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.

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