On Disney Buying Marvel and the Imminent Explosion of Many a Fanboy's Head

I was a little shellshocked to learn this morning that media/entertainment giant Walt Disney Co. intends to wholly acquire Marvel Entertainment to the tune of four billion dollars. Not being a shareholder of either I don't really have any personal stake except that of a fan.

From the financial standpoint the sale makes perfect sense in the current economic climate; Disney is a brand name that is probably the closest thing to recession-proof that an entertainment company can get these days, and as much as I've loved many of their comic books, and as much money as their movies have made over the last ten years, I don't think the same can be said for Marvel. They are basically doing this to secure their future, which has probably been thrown into doubt by all the madness of the last year or so. On that score, I'm quite happy Marvel has such deep pockets at their disposal.

From a creative standpoint, though, well, there's bit a lot of screaming on the internet in the last few hours about how bad that could be, some of it funny, some of it devoid of any intelligence, and all of it speculative, of course. The general consensus appears to be no consensus at all, with many people dreading Hannah Montana/Avengers crossovers and others cheering the prospect of Marvel/Pixar teamups.

For my part, I don't think Disney should mess with Marvel's publishing line, and I'd like to think that they won't; why change a formula that attracted them enough to buy an entire company in the first place? Basically, Disney knows next to nothing about the kind of comics that Marvel publishes, markets and sells, and Marvel has been doing a pretty good job of it over the last several years from a sales point of view, so I hardly think they'd mess with what works. Of course I could be wrong, but considering Joe Quesada, who is basically responsible for that very line has been among the first online to reassure the reading public of this, well I take some reassurance. Another potential plus from the impending relationship is that the prospect of Disney money might lure some creators over, though frankly I'm already quite happy with the stable that's already there. (Not like Jim Lee needs the money, but I'd still like to see him draw a full Spider-Man and/or Daredevil story-arc before I die).

So as far as comics are concerned, I'm reasonably confident that guys like Matt Fraction, Mark Millar, Dan Slott and Ed Brubaker will still be great writers and will continue to come up with great stories. Life as we comic book readers know it will continue, with a couple of possible perks as well in the form of new creators wanting in on the Disney money train.

On the animated front, I have to confess I have mixed feelings on the matter.

On the one hand the merger will mean that Pixar is to be Marvel's sister company. That prospect could blow up millions of fanboy heads as well, but in a good way. For one thing, Pixar could serve as a platform for Marvel's not-so-well-known-outside-comic-fandom properties that might not quite make the transition to the big screen, like the Runaways, who were recently announced to be slated for live-action adaptation but whose film could, development hell being the way it is, in reality take a looooong time to get off the ground, Doctor Strange, whose film has been in development hell since the 1980s, and the Guardians of the Galaxy as well as other cosmic characters like Mar-Vell and Noh Varr, to name but a few. And if they were by some miracle to get their hands on The Fantastic Four, well all of 20th Century Fox and Tim Story's sins will be forgotten if not forgiven. Of course, that's not likely to happen as all of the studios currently with deals to film or at least distribute Marvel properties, from Fox to Paramount to Sony to Universal, are now clinging to these contracts for dear life as they know how much money is on the table. In short, anyone hoping for a Pixar-made Avengers, Spider-Man or X-Men will be bitterly disappointed unless Disney is willing to make Paramount, Sony or Fox a whole lot richer. Fortunately, there are a lot of other toys for Pixar to play with; Marvel's library does consist of over 5,000 characters, after all. So the prospect of Pixar drawing on Marvel's library for future movies is something that is very, very good. As long as it's Pixar doing the animating and not the made-for-TV-mediocre in-house outfit Disney came up with that produced such execrable films as Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons, back when Disney were afraid they'd lose Pixar, Marvel's properties should be in great hands.

As far as the TV/Home Video Animation front is concerned, though, I'm not particularly thrilled. Anyone who's seen Disney's truly dreadful direct-to-video sequels of their popular and acclaimed animated films like Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, Pocahontas, and more recently Cinderella, not to mention the rather abominable TV adaptations of fantastic films like Tarzan, will know what I'm talking about when I say that Disney is capable of taking some great properties and milking them for every dollar they're worth and then some. It could be good, but it could also be very, very bad.

On the live-action feature film front, well, I'm kind of filled with dread. Films based on Marvel properties are clearly action movies and on that front Jerry Bruckheimer has practically been Disney's go-to-guy since the mid-1990s. Now Bruckheimer is responsible for producing a lot of action movies I've enjoyed over the years, from Top Gun, the first Bad Boys, Crimson Tide and The Rock, all of which he co-produced with the late Don Simpson, to the thrill-ride Enemy of the State, which remains one of my favorite Will Smith movies ever, Black Hawk Down, and the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I also happened to enjoy the first National Treasure movie a lot, but I would not want any of my Marvel movies to be made with the same sense of flightiness. My rule about Bruckheimer of late, though seems to be that the bigger the movie, the worse it gets, as attested by films like Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, and the two Pirates of the Carribean sequels. Most movies based on Marvel properties by nature, would have to be big, so that doesn't bode well for having Bruckheimer produce any of them. If Disney leaves folks like Kevin Feige, Avi Arad and Jon Favreau to their own devices, everything should be fine. Of course, like I said, barring additional buyouts, film properties like Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and the Avengers (all part of Marvel's self-produced film slate) are still locked into Marvel's agreements with Paramount and Universal, the studios responsible for marketing and distributing the films, for better or worse.

I know this blog post is like a drop of water in an ocean of fanboy reaction but I'd like to conclude by saying that it's way, WAY too early to conclude that the merger means the end of Marvel as its fans know it. It's also too early to say if this is a good thing, though there are tangible positives already. Let's just sit tight and see what happens; the merger hasn't even happened yet, after all.

Cameron, Meet Messageboards and Comment Pages

The last time James Cameron made a straight-up action movie, True Lies, the internet (as we know it, anyway; it's been apparently been around for 40 years) was in a somewhat nascent form. By the time Titanic was released in 1997, the internet, and the messageboard, was already in a state of rather healthy activity as far as messageboards and online comments went, but sites like aintitcoolnews.com were still a year or so away from truly exploding onto the pop-culture scene. And in any event, Titanic made its megabucks through women and teenage girls who enjoyed a good cry and the boyfriends and husbands who wanted to appease them.

Avatar is James Cameron's first feature film in twelve years, and it is opening to a completely different pop culture milieu than any of his other movies. It's opening in the age of u-torrents, trailers on Apple, TMZ and most imporantly, of legions upon legions of self-important fanboys.

The whining was evident on at least two of the sites that showcased the Avatar trailer. Every other comment was how let down they felt, how the Na'vi (the fantastical aliens whose planet serves as the setting for the story) looked cartoony, or how James Cameron had turned into George Lucas. Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch.

I'm pretty sure Cameron isn't exactly thin-skinned, but I wonder how he feels about thousands upon thousands of posts by strident, know-it-all fanboys proclaim that his film sucks four full months before its theatrical release?

Such feedback isn't what I'd call completely useless as reactions to things like Superbowl ads were cues for special effects vendors to tweak some shots but in general, like I've said a thousand times before, fanboys really are nothing more than a bunch of trolls at heart. There were legions of them who predicted that the new Terminator movie would rule the box-office just because their beloved Christian Bale is in it. There were bunches of them that predicted Star Wars: Episode II would kick Spider-Man's butt. And there are multitudes of them who, EVERY time there's a movie that makes heavy use of digital effects, have to harp on how fake the effects look, no matter how outlandish the character being depicted is. And so many of them are so woefully inarticulate that, apart from their inability to conjugate or spell properly, some of them can only manage to write one word: fail! Why Avi Arad strove to pander to these people when making Spider-Man 3 will forever be beyond me.

Avatar will probably make a killing at the box-office, and even though that isn't likely to shut the fanboys up any time soon even if it does, at least we'll know for sure that life goes on no matter how many trolls infest the internet.

And the World is Right-Side Up Again...

I don't know if anyone remembers the 1988 made-for-television film A Dangerous Life, but it was, I think, an Australian production employing Filipino, Australian, and some American actors made to dramatize the then-recent EDSA Revolution which saw the Philippines oust a dictator who had been in power for nearly two decades, Ferdinand Marcos, and install as their President the widow of one of Marcos' slain political rivals.

Time passed, and people gradually fell out of love with the Aquino administration, blaming it for the admittedly several problems that beset the country at the time, not the least of which were the widespread and frequent power outages that hit the entire countryside at varying times. They were a little happier to have her hand-picked successor (and former Marcos right hand, ironically enough) Fidel V. Ramos as president for six years, but by and large Cory remained a highly respected figure, especially for having been at the forefront of the restoration of the democratic process to our country.

Things started getting a little strange after Joseph "Erap" Estrada was elected President in 1998. One of the first things he seemed determined to do was to restore the Marcoses to their old glory, starting with the burial of former strongman Ferdie Marcos himself in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, which basically opened a lot of wounds that had only just healed, with some still in the process of healing. He was a marked man after that, and when he basically handed over the reins to his then-VP Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2001 one of the people presiding over "EDSA Dos" was Cory Aquino.

After the much-debated elections in 2004 in which GMA was proclaimed President at the expense of previous favorite, the late movie star Fernando Poe, Jr., things started to get a little crazy, particularly when the "Hello Garci" scandal broke out.

Cory Aquino knew or had a good idea of what it was like to have been cheated out of an election considering that was what is widely believed to have happened during the "Snap Elections" of 1986 and so she joined the growing clamor against GMA, the first time she ever stood against a sitting President she effectively helped install three years ago.

But that was just part of the craziness.

Suddenly, the Presidential Commission for Good Governance, the PCGG which had been formed under the aegis of the Aquino administration for the purpose of recovering the billions of pesos of allegedly ill-gotten wealth from the Marcos family and their cronies and for prosecuting the people responsible for gorging themselves on the national treasury for years, was attempting all kinds of kooky ex-deals designed to get the Marcoses off the hook in exchange for what was believed by some to be a token amount of the sequestered fortunes. Having worked there for over a year I wasn't too happy to read about these developments.

The next thing that appalled me was that in the bout between GMA and Cory Aquino, it was the latter who was, in several eyes anyway, apparently coming off worse. A lot of people were starting to say that Cory had become irrelevant and some insinuations as well as outright pronouncements were made that she was a hindrance to progress. That the palace would make these remarks was, of course, understandable, but that some writers picked up on it was downright confounding. Here we had an icon of democracy up against a person who had apparently engaged in massive fraud to attain the Presidency, and yet the general sentiment was the ignore the former and support the latter.

In truth, I could actually understand the general sentiment of weariness with "People Power," especially considering the opportunistic scumbags who were, from 2004 to sometime last year when they all started going their separate ways in preparation for their respective bids for the presidency, joining the bandwagon. Heck, it was widely whispered that Ramos used the "equity of the incumbent" to triumph over Miriam Defensor-Santiago back in 1992 but no one was nailing him to the cross for it (though admittedly FVR never had a "Hello Garci" recording to try to explain).

What I couldn't understand was how it happened that brickbats were suddenly being flung at Cory for trying to call for some accountability.

Now, though I was just a kid when EDSA happened, as I got older I had a better perspective of things, and I can honestly say I was never so high on the Cory Kool-Aid to be blinded to some of her poorer judgment calls while she was in power. A Mendiola massacre occurred on her watch, for one thing, and of course the controversy of family-owned Hacienda Luisita never quite left the public consciousness, not to mention the infamous Kamag-Anak, Inc. that made the proverbial hay while the sun was shining.

But for goodness' sake, the extent to which she was actually villified was really rather flabbergasting. I just didn't get it at all.

And then, somewhere in the middle of all this, people were talking about someone making a movie about the Marcoses starring Hollywood stars like Brad Pitt as Ferdinand Marcos and Julia Roberts or some other Hollywood it-girl as Imelda (granted, it could easily have been a rumor started by the member of the Marcos family itself or one of their sycophants)! Fortunately a not-quite-flattering portrayal of Imelda hit theaters a few years ago in a documentary about her, but I just couldn't contain the WTF impulses that possessed me then.

When Cory died, though, although it was sad to see her go, I was genuinely glad to see things suddenly turning right again.

Suddenly people remembered that the Marcoses had plundered the country and murdered people, crimes for which they have yet to be held fully accountable (at least Imelda anyway, considering that Ferdie could well be paying for it all already where he's gone). Suddenly GMA properly started looking like pond scum again, especially after she and some of her select lackeys, during this period of widespread mourning, were found to have gorged themselves on a million pesos worth of food in some restaurant in New York (where the food isn't even reportedly that good). Suddenly it's Cory whose life story will be made into a movie, albeit with local talent, though who would really want white boys and girls to play Filipinos anyway?

At least in some ways, the world is again as it should be.

Celebrating Original Films in 2009

Going into 2009 I was only aware of two original films that I'd be looking forward to watching: Disney/Pixar's Up and James Cameron's Avatar. As of August, I'm delighted to learn that instead of just two there are now (at least) five: the aforementioned two, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker and Neil Blomkamp's District 9. Not having seen any of them, I'm certainly not qualified to give a review, but the good news is that, apart from the predictable buzz generated by a Pixar project and Cameron's first movie project in a dozen years, as well as the rather vocal if slightly mixed reaction to Tarantino's new film at Cannes, surprisingly The Hurt Locker and District 9, two movies that don't have any particularly big names attached (with the exception of Peter Jackson who has producer or executive producer credit on the latter) have, in terms of critical reaction anyway, become quite conspicuous, with the former, a military-themed movie, being the first movie dealing with the U.S. military's occupation of Iraq to get a positive response from film critics and some audience segments (with its buzz increasing over time). Both movies look like they're about ready to pop, and this remake/adaptation/sequel/prequel-weary movie lover is sincerely and fervently hoping that they do.

The best part of them both is that these films aren't just some esoteric, arty movies, the kind that, as Robert Downey Jr. said when inviting Gwyneth Paltrow to star in Iron Man, nobody sees. The Hurt Locker is an action-thriller, directed by the highly capable but sadly underappreciated Kathryn Bigelow, while District 9 is an action science fiction film. I think the last original action-thriller to hit movie screens was the first Die Hard film. Even the fifteen-year old, enormously entertaining Speed was literally conceived as "Die Hard on a bus." The Hurt Locker, which, this early, is already getting Oscar buzz from reviewers, wasn't even conceived as that kind of movie. It's set in the Iraq occupation, but from what I'm read it's apparently devoid of any of the polemics that have turned past efforts on the subject matter into box-office poison. District 9, for its part, appears to be the first original work of science fiction to hit screens since James Cameron's The Abyss. Sure, there have been some pretty entertaining sci-fi movies since then like Jurassic Park, but the thought that a filmmaker could sit down and come up with something entirely on his own without standing on the shoulders of someone like Michael Crichton is pretty amazing, even though theoretically, it shouldn't be.

It's gratifying to see these two films muscling in on territory that for two long has been dominated by sequels, prequels, video games and (gag) toy adaptations. I love the thought that if these films become breakout hits with their low budgets and maverick filmmaking sensibilities, Hollywood suits will be scrambling to make "the next Hurt Locker" and "the next District 9" because just maybe, one of those suits will start looking around for "the next ORIGINAL idea."

I'm similarly enamored with Basterds, and particularly I love the story of how Tarantino spent over a decade (or more) writing the script. I know I'll be in line for it in a couple of weeks.

Although District 9 looks like it'll be coming out in a few weeks I honestly don't know if I'll be able to find the time to see it, let alone Hurt Locker which doesn't look like it'll be released here any time soon, if at all, but I am immensely glad that these movies are out there and I hope there are many, many more of their kind to come.

This Comic Book Fan has Learned to Wait for the Trade

I think my days of collecting expensive toy cars may well be numbered; on top of the fact that I can count on one hand the remaining cars I want to buy, none of which are even on the market yet (and which won't be for awhile), it is simply too expensive a hobby to pursue on a regular basis and there simply isn't enough space anymore. I'll probably find myself revisiting it someday when a) I have a lot more money, which will eventually happen and b) I have a nice, dedicated cabinet in which to put all my cars.

But there's another reason why, after the last of the few remaining cars on my wish list trickles in, I may call it a day, and it's because I'm slowly rediscovering my first love: comics.

I once wrote that, even when my comic-book collecting had tapered off considerably, I wasn't going to renounce comic books altogether but that 1) I would stop collecting them in individual issues and more importantly, 2) I would only come back when I found stories that I wanted to read again.

Well, in terms of the former I haven't exactly been faithful to this promise as I've been buying a few single issues here and there such as one-shots, the landmark Amazing Spider Man #600, and the Captain America: Reborn limited series. They've all been fun, especially ASM #600 and Reborn, of which only two issues have come out so far, but nothing's persuaded me to go back to collecting monthlies.

On the recommendation of my favorite retailer, I picked up the first storyarc of The Invincible Iron Man in trade paperback format, and was quite simply blown away by both the story and the art. Here was a story that was in continuity and which took place after "events" like Civil War and World War Hulk and their somewhat unflattering portrayals of the character which showed respect for what had been established before but which managed to create an original story with real narrative heft. From my understanding of "events" and what they do, those that took place in this story not likely to be undone by any retconning event. I've long wanted to read a story that felt like it mattered somehow and I've finally found at least this one. After the somewhat lengthy "World's Most Wanted" storyline in the title concludes, I may well eventually look for that in collected form as well. I guess I really missed out by just sticking to the Marvel universe according to Bendis, Millar and Straczynski for the last several years. Matt Fraction is a gem of a writer and I hope Marvel keep him busy for a long time to income, particularly writing Iron Man stories. I also hope they keep Salvador Larroca locked into a contract to work for them for as long as is humanly possible.

Having a nice, handy volume to take anywhere whenever I want to read is not entirely a new thing for me but of all the trade paperbacks I've ever bought, I have to say this one has turned out to be the best read, even when measured against my all-time favorites like the collection of J. Michael Straczynski's inaugural story arc on The Amazing Spider-Man back in 2001. The thought that there are more compilations yet to come from this writer as well as old favorites like Millar, who will be returning to the Ultimates this month is positively tantalizing.

Gone are the days I had to rush to the store to get the next issue or get beaten to the punch by fans and/or speculators. Gone is the itch to complete long runs of a single book. Gone is the mental justification I had for buying single issues that I would one day be able to sell them on the internet. I've already sold a fair number of comics on eBay, getting easily more than I paid for them but the whole thing holds no more appeal for me, and taking care of comics against deterioration and acid damage is just something I can't really do on a regular basis, especially considering the climate here. But I still love a good comic-book story, and so I love me a good trade paperback. Single issues are indeed collectible, but I think I've sold more than enough of them on eBay to prove that to my wife (or anyone else who might doubt it), and I have no further interest in collecting things that are inherently fragile on the off-chance I decide to sell them again someday. Having them sit in my room with the smug knowledge (or supposition) that they will be worth a fortune someday doesn't do anything for me anymore either. So for me there's simply no point to single issues anymore.

I know that paperbacks can't survive without the original, single-issue runs, and so I understand and appreciate what impels single-issue collectors to keep collecting the way they do. After all, until only fairly recently I was one of them. But in reading the Iron Man trade paperback I've finally come to understand the made-for-trade mindset that has many Marvel Comics storylines take place over five to seven issues. Had I collected The Ultimates in this fashion, I would never have chafed at how late the individual issues arrived.

And, thanks to the fact that in collecting my cars I could never buy more than one every few months, I've gotten used to waiting for something, which I could never really do when I was regularly collecting single issues. Reading the issues all in succession is immensely gratifying, especially stuff written by Mark Millar or, most recently, this stuff by Fraction.

I may well buy my next trade paperback months from now, or maybe even a year. The point is it doesn't matter; the collected story will wait for me without skyrocketing in value on the back-issue market. Such is the beauty of the trade paperback!

So in a manner of speaking, my collecting days are back...but not quite in the same way.

Watching Harry Potter, Anakin Skywalker and My Girl Grow Up

I'm not entirely sure why I keep gravitating towards the topic of child stars. Maybe it's partly because I've been a parent long enough to watch my kids grow considerably, and within a considerably short period of time, that I've acquired this morbid fascination with the way Hollywood seems to "bring up" its young.

As far as I can tell, the handlers of the Harry Potter kids (apart, of course, from their parents) appear to have done the best job considering the enormous amount of pressure that has, for eight years running now, rested on the shoulders of these youngsters. For six movies now, they've played the same characters and have gone from tykes to teens. The good news is, we haven't been reading about any DUIs, wild parties or seen any snapshots of any of them without their underwear (though on the topic of snapshots I have seen ONE photoshopped pic featuring the actors playing the main trio with Rupert Grint's "hand" firmly on Emma Watson's breast"). In short, as far as outward appearances are concerned, they appear to be none the worse for wear. They're all still in school, and are apparently not on drugs, which can only be a good thing. Maybe, just maybe, they'll all go the way of Jodie Foster rather than Lindsay Lohan.

Speaking of kids who are in school, I was pleasantly surprised to read about (and actually watch a video of) Jake Lloyd, who back in 1999 played ten-year-old Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, a movie I actually hated. It seems that, after the role that would have made anyone else's career, he pretty much dropped out of sight (something fanboys will probably thank him for if they get the chance) and turned up, ten years later, in an online interview. The boy's in college and appears to be doing well. No drug-related stories, etc. To think it was only a few years ago that his contemporary, Haley Joel Osment, who also starred in a 1999 smash-hit, The Sixth Sense, figured in a DUI arrest.

Another child-star, from a little further back, is making her return to movies after a long absence. Anna Chlumsky, star of 1991's My Girl, was unable to parlay the success of that one film into a film career as three of her next movies, including the sequel to My Girl, tanked at the box office. She then walked away from movies and focused on, apparently, growing up and going back to school, among other things. And now she's back and apparently quite well adjusted with a college degree, a marriage, and a healthy stage career. Maybe she should thank her lucky stars that her career as a child actor didn't take off. After all, it didn't do the career of her My Girl co-star Macaulay Culkin any favors.

It's nice to read about these things after hearing things about Michael Jackson's troubled childhood as people look back on his life. I guess that a lot of child actors turn out okay, especially the ones who take a step back to live life outside Hollywood for a while; it's just that we don't read about them too much.

Revisiting Spider-Man's Clone Saga and Other Stupidities

To my mind, the Clone Saga was one of Marvel's ballsiest gambits ever. I definitely won't consider it one of the best stories ever, or, for that matter, even a good story...or even a very original story.

Still, the notion of replacing the Spider-Man whose adventures people had been following for twenty years was insanely gutsy, made more so by the fact that they tried to pass off the replacement as "the real Spider-Man all along." This was, I think, the first truly serious attempt to "un-marry" Spider-man.

Of course, there was no way that legions of fans were going to swallow that the only Spider-Man they had ever known was a fake, and even though I enjoyed the adventures of Ben Reilly I knew, in the back of my head, that they weren't going to last.

Thing is, when Reilly was killed and Norman Osborn brought back in exchange, I was so annoyed that I basically dropped the book for three years, coming back a little over a year before the Straczynski-led Spider-renaissance. Even though I decided after a year of putting up with Howard Mackie that I was better off not reading the title, JMS, with his radically new take on Spider-Man, pulled me right back in and I was an avid, regular reader for over two years thereafter, at least until artist John Romita Jr. left the book in early 2004.

But in that time, for me anyway, as someone who had followed Spider-Man's adventures on and off and on again since 1988, the JMS period represented a bit of a golden age as far as I was concerned; The Amazing Spider-Man was more readable than it had been in a long time. One thing I noticed, however, was that there was little to no reference, during this time, to anything that had come before it. In fact, it appeared that Spider-Man lived in a bit of a bubble. Except perhaps for some of the most rudimentary aspects of Spider-Man's history, there was nary a wink or a nod to any particular Spider-Man story that had come before.

The stories told in this period of time were, in a way, reflective of just about all Marvel's publications in the early Joe Quesada/Bill Jemas-era.

In this post-Jemas era, while crossovers, events and variant covers are all the rage again, one good thing about it is that suddenly Marvel comics writers were no longer afraid of revisiting the past again.

These days, retrospective stories like the Spider-Man and the X-Men miniseries can feature Ben Reilly in his brief tenure as Spider-Man, and an ongoing storyline can be published featuring the Clone Saga, "as it was intended to be told" by two of the original writers, Tom De Falco and Howard Mackie.

These days, Stan Lee can write a brief back-up story in The Amazing Spider-Man #600 commenting on how idiotic Spider-Man's status quo shifts over the years have been, including the changes to his marriage.

I gave up regularly collecting comic books because of the distinct feeling that the creators were constantly yanking my chain, switching the status quo just for the sake of it and not because it developed the character in any truly positive way. My favorite Spider-Man comic book remains issue #38, volume 2 in which he and Aunt May finally have it out about Peter's secret life as Spider-Man. It's an issue-long conversation in which Aunt May, having discovered without Peter's knowledge that he is, in fact, Spider-Man, takes him to task for having hidden the truth from her for so many years. It was heart-wrenching, beautiful stuff and a wonderful treatise on honesty in relationships. And now, in this "Brand New Day" where Aunt May is back to knowing nothing about Peter's double-life, it's completely meaningless, no matter what Quesada and his editors say about things "having happened, only nobody remembers them."

Maybe now that they're willing to "let the past in" and have stopped sweeping their past storylines and indiscretions under the carpet, Marvel will find a way to add that extra layer of meaning to Peter's relationship with Aunt May (among so many other things). Just maybe.

Of course, if they don't, I still get to save about P165 every month.

The Subtext of Anti-Parent Cartoons

Thanks to the likes of Spongebob Squarepants, Avatar: The Last Airbender and a handful of other cartoons, I'm quite a fan of cable network Nickelodeon. Some of the shows of rival Cartoon Network are okay, too, but many of them, like Ben 10, feel more like they were designed to sell toys than tell stories. Unfortunately, it's got a couple of shows I don't care for very much, namely The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron and The Fairly Oddparents. In both cartoons, the main characters' fathers are depicted as ignorant, self-absorbed buffoons.

The Fairly Oddparents essentially tells the story of a child whose life is so miserable that he is "gifted" with two fairy godparents to help make his life more bearable. In this context it is understandable, at least from a narrative point of view, and therefore occasionally amusing that both of his parents (particularly his father) are depicted as complete jackasses. If he wasn't unhappy, he wouldn't have any need of his fairy godparents. The writing's fairly lazy that way but at least there's some logic to it.

As for Jimmy Neutron, well quite frankly I can't think of any good reason why his father has to be a complete and utter moron who doesn't appear to do anything useful for a living and is preoccupied most of the time with...of all things...ducks. About the only reason I can think of is that if Jimmy had parents who were even half as smart as he supposedly is (and for someone who's supposed to be smart he does a lot of profoundly stupid things almost every episode) he wouldn't be able to do all the amazing things he does because they wouldn't let him. Again, more lazy writing in my opinion, if that's the case.

But maybe there's more to it than that; maybe American parents in general and American fathers in particular have gotten so preoccupied with themselves and their own gratification that there's a whole generation of kids who have been neglected. Maybe it is this generation that has turned to cable television and video games for gratification. If this is a swipe at such parents and the overall effect of a consumerist-capitalist society, then so be it, but otherwise I cannot stand a show that would deliberately breed such contempt for parental figures.

At least Jimmy Neutron stopped airing new episodes two years ago...

Why Do Makers of Comic Book Movies Keep Recycling Actors?

What do Halle Berry, Sam Eliot, Jon Favreau, Morgan Freeman, Ben Foster, Samuel Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Ron Perlman, Natalie Portman, Ryan Reynolds, Rebecca Romijn, and Mickey Rourke all have in common? Well, each of them has appeared in more than one movie adapting a comic-book. In the cases of Eliot, Favreau, Foster, Reynolds and Romijn they've even appeared in more than one Marvel movie franchise.

Now, when they're done right or even just well (which oddly enough isn't always the same as right), I am a big fan of comic book movies, especially the Marvel ones, but I have to say this practice a lot of their producers have of recycling the same actors over and over again is kind of silly.

I'm not sure when it all started but the earliest instance I know of was Wesley Snipes who spent a long time cultivating the Black Panther franchise as a star vehicle before eventually jumping ship to play the title character in Blade instead, while Nicolas Cage was solidly in the running to star in Tim Burton's then-planned "reimagination" of the Superman franchise before the project fell apart and he left to do Ghost Rider instead. These actors, however, did not actually play two characters in two separate movies, some of them from the same "universe." I honestly don't get why comic-book movie producers seem to think there's only a limited pool of actors from whom they can draw people to play superheroes or their supporting characters. Sure, in many cases it's the actor who comes forward, as Reynolds has been actively campaigning to play the Flash and, prior to the announcement that he would be playing Hal Jordan a.k.a. Green Lantern in Martin Campbell's upcoming film, was already slated to star in a spinoff featuring the Deadpool character he played in the recent Wolverine movie. Robert Downey Jr. chased down the role of Tony Stark/Iron Man. But with the exception of Reynolds who is set to star as the lead in two comic book films, most of the recycled actors have played supporting, if pivotal roles for which, whatever their campaigning, they were ultimately chosen. So in short, either a limited number of actors went after these roles, or the studios went after a limited number of actors.

(Incidentally, and to go a little off-topic, while I did not feel Reynolds was particularly well cast as GL, I was happy to hear the news of his casting. I'm a big fan of director Campbell's work, particularly on Casino Royale, Daniel Craig's inaugural outing as James Bond, and The Mask of Zorro, and I have high hopes for this film.)

If it is a case of the studios dipping into the same well over and over again this is rather ridiculous, especially in the case of Marvel that has imminent plans of crossing over several of its franchises into the Avengers movie, with possibly more crossovers down the line should they ever start reacquiring the film rights to franchises that have been held for years by studios like Sony and Fox. It's unlikely that these actors would ever appear as two characters, but that it could even happen is extremely silly.

It's equally annoying that Marvel in particular keep going back to the same people for their scripts, particularly the likes of Zak Penn whose work in The Incredible Hulk may have been okay but whose X:Men: The Last Stand and Elektra were rather terrible.

One would think that with over two dozen successful films since the first Superman movie launched the genre 31 years ago, it would be easy for comic book-based projects to attract top talent, or at the very least fresh talent every time a new one is announced. For all we know this talent is already banging on the filmmakers' doors. I know a pre-Hulk Ed Norton campaigned to be able to play Warren Worthington/Angel before the role was given to the insufferable Ben Foster. So is this a case of producers going with the cheapest available talent even though the top talent is readily available? I certainly hope not.

One thing's for sure, there are a lot of great or potentially great comic-book based films currently in the pipeline, and it would be best for EVERYONE concerned, fans and moviemakers alike, if the producers got the best people available for the job, not just some bunch of also-rans they can easily lowball.

Shattering Images

NOTE: Edited for accuracy

Last year, when Meg Ryan went gave an interview to coincide with the release of her latest film The Women, she made certain comments with respect to her ex-husband Dennis Quaid's indiscretions during their now-defunct marriage (which were actually appropriate considering that the film dealt with the topic of marital infidelity among other things). These comments were reported in a lot of media outlets as the bitter tirade of someone who hasn't gotten over something.

Now, if these comments were simply a recollection of her own experience in relation to her film or a backhanded swipe at her ex-husband, it's impossible to say. But granting that it was a dig at Quaid I can't really say I blame her; her much publicized roll-in-the-hay with co-star Russell Crowe on the set of the 2001 thriller Proof of Life effectively killed her career, though it had no perceptible effect on Crowe's. Her stature as Hollywood's girl-next-door, or, more aptly, America's Sweetheart, meant that extra-marital affairs were a no-no for her.

Quaid, who won a fair amount of sympathy after Ryan had two-timed him, has since his breakup with Ryan seen a bit of a career resurgence with films like The Rookie, The Day After Tomorrow, Vantage Point and even the upcoming G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra. Maybe Ryan felt it incongruous that he should enjoy success after infidelity while she has effectively been kicked to the curb. Whether or not that was what she meant, it does seem a little unfair when one thinks about it. But then perception is not often governed by the laws of fairness.

The thing is, her fall from grace wasn't even a matter of her being a woman; Angelina Jolie has been married and divorced twice and is perceived by many, rightly or wrongly, to be the reason why Brad Pitt left his ex-wife Jennifer Aniston, and yet she not only has post-"homewrecking" hits like Wanted under her belt; she garnered an Academy Award nomination for Changeling to boot. Apparently bad girls are more in fashion now than sweethearts.

Speaking of "bad people" such as the aforementioned Crowe, apparently there is a limit to what "bad boys" can get away with as Crowe learned when he gained some notoriety for reportedly injuring a hotel clerk with a telephone even though based on some accounts the clerk, who supposedly uttered "whatever" when Crowe complained about a malfunctioning phone service, may have at least partially deserved to get pummelled. Crowe's image took a beating especially considering that at the time he was trying to sell a movie where he played a downtrodden depression-era boxer. Not much chance of that happening if you're a real-life bully. Perhaps as a result, Cinderella Man tanked at the box-office.

Kobe Bryant's career was, less than two years after the fact, none the worse for wear after the woman who accused him of raping her settled out of court with him. His star was not dimmed in the least when he won Olympic gold last year or hoisted his first Shaq-free NBA title trophy over his head a few weeks ago. His multi-million dollar endorsement deals are still pretty much intact (though they admittedly were in jeopardy for awhile as was his public image). He took a hit, but ultimately bounced back.

Lest people argue that the case was settled and that Kobe should be regarded as innocent until proven guilty, one could look to the case of the late Michael Jackson for a sterling example of how allegations of sexual impropriety can be a real kiss of death for one's career. Now, I'm not even a Michael Jackson fan (as I've written elsewhere), and admittedly there's something about pedophilia that arguably makes it even more heinous than rape of an adult but the fact of the matter is that while the first case was settled, in the second instance Jackson was acquitted. That is to say, it was ruled that it had not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he had had sexual relations with his accuser. This was not some case of some shady out-of-court deal. And yet, the first case had already done enough to make sure his chances of selling new albums ere dead and gone, long before he was. In many people's minds, Michael died a pedophile, regardless of whether or not he was. Of course, he didn't do himself any favors by admitting he had little boys sleep in his bed, no matter how much he insisted that it wasn't sexual.

Mel Gibson, of course, with his sanctimonious, hear-mass-in-my-own-private-chapel-in-Latin, make-a-movie-in-ancient-languages-about-how-our-sins-killed-Christ pontification basically set himself up for a fall, and his DUI in 2006 was quite the fall, so much so that three years later fellow Hollywood star Brad Pitt was able to rib him about it. He really does look quite foolish in his mug shot. As to whether or not it's killed Gibson's career remains to be seen as either later this year or early next year he is slated to make his first onscreen appearance since 2002's Signs in a movie directed by Martin Campbell.

Scandal has different ways of affecting different people. For that matter, different things constitute scandal for different people. For Meg Ryan, scandal is having sex with a man other than her husband, while for other celebrities it involves DUI. But the thing about people who are well-known is that the effect of a scandal upon a person's career ultimately depends on what people have come to expect from that person.

Maybe, in that sense, a scandal can be liberating because then the person involved is free from all expectations.

The Different Shades of Celebrity Deaths

I have no doubt that the internet is now chock-full of obituaries for Michael Jackson, and to a lesser extent, Farrah Fawcett who died less than 24 hours before he did. Not having been a huge fan of either of these celebrities, I really have nothing much to contribute by way of an obit. I do have a bit to say on the matter, though.

Celebrities are, by no means, any better as human beings than the average person; they are simply better known than we are. That comes with so many things; the ability to get across whatever they want to say to more people, often a higher salary than most of us, and often, the unwanted attention of several people, something that usually follows them all to their graves.

But just as not all celebrities (or people for that matter) live in the same way, neither do they die in the same way, and I'm not referring to causes of death. No, that's often secondary to the stage of a celebrity's career when he or she dies.

On the one end of the scale there are the celebrities who die so soon in their careers that all at once there is regret that they were unable to realize their full potential, that the public did not get the chance to know them better, and essentially that they died far, far too young. Probably the most recent such death would be that of Heath Ledger, although in the celebrity world there's really no shortage of them from the passing of such iconic figures as James Dean, Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Holly and Kurt Cobain to deaths of other promising artists as those of River Phoenix, Brandon Lee, Aaliyah and even lesser-known talents such as Brad Renfro. These are people who died even before the age of 30, so young that they left so many questions behind as to what they could have achieved as actors or performers given the opportunity. There are also artists who may have died a little bit older than that but whose passing felt only a little less premature; the thought that there was so much more they could have given still weighs on people's minds. While John Candy was obviously not in the best of health, his passing to me was a real tragedy because quite honestly that guy was one of the funniest comedians around and had he lived even another ten years there was so much he could have done.

On the other extreme there are peformers who have lived long, full lives and have had the stellar careers to go along with them. These are celebrities who have achieved everything they possibly could have in their chosen careers and who pass on from this life as revered icons who rise above any controversy that may have popped up in their lifetimes. I think it's fair to say that industry legends like Frank Sinatra, Katherine Hepburn, Paul Newman, and even Charlton Heston fall into this particular category. If he were to die twenty to thirty years from now instead of tomorrow without making more Dan Brown-based movies and more of the caliber that won him his two Oscars, I think Tom Hanks is pretty much destined for this pantheon, as Will Smith, at his current trajectory, would be if he died an old man.

And then there's all the other permutations somewhere in between.

Farrah Fawcett left quite the pop-culture impression on the public in her heyday, but her time as a star basically came and went. She was able to settle into a relatively quiet life (for a celebrity anyway) and endure her battle with her esoteric cancer privately. She was most certainly an icon in her day, and she certainly died quite young, but all things considered, had it not been for her death less than two days ago she would have gone on living a relatively quiet existence.

Then there's the celebrity death which is defies ready categorization. This is the death of a celebrity who has had an impact on the cultural landscape that is so distinctive and so indelible that even if he or she dies long, long after his or her star has waxed and waned, that death leaves people talking about that particular celebrity for years after the fact.

It used to be that the only celebrity I could think of that would fit this bill was Elvis Presley, who, at the time of his death, was well past his lean, mean movie star days and had literally and figuratively gotten fat off the legend he had built. This notwithstanding, his death at the very young age of forty-two ignited worldwide mourning and volumes of conspiracy theories, many of which have managed to persist for over three decades.

Now, I'm convinced Michael Jackson will be the one other celebrity whose death will be viewed in the same way.

I am not what I'd call a Michael Jackson fan by any stretch of the imagination but I cannot deny the impact he had on popular culture in the eighties and the early nineties. He was not just some flash-in-the-pan; he didn't come and go with a particular musical era. He defined the era himself and set the stage for dozens of acts that came after him.

More importantly than that, even years after Jackson's popularity as a performer had waned with the record-buying public, he was still a hot-button topic of conversation. In short, even when were no longer listening to him as much, they were still talking about him. Even when the musical landscape had changed, he still lingered in the public consciousness, even if it was as an oddball recluse.

This is neither an attempt to canonize or condemn him; it's simply a fact. Talent...controversy...people have asked others to forget the other and focus on the one, but the truth is it's all part of the package, the totality of who he was. Thanks to a whole confluence of factors he became who and what he was and part of his public image.

And THAT's what makes his death so unique. Talented artists have died before him and will inevitably die after him, but none like him. He was arguably one of the most polarizing figures in the world of entertainment; there was never any middle ground with the guy, who was adored by his followers and profoundly despised by his detractors. To those who called him Jacko and those who called him Wacko his death represents something significant and certainly worth talking about at length.

Another thing about Jackson is that his is the ultimate cautionary tale. In a world where child stars fall from grace with alarming regularity his fall was the longest and the hardest and not even because of any dip in his popularity or his ability to sell records; that is actually irrelevant. He could have died with a billion dollar bank account and his albums selling like hotcakes but his fall, from the way he basically turned his body inside out for decades to the way he seemed unable to cope with going out in public, would still have been self-evident.

Earlier I blogged about how America and in particular Hollywood should take a closer look at how child stars are handled (or manhandled) by their parent/managers. Maybe stricter laws should be enacted or more maybe existing laws should be more strictly enforced.

His death, just like his life, is certainly unique in terms of the overall effect it's had on people so far, but if one were to categorize him it would have to be as someone whose celebrity may well have been the death of him.

Hasbro: Bringing Our Childhood Memories to Life...Or Not...

One summer, when I was about ten years old, I watched the animated feature length film, Transformers: The Movie on Betamax. About a year later I watched G.I. Joe: The Movie on Betamax too. I have no doubt I'd probably find them quite trashy if I were to watch them again today (especially the G.I. Joe movie, which I already found kind of silly a year or two after I first watched it) but back then they were pretty much the cat's pajamas.

I'm pretty certain that people like me, who grew up watching those cartoons and who "oohed" and "aahed" at the films of Michael Bay and Stephen Sommers in the mid-to-late nineties and the early part of this millenium, were the target audience for 2007's Transformers and the upcoming Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

Now, I liked Bay's The Rock and Sommers' The Mummy. I grew up with both Transformers and G.I. Joe in terms of the toys and the animated TV shows. But for some reason the thought of these properties being adapted to the big screen didn't push the buttons for me that I might have thought they would when I was younger. Whereas my reaction to the title-sequence of Spider-Man was akin to a nerdgasm, the best reaction these movies merited was a "hmmm, that looks cool." I even understand why.

Spider-Man and the rest of the comic book characters whose adaptations I eagerly patronized were derived from mythologies that were shaped over several decades. While the main directive of the writers, artists and editors responsible for these characters was basically to sell comics, there were a considerable number of them who, out of a real love for them, were, over the years, able to tell some very compelling stories which have gone into the characters' mythologies and have made them astonishingly rich.

As for the Hasbro properties, well, the fact that they first appeared as toys kind of says everything. All of the media built around them, in the form of Saturday morning cartoons, comic books, novelizations, video games, was designed to sell toys. Not much mythology there.

Even Transformers: the Movie, which I watched a total of TWENTY-SIX times in that fateful summer, was aimed at launching the new line of robot toys, which was why Optimus Prime was offed. Guess who had a toy of Rodimus Prime, the hero of that cartoon, by Christmas that very year? The idea of all of these media was to SELL toys. That's why they've been rebooted ad nauseam for the last quarter of a century; they had to be constantly reshaped and retooled with new continuities and supporting characters and sensibilities, because apart from Optimus Prime, and very few other characters, none of the robots are charismatic or compelling enough to survive the number of different iterations that the product line has gone through.

G.I. Joe is, while also primarily about selling toys, nonetheless a different can of worms. It's older than Transformers by a few years and has a rather well-developed history courtesy of writer Larry Hama's loooooooong tenure on the Marvel Comics series (spanning easily over ten years) among others as opposed to the Transformers comics which had several different writers swapping duties. The thing is, hope of translating any of that mythology intelligently has considerably dimmed with Stephen Sommers coming on board, as anyone who has seen the second Mummy film and 2004's Van Helsing can surely attest. The latter of those two movies is probably one of the worst films I've seen this decade. The rubber muscle suits that have been showcased in the G.I. Joe's promotional stills, which presumably serve as the characters' body armor, are anything but confidence-inspiring. When one thinks about it, though, how else does one translate the look of these toys onto the big screen? Those of them that aren't dressed in generic U.S. military uniforms look downright garish, like Scarlett in her blue and tan tights. And exactly how will the fights between G.I. Joe and Cobra look in real life, with everyone parachuting out of his or her airplane in time and nobody ever dying from the hail of gunfire that is exchanged?

And that, in a nutshell, encapsulates the main problem facing these movies; they adapt properties that may or may not translate very well on the screen. It's a good thing in a way because it reduces expectations, but then, is it really a good thing when filmmakers are excused from making movies that make any sense? I found the first Transformers movie quite juvenile especially with lines that just made me cringe like "whatever happens, I'm glad I got in that car with you." And although it seems that in the entertainment world, a particular property is deemed to have hit its zenith when it has a live-action, Hollywood movie made based on it, I remain in the minority that believes that maybe some things shouldn't be translated.

I'm not narrow-minded though; as little as I enjoyed the first Transformers, I'll probably go see the second, scathingly bad reviews (so far) notwithstanding and G.I. Joe. If I don't like them, then I'll know I was right.

Say what one will about Mattel, but at least they've held off on making a live-action Barbie movie, though they came this close to making one based on the Hot Wheels line. Maybe, just maybe, they recognize that by making live-action films they will attempt a translation that just isn't really possible.

Surprise, Surprise, Captain America's Coming Back to Life.

When the mainstream media broke the news over two years ago that Steve Rogers, aka Marvel Comics icon Captain America would meet his death in issue #25 of his own series, I doubt there was anyone who reads comic books or who was alive in 1992 (when Superman was "killed") that seriously believed he would stay dead. The question, at least among comic book fans and in particular Marvel Comics fans, was always how and when he would be brought back. Another question was how the stories would be told in the meantime, and with Ed Brubaker handling the writing duties the answer was: very well. Bucky, Cap's sidekick in World War II whom Brubaker had resurrected, assumed the mantle of the star-spangled hero to the surprising approval of many, many comic book fans. So great was their approval, in fact, that a lot of them are lamenting the announcement of Rogers' return after only two and a half years. That says a lot about Brubaker's craft; he made New Coke taste good.

Who better, therefore, than Brubaker to bring Rogers back? And this time he's joined not just by the very talented artist Steve Epting, with whom he made his mark on the character; no, drawing the book is a man who has drawn arguably one of the most iconic images of Captain America since Jack Kirby, Bryan Hitch of The Ultimates fame.

What strikes me as funny about this book, and why I'm even writing this post even without any of my own news to bring to the table, is how people have mentioned that it seems to coincide with the climate of change. When Steve Rogers "died" two years ago I quipped while chatting with my comic-book fan friends, that he'd be back when George W. Bush was out of the the White House, when America had recovered a sense of self-respect and hope in their leaders. For all I know, the story was given the green light the moment Barack Obama's victory was announced; maybe if John McCain had won the 2008 U.S. Presidential Elections and perpetuated Bush's policies Marvel would have shelved the story for at least another four years. President Obama has given Marvel Comics their highest selling book in many years, after all and has tickled them pink with his declaration that he was (is?) an avid collector of The Amazing Spider-Man; it isn't too far-fetched to think his victory and the wave of optimism that followed somehow shaped Marvel's decision to reinstate Rogers as Cap. They could have elected to resurrect him closer to the release of his long-planned feature film but maybe they fear that by that time President Obama may have turned out to be a disappointment. I don't know. In any event, coincidence or not, they are certainly striking while the iron is hot, i.e. while "America" is no longer a four-letter word outside of the U.S.

Questions of timing and conspiracy theories about why they've done it now aside, though, one cannot deny that Marvel is definitely bringing Cap back in style. It would have been just as nice to have another high-profile artists on the book like Steve McNiven, who's got a similar eye for detail or Jimmy Cheung, whose work hasn't been seen in so long it's worrying, but if Hitch's work is anything like his 26-issue, two-volume run on Ultimates I will be the last person to complain.

Not having purchased a book featuring Captain America since Marvel's Civil War event, I have no idea how they plan to bring him back, but the goodwill Brubaker has won over, and Hitch's pencils, will definitely be reason enough to check this out.

The Toy Story Films...Irresistibly Charming, Irrepressibly Illogical (Even for a Cartoon)

I realize this is my second successive post about animated films, with a particular focus on Pixar, but there's something that I've been thinking about a lot lately, specifically since my kids, thanks ot the wonders of the DVD, both got addicted to the two Toy Story movies that have come out so far. 

Now, I'm one of the millions of people whose pants John Lasseter and his merry men at Pixar have, with their eight movies (that I've seen, the latest opus, Up, not having coming out here yet) charmed off with their thoroughly entertaining and often genuinely affecting stories which often have very valid, very moving things about the human condition. I'm one of the people anxiously looking forward to the next Toy Story movie which is due out in the summer of 2010. 

That said, I think that Lasseter and his posse, at least as far as the Toy Story movies are concerned, is guilty of some pretty lazy-ass writing.  There, I said it. 

I made a pretty big stink a few posts ago about how movies should adhere to their own internal logic, no matter how skewed in the real world that logic may be. Once the writers have set the "rules of the game" they should not be permitted to rewrite them, unless the rules themselves were by design meant to be rewritten, but again this is a function of how carefully the writers have tied everything together. Boy that sounds confusing.

Anyway, as much as I love both Lasseter's Toy Story films, they, in particular the first one but also in no small measure the second one, are both guilty of some glaring holes in their own internal logic, and this has nothing to do with the films purporting to be "realistic."

At the outset, I accepted wholeheartedly the notion of anthrophomorphic, talking toys.  I accepted that they could walk around and have feelings like love, happiness, anger, jealously, and insecurity.  I didn't even have a problem with the fact that the toys seemed indestructible on several occasions.

But what bothered me as early as 1995 was the thought that the writers of Toy Story, including people I highly respect like WALL-E and Finding Nemo director Andrew Stanton and geek God Joss Whedon, pretty much pissed all over their universe's own internal logic.

The toys have rules, this is explicitly stated by Woody at the end of the film when he says that to save Buzz, the toys have to break a few of them. First and foremost among these rules, apparently, is that humans must not know that toys are alive. 

Buzz Lightyear does not believe he is a toy. This is central to his role; the scene where he discovers he is a toy is supposed to be a moment of profound heartbreak for both him and the audience and it's even punctuated by a sappy, overbearing and ultimately manipulative (but nonetheless catchy) song by the film's composer Randy Newman.

And yet...Buzz wholeheartedly and without any question or misgiving embraces the cardinal rule of the toys that he must not appear alive to humans. There is no explanation, not even a throwaway one, like some one-liner about his space-ranger survival training in hostile territory, for why he does it, for why he lets Andy, the toys' owner, treat him like a toy even though he firmly believes he is not one. I wanted (and still want) to ignore this and just let my sense of wonder take over, but for the life of me I could never get over how the writers punched a hole so big in their adopted logic that one could drive a fleet of Pizza Planet delivery trucks right through it.  There's nothing wrong with the toys' set of unwritten rules, or that Buzz should follow them; the problem is that as someone who, for most of the movie, does not believe he is a toy, there is no reason for him to do so.

There is more of this tomfoolery in the second installment as another Buzz makes his appearance in the second movie as a story device for a confrontation with Emperor Zurg, but it's easy to ignofe the second time around because the story doesn't hinge on it. 

In TS2, though, there is more ridiculously flexible logic afoot. The theme is mortality, which basically hits home the way that envy did in the first movie. Woody is afraid Andy will discard him. He has no idea what it's like to be cast aside by an owner, the child whom he loves with all his, um, heart and is moved to profound pity when he hears the story of Jessie, a "Woody's Roundup" doll just like him, whose former owner Emily grew up in the sixties and basically donated her to charity when she grew tired of her. 

There's just one problem here; Woody is explicitly described by his mom as an "old family toy" and then later by another character as a "hand-me-down cowboy doll," ergo, Andy cannot possibly have been Woody's first owner. He would have to have gone through at least one other child who grew up, quite possibly even two, so the question arises; why doesn't Woody remember any of this? He's an antique; the Prospector character, who has never left his box when the movie starts, remembers watching "every other toy get sold" while sitting on a dime-store shelf." Why doesn't Woody, a toy of similar vintage, remember being owned by someone other than Andy?

Again, it's all about INTERNAL logic. Never mind that the entire premise is completely and unabashedly fantastical; the fact is that the writers set rules for themselves and in the next breath broke some of the biggest ones.

What is the point of this post? Well, partly it's to say that such is the sleight of hand of Pixar that even with such enormous holes in their writing, they've got audiences and critics the world over singing odes to them. The Toy Stories are among my favorite films, animated or otherwise, ever, which really goes to show how comprehensively I embrace them for all their flaws. 

But really, is it too much to ask that their writers at least adopt and employ consistent logic in their otherwise sterling storytelling? I know they can do better.

Most of me is pretty sure I'll enjoy Toy Story 3 in 2010 a whole lot, especially when I watch it with my kids, but part of me is wondering what internal, self-imposed logic its writers will trample upon this time.

Pixar's John Lasseter: The Savior of Hand-Drawn, 2D Animation?

In 1989, Walt Disney Studios, whose animated feature films had been box-office kings in the forties, fifties and sixties before their grosses started tapering off for most of the seventies and eighties, enjoyed a bit of a resurgence with the release of The Little Mermaid, their biggest box-office hit in several years. This was followed up two years later by one of the most beloved animated films ever to come from the studio and the only film ever receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, Beauty and the Beast. A string of critical and commercial successes followed with Aladdin, The Lion King and Pocahontas. The early nineties were pretty much a renaissance for the hand-drawn Disney feature length animated film.

Now, what the makers of these hand-drawn wonders may or may not have known that the very studio responsible for releasing their movies was about to push their product to the brink of extinction with an all-new breed of animated film: the computer generated kind.

In 1995, the year Pocahontas grossed roughly $142 million ( numbers which, while solid, definitely represented a disappointment considering The Lion King's gross of $312 million the year before) , Disney released their first ever offering from Pixar Films: Toy Story, directed by John Lasseter and featuring the voices of Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, it was a film animated entirely using computer generated imagery in lieu of the old hand-drawn techniques. The film went on to gross $192 million, the highest of the whole year.

For masters of the hand-drawn animated film such as Glen Keane, James Baxter and Eric Goldberg to name but a few, this would mark the beginning of the end of the world as they knew it. In the latter half of the 1990s, hand-drawn animated films like The Hunchbank of Notre Dame, Hercules and Mulan all failed to achieve the commercial success of their counterparts that had come out pre-Toy Story. Although Tarzan, with its impressive $171 million box office haul in 1999, gave hope for one brief, shining moment that the hand-drawn animated film would endure, it was followed by more out-and-out disappointments like the David Spade vehicle The Emperor's New Groove which even featured songs by Sting and the expensive summer misfire Atlantis: The Lost Empire. That wasn't even the worst of it. In 2002, after Lilo & Stitch grossed a respectable $140 million in the U.S. box office, the last hand-drawn Disney film to earn over $100 million domestically, Treasure Planet, made for a staggering $140 million (which, for the sake of perspective, was the same amount of money Sony Pictures spent making Spider-Man, that year's biggest hit), proved to be the studio's biggest flop ever, grossing a measly $38 million domestically and effectively driving the last nail into the coffin of the hand-drawn animated film. Considering that a Disney cartoon takes between two to three years to make, the next two releases, Brother Bear and Home on the Range, were probably in the can or in prodcution well before Planet bombed, but as a result they were released to little to no fanfare, with Range being dropped into a mid-spring release rather than into the traditionally preferred summer or Thanksgiving slot, where it bombed. It was also announced, not long before that film's release, that it would be the studio's last hand-drawn film.

Hand-drawn animated would surface for portions of 2007's Enchanted and a few minutes of Dreamworks' Kung Fu Panda, but it truly seemed as though the world was done with hand-drawn animation.

While all this was going on, Pixar churned out hit after hit for their distributor, Disney. Not a single one of their films has grossed less than $150 million in the United States alone, with only two of their films grossing less than $200 million. In 2003, the $339 million gross of Finding Nemo, Pixar's highest-grossing film to date, was second only to the $377 million of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, a film everyone knew would be huge.

It came to a point where the guys at Pixar got tired to paying the lion's share of the profits to Disney, and a protracted negotiations ensued. Pixar wanted to pack up and set up shop somewhere else. Disney's knee-jerk reaction was to close down their hand-drawn department and set up their own CGI studio, which churned out such dreck as Chicken Little and the stunningly mediocre Meet the Robinsons. However, they recognized that there was no way they would ever be able to approximate the quality of what Pixar had to offer (and probably that they'd get eaten alive by not only Pixar movies but by the stuff from Dreamworks Animation, which had positioned itself as the Other Major Player in the CG animation game with films like the Shrek trilogy, Madagascar, and Shark Tale. So eventually, a deal was reached giving Pixar not only greater control over their own destiny, but putting Lasseter in charge of Disney's entire animated division.

One of Lasseter's first edicts as the new czar of Disney animation? Bring back hand-drawn animation. You gotta love the guy.

Of course, he's pretty much bringing it into the 21st century, with a lot of updated computer-aided techniques supplementing the hand-drawn work, replacing the now-antiquated Computer Animation Production System Disney had been using from the early 80s up until the demise of its hand-drawn department.

The first new hand-drawn film under the Lasseter era will be The Princess and the Frog, a musical adventure which features a first for any Disney film, a leading character of African-American descent, a pleasant change of pace from a studio once described by activist/director Spike Lee as "the plantation," and which cast a wimpy-voiced and very white Matthew Broderick as the voice of the Lion King, an unmistakably African character.

Heck, I like the new Disney hand-drawn department already!

Another of My Childhood Heroes Finally Gets His Big-Screen Break...

I grew up with Belgian hero Tintin's adventures. At one point or another I've had every one of the books except for the controversial Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in Russia. Likewise, I don't have the last, unfinished work of Herge, Tintin and Alph-art.  But more than any American superhero, including Spider-Man, the Hulk or Batman, Tintin is a comic book character to whom I had the most exposure right up until puberty, so the impression left was pretty much indelible.

I am, as a result, thoroughly excited about the upcoming trilogy of motion-capture films featuring Tintin and his entire supporting cast, including his dog Snowy, my favorite character from the series Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, and the bumbling English detectives Thompson and Thomson. 

These are movies that have been a long, long time in the making as producer/director Steven Spielberg has long held the option on the movies, which is just as well because now the motion capture technology which is being used to film it has matured to the point that realizing Tintin on the big screen in a manner faithful to Herge's striking visuals is now entirely possible. Neither a straight live-action nor a hand-drawn adaptation, in my opinion, would have captured Herge's extraordinary eye for detail, not for the kind of budgets Hollywood is used to working with, and motion capture and CGI is simply the way to go. Who better to pull this off than Spielberg himself, one of original the masters of visual effects-laden films (ignoring the shoddiness of the CGI in the last Indiana Jones movie, of course)? Well, as if that was not enough he has chosen to collaborate with Peter Jackson, whose work in motion capture for the LOTR trilogy and King Kong were groundbreaking, and apparently dazzling enough to get Spielberg to forgo his usual collaboration with his usual F/X vendor Industrial Light and Magic for this series.

I love the casting as well from Jamie Bell (of Billy Elliot and King Kong fame) as Tintin himself to Andy Serkis (who achieved worldwide fame as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies) as Captain Haddock to Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) as Thomson and Thompson.

The films are a long way off (the first to be released in December 2011) which is good because it will give its distributors Paramount Pictures and Sony Pictures plenty of time to market the film, which may well prove a hard sell in the United States despite having the names of Spielberg and Jackson attached. Tintin is kind of like Formula 1, loved in the rest of the world but ignored in America, so their ability to put butts in the seats will be almost purely down to the two directors' drawing power rather than any goodwill the character may have in America.

The distributors recognize the risks involved in this production; rather than the usual U.S./rest of the world split, Paramount and Sony appear to be splitting the distribution territories around the world equally, with Paramount perhaps recognizing that the film may, in spite of everything, flounder in the U.S. market and therefore wanting to hedge its bets with a couple of other territories. Well, the studios can play poker all they want, as long as they give Spielberg and Jackson free rein to make my most anticipated comic-book movie since the first Spider-Man. I know I'll be lining up for this one.

On Messing Up Child Stars

Yesterday I read a little blurb on Yahoo News about Candace Cameron, one of the stars of the now defunct sitcom Full House. Unlike her more infamous former child co-stars Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen she seems to be somewhat more well-adjusted and managed to grab attention for looking great in a black dress, something positive for a change. 

The rule, however, seems to be that child actors who enjoy even moderate success in film, television or music end up basket cases with extensive records of substance abuse, wild partying or even going around town without underwear. Whether it's Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, the aforementioned Olsen twins, Macauley Culkin, Edward Furlong or the more tragic examples like Brad Renfro, who died of a drug overdose last year there seems to be a direct correlation between ascension into celebrity at a very young age and an eventual downward spiral into an essentially troubled existence. I'd say this correlation is so clear that it's not even up for debate anymore. The question is, can anything be done about it?

It's a relevant question because a lot of these performers, like the kids of High School Musical or Hannah Montana, may often reach global audiences thanks to brands like Disney, Nickelodeon or Warner Brothers, (with Lohan in particular owing the career she once had to Disney) and like it or not many of them may be viewed as role models. 

Celebrity children are just like any other children, after all; they need guidance, parental figures and values formation, something the aforementioned child stars/former child stars clearly didn't get. They need to keep their feet planted firmly on the ground, which, too often, isn't what happens.  Now, not all child stars are messed up in the head; kudos to the likes of Billy Ray Cyrus and the handlers of a lot of Disney's and Nickelodeon's child stars, all of whom seem to be turning out okay...so far. Clearly, they've done something right. And there's always the example of Jodie Foster to show that a career as a child actor does not have to go bad.

My guess is that in many of the cases where it goes wrong it's the parents who are to blame, and in particular the parents' overwhelming greed that comes with the thought that their children can make them rich.

Well, considering how zealous the anti-child abuse legislation is in the United States one would think there would be some kind of legal infrastructure protecting children from such rapacious parents. Surely by now there's enough empirical evidence to justify concrete action to guard against this kind of occurrence? It doesn't exactly seem like it.

Till the day that the Americans in general figure out how to keep their child stars from going batty I am glad I've been able to keep my kids from going ga-ga over any child star.

  

Letting Sleeping Dogs Lie

Recently, Marvel Comics launched a new ongoing series featuring the popular X-Men entitled X-Men: Forever, written by renowned X-Men writer Chris Claremont. The idea behind the series was to give Claremont the opportunity to tell the X-Men stories he had wanted to write waaaaaaay back on his all-too-brief tenure on the then-newly-launched adjectiveless X-Men book back in 1991, but had been unable to write after leaving the book due to creative differences with then white-hot artist/co-plotter Jim Lee. In short, the series was set 18-year-old X-Men continuity. Even after such masters as Grant Morrison and Joss Whedon conclusively proved to the comic-book reading world that there was, indeed, life after Chris Claremont, Marvel, for some reason, still saw the need to go back to that well, filled with water that, arguably, had already stagnated.

This seems to be a microcosm of the entertainment industry in general. I know I already lamented this several posts ago on this very blog but considering that, whether in the movies, television or comics, the sheer amount of sequels, prequels, remakes, "reimaginations" and now "reboots" has gone up rather than down, the complaint stands, even though I did enjoy the new Star Trek.

I mean, for every Star Trek, Casino Royale or Batman Begins there is Knight Rider, Bewitched, Beverly Hills 90210, Planet of the Apes, Pink Panther, Psycho, The Wicker Man, and so on and so forth. Probably in the time it takes me to write this blog post three or four more sequels, prequels, remakes or reboots will be greenlit.

Now, in the case of comic books, which are serialized, the retreading of old storylines (e.g. Crisis and now, this exhumation of an X-Men continuity which are nearly two decades old) is the equivalent of the remake, etc.  Sometimes it works, as it did with Ultimates and Ultimate Spider-Man, but regurgitating old material (or using old writers to write "old style" material) is just as likely to turn off fans as it is to push their nostalgia buttons. It's worth noting that the current incarnation of Marvel's entire Ultimate line which was meant as a "modernization" of forty-year old storylines and characters has been discontinued due to flagging sales, with a "relaunch" planned for this year. Ugh.

Hollywood probably won't learn its lesson anytime soon with Batman, James Bond, and now the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise making a killing at the box-office long after they were left for dead, but one can always hope audiences and subsequently filmmakers get sick of "reimagining" the same thing over and over again. One need only to look at the Pixar films, only one of which was a sequel and most of which were completely original material, to know that it's still possible, in this day and age, to produce work that is both original and successful.

Good News for Spider-Man 4

While I'm one of the people who vehemently believes that Venom did not belong in Spider-Man 3, I also think that the buck should stop with the film's director, Sam Raimi. After all I think it was Raimi's idea to have Peter Parker do some ridiculous dance to a James Brown song, to retool Sandman as a sympathetic character and to retcon him (yes, even in the film) into the murder of Uncle Ben, and to cast some completely untalented children in bit parts towards the climax of the film (i.e. the boys who say "awesome" and "wicked cool" and the little girl who sells J. Jonah Jameson a camera). So while I joined the chorus of people who decried Venom's appearance in the story as dictated by Avi Arad, I'm not unmindful of Raimi's rightful share of the blame.

That said, I am really, really glad he seems to have gotten his mojo back, something apparent from the pre-release buzz surrounding his return to horror Drag Me To Hell. Now, I'm not a horror movie fan and will most likely not see it when it comes out here, but considering that the Spider-Man franchise remains very much in Raimi's hands I'm glad he's still got his touch. Also, it's encouraging to note that the scripting duties for SM4 have been handed over to someone else, which works for me because I think giving Raimi and his brother a hand in the writing was a huge mistake; SM1 and 2 were scripted by David Koepp and Alvin Sargent, respectively, and while Sargent pulled scrivening duties on the third film it was based on treatment by Sam and Ivan Raimi.

Now that Raimi's managed to win back some of the goodwill he may have squandered with SM3, I'm really hoping he manages to get the bit back between his teeth when SM4 starts shooting sometime next year. There are things he could work on; I'm hoping he improves the CG quality (which seemed to peak with SM2 before going disastrously awry in SM3) and, if possible, hires someone better than Christopher Young to do the scoring. As far as casting goes, I honestly wouldn't mind if he replaced Kirsten Dunst with Alison Lohman as well; I've always found Lohman more attractive.

Come May 2011, Sam, people will be back in your corner once more so you'd better deliver, especially considering you'll be up against Captain America and the Avengers...

The Real Slaughter...

I'm not terribly keen on seeing the film Kinatay, even though its director Brilliante Mendoza, has only just won the the award for Best Director at the recently-concluded Cannes Film Festival. I am genuinely annoyed, though, that apparently, I couldn't see it even if I wanted to, at least not in Philippine movie theaters. It looks like I have the government to thank for that.

For a change, it's not that the government banned the film or subjected it to heavy censorship; it's that Mendoza, its director, in anticipation of the hack-job treatment by the government has shied away from having it commercially screened choosing instead to show it at universities around the country, which is probably the best place for it.

I think it speaks volumes of how prudish and culturally stunted several of our institutions are that an award-winning filmmaker shies away from showing his own people what appears to be his greatest work so far. Our institutions are kind of like parents who won't let their kids play pop music, or do something radically different from what they're used to. After so many years, the children become shy to let their parents know about anything they do because they're afraid of getting chastised or worse. After awhile, the parent doesn't even have to do anything for the child to not want to tell or show him something. Notably, though, this doesn't stop the child from doing what he wants to do; he just doesn't tell the parent about it.

Now, while as a parent I certainly see the need to discipline my children and to make sure they don't behave in a way likely to get either of them in big trouble, the parent analogy fails insofar as it fails to take into account the fact that the censors and film review board often forget that with respect to certain things, movie viewers should be allowed to make up their own minds about something, whether it's excessively violent, or prurient, or unfit for their viewing. All the review board's job is to give a film a rating, and yet with that dreaded "X" they've managed to strike fear in the hearts of so many directors wanting to reach a wider audience and it is thus that the butchered movie is born; directors wanting to please the review board hack and slice until their film gets the favorable rating for which they yearn.

Ironically, the word "katay" from which the title is derived means, to butcher or slaughter rather than the "massacre" into which it has been incorrectly translated in some news outlets. Had Mendoza attempted to screen the film for commercial audiences here, perhaps its title would have been more a description of the film itself than of the story it had attempted to narrate. We shall never know.