Short and blunt:
My DREDD review. On Daily Grindhouse.
Get there. ‘Like’ it.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Judge Dredd by John McCrea
Judge Dredd by Steve Dillon
Judge Dredd by Brian Bolland
Another by Brian Bolland
Judge Dredd by Carlos Ezquerra
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It’s gone way beyond commonplace to dismiss Jerry Lewis and make easy jokes about the French for appreciating him more than we do, but you know what? Painful as it may be to admit, the French are occasionally right about a few things: Fries, dressing, Sophie Marceau, The Statue Of Liberty, and Jerry Lewis being funny. In fact, I’m willing to bet you twenty bucks that no more than one out of every five people who talk shit about Jerry Lewis have never actually seen a Jerry Lewis movie. I invite you to correct that oversight. Granted, I’m not the biggest Jerry Lewis booster myself, if only because I haven’t seen too many of his films, but the ones I have seen are a little bit tremendous. Best entry point? Well, you can’t beat THE NUTTY PROFESSOR. But personally, my favorite so far is ARTISTS & MODELS.
ARTISTS & MODELS is a Dean and Jerry picture, one of seventeen they made together. It came towards the tail-end of the Dean Martin/ Jerry Lewis partnership, and as a result it couldn’t be more polished. In this one, they play roommates. Dean is a struggling painter and Jerry has a child-like fascination with comic books, which Dean doesn’t get at first — until he sees dollar signs. Think of it a little bit like Kavalier & Clay with 1950s-era dick jokes. So those guys are the artists. Then there are the models…
Shirley MacLaine plays a secretary at a comic book company, the model for Jerry’s favorite character “The Bat Lady” — Shirley develops a crush on Jerry, who doesn’t yet know that she moonlights in a bat costume. Other romantic interests (Dean’s) include Dorothy Malone (actually a cartoonist herself in the story), Eva Gabor, and Anita Ekberg, whose proportions (so studiously examined in Fellini’s LA DOLCE VITA) made her a particularly good fit for a movie about superhero comics.
Frank Tashlin was the director of ARTISTS AND MODELS, which is why it is such an especially enjoyable film. Before Tashlin got into features, he was a cartoonist and animator — while he doesn’t quite have the name recognition of Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, and Bob Clampett among aficionados of vintage cartoons, he was their contemporary and colleague. Tashlin brought his outsized perspective to features. His movies are splashed with color and teeming with gags. Busty women were a Tashlin trademark, as was rock ‘n roll (THE GIRL CAN’T HELP IT, with Jayne Mansfield, combined them.) There’s an innocent, prankish, irresistable zeal to Frank Tashlin’s movies. ARTISTS & MODELS was his first with Martin and Lewis. He went on to direct them in HOLLYWOOD OR BUST, and after Dean and Jerry broke up, Tashlin made six movies with Jerry on the solo. Tashlin directed Jerry Lewis the way he directed Bugs Bunny — there was no difference. Note the scene in ARTISTS & MODELS where Jerry gets stretched out to the point where his feet meet the back of his head. These movies are truly like live-action cartoons. But with romance and musical numbers. They have everything.
The best thing about the Martin/Lewis partnership is the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of it all — you get the zany slapstick from Jerry and the velvety crooning from Dean, both in the same movie. It’s a crazy comedy and a big studio musical all in one. I also just plain love that old-Hollywood VistaVision look, embodied by films such as THE SEARCHERS, FUNNY FACE, GUNFIGHT AT THE OK CORRAL, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, TO CATCH A THIEF, VERTIGO, THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, and THE FOX & THE HOUND. There’s something about the way those movies feel, a warm and attractive classicism, and this one’s no different. This movie is a comfort.
Why watch old movies? This is ‘why watch old movies.’ Trust me – you’ll love it. If you don’t, you get your money back. (I won plenty from all those folks who bet me up in the first paragraph.)
ARTISTS & MODELS is playing tonight at BAM as part of their profoundly-recommended “American Gagsters” film series.
The great Dave Kehr on ARTISTS & MODELS: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/movies/homevideo/05dvds.html
and on Frank Tashlin: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/movies/20kehr.html?ex=1313726400&en=5d41e233eb53874c&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
And me on Twitter: @jonnyabomb
Hey, what did the beat-up boxer say when his trainer asked him how he was feeling?
THOR!
So Thor‘s out on DVD and Blu-Ray today. My review was pretty funny, if I do say so myself. And I do. “So myself.” Anyway. Thor. Let’s go back there together, shall we?’
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Here’s what I liked about Thor:
They had to change up Thor’s costume. They couldn’t have gone with the winged helmet and the yellow hooker boots. But that giant robot thing? That’s the Destroyer. And if you look at the above pictures, you’ll see that it looks a whole lot like the way Jack Kirby first drew it, almost fifty years ago. That’s pretty cool. The reason that most of us who grew up on superhero comics love them so much has almost everything to do with the drawings of Jack Kirby, the guy who created the looks of most of the most famous superhero comic characters. Kirby’s drawings STILL leap off the page. They have a sense of weight and a kineticism, a strange energy, that remains just as effective today.
And somebody at Marvel (and Paramount) had the good sense to not mess with Kirby’s vision too much. How cool is it that, nearly fifty years later, we’re seeing a Jack Kirby character on the big screen, looking much the way that Kirby first designed it? I’ll answer that. It’s extremely cool.
To me, it’s so extremely weird that a major summer movie was made from one of the most esoteric of 1960s Marvel Comics that I can’t help but embrace it. Thor was always one of my least favorite Marvel characters, but in my opinion this is as good a Thor movie as we could reasonably expect.
Here’s the Thor story really quick: The world of Thor supposes that the characters of Norse mythology exist in our dimension as super-powered extraterrestrial beings. Thor, the arrogant god of thunder, grows up alongside his half-brother Loki, the god of mischief, under their father, the all-powerful Odin. Thor’s impetuousness sees him exiled by Odin, powerless, to Earth, where he has to prove his worthiness before he can lift his mighty hammer and wield the power of Thor.
Basically, that’s all here. Chris Hemsworth plays Thor, and what I like about the character here is that Thor starts out as a total dick. I like when he yells at an army of approaching Frost Giants (as much a Robert E. Howard notion as an ancient Norse one), I like when he does the whirling-hammer trick that you see on that Kirby cover up above, and I like that he gets Tasered by a flighty college student when he’s stuck powerless on Earth. Hemsworth is good, even if he’s hardly the most interesting character in the movie.
More interesting is Tom Hiddleston as Loki, who gets several more notes to play as a character who starts out as a friend to Thor and becomes his main antagonist – although the way it plays out, there are some real and almost understandable reasons why.
I also liked Anthony Hopkins as Odin, maybe because in his early scenes he looks like Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn. At this point it’s a pretty generic idea to cast Hopkins in this kind of a role, but again the weirdness of the setting makes it more interesting than it could have been. I like the scene where he goes into a strange hibernation that all the characters call “the Odinsleep.” I’d love to start referring to my own need for napping as “the Jonnysleep.”
I liked Thor’s buddies, Lady Sif and the Warriors Three. I liked Sif (Jaimie Alexander) because she’s pretty, I liked Fandral (Josh Dallas) because it was fun trying to figure out whether or not he was played by Matthew Modine, and I liked Volstagg (Ray Stevenson) because I honestly couldn’t tell that he was Ray Stevenson until his second or third scene. And yes, I liked the big cameo, as a Marvel Comics zombie in recovery. It was a blatant plug for the upcoming Avengers movie, but it almost makes sense. I also liked Natalie Portman in this movie, and I really liked Stellan Skarsgard, as her very skeptical coworker who eventually becomes a believer. It’s nice to have solid supporting players who can help a skeptical audience member like me start to take more seriously a truly ridiculous premise. And Idris Elba, forever The Wire’s Stringer Bell, grounds some of the most ridiculous moments of all, as the guardian over the bridge between Earth and the world of the gods. My man literally stands in front of a rainbow bridge (sounds like something Prince would sing about), in a helmet that’s taller than I am, and somehow manages to remain a convincing badass. Let us remember him at years’ end for Great Achievements In Badassness.
Is this a great movie? No. No, it is not. For one thing, it has more distracting product placement than just about any movie in recent memory. (I understand that this movie was a tough sell and they needed all the ad revenue they could get, but still: I got contact-high brain-freeze from all the 7-11 logos on hand.) More damningly, Kenneth Branagh’s direction inexplicably has more Dutch angles than any movie ever should. Thor has more Dutch angles than Citizen Kane, though, to be fair, less than Battlefield Earth. Why so many Dutch angles? Was it some misunderstanding, considering all the Norse references at hand? It’s really distracting, and pretty corny. And the same issues that plagued Iron Man 2, where Marvel Studios is working too hard to shoehorn subplots for the upcoming Avengers movie into all of its movies, are present here, though not quite as distractingly as in Iron Man 2.
Overall, I enjoyed Thor, and way more than I ever thought I would. As is very clear by now, I grew up as a big fan of Marvel Comics. I don’t remotely have the same passion nowadays, but I can still enjoy a decent comic-book flick when they come around. Thor to me is like when I was living in my most voracious comic-book reading phase – it’s not a character I care much about, and it isn’t the best comic story ever told, but it’s a solid enough detour from my regular reading habits. I may rather be reading about Spider-Man and Batman, but since I’ve already read their best stories over and over, this is an okay change of pace.
Seriously guys, follow me on Twitter already. This all happens there too.
Me on Twitter: @jonnyabomb
In the modern superhero-movie gold rush, Captain America was always going to be one of the hardest comic book characters to adapt to screen.
For one thing, his name is Captain America.
That’s so unsubtle it sounds like a parody, and not a particularly timely one either. We’re already forty years past that name being ironically referenced in Easy Rider, and nearly ten years past the jingoistic marionette spectacle of Team America: World Police. It’s also a problem because what happens when Major America and General America show up? The Captain’s got to stand down. He might be king shit to guys like Private America and Chief Warrant Officer America, but let’s just say Captain America doesn’t have Batman or Spider-Man’s autonomy.
There’s also the matter of Captain America walking around quite literally dressed in the American flag, which is something even the Team America puppetswere too modest and demure to do.
Those are the superficial issues. At the core of the character are some even trickier prospects. Captain America never had the split-personality secret-identity of Clark Kent and Superman — the story of Captain America is the story of Steve Rogers, a 98-pound weakling from New York City who wanted to fight the Nazis so badly that he signed up for a Super-Soldier program which made him bigger, stronger, and tougher than the average GI.
Arguably the two most popular superheroes are inarguably the two most financially successful ones, particularly in movies: Batman and Spider-Man. Along with Captain A, these two were always my favorites, but even I have to admit that Batman and Spider-Man are fueled by vengeance fantasies: Batman is a bipolar, obsessive aristocrat who uses his parents’ murder as a reason to scare the shit out of every criminal he meets, while Spider-Man is a neurotic nerd whose beloved uncle’s murder sets off his compulsion to go after the same target population. As the two most popular, these two are the most emblematic of the majority of superhero stories: Most superheroes are aggressors. Captain America is a little different. Captain America is primarily a reactor. Think of it this way: The Mighty Thor swings a hammer. Captain America carries a shield.
That’s a bit of a reduction, since the most basic appeal of Captain America has always been that comic cover where he busts Hitler square in his stupid little mustache…
…So it’s not exactly as if Captain America doesn’t have vengeance on the agenda too. He is an avenger, sure. It even says so in the title of the new movie. But unlike Batman or Spider-Man or Wolverine or even Superman, Captain America doesn’t start fights. He only finishes them.
More than any other character in comics, the core of Captain America is decency. Patriotism and propaganda were part of his creation, but the reason why Captain A has endured is that he’s the character who always does the right thing, the most noble and the most pure-hearted, the most good of all the good guys. The storytelling problem that poses is how to keep such a character interesting.
The symbolic approach is a mistake. After 9/11 in particular, there were some comic images that leaned heavily on Captain America, saluting or standing mournfully or even digging through debris, which, like the Native American with the tear in his eye, is crude and overwrought. Using a costumed-crimefighter character in such a context is simplistic, inadequate, and in retrospect, laughable. So you can’t do the Chris Nolan approach, and try to engage with modern issues. The best way to do it, as I suggested in an earlier piece, is to embrace the escapism.
The first Captain America comics I ever read weren’t the earliest ones by writer Joe Simon and artist Jack Kirby, nor were they the later comics by Kirby with Stan Lee, or the very influential comics by Jim Steranko. It was a later storyline by writer Mark Gruenwald and artist Kieron Dwyer, where Captain America gets drawn into a globe-trotting race to track down a long-lost artifact. Captain A and a pretty female sidekick travel by air and by sea and through jungles, facing obstacles including several different booby-traps, a swarm of angry cannibals, and also snakes. Any of this sounding a lot like something else to you yet?
He also fights a shark…
But that’s just about the only thing that didn’t happen in Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
All of this is a roundabout way of getting to the point that Marvel Studios made this Captain America exactly the way I always imagined it could be, and exactly the way it really should be: Indiana Jones in a silly costume.
You’re never going to get Spielberg to direct a superhero movie, but what you can do is to get one of his protegees (Joe Johnston) to bring that swashbuckling 1940s serial aesthetic that Spielberg conquered the world with in the Indiana Jones movies, and graft that onto the squarest of the square-jawed Marvel heroes. It’s the best possible approach. Even though the World War 2 era had unimaginable but very real horrors, it’s somehow still possible to use that setting for cartoony adventures. It doesn’t work to shoehorn fantastical elements into a modern wartime setting, but for some reason it’s allowable with World War 2, I would guess because comics, cartoons, and superheroes were such a part of the war effort at the time. World War 2 was the last war that was a clear case of good versus evil. By Vietnam and continuing towards Iraq, American motives are more complicated, arguably even more sinister. You can’t have Captain America become the kind of bullies he chooses to fight.
The exaggerated period setting of Captain America: The First Avenger is part of what makes it so appealing. I liked Johnston’s previous movie, The Wolfman, and part of that, again, was the atmosphere, the smoky inkiness of the locations and soundstages. Cinematographer Shelly Johnson returns for his next Joe Johnston movie, using a hazy, washed-out palette, out of which more colorful characters like Captain America and the Red Skull almost literally jump. The look of the movie is halfway between Saving Private Ryan and Spider-Man 2. It’s weird but fun.
This movie also happens to be perfectly cast. Chris Evans has made a steady career out of playing callow, arrogant, bull-headed characters (to very entertaining effect), but here he projects a stolid decency that is absolutely right. Many writers and critics argue that it’s more fun to root for the bad guy, that it’s nearly impossible to make goodness appealing, but just because it’s hard to do doesn’t mean it can’t be done: Evans makes decency utterly compelling. Even when he’s eerily de-buffed for the early CGI-abetted scenes as the scrawny Steve Rogers, Evans gets you on his side. Those early scenes are just a tiny bit comical: There is definitely a side of me that would have liked to see Steve Rogers receive all his super-powers while still retaining that original tiny size, just to watch a little monkey Captain America jumping around for the latter half of the movie, but I think the filmmakers went the right way.
Hugo Weaving, who plays the Red Skull, is something of a genre-film mainstay, between The Matrix and The Lord Of The Rings and The Wolfman, but he’s enough different here that it’s worth it. And frankly speaking, not many actors can do this kind of work, bringing weight to subject matter which is perilously close to weightless. Weaving plays the Red Skull with a quasi-Germanic accent reminiscent of, and in fact patterned upon, the voice of director Werner Herzog. Again, this kind of thing makes me fantasize about a world where Werner Herzog himself gets to play the Red Skull (battling a little monkey Captain America), but again I suggest the filmmakers did the more reasonable thing.
The Red Skull has a toady little assistant named Doctor Zola, who is played by the character actor Toby Jones, who played Karl Rove in Oliver Stone’s W. and so is playing pretty much the same character here. I remember this character from the comics, where he became a funky cyborg whose head was in his chest. In a movie already stocked with geeky in-jokes (the Human Torch costume in the World’s Fair scene; the off-hand Raiders reference to Nazis digging in the desert), my favorite was the shot introducing Dr. Zola, where he’s peering into a microscope and the visual effect makes it look like his face is on his chest. I’m not a fan of in-jokes if they slow the movie down, but these in-jokes didn’t.
Another in-joke is the character of Howard Stark, played byDominic Cooper, who we quickly figure out is meant to be the dashing scientist dad of Robert Downey Jr.’s character from the Iron Man movies. Stark and Professor Erskine, played by Stanley Tucci, head up the team who turn Steve Rogers into the strapping super-soldier he becomes, and who also perfect his famous shield. These two are just a part of the wide-ranging and hugely likable supporting cast, which also includes Derek Luke and Band Of Brothers‘ Neal McDonough as two of the Howling Commandos (lesser-known but awesome Stan Lee/Jack Kirby creations.)
Best of all are Tommy Lee Jones, cracking jokes and stealing all the best lines as Steve Rogers’ hardassed superior officer — I guess Tommy Lee would technically be ”Colenol America” in this movie – and Hayley Atwell as the love interest, British officer Peggy Carter, who gets to be a much more active participant than we’ve seen in any superhero movie so far let “the girl” be. Let’s not get carried away; we’re still a long ways off from a superhero movie where female characters get to drive the plot in any kind of interesting, developed way, but this actress projects a real wit and intelligence, an assertive femininity, that the movie really does need. It doesn’t help that she’s more voluptuous than the standard Hollywood actress. Sorry! I don’t mind admitting that I like a woman with brains and feistiness, but also one who’s demonstrably woman. See here:
In fact, instead of ending this piece with the classic review structure (“In conclusion…”), I’m just going to end it with a Hayley Atwell photobomb, because when I do this kind of thing I get more visits to my website, which my website deserves, and honestly speaking, it’s not exactly unpleasant for me either.
Any complaints?
Find me on Twitter!: @jonnyabomb
This review, for reasons quickly to become apparent, first appeared in 2009. I’m posting it now because my long-awaited Sucker Punch review is going up next.
NOT THAT INTO YOU, WATCHMEN.
Naw, I dug the Watchmen movie a fair amount, actually. I just saw the above mash-up title [He’s Just Not That Into You + Watchmen] on a marquee somewhere in Yonkers back around the time both movies were in theaters, and I had to finally share it. Unfortunately, it seems to accurately describe the opinions of a significant percentage of moviegoers and most of the fans of the Watchmen comic too. Today I want to talk about whether that’s fair, or whether people should give the movie another look.
The Watchmen Director’s Cut DVD is now among us, so this is a good time to start thinking about where this long-awaited, somewhat tepidly-received film adaptation of a universally-acknowledged comic book masterpiece fits in to the pantheon of comic book cinema. When the movie version of Watchmen was finally released a few months ago (22 years after the original 12-issue comic series), people fell over themselves to make public their earliest thoughts. I think the movie demands just a little more time to simmer. Personally, I at least had to wait to see Tales of The Black Freighter.
So now, at this point in time, I’ve seen Black Freighter on DVD twice, and Under The Hood once, and I’ve now seen around 9 hours of the filmed Watchmen. That means 3 trips to the movie theater (so far). By my estimation, 3 times is once more than Jackie Earle Haley, twice more than Billy Crudup’s [probably shocked] family, and thrice more than original comic series writer Alan Moore. Although I did enjoy it every time, I didn’t see it that often out of some insane love for the movie – it just works out that way sometimes. (Promised three separate groups of people I’d see it with them, didn’t mind the repeat trips, etc.)
But I’ve definitely had ample opportunity to give fair consideration to Watchmen, a movie that was widely-reported to be by its makers, and remains very obviously upon every viewing, a labor of love. It’s a thoughtful and intriguing interpretation of source material that was virtually impossible to approximate, and as such, of course it was unfairly and [usually] wrongly slammed from many quarters.
I think one of the big problems I observe with the world at large today, and certainly in the realm of pop culture, is that everybody needs to appear as if they know everything. The truth is that everybody does not know everything. Nobody knows everything, and almost everybody knows a whole lot less than they think they do. I’m no different. I have some inside knowledge on some things, but I’m no insider. I have some expertise in many things, but I’m no expert. I’m human. I change my mind sometimes. I’m wrong sometimes, and I try to admit it when I am. No matter how hard I try, I’m not perfect. But I’m trying, Ringo. I’m trying REAL hard.
So you can take my opinion of Watchmen or you can leave it, but at least understand that I took plenty of time to think about it, and now, with all that said, here’s what I came up with:
Ultimately, I have come to agree that Watchmen was worth doing as a movie, but ultimately, I also believe that – and I don’t want to be the kind of prick who says this, but all the same – of course the book remains better than the movie. The difference between Watchmen the book and Watchmen the movie is that the book is unquestionably a masterpiece, and while the movie does its level best and usually succeeds, a masterpiece it ain’t quite.
Let’s look at all of the individual elements and how they add up:
THE FILMMAKING:
THE CASTING:
All haters can go screw. She was fine. In fact, she was better than fine. She was fine in the acting sense, and in the other sense of fine, she was super-hot. Who could have played that role better? Kate Winslet? Don’t think so. The role of Silk Spectre calls for sex appeal, a smile that can draw dudes as diverse as Dr. Manhattan and Nite Owl 2, a convincing physicality, some insecurity, and just a dash of naiveté. What about that did Malin Akerman not provide? She not only sold the part, but she brought the sex to it also. I love how some comic book fans refuse to admit that part of the history and the adolescent draw of superhero comics is the weird sexual fantasy aspect of it all. I wonder if the legions of droolers who went to see Transformers 2 cared about the convincing acting of Megan Fox. I wonder if everybody in the world who loved The Dark Knight were into it more because of Maggie Gylenhaal’s acting. I wonder if it would have hurt that movie to cast hotter. Actually, I argue it could only have helped. Weird sex has more to do with superheroes than anyone likes to talk about. That’s why Batman Returns is half a good movie, by the way. (The other half stars The Penguin.) It’s also the entire reason why Alan Moore originally wrote those scenes into Watchmen.
I’m definitely on the Billy Crudup bandwagon. I’ve seen the guy on stage and in a bunch of movies and it’s clear he’s a hugely talented and adventurous actor. As Dr. Manhattan, he’s convincingly otherworldly and detached, while strangely vulnerable and searching. He’s just right. And there, that’s an entire paragraph passed without any easy blue-balls jokes.
Unexpectedly nice to see this M.I.A. 1980s character actor on screen again, and he gives one of the more believable, affecting performances in the entire magilla, even saddled as he is with rodent-like makeup and big fake ears.
Very talented actor; probably miscast. Or at least, misdirected. This character is maybe THE major misstep Watchmen the movie makes. Matthew Goode can convincingly play a charismatic, intimidating, impossible-to-beat villain – see The Lookout for proof – but he doesn’t come off that way in Watchmen, which is a sizable issue. Here, he comes off like the world’s richest Prince fan. In the book, Rorshach makes a crack about Adrian’s possible homosexuality, a crack that the movie makes overt by having him have a folder on his hard drive labeled “Boys.” Problematic; particularly coming from the director of 300. I understand that they were going for the Alexander the Great parallel, but it’s totally unnecessary and a distracting divergence from the point of Ozymandias. In the alternate-universe re-cast, they could try to go with Paul Walker or the long-rumoured Jude Law. Again, no offense to Matthew Goode – I just don’t think the chemistry here was right.
The Carla Gugino bandwagon is another one I happily ride. She elevates every under-written role she takes, and legitimizes every inferior movie she makes. She’s a convincing actor with a subtle sense of humor and she’s also incredibly fun to look at. Perfect casting here; solid performance.
Speaking of perfect casting: Holy hell, what a face. Damn, do I ever wish that more interesting faces like this would get back into American movies. Not only that, but the guy’s scarily perfect as the un-pretty, inexplicably-lovable sociopathic vigilante. Everybody agrees that Jackie Earle Haley is amazing in Watchmen, and everybody is right. I’d love to write more about it, but there’s really not much more to say. The guy’s one-hundred percent.
This fella is totally right for his role too. For some reason, all discussions of Jeffrey Dean Morgan in this movie began with which other actors he supposedly resembles: Robert Downey Jr. multiplied by George Clooney, or an Americanized Javier Bardem, blah blah blah. That makes sense. That skewed resemblance to better-known leading man types, the way he suggests other actors we all like, actually really works to make this character work, as does the actor’s own charisma and talent. It’s a hard job he’s got here; to make a racist, rapist asshole compelling enough to hang a two-hour murder-mystery on, but he pulls it off, in my opinion.
I was initially skeptical of Patrick Wilson in this role, because I was probably confusing him with his callow Greek-god character from Little Children, and also I always looked at the comic-book Nite Owl as a much shlubbier nebbish than Patrick Wilson could ever portray. Despite the too-obvious athleticism, he turns out to be a solid choice for the part. He undercuts his action figure blandness with an appropriately convincing self-doubt and a sly sense of humor – it’s like Kevin Costner all over again (in his good roles, that is).
Misfire. Forgive my language, Mr. President, but that was some truly shitty Richard Nixon. Would it have been tough to get Frank Langella to fill the role? He’s all warmed up for it these days. On first glimpse of the leader of the Watchmen world, my cousin turned to me and said “he looks like Dan Aykroyd from Nothing But Trouble” and I entirely agreed. Actually, Dan Aykroyd coulda played a better Nixon. If you get the Nothing But Trouble reference, you figure that’s not what they were going for. In fact, most of the old-age makeup in general in Watchmen was less than great. (Guess Fincher hired out all the best makeup artists for Benjamin Button.) Bad Nixon is an unnecessary distraction, especially considering how close to the beginning the character first appears.
I’m a big fan of Danny Woodburn, and not just from Seinfeld. I think he’s a good actor and I appreciate his resemblance to Billy Joel. Anybody who’s read my earlier pieces knows that I support the casting of little people in pivotal roles in huge-budget non-comedy pictures. But I feel like in this case, Big Figure is an element that was lost in translation from comic to film. In comics, little people are shorthand – Alan Moore could depict a gang boss who is also a little person because superhero comic book readers understand the reference to characters like the Penguin, etc., who could lead physically larger henchmen due to their intellect and superior cruelty. By contrast, film audiences, through no fault of their own (I blame hack comedies), are conditioned to laugh whenever a little person appears. And that’s exactly what happened in every audience I saw Watchmen with. While there is plenty of jet-black humor in the prison-break sequence, none of it is intended to be at the expense of Danny Woodburn’s stature. This is one place where the filmmakers could have (and probably should have) diverged from the text and cast Big Figure differently. The sequence really would have worked as intended if, say, Michael Clarke Duncan or Ron Perlman or Tommy Lister or The Rock were standing outside that cell, ominously stalking Jackie Earle Haley’s Rorshach. As it is, the jailbreak sequence, a highlight of the book, doesn’t hardly rock on film.
THE FINAL TALLY:
Everything’s good except Big Figure, Gay Ozymandias, and Bad Nixon. Everything else either surpasses expectations, or confirms them. By my math, that’s a success. The credit goes to Zack Snyder and his team for making the movie work as well as it does, and to the people at Warner Brothers who let him make the movie his way. It really was as good a Watchmen adaptation as anyone could have asked for. Personally, I never asked for it, didn’t feel it was necessary. But if it had to happen – and apparently it did – then it’s best that it went down this way. The flaws are significant enough that the movie still pales in comparison to the book, but then again, most things do. That’s how Watchmen, the movie, should stand in the estimation of comic book fans. I can’t say if it works for the laypeople, but it probably wasn’t made for them, honestly. Zack Snyder was really talking directly to fans of the original comic here, and the fans should be thankful. This one is.
P.S. Alan Moore, lighten up a little. This movie was a compliment to you.
P.P.S. Dave Gibbons, you’re still TOO fresh. What a great artist – if only for the spotlight it has returned to the virtuosity of Dave Gibbons’ art, the Watchmen movie was a worthy experiment.
Gene Colan, without question one of the greatest comic book artists of all time, died this past Thursday at the age of 84. He was best known for his early work on Daredevil and Iron Man at Marvel Comics, and also his work on characters like Batman for DC Comics, but more than anything the work that makes him immortal is his legendary run on Tomb Of Dracula with writer Marv Wolfman at Marvel throughout the 1970s. Gene Colan’s work had unprecedented life and darkness to it. There was so much weight and substance to his pencil drawings that his work didn’t always need to be inked (generally the norm in comic book production). He could do the superhero stuff as well as any artist of the era, but there was something particularly special about his work in horror, as I am about to show you…
For more, read this excellent obituary from The Comics Journal, and this fantastic interview from their archives.
Here’s what I liked about Thor:
They had to change up Thor’s costume. They couldn’t have gone with the winged helmet and the yellow hooker boots. But that giant robot thing? That’s the Destroyer. And if you look at the above pictures, you’ll see that it looks a whole lot like the way Jack Kirby first drew it, almost fifty years ago. That’s pretty cool. The reason that most of us who grew up on superhero comics love them so much has almost everything to do with the drawings of Jack Kirby, the guy who created the looks of most of the most famous superhero comic characters. Kirby’s drawings STILL leap off the page. They have a sense of weight and a kineticism, a strange energy, that remains just as effective today.
And somebody at Marvel (and Paramount) had the good sense to not mess with Kirby’s vision too much. How cool is it that, nearly fifty years later, we’re seeing a Jack Kirby character on the big screen, looking much the way that Kirby first designed it? I’ll answer that. It’s extremely cool.
To me, it’s so extremely weird that a major summer movie was made from one of the most esoteric of 1960s Marvel Comics that I can’t help but embrace it. Thor was always one of my least favorite Marvel characters, but in my opinion this is as good a Thor movie as we could reasonably expect.
Here’s the Thor story really quick: The world of Thor supposes that the characters of Norse mythology exist in our dimension as super-powered extraterrestrial beings. Thor, the arrogant god of thunder, grows up alongside his half-brother Loki, the god of mischief, under their father, the all-powerful Odin. Thor’s impetuousness sees him exiled by Odin, powerless, to Earth, where he has to prove his worthiness before he can lift his mighty hammer and wield the power of Thor.
Basically, that’s all here. Chris Hemsworth plays Thor, and what I like about the character here is that Thor starts out as a total dick. I like when he yells at an army of approaching Frost Giants (as much a Robert E. Howard notion as an ancient Norse one), I like when he does the whirling-hammer trick that you see on that Kirby cover up above, and I like that he gets Tasered by a flighty college student when he’s stuck powerless on Earth. Hemsworth is good, even if he’s hardly the most interesting character in the movie.
More interesting is Tom Hiddleston as Loki, who gets several more notes to play as a character who starts out as a friend to Thor and becomes his main antagonist – although the way it plays out, there are some real and almost understandable reasons why.
I also liked Anthony Hopkins as Odin, maybe because in his early scenes he looks like Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn. At this point it’s a pretty generic idea to cast Hopkins in this kind of a role, but again the weirdness of the setting makes it more interesting than it could have been. I like the scene where he goes into a strange hibernation that all the characters call “the Odinsleep.” I’d love to start referring to my own need for napping as “the Jonnysleep.”
I liked Thor’s buddies, Lady Sif and the Warriors Three. I liked Sif (Jaimie Alexander) because she’s pretty, I liked Fandral (Josh Dallas) because it was fun trying to figure out whether or not he was played by Matthew Modine, and I liked Volstagg (Ray Stevenson) because I honestly couldn’t tell that he was Ray Stevenson until his second or third scene. And yes, I liked the big cameo, as a Marvel Comics zombie in recovery. It was a blatant plug for the upcoming Avengers movie, but it almost makes sense. I also liked Natalie Portman in this movie, and I really liked Stellan Skarsgard, as her very skeptical coworker who eventually becomes a believer. It’s nice to have solid supporting players who can help a skeptical audience member like me start to take more seriously a truly ridiculous premise. And Idris Elba, forever The Wire’s Stringer Bell, grounds some of the most ridiculous moments of all, as the guardian over the bridge between Earth and the world of the gods. My man literally stands in front of a rainbow bridge (sounds like something Prince would sing about), in a helmet that’s taller than I am, and somehow manages to remain a convincing badass. Let us remember him at years’ end for Great Achievements In Badassness.
Is this a great movie? No. No, it is not. For one thing, it has more distracting product placement than just about any movie in recent memory. (I understand that this movie was a tough sell and they needed all the ad revenue they could get, but still: I got contact-high brain-freeze from all the 7-11 logos on hand.) More damningly, Kenneth Branagh’s direction inexplicably has more Dutch angles than any movie ever should. Thor has more Dutch angles than Citizen Kane, though, to be fair, less than Battlefield Earth. Why so many Dutch angles? Was it some misunderstanding, considering all the Norse references at hand? It’s really distracting, and pretty corny. And the same issues that plagued Iron Man 2, where Marvel Studios is working too hard to shoehorn subplots for the upcoming Avengers movie into all of its movies, are present here, though not quite as distractingly as in Iron Man 2.
Overall, I enjoyed Thor, and way more than I ever thought I would. As is very clear by now, I grew up as a big fan of Marvel Comics. I don’t remotely have the same passion nowadays, but I can still enjoy a decent comic-book flick when they come around. Thor to me is like when I was living in my most voracious comic-book reading phase – it’s not a character I care much about, and it isn’t the best comic story ever told, but it’s a solid enough detour from my regular reading habits. I may rather be reading about Spider-Man and Batman, but since I’ve already read their best stories over and over, this is an okay change of pace.
My Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World review now exists! I don’t think it ruins anything. I just recommend that you see the movie — it’s fun!
Well, I’m won over. I get it now. I admit, I was skeptical about this Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World thing. If you click through to this editorial, you will see my comprehensive thoughts on the comic and the movie and director Edgar Wright’s work in general. Up until now, I saw all kinds of potential but was not riding on the love bus with so many of you Shaun Of The Dead superfans. I stand by my earlier reasons for hesitating, but I was strolling cooly alongside the love bus. I hadn’t boarded yet. I was not fully convinced. Now I am.
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is a fun, witty, energetic summer movie whose virtues will remain fresh long after the season has passed. Again, to be honest, it took me a moment to warm up. For the first half hour, the movie was still working on me. It felt dangerously cutesy, and more like the kind of thing I would’ve loved fifteen years ago but not today, as a sporadically-mature adult man. At some point early on, the movie either won me over or I relented, because for the rest of the running time I found it to be seventeen different kinds of fun.
You don’t have to be a fan of the comic book series by Bryan Lee O’Malley to have a great time at the movie. You don’t have to be a fan of video games to have a great time at the movie. I’m sure it helps, but I can’t say I’m really either one of those things. You don’t have to be a fan of Edgar Wright’s previous pair of movies either, Shaun Of The Dead or Hot Fuzz, although you can be, and either way you should be impressed at the lightning-leap forward the young director takes on this newest flick. Working with Bill Pope, one of the most forward-thinking cinematographers in the business (The Matrix, Spider-Man 2, Team America), Wright stylistically blows the roof off the place and does a standing back-flip out into the front yard.
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is the story of the title character, Scott Pilgrim, played by Superbad’s Michael Cera. Scott is a 22-year-old bass guitarist in a band called Sex Bob-Omb – I know, I didn’t like the name either until I heard it screamed out loud by the band’s drummer, and it helps that the actual tunes are played by Beck (who, not for nothing, Michael Cera kinda resembles in this movie). Scott has a 17-year-old girlfriend named Knives Chau, played by the endlessly sweet Ellen Wong in a role I should have hated but totally didn’t. Scott lives in a one-bedroom apartment where he shares a bed with his caustic gay roommate Wallace Wells, played by a scene-stealingly dry Kieran Culkin. I also really liked the interplay between Scott’s band, which includes lead guitarist Stephen Stills (Mark Webber), drummer Kim Pine (Alison Pill), and roadie/bass understudy Young Neil (Johnny Simmons, who was equally likable in the much-maligned Jennifer’s Body).
The danger of making a movie about hyper-verbal, super-quirky young people is casting; cast the wrong people and the movie can be unbearable. This movie shows how it’s supposed to work. This movie is perfectly-cast. I liked all of these kids, even in the moments where they were being jerks to each other. The banter is fresh and fast – you have no idea how fast – and these characters are a good group to spend a couple of hours with.
This miniature environment in which Scott Pilgrim roams is totally upended when he meets a girl named Ramona Flowers, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead. This is the crux of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World – Scott falls in love at first sight and works overtime to make it mutual, to great comedic effect. The thing is, Ramona is flighty and elusive and guarded and frequently less than affectionate. She’s also cute as all hell, and as we all know, that’s a maddening combination. As the relationship develops, it becomes apparent that Ramona has a string of exes who are more than happy to make it even harder for Scott than it already is. Here’s the main conceit of both the comic book and the movie, which is that Scott has to literally defeat the seven evil exes in battle if he wants to date Ramona. It’s a cross between a John Hughes movie and a 1970s kung-fu flick. It’s as if the young John Cusack was cast in Master Of The Flying Guillotine. It’s a Michael Cera action movie. It shouldn’t work, and yet it totally does.
Again, that’s a credit to the cast who Edgar Wright has assembled, particularly a brilliantly over-the-top Chris Evans as a pro-skateboarder turned action-movie-star and ex-Superman Brandon Routh as a towering metrosexual supervillain who is currently dating Scott’s own ex, Envy Adams (Brie Larson) and is happy to rub it in. And then there’s Jason Schwartzman as the Lex Luthor and the Doctor Doom of the entire enterprise, about which I will speak no more, only to say that no one anywhere does that blend of infuriating and impishly charming as well as this guy does.
But the key to the success of the entire movie, in my opinion, is Mary Elizabeth Winstead. She’s playing the idealized dream girl, and is convincing enough at that for sure, but she brings a calm and an indecision and even a little darkness to the role that is absolutely the source of the movie’s believability, even amidst all of the kung-fu fights and sword duels and musical numbers. She makes you believe that a girl like this would be interested in not only the geeky Scott Pilgrim, but also that she had been interested in the seven evil exes at one point. She suggests a realistic dating history that doesn’t have the room to exist onscreen with all of the movie’s more fantastic elements. She has an understandable chemistry with Michael Cera, sweet yet sharp, tender yet tentative. She has a late-in-the-game moment with a hammer that renders a Thor movie irrelevant. She’s great.
And for the record, Michael Cera is reliably good too – his comic timing is as always, impeccable, and even though he’s playing a character who technically can be somewhat of a dickhead, he’s always worth rooting for. This is both a departure from the typical Michael Cera performance and a more complicated shading of a familiar role for him. He’s a super-talented kid, and though his peerless ability to play young makes me wonder how he’ll sustain a career once he grows out of those roles, I can’t imagine any other actor who could have carried this movie.
And I can’t imagine anyone else who could have directed it. Edgar Wright has done some impressive, interesting work with this movie. His direction is fizzy and brisk and feels like something new. The movie moves quickly but cleanly, and though it’s dense with pop cultural references and visual cues and sound effects, all of those things feel organically incorporated into the movie around it. It might draw on the aesthetics of old-school video games, but it only ever feels like the work of a director in love with movies. Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, as reference-heavy as it is, is truly original, and besides that, it’s more accessible than I ever could have imagined. It’s a movie that you could show to little kids and to very old people alike, and they’d all spark to it (although I imagine that it could seem totally surreal to someone who never played any video games and wonders why all these villains are turning into coins and why some guy keeps screaming “K.O.!” on the soundtrack.) It’s a great date movie, and it can also serve as hope to the lonely souls in the audience. It’s a movie about something, about the self-doubt and the confusion that meeting a new person and wondering how you can measure up to their standards, and it tells that story with unparalleled style and verve. And again, it’s a Michael Cera action movie that convinces. Who would have dreamed?
Old trick: Reel ‘em in with bright colors and pretty ladies, keep ‘em in with wit & panache.
I hope you’re all following my Twitter which is just a steady stream of my thoughts and articles and who could live without that, but I’ve had a few articles up on Mapcidy recently that I’d like to direct your attention to.
I’m trying to get up some up-to-date movie news on some of the upcoming flicks I find interesting, along with weighing in on some cool-looking trailers. I resurrected my comics column and put up one of my occasional music recommendations. These are all things that will enrich your life, and that is certainly an exaggeration. But these are things that I have done, and as such they ought to be mentioned on my blog.
ALBUM REVIEW: Sir Lucious Left Foot… The Son Of Chico Dusty.
MOVIE NEWS: Daniel Craig To Star In The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
THAT’S RIGHT, I SAID COMICS Issue #14 – Scarlet.
THAT’S RIGHT, I SAID COMICS Issue #15 – San Diego Comic-Con 2010.
It’s Wednesday now. Good enough reason to encourage you to check out a fresh batch of articles concocted by yours truly. Please read & comment!
DVD Tuesday – The June 8th, 2010 Edition.
TV REVIEW: Last Comic Standing.
WEB SIGHT OF THE DAY: Mortal Kombat: Rebirth.
In other news: My friends are taking over the world with their new projects! This makes me happy. Please click through the following links, and support these talented people:
REAL MEN REAL ISSUES: Episode 4! (exclusively on Babelgum.com)
White On Rice (now available On Demand)
The Good Guys (Monday nights on Fox)
The Man That I Was (just premiered in Los Angeles!)
S.H.O.O.T. First (full comic available online)
Television Without Pity and Pop Sculpture (for all your Zach Oat needs)
If I’m missing anybody this time around, remind me and you can be sure I will shout you out soon enough.
