Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (4/5)

At this point everyone hates Frank Miller.  You hate Frank Miller.  I hate Frank Miller.  All your friends hate Frank Miller.  Your grandmother, if she knows who he is, probably hates Frank Miller too.  After many years of contributing to the development of American comic books, Miller’s talent and credibility hit a serious wall sometime in the 21^st century.  His output has been so bad that people have started to wonder whether or not he was ever talented.  To top it all off, in addition to putting out lazily written drivel, he also released a bizarre anti-Occupy Wall Street rant that fully revealed his inner neocon.  Miller’s politics were never exactly subtle—in fact, if one of his characters came upon nuance, he would have likely socked it in the jaw—but there was a certain complexity to his political positions, which often camped out somewhere in the borderlands where liberals and libertarians have achieved an uneasy truce.  So judging merely by Miller’s involvement, there was little reason to be optimistic about a long delayed sequel to the original Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller collaboration, Sin City.

But, surprisingly, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For has turned out to be a worthy sequel to the stylish and brutal original.  Despite the diminishing quality of both Miller and Rodriguez’s work in recent years, there must be something about working together that brings out the best in both artists.  Like the first movie, A Dame to Kill For is split into several distinct but vaguely interrelated tales.  Two of the film’s stories, the eponymous “A Dame to Kill For” and “Just Another Saturday Night,” are taken straight from Miller’s funny books where the other two, “The Long Bad Night” and “Nancy’s Last Dance,” were written by Miller exclusively for the film. The events of Dame occur before and after the events of the first film, making it a sort of pre-sequel and allowing Miller and Rodriguez to resurrect fan favorite characters like Marv.

“Just Another Saturday Night” is little more than a cynical smirk of a story that serves to set the stage for the rest.  The film’s meatiest tale is the titular “Dame to Kill For.”  Taking over for Clive Owen, Josh Brolin plays Dwight who gets pulled back into a world of seduction and double crosses by his old flame, Ava.  Played by Eva Green in various stages of undress (she’s French), Ava is the femme fatale turned up to eleven.  Able to transform herself into varying female archetypes so she fits the desires of any single man, Ava is a consummate manipulator. 

 

The femme fatale standard is highly problematic, but in certain films she has been made to symbolize female agency within a patriarchal world.  It would be difficult to redeem Ava, and there’s no confusing the writing of Frank Miller for a feminist treatise, but I’m not quite willing to call Miller an outright misogynist.  (Perhaps Ava’s ability to transform herself is a critique of the kinds of boxes men wish to box women into?)  And to complicate matters somewhat, A Dame to Kill For brings back the women of Old Town, an area of Sin City controlled and policed by its resident prostitutes.  If anything, A Dame to Kill For arguably tests the limits of third-wave feminism.

The two stories written specifically for Dame feel a little trim compared to those first written for the page.  In the first Sin City, there was a sense that each individual yarn could have been expanded into its own film, which is not the case in the sequel.  “The Long Bad Night” follows the preternaturally lucky Johnny (Joseph Gordon Levitt) as he weasels his way into a high stakes card game and makes enemies of the unrelenting big bad, Senator Roarke (played with gusto once again by Powers Boothe).  I naturally love the noir inspired irony that for someone with unerring luck, Johnny still has a horrendous time in Sin City.  (I also thoroughly enjoyed the scene stealing cameo from Christopher Lloyd.)  By contrast, “Nancy’s Last Dance,” a more direct sequel to the first film, suffers somewhat.  The story of Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba) and her attempt to avenge the death of police officer and her savior, John Hartigan, played once again by Bruce Willis, only this time, well, dead, seems too undercooked to have much of an impact. 

If A Dame to Kill For lacks some of the more memorable elements of the original—a dead Benecio Del Toro speaking from the grave while part of a gun sticks out from his head or Elijah Wood’s trophy room—each story seems to slide into the next more easily for a more cohesive whole.  Plenty of critics have claimed the film has come too late and audiences are used to its box of tricks by now.  I impolitely disagree.  Dame may not be as good as the first film, but I think it injects something much needed into today’s genre of comic book movies: a sense of visual experimentation. 

Here Rodriguez expands on what he accomplished in the original film, mixing in metaphorical images of a tiny Johnny sliced apart by Rourke or staging a car chase around Marv’s head as he remembers what happened earlier in the night.  If anything, today’s comic book films are far more conservative visually then they were a decade ago or more ago.  Marvel, the most financially successful maker of comic book films, appears to be uninterested in fusing the distinct visuals of film and comic books lest it muss up their plans for franchise domination.  (I wouldn’t be surprised if this was part of the reason for the departure of Edgar Wright, a unique visual stylist, from Ant Man).  Compare the relatively safe imagery of the Marvel films to the hyperkinetic camera movement of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, or the disorienting use or split screen in Ang Lee’s Hulk, or, to stretch back farther, the infusion of German Expressionism into Tim Burton’s Batman films.  Hell, even the now forgotten 90s superhero film The Shadow has some wonderfully bizarre imagery that would be deemed too out there in 2014.  I’m a fan of Marvel’s movies, but I’m also somewhat nostalgic for that period of time in the aughts when comic books were providing a new template for what was possible in Hollywood films.  In 2005, the original Sin City seemed like the culmination of a series of experiments, but in 2014, A Dame to Kill For seems wholly singular.  

Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne

Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne (4/5)

Listen: Bruce Wayne has come unstuck in time.  The last we saw of Batman, he had been zapped by Darkseid’s omega beams, but instead of killing him, they actually sent him into the past.  The Return of Bruce Wayne follows Bruce Wayne as he skips from one century to the next getting in all sorts of adventures.  It’s the kind of set up that’s bursting with potential and any writer worth his salt would jump at the opportunity to write stories about Batman battling the pirate Blackbeard, caught in the middle of a prehistoric intertribal feud, or solving mysteries in Puritan New England.  But we don’t have just any writer at the helm of Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne.  We have Grant Morrison that insanely inventive but wildly uneven Scottsman.

The Return of Bruce Wayne follows Morrison’s writing on Final Crisis, arguably the absolute nadir of his major comic book work.  Most of that series reads as if Morrison was vomiting up ideas and hoping that a few of them stuck.  What’s most frustrating about Grant Morrison is that he is, when at the top of his game, a tremendous talent.  His first creator owned invention, The Invisibles is a wonderful distillation of his interest in magic, countercultural movements, and mind melting time travel.  But when he superimposes those interests onto the world of superheroes, the results are often mixed.  I sometimes wish Morrison had a mentor around like Gertrude Stein who famously told a young Ernest Hemingway, “Start again – and this time concentrate.”  Luckily, The Return of Bruce Wayne, while far from perfect, is some of Morrison’s best work with DC’s major characters. 

The fact that each issue of The Return of Bruce Wayne is largely self-contained reigns in Morrison’s more self-indulgent tendencies.  While there is an overarching plot dealing with Darkseid’s attempt to use Bruce as a weapon, the story is mostly episodic.  The best moments in the series occur early on.  In the first chapter, Bruce Wayne is found in a prehistoric cave and discovered by a tribe of early men.  The story is told from the perspectives of the cave men, so we cannot understand anything Wayne has to say, since he is speaking in modern day English.  The tribe has a run in with another group of cavemen lead by none other than Vandal Savage, and Bruce Wayne must take on the mantle of the bat in order to fight his way out of their clutches.  At the end of this adventure an eclipse occurs, which sends Wayne skipping along to the next point in time with only echoes of his memory still in tact.

Wayne then finds himself in an early 17^th century Gotham run by Puritans.  There Wayne befriends a pagan who lives by herself, hidden away in the local woods.  He also becomes an inspector who uses his still intact detective skills to solve crimes in colonial America.  Morrison has fun with these jumps in time.  The story takes on an epic scope, even if it mostly takes place in and around what would be modern day Gotham.  Wayne leaps through time even as he stays relatively grounded in place.  Morrison also builds a fun mythology around Wayne’s time traveling adventures.  The cape and cowl he brought back from the future, as well as his first appearance as a Bat-like god, appears to later influence the Miagani, a nation of Native-Americans whose culture revolves around the bat. 

And because this is a Morrison book, it can be read as a meta-commentary on Batman as a character.  Each time Bruce Wayne reconstitutes himself in time, he essentially forms himself into a different variation of Batman.  This is reminiscent of ways that Batman has been reinvented throughout his seventy year history, from his beginnings as a hard boiled vigilante to his role as a pop art icon in the 60s to his transformation into an anti-hero by Frank Miller in the 80s.  But Morrison is also commenting on the number of archetypal heroes that make up Batman’s DNA, including the bat as a totem symbol, the Western gunslinger, and the film noir detective.

But, unfortunately, Morrison isn’t able to keep up this level of storytelling.  As the series runs on, he spends more time explaining Darkseid’s plan to charge Wayne up with omega energy so that when he reaches the present day, he will destroy the planet.  These cosmic level shenanigans are far less interesting than the individual adventures Wayne had been having throughout time.  And eventually the story devolves into a bunch of technobabble you might find in an episode of Star Trek.  Still, the good outweighs the bad, and unless you’re one of those who absolutely cannot stand Morrison’s brand of insanity, then there’s plenty to love in The Return of Bruce Wayne.  At the very least, the series proves that no matter the century, Batman will always be cool as hell. 

Batman Begins

Batman Begins (4/5)

In a pivotal moment in Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne is ordered by his mentor Ducard to execute a man from a small village who has been accused of killing his neighbor because he coveted his land.  Wayne demurs, telling Ducard that the villager deserves to be tried for his crimes before punishment is meted out.  If we merely execute the man, Wayne argues, without a procedure in place to check our baser tendencies for retribution, then the result is not justice but rather retribution.  The question of where we draw the line between justice and vengeance becomes the core theme of Christopher Nolan’s first foray into the Batman mythos, and it is a question that seems particularly suited to the character of Batman.  It is also a question that had been all but ignored in the years following the September 11^th attacks.  In many ways Batman Begins is the quintessential post-9/11 film that manages to smuggle moral quandaries into a big budgeted blockbuster when the larger discourse surrounding terrorism seemed content to ignore basic questions of justice. 

Tellingly, the villains of Batman Begins are an international terrorist organization by the name of the League of Shadows and headed by a mysterious character Ra’s al Ghul.  It is later revealed that the League of Shadows has been around for centuries and exists to level empires that have become too big for their britches.  But before the League of Shadows reveals themselves as the villains, they first serve as a training organization for Bruce Wayne, a billionaire driven by the death of his parents to travel across the globe in an attempt to understand the world of criminals from the inside out. 

Perhaps one of the most brilliant moves that Nolan makes in the film is to spend nearly half of the movie on the training and origins of Batman.  When Nolan’s Batman film was release, it had been nearly eight years since the disastrous Batman & Robin, a film so poorly received that it single handedly killed of the multi-million dollar franchise.  Where Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin attempted to resurrect the camp and humor of the old Adam West Batman series (although Schumacher’s film didn’t have one-tenth of the whit of the 1960s TV show), Batman Begins endeavors to shroud the superhero’s origins in as much realism as possible. 

The film cuts back and forth between Wayne’s training with Ducard and his lost years dealing with the death of his parents.  In recounting Batman’s origins, Nolan decides to include one of the most controversial figures in all of Batman’s seventy year history: Joe Chill.  Plenty of Batman nerds (myself included) have argued about whether or not the murderer of Thomas and Martha Wayne should even have an identity.  Those of us who prefer the anonymous mugger version of the story claim that because the murderer is never caught, any criminal, whether it’s an everyday bank robber or one of Batman’s rogue’s gallery, can serve as a stand in for the man who killed Batman’s parents.  I’ve often found myself on the anti-Joe Chill side of this argument, but Nolan’s treatment of the character has forced me to rethink my position.  Instead of a low life scumbag who murdered two people for a handful of cash and some jewelry, Joe Chill is portrayed as a desperate figure who turned to crime in the midst of an economic recession.  And his killing of the Waynes looks more like a man who acted out of fear than sadism. 

By transforming the motivations for Chill’s crime, Nolan expands the question of crime from the actions of individual actors to notions of systemic economic and ideological circumstances.  In fact, when the League of Shadows reappears in the film’s climax, it is explained that the organization first attempted to level Gotham by leveling its economy, causing the recession that lead to criminals like Joe Chill.  This is an astute account of how terrorism works.  Many forget that one of the chief goals of the September 11^th attacks was not merely the indiscriminate killing of innocent people; it was also an attempt to embroil the U.S.in foreign wars in order to bleed us dry with deficit spending.  By emphasizing the economics of crime and terrorism, Batman Begins asks us to question the root cause of violence. 

The first half of Batman Begins is so well crafted, so methodical in its pacing, that it’s almost a shame that Bruce Wayne has to suit up in the second half.  Batman’s origins are so compelling that Nolan could have done the entire film without a single appearance of the cape and cowl.  (In fact, I’ve always felt that a TV series that followed Bruce around the world as he trains to become Batman would be a big hit).  The second half of the film is decidedly overstuffed, and it suffers from a glut of villains, a problem most superhero franchises don’t run into until the sequels.  Batman faces off against the League of Shadows, Gotham’s crime boss Falconi, and the deranged Scarecrow.  Any fan of the comics has to object to the inclusion of the Scarecrow in this film.  While his psychological obsession with fear and terror fit neatly within the themes of the movie, the Scarecrow is such a strong villain that it’s truly a shame he doesn’t receive the sole spotlight.  This may be a complaint reserved for comic book geeks, but as a member of this group, I must object.

Nolan also struggles when filming action sequences.  He uses so many quick cuts that it is nearly impossible to see what is going on.  At times this is intentional, such as when we are supposed to see Batman’s hit and run techniques from the point of view of the criminals themselves.  But there are scenes later on that use the same choppy camera work for no particular reason.  At one point Batman has to fight four different ninjas, which sounds like the coolest thing ever.  But unfortunately Nolan slices and dices the fight choreography, making the entire thing nearly incomprehensible. 

But perhaps the film’s single most glaring misstep is Katie Holmes’s tone deaf performance as Bruce Wayne’s childhood friend, Rachel Dawes.  Whenever Holmes attempts to be charming she tends to smile with half of her face, which can be downright frightening.  But in her defense, she is given some of the film’s worst lines of dialogue.  Even Katharine Hepburn couldn’t deliver the phrase “Some of us have work to do” without sounding like a stuck up prick.  Superhero films have not always been kind to their female characters, and Batman Begins perpetrates this boy’s club tradition.

Batman Begins is a much more uneven film in its second half than in its first half, but it still manages to meld big summer action with surprisingly nuanced questions of how we understand terrorism.  When Wayne refuses to executed the villager accused of murder, he asks us to question how far one can go with retribution before you become the very object you are fighting against.  How many indefinite detentions, indiscriminate aerial bombings, extrajudicial executions can a nation participate in until it is perpetuating the same kind of violence it has sworn to stop.  Batman Begins proves that when those in the media stops asking tough questions, popular culture can sometimes smuggle them into the public debate under the guise of entertainment. 

The Dark Knight of the Soul

Batman is the greatest superhero.  Sure, there are some other contenders.  Spiderman’s mixture of everyman foibles and web slinging escapism absolutely put him in the running.  Wolverine’s blue collar attitude also has his promoters.  And we might even throw a nod to Superman because he started this whole crazy mess to begin with.  But, for my money, Batman is still tops. 

            Batman has reigned as the greatest superhero thanks to two important elements: 1) the introduction of a “why” and 2) his malleability.  Batman was the first superhero in the golden age to explain why he decides to dress up and fight crime.  Where other superheroes spent entire issues explaining the origins of their powers, Batman didn’t have powers to begin with, so Bill Finger and Bob Kane decided to give him a motivation.  Michael Chabon explains the importance of the question “Why” in his classic novel about young Jewish comic book writers, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &Clay:

                                    “The question is why.”

                                    “The question is why.”

                                    “Why,” Joe repeated.

                                    “Why is he doing it?”

                                    “Doing what?

                                    “Dressing up like a monkey or an ice cube or a can of fucking corn.”

                                    “To fight the crime, isn’t it?”

            “Well, yes, to fight crime.  To fight evil.  But that’s all any of these guys are doing.  That’s as far as they ever go.  They just…you know, it’s the right thing to do, so they do it.  How interesting is that?”

            “I see.”

            “Only Batman, you know…see, yeah, that’s good.  That’s what makes Batman good, and not dull at all, even though he’s just a guy who dresses up like a bat and beats people up.”

            “What is the reason for Batman?  The why?”

            “His parents were killed, see?  In cold blood.  Right in front of his eyes, when he was a kid.  By a robber.”  (94-95)

Finger and Kane were the first people who realized that a comic book character could have an interior life.  Batman is the first psychologically conflicted superhero.

            But being the first doesn’t also make you the best seventy years later.  Employing a “why” has been put into practice for plenty of superheroes since Batman, and has lead to Spiderman’s wonderful mantra, “With great power comes great responsibility.”  Batman is also the greatest superhero because he is so malleable.  So long as a handful of necessary elements are put into place, an artist can make Batman his own in a manner that is unheard of for other superheroes.  There is no Batman; there are merely a bunch of Batmen.  Because Batman’s story may be told and retold with variation again and again, he never becomes stale.  And different versions, sometimes even when they conflict in their retelling or ideological point of view, seem perfectly legitimate.  It doesn’t break the mythology if the killer of the Waynes escapes justice or if that killer, Joe Chill, is later caught by the police.  Both are acceptable retellings that may transform, ever so slightly, the meaning of Batman’s origin, but, ultimately, they don’t break the Bat. 

            So why am I talking about Batman?  Well, as many of you know, there happens to be a new Batman movie coming out this summer.  It’s a little, independent piece called The Dark Knight Rises.  (It seems as if everything rises in movies these days: machines, apes, Cobra).  Well, in the next few months I want to take a look at the two films that lead up to the final film in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy.  I remember enjoying Nolan’s work on Batman, although I haven’t watched The Dark Knight since it was in theaters several years ago.  I’m also a fan of Nolan’s work in general, to varying degrees.  On the internet these days Nolan is either hailed as an artistic God and the true inheritor of the mantle of Stanley Kubrick (yes, there are people who think this), or he is decried as an overrated hack.  Well, for most of us he is neither.  He has made some great films and some uneven films (although he has yet to make a terrible film).  I also don’t believe that his version of Batman is definitive.  It is the creation of a singular artist, but it is also nothing more than a single perspective among many.  In my views I will try to look at how Nolan transforms the Batman mythos to reflect Western anxieties in the decade following 9/11.  But if my interpretation isn’t up to your liking, then all I can ask is, “Why so serious?”

The Avengers

The Avengers (4/5)

            Well, it’s finally here.  Many of us have been waiting for this moment for years, some for even decades.  But despite the bumps along the ways, and fears that we may never see its realization, us fans finally have what we have wanted for so long.  I’m talking, of course, about Joss Whedon’s first time helming an existing property in a major motion picture.  As much as Whedon fans have enjoyed his original work over the years, many of us have wondered what he could do not only with preexisting characters but also with the backing of a major budget and the epic panoramic screen of the multiplex.  Oh, and of course the film itself happens to be The Avengers, the most anticipated movie of the last ten years or so.  And I’m happy to report that no one other than Whedon would have been able to pull off a film with this scope and this huge cast of characters. 

            As you might guess, this review will be Whedon centric.  Plenty of people have dissected The Avengers from the point of view of comic book fans or critics of summer blockbusters.  But I would like to approach it from the perspective of one entry within Whedon’s larger oeuvre.  I have a long history with Whedon’s work, starting in high school when I first started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on a lark.  The concept of transforming a poorly received film into an ongoing series appeared to be such an idiotic idea that I decided to tune in order to witness some schadenfreude.  But eventually I found myself sucked into the story of a group of teenagers struggling simultaneously with adolescents and the supernatural, both elements of the show serving as metaphor for the other.  Not only did Buffy provide a surprisingly accurate view of growing up, but it also dipped into narrative experimentation.  Like many TV shows from the 90s, Buffy was acutely aware of genre conventions and subverted them whenever it could.  From then on I was a devoted fan of Whedon’s work, from his spin off series Angel to the cult classic Firefly to his work in comic books. 

            And of all the elements Whedon is most known for, the one that makes him most suited for an Avengers film is his ability to handle a large cast of characters without letting anyone slide into the background.  Whedon once said that he had to add more characters to Angel because he had such a difficult time writing for just the three principle actors.  It’s also not uncommon for ancillary characters to become series regulars in his shows.  So if anyone is capable of balancing out four superheroes who had previously anchored their own films along with a good helping of backup characters, it is Joss Whedon.  The Avengers combines elements from many of the previous films.  The Iron Man movies initially introduced the idea of “The Avengers Initiative,” first in a post-credit scene from the first film and later in the sequel SHIELD and the Avengers served as an entire subplot that nearly derailed the movie.  The MacGuffin, here known as the tesseract, was first introduced in Captain America and has a connection to the Norse Gods that filled out the mythology of Thor.  And the main villain, Loki, is of course the adopted brother of Thor himself.  Of all the previous Marvel movies, The Incredible Hulk is the least essential.  But with a new casting (Mark Ruffalo replaces Edward Norton) audiences have an opportunity to become reacquainted with the green guy. 

            The basic plot of the film is relatively straight forward with only a few curves thrown in for good measure.  Loki wants to steal the tesseract so that he can lead an invading alien force that will take over the Earth.  Without too much plot to get in the way, Whedon is capable of focusing his energy on the story’s core pith: the friction between the heroes.  A lot of the film’s drama comes from the fact that these characters don’t belong together.  Their personalities and ideologies just don’t fit.  In most comic books this means that the heroes have to fight before they team up, and in true comic book form when Thor tries to extract Loki from SHIELD custody and take him back to Asgardian jurisdiction Captain America and Iron Man team up to stop him.  Likewise, Captain America, who is a man out of time, continually brushes up against Tony Stark.  This makes sense, since Steve Rogers is a veteran of World War II when it was necessary for the individuals to sacrifice himself for the greater good, but, as Iron Man, Tony Stark doesn’t do anything without first considering his own ego.  And in the midst of all this tension lies Bruce Banner who is liable to Hulk out at any provocation. 

            Whedon is able to steer the film towards the interpersonal thanks to a few tricks he learned back in his Buffy days.  In the episode, “The Yoko Factor,” the gang captures the punk rock vampire Spike only for him to psychologically manipulate each of Buffy’s friends in order to get them to turn on one another.  The point of the episode is that these tensions have existed for some time, and it only took a little spark for all of the resentment between friends to ignite into hatred.  Similarly, in The Avengers, Shield manages to capture Loki who then proceeds to sew seeds of distrust among the newly formed super group.  By making the tensions between the Avengers a weakness the villain can exploit, Whedon is able to clearly illustrate these characters for the audience while keeping the plot moving along.  The story doesn’t need to stop in order for us to get to know these characters.

            If Whedon is known for one authorial tick, then it is probably his use of witticisms and word play.  The team dynamic allows him plenty of space to incorporate some of his well known dialogue.  The film trades in lots of quips between heroes and has a sprinkling of snark without going overboard.  Critics of Whedon’s writing find his dialogue to be treacly rather than charming, and while I mostly disagree with these critics, it’s certainly true that not all of Whedon’s verbal jabs land properly.  This is especially true when Whedon isn’t present to carefully direct his dialogue’s delivery (see Halle Berry in The X-Men).  But like an athlete who does his best work in front of millions, here, when the world is watching, Whedon’s humor absolutely shines.  And he has found a great ally in Robert Downey Jr. who is known to insist on making his own improvements on his scripts (the “Shwarma” joke was apparently all his idea).  In fact, Whedon is confident enough in his humor to momentarily take a break from the action to show us a Shield agent playing Galaga on a multimillion dollar computer when his boss isn’t watching.  A joke that wouldn’t work if he didn’t trust that his audience shared his own bizarre sense of humor. 

            In addition to his use of repartee, Whedon’s also well known as a pop culture feminist, which in practice means he likes to watch an attractive lady beat up guys much bigger than herself.  Here Black Widow (played by Scarlett Johansson) serves this particular purpose.  Several times throughout the film, Black Widow uses others’ perception of her as an emotionally fragile creature in order to, jujitsu-like, convince her enemies to spill important information.  What might be first seen as a weakness becomes a weapon.  Whedon is clearly within the ideological confines of third-wave feminism, which seems to maintain that women can both serve as sexual objects while simultaneously kicking ass.  And there’s some legitimate criticism to this approach to feminism, but Whedon generally gets away with it because he’s able to write strong, interesting female characters.  We learn that Black Widow has a history with another SHIELD agent, Hawkeye (played by Jeremy Renner and, unfortunately, not given much of a role).  And when he is taken by Loki, Black Widow, in a role reversal, is allowed to become his savior.  Third wave feminism suits Johansson, an actress who most directors seem unable to do anything interesting with.  Arguably, this is her best role since Lost in Translation.

            But if there is a single major theme of The Avengers, then it is the question of the place of the individual within a larger community.  While making a pit stop in Germany, Loki takes the time to make a crowd of people bow before him while he pontificates on the useless notion of freedom.  And if the parallels between Loki’s philosophy and fascism aren’t clear enough, an older gentleman in the crowd decides to stand up and all but call Loki Hitler (obviously this fellow has never heard of Godwin’s Law).  But the Avengers have their own problems formulating a cohesive group.  Each character is in some manner or other cut off from the larger society, whether it is Bruce Banner’s rage or Tony Stark’s ego.  These are individuals who are marked as outsiders, a favorite theme of Whedon’s work.  But their very survival, and the survival of the world, is dependant on the ability of these individual parts to interlock.  Whedon represents the eventual coming together of these heroes in the final battle with a single shot that moves around the city in order to let the audience see how these characters work together as a cohesive unit.  For Whedon the answer to forced unity is not pure individuality, but rather a volatile mixture of the singular within the communal.

            But Whedon hasn’t lost his healthy distrust of governing bodies.  Without giving too much away, in addition to dealing with an alien invasions, the film’s heroes must also contend with the unclear motives of SHIELD, the quasi-military/quasi-intelligence agency that first assembled the Avengers.  Not only do members of the Avengers accuse SHIELD of attempting to create weapons of mass destruction, but the organization also purposefully attacks a civilian target for the “greater good.”  In fact, Whedon’s portrayal of SHIELD may have been too subversive for the U.S. military who cited its portrayals as a reason why they refused to cooperate with the movie by lending military equipment, an offer they regularly extend to films that represent the armed forces in a much more “patriotic” light. 

            For the most part the movies produced by Marvel have been, by necessity, studio films in the classic Hollywood tradition.  Superhero movies have become so popular that most studios have banished any ultra stylistic auteurs who, early on in the superhero craze, put out some of the more distinctive films in the genre.  The likes of Ang Lee and Sam Raimi were deemed too idiosyncratic to helm multi-million dollar films.  That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been some interesting superhero films in the last few years, but it does mean that singular visions have been replaced by the work of handy craftsmen.  When you watch Tim Burton’s Batman, you immediately recognize that this can be nothing but the work of Tim Burton The same could be said about Nolan’s Batman series, thanks to the fact that they were first made when superhero auteurs were still in vogue.  (It’s unlikely in today’s environment that the studio would give Nolan as much free reign as he wielded).  Joss Whedon’s The Avengers (a title that would make more sense than Marvel’s The Avengers) attempts to derail this trend.  While Whedon is still constrained by the visual and narrative template established previously in earlier Marvel movies, he still manages to create a film that speaks with his own artistic voice.  This is especially impressive when you consider the fact that he was entrusted with an astronomical budget.  Maybe from within the deafening confines of the studio system, a singular voice can make itself heard after all.

Green Lantern

Green Lantern (3/5)

Over the last decade, the summer and holiday months have been littered with the cast off remains of failed franchises.  Eager for the consistent influx of cash that popular series like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, or Twilight bring in over the course of years, or even decades, studios have been caught counting their chickens long before they have hatched, hoping that whatever rebooted 80s cartoon, young adult novel, or underused superhero will leaven the strain of actually producing new material.  Some of these failures have taken on the veneer of cult success (I would argue this in the case of the Wachowski’s Speed Racer or Joe Johnston’s The Rocketeer), where others fail to live up to the promise of their source material (such as Jonah Hex or The Golden Compass), and still others should never have been put into production in the first place (Prince of Persia, Battlefield Earth).  And while there have been rumors of a Green Lantern sequel, I have the feeling that the first film’s poor showing at the box office will dissuade the bean counters from risking another go at DC’s space cop.  And that’s a shame, not because the first film was such a triumph, but because, despite plenty of flaws, there’s a lot of potential in the Green Lantern, even if much of it is squandered by the movie’s end.

I watched Green Lantern after reading some damning reviews, so imagine my surprise when, for at least the first half of the film, the movie turned out to be an engaging balance of sci-fi spectacle and carefully executed character building.  We begin the film in the far reaches of space where some alien astronauts stumble upon a trapped entity known as Parallax who feeds on these victims and escapes.  Parallax proceeds to chase down and mortally wound the Green Lantern who had trapped him in the first place, Abin Sur.  Sur manages to escape from Parallax and crash land on Earth where he, knowing how little time he has left, instructs his ring, the source of a Green Lantern’s power, to find a suitable replacement. 

The ring eventually chooses Hal Jordan, a test pilot for experimental aircraft.  Hal’s portrayed as a womanizer whose talents as a pilot far outstrip his discipline.  He works for Ferris Aircraft and has some romantic history with the boss’s daughter, Carol Ferris, who also happens to balance her career helping run the family business with her roles as a test pilot along with Hal.  The two must run a demonstration for the government in hopes that Uncle Sam will buy their non-manned fighter pilot drones (take that China!).  While the ultimate goal of this demonstration is to show how good the drones are, Hal decides to break the rules of engagement by taking his jet much higher than permitted, which allows him to take out the drones, but also forces him to crash his plane in the process.  Naturally, Carol is upset when Hal not only uncovers flaws in their product but also trashes a multi-million dollar piece of equipment. 

Hal is played by Ryan Reynolds, who got his start as a cartoony wiseass in sitcoms and teen comedies but has since attempted to break his way into marginally more serious action work, and he has spent years trying to prove himself as a potential blockbuster lead.  Here his ability to crack a joke not only serves to accentuate his character’s freewheeling nature, but also helps ground the more absurdist aspects of a comic book character who was created fifty years ago.  The movie manages to be funny without becoming jokey.  Reynolds also happens to have great chemistry with love interest Carol Ferris, played by Blake Lively.  The two of them have a surprisingly emotionally complicated scene at a local bar for pilots that could have been sliced into a more dramatic film without much trouble.  The central love story reminded me of the scenes in another film by directors Martin Campbell, the James Bond reboot Casino Royale, whose romance between Bond and Vesper served as the heart of the film. 

It’s not long after he downs the company jet that Hal is swept away by Abin Sur’s ring and taken to the crash site of Sur’s escape pod where the dying alien tells him how to use the ring.  After figuring out the basics Hal is whisked away to the planet Oa, the headquarters of the Guardians, a race of blue aliens who forged the Green Lantern rings in order to form the Green Lantern Corps, a group tasked with policing the entire universe.  The planet Oa is beautifully filmed, a strange mixture of darkened crags, smooth surfaces of technology, and tasteful waves of color.  It is as if an aurora borealis went off in an Apple store after hours.  Here Hal learns of the history of the Green Lanterns and begins his training with Kilowog, a beast of an alien with the face of a pig, the body of a brick wall, and the voice, conveniently enough, of Michael Clark Duncan. 

It’s at this point in the movie where I excitedly awaited for the film to really take off.  Until now there had been some exciting action and nice character work.  Hal had been firmly established as a screw up, adrift in life, hoping for something bigger, and now that fate has handed him the chance to join the Green Lantern Corps, he presumably has a chance to right his course in life.  But in an incredibly contrived moment, he decides that he’s not up to snuff, quits the corps and returns to Earth (although, strangely enough, he is allowed to keep the ring).  Instead of the epic space opera I was expecting, the filmmakers decides on something far more quotidian: a superhero movie.  The rest of the film goes through the usual superhero motions: the main character reveals himself to the public by bravely saving hundreds of people and afterwards visits the love interest/damsel in distress.  Green Lantern is a decidedly schizophrenic movie.  Where the first half of the film provides the perfect set up for the “hero’s journey,” a story about one character being plucked from the mundane world and lifted into an exciting realm of adventure, the second half of the film seems content on playing superhero connect the dots.  There is even a second villain, a scientist who becomes infected by Parallax, who is obviously there to make sure the action doesn’t stray too far from Earth. 

I’m convinced that the studio didn’t really know what they had with the Green Lantern.  Unlike Batman, Spider-Man, or even Superman, the Green Lantern Corps lends itself to interplanetary superheroics more in the vein of Star Wars and Flash Gordon than Iron Man.  But this is also what makes the character exciting.  Where we have seen the basic outline of a superhero movie time and again, Green Lantern offers the chance of more science fiction tropes, which could potentially differentiate him from the glut of other superhero movies.  Instead of shying away from the imaginatively bizarre, the filmmakers should have embraced the alien aspects of the Green Lantern mythos.  Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Green Lantern is that it represents a missed opportunity.  The few moments we spend in space are exciting because of their promise of the weird, and because they are one of the few images of space made by people who have actually looked at photographs from the Hubble Telescope.  Instead of peregrine flights of fancy, the movie clings tight to formula, and suffered for it, both artistically and at the box office.

All Star Batman & Robin #8 (1/5)

All Star Batman & Robin #8 (1/5)

This review should be unnecessary. This kind of piss-poor writing and snail paced plot should be dismissed and choked to death with lack of sales. Except that the name Frank Miller is on the cover, which for some people is the mark of quality no matter what. After all this is the man who's comics are turned into box office money and one of the few names non-comic book readers actually recognize. So when his name is on the cover people give him the benefit of the doubt, far too much benefit and far too little doubt.

I'm not a Frank Miller hater by any means. I think he's got a great sense of pulp and I even enjoyed The Dark Knight Strikes Again which was a hilarious send up of the Bush administration. Most people defend All Star Batman & Robin by saying it's a parody of DC comics and shouldn't be taken seriously. I'm all for poking fun at comic book conventions but there's not much that's actually funny. Thanks to Miller's lazy writing most issues have focused on a superhero from the DC showing up briefly but not doing anything to further the plot. In this issue it's Hal Jordan's Green Lantern and the "gag" is he's dumb. The entire scene consists of a rooftop exchange between Hal and Batman. Hal is eating a hot dog (hilarious!) and he's unable to find Batman hiding in the shadows for the first half of the conversation (what a Laruel and Hardy combo!). Batman then calls him a "moron" about fifty times and tells him they'll meet later. In eight issues there has been an issue and a half worth of plot (and this is being generous). The pointless cameos have ground this series to a halt.

If anything All Star Batman & Robin is a parody of Miller's writing style. The over the top violence and "grit" lose all meaning because it's so absurd, and when you start making fun of yourself without realizing it readers are going to look over past work and wonder if they stand up as well as they once thought. The Joker is portrayed as a date raping serial killer. The psychopath Joker characterization too often leads to striping the character of any of his defining personality. Where are the twisted punch lines and tortured logic that's his m.o.? All Miller did was make a generic sociopath and give him white skin and green hair. This is the kind of thing a Frank Miller wannabe does, not the original.

I remember reading that Miller said this series was supposed to be a prequel to his classic The Dark Knight Returns, but I don't get that feeling anywhere. The first sign of of a connection is that the weird shirtless Nazi woman with swastikas painted on her chest makes a brief cameo. So if there are any fans of that flash in the pan Frank Miller creation feel free to pick up this issue but for anyone else stop inflating this man's ego.