Meanwhile…

Managed to sneak out and see Captain America: The First Avenger this weekend. Loved it. They nailed the characters, the mood, everything. The performances were spot on. The action is fun. And if you’ve been paying attention to the Iron Man and Thor movies, there are lots of little tie-ins to neatly place these movies all in the same universe.

Not that it’s perfect. It could have used another trip through the editing room – some of the action scenes could have been trimmed, and the USO tour was way too long. I would have liked more Bucky, and a more epic…destiny for him.

I also would have liked them to push the Nazi superscience a little more – a huge robot for Steve to bring down would have been a blast, and would have probably helped a general audience believe that this is a man who can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with guys like Iron Man and Thor. I think when the Avengers movie comes out, Cap is going to have to prove himself in a way he never had to in the comics.

But, overall, I really enjoyed the flick. Looking forward to seeing it at least once or twice more.

I was going to write an elaborate, scene-by-scene savaging of this weekend’s Green Lantern, but then the A/C on our house died late Saturday. This unit is, I’m guessing, as old as the house, which by coincidence makes it about as old as I am.

Some of us in the business might call that foreshadowing.

But, yeah. Green Lantern. Yeesh. The Tomatometer has it at 26%, which if you ask me is being generous. The editing is choppy, the characterization off mark, and the script is a laundry list of amateur screenwriting mistakes that would make a first year semester day RTVF major blush. A full third of the movie and several of the major characters should have been cut entirely.

And the villain looks like big pile of poop.

When I get a chance I may pull up the script online somewhere and go through it in more detail, but for now, suffice to say it should be avoided if you at all value your opinion of Hal Jordan.

It was a delight to see the alien Green Lanterns – Kilowog, Tomar Re, and a bunch of the obscure ones (they even had this guy and her). And Mark Strong was great as the completely underused Sinestro.

Otherwise, though, this thing pretty much stunk on every level. I dearly wanted it to be good, but they just didn’t pull this one off.

Possibly the worst part of this failure is that, if the movie isn’t financially successful – I haven’t looked at the numbers yet – the studio will probably come to the wrong conclusion as to why it failed. As bad as it is, the movie is actually quite brave in not pulling its punches and making the story as cosmic and out there as it does. Most of the comic book movies hold back a little – bringing the costumes down to earth, cutting out the more bizarre aspects, etc. Green Lantern really didn’t do that, which is admirable. And that’s far from why the movie is bad. I just hope its failure doesn’t hinder future DC properties.

Managed to get out and see X-Men: First Class this weekend, the third in the X-Men franchise and a prequel to the original.

It’s pretty good. It’s a giant Bond movie – like an original Sean Connery jetpacks and mad scientists trying to blow up the moon ’60s Bond – but with super powers.

There are about a million things I could nitpick, little flaws throughout that could have been fixed with another draft or two of the script. I’m gonna pick on the most glaring weakness, though, which was Emma Frost. January Jones looked the part, but, aside from her lackluster acting skills, the movie really didn’t give her anything to work with. None of Emma’s ruthless cunning came across at all. She’s a great manipulator, that’s her thing, but in this she was just another minion. (And this is excluding the heroic aspects of her character, which obviously wouldn’t have worked for the story in this movie.) It didn’t help that there was no Kitty Pryde-type character for her to bounce off of. It made me sad.

It also annoyed me that her clothes turned to diamond along with her skin. Maybe that was just a limitation of the special effects. But that’s just one of the million nit-picks.

Anyway, I guess it can’t be helped. The first couple X-films messed up Storm just as badly, so they have a track record for this sort of thing.

Just so I don’t end on a bad note – Magneto and Xavier were perfect, flawlessly executed (well, mostly – nearly everything between Xavier and Mystique was odd). The rest of the movie is there primarily to make them look good. It was fun seeing Magneto be a bad-ass and being morally ambiguous, which is always how I liked him in the comics (his moments of pure evil, trying to massacre millions of people, always struck me as out of character). And Xavier was great – we got to see him using his powers, training people to use theirs, healing people, and displaying some genuinely moving moments of compassion and empathy. You could definitely see this man going on to inspire others to follow his dream.

Anyway, there it is. Fun, but flawed. Just don’t think about it too hard while you’re watching.

In case you hadn’t heard (like I just did like an hour ago), someone is remaking Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Without Joss Whedon!

Someone grab the pitchforks! Boycott something! OMG!!!111!!

Seriously, though, I don’t care.

Don’t get me wrong, I loves me some Buffy. I own all seven seasons on DVD and have been faithfully reading Season 8 even when it’s not that good. I even watch it occasionally in syndication on Logo when nothing else is on despite the ridiculous drag queen commercials. There’s an awesome Mr. Pointy replica a friend crafted on my bookcase alongside my signed Green Lantern and Cardboard Tube; the greatest weapons in the universe. I own that one issue of Rolling Stone with Sarah Michelle Gellar on the cover. You know the one.

Just in case you don't.

Here’s the thing: Buffy is awesome. She’s a great, fun character, and the metaphorical genre-twisting that made the show special is built into the basic premise; you can’t take that away from her, at least as long as Buffy is still kind of a silly name.

Other writers have handled the character, and done it well. The television series that so many people are treating as sacred wasn’t even the first version, but sort of a soft reboot of the story started in the original movie.

Everyone complains about remakes, but for the most part it’s ridiculous whinging. There are perfectly good characters and stories laying around waiting for the right writer or artist or cinematographer to come along and do them justice. For every unnecessary Psycho remake there’s a Maltese Falcon. If someone offered me a chance to write a remake or sequel to The Last Starfighter I would sell any number of your souls to do so – I love the original, but come on how awesome would the Death Blossom be in 3D, amiright?

At any rate, the mere existence of remakes doesn’t invalidate the one you love. The originals are still there, you can still watch or read them. No matter how many times George Lucas craps on his own Star Wars flicks, I still have the originals to re-watch and pass on to my descendants (somewhere…on VHS…that I don’t have a VCR to watch, but still).

My point is Buffy is a strong character with great potential. Getting all worked up about a remake is not just silly, but mildly insulting to her and to Joss. She can stand on her own and create a legacy that generations to come can enjoy. We can either let her go and do that, joining the ranks of other great fictional characters like Conan the Barbarian, Sherlock Holmes, and Batman, or we can horde her and let her become a forgotten cult classic once the current core audience dies out.

Either the remake is great, in which case yay! or it’s terrible, in which case it’ll be marginalized and quickly forgotten. So relax. There’s no losing side to this.

Disclaimer:  If they ever go through with that Seven Samurai remake I’ve hearing about for the last few years I WILL MURDER SOMEONE’S FACE.

That is all.

I’ve finished reading Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart, and it is quite good. It’s like 1984, but with the past 20 years of pop culture, the internet, and pretty recent political hullabaloo thrown in. Hyped as a hilarious satire, I actually didn’t find it all that hilarious. Amusing, sure, but not laugh-out-loud funny. It’s an excellent read for other reasons, though, so I give it a hearty recommendation.

(And I don’t mean to put down Shteyngart’s comedic skills – I’ve heard him on NPR and he’s a brilliantly funny guy. I just didn’t think humor was Super Sad True Love Story‘s strength.)

The Sad is what’s most vital to the book, I think. In a way it’s overreacting to certain things – the belief that language is dying, for example, something you hear a lot but is largely nonsense. But other things are dead on, like how everyone is obsessed and addicted to their iPhone equivalent, and how the US economy is based pretty much entirely on us buying that useless crap. Maybe the book is funnier than I thought, and I couldn’t see it because that sort of thing annoys me so much.

Now I’m rereading Salman Rushdie’s Fury, which I read years ago and have thoroughly forgotten. It is very funny. Also funny – my wife and I spotted him in New York City on our honeymoon. My wife is so awesome at spotting celebrities she can pick Salman Rushdie out of a crowd at the Museum of Natural History. This is her super power. Even she doesn’t even know how she does it.

Unwritten, Vol. 2,  by Mike Carey and Peter Gross. Excellent stuff. Did I mention Unwritten before? It’s about this guy whose dad wrote a series of Harry Potter-style boy wizard books, and he’s living off his father’s fame. Then the lines between the books and the real world begin to blur, with some pretty horrendous consequences.

The Plain Janes, by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg, from DC’s now-defunct Minx line of comics. Nothing that will blow your mind, but I enjoyed it. There’s some cute art stuff going on. I’m seeing some reviews now complaining about one-dimensional characters and it’s hard to argue with them.

Old Man Logan, by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven. There are a couple of stories that the X-Men do really well, and bleak, horrible futures is one of them. Stories where the heroes failed and are now all dead or otherwise gone always bother me at a fundamental level, but they’re still fun. I guess it’s good to see why we need them. McNiven’s art is incredible.

Irredeemable, vol. 2, by Mark Waid and Peter Krause. Mark Waid has always been one of my favorite writers, and he’s still got it. This series about the world’s most powerful superhero gone bad, killing his former friends, enemies, and millions of innocent civilians keeps taking unexpected turns.

I finally got around to watching Fantastic Mr. Fox, which is, ahem, fantastic. It’s up there with Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, my favorite Wes Anderson movies. If you’ve been as negligent as I, you should check it out.

In general I feel pretty meh about the Oscars nowadays, but I thought I’d glance over them anyway. I don’t have much opinion on the performance nominations and what not. Since I have a terrible memory for this, I’ve got a list of the movies that came out last year and I’m comparing it to the nomination list. Prep yourself for some stream-of-consciousness style commentary.

Best Picture. Avatar will almost certainly win, though everyone but the voters will likely agree that it shouldn’t. Why is The Blind Side there? Haven’t we seen the “feel good high school football movie in which somebody overcomes great disadvantage” about a billion times already? District 9 and Up In the Air are good, but not Best Picture good. Out of the ones I’ve seen, I think I enjoyed Inglourious Basterds the most, but I understand it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I’m cursing myself for not having seen A Serious Man. From what I’ve heard, Precious might actually be the one that deserves the prize.

I feel like if it hadn’t made a babillion dollars, Avatar wouldn’t be there, and Sherlock Holmes would have been able to take it’s rightful nomination.

If Avatar wins Best Art Direction I’ll be sorely disappointed. People have complained about the recycled script, but there was nothing remotely original about the art design. It didn’t deserve a nomination, much less a win.

Wait, why wasn’t Watchmen nominated for Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay)? Instead we get District 9, which devolved into a generic action movie in it’s 3rd act.

(Observation: There were a ton of documentaries about the environment in 2009.)

Damn, I didn’t get to see The Men Who Stare at Goats, either. Or The Fantastic Mr. Fox. A lot of stuff came and went during my insane busy season at work.

They should create a special Most Number of Heads Cut in Half Because Ninjas Don’t Fuck Around with that Neck Nonsense award for Ninja Assassin.

I also didn’t get to see The Imaginanium of Doctor Parnassus, an omission for which I should be beaten with reeds.

The Wife Awards: Jeff Bridges wins the Most Frequently Mentioned Person My Wife would Totally Do award, and (500) Days of Summer gets the Movie During Which Wife Most Frequently Glared at her Husband award.

And really, those are the ones that matter.

I attempted to watch Wings of Desire and failed utterly. I get it, it’s pretty and artful and life sucks. After an hour of nothing happening I gave up. Please don’t mistake me for someone with the attention span of a Michael Bay Transformers fan, or who doesn’t like “reading” at the movies. I’m a huge fan of Kurosawa, for example, and he doesn’t exactly have the most fast-paced movies. But you don’t need an hour to develop a character whose defining characteristic is that he’s bored.

On the plus side, now I get all those Sprockets jokes.

I watched The Friends of Eddie Coyle last night, and it was fantastic. Great story of a small-time hood in over his head in a town full of scumbags. Robert Mitchum and Peter both turn in excellent performances. Check it out. The film got a really nice Criterion edition just this past year.

And just to end on a down note, I checked out the first episode of Spartacus: Blood and Sand on Starz. Wow was it bad. Probably one of the worst things I’ve seen on television. They essentially took everything that was good about HBO’s Rome, threw it out, then added in effects from 300 that they clearly didn’t have the budget to recreate. When the appearance of Lucy Lawless doesn’t persuade me to keep watching, you know you’ve got a problem.

I’ve always had a fascination with post-apocalyptic stories. People staggering amongst the ruins of our great civilization, scrounging to live, with a few  clinging to humanity as the rest of society regresses around them. Who doesn’t like a little Mad Max every now and then? One of the things that intrigues me most about the Terminator franchise isn’t the idea that soldiers are traveling through time to try and prevent the fall of mankind, but the fact that ultimately they fail.

I didn’t get a chance to see The Road, but I’m reading the book now and it is bogglingly good, one of those “why does anyone bother to continue writing in this subgenre after this” sort of books. (Though the fact that it’s listed as “literature” instead of “science fiction” is an example of arrogant genre-dismissive bullshit that I can’t stand.) For a fun exercise in seeing people entirely missing the point, take a gander at some of the negative reviews over at Amazon. I particularly enjoy the one that thinks the lack of punctuation was perhaps an accident.

I did get to see The Book of Eli on Monday. There were a few things that could have been improved, but overall I thought it was quite good. I’m kind of surprised at the overall negative reviews it’s gotten. Many immediately complain that they’re tired of apocalyptic movies, at which point I pretty much stop reading. Isn’t that your own fault for becoming a movie reviewer? Stop whinging about your comfy, trivial job.

Anyway, I am interested in the place of religion in these settings. Would people turn their backs on the old religions, since they appear to have failed? Would they cling to them, desperate for salvation? Would they invent new ones to try and explain the horrible events that took place?

The third option is a sticky wicket to me. We tend to think of religion as something that humans naturally develop per a basic need to explain the unknown, but I have to wonder if new religions would arise at all. In these scenarios, humans are barely surviving, primarily off the remnants of the dead, and a landscape so inhospitable makes long-term survival for the species unlikely. When would these people have the luxury of inventing new gods?

Woke up to a fresh new rejection today, this one to “The Organization,” a flash piece I wrote a while back. It’s a sort of romantic comedy/GIJoe-super-espionage parody piece. I like it, but I can see why they rejected it. If you’re not familiar with the sort of genre the piece is having fun with, it would seem like a lot is being left out. I suppose I could expand the story, really flesh out the universe and everything, but it seems like the people who would have fun reading this story might find that unnecessary and even tedious. Like sitting down to Get Smart but having to sit through twenty minutes of someone explaining to you what a spy is.

That’s part of the danger of writing genre I suppose, especially these days. We often rely heavily on what’s been written before, and simply stand on previous writers’ shoulders.

You can see that flaw really well in Cameron’s Avatar. All the characters and even the technology are derived from archetypes that are used all the time in science fiction. One glance at Sigourney Weaver’s character will tell you she’s the Compassionate But Stubborn Scientist that we’ve seen so many times before. Five seconds after he appears on screen, we understand that Giovanni Ribisi is the Greedy Corporate Guy. Then meet Hardass Military Dude. He’s got scars. Trust me when I say they do deep!

Similarly, most of the technology in the film we’ve seen in dozens of video games and even Cameron’s old movies. Those dropships and armored exoskeletons all look awfully familiar!

It’s all shorthand. The writer doesn’t have to spend much any time developing these personalities because we immediately know who they are, how they’re going to act, what their motivations are, etc. It’s just unfortunate when the writer doesn’t bother to take them further than the attributes and stats on the pre-generated character sheet (which Cameron, unfortunately, doesn’t do).

It is handy for some situations, though. In flash, for example, you don’t necessarily have space to do more with a character. So you can reassure the reader that this is Standard Security Guard Sleeping At His Post or Pseudo-Lesbian Who Doesn’t Shave And Wants To Save The Whales and move on. Nothing particularly lost. In parody and satire, you’re relying on those sorts of archetypes, even if it’s your job to show how they’re silly or shatter them. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was based purely on reversing the Blond Running From a Monster Does Something Stupid and Dies archetype.

Either way, if the audience doesn’t know the archetype, the effect is lost. So do I try to shop the story elsewhere, where the editors and audience will immediately recognize the genre parody, or do I try to expand the story and try to net a larger audience? Hurm.

(You can do it in comedy, too – one of my favorite running gags in Monty Python’s Flying Circus was that any time someone started to tell a “If I could walk that way…” joke they would be interrupted. We all know how that would have ended, so there’s no need to finish it – you can basically get two jokes with one stroke by interrupting them.)

I don’t have too much to add to the chorus concerning James Cameron’s new movie, but I will say this – if you don’t see it at a digital theater and in 3D, you are doing yourself a grave disservice. The film is mind-staggeringly gorgeous. Why we even still have non-digital screens is beyond my comprehension, but there you go.

Happily, 3D has gotten much better since the last time I saw anything in the format, which is when I was like 9.