Hollywood Whitewashing

Last weekend, a movie version of the popular Japanese manga Dragonball Z opened across the globe, to tepid box-office results. It starred a Caucasian actor, the bug-eyed Justin Chatwin, whose last truly notable role was as Tom Cruise's teenage son in War of the Worlds. Next year will see the release of at least two intended "tentpole" summer pictures with lead characters that aren't Caucasian: M. Night Shyamalan's adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender (simply titled The Last Airbender, due to disputes with James Cameron over the use of the word "Avatar"), and Jerry Bruckheimer's big screen version of the popular game The Prince of Persia.  The former is admittedly set in a fantastical world, albeit one heavily influenced by Asian culture as is clear from its themes, visuals, music, the names of the characters, and ultimately the admissions of the creators themselves.The latter, however, is set in the historical kingdom of ancient Persia and India though the story also has some fantastical twists.

In both cases, though, Caucasian actors have been pretty much shoehorned into roles that, to put it mildly, seem somewhat inappropriate for them. In the case of Persia, the role of the Prince is essayed by semi-popular actor Jake Gyllenhaal, apparently angling for his big breakout action movie (considering that in the last one he starred in The Day After Tomorrow, the real star was the digital rendering of the multiple catastrophes that rocked the world), while role of the princess is played by recent Bond girl Gemma Arterton. Neither actor, conspicuously, is Middle Eastern, though one could argue that Gyllenhaal's Jewish heritage brings him a couple of steps closer to the Prince, certainly more than Arterton is to an INDIAN princess.

The cast of The Last Airbender, as I have noted in another post, is even more ridiculous; M. Night Shyalaman has gone with, for the most part, a bunch of Caucasian UNKNOWNS for the lead characters; ALL of whom are clearly designed to be Asian-inspired. I was even profoundly insulted by an alleged comment I read on Wikipedia where one of the teeny-boppers cast as Sokka, who would best have been essayed by an Inuit/Native American, crassly said something like "I'll just have to get a tan and shave the sides of my head; a little suspension of disbelief is required." The belated casting of Slumdog Millionaire's breakout star Dev Patel as Prince Zuko is hardly a balm to the sting of Shyamalan's ridiculous casting decisions; the damage has been done.

Ironically enough, the voice actors of almost all of these characters, from Yuri Lowenthal who voiced the Prince to Zach Tyler Eisen who voiced Aang the Avatar, are white, but there's a world of difference between animation and live action in this respect; an animated character is an amalgam of his voice and his visual representation, but in the end it's what people, whether the gamers or the viewers, see on the screen that really leaves the impression; just about anyone could be a voice actor and in fact in other territories, the voices are quite easily replaced. With live action, though, no amount of dubbing can change what appears on the big screen, and the awkwardness of bad casting.

The way I see it, the imperative here is to create an affinity between the audience and the characters they are seeing on the screen, and to an extent I get that, especially in the case of Persia, which has been cast with a semi-well-known actor. 

But if there's any lesson that films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and, more recently, Slumdog Millionaire have to teach, its that you don't have to put white asses on the screen to get white asses in the seats. Furthermore, the audience for these movies goes well beyond the borders of the United States now; many movies make the real money overseas. As impressive, for example, as Titanic's 600 million dollar gross is, it is dwarfed by the $1.2 billion gross it made in the rest of the world, which is, loath that I am to state the obvious, 2/3 of the film's total gross. 

In short, there is no need to just pander to white Americans, many of whom, incidentally, recently voted a black man into their highest public office. 

 It was gratifying to see Dragonball: Evolution crash and burn, even though in that case, casting a white actor was arguably not as strange considering Gokou is supposed to be an alien. With any luck, though, maybe the whitewashing will stop someday soon, and we'll see more East Asian or West Asian people actually PLAYED by East Asian or West Asian actors.

The Passion of Star Trek: and the Fanboys Are At It Again...

The Star Trek reboot, which is due out in a little less than a month, like any piece of pop-culture in this day and age of the internet and Apple downloads, has its share of fans and, ridiculously enough, its detractors.

It no longer comes as any surprise to me that fanboys are lightning quick to make the conclusions as to the quality of this film based on a few trailers and casting decisions. Since The Dark Knight pleased audiences and critics the world over long after fanboys declared it would be the greatest movie of all time I've simply resigned myself to the fact that they will milk their newfound sense of infallibility for a long, long time to come and have thus far been able to avoid my old vice of reading messageboards and thereby spared myself some undue aggravation. Accusations like"Star Trek 90210" are utterly puerile, they no longer annoy me the way they would once have done.

What strikes me as amusing and appalling at the same time is the thought that considering the profile of several fanboys, a lot of the twelve to fifteen year olds who post on message boards weren't even zygotes at the time the last Kirk Star Trek movie came out, and I'm hard-pressed to imagine a forty or fifty something, the generation of people who would have actually grown up with the original Star Trek series, coining a name like "Star Trek 90210." Of course, it's never wise to underestimate the devotion of Trekkies of any age, and the original Trekkies were, after all the forefathers of the modern fanboy. Still, I can't help but feel that a late-thirty, forty or fifty something person posting "this will suck" about a movie he hasn't seen is downright pathetic, as is a teenager or tweener spending all of his time going over old Star Trek replays or DVDs instead of playing outside.

For my part, I think the movie looks great based on the trailers, but am not about to draw any conclusions one way or the other about it. That's pretty much how one should assess a movie one hasn't seen. If one doesn't like what he sees in the marketing materials, he is free to not watch it, no matter what devotees of Speed Racer might whine on messageboards.

The thing about "this is going to suck" pronouncements is that I think they're here to stay. It's like I've been saying for ages: thanks to the internet any idiot with an opinion can make it known (feel free to insert snark about this writer here).

To be fair to the naysayers, they HAVE been pretty much on the money about Mark Steven Johnson's Marvel films...

Adapting Anime

This week, the live-action adaptation of Dragonball Z is coming to theaters in the Philippines. I'm the last person on earth I'd call a fan of that long running Japanese animated show, but the merest glance at the promotional material such as the posters and theatrical trailers told me that a great many liberties had been taken with the original story.

And I wondered to myself just then if it even made sense to adapt that series, as well as several other works of anime. I guess another way to ask the question would be: does anime lend itself well to live-action adaptation? For me, the answer is a big, fat, emphatic "I'm not sure."

The adaptation of many TV series, I think, makes sense. While I wasn't a fan of Speed Racer, either the adaptation or the cartoon it was adapted from, there was, to me, definitely a logic in bringing the 1960s series to the big screen.  I can also say that I am looking forward to the CGI adaptation of Astro Boy, a TV series I followed quite extensively when I was younger, as well as the alleged Robotech adaptation that was greenlit following the success of Transformers. Most of the old anime TV shows, after all, due to their mass-market, serialized nature, sported so-so animation and generated their followings based mostly on their stories and characters rather than stunning visuals, although the odd episode would be remembered for great animation too. So bringing those to the big screen makes sense, for the most part.

But what about the sprawling, ambitious, eye-popping feature films like Akira, Ghost in the Shell or any of the works by Hayao Miyazaki, which ooze consummate artistry from their every cel? Like Disney movies, they represent hand-drawn animation at its highest form, the cartoon done to perfection. And yet, in the case of Akira, at the very least, I understand that a live-action adaptation is bubbling on the minds of some studio execs, which to me would be heresy. After all, does any Disney exec fancy adapting Beauty and the Beast, or Cinderella, in live action? Of course not. Some works of Japanese anime should be similarly sacrosanct.

Another problem adapting anime presents is the very distinctive look of its characters, who, apart from having highly exaggerated facial features, often achieved highly exaggerated facial expressions which cannot really be reflected in real life and yet which often imbue the storytelling with its distinctive flavor.  Part of me understands (though I still refuse to condone) M. Night Shyamalan's decision to cast his adapatation of the anime-inspired Avatar: The Last Airbender with white actors; no Asian/Japanese/Chinese actor could have the round eyes of an anime character; it simply isn't physiologically possible.  Of course, he could have gone for Indian actors, whose eyes are arguably often bigger than those of Caucasians, but that's a whole other can of worms. 

The point is that several visual quirks of the characters, an integral part of the anime aesthetic and mythology cannot be effectively adapted in live action. Of course, by that logic the upcoming Astro Boy is exempt as it is done in CGI rather than live action.

There are some anime that may lend themselves well to adaptation, but if Hollywood knows what's good for them, they should leave classics like Akira alone.

The World Doesn't Get Alan Moore

While I am well-aware of Alan Moore's significance as a modern cultural touchstone, I can't honestly say I've read any of his truly significant works. In fact, apart from an issue of Spawn and a couple of issues of WildC.A.Ts I can say I haven't read anything by him at all. As a longtime comic book fan I am embarrassed to say I haven't read Watchmen (at least I can claim having flipped through The Dark Knight Returns when it was on display at Power Books., though that was by Frank Miller, back when he was still credible).

Arguably, then, I don't have any business writing a blog post about Alan Moore's work, but the thing of it is, I have enjoyed at least two adaptations of his seminal comic books, V for Vendetta and Watchmen, the former a bit more than the latter and am sincerely disappointed that people don't seem to appreciate these works as much as I have. Rather than offer some snarky, elitist explanation as to why people don't "get" Alan Moore, though, I thought I'd try to posit a little theory I've been brewing since I found out that Watchmen conspicuously underperformed at the box office.

I know they're pretty much the world's easiest target, but first of all I blame Hollywood, and V for Vendetta, while it remains my favorite adaptation of a work by Moore, is a good example. There the filmmakers (Andy and Larry Wachowski of The Matrix fame) were able to preserve a lot of the key elements and aspects of the story but still managed to dull its edges by removing some of the more risque aspects of Moore's storytelling. There's a whole wikipedia entry on the changes, but I was struck by the removal of Finch's resorting to drug use to try to learn to think like V, and ultimately by the fact that unlike his cinematic counterpart, the comic-book version of V cared not a whit for democracy but was in fact an anarchist. There is such a thing as taking creative liberties, but there's also such a thing as hijacking somebody's body of work to make it a platform for one's own agenda, and though I had no problem with the film being the anti-Bush propaganda that critics accused it of being, I really wasn't fond of the fact that the story went from a bold vision of a world where all vestige of despotic order is destroyed and replaced with its antithesis to a feel-good, twisted version of an "I'd like to teach the world to sing" Coca-Cola chorus. It became about "freedom" and "democracy," which, while virtues in and of themselves, were NOT part of the original story. So for the most part, Hollywood doesn't have the balls to envision Alan Moore's work as it should be done. One only need watch The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to see that.

How, then does one explain the underwhelming box-office performance of Watchmen, which a lot of fans have hailed as painstakingly faithful to the source material?

That brings me to the second culprit behind the lukewarm reception to adaptations of Alan Moore's works; Joe Public's perception of comic book movies.

Now, though it wasn't my favorite comic book movie of last year or of all time, I really have to concede that makers of The Dark Knight have probably made the boldest narrative effort by (spoiler alert, if one is needed) pitting Batman against a villain he cannot conclusively defeat without great personal cost. Thing is, there was a structure to it; a hero, a villain, and acts of good pitted against acts of evil.

Neither V for Vendetta nor Watchmen follows that paradigm, with the characters there often acting with as much villainy as heroism. And it is because of this, the absence of larger-than-life archetypes, that the general audience, who, I think, have pre-conceived notions of the kind of stories their comic-book based movies should tell based on over three decades of such movies starting with 1978's Superman, simply doesn't connect to Moore's characters, which is really a shame because they are wonderfully nuanced, even when watered down.

Another aspect I think comes into play is something Moore himself declared; his works are unfilmable, because they depict events and characters in a way that can only be done on the printed page. I don't know that I agree entirely with that and certainly the technological advances made since Watchmen's initial publication in 1986 have made that statement debatable, but it is still entirely possible that things may have gotten lost in translation. Some of the most damning indictments of the film have come from internet fans who watched the film, were underwhelmed, re-read the comic books to restore their faith in Moore, and came to the conclusion that the story "wasn't really that great to begin with," which is more the fault of the filmmaker than anyone else; I mean, I don't remember it ever happening that an adaptation has literally dragged down the source material along with it. Maybe Moore was right and the series should never have been filmed.

I think the problem in a nut shell is that the world is not ready for Alan Moore yet. Whether it's Hollywood producers with no balls, or audiences with too many preconceived notions, I don't think people are in the proper position to appreciate the subtext of Moore's works.

Film Piracy Rears Its Head Again

I have to confess that X-Men Origins: Wolverine was not particularly high on my list of "must-see movies" for this year and indeed the only big ticket movie I'm really intent on seeing, James Cameron's Avatar, isn't due out till December.  I'd also like to point out that I'm not a fan of the way 20th Century Fox, as a studio, have handled their Marvel properties, basically butt-fucking everything from the X-Men franchise to Fantastic Four to Daredevil.

Still, the thought that something like 90% of the movie has been released on torrents really pisses me off.

I appreciate that video piracy is quite the equalizer considering the way DVDs used to be priced and considering the way Blu Ray discs still are priced now, but the thing about downloading movies before their release doesn't just hurt the home video market; it hurts the moviemaking industry itself. I've already gone on about this at length in an older post, but I think it is worth adding that in this day and age of internet, where millions of people can download from a single site, some real damage can be done. This isn't the age of the bootleg betamax or VHS tape; it's a lot more serious.

Good for you if you're out to destroy Hollywood, which is admittedly a pretty ugly place these days capable of producing some really trashy product, but not if you actually love movies. I never could reconcile my late best friend's proclamation that he loved movies with the fact that just about every video in his collection was pirated, even the small, independent movies.

I'll agree that, quite often, studios need to be cut down a peg or two and piracy can be a good way to do it, and maybe, just maybe, that's a little slap in the face Fox needs to start taking their Marvel Properties seriously, lest Marvel buy them back and start making the X-Men, FF and Daredevil actually watchable again.  So fine.

But let's not delude ourselves that these torrent bastards are champions of the people. Please.

One of Life's Great Mysteries: Why the Punisher Has Had THREE Movies

As comprehensively reviled as their third installments were, the Spider-Man and X-Men film franchises clearly earned enough money to justify a third chapter for each one. After the release of the first movie of each series it became clear that these properties had not only a comic-book reading fanbase but a movie-going one as well which made ponying up resources for a third go a bit of a no-brainer for the studios handling them. For these two Marvel properties, three makes sense.

The same thing, however, cannot be said for the only other Marvel property, to the exclusion even of such illustrious names as the Fantastic Four and the Incredible Hulk, to have had three feature-length, big screen movies made adapting it: The Punisher.

The Punisher, a.k.a. Frank Castle, has been the subject of three films, one in 1989 starring Dolph Lundgren which may or may not have made it to theaters, one in 2004 starring Thomas Jane as the title character and John Travolta as the bad guy, and finally (I hope) one that came out last year in the U.S. and is coming to theaters next week starring some Irishman named Ray Stevenson.

All films have been critical and commercial failures, save for the film starring Lundgren, which may or may not have even made it into theaters at all (though for the record it came out here in Philippine movie theaters), which really prompts the question: WHY has this character gotten so many second chances? Note, each of the latter two movies "rebooted" what came before it, so in other words Frank Castle has been introduced to movie audiences a total of THREE times.

Now, there is admittedly a certain logic in wanting to go to the Punisher well as often as possible. He doesn't have superpowers or gadgets and therefore movies starring him are relatively cheap to produce (with this last one being made for a frugal $22 million). Also, the Punisher does have a bit of a cult following since his rise to prominence in the Marvel Universe during the "grim and gritty" era of the 1980s. Thing is, all of the films bombed and money down the toilet is still money down the toilet, so I hope the idiots over at Lionsgate Films as well as the occasionally self-delusional Avi Arad (who claimed Elektra failed because it was poorly marketed) have finally been awakened by the sound of their product crashing and burning.

Off the top of my head I can think of at least one Marvel hero who deserves the reboot treatment a hell of a lot more: Daredevil. To be fair, the lamentable 2003 film Daredevil was the first Marvel film to ever spawn a spin-off in the failed Elektra, but despite two weeks as America's #1 movie and a domestic gross north of $100 million, a perfectly respectable feat for a then somewhat obscure Marvel character, neither Marvel nor the studio that has the rights to the character, 20th Century Fox, seems to have any plans on what to do next. This is a profound shame because if the property were rebooted with a good cast and crew and filmed based on a storyline as electrifying as Frank Miller's Born Again, Marvel (and whoever studio they go with) could have a real winner on their hands. I would even venture to say that if Born Again were adapted properly, with its haunting, gut-wrenching look at how a superhero unravels, it would give The Dark Knight a run for its money as the greatest comic-book movie of all time. Hell, even the director of the 2003 turkey, Mark Steven Johnson, got a second bite of the Marvel apple with the truly disastrous Ghost Rider, so it's beyond me why Tom Rothman is still sitting on a property that, done right, could banish Fox's reputation for creatively sodomizing its comic-book properties.

Even in terms of mythology, Matt Murdock, Daredevil's alter ego wins hands down over the Punisher, who really isn't much more than a quintessential Charles Bronson-esque urban vigilante type. The very concept of a lawyer running around at night beating people up as a superhero makes for some truly rich irony; Murdock is actually a bit of a hypocrite for doing what he does, and that makes him all the more interesting. Throw in the bit about him being blind and him having lost his father, an aging boxer who refused to throw a fight, and his truly dysfunctional upbringing and there's the potential for so much nuanced storytelling that plumbs the depths of the human psyche. It speaks volumes of the character that his fans were so disappointed with his movie, in the same way that some reviews speak volumes about the Punisher in saying that the latest movie, Punisher War Zone, has been the most faithful to the comic book so far with its senseless violence. The Punisher is basically an ultra-right-wing gun lover's fantasy: a guy who solves his problems by blowing people away. Daredevil is much, much more than that.

I understand one of Avi Arad's wet dreams right now is to get the film rights to the Daredevil character back from Fox so that Marvel Studios can make the movie with a studio like Paramount or Universal simply handling distribution and marketing. Well, though he's dropped the ball on in the past (Helloooo Spider-Man 3!) I truly wish him luck with this endeavor, so long as Mark Steven Johnson isn't allowed within a kilometer of the script or actual production. I would also have mentioned Fantastic Four as a franchise that needs to be done over (even though I enjoyed the second one), but apparently Fox and/or Marvel already have that in mind. Personally I'd like to see Marvel buy that one back, too.

With Iron Man winning back a great deal of credibility for Marvel Properties after it was squandered by the likes of X-Men 3 and Spider-Man 3, maybe Marvel should look at the direction a lot of its franchises, particularly the ones handled by other studios rather than their outfit, have taken, and do some serious re-tooling.

Earlier I read about their single most intelligent decision since signing Jon Favreau and Robert Downey for Iron Man: they've pushed back their movie slate, consisting of Avengers, Thor, and Captain America back a year. Sony Pictures, whether on their urging or otherwise, has likewise pushed back Spider-Man 4. They finally recognize what everyone's been screaming: that, as shown by films like Iron Man, you can't rush good movies.

It is my hope against hope that with the utter and comprehensive failure of Punisher: War Zone, we fans have seen the last of Marvel's cookie-cutter movies, whoever the studio.

A World Run by Bad Guys

2008 marked the year I said "enough" to Marvel Comics and their events. My attention was squarely focused on other things, whether it was my family, new job, or diecast car collecting. Sure, I bought a few issues here and there and am currently finishing Kurt Busiek's sequel to Marvels, with art by Jay Anacleto, but otherwise I can pretty much categorically say that my large scale collecting of single issues is over. If I ever go back now it's to trade paperbacks; I'm all but done with the whole "comics as collectibles" concept (especially since I now have to pay to post stuff on eBay) and now choose to view them as stories to read and enjoy, even though there are almost no stories out there right now that I enjoy that much.

That said, I like the idea of the Marvel Universe's status quo.

The idea of villains being in charge is not quite original; indeed DC, through writer Jeph Loeb had Lex Luthor elected President of the United States in its universe a few years back, a status quo that persisted for quite a few years until being undone in 2003.

What I like, though is how this idea was gestated, and how it doesn't just involve one bad guy but some of the most notorious villains in the Marvel Universe, none of whom has really changed his or her stripes but all of whom nonetheless now have the public on their side for the time being.

The story feels organic because it wasn't as though everyone woke up one morning to find Norman Osborn in charge; the seeds for this were planted as early as Civil War and were germinated in Thunderbolts (and even issues of Amazing Spider-Man) before the turning point came at the end of Secret Invasion, where Osborn put a gun to the head of Skrull Queen Veranke and basically blew her away. By this time the credibility of superheroes is so tattered after a full-on superhero-vs-superhero war, an invasion by the Hulk, and an alien infiltration, that people feel they have no one else to turn to but the bad guys. I haven't followed the execution, but as a concept it sounds pretty darned cool.

Of course, the conceit of bad guys being in charge can't last forever (even the Republicans lost the last election, after all ;D) so this gimmick will soon be over, but one's got to give Marvel credit. And apparently they can sustain a gimmick for awhile; Steve Rogers, after all, has officially been dead for two years and yet the comic book Captain America has enjoyed pretty brisk sales notwithstanding. 

So though I havent' been conned into buying comics regularly again, I will say I am interested to see where Quesada and crew will go with this particular direction.

Rewarded At Last

It's true enough that the independent film as we know it owes much of the recognition it receives today to the Weinstein brothers, Harvey and Bob, and the studio they founded, Miramax, but this is far from the only studio that has produced some truly quality independent movies in the last fifteen years or so.

My personal favorite purveyor of indie films happens to be Fox Searchlight Pictures. Sure, like many fans aggrieved by his decisions with respect to Marvel Comics movies I may think Tom Rothman is the devil's spawn, but Fox Searchlight is a different animal from 20th Century Fox and they've come up with some really memorable films. For those unfamiliar with their films, it will be my pleasure to list my favorites:

The Full Monty (1997) is, as far as I know, the film that put the then-fledgling indie film distributor on the map. Directed by Peter Cattaneo and written by Simon Beaufoy, the film tells the (apparently true) story of several blue collar workers in England who, upon being retrenched, decide upon a rather unorthodox way of making money for their families, i.e. by doing a male striptease act a la Chippendales. It's British humor at its very finest, and even the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences was captivated; the film received four Academy Award nominations including nods for Best Picture and Best Director.

Waking Ned Devine (1999) set in a tiny Irish village, is another absolute gem of a film about a man who dies of a heart attack upon learning that he has won the lottery, and, more imporantly about the village's collective effort to cover up his death so that they can collect the prize and split it amongst themselves. I think I may have burst blood vessels laughing at how funny that movie was.

Sideways (2004) is set on the other side of the pond for a change; specifically, California, where depressed middle-school teacher Miles (a wonderful Paul Giamatti) accompanies his friend, over-the-hill actor Jack (the hilariously authentic Thomas Haden Church) on one last weekend of fun in California wine country before Jack gets married to his longtime girlfriend. The film alternates between haunting poignancy and laugh-out-loud hilarity, and was my favorite release of 2004, even over the acclaimed blockbuster Spider-Man 2. It also got multiple Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture, and it ended up taking home the golden statuette for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Little Miss Sunshine (2006) a film about a children's beauty pageant, which has her entire family composed of her self-help guru dad (Greg Kinnear), exasperated-to-have-invested-all-her-money mom (Toni Colette), emo/ultra-quiet/aspiring pilot half-brother (Paul Dano), her insane, profane, drug-addict grandfather (Alan Arkin), and her suicidal gay college professor uncle (Steve Carell) make a cross country trip in a beat-up Volkswagen bus that turns out to be a character unto itself as the movie unfolds. Like Sideways, it's a movie about a road trip, and what a road trip it turns out to be! I loved this film and apparently the MPAAS did too; it won two Oscars, one for Best Original Screenplay and the other for Alan Arkin's supporting role as the foul-mouthed granddad.

Juno (2007) is a movie about a smart (and smart-mouthed) teenage girl (Ellen Page) who gets pregnant by her best friend (Michael Cera) puts her baby, unborn for most of the movie, up for adoption. The couple that responds to her ad, a pair of yuupies played by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner seems to be the perfect couple and therefore the perfect parents but like the saying goes, looks can be deceiving. Again, Fox Searchlight flirted with Oscar as the film garnered nominations for Best Picture, Director, Actress for Page's spunky teen, and Original Screenplay. Writer Diablo Cody took home the award for her bitingly original script.

If I seem unduly preoccupied with the attention the films released by Fox Searchlight have been getting from the MPAAS it's because I am truly and deeply glad that on February 22, 2009 at the Kodak Theater, one of their releases, the extremely popular Slumdog Millionaire, finally took home the top prize for the studio, besting offerings from Paramount, Focus Films (Universal Pictures' independent arm), Universal itself, and Oscar veterans the Weinstein brothers courtesy of their new studio, Weinstein Films. It was also the film through which Monty screenwriter Beaufoy managed to snag a long-overdue Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

What I like about Fox Searchlight movies is that while they show a broad spectrum of human experience with dark or heavy films like Boys Don't Cry or Kinsey also having come from their stable, most of their truly outstanding movies, and the ones that garner the most recognition, are all life-affirming, lighthearted affairs that, even if they don't necessarily have storybook happy endings, are nonetheless very positive in their overall outlook. I hear that Slumdog continues this trend and am quite excited to see it, apart from the fact that it has won an award for the studio which it has deserved for a long, long time.

Why Comic Book Makers Should Stop Pandering to Hollywood

These days, thanks to films like The Dark Knight, the first couple of Spider-Man films and Iron Man, comic books are seen as entirely legitimate source material for motion pictures. This is good in that comic books seem to finally be coming out of the ghetto to which they've been confined for the longest time, but bad in that now, a lot of comic book storylines feel extremely self-conscious, as if their writers were making pitches for Hollywood screenplays. Worse still, a lot of writers working on comics these days are screenwriters or TV writers, and their work is of mixed quality; while I loved the work of J. Michael Straczynski, for example, I can't say the same for that of Jeph Loeb. Quite frankly the problem with comics these days is that a lot of them feel like wannabe movies.

And this is a terrible thing. Comics are comics and movies are movies, and both are distinct art forms, each with its own peculiarities and idiosyncrasies, and each with characteristics unique to its own form that the other cannot and should not aspire to mimic.

There are so many things about comics that simply have not been translated to movies: Spider-Man has forgotten the ability to wisecrack. V (in V for Vendetta) suddenly became an agent of democracy rather than anarchy. Superman has not faced any of his cosmos-shattering adversaries like Darkseid or Braniac and has had to content himself with flying really fast and lifting really heavy objects. The Hulk, well, for two movies running now, the Hulk has not quite felt real. This may not speak very well of the movies that adapted them, but it speaks well of the source material in that there remain certain intangibles which they have over their adaptations; there remains reason for viewers to say "I liked the comic better" the same way Lord of the Rings purists will always say "I liked the book better."

Bill Watterson, creator of the now defunct Calvin and Hobbes, hit the nail on the head when he refused to allow his creation to be adapted as a cartoon. Basically, even though he had a deep respect for the art of animation, he had a problem with voice actors giving life to Calvin. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine Watterson feeling that no six or seven-year-old boy could properly deliver Calvin's ridiculously precocious dialogue properly, or that some middle-aged woman (e.g. The Simpsons' Nancy Cartwright) would always be just that: a middle-aged woman and not a child. Thanks to this little bit of artistic integrity on Watterson's part, the strip is now immortalized in its current form and Calvin will never be reduced to the identity of his voice actor or Korean animation studio, which is more than I can say for Spider-man, who is indelibly linked to Tobey Maguire by millions of people who've never picked up a comic book.

Lest I be misconstrued, I'd like to clarify that I'm not against adapting comic books at all; I love many of the comic book adaptations that have come out over the years, with the first two Spider-Man film and last year's Iron Man being my favorites with my (personal) runnerup honors going, in no particular order, to the Bryan Singer X-Men films, the Hellboy films, Guillermo Del Toro's lone Blade film, Blade II, and the Christopher Nolan Batman films.

My point is that the attempts of some comic book creators or publishers to "make life easier" for the filmmakers that may or may not adapt their work by writing stories that pander to them or redesigning costumes or origins or various other tweaks is doing the comic book industry as a whole a severe disservice. Of course, in some cases "realistic" costume tweaks can help; without Adi Granov's designs, I'm pretty sure Iron Man would not have been half as watchable as it eventually was.

I say, let the film industry play catch-up. One can only imagine how frightfully dreadful comic books and their subsequent adaptations would have been had Stan Lee been content to limit his stories to the kind of images that the technology of the time was capable of realizing.

Hollywood has caught up with a lot of comic books, having made some pretty sterling adaptations in the last few years. If comic book writers absolutely have to think about Hollywood when writing their plots and scripts, I think their driving concern should be "so what CAN'T Hollywood do yet?" Assuming visual effects studios can ever crack those nuts, that would make for some pretty engaging viewing.

Shamelessly Riding the Obama Phenomenon

Last January, Marvel Comics sold over 350,000 copies of a Spider-Man comic book that featured U.S. President Barack Obama on the cover and in a five-page back-up story. I saw a copy in Filbar's and despite having an overwhelming urge to join the wave of speculators that no doubt helped propel sales skyward I balked, being utterly turned off by the art and script of the story featuring Obama, all of which pretty much gave comic books a really bad name.

Not too long before, Marvel's Editor-in-Chief had said that in keeping with Marvel portraying the "real world," the U.S. President of the Marvel Universe would be Barack Obama. This was buttressed by an appearance the Commander-in-Chief apparently made, in continuity, in an issue of the comic-book Thunderbolts, which also came out in January. The writer of the series, Andy Diggle, went on record saying the President was Obama and even spiced up the script with a reference to his star-studded inauguration.

And it was then that marketing reared its hideous head.

Probably at the instance of some clowns with MBAs, Marvel's marketing arm claims that the only Obama appearing in the Marvel Universe is the one who shows up in Amazing Spider Man 583, the one whose dialogue is downright embarrassing (along with the dialogue of the rest of the story), the one who doesn't look a blessed thing like him, and who appears in a horribly stereotypical, borderline racist depiction of what a "black president" should be like (i.e. a basketball expert). Not, Marvel's marketing is quick to point out, the decisive, authoritative figure that attempts to rein in the now power-mad Norman Osborn. That man, according to Marvel marketing, is merely "the representation of who the President in the Marvel Universe is" even though he's quite obviously black, slim and young(ish). Of course, the appearance of Obama elsewhere would probably detract from the sales of the book Marvel are most keen to push. Maybe they can retract their announcement later, when the sales department is satisfied with the figures.

Please, Marvel, ditch the suits. They're really just embarrassing the lot of you.

Barack Obama: A Cultural Phenomenon I'm Glad I Lived to See

My daughter is three years old, going on four, and knows nothing of racial differences between people, much less stereotypes. A few days ago we were watching Iron Man on DVD, and upon the appearance of James Rhodes, a character played by African-American actor Terrence Howard, she cried out "it's Barack Obama!"

I believe that speaks volumes about Barack Obama's cultural impact the world over. Like Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods, Obama is now the global avatar for the black man. It is true that he is a man of several different ethnic backgrounds, considering that his mother was white and that his stepfather was Indonesian, and people who really care to read up on the man will know this as there is pretty much a wealth of information steadily becoming available about him.

For the rest of the world, however, what they see is what they get, and as a result white and brown melt away and suddenly Obama is the quintessential black man, which, for black activists everywhere, can only be a good thing. This has been written elsewhere, and far more eloquently, but I thought it worth taking note of considering my kids are even in on it.

It's really worth taking note that a three-year-old immediately identifies a random black man as "Barack Obama" considering that less than two years ago people who weren't following the American political scene were saying "what's a Barack Obama?"

I like the fact that my children are growing up in an era where Barack Obama's success is even possible, considering how it's barely been a year since people were saying it was not. Heck, I love having witnessed this era myself, even if I wasn't in Washington or Chicago for all the festivities.

WHY ASIANS SHOULD BOYCOTT THE FILM VERSION OF AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER

When it was announced that M. Night Shyamalan, Indian-American director of The Sixth Sense, would be directing the live-action adaptation of the popular cartoon series Avatar: The Last Airbender, I had mixed feelings on the matter. I was, without question, glad that a director of such high profile had been given the project, and glad further than he had a distinctive Asian heritage which could translate into a keen awareness of the story's Asian orientation and a desire to bring that intact to the big screen. I was worried that this movie was not exactly up his alley, as it will be his first adaptation of someone else's material and it will be an action movie, which is quite a contrast from the slow-burn thrillers he's done throughout his career.

Still, as a fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender I was excited for the project, even when I heard they had to drop the word "Avatar" from the title due to legal conflicts with James Cameron, whose highly anticipated return to filmmaking, Avatar is due out this December. I followed updates on location shooting and casting, though for a while I fell out of the loop.

Still, I wondered who'd they'd cast as the characters. I knew they'd probably go for unknowns, so I figured, things being the way they are, they'd get Amerasian kids (American citizens of Asian descent) for the roles.

Recently, though, I was able to catch some snippets online, and what I read appalled me. Apparently they've hired WHITE kids to play Aang, Sokka and Katara! Aang, to anyone familiar with the show, is clearly derived from a Buddhist monk, while Sokka and Katara look and dress distinctly like Inuits (the people who, if I'm not mistaken, are more popularly known as Eskimos) so it would have been a no-brainer to cast an Asian unknown as Aang and two Native American unknowns as Sokka and Katara. Right? Right? Wrong, apparently.

It's Mickey-fucking-Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's all over again.

It makes me wonder if Shyamalan and Paramount even understand the whole concept of the show being a love letter to Asian culture and the values it espouses. The series creators have even openly professed their love for the works of Hayao Miyazaki whose styling they often tried to ape in the course of the series.

I smell marketing all over the casting of three white kids, and wonder if the dipshits over at Paramount need to look over the grosses of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon again, a movie that made a bundle of money without a white person in sight, and without a word of English even being spoken. It's kind of mind-blowing how, in an age where a man with American, African AND Asian heritage can be elected President of the United States of America, and where the biggest movie star in the world is an African American, a bunch of myopic movie producers and an even MORE myopic movie director still believe that the only way to sell an ASIAN themed movie is to fill it with white kids.

I took little consolation from the knowledge that the story's primary villain-turned-hero, Prince Zuko, was recast from a white teeny-bopper to rising star Dev Patel, the British Indian actor currently making waves in Danny Boyle's Oscar frontrunner Slumdog Millionaire. Zuko is, next to Aang, probably the most important character of the story, and one Shyamalan himself has identified as his favorite, so it's nice that a person of Asian descent (though he is British) should get this role. But, with a white kid still in the lead role, a role written for an ASIAN kid, it's all still all wrong. Sure, all of the lead voice actors for the characters (again, with the exception of Prince Zuko, who was dubbed by Filipino-American Dante Basco) were white, but the intention for them to be Asian is ALL OVER THE PLACE, from the houses they live in to the clothes they wear to the values they profess to cherish.

People are raising a hue and a cry over the suggestion that Will Smith, the biggest box-office star on planet earth, play Captain America because Steve Rogers, as a character, is blond and blue-eyed. Well, while Aang is certainly nowhere near as iconic as Steve Rogers he is meant to be Asian in his looks AND his personal philosophy, so the decision to go with a white kid, who hearkens from a culture that represents a COMPLETELY different value system (and comes from a state which gave birth to a President more reprehensible than the series' main villain, Firelord Ozai), is every bit as objectionable if not more so.

What kills me about Paramount's and Shyamalan's decision is that Asians outnumber Caucasians by something like five to one on Planet Earth, and in America alone they could have practically thrown a stone and hit a kid of Asian descent and looks, especially if they'd gone to California or Hawaii. Instead, they get a WHITE kid from TEXAS. Just TYPING that makes my skin crawl.

This early, I've pretty much decided not to see this in the theaters; if it turns out to be any good I'll just go to a street corner and pick up a bootleg DVD. Unless and until Paramount get their shit together and show those white kids the door they are not getting a blessed centavo of my money and, if there's ANY justice in the world, not any money from any Asian person anywhere.

It's my hope now that the upcoming Dragonball movie, which also features a white guy in a role arguably created for an Asian, tanks horribly, thus forcing Paramount and Shyamalan to seriously and I mean SERIOUSLY rethink their casting decisions.

The Snub of WALL-E: The REAL Oscar Disappointment

That Pixar's WALL-E got snubbed by the Academy has apparently not come as a surprise to many people, certainly not in the way that The Dark Knight snub did. To my mind, though, it's certainly a bigger crime, because in addition to being a narrative masterpiece, the movie has something a lot more to say than, at the very least, a movie about a man aging backwards, yet another look at a disgraced President, a gay politician, and yet ANOTHER Holocaust/WWII themed movie.

WALL-E may have a love story beating at its heart, but first and foremost it's a film about saving our planet, something which can only begin with a sincere change of attitude. THIS is the kind of blend of craftsmanship AND relevance that the Academy has awarded in the past and should continue to recognize. Movies like Schindler's List and Crash were unapologetically message movies that were bestowed the Best Picture honor, so why not give similar recognition to a movie that is arguably at least as well-made as the former and, from what I've heard almost CERTAINLY better made than the latter? I may well have answered my own question on this very blog by talking about the Weinstein Brother's omnipresent influence with the Academy, but considering that Pixar has scored THREE best animated feature wins and has had every single one of its films released after the category was introduced score a nomination one wonders why they haven't crossed over yet. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon managed to score a Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film nod years ago, so really, I have to say, what's keeping the Academy from recognizing one of the best made movies of the year, which is arguably the most socially relevant?

There can be good arguments made in favor of passing up WALL-E just as there can be those for its snubbing The Dark Knight as well, though to my mind, in the case of the former, I'll be harder pressed to believe them. After all, the film WAS nominated for Best Original Screenplay, an arguably major award that not even TDK scored for all its eight nominations, and that's usually a very important indicator of how the Academy views the craftsmanship of the film. And to think that WALL-E and TDK were overlooked in favor of The Reader, a film which is now the whipping boy of just about everyone who believes these two films deserved better.

The way I see it, when the era of the Weinsteins is over, Oscar season will become a lot more interesting, because then films will have a better chance of getting in on merit.

Visionary History

One of my favorite movies of 2004 was Pixar Films' The Incredibles, directed by Brad Bird. I loved everything about it: the idea of a superhero undergoing a midlife crisis and getting fat and balding just like regular people, the snappy dialogue, crisp animation and geek references.

One thing in particular I feel deserves celebrating about this movie is how it achieves a timelessness in its storytelling. Sure, it does this primarily by tapping universally understood themes and concerns, but one thing that really helps it along is the ultra-slick, retro-futuristic motif that permeates the film, from the production and costume design to Michael Giacchino's fantastically lively, predominantly jazz music score. It's evocative of a period that's caught somewhere between the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, and yet so much of the technology flaunted there doesn't even exist yet, even though much of it is theoretically possible.

I love movies that play with history this way; sometimes the filmmaker picks a certain point in human history and says "what if this was done differently somehow" and ends up giving us a world we can now only dream of seeing in real life. These are certainly not visions of our actual past, nor are they necessarily of our future, but often somewhere in between, somewhere we can never quite be because they are at the same time somewhere we've already been and somewhere we aren't quite at just yet. I believe one of the terms used to describe such non-histories is "steampunk."

Apart from Brad Bird's The Incredibles, one of my favorite examples of this is the little-seen Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a pet project of Jude Law's which presented an alternate version of the 1930s which was brought to life almost exclusively in Computer Generated Imagery, a full year before Robert Rodriguez did it in Sin City and three before Zack Snyder did it with 300. Unlike The Incredibles, Sky Captain does not envision a world that is neither here nor there but rather presents us with a definite past, albeit not the one we knew, one with Zeppelins as a usual mode of travel and robots that roam New York City in the 1930s. I suppose another good example would be The Golden Compass, though I did not see that film.

Speed Racer, for all its flaws, went the retro-futuristic route that The Incredibles did, and to my mind it is quite relevant that these two films share, in Michael Giacchino, a composer. While as a racing fan I simply didn't buy the film and its impossibilities, I loved the alternate history it presented with a world where cars ran on fantastical sounding components like transponders and convergenators, using fuel cells and yet sounding very much like throaty V8s were propelling them. The stylized anime-inspired visualization didn't float my boat when it came to many of the racing scenes, but it made everything else quite pleasing to the eye.

I'm sure there are dozens of examples of films that employ this storytelling technique just floating out there and I'd love to get my hands on them. I don't know how many people would agree with me on this but I'd love to see Superman re-fashioned this way.

Why The Dark Knight Didn't Bag Major Oscar Nominations (Except for Heath Ledger's)

There's a part of me, a mean, juvenile, unapologetically puerile part, that took absolute glee from knowing that The Dark Knight failed to land nominations for Best Picture, Director or Screenplay at the recently announced Academy Award nominations, and not because I have anything in particular against the movie itself.

No, my beef is with the legions upon legions of fanboys who infested messageboards like a loud, unstoppable plague for months before the release of TDK and were thumping their chests for months thereafter, like the asshats who posted messages like "TDKTDKTDK (add about 100 more TDKs)" and "TDK will pwn" on every update on Iron Man or some other movie of 2008, people who, as the film scooped up one accolade after another, were picking up a sickening momentum in terms of their collective cacophony. The snub at the Golden Globes, while it could have been seen as a precursor of things to come for the film, really meant little to nothing as the Globes have been somewhat widely ridiculed for years.

As patently absurd as it sounds, it struck me that, if TDK had garnered either Best Picture or Best Director nod, fanboys would have been morally convinced that they owned the world, and the entertainment industry would go to hell in a handbasket because Hollywood would agree. I mean, as it is, they already have a sense of self-importance more bloated than a drowning victim who's been floating around for about three months.

I have no idea if the Academy was thinking this and truth be told, they probably weren't, but I'm GLAD the fanboys are taking it personally; I'm GLAD that, to them, it's the Oscar folks flipping the bird right at them. The sound of their collective heart breaking as they post their spelling- and-grammar-impaired diatribes on messageboards decrying the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences is all the payback I'll ever need. Iron Man didn't get any major Oscar nods either but I couldn't give a damn; it's already performed well beyond anyone's expectations, even making it on at least ONE major critic's top ten movies of 2008 lists...a list which excluded TDK. In short, no expectations, no disappointment. I don't even expect Iron Man to win either of the technical Oscars for which it was nominated.

The more rabid TDK fans, intoxicated on the thought that for once, they were at one with the teeming masses, rode the gravy train all the way till it was abruptly derailed last Thursday.

It was funny how they loved to talk about how grosses mean nothing and yet point to TDK's b.o. as the reason why it's the greatest movie ever. It was funny how they talk about how awards mean nothing but cried like babies when TDK was snubbed in favor of The Reader, which, from all indications, is yet another meandering downer of a movie produced by the grossly overrated Weinstein brothers, Bob and Harvey.

Thing is, even though there was a part of me that took pleasure in seeing so many fanboys wailing like hungry infants, the greater part of me, to my SURPRISE, was sickened that yet again, the Academy has shown its true colors by throwing its most infamous "political figures," the Weinsteins, a bone, one that happened to be at Batman's expense. Of the five nominees, four were widely expected to make it into the race: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire, Milk and Frost/Nixon. The Reader, a film which was noted for Kate Winslet's portrayal of a Nazi, while well-regarded, was not expected to make the cut. It perhaps is not entirely coincidence that it happened to be released by the Weinstein company, the studio formed by the Weinstein brothers after Walt Disney Pictures eased them out of ownership of the studio they had founded, Miramax.

The fanboys whose pleasure gave me a rise can and actually should take solace from the knowledge that the Academy, in its history spanning over eight decades, has, time and time again betrayed its highly political nature. There have, throughout the years, been power players and I'm sure learned film historians could provide a pretty long list of them. Recently, in maybe the last four or five years, TIME's Richard Corliss, wrote about how downright ridiculous some of the awards in the last twenty years had been and I have seen a couple of lists of questionable nominations that some other writers have compiled over the years.

Of these power players, the Weinsteins are undoubtedly among the more significant of recent times.

Now, these guys have arguably done a lot for independent film, almost as much as Robert Redford did by coming up with the Sundance Film Festival. The studio they founded has enabled small filmmakers to make movies that a lot of mainstream studios wouldn't even touch. In fact, sometime in the 1990s, the Weinsteins helped make independent cinema "en vogue" at a time when studios seemed to be artistically bankrupt.

That said, the brothers, both at their time with Miramax and their new studio, the Weinstein Company, have come up with some real clunkers, some of which, absurdly enough, were able to garner Oscar nods or even wins and to my mind it's the Academy's irrational need to pander to these men that makes so many of their choices suspect, including some of the ones they made this year.

The late 1990s to early 2000s were the heyday of the Weinsteins in terms of Academy Award recognition. 1998 was a year that particularly grated on me as the moderately entertaining Shakespeare in Love achieved a shocking and widely despised upset over the sweeping war epic Saving Private Ryan. Moreover, Gwyneth Paltrow's Oscar for Best Actress left a lot of people grumbling, as did Roberto Benigni's Best Actor win for Life is Beautiful, a film in which he played...himself. The worst was yet to come, though, as 1999 and 2000 saw back-to-back nominations for Miramax that, in a word, seemed somewhat gratuitous on the part of the Academy. Lasse Halstrom's The Cider House Rules, a film based on John Irving's novel that was regarded by critics as somewhat tepid and which didn't even achieve much by way of box-office garnered Best Director and Picture nods to the dismay of many. I'd like to comment more on that but I haven't seen the film.

In 2000, though, the Academy gave quite a bit of recognition to a film I DID see and which I found distinctly underwhelming: Chocolat, AGAIN directed by Halstrom, and AGAIN distributed by Miramax. It got nominations for Best Picture, Actress and Supporting Actress, among others, and though I found it a charming little film I confess I was really left scratching my head by the Academy's choice. It was shut out when awards night rolled around, but in any event the nominations themselves were absolutely puzzling, and pretty much led me to believe that the Weinsteins somehow had the Academy by its collective balls, if that was at all possible.

Nor are the Academy's dodgy decisions limited to favoring the W brothers. Among some decisions I found somewhat risible were Kevin Spacey's Oscar for playing American Beauty's Lester Burnham, who was basically a total retread of a character he'd played in the late Ted Demme's The Ref, a movie that had come out five years earlier. There was Denzel Washington's Best Actor Oscar for Training Day, which he arguably should have gotten two years earlier for The Hurricane and which could have been an apology from the Academy for passing him over in favor of Spacey. Unfortunately, if it was an apology, it came at the expense of Russell Crowe, who deserved to be a back-to-back winner that year. Crowe had won a deserved Oscar for Gladiator but lost out on A Beautiful Mind, something I (and a couple of other people I know) feel was just...wrong.

And then, of course, there was all the brouhaha in 2005 about how Crash won the Best Picture Prize that, many believed, rightfully belonged to Brokeback Mountain. I won't even get started on that one.

It's all politics, really. It seems that the Weinsteins who are notorious for their aggressive campaigning come awards season, needed a slot and somebody had to get bumped off. In a way, it's the luck of the draw and considering TDK was primarily a summer blockbuster type of movie, it was the easiest choice to drop in favor of a "serious" film, i.e. anything from the Weinsteins that has an unhappy ending. I'm not saying there was anything as insidious as a buyout or something like that, but I am willing to bet money that the Academy's biases against certain genres and FOR certain producers, based on past history, may have played a role of one kind or another.

So TDK fans, content yourselves with your favorite movie's 8 Oscar nominations, critical acclaim and massive box-office. You may not own the world, but an Oscar Best Picture snub isn't nearly the terrible blow many of you may think it is.

"Philippine Independent Cinema," or...Leave It To Filipinos To Bastardize Yet Another Noble Concept...

On my way to and from work I find myself walking by a lot of "second-run cinemas" or movie theaters that show old movies. Because I work in the Manila area and walk most often by Avenida Rizal, most of those second-run theaters invariably show...adult films. Though I never actually watched any of the movies, a lot of them looked familiar to me, and it was only upon some thought that I realized it was because I had seen the ads and posters for a number of them before, touted as examples of "Philippine Independent Cinema." I almost gagged with the realization.

Now, I'm no prude and no self-righteous crusader and I've seen a number skin flicks or skin-heavy flicks, including some of the acclaimed ones. That said, it really pains me to see that Robinson's Galleria, which devotes one of its theaters to showing independent movies, more often than not finds itself playing features that end up in second-run skin-flick theaters. Whether it's straight or gay porn, the thought that the only stories that many, if not most of our "independent" filmmakers can come up with are those involving graphic sexual intercourse really makes me shake my head for the Philippine movie industry as a whole. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the forces behind these so-called "independent" films were basically the guys who were cut loose by the studios when folks like Henry Sy (and the consumers in general) laid down the law and said "we don't want to watch your garbage anymore." So yeah, the term "independent" is accurate in that sense, but I despise those people for badging their films with it, because in some cultures, like Hollywood, an independent film is one that is free from studio meddling and bureaucracy and, quite often the need to pander to the lowest common denominator. Of course, just because a foreign film is independent is no guarantee it'll be good, but if nothing else, it'll at least be different from the stuff the studios come up with.

Here, "independent films" seem only to pander to their viewer's sexual appetites, with story basically being a secondary consideration. I saw the highly controversial "Live Show" on DVD and, whatever people may say about the decision to ban it, will have to agree with its critics that yeah, it was basically pornography masquerading as a "message film." One of its stars, Klaudia Koronel, did porn fans a great disservice by going legit, getting her degree and getting married (I think), but she did the movie viewing public a huge favor by ensuring they'd never have to endure her "acting" again.

There's nothing wrong with independent films having sexual content if it serves a greater story, but for flick upon flick to center around the same themes and to lean on the same old devices to propel their stories, many of which involve two people taking their clothes off and getting it on, kind of hammers home just WHY Filipino movies are floundering in the first place. I'll give a good example; when Asia Agcaoili promoted her movie "Casa" another movie bandied about as an "indie flick," her selling point was basically...her sex scenes. Nothing about the story or guerilla style filmmaking, just...her explicit sex scenes for which, she teased, she did not even cover her vaginal opening with the plaster traditional used by actors simulating love scenes to prevent unwanted entry. I've often fantasized about buying all of her smut on black market DVDs, smug in the knowledge that I'll be "taking advantage" of her without giving her a solitary centavo of my money. She deserves no less for mangling something as noble as the term "indie flick" which in other places of the world means something more than a soft-core porn movie.

The problem isn't that we're prudes or living in the 19th century; the problem is that now the "independent filmmakers" who are basically supposed to be mavericks and at the forefront of creativity, appear to be creatively bankrupt.

Petty Tyrants Lining the Pews

This was meant to be my "pop culture" blog, but lately I've decided that it would be better devoted to what it was titled for: throwing tantrums, and this one, to my mind, is a doozy.

I sometimes find myself questioning the systems that some parish priests institute as part of their masses, like the time of the mass during which they choose to make their announcements, with some priests having the congregation stand up, abruptly sit down again to listen to the announcements, then to stand up again. One parish has the congregation stand up after communion and all the way through several minutes worth of announcements after they've already sat through an entire mass and want to go back to work. These can be pretty annoying, but truth be told I just shrug my shoulders and make it a point to avoid going to mass there.

There's one practice, though, which I simply have to comment on because based on what I've seen it appears to have bred a bunch of despots.

Apparently, in one parish, the line for communion is policed by a bunch of middle-aged to geriatric women. I experienced this first hand when one such woman snarled at me to wait till I was called, as I was, at the time, unfamiliar with their practices. I've not made the same mistake again, but I have noted that a couple of these pseudo gestapo tend to give parishioners dirty looks for such harmless things as heading to the bathroom, which I sometimes do when hearing mass. Now, I won't knock the purpose for these attempts to instill some kind of order as I'm not really familiar with how chaotic things were before these systems were put in place, but I will say that if ever it was a good idea, the cure has since become worse than the disease.

The saying power corrupts may be tired and old but it is ridiculously apt, and what immediately comes to mind when thinking about those old biddies who fancy themselves "policewomen of God" (a concept probably cooked by an overzealous parish priest) is a bit of dialogue between Steve Buscemi and an actor playing a parking attendant, whose name I've forgotten, which took place in the movie Fargo. In the film, Buscemi pulls into a parking lot, gets a ticket, doesn't park, then, upon immediately pulling out again, is compelled by the attendant to pay for the ticket. Annoyed, Buscemi says "I bet you think you're some kind of authority figure, with your little uniform." That's pretty much EXACTLY how to describe the attitudes of many of these post-menopausal women during the mass.

Well, if the church starts to lose parishioners to nearby churches, and I can think of at least two, in reevaluating their approach, the first thing they should give the axe are these ridiculous little stormtroopers.

Movies Made for Everyone That Pleased (Almost) No One

I'd be a consummate liar and hypocrite if I said that I was not at all entertained by the Speed Racer feature film when I watched it on DVD a few days ago; it was funny at some parts and exciting at others, and I honestly liked the story which propounded the arguably speculative but at the same time intriguing conspiracy theory that race victories are often decided in board rooms rather than on racetracks. Sure, I found a lot, and I mean a lot, wrong with it, but I still managed to enjoy myself for most of its 130 minutes.

That said, I understand why it bombed, primarily because it's a phenomenon I've seen before.

The first movie that comes to mind when I think of movies that tried to reach several audiences all at once is Titan A.E., the last feature-length animated film ever to be directed by one of my favorite animation wizards of the pre-Pixar era, Don Bluth, the director of An American Tail and The Secret of N.I.M.H. It was way too violent to be a kid's film (with several characters getting blown away and with one character snapping the neck of another) but never, even with Joss Whedon as one of its screenwriters and some really fantastic CGI blended in with the hand-drawn animation, quite seemed to cross over into sci-fi action territory. I, for one, liked it, but kind of had an inkling that its somewhat amorphous nature could, as it did, hurt its potential box-office. The real tragedy was how this movie apparently did for Don Bluth what Gigli did for one-time Oscar-nominated director Martin Brest. It's sad that this approach to animated filmmaking tanked because had it worked I could see a lot of comic books being made into films this way, and to my mind it is definitely nice to watch. Two attempts by Disney to make movies in this style, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet, suffered similar fates at the box office, with Treasure Planet being one of the biggest box-0ffice turkeys of 2002. A Punisher film done in this anime hybrid style, reminiscent of the short-lived but fantastic HBO Spawn series, would probably have been a lot better than all of the forgettable live action films Marvel has failed to sell.

Another example I can think of, though this is slightly different, is Kingdom of Heaven, a movie that tried to be a historical epic in the vein of Braveheart and a political commentary on the struggle in Israel all at once, with director Ridley Scott and screenwriter William Monahan trying perhaps a little too hard not to antagonize any Muslim viewers. The film, while gorgeously shot and with a number of good points, ultimately meandered and sputtered at the box office as well, although a director's cut that has been released on DVD which had something like an additional half-hour of footage was allegedly a much better film than what made it into theaters.

Like both these films, Speed Racer is, in many ways, a fairly bold enterprise. While I wasn't a fan of the Japanese animated TV show on which the movie was based, I liked the idea of a major, big-budget racing movie, the first to be attempted since Renny Harlin's trainwreck titled Driven. I even liked that, from what I saw in the trailers, this movie, rather than try (and fail) to capture racing the way that Harlin did, the Wachowski brothers of Matrix fame/infamy were trying for a retro-futuristic, hyper reality.

The thing is, while they attempt to build their visuals around a fantastical world, they ground their script in the more "real" issues of big corporations running and fixing races. While they attempt to make a kid-friendly movie where the race winner drinks milk instead of champagne, they create races where crashes and deliberate collisions by drivers are commonplace. There's a fairly interesting amount of pseudo-science which vaguely explains how the cars are built and how they run, but all believability pretty much jumps out the window when one sees the cars pretty much defy all known laws of physics.

There's just too much going on at the same time for the brain to really process, and I've noticed that the people who've enjoyed themselves the most are my kids, to whom concerns like plot and credibility are pretty much superfluous.

There's a lot wrong with these movies, but they definitely deserve credit for trying something new. People who make these noble failures deserve some kind of pat on the back for trying something new, and well, for whatever it's worth, I'm giving it to them here.

Fool Me Once...

When I read the first issue of the Marvel Comics miniseries The Eternals by Neil Gaiman and John Romita Jr., I genuinely felt the story held the promise of great things to come. Seven issues later, I felt that the series had utterly failed to deliver on this promise and had basically spent the entire seven issues showcasing Romita's art and spinning its wheels. There were a lot things set up pretty well, but after seven issues there was no payoff to be found anywhere.

When the ongoing Eternals series was announced I understood what Gaiman's true imperative had been, which was to set-up the ongoing and whet people's appetites for these relatively obscure characters, even though he would pass the writer's baton to someone else.

I was sold on work of series artist Daniel Acuna after seeing a few preview pages, and wanting desperately to see some payoff after following a very expensive seven issues of Gaiman's miniseries I picked up the first storyarc. I had thought to review it in my multiply blog, which is where I post majority of my thoughts nowadays anyway, but I changed my mind and put my thoughts here because these are the first words I'm typing in a while that actually qualify as a tantrum.

After six issues, a little more exposition and character development, I'm still where I was when I bought this series, which was to be my "triumphant" return to comic-book collecting; feeling that I had been completely hoodwinked into thinking I'd be getting a complete story and not just some prolonged, unconsummated tease. The art is pretty (except for some annoyingly muddy colors), but this series doesn't even merit a review anymore.

I understand the writers' and editors' imperative to keep things interesting as this is now and ongoing series as opposed to a limited one, but the sales of the title seem to indicate that other readers feel exactly as I do. I've learned that in a desperate bid to boost sales, Marvel is tying the book into the X-Men to generate a little attention, but for my part I have never bought any comic just because it has "X" on the cover. Also, Acuna appears to be leaving, thus removing my only reason to keep following this title.

Thanks a lot for spoiling my "comeback," Marvel. And here I was thinking you actually wanted my money. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. If you manage to fool me again, well, I'm clearly hopeless.

The Filipino's Resurgence in Comics, Here and Abroad

I'm all but retired from collecting monthly comics, and even from posting on this blog, which was purportedly supposed to be devoted to "pop culture" such as comics, movies, books and TV programs after I'd designated my "multiply" blog as the site of my ruminations and after I pretty much stopped following Formula One after watching Ferrari throw a potential driver's championship away. This blog has, for the last couple of months, actually felt by and large irrelevant as I find I have surprisingly little to say even though I've been busier, and happier, in the last year than I EVER have. Maybe the problem is that "tantrum" now sounds like a complete and utter misnomer. Still, someone once said not to get rid of the stuff I write as this is actually inventory.

Well, introspection aside, I thought it worth writing that even though 2008 may not have been the best year for comic enthusiasts in general in terms of the available reading material, it's been a great year for fans of Filipino comic book creators, who got to flex their artistic muscles in both local and foreign publications.

2008 was the year that Gerry Alanguilan concluded Elmer, his highly engaging, if flawed miniseries about talking chickens. It was the year Budjette Tan and Ka-Jo Baldissimo presented not just one but two collected editions of Trese, their refreshingly original and distinctly Filipino series about an investigator into the paranormal. It was the year that Arnold Arre, the creator of the beloved Mythology Class, launched another graphic novel.

It was also a continuation of the Filipino artist's long-running winning streak in drawing American comics. For eight months of this year, Secret Invasion, a Marvel miniseries drawn by Filipino Lienil Francis Yu, topped the sales charts, and this month has seen the launch of Marvels: Eye of the Camera, the sequel to the groundbreaking miniseries by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, with Filipino Jay Anacleto taking over the art chores from Ross this time around. Of course, Filipinos are making their presence known all over the comics landscape with artists like Carlo Pagulayan, Phillip Tan, and Mico Suayan to name a few, landing regular gigs among the big comics companies like Marvel, DC and Top Cow/Image, also to name a few.

Unfortunately, the recent financial crunch has meant another price hike for some mainstream comics, and the decrease in spending on luxury items, which is essentially what comics are, may inevitably hit the industry, but it's nice to know that, for this year at least, Filipino talent has continued to make quite an impression on comics readers around the world.