Avenging Comic Book Movies

Hollywood started as simple theft from plays, novels and short stories.  Copyright laws have changed considerably giving some protection to authors.  Nosferatu, a classic, was made because the Stoker family wouldn’t give the rights for the film.  So they just changed the name and made it anyway.  Copyright laws are also the happy birthday song is evil.  I say this because if you into the song on television you have to pay.  Not so much as say the Rolling Stones but you have to pay for the song you hear at the very least once every year of your life.  It’s also the reason chain restaurants make up their own goofy as shit version with off kilter clapping that makes you want to punch them all as they crowd lackluster around your melting ice cream and sparkly candle trying desperately not to think about their failures as human beings.  You might think this harsh condemnation but I’ve worked in the food industry, it’s not harsh enough; all those people are broken and many I consider friends.

Lately we’ve had a very strong comic book presence in film.  I am in no way opposed to this.  The last two Batman films have been amazing after the clusterfuck that was the Clooney Batman.  I’ll never forget and I’ll never forgive you George.  In my dreams Clooney is beaten senseless by Michael Keaton and Christian Bale.  He is left almost lifeless and bereft of will.  He whispers his apologies and pledges to donate half his fortune to funding a camp for younglings to train them as real life batmen.  But ignore such fantasy.  Except for the camp of future batmen because that’s fucking awesome and someone should do that.  Not one of those too eccentric rich guys because we don’t want car loads of impressionable young men alone with those people.

This leads me to The Avengers the epoch of Marvel’s movie series.  Ignoring the X-Men (film rights owned by Fox) and their five films as well as Spiderman (film rights owned by Sony) and his three, but son to be four, films we are left with:

1. Iron Man
2. Iron Man 2
3. The Hulk (Edward Norton vehicle not the Eric Bana/Ang Lee disaster)
4. Captain America
5. Thor
6. The Avengers

That’s a couple of movies.  There are sequel plans for Iron Man, Cap, Thor and the Avengers group as a whole.  Hank Pym and Wasp wait anxiously off frame hoping to be remembered or even mentioned.  Outside of the Batman revamp this is about as good a series of unfucked with comic books as we are likely to get.  Superman  is always going to be bad in film.  He’s just boring.  Sorry.  He’s invulnerable for crying out loud.  They killed him off in the nineties because the nineties hates everything especially placing things like an ‘e’ in front of XTREME.

Dear 90’s,

Fuck you.

Sincerely,

The letter E 

And that ended in disappointment.  Banner sales for a flagging series for a short period of time but crap nonetheless.  No one wants to see invulnerable.  It’s like playing with the kid who chooses like seventeen superpowers or all powers combined or his only weakness if getting stronger or some bullshit like that.  Fuck you Kyle and you’re immature bullshit.  I’m never playing with you again.

But what about the X-Men you say, or Spiderman?  Well the first two x-Men were fine.  Sadly they set up a promise Hollywood wasn’t ready to deliver on.  Those of you familiar with the dark phoenix knows the third x-men was probably the worst possible rehashing of crappy storylines.  It should have been more like the X-men were Japanese scientist and the Phoenix was Godzilla.  They get crushed.  Until they figure something out at the end or Jean’s humanity someone wins over in the end so they can kill her.  Not fall on the crutch of Sir Ian McKellan being awesome and able to save a shitty film.  Then there was the Wolverine movie.  I give them points from trying to build plot.  But that gets tossed out the door by convoluted plotlines, poor character decisions, as  well as their handling of two fan favorites Gambit and Deadpool.  The plot had the makings of being moderately acceptable.  But they achieved the feat of being complicated but completely stupid.  Poor character decisions come from a character making a necessary decision for the plot to progress but not correct in terms of the character we’ve seen developed.  If I create class bully as a character without signs of remorse he cannot simple turn over a new leaf once embarrassed once by the protagonist.  No after being embarrassed he tries to kick the shit out of him even harder. Why?  Because that’s how bullies fucking act.  It’s their nature.  Why did Gambit suck?  We spent three films waiting for him and he barely does anything.  Plus, worst of all, he’s kind of boring.  The man kicks boring in the face.  Why did deadpool suck?  Because they cast the right person for it and then ruined the fucking character, took away his ability to speak at one point and gave him fucking laser eyes.   He was only fun for a minutes and then basically of screen pasr the first ten minutes. Fuck you movie studios.  Why must you shit on the things I love?  On that note, special shout out to George ‘I hate my fans’ Lucas.  Evidence that it is never a good idea for one and only one creative input to have total reign with no censure or confines placed on them.  For Spiderman see emo Toby Maguire and the ruining of Venom.  Much smaller and staid fuck you that studio.

Quick note on the Hulk’s tumultuous film past.  Ang Lee’s movie was awful because they made the decision of removing, by choice, emotion from the lead character.  We as an audience want to relate to someone.  We’ve related to killers, assholes, vagabonds and weirdos but it’s hard to relate to someone who barely shows emotion.  Yes, I understand the point  But even as the Hulk he seemed quite.  He needs to snarl and snap.  Be violent.  The character needs to struggle to contain.  Not be so copped up he is unable to smile or frown.  There is tension to be had here.  The Edward Norton movie wasn’t that bad.  Certainly nothing special but not a crime against film or comic books.  I’m sad there was issues between him and the film studio but I do think Mark Ruffalo was better in the role.

The Avengers had a strong cast of relatable complicated characters with back stories, flaws and personality quirks.  It had snappy dialogue, and not just from the always witty Robert Downey Jr., and good pacing.  So much depends on things like pacing, development of tensions and correct easing of tension.  Too many movies deflate tension too quickly or too soon or don’t develop tension at the right moments.  Building proper tension is akin to boiling water.  You can’t do it in seconds.  You can create some jumps with cheap tactics like loud dramatic sounds cues from out of nowhere(usually called ‘the bus’ from a horror films use of a loud bus noise to cause the audience to jump).

There were one or two not so fantastic parts.  (spoilers).  As per usual the Hulk’s condition is complicated.  His grappling with his inner beast is centric to his story and his reason for being.  He is our reflection of our unexpressed rage personified.  We all wish sometimes to be able to blindly let loose pent up emotion.  But Banner must deal with keeping it in check for fear or constant eruption and endangerment of others.  In various points on the comic he is control to varying amounts.  The ‘heroes’ sent him off planet at one point as he was too dangerous to stay on earth.  The original reason for the Avengers to unite was to defeat the Hulk.  In the movie Banner is only partially in control.  He goes into Hulk rage twice.  Once with no control almost smashing up Black Widow.  Then the second time revealing that he was always angry simple changes at will and seems able to have some manner of control over himself but attacking the bad guy only (save for a ‘personal’ moment with Thor).  At what point was there a difference.  Yes it was necessary to have the Hulk be good guy at the end but how is there logic for the change?

Another problem is why did Loki piss off each Avenger individually.  Without doing so SHIELD would be unable to repell his assault.  But by angering each member of the team he effectively united them against him.  His psychological win in the second act only served to create a wedge for a short time.  One might argue that Loki wanted to win by going through these men and women instead of simply just subterfuge alone.  But who knows, he was adopted anyway (end spoilers)

But hopefully with its enormous box office wins Hollywood will pay attention to the kind of geek friendly movies they should be making.  You can make a smart action explosion special effect extravaganza.  The good films that should have been made instead of the crappy bastardized version Hollywood hacks churn out due to boring test groups may very well be avenged.

Ben