So is Peter Jackson going to direct The Hobbit? Or will it be his protege Neill Bolmkamp, who directed District 9? Who knows — I just hope this mess with MGM gets sorted out soon.  I’m still getting over my enormous disappointment that MGM’s financial situation resulted in Guillermo del Toro’s departure from The Hobbit films.  But boy would it be great to see PJ take the helm once again…

Great new trailer is up for The Social Network, the new film about facebook directed by David Fincher and scripted by Aaron Sorkin.

So, we finally got out first glimpse at The Green Hornet and… I’m still not quite sure what to think.  This film is either going to be awesome or a total catastrophe…

This is a cool poster.

CHUD’s list of the Worst CGI in Film History continues, and it’s well worth your time.

Will we ever get another decent X-Men film?  I loved X-Men and X2, but X3 was a crushing disappointment and the less spoken of the abominable X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the better.  I hate prequels, as a rule, so when word came out last year that the next X-film would be a prequel entitled X-Men: First Class, I thought that was a big mis-step.  So what now gives me hope?  Director Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake, Stardust, Kick Ass) and stars James McAvoy (Children of Dune, Atonement, Wanter) as Professor X and Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds) as Magneto.  An ember of hope is fanned…

Are we about to finally get another decent Predator film?  The first Predator is awesome — one on my favorite movies ever.  But the second one (set in the future with Danny Glover as the lead) is weak, and the less spoken of the two Alien Vs. Predator films the better.  But Robert Rodriguez and Nimrod Antal’s Predators is set for release in just a few short weeks, and damn if this new trailer isn’t pretty awesome.  An ember of hope is fanned…

It’s hard for me to believe that a new Planet of the Apes film is really happening.  And now I read that John Lithgow and Freida Pinto (Slumdog Millionaire) have joined the cast?  Um, okay… An ember of hope is… well… we’ll see…

Hoo boy.

One of my first articles, when I started this blog, was about great franchises that have fallen on hard times.  I was writing about my once-beloved Alien and Predator series, but we can all now safely add the X-Men films to that list.  What in the world has happened to this series??  X-Men and X2 were so spectacular — but after X3 and now the rather verbosely titled X-Men Origins: Wolverine I am sad to report that the series is batting only two for four.

That’s not to say that Wolverine is a Fantastic Four caliber catastrophe.  Some talented actors appear on-screen, there’s some exciting action, some familiar X-Men characters pop up (one in particular really surprised me), and we finally get to hear Wolverine say on-screen, “I’m the best there is at what I do.  But what I do best isn’t very nice.”  But X-Men Origins: Wolverine a rentlessly dour and joyless affair, one that consistently reveals itself to be a truly B-Grade effort.  What do I mean by that?  Allow me to elaborate:

The film is filled with plot-holes, but more than that, it doesn’t hold together at all as any sort of coherent narrative.  I respect the filmmakers’ ambition in trying to capture a number of different periods in Wolverine’s life, from his birth in the late 1800’s, through his experiences in a variety of wars (captured really well, actually, in an exciting opening credits sequence), through his time with Silver Fox, his involvement in the Weapon X program, and beyond.  But none of the bits and pieces hang together.  Instead of merging together to form an expansive back-story, each jump in time left me with countless unanswered questions: Why would Logan, a Canadian, fight in so many of America’s wars?  Right from the first scene, he is established as a gentler soul than his mean brother Victor — so why would Logan hang around with Victor for so many years?  If Stryker and the team were so upset when Wolverine left them, how and why did the whole group disband soon after?  And why would Victor, of all people, be the one to remain in Stryker’s service?  I could go on.

The film makes a total hash of the X-Men comic continuity.  There was a lot of precedent for this, of course, as the previous three X-Men films also mixed and matched characters and story-lines from different periods of the comics with great abandon.  But there’s a souless “everything and the kitchen sink” approach to this film as it ties in a barrage of random Marvel Comics characters (Gambit!  Deadpool!  The Blob!) into Wolverine’s origin — and many of the changes to the established comic books’ back-stories really bugged me.  Sabretooth and Wolverine are siblings?  Logan entered the Weapon X program voluntarily?  Emma Frost is Silver Fox’s sister?  Whaaa??

The film isn’t even all that consistent with the previous three X-Men films.  I mean, I know that Logan gets shot with amnesia bullets at the end (I’m not kidding, by the way — do you think I could make that up??) so he wouldn’t remember meeting young Cyclops — but shouldn’t Cyke have remembered HIM when they meet up again in the first X-Men film?  

There are some moments of fun action and visual spectacle — the three-way fight atop a nuclear reactor at the movie’s end comes to mind — but some achingly bad special effects as well.  In the scene in a bathroom where Logan first pops his adamantium claws, the claws look ridiculously fake.  I mean, really astonishingly I-can’t-believe-that’s-the-finished-effects-shot fake.  

I feel sort of bad about picking on this movie, because Hugh Jackman seems like a terrific fellow — and he is so good at playing Wolverine that it is easy, now in his fourth go-round in the role, to take him for granted.  This is a character that, before the first X-Men film, I would have argued to the death would be completely impossible to play on film and not come off as totally ridiculous.  And yet, ever since that first shot that revealed him in the steel cage in the first X-Men movie, Jackman has inhabited the character in a magical way.  Even in this sub-par installment (or maybe I should say especially in this sub-par installment), he’s the best thing about the film.

It is clear that the stewards of the X-Men film franchise really have no idea where to take the series.  That is frustrating, because there is a GOLDMINE of amazing X-Men stories from the last 40 years of comic books that can be drawn from.  This should be the easiest franchise in the world to continue for movie after movie.  There are so many great stories that could be adapted.  Are actors like Patrick Stewart or Halle Berry getting too expensive?  Easy!  Just re-cast the roles or write those characters out of the series and bring in new ones.  The X-Men in the comics changed their roster constantly, and there are so many amazing new characters who could be brought to life on screen to replace a Storm or a Professor X or a Jean Grey.  

I could understand it if the film-makers wanted to, occasionally, take a break from the enormous multi-character X-Men epics to focus on a single character film.  The idea of making a gritty Wolverine solo movie is an appealing one!  But if that was the filmmakers’ intention, then why did they surround Logan in this film with a bevy of other mutant characters — X-Men lite, if you will?  If we’re going to see Logan fight the bad guys along with a team of people with super-powers, then why not just give us a fourth X-Men film, for heavens sake??   And dark and gritty, this film is not.  True, Logan spends much of the movie unhappy, and none of the characters around him are any fun.  But the film never brings and real intensity or violence to the fight scenes, and the emotional moments just aren’t that gripping.  (Compare the death of a female character in this film to the mid-movie death of a female character in The Dark Knight.  Night and day in terms of the emotional impact of those two moments.)

Furthermore, if one wanted to make a Wolverine solo film, I am stunned that the filmmakers decided to tell this patchwork origin story and ignored what would have been a magnificent template for a film: the 4-issue mini-series Wolverine, from 1987, by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller.  In Wolverine’s first major solo spin-off adventure, Logan travels to Japan, falls in love, fights ninjas, and travels an intense personal journey in which he struggles between the human and animal sides of his nature.  A spectacular story that holds up today, this would have make a kick-ass movie.

Instead, I got to watch Wolverine team up with some leftovers from Dutch’s team from Predator to hunt rocks, kill some people, then make goo-goo eyes at a cute babe, cut down some trees, meet Ma and Pa Kent, jump onto a helicopter, and engage in three versions of the exact same fight with his pissed-off brother Sabretooth.  Oh, and at long last we learned the origin of that cool jacket Logan was wearing in the first X-Men movie.

Pass me those amnesia bullets, would you please?

The various X-Men comic books have been a sales juggernaut for Marvel Comics for almost forty years now, and the success of the three X-Men films has certainly furthered the spread of this franchise.  There have been a heck of a lot of talented writers and artists involved in the X-Men over that long stretch of time, but one man really deserves the lion’s share of the credit: Chris Claremont, who wrote The Uncanny X-Men comic book from 1975-1991. 

Over the course of that incredibly lengthy run, Clarement shaped the characters, the stories, and the world of the X-Men, so much of which is known and loved world-wide today. 

I started reading Uncanny X-Men towards the late-middle of Claremont’s run, in the mid/late 80’s.  I’d been reading comics for a few years (my enjoyment of Marvel’s Transformers comic book series lead me to various super-hero titles such as the Fantastic Four and the Avengers), and people kept telling me “you can’t be a comic fan and not be reading X-Men.” I finally took the plunge, and I was immediately sucked into the series.  Claremont was incredibly skilled at crafting interesting, really three-dimensional and human characters, and his stories were dense and sophisticated.  (Claremont was the master of the “sub-plot,” in which various story-lines would weave in and out of the comic, sometimes for YEARS, before finally dovetailing with the main story being told.)

After Claremont left the X-Men comic in 1991, I continued to follow the series for many years, but it was never able to recapture for me the greatness of the Claremont era.  Various writers and artists would rotate through the book, and some entertaining stories were told… but after a while I finally began to get bored, and I ultimately stopped reading.  Once or twice a year I’d pick up an issue or a mini-series, but nothing ever held my interest enough to warrant my reading the title again on a monthly basis.

Then, in 2001, the British writer-artist team of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely took over one of the X-Men comics.  (By this point, there were several!)  I purchased their first issue, titled “E for Extinction,” and was blown away.  Suddenly, the characters were interesting again, and the world those characters inhabited seemed dangerous again.  I was hooked, and with no small amount of disbelief I started reading an X-Men comic every month again.

Maybe I’ll return to this topic at a later date to write a lengthier review of Morrison’s run, but ultimately I was disappointed by what had begun so promisingly.  From the beginning, Quitely wasn’t able to keep up a regular schedule, and without his magnificent art the stories suffered.  (It didn’t help that the fill-in artists each had dramatically different styles, which made it really jarring from issue to issue.)  And while at first I was really intrigued and excited by the amazing density of new ideas that Morrison brought to each issue, by the end of his run I started to feel that the characters of the comic had drifted too far from the world that I had grown up with.

Why am I writing about any of this?  I’m getting to that!!  After Morrison left, the X-Men comics seemed directionless again, and I again stopped reading.  But only a few months later, Joss Whedon began writing a new X-Men comic, titled Astonishing X-Men.  Whedon is known to many as the creator and show-runner of the much-loved Buffy and Angel TV shows, and while I had never (and still haven’t) seen either of those series, I had fallen head-over-heels in love with the next TV show he created:  Firefly.  

Whedon was joined by one of the best artists working in comics today, a gentleman named John Cassaday.  They began a 25-issue run on the title that wrapped up this past spring.  When I purchased the final issue, I decided that before reading it I wanted to go back and re-read their entire run, which I finally had a chance to do this past week.

It is magnificent.  Whedon was able to bring to the comic everything that makes his writing for TV so addicting – most particularly his knack for creating characters who you immediately fall in love with.  The way he is able to create dramatic stories that are also filled with fall-out-of-your seat humor, without turning into self-parody, is also quite stunning.  Whedon was able to capture everything that made Claremont’s run on X-Men so amazing, while also not losing sight of the modern continuity of the book (including many of Morrison’s more far-out ideas, such as secondary mutations, Cerebra, and the idea that Cyclops and Emma Frost – once a deadly enemy of the X-Men – would fall into a love affair).  This is a singularly impressive feat. 

Whedon & Cassaday’s run is divided into four main stories, each of which can be found in collected editions.

“Gifted” (issues #1-6) – Probably my favorite story, in which Whedon re-introduces the characters who will serve as the main focus of his run:  Cyclops, Emma Frost, Wolverine, Kitty Pryde, and Beast.  In issue four, Whedon adds a sixth main character, crafting a very emotional resurrection of a classic X-Men character who had been killed off in the 90’s, and I will love him forever for that.  I’ll also love him forever for returning Kitty Pryde (the young Jewish girl who seemed like she was a favored character of Claremont’s back in the day – she certainly was a favorite of mine) to the forefront of the X-Universe.

The main story concerns a scientist who discovers a “cure” for mutants.  Elements of this story-line were used quite liberally in the third X-Men movie,  so its interesting to go back and read the (far superior) source material now.  I think the aspects of this story that made it into the third film were some of the best parts of what was, ultimately, a very disappointing movie.  The question that our characters must confront — is being a mutant something unique and vital to who they each are as people, or is it just a disease that they want to be cured of with a drug or an injection — is powerful stuff, and its one of those ideas that’s so good that one wonders why it took over 30 years for someone to come up with this story-line.

“Dangerous” (issues 7-12) – In which the Danger Room (the X-Men’s training facility which they use to test their mutant abilities) achieves sentience and attempts to carry out what has always been its main programming: to kill the X-Men. 

“Torn” (issues 13-18) – In which the Hellfire Club (a great group of villains from Claremont’s run – they figured prominently into the original and famous Dark Phoenix saga) return, and the Cyclops-Emma Frost relationship is explored in a very deep and intriguing way.  Also, Kitty Pryde and Peter Rasputin (Colossus) do it.

(The above, by the way, is one of the most hysterical – and also the most poignant – stories in Whedon’s run, and again, the way he is able to weave humor and pathos together is really amazing to me.  I certainly found myself getting very emotionally involved in the Kitty-Peter relationship, and in the way that plays out in the final arc of Whedon’s run.)

“Unstoppable” – In which the X-Men find themselves brought to an alien world which Colossus is prophesied to destroy.  All of Whedon’s storylines and character arcs converge here, and its terrific.  My only complaint is the ending, which is a bit abrupt and cries out for a continuation.  More Whedon/Cassaday X-Men comics, someday, please!!

I highly highly highly recommend these comics.  While there is a LOT in there that really speaks to a long-time X-Men comics reader like myself, NO prior reading is required to enjoy this story.  If you liked the first two great X-Men movies, and/or if you’ve enjoyed any of Whedon’s TV work (Buffy, Angel, Firefly and the big-screen follow-up Serenity), then I urge you to check these comics out.  Its not exactly “great literature” the way graphic novels like Watchmen or Maus or V for Vendetta or Jinx (I could go on and on here) are, but it is terrifically entertaining escapist fantasy.  Super-hero comics at their finest.  

May 27th, 2008

I love comic books. And that means that I grew up with a great love of super-hero stories. These days its true that many of my favorite comic books have little to do with super-heroes (looking through my “to-read” pile I see titles like David Lapham’s Young Liars, Stephen King’s The Dark Tower adaptation, Jeff Smith’s new boot RASL, Mike Mignola’s BPRD and Abe Sapien, Ed Brubaker’s Criminal, Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso’s 100 Bullets, to name just a few.) But there is still something about a great super-hero yarn that really excites me. (For instance, I’ve been reading and throughly enjoying Ed Brubaker’s run on Daredevil, Brian Michael Bendis’ work on Avengers and Secret Invasion, and Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men.)

That love of a good super-hero tale extends to movies. While working on these new Iron Man cartoons, and thinking about the movies still ahead this summer (Hellboy II, The Dark Knight, and The Incredible Hulk), I’ve been thinking about what makes a great super-hero movie.

Here are my five favorite super-hero movies of all time:

5. Unbreakable — Back when I loved M. Night Shyamalan, he made this fantastic little tale about a man (Bruce Willis) who discovers that he cannot be injured. There are no costumes, no witticisms, none of the silly trappings that have come to be associated with super-heroes and super-hero movies. Just a compelling story with some terrific under-played acting from a great cast (Bruce Willis has never been better than he is here as the sad, empty man who discovers that he is different), and some really interesting scene composition, shot set-ups, and editing choices from director Shyamalan.

4. Hellboy — Adapted from a series of mini-series written and gorgeously illustrated by Mike Mignola, Hellboy follows the adventures of a paranormal investigator who is actually a demon from Hell himself. Who loves pancakes. The comic is a wonderfully bizarre, textured mix of fairy tales, folklore and some good old-fashioned monster-fighting action. The film, directed by Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, and the man tapped to direct the upcoming two films based on The Hobbit) is a remarkable realization of Mignola’s comic. The splendid, consistently under-rated Ron Perlman is brilliant as Hellboy, bringing enormous depth and warmth to the character despite all the red rubber makeup.

3. Spider-Man 2 — Like Hellboy, Spider-Man 2 is another film whose greatest strength is the way it is able to distill the essence of a beloved (albeit much more widely-known) comic book character into a compelling film all its own. Tobey Maguire was born to play the stiff, dorky Peter Parker who one day discovers that with great power comes great responsibility. I generally like my super-hero movies to be dark and morose, but what sets Spider-Man apart to me is actually the fun, giddy energy of the proceedings — from the beautiful visual effects of Spider-Man web-swinging through the NYC skyscrapers to the breathless scenery-chewing J. K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson, this movie is a lot of fun. And it has a note-perfect ending.

2. X-Men 2 — Speaking of note-perfect endings, the last shot of this film had me ready, no DESPERATE, to watch X3 right then and there. (Too bad X3 wound up being such a disappointment, but that’s a subject for another time.) The whole rest of this movie leading UP to that phenomenal last shot is pretty dang good as well. Bryan Singer took everything that worked in the 1st X-Men film and stepped everything up several notches in this one. The action is terrific — the sequence in which Stryker’s soldiers lay siege to the X-Mansion with only Wolverine there to defend the students is a powerhouse of a sequence and everything I want to see in a super-hero movie. But it is the story behind the action that sets this film apart from other whizz-bang special effects films. There is Jean Grey’s struggle with her growing powers that threaten to overwhelm her, and her growing fear that she’ll be unable to do so. There is Wolverine’s attempt to discover his past and, more importantly, to figure out what bearing his past has to the person he wants to be. But most compelling is the way the young characters (Rogue, Iceman, Pyro) are pulled between the peaceful message of Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and the more violent leanings of Magneto (Ian McKellan). Aaron Stanford plays Pyro, and the way his character is slowly tempted towards the “dark side” is a far more gripping tale than George Lucas’ three-movie similar story about a young Anakin Skywalker. (BTW, I will always refer to this movie as X-Men 2 or X2, but never by the stupid title of X-Men United that the Fox Marketing department for some reason affixed to this film in the weeks before its release. I’m just saying.)

1. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm — In 1992 DC comics launched a half-hour cartoon show called Batman: The Animated Series. It was brilliant. Gorgeous animation and character design married to rich, deep stories that took Batman VERY seriously created a show that grabbed viewers’ attentions and, to me at least, remains the definitive version of Batman. In 1993, a theatrical film based on the show was released to theatres: Mask of the Phantasm. Interwoven stories and flashbacks tell the tale of Batman’s confrontation with a more violent vigilante, The Phantasm, as well as the story of how, years earlier, a young Bruce Wayne abandoned his chances for love and happiness to honor the vow he made to his murdered parents to rid Gotham City of crime. Batman Begins covers similar ground (both films were imspired by the comic mini-series Batman: Year One by Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli), and while I absolutely adore Batman Begins, to me Mask of the Phantasm is the superior telling of this story. It is astonishingly grim and psychologically probing (the scene in which a young Bruce Wayne, who has begun to realize that his becoming the Batman will dominate and destroy his life, begs his dead parents to release him from his vow, is a chilling moment and one of my favorite scenes in any movie ever). The narrative is sophisticatedly told — the film features intertwining flashbacks within flashbacks long before such storytelling devices were popularized by Lost or films like The Prestige. The animation is gorgeous. The ending is perfectly down-beat yet satisfying. (You can see my focus on the importance of a good film’s ending well.) Mark Hammil is astonishing as the voice of the Joker (who enters the story during the second half of the film). Hammil’s Joker is by far the best film version of this charcter so far — lunatic and dangerous (although I do have high hopes for Heath Ledger in the upcoming The Dark Knight). And speaking of definitive versions of a character, Kevin Conroy IS Batman. I cannot conceive that his performance can ever be topped. He IS Batman. End of story. If you haven not seen this film, go rent it. It rocks.