I'm not entirely sure, but I think the first time one major Hollywood franchise collided with another in the same year was the summer of 1989, when the first Batman went up against Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Sure, 1984 had seen the release of three major studio films, Ghostbusters from Columbia Pictures, Beverly Hills Cop and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom from Paramount, but the concept of the franchise hadn't quite evolved into what it is now (although there had already been three Star Wars films and E.T., the idea of using movies to move enormous amounts of merchandise was not nearly as widely used as it is today). Besides, the only place where one could read about Batman trouncing the third Indiana Jones film at the box-office was in the trade paper, Variety, or in the occasional story the mainstream media would run on the subject.
These days, however, with the internet offering people all around the world instantaneous, real-time, daily access to box-office receipts, suddenly everyone can find out how this year's Batman installment (the sixth, although it amounts to a "reboot" of the 1989 version which featured the first Batman/Joker showdown) fares against this year's Indiana Jones. And suddenly, for some strange reason, it suddenly matters to fans how much money their movie will make in relation to another movie, even if they won't receive a single cent of it.
I've written derisively about fanboys here and elsewhere so I'm not particularly interested in flogging that particular dead horse right now (at least, not till I get some momentum going). What I would like to offer is my own personal opinion on the whole horserace phenomenon when it comes to predicting and even just following box-office results.
The first time I was exposed to a box-office horserace in the internet age was when the inaugural Spider-Man film pulled off a major upset against the second Star Wars prequel, Attack of the Clones. I was just happy to see Spider-Man on the screen for the first time in the many, many years I'd been following his adventures, and didn't care at first how well his movie fared relative to another one, except of course that I wanted the film to succeed.
That's what I'm about: box-office results of a movie in their absolute sense, and not relative to the earnings of other movies. Monitoring such results has been my hobby, my addiction, for as long I've had hobbies. Thanks to the internet it's one I'm able to enjoy free of charge nowadays. In the pre-internet age I can even remember following the weekly grosses in issues of Variety that I read off the rack ;) way back in 1990, if not earlier.
Before too long, though, I found myself genuinely irked that a lot of fans on the internet even in the mainstream media were "shouting down" Spider-Man, saying that there was no way it could possibly gross more revenue than the latest Star Wars installment. None of the makers of either film was trying to sell one movie as an alternative to another (there were interview statements to this effect, in fact) but for some reason fans and wags had just seen the need to make their more-or-less simultaneous release as a boxing match of some kind, or, like I said, a horse race, one that Spider-Man eventually won. For my part, I was gratified, but when I think about it, I probably wouldn't even have cared if none of the Star Wars diehards had started shooting off their mouths (or keyboards).
Since then, franchise showdowns have been a fairly regular thing at the multiplexes, but most studio execs are smart enough to space their releases because they realize that if they try to open against a big movie, everybody loses, including them. So, they're not really being diplomatic by saying "we'd love to see both movies succeed;" to an extent it's sincere.
It's not the studios, whether Paramount, Sony, Universal or Warner Brothers that are contriving these ridiculous contests, it's the twelve-year-old (actual or equivalent, sorry, I couldn't resist) fanboys who are stirred up by trashy magazines/websites like Entertainment Weekly or comingsoon.net into creating this whole mentality.
2008 is yet another year for a horse race, it seems. The Dark Knight, the sequel to the successful 2005 reboot of the Batman franchise, Batman Begins, is arguably the season's, if not the year's most anticipated movie. Iron Man, the long-awaited adaptation of the popular comic book character, is what kicked the summer season off. Dark Knight comes out in July, Iron Man opened in May to stellar grosses and reviews. Judging by their release dates, these movies were intended to co-exist rather than compete. What the makers of Iron Man, a character relatively unknown to non-comic book fans, achieved is genuinely impressive: sustained box-office revenue over an eight-week period and really good reviews, which is rare in this day of first weekend bonanzas and second weekend dropoffs and critical panning. Whether or not TDK earns the highest grosses this summer, Iron Man is still an unqualified success. Still, articles on the internet pointing out this feat are invariably met with cries of "TDK will own" or worse, "TDK will pwn." It says something about the intelligence quotient of these people that they adopt typographical errors as their catchphrases.
I actually believe, given the buzz and some early reviews, that TDK will be every bit as successful as fanboys anticipate it to be, but that's not really the point. I doubt I'll be able to have that silent moment of gratification I had when Star Wars: Episode II failed to match the grosses of Spider-Man, but one thing I will be able to take solace in is knowing that the makers of Iron Man have made more money than most, if not all of those idiotic fanboys will ever make in their lifetimes, for all their harping about the as-yet-non-existent grosses of The Dark Knight.
It's as if fanboys want the products they love to monopolize success, not having the brains to realize that in a four-month summer movie season, there's more than enough of it to go around. It was the case with Star Wars, and was the case with The Dark Knight. If Marvel has its zombies, well I guess DC now has its drones who, without even receiving a red cent from Warner Brothers and without even being asked to, are slavishly marketing a film they haven't even seen yet. It doesn't help that the media, online mainly, contrives a competition when there is none.
Yes, the horserace mentality is really and truly stupid, but I guess entertainment "journalists" have to have something to write about every season besides the latest starlet's trip to rehab.
Still, I could be wrong about saying that it's the media who whips them up into a frenzy; for all I know, these stupid people have been around since time out of mind, and are only finding their voice now thanks to the internet, where stupidity and inanity can at last make itself heard, as witnessed by the fact that I devoted so much time to the topic on this blog. Hehehe
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Sunday, June 08, 2008
One More Time Now...HULK SMASH!
I realize I've been writing about this topic nearly ad nauseam, but with less than a week to go I confess I'm on the edge of my seat to see how The Incredible Hulk will fare at the box office.
Unlike nearly everyone I know, I actually liked Ang Lee's take on the Hulk in 2003. It was principally about repressed anger and pain, which is very much in keeping with the spirit of the character. I know of people who've excoriated the take for not being in keeping with the "Jekyll and Hyde" aspect of the character but in truth the Hulk was never just about that gray-skinned, Peter David-penned run. The movie had its missteps, and it DID take the Hulk a bit too long to finally appear, but Lee's heart, to use the cliche, was in the right place. And the ILM-generated giant looked a lot more impressive (albeit too large) than some ridiculous, latter-day Lou Ferrigno would have. I've said before and I say it again: I liked it, but I totally get why everyone else didn't. The movie did miss a lot of important marks.
The greenlighting and production of a second film has left a lot of non-fans/casual moviegoers (who are the real moneymakers for movies, no matter what fanboys may claim) scratching their heads, saying why make another one when the first one was so bad? This was not, after all, a franchise that had jumped the rails, like Batman had in 1997 before getting back on track in 2005 with Batman Begins. This was a property that stalled right out the gate.
Well, there's more than one answer to that, and fans know them. First of all, the Hulk is a Marvel property that's just too important to let die with one misguided adaptation. In the hierarchy of publicly known Marvel characters, i.e., those whose appeal stretches beyond comic-book geeks, he is second only to Spider-Man in terms of name recognition, thanks in large part to the 1970s TV show which played in syndication all around the world many, many years after it had run its course. Considering Marvel reacquired the rights to this truly beloved character it makes sense that they would want to erase the terrible impression Ang Lee left on most audiences five years ago.
Second, and this is clear from the events in Iron Man, Marvel is attempting something incredibly ambitious that goes far beyond the casual and rather limp references to Gotham City and Metropolis made in the Superman and Batman movies: they're looking to achieve a cohesive Marvel Universe and a movie that ties it all together with The Avengers. No, this is not the rancid adaptation, starring Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman, of the old British TV show but a realization of one of the most important comic books in Marvel's publishing line. As a founding member of the original Avengers' team in the 60s and as a critical story point in the 2002 re-imagination of the Avengers' story, The Ultimates, Bruce Banner/Hulk is integral to the telling of the Avengers' origin. THAT is why his story must be redone, and done right this time.
It's not likely that non-fans will understand this imperative, which is why Marvel are working overtime to sell the fact that Robert Downey Jr., still basking in the runaway success of Iron Man, so far the year's biggest box-office hit, appears in The Incredible Hulk as Tony Stark. They bided their time with releasing footage due to concerns over the computer-generated imagery, but now they've pulled out all the marketing stops, with one trailer and internet clip after another. If the responses over at aintitcoolnews.com are any indication, Marvel and effectively banished the memory of the negative buzz building up to the first Hulk movie that followed its infamous "tank throwing" superbowl ad. The fanboys, as seems clear from the messageboards, are pumped for this.
As with Iron Man, the warm reception this movie is getting from fans appears to stem from the fact that there was no attempt to sanitize it for kids. This is a movie that makes full use of its PG-13 rating because its makers know that's where the core audience lies, and the story is much better for this lack of artificial and unnecessary restraint. A PG or (gasp) G-rated Lord of the Rings would have been completely inutile, and the same goes with the stories of the Hulk, who in his Forty-six years of publication has cut a huge swath of destruction across the Marvel Universe and who, it has long been established, is neither hero nor villain but just a misunderstood man who wants to be left alone. If the reviews I've read are to be believed, the new crew responsible for this movie had understood this concept a lot more than Lee and his crew did. And the fans are cheering in the streets.
The big fat question mark, however, remains; what do the non-fans think of this? It's the non-fans who spell the difference between one-weekend wonder and sustained box-office smash. It's the non-fans who made sure Iron Man was more than just another superhero movie that does all of its business in the first fifteen days or so. Having won over the fans (or at least their anointed representatives), with their advance screenings of The Incredible Hulk, Marvel now faces the task of winning over the people who are still wondering (and I've met them) why there's a second Hulk movie in the first place. It won't even be enough for a good opening weekend, to show that this movie's truly exorcised the demons of its predecessor it's got to show some legs.
I'm still holding my breath, because I dearly want this new movie to be GOOD.
Unlike nearly everyone I know, I actually liked Ang Lee's take on the Hulk in 2003. It was principally about repressed anger and pain, which is very much in keeping with the spirit of the character. I know of people who've excoriated the take for not being in keeping with the "Jekyll and Hyde" aspect of the character but in truth the Hulk was never just about that gray-skinned, Peter David-penned run. The movie had its missteps, and it DID take the Hulk a bit too long to finally appear, but Lee's heart, to use the cliche, was in the right place. And the ILM-generated giant looked a lot more impressive (albeit too large) than some ridiculous, latter-day Lou Ferrigno would have. I've said before and I say it again: I liked it, but I totally get why everyone else didn't. The movie did miss a lot of important marks.
The greenlighting and production of a second film has left a lot of non-fans/casual moviegoers (who are the real moneymakers for movies, no matter what fanboys may claim) scratching their heads, saying why make another one when the first one was so bad? This was not, after all, a franchise that had jumped the rails, like Batman had in 1997 before getting back on track in 2005 with Batman Begins. This was a property that stalled right out the gate.
Well, there's more than one answer to that, and fans know them. First of all, the Hulk is a Marvel property that's just too important to let die with one misguided adaptation. In the hierarchy of publicly known Marvel characters, i.e., those whose appeal stretches beyond comic-book geeks, he is second only to Spider-Man in terms of name recognition, thanks in large part to the 1970s TV show which played in syndication all around the world many, many years after it had run its course. Considering Marvel reacquired the rights to this truly beloved character it makes sense that they would want to erase the terrible impression Ang Lee left on most audiences five years ago.
Second, and this is clear from the events in Iron Man, Marvel is attempting something incredibly ambitious that goes far beyond the casual and rather limp references to Gotham City and Metropolis made in the Superman and Batman movies: they're looking to achieve a cohesive Marvel Universe and a movie that ties it all together with The Avengers. No, this is not the rancid adaptation, starring Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman, of the old British TV show but a realization of one of the most important comic books in Marvel's publishing line. As a founding member of the original Avengers' team in the 60s and as a critical story point in the 2002 re-imagination of the Avengers' story, The Ultimates, Bruce Banner/Hulk is integral to the telling of the Avengers' origin. THAT is why his story must be redone, and done right this time.
It's not likely that non-fans will understand this imperative, which is why Marvel are working overtime to sell the fact that Robert Downey Jr., still basking in the runaway success of Iron Man, so far the year's biggest box-office hit, appears in The Incredible Hulk as Tony Stark. They bided their time with releasing footage due to concerns over the computer-generated imagery, but now they've pulled out all the marketing stops, with one trailer and internet clip after another. If the responses over at aintitcoolnews.com are any indication, Marvel and effectively banished the memory of the negative buzz building up to the first Hulk movie that followed its infamous "tank throwing" superbowl ad. The fanboys, as seems clear from the messageboards, are pumped for this.
As with Iron Man, the warm reception this movie is getting from fans appears to stem from the fact that there was no attempt to sanitize it for kids. This is a movie that makes full use of its PG-13 rating because its makers know that's where the core audience lies, and the story is much better for this lack of artificial and unnecessary restraint. A PG or (gasp) G-rated Lord of the Rings would have been completely inutile, and the same goes with the stories of the Hulk, who in his Forty-six years of publication has cut a huge swath of destruction across the Marvel Universe and who, it has long been established, is neither hero nor villain but just a misunderstood man who wants to be left alone. If the reviews I've read are to be believed, the new crew responsible for this movie had understood this concept a lot more than Lee and his crew did. And the fans are cheering in the streets.
The big fat question mark, however, remains; what do the non-fans think of this? It's the non-fans who spell the difference between one-weekend wonder and sustained box-office smash. It's the non-fans who made sure Iron Man was more than just another superhero movie that does all of its business in the first fifteen days or so. Having won over the fans (or at least their anointed representatives), with their advance screenings of The Incredible Hulk, Marvel now faces the task of winning over the people who are still wondering (and I've met them) why there's a second Hulk movie in the first place. It won't even be enough for a good opening weekend, to show that this movie's truly exorcised the demons of its predecessor it's got to show some legs.
I'm still holding my breath, because I dearly want this new movie to be GOOD.
Saturday, June 07, 2008
Hollywood's Summer of the Forty-something
It's funny how, this time six years ago, journalists were talking about how the actors chosen to lead big-budget Hollywood films were getting younger and younger, with stars like Tobey Maguire, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck headlining some of the summer season's biggest movies. This trend was presaged as a sort of "passing of the torch" with Hollywood's traditional rugged action stars like Stallone and Schwarzenegger basically making way for a much younger and much less...masculine set of action or cinema heroes.
Youth was the catchphrase of many a writer about the future of Hollywood, with twenty and thirty-something stars, directors and writers being tipped to inherit moviemaking in general from the aging stars of yesteryear, including old fogeys like Tom Hanks and Cruise and Harrison Ford. Considering that among the up-and-comers included some pretty awful excuses for actors like Paul Walker, Elijah Wood, Hayden Christensen, Jessica Alba and Shia LeBeouf, that future didn't seem particularly bright.
2008, therefore, comes as a huge sigh of relief to those dreading the takeover of these pseudo-performers as it seems that audiences aren't quite as youth-obsessed as Hollywood once thought they were.
Three of the year's biggest opening movies are headlined by stars all over 40, with the lead actors of Iron Man, Indiana Jones and Sex and the City Stars all having passed the big four-zero at the least two years ago, and in Indy's case many, many years ago. In stark contrast, movies centered around young heroes like Speed Racer and the Narnia sequel, Prince Caspian, have conspicuously floundered at the box-office, in the case of the latter, despite the very healthy grosses of its predecessor. There's no real science to my analysis but I can say categorically that it should be clear to studio execs that audiences don't gravitate towards a given movie based on the age of its stars. There's no need to cast a twenty-something unknown as Tony Stark when a forty-something Robert Downey Jr., baggage and all, is available and perfect for the role. There's no need to re-cast Indiana Jones just yet (pay attention, George Lucas) when everyone still likes Harrison Ford just fine in the role. And there's no need to flog us with useless romantic comedies, which are now a shadow of what they used to be, starring Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan (though I honestly wouldn't mind seeing more of Katherine Heigl) when Sarah Jessica Parker, horseface and all, and her menopausal or almost menopausal cohorts can still sell their movie like hotcakes.
I've nothing against movies with young people; heck at 33 I'm still within the demographic that is still pleased by a younger-skewing cast. But lately I've found myself extremely disheartened with Hollywood's tendency to go young, which is basically dictated by sequel math, i.e., how much older the actor will be by the nth installment of a potential blockbuster franchise, and not by the actual talent the actor has. Had this math been strictly applied, the 43-year-old Downey Jr. would surely have seen his chances of snagging the role of Stark dwindle, with the film's director Jon Favreau already declaring he wanted to find the next Brandon (shudder) Routh.
Of course, there are some roles that need actors of a certain age (the Harry Potter gang and even Spider-Man come to mind) but for a while Hollywood apparently figured its future lay in casting young actors no matter the role, and no matter how bad the actor. Iron Man would have been a perfect example of that logic, and thank God it isn't. Thank God Superman Returns now must suffer that ignominy.
Incidentally, I cringe at the thought that Captain America, whose movie has the potential to be the next Spider-Man, has already been cast based on the alleged actor's looks and not on his talent or resume. Someone posting on some messageboard claims to already know (though he wasn't telling) and said only "he has the physicality to pull it off" which basically sent a chill down my spine.
Marvel, and every other moviemaking outfit out there, should take down notes about how this summer is going; pandering to sequels and future installments is NOT the way to go, while casting actors who are RIGHT for their parts, WHATEVER their age, IS.
Youth was the catchphrase of many a writer about the future of Hollywood, with twenty and thirty-something stars, directors and writers being tipped to inherit moviemaking in general from the aging stars of yesteryear, including old fogeys like Tom Hanks and Cruise and Harrison Ford. Considering that among the up-and-comers included some pretty awful excuses for actors like Paul Walker, Elijah Wood, Hayden Christensen, Jessica Alba and Shia LeBeouf, that future didn't seem particularly bright.
2008, therefore, comes as a huge sigh of relief to those dreading the takeover of these pseudo-performers as it seems that audiences aren't quite as youth-obsessed as Hollywood once thought they were.
Three of the year's biggest opening movies are headlined by stars all over 40, with the lead actors of Iron Man, Indiana Jones and Sex and the City Stars all having passed the big four-zero at the least two years ago, and in Indy's case many, many years ago. In stark contrast, movies centered around young heroes like Speed Racer and the Narnia sequel, Prince Caspian, have conspicuously floundered at the box-office, in the case of the latter, despite the very healthy grosses of its predecessor. There's no real science to my analysis but I can say categorically that it should be clear to studio execs that audiences don't gravitate towards a given movie based on the age of its stars. There's no need to cast a twenty-something unknown as Tony Stark when a forty-something Robert Downey Jr., baggage and all, is available and perfect for the role. There's no need to re-cast Indiana Jones just yet (pay attention, George Lucas) when everyone still likes Harrison Ford just fine in the role. And there's no need to flog us with useless romantic comedies, which are now a shadow of what they used to be, starring Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan (though I honestly wouldn't mind seeing more of Katherine Heigl) when Sarah Jessica Parker, horseface and all, and her menopausal or almost menopausal cohorts can still sell their movie like hotcakes.
I've nothing against movies with young people; heck at 33 I'm still within the demographic that is still pleased by a younger-skewing cast. But lately I've found myself extremely disheartened with Hollywood's tendency to go young, which is basically dictated by sequel math, i.e., how much older the actor will be by the nth installment of a potential blockbuster franchise, and not by the actual talent the actor has. Had this math been strictly applied, the 43-year-old Downey Jr. would surely have seen his chances of snagging the role of Stark dwindle, with the film's director Jon Favreau already declaring he wanted to find the next Brandon (shudder) Routh.
Of course, there are some roles that need actors of a certain age (the Harry Potter gang and even Spider-Man come to mind) but for a while Hollywood apparently figured its future lay in casting young actors no matter the role, and no matter how bad the actor. Iron Man would have been a perfect example of that logic, and thank God it isn't. Thank God Superman Returns now must suffer that ignominy.
Incidentally, I cringe at the thought that Captain America, whose movie has the potential to be the next Spider-Man, has already been cast based on the alleged actor's looks and not on his talent or resume. Someone posting on some messageboard claims to already know (though he wasn't telling) and said only "he has the physicality to pull it off" which basically sent a chill down my spine.
Marvel, and every other moviemaking outfit out there, should take down notes about how this summer is going; pandering to sequels and future installments is NOT the way to go, while casting actors who are RIGHT for their parts, WHATEVER their age, IS.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
If It's Broke, Reboot It
BLOGGER'S NOTE: I'm thinking of focusing this blog's posts on pop-culture/movie reviews and that sort of thing because my own personal/political rants don't really have any place here; I can post them on my multiply blog anyway.
Most people think the concept of the movie franchise "reboot" started with 2005's Batman Begins. As I posted a couple of years ago, that isn't necessarily the case. In 2002, Paramount Pictures, despite the success of the last installment of the Jack Ryan franchise, Clear and Present Danger starring Harrison Ford in 1994, decided to go with a younger actor, namely Ben Affleck, for what should have been a subsequent installment as far as the books were concerned, The Sum of All Fears. The film obviously couldn't have been a sequel, but because, storywise, it took place later than the other books, it couldn't really be treated as a prequel either. And it was too soon since the last one to be considered a re-make, especially since the book had never been adapted before. It was thus that the reboot was born.
Although Sum may have flown under most people's radar (and it would, next to the much more high profile Batman Begins and even the James Bond reboot, Casino Royale) it did pretty respectable business back in its day, dislodging Star Wars: Episode II from the top spot of the U.S. box office and grossing more than $100 million dollars in the U.S. alone. It validated the concept of the reboot and now it appears to be en vogue, with the handlers of many a flagging franchise at least toying with the idea.
One of those handlers, the newly-formed Marvel Studios, appears to have adopted that idea for one of their own franchises, the Hulk. Though I personally liked Ang Lee's decidedly unconventional take on the character in 2003, I can certainly understand and sympathize with the people who hated the movie. Still enjoying the runaway success of Iron Man, Marvel hopes, with The Incredible Hulk, the second feature film based on the titular property in five years, to rub out the box-office stench from Universal Pictures' failed attempt to establish the Hulk as a franchise.
It's actually somewhat laughable how Marvel tries to distance themselves from the word "reboot" even though they've already categorically admitted to hitting "the reset button" for this franchise as if they're ashamed to admit it. To an extent I understand their leeriness; it's only been five years since the last film, and unlike the Ryan, Batman or Bond franchises, there's been one other film so far. A reboot, therefore, feels too premature, even though a sequel to a film that many people hated obviously feels like a bad idea. So they're caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
Whatever they want to call it, though, this film represents something very important for the studio as they try to build on the momentum they started earlier this summer with Iron Man. This film is meant to make a statement, namely that "the studio did it wrong; now that we have creative control, we'll do it right."
And they've hit a lot of right notes so far, from the casting of Edward Norton (who was actually one of Ang Lee's first choices for the role for his 2003 film) as Bruce Banner to the inclusion of character actor Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction) as Emil Blonksy, better known to comic book fans as the Abomination.
Having been burned by the backlash they got for the computer-generated imagery of the first film (which in my opinion was actually pretty good), Marvel held off releasing footage of the new Hulk as long as they possibly could while they tweaked the shots, and were accused of refusing to market the movie. Of course, when they finally did release the trailer and several minutes of action footage besides, they still got the inevitable and utterly predictable fanboy bitching about how fake the CGI looked, as though it's possible to make a "real" looking nine-foot, 1500-pound green man. Maybe my post flipping the bird to fanboys needs updating (especially with all the Indiana Jones bashing that's been going around). Still, even the CGI-bashing fanboys have acknowledged that from what they've seen this film is definitely a departure in tone from the previous film and professed some optimism. Of course, fanboys are the only barometer so far because only fanboys love to shoot their mouths off about movies they haven't yet seen. Everyone else, like critics and audiences, weighs in after they've seen the film.
As a Marvel fan I dearly want this film to be good and may even forgive it some of its shortcomings, whatever they may be. I was happy that Iron Man restored some luster to the Marvel brand after the thorough disappointments that X-Men 3 and Spider-Man 3 turned out to be, and while I seriously doubt that The Incredible Hulk will ascend to those heights, critically and commercially, I at least hope it will be good. The Hulk, I think, is a beloved enough property to justify a second attempt, as soon as it may seem. There's no denying though, that for all their careful casting choices and aggressive marketing at this stage, Marvel are still facing an uphill battle. Still, if they win it, what a victory it will be.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Paramount Pictures: Credit Where Credit Isn't Due
I guess one of the downsides of being a small, starting-up outfit is that when your product has the name of a bigger group attached to it, people will remember the bigger name.
That's exactly the case with Marvel Studios, which is enjoying an enormous amount of success with their inaugural offering, Iron Man, the first of several films Paramount Pictures is releasing pursuant to a distributorship agreement with Marvel for several of their self-made films. Marvel is the big winner here, having made a movie entirely on their own terms, creatively speaking, and now laughing all the way to the bank because of it. After all, they only have to pay a relatively nominal fee to Paramount for its help in marketing and releasing the film, as opposed to the lion's share they previously had to give up to studios like Sony Pictures and 20th Century Fox. This bodes extremely well for future self-made movies, like Captain America (which Paramount may help finance) and the strongly hinted Avengers movie.
What irks me a little, though, is how in some of the mainstream and internet press, Iron Man is apparently being billed as a Paramount picture. Not just a Paramount release, mind you, although some media outlets have it right. No, some writers seem content to just chuck the Marvel brand aside and assume that Paramount came up with this picture with a little help from Marvel, much like Sony did the Spider-Man movies or Fox did the X-Men ones. For example, the very industrious (and credible) box office tabulator Gitesh Pandya of boxofficeguru.com, on the eve of the release of inevitable box-office juggernaut Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull is hailing the possibility that Paramount may be the first studio to "generate" two movies that grossed over $300 million dollars in a year two years in a row.
Now, I understand that for purposes of tabulating box-office results here it makes sense to just group movies according to their distributors, but this annoys me for a very specific reason and it's not just because Marvel deserves full credit (which they do) for having made, not released, the best comic book movie ever to the complete exclusion of Paramount Pictures.
This annoys me because quite frankly, Paramount deserves little to no credit for actually making the movies that propelled it to the top of the charts last year as the studio with the biggest box-office, and even less credit for what is currently the highest grossing movie of 2008 (at $223 million and counting).
Sometime in 2005 or 2006, Paramount bought Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks studios, and essentially inherited all of the movies that were in the pipeline at the time, including eventual box-office smashes like Transformers, Shrek 3, Blades of Glory, and A Bee Movie, or all four of the movies they released in 2007 that grossed over $100 million. What did they do in-house that year? Anyone remember Mark Wahlberg's Shooter? No, I didn't think so.
Before 2007 they had turkeys like Mission Impossible 3 and War of the Worlds (which was co-produced by Dreamworks). If anything, it's an article about War of the Worlds that even prompted this rather indulgent post.
Back in 2005, WoTW essentially opened to a $100 million weekend over the Fourth of July Holiday frame, nearly $80 million shy of the benchmark that had been set the previous year by Spider-Man 2. When asked how he felt about their biggest tentpole movie for that year basically falling far short of the record, some suit at Paramount basically said "this isn't just some comic book property, it's a beloved classic" or some really insufferable bullshit like that and went on to suggest that WoTW would have the legs to outgross SM2...which it didn't.
And NOW, after essentially basking in the success of properties they bought from Spielberg rather than making their own movies (the vast majority of which have tanked since the year 2000, when Tom Cruise was still able to sell Mission Impossible: 2), Paramount are receiving credit for the success of..."some comic book property?!?"
Hey, Pandya and all you other misinformed writers there who will probably call Iron Man and Indy Paramount's "one-two punch" of 2008 along with some other movies inherited from Dreamworks like Kung Fu Panda, please get it right: Paramount did not "generate" Iron Man (and arguably not even Indy, which is a Lucas property in the same way that the Star Wars movies are), they simply distributed it. They deserve no more credit for Marvel's inaugural smash hit than Newmarket Films did for The Passion of the Christ. THAT'S a comparison that should make sense to you.
I know Marvel are rolling in the dough right now and need about as much sympathy as a winner of the grand jackpot in the lotto, but the irony here hit me so hard I couldn't help but put in my two cents' worth.
Seriously, Paramount Pictures is enjoying a lot of time in the spotlight these days on the strength of films they either just bought lock, stock and barrel (like all their Dreamworks stuff) or are just distributing. Their formula for success or regaining their long lost box-office glory seems to be to just buy someone else's studio or distribute someone else's movies. When they start ponying up money and/or actual input for movies again, like they did for James Cameron's Titanic many years ago and like they will reputedly do again for Captain America sometime down the line, then maybe they'll deserve all the praise people are now heaping on them for coming up with box-office success.
(Of course, I wouldn't want them to start fucking up Marvel's movies like Sony and Fox did, but a big, fat boost in the production budgets of the movies would be nice...)
That's exactly the case with Marvel Studios, which is enjoying an enormous amount of success with their inaugural offering, Iron Man, the first of several films Paramount Pictures is releasing pursuant to a distributorship agreement with Marvel for several of their self-made films. Marvel is the big winner here, having made a movie entirely on their own terms, creatively speaking, and now laughing all the way to the bank because of it. After all, they only have to pay a relatively nominal fee to Paramount for its help in marketing and releasing the film, as opposed to the lion's share they previously had to give up to studios like Sony Pictures and 20th Century Fox. This bodes extremely well for future self-made movies, like Captain America (which Paramount may help finance) and the strongly hinted Avengers movie.
What irks me a little, though, is how in some of the mainstream and internet press, Iron Man is apparently being billed as a Paramount picture. Not just a Paramount release, mind you, although some media outlets have it right. No, some writers seem content to just chuck the Marvel brand aside and assume that Paramount came up with this picture with a little help from Marvel, much like Sony did the Spider-Man movies or Fox did the X-Men ones. For example, the very industrious (and credible) box office tabulator Gitesh Pandya of boxofficeguru.com, on the eve of the release of inevitable box-office juggernaut Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull is hailing the possibility that Paramount may be the first studio to "generate" two movies that grossed over $300 million dollars in a year two years in a row.
Now, I understand that for purposes of tabulating box-office results here it makes sense to just group movies according to their distributors, but this annoys me for a very specific reason and it's not just because Marvel deserves full credit (which they do) for having made, not released, the best comic book movie ever to the complete exclusion of Paramount Pictures.
This annoys me because quite frankly, Paramount deserves little to no credit for actually making the movies that propelled it to the top of the charts last year as the studio with the biggest box-office, and even less credit for what is currently the highest grossing movie of 2008 (at $223 million and counting).
Sometime in 2005 or 2006, Paramount bought Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks studios, and essentially inherited all of the movies that were in the pipeline at the time, including eventual box-office smashes like Transformers, Shrek 3, Blades of Glory, and A Bee Movie, or all four of the movies they released in 2007 that grossed over $100 million. What did they do in-house that year? Anyone remember Mark Wahlberg's Shooter? No, I didn't think so.
Before 2007 they had turkeys like Mission Impossible 3 and War of the Worlds (which was co-produced by Dreamworks). If anything, it's an article about War of the Worlds that even prompted this rather indulgent post.
Back in 2005, WoTW essentially opened to a $100 million weekend over the Fourth of July Holiday frame, nearly $80 million shy of the benchmark that had been set the previous year by Spider-Man 2. When asked how he felt about their biggest tentpole movie for that year basically falling far short of the record, some suit at Paramount basically said "this isn't just some comic book property, it's a beloved classic" or some really insufferable bullshit like that and went on to suggest that WoTW would have the legs to outgross SM2...which it didn't.
And NOW, after essentially basking in the success of properties they bought from Spielberg rather than making their own movies (the vast majority of which have tanked since the year 2000, when Tom Cruise was still able to sell Mission Impossible: 2), Paramount are receiving credit for the success of..."some comic book property?!?"
Hey, Pandya and all you other misinformed writers there who will probably call Iron Man and Indy Paramount's "one-two punch" of 2008 along with some other movies inherited from Dreamworks like Kung Fu Panda, please get it right: Paramount did not "generate" Iron Man (and arguably not even Indy, which is a Lucas property in the same way that the Star Wars movies are), they simply distributed it. They deserve no more credit for Marvel's inaugural smash hit than Newmarket Films did for The Passion of the Christ. THAT'S a comparison that should make sense to you.
I know Marvel are rolling in the dough right now and need about as much sympathy as a winner of the grand jackpot in the lotto, but the irony here hit me so hard I couldn't help but put in my two cents' worth.
Seriously, Paramount Pictures is enjoying a lot of time in the spotlight these days on the strength of films they either just bought lock, stock and barrel (like all their Dreamworks stuff) or are just distributing. Their formula for success or regaining their long lost box-office glory seems to be to just buy someone else's studio or distribute someone else's movies. When they start ponying up money and/or actual input for movies again, like they did for James Cameron's Titanic many years ago and like they will reputedly do again for Captain America sometime down the line, then maybe they'll deserve all the praise people are now heaping on them for coming up with box-office success.
(Of course, I wouldn't want them to start fucking up Marvel's movies like Sony and Fox did, but a big, fat boost in the production budgets of the movies would be nice...)
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Anime Dialogue
Has anyone ever noticed how consistently awful the dialogue in most mainstream Japanese anime is? I used to think it was a function of the translation, but after hearing dialogue from several different shows I've come to the conclusion that it's now more the rule than the exception in today's serialized Japanese cartoons.
I can pinpoint exactly what it is about the dialogue that bothers me, too: the seemingly inexhaustible need for exposition, either by a bad guy or by an ominous supporting character. At some point in the story, the bad guy/supporting character explains, in rather stilted English when the cartoon is dubbed, an important story point to the hero, who, it seems, cannot otherwise figure anything out for himself. This exposition is punctuated by some extremely pretentious and wholly unbelievable language which seems all the more absurd when enunciated by the voice 'actors' who are either the same awful ones used over and over or different people trained to speak in the same monotonous accent. I used to think most of the English dubbing was done in Canada, but now I think it's done in Asia by people vainly trying their hardest to speak like Westerners. My computer is not facing the TV, but when I'm on it I can tell if the channel on is Animax from both the stilted (Canadian? Japanese?) accents of the characters and their ludicrous English they're spouting.
This character monologuing undermines the individual shows and the genre in several ways; first it violates one of the first principles of storytelling: show, don't tell. Considering that the medium here is a visual one, the storytelling deficiency betrayed by such heavy reliance on this poor excuse for 'dialogue' is all the more glaring and the irony almost too bitter to endure.
Some of the truly great anime, like Akira, relied very little on dialogue except at crucial points in the story, and even then not so much. One seminal work, Ghost in the Shell, was heavy on exposition towards the end where the Puppet Master character explained everything to the Major, and kind of ground the narrative to a halt, but at least not before the movie had hurtled along at two hundred miles an hour with some of the most eye-popping action sequences ever animated. The funny thing is, I don't even know that dialogue that appears midway through the story for exposition is even a Japanese thing; I've seen Japanese cartoons that have gone without it, and although I've seen very few of the legendary Akira Kurosawa's films, I know they weren't really dialogue heavy, either.
There's a reason it's called anime, which incidentally isn't even a Japanese word; it's French, and loosely translated it means alive. The recent wave of dreck polluting Animax and some other channels featuring Japanese cartoons is anything but that.
Second, the reliance on consistently bad writing in lieu of action just goes to show how, just like the American shows they used to stand head and shoulders above, the makers of Japanese cartoons are not in the least bit above cutting corners and sacrificing the quality of their work in the process. Talking heads, after all, are a lot easier to animate than people fighting or running or jumping or doing anything else that could propel the story forward without hitting both the hero and the viewer over the head with some explanation of everything that's going on. It was bad enough when they had Gundam robots just floating around in space on their rocket boots or packs instead of running , throwing punches, swinging their lazer swords or whatever their weapons are. Now, they apparently can't even have people moving around; it's either too expensive or time-consuming, so they just have them stand around and talk most of the time.
I'm no anime connoisseur, but I am familiar with some of the best in the genre like the aforementioned Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo and some of the works of Hayao Miyazaki like Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. That was stuff that was vibrant and alive and made full use of the imagery that was at their disposal. There, the only limits were the imaginations of the writers and animators. These days, apparently there are a lot more considerations weighing them down.
It's kind of absurd that in cannibalizing one of the oldest Japanese cartoons for the big screen, Speed Racer, the Wachowski Brothers have, based on the mostly negative reviews I've read, imported this penchant for expository dialogue in one of the scenes involving the hero listening to...you guessed it...a long monologue by the villain.
This is not what anime should be about, and if this truly is the future of the medium, I honestly hope it leads to its extinction, so that people with a real sense of imagination can take the reins and give us actual anime, not just cartoons.
I can pinpoint exactly what it is about the dialogue that bothers me, too: the seemingly inexhaustible need for exposition, either by a bad guy or by an ominous supporting character. At some point in the story, the bad guy/supporting character explains, in rather stilted English when the cartoon is dubbed, an important story point to the hero, who, it seems, cannot otherwise figure anything out for himself. This exposition is punctuated by some extremely pretentious and wholly unbelievable language which seems all the more absurd when enunciated by the voice 'actors' who are either the same awful ones used over and over or different people trained to speak in the same monotonous accent. I used to think most of the English dubbing was done in Canada, but now I think it's done in Asia by people vainly trying their hardest to speak like Westerners. My computer is not facing the TV, but when I'm on it I can tell if the channel on is Animax from both the stilted (Canadian? Japanese?) accents of the characters and their ludicrous English they're spouting.
This character monologuing undermines the individual shows and the genre in several ways; first it violates one of the first principles of storytelling: show, don't tell. Considering that the medium here is a visual one, the storytelling deficiency betrayed by such heavy reliance on this poor excuse for 'dialogue' is all the more glaring and the irony almost too bitter to endure.
Some of the truly great anime, like Akira, relied very little on dialogue except at crucial points in the story, and even then not so much. One seminal work, Ghost in the Shell, was heavy on exposition towards the end where the Puppet Master character explained everything to the Major, and kind of ground the narrative to a halt, but at least not before the movie had hurtled along at two hundred miles an hour with some of the most eye-popping action sequences ever animated. The funny thing is, I don't even know that dialogue that appears midway through the story for exposition is even a Japanese thing; I've seen Japanese cartoons that have gone without it, and although I've seen very few of the legendary Akira Kurosawa's films, I know they weren't really dialogue heavy, either.
There's a reason it's called anime, which incidentally isn't even a Japanese word; it's French, and loosely translated it means alive. The recent wave of dreck polluting Animax and some other channels featuring Japanese cartoons is anything but that.
Second, the reliance on consistently bad writing in lieu of action just goes to show how, just like the American shows they used to stand head and shoulders above, the makers of Japanese cartoons are not in the least bit above cutting corners and sacrificing the quality of their work in the process. Talking heads, after all, are a lot easier to animate than people fighting or running or jumping or doing anything else that could propel the story forward without hitting both the hero and the viewer over the head with some explanation of everything that's going on. It was bad enough when they had Gundam robots just floating around in space on their rocket boots or packs instead of running , throwing punches, swinging their lazer swords or whatever their weapons are. Now, they apparently can't even have people moving around; it's either too expensive or time-consuming, so they just have them stand around and talk most of the time.
I'm no anime connoisseur, but I am familiar with some of the best in the genre like the aforementioned Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo and some of the works of Hayao Miyazaki like Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. That was stuff that was vibrant and alive and made full use of the imagery that was at their disposal. There, the only limits were the imaginations of the writers and animators. These days, apparently there are a lot more considerations weighing them down.
It's kind of absurd that in cannibalizing one of the oldest Japanese cartoons for the big screen, Speed Racer, the Wachowski Brothers have, based on the mostly negative reviews I've read, imported this penchant for expository dialogue in one of the scenes involving the hero listening to...you guessed it...a long monologue by the villain.
This is not what anime should be about, and if this truly is the future of the medium, I honestly hope it leads to its extinction, so that people with a real sense of imagination can take the reins and give us actual anime, not just cartoons.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Marvel Films' Next Move
Over on my multiply page (apeltala.multiply.com), I basically wrote a review fellating everyone who had anything to do with the brand-spanking-new comic book adaptation, Iron Man, from Robert Downey, Jr. to Stan Winston and ILM to the Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby to Jon Favreau. I'm totally gay for all of those people now for making what I feel is the best comic-book based movie of all time. What I didn't mention in the review, which reached epic lengths, was how totally proud I was of Marvel studios for having successfully put to bed their very first movie as a studio.
Of course, the success of the endeavor will be decided in the coming days as the opening weekend grosses are determined, and more so in the weeks that follow as audiences will determine if the movie is nothing but a one-weekend-wonder (assuming it even achieves that) or a bona fide smash hit. Based on reviews and building internet buzz (generated by people who've already seen it), I'm willing to bet on the latter.
Granting that Marvel does bag its first box office smash right out of the gate, I think they should set in motion a number of things, which may or may not already be on their to-do list:
1. They should start aggressively buying back their properties from the studios they have existing deals with. Spider-Man is pretty much out of the question considering Sony's made billions out of just three movies and have at least another three contracted. Besides, it was Sam Raimi's vision and Sony's laissez faire attitude that were responsible for the thoroughly brilliant first two films and Avi Arad's intervention and desire to pander to fanboys that were responsible for the crapfest that the third movie turned out to be. So I think Sony should be left to their own devices with respect to Spider-Man, even assuming they wouldn't fight tooth and nail to keep him in their stable. Fox, however, has basically ass-raped the X-Men, repeatedly clipping Bryan Singer's wings and churning out the pure dreck that was X-Men 3 two years ago. They also ruined Daredevil and the Fantastic Four even though I actually enjoyed the second FF movie quite a bit. A buy back is definitely in order here, and given Tom Rothman's track record and visible disdain for these properties I wouldn't be surprised if all he'd ask Marvel would be "how much are you willing to pay for them?"
2. They should fast-track the Captain America and Thor movies. After the end credits of Iron Man, Marvel dropped a big-fat letter of intent to make the Avengers movie a reality. This won't happen, though, until the characters of Captain America and Thor, the only other two members of the team whose popularity would, theoretically, support their own movies, are well-established in Marvel's movie-verse. Thing is, Downey, Jr. has well and truly established himself as Iron Man with his portrayal, but the guy's already into his middle age. I give him a seven-year window at the very most before he starts looking ridiculous parading around as a super hero, so if they want to make an Avengers movie, they'd better do it while he's still got spring in his step. Iron Man's done and dusted bring on Cap and Thor and do it quick.
3. In this connection, Marvel should lure new talent. It's rather striking that in the course of over a dozen movies, Marvel have repeated themselves in terms of cast and crew and I don't just mean actors returning for sequels. No, some actors have starred in films based on two different properties, like Rebecca Romijn moonlighting between X-Men and Punisher and Sam Elliot moonlighting between Hulk and Ghost Rider, to name a couple. Worse still, however, is their woefully small stable of writers and directors. After the debacle that was Daredevil, writer/director Mark Steven Johnson shouldn't have been allowed near another Marvel property again, and yet he ended up making lightning strike twice with the comprehensively awful Ghost Rider. Screenwriter Zak Penn may have had a hand in the handsomely crafted X2, but he was also responsible for garbage like Elektra and X3. Despite the bad reception these films have gotten he was given another bite at the Marvel apple with The Incredible Hulk, even though Edward Norton supposedly made some major rewrites. While it makes sense to retain the services of those who've delivered for them, like Sam Raimi and Alvin Sargent, for example, Marvel should really and truly try to keep their talent pool fresh and perpetually growing in order to keep their concepts fresh. The four writers of Iron Man are a pretty good start in the right direction; their script crackles with intensity and intelligence. They, and not Penn, should be given a crack at the inevitable Captain America movie (and please, please get MATT DAMON to play Steve Rogers!).
If their concern is respect for the material, they should know there's no shortage of Hollywood writers and directors out there who'd love to sink their teeth into a Marvel property. They just have to know how to bring them in, and now that they have their own studio, they are free to do just that.
Iron Man could and probably will be the start of something big for Marvel. It could signal their transition from peripheral player to heavyweight contender in Hollywood, and if they are able to gain that foothold with this and their upcoming Hulk movie they should really make the most out of that goodwill because as with so many other things in tinseltown it could well be fleeting.
Of course, the success of the endeavor will be decided in the coming days as the opening weekend grosses are determined, and more so in the weeks that follow as audiences will determine if the movie is nothing but a one-weekend-wonder (assuming it even achieves that) or a bona fide smash hit. Based on reviews and building internet buzz (generated by people who've already seen it), I'm willing to bet on the latter.
Granting that Marvel does bag its first box office smash right out of the gate, I think they should set in motion a number of things, which may or may not already be on their to-do list:
1. They should start aggressively buying back their properties from the studios they have existing deals with. Spider-Man is pretty much out of the question considering Sony's made billions out of just three movies and have at least another three contracted. Besides, it was Sam Raimi's vision and Sony's laissez faire attitude that were responsible for the thoroughly brilliant first two films and Avi Arad's intervention and desire to pander to fanboys that were responsible for the crapfest that the third movie turned out to be. So I think Sony should be left to their own devices with respect to Spider-Man, even assuming they wouldn't fight tooth and nail to keep him in their stable. Fox, however, has basically ass-raped the X-Men, repeatedly clipping Bryan Singer's wings and churning out the pure dreck that was X-Men 3 two years ago. They also ruined Daredevil and the Fantastic Four even though I actually enjoyed the second FF movie quite a bit. A buy back is definitely in order here, and given Tom Rothman's track record and visible disdain for these properties I wouldn't be surprised if all he'd ask Marvel would be "how much are you willing to pay for them?"
2. They should fast-track the Captain America and Thor movies. After the end credits of Iron Man, Marvel dropped a big-fat letter of intent to make the Avengers movie a reality. This won't happen, though, until the characters of Captain America and Thor, the only other two members of the team whose popularity would, theoretically, support their own movies, are well-established in Marvel's movie-verse. Thing is, Downey, Jr. has well and truly established himself as Iron Man with his portrayal, but the guy's already into his middle age. I give him a seven-year window at the very most before he starts looking ridiculous parading around as a super hero, so if they want to make an Avengers movie, they'd better do it while he's still got spring in his step. Iron Man's done and dusted bring on Cap and Thor and do it quick.
3. In this connection, Marvel should lure new talent. It's rather striking that in the course of over a dozen movies, Marvel have repeated themselves in terms of cast and crew and I don't just mean actors returning for sequels. No, some actors have starred in films based on two different properties, like Rebecca Romijn moonlighting between X-Men and Punisher and Sam Elliot moonlighting between Hulk and Ghost Rider, to name a couple. Worse still, however, is their woefully small stable of writers and directors. After the debacle that was Daredevil, writer/director Mark Steven Johnson shouldn't have been allowed near another Marvel property again, and yet he ended up making lightning strike twice with the comprehensively awful Ghost Rider. Screenwriter Zak Penn may have had a hand in the handsomely crafted X2, but he was also responsible for garbage like Elektra and X3. Despite the bad reception these films have gotten he was given another bite at the Marvel apple with The Incredible Hulk, even though Edward Norton supposedly made some major rewrites. While it makes sense to retain the services of those who've delivered for them, like Sam Raimi and Alvin Sargent, for example, Marvel should really and truly try to keep their talent pool fresh and perpetually growing in order to keep their concepts fresh. The four writers of Iron Man are a pretty good start in the right direction; their script crackles with intensity and intelligence. They, and not Penn, should be given a crack at the inevitable Captain America movie (and please, please get MATT DAMON to play Steve Rogers!).
If their concern is respect for the material, they should know there's no shortage of Hollywood writers and directors out there who'd love to sink their teeth into a Marvel property. They just have to know how to bring them in, and now that they have their own studio, they are free to do just that.
Iron Man could and probably will be the start of something big for Marvel. It could signal their transition from peripheral player to heavyweight contender in Hollywood, and if they are able to gain that foothold with this and their upcoming Hulk movie they should really make the most out of that goodwill because as with so many other things in tinseltown it could well be fleeting.
Couldn't Help Myself...
...the One Hundred Dollar toy car has been bought, except it turned out to be an eighty dollar car and a twenty dollar car. Over and above anything else, it was an extended (weeklong) period of stress spent finishing a very time sensitive project that pushed my desire past the point of controlling it. Fortunately, this little exercise in self-punishment paid fairly well so I was able (with the wife's consent, of course), to indulge myself just this once, even if it means a fresh and potentially longer moratorium.
There's really something to be said for buying such a lovely item...two of them, actually. Two different scales of the same car, the Porsche 911 997 GT3, by AUTOart. Probably not necessarily the most responsible way to spend money, but I definitely needed it at the time, having deprived myself of both sleep and time for my day job.
Anyway, a friend and fellow collector told me that the boon and the bane of being a collector, even a 'moderate' as opposed to 'hardcore' one is that no matter how gorgeous or definitively satisfying a piece is when one acquires it, x weeks or months later there will be something even more beautiful just begging to be bought. I know that, deep down, I still have a hankering for that Kyosho 1/18 Audi R8 that I just missed out on the day I bought the 1/18 911 GT3, even though I honestly do believe I got a better deal with the Porsche. I'm actually glad for the lean times I have to endure every now and then because at least the urge gets the temperance it needs. Barring another extremely high-stress, high-income stretch of time...or an insanely large windfall I can see myself putting off buying another big-ticket item (the Audi R8 comes to mind) until December at the very earliest, and I'm pretty sure I know where I'll be able to find one by then, even without the benefit of eBay.
But damned if this collector's itch isn't one of the most formidable forces I've ever had to reckon with in my life. I'm actually glad Matchbox makes such nice models; it's easier to keep the need at bay if I can feed it a little every now and then ;)
There's really something to be said for buying such a lovely item...two of them, actually. Two different scales of the same car, the Porsche 911 997 GT3, by AUTOart. Probably not necessarily the most responsible way to spend money, but I definitely needed it at the time, having deprived myself of both sleep and time for my day job.
Anyway, a friend and fellow collector told me that the boon and the bane of being a collector, even a 'moderate' as opposed to 'hardcore' one is that no matter how gorgeous or definitively satisfying a piece is when one acquires it, x weeks or months later there will be something even more beautiful just begging to be bought. I know that, deep down, I still have a hankering for that Kyosho 1/18 Audi R8 that I just missed out on the day I bought the 1/18 911 GT3, even though I honestly do believe I got a better deal with the Porsche. I'm actually glad for the lean times I have to endure every now and then because at least the urge gets the temperance it needs. Barring another extremely high-stress, high-income stretch of time...or an insanely large windfall I can see myself putting off buying another big-ticket item (the Audi R8 comes to mind) until December at the very earliest, and I'm pretty sure I know where I'll be able to find one by then, even without the benefit of eBay.
But damned if this collector's itch isn't one of the most formidable forces I've ever had to reckon with in my life. I'm actually glad Matchbox makes such nice models; it's easier to keep the need at bay if I can feed it a little every now and then ;)
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Lowering the Bar
I'm of two minds of the recent decision to lower the passing grade of the 2007 Bar Exams. On the one hand, I thank God the Supreme Court saved all those people from the sadism of one or more of the examiners, but on the other hand, I wonder if they haven't done the profession a disservice in the process.
Of course, this is not the first time the bar grade has been lowered.
When he was alive, my grandfather never got tired of telling me how lucky he was to have passed the bar because the grade was lowered in order to accommodate a high profile examinee at the time (I will refrain from giving names). He told me he got something like a 73 or a 74 at a time when the passing grade was kicked down to 70.
That's just one other instance of grade-tweaking in the nearly 100 years of the bar exam, and from what I hear not the only one.
The thing is, I know how absolutely power-drunk and completely unreasonable some law school professors can be, giving students a hard time for no other reason than that they can, no matter what they might tell other people. A lot of bar examiners are cut from the same cloth, and unlike law professors, they cannot be approached after the exam is done and be begged for mercy or reconsideration.
All these things taken into account, yes, the Supreme Court did the right thing.
The question is, if next year, with a whole new batch of examiners, the un-'tweaked' results of the bar are still the same, will the decision to change things around still have been a good one?
And of those who benefitted from the adjustment, how many people actually deserved it?
None of these issues is of any real concern to me, but part of me can't help but wonder either way.
No More Excuses
I've been on moratorium from collecting toy cars for the last six months or so. The moratorium first came into force after I spent in excess of three thousand pesos, or over eighty US dollars, on a 1/18 scale toy version of the Ferrari F2007 that Kimi Raikkonen drove to victory. Since then I've been able to sneak in the occasional P100 Hot Wheels or Matchbox, and last month I managed a P250 purchase of a Shelby Mustang, but my expenses have yet to scale such towering heights again, and will not do so for a little while to come. As far as anything above P500 is concerned it's a big fat nyet.
Fortunately I had settled into "Holy Grail" mode, meaning, that I would save up for that next big push, in this case a 1/18 scale Audi R8 by Kyosho. I'm more than willing to bide my time on this one, because I know there aren't a whole lot of people willing to pony up that kind of money for this thing.
Oddly enough, I comforted myself with the thought that, even while saving up for this glorious coup, I would still be on the lookout for less pricey stuff, namely the Audi R8 and the Porsche 911 GT3, both rendered by Matchbox in gloriously affordable 1/64. I figured that the hunt for these would keep me nice and happy till the big day, whenever that may be.
Well, yesterday I found both Matchbox cars in one fell swoop, and in true fanboy/collector tradition, bought two of each; one to save and one to open.
I'm so deliriously happy with the way the GT3 was done that I even posted a product review of it over on my multiply page. I was of course happy to find the Audi R8, but found the paint job a little disappointing considering that the car has a somewhat patented look with one color for its body and another, highly contrasting color for the aluminum blades covering the massive cooling vents on either side of the car, for example, white body, blue blades, or blue body, silver blades. Matchbox eschewed any such color combinations and just colored the car a plain silver, even though the casting of the car itself is still topnotch for something so small.
I guess my 'problem' now is that I really have no excuse left from swearing off collecting and saving up for 'the big one.' Ah, well...
Fortunately I had settled into "Holy Grail" mode, meaning, that I would save up for that next big push, in this case a 1/18 scale Audi R8 by Kyosho. I'm more than willing to bide my time on this one, because I know there aren't a whole lot of people willing to pony up that kind of money for this thing.
Oddly enough, I comforted myself with the thought that, even while saving up for this glorious coup, I would still be on the lookout for less pricey stuff, namely the Audi R8 and the Porsche 911 GT3, both rendered by Matchbox in gloriously affordable 1/64. I figured that the hunt for these would keep me nice and happy till the big day, whenever that may be.
Well, yesterday I found both Matchbox cars in one fell swoop, and in true fanboy/collector tradition, bought two of each; one to save and one to open.
I'm so deliriously happy with the way the GT3 was done that I even posted a product review of it over on my multiply page. I was of course happy to find the Audi R8, but found the paint job a little disappointing considering that the car has a somewhat patented look with one color for its body and another, highly contrasting color for the aluminum blades covering the massive cooling vents on either side of the car, for example, white body, blue blades, or blue body, silver blades. Matchbox eschewed any such color combinations and just colored the car a plain silver, even though the casting of the car itself is still topnotch for something so small.
I guess my 'problem' now is that I really have no excuse left from swearing off collecting and saving up for 'the big one.' Ah, well...
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Metafiction...Sort of...
I've never had any bones about borrowing from my own personal experience/angst when writing short fiction. I did it a lot when I was younger, and I continue to do so to a more limited extent nowadays, and I'll probably keep on doing it in one form or another depending on the kind of story I'm writing.
But now is the first time I've tried to write with someone else, namely my recently deceased dear friend Jay Tan, as a template, and I've been repeatedly surprised by how hard a task it is proving to be.
Oddly enough, it's not because I'm concerned he might look bad. No, my concern is that he might come across as a two-dimensional, namby-pamby goody-two shoes whose sole cause of misery in life is that the author (me) wants to pile a whole series of misfortunes on him. No, what I hope to do is to borrow a little bit from Shakespeare and create a character who very much shapes his own destiny, in that when things go wrong he has himself to blame and when things go right...well, it's because he did something right. I don't want someone who just gets buffeted about by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune because he's too nice a guy to do anything about it. To create such an insipid character out of such a wonderfully nuanced human being would be a supreme insult, almost as much as if I just made the guy a flat-out asshole.
Even though the character is only loosely based on Jay, and is so unlike him in many respects, (for example, he won't even talk like he did), I still find myself tortured by the thought of creating a pasteboard character one way or the other who doesn't deserve the fate I have in store for him at the end of the story (ah ah aaaahhh, you'll have to read it once it's done...talesfrommasutra.blogspot.com).
Consequently I've done the unthinkable; unable to fully fathom the depth's of Jay's mind, which is now lost to me for the rest of this lifetime, I've infused a little bit of my romantic history into the narrative...my frustrations, my angst.
The original 'inspired by' template now feels a tad tainted, or at the very least diluted, but from where I stand it felt like a necessary evil because I felt like I was up against a creative brick wall.
I'm eleven pages into what I envision to be about a hundred-plus-page novella which I plan to break up into smaller installments to be published online, and I have yet to introduce the other lead character. I can't spend too much time dawdling on this one guy or I'll shoot myself in the foot for sure.
The result, as sick as this may sound, currently feels like a Jay Tan-Jim Arroyo inspired hybrid, or our love child, for those of you whose minds are perpetually in the gutter.
In the end, I'm not trying to create a character that everyone will love because he's such a nice guy or that everyone will hate because he's such an asshole, but someone who people will be able to understand and relate to, no matter how good or bad his actions may be. If I get this across, then I will have honored Jay through this creation.
But now is the first time I've tried to write with someone else, namely my recently deceased dear friend Jay Tan, as a template, and I've been repeatedly surprised by how hard a task it is proving to be.
Oddly enough, it's not because I'm concerned he might look bad. No, my concern is that he might come across as a two-dimensional, namby-pamby goody-two shoes whose sole cause of misery in life is that the author (me) wants to pile a whole series of misfortunes on him. No, what I hope to do is to borrow a little bit from Shakespeare and create a character who very much shapes his own destiny, in that when things go wrong he has himself to blame and when things go right...well, it's because he did something right. I don't want someone who just gets buffeted about by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune because he's too nice a guy to do anything about it. To create such an insipid character out of such a wonderfully nuanced human being would be a supreme insult, almost as much as if I just made the guy a flat-out asshole.
Even though the character is only loosely based on Jay, and is so unlike him in many respects, (for example, he won't even talk like he did), I still find myself tortured by the thought of creating a pasteboard character one way or the other who doesn't deserve the fate I have in store for him at the end of the story (ah ah aaaahhh, you'll have to read it once it's done...talesfrommasutra.blogspot.com).
Consequently I've done the unthinkable; unable to fully fathom the depth's of Jay's mind, which is now lost to me for the rest of this lifetime, I've infused a little bit of my romantic history into the narrative...my frustrations, my angst.
The original 'inspired by' template now feels a tad tainted, or at the very least diluted, but from where I stand it felt like a necessary evil because I felt like I was up against a creative brick wall.
I'm eleven pages into what I envision to be about a hundred-plus-page novella which I plan to break up into smaller installments to be published online, and I have yet to introduce the other lead character. I can't spend too much time dawdling on this one guy or I'll shoot myself in the foot for sure.
The result, as sick as this may sound, currently feels like a Jay Tan-Jim Arroyo inspired hybrid, or our love child, for those of you whose minds are perpetually in the gutter.
In the end, I'm not trying to create a character that everyone will love because he's such a nice guy or that everyone will hate because he's such an asshole, but someone who people will be able to understand and relate to, no matter how good or bad his actions may be. If I get this across, then I will have honored Jay through this creation.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Why I Stopped Collecting Comic Books
It's funny; I actually mentioned the reason why I stopped collecting in my multiply blog, but that was only incidental to a review I wrote of Arnold Arre's "The Mythology Class." Considering I've been a fairly regular comic book collector for over twenty years by now, though, I figure I could expound on the topic a little more than that.
There was a time when mainstream comics were a storytelling medium, and to be honest, it wasn't even that long ago. Marvel Comics put out a lot of good stories, such as both volumes of The Ultimates, Mark Millar's 12-issue run on Spider-Man, Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men, and about the first two years of J. Michael Straczynski's run on Amazing Spider-Man, to name a few. Sometime around 2004 or 2005, however, the mandate over at Marvel comics changed, and I can only say for the worse.
Events took precedence over actual storytelling, and suddenly the overriding concern at editorial appeared to be to either establish new status quos, or completely destroy long standing ones. There's nothing wrong with this, per se, except that in doing so, they basically destroyed a simple principle of storytelling that says that any story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
No, three major Marvel 'event' miniseries (and possibly more that I haven't really kept track of) basically followed the pattern of beginning-middle-total anticlimax. Civil War was unabashedly designed to 'change the face of the Marvel Universe' and in that it did its job, but ending on a rather unsatisfying note, with the now-dead Captain America basically copping out of the fight. Of course, this gave rise to several dozen "Civil War Aftermath" and "Civil War Initiative" books, only one of which I actually enjoyed (Dan Slott's Avengers: The Initiative, which I reviewed here). World War Hulk, which started with everyone's favorite green giant dishing out some much-deserved ass-kicking around the Marvel Universe, ended with a similar cop-out, that is, with some half-hearted explanation on how Hulk's misery wasn't really the fault of Marvel's 'heroes' Tony Stark, Reed Richards, Stephen Strange and Black Bolt.
Oh, and Hulk ultimately lost his 'world war,' mainly by default. Similarly, a plethora of new books were launched from the non-ending of this series as well.
Probably the most heinous example of a narrative anti-climax I've seen, however, has to be Neil Gaiman's take on the Eternals, a miniseries which is beautifully drawn and peppered with some lovely dialogue...but in which PRACTICALLY NOTHING HAPPENS. There's long been talk about a sequel/ongoing series to follow this story up, but it severely disappointed me that someone like Gaiman would even agree to write a story that would basically just "set up" the characters without actually having them DO anything. Thinking about it, Gaiman's name on the series was just one big marketing push for an obscure property that Marvel's been unable to sell for years. Eternals didn't have to be some big marketing push the way Marvel's other properties were, but it sure as hell read like one.
So in short, comic books of the last three years are no longer created with the intent of telling a story and keeping the fans entertained, but with ensuring that the stories are so open-ended and thoroughly unsatisfying that people will HAVE to come back for more. Well, I for one am getting off this particular bandwagon. Oh, wait, I already have.
Sure, there are a lot of comics out there that aren't guilty of this shameless ploy, like All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, which apparently tells stories in single or two-issue arcs and will do so until its twelfth issue hits stands sometime in 2010 (which is sad considering it started in 2005), or The Twelve by J. Michael Straczynski and Chris Weston, or even Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's take on The Fantastic Four, but I'm not in any hurry to pick them up because I've really been worn down by all the stunts. The beauty about ASS is that the back issues aren't that hard to scrounge up, and well, as far as the two Marvel series are concerned, they'll probably look even better when collected.
Though I still sporadically collect toy cars, now I'm more into my blogs (including this one), my writing, and my multiply account. It's always nicer to create things rather than just consume goods, all things considered.
There was a time when mainstream comics were a storytelling medium, and to be honest, it wasn't even that long ago. Marvel Comics put out a lot of good stories, such as both volumes of The Ultimates, Mark Millar's 12-issue run on Spider-Man, Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men, and about the first two years of J. Michael Straczynski's run on Amazing Spider-Man, to name a few. Sometime around 2004 or 2005, however, the mandate over at Marvel comics changed, and I can only say for the worse.
Events took precedence over actual storytelling, and suddenly the overriding concern at editorial appeared to be to either establish new status quos, or completely destroy long standing ones. There's nothing wrong with this, per se, except that in doing so, they basically destroyed a simple principle of storytelling that says that any story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
No, three major Marvel 'event' miniseries (and possibly more that I haven't really kept track of) basically followed the pattern of beginning-middle-total anticlimax. Civil War was unabashedly designed to 'change the face of the Marvel Universe' and in that it did its job, but ending on a rather unsatisfying note, with the now-dead Captain America basically copping out of the fight. Of course, this gave rise to several dozen "Civil War Aftermath" and "Civil War Initiative" books, only one of which I actually enjoyed (Dan Slott's Avengers: The Initiative, which I reviewed here). World War Hulk, which started with everyone's favorite green giant dishing out some much-deserved ass-kicking around the Marvel Universe, ended with a similar cop-out, that is, with some half-hearted explanation on how Hulk's misery wasn't really the fault of Marvel's 'heroes' Tony Stark, Reed Richards, Stephen Strange and Black Bolt.
Oh, and Hulk ultimately lost his 'world war,' mainly by default. Similarly, a plethora of new books were launched from the non-ending of this series as well.
Probably the most heinous example of a narrative anti-climax I've seen, however, has to be Neil Gaiman's take on the Eternals, a miniseries which is beautifully drawn and peppered with some lovely dialogue...but in which PRACTICALLY NOTHING HAPPENS. There's long been talk about a sequel/ongoing series to follow this story up, but it severely disappointed me that someone like Gaiman would even agree to write a story that would basically just "set up" the characters without actually having them DO anything. Thinking about it, Gaiman's name on the series was just one big marketing push for an obscure property that Marvel's been unable to sell for years. Eternals didn't have to be some big marketing push the way Marvel's other properties were, but it sure as hell read like one.
So in short, comic books of the last three years are no longer created with the intent of telling a story and keeping the fans entertained, but with ensuring that the stories are so open-ended and thoroughly unsatisfying that people will HAVE to come back for more. Well, I for one am getting off this particular bandwagon. Oh, wait, I already have.
Sure, there are a lot of comics out there that aren't guilty of this shameless ploy, like All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, which apparently tells stories in single or two-issue arcs and will do so until its twelfth issue hits stands sometime in 2010 (which is sad considering it started in 2005), or The Twelve by J. Michael Straczynski and Chris Weston, or even Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's take on The Fantastic Four, but I'm not in any hurry to pick them up because I've really been worn down by all the stunts. The beauty about ASS is that the back issues aren't that hard to scrounge up, and well, as far as the two Marvel series are concerned, they'll probably look even better when collected.
Though I still sporadically collect toy cars, now I'm more into my blogs (including this one), my writing, and my multiply account. It's always nicer to create things rather than just consume goods, all things considered.
Monday, March 03, 2008
My New Favorite Place
I figured that I needed to write a post that would take me away from all of the grief, frustration and anger that has characterized my life for the last several months, a series of lows and lowers (as opposed to the usual highs and lows paradigm) that only just recently started to taper off.
I'd like to write about my new haven; the place where I go to on a regular basis to find inner peace: the Santa Cruz church.
I've been working at my new job in Binondo for nearly two months now, but for some reason I've formed no real connection with the Binondo church, as beautifully ornate as it may be. With its aged and crumbly gray finish, the Binondo church should theoretically appeal more to me, a self-confessed fan of old churches (who practically went into orgasmic ecstasy two years ago when we, my family and I, did an extended tour of the north, which as everyone knows is the place to find old, Spanish era churches here in the Philippines).
The Sta. Cruz Church, however, does not appeal to the old church lover in me. Although the basic structure itself is over two hundred years old, it's pretty much been maintained and updated through the years. The current exterior finish is an arguably somewhat bland coat of white paint, while the roofing is, I think, green galvanized iron. Granted, rare is the church, even in the Ilocos, that still maintains the old tile roofing, but the combination of plaster, white paint and green roofing can make people forget that they're looking at a structure that's nearly a quarter of a millenium old, even despite the classical Spanish era facade with the bell tower and everything.
But that's not the point.
What I hands-down love about the church is the austerity of it. It's actually very bare inside, in an almost Zen-kind of way. The hallmark of many an old church, including some of my favorites, is the huge structure behind the altar which houses either a central icon like a miraculous image of the Virgin Mary or the Baby Jesus, or two hundred million saints. There's nothing like that in Sta. Cruz; just a mosaic of a lamb and a stream of water flowing down from it (no, it's not taking a leak), which ends on the tabernacle. It's so very simple and yet so powerful. There are a couple of statues in the side naves, sure, but nothing too ostentatious. Most of the images are found in little alcoves near the entrance to the church, and as a result the people who want to pay homage to them are free to visit their favorite saint while the casual churchgoer is free to sit in the pews and just pray without having his senses bombarded by this statue or that statue. Also, the paucity of plaster images means that the Sacred Host, which is set on the altar for display during most hours of the day, gets all of the attention.
I think what I love about the place is how much easier it is for me to commune with God there. The architecture, and the whole "look at me, I'm beautiful" aura that usually surrounds and even sometimes saturates old churches doesn't distract me from what's really important about setting foot in the house of the Lord.
My wife tells me she also used to like going there, many years ago, when she was teaching in a Chinese School in the area. There's a certain poetry in that, I think. Maybe some day we can renew our wedding vows there or something. Or we could have our next kid (assuming there is one) baptized there. And lunch or dinner or merienda sena will be at a nice Chinese restaurant nearby. Whatever.
The point is I love going to that Church to find inner peace. It's nice to have a "special place" and while I consider Bohol the most serene place I've been to, at least I don't have fly a thousand kilometers or so to get to the place that settles my mind and spirit.
I'd like to write about my new haven; the place where I go to on a regular basis to find inner peace: the Santa Cruz church.
I've been working at my new job in Binondo for nearly two months now, but for some reason I've formed no real connection with the Binondo church, as beautifully ornate as it may be. With its aged and crumbly gray finish, the Binondo church should theoretically appeal more to me, a self-confessed fan of old churches (who practically went into orgasmic ecstasy two years ago when we, my family and I, did an extended tour of the north, which as everyone knows is the place to find old, Spanish era churches here in the Philippines).
The Sta. Cruz Church, however, does not appeal to the old church lover in me. Although the basic structure itself is over two hundred years old, it's pretty much been maintained and updated through the years. The current exterior finish is an arguably somewhat bland coat of white paint, while the roofing is, I think, green galvanized iron. Granted, rare is the church, even in the Ilocos, that still maintains the old tile roofing, but the combination of plaster, white paint and green roofing can make people forget that they're looking at a structure that's nearly a quarter of a millenium old, even despite the classical Spanish era facade with the bell tower and everything.
But that's not the point.
What I hands-down love about the church is the austerity of it. It's actually very bare inside, in an almost Zen-kind of way. The hallmark of many an old church, including some of my favorites, is the huge structure behind the altar which houses either a central icon like a miraculous image of the Virgin Mary or the Baby Jesus, or two hundred million saints. There's nothing like that in Sta. Cruz; just a mosaic of a lamb and a stream of water flowing down from it (no, it's not taking a leak), which ends on the tabernacle. It's so very simple and yet so powerful. There are a couple of statues in the side naves, sure, but nothing too ostentatious. Most of the images are found in little alcoves near the entrance to the church, and as a result the people who want to pay homage to them are free to visit their favorite saint while the casual churchgoer is free to sit in the pews and just pray without having his senses bombarded by this statue or that statue. Also, the paucity of plaster images means that the Sacred Host, which is set on the altar for display during most hours of the day, gets all of the attention.
I think what I love about the place is how much easier it is for me to commune with God there. The architecture, and the whole "look at me, I'm beautiful" aura that usually surrounds and even sometimes saturates old churches doesn't distract me from what's really important about setting foot in the house of the Lord.
My wife tells me she also used to like going there, many years ago, when she was teaching in a Chinese School in the area. There's a certain poetry in that, I think. Maybe some day we can renew our wedding vows there or something. Or we could have our next kid (assuming there is one) baptized there. And lunch or dinner or merienda sena will be at a nice Chinese restaurant nearby. Whatever.
The point is I love going to that Church to find inner peace. It's nice to have a "special place" and while I consider Bohol the most serene place I've been to, at least I don't have fly a thousand kilometers or so to get to the place that settles my mind and spirit.
Saturday, March 01, 2008
Naked Grief
A few years ago comic-book writer J.M. DeMatteis put Spider-Man into a murderous rage against one of his long-time foes, the chameleon. He was basically fit to kill. At the end, however, Chameleon had some kind of nervous breakdown, and as a result Spider-Man couldn't push through with clobbering him with the huge tombstone he'd been about to use to bash the guy's head in. The rationale the writer gave was that 'such naked anguish is hard to look upon.' I don't know whether or not DeMatteis coined the phrase, but it left quite an impact on my mind, such that fourteen years after reading that comic book, I find myself revisiting, if not slightly altering it to describe the collective experience of mourning Jay Tan.
The outpouring of grief during his wake and funeral mass was unlike any I'd ever seen, and although I'm not what I'd call a regular at such events, I've been to more than my fair share. Of course, considering how dear Jay was to me it was fairly easily for me to be swept up in the tide of grief; though I had cried a fair bit in the first few nights of the wake, it turned out, a bit to my surprise, that I was basically just warming up for the grand finale on the day of his funeral. Even through my own tears I could see how many others were being shed for such a dear friend, a son, a brother, a cousin...a great person in general.
Grief does strange things to people; during the last night of his wake a large number of people ranging from his co-workers to his friends to his immediate family had quite a few stories to share and some of them would have been pretty embarrassing to the speakers themselves under any other circumstances, but it didn't really matter. This was the last hurrah, on this earth anyway, of someone whom everyone gathered had loved in one way or another.
DeMatteis' choice of words, i.e. 'naked' and a word equated to profound sorrow, just feels completely appropriate; other writers may have used 'stark' or 'pure' but 'naked' just works so much better because of the things associated with the word: vulnerability, shame, discomfort among other things. People (theoretically) get naked with and in front of someone with whom they feel an emotional bond.
There we were...a whole bunch of naked people. Some were less comfortable about it than others, but even those most determined not to show too much emotion found themselves crying. In one instance, I consoled a friend who had been hell-bent on keeping in the tears...but failed. I said, "it's all right; it's for Jay anyway."
Just as Jay would have wanted, we will get over him; the healing process has already begun. But it's certainly going to take awhile. I hardly think Jay will begrudge us that.
The outpouring of grief during his wake and funeral mass was unlike any I'd ever seen, and although I'm not what I'd call a regular at such events, I've been to more than my fair share. Of course, considering how dear Jay was to me it was fairly easily for me to be swept up in the tide of grief; though I had cried a fair bit in the first few nights of the wake, it turned out, a bit to my surprise, that I was basically just warming up for the grand finale on the day of his funeral. Even through my own tears I could see how many others were being shed for such a dear friend, a son, a brother, a cousin...a great person in general.
Grief does strange things to people; during the last night of his wake a large number of people ranging from his co-workers to his friends to his immediate family had quite a few stories to share and some of them would have been pretty embarrassing to the speakers themselves under any other circumstances, but it didn't really matter. This was the last hurrah, on this earth anyway, of someone whom everyone gathered had loved in one way or another.
DeMatteis' choice of words, i.e. 'naked' and a word equated to profound sorrow, just feels completely appropriate; other writers may have used 'stark' or 'pure' but 'naked' just works so much better because of the things associated with the word: vulnerability, shame, discomfort among other things. People (theoretically) get naked with and in front of someone with whom they feel an emotional bond.
There we were...a whole bunch of naked people. Some were less comfortable about it than others, but even those most determined not to show too much emotion found themselves crying. In one instance, I consoled a friend who had been hell-bent on keeping in the tears...but failed. I said, "it's all right; it's for Jay anyway."
Just as Jay would have wanted, we will get over him; the healing process has already begun. But it's certainly going to take awhile. I hardly think Jay will begrudge us that.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
I Can't Say This Enough Right Now...
I miss you, Jay. I know I'm not the only one. I know you wouldn't want me to be all sad and mopey, but here I am.
My friend says you're in a better place, and I know this to be true, but just as I knew there was a very real chance that you wouldn't survive your transplant for very long yet refused to believe it, so I feel terrible about your being gone even though I know you're in a place where nothing can harm you anymore, where all you'll ever feel is joy and God's loving embrace.
My friend says you're in a better place, and I know this to be true, but just as I knew there was a very real chance that you wouldn't survive your transplant for very long yet refused to believe it, so I feel terrible about your being gone even though I know you're in a place where nothing can harm you anymore, where all you'll ever feel is joy and God's loving embrace.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
John Julian M. Tan III
He went by a lot of names: J.J., Jay, Budoy and the Bounce. I called him friend. For the longest time my best friend, but never anything less than one of my closest friends in this life, the kind of friend a lot of people go through their whole lives without ever having.
Last Monday, he died. On Tuesday, I eulogized him on our barkada's blog. It was unrelentingly maudlin, which made sense, but what annoyed me upon re-reading it was how it read like some kind of posthumous resume, like I was making some lame attempt to endorse Jay to the Big Guy upstairs. Of course it was all about praise and his legacy and his contribution to society in such a short span of time on top of being a great friend, son, brother, uncle and all of that feel-good, bittersweet dreck, and it may all have been true, but it didn't stop me from feeling that I had written something utterly puerile.
The death of someone this important in my life deserves something much more than I can put into words. This much grief can't simply be the subject of sound bytes like "he lived well" or "he was a good man" without profoundly insulting the deceased. It's like I said to another of my close friends and my kumare when Jay's family was reduced to tears again after last night's mass: with so much love comes so much pain.
I'm living out that particular truism right now. I cried at breakfast this morning. I've never, in my entire thirty-two years of living, cried at breakfast, not even when I was a whiny, spoiled kid. In my adult life I can count on my hands the number of times I've really cried (excluding tearing up at sappy movies, which doesn't even happen that often). I cried after being on either end of a "this relationship isn't going to happen" speech. I cried when I failed the bar exams after my first attempt. I cried on other occasions I don't care to name, but in no instance did I weep during breakfast. None. Oh, and since Jay died, I've lost count of the times I've cried as an adult.
Oddly enough, I find myself laughing maniacally when I think of all the times I spent with Jay. There's no shortage of anecdotes, whether it's the sight of him dressed up as steel-bra era Madonna during our class's Halloween Party back in 2006 or the time he and I were in the back of a pickup, I started choking on a chunk of ice cream, at which point he looked at me nonchalantly and said "Jim, if you die, can I have your comic books?" or any of the bazillions of times I called him up or visited him at home and shot the breeze over everything from comic books to politics to his massive collection (just under 1,000 I think) of bootleg DVDs. I loved having discovered Will Ferrell with him in A Night At the Roxbury, to which there should definitely be a sequel considering how huge Ferrell is now. Any and every Will Ferrell movie I enjoy henceforth will always remind me of Jay.
Recently, I had what I thought was a keeper of a friendship go sour, and although at no point was I about to trade up my real friends for this new one (hey, one cannot have too many friends), the first person to whom I expressed my disappointment was Jay. He didn't hit me with "I told you so" (that was my wife's job), but did what he did best; he reminded me, through his gentle words and reassurance, of how, in a world where things and people are too often not what they seem to be, our friendship was the real deal, and would last till the end.
I didn't figure that, scant weeks after, the end would come.
Even though the chain of events that led to his eventual passing began as early as last May 2007 and there were red flags galore all throughout the ordeal, and even though someone who had buried two loved ones, a mother and a brother, who had expired from kidney failure told me, in no uncertain terms, not to get my hopes up, I hoped against all hope that Jay would make it through. Even when my brain was telling me he was a goner, even when the Saturday before he died he looked like a corpse-in-waiting with his face blackened from the drugs they were pumping into him, ironically enough, to keep him alive, I was still hoping.
Irony seems to be the order of the day here. Though the magnanimity of Jay's spirit was unparalleled, he didn't really live the healthiest lifestyle around. He sort of embodied the credo of one of his favorite films, if not his all-time favorite, Dead Poets Society: Carpe Diem, or seize the day. He seized the day, all right, and scarfed it down with a side order of fries. Oh yeah, he was a big eater, and a big guy as a result. He smoked like a chimney when he started working in advertising nearly a decade or so ago. He worked really late, always consumed with the passion of coming up with some truly magnificent copy. And yet...and yet...what actually took out his kidneys and resulted in the transplant and the anti-rejection medication which left him vulnerable to the infection that ultimately took his life was a virus he had had the misfortune of not having developed an immunity to, unlike 90% of the Filipino population. In short, it had absolutely nothing to do with the way he had lived his life. To put it glibly, a statistical aberration killed my friend. Before I understood this, I remember how, when I was sitting right next to him during one of his dialysis sessions, I chewed him out for the way he had lived his life. I felt like such an asshole afterwards. I can't say with one hundred per cent certainty if, had it been up to him, Jay would have made the sacrifices necessary to basically save his own life, but I do know that leading up to and after his operation, he managed to shed at least over twenty kilos of body weight. The will to live was definitely there.
The irony of how he died is part of what fuels my rage. Yes, I'm going through the whole "stages of loss" cliche, but what's particularly painful is how I seem to be feeling everything at once. Every time the denial instinct kicks in my mind instantly flashes the image of Jay's inert body lying on the hospital bed where he breathed his last, an image that will probably haunt me for quite a while.
The rage part, though, is surprisingly easy. I feel rage, first and foremost, at myself, for feeling sorry for myself for the better part of last year without appreciating nearly as much as I should have how precious and magnificent the gift of life is. I feel rage at how, on top of everything else, Jay managed to pull a Cyrano De Bergerac and die without letting the object of his affection really know how he felt. She was there last night, and for some reason I thought of Penelope Cruz in the last few scenes of Vanilla Sky, where it is revealed that she looked for Tom Cruise's character, interested in him, but upon failing to find him left with a vague sense of regret, a sense of 'now I'll never know what could have been.'
Thoughts and emotions are colliding in my mind and heart every nanosecond. I gagged on the cup of water I was drinking just now while my head was swirling with all of these emotions. How prosaic: I'm choking on my grief.
I would love to end this post with some uplifting reflection like "rather than dwell on the pain of his loss; I should think how lucky I was to have him in my life as long as I did," but it would feel altogether insincere and, in a word, saccharine.
I'm selfish. I'm small. I'm low on emotional quotient. I want my friend back against all logic and rationality. Of course, not in a George Romero kind of way (haha, see Jay? Another movie reference!).
What hurts the most of all is that the guy who was best at comforting me in times like this... is the guy I'm now mourning.
I know you probably hate what I'm doing right now, Jay, and I may well have to watch myself every time I drink a glass of water. It's just...so hard right now.
There's nothing else left to say right now...numbness (another state of being that comes calling way too often these days) has set in so I can't bitch and moan any more than I already have.
Still and all, I think it must be said: Adam Sandler's death scene in Click was still lame, Jay. Before you haunt my dreams forever, let me explain; the guy's performance was just devoid of all dignity. If Sandler had wanted to know how to portray someone at the end of his rope with his respectability completely intact, he should have given you a call.
Last Monday, he died. On Tuesday, I eulogized him on our barkada's blog. It was unrelentingly maudlin, which made sense, but what annoyed me upon re-reading it was how it read like some kind of posthumous resume, like I was making some lame attempt to endorse Jay to the Big Guy upstairs. Of course it was all about praise and his legacy and his contribution to society in such a short span of time on top of being a great friend, son, brother, uncle and all of that feel-good, bittersweet dreck, and it may all have been true, but it didn't stop me from feeling that I had written something utterly puerile.
The death of someone this important in my life deserves something much more than I can put into words. This much grief can't simply be the subject of sound bytes like "he lived well" or "he was a good man" without profoundly insulting the deceased. It's like I said to another of my close friends and my kumare when Jay's family was reduced to tears again after last night's mass: with so much love comes so much pain.
I'm living out that particular truism right now. I cried at breakfast this morning. I've never, in my entire thirty-two years of living, cried at breakfast, not even when I was a whiny, spoiled kid. In my adult life I can count on my hands the number of times I've really cried (excluding tearing up at sappy movies, which doesn't even happen that often). I cried after being on either end of a "this relationship isn't going to happen" speech. I cried when I failed the bar exams after my first attempt. I cried on other occasions I don't care to name, but in no instance did I weep during breakfast. None. Oh, and since Jay died, I've lost count of the times I've cried as an adult.
Oddly enough, I find myself laughing maniacally when I think of all the times I spent with Jay. There's no shortage of anecdotes, whether it's the sight of him dressed up as steel-bra era Madonna during our class's Halloween Party back in 2006 or the time he and I were in the back of a pickup, I started choking on a chunk of ice cream, at which point he looked at me nonchalantly and said "Jim, if you die, can I have your comic books?" or any of the bazillions of times I called him up or visited him at home and shot the breeze over everything from comic books to politics to his massive collection (just under 1,000 I think) of bootleg DVDs. I loved having discovered Will Ferrell with him in A Night At the Roxbury, to which there should definitely be a sequel considering how huge Ferrell is now. Any and every Will Ferrell movie I enjoy henceforth will always remind me of Jay.
Recently, I had what I thought was a keeper of a friendship go sour, and although at no point was I about to trade up my real friends for this new one (hey, one cannot have too many friends), the first person to whom I expressed my disappointment was Jay. He didn't hit me with "I told you so" (that was my wife's job), but did what he did best; he reminded me, through his gentle words and reassurance, of how, in a world where things and people are too often not what they seem to be, our friendship was the real deal, and would last till the end.
I didn't figure that, scant weeks after, the end would come.
Even though the chain of events that led to his eventual passing began as early as last May 2007 and there were red flags galore all throughout the ordeal, and even though someone who had buried two loved ones, a mother and a brother, who had expired from kidney failure told me, in no uncertain terms, not to get my hopes up, I hoped against all hope that Jay would make it through. Even when my brain was telling me he was a goner, even when the Saturday before he died he looked like a corpse-in-waiting with his face blackened from the drugs they were pumping into him, ironically enough, to keep him alive, I was still hoping.
Irony seems to be the order of the day here. Though the magnanimity of Jay's spirit was unparalleled, he didn't really live the healthiest lifestyle around. He sort of embodied the credo of one of his favorite films, if not his all-time favorite, Dead Poets Society: Carpe Diem, or seize the day. He seized the day, all right, and scarfed it down with a side order of fries. Oh yeah, he was a big eater, and a big guy as a result. He smoked like a chimney when he started working in advertising nearly a decade or so ago. He worked really late, always consumed with the passion of coming up with some truly magnificent copy. And yet...and yet...what actually took out his kidneys and resulted in the transplant and the anti-rejection medication which left him vulnerable to the infection that ultimately took his life was a virus he had had the misfortune of not having developed an immunity to, unlike 90% of the Filipino population. In short, it had absolutely nothing to do with the way he had lived his life. To put it glibly, a statistical aberration killed my friend. Before I understood this, I remember how, when I was sitting right next to him during one of his dialysis sessions, I chewed him out for the way he had lived his life. I felt like such an asshole afterwards. I can't say with one hundred per cent certainty if, had it been up to him, Jay would have made the sacrifices necessary to basically save his own life, but I do know that leading up to and after his operation, he managed to shed at least over twenty kilos of body weight. The will to live was definitely there.
The irony of how he died is part of what fuels my rage. Yes, I'm going through the whole "stages of loss" cliche, but what's particularly painful is how I seem to be feeling everything at once. Every time the denial instinct kicks in my mind instantly flashes the image of Jay's inert body lying on the hospital bed where he breathed his last, an image that will probably haunt me for quite a while.
The rage part, though, is surprisingly easy. I feel rage, first and foremost, at myself, for feeling sorry for myself for the better part of last year without appreciating nearly as much as I should have how precious and magnificent the gift of life is. I feel rage at how, on top of everything else, Jay managed to pull a Cyrano De Bergerac and die without letting the object of his affection really know how he felt. She was there last night, and for some reason I thought of Penelope Cruz in the last few scenes of Vanilla Sky, where it is revealed that she looked for Tom Cruise's character, interested in him, but upon failing to find him left with a vague sense of regret, a sense of 'now I'll never know what could have been.'
Thoughts and emotions are colliding in my mind and heart every nanosecond. I gagged on the cup of water I was drinking just now while my head was swirling with all of these emotions. How prosaic: I'm choking on my grief.
I would love to end this post with some uplifting reflection like "rather than dwell on the pain of his loss; I should think how lucky I was to have him in my life as long as I did," but it would feel altogether insincere and, in a word, saccharine.
I'm selfish. I'm small. I'm low on emotional quotient. I want my friend back against all logic and rationality. Of course, not in a George Romero kind of way (haha, see Jay? Another movie reference!).
What hurts the most of all is that the guy who was best at comforting me in times like this... is the guy I'm now mourning.
I know you probably hate what I'm doing right now, Jay, and I may well have to watch myself every time I drink a glass of water. It's just...so hard right now.
There's nothing else left to say right now...numbness (another state of being that comes calling way too often these days) has set in so I can't bitch and moan any more than I already have.
Still and all, I think it must be said: Adam Sandler's death scene in Click was still lame, Jay. Before you haunt my dreams forever, let me explain; the guy's performance was just devoid of all dignity. If Sandler had wanted to know how to portray someone at the end of his rope with his respectability completely intact, he should have given you a call.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Rolling Disasters Waiting to Happen
There's been a lot to blog about these days, from the sudden and tragic death of Oscar-nominated Australian actor Heath Ledger to the abject humiliation suffered by multiple-term speaker of the House of Representatives Jose de Venecia, to the way a Filipino on American Idol dressed like a chicken became the next William Hung, but the thing about tragedies and downfalls and other forms of personal disaster is that they tend to become footnotes in history considering that once the terrible thing has happened there really isn't much else to talk about.
What I want to talk about is essentially a "sequel" to an earlier post I made about those idiots on scooters that they pay for at the rate of something like five pesos a day. Since making that post I have heard that no less than the Asian Development Bank has conducted a study on the death rate of these motorized primates and has come to the conclusion that it is of epidemic proportions.
These guys still raise my blood pressure every time I'm on the road, and even when I'm walking on the sidewalk as quite a few of them seem to view it as an extension of the road they can drive on. Tricycle drivers aggravate me similarly but somehow I've learned how to live with them. At least with tricycle drivers there's no danger that I might accidentally kill one on the road; they're too big and too slow to make a move sudden enough that might result in my running over them.
The problem with these two-wheeled menaces is that at all times they pose a danger to themselves, pedestrians and motorists. Every single day is a potential new disaster with hundreds of these things (and counting) on the road.
What I think people should know is that we don't have to sit here helpless to do anything about it. We can prepare petitions, breathe down the necks of our legislators and tell them that enough is enough; it's time to get these things off major highways and sidewalks. Let's have them impose prohibitive taxes on the sons of bitches who hawk these things. It's easy enough; all they'd have to do in the face of accusations of draconian legislation is invoke the time-honored principle of POLICE POWER (a legal term; look it up). They would merely have to slap the massive and growing statistics of DEATH in the face of any interest group inclined to protect these chimpanzees' right to roam the streets and say that the need to save lives is more important than anyone's right to act like he owns the road.
I'm serious here; on the one hand it's something of a blessing that all of these pieces of dog turd are getting wiped out as it's a form of natural selection. The smart survive and the stupid end up roadkill. The problem is that the people who run over these blights on humanity are inevitably the ones who end up paying the price; they're the ones that have to go to court and suffer wrongful prosecution and even assuming this doesn't push through, they're the ones who have to live with knowing that they were in an accident that killed someone, regardles of whose fault it is.
Quite frankly, considering the paucity of comments on this blog in the last eight months or so I'm pretty sure nobody really reads it, or that very few people do. Can't say I'm surprised as most of the time I don't really write anything of consequence.
THIS time, though, I exhort my one or two regular readers and the odd person who stumbles onto this blog: please get the word out about these disasters-around-the-corner. Create a link to this post if you're too lazy to expound. Get legislation written! Get these bastards OFF THE MAJOR ROADS AND THE SIDEWALKS!
The sooner these things can get done, the sooner we can stop worrying about having the blood of these fools on our bumpers.
What I want to talk about is essentially a "sequel" to an earlier post I made about those idiots on scooters that they pay for at the rate of something like five pesos a day. Since making that post I have heard that no less than the Asian Development Bank has conducted a study on the death rate of these motorized primates and has come to the conclusion that it is of epidemic proportions.
These guys still raise my blood pressure every time I'm on the road, and even when I'm walking on the sidewalk as quite a few of them seem to view it as an extension of the road they can drive on. Tricycle drivers aggravate me similarly but somehow I've learned how to live with them. At least with tricycle drivers there's no danger that I might accidentally kill one on the road; they're too big and too slow to make a move sudden enough that might result in my running over them.
The problem with these two-wheeled menaces is that at all times they pose a danger to themselves, pedestrians and motorists. Every single day is a potential new disaster with hundreds of these things (and counting) on the road.
What I think people should know is that we don't have to sit here helpless to do anything about it. We can prepare petitions, breathe down the necks of our legislators and tell them that enough is enough; it's time to get these things off major highways and sidewalks. Let's have them impose prohibitive taxes on the sons of bitches who hawk these things. It's easy enough; all they'd have to do in the face of accusations of draconian legislation is invoke the time-honored principle of POLICE POWER (a legal term; look it up). They would merely have to slap the massive and growing statistics of DEATH in the face of any interest group inclined to protect these chimpanzees' right to roam the streets and say that the need to save lives is more important than anyone's right to act like he owns the road.
I'm serious here; on the one hand it's something of a blessing that all of these pieces of dog turd are getting wiped out as it's a form of natural selection. The smart survive and the stupid end up roadkill. The problem is that the people who run over these blights on humanity are inevitably the ones who end up paying the price; they're the ones that have to go to court and suffer wrongful prosecution and even assuming this doesn't push through, they're the ones who have to live with knowing that they were in an accident that killed someone, regardles of whose fault it is.
Quite frankly, considering the paucity of comments on this blog in the last eight months or so I'm pretty sure nobody really reads it, or that very few people do. Can't say I'm surprised as most of the time I don't really write anything of consequence.
THIS time, though, I exhort my one or two regular readers and the odd person who stumbles onto this blog: please get the word out about these disasters-around-the-corner. Create a link to this post if you're too lazy to expound. Get legislation written! Get these bastards OFF THE MAJOR ROADS AND THE SIDEWALKS!
The sooner these things can get done, the sooner we can stop worrying about having the blood of these fools on our bumpers.
Friday, January 25, 2008
A Good Start to A Brand New Day
With the last issue of the first arc of Amazing Spider-Man: Brand New Day having just come out, I figured it would be a good time to weigh in one last time on the issue of Spider-Man's marriage before I bid adieu to the character for a little while. While unfortunately, Erik Larsen may have beaten me to the punch in his One Fan's Opinion Column on comicbookresources.com, I have a slightly different perspective on the matter which, as a fanboy, I'd like to make known.
Historically, One More Day marks the third time in the last fourteen years or so that Marvel editorial have tried to 'un-marry' Spider-Man. The first, and up until One More Day most contentious attempt took place during the infamous Clone Saga, where it was essentially declared that the Peter Parker whose adventures everyone had been following for twenty one years or so was a clone, a fake, a copy of the real Peter Parker, who in Marvel time had been gone five years. The set-up for this idea took a full two years, but the backlash was so bad that this publicly regarded impostor, renamed "Ben Reilly" to distinguish him, absurdly enough, from Peter "clone" Parker, was so widely rejected by readership that rather than let him fade quietly into the background with the possibility of reintroducing him at a later date, editorial killed the poor guy within a year of his having donned the Spider-Man outfit. The poor Spider-clone was killed twice.
The second time took place during the similarly reviled tenure of Howard Mackie and John Byrne, under the editorial watch of chief Bob Harras. Their solution was more and less drastic at the same time: Mary Jane Parker was apparently blown up in a plane by some guy who was stalking her. Of course, her "death" was loaded with ambiguity and in the end it felt rather half-assed even before it was revealed to have been a fake-out; having learned from the debacle of the Clone Saga, which took years to set up but less than a year to unravel, Marvel decided a "safer" route which would enable them to resurrect MJ at the drop of the hat if fan reaction was unfavorable.
Oddly enough, credit goes to the current regime at Marvel for having the balls to throw their full weight behind this initiative, Clone-Saga style, fully aware that reader could react as violently to this story as they did to Ben Reilly, as many of them in fact have.
While as I've often said, I have a problem with the whole Faustian Pact thing (Joe Quesada's defense of the methodology notwithstanding), I see the logic of un-marrying Spider-Man, which I've already discussed.
In fact, I'll go one step further than Joey Q and address all of the people who've said "but anyone who wants a swinging (pardon the pun) single Spider-Man can always read Ultimate Spider-Man or Spider-Man Adventures."
Well, the Q would never, ever put down one of the books his company puts out, but bound by no such compunctions, I can say that the way things are, both those books are currently second-class citizens in Marvel's publishing scheme.
Spider-Man Adventures isn't even designed for the mainstream, direct market; it's a kid's book designed to sell in bookstores, and everything in it is essentially a re-hash of old Lee/Ditko or Lee/Romita stories.
As for Ultimate Spider-Man, well, as far as I can tell it's served its initial purpose, which was to revitalize interest in Spidey by making him "relevant" to younger audiences. There was a time when this title was regularly outselling the flagship one, but those days are long gone and USM hasn't even been selling in the top ten for years now.
The idea, in short was to increase readership on the core Spider-Man book, to the extent that all other Spidey books, Sensational and Friendly Neighborhood, were axed to make way for the thrice-monthly, rotating creators publishing scheme.
Having finished that scheme's first storyarc, I think Marvel may be on the right track here.
It was a marketing coup on Marvel's part to have Civil War alumnus Steve McNiven draw the launching arc. His art looks livelier in Amazing Spider-Man #548 than it ever has, and quite frankly not even the previously partially-true accusations of his people looking 'plasticky' can stick here. I think the switch from regular colorist Morry Hollowell to reliever Dave Stewart may have something to do with it. The art is absolutely brilliant, and bristles with much more kinetic energy than I've ever seen in McNiven's pencils. There is no way any of the artists following McNiven on this title, at least four of whom have already been named, can match this standard of quality in my eyes, so it's still adieu for me.
I must say, before I go, that writer Dan Slott sets a tone for this new direction that seems a lot easier to swallow than the idea of Peter Parker being counterfeit or the idea of Mary Jane lying in a million pieces at the bottom of the sea. A new villain (albeit one with the somewhat prosaic name of "Mr. Negative") has been introduced and established, with powers and an origin yet to be fully revealed, a nice little monkeywrench has been thrown in the works for the Daily Bugle, and Peter Parker is back to the down-on-his-luck loser he was created to be...a concept that got diluted several times over, especially when he moved into the New Avengers' tower.
Last time I thanked Marvel for making the decision for me to leave easier and less tainted with bitterness over One More Day. Now I'd like to thank Dan Slott and Steve McNiven for making me believe that, however bad OMD may have been, Brand New Day is actually a pretty good idea.
Historically, One More Day marks the third time in the last fourteen years or so that Marvel editorial have tried to 'un-marry' Spider-Man. The first, and up until One More Day most contentious attempt took place during the infamous Clone Saga, where it was essentially declared that the Peter Parker whose adventures everyone had been following for twenty one years or so was a clone, a fake, a copy of the real Peter Parker, who in Marvel time had been gone five years. The set-up for this idea took a full two years, but the backlash was so bad that this publicly regarded impostor, renamed "Ben Reilly" to distinguish him, absurdly enough, from Peter "clone" Parker, was so widely rejected by readership that rather than let him fade quietly into the background with the possibility of reintroducing him at a later date, editorial killed the poor guy within a year of his having donned the Spider-Man outfit. The poor Spider-clone was killed twice.
The second time took place during the similarly reviled tenure of Howard Mackie and John Byrne, under the editorial watch of chief Bob Harras. Their solution was more and less drastic at the same time: Mary Jane Parker was apparently blown up in a plane by some guy who was stalking her. Of course, her "death" was loaded with ambiguity and in the end it felt rather half-assed even before it was revealed to have been a fake-out; having learned from the debacle of the Clone Saga, which took years to set up but less than a year to unravel, Marvel decided a "safer" route which would enable them to resurrect MJ at the drop of the hat if fan reaction was unfavorable.
Oddly enough, credit goes to the current regime at Marvel for having the balls to throw their full weight behind this initiative, Clone-Saga style, fully aware that reader could react as violently to this story as they did to Ben Reilly, as many of them in fact have.
While as I've often said, I have a problem with the whole Faustian Pact thing (Joe Quesada's defense of the methodology notwithstanding), I see the logic of un-marrying Spider-Man, which I've already discussed.
In fact, I'll go one step further than Joey Q and address all of the people who've said "but anyone who wants a swinging (pardon the pun) single Spider-Man can always read Ultimate Spider-Man or Spider-Man Adventures."
Well, the Q would never, ever put down one of the books his company puts out, but bound by no such compunctions, I can say that the way things are, both those books are currently second-class citizens in Marvel's publishing scheme.
Spider-Man Adventures isn't even designed for the mainstream, direct market; it's a kid's book designed to sell in bookstores, and everything in it is essentially a re-hash of old Lee/Ditko or Lee/Romita stories.
As for Ultimate Spider-Man, well, as far as I can tell it's served its initial purpose, which was to revitalize interest in Spidey by making him "relevant" to younger audiences. There was a time when this title was regularly outselling the flagship one, but those days are long gone and USM hasn't even been selling in the top ten for years now.
The idea, in short was to increase readership on the core Spider-Man book, to the extent that all other Spidey books, Sensational and Friendly Neighborhood, were axed to make way for the thrice-monthly, rotating creators publishing scheme.
Having finished that scheme's first storyarc, I think Marvel may be on the right track here.
It was a marketing coup on Marvel's part to have Civil War alumnus Steve McNiven draw the launching arc. His art looks livelier in Amazing Spider-Man #548 than it ever has, and quite frankly not even the previously partially-true accusations of his people looking 'plasticky' can stick here. I think the switch from regular colorist Morry Hollowell to reliever Dave Stewart may have something to do with it. The art is absolutely brilliant, and bristles with much more kinetic energy than I've ever seen in McNiven's pencils. There is no way any of the artists following McNiven on this title, at least four of whom have already been named, can match this standard of quality in my eyes, so it's still adieu for me.
I must say, before I go, that writer Dan Slott sets a tone for this new direction that seems a lot easier to swallow than the idea of Peter Parker being counterfeit or the idea of Mary Jane lying in a million pieces at the bottom of the sea. A new villain (albeit one with the somewhat prosaic name of "Mr. Negative") has been introduced and established, with powers and an origin yet to be fully revealed, a nice little monkeywrench has been thrown in the works for the Daily Bugle, and Peter Parker is back to the down-on-his-luck loser he was created to be...a concept that got diluted several times over, especially when he moved into the New Avengers' tower.
Last time I thanked Marvel for making the decision for me to leave easier and less tainted with bitterness over One More Day. Now I'd like to thank Dan Slott and Steve McNiven for making me believe that, however bad OMD may have been, Brand New Day is actually a pretty good idea.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Homecoming
After a little over a year and a half after I bid the halls of the Supreme Court a very fond farewell, I find myself back in the city to which I have written more than one ode.
I find myself exposed to a different part of Manila this time; I'm working out of Binondo, and in a law firm at that, so I've been a little too busy to take in my new surroundings.
That said, though, I have taken the opportunity to walk along the Escolta, to hear a mass at Sta. Cruz and to say a prayer at the Binondo church. The other day I spent my lunch break walking through the streets of Binondo looking to see what kind of shops they had, and wound up in Divisoria.
I have to say that I'm not one for teeming streets; give me old architecture any day and a nice "old world" vibe, but considering that I'm someone who's repeatedly professed love for this city it's nice to have seen another few parts of it, like Binondo, Sta. Cruz, and even the stretch along Recto between the LRT2 station and these places.
Of course, my homecoming wouldn't have been complete without a leisurely stroll through Luneta Park ;)
I find myself exposed to a different part of Manila this time; I'm working out of Binondo, and in a law firm at that, so I've been a little too busy to take in my new surroundings.
That said, though, I have taken the opportunity to walk along the Escolta, to hear a mass at Sta. Cruz and to say a prayer at the Binondo church. The other day I spent my lunch break walking through the streets of Binondo looking to see what kind of shops they had, and wound up in Divisoria.
I have to say that I'm not one for teeming streets; give me old architecture any day and a nice "old world" vibe, but considering that I'm someone who's repeatedly professed love for this city it's nice to have seen another few parts of it, like Binondo, Sta. Cruz, and even the stretch along Recto between the LRT2 station and these places.
Of course, my homecoming wouldn't have been complete without a leisurely stroll through Luneta Park ;)
Spider-Man's New Status Quo: The End Which Justifies the Means?
This week the second issue of Marvel's newest experiment, the thrice-weekly shipping of Amazing Spider-Man came out. True to my resolution to finish the first arc before quitting the series for the foreseeable future, I bought the issue, ASM #547, and to my surprise was thoroughly impressed by what I saw.
Am I backpedaling on my decision to put buying Spidey on indefinite hiatus? Not really, considering I still need the money and considering the team behind this story arc will only last until next issue, but I have to say that while I still disagree with the methodology used to bring about this new status quo, I am starting to see why Joe Quesada was willing to brave fanboy ire, online and offline, to establish it.
Recently a friend of mine briefly discussed one of my posts here with me, in particular asking why Marvel felt the need to "un-marry" Spider-Man, saying that between the two of us, we led pretty interesting lives even though we were already married.
Now, I value my friend's opinion quite a bit but I have to say I understand the logic here; Spider-Man was created for a young audience, for the teenagers and twenty-somethings still trying to come to grips with the fact that the world more often than not doesn't work the way they want it to, and a Spider-Man married to a supermodel somehow damaged that paradigm. How could Peter Parker be a lovable loser when he's married to one of the hottest women in the Marvel Universe? And, more crucially, could kids and college students, many of whom are hard-pressed to get a date at that point in their lives, really relate to a married guy, let alone a guy hitched to and regularly boinking a supermodel?
Marvel's plan to void Spider-Man's marriage was, although problematic for me, not my main beef with them, but rather how they pulled it off. This matter has been discussed in this blog and elsewhere ad nauseam, so there's really no point to rehashing any of those old diatribes here.
What I will say is that, after the tumultuous "reboot," the creative team of writer Dan Slott and penciler Steve McNiven, inker Dexter Vines and colorist Morry Hollowell (the art team collectively known as "Team Civil War") pretty much hit the ground running. Had the first couple of issues been scripted as ineptly as the epilogue to One More Day, for which Joe Quesada has accepted blame, this "new" Spider-Man would almost certainly be stumbling out of the gate. That is definitely NOT the case here.
To wax cliche, Slott demonstrates that he was born to write Spider-Man. From Peter's character moments to Spider-Man's battle banter, Slott seems to have everything about him down pat. As much as I enjoyed my issues of JMS' run, I have to admit his take on Peter was pretty short on the witty comments, which is pretty essential to the whole affair. Slott hearkens back to the old Stan Lee days of snappy patter without the goofy, anachronistic tone from which Lee's recent writing efforts (e.g. The Last Fantastic Four Story) have suffered.
That Slott is not quite able to completely remove the bad taste that One More Day has left in my mouth is through no fault of his own; it's simply been too soon since that storytelling debacle. I have to say, though, that with the second issue, Slott manages to come a lot closer to making me forget One More Day than I thought possible.
As impressive as Slott's writing is, however, the main reason for my loving this story arc is the reason my resolve to drop this book remains, which is that there is no way, barring a change of editorial heart, that Amazing Spider-Man will ever look this good again, at least in the near future, because McNiven is, quite frankly, a penciling god, and upon his departure from the book after next issue, he will be SORELY missed.
The quality of McNiven's pencils, ably abetted by Vines and Hollowell offers stark testimony to the advantage of giving artists buckets of lead time to prepare their work; it's better than it's been in years. The last time I enjoyed his art this much was when he had just started on Marvel Knights 4. In the projects he had done for Marvel since then he was either hamstrung with scripts that didn't exploit his talent properly (his run on New Avengers) or rushed into meeting deadlines (Civil War), such that his work, while still better than that of 80% of most other mainstream artists noticeably dipped in overall quality.
For two issues out of three, however, this has not been the case for ol' Stevie. McNiven has long said he's wanted to do Spider-Man and his love for the character absolutely shines through here. He even pulls a bit of a surprise and channels Todd McFarlane for one glorious splash page. Looking at the page from afar my father thought the art had been digitally rendered rather than hand-drawn. That's how good the guy is.
Marvel, however, have been pretty candid that McNiven is kind of a marketing hook to whet readers' appetites for Spider-Man's new direction; after #548 ships next week he's off to join Civil War collaborator Mark Millar on a yet-undisclosed project, undoubtedly to the anguish of many a Spider-fan who may have hoped he'd draw Peter Parker's adventures forever. After he leaves, with due respect to the artists they've got lined up, including my sentimental favorite John Romita, Jr., the book will simply not look as good.
So while I'm still taking my indefinite break from the title after McNiven leaves, at least now I'm leaving with a lot less bitterness.
My wallet thanks you, Marvel, and now I can say I thank you for seeing me (and possibly a lot of other readers) off with a great story, and some absolutely stellar art.
Am I backpedaling on my decision to put buying Spidey on indefinite hiatus? Not really, considering I still need the money and considering the team behind this story arc will only last until next issue, but I have to say that while I still disagree with the methodology used to bring about this new status quo, I am starting to see why Joe Quesada was willing to brave fanboy ire, online and offline, to establish it.
Recently a friend of mine briefly discussed one of my posts here with me, in particular asking why Marvel felt the need to "un-marry" Spider-Man, saying that between the two of us, we led pretty interesting lives even though we were already married.
Now, I value my friend's opinion quite a bit but I have to say I understand the logic here; Spider-Man was created for a young audience, for the teenagers and twenty-somethings still trying to come to grips with the fact that the world more often than not doesn't work the way they want it to, and a Spider-Man married to a supermodel somehow damaged that paradigm. How could Peter Parker be a lovable loser when he's married to one of the hottest women in the Marvel Universe? And, more crucially, could kids and college students, many of whom are hard-pressed to get a date at that point in their lives, really relate to a married guy, let alone a guy hitched to and regularly boinking a supermodel?
Marvel's plan to void Spider-Man's marriage was, although problematic for me, not my main beef with them, but rather how they pulled it off. This matter has been discussed in this blog and elsewhere ad nauseam, so there's really no point to rehashing any of those old diatribes here.
What I will say is that, after the tumultuous "reboot," the creative team of writer Dan Slott and penciler Steve McNiven, inker Dexter Vines and colorist Morry Hollowell (the art team collectively known as "Team Civil War") pretty much hit the ground running. Had the first couple of issues been scripted as ineptly as the epilogue to One More Day, for which Joe Quesada has accepted blame, this "new" Spider-Man would almost certainly be stumbling out of the gate. That is definitely NOT the case here.
To wax cliche, Slott demonstrates that he was born to write Spider-Man. From Peter's character moments to Spider-Man's battle banter, Slott seems to have everything about him down pat. As much as I enjoyed my issues of JMS' run, I have to admit his take on Peter was pretty short on the witty comments, which is pretty essential to the whole affair. Slott hearkens back to the old Stan Lee days of snappy patter without the goofy, anachronistic tone from which Lee's recent writing efforts (e.g. The Last Fantastic Four Story) have suffered.
That Slott is not quite able to completely remove the bad taste that One More Day has left in my mouth is through no fault of his own; it's simply been too soon since that storytelling debacle. I have to say, though, that with the second issue, Slott manages to come a lot closer to making me forget One More Day than I thought possible.
As impressive as Slott's writing is, however, the main reason for my loving this story arc is the reason my resolve to drop this book remains, which is that there is no way, barring a change of editorial heart, that Amazing Spider-Man will ever look this good again, at least in the near future, because McNiven is, quite frankly, a penciling god, and upon his departure from the book after next issue, he will be SORELY missed.
The quality of McNiven's pencils, ably abetted by Vines and Hollowell offers stark testimony to the advantage of giving artists buckets of lead time to prepare their work; it's better than it's been in years. The last time I enjoyed his art this much was when he had just started on Marvel Knights 4. In the projects he had done for Marvel since then he was either hamstrung with scripts that didn't exploit his talent properly (his run on New Avengers) or rushed into meeting deadlines (Civil War), such that his work, while still better than that of 80% of most other mainstream artists noticeably dipped in overall quality.
For two issues out of three, however, this has not been the case for ol' Stevie. McNiven has long said he's wanted to do Spider-Man and his love for the character absolutely shines through here. He even pulls a bit of a surprise and channels Todd McFarlane for one glorious splash page. Looking at the page from afar my father thought the art had been digitally rendered rather than hand-drawn. That's how good the guy is.
Marvel, however, have been pretty candid that McNiven is kind of a marketing hook to whet readers' appetites for Spider-Man's new direction; after #548 ships next week he's off to join Civil War collaborator Mark Millar on a yet-undisclosed project, undoubtedly to the anguish of many a Spider-fan who may have hoped he'd draw Peter Parker's adventures forever. After he leaves, with due respect to the artists they've got lined up, including my sentimental favorite John Romita, Jr., the book will simply not look as good.
So while I'm still taking my indefinite break from the title after McNiven leaves, at least now I'm leaving with a lot less bitterness.
My wallet thanks you, Marvel, and now I can say I thank you for seeing me (and possibly a lot of other readers) off with a great story, and some absolutely stellar art.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
The Legend of Will
I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a connoisseur of the sub-genre of literature known as speculative fiction, but I am familiar with the central premise of one of its landmark works, the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend. Essentially, it's about how an ordinary man, Robert Neville, becomes a legend in a world full of vampires for his ferocious ability to kill them, essentially turning the concept of vampires being legendary among men on its head. As fascinating as this book is, it is unabashedly bleak in is storytelling approach, and not exactly the stuff of box-office fireworks, although it was made into two movies, The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price and The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston.
Trust Will Smith to prove everyone wrong.
Will's version of the movie, scripted by Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman and directed by Francis Lawrence, is the first film adaptation to actually use the book's title, although from what I understand it has more in common with Heston's Omega Man (which I haven't seen) than the actual book.
In it, Robert Neville (Smith) is not an ordinary man but in fact a military scientist, and the world is not populated by vampires (at least not nominally) but by humans who have been mutated by a virus that was engineered by a scientist named Dr. Alice Krippen (played by an uncredited Emma Thompson) as a cure for cancer. The virus has wiped out most of the world's population, and of the remainder who have survived an overwhelming majority have transformed into these beasts (referred to late in the film as "dark seekers"), while the immune remainder basically serve as their food.
Neville is, to his knowledge the one remaining immune person in the world. He lives in New York City, which was essentially ground zero for the infection, and spends his days searching for survivors, hunting for food, and experimenting with infected rats using his own immune blood in hopes of finding a cure. He spends his nights holed up in his brownstone with steel shutters, hoping the dark seekers won't come for him. His only companion throughout majority of the movie is a German Shepherd named Sam.
Without giving away too much, I can say that at some point he does, in fact, encounter these mutants, and in fact he captures one for experimentation purposes. Any other revelation would lead to spoilers.
I will say, though, that while the movie strives to maintain the bleak nature of the book, Matheson's conceit eventually gives way to a somewhat more upbeat ending than originally envisioned, and the reason for Neville's becoming the titular "Legend" is altered somewhat.
Much has been said about this film, particularly Smith's performance as Neville, which has been rightfully likened to Tom Hanks' Oscar-nominated take as a marooned FedEx employee in Cast Away. Truth be told, Smith is astonishing as Neville, creating the full range of emotions his character feels; desolation, despair, regret and even fear, all without any co-stars to play off. This is his movie to carry, and without him, no amount of suspenseful music, tight camera angles or shadowy lighting could create the atmosphere he does by his mere presence. In short, he pulls it off superbly.
Much has also been said about the special effects, most of it bad. Well, to my mind the filmmakers' greatest achievement was turning New York City into a deserted wasteland, which was no mean feat considering how populated it is in real life (and they did shoot on location). The effects used to create the zombie/vampire creatures in the movie is serviceable, and though it could have been better I would not really say it was the worst I've ever seen.
But even dodgy effects cannot detract from the manner in which Smith successfully sells this property. It is an amazing tour de force for an actor who has already reaped both box-office glory and critical acclaim. Only the two Toms, Hanks and Cruise, can claim to have achieved more than Will, and notably, both of their movies this year have floundered, leaving Will the last man standing, as it were.
At this rate, Smith could probably sell a movie about him reading the phone book (an unfortunate cliche, but an entirely apt one, I think), though as canny as he is, he'll probably come up with an even more successful project next time around.
Legend indeed.
Trust Will Smith to prove everyone wrong.
Will's version of the movie, scripted by Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman and directed by Francis Lawrence, is the first film adaptation to actually use the book's title, although from what I understand it has more in common with Heston's Omega Man (which I haven't seen) than the actual book.
In it, Robert Neville (Smith) is not an ordinary man but in fact a military scientist, and the world is not populated by vampires (at least not nominally) but by humans who have been mutated by a virus that was engineered by a scientist named Dr. Alice Krippen (played by an uncredited Emma Thompson) as a cure for cancer. The virus has wiped out most of the world's population, and of the remainder who have survived an overwhelming majority have transformed into these beasts (referred to late in the film as "dark seekers"), while the immune remainder basically serve as their food.
Neville is, to his knowledge the one remaining immune person in the world. He lives in New York City, which was essentially ground zero for the infection, and spends his days searching for survivors, hunting for food, and experimenting with infected rats using his own immune blood in hopes of finding a cure. He spends his nights holed up in his brownstone with steel shutters, hoping the dark seekers won't come for him. His only companion throughout majority of the movie is a German Shepherd named Sam.
Without giving away too much, I can say that at some point he does, in fact, encounter these mutants, and in fact he captures one for experimentation purposes. Any other revelation would lead to spoilers.
I will say, though, that while the movie strives to maintain the bleak nature of the book, Matheson's conceit eventually gives way to a somewhat more upbeat ending than originally envisioned, and the reason for Neville's becoming the titular "Legend" is altered somewhat.
Much has been said about this film, particularly Smith's performance as Neville, which has been rightfully likened to Tom Hanks' Oscar-nominated take as a marooned FedEx employee in Cast Away. Truth be told, Smith is astonishing as Neville, creating the full range of emotions his character feels; desolation, despair, regret and even fear, all without any co-stars to play off. This is his movie to carry, and without him, no amount of suspenseful music, tight camera angles or shadowy lighting could create the atmosphere he does by his mere presence. In short, he pulls it off superbly.
Much has also been said about the special effects, most of it bad. Well, to my mind the filmmakers' greatest achievement was turning New York City into a deserted wasteland, which was no mean feat considering how populated it is in real life (and they did shoot on location). The effects used to create the zombie/vampire creatures in the movie is serviceable, and though it could have been better I would not really say it was the worst I've ever seen.
But even dodgy effects cannot detract from the manner in which Smith successfully sells this property. It is an amazing tour de force for an actor who has already reaped both box-office glory and critical acclaim. Only the two Toms, Hanks and Cruise, can claim to have achieved more than Will, and notably, both of their movies this year have floundered, leaving Will the last man standing, as it were.
At this rate, Smith could probably sell a movie about him reading the phone book (an unfortunate cliche, but an entirely apt one, I think), though as canny as he is, he'll probably come up with an even more successful project next time around.
Legend indeed.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Goodbye, Spider-Man...
I've decided to give Marvel Comics' new direction for its flagship character, Spider-Man a shot; last week I bought the first of three issues of Amazing Spider-Man to be published this January, which prosaically enough bears the caption "Brand New Day."
Having suffered through the contrivance of One More Day and its ham-handed tabula rasa treatment of Spider-Man continuity, I couldn't help but groan at how Marvel is essentially trying to sell us a bill of goods by telling us that the Marvel Universe is essentially the same place it's been all this time, except that Peter Parker is no longer married to Mary Jane, Aunt May doesn't remember who Peter Parker is, and, oh Harry Osborn, who died quite poignantly in Spectacular Spider-Man 200, is inexplicably alive. As a comic fan I understand that contrivance is very much the name of the game, but that doesn't excuse a lack of creativity.
Oddly enough, I, a married man, even understand the logic behind 'un-marrying' Peter, but find the way it was done so slipshod that I simply cannot give my long-term support to the damage it's done to the last twenty or so years of Spider-Man's mythos. Oh, sure, Marvel editorial have done a great deal of online damage control saying that they've gone over Spider-Man's history and have figured out how this is all going to work, but frankly I'm no longer interested in waiting around to find out how.
I can't stand, first and foremost, that Peter and Aunt May's relationship, which had evolved quite beautifully under J. Michael Straczynski's tenure, has been reset to her not knowing his secret identity. Issue #38 of ASM Vol. II, the issue where May and Peter have it out about his long-kept secret, and easily my favorite issue of JMS's seven-year run on the title, has just been rendered null and void, as well as all of the other touching issues where Aunt May shows how strong she really is. Sure, the new Spider crew tries to show the audience that this isn't your daddy's Aunt May--she's a proactive, tough-as-nails member of the community, helping out in soup kitchens and election campaigns--but it feels like it's too little, too late. The point is that Peter is still bullshitting her, and not only that, he's now a bum to boot. Parker luck my ass.
I find the 'mysterious' superheroine Jackpot (to whom I was introduced as early as last May's Free Comic Book Day issue of ASM) similarly wince-inducing, and hope, most likely in vain, that it isn't Mary Jane under the tights because I can't possibly think of a worse conceptualization for a superhero. Where'd she get her super powers? Mephisto? Shouldn't she be on fire or something?
Most jarring of all is the return of Harry, whose death way back in 1993 was handled with such sensitivity and finesse that I was sure his demise would go on to be Spidey canon, like Gwen Stacy, Jean De Wolffe, or Kraven. I found particularly crass how Joe Quesada basically said "come on, you just have to have Harry back, it makes everything more fun" or something like that, basically showing that the only reason Harry's back is because he thinks it's a good idea.
I'm not even going to go into the hypergeekness that has fandom picking away at how One More Day and Brand New Day represent essentially a huge tear in Marvel's space time continuum as a whole. I don't even read that many comics, as big a comic fan as I may have been.
All I know is that Joe Quesada and company have whipped out their wangs and pissed on, by and large, my experience of reading Spider-Man comic books. I'm going to finish the first three issues of this new direction, and then I am going to swear off Spider-Man in general...not a hard thing to do considering 1) I hadn't been regularly collecting ASM since John Romita Jr. left the book and 2) I really do have to make some spending cutbacks in the next few months, so this is a good place to start.
It made me happy to see Marvel Comics dominating sales for two years in a row following DC's several years of dominance riding on the shoulders of Jim Lee, Michael Turner, and event comics with the word "Crisis" attached to it, but now I'm just depressed because I really get the impression that Joe Quesada thinks he can get away with murder.
Well, Joe, I can now honestly say that although I've enjoyed a lot, and I mean a LOT of the comic books that came out under your watch as Marvel E-I-C, I'm done letting you walk all over my favorite comic book character.
I'll be back if and when all of this new dreck is retconned out of existence.
Having suffered through the contrivance of One More Day and its ham-handed tabula rasa treatment of Spider-Man continuity, I couldn't help but groan at how Marvel is essentially trying to sell us a bill of goods by telling us that the Marvel Universe is essentially the same place it's been all this time, except that Peter Parker is no longer married to Mary Jane, Aunt May doesn't remember who Peter Parker is, and, oh Harry Osborn, who died quite poignantly in Spectacular Spider-Man 200, is inexplicably alive. As a comic fan I understand that contrivance is very much the name of the game, but that doesn't excuse a lack of creativity.
Oddly enough, I, a married man, even understand the logic behind 'un-marrying' Peter, but find the way it was done so slipshod that I simply cannot give my long-term support to the damage it's done to the last twenty or so years of Spider-Man's mythos. Oh, sure, Marvel editorial have done a great deal of online damage control saying that they've gone over Spider-Man's history and have figured out how this is all going to work, but frankly I'm no longer interested in waiting around to find out how.
I can't stand, first and foremost, that Peter and Aunt May's relationship, which had evolved quite beautifully under J. Michael Straczynski's tenure, has been reset to her not knowing his secret identity. Issue #38 of ASM Vol. II, the issue where May and Peter have it out about his long-kept secret, and easily my favorite issue of JMS's seven-year run on the title, has just been rendered null and void, as well as all of the other touching issues where Aunt May shows how strong she really is. Sure, the new Spider crew tries to show the audience that this isn't your daddy's Aunt May--she's a proactive, tough-as-nails member of the community, helping out in soup kitchens and election campaigns--but it feels like it's too little, too late. The point is that Peter is still bullshitting her, and not only that, he's now a bum to boot. Parker luck my ass.
I find the 'mysterious' superheroine Jackpot (to whom I was introduced as early as last May's Free Comic Book Day issue of ASM) similarly wince-inducing, and hope, most likely in vain, that it isn't Mary Jane under the tights because I can't possibly think of a worse conceptualization for a superhero. Where'd she get her super powers? Mephisto? Shouldn't she be on fire or something?
Most jarring of all is the return of Harry, whose death way back in 1993 was handled with such sensitivity and finesse that I was sure his demise would go on to be Spidey canon, like Gwen Stacy, Jean De Wolffe, or Kraven. I found particularly crass how Joe Quesada basically said "come on, you just have to have Harry back, it makes everything more fun" or something like that, basically showing that the only reason Harry's back is because he thinks it's a good idea.
I'm not even going to go into the hypergeekness that has fandom picking away at how One More Day and Brand New Day represent essentially a huge tear in Marvel's space time continuum as a whole. I don't even read that many comics, as big a comic fan as I may have been.
All I know is that Joe Quesada and company have whipped out their wangs and pissed on, by and large, my experience of reading Spider-Man comic books. I'm going to finish the first three issues of this new direction, and then I am going to swear off Spider-Man in general...not a hard thing to do considering 1) I hadn't been regularly collecting ASM since John Romita Jr. left the book and 2) I really do have to make some spending cutbacks in the next few months, so this is a good place to start.
It made me happy to see Marvel Comics dominating sales for two years in a row following DC's several years of dominance riding on the shoulders of Jim Lee, Michael Turner, and event comics with the word "Crisis" attached to it, but now I'm just depressed because I really get the impression that Joe Quesada thinks he can get away with murder.
Well, Joe, I can now honestly say that although I've enjoyed a lot, and I mean a LOT of the comic books that came out under your watch as Marvel E-I-C, I'm done letting you walk all over my favorite comic book character.
I'll be back if and when all of this new dreck is retconned out of existence.
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