars. Kate Beckinsale, for one, would have made a great Lois because apart from being gorgeous, she brings a certain maturity to the table, due in no small part to the fact that she already has a kid in real life. While there has been much hullaballoo about the casting of Brandon Routh, who admittedly bears a striking resemblance to Christopher Reeve, Singer should have gone for an actor who could convincingly play romance. Routh simply can't sell us on the idea that he's in love with Lois Lane. Well, apparently we now know why Bryan Singer didn't bother to write any real love stories into his X-Men movies: he can't do romance to save his life.

The second biggest problem is the way the hero-villain dynamic is played out. Yet again, Lex Luthor (given the hambone treatment by Oscar winning Spacey) has a diabolical scheme that involves him becoming rich and powerful at the expense of billions of lives. As in the earlier films, he has included the use of kryptonite in his plans to protect himself against Superman. And again, Superman walks right into Luthor's kryptonite-laced lair.

I seem to remember a vivid image of Christopher Reeve chained to a huge hunk of kryptonite in the first Superman movie. This movie supposedly only takes place five or six years after that, so I wonder why on earth it doesn't even occur to Superman that Luthor would use kryptonite against him again?

See, the trouble with making a hero so powerful that he only has one known weakness is that the only way for an infinitely weaker opponent to take advantage of that weakness more than once is for the hero to be a complete and utter moron, which in this case, Superman apparently is. Kudos actually goes to Luthor for outsmarting Superman yet again.

See, if this were told as a remake, these concerns would be non-issues. Lois and Superman, having only just met, could be as awkward and devoid of history as they wanted to be, and Luthor could zap Superman with as much kryptonite as could fit the screen, and it wouldn't matter, because it would all be shiny and new.

As parts of a sequel, however, these little details simply don't add up.

The good news, however, is that as an action director, Bryan Singer is in absolute top form. He is every inch the auteur who had Nightcrawler kick the ass of the American President's entire entourage, who had Wolverine gut the U.S. military blackops agents invading the Xavier mansion, and who had Storm take out U.S. fighter jets with tornadoes. Singer's sense of scope is very much intact and it was this that X-men 3 was sorely lacking, all things considered.

The space shuttle piggyback sequence was perfectly conceived and executed, and it was a properly auspicious way for Superman to make his grand return. The homages to both the Action Comics artwork and the Reeve flying sequences were also well done, although in the case of the latter it once again reinforces my opinion that this should have been presented as a remake instead of a sequel.

Guy Hendrix Dyas' reimagining of the fortress of solitude is absolutely awe-inspiring, and I'm only sorry there weren't more sequences involving it. His vision of Luthor's rock palace towards the end is obviously derived from the fortress and is therefore not quite as spectacular being cast in black and grey hues, but it's still imposing to behold. When I saw the ice cathedral that was the fortress, I had a good idea where a healthy portion of this movie's $200 million plus budget went. It was, in this instance, money well spent.

Sony Pictures Imageworks justifies the fact that they were chosen over other visual effects outfits by showing that the effects of this movie could not possibly have been done any better. Like many people, I'm sure, I am a huge, huge fan of that bullet-bouncing-off-Superman's-eye sequence. Incredible stuff.

The visuals I expected of Singer were all there, but storywise, this is still nowhere near what he threw together in X2.

I don't know if there will be a sequel anytime soon, given that this mammoth-budgeted movie's box-office returns aren't quite as robust as people have predicted, but I hope that next time around Singer brings a solid, FRESH, take on the Man of Steel to go with his stunning visuals.

On Friends Being Friends

The other days, I hitched a ride home with my boss at work. The nice thing about spending time with my bosses and co-workers is that most of the time (at least to my experience) they don't talk shop. They share tips on work with me, what with me being the new guy and all, but for the most part they like to talk about life in general, things outside the practice of law, and I welcome it.

Anyway, we got to talking about how I like to hang around with an old friend from law school who happens to work two buildings away from mine. We're pretty much updated on each other's professional lives; when the crap hit the fan (or at least I thought it did) at the office once, I called her up and we met at a nearby coffee shop while I vented. She found out about it before my wife did, which my wife didn't like very much.

Upon hearing this anecdote, my boss, himself a married man, shared a bit of advice though this is certainly paraphrased: avoid having "special female friends." Another way of putting it, I guess, would be that there shouldn't be any woman that I feel more comfortable talking to than my wife. There shouldn't be things that I can tell another woman that I can't tell my wife, especially if it's stuff about my wife. It hit me right away that he was right, even though, thank goodness, I hadn't reached that rather dangerous threshold just yet. But the fact that I had told another woman about something rather personal (I was feeling really crappy at the time and needed someone to listen) before my wife, who was just a cellphone call away (we're Sun subscribers, so I can't use the old "saving my load" excuse) was not good.

It hit me: how many married, or "involved" people have "special friends," that is, people they tend to approach with something before they talk to their significant others, sometimes, even without ever going to their significant others? How many people have someone like this in their lives, whether it's people they knew before they were married or people they met afterwards? Thinking about it, it's not the healthiest thing one can do for his or her own marriage, so why do so many people do it? Depending on the closeness one feels to this "special friend" it can really be a dangerous proposition. Like my boss said to me: she's still a woman.

I guess the rule of thumb, really, is avoid stocking up on things you can't tell your spouse, and not just the big no-nos like affairs and vices. I mean little things, like things that annoy you about her or him. White lies are no good, especially if you find some other outlet to bitch to about the truth.

I tend to understand why women who used to be "special friends" (but not girlfriends) with certain guys tend to shy away once the guys get married. That is a good call, even though the situation doesn't always call for them to drop out of sight altogether.

I guess the bottom line, really, is that I should be able to talk to my wife about ANYTHING. Right now, fortunately, I still am.

Travesty

Some time after I had left the PCGG, I was thunderstruck to learn how the folks in charge had basically fucked everything up for the valiant Haydee Yorac and her crew of commissioners. Essentially, it turned out all she had done was to take wads of cash from the pockets of one set of thieves only to transmit it to the pockets of another. It was frustrating enough to make her quit, and maybe even kill her, I don't know. God rest her soul, poor woman.

Just as with the PCGG, I left the Supreme Court about six weeks ago with no baggage, with no ill will against anyone, and with no regrets whatsoever. I just felt it was time to move on, but at the same time I'm glad I was there for as long as I was. I was proud to be part of such a fine institution.

It makes me sick to the bowels of my being, therefore, to see the current Chief Justice milk his position for as much media exposure as he can possibly get, largely at the expense of the credibility of the institution.

The way Art Panganiban postured on the death penalty just before its abolition by Congress speaks rather ill of his credibility as a magistrate, much less as the head of the highest court of the land. He claims there was no impropriety to what he said, and that he should be free to express his own opinion.

Well, Mr. Chief Justice, here's the thing: your personal opinion finds its way into some of the country's most important decisions and resolutions. Your opinion, in many instances, has the force of law. Your opinion can shape lives or break them. Your opinion doesn't belong to you right now: it belongs to the Supreme Court.

I think this guy is in the wrong line of work, really. He should have his own talk show, whether or radio or on TV. He is a glory hound unlike any there ever was. Put next to his most immediate predecessor, the eminent Hilario Davide who guarded his own convictions closely when asked for his take on issues of transcendental importance. The guy showed dignity and composure. His successor is kind of like a circus clown with the way he carries on.

All of 2005's bar passers must know of his little slide presentation during their oath-taking, a solemn occasion that is supposed to be part of the Supreme Court's official business. Instead, the chief took the opportunity to tell his sad sob story growing up, which, I've told, is notably exaggerated in some portions. Incidents like that made me glad I passed the last bar during Davide's term. The stinker of it is (for those who were there, anyway) that no batch after this will ever have to endure such annoyance because Panganiban is stepping down in December.

Some comment has been made about how generous Panganiban is with the bonuses he lavishes on Court employees. Well, of course he can be generous; it's not exactly his money he's giving away now, is it?

I don't know if I'll ever work at the Supreme Court again, as much as I liked it there, but I do know one thing for sure: I'm definitely not going back while Panganiban is still in charge.

On The Eternals Issue #1

I'm not particularly sorry I didn't get to meet Neil Gaiman when he was here in the Philippines. It's not that I have anything against him, but as soon as I heard how many people went to have their stuff signed by him I realized that I would have spent an entire working day (or more) to have about eight comic books signed, and not even my particularly prized stuff.

Previous to yesterday, the only Gaiman stuff I had was his second Death miniseries (The Time of Your Life) and his four-issue Stardust illustrated, serialized novel (I can't bring myself to call it a comic book or a graphic novel, because it really isn't one). I rather enjoyed the latter and am happy to report that it's being made into a feature film.

Still, there was something about the way he wrote that made it feel somehow distant from everything else I was reading at the time. Granted, it was better written (because folks like Mark Millar, Brian Bendis and J. Michael Straczynski hadn't started writing mainstream just yet) than the other stuff, but it feel real-world, like a lot of the dialogue in the Death books. It somehow felt surreal, otherworldly.

Eternals changes that somewhat. In a nutshell, it's about a race of immortals who have, for the most part, forgotten who they are, that walk among men, specifically the men of the regular Marvel Universe. We see most of the story through the eyes of Mark Curry, a young New York intern whose life takes a strange turn when blond-haired, golden eyed Ike Harris shows up in the hospital restroom one day to tell him that he is a being of fantastical power. Other characters who show up are Sersi, a flightly New York party planner whose dialogue reads just a touch like some of the lines of Death in The High Cost of Living, the mysterious Druig, weapons R&D expert Thena, and tweeny TV star Sprite. Still, this particular issue is all about Mark and Ike, who share most of the issue's conversations.

And it is here that Gaiman plants his foot firmly in the real-world nature of the Marvel Universe. I never bought Marvel: 1602 because the neither the premise nor the art grabbed me enough to entice me to spent a small fortune on all eight issues. It was too out there, and like I said once before felt like it was designed to pander to Gaiman's penchant for the strange.

Eternals is still a fantastical project, by that logic, but at the very least it still has the "real," modern world as its starting point. And Gaiman's dialogue straddles the line between fantasy and reality. He gives the everyman a point of view in Mark Curry instead of populating his world with a whole bunch of strange characters.

As for the art, my reverence of John Romita Jr. has sometimes bordered on the idolatrous. I guess that statement pretty much says it all.

In the course of his thirty or so year career he has actually gotten very little of the respect that is due him. He did remarkable runs on X-Men, Spider-Man and Iron Man in the 80s, but he didn't enjoy the superstar status that was lavished on the likes of Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane and (gasp!) Rob Liefeld. In the last twenty years he has worked with as many cookie-cutter hacks as he has really good writers.

The only other time a book of his was treated as an event was in 1993 when he and Frank Miller came up with Daredevil: The Man Without Fear. His work on that book was really something special, which was why it boggled my mind that for years after that he was paired up with some at best mediocre writers like Scott Lobdell, Howard Mackie and Dan Jurgens. Arguably one of Marvel's top talents, he was really getting the short shrift: his books were getting printed on toilet paper and colored by people who were either autistic or blind or both. John's stuff looked like shit, in short, even though his talent still shone through occasionally.


It was a good thing that Joe Quesada, a fellow illustrator, finally became Marvel's editor-in-chief because as one of JR Jr.'s biggest fans, he finally started giving him the "props" (as the rather irritating slang goes) he deserves. He paired him with the vastly talented J. Michael Straczynski, gave him a phenomenal coloring team in Dan Kemp and Avalon Studios. He was also generous with his praise for the man in all of his interviews where JR's name came up. Anyone who's seen the extras on the Spider-Man DVD will know what I'm talking about.

Still, before this project, Johnny never seemed to recover the vibe that had made Man Without Fear so special. He'd come close a few times, but never quite hit it out of the park the way he had before.

That's all changed with issue #1 of Eternals. The illustration, the storytelling, the rendering (which is not something John is famous for) are out of this work. Credit goes of course to the stellar inking team of Danny Miki and Tim Townsend, as well as the brilliant palette of colorist Matt Hollingsworth, but their efforts wouldn't mean anything if they weren't inking or coloring such ebullient, outstanding pencils.

In short, this is a great start to what promises to be a very entertaining series. The only thing I didn't like was how they shoehorned the current Marvel line-wide event Civil War, into the story. Although I am a self-professed fan of that particular series, I felt that the little nod to Marvel's ongoing continuity took me out of the story somewhat.

Flaws notwithstanding, though, I'm certainly on board for all six issues.

On Spider-Man Unmasking

Considering how many posts in the past I've devoted to comics, even those I hadn't read at the time, I don't think I'd be able to live with myself if I didn't write even just a blurb about the fact that my favorite superhero of all time has, in the pages of Marvel Comics' Civil War #2, revealed his secret identity to the public, at a press conference, no less.

To make a long story short, Peter Parker shows his support for Tony Stark(aka Iron Man), who in turn is the point-man for all superheroes advocating the Superhero Registration Act that was introduced in issue #1, by showing that he is not afraid to reveal himself to all. In the course of a concurrent issue of Amazing Spider-Man, he has a conversation with Mary Jane and Aunt May about all the repercussions of his revealing himself, and essentially, they talk him into it.

The attention this move by Marvel has generated is quite massive. Not since the death of Superman has a comic-book character gotten this much mainstream media exposure for reasons other than the box-office performance of his latest movie adaptation.

Of course, the naysayers are saying that it's bullshit, that it's completely out of character for Peter, and that it will all be voided down the line anyway by some simple story device (considering the vast range of superpowers that Marvel's characters have).

I say it's actually a good idea.

Although I am a self-confessed Marvel fan, I am not a Marvel apologist. They've had some pretty terrible ideas in the past, a lot of them having to do with Spider-Man. The clone saga comes to mind, as does the notion of Norman Osborn retroactively siring children by Gwen Stacy, as well as the whole John Byrne retooling of Spider-Man's origin. Yep, they've come up with some real stinkers.

But this isn't one of them, not in and of itself.

This isn't like the death of Superman, which no one (myself included) realized was nothing but a huge marketing gambit on DC Comics' part. There are a number of reasons for this.

1. Mark Millar is a much better writer than Dan Jurgens.

2. Steve McNiven is an EXPONENTIALLY better artist than Dan Jurgens.

and most importantly...

3. When Superman died (as would be the case with any character) there were only two directions to go: a) keep him dead or b) bring him back. The only creativity involved, really, was how to bring him back. I know there was the whole big deal about it being a great opportunity to introduce "cool new characters" like Steel (whose true redeeming value is that he killed Shaquille O' Neal's movie career) and Superboy (whom DC recently killed, strangely enough), but really, there really wasn't much else to do but bring him back.

By unmasking Spider-Man, Marvel has opened the door for all kinds of stories to be told. There are so many directions they can take the character that it can boggle the average fanboy's mind. Even assuming some future writer or artist manages to put the genie back into the bottle at some point, these stories will still have been told, and their impact will still have been felt, certainly by Peter himself, who may realize, depending on what he goes through from here, that it wasn't such a good idea after all. The gravity of his decision will not be diminished, especially if he suffers for it in the meantime. And in the meantime, readers will get a glimpse of what Spider-Man's life would be like if all his enemies, not just kooks like Norman Osborn, knew who he was when he took of his tights and who he went home to at night.

THIS has POTENTIAL. I don't know if Marvel will fully exploit that potential, but it's undeniably there.

And to think, Civil War is only on issue #2...of SEVEN.

Heh Heh, You Know What They Say About Imitation...

The people responsible for making and marketing Superman Returns are doing absolutely everything right, from hiring one of the best comic book movie directors out there to the magnificent trailers they've cut for it. I fully anticipate enjoying the movie consummately and without any of the reservations I felt about X-Men: The Last Stand (and writing a glowing review of it, too).

That said, I've made a couple of observations about the movie, having followed its online (and onscreen) trailers pretty faithfully (though not so obsessively that I was willing to pay good money to see trash like Poseidon) that put a different kind of smile on my face.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have been a fan of Spider-Man for almost as long as it took to get a Spider-Man movie made (very minimal exaggeration there). I was practically rabid when the first Spidey movie broke box office records and became the highest grossing movie of the new millenium back when it was released. I am a fan of both of the web slinger's onscreen adventures, in particular Spider-Man 2.

Having seen SM2 as many times as I have, I've noticed a lot, and I mean a lot of similarities between its storyline and general craftsmanship and that of the upcoming Superman epic.

For a quick rundown: In SM2, Mary Jane was engaged to John Jameson, son of Daily Bugle publisher Jonah Jameson. In SR, Lois Lane is engaged to the nephew of Daily Planet editor-in-chief Perry White. In SM2, Peter Parker/Spider-Man struggles with his own frustrations. In SR, Clark Kent/Kal El/Superman struggles with the fact that the world apparently doesn't need him anymore (although in SM2 part of his problem is his decision to turn his back on the world even though it does need him).

Admittedly, Singer and company have made no secret about their dilemma of how to make Superman relevant to an audience that has warmed up to angst ridden heroes, foremost of whom would definitely be Spider-Man. But I didn't think they'd even go for similar plot devices.

Even the superficial similarities are there: Sony Picture Imageworks, the company that is making Superman fly on the big screen for the first time in almost twenty years, is the company that enabled Spider-Man to swing through Manhattan. I mean, they could have just as easily have gone with ILM, or even the new king of the visual effects roost Weta Digital, but they went for SPI, based largely, if not solely, on its track record with iconic superheroes. A close look at Superman's spandex shows that there's a certain texture to it, the way James Acheson designed Spider-Man's tights in a very peculiar way.

It's particularly gratifying for a Spider-Man fan like myself, in the same way that Pepsi lovers must have loved Coke's flavor shift twenty years ago, to see the makers of Superman trying to make him more like Spider-Man to sell him these days. It's funny considering that if Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster hadn't come up with Superman in 1938, Spider-Man, in all likelihood, wouldn't even exist. Even the most fanatical Spider-Man devotee knows that. In the same sense, the original Richard Donner Superman served as a huge inspiration for Sam Raimi's Spidey movies. I guess it's cyclical somehow, the way George Lucas was inspired by Japanese epics to make Star Wars, which in turn inspired a lot of Japanese anime and manga creators to make a whole slew of space-epics over the next several years.

The marketing push for Superman Returns has it poised to be potentially the biggest movie of the year, and not the runner-up to the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel a lot of people were predicting, and if the movie is anywhere near as good as the trailers are, it will truly deserve that title. Still, it gives me an odd sense of satisfaction to know that no small part of the movie's success will spring from all the lessons the filmmakers learned from the trails blazed by Sam Raimi and his Spider-Man crew.

Also, if Superman Returns should go on to break records, it'll be with some eager anticipation that I'll wait for Spider-Man 3 (out next year) to top them. Hehehe...

X-Men 3: Less and More

As someone who enjoyed both X-men movies, the second more than the first, I was one of the many who was terrified by the thought that 20th Century Fox had tapped Brett Ratner to replace Bryan Singer, who had gone off to do Superman Returns, on X-Men 3. I was even more terrified by the thought that, instead of moving production back so that they could better ensure the quality of the film, the way Sony/Columbia Pictures pushed back Spider-Man 2, Fox was dead set on releasing the film in May 2006, which meant that shooting would have to wrap faster than the ink could dry on Ratner's contract. I felt something heavy in the pit of my stomach upon reading post upon post of obnoxious fanboy gloating that the new Superman would "own" the new X-Men movie, as the slang goes. It kind of ticked me off, considering that DC/Warner Brothers pissed that franchise away almost two decades ago and were finally able to revitalize it by swiping one of Marvel films' most prized directors, who, back when he had been tapped him for the first mutant movie, was a seemingly illogical choice.

When the credits rolled, however, my feelings, although slightly mixed, were still leaning towards gladness that Bryan Singer had left.

X-Men: The Last Stand, is easily a better movie than the first X-Men movie, but is also at the same time less and more than its most immediate predecessor, X2.

The story in a nutshell, a pharmaceutal company has come up with a cure for genetic mutation, causing shockwaves in the mutant community, most notably the fugitive Magneto (Ian McKellen), who is determined to take this cure and all those who push it out. Also, Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) comes back from what seemed like certain death in the second movie, but with a strange malevolence about her.

One of Singer's strong points was his characterization, although the only real beneficiaries thereof in the first two movies were Wolverine, Magneto and Rogue. Also, and I know I'm not the first person to say this, I truly felt that Singer showed a larger sense of scope, particularly in X2, than Ratner showed in the new movie. One got the whole widescreen sense of it, with visual tours de force like the opening/Nightcrawler scene, and the scene where the x-jet is pursued by fighter planes. His very strong visual sense is also clear from all the new Superman Returns trailers, and we get a very good idea of the kind of X-Men movie Singer could have made had the Fox executives not been so stingy with the budget. I guess the poor guy just got tired of fighting for more money.

That said, X-Men: The Last Stand, while certainly having benefitted from all the groundwork laid down in the first two movies, does a lot more as an emsemble piece, and as an action movie than either of its predecessors.

In the first two X-Men movies, the focus was almost strictly on Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), while other characters essentially made cameos, most notably Kitty Pryde, who was so unimportant to Singer that I think she was played by two different actresses in X-Men and X2. Here, she not only gets exponentially more screen time, but a very capable actress in the young Ellen Page to make that time meaningful. She even, for a moment, gets involved in a little love triangle, which gives the story a touch more flavor, although it's not very well developed. Others who get more screen time and nuance are Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), Storm (Halle Berry) and a welcome new addition to the X-family (on screen, anyway) in the form of Hank McCoy (the brilliantly cast Kelsey Grammer) who was only mentioned in X2.

Singer's actions scene in the first two X-films were, for the most part, godawful. All of the fight scenes of the first X-Men were an absolute joke and lent themselves quite readily to allegations of being poorly done Matrix ripoffs (which were probably right on the money). X2 seemed to offer so much more promise with that opening fight scene involving Nightcrawler, which was easily more riveting to watch than anything that happened in either of the Matrix sequels that came out that year, but all its action scenes thereafter fell sadly limp.

I read somewhere that Singer's directive to Jackman and his sparring partner, Kelly Hu a.k.a. Lady Deathstrike was to fight savagely, and not as if they were skilled martial artists. Well, apparently, Singer chose to flip the bird at about twenty years of Marvel continuity because the reason why Wolverine is the Marvel Universe's biggest badass is, besides the adamantium claws and the healing factor, the fact that he knows how to fight. Singer threw this out the window and as a result Wolverine came across as a complete and utter wuss for two consecutive movies. Maybe he was just too cheap to hire a choreographer.

Not so in this installment. There are moves. There is grace. There are, count 'em, TWO fastball specials (geekboy slang for whenever Colossus, the steel X-Man, pitches Wolverine like a fastball-hence the name-at a bad guy). There are even fight scenes involving other X-Men! There are well-timed, well-placed battles, like the first skirmish in the suburb between X-Men and Magneto's goons, including a well-cast Juggernaut, and the climactic confrontation at Alcatraz, as well as a nicely done scrap between Wolverine and a number of Magneto's minions somewhere near the last act. Also, Ratner can claim of the distinction of having pulled the X-Men franchise clear from any allegations of the Wachowski brothers' influence; none of the fight scenes look anything like the stylized violence we saw earlier this year in V for Vendetta.

It is obviously unfair to flog either of the first X-Men movies in order to praise this one, because Singer started this ball rolling in considerable style, but comparisons are of course, inevitable. That said, however, Ratner does an admirable job paying off some of the things Singer set up in X2. In particular, I had been looking forward to a Pyro/Iceman duel, and I wasn't at all disappointed. They gave them a meaningful, menacing run-in halfway through the film and had it all come to a head in a memorable fire vs. ice showdown.

There has been much debate on how the Dark Phoenix storyline was handled. To be honest, I haven't read those comics in their entirety, although I know, like any respectable fanboy, how it goes. All I have to say is that it would have been difficult for any director to tell the story without the Shi'ar or the alien Phoenix Force or even the Hellfire Club, all of whom played such pivotal parts in the comics, and as a result Ratner and his writers were severely hobbled. I think that under the circumstances, they acquitted themselves rather well, and the visual interpretation of the Phoenix, particularly in that scene at the Grey house, was appropriately creepy and had a more much more visceral effect than some cornball flaming bird surrounding Famke Janssen would have had. There did seem to be some influence from Lord of the Rings, though, particularly that scene where Galadriel wigs out.

All told, while there are aspects of Singer's storytelling that I miss, there is territory here that Ratner covered that Singer, judging from the way he directed the first two films, would not even have bothered to explore, and for this I am quite grateful.

That said, I am still looking forward to Superman Returns. I take solace in knowing that Superman doesn't have to know any special choreography, so at least I know there won't be any laughable fight scenes.

R.I.P., PCGG

About five years ago I got to work with the Presidential Commission on Good Government, the body assembled by the Aquino government to recover the ill-gotten wealth amassed by former President Ferdinand Marcos and his cronies, and to prosecute those responsible for the wanton plunder that had ravaged the national treasury for nearly two decades. One of my professors in law school, Victoria Avena, just happened to be a commissioner at the time.

It was a good time to be involved with the Commission, back then. The late Haydee Yorac was in charge, and was making it a point to staff her legal team with damned good lawyers, something that had, for the most part, been sorely missing from the PCGG's ranks since its inception in 1986. She wasn't about to take any shit from anybody, and was all about kicking ass and taking names. The famous Coco Levy decision that the Supreme Court handed down in December of 2001, which effectively took hundreds of millions out of the hands of former crony Danding Cojuangco was a victory to remember for the Commission and one hell of a morale booster.

I left the Commission late the next year, but nonetheless continued to follow its progress, especially when it experienced at least one more legal triumph at the Supreme Court.

And then, maybe about two years later, things started going to hell.

It started when Yorac left. I'm fairly sure it was the corruption she got fed up with, the fact that the Arroyo administration, or elements thereof, at least, were siphoning off the funds and resources it had taken gallons of blood and sweat to win back...for the people. It could also have been the fact that even then, the Arroyo government was already trying to cut deals with the Marcoses in exchange for their support. It doesn't really take a genius to figure out that while Yorac remained committed to doing her job, her bosses in the Palace had a different agenda, which was why she simply up and left.

Enter this new team led by Abcede. There's not much to describe, really. Suffice it to say that he wants to cut a deal with the Marcoses, and let them go absolutely scot-free, his rationale being that the government has already spent too much money chasing after them and their money. Holy shit.

First of all, what happened to the Marcoses' accountability? Their wanton rape of Filipino dignity, not to mention the economy? Pepole who are bitching about what a power-hungry harridan GMA is now have been, as I understand it, drawing a lot of flawed parallels between her and Marcos. She's bad, sure, especially as we can see from what she's trying to pull now, but I don't think we'll ever see anyone as bad as Marcos was. Strike this deal and all is forgiven and forgotten. The cronies and everyone else responsible walks off, free to enjoy their millions and live like kings while the country they butt-fucked to amass their money continues to languish in complete and utter squalor.

Second, even assuming the Marcoses agree to turn over funds to the goverment, they are hardly likely to surrender much more than the tiniest fraction of their amassed fortune. Consider that this amounted to billions back in the eighties, multiplied by all the investments they probably made with them taking inflation and interest into account. Imelda, insane though she may seem, probably wasn't kidding when she said that it amounts to trillions by now. Trillions that belong to the Filipino people who suffered and died under Marcos' tyrannical megalomania. If the Marcoses gave the government one trillion pesos, it doesn't mean a thing if they kept three or four for themselves.

Third, it is utterly asinine to complaint about the PCGG's lack of success over the last several years. Under Yorac's watch, so much was achieved because she and the lawyers under her placed emphasis on competence and integrity, concepts that seem foreign to the Commission for the rest of its existence thereafter, and for much of its existence before. The PCGG lost its cases and arguments because its lawyers were idiots and because the Sandiganbayan justices were crooked or stupid. However, by rectifying the former, they were able to overcome some of the difficulties posed by the latter.

I agree with certain sectors that say it is time to bring an end to the PCGG. Cut off its budget, its lifeline, let it die in the sun like a fish washed up on the shore. Yorac, one of the best things that ever happened to the PCGG, is already in her grave. It would be sad if this continuous display of idiocy put PCGG founder Jovito Salonga in his grave, too.

It was once a nice place to work...but that time is long past. Obviously, it's no longer interested in holding the past dictator and his minions liable for what they've done, so let the task fall into more honest, competent, and determined hands.

And as far as I'm concerned, this should be one of the nails in the coffin of Arroyo's government. For the longest time I have actually been defending the administration against the opposition (whom I still think are scum), but now she's lost at least one, probably more supporters with her blatant, unabashed efforts to cut a deal with those from whose depradations the country has yet to fully recover.

Obscure but Memorable Comics

A few posts ago I said that Marvel Comics' Civil War #1 made all other comics feel silly and irrelevant. I also said it I was pretty sure it was a passing feeling, and looking through some old comics, I see I was right.

I hardly consider myself a connoisseur of independent/creator-owned comics, but in the last couple of years two titles in particular caught my eye, and I don't regret buying them for a minute, entitled We3 and Chosen. I will review them in the order in which I enjoyed them, being, last one most.

We3, from DC Comics' Vertigo imprint, is the story of three household pets that have been turned into cybernetic killing machines by the U.S. military-industrial complex. When the military brass decides that they are obsolete and gives the directive to have them decommissioned, all hell breaks loose. What transpires over the next three issues is essentially a brutal, protracted chase that culminates in a truly savage fight to the finish.

Written by Justice League of America and X-Men writer Grant Morrison and beautifully illustrated by his X-Men collaborator Frank Quitely, the story is essentially a scathing commentary on animal testing, set in the context of some kick-ass comic book action sequences.

I don't really find Morrison to be the genius that some people say he is, but he really knows how to keep a reader's attention. Following the odyssey of this little family of oddballs is rather engaging, if not a little predictable at some turns. I also love the way he paces the story. I always had a sense of what was going to happen, but I still wanted to see how he would get there. It's not what I'd call groundbreaking, but the presentation definitely feels fresh. This is due in no small part to Quitely's nearly flawless art. Given that the three protagonists are animals who can only engage in the most rudimentary dialogue possible, it falls upon him to convey their character effectively, and he does a magnificent job.

We3 is certainly not without its problems, foremost of which being the plausibility of the science involved. It reads a little bit like Robert O' Brien's The Secret of NIMH, in which a bunch of street rats and mice became super-smart after being injected with foreign DNA, a concept which, as we now know, is scientifically absurd. There is a bit of suspension of disbelief involved here; we the readers are supposed to buy the notion that the U.S. government would try untested technology on three adult animals when they could much more easily breed animals specifically for the job. This story clearly has its origins in the notion "wouldn't it be cool if household pets were made into killing machines" but Morrison never offers a satisfactory explanation for such a conceit, which I think is necessary in a "realistic" comic book, and as a result the story can't quite transcend its decidedly comic-booky premise.

Finally, there's the fact that the creators lean on the "awww" button a little too much, meaning that they try a little too hard to call attention to the tragedy of the lead characters instead of just letting their inherently tragic situation speak for itself.

Flaws notwithstanding, however, We3 was, back when I was completing its three issues, a truly involving read from start to finish. This story, being self-contained and apparently independent of any superhero universe, came without any baggage such as continuity or pre-existing sentimental attachments to any of the characters. One really wonders where the characters are going, or will end up, even though there's some idea of where that will be.

And then there's the art. Hooo boy, it made me sad the day Frank Quitely signed a multi-year exclusive contract with DC Comics that meant he wouldn't be drawing the X-Men or any other Marvel character for a while, but if it means he gets to produce stuff like We3 all the time, then I'm more than happy he made the jump. This guy's attention to detail is fantastic, and his characters are more expressive than those drawn by about 70% of all other mainstream comic book artists, including some of the best. He doesn't quite draw the prettiest girls around, but I'd take his moody and expressive females over Jim Lee's generic lookalike babes any day.

An altogether different pleasure came from buying and reading Dark Horse Comics' Chosen, an acclaimed and slightly controversial comic book miniseries by Civil War scribe Mark Millar and DC/Vertigo Comics mainstay Peter Gross, that purportedly asks one simple question: what if some snot-nosed kid growing up in suburban America suddenly found out that he was the second coming of Jesus Christ? Jodie Christianson, a 12 year-old just like any other, finds this out the hard way when an 18-wheeler of a truck falls on his head and he walks away without a scratch. From that point on it's a series of thrills and chills, with Jodie performing one miracle after another and making converts of just about everyone in the town with the exception of the local parish priest. It's a coming of age story in probably the most literal sense of the word, with a twist at the end which feels kind of spine-tingling in light of current events.

For anyone, and I mean anyone who has experienced puberty, this comic book is an absolute must-read. It's Stand By Me set in the 1980s with a religious/supernatural undercurrent. This story is pure fun, so much fun that it feels like a guilty pleasure sometimes. Like We3, it was a comic I avidly waited for because in this case I only had the vaguest idea of where the story was going, and while in retrospect I should have seen the twist at the end coming, the truth of the matter is that I was enjoying myself too much to play sleuth.

Millar, whose knack for entertaining and believable dialogue is almost unparalleled, is truly in his element here. Though he has openly and repeatedly professed a love for the larger-than-life characters of Superman and Captain America among others, he has shown a real knack for capturing the the small and intimate, as is shown by the way he wrote Peter Parker when he did Spider-Man, as well as his characterization of little Jodie and his friends here. I'll grant that some of the dialogue feels forced, but there are some genuine laugh-out-loud moments here, like the scene where Jodie turns water sitting in a bunch of plastic soda bottles into wine.

As for the art, let me just say that while Peter Gross is the last person on earth I'd want to draw my superhero comic books, he is the only person I'd choose to draw this project. He perfectly captures the naivete of Jodie and the sleepy little town of Peoria, Illinois with such skill that it feels like he was born to draw this book. This not a story that needs ultra-slick linework and rendering from the likes of Steve McNiven or George Perez, but one that needs a touch of innocence and simplicity, which Gross delivers.

The twist ending, which I hope I haven't given away by now, actually comes as something as a relief for some reason, more than the sledgehammer that Millar probably intended. Although I wonder if it wasn't some kind of cop-out from the way he had planned it before, this doesn't diminish the enjoyability of everything that came before it. I understand he has a sequel in the works to be entitled American Jesus. I know I'll be there for that.

We3 and Chosen are available as collected editions, and I'm pretty sure, for the more economically-minded, they're available online by now, having come out in 2004 and 2003, respectively. Whether one reads them off his laptop or a book in his lap, both these miniseries are solid arguments for respecting comic books as a legitimate mainstream art form.

An Open Invitation

Here's a bit of cynicism for you: when a hapless commuter gets her cellphone snatched from her by some lowlife, the natural tendency of many people is, instead of sympathizing with her, to shake their heads and cluck "nag-ce-cellphone kasi sa jeep, eh." The trangression is less that of the thief who has clearly taken what doesn't belong to him and more that of the victim who left herself a little bit more open to the commission of the crime. It is downright wrong to think like this, of course; people shouldn't have to be afraid to use their cellphones, their own property, in public. It is not a crime to use one's cellphone wherever he or she wants, and at the end of the day the criminals are still the ones who run off with the phone. They aren't forces of nature; just pieces of crap. People shouldn't have to worry about these thugs swiping their things.

The reality, however, is sadly far, far removed from the ideal. In a land beset by poverty and erosion of basic human values, it's almost a given that crimes will occur under certain circumstances. It becomes a responsibility to safeguard one's self from such contingencies by taking certain measures, or by refraining from certain conduct.

Having said this, it strikes me that the girl who was allegedly raped by four United States Marines acted rather imprudently, to say the least. To say the worst, one could say that she could not have asked for it more if she had painted a bull's eye on her vagina.

This is not a discussion on whether or not the rape took place; that is for the trial court to determine, although frankly, I'm fairly sure they did it, especially considering they've already gone for the consensual sex defense, which places them in an uphill battle from this point onwards, considering the eyewitness accounts that had them dumping her in the side of the road in her underwear. Whether or not they did was entirely beside the point.

The point is that this girl opened herself to this kind of situation the way people who use their cellphones on a jeep in Tondo open themselves to snatchers. I wouldn't even be talking about this if I didn't think that there seems to be a disturbing trend among young people to throw caution to the wind when it comes to their night life.

I hardly consider myself a prude; I'm not about to protest anyone wearing short skirts or tube tops or any of that stuff, but I do think that people should know how to take care of themselves. I am a thirtysomething male, but there are still places that I wouldn't necessarily go alone, given the option.

I've actually seen a young, attractive girl go to a bar, get drunk out of her gourd, and proceed to cavort with a guy who, from all appearances, she had only just met at the bar. I've read about a rather asinine practice among young people known as "speed dating" where the object is to go out with as many people in a day/evening as possible, on the rationale that "if you don't get a boyfriend, at least you make 20 new friends." I guess that's possible, assuming they don't think the girl is a player, or, to use more vulgar language, a slut.

Dating rituals are not only charmingly quaint appurtenances to one's love/sex life; they serve as important filters or screening processes by which both men and women, boys and girls are able to determine if the people they're going out with are suitable for them. By not offering one's body to someone she's just met, a girl has a chance to unearth a lot of potentially material information about him, which is obviously an impossibility if she drops her panties because she likes his mojo, or because she's too drunk to care.

By all accounts, the Olongapo rape victim was supposed to be intelligent and well-educated, so one wonders what in God's name she was doing in a bar trying to pick up Americans in the first place. That's her business, really, but that doesn't mean she couldn't have been more careful in the company she chose. Judging by decades of Philippine-American relations, it's pretty easy to surmise what American servicemen hanging out at bars in Olongapo are looking for, so unless she spent her whole life living under a rock before heading out to that bar this girl had every reason to be on her guard.

The rape itself was heinous. The men involved undoubtedly deserve the maximum penalty if they did it, and I truly hope they get exactly what is coming to them. But one cannot deny that the girl they ravished had no reason to believe they had anything but the basest of intentions. She took the least possible amount of caution going into what was already a potentially dangerous situation, with disastrous results. This does not mean that she was not raped, just a cellphone snatched from someone using it in a jeep is still a stolen item no matter how careless its owner was. But there is an important lesson to be learned here about how cautious poeple should be, especially how today's increasingly hedonistic crowd seems to be pushing the boundaries of acceptable risks.

As someone whose daughter will one day be as old as that girl, I hope I am able to impress this upon her one day.

Moving On

Today was my last day as an employee of the Supreme Court of the Philippines. I worked there, to the day, for seventeen months, a personal record. I had originally planned to stay until Chief Justice Panganiban's retirement in December, but when the newest wave of bar passers was announced I spotted an opportunity to grab work at a law firm, and so I decided to fast track my plans a little bit. The plan was to hand my resume out, without a word to anyone at work, and if it didn't work out, I could always just return to the status quo. If it did, then I'd be out of there in the statutory 30 days. The latter just so happened to come true.

I couldn't have picked a better time to leave the Court; I'm leaving on a high, at a time when the institution's credibility has been restored by three successive decisions upholding the primacy of civil liberties and clipping the wings of an administration that seems to aspire towards authoritarianism or some permutation thereof. I'm leaving without intrigues in my wake, without bad blood between me and anyone in the office, and ultimately, without any regrets. In other words, I'm quitting while I'm ahead, and it feels great.

There's something really special about having done a "tour of duty" over there on Padre Faura, and it's more than just researching and assisting in the preparation of decisions. It's more than going to work every day knowing that the hopes of many of the country's lawyers and their clients hinges on how we decide their cases. It's about being part of history as it is made. This came home with dramatic effect on my penultimate week, which I spent in Baguio, when they released the decision regarding Presidential Proclamation No. 1017, which bore an eerie resemblance to Presidential Decree No. 1081, which declared Martial Law, over 34 years ago.

It doesn't matter that I had nothing to do with preparing momentous decisions like the three successive ones that came out of Baguio this past month. It's enough for me that I was there and that I was working in the same office. It's not about the ability to take credit for anything, it's about knowing one was there to witness something special. I now have the vaguest idea of how people felt when they watched the Berlin Wall come down. Well, maybe not, but the point is I know now how special it feels to be in the right place at the right time.

That time has now passed, and it feels only right to move on along with it, but it's been one HECK of a ride.

Onward and upward to new challenges and milestones!

A Comic Book That Truly Speaks

Recently I've made film reviewing a regular staple of this blog, eschewing every thing else such my political opinions, personal experiences, and even my quips on comic books. Lately, however, I haven't seen any movie that has truly tickled my fancy, and the last movie I saw, Mission Impossible III, is not even worth taking the time out to pan. I will say, however, that in view of the damage his public persona seems to have inflicted on the grosses of his vanity projects, Tom Cruise should stick to making good movies from now on.

This post marks a return to my comics commentary for what I feel is a very special reason: Marvel Comics' Civil War #1.

Here in the Philippines and in the United States, the topic of civil liberties has, of late, been a rather sensitive issue. Here, it's been a question of how far the President can go to quell civil liberties in order to defend her tenuous grip on power, and there it's been a question of what the United States government won't sacrifice in their hunt for the terrorists who are allegedly threatening the American way of life.

The beauty of Marvel Comics characters, perhaps more than any other, is best appreciated when they are written as metaphors for the human condition. Spider-Man symbolizes the uncertainty and frustration of youth, the Fantastic Four stand for the love/hate relationship shared by most families, Iron Man represents humanity's growing dependence on technology, and so on and so forth. Ultimates writer Mark Millar plays this card to spectacuar effect in this miniseries.

The first issue in a nutshell:The New Warriors, a D-list group of superheroes, are the stars of a reality show that has them traveling across America in search of scumbags to beat up. In a suburban Connecticut town, they happen up four major supervillians who've only recently broken out of prison and are lying low, one of whom happens to be Nitro, who has the power to generate powerful explosions. They ambush the villains, and Nitro blows up, killing the Warriors and several hundred residents of the town. The bereaved residents of the town demand a response from the U.S. government, and that response is the Superhuman Registration Act, a piece of legislation designed to make superheroes publicly accountable for their actions by turning them into federal employees. Superheroes are uneasy over its implications, as exemplified by an attempt by SHIELD, a government super-spy agency, to subdue Captain America, which ends in the latter's escape.

When the hype for this book came out, the tendency of fans and naysayers alike was to act dismissive towards the title. For my part, my main hook was that Steve McNiven would be drawing this book (and he doesn't disappoint, either). When I read this book, however, I confess that all my fears turned out to be unjustified.

The commentary on sacrificing civil liberties "so that people will feel safe again" WORKS. It is intelligently written, although the treatment of the two different sides of the issue is not as even-handed as Marvel would have liked us to believe before. Still, the presentation is entirely credible, even if a little flawed, and the comic book, as a whole, works as both a superhero book AND political commentary, although admittedly not terribly in-depth.

I love the way Millar and McNiven painted in shocking detail the tragedy of Stamford, Connecticut, and then right away, posed the question "do you crack down on every super hero just because of one errant group?" It's been years since the Marvel metaphor has been used to such devastating effect. "Because there could be terrorists among us, do you remove our right to privacy?"

The masks and secret identities in this story stand in for people's private lives, their e-mail, their secret thoughts and opinions. The rage of the people whose loved ones died in the explosion mirrors that of the families of the 9/11 victims. Not even when they put Spider-Man right in the heart of the 9/11 tragedy did Marvel put its finger so squarely on the pulse of a nation at war with itself.

As ridiculous as this sounds, reading this comic book has made every other comic book on the market, including some that I am buying and enjoying, seem absolutely inane, and devoid of any relevance to humanity whatsoever, with the possible exception of Millar's Ultimates. This is probably just a passing feeling, but it was surprising nonetheless, considering I've never felt this way about a comic book before.

I know comic books do not have the mainstream acceptance they once had and that not a whole not of people invest time and money in them other than the select cache of geeks known as fanboys, but for the first time I find myself saying to anyone who reads this: I highly recommend this book. It's something quite different from anything that's ever come before it.

Predictably Stupid

I haven't read The Da Vinci Code. I may or may not watch its film adaptation when it comes out in a few weeks. For reasons I cannot entirely explain, I am not all that keen on catching it in theaters. In fact, my interest in watching it is minimal, Tom Hanks and Ron Howard notwithstanding.

That said, I find myself gagging over the idiots who are calling for the movie to be banned from exhibition in the Philippines. Apparently, people in this country are getting stupider by the day.

The rest of the world is shaking its head at the narrowmindedness of several members of the Islamic community that has reacted quite violently to the publication of several Danish cartoons defamatory of the prophet Muhammad. A lot of Christians like to think that they are above such tantrums, simply because they aren't protesting in the streets or burning flags. I'd like to think that's true as well, but the gaggle of fools, including priests, no less demanding that the MTRCB bar The Da Vinci Code from exhibition even before they've previewed it make me think twice about having such confidence.

For all of these people I have four words, one of which is actually a contraction: IT'S. JUST. A. MOVIE.

By calling for the suppression of this work of FICTION, these people who fancy themselves defenders of the faith will effectively be doing Christianity, as well as the faithful, a huge disservice. It's tantamount to their saying that this supposed affront to the Christian faith (and all its various denominations) should not be shown, lest it pollute the minds of those that watch it. It's the same argument against pornography, basically.

The problem is that when the subject matter of a film is religion, specifically an "alternative viewpoint," to suppress a film creates the distinct impression that one is afraid of it and its effects. Do these people really think so little of the Catholic faithful that they are certain they can be swayed by a mere movie? One adapted by a hack like Akiva Goldsman?

I'm just glad a lot of very responsible Christian leaders, including members of the Opus Dei, who take the biggest hits from the movie, are calling for sobriety and saying that if the movie should spark anything, it should be discussion and not attempts towards suppression.

Still, it really, really doesn't speak well of all the idiots in this country and in the others that have yelled and screamed for the suppression of this film. They seem to learn nothing from history and its lessons on suppressing the freedom of expression.

Let the movie and its controversy ride its course, I say. Intelligent, informed discussion is more likely to kill all the so-called issues raised in this movie more effectively than strident calls to have it banned. Come on, people, let's show the world that Christians deal with challenges to their faith intelligently.

Dated Movies (not Date Movies)

There is something truly comical about watching movies that are supposed to be set in particular times and places far removed from the years in which they were actually made and spotting various cultural landmarks which inevitably tie them to such years. This happened a lot in Hollywood's earlier days, obviously, right up until late last century, but this was largely due to issues of technology. These days, such movies still pop up on the grid periodically, but this comes down to just bad storytelling. Of course, contemporary films don't really count, seeing as how the filmmaker has no choice but to adopt conventions of the time to tell a believable story.

There are some movies that absolutely scream "I was made in 1985!" even though they may actually be set in the 1930s. As odd a choice as it may seem "Star Wars, Episode IV" or the very first Star Wars movie is actually a pretty good example of a movie that feels dated. Issues of technology aside, the film is permanently marked by its actors' shaggy hairdos and Mark Hammill's "gee-whiz" line delivery. The funny part is that no matter how many times Lucas intercalates new digital features every few years the movie still feels stuck in the seventies, and everything else just feels like add-ons. James Cameron's Titanic is similarly quagmired due to Leonardo DiCaprio's unmistakably 90s long-bangs haircut, as well as some really bad dialogue.

Another thing that tends to date movies which would otherwise seem ageless is the music with which the film is scored. Titanic tops the list of such films with all of the synthesized undertones and Enya-like, new-age vocalizing with which composer James Horner saturated his music. The Passion of the Christ, for all of Mel Gibson's directorial prowess, may one day feel dated because of John Debney's use of some fairly contemporary instruments as accompaniment to the traditional orchestra and choir. For the record, I like and own both soundtracks, but they just don't strike me as timeless.

Probably the most glaring example of a movie that will, in a couple of years, sound really anachronistic is the first installment of The Chronicles of Narnia. Howard Shore achieved timelessness (at least to my mind) with his sweeping orchestra and majestic choral and solo vocalists when he did the Lord of the Rings films, so I don't really understand why Narnia composer Harry Gregson-Williams felt he had to go contemporary and take the viewer out of the story, which, when it wasn't set in Narnia was set in 1940s England. (Of course, it's not like the film didn't have other problems).

It's silly to suppose that anyone can make a truly timeless piece. Some people have come fairly close over the last few years, like Spielberg with Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan and Peter Jackson with the aforementioned Rings films, but the thing about such cultural markers is that they tend to spoil a viewing experience and, as I said earlier, take a reader out of a story. There are a number of films that, while not necessarily timeless, don't really feel dated, and maybe I'll make a list of them next time.

Whatever Happened to GMA Films

I am not a regular patron of Filipino films. I do not say this with either pride or shame, but only as a statement of fact. I would like to think, however, that the few films I have seen (at least dating back to late adolescence onward) are of a reasonable level of quality.

Back in the late 90s to the year 2000, there was one studio that produced movies which I religiously followed, three years in a row: GMA Films. I unfortunately missed the acclaimed Sa Pusod ng Dagat, but I caught Marilou Diaz-Abaya's next two movies, Jose Rizal and Muro Ami almost as soon as they came out. The next year, I watched Joel Lamangan's Death Row. While neither Lamangan's direction nor his visual sense was anywhere near as refined as Diaz-Abaya's, the commitment to quality storytelling was still there, albeit diminished.

And then...nothing. In 2001, Diaz-Abaya moved to rival Star Cinema, where she made Bagong Buwan for them (a film I have unfortunately yet to see) and Noon at Ngayon (a film which, I unfortunately, did see). Not only did GMA Films lose their star player, but apparently they also left the game altogether.

A few years later, GMA Films broke their silence with...teeny-bopper love stories? Starring Richard Gutierrez, a guy who only has about two facial expressions in his entire acting repertoire, the pout and the smile? What the hell is going on here?

All right, I understand that the Filipino movie industry is in somewhat dire straits right now. I understand filmmakers are adopting a number of strategies to keep it afloat, ranging from adopting digital technology to save on shooting costs to sticking to relatively safe storytelling formulas, such as casting young and popular stars in romantic films.

To this argument, I have this to say in response: people responded to those early offerings of GMA films, particularly, the movies of Diaz-Abaya. Rizal reportedly grossed over a hundred million pesos back in 1998, which was quite a feat for a local film. Granted, a lot of that came from students who were required by their high school and grade school teachers to watch the film, but I for one watched it without need of any such compulsion, and I'm certain a lot of other people did as well. As if to prove a point, the following year's Muro-Ami, while not quite the moneymaker, reportedly raked in about seventy-four percent of Rizal's box-office take. These films somehow tapped into the public's need for quality Philippine cinema, and didn't even need the backing of Imelda Marcos (like many of the experimental flicks in the 1980s). Why they vanished like thieves in the night, instead of inspiring a whole new wave of great Filipino movies, I really cannot imagine.

Lately, the film outfit Unitel seems to be following GMA Films' lead by producing films that go against the grain, but have not had any breakout success thus far. It's truly frustrating.

I challenge GMA: rediscover that vibe, that commitment to greatness that made you the undisputed cinematic kings of 1998 and 1999. Filipino moviegoers everywhere deserve it.

CG Cartoon Glut

Last week, I watched Ice Age 2 with my son and my half-brother. I definitely felt that the movie suffered from "sequelitis," which is the natural tendency of a sequel to be less of a movie than the original. Still, I liked it. Ninety minutes later, however, I left the movie theater feeling a little perturbed, and not because of the movie I had just watched.

Before the movie even began, I saw, or should I say, was subjected to trailers for FIVE computer-generated imagery (CGI) cartoons. In no particular order, they were Cars, The Wild, Happy Feet, The Ant Bully and Open Season. I'm just glad I was spared having to watch the trailer for Over the Hedge, Dreamworks' Animation's latest offering, for the nth time.

Competition is usually a good thing, especially in a creative environment, where lack of any real rivals tends to result in stagnation.

Walt Disney's animation studio was a good example. Back when Disney had a monopoly on quality animated feature-length films (in the days of the hand-drawn cartoon), the company churned out several decades' worth of classics, up until the dawn of the new millenium, when they seemed to lose their touch, around which time their partner Pixar started producing the next wave of animated classics under the Mickey Mouse banner. Disney's last hand-drawn hit, 2002's Lilo and Stitch, played a lot more like an extended Saturday morning cartoon than gems like Aladdin or even Tarzan.

In the days of the hand-drawn cartoon, particularly its renaissance in the 90s, a lot of studios tried to ape the success of Beauty and the Beast by churning out cheaper, shoddier cartoons like Ferngully, The Magic Sword, and similar excrement. The good news is that these turkeys faded quickly into the night, and were few and far between. The bad news is that Disney, with no real competition in sight, ended up producing crappy movies.

But with the dawn of Pixar, it seemed that the decline of Disney's hand-drawn fortunes didn't matter as they seemed to have a new way to monopolize the success of the cartoon feature: make CGI movies!

Sadly for them, this didn't happen as more than one studio was able to offer some pretty stiff competition. In 2001, Dreamworks' Shrek thrashed Pixar's Monsters, Inc., both in terms of box-office and awards, going on to win the first ever Academy Award for an animated feature. In 2002, 20th Century Fox and their partner, Blue Sky studios, came up with the first Ice Age movie, which was the biggest animated film of 2002 in terms of box-office grosses. Granted, Disney/Pixar still came up with rock-solid flicks like Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, but it was clear they were not the rulers of the roost, especially considering that Shrek 2 was the top-grossing film of 2004, outgrossing The Incredibles by nearly $200 million. The myth of Disney's invincibility was shattered. The field was now open, and one would think that with such thriving competition, the players would strive to do their best.

The problem, however, was that suddenly, every idiot with a PC and the appropriate software suddenly believed he could come up with a CGI blockbuster, with no real regard to quality control. While the Shrek movies have been a blast, everything that the Dreamworks Animation studios have produced since (which, incidentally, does not include Wallace and Gromit, which they only distributed) has been quite puerile. Last year's Madagascar was shite, as was A Shark Tale the year before. The idiots seem to think that by stuffing a movie with superstar comedians and peppering their scripts with pop-culture references they automatically have on their hands works of art. Unfortunately, their formula has translated into box-office success.

Even a Pixar-less Disney took a shot at the CGI genre with last year's Chicken Little, which is easily the worst CGI film I have ever seen, and probably one of the worst movies I've ever seen as well. With its cardboard characterizations and its thoroughly irritating soundtrack the movie wasn't even up to par with most Saturday morning cartoons. While they managed a hit, its success was nowhere near that of their Pixar stuff, which should tell them something. Happily, their latest effort without Pixar, a Madagascar ripoff entitled The Wild, looks like it's stalling right out of the gate. At least that looks like it'll be nipped in the bud.

Joining the fray are Warner Bros. and Sony Pictures, which appear to be hastily shoving together animation divisions. WB is producing TWO movies, Happy Feet and The Ant Bully, and while the former shows off some spectacular camerawork and slick animation technique, they both seem pretty flaccid scriptwise, at least if the jokes cracked in their trailers are any indication. Sony Pictures' Open Season just looks putrid, from the amateurish way the digital characters are rendered to the lines they spew out. They should just stick to making Spider-Man movies.

What made hits like the Pixar movies, the Shrek films, and even the first Ice Age movie extra special cinematic outings were, at the very heart, well-crafted scripts with thoroughly fleshed out characters and truly clever jokes. As much as I loved the animation of The Incredibles, it's the lines I find myself going back to again and again. The studios out to ape their success should also take this important fact into consideration: most of these films take two to three years to make, and are as much labors of love as they are commercial enterprises. The latest software and camerawork do not an animated classic make. Robert Zemeckis has the right idea, even though 2004's Polar Express was not terribly well-written; his latest CGI/performance capture opus, Beowulf, is currently in gestation and won't hit cinemas till late 2007 or mid-2008. AND it will feature a script by acclaimed writer Neil Gaiman. THAT'S the kind of quality these people should aspire to invest in their features.

I make an impassioned plea to the general public. Don't take your kids to see animated movies just because they're CGI or because they have some McDonald's tie-in. I, for one, refuse to take my kid to see The Wild, which will be out soon. I'm similarly hesitant about every other movie except for Pixar's Cars. As the paying public, only we can get across to these creeps in their business suits that the only movies we want our kids to see are the GREAT ones.

V for Vanity

In terms of source material, V for Vendetta is easily the most intelligent of the latest slew of comic-book based films (and even possibly of all of them). While most comic book movies are content to be slam-bang, a hundred thrill-a-minute action films, this movie dares to be different by tackling a rather sensitive theme: terrorism.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers, most significantly screenwriters Andy and Larry Wachowski of Matrix fame (or infamy depending on which installments we're talking about) trade Alan Moore's caricatured allegory of Thatcher's England for a hit-you-over-the-head diatribe against the Bush government. And it is here that the movie stumbles. I say this as someone who utterly despises Dubya and his policies.

The movie is set in a totalitarian London taken right out of George Orwell's 1984. Civil liberties are a thing of the past, and the whole nation is run by the iron fist of High Chancellor Adam Sutler (John Hurt). Enter V (Hugo Weaving), a one-time political dissident whose body has been radically altered by horrific genetic experiments conducted by the government on many of its political prisoners in a secret detention center. V is at once a freedom fighter, a poet, a master swordsman, and a madman. He spends the entire movie concealed behind a Guy Fawkes mask and under a page-boy wig. In the course of the movie, of course, we're made to understand why.

In the course of his clash with the government, V rescues and is rescued by a twenty-something employee of a state-run television station, Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman). He pulls off a particularly daring raid on a television station, sending an anti-government broadcast all across London which sets the police, led by Inspector Finch (Stephen Rea), on his trail. Apparently, he plans to blow up Parliament on November 5 of the next year, just as historical figure Guy Fawkes attempted to do in the 1600s.

What follows is the unravelling of the mystery of who V is and how he came to be, as well as his rather intimate relationship to the government and its dark secrets.

Writer Alan Moore has openly disowned this movie, and although it is entertaining in its own right, it is easy to see why. The problem posed, really, is an ideological one. I've never actually read it, but I've heard that Moore's original graphic novel juxtaposed fascism against anarchy. V was not out to restore people's civil liberties, but simply to destroy the establishment and replace it with its antithesis. V is an anti-hero, in short, and this is evident even in his relationship with Evey, which, although still somewhat dark in the movie, has apparently been romanticized considerably from its original incarnation in the comics.

The problem here is that, rather than preserve the integrity of Alan Moore's original vision, the Wachowskis would rather preserve their own message that Bush is the devil incarnate, so they refuse to saddle V with character quirks such as moral ambiguity. V, a man who wants to blow up buildings and who murders at least two dozen people in the course of the film, is depicted as a man on the side of the angels, which is actually somewhat dangerous.

A good character to compare V to, if only because they both are anti-heroes, is Tom Hanks' world-weary hitman in The Road to Perdition (also a comic-book adaptation). Never once did Sam Mendes and screenwriter David Self try to convince us that Hanks' character is anything other than a killer. He's a sympathetic character, to be sure, but he is a bad guy who does bad things, whose fate at the end fo the movie is practically pre-ordained. That we identify with him and his moral quandary is one of the movie's triumphs.

V, by contrast, is even more murderous than Tom Hanks' hitman, but it is clear from the music, from the lighting and dialogue that we are meant to cheer him on. That is one train I just cannot ride.

Still, in terms of action and pacing, both the cast and crew acquit themselves well. Natalie Portman is effectively the eyes and ears of the audience, and she carries the film admirably, even though her English accent seems a little spotty here and there. Hugo Weaving was quite well-cast as V, especially considering that the mask he perpetually wears is sometimes as difficult to watch as it undoubtedly was for him to act behind. John Hurt, who plays the movie's least fleshed out character, tries to make do with what he has, but he can't elevate Sutler beyond the pasteboard figure that the script makes him out to be.

The irony of the Wachowski brothers efforts is, given how blatant the movie is in its intentions, it's likely that the only people who will even go and see it are the people already inclined to hate Bush, so essentially they'll be preaching to the choir.

This movie certainly has some entertainment value, but it's not nearly as brave as its makers would like to believe.

On UP Grads Winning Beauty Pageants

Maybe it's the snob in me (who I didn't even know existed, incidentally), but I personally feel slighted by the sudden boom in beauty queens who graduated from my old alma mater, UP Diliman. It's funny how, when a law school classmate of mine joined the BB. Pilipinas contest in 2001 and won, I was one of those cheering her on, but after seeing several more of them join, and seeing two them win in as many years, I find myself bothered.

The latest winner, Lia Ramos, who happened to finish the same undergraduate course as I did (Political Science) recently defended beauty pageants, saying that they aren't exploitative. While I'll leave it to Gabriela and similarly oriented groups to debate that point, my concern is a tad different. I can't help but feel that beauty pageants, in their own way, keep us in the dark ages when it comes to appreciating true beauty.

Thanks to instantaneous communications technology, we find ourselves bombarded with more and more sensory stimulants by the day, and as a result, appearances seem to matter more than anything. Individuality remains a subversive concept, which has even been hijacked by these asshole clothing companies that purport to sell it on their racks.

In this day and age of bulimia and insecurity, it is important that people should be reminded that looks aren't an all important thing. To my mind, there is no one better to lead this charge than those more enlightened among us, namely the intelligensia (if I've misspelled this, someone please tell me). In my honest opinion, UP grads should be at the forefront of such a group.

It strikes me as a tad off, therefore, that UP grads (among them a lawyer and a poli sci grad, for Pete's sake) seem to tackle things from a completely different direction! Instead of distinguishing themselves in their field by championing environmental causes or something truly significant like that, they're joining contests that before anything else place emphasis on physical beauty! They explain that this is a way to put themselves on the map and therefore get people's attention so that they can share whatever advocacy it is they want to push. And then there's all that self-confidence stuff.

Well, I can't help but feel that there are plenty of other ways by which such obviously intelligent people can make an impact in society, particularly when they are of such phenomenal academic pedigree and are drop-dead gorgeous to boot. They don't really have to try to so hard to work within the system because the system is already skewed in their favor. Beauty and brains, sad to say, trumps plain old brains, really. So why bother putting even more premium on appearance by joining these contests? It's starting to get annoying.

Well, maybe it's just the snob in me. It only started bothering me, after all, when UP grads started figuring so prominently in these things.

Traditional Meets Avante-Garde

As a comics fan, I am fond of great stories, more than anything else, and of the creative teams that are responsible for them. I'm not really into "event" books, like Infinite Crisis and its ilk, and truth be told I'm still banging my head on the wall that I paid for two issues of House of M.

The favorite comics in my collection involve writers and artists who I feel are at the top of their game. I treasure my issues of Amazing Spider-Man by J. Michael Straczynski and John Romita Jr, my issues of X-Men by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday, and my issues of Ultimates by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch. I feel these books are more important than megahyped event books because of the way they alter status quos without trying too hard to do it.

It's nice to know, however, that even though the big comics companies are caught up in "universe altering event" mania, that they can still come up with books that stick to the basics, i.e., put a dynamite creative team together and just let them do their work, free of any "change the world" directives.

One such book I'm really looking forward to is "The Eternals," coming this June from renowned writer Neil Gaiman and my all-time favorite comic book artist, John Romita, Jr.

Though just about everyone credits Frank Miller and Alan Moore with revolutionizing the superhero genre, to my mind Neil Gaiman has done more still to win respectability for comic books in general as a legitimate form of literature. I'm fairly certain that it was his work for DC Vertigo that has bridged the gap between "funny books" and literature, especially since he is well known for having achieved a great deal of success writing both. In college, one thing that really struck me about the man was that (as consummately shallow as this may sound) girls read his books. Enjoying his "Sandman" was not just "a guy thing."

John Romita, Jr. on the other hand, is about as traditional a comic-book professional as one can get. He's something of a latter-day Jack Kirby (a comparison which I was not the first to draw) with the exception that he has shown a LOT more versatility than the late "King" of comics. Not only that, but he's proven to be something of an "eternal" himself, considering that his career began all the way back in the seventies, and he's still going strong, still selling books while erstwhile comic greats like Chris Claremont and John Byrne have fallen by the wayside. One of the reasons he's been so enduring is that while he still maintains a distinctive style, there is no denying how remarkably he has been able to reinvent himself over and over with each passing decade. Also, he is according to both fans and his peers, able to tell a story better than anyone else in the industry.

I avoided Marvel 1602 because I had the rather unpleasant impression that the folks at Marvel were trying too hard to pander to Gaiman's penchant for writing strange, off-kilter stuff. Setting the entire Marvel universe in the 17th century was admittedly a novel idea, but it didn't really give us an idea of how Neil Gaiman would write a legitimate, mainstream Marvel book. This new project, however, is completely in continuity and involves an actual (albeit almost unused) character from Marvel's pantheon.

Bearing this in mind, "Eternals" promises to be a true marriage between exemplary traditional comic book storytelling and the virtually haute couture sensibility for which much of Gaiman's work is known.

Of course, not a single page of this series has even been penciled yet, so I don't really want to draw any conclusions until I've finished reading at least one issue, but having enjoyed Gaiman's Death and Stardust and Romita's Daredevil, Amazing Spider-Man and even Wolverine, I'm hard-pressed to imagine how this team will let me down.

Two Out of Five

Every now and then I make it a point to catch all five films nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Best Picture of the Year. I managed to watch all of the films nominated for the 1991, 1998 and 2003 Best Picture Oscar.

This year, I've thus far only managed to catch two of the 2005 nominees: Brokeback Mountain and Munich, excellent movies both.

Munich, which deals with the aftermath of the 1972 massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, is Steven Spielberg's dissertation on the politics of counterterrorism.

It stars Eric Bana as Avner Kaufman, an Israeli tasked by his government to head an underground team of assassins that is to exact Israel's revenge on the plotters of the Munich massacre. Bana is ably supported by a diverse cast of actors, ranging from Amelie's Mathieu Kassovitz to the next James Bond, Daniel Craig, to everyone's favorite character actor, Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush.

The movie chronicles, in almost uncomfortable closeup, the psychological and spiritual journey, and eventual ordeal, that the Israeli team of assassins undergoes as they take out one target after another, encountering harrowing snafus in more than one instance. It's about the senselessness of violence, which, incidentally, is featured quite gratuitously, although it is entirely germane to the story.

With this film, Spielberg reinforces the notion that he does his best work when he isn't saddled with Hollywood heavy hitters and their corresponding egos (the lone exception, in my opinion, being "Minority Report.") The films he made with pre-packaged stars (as opposed to the actor who became a star through his films, Harrison Ford), such as Hook and War of the Worlds fell short in terms of storytelling, mostly because a number of these stars seemed, with every line, to be screaming "hey, look at me, look at me! I'm in a Spielberg movie!"

The actors assembled for this film are not guilty of any such posturing. It is, more than anything else, their performances that drive home Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner's not-so-subtle point that violence only begets violence, and that as vile as the Munich massacre and all the other subsequent acts of terror committed by the PLO were, acts of pure and simple vengeance aren't really any better, especially since they do nothing to solve the real problem. The film doesn't offer its own solutions to the problem, but it does call upon the viewers to think a little harder about what the appropriate response to terrorism should be, instead of just trying to grind its perpetrators into the dirt.

Like Munich, Brokeback Mountain is a film with an agenda. It portrays a gay couple in the American West who, because they cannot live out in the open, steal several moments together over the course of two decades, with their relationship eventually ending in tragedy.

Much has been said about the fact that this movie has become a cultural phenomenon, even though it hasn't really set the box office on fire. All I have to say is, that whatever attention it's getting, it deserves.

The funny thing about it is that my stance on homosexual relationships hasn't really changed. I've always been a fence-sitter on the subject, and I don't see myself campaigning for gay rights just because I was moved by this movie. But for me, Ang Lee's greatest triumph here is that he has crafted a love story substituting a gay couple for a straight one, and pulled it off. It's heartbreaking in the way that few love stories over the last several years have been.

Heath Ledger's Ennis Del Mar is the movie's beating heart. Despite admirable performances by his co-stars, including standout acting by Michelle Williams his miserable wife Alma, this film would not take off without Heath. With minimal dialogue, he conveys to the audience just how much he loves Jake Gyllenhaal's Jack Twist, and how much it tears him up inside that he can't be with him in the way he would like.

Yes, on a macro-level, the movie says that "if only Ennis and Jack were allowed to freely share their love, then all this tragedy could have been avoided," but the truth is that such a sweeping argument is undercut by a lot of incidents in the story, most of them involving Jack's promiscuity. The film's real virtue is its very intimate, personal love story that just happens to be between two men.

These two movies don't exactly purport to change the world, but they do provide a great deal of food for thought. People who say the film industry is in a state of decline should definitely go out and see these films (and rent Sideways, for good measure).