Why Reduce Expectations?

I accept that not all films are created equal, that some films are inevitably better than others, that there are several different kinds/genres of film, and that sometimes it's pointless to compare films or evaluate some films by the standards that are applied to others. 

What I do not and will never accept, though, is the notion that a film, by virtue of being a comedy/action/insert-genre-here film, is exempted from having any semblance of quality, e.g. "what do you expect, it's an action film!" or "of course, it's mindless, it's a family movie!" Now, I realize that quality is a highly subjective term so I've come up with some very basic parameters that, in my opinion, should apply to almost any movie, no matter the genre:

1) I think that a movie should, first and foremost, have a plot, not a string of excuses for certain events to happen. There should be something, whether it's a physical MacGuffin or something more substantial, that pushes the characters forward from the start of the movie to its end.

2) I think it's fair to say that any movie or even any work of fiction, for that matter, should proceed according to its own internal logic, even if that logic is presented as inherently illogical. In short, once the filmmakers/storytellers lay down the parameters of the story, they should stick to them instead of shifting back and forth within this logic at their convenience just to advance the story.

3) I think that, with the possible exception of Dumb and Dumber, no film should be allowed to rely on the stupidity of its main characters to propel the story forward. The worst ever example of this faux pas I witnessed on film was when, in Back to the Future II, Michael J. Fox's Marty McFly, for no apparent reason, walked away from the time-traveling DeLorean and left the door WIDE OPEN for a considerable period of time, allowing old Biff (Thomas Wilson) to go back in time and mess up the entire continuum with his self-aggrandizing actions. None of this would have been possible if Marty McFly hadn't left the door open, and therefore his inexplicable stupidity was the only possible catalyst of some very important plot points. I know with absolute certainty that there are other examples of such awful plot devices but this is the one that truly left an impression on me, even though it occurred 20 years ago.

I therefore don't accept that Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian is supposed to be mindless. If I find it every bit as bad as reviewers have claimed it to be, I won't accept that Terminator: Salvation is excused from making any kind of sense just because it's an action movie. Whether their purpose is to make us cry, laugh, cringe or cheer, movies are supposed to be well-done love letters to the audience, not dumbed-down, pandering tripe that basically treats all moviegoers like small children. Heck, some of the most intelligent movies ever made (like most of the Pixar films) are branded as family movies, but they don't use that as an excuse to condemn their films to mediocrity. 

Suddenly I am Glad I Never Bought "The Passion of the Christ" on DVD

I was not a fan of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, when it came out, though I did admire his singularity of vision and his striking (no pun intended) use of lighting, set design, acting, music, sound mixing and editing, all of which seemed to exude the sheer force of his conviction in making this movie. Not being Jewish or having grown up around Jews I was not aware of any anti-Semitic slant in the film (even though his drunken 2006 rant sort of retroactively confirmed what a lot of people were arguing just before and during the film's release). As a Catholic I also respected his devotion, even though I didn't exactly agree with his expression of it. But I never cared enough for his film enough to see it again, let alone bring it home on DVD.

When I learned about the failure of Mel Gibson's marriage on Yahoo News, and the fact that his new, younger girlfriend was pregnant with his child, I was surprised at how upset I felt, but subsequently glad that I felt that way.

Mel Gibson's 27-year-marriage, out of which he fathered seven kids was not, as far as I know, the typical Hollywood coupling. It's different from the unions that have so often been shoved in my face that I have, God forgive me, actually wished for their eventual failure, like the name-amalgam pairs, Bennifer (Mark I), TomKat and Brangelina to name a few and the really disturbing pairings like Marilyn Manson and Evan Rachel Wood. No, Gibson met and married his non-movie star wife before even he was a star; he didn't parade her around or jump on couches professing his love for her.  He wasn't very good tabloid fodder that way, but he did seem like a nice, low-key husband determined to keep his private life mostly out of the public eye.

And it was thus that I realized that I didn't even feel that bad for him but for his marriage, because after all the controversy that hounded him over The Passion and his infamous DUI in 2006, it seemed that his being a decent family man was one of the few redeeming things about him. It was nice to know about a megamillion dollar movie star being able to stay married to his mundane, non-movie star wife for a long period of time and to raise a nice, big family with all of his millions. I was similarly disappointed when Eddie Murphy's longtime marriage to his wife, which also produced five or six children, if I recall correctly, ended.

But I think what riles me more about Mel's transgression against his marriage is basically the fact that he made a movie about Jesus. Jesus. He made a movie with the syrupy, extremely heavy-handed message that Jesus loved us and endured things that no person should have to endure just to redeem us of our sins. He blistered my eyes with the sight of the infamous "cat's claw" whip ripping flesh from Jim Caviezel's body as he played Jesus Christ. 

And I thought, how could a person who makes a movie about Jesus and goes around in junkets saying that this was his most profound and heartfelt expression of his love for Jesus do something like that? As far as Gibson was concerned, after all The Passion wasn't just some film or even a vanity project; it was, as far as I know, the very embodiment of his faith. He even said that he made a cameo in it; his was the hand that hammered the nails into Jesus' hands, saying that he crucified Jesus through his sins. Remembering that quote made me think: so are you lancing his side now too?

Nowadays I can no longer dissociate The Passion, which should probably still be appreciated on its own merits, as the sanctimonious ravings of some ultra-conservative blowhard who clearly has no moral authority or any other form of business preaching to anyone about how much God or Jesus loves us. I also felt irritated at how people like him, as cliche as this may sound, really give us Catholics a bad name. 

Thanks a lot for making us look like pontificating hypocrites, as if those idiots on the pulpits weren't already doing a good enough job. Why don't you go become a Fundamentalist Protestant and erode their credibility a few notches?

At the end of the day, the one thing I'm glad about is that I realize that I still value marriage even my own, at least enough to feel bad to see one that's lasted for so long end so badly. All that's left for me to do is somehow learn from Gibson's mistakes and hope I don't make them. It really is such a shame...

More Marvel Movie Mania: Branagh's Bets

Marvel comics fan though I am, the mighty Thor is not among my favorite characters in their pantheon. That said, I like him as a character of the Avengers and in good hands he's a nice character to read...pretty much the same deal as with Superman. Though I did like the Don Blake alter-ego; typical Stan Lee irony was at work there (unless Blake was Jack Kirby's idea).  And while I'm not nearly as excited at the prospect of a movie about him as I was about, say Spider-Man or Iron Man, I am looking forward to the impending adaptation for a number of reasons.

The first and foremost is the upcoming Avengers movie; it's long been said that the principal Avengers (Captain America, Iron Man, Thor) will be introduced in their own movies before the team movie itself comes out, and with Iron Man already having opened to much success last year Thor is now the next crucial piece of the puzzle. A successful film about him will bring us that much closer to the Avengers film and that, by itself, is a highly tantalizing prospect.

The second reason I'm excited for this and it's almost as big as the first is the choice of actor-director Kenneth Branagh to direct the film. Now the only two Kenneth Branagh films I've seen in their entirety are Much Ado About Nothing (1993), which I found very good, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), which I found very bad. So if it's based on my own experience of his work, there's a 50/50 chance the Thor movie will stink.

The thing is, and my own experience has nothing to do with this, there is no denying the pedigree that Branagh brings to this film. This is a filmmaker who has built his career almost entirely on adapting the works of William Shakespeare with films he starred in like Much Ado..., Henry V, Hamlet and ones he did not, like the recent As You Like It. That Marvel went after him shows how seriously they are taking this project.

Thirdly, and this is actually a corollary of the second reason, Branagh's showing a clear desire to defy convention. Conventional wisdom has for quite some practically dictated that with a franchise movie, the usual strategy is to cast a relative unknown in the lead and surround him with well-known (or at the very least, better-known) actors, preferably as the villains, but also as supporting characters. It's been that way for years, with the Hackman and Reeve playing off each other in Superman, Nicholson and Keaton squaring off in Batman, and Dafoe and Maguire duking it out in Spider-Man.

Apparently Branagh would have none of that. While he went with the relatively unknown lead (Australian actor Chris Hemsworth, who made quite an impression on me with his very brief performance as George Kirk Sr., the father of James T. Kirk of the Star Trek series) which was almost to be expected (with people like Robert Downey, Jr. being more the exception than the rule), he cast an actor who was perhaps even LESS known outside of his native country than Hemsworth, a British theater actor named Tom Hiddleston, who had worked with Branagh before. That kind of moxie can lead to one of two things: astonishing success or utter disaster. There is no middle ground, as far as I know. 

Considering what's riding on this film, I do hope Branagh's gambit pays off.  Thor is not quite the household name that Spider-Man was before his film, but neither was Iron Man, or Daredevil or Ghost Rider, and every one of those characters' movies, whether deservedly or not, spent two straight weekends as America's number one movie.

In short, Thor may be another feather in Marvel's cap or their first misstep as a studio, but either way, I'm quite interested to find out how it does.

My Attempt to Untwist Trekkies' Panties

SPOILER WARNING: This is not a review; it is a discussion of certain key story elements of the new Star Trek film. Anyone not wanting to have plot points revealed before hand should steer clear of this post.

I am no Trek newbie. I was seven years old when Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan came out and was old enough to feel sad when Spock, then played by Leonard Nimoy, sacrificed himself to save the crew of the Enterprise, and glad to see him return in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Of the ten movies that came before the 2009 film, described by some as a reboot, by others as a prequel and still others as a sequel, I've seen five in the theaters, and only eight overall (having missed the much reviled Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and the franchise-killing Star Trek: Nemesis). My favorites prior to the new film were the 1996 film First Contact, which actually featured the Next Generation cast of Patrick Stewart et al., and, of course The Wrath of Khan. I'm not a big fan of the original TV series and I may not have written dissertations on Trek (though I've heard that at least one has been written) but I think I'm fit to at least offer an opinion on why the new Star Trek film does NOT erase all of the previous ones from continuity.

As I understand it, time travel is not possible in the fanciful way it's been depicted in fiction, i.e. apparently, due to the laws of physics, it's not possible to go back, though it is theoretically possible to go far forward. Apparently H.G. Wells was correct to assert, as he did in The Time Machine, that one cannot travel back in time. Hence, the notion of traveling back in time will forever remain a fantastical one, the rules of which can pretty much depend on the writer.

In Star Trek, therefore, when the villainous Nero and Spock find themselves flung backwards in time after being sucked through a black hole it is revealed that they have altered the space-time continuum by their mere presence, and even more so by the acts of mayhem Nero perpetrates on the universe of the past, destroying space vessels and even an entire planet.

It is the course of the film that the young/new Spock (Zachary Quinto this time around) declares that because of Nero, the time-stream has been altered and that all of the characters' destinies have changed and are now completely unpredictable.

This has caused a bit of an uproar among some fans (who appear to be in the minority, considering that the new Trek film is reportedly on its way to becoming the most successful in the history of the franchise, even allowing for inflation).

Still, if for no other reason than I want to stand up for a movie I really enjoyed, more than I've ever enjoyed ANY Trek movie, I would like to try my hand at justifying my belief that what has been created is an alternate universe that runs parallel to the original continuity but does not replace it.

The key here is Spock, who appears both as a young man portrayed by Quinto and an old one portrayed by Nimoy.

First of all, Spock remembers the past that he knew; he remembered his friendship with Kirk, Scotty's transport theories and even what drove Nero to do what he did. Had his timeline been erased, he would not have remembered things the way he did and the writers could have just as easily come up with another story device for Kirk to learn of what happened, like Nero's monologue for example, or something else. Just as Nimoy is the link between the past and the present Star Trek in the real world, so is Spock the nexus between the original reality and the one that now runs parallel to it. Time travel to the past will never be real; there are no rules, let alone hard and fast ones, so the writers have a lot of room to play around, and they've played pretty well in my opinion.

Second, clearly director J.J. Abrams and his writers wanted to pay homage to what had come before; rather than have Spock recount the past in some cheesy Titanic-style flashback, they infused him into the story and kept him around when everything was finished rather than have him fade away to his own time or something like that.  This movie is a sequel because even though it's set in the past, the old Spock is right smack in the middle of it; for him, this takes place AFTER all of the old adventures in the first six movies (the seventh being the first of four Next Generation films), so the past is his future. It could have been a straight-up prequel, but the filmmakers were determined that it should not be so, hence the fascinating prequel-reboot hybrid feel to the whole affair.

Finally, it makes no sense that Abrams and company would go through all this trouble to woo new audiences but be completely and utterly oblivious to the built-in fandom that this franchise has accumulated over well over forty years. Trekkies are the last people on Earth they would want to alienate because theirs would be the first fannies in the seats. It's probably the main reason Nimoy was brought on board.

In short...of all the possible conclusions, given both the narrative devices and the imperatives behind them, the idea of a parallel universe is the most...logical.

Toy Tie-Ins: Often A Boon and Sometimes a Bane to A Film's Marketing...

Toy tie-ins are cool. Ever since the concept was first massively popularized by Kenner when it made and sold licensed toy versions of Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader and the other characters of Star Wars, toy tie-ins have been an integral part of the marketing push of any big movie franchise or aspiring movie franchise. I think there have been books written on the subject, which has, by now, formed a sort of sub-culture all its own which was arguably lampooned in films like The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

So important are toy campaigns, in fact, that they can help a movie studio make money even if the film itself underperforms, as was the case with the "Hulk hands" which proved to be rather popular toys despite the underwhelming grosses of the 2003 Marvel Comics-based film Hulk. Notably, with last year's sequel, The Incredible Hulk, also came the return of the very same toy, albeit from a different manufacturer in Hasbro as opposed to Marvel's "in-house" toymaker Toy Biz. Toy tie-ins, of course, can help the profile of TV shows as well, although in some instances the show is merely the vehicle to sell the toys, as was the case with such popular toy lines as Transformers and G.I. Joe, to name a few. That's a different animal altogether.

Sometimes, the tie-ins are brilliant; this is determined mainly by the quality of the toys. I despised the plastic and overly expensive Speed Racer Hot Wheels cars that came out to coincide with the movie, but liked (and even bought) the relatively cheaper, die cast Jada Toys versions of Speed Racer cars based on those featured in the original 1960s cartoon. Jada toys does good tie-in, movie-based stuff like the Scarface Cadillac (with matching Al Pacino figurine!) or the Initial "D" cars based on the popular anime. Sometimes they're awful, and I won't even go into some of the worse ones I've seen on a shelf.

For better or worse, though, I won't deny that all of these toys help increase awareness of a film, even months before its actual release.

The thing is, sometimes they can make a potential audience a little too much aware of a film by revealing plot points. I won't go into specifics, but suffice it to say I think a certain summer movie this year has had one of its surprises revealed by the toys currently on the shelves.

Now this could all be deliberate; let people think they know a certain plot twist ahead of time and give them a sense of gratification upon being able to "get the jump" on everyone else, but for those of us who want our surprises to remain surprises, it can be rather irritating to have a good chunk of the plot telegraphed to us beforehand. It feels a case of some really bad marketing strategy. Can anyone imagine how much The Sixth Sense would have been diminished if people knew the whole story, or even just the twist at the end, beforehand? That's the kind of spoilage I think I experienced by glancing at these toys (and, incidentally, some stupid person also spoiled the ending of The Sixth Sense for me as well, though I was still able to enjoy it despite my profound annoyance).

I mean, what's the point of dodging wikipedia, and other spoiler heavy sites on the internet if a spoiler can appear in glorious 3-D on a toy shelf?

I guess the one sure way to make sure one has a spoiler-free action/franchise movie experience is to steer absolutely clear of toy stores (assuming one is the kind who frequents them to begin with) for at least three or four months before the movie's release in theaters, and, if one is a toy collector, buy them the day after watching it.

Easter Eggs

Since I introduced the concept of the "Easter Egg" on DVDs to my son, he's been pretty much obsessed with them, quite to my amusement.

I realize that an Easter Egg is loosely defined as something that is hidden, but what's really fun about movies based on pop-culture icons like the Hulk or Spider-man is that these characters have such rich histories that it's child's play to pack in tons of references, some obvious, some obscure, to these histories in the movies. Depending on the fan's knowledge of the character, the little factoids may be easy or tough to spot, i.e. they may or may not be "Easter Eggs," but I'll just call them that for convenience's sake.

Here, in no particular order, are some Marvel Easter Eggs/references, some obvious, some a touch more subtle, that I particularly enjoyed:

The appearances of Jim Wilson and Bill Bixby in The Incredible Hulk. "Hey! That's a great punch!"

Tony Stark referring to a "Ben" during the press conference in Iron Man where he had everyone sit on the floor, who may or may not have been Ben Urich ( a character that Scott Glenn---not Joe Pantoliano--was born to play).

Captain America's shield in Iron Man.

The "Eddie's been trying to get a picture of him for weeks" line in the first Spider-Man movie, seen as an oblique reference to Eddie Brock which was later invalidated by the fact that in Spider-Man 3 he was "the new guy." It was quite a tease, and even though SM3 eventually disappointed, that particular reference was still fun.

The list of mutants that appeared on a computer screen in X2: X-Men United. Yet another tease that eventually let me down, but it sure got the fanboy in me drooling.

The Fastball Special from the much-reviled X-Men 3. The difficulty with casting a man as large as Hugh Jackman as the diminutive Wolverine is that you have to cast someone even bigger than him as Colossus to make the FS seem anything other than ridiculous. Well, they found their man with Daniel Cudmore, who must be seven feet tall and four hundred pounds or something (he looks huge, anyway), and even though the actual move looked a touch awkward (in the comics Colossus doesn't have to spin around; he just chucks Wolverine like he would a baseball, hence the name) I applauded the effort.

"Whiplash 1" and "Whiplash 2" in Iron Man. Coincidentally or not, Whiplash (whom I "met" in the comic book world as Blacklash), played by Mickey Rourke, is slated to be the next villain for Shellhead to square off against.

Samuel Sterns' swelling head in The Incredible Hulk, a sneak preview of his guise as the Leader. If only for that, that movie deserves a sequel.

The references to the writers and artists of the character Daredevil was one of the few things that was truly good about the movie based on him. From the names of the boxers Matt Murdock's father fought (Bendis, Mack, Miller) to the billboards (Romita was on one) to the names of the characters (Fr. Everett being a reference to co-creator Bill Everett, lowlife Jose Quesada being a reference to Marvel E-I-C and Daredevil writer/artist Joe Quesada) to appearances by the creators themselves (Stan Lee in his obligatory Marvel movie cameo, Kevin Smith as a morgue attendant, Frank Miller as a bodyguard with a Bullseye-flung pencil in his forehead), this movie is second to none in references to the character's many, many creators. It'd be even cooler if there were references I didn't catch, like Gene Colan or something like that; though I'm not about to get that movie on DVD just for that, it would be cool to catch it while I was watching the movie on TV or during a bus ride or something like that.

Yeah, comic book geeks, except for the perenially-complaining, impossible to please ones, are really in a better position to enjoy comic-book derived films than anyone else. ;D

For the Love of Simon Cowell, Jeremy Clarkson and...Armond White???

Just about anyone who watches TV knows who Simon Cowell is. The sultan of snark has achieved heights of notoriety that neither of his co-judges, each of whom is well-enough-known in his or her own right, can quite aspire to achieve, at least as judges of the show (considering that Paula Abdul was already quite popular on her own independently of the show), and it isn't just because he was responsible for (or at least instrumental to) bringing the show over to the U.S. from across the pond. It's because of all the four (formerly three) judges, he is apparently the hardest to please, and of four judges, all of whom are perfectly capable of giving an aspiring idol a thumbs-down, his negative remarks are easily the most biting, the most caustic, the most likely to break hearts and crush spirits. Pleasing Cowell has therefore become something of a Holy Grail, with many aspirants, including the really, really awful ones that kick off any given season, often proclaiming that they WILL win him over. Never mind, Paula, Randy and the other new judge whose name I have yet to remember. Simon, in many people's eyes, is the big cheese, even though, during auditions, there are three people who could (and often do) outvote him, and even though during the actual contest, the voting is entirely in the hands of the audience. 

It's the same thing with Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson, who, to those who follow the show, is rather famous/infamous for his virtually all abiding intolerance of two things: 1) American cars; and 2) almost all variants of the Porsche 911. Over the years, the BBC program has by and large been more about entertainment than journalism, with Clarkson and his co-hosts Richard Hammond and James May having gotten their facts wrong about the cars they were reviewing on more than one occasion, and rather than give straightforward reviews of the vehicles they drive the reviewers, particularly Clarkson, invariably resort to hyperbole, quite often in lambasting the subjects of their review. In fact, in one episode last year, Clarkson, rather than actually review the Porsche 911 GT2, had a series of shots of him smoking the wheels with him wailing behind the wheel to signify how unruly a car he found it to be.  Between his hatred of the 911, which can sometimes border on the irrational, and his repeated fudging up of the facts of the cars he drives, Clarkson is hardly the world's most professional automotive journalist, but I defy anyone to name someone in the same line of work who is anywhere near as well-known (at least in the English-speaking world).

While he is nowhere near as well-known as either of the foregoing gentlemen, Armond White, a film critic for the New York Press whose reviews appear online at the popular website rottentomatoes.com, appears to be gaining a bit of notoriety for his apparent determination to give otherwise critically acclaimed movies failing grades and to do the exact opposite for a lot of movies that get critically panned. As absurd as this sounds, allow me to give examples: last year he panned films like The Dark Knight, Slumdog Millionaire, The Wrestler and Milk, all of which scored at least 93% or higher on the "Tomatometer" or the site's collective score based on all of the compiled reviews. This year, his was one of the eight negative reviews of the new Star Trek film, which so far has rated an astonishing 96% on rottentomatoes.com out of more than two hundred reviews so far (though to be fair, he was in good company this time, with renowned film critic Roger Ebert posting a rather negative review himself).  With this guy the rule of thumb seems to be that if everyone else seems to like it, it's almost a given that he will hate it. 

But that's not the astonishing thing.

What really killed me was how, of the more than two hundred reviews currently tracked on rottentomatoes.com, White's review, far and away, has the most traffic in the form of user comments, with RT users having posted well over TWO HUNDRED COMMENTS on his review alone at last count. Sure, the comments were basically buckets of venom, some of them racist, some of them calling for his job, threatening his life, or that of his family, while some of them posited conspiracy theories about why he likes to give bad reviews to otherwise well-reviewed movies, but the point is, the comments were THERE. NO OTHER review generated anywhere NEAR as many responses. I never even bothered to read the review, and my previous experience with White's reviews had gotten my blood boiling; the comments were more than enough reading for me.

And it hit me: a GREAT many people in this world, whether they are followers of Simon Cowell, or of Jeremy Clarkson or the people who just want to pull down their pants and crap on Armond White, are profoundly addicted to negativity.

I'm sure someone with a better understanding of the human psyche could articulate this point a lot better than I am trying to do here, but since a dear friend of mine pointed out (on this very space) that I seem to seek out things that annoy me I've been trying to understand why. I haven't yet succeeded, but I've at the very least determined that I'm not alone.

And that isn't a good thing.

Maybe it's part of our nature because we aim to please, therefore we seek out the people hardest to please. Or maybe it's because when we see a red stain on a white dress we have to keep rubbing and rubbing it until the entire dress is stained.

Or maybe it's because we love bad boys/girls. I mean, when talking about Star Wars, one has to ask: who's more iconic, Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader? And is it coincidence that Hannibal Lecter has been featured in five movies as opposed to Clarice Starling's two?

I don't pretend to understand why it is that so many people gravitate towards things that upset them, irritate them or make them varying degrees of unhappy, but it seems like an inescapable truth that people do just that, even when they know better. 

We really are a bunch of total basket cases that way...

So the next time Simon buys another mansion or shacks up with some other impossibly gorgeous ingenue, or the next time Jezza smokes the tires of some unconscionably expensive, million-horsepower monster with Alcantara leather and gets paid for it, or the next time Armond White basks in the thousands of negative comments from his anti-fans, each of these men should take pause and give thanks for many people's inordinate fondness for dwelling on the negative.

The Difference Between Fox Marvel Movies and Every Other Kind...

Last year, 2008, was my favorite year for Marvel Comics movies. Last year, we Marvel Comics fans were treated to one hit-it-out-of-the-park fantastic film with Iron Man, and one solidly-entertaining, if sometimes flawed popcorn flick with The Incredible Hulk. Not since 2002, when the one-two punch of Blade II and Spider-Man rocked my world, had I enjoyed a year full of comic-book movies that much.

For me 2008 was particularly gratifying as a Marvel fan because it was a year that some luster was restored to the brand; after a run of both critical and box-office successes with the first two Spider-man movies and X-Men 2, Marvel's film properties suffered a visible drop in quality, with the Fantastic Four movies being average at best, the Ghost Rider film turning out to be unspeakably awful, and the third installments of both the Spider-man and X-men franchises proving to be huge disappointments to many fans.

The summer of 2008 changed that when Iron Man surprised everyone by coming in second only to The Dark Knight in terms of United States grosses and garnering stellar reviews almost across the board, at least if rottentomatoes.com and metacritic are to be believed. The Incredible Hulk may not have scaled similar heights, but considering that it was working against a lot of factors, chief of which was the very poor reception of its predecessor, Ang Lee's 2003 debacle Hulk (which I actually liked), it was actually quite an achievement; it opened well, showed visibly better legs than the Lee film, and left a lot of fanboys cheering. And best of all, both movies, the latter even more than the former, offered somewhat tantalizing teases of the unified Marvel Universe to come, something no other comic book film, Marvel, DC or otherwise, could claim.

Of course, the best part about both these movies was that they were not made by a studio, whether Sony, Fox or Universal; they were made by Marvel itself, with studios such as Paramount and Universal only handling the distribution duties. Marvel showed that with the right amount of money, talent and love for the material, there was so much they could do. Sony Pictures, the studio responsible for Spider-Man, perked up and took notice; they pushed the release date on the inevitable fourth installment back a full year to allow for more development time.

Unfortunately, however, the quality of those two films appears to have had no impact on how Twentieth Century Fox handles its Marvel movies, at least if X-Men Origins: Wolverine is any indication.

To be fair, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, was probably well into production at the time both Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk came out, so its quality, or lack thereof, may well have been set in stone in some respects, but the chasm in quality between the Fox film and that made by Marvel themselves is so wide one wonders if Fox will ever catch up, though they're reputedly fixing to retool the Fantastic Four franchise along the lines of Iron Man.  If they hire ILM to do the effects instead of some two-penny, half-penny outfit I'll be inclined to believe them. 

The way Fox makes Marvel movies is a lot like the way Mattel/Hot Wheels makes 1/18 Ferrari model cars. Both companies are fond of cutting corners and are often so intent on getting more for less than their products are visibly slipshod, especially when compared to the slicker products of their rivals.  Just as Mattel has a stranglehold on the Ferrari license, unfortunately so does Fox seem to have an interminable contract with Marvel over properties like Daredevil, Fantastic Four, and,  of course the X-Men. So for years to come we can look forward to cheap excuses for Ferrari models and crappy Marvel/Fox movies. The thing is, like a toy modeled after a Ferrari, a movie made based on a Marvel Comics property has the potential to be so much more.

Iron Man II and Terrence Howard's Tribulations

The idealist in me wants to sympathize with actor Terrence Howard, who was dropped from the cast of the upcoming sequel Iron Man II. From the outside looking in it seems to be yet another case of the big guy (Marvel Studios in this case) trampling on the little guy (Howard).

The problem is, I didn't care that much for Howard's performance in the first Iron Man movie. I pretty much liked every performance in the film, but as far as I was concerned, Howard's was the weak link and I know other people felt the same.

Secondly, I actually prefer Don Cheadle, the actor tapped to replace Howard as Col. James Rhodes, Tony Stark/Iron Man's best friend and confidant, who like Howard, and even Iron Man himself, Robert Downey Jr., also has an Academy Award nomination under his belt. I came to like Cheadle as early as his regular appearance on David E. Kelley's TV Series Picket Fences in the early 1990s and found his performance as Paul Rusesabagina in 2004's Hotel Rwanda to be particlarly moving. So all things considered, I believe Marvel traded up.

But it's hard to write off Howard's ranting as that of an actor spurned; he got the shaft after having signed contracts, and though the odds are good that I'll enjoy Iron Man II with or without him, Marvel still appears to be the heavy in this instance and it doesn't feel particularly good.

Ultimately I guess one can chalk it up to Marvel having made a mistake in its early dealings with actors...they are, after all, a fledgling studio...but I sure hope this isn't a sign of what's to come from them, especially with so many important movies in the pipeline.

Foot-in-Mouth Disease on the Web!

Most of my favorite sites these days are the ones on which I get to post my thoughts, such as this blog, my multiply and facebook page, and my diecast forum. I no longer care much for any of the other sites I used to visit, whether it's the movie sites or the comics sites, and rarely even click on them anymore.

The lone exception, however, would have to be aintitcoolnews.com, a site I follow as much now as I did when my regular haunts were entertainment news sites and comic book sites.

I haunt their site on a semi-regular basis because I like their stories, a lot of their reviews, and even their message boards (dubbed 'talkbacks') because unlike the other stuff I used to read the comments there are actually laugh-out-loud funny, whether deliberately or otherwise.

But I think my affinity for this site stems from the fact that it kind of represents a bunch of fanboys made good. I mean, these are guys who get passes to movies and all kinds of sneak preview goodness based simply on the fact that they are fans who were industrious enough to put up their own website and proclaim their love for pop culture. These were not some basement-dwelling trolls content to infest other people's websites with their snarky, infantile comments; these guys made devotion to pop culture their life. I don't even know what Harry Knowles, the site's founder, even does for a living apart from this site, assuming he even has to.

I was, as a result, somewhat disappointed to recently learn that Knowles, who has practically attained the status of pop-sub-culture icon, is not nearly as well-versed in the pop-culture he professes to adore as he himself thought he was, and made this ignorance embarrassingly public on AICN itself a few days ago.

He created a post on AICN saying, to paraphrase him, that the marketing materials of the upcoming X-Men Origins: Wolverine had put him into a "berserker rage" a phrase often used to describe Wolverine's fits of murderous rage during which he vivisects his enemies with his adamantium claws. A click on the article showed that Knowles was having conniptions about the fact that one of the featured mutants in the movie, Emma Frost, who is in fact based on a character appearing in the X-Men comic books, was depicted as having the mutant ability to turn into, as Knowles put it, a "Disco Ball." What followed then was a string of profanity directed by and large at the studio which produced the film, Twentieth Century Fox, and an admonition to at least consult wikipedia on the characters they were bringing to the screen, because Emma Frost (a.k.a. The White Queen) isn't some "Disco Ball" girl, she's a (censored) TELEPATH!

And it was in this moment that Harry Knowles, supposed pop-culture demi-god, turned putting his foot into his mouth into a goddamned art form.

See, the thing about Emma Frost is that in 2001, when Grant Morrison, a writer some people revere as the next Alan Moore, was writing one of the X-Men's monthly comic books, he introduced the concept of a "secondary mutation" or, in layman's terms, either a second unusual feature or a second superpower for some of the title's characters. Emma Frost received one such "secondary mutation," and her added power was that she could turn her skin into diamond. So counting from '01, Emma Frost has basically had this power, in addition to her telepathy, for almost nine years.

And Harry Knowles didn't have the first clue that she did, and even accused people who DID know that fact of being ignoramuses. Of course, a lot of fanboys who HAVE read the X-Men in the last ten years or so had a field day with Knowles.

Now, I was actually sad to see this happen to Knowles, because of all the people whose reviews I read on AICN, it is him with whom I have the most in common in terms of taste in movies. About 85% of the time we've seen eye-to-eye on several blockbusters and even some of the smaller films he reviews. With the notable exception of his unhealthy preoccupation with the Russian girl in the last two Spider-Man movies, we like and dislike mostly the same things about the movies he reviews. An endorsement from Harry Knowles can sometimes (though not always) get my fanny into the seat to watch a movie. There are a number of other writers on the site whom I would have loved to see make fools of themselves in so blatant a fashion, but apparently they all do their homework better than Knowles.

I'm not even disappointed that Knowles didn't know about Emma Frost's additional power. I'm disappointed that he didn't take his own advice and learn more about the character via Wikipedia or a good old-fashioned trade paperback before shooting his keyboard off about what sodomizers Twentieth Century Fox are. I'm the last person in the world I'd consider a Fox defender; what they've done to at least three Marvel properties, including the X-Men, is virtually unforgivable, but it just so happened in this instance that they were right on the money. It also makes sense from a cinematic perspective to use Emma's "diamond skin" power because frankly it's a lot more unique that telepathy, which has already been thoroughly done in three prior X-Men films.

That's really the thing about fanboys at the end of the day, even the prominent ones like Knowles, is that they can be so intoxicated with their own self-importance in terms of pop-culture that they consider themselves above even doing a simple fact check before shooting off their mouths, which also explains the ENDLESS stream of message board posts proclaiming "this movie is going to suck" based not even on movie trailers or teasers anymore but on mere ANNOUNCEMENTS as to cast or crew. I had thought Harry Knowles above that sort of garbage, and felt extremely disappointed, even though he's never exactly been a role model of mine. I also don't think he helped himself one bit when, in editing the piece, he acknowledged his mistake and then added with visible bitterness that Frost's diamond power was stupid anyway and that "technically" Fox was not responsible for her having that power. Well, Harry, I'm sorry to tell you this but as far as the comic book character goes, Fox had NOTHING to do with Emma gaining diamond-skin powers. "Technically" doesn't even enter the picture anymore because Fox's non-involvement in Grant Morrison's creative decision is ABSOLUTE.

Knowles should consider himself lucky he never tried to become a lawyer, as that kind of unfounded, shoot-from-the-hip proclamation is the sort of thing that could cost him a case. Maybe I could be a fanboy demi-god someday...

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.