Yeah, I haven't done one of these for a while, but the reason (other than the fact that I've been blogging less in general) is mostly that I didn't really have much to say about the episodes since "Asylum of the Daleks".
To be perfectly honest, the first half of Series 7 was a bit of a waste in my opinion.
"Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" was fun, but mostly in a gimmicky way.
"A Town Called Mercy" was great, but I'm not going to lie, Tennant was way better than Smith at showing the ruthless, merciless of the Doctor. When Tennant did a face-heel turn, it felt surprising, but scarily believable. Like when your funny friend suddenly gets very serious and angry. Smith sometimes has a hard time being believably cold.
"The Power of Three" had an excellent build-up, but a really underwhelming payoff and a really doofy last line. That said, I liked how it forced the Doctor to stay in one place for a long time and showed how incredibly difficult that was for him. It was an interesting exploration of his character that hadn't really been explored before.
Finally, we reached "The Angels Take Manhattan" and while I personally think it was a satisfying conclusion for Amy and Rory, I also think it was one of Moffat's weakest episodes to date, mostly because paradoxes almost always make a terrible plot-device in Doctor Who, especially when you never establish their mechanics before they become important. In one episode, a paradox just releases a giant reality-destroying creature, in another episode a paradox would blow a hole in the space-time continuum the size of Belgium, and in this episode, a paradox allows them to defeat the weeping angels and jettison themselves back to their original time. See? Not terribly consistent.
Since the Christmas special, I find I have to keep reminding myself that all those episodes were part of the same series. It really doesn't feel that way to me. "The Snowmen" and the episodes since then have all felt like their own separate series. The only thread connecting them is Clara's appearance in "Asylum of the Daleks", but the rest of the first half just felt like Amy and Rory's parade of death. Now that they're gone, the series finally seems to have taken shape and feels more distinct.
"The Snowmen" wasn't particularly memorable, but I love Vastra, Jenny, and Strax, and I was pretty OK with Clara's reappearance. I think that the introduction of the Great Intelligence is promising, but more on that later.
"The Bells of St. John" was pretty good and as an IT person, I appreciated a show warning the masses about unsecured WiFi networks. It was plotted rather well and continued the Great Intelligence thing, which made me happy. Again, more on that later.
"The Rings of Akhaten" was admittedly rather hokey and cliche and sickeningly sweet, but I honestly really liked it because it felt so refreshing to have an episode that was more interested in sentiment than in acting clever.
"Cold War" was OK, but "Dalek" from the first series did something very similar far better.
"Hide" was excellent and like "Rings" (which was written by the same person) it felt very different from other recent "Doctor Who" stories. It had a very solid emotional foundation that has often been ignored since Moffat took over.
I don't think I really noticed how cold and generally over-intellectual "Doctor Who" had gotten since RTD left, but I think that's partially because RTD's run quickly became overly-emotional and almost anti-intellectual, so I was happy to change gears.
Still, it's been a few years now and it's good to see that Moffat's trying to mix things up a bit.
Which brings me to "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS".
Let me just say that I don't love this episode. I like it, but there are parts I really dislike. The subplot regarding the brothers seemed pretty forced. Why exactly did the Doctor need their help? It seems like all they did was create more conflict. I liked that we got to see more of the TARDIS, though it seems like the only times we get to see the inner workings of the TARDIS is when we're running through it at top-speed and can only have enough time to throw in one or two in-jokes for the fans. Beyond that, it was a fun episode, although I still feel like Clara hasn't established much of an identity for herself yet, probably because her identity is a very critical plot-point, which is potentially great for later on, but kind of sacrifices a certain level of investment in the here and now.
Still, the reason this episode made me feel like blogging about "Doctor Who" again is because it made me realize something about this second half of Series 7 that kind of defines its current direction.
You see, up until now, RTD and Moffat had been more than content to completely ignore Old Who. Oh sure, they might bring in a well-known adversary every season or so, but the Doctor in New Who has generally been very tight-lipped about his old escapades. He might bring up the fact that he had children, but he would be very vague and just give silent looks whenever the subject was brought up.
To get to the point, RTD and Moffat were always afraid of alienating new fans by referencing material they know next to nothing about. If they were going to bring in something from Old Who, it would be rebooted and re-contextualized to the point where it might as well be completely new. This was something they more or less admitted to, by the way. They intentionally didn't want to dig too deep into the recesses of the Doctor's ancient history because they were more interested in telling their own stories and creating their own monsters.
And that's fine, really, but one thing Old Who fans are often quick to point out is that it often seems like anything "new" they create tends to have something almost exactly like it from the already established and obscenely overly-documented canon. The sliver of effort required to take an idea and fold it into the vast well of canonical material would generally have been worth it just to throw in a little fan-service.
However, starting with "The Snowmen", the show has taken a very interesting shift towards acknowledging Old Who in almost every episode.
"The Snowmen" and "The Bells of St. John" both involve the Great Intelligence, a lesser-known villain from Old Who during the Troughton era, and he appears to be the Big Bad for the remainder of this series. In "The Rings of Akhaten", the Doctor openly and freely states that he had a granddaughter that he used to travel with, something he had always danced around in New Who. In "Cold War" we see the return of the Ice Warriors, another monster from the Troughton era (with some additional appearances in the Pertwee era). While "Hide" doesn't incorporate any direct references, its general tone and style feel incredibly different from almost any other episode in New Who, though I wouldn't say it's particularly Old Who-feeling either.
And in "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS", we have references galore, mostly through little artifacts scattered about and ghostly voices of previous doctors and companions.
More importantly, the Doctor himself feels older. From Series 5 through the mid-point in the current series, Smith's Doctor has been very bouncy and excitable. He felt surprisingly wise, but still very spry and adventurous. After the loss of Amy and Rory, however, he became a lot more crotchety. Not quite in the same way as Eccleston's Doctor. Honestly, he seems very reminiscent of Hartnell's Doctor. Deliberate, a little grouchy, a bit obstinate, and just plain old. For the youngest actor to ever play the Doctor, I don't think anyone else has ever made the character feel quite as ancient as Smith has during these past few episodes.
There's no reason to ask why there's been a sudden fondness for the good old days. We all know that this is the year of the 50th Anniversary of "Doctor Who". We have an episode bringing back the Cybermen, a finale supposedly revealing the name of the Doctor, and a special somehow bringing back Rose Tyler and Handy (the half-human Doctor clone regenerated from his hand).
Still, I find this shift in direction fairly promising. Even if the episodes haven't been terribly excellent, if there's some master plan at work, it could really pay off in a big way, particularly for some jaded old fans.
That said, I also was willing to give Moffat some rope during Series 6. His first episode was stellar, but hinged on the promise that the Doctor would die, which was one hell of a pickle that Moffat wrote himself into. I truly believed that he had already worked out his plan, but when the series ended, it was relatively clear that Moffat had no idea how he was going to write his way out of it, and so the end was a pretty massive disappointment, especially since the supposed death of the Doctor has been in no way consistent with his behavior in Series 7.
So it's entirely plausible (and even probable) that Moffat set himself up to reveal the true name of the Doctor with no real plan on how exactly he was going to handle it. I fully expect him to cop out at the end or give us something massively unsatisfying.
Then again, it's important to note that the identity of the Doctor is the one plot point that Moffat has had brewing since "Girl in the Fireplace" in Series 2. In that episode, Madame de Pompadour reads his mind and remarks on how he's hiding something behind his name. Then in Series 4's "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead", we find out that River Song knows his name and that there's only one reason she would. Much later on when the Doctor marries River, he supposedly tells her his name, but he actually just gave her a clue to make it clear that he would survive her attempted murder. Now it's clear that "Doctor Who?" is apparently the first question ever asked in the history of the universe and that its answer is somehow very dangerous. I would not be surprised if the identity of the Doctor is something that Moffat had spent a lot of time pondering as a life-long fan and eventually thought of an answer that excited and satisfied him enough to make a part of his own head-canon, and once he started getting brought in to write more and more for the show, he started leaving in bread crumbs just in case he ever got the opportunity to make it actually happen. Once he got the opportunity to act as show-runner, he decided that this would be his claim to fame and that he would dedicate his entire run to build up to the moment when he would finally reveal the Doctor's name and blow all our minds.
Or he's just making this shit up as he goes along.
I guess we'll find out in a few more weeks.
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Thursday, April 18, 2013
The Anti-Popularity of Superman
It's common for people to dislike something that is typically perceived as popular simply because they feel that its popularity is disproportionate to how cool the thing actually is. These sorts of things can sometimes even have a bizarre sort of anti-popularity, where it almost seems more common to dislike it than to actually earnestly like it, yet it still remains fixed in popular culture in spite of this. Pop music, reality TV, Tom Cruise... all of these things that apparently a lot of people really like, but we often find ourselves wondering where these people are, because it generally seems like more people make fun of them than actually enjoy them.
Probably one of the most well-known examples of this kind of anti-popularity is Superman.
Everyone says Superman is this big iconic superhero, possibly the most popular superhero of all-time, but it's incredibly rare -- especially among actual comic book fans -- to find people who actually give a shit about him.
More often than not, people say he doesn't deserve his notoriety. That he's too boring because he has no internal conflict, no serious weakness, and he's completely overpowered. With the exception of Lex Luthor and MAYBE Zod, his rogues gallery is mostly unknown to the general public. He's just completely uninteresting when compared to heroes with less power and more personality.
And while it's rare to find people who are genuinely fans of Superman, he still somehow dominates the public consciousness. Some say it's because he was the first of his kind, that it's because he's been around for so long, or that it's because he's basically the point of reference that we judge all other superheroes on. Superman is the default and all other superheroes are essentially tweaks on his general heroic persona.
In that light, I guess it's not surprising that Warner Bros. often has a hard time making Superman movies. On the one hand, everyone knows who he is, so brand recognition is through the roof, but on the other hand, apparently no one really likes him so they often try to redefine his persona to be more accessible to general audiences. Long story short, things often dissolve into executives trying to get Superman to wear black leather.
But seeing as today is the 75th anniversary of Action Comics #1 and how the pretty cool-looking new trailer for "The Man of Steel" just came out...
...I thought this might be a good time to share my feelings on Superman.
To get right to the point, I think Superman is way more interesting than most people give him credit for. No, he isn't interesting for the same reasons that Batman or Spider-Man are interesting. He's far too powerful to be interesting in those ways, which is probably why so many writers have a hard time with him. They focus too much on trying to disempower Superman in order to get him to fit into the mold of other superhero movies.
But Superman is an empowerment fantasy through-and-through. Forcing him to be weak through kryptonite or putting Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane in danger often comes off as hackneyed. There's no way to make him interestingly disempowered.
Those kinds of stories are what movies like "Iron Man", "Captain America: The First Avenger", and "The Dark Knight" are for. Stories of (mostly) ordinary human beings discovering what is exceptional about themselves and using it to benefit the world they live in. They struggle with personal problems and have most of the same weaknesses we do. They don't need a glowing rock or an imperiled loved one to be interesting. They are inherently interesting because they are like us.
Superman is not like us. Superman cannot be like us. Superman will never be like us. Giving him kryptonite doesn't make him seem more vulnerable, it just puts the plot on pause until the kryptonite goes away. Putting his loved ones in danger just disempowers and reduces his supporting cast.
But really, Superman's limitless power isn't actually the biggest problem with his character. Plenty of superheroes are overpowered simply because audiences believe they are never truly in danger. Batman always has a plan and a gadget, Spider-Man has his spider-sense, Wolverine has a healing factor. Even if a character does die, it probably won't last for very long.
No, the sticking point most people have with Superman is that he's a boy scout. That he's lawful stupid.
And frankly, that's kind of understandable. We as human beings always bend the rules once in a while during exceptional circumstances, so when we see Superman let Lex Luthor live for the billionth time, we wonder how much trouble he would save if he made an exception just this once. That with all his power, he was wasting his potential behind moral black-and-white bullshit that few people can honestly relate to.
But that's exactly what makes Superman interesting. While most superheroes are limited in their power and devote their lives to doing everything they possibly can within the realms of their power, Superman has the opposite problem. This man can protect Metropolis, the USA, the entire planet, and even planets in other galaxies, all while still holding a steady job as a reporter. He has no limits, so he has to define those limits for himself.
He lives in a world made of cardboard, controlled by ants. If he wanted to, he could crush all of us and rule as a king and say he did it for the good of mankind. And in fact, in many stories, he does exactly that.
If Superman decides that just this one time, he'll kill Lex Luthor because he's proven to be a threat and that he can never change, then it forces him to second-guess every decision he's ever made. Why not kill ALL the supervillains? Why stop at supervillains? Why let corrupt governments exist? Why let any governments exist?
Superman has to live every day consciously deciding what he can and cannot do with his unlimited power, and his faith in humanity is so strong that he refuses to let himself be anything more than a beacon of hope for these people.
Superman isn't just an empowerment fantasy. He's a constant reminder that those with power don't merely have a responsibility to use their power for good; they have a responsibility to understand what "good" truly means. Many of us wish we have the power of superheroes, but heroes like Superman remind us what we want that power for.
I think that's why Superman tends to resonate more with the underprivileged, particularly during times of crisis. While a lot of the time we indulge in empowerment fantasies because we think it would be cool to beat up bad guys and fly around the city, we are also attracted to empowerment fantasies because many of us thirst for people with power who hold themselves to a higher standard, and we like to believe that such a person exists in all of us.
In a way, Superman reminds me of the late Mr. Rogers.
Fred Rogers was not exactly the most interesting person in the world, or at least not the most entertaining. I was always more of a Sesame Street and Nickelodeon kid, myself. Mr. Rogers was just a little too slow-paced for my hyperactive brain. A little too consistent. After all, the man was kind of terrifying in how perfect he was. He never lost his temper, always stood up for what he believed in, wore the same damn outfit every day, and never once complained... Legend has it that he always maintained the exact weight of 143 lbs. simply because he really liked how that arrangement of numbers matched the number of letters in each word of the phrase "I love you". He paved the way for fair use laws and convinced cold-hearted politicians to fund PBS by appealing to their better nature. This man probably could have ended wars with a stern letter. So while "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" may not have been everyone's favorite TV show (and in fact many of us might have made fun of how corny it was), pretty much everyone agreed that Mr. Rogers was basically a saint. He held himself to a high standard because he cared so much about the rest of the world. He would spend nearly every day of his life looking out to millions of children and reminding them that they were special and that they belonged to a community that loved them for who they were. Maybe it's not the most he could have done with his mega-popularity and enormous audience, but he felt it was the most important thing he could have said, so he never stopped saying it. If you asked me, that is what a Superman truly is.
Probably one of the most well-known examples of this kind of anti-popularity is Superman.
Everyone says Superman is this big iconic superhero, possibly the most popular superhero of all-time, but it's incredibly rare -- especially among actual comic book fans -- to find people who actually give a shit about him.
More often than not, people say he doesn't deserve his notoriety. That he's too boring because he has no internal conflict, no serious weakness, and he's completely overpowered. With the exception of Lex Luthor and MAYBE Zod, his rogues gallery is mostly unknown to the general public. He's just completely uninteresting when compared to heroes with less power and more personality.
And while it's rare to find people who are genuinely fans of Superman, he still somehow dominates the public consciousness. Some say it's because he was the first of his kind, that it's because he's been around for so long, or that it's because he's basically the point of reference that we judge all other superheroes on. Superman is the default and all other superheroes are essentially tweaks on his general heroic persona.
In that light, I guess it's not surprising that Warner Bros. often has a hard time making Superman movies. On the one hand, everyone knows who he is, so brand recognition is through the roof, but on the other hand, apparently no one really likes him so they often try to redefine his persona to be more accessible to general audiences. Long story short, things often dissolve into executives trying to get Superman to wear black leather.
But seeing as today is the 75th anniversary of Action Comics #1 and how the pretty cool-looking new trailer for "The Man of Steel" just came out...
...I thought this might be a good time to share my feelings on Superman.
To get right to the point, I think Superman is way more interesting than most people give him credit for. No, he isn't interesting for the same reasons that Batman or Spider-Man are interesting. He's far too powerful to be interesting in those ways, which is probably why so many writers have a hard time with him. They focus too much on trying to disempower Superman in order to get him to fit into the mold of other superhero movies.
But Superman is an empowerment fantasy through-and-through. Forcing him to be weak through kryptonite or putting Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane in danger often comes off as hackneyed. There's no way to make him interestingly disempowered.
Those kinds of stories are what movies like "Iron Man", "Captain America: The First Avenger", and "The Dark Knight" are for. Stories of (mostly) ordinary human beings discovering what is exceptional about themselves and using it to benefit the world they live in. They struggle with personal problems and have most of the same weaknesses we do. They don't need a glowing rock or an imperiled loved one to be interesting. They are inherently interesting because they are like us.
Superman is not like us. Superman cannot be like us. Superman will never be like us. Giving him kryptonite doesn't make him seem more vulnerable, it just puts the plot on pause until the kryptonite goes away. Putting his loved ones in danger just disempowers and reduces his supporting cast.
But really, Superman's limitless power isn't actually the biggest problem with his character. Plenty of superheroes are overpowered simply because audiences believe they are never truly in danger. Batman always has a plan and a gadget, Spider-Man has his spider-sense, Wolverine has a healing factor. Even if a character does die, it probably won't last for very long.
No, the sticking point most people have with Superman is that he's a boy scout. That he's lawful stupid.
And frankly, that's kind of understandable. We as human beings always bend the rules once in a while during exceptional circumstances, so when we see Superman let Lex Luthor live for the billionth time, we wonder how much trouble he would save if he made an exception just this once. That with all his power, he was wasting his potential behind moral black-and-white bullshit that few people can honestly relate to.
But that's exactly what makes Superman interesting. While most superheroes are limited in their power and devote their lives to doing everything they possibly can within the realms of their power, Superman has the opposite problem. This man can protect Metropolis, the USA, the entire planet, and even planets in other galaxies, all while still holding a steady job as a reporter. He has no limits, so he has to define those limits for himself.
He lives in a world made of cardboard, controlled by ants. If he wanted to, he could crush all of us and rule as a king and say he did it for the good of mankind. And in fact, in many stories, he does exactly that.
If Superman decides that just this one time, he'll kill Lex Luthor because he's proven to be a threat and that he can never change, then it forces him to second-guess every decision he's ever made. Why not kill ALL the supervillains? Why stop at supervillains? Why let corrupt governments exist? Why let any governments exist?
Superman has to live every day consciously deciding what he can and cannot do with his unlimited power, and his faith in humanity is so strong that he refuses to let himself be anything more than a beacon of hope for these people.
Superman isn't just an empowerment fantasy. He's a constant reminder that those with power don't merely have a responsibility to use their power for good; they have a responsibility to understand what "good" truly means. Many of us wish we have the power of superheroes, but heroes like Superman remind us what we want that power for.
I think that's why Superman tends to resonate more with the underprivileged, particularly during times of crisis. While a lot of the time we indulge in empowerment fantasies because we think it would be cool to beat up bad guys and fly around the city, we are also attracted to empowerment fantasies because many of us thirst for people with power who hold themselves to a higher standard, and we like to believe that such a person exists in all of us.
In a way, Superman reminds me of the late Mr. Rogers.
Fred Rogers was not exactly the most interesting person in the world, or at least not the most entertaining. I was always more of a Sesame Street and Nickelodeon kid, myself. Mr. Rogers was just a little too slow-paced for my hyperactive brain. A little too consistent. After all, the man was kind of terrifying in how perfect he was. He never lost his temper, always stood up for what he believed in, wore the same damn outfit every day, and never once complained... Legend has it that he always maintained the exact weight of 143 lbs. simply because he really liked how that arrangement of numbers matched the number of letters in each word of the phrase "I love you". He paved the way for fair use laws and convinced cold-hearted politicians to fund PBS by appealing to their better nature. This man probably could have ended wars with a stern letter. So while "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" may not have been everyone's favorite TV show (and in fact many of us might have made fun of how corny it was), pretty much everyone agreed that Mr. Rogers was basically a saint. He held himself to a high standard because he cared so much about the rest of the world. He would spend nearly every day of his life looking out to millions of children and reminding them that they were special and that they belonged to a community that loved them for who they were. Maybe it's not the most he could have done with his mega-popularity and enormous audience, but he felt it was the most important thing he could have said, so he never stopped saying it. If you asked me, that is what a Superman truly is.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Deconstructing Hit-Girl
Hit-Girl from the film "Kick-Ass" is probably my favorite costumed hero in film. While Hit-Girl from the comic book was also excellent, she lacked the solid grounding of the character that actress Chloe Moretz gives her in the film (mostly because Mark Millar's characters are almost always borderline sociopathic by default).
With the trailer for "Kick-Ass 2" hitting the Internet, I thought it would be fun to go deeper into why I love the character of Hit-Girl as much as I do.
A lot of people seem to have issues when it comes to Hit-Girl. In a way, she's a very simple character, but also incredibly complex, and I think that creates some cognitive dissonance for people. However, in that cognitive dissonance lies some very interesting subtext regarding the young sidekick trope, violence in general, and feminism.
Warning, this contains spoilers for the first "Kick-Ass" miniseries and film, as well as spoilers for "Django Unchained", "Harry Potter", "Hunger Games" and the recent "Batman" comics (specifically regarding Damian Wayne).
Oh, and trigger warning for violent images involving children (though I don't show any children on the receiving end of this violence if that matters to you).
With this in mind, let's go back to his review of "Kick-Ass" for a moment:
With "Kick-Ass", he acknowledges it as satire, but absolutely refuses to give the film a pass. While "Django" gets a perfect score, "Kick-Ass" gets a failing grade.
He's fine with kids putting themselves in danger, in fact he seems to insist on it. He's fine with foul-mouthed characters who murder without mercy. He's fine with brutal and offensive violence used as satire.
He just apparently has a problem when all three are used at the same time.
Now, I love Roger Ebert, but I don't always agree with him. In this case, I think that he's unable to admit his own hypocrisy. He is capable of enjoying violence, but when that violence is perpetrated by a child, he's suddenly confronted with the fact that violence is a bad thing. He asks himself if he ought to be enjoying Hit-Girl killing people, and he tells himself that he shouldn't. So he makes the conscious decision to dislike the film.
Here's a newsflash: Violence is a bad thing. Always. When Brad Pitt kills dehumanized bad guys, he's not "allowed" to do it because he's an adult male or because it's a war movie. Killing is bad. There's a law against it and everything.
And yet, we are capable of enjoying violence in media. In fact, most people enjoy fictional violence quite a bit. Action films are by far the most popular and successful films in the industry.
Why is that? Well, there are a number of theories on the subject, but the one I mostly subscribe to goes something like this:
Human beings are capable of telling the difference between the real world and fiction.
Just look at that. Let the ridiculousness of that scene sit in your brain. Do you believe for one second that Roger Ebert saw that and the first thing that came to his mind was Columbine? That he genuinely worried that a 6-year-old would see this and think that's something they'd want to try?
I for one don't think so. I mean, let's get real. When I was a kid, movie violence that involved blood terrified me, and I think that's fairly common. Even once I got used to it, it was never really ideal. Blood meant that something became dangerous. I could enjoy it, but I would never try it.
I think that what Ebert actually thought was, "Having a child behave this way in the real world is wrong. Therefore, I have to reject this movie and mark it as reprehensible in order to seem like a decent human being. I'd rather be square and morally superior than have fun and feel like a bad person for enjoying myself, even if it is meant to be satirical."
And that's just human, really. Sometimes we feel guilty about the things we like, and sometimes we feel like we aren't allowed to enjoy something for that reason. But it is possible to acknowledge something as problematic while still enjoying it. We are not robots. We can live with contradictions.
Hit-Girl being a child doesn't make her actions any more or less terrible than if they were done by Clive Owen. But her being a child does actually serve to remind us that the actions are horrible. In a movie that asks the question, "Why aren't there superheroes in real life?" Hit-Girl provides the answer, "Because that would be horrifying." And we acknowledge that and understand that, but even once we understand that we think, "But it would still be pretty fucking cool."
This actually mirrors Dave's entire journey. He asks that question, gives it a try, and nearly dies almost immediately. Yet he still gets back into it. It speaks to our stubborn and borderline masochistic nature as humans when it comes to our obsession with finding our own reason for living.
With the trailer for "Kick-Ass 2" hitting the Internet, I thought it would be fun to go deeper into why I love the character of Hit-Girl as much as I do.
A lot of people seem to have issues when it comes to Hit-Girl. In a way, she's a very simple character, but also incredibly complex, and I think that creates some cognitive dissonance for people. However, in that cognitive dissonance lies some very interesting subtext regarding the young sidekick trope, violence in general, and feminism.
Warning, this contains spoilers for the first "Kick-Ass" miniseries and film, as well as spoilers for "Django Unchained", "Harry Potter", "Hunger Games" and the recent "Batman" comics (specifically regarding Damian Wayne).
Oh, and trigger warning for violent images involving children (though I don't show any children on the receiving end of this violence if that matters to you).
Who Is Hit-Girl?
For those who are unfamiliar with the character or the story she's from, a brief summary.
"Kick-Ass" was a comic book miniseries created by Mark Millar, which was eventually turned into a film. It followed the exploits of a high school student named Dave Lizewski who is a comic book fan. One day he wonders why superheroes don't exist in real life. If not superheroes with actual powers, why not superheroes like Batman? So he decides to throw together a costume and give it a try.
Lacking any real training, his first outing gets him stabbed, hit by a car, and left for dead.
After a great deal of intensive surgery and physical rehabilitation, he decides to give it another go. This time, he actually manages to do some good and becomes known as Kick-Ass.
As his exploits become more well-known, he meets two other apparent superheroes named Big Daddy and Hit-Girl, real names Damon and Mindy Macready. While Damon is an adult, Mindy is an eleven-year-old child and Damon's own daughter. Unlike Dave, they have training, a backstory, better equipment, and they are far more brutal and effective, killing mobsters and targeting crime bosses with a larger purpose.
The comics and the film diverge a bit after this.
In the comic book, Big Daddy is just an asshole who abandoned his wife with his child to go pursue a life of crime-fighting funded by his comic book collection. He makes up a story about his wife dying and ropes his kid along in their shared delusion. Personally, I find this revelation to be really stupid. Partially because there's no way a comic book collector could make that much money from any collection you can fit in a briefcase, and partially because I just don't buy that a normal guy could effectively train himself and a child as well as he does. Only a character written by Mark Millar can be this spectacularly unbelievable.
In the film however, Big Daddy's backstory is actually true. He was a cop who got framed and thrown in jail. His wife committed suicide and when he got out, he decided to get vengeance. He trains his daughter as well partially because he felt she was also deserving of vengeance and partially so that she could continue to stay with him while he pursued this path. While Big Daddy still uses comic book imagery to manipulate his daughter, his motivations are more understandable. As a trained cop, he's capable and experienced. Also, the fact that he kills drug dealers and mobsters explains where he gets the money to pay for his activities. He's far more believable and actually surprisingly likable in spite of what he puts his daughter through.
Either way, you end up with an eleven-year-old girl who believes that her father is a superhero, that she is his sidekick, and that they fight to protect their city and get vengeance for their loved one.
What makes Hit-Girl particularly unusual, however, is that she is the most capable individual in the series. She trains the hardest, wholeheartedly believes in the mission, and does not act like a child at all. She curses like a sailor, murders criminals without hesitation, and mocks Dave's trepidation regularly.
In short, she behaves like a typical over-the-top action hero not unlike Jason Statham, except she is an eleven-year-old girl in a costume and a purple wig.
At the end of the first series/movie, Big Daddy dies, but she finishes his mission and goes into retirement, attempting to lead a normal life.
I haven't read the second miniseries, mostly because I prefer the film and would rather see the sequel to the film unspoiled. But judging from the trailer, it seems that in their retirement, Hit-Girl trains Dave to actually be a competent fighter and eventually comes out of retirement when supervillains start to show up.
So that's Hit-Girl. A foul-mouthed, psychotic, prepubescent machine of death and justice.
Now let's get to the deconstruction.
Hit-Girl As Commentary On The Sidekick Trope
Sidekicks have been around for as long as masked heroes have been around. It's not difficult to understand the appeal. Some masked heroes have very few flaws and have powers and abilities few could fathom obtaining for themselves. This can make it difficult for an audience to connect with them. A sidekick, however, is often flawed, relatively normal, and very reverent of the hero in question. Not only are they easier for the audience to project onto, they humanize their heroes by showing a more personal side of them and by often acting as a weakness when they get in over their heads.
It's no surprise, then, that a great number of sidekicks started out as kids. Robin, Aqualad, Speedy, Kid Flash, you get the picture.
But fans of comics will note that Marvel Comics never really employed young sidekicks with one notable exception: Bucky. However, Bucky was killed in 1968, effectively giving a reason for why no one else has young sidekicks in the Marvel Universe. It's said that Stan Lee wasn't fond of the trope, and it's worth noting that Marvel characters tend to be very flawed and have many personal relationships, so a sidekick character was rarely deemed necessary.
However, it's also worth noting that the 60's-70's saw the rise of comics beginning to subvert the limiting Comics Code Authority. They began to deal with more topical and mature themes, problems became more realistic, heroes became less perfect, and the stories felt less disposable.
As time went on, sidekicks felt more and more out of place, particularly very young ones. In some cases, they might have been accused of being bad influences for kids. As comics began to get darker, they no longer seemed like a place that was safe for crime-fighting children.
I think it hit its peak in the late 80's when DC Comics killed off Jason Todd. Robin was always the quintessential sidekick, so his death (which also happened to be very brutal) carried a lot of weight. Even though Jason Todd wasn't all that young compared to some Robins, the classic team-up just seemed peculiar in the more modern ages of comics.
But really, nobody paid much attention to the ethical questions regarding young sidekicks. If young sidekicks fell out of fashion, it probably wasn't because it seemed wrong to put children in those sorts of situations, but more because it seemed hokey or ridiculous.
Case in point, the most recent Robin, Damian Wayne (who also recently died) was the youngest one yet, but by making him sociopathic, very mature for his age, and trained by the world's greatest assassins, they were able to side-step making him seem hokey or silly. They also managed to side-step the homophobia surrounding the Batman and Robin team-up by making his Bruce's biological son. If comic fans had a problem with Damian, it was that he was too dark and serious, not that he was too young.
But really, when we stop and think about it, this is truly fucked up. A man who faces life-or-death situations on a daily basis decides to take a kid (and in the case of Damian, his kid) along, even though it could (and has) easily lead to the child's untimely death.
One of the more interesting things about empowered children in mass media that aim at widespread appeal and garner phenomenal popularity is that adults tend to enjoy them just as much as (if not more than) the children that are presumably meant to relate to them. Just look at the recent explosion of popularity of movie franchises like Harry Potter and Twilight. A lot of adults look back on their childhoods with a sort of empty regret. Even people who didn't necessarily have a particularly enjoyable childhood will wish that their childhoods were maybe more interesting and that they had done more. So the idea of children whose boring lives are interrupted by the fantastic is potentially interesting to audiences of all ages.
However, there's a fine line that such characters tend to walk when they are expected to lead to million-dollar franchises, lest ye risk offending the adult audience that pays for the ticket. While YA in books are full of excellent characters with depth and realism, the stuff that gets picked up to be turned into blockbuster film franchises tends to wind up with a lot of arbitrary "conventional wisdom". Young characters can't use foul language, young characters can't die, young characters can't have sex, young characters can't kill people. Even within YA novels, some parents set arbitrary standards for what kinds of novels they let their children read (in this day and age, I'd just be glad kids are reading anything). Back when Borders still existed, I once overheard a mother asking a clerk about a YA novel (I can't remember which), expressing her concern about whether the content was appropriate. She stated that she was OK with "Twilight" and used that as her baseline for what was acceptable. I couldn't have rolled my eyes harder if I tried.
These are the "standards" that prevent the mountains of good works from being adapted for mass audiences without having their guts ripped out first. It essentially boils down to "whatever makes the adult in the room feel uncomfortable." But why? What is it about treating younger characters like actual people that puts so many presumably level-headed adults on edge?
Well, the knee-jerk answer is that it is inappropriate. If a popular work is directed towards children, it can be deemed as a bad influence and angry mothers will try to get it banned. If the popular work is not directed towards children, it can be accused of being perverse, as though the author enjoys talking about underage characters behaving like adults. Even in the case of "Kick-Ass", one critic presumed that Hit-Girl was meant to be fetishistic, which was such a ridiculous leap of illogic that it led to him getting pummeled by the Internet.
But if we're being honest, the big underlying reason adults get up in arms over kids behaving in certain ways on film (even if the film is in no way directed towards children) is because those aspects tend to spoil our fun.
We go to the movies expecting a laugh, and then we get this cool action scene, but instead of a balding 40-year-old man brutally killing waves of nameless drug dealers, we have an eleven-year-old doing the same thing and then ALL OF A SUDDEN we're expected to think about our feelings and that makes us very cross indeed. So generally, the sorts of films that tend to garner widest appeal often try not to step outside anybody's comfort zone.
I mean, let's look at one of the most popular franchises ever (for both children and adults), Harry Potter. Harry is ripped away from his life (granted it was a shitty life, but the point stands) so that he can run off with a strange man who tells him he's special. He goes to a school where they don't teach math, literature, or social studies, he's separated from his dissenting and abusive parental figures, separated from the harsh real world, discovers he's a god at this sport that requires no real training or teamwork (at least not for his position), and he's put in perilous situations where he emerges victorious over terrible evil. At the age of eleven.
Is it really any wonder why Harry Potter is so popular? How many kids wish school was actually that awesome? How many adults wish that they discovered they were special when they were young? Wish that they had had more agency during that part of their life?
But most of the books jump through a few hoops to make sure we don't feel guilty about vicariously enjoying Harry's perilous situations. All of the adults try to make sure that the children don't get involved with the serious shit (though they do anyway). Harry is still expected to face consequences when he misbehaves or disregards rules. When Harry defeats a villain, it is typically through something defensive. In the first book, Harry doesn't KILL the evil Professor Quirrell, Professor Quirrell gets himself killed by touching Harry. In the second book, Harry may kill the basilisk, but the basilisk is not only a ruthless killing machine, it is an animal and therefore doesn't feel "wrong" to stab in the face. Then when he defeats Voldemort's horcrux, all he does is stab a book. In the sixth book, Harry finally directly harms someone with magic, and it is (understandably) treated as this truly horrific and awful thing. In the final book, when he faces Voldemort, again Voldemort essentially just gets himself killed. The only truly evil thing Harry does that goes unpunished is when he uses a forbidden mind-control curse on a goblin at a bank who is basically just doing his job, but that is easy enough to miss or overlook.
It seems to me that J.K. Rowling did her best to try and avoid forcing her readers to ask any hard questions about her characters or have her characters deal with some of the more complex aspects of growing up, especially when it came to sex. Sure, characters hooked up and they talked about snogging an awful lot, but that's always where things ended. When she released "The Casual Vacancy", which dealt with many more sexual themes, in an interview she talked about how she felt those aspects were not appropriate for fantasy, and she's entitled to her opinion, but I'd say George R.R. Martin would have some pretty major objections to that consensus.
Another good example of this tendency to keep things morally simple is the "Hunger Games" film adaptation (I've only seen the movie, so forgive me if this doesn't accurately reflect the book or the series as a whole). I would like to point out that I actually really like the movie and think that it's success will change a lot of the "conventional wisdom" I'm talking about, but I couldn't help but find it odd that in a film that bravely deals with a society that routinely pits children against one another in brutal death matches, the main character of Katniss rarely ever actually kills anyone. She releases a nest of homicidal super-bees, which directly kills one person, but Katniss herself is also stung and it causes her a great deal of pain. It was an act of desperation, it was indirect, and she was still punished anyway.
The rest of the story practically conspires to avoid forcing her to kill anyone. She allies herself with the young Rue, and not once do they address the very serious truth that the best-case scenario is that they are the last two standing and would then be forced to kill one another. What would Katniss do in that situation? Allow Rue to kill her, leaving her sister without anyone and forcing Rue to live with the knowledge that she's guilty of a friend's death? I was actually really involved with the implications of this alliance and how it would test Katniss as a character. Unfortunately, she is saved from having to make that decision as Rue is tragically killed by some other asshole.
Additionally, the presence of the "careers", the children who are trained to be ruthless killers specifically to win the Hunger Games, also serve to absolve Katniss of tough ethical decisions. While Katniss is hiding and taking care of Peeta, the "careers" are killing all of the innocent children. By the time Katniss finally has to kill someone, there's only one "career" left, and since he's been gleefully killing people left and right and is about to kill Peeta, we don't really feel bad for him and we feel Katniss is justified. At the very end when they finally force Katniss to kill Peeta, they make a suicide pact to force the people running the Games to keep their word, but if they hadn't changed the rules in the first place, that tactic probably wouldn't have worked.
As horrifying as the "careers" are, the story would have been far more horrifying if they didn't exist at all. What if none of the kids were trained to take part in this? What if all of the kids followed Katniss' strategy and just waited in the forest. Eventually, someone would have needed to kill someone else. Eventually Katniss would have had to kill someone who was no more deserving of death than she was. Possibly someone not unlike the sister she was putting her life on the line for. I'm not saying the story would have been better, the "careers" make sense within the context of the story and provide a very powerful sense of danger, but their evil allows Katniss' actions to seem comparatively good so that she can remain likable, at least according to "conventional wisdom".
We don't make things easy for these characters because it would be otherwise inappropriate. We do it because we want to enjoy ourselves. Forcing Katniss to murder Rue or Peeta might have been too dark and ruined our fun. Making Harry cast Avada Kedavra to take down Voldemort would not have seemed very heroic. We don't want these kids to feel seriously emotionally scarred simply for doing the things we want them to do.
A common trope in these sorts of films is when an authority figure underestimates the younger protagonist and is then inevitably saved because the protagonist acted in spite of their wishes and was able to do something the older authority figures could not have done themselves. It's ironic, then, that we decide to be very specific about what those young protagonists can and cannot do within that rebellious streak.
Disobey rules? Sure. Speak their mind? Of course. Stand up for naive moral absolutism? Definitely. But kill someone? Nope. Have a lapse in moral judgement? Nah. Express any kind of romantic desire that's at least partially sexual in nature? Never.
This brings us finally to Hit-Girl.
Hit-Girl is damn near impossible not to love. Even if you find the use of the character reprehensible, the main reason you feel that way is because you care about her. She's strong, but she had to work for it. Her dad encourages her and takes an interest in spending time with her. She's flawed, but admirable. She's young, but sharp as a tack.
In a way, she's the perfect sidekick. She's a very simple analogue for the audience, she has an interesting, fulfilling, and exciting life, she's likable, she's capable, and she brings a lot of heart to the proceedings. But she also kills with no moral repercussions, she uses foul and sexually-explicit language frequently, and she lives a life where she is essentially being exploited and warped by her father.
So in a way, she embodies both the things we love about young heroes while also embodying the aspects of young heroes we tend to filter out for our own comfort.
The cursing isn't so awful. Children swearing is usually hilarious. Most adults aren't actually offended by curse words, they're only offended if there's a chance children might hear them. Honestly, it would be easier if we all just stopped caring.
But the physical and psychological violence? That is where a lot of us draw the line, which brings me to my next point.
However, there's a fine line that such characters tend to walk when they are expected to lead to million-dollar franchises, lest ye risk offending the adult audience that pays for the ticket. While YA in books are full of excellent characters with depth and realism, the stuff that gets picked up to be turned into blockbuster film franchises tends to wind up with a lot of arbitrary "conventional wisdom". Young characters can't use foul language, young characters can't die, young characters can't have sex, young characters can't kill people. Even within YA novels, some parents set arbitrary standards for what kinds of novels they let their children read (in this day and age, I'd just be glad kids are reading anything). Back when Borders still existed, I once overheard a mother asking a clerk about a YA novel (I can't remember which), expressing her concern about whether the content was appropriate. She stated that she was OK with "Twilight" and used that as her baseline for what was acceptable. I couldn't have rolled my eyes harder if I tried.
These are the "standards" that prevent the mountains of good works from being adapted for mass audiences without having their guts ripped out first. It essentially boils down to "whatever makes the adult in the room feel uncomfortable." But why? What is it about treating younger characters like actual people that puts so many presumably level-headed adults on edge?
Well, the knee-jerk answer is that it is inappropriate. If a popular work is directed towards children, it can be deemed as a bad influence and angry mothers will try to get it banned. If the popular work is not directed towards children, it can be accused of being perverse, as though the author enjoys talking about underage characters behaving like adults. Even in the case of "Kick-Ass", one critic presumed that Hit-Girl was meant to be fetishistic, which was such a ridiculous leap of illogic that it led to him getting pummeled by the Internet.
But if we're being honest, the big underlying reason adults get up in arms over kids behaving in certain ways on film (even if the film is in no way directed towards children) is because those aspects tend to spoil our fun.
We go to the movies expecting a laugh, and then we get this cool action scene, but instead of a balding 40-year-old man brutally killing waves of nameless drug dealers, we have an eleven-year-old doing the same thing and then ALL OF A SUDDEN we're expected to think about our feelings and that makes us very cross indeed. So generally, the sorts of films that tend to garner widest appeal often try not to step outside anybody's comfort zone.
I mean, let's look at one of the most popular franchises ever (for both children and adults), Harry Potter. Harry is ripped away from his life (granted it was a shitty life, but the point stands) so that he can run off with a strange man who tells him he's special. He goes to a school where they don't teach math, literature, or social studies, he's separated from his dissenting and abusive parental figures, separated from the harsh real world, discovers he's a god at this sport that requires no real training or teamwork (at least not for his position), and he's put in perilous situations where he emerges victorious over terrible evil. At the age of eleven.
Is it really any wonder why Harry Potter is so popular? How many kids wish school was actually that awesome? How many adults wish that they discovered they were special when they were young? Wish that they had had more agency during that part of their life?
But most of the books jump through a few hoops to make sure we don't feel guilty about vicariously enjoying Harry's perilous situations. All of the adults try to make sure that the children don't get involved with the serious shit (though they do anyway). Harry is still expected to face consequences when he misbehaves or disregards rules. When Harry defeats a villain, it is typically through something defensive. In the first book, Harry doesn't KILL the evil Professor Quirrell, Professor Quirrell gets himself killed by touching Harry. In the second book, Harry may kill the basilisk, but the basilisk is not only a ruthless killing machine, it is an animal and therefore doesn't feel "wrong" to stab in the face. Then when he defeats Voldemort's horcrux, all he does is stab a book. In the sixth book, Harry finally directly harms someone with magic, and it is (understandably) treated as this truly horrific and awful thing. In the final book, when he faces Voldemort, again Voldemort essentially just gets himself killed. The only truly evil thing Harry does that goes unpunished is when he uses a forbidden mind-control curse on a goblin at a bank who is basically just doing his job, but that is easy enough to miss or overlook.
It seems to me that J.K. Rowling did her best to try and avoid forcing her readers to ask any hard questions about her characters or have her characters deal with some of the more complex aspects of growing up, especially when it came to sex. Sure, characters hooked up and they talked about snogging an awful lot, but that's always where things ended. When she released "The Casual Vacancy", which dealt with many more sexual themes, in an interview she talked about how she felt those aspects were not appropriate for fantasy, and she's entitled to her opinion, but I'd say George R.R. Martin would have some pretty major objections to that consensus.
Another good example of this tendency to keep things morally simple is the "Hunger Games" film adaptation (I've only seen the movie, so forgive me if this doesn't accurately reflect the book or the series as a whole). I would like to point out that I actually really like the movie and think that it's success will change a lot of the "conventional wisdom" I'm talking about, but I couldn't help but find it odd that in a film that bravely deals with a society that routinely pits children against one another in brutal death matches, the main character of Katniss rarely ever actually kills anyone. She releases a nest of homicidal super-bees, which directly kills one person, but Katniss herself is also stung and it causes her a great deal of pain. It was an act of desperation, it was indirect, and she was still punished anyway.
The rest of the story practically conspires to avoid forcing her to kill anyone. She allies herself with the young Rue, and not once do they address the very serious truth that the best-case scenario is that they are the last two standing and would then be forced to kill one another. What would Katniss do in that situation? Allow Rue to kill her, leaving her sister without anyone and forcing Rue to live with the knowledge that she's guilty of a friend's death? I was actually really involved with the implications of this alliance and how it would test Katniss as a character. Unfortunately, she is saved from having to make that decision as Rue is tragically killed by some other asshole.
Additionally, the presence of the "careers", the children who are trained to be ruthless killers specifically to win the Hunger Games, also serve to absolve Katniss of tough ethical decisions. While Katniss is hiding and taking care of Peeta, the "careers" are killing all of the innocent children. By the time Katniss finally has to kill someone, there's only one "career" left, and since he's been gleefully killing people left and right and is about to kill Peeta, we don't really feel bad for him and we feel Katniss is justified. At the very end when they finally force Katniss to kill Peeta, they make a suicide pact to force the people running the Games to keep their word, but if they hadn't changed the rules in the first place, that tactic probably wouldn't have worked.
As horrifying as the "careers" are, the story would have been far more horrifying if they didn't exist at all. What if none of the kids were trained to take part in this? What if all of the kids followed Katniss' strategy and just waited in the forest. Eventually, someone would have needed to kill someone else. Eventually Katniss would have had to kill someone who was no more deserving of death than she was. Possibly someone not unlike the sister she was putting her life on the line for. I'm not saying the story would have been better, the "careers" make sense within the context of the story and provide a very powerful sense of danger, but their evil allows Katniss' actions to seem comparatively good so that she can remain likable, at least according to "conventional wisdom".
We don't make things easy for these characters because it would be otherwise inappropriate. We do it because we want to enjoy ourselves. Forcing Katniss to murder Rue or Peeta might have been too dark and ruined our fun. Making Harry cast Avada Kedavra to take down Voldemort would not have seemed very heroic. We don't want these kids to feel seriously emotionally scarred simply for doing the things we want them to do.
A common trope in these sorts of films is when an authority figure underestimates the younger protagonist and is then inevitably saved because the protagonist acted in spite of their wishes and was able to do something the older authority figures could not have done themselves. It's ironic, then, that we decide to be very specific about what those young protagonists can and cannot do within that rebellious streak.
Disobey rules? Sure. Speak their mind? Of course. Stand up for naive moral absolutism? Definitely. But kill someone? Nope. Have a lapse in moral judgement? Nah. Express any kind of romantic desire that's at least partially sexual in nature? Never.
This brings us finally to Hit-Girl.
Hit-Girl is damn near impossible not to love. Even if you find the use of the character reprehensible, the main reason you feel that way is because you care about her. She's strong, but she had to work for it. Her dad encourages her and takes an interest in spending time with her. She's flawed, but admirable. She's young, but sharp as a tack.
In a way, she's the perfect sidekick. She's a very simple analogue for the audience, she has an interesting, fulfilling, and exciting life, she's likable, she's capable, and she brings a lot of heart to the proceedings. But she also kills with no moral repercussions, she uses foul and sexually-explicit language frequently, and she lives a life where she is essentially being exploited and warped by her father.
So in a way, she embodies both the things we love about young heroes while also embodying the aspects of young heroes we tend to filter out for our own comfort.
The cursing isn't so awful. Children swearing is usually hilarious. Most adults aren't actually offended by curse words, they're only offended if there's a chance children might hear them. Honestly, it would be easier if we all just stopped caring.
But the physical and psychological violence? That is where a lot of us draw the line, which brings me to my next point.
Hit-Girl As Commentary On Violence In Entertainment
Roger Ebert is one of those critics who will completely shut out a movie if it offends him in a way he feels is gratuitous. That doesn't make him a bad critic, in fact I'd say his subjectivity is what makes him a great critic. But it does often lead to him disliking or liking movies for relatively silly reasons.
One of his "blind spots" is children. While he has no children himself (at least I don't think he does) he's always come off as very fond of children. He gave both horrendous "Garfield" films favorable reviews from the position that kids ought to love them.
When it came to "Kick-Ass" his entire reason for hating the movie was that Hit-Girl killed people with little to no regard for human life. In his own words:
One can't really disagree with this observation. The movie does dehumanize the mobsters that are killed and glorify those who kill them. And in a world where there are school shootings and child soldiers, it's hard to deny that violence perpetrated by children in the real world is particularly revolting and dark. As such, I can understand people who cannot enjoy watching children take part in the battles of adults.
However, what I find interesting is this other tid-bit from Roger Ebert's review of "Superman Returns":
So apparently Roger Ebert is actually fine with fictional kids putting themselves in harm's way. In fact, if they don't, it appears to be a negative trait of a film to him. His only requirement is that it's safe and family-friendly, as in "Spy Kids". If a kid is shy and doesn't want to fight, he's a brat and a detriment to the plot.
OK, so maybe his problem is just that he doesn't like glorified violence in films. Yeah, that's understandable too. Sometimes over-the-top violence just pushes things too far for some people.
Then again, he really liked "Inglourious Basterds", which definitely glorified violence in a spectacular fashion.
OK, well, maybe it's just brutal violence that offends Roger Ebert. The kind of violence that is over-the-top and ridiculous, but really uncomfortable to watch due to the context. I can understand that too. After all, not everyone is cool with movies making them uncomfortable, even if it's for the purposes of satire.
However, this bit from his recent review of "Django Unchained" offers an interesting exception to this:
When it came to "Kick-Ass" his entire reason for hating the movie was that Hit-Girl killed people with little to no regard for human life. In his own words:
Big Daddy and Mindy never have a chat about, you know, stuff like how when you kill people, they are really dead. This movie regards human beings like video-game targets. Kill one, and you score. They're dead, you win. When kids in the age range of this movie's home video audience are shooting one another every day in America, that kind of stops being funny.
One can't really disagree with this observation. The movie does dehumanize the mobsters that are killed and glorify those who kill them. And in a world where there are school shootings and child soldiers, it's hard to deny that violence perpetrated by children in the real world is particularly revolting and dark. As such, I can understand people who cannot enjoy watching children take part in the battles of adults.
However, what I find interesting is this other tid-bit from Roger Ebert's review of "Superman Returns":
Now about Lois' kid. We know who his father is, and Lois knows, and I guess the kid knows, although he calls Richard his daddy. But why is nothing done with this character? He sends a piano flying across a room, but otherwise he just stares with big, solemn eyes, like one of those self-sufficient little brats you can't get to talk. It would have been fun to give Superman a bright, sassy child, like one of the Spy Kids, and make him a part of the plot.
So apparently Roger Ebert is actually fine with fictional kids putting themselves in harm's way. In fact, if they don't, it appears to be a negative trait of a film to him. His only requirement is that it's safe and family-friendly, as in "Spy Kids". If a kid is shy and doesn't want to fight, he's a brat and a detriment to the plot.
OK, so maybe his problem is just that he doesn't like glorified violence in films. Yeah, that's understandable too. Sometimes over-the-top violence just pushes things too far for some people.
Then again, he really liked "Inglourious Basterds", which definitely glorified violence in a spectacular fashion.
OK, well, maybe it's just brutal violence that offends Roger Ebert. The kind of violence that is over-the-top and ridiculous, but really uncomfortable to watch due to the context. I can understand that too. After all, not everyone is cool with movies making them uncomfortable, even if it's for the purposes of satire.
However, this bit from his recent review of "Django Unchained" offers an interesting exception to this:
Because "Django" is so filled with violence and transgressive behavior, he told me something that day [at Cannes] that's worth remembering when discussing "Django:" "When I'm writing a movie, I hear the laughter. People talk about the violence. What about the comedy? 'Pulp Fiction' has such an obviously comic spirit, even with all the weird things that are happening. To me, the most torturous thing in the world, and this counts for 'Reservoir Dogs' just as much as it does to 'Pulp,' is to watch it with an audience who doesn't know they're supposed to laugh. Because that's a death. Because I'm hearing the laughs in my mind, and there's this dead silence of crickets sounding in the audience, you know?"
I sorta know. There were however some dead crickets in my mind during the scene in "Django Unchained" where we visit a Southern Plantation run by a genteel monster named Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), who for his after-dinner entertainment is having two slaves fight each other to the death. It's a brutal fight, covered with the blood that flows unusually copiously in the film. The losing slave screams without stopping, and I reflected that throughout the film there is much more screaming in a violent scene than you usually hear. Finally the fight is over, and there's a shot of the defeated slave's head as a hammer is dropped on the floor next to it by Mr. Candie. The hammer, (off-screen but barely) is used by the fight's winner to finish off his opponent.
At this point in the film I found myself mentally composing a letter to Quentin, explaining why I stopped watching his film. The letter went unwritten. There are such scenes in most Tarantino films. Do you remember Michael Madsen cutting off the cop's ear in "Reservoir Dogs?" When QT begins a movie, I believe, his destination is to aim over the top. The top itself will not do.
[...]
Consider the fight scene I described. Where is the comedy? Tarantino says he hears laughter in his mind. Why? I suspect it's because this entire film takes the painful, touchy subject of slavery and approaches it without the slightest restraint. At some point in the scene, QT's laughter may be because the audience expects to see violence but doesn't expect to get it a such an extreme; he's rubbing it in.That I find absolutely fascinating. In spite of finding the Mandingo fight to be absolutely horrible to watch for its ridiculous violence and brutally racist context, he sees the satire in it and uses it to justify that context.
With this in mind, let's go back to his review of "Kick-Ass" for a moment:
Shall I have feelings, or should I pretend to be cool? Will I seem hopelessly square if I find “Kick-Ass” morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? Let's say you're a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the movie does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in. A movie camera makes a record of whatever is placed in front of it, and in this case, it shows deadly carnage dished out by an 11-year-old girl, after which an adult man brutally hammers her to within an inch of her life. Blood everywhere. Now tell me all about the context.
With "Kick-Ass", he acknowledges it as satire, but absolutely refuses to give the film a pass. While "Django" gets a perfect score, "Kick-Ass" gets a failing grade.
He's fine with kids putting themselves in danger, in fact he seems to insist on it. He's fine with foul-mouthed characters who murder without mercy. He's fine with brutal and offensive violence used as satire.
He just apparently has a problem when all three are used at the same time.
Now, I love Roger Ebert, but I don't always agree with him. In this case, I think that he's unable to admit his own hypocrisy. He is capable of enjoying violence, but when that violence is perpetrated by a child, he's suddenly confronted with the fact that violence is a bad thing. He asks himself if he ought to be enjoying Hit-Girl killing people, and he tells himself that he shouldn't. So he makes the conscious decision to dislike the film.
Here's a newsflash: Violence is a bad thing. Always. When Brad Pitt kills dehumanized bad guys, he's not "allowed" to do it because he's an adult male or because it's a war movie. Killing is bad. There's a law against it and everything.
And yet, we are capable of enjoying violence in media. In fact, most people enjoy fictional violence quite a bit. Action films are by far the most popular and successful films in the industry.
Why is that? Well, there are a number of theories on the subject, but the one I mostly subscribe to goes something like this:
Human beings are capable of telling the difference between the real world and fiction.
Just look at that. Let the ridiculousness of that scene sit in your brain. Do you believe for one second that Roger Ebert saw that and the first thing that came to his mind was Columbine? That he genuinely worried that a 6-year-old would see this and think that's something they'd want to try?
I for one don't think so. I mean, let's get real. When I was a kid, movie violence that involved blood terrified me, and I think that's fairly common. Even once I got used to it, it was never really ideal. Blood meant that something became dangerous. I could enjoy it, but I would never try it.
I think that what Ebert actually thought was, "Having a child behave this way in the real world is wrong. Therefore, I have to reject this movie and mark it as reprehensible in order to seem like a decent human being. I'd rather be square and morally superior than have fun and feel like a bad person for enjoying myself, even if it is meant to be satirical."
And that's just human, really. Sometimes we feel guilty about the things we like, and sometimes we feel like we aren't allowed to enjoy something for that reason. But it is possible to acknowledge something as problematic while still enjoying it. We are not robots. We can live with contradictions.
Hit-Girl being a child doesn't make her actions any more or less terrible than if they were done by Clive Owen. But her being a child does actually serve to remind us that the actions are horrible. In a movie that asks the question, "Why aren't there superheroes in real life?" Hit-Girl provides the answer, "Because that would be horrifying." And we acknowledge that and understand that, but even once we understand that we think, "But it would still be pretty fucking cool."
This actually mirrors Dave's entire journey. He asks that question, gives it a try, and nearly dies almost immediately. Yet he still gets back into it. It speaks to our stubborn and borderline masochistic nature as humans when it comes to our obsession with finding our own reason for living.
Hit-Girl As A Strong Female Character
Comics and movies have issues with women.
Still, any fan of comics and film will be quick to say that there are plenty of strong female characters, and they are not wrong.
Still, any fan of comics and film will be quick to say that there are plenty of strong female characters, and they are not wrong.
However, if you ask those people to name strong female characters who aren't sexualized or at least portrayed in a traditionally feminine and attractive manner, or in the case of film, cast specifically with women who are generally considered attractive, you might find the list gets a bit shorter.
Then if you ask for strong female characters who aren't sexualized or deliberately designed to look more masculine or traditionally "ugly", you'd have a much shorter list.
Then if you take that list and ask for characters who are primary or secondary protagonists, you'd probably be left with an even shorter list.
Then if you take that list and ask for characters who are primary or secondary protagonists, you'd probably be left with an even shorter list.
But on that list, you'd find Hit-Girl.
Hit-Girl does not hide or reject her femininity. She does not act like her gender is a burden. She does not dress in a deliberately traditionally masculine manner. She is a girl. It's even in her name.
One problem with female characters in the media is an obsession over their appearance. If character designers or casting directors aren't obsessing over developing an image of a character that's very attractive, they are deliberately trying to avoid doing that. But when you decide you want to make this female character dress like a guy and have tons of muscles and much harder features specifically to avoid making a traditionally feminine character, you're still obsessing over their appearance.
With male characters, this almost never happens. While it's true that a lot of male characters are also designed to be attractive, this is not always reflected in their appearance. Some male characters look fairly average or overweight or deformed, but they might still have an attractive personality by being humorous or charismatic.
I mean, just think about the women you know in your day-to-day life. How many women like that do you see as characters in film? Now think about the men you know in your day-to-day life. How many men like that do you see as characters in film? I don't know about you, but it seems like there are a much wider variety of male actors than there are female actors, and the reason is that male characters don't generally have to be "the whole package" as it were.
With female characters, you can make them strong. You can make them kick ass, you can make them independent, you can make them powerful, you can make them assertive. But you still need to make them sexy. Or if you don't make them sexy, they have to be self-conscious about their appearance.
This isn't always done deliberately. After all, a lot of artists might go about this with good intentions. They see that there aren't a lot of good female role models, so they create a character that is over-the-top powerful. But then they worry that if they don't make the character attractive, they create this subtext that says that you can either be powerful or attractive, not both. But in obsessing over that, they then create the message that if you are powerful, you also ought to be attractive. That appearance still matters regardless of your other qualities. That you still need to form a romantic relationship to be happy.
Hit-Girl, being an eleven-year-old girl, pretty much can't be made deliberately attractive or unattractive. She can't form a romantic relationship. She's just a normal girl who also happens to be an incredible crime-fighter.
With male characters, this almost never happens. While it's true that a lot of male characters are also designed to be attractive, this is not always reflected in their appearance. Some male characters look fairly average or overweight or deformed, but they might still have an attractive personality by being humorous or charismatic.
I mean, just think about the women you know in your day-to-day life. How many women like that do you see as characters in film? Now think about the men you know in your day-to-day life. How many men like that do you see as characters in film? I don't know about you, but it seems like there are a much wider variety of male actors than there are female actors, and the reason is that male characters don't generally have to be "the whole package" as it were.
With female characters, you can make them strong. You can make them kick ass, you can make them independent, you can make them powerful, you can make them assertive. But you still need to make them sexy. Or if you don't make them sexy, they have to be self-conscious about their appearance.
This isn't always done deliberately. After all, a lot of artists might go about this with good intentions. They see that there aren't a lot of good female role models, so they create a character that is over-the-top powerful. But then they worry that if they don't make the character attractive, they create this subtext that says that you can either be powerful or attractive, not both. But in obsessing over that, they then create the message that if you are powerful, you also ought to be attractive. That appearance still matters regardless of your other qualities. That you still need to form a romantic relationship to be happy.
Hit-Girl, being an eleven-year-old girl, pretty much can't be made deliberately attractive or unattractive. She can't form a romantic relationship. She's just a normal girl who also happens to be an incredible crime-fighter.
Now, given Mark Millar's track record, I'm inclined to believe this might have been kind of an accident much in the same way that Frank Miller's Carrie Kelley was a strong female character until she grew up and then Frank decided it was OK to sexualize her like he does with all of his other female characters. But whether or not Millar intended it, Hit-Girl is a great example of a strong female character in comics and action films in spite of being young and scrawny.
On the other hand, Hit-Girl is initially problematic in that she is basically being manipulated by a man into pursuing his selfish and dangerous delusions. However, after his death, she basically takes her life into her own hands. In a way, she graduates from being sidekick to being the superhero and Kick-Ass becomes her sidekick. In both the comic and the movie, Hit-Girl saves him, takes the lead, does almost all of the work, and all Kick-Ass does is take on the equally untrained Red Mist and save Hit-Girl's life at the end. All of that is pretty much par for the course for a sidekick.
Hit-Girl is allowed to not be perfect. She has issues and her life is far from healthy. She has impressive strength, but it comes at a cost. And yet she is still driven to do good. While her perception of the world is warped, her intentions are pure. She is defined by her actions and motivation, not by her power set and appearance.
Additionally, her use of language is interesting. She often uses gendered insults (i.e. "cunt", "pussy", etc.), which generally make a lot of people cringe (myself included) when directed towards individuals, but since they come from the mouth of a little girl and are often directed towards men, it comes off as rather brilliant. She effectively strips the gendered insults of their intended misogyny and throws them back without a hint of irony.
An easy criticism is that Hit-Girl is not the sort of character that anyone should aspire to be. I would completely agree. No child should ever want to be like Hit-Girl and no adult should vicariously fantasize about having a childhood like hers.
But one of the biggest problems facing female characters in fiction is that nearly all of them are expected to either be a role model or a clearly reprehensible villain. Either an example of what a woman should be or an example of what a woman shouldn't be. While this is understandable considering the general lack of positive role models for women in fiction, I still find this tendency severely limiting.
Deadpool is not a role model. The Punisher is not a role model. Spawn is not a role model. But they are still fascinating and easy to enjoy or relate to in certain ways.
Male characters aren't typically designed to be role models and that allows them to be complex and interesting and various. If we treat every child character and every female character like they have to live up to some sort of ideal, then we are just imposing those ideals on children and women. We are saying "this is how you ought to be".
I'm not saying role models don't have their place. It's good to have ideals to live up to. But when that's all you have, it stops being an ideal and becomes an unreasonable standard.
Hit-Girl is allowed to not be perfect. She has issues and her life is far from healthy. She has impressive strength, but it comes at a cost. And yet she is still driven to do good. While her perception of the world is warped, her intentions are pure. She is defined by her actions and motivation, not by her power set and appearance.
Additionally, her use of language is interesting. She often uses gendered insults (i.e. "cunt", "pussy", etc.), which generally make a lot of people cringe (myself included) when directed towards individuals, but since they come from the mouth of a little girl and are often directed towards men, it comes off as rather brilliant. She effectively strips the gendered insults of their intended misogyny and throws them back without a hint of irony.
An easy criticism is that Hit-Girl is not the sort of character that anyone should aspire to be. I would completely agree. No child should ever want to be like Hit-Girl and no adult should vicariously fantasize about having a childhood like hers.
But one of the biggest problems facing female characters in fiction is that nearly all of them are expected to either be a role model or a clearly reprehensible villain. Either an example of what a woman should be or an example of what a woman shouldn't be. While this is understandable considering the general lack of positive role models for women in fiction, I still find this tendency severely limiting.
Deadpool is not a role model. The Punisher is not a role model. Spawn is not a role model. But they are still fascinating and easy to enjoy or relate to in certain ways.
Male characters aren't typically designed to be role models and that allows them to be complex and interesting and various. If we treat every child character and every female character like they have to live up to some sort of ideal, then we are just imposing those ideals on children and women. We are saying "this is how you ought to be".
I'm not saying role models don't have their place. It's good to have ideals to live up to. But when that's all you have, it stops being an ideal and becomes an unreasonable standard.
Unsolvable Puzzles
When all is said and done, I love contradictions in fictional characters. I've said before that my favorite superhero in comics is Deadpool. I suspect that if he was faithfully brought to film, he would be my favorite superhero in film instead of Hit-Girl, but that has yet to happen.
What I love about Deadpool is that on the surface, he's just a really funny and incredibly talented mercenary. He's fun to read on the most basic level. But underneath that surface is a great deal of complexity and horror. Behind the mask is a person with deep-seated issues. He is entertaining on all levels, but those levels often seem at odds with one another. He will seem careless and amoral in his actions, reveling in the carnage for its own sake, but beneath that there is a sense of larger purpose and personal failing to live up to it. He actively chooses to be careless and silly as a defense mechanism. I find it utterly fascinating.
And I find that he has a lot in common with Hit-Girl. Hit-Girl is a lot of fun on the surface level. She's hilarious, direct, clever, and wonderfully brutal. But the parts that make her who she is are fairly disturbing. Like Deadpool, her character engages us on two levels that seem to contradict one another. On the one hand we feel bad for her, but on the other hand, we love to see her do what she does best.
I like it when fiction makes me think and characters like these are puzzles that cannot be solved. They force us to ask questions about ourselves while always keeping us guessing about what they might do next.
Their existence seems to be insular. They don't exist purely for our entertainment, though we may find them entertaining. They don't exist purely to make a point, although they certainly do. They exist because they exist. And that's a rare trait for a character in a world ruled by brands and characters created through coldly calculated marketing strategies.
Friday, February 22, 2013
The PlayStation 4's Secret Weapon
So in spite of what I thought would be the intelligent thing to do, Sony has gone ahead and announced the PlayStation 4, which shall be released early Q4 in anticipation of Black Friday and the holiday season.
At first, my reaction to all the news coming out of the press conference involved a lot of groaning. None of what I heard really got me excited. It all sounded safe. Predictable.
But after giving it some time, I think that Sony has the potential to do something great, they need only realize it.
If you've ever seen "2001: A Space Odyssey", you'd know that towards the beginning you witness the first moment where an organism on Earth discovered tools. If you haven't seen "2001: A Space Odyssey", you'd still know about that moment because it's been referenced and parodied in our popular culture over and over again.
One thing people rarely say about "2001: A Space Odyssey" is that it is a very slow movie. Everything happens at a snail's pace, and to be honest, it's a bit hard for me to watch for that reason. But one part where this deliberate pace really works is during this scene.
You see the ape idling away, unconsciously touching the bone. He fiddles with it. Moves it. Picks it up. Drops it. Picks it back up again.
If you know what's going to happen, it can be pretty frustrating. You generally want to just scream, "IT'S A TOOL, YOU DAMN DIRTY APE! IT WILL REVOLUTIONIZE MODERN SOCIETY! NOW HIT SOMETHING WITH IT FOR FUCK'S SAKE!"
That's kind of how I feel with Sony right now after giving it some thought.
The PS4 has a lot of interesting potential. Sony has (intentionally or otherwise) put itself in a position where it could conceivably destroy its competition and seize the throne once more.
It need only realize that the bone it's playing with can be used as a powerful weapon.
That bone is cloud gaming.
At first, my reaction to all the news coming out of the press conference involved a lot of groaning. None of what I heard really got me excited. It all sounded safe. Predictable.
But after giving it some time, I think that Sony has the potential to do something great, they need only realize it.
If you've ever seen "2001: A Space Odyssey", you'd know that towards the beginning you witness the first moment where an organism on Earth discovered tools. If you haven't seen "2001: A Space Odyssey", you'd still know about that moment because it's been referenced and parodied in our popular culture over and over again.
One thing people rarely say about "2001: A Space Odyssey" is that it is a very slow movie. Everything happens at a snail's pace, and to be honest, it's a bit hard for me to watch for that reason. But one part where this deliberate pace really works is during this scene.
You see the ape idling away, unconsciously touching the bone. He fiddles with it. Moves it. Picks it up. Drops it. Picks it back up again.
If you know what's going to happen, it can be pretty frustrating. You generally want to just scream, "IT'S A TOOL, YOU DAMN DIRTY APE! IT WILL REVOLUTIONIZE MODERN SOCIETY! NOW HIT SOMETHING WITH IT FOR FUCK'S SAKE!"
That's kind of how I feel with Sony right now after giving it some thought.
The PS4 has a lot of interesting potential. Sony has (intentionally or otherwise) put itself in a position where it could conceivably destroy its competition and seize the throne once more.
It need only realize that the bone it's playing with can be used as a powerful weapon.
That bone is cloud gaming.
Looking Forward
One of the most interesting aspects of the PS4 is how it moved to the x86 architecture. Generally, people have made the comparison that modern video game consoles are essentially PCs with very specific hardware/firmware/OS configurations geared towards playing proprietary software, but the fact is that most modern gaming consoles would make very poor PCs. Anyone who installed Linux on their PS3 can attest to this firsthand. The PS3 can pull off some pretty impressive things, but it has less RAM than my phone and about the same processor as a 6-year-old Apple PowerBook.
The PS4, on the other hand, would make a fine PC. I know this because I coincidentally just recently helped a friend build a PC with an eight-core AMD processor and a mid-range graphics card and it's pretty damn excellent for a pretty decent price. It won't be setting the world on fire, but it does its job very well.
The problem, however, is that moving away from the PowerPC architecture means that the old games for the PS3 are not compatible. They can be made compatible, either through some kind of emulation or through individual porting, but certain games that were designed to maximize the PS3's hardware will probably need to be redesigned from the ground up.
The news of the PS4 lacking backwards compatibility upset many people, myself included. However, Sony's response regarding the possibility of making older games available through a new cloud-streaming service got a few raised eyebrows.
When Sony acquired Gaikai in October, it didn't exactly make that many waves. Sure, cloud gaming is an interesting concept, but it hasn't really gotten anywhere just yet and probably won't get there anytime soon.
People just sort of instinctively dismiss Sony's casual mention of a cloud gaming service because we all sort of just assume that it will be underwhelming.
But why do we so easily dismiss the prospect of cloud gaming?
The Perceived Problems of Cloud Gaming
I've talked a bit about this before, but the biggest perceived hurdle involved in cloud services is bandwidth/spectrum crunch. We don't have a lot of bandwidth and we are basically running out. In terms of wired bandwidth, the solution is generally to just lay down more cables, which costs money, but it is doable and cost-effective (and frankly, we've needed more fiber for a long time). Wireless bandwidth, on the other hand, is limited by the laws of physics, but that's not really an issue here. No one in the next 10 years is going to reasonably expect to be able to play a streaming video game on a mobile device with no lag or connectivity issues. It's just not a reasonable expectation. We barely expect to watch movies on our mobile devices with any amount of consistency.
But even though wired bandwidth doesn't have as many limitations, the fact remains that the few services that have successfully transitioned to the cloud have had a serious impact on our network infrastructure. Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu make up more than half of our total network bandwidth. If cloud gaming became a thing as popular as Netflix (which it absolutely has the potential to become) then we'd have to lay down a lot of new fiber to keep things running smooth. After all...
Additionally, anyone who has ever played a game with a networking component knows that lag is pretty much inevitable. Even in the best of situations, if networks are involved, something is going to slow down or get disconnected or misbehave in some other way.
So when we hear that Sony is looking into the possibility of offering some games streaming through the cloud, I think very few of us are taking them seriously. We roll our eyes and say, "You expect me to play an entire game on the cloud when the PlayStation Network can barely keep up with me playing CoD? Get real."
But here's the thing. Cloud gaming is not quite the same concept as playing an MMO or even playing online multiplayer. See, online multiplayer's biggest hurdle is not you connecting to the central server. It's you connecting with some other random schmo on the other side of the continent. The lag comes into play most often because it's hard for the central server to keep everybody connected and communicating with as much up-to-date information as possible. Not only does it have to keep track of where everybody is, it has to tell everybody else that's connected to it. So the limitations of your connection are augmented by the limitations of other peoples' connections.
With cloud gaming, it's actually not as complicated. It's just you talking to a server. The server doesn't have to coordinate with other random people, it just has to worry about you.
"OK," you might respond, "But modern games are huge. They take up like 10-20GB. How can you stream that much data?"
Well, you don't. That's not how cloud gaming works. The games themselves are actually running on dedicated hardware connected to the server. This way the games aren't limited by your hardware. Your local machine might be pulling some of the weight. It might have to store some local assets to minimize the amount of data that the server needs to send you, but ultimately, all you are sending the server is command inputs, and all you are getting back are graphical images of the game you are playing. In essence, it's not actually all that different from video streaming, other than the fact that the audio/video you see is rendered in real-time based on commands you send to it. Yes, that's still very complicated and even the slightest bit of lag can seriously impact certain types of games, but these are problems we've been working on solving. They're not quite as insurmountable as one might think.
So really, the concept of cloud gaming is not only fairly reasonable, it's potentially awesome. If it becomes the new standard, we would potentially no longer have to buy a new console ever again. All the hardware updates would happen on the server side and so long as our machines could keep up with displaying the graphical data, we wouldn't need to change a thing. How cool would that be?
However, even though the initial misconceptions about cloud gaming are fairly easy to dismiss, there are actually some serious hurdles that are preventing this from becoming a reality.
After all, OnLive and Gaikai aren't brand new. They've been around for a few years. And they work pretty well (or so I'm told). So why haven't they caught on?
The Actual Problems of Cloud Gaming
People forget this, but it took Netflix a really long time to develop a decent cloud service. I mean, they were already gaining ground on Blockbuster and Hollywood Video with their mail-delivery disc rental, but they weren't some monumental powerhouse. Then in 2008, they partnered up with Starz to stream some of the movies that Starz had the publishing rights to. Then they expanded a couple years later. Then they started making their services available to Xbox Live customers. Then they made it available to the PS3 and Wii. Then iOS and Android. During this transition, Netflix spent hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire the publishing rights to all of this content, as well as to invest in the necessary infrastructure to keep up with increasing demand.
OnLive and Gaikai (and any other game streaming service I'm not aware of) are small companies with a very small market. Their products might work well, but the video game industry is a tough nut to crack. To succeed, you need good marketing, solid and affordable hardware, and a good game library.
OnLive, in my opinion, has terrible marketing. Every ad or commercial or press I've seen for it makes it sound like a scam. They clearly understand that people have misgivings about the concept of cloud gaming, but rather than address those concerns, they pretend they don't exist and that they've solved all of the problems. This makes them seem dishonest, and generally they never live up to their own hype.
Gaikai I literally had never heard about before they were acquired by Sony a few months ago.
The hardware that supports OnLive is varied and inconsistent. They supposedly support tons of devices, but one instinctively knows that this is problematic, especially when they supposedly support mobile devices. Gaikai was in a similar boat before they were acquired by Sony, but more on that later.
As for games? This is probably where cloud services really shit the bed. OnLive, which is presently the most successful service out there, only has about 300 games to offer, and each has to be bought individually for essentially the same price as the disc version.
It's no surprise that OnLive hasn't gotten any substantial success. Why would I invest in hardware to play a potentially inferior version of a game I could just as easily buy for the same price and play without depending on an Internet connection or suffering glitches and poor video quality? The simple answer is, I wouldn't. And neither would you.
Imagine if Netflix had started out by only offering about 300 movies and you had to buy each one individually. Do you think they would have ever exploded in popularity the way they did?
But the limited selection and pricing schemes make sense. Game developers are notorious for demanding inflated prices for their hardware and being very protective of their publishing rights. OnLive couldn't offer a subscription service if they wanted to, simply because the only way they can get newer games is if they sell them for the standard price that everyone else has to. They have no special relationship with publishers and the publishers see no value in offering their games as part of a subscription package, and OnLive probably couldn't afford it anyway.
Still, that's not the only problem. The other big problem OnLive has is that they're not willing to commit to a serious infrastructure. The sad truth is that if they did somehow become an instant overnight success, their servers probably couldn't handle it and they'd drown in demand they couldn't supply.
So those are the real problems facing cloud gaming. A lacking infrastructure, dishonest marketing, wary publishers, skeptical consumers, disparate hardware requirements, and limited funding.
How Sony Could Make It Work
Despite these problems, I came to the realization that Sony is probably the best-equipped company to handle this problem head-on. They already have the tools at their disposal. They have the marketing. They're already a big name in the industry. People will listen to them. They have the standardized hardware. The PS4 sounds like a really solid machine and every single one will be functionally identical. With a stable broadband connection, decent servers, and well-written protocols, it could probably manage streaming games from previous generations with pretty decent quality. They have the infrastructure... sort of. They own Gaikai and they have a pretty decent PlayStation Network service that's not all that great, but they have the money to make it better if they care enough to. They don't have very many financial limitations. If nothing else, they've at least made it clear that they intend to do something along the lines of cloud gaming.
Most importantly, Sony has games. Games that people love. Games that they have the publishing rights to. And even more importantly, Sony has been previously willing to give their games away for free to PlayStation Plus subscribers. In measured amounts, certainly, but it's still something they've tried out, and maybe it's actually got some of them thinking.
So imagine this possible future, if you will.
It's June 11. The first day of E3. Microsoft goes up and announces the new Xbox. It's everything we expected it to be. They talk about better hardware, better graphics, better social aspects, better Live, better Kinect, better Windows 8 integration, and better pricing. They leave the stage confident that Sony is demolished.
Then Sony takes the stage. They unveil the PS4. It looks basically like what we expected it to look like. The hardware is about what we thought it would be. The gameplay demos are what we expected. Sony is about to be written off.
Then someone takes the stage to talk about the new PlayStation Cloud service. Everyone gets comfortable and zones out, idly tweeting about some other aspect of the coverage. Then the speaker drops a bombshell.
"On launch, we'll have all of the previous-generation games published by Sony Computer Entertainment available on PlayStation Cloud. This includes the Uncharted series, the Jak series, the Infamous series, the Ratchet and Clank series, the God of War series, the Sly Cooper series, the Spyro series, the Resistance series, just to name a handful."
The press gives a decent round of applause, then the speaker continues.
"These games, of course, will all be purchasable digitally through the PlayStation Store, but PlayStation Plus subscribers will be able to play all of these games through the PlayStation Cloud service for no additional cost."
And then everybody completely loses their shit. The PS4 has gone from just another PlayStation to the motherfucking monolith.
Sure, Sony doesn't have the publishing rights to that many games. I haven't stopped and counted, but it's probably not much more than around 100 or so titles. But most of those titles are big, important titles. Titles that cover every genre. Brands that Sony has tried very hard to embellish. Some that we just haven't seen in quite a long time.
Think about it. You buy the console and pay a $50 one-year subscription (maybe the price will go up, but even if it does, the point stands) and you can suddenly play every old Sony game ever made. No need to worry about storage space. You just flip through the catalog and start playing. Look me in the eye and tell me that you wouldn't get excited over that prospect. That you wouldn't want a PS4.
Even if the selection was just limited to older titles owned by Sony, that alone would basically shake up the console world in a way it hasn't been impacted since the introduction of the Nintendo 64.
Then all Sony would have to do is keep their word. The service wouldn't have to be perfect. We're talking about older games, here. Older games you're playing essentially for free. Sometimes Netflix is slow or glitchy, but we still love it. So long as the service worked pretty well most of the time, we'd all adore it.
Of course, they'd also offer new games through the new service, but you'd probably have to pay for them. Maybe not full price, but enough to offset the additional cost of processing the enhanced graphics in the cloud. And if it was good enough, we'd probably be OK with it. A lot of us would still generally buy physical copies of our games at full price on launch day, but those of us with less disposable income and less interest in keeping games for more than an initial play-through would probably be willing to buy the discounted cloud version.
With the financial success of the console and the influx of new subscriptions, Sony would have the money and confidence to bolster their infrastructure, acquire more publishing deals, take more risks, and really make the service the new industry standard.
Meanwhile, Microsoft would probably be scrambling to acquire OnLive and set up a similar service, though they probably would keep the pricing scheme rather than give away games to subscribers. Their service would fail. Nintendo would just keep doing what they do and enjoying their niche market.
Over time, cloud gaming would basically be the new normal. Games would no longer have to worry as much about selling X number of copies in order to succeed. They could spend less on spectacle and smaller games would be easier to try with minimal investment. Eventually Microsoft (or someone else) will catch up and offer a decent competing service.
Sony could literally change the face of the industry.
Too Bad Sony Probably Won't
That being said, the problem is that Sony probably doesn't want to go all in on something this potentially risky. They've never been much of a risk-taking company. They might make their games available for their new Cloud service, and they might make some of the games free for PlayStation Plus subscribers, but it would be similar to their current offerings. Certain games will be free for a brief period of time, others will be discounted, you can only access them so long as you maintain the subscription. Their selection would probably be small to start with and grow slowly over time, but it will never take the world by storm simply because the alternative of buying a full physical or digital copy has more to offer than the cloud version.
Meanwhile, the new Xbox will kick their asses because even if it will be technically inferior, it will almost definitely be backwards compatible, it will probably be cheaper, and it will probably have much better marketing.
Let me make this clear. I'm a pretty big Sony fan. I didn't used to be. I never owned a PS2, I didn't buy a PS3 until I had already bought a Wii and an Xbox 360. But the PS3 is what I consider to be the best console currently available. Sony has proven that when they're pointed in the right direction, they can really work some magic. But Sony has a bad habit of doing something just because it worked well in the past. "So what if the PS3 is expensive? The PS2 was more expensive than the GameCube but we won because we had better graphics and DVD support. The PS3 has the best graphics and supports the new Blu-Ray. The PSP has the best graphics and UMD support. Surely, they will be major successes." Almost all of their major failures can be attributed to them trying to repeat history. Sixaxis, Move, Home, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, and possibly also the PS4.
Just saying, they're not big on trying new things, and that's usually their biggest downfall. They'd rather react than set the terms themselves.
The PS4 will probably do just fine, but it will never dominate unless Sony stops fiddling with the bone and starts cracking skulls.
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Top 20 Favorite Comic Book Movies
I was struck with the sudden urge to list my favorite comic book movies to date. Not sure why, but I'm going to do it. Here are my rules:
1) It has to be a live action film. It can be heavily stylized and have all the computer graphics it wants, but at the end of the day, the film needs to have living actors being filmed with cameras, so no direct-to-DVD animated features, even if they're really good (and some of them totally are).
2) It has to be based on English-language comics. It can't just be about superheroes and it doesn't count if it just so happened to also have a comic tie-in. "The Hobbit" is not a comic book movie just because it was turned into a graphic novel before it turned into a movie. It has to be BASED on a comic book, even if it's only loosely connected.
3) It doesn't have to be about superheroes.
OK, let's do this.
Probably the most meta comic book movie ever, this movie is an adaptation of the autobiographical comic books of the late Harvey Pekar. It's weird because on the one hand, it could just be seen as a biopic of Pekar and not so much an adaptation of the comic, but the movie includes bits of interviews with the actual Harvey Pekar on the set of the film, little snippets of animations done in the style of the comics, and some parts that are straight-up adaptations of certain "American Splendor" comics.
Harvey Pekar is both inspirational and very sobering. On the one hand, he stands as an example of an ordinary American pursuing an artistic endeavor for no reason other than he wanted to and finding success in it. On the other hand, his artistic success never exactly changed his financial situation (he still worked at his day job until he eventually retired a few years before his recent death) so he was only able to find satisfaction in knowing that his writing meant something to both himself and the people around him.
This is easily the greatest comic book movie that isn't about a superhero. In fact, I had a hard time not putting this at the very top of the list. But the truth is, as excellent as this movie is, comic book movies are about more than just being good movies.
To me, a comic book movie is about fantasy and escapism and "American Splendor" is very much the opposite of that. While I cannot deny how excellent this film is, it simply isn't something that I can just pop in and watch at a moment's notice. If I was giving out an award or something, I'd pick "American Splendor", but we're talking about my favorites, and sadly, #7 is the best I can offer this excellent film.
As much as I love "Spider-Man 2", I can't deny that it's the cheesiest film in my Top 10 by far. If you think I'm being too harsh, just go back and watch the bank heist scene. Everything Aunt May does in that scene could have been lifted straight from a cartoon.
The thing about Sam Raimi is that he loves cheese. All of his movies have it and display it proudly. Sometimes it doesn't work out so well, like in "Spider-Man 3" where most audiences felt he went a little too overboard with the cheese and didn't balance it out. But in "Spider-Man 2", it works because we care about Peter as a character.
The first act of the film is probably the best part of the entire Spider-Man franchise for me. It's not like it's the first film to do the whole "hero is a failure at life" shtick, but there are two things that it does better than any other film like it.
1) It's funny. Sometimes it's difficult to watch a hapless loser fail again and again. Peter is given one last chance by Aasif Mandvi to deliver a pizza on time, he happens upon a crime along the way, he just barely misses the deadline, the customer refuses to pay for the pizza, Aasif fires him, his landlord hounds him for the rent, he forgets his own birthday, his best friend is upset with him for hiding the identity of Spider-Man, MJ is seeing someone, Aunt May is behind on her mortgage... The first act of the film is a never-ending chain of failure. But Sam Raimi manages to keep it fun by injecting humor into it. Like when Peter changes into Spider-Man during the pizza delivery, someone sees him walk into the alley and then deduces, "Spider-Man stole that guy's pizza!" Or how once Peter finally arrives at his destination, he emerges from a closet and spends nearly a full minute rearranging the mops that keep falling out. And the whole time, Peter maintains this almost superhuman naive optimism that you just can't believe exists in someone who has spent their whole lives in New York City. It makes you want to see him succeed.
2) This film makes his struggle the entire centerpiece of the film. Much like "Superman II", Spider-Man gets the rare opportunity to decide whether or not he even wants to be Spider-Man. More interestingly, however, the film has this transformation occur naturally. The more and more he regrets being Spider-Man, the more he starts to lose control over his powers. He can't climb on walls, he can't shoot his web, he can't see without glasses... he thinks something is wrong with him. And in any other superhero film, there probably would be something wrong. Like a supervillain poisoned him or some alien artifact is mutating him or something like that. But when he sees a doctor, all he says is that, "Maybe you aren't supposed to be Spider-Man climbing on those walls." It's a psychological block. In the first film, Peter accepted that "With great power comes great responsibility," but in this film, he asks if he can just deny the power itself, and therefore deny the responsibility that comes with it. That is such an interesting struggle that really drives the whole movie forward.
I love this movie and embrace its cheesiness, because at its core it has its priorities straight.
The first "X-Men" film was a big deal... at the time. In retrospect, it's not really all that good. It has some funny moments and the overall plot is solid enough, and most of the casting is spot-on, but I have a lot of problems with it. Primarily because that movie doesn't trust the audience enough to risk us sympathizing with the Brotherhood. On it's face, Magneto's plan to mutate the entire island of Manhattan sounds like a potentially interesting plan... but we find out that the process straight-up kills people after a few days. Because of this, we are essentially forced to take the X-Men's side in this conflict. Additionally, a lot of the characters are bland and one-note. Though I will say, one of my favorite lines from any movie ever is, "You know this plastic prison of theirs won't hold me forever."
"X2", on the other hand, is pretty much straight-up "Wrath of Khan", by which I mean that this film delivers on all of potential that we caught a glimpse of in the first film. Additionally, the film is literally like "Wrath of Khan" at the very end when a character sort-of-dies at the end to save the rest of the group and then gets to say the opening line from the first movie in voice-over just before the very end while showing their burial site. But I digress.
"X2" is the best X-Men film in the franchise thus far because Bryan Singer realized that the Brotherhood is meant to be sympathetic. By giving the X-Men and the Brotherhood a common threat to face together, they not only set up an excellent dynamic throughout the film, the encapsulated the entirety of the plight of an oppressed people.
Xavier's peaceful approach has been compromised. William Stryker has manipulated the President into allowing him to raid the X-Mansion, allowing him access to both Xavier and Cerebro, which he then attempts to use to wipe out all of mutant-kind. In order to stop him, the X-Men have to team up with the Brotherhood and go on the offensive against humans for the first time in the franchise.
Every step of the way, we go deeper into the whole civil rights aspect of the story, specifically through Bryan Singer's experience as a gay man. The scene at Bobby's house where he essentially "comes out" to his family makes this very apparent. The movie also gives us brief character moments with nuggets of poignancy. Like when Nightcrawler asks Mystique (who rarely ever says anything in these movies) why she doesn't use her power to look normal all the time, to which she responds, "Because we shouldn't have to." There's also this fantastic moment in Bobby's house where Pyro looks at a picture of Bobby's family and just the way it's framed tells you pretty much everything you need to know about him. That's the power of film, people.
If I have any problems with X2, it's pretty much the same problem I have with all of Singer's superhero films. The female characters get kind of screwed over. That's not to say they're weak characters or anything, just that for some reason, Bryan Singer's female characters always tend to be very soft-spoken, particularly when compared to their comic book counterparts. Take Rogue for example. In the 90's, Rogue was extroverted, much more super-powered, and a lot less vulnerable emotionally. In the films she's... Anna Paquin. That's not to say she does a bad job or that she's not interesting in her own right. There is one moment I like where Magneto makes fun of the white streak in her hair (that he caused) and she starts to remove her gloves before Bobby stops her. She's not a wimp or anything. It's just that she's so... quiet and unassuming. Pretty much all of the women are. It just bothers me, I guess.
Beyond that, the film is just excellent from beginning to end.
I honestly had a really hard time placing this one and I had an even harder time accepting that I placed it so high. I mean, "Captain America" has a lot of problems, particularly when it comes to the villain and the pacing of the third act.
But the reason I place it so high is because the things it does right are not only done incredibly well, but they are surprisingly rare for a comic book movie.
For example, the character of Captain America is probably the most straight-faced good-for-goodness-sake altruistic hero since Richard Donner's Superman. And this movie wears that proudly. Seriously, how many other movies in the past two decades have had a Lawful Good superhero that wasn't treated as corny or old-fashioned or anachronistic? It was refreshing to see a superhero who didn't have an asshole phase during their journey.
On top of that, the world-building in this movie is effortlessly great. It throws in elements from "Iron Man" and "Thor" without ever once stopping to explain itself. It was the first movie in the MCU to have the balls to just roll with it, and I love that.
And I can't lie, as much as Red Skull is just a one-dimensional villain, I think that kind of works for this movie. He offers a sort of simplicity in evil that is fairly common in period WWII films. Plus, I just really love Hugo Weaving, even if he is kind of phoning it in. I would probably be fine in Red Skull never came back (and apparently Hugo Weaving has no intent to ever reprise the role), but for this movie, I'm OK with him.
Beyond that, there's just so many little things I love about this movie. The little kid who assures Cap that he can swim. The old lady with the tommy gun. Peggy shooting a moving vehicle from a quarter mile away with the smallest gun in existence and hitting. Cap using guns and lethal force without ever grinding the movie to a halt to question the morality of it. Every single thing Tommy Lee Jones says.
I just love so much about this movie that I don't really care if it has flaws or that it doesn't really have some deep message like "X2". I never get tired of watching it.
This film single-handedly redefined the superhero film, or at least it defied what conventional Hollywood executives thought about them. "You can't make a successful comic book movie about a character no one has heard about." Then came "Iron Man". "You can't make a successful comic book movie without a big name actor with a proven box office draw." Then came "Iron Man". "You can't make a successful comic book movie that's faithful to its source material." Then came "Iron Man". "You can't set up a shared continuity between comic book movie franchises." Then came "Iron Man". "If you don't have an action beat every 10 minutes, the audience will get bored." "Super heroes have to be young and naive." "Super heroes have to have a secret identity."
I could go on.
"Iron Man" was a game changer and is pretty much the reason we got about 1/4 of the films on this list. It was able to give comic book fans their own sense of fun by giving them things to giggle about the whole way through while still keeping it accessible to a new audience.
Like "Captain America: The First Avenger", "Iron Man" has a pretty weak third act, again mostly due to the fairly boring villain. However, what makes "Iron Man" slightly superior in my opinion is that it also has an incredibly strong second act. Seeing Tony build and test his suit is engaging and I honestly can't really put my finger on why. There's really no conflict to speak of, no clear goal to achieve. It's just Tony in his workshop building toys. But there's just something about that that works. And then it all builds up to him deciding to use his new suit to do some good in the world, and I love how unconventional it is.
Typically, once a superhero accepts their duty, their first act is to beat up some thugs in an alley. It's iconic. But the thing is, that type of crime isn't really what someone like Tony Stark has to deal with on a daily basis. Tony has to see on the news how his weapons are tearing apart innocent lives thousands of miles away. So what does he do? He flies out to the Middle East and kicks some terrorist ass.
I can't really think of another film that does this, and in a post-9/11 world, I think this really resonated with a lot of Americans who wished that there was a way we could help stem the tide of chaos in the Middle East without going whole hog and occupying it.
Beyond that, the other thing that works incredibly well is the chemistry between all of the characters. They all play really well off one another and their ad-libbing always feels natural.
Do I really need to say anything at this point? While this movie is certainly not perfect, it is probably exactly what it needed to be. It delivers on its premise, it gives us solid character moments, it's paced well, and the final act is amazing. Heck, I can forgive the fact that pretty much every other MCU movie had a lousy third act by thinking of this movie as The Third Act. And still, because this movie doesn't throw out everything and the kitchen sink, there's enough left to build on for future installments without risking them being "disappointments". I can all but guarantee that "Avengers 2" will be far better than this film because Joss Whedon will be able to take the time to polish it and deliver on the setups that he wants to plant. "Avengers" was saved by Joss. It was likely shaping up to be a mess and Joss stepped in to make it work on really tight time restraints. While it certainly carries his signature style and care for attention to detail, no one could say it's his best work, and it didn't need to be. Joss was just trying to make it work, and the fact that he did is admirable.
While this film is not my all-time favorite, I very much suspect the follow-up will be.
I know this film is generally overrated and I myself have sung countless praises for it, but considering how hard I tend to come down on "The Dark Knight Rises", I think it's important to reiterate that this is my all-time favorite comic book movie.
It's not flawless. For example, why exactly does Batman take the blame for Harvey's actions when it would be just as easy to blame the Joker? Or yeah, Christian Bale's Batman Voice.
But this movie dares to do so many things with Batman that basically no one else has tried. I mean, name one other Batman story where Batman actively wanted to give up being Batman? Where he was actually working with an endgame in mind? Where he actually saw a path to making Gotham a better place? Where he was more interested in stopping ordinary criminals than stopping colorful psychopaths? Where he worked with the police and the DA's office rather than just do their jobs for them? Where the Joker was able to be dark and threatening in a very realistic way without sacrificing his psychotic sense of fun and humor?
This film is not just a great comic book film, it is an expertly crafted film in its own right. I've gone on about this before, but ultimately, that's why I feel this is the best film of the bunch. Because not only is it a great comic book adaptation, it's still an excellent film on its own.
1) It has to be a live action film. It can be heavily stylized and have all the computer graphics it wants, but at the end of the day, the film needs to have living actors being filmed with cameras, so no direct-to-DVD animated features, even if they're really good (and some of them totally are).
2) It has to be based on English-language comics. It can't just be about superheroes and it doesn't count if it just so happened to also have a comic tie-in. "The Hobbit" is not a comic book movie just because it was turned into a graphic novel before it turned into a movie. It has to be BASED on a comic book, even if it's only loosely connected.
3) It doesn't have to be about superheroes.
OK, let's do this.
#20 - "Wanted"
This movie is a guilty pleasure and I know it. The dialogue is laughably cliche, the story is ridiculous, and most of the people I know who have seen it don't like it.
But this is my list, so there.
In spite of its numerous flaws, there are two things I really like about this movie. First of all, its cool sense of style. Everything about this movie is over-the-top and never takes a moment to come back down. It's a movie about super-assassins who take orders from a magic loom. This loom is never explained. It just is. And I love that. This movie never takes itself seriously, but it doesn't stop to poke fun at itself either. I rarely like it when comic book movies take the subject matter lightly and then point it out. It's like a comedian laughing at their own jokes. "Wanted" is always ridiculous and does it all with a straight face.
The other thing I like about this movie is that it completely disregards the source material.
The comic book "Wanted", written by Mark Millar, is about super-villains who have long since taken over the world, made the world think superheroes never really existed, and have been ruling from the shadows ever since. While it's a cool premise and occasionally has interesting things to say, most of the book is just juvenile for the sake of being "edgy". Millar often has a problem with that, and "Wanted" is where it really comes out the most. It's just so damn hateful that it's really hard to enjoy. So frankly, I think the movie is an improvement, even if it never really scratches the surface of the questions of morality that the comic brings up, simply because the movie is a lot more fun than the comic. Simple as that.
#19 - "Hellboy"
I honestly feel bad putting this movie so low on the list. "Hellboy" is actually a really well-made movie, at least from a big-picture perspective. The world-building is great, the characters are great, the design of everything is great... It's really an enjoyable experience if you haven't seen it yet.
The problem is just that the movie (and to a greater extent, its sequel) never comes up with anything particularly clever for its characters to do. When I think of this movie, all I can remember are the characters. I have to ponder for about a moment before I can even remember what the central conflict of the movie is and how it plays out. That's a serious problem.
I love Guillermo Del Toro and I would be glad to see another "Hellboy" movie, but they really need to come up with better stories for these movies.
#18 - "Daredevil" (The Director's Cut)
PUT DOWN YOUR TORCHES AND PITCHFORKS. Yes, I know, "Daredevil" is generally derided as a really bad movie. But look, before you get upset with me, do me a favor and watch the Director's Cut of the film first.
My biggest problems with the theatrical cut was that there was way too much emphasis on the love story between Matt Murdock and Elektra, which is also SUPER-RUSHED. Their first date consists of standing on a roof in the rain and it immediately cuts to them having sex. And this is meant to be the thread that connects the narrative of the film. It also doesn't help that Jennifer Gardner is really awful in this, though the depths of her suckitude as Elektra had yet to be fully charted.
However, the Director's Cut both paces the (still pretty awful) romance in a more believable way and also removes the major emphasis it has in the theatrical cut. There's a lot more going on in this film and most of it is actually halfway decent.
But really, I know that's not why most people dislike this movie. They mostly just think Ben Affleck isn't good in the role.
You know what? I don't get that. I think he does just fine. I get that people had a major hate-on for him at the time because of "Pearl Harbor" and "Gigli" and his general overexposure in the media. But you know what? I think he's fine in this role. Not perfect, but certainly not as bad as everyone seems to think.
And on top of that, the late Michael Clarke Duncan is PHENOMENAL as Kingpin and Colin Farrell is pretty hilarious as Bullseye (even if he's not quite as great as the comic book version of the character).
I will say that Daredevil's costume is pretty hideous, but this was in the post-"X-Men" ALL COSTUMES MUST BE MADE OF LEATHER phase, so I can forgive it.
Also, yes, 90% of the soundtrack is Evanescence, but they were big at the time, so again, I can forgive it.
I really suggest people check out the Director's Cut with fresh eyes (no pun intended). It might be a lot better than you remember. No, it's not perfect, but it's memorable, enjoyable, and certainly worth watching.
#17 - "Blade II"
Hello again, Guillermo Del Toro.
You know, people keep talking about how we need a comic book movie with a person of color as the main character, rather than as just a sidekick. While I certainly agree with the sentiment and would love movies about Luke Cage or Black Panther, people always seem to forget about the "Blade" series. They also forget about the "Spawn" movie, but that movie is probably worth forgetting.
While the first "Blade" got too caught up in the romance plot and it's world-building to really focus on the story, and "Blade: Trinity" is just... bad, "Blade II" was a pretty excellent film, even if it didn't have much depth.
This movie is pretty much a never-ending action sequence, but that doesn't mean it's dumb. There's compelling conflict the whole way through. Blade is working alongside the vampires (which provides an excellent amount of tension for the film) in order to stop a new breed of vampire that poses a greater threat to both vampires and humans alike.
Like I said, this isn't a deep film. We have good character moments, but they really don't have anything big to say that provides something for the audience to relate to.
What you DO have are a lot of really excellent action scenes that you feel invested in the whole way through and a plot that's a bit predictable, but still provides enough twists and turns to keep it fresh.
#16 - "Kick-Ass"
Yet another movie based on a Mark Millar comic, and again, I like the movie better than the comic because of what it changes. Specifically, it got rid of a lot of the mean-spirited undertones from the comic and focused on having fun rather than pretending to be realistic.
I like the idea of people becoming superheroes in a world where superheroes only exist in comics. I like the idea that attempting to do this is treated as a bit psychotic.
People enjoy this movie for many different reasons, but what I like most about it is the subtext about certain comic book tropes, particularly in regards to the relationship between Big Daddy and Hit-Girl. In the comics, this relationship is a lot more fucked up and the underlying subtext says less about the comics themselves and more about the people who enjoy them that is frankly just kind of stupid. In the movie, however, they do a lot more to draw parallels between their relationship and the relationship of Batman and Robin.
Both the comic and the movie are very clever to turn the pre-teen sidekick trope on its head to show just how fucked up it is, but the movie follows through and makes Big Daddy's madness more about vengeance and believing that his daughter deserves vengeance as well, much in the same way Batman justifies his indoctrination of Robin.
While I like Kick-Ass as a character and I think his story is pretty interesting, Hit-Girl is easily the most enjoyable and darkly fascinating aspect of the film. Not only does Chloë Grace Moretz out-act pretty much everyone else in the movie, her unflinching dedication to the character is really amazing.
Many people think the existence of her character is reprehensible, and I get that, but we're SUPPOSED to see it as reprehensible. If Robin actually existed in the real world, Hit-Girl is pretty much the best-case scenario, and that's pretty terrifying. I don't know about you, but I'll never look at young sidekicks the same way again.
Many people think the existence of her character is reprehensible, and I get that, but we're SUPPOSED to see it as reprehensible. If Robin actually existed in the real world, Hit-Girl is pretty much the best-case scenario, and that's pretty terrifying. I don't know about you, but I'll never look at young sidekicks the same way again.
#15 - "300"
Overrated? Probably. Homophobic? Yeah, though I think it's partially ironic considering the massive amounts of beefcake strutting around the movie. Historically inaccurate? Obviously.
But holy fuck, this movie is so much fun.
This movie is on the list pretty much for the same reasons as "Wanted" and "Blade II". It has a great sense of style and the copious amounts of action are genuinely engrossing the whole way through. By keeping the numbers small, each Spartan death feels like a big deal. Each battle feels potentially pivotal, particularly as the enemies get bigger and crazier.
I know people have issues with Zack Snyder's tendency to do that whole "vaulting" thing where he speeds up, slows down, and then speeds up again. I personally love the technique, particularly for comic book adaptations. It gives action beats a sense of power and a particular visual impression left on the viewer without actually slowing down the pace of the scene. I'm not really sure why people hate it so much, to be honest. Maybe someone can explain it to me?
#14 - "Mystery Men"
This is one film that's not on a lot of people's radar. It came out a year before "X-Men" made comic book movies a big thing and thus did really poorly in the box office. It was based on an indie comic no one had heard of, let alone read, and it marketed the film towards kids in spite of its PG-13 rating. Additionally, critics were mixed about it and no one really ever heard of it again.
Personally, I absolutely loved this movie as a kid. Back when I first got a DVD player, my family only had a handful of DVDs, so I generally watched the same few movies over and over again. This was one of them. I watched it so many times, the DVD basically became unplayable.
There was just a lot that I really liked about this movie. With the exception of Spleen, whose superpower is farting (I've never been one for scatological humor), all the "superheroes" are great. The Shoveler is played completely straight-faced by William H. Macy, who literally says to his wife, "God gave me a gift. I shovel well. I shovel very well," without a hint of irony. The Blue Raja is played by the vocally talented Hank Azaria (mostly known for his work as pretty much every character on "The Simpsons") with the unusual ability to throw silverware with the accuracy of Bullseye, and also the ability to fake a British accent. The Sphinx, played by Wes Studi, one of the more prominent Native American actors in Hollywood, is one of the few characters with actual superpowers, but mostly just spouts out formulaic fortune-cookie wisdom, which never stops being funny. Janeane Garofalo pretty much steals the show as The Bowler, who telekinetically manipulates a bowling ball with the skull of her father in it. Kel Mitchell plays the Invisible Boy who claims that he can turn invisible, but only if nobody is watching... even himself. Even Ben Stiller, who I usually dislike, is actually kind of excellent in this film as Mr. Furious, who is pretty much the only character to have a substantial arc.
As for the antagonists, we also have the excellent Eddie Izzard as Tony P., leader of the Disco Boys, who admirably fakes a rather convincing American accent, Greg Kinnear as the corporate-sponsored hero, Captain Amazing, and last but certainly not least, we have Geoffrey Rush as the primary villain, Casanova Frankenstein. How Rush has managed not to play more supervillains, I'm not sure, but he really ought to.
While this movie is probably not the BEST film on this list (hence why it didn't break the Top 10), I certainly think it's the funniest. That being said, despite its gigantic cast, this movie actually manages to balance out the third act rather nicely. Each character gets a moment to shine in the final battle and while it's certainly not "Avengers" material, this movie managed to establish seven unique characters AND a plot AND a decent final climax without needing a bunch of lead-up movies. Pretty impressive, if you asked me.
#13 - "Men in Black"
Not a lot of people realize this film is based on a comic book, but it kind of is. Though the comics were more serious, the titular Men in Black policed the paranormal as well as the extraterrestrial, and Jay was white instead of black, the overall premise was mostly in tact. I personally think there could be a serious interpretation of the source material at some point in the future, but as a comedy, this film works really well.
The sequels not so much, but this film has stood the test of time and really holds up. It's funny, interesting, at times a bit profound, and the dynamic between Jones and Smith is pretty much perfect.
I think my favorite thing about this movie is Agent Jay. The test he takes toward the end of the first act works brilliantly to both help us understand the character as well as making us like him. His ability to think outside the box and accept things beyond the obvious make him stand out both to the organization and to the audience. The part where he explains his hesitation during the shooting range scene is probably one of my favorite monologues in all of cinema.
I won't go on and on about this since everyone already knows this movie is great, but it definitely deserves its praise.
#12 - "Thor"
Much like "Mystery Men", my love of "Thor" is mostly centered around the actors. While the action beats are often forgettable, the lighting and camera work are often amateurish, and the overall plot is more than a little rushed, Kenneth Branagh put a tremendous amount of work into getting great performances out of all of the actors, which (for me) makes up for most of the shortcomings.
No, it's not terribly believable that Thor learns humility and falls in love in about two or three days, but I buy it because Chris Hemsworth sells it. Sure, he's overreacting, but I believe it. I mean, he has a really rough couple of days. He gets banished, his hammer basically tells him he's not worthy, he believes his dad is dead and that it's his fault, and Hemsworth really works with it. It's rushed, but it's still a character progression that makes sense to me.
Tom Hiddleston's Loki ALMOST doesn't work, but in that last moment where he reveals his TRUE plan, it all makes sense emotionally. He plays with the fact that we expect a face-heel turn and twists it to his benefit. I think it's why he's generally considered the best supervillain from Phase One of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (other than the fact that he's the only one they didn't kill off). Then there's Anthony Hopkins as Odin, who manages to be a total asshole but still command an immense amount of respect. Yes, he's a huge dick to Thor and Loki, but unlike how he is often portrayed in the comics, Hopkins gives the character enough emotional weight to make us understand why he would do these things, even if they're objectively bad decisions.
I pretty much love everyone in this cast, even Natalie Portman's re-imagined version of Jane Foster, which some people seem to dislike. Despite being relegated to love interest, she still has her own motivations and passions about her work that are initially far more powerful than her attraction to Thor. I mean, she runs the guy over with her car and is more interested in the markings on the ground than his well-being. I love that.
#11 - "Watchmen"
To most comic book fans, this movie garners two major points of criticism. That it is too slavishly devoted to the source material and that it changed the ending. The funny thing is that most critics bring up BOTH of these points simultaneously without a hint of cognitive dissonance. That you can say that this movie changed too much and also not enough is evidence for just how difficult this adaptation was.
This movie's production history was REALLY troubled. They tried modernizing it, simplifying it, softening it, and along the way, it fell apart again and again.
Then Zack Snyder stepped in and decided to be almost completely faithful to the original story, both in story and visuals. Since it's a long graphic novel, some story aspects required simplification, but for the most part, he decided that the best way to adapt the story was to just film the comic book as it was.
While the finished product may not be very well-paced as a result, I think that the negative criticism this movie gets from comic book fans has a lot to do with how hyped we got from the trailer.
The trailer for this movie, attached to "The Dark Knight", was pretty much perfect. Everything looked right, and the one line we got was delivered exactly as we all hoped it would be.
The thing is, "Watchmen" is paraded as the quintessential comic book. The "Citizen Kane" of comics. And this was comic out in the wake of "Iron Man" and "The Dark Knight". We were really optimistic and hopeful and there was kind of this unspoken assumption that a faithful adaptation of the greatest comic book ever would result in the greatest comic book movie ever.
Obviously, given that I ranked this movie at #11, this didn't turn out to be the case.
But that doesn't make this a bad movie! On the contrary, I love this movie. I think it definitely preserves everything essential about the graphic novel and the visual flair is pretty much perfect.
I really think this was close to the best "Watchmen" film we could have gotten. I personally think they should have cast older women for both Silk Spectre and Silk Spectre II, or at the very least, better actresses, but beyond that, I'm very much happy with the film.
I think that the problem is that the comic itself is a bit overrated. It's great, don't get me wrong, but I think it's mostly considered "the greatest comic" by people who generally aren't big comic book fans. "Watchmen" serves as a great tear-down of the status of comic books at the time it was made, but comic books have been dealing with serious stuff for decades now. "Watchmen" only appears unique to people who haven't actually been reading comic books for the past few years.
That's not to say that it's not a masterpiece, but I wouldn't really call it my favorite comic, nor would I call it the best comic of all time.
I think we all hoped that the movie would be way bigger than it was and that the mainstream audiences would finally "get it" the way we hoped they would. But really, that wasn't fair of us.
We got a movie that was almost an entirely faithful adaptation of the story, something we had been clamoring for for years, and when it wasn't as amazing as we had hoped, we assumed that it was just because there was something wrong with the adaptation. Sorry guys, but this movie is great. The problem, if any exists, is just that the source material isn't as earth-shatteringly good as we seem to think it is.
#10 - "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"
I wish this film hadn't started production until after the comic book had ended. The changes to the ending really weaken the overall film by making it about Scott overcoming his lack of self-respect rather than overcoming his immaturity, selfishness, and inability to confront his own shortcomings. It also does a disservice to Ramona and Knives by making the narrative less about them and more about how Scott treats them, which isn't THAT bad, but it also makes Ramona seem a lot more reprehensible and a lot less likable.
That being said, I love this movie. Not only is it hilarious, well-acted, sharply-directed, and really clever, but it really resonates with the post-Boomer generation, which turns everything into a conflict in order to find a way to deal with it.
This movie also popularized the term "hipster" as a pejorative term, mostly by the film's critics. Since then, "hipster" has become the new "emo kid" in terms of being the whipping boy of popular culture. It's kind of disheartening to me that older audiences disregarded this movie because they couldn't see past the unique visual style and assumed that that was all there was to it, but I believe this film will be fondly remembered once people get over their irrational hatred of Michael Cera.
If you haven't seen it yet, give it a watch. It may not have a totally coherent ending, but it's still a lot of fun and really in a class of its own.
#9 - "Sin City"
I have grown to really dislike Frank Miller in recent years, and part of the problem (other than his general racism and homophobia) is that he never really left "Sin City". Everything he's written since then has been done in a gritty film noir style, even when it REALLY doesn't fit the tone.
That being said, most of "Sin City" is actually worth reading, and this film was pretty much the first to just take the comic book source material and film it as-is. Filmed almost entirely on blue and green screen, Robert Rodriguez was able to infuse the unique sense of style that the comic books had into the film without really having to change much of anything.
The movie has some problems. Since it tells a bunch of shorter stories, it runs into pacing problems as each story has its own arc. By the time you return to Harigan's story, you're kind of worn out and checking your watch.
Also (and this is a problem in the comics too) almost all of the protagonists are the same. Straight white male, getting older, back against the wall, fighting for love, gravely voice, big gun, big fists, you get the picture. They still manage to be interesting and compelling characters, but there's not a lot of range here. If you don't like the first story, you won't like the other stories.
But for a movie with almost no actual set, this film has atmosphere like you wouldn't believe. Some of these locations feel more real than some movies filmed on location. That's not to say that they look real. Like everything, they're highly stylized. But everything feels real if that makes any sense.
I've been wanting a sequel to this since it came out, but now that it's actually about to happen, I'm actually kind of dreading it. Not just because two of the cast members have since died, but also because I really don't know if another movie can really say anything that the first movie hasn't already said. I guess we'll find out.
#8 - "V for Vendetta"
I've mentioned a number of times how much I love the Wachowskis. While they didn't direct "V for Vendetta", their involvement as producers was definitely more than just superficial. While I think this film lacks their unique sense of visual style, the underlying themes are very familiar.
Much like the reaction to "Watchmen", comic fans have disliked this film for the changes it makes to the source material. In this case, however, I can understand their issues.
This film DOES take out quite a bit of the political undercurrent of the comics and alters them to make them applicable more to the post-9/11 world rather than just about the U.K. under Thatcher. I can see why this bothers some people, but frankly, I have a much easier time relating to the current political climate rather than the political climate of a different nation in a different time.
It may seem a bit exploitative of English work, but the story isn't really about America, and in a way, that's kind of what I like about it. While the issues raised are politically American, they are still applicable to the entire world, and by having this take place in a foreign culture, it gives the viewers a certain amount of distance to really think about the larger implications of these issues.
Another big change is that the comics never really paint V as a hero in the strictest sense. While he still does many questionable things in the film, the film ultimately makes it clear that we're supposed to be on his side for the most part. The comics aren't quite so clear on the issue. V brings about anarchy in order to cleanse the world and allow something new to rise up from the ashes, and we're never really sure if that's really a good thing. The fact that he's motivated by vengeance is also troubling since he may not actually have the right amount of clarity.
Still, unlike "Watchmen", I don't think complete moral ambiguity serves this story very well, or at least, it wouldn't have worked for the film.
The biggest (though probably most subtle) change the film makes is that while anarchy is a part of V's plan, it is not really the stated goal of his plan. He uses anarchy, not as a method of destruction, but as a method of unification. Empowering the individual and the collective in order to undermine the government they had become dependent on. Alan Moore was more about reducing everything to zero and asking the reader to fill in the blanks.
I personally think that the reason the film is so different from the comics is because Moore essentially asked his audience to make up their own minds. The film is essentially the Wachowskis and James McTeigue demonstrating their own personal interpretation of the story.
Unless Moore made the film himself, it would be impossible for any other filmmaker not to put their own feelings into the adaptation, so I'm actually glad that they decided to embrace it rather than try to remain 100% faithful.
The film itself, while a bit ham-handed at times, is really solid and engrossing. I enjoy watching it every year on November 5, and I haven't grown tired of it yet.
#7 - "American Splendor"
Probably the most meta comic book movie ever, this movie is an adaptation of the autobiographical comic books of the late Harvey Pekar. It's weird because on the one hand, it could just be seen as a biopic of Pekar and not so much an adaptation of the comic, but the movie includes bits of interviews with the actual Harvey Pekar on the set of the film, little snippets of animations done in the style of the comics, and some parts that are straight-up adaptations of certain "American Splendor" comics.
Harvey Pekar is both inspirational and very sobering. On the one hand, he stands as an example of an ordinary American pursuing an artistic endeavor for no reason other than he wanted to and finding success in it. On the other hand, his artistic success never exactly changed his financial situation (he still worked at his day job until he eventually retired a few years before his recent death) so he was only able to find satisfaction in knowing that his writing meant something to both himself and the people around him.
This is easily the greatest comic book movie that isn't about a superhero. In fact, I had a hard time not putting this at the very top of the list. But the truth is, as excellent as this movie is, comic book movies are about more than just being good movies.
To me, a comic book movie is about fantasy and escapism and "American Splendor" is very much the opposite of that. While I cannot deny how excellent this film is, it simply isn't something that I can just pop in and watch at a moment's notice. If I was giving out an award or something, I'd pick "American Splendor", but we're talking about my favorites, and sadly, #7 is the best I can offer this excellent film.
#6 - "Spider-Man 2"
As much as I love "Spider-Man 2", I can't deny that it's the cheesiest film in my Top 10 by far. If you think I'm being too harsh, just go back and watch the bank heist scene. Everything Aunt May does in that scene could have been lifted straight from a cartoon.
The thing about Sam Raimi is that he loves cheese. All of his movies have it and display it proudly. Sometimes it doesn't work out so well, like in "Spider-Man 3" where most audiences felt he went a little too overboard with the cheese and didn't balance it out. But in "Spider-Man 2", it works because we care about Peter as a character.
The first act of the film is probably the best part of the entire Spider-Man franchise for me. It's not like it's the first film to do the whole "hero is a failure at life" shtick, but there are two things that it does better than any other film like it.
1) It's funny. Sometimes it's difficult to watch a hapless loser fail again and again. Peter is given one last chance by Aasif Mandvi to deliver a pizza on time, he happens upon a crime along the way, he just barely misses the deadline, the customer refuses to pay for the pizza, Aasif fires him, his landlord hounds him for the rent, he forgets his own birthday, his best friend is upset with him for hiding the identity of Spider-Man, MJ is seeing someone, Aunt May is behind on her mortgage... The first act of the film is a never-ending chain of failure. But Sam Raimi manages to keep it fun by injecting humor into it. Like when Peter changes into Spider-Man during the pizza delivery, someone sees him walk into the alley and then deduces, "Spider-Man stole that guy's pizza!" Or how once Peter finally arrives at his destination, he emerges from a closet and spends nearly a full minute rearranging the mops that keep falling out. And the whole time, Peter maintains this almost superhuman naive optimism that you just can't believe exists in someone who has spent their whole lives in New York City. It makes you want to see him succeed.
2) This film makes his struggle the entire centerpiece of the film. Much like "Superman II", Spider-Man gets the rare opportunity to decide whether or not he even wants to be Spider-Man. More interestingly, however, the film has this transformation occur naturally. The more and more he regrets being Spider-Man, the more he starts to lose control over his powers. He can't climb on walls, he can't shoot his web, he can't see without glasses... he thinks something is wrong with him. And in any other superhero film, there probably would be something wrong. Like a supervillain poisoned him or some alien artifact is mutating him or something like that. But when he sees a doctor, all he says is that, "Maybe you aren't supposed to be Spider-Man climbing on those walls." It's a psychological block. In the first film, Peter accepted that "With great power comes great responsibility," but in this film, he asks if he can just deny the power itself, and therefore deny the responsibility that comes with it. That is such an interesting struggle that really drives the whole movie forward.
I love this movie and embrace its cheesiness, because at its core it has its priorities straight.
#5 - "X2: X-Men United"
The first "X-Men" film was a big deal... at the time. In retrospect, it's not really all that good. It has some funny moments and the overall plot is solid enough, and most of the casting is spot-on, but I have a lot of problems with it. Primarily because that movie doesn't trust the audience enough to risk us sympathizing with the Brotherhood. On it's face, Magneto's plan to mutate the entire island of Manhattan sounds like a potentially interesting plan... but we find out that the process straight-up kills people after a few days. Because of this, we are essentially forced to take the X-Men's side in this conflict. Additionally, a lot of the characters are bland and one-note. Though I will say, one of my favorite lines from any movie ever is, "You know this plastic prison of theirs won't hold me forever."
"X2", on the other hand, is pretty much straight-up "Wrath of Khan", by which I mean that this film delivers on all of potential that we caught a glimpse of in the first film. Additionally, the film is literally like "Wrath of Khan" at the very end when a character sort-of-dies at the end to save the rest of the group and then gets to say the opening line from the first movie in voice-over just before the very end while showing their burial site. But I digress.
"X2" is the best X-Men film in the franchise thus far because Bryan Singer realized that the Brotherhood is meant to be sympathetic. By giving the X-Men and the Brotherhood a common threat to face together, they not only set up an excellent dynamic throughout the film, the encapsulated the entirety of the plight of an oppressed people.
Xavier's peaceful approach has been compromised. William Stryker has manipulated the President into allowing him to raid the X-Mansion, allowing him access to both Xavier and Cerebro, which he then attempts to use to wipe out all of mutant-kind. In order to stop him, the X-Men have to team up with the Brotherhood and go on the offensive against humans for the first time in the franchise.
Every step of the way, we go deeper into the whole civil rights aspect of the story, specifically through Bryan Singer's experience as a gay man. The scene at Bobby's house where he essentially "comes out" to his family makes this very apparent. The movie also gives us brief character moments with nuggets of poignancy. Like when Nightcrawler asks Mystique (who rarely ever says anything in these movies) why she doesn't use her power to look normal all the time, to which she responds, "Because we shouldn't have to." There's also this fantastic moment in Bobby's house where Pyro looks at a picture of Bobby's family and just the way it's framed tells you pretty much everything you need to know about him. That's the power of film, people.
If I have any problems with X2, it's pretty much the same problem I have with all of Singer's superhero films. The female characters get kind of screwed over. That's not to say they're weak characters or anything, just that for some reason, Bryan Singer's female characters always tend to be very soft-spoken, particularly when compared to their comic book counterparts. Take Rogue for example. In the 90's, Rogue was extroverted, much more super-powered, and a lot less vulnerable emotionally. In the films she's... Anna Paquin. That's not to say she does a bad job or that she's not interesting in her own right. There is one moment I like where Magneto makes fun of the white streak in her hair (that he caused) and she starts to remove her gloves before Bobby stops her. She's not a wimp or anything. It's just that she's so... quiet and unassuming. Pretty much all of the women are. It just bothers me, I guess.
Beyond that, the film is just excellent from beginning to end.
#4 - "Captain America: The First Avenger"
I honestly had a really hard time placing this one and I had an even harder time accepting that I placed it so high. I mean, "Captain America" has a lot of problems, particularly when it comes to the villain and the pacing of the third act.
But the reason I place it so high is because the things it does right are not only done incredibly well, but they are surprisingly rare for a comic book movie.
For example, the character of Captain America is probably the most straight-faced good-for-goodness-sake altruistic hero since Richard Donner's Superman. And this movie wears that proudly. Seriously, how many other movies in the past two decades have had a Lawful Good superhero that wasn't treated as corny or old-fashioned or anachronistic? It was refreshing to see a superhero who didn't have an asshole phase during their journey.
On top of that, the world-building in this movie is effortlessly great. It throws in elements from "Iron Man" and "Thor" without ever once stopping to explain itself. It was the first movie in the MCU to have the balls to just roll with it, and I love that.
And I can't lie, as much as Red Skull is just a one-dimensional villain, I think that kind of works for this movie. He offers a sort of simplicity in evil that is fairly common in period WWII films. Plus, I just really love Hugo Weaving, even if he is kind of phoning it in. I would probably be fine in Red Skull never came back (and apparently Hugo Weaving has no intent to ever reprise the role), but for this movie, I'm OK with him.
Beyond that, there's just so many little things I love about this movie. The little kid who assures Cap that he can swim. The old lady with the tommy gun. Peggy shooting a moving vehicle from a quarter mile away with the smallest gun in existence and hitting. Cap using guns and lethal force without ever grinding the movie to a halt to question the morality of it. Every single thing Tommy Lee Jones says.
I just love so much about this movie that I don't really care if it has flaws or that it doesn't really have some deep message like "X2". I never get tired of watching it.
#3 - "Iron Man"
This film single-handedly redefined the superhero film, or at least it defied what conventional Hollywood executives thought about them. "You can't make a successful comic book movie about a character no one has heard about." Then came "Iron Man". "You can't make a successful comic book movie without a big name actor with a proven box office draw." Then came "Iron Man". "You can't make a successful comic book movie that's faithful to its source material." Then came "Iron Man". "You can't set up a shared continuity between comic book movie franchises." Then came "Iron Man". "If you don't have an action beat every 10 minutes, the audience will get bored." "Super heroes have to be young and naive." "Super heroes have to have a secret identity."
I could go on.
"Iron Man" was a game changer and is pretty much the reason we got about 1/4 of the films on this list. It was able to give comic book fans their own sense of fun by giving them things to giggle about the whole way through while still keeping it accessible to a new audience.
Like "Captain America: The First Avenger", "Iron Man" has a pretty weak third act, again mostly due to the fairly boring villain. However, what makes "Iron Man" slightly superior in my opinion is that it also has an incredibly strong second act. Seeing Tony build and test his suit is engaging and I honestly can't really put my finger on why. There's really no conflict to speak of, no clear goal to achieve. It's just Tony in his workshop building toys. But there's just something about that that works. And then it all builds up to him deciding to use his new suit to do some good in the world, and I love how unconventional it is.
Typically, once a superhero accepts their duty, their first act is to beat up some thugs in an alley. It's iconic. But the thing is, that type of crime isn't really what someone like Tony Stark has to deal with on a daily basis. Tony has to see on the news how his weapons are tearing apart innocent lives thousands of miles away. So what does he do? He flies out to the Middle East and kicks some terrorist ass.
I can't really think of another film that does this, and in a post-9/11 world, I think this really resonated with a lot of Americans who wished that there was a way we could help stem the tide of chaos in the Middle East without going whole hog and occupying it.
Beyond that, the other thing that works incredibly well is the chemistry between all of the characters. They all play really well off one another and their ad-libbing always feels natural.
#2 - "The Avengers"
Do I really need to say anything at this point? While this movie is certainly not perfect, it is probably exactly what it needed to be. It delivers on its premise, it gives us solid character moments, it's paced well, and the final act is amazing. Heck, I can forgive the fact that pretty much every other MCU movie had a lousy third act by thinking of this movie as The Third Act. And still, because this movie doesn't throw out everything and the kitchen sink, there's enough left to build on for future installments without risking them being "disappointments". I can all but guarantee that "Avengers 2" will be far better than this film because Joss Whedon will be able to take the time to polish it and deliver on the setups that he wants to plant. "Avengers" was saved by Joss. It was likely shaping up to be a mess and Joss stepped in to make it work on really tight time restraints. While it certainly carries his signature style and care for attention to detail, no one could say it's his best work, and it didn't need to be. Joss was just trying to make it work, and the fact that he did is admirable.
While this film is not my all-time favorite, I very much suspect the follow-up will be.
#1 - "The Dark Knight"
I know this film is generally overrated and I myself have sung countless praises for it, but considering how hard I tend to come down on "The Dark Knight Rises", I think it's important to reiterate that this is my all-time favorite comic book movie.
It's not flawless. For example, why exactly does Batman take the blame for Harvey's actions when it would be just as easy to blame the Joker? Or yeah, Christian Bale's Batman Voice.
But this movie dares to do so many things with Batman that basically no one else has tried. I mean, name one other Batman story where Batman actively wanted to give up being Batman? Where he was actually working with an endgame in mind? Where he actually saw a path to making Gotham a better place? Where he was more interested in stopping ordinary criminals than stopping colorful psychopaths? Where he worked with the police and the DA's office rather than just do their jobs for them? Where the Joker was able to be dark and threatening in a very realistic way without sacrificing his psychotic sense of fun and humor?
This film is not just a great comic book film, it is an expertly crafted film in its own right. I've gone on about this before, but ultimately, that's why I feel this is the best film of the bunch. Because not only is it a great comic book adaptation, it's still an excellent film on its own.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)