The Avengers part 14

Snapz Pro XScreenSnapz006

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The gloves are off, the war is on.  Stark Tower is ground zero.  For the first time in The Avengers’s narrative, there are civilians involved.  Civilians had to pay attention in Stuttgart, but now they are collateral damage.

Why New York, again?  Hasn’t New York suffered enough cinematic attacks since 9/11?  From the Green Goblin’s assault on the Roosevelt Island tram to Cloverfield‘s giant angry whatsit, to Bane’s perversion of the Occupy movement, why must New York keep suffering?  Part of the answer, of course, is that New York must suffer fantastic re-creations of 9/11 in order for us to understand and heal from that event as a culture.  Another part of the answer is that New York is simply Marvel’s home and always has been — there are fewer cinematic real-estate shifts more jarring than the one that removed The Punisher from the gritty streets of New York and moved him to — what the ever-loving fuck — Tampa?  But finally, the answer to the question “Why New York?” is that it is America’s City, the melting pot, the place where America, like it or not, was born, and is continually born, the place where all the world comes to be American.  Millions of people, all from somewhere else, all living atop one another, all clashing against each other, all chasing the dream, all hating one another, all knowing that that very clashing makes the city stronger.  Just like, you know, not to put too fine a point on it, The Avengers.

website statistics


Read more

True Grit part 6

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Faithful reader Bob Glouberman writes:

It seems to me that LaBoeuf isn’t auditioning for the role of father but for the role of suitor, and spurned suitor at that. He is constantly trying to impress her so he can steal a kiss from her. When he showed her his star on their first meeting he was trying to impress her as a suitor not as a father. And when he spanked her, he did so more as a peer and spurned lover. When he leaves Mattie later in the movie, it’s a scene of lovers leaving each other for the last time. If he’s auditioning for the role of father, it’s a creepy molesting kind of father.

I see what Mr. Glouberman is getting at here, although if LaBoeuf wishes to be lover to a 14-year-old girl, and demonstrates his love by whipping her with a stick, he’s got a whole other set of problems.

On the other hand, perhaps he’s right.  Perhaps both LaBoeuf and Rooster are auditioning for the honor of Mattie’s hand.  Although if they are, Rooster isn’t trying very hard – he’s cagey, inward, egotistical and disinterested.  Not to mention about 45 years too old for her.  Which, hey, is exactly what some girls look for in a man.

Read more

Superfriends vs. Justice League

When a child first sees a cool new superhero, the first question is usually “What does he do?”

This is a fitting query regarding characters of action, but it is no way to structure a TV show. And yet, it is seemingly how the producers approached the structure of Superfriends. In contrast, the producers of Justice League took the “What does he do?” question for granted and instead asked the far more important question “Who is he?” The characters in Justice League are individuals with points of view, motivations and personalities, the characters in Superfriends are merely agglomerations of abilities.

The cape is not the man, and this, I opine, is the basis of why Justice League will be treasured for generations to come while Superfriends will always be regarded as a camp classic fit only for the simple.

In Superfriends, Batman has a computer and a cave full of gadgets, Wonder Woman has a magic rope and an invisible plane, Green Lantern has a magic ring, Flash is fast, Superman has his multitudinous powers, Aquaman talks to fish. Those are all fine attributes, but they do not, in and of themselves, constitute character. If all that mattered was the number of powers, Martian Manhunter would be a more popular superhero than Superman. What the producers of Superfriends chose to do is give all their heroes the exact same personality, whether they are the Last Son of Krypton, the Dark Knight, the Amazon Princess or The Guy Who Talks to Fish. The heroes of Superfriends are uniformly game, brave, chipper, chatty, easily startled and, paradoxically, unflappable. No sooner do they exclaim “Great Krypton/Hera/Gotham/Neptune!” than they pull some improbable solution out of the air and calmly implement it (as Seanbaby mentions, this solution often involves “spinning around” the bad guy/explosion/missile/lava/monster/lava-monster until the spinning affects it somehow).  This conceptual blunder, not the dumb plots or the cheap animation, is why Superfriends is so reviled.  Television can soar on dumb plots and cheap animation, it cannot survive without characters.  This is why episodes of Superfriends feel so shallow, repetitive and lame; there are seven main characters and they all think and act exactly the same way.  Think about it: Hanna-Barbera actually gave the members of the Justice League less personality than they gave to the members of the Mystery Gang.

Because their protagonists have no personalities (or, if you like, they all have roughly the same personalities as Batman and Robin do on the Adam West Batman show, the source of Superfriends‘ most likely inspiration) there is no dramatic tension in the scripts.  That means that the writers must come up with ever-more-improbable, ever-more-lame, ever-more-fantastic, ever-more-bizarre plots of exhausting, spiraling action to put their heroes and their various abilities through their paces.  These plots can be wonderful diversions, but they do not constitute drama.

The producers of Justice League, coming from the success of their Batman and Superman animated series’, understood from the beginning that it actually doesn’t matter what a superhero’s abilities are; what matters is who the superhero is

Take Green Lantern.  The beauty of Green Lantern is not that his ring can make anything happen, it’s that his ring can make anything happen within the bounds of his imagination and that that magic is limited to the force of his will-power.  Green Lantern is not about a magic ring, it is about Imagination and Will.  If the wearer is a dullard, he makes a very poor Green Lantern indeed, and his ring is useless if one can wear down his will.  (The creator of Green Lantern borrowed the magic-ring idea from Arabian Nights; the first Green Lantern’s name was originally to be Alan Ladd, off of Aladdin.)  Green Lantern’s appeal lies not in his ring, the ring is a tool, like a badge or a gun; Green Lantern’s appeal lies in the personality of the man/woman/space-creature wearing the ring.  Like a western or police drama, it’s doesn’t matter that one carries a badge, what matters is who carries the badge.  One can be a great policeman, a corrupt policeman, a shy policeman, an incompetent policeman, a sly policeman, a duplicitous policeman.  The same principle applies to doctors, lawyers, detectives and space explorers, to name only the most prevalent of TV professions.  And yet, in the minds of the producers of Superfriends, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Mike Hammer, Jim Rockford and Barnaby Jones are all the exact same person.

In Justice League, what was important to the producers about Wonder Woman is not that she’s super-strong or has a magic rope, but that she’s a princess who has led a coddled, innocent, priviledged life apart from man’s world.  The strength and the rope are tools that happen to be sitting around, useful in fighting alien menaces, but the point is that her naive personality and optimistic attitude give rise to drama as she clashes not with bad guys but with Batman’s scowling cynicism or Hawkgirl’s brazen forthrightness (favorite Hawkgirl line: “Less talking, more hitting!”).  The producers of Justice League didn’t get around to mentioning that WW’s lasso is a lie-detector until the third season, and even then it was total surprise to WW.  What makes Flash work in Justice League is not that he’s fast but that he’s a careless goofball.  What makes Batman work is not that he’s a brilliant detective but that he’s bitter, remote and scornful.  And, as I’ve mentioned before, what makes Martian Manhunter a different character from Superman is not his powers but his soul.  The characters in Justice League aren’t a bunch of superheroes, they are a bunch of people who happen to have super-powers.  This seems like an obvious distinction to make, and has been in the comics since their inception, but it never occurred to the producers of Superfriends.

When any seven people are thrown into a high-stakes, high-pressure situation, drama inevitably occurs.  While the plot contrivances of Justice League are more carefully, logically and elegantly presented than those of Superfriends, they are not more interesting or believable.  A talking gorilla, an evil computer or an alien overlord are of the same narrative value whether they are designed by Alex Toth or Bruce Timm.  What keeps Justice League alive is the drama that arises from the clash of personalities responding to the crisis.
hit counter html code

Justice League (part I)


The Justice Lords would like a word with you.

My son has turned me into a geek.

I never read comic books as a kid. I think the first comic book I ever read was Watchmen in 1985. I read Dark Knight Returns after Tim Burton’s Batman movie came out. I didn’t start reading comics until Joel Silver asked me to work on the Wonder Woman movie in 1999.  Even then, it was all “just research.” It was more fun than reading Dickens (mostly), but I never considered it a pursuit in and of itself.

My son has changed all of that.

He loves superheroes. He can’t get enough of them. When he wakes up, his first thought is about someone he needs to look up on Wikipedia so that he can draw a picture of them. The Marvel splash-panel I posted last week is only one of dozens of superhero drawings that lie scattered in heaps around the house. His walls, floor and shelves are plastered and stacked high with drawings and figurines. (Strangely, every time I’ve tried to interest him in an actual poster showing the same superheroes, he’s never interested; they never “look right” to him.)

Part of it, I know, is related to his interest in dinosaurs, which recently reached its saturation point. That is, like the dinosaur world, the superhero world comprises another world of tiny pieces of information for his rapidly-expanding mind to categorize. In dinosaurs, you have plant-eaters and predators, in superheroes, you have good guys and bad guys. Among plant-eaters you have long-necks and short-necks, among predators you have therapods and oviraptors; among good guys you have metahumans and “regular guys in costumes,” among bad guys you have aliens and robots. And all combinations of the above. (His interest in dinosaurs supplanted his interest in trains, which occupied the first half of his life.)

So a conversation between us will go something like this:

S. Dad, what do you know about Magneto?
D. Magneto can control metal with his mind.
S. Is he a good guy or a bad guy?
D. Magneto is a bad guy.
S. And does he have superpowers or is he a regular guy in a costume?
D. He has superpowers. He can control metal with his mind.
S. Yeah, but he’s not super-strong, and he doesn’t have, like, heat vision or anything.
D. Yeah, but he can control metal with his mind. That’s his super-power.
S. But how did he get like that?
D. He was born like that. He’s a mutant. That’s the difference between X-Men and The Avengers. The X-Men were all born with their powers, the Avengers are all regular people who had accidents.
S. But what about Wolverine?
D. Wolverine is an X-Man.
S. But he’s in the Avengers! And so is Storm!
(one trip to the Marvel Encyclopedia later)
D. Okay, but Wolverine and Storm were in the X-Men first.
S. And is Elektra a good guy or a bad guy?
D. Elektra is kind of like Catwoman. Sometimes she’s a good guy and sometimes she’s a bad guy — it kind of depends on where you happen to be standing at the moment.

And so on.

(Of the many differences between DC and Marvel, one of the most striking, from an “adult trying to explain comic book heroes to a child who can’t read yet” point-of-view anyway, is that the lines of good and bad are drawn much more clearly in the DC universe; in Marvel, characters are zipping back and forth over the line all the time. How do I explain that the Punisher, who slaughters people with guns, is a good guy, while Batman, who despises guns and never kills anyone, is also a good guy? Or for that matter, how do I explain that the Hulk is a good guy, when no one, not even the Hulk, thinks he’s a good guy? And how do I explain how the media in Spider-Man’s world shapes the public’s perception of him, making a good guy look bad?)

Anyway, long story short, there’s this show, Justice League, that a year or so ago just hit my son like a truck.

I can’t explain it. He liked the Bruce Timm Batman show, but it was always a little too scary for him. He liked the Bruce Timm Superman show, but the plots were a little too complex for him (typical conversation: Sam: Who’s that? Dad: That’s Lex Luthor. Sam: Is he the bad guy? Dad: He’s the bad guy. Sam: Then why isn’t Superman fighting him?). But Justice League hit him just right. Something about the family dynamics of the group, Superman and Batman and Flash and Green Lantern and Wonder Woman and Martian Manhunter and Hawkgirl all in the same show, bouncing off each other and having their own adventures, somehow that clicked in his brain in a way that the individual heroes’ shows did not.  The complications, which I would have thought would have made the show more difficult to follow, instead gave him more to feast on.

Now then: none of this means that I’ve been watching all these shows with him.  Normally, these shows exist as something for Sam to watch while mom and dad get to spend 23 minutes having a conversation or eating dinner.  But one night a few weeks ago, I called my wife to dinner and she didn’t come.  Ten minutes later she wandered up from the TV room as though in a daze and said “I’m sorry, I got caught up in Justice League.”  And I made a sound like Scooby-Doo does when he’s confused, and when after everyone went to bed I stayed up to see what the hell was so interesting about this episode of Justice League.

Check this out: the episode (it’s a two-parter) is called “A Better World.”

The show begins like this: Lex Luthor has somehow become president and is, apparently, about to destroy the world.  Superman busts through White House security and confronts him in the Oval Office.  Lex sneers at him and says “Go ahead, arrest me, put me in jail, I’ll just get out again, I always do, you’ll never be rid of me, you know that,” and Superman sighs and says “Yeah, you’re right,” and kills him.  Just kills him.  Just turns on his heat vision and zaps him, right there in the Oval Office.  And Luthor falls over in a heap.  Because Superman could totally do that, you know.  Who would stop him?  No one can stop him.  Why didn’t he do it a long time ago?

And Superman just stands there over Luthor’s body.  There’s no triumph or release, just grim silence.  And Wonder Woman comes in and sees the dead body and says “…Oh. (beat) Well, I guess it had to happen at some point.”  And the crisis is over, poof, all the world’s problems are solved.

Fade out.  Roll titles.

Cut to: two years later, and the Justice League has all new uniforms, a new name (The Justice Lords) and they never leave the Watchtower (that’s their spaceship), because they never have to, because there is no crime.  There is no crime because, as we come to find out, the Justice League has lobotomized all the criminals.  We visit Arkham Asylum and find Joker and Poison Ivy and Two-Face and everyone else cheerful, model prisoners, milling around the grounds like pleasant, happy zombies.  Gotham City is so clean and bright it looks like Metropolis.  There’s an incredible scene where Justice Lord Superman is battling Doomsday (whom, aficianados will know, once killed Superman in the comics) and, just as Doomsday is about to go into his “MWAH HA HA” victory laugh, Justice Lord Superman zaps him in the forehead and we watch his brains melt down the sides of his face and Doomsday gets a queer, disconnected, disappointed look in his eyes as he slumps to the ground, still alive but no longer dangerous; somehow, it never occurred to him that Superman possessed the power to lobotomize him.

With no crime to fight, Justice Lord Batman has turned to science and has made an important discovery: he’s stumbled across a parallel dimension, where the normal, regular old Justice League with their colorful costumes and bickering ways are still wasting their time, struggling through a world filled with supervillains.  The Justice Lords take pity on the poor old alternate-dimension Justice League (who we realize, in time, are our dimension’s Justice League; that is, the whole first part of the show is taking place in an alternate dimension and the protagonists don’t enter until the beginning of Act II) and, in a gesture of kindness, kidnap them and take them prisoner so that they can clean up the other dimension too.  And so Act III has the Justice League taking on the Justice Lords, which, you can imagine, is difficult because they are, in fact, the exact same people, only a teeny bit more ruthless.  And on the one hand, you don’t like the Justice Lords because of that ruthlessness, and on the other hand, it’s like — well, how come the Justice League took this long to get their act together?  And the tension is unbearable because, as the title suggests, the Justice Lords have truly made their world better, and the Justice League is actually fighting to make it more chaotic and dangerous.

Bizarre enough?  It gets better.  To solve the problem of the Justice Lord Superman, whom no one can subdue, the Justice League must turn to Lex Luthor, who is still alive in this world, and who has the scientific knowledge to build a super-power-sapping device (“device” being the operative word here).  Luthor will zap the Justice Lord Superman so that the good-old Justice League can take back control of our world (or, rather, relinquish control of our world).  In exchange for his super-power-sapping device, the Justice League grants Lex a full pardon for all his past crimes and makes him a free man.

In the epilogue, we see a sobered, grateful Lex at a press conference, vowing to give up crime forever and — you knew it had to come — announcing his bid for the presidency.  And the cycle begins again.

And I’m sitting in front of the TV with my mouth hanging open.  This is a far cry from Superfriends.  In the span of a 45-minute superhero cartoon, Bruce Timm and company have just told me more about society, civilization and justice than I ever learned in a season of Law and Order.  Sure, Superman could just kill Lex.  Of course he could.  Why doesn’t he?  That would make everything better.  All it takes is the will to do so.  And that goes for all the Justice League.  Why bother negotiating with murderous thugs?  Why not just kill them?  They obviously have the power to do so.  Why put up with giggling psychopaths who have nothing to contribute to society?  Why not just kill them?  And then, dumb as it sounds, it hit me: that’s why they call it Superman’s “Never Ending Struggle for Truth and Justice.”  The whole point of the Justice League (and their real-world counteparts) is not to rid the world of crime, but to be vigilant in the fight against it.  And then I was reminded about something regarding God as well.  The DC superheroes were always modelled after the Gods, were they not?  Well here’s the answer to the great question, Why do the Gods allow evil to exist?

Okay, enough for now.  I’ve barely scratched the surface of my thoughts about this show.  There’s a three-part episode where, get this, the Justice League goes back in time to World War II, in order to…restore Adolf Hitler to power.

Suffice to say, it’s no longer Sam saying “Hey, let’s watch Justice League!”  Instead, it’s him saying “Can I watch Scooby-Doo?”  And I’m saying “No, c’mon, let’s watch Justice League!”  Now I know who all the characters are and what their backstories are (Did you know Hawkgirl was a detective on her home planet?) and what’s more, I care about them in ways I never have before.  And I will get into the reasons for that in Part II.

I leave you for the moment with what is probably my favorite moment in the series, and emblematic of its genius.  There’s a robot (AMAZO) who has the ability to imitate the powers of any superhero it sees.  If it sees the Flash, it can run at the speed of light, if it sees Green Lantern, it can fashion a magic power ring, etc.  It sees Superman, and acquires all his powers, and starts smashing stuff up.  Batman, who has no powers to acquire, is the only one capable of fighting it.  Thinking fast, he takes a lump of Kryptonite out of his pocket and lobs it at the robot, who collapses like a ragdoll and falls into the river (Batman reasoning that if AMAZO has acquired Superman’s strengths, he might also have acquired his weaknesses).

And Wonder Woman comes out from under a piece of rubble and says “So, what, you just always carry around a piece of Kryptonite with you?”  And Batman scowls and mutters “Call it insurance,” and dashes off into the night.

Because he’s seen the “Better World” episode, probably.
hit counter html code

« Previous Page