Paul O'Brian writes about Watchmen, trivia, albums, interactive fiction, and more.

>SUPERVERBOSE

Tag: reviews Page 3 of 7

Young Liars

Kristen Wiig plays a recurring character on Saturday Night Live named Judy Grimes, whose schtick is that she’s a travel expert, but gets much too nervous on air to give any travel tips. Instead, she just keeps negating herself, making a statement and then saying, “just kidding.” As the sketch winds up, she eventually dives into some rapid-fire, bravura, all-in-one-breath monologue along these lines:

I’m fine. Besides, I… can’t come back another time because I’m too busy — just kidding, I’m not busy — just kidding, I am but I don’t have any time for you — just kidding, I don’t know how to make time — just kidding, but I know how to make pies — just kidding, I don’t — just kidding, I do, and I’ll make one right now — just kidding, I can’t, because I don’t have a pan — just kidding, I do, but I gotta buy sugar — just kidding, I have what I need, but I don’t have a stove — just kidding, there’s a stove under here, it’s hot — ouch! — just kidding, there’s no stove under here, there’s one at my house, let’s go there right now — just kidding, we can’t all go together, it’s hard to travel in a group — just kidding, we can’t do it because my car’s not big enough — just kidding, we’re in right now, this whole studio’s my car — just kidding, it isn’t — just kidding, it is — beep, beep! Get out of my way! — just kidding, we’re not in my car — just kidding, I wrecked my car — just kidding, I ran into a tree — just kidding, it was a bush — just kidding, it was a man, he was very upset — just kidding, he laughed — just kidding, he died — just kidding, it was a dream — just kidding, it wasn’t a dream, it was a movie I rented — just kidding, I bought it, and now I regret it, it wasn’t very good — just kidding, it was okay — just kidding!

This is exactly the narrative structure of David Lapham’s Young Liars. Oh, it starts out coherent enough. There’s a great premise — a guy in love with a girl who has a bullet in her brain, which makes her utterly fearless, obedient but unpredictable, and constantly in danger of death. There’s a bevy of fun supporting characters. There’s a breathless, rock & roll aesthetic, which veers from extremes of violence to heartbreaking tenderness. There’s a bunch of compelling, plotty twists and turns, intriguing flashbacks, and dark foreshadowing, with a killer climax at the end of issue #6.

Unfortunately, it then goes on for 12 more issues.

In those issues, Lapham breaks down everything he’s built up over the first six to replace it with something else. And then he does it again. And again. And again. Oh, the next part of the story is Sadie’s coma dream. Just kidding, it’s real and she’s an alien from Mars. Just kidding, a different character is the alien. Just kidding, the narrator is a schizophrenic. Just kidding, he’s sane but he’s being manipulated by a conspiracy. Just kidding, the conspiracy is the aliens. Just kidding, the aliens are taking over the conspiracy. Just kidding, the aliens are just a metaphor for corporate takeover. Just kidding, the narrator is a liar. Just kidding, everybody’s a liar. Just kidding, this is all stories told by a psychotic washed-up rock star. Just kidding. Just kidding. Just kidding. The first time one of these shifts happens, it’s intriguing. Then it’s shocking and enthralling. Then it’s confusing. Then irritating. Then maddening. Then really, really boring.

I read all 18 issues of Young Liars in one day. Stray Bullets made me a fan of Lapham, so I decided to subscribe to YL, but my time is highly circumscribed, so the series started and ended before I began reading it. What this experience crystallized for me is that I deeply dislike this narrative structure. Don’t get me wrong — I dig some reality-bending in a story. It’s a great spice. What I do not dig is when the story’s basic reality gets fractured so often or so severely that I no longer know what the story’s basic reality even is anymore. If I go long enough with no idea what is real, it turns out I really no longer care what is real, and the whole thing gets much less interesting. Plus, I completely lose faith that interesting plot danglers from early on are going to be paid off in any coherent way.

I read a great dissection of Heroes, which very accurately described it as a narrative Ponzi scheme, constantly borrowing from the future to disguise the fact that it’s actually based on nothing. This is Young Liars‘ problem as well. Between this, the disappointing run on Detective Comics, and the indefinite cessation of Stray Bullets (along with my vanished faith that that series will ever draw its strands together), I think I’m done with David Lapham now. He’s a fantastic stylist, but it turns out I’m only impressed by that when it’s paired with good storytelling.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Season 3 revisited

Early in my Buffy-watching project, I swore off both DVD extras and Television Without Pity recaps, because they were just way too spoiler-laden. Now that I’ve finished watching all episodes of Buffy and Angel, I’m (slowly!) going back through the whole saga, reading the recaps and watching the extras.

I just finished season three of Buffy for the second time, and am amazed anew. What a marvelous achievement. It’s just such great television, and this time through I found myself appreciating a couple of things that had passed me by the first time:

*** Spoilers after this point ***

1) I liked the Mayor the first time around, just because his milk-and-cookies qualities made such a great contrast to his evilness and batshit insanity. What I appreciated about him this time, though, was the fact that because he really didn’t care about them, he was able to speak the absolute truth to Buffy and Angel. I loved the scene in “Choices” where he tongue-lashes Angel for selfishness in relation to Buffy. Everything he says is absolutely dead-on, and highlights the fact that even though they don’t look it, Buffy and Angel are a ridiculously May-December relationship. There’s a strong argument to be made that Angel is taking advantage of her — whatever she’s had to go through, she’s still an 18-year-old (if that) girl. The mayor’s genuine disgust with Angel in that scene is a fantastic way of completely dooming their relationship from an unexpected direction.

2) The resonance of the classroom scene in “Earshot” is just a thing of beauty. The Othello discussion serves the purpose of showing Buffy’s sudden classroom smarts, and her peers’ reaction to it, of course. The teacher’s explication puts focus on Buffy’s anxiety about Angel and leads us in to the attempted mind-reading scene, of course. But let’s take a look at what Buffy actually says about Iago:

“Well, he, um, he sort of admits himself that his motive are… spurious! He, um, he does things because he, he enjoys them. It’s like he’s not, he’s not really a person. He’s a, the dark half of Othello himself.”

The dark half of the protagonist? Doing evil for the joy of it, with spurious motives? Ring any bells about anybody from this season? Oh, right: Faith. Of course.

And listening to the DVD commentary from writer Jane Espenson reveals that this scene was heavily rewritten by Joss. Of course it was.

Etta James at the Boulder Theater, 6/13

I became an Etta James fan in kind of a backwards way. Being quite the dedicated Eurythmics fan back in the 80’s, I even paid attention to their quirky little side projects. One of these was the soundtrack for a 1989 movie called Rooftops, which I never saw but was apparently fairly awful. Dave Stewart did some songs for it, and one of these was a track called “Avenue D”, on which Etta was the vocalist. I didn’t really know who she was, aside from the fact that I recognized her name and knew she’d been around a while. I did read a little article saying something like, “Dave Stewart does his best work when paired with a soulful singer, and James certainly fills the bill.” I was at NYU at the time — I actually remember listening to the 45 at Tower Records, liking the song, and buying it. I really dug her performance on that song. I looked into her a little more (which in those pre-Internet days meant just paying attention to what records of hers were in the stores), and found that she had done a comeback album the previous year called Seven Year Itch. A friend and I split the cost of the cassette, and I really liked that too. I bought her next couple of records, then lost track of her for a while.

10 years or so later, I became conscious of “At Last”, again in a backwards way — Stevie did a cover of it at a benefit concert where everybody sang standards. I fell in love with the song then, and heard Etta’s version later in the movie Pleasantville, and loved it again. Still, I never got around to pursuing her further, until this past Christmas, when I put The Essential Etta James on my Amazon wish list, and received it. I’d been listening to it a lot in the car when I heard that she was coming to Boulder in concert. I decided that I needed to go, and I found a fantastic ticket online: 2nd row aisle seat.

When I got there, I was thrilled to find that it was indeed one of the best seats in the house. I had a perfect sightline to everything, and was wonderfully close. There was an unannounced opening act, which was a drag — I’d asked Laura to cover childcare so I could get to the show on time. If I’d known, I’d certainly have come much later. Anyhow, after that, stagehands started setting up Etta’s stage, including a big comfy leather seat with the word “Etta!” inscribed on the front. At 9:00, her band filed onstage, along with somebody who didn’t introduce himself. He greeted the crowd, said “Miss James is in the house!”, and then introduced The Roots Band. (Not The Roots, who appear on Jimmy Fallon’s talk show, but rather just a bunch of touring musicians.) It was cool — a horn section, two guitarists, keyboard, bass, and drums. So then The Roots Band proceeds to vamp for 10 minutes.

Finally, Etta herself comes out, sits on the chair, and opens with “Come To Mama,” a song from Seven Year Itch that I’d known previously when Bob Seger recorded it (as “Come To Papa.”) In Seger’s hands, the song has a clear sexual subtext. Coming from James, the subtext becomes supertext, with lyrics like “If you feel like a horse chomping at the bit / Call my number, 777-6969, I’ll get you a fix.” But lyrics aside, OH MY GOD. It was easily the most sexual performance I’d ever seen, and I’ve seen both Tori Amos and Liz Phair (the latter of whom suffered a wardrobe malfunction that exposed her bare breast to the audience for the better part of a song.) Etta sang the entire song while absolutely pawing herself, and I mean her entire body, giving special emphasis to lines like “I’ve got your favorite toy / Guaranteed to bring you joy.” We are talking about a 71-year-old woman here, a grandmother, whose son is actually in the band, as her drummer. It was, to say the least, a little shocking. I wasn’t really bothered by it (though as a friend of mine pointed out, would you want to watch your mother doing that night after night?), but I was pretty floored. She continued in that vein the entire show. She never stood up, but her hands never rested much either. When singing “I’d Rather Go Blind,” she elaborated: “Sittin here thinkin’ of your kiss, and your… mmmmm, you all know what I’m talkin’ about.” And the song after that was called, “I Want To Ta-Ta You, Baby.”

While Etta’s libido has never waned (at least if her stage shtick is to be believed), I’m afraid the same can’t be said for her mind. For one thing, she clearly thought she was in Canada. “It’s been a long time since I’ve played in Canada!” she said. “I’m so happy to be back!” I thought she was joking at first, but then in the next song, she introduced her guitarist with, “This is Joshua. He’s Canadian, too!” She also introduced “I’d Rather Go Blind” by saying, “Here’s a song my sons and I wrote together.” Now, that song was first recorded in 1969, when James was 31 years old. The Internet doesn’t seem to want to tell me when her sons were born, but it does tell me that the song is co-credited to Ellington Jordan, not Donto and Sametto James. Oh, and then there was the long introduction where she said she was going to do a song by one of the baddest chicks of all time, Janis Joplin, and that song is called, “You Can Leave Your Hat On.” Written by Randy Newman. In 1972. Two years after Joplin died. All I could do was shake my head and laugh.

Her voice, though, still sounds amazing. She kept stealing glances at the lyric sheet next to her, but that didn’t stop her from nailing every single note. She also had a terrific stage presence, despite remaining seated the entire time. She was always playfully, bawdily bantering with the audience, even as she was performing songs. In “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” after she sang the line, “Suspicious minds are talking / They’re trying to tear us apart,” she would very clearly mouth the words “FUCK THEM.” It was hilarious.

Unfortunately, while the music was great, I didn’t get to hear it for very long — at 9:55, she said good night, and walked off stage, only to immediately drive back on astride a little red Rascal scooter. She sat back down in the chair and sang “At Last”, sounding phenomenal. And then… that was it. She left, stage lights came up, just an hour after the band had come on. That was very disappointing to me, as the ticket hadn’t been cheap. I quite understand that it’s probably hard on her to play very long, but if the length of your show is going to be much less than is conventionally accepted, your ticket price should be well below the standard too.

All in all, it was one of the strangest shows I’d ever seen. I loved the music, and was greatly amused by the rest. But I sure wish I’d known to come late, and been ready to leave early.

Watchmen

I’ve just seen Watchmen again, this time in IMAX, and now I think I’m ready to write about it. There are a number of people (say, for example, Adam) who found the Watchmen graphic novel to be one of the best things ever. I do not fall into this group. Don’t get me wrong — I love Alan Moore, and I liked the book very much, but I didn’t find it overwhelmingly compelling and revelatory in the way that some people do. To me it felt like a good, well-written story that resisted superhero clichés in some interesting ways. A solid B or B+.

Now, I think there were a couple of things working against me at the time I read it. One was the fact that I read it in the mid-90s rather than the mid-80s. By that time, various aspects of it had been frequently imitated in various ways, and what was revolutionary and groundbreaking about it no longer seemed so.

Laura has a story about being assigned Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in a college class, and complaining to the professor, “These guys write in such a clichéd style, it’s driving me crazy!” To which her professor of course replied, “No, no, see, these guys invented this style. It was their thousands of imitators who turned it into a cliché.” Well, I had a bit of the Hammett/Chandler effect going when I read Watchmen, even though intellectually I understood that Moore was the originator. His ideas just couldn’t have the same impact on me that they would have had if I’d read them first.

My other disadvantage is the fact that the book is so highly and universally praised. Reading something after hearing bunches of people call it The Most Awesome Thing Ever I Mean Ever can hardly help but be a slightly disappointing experience. It’s the expectation theory.

Well, having read quite a bit of the press around the movie and how it compares to the book, I think it’s safe to say that I missed entire layers of that book in my first reading. I’d really love to reread the graphic novel, perhaps with some kind of Annotated Watchmen alongside it. (Okay Watchmen book, go stand over there in the line marked “to read.” Yes, I know there are 112 books in the line. Hey, I pick randomly from the group, so maybe you’ll get lucky.) Like the book, I think the movie benefits from repeated viewings. I know I was catching things this time around that completely passed me by on the first viewing. However, my overall opinion remains the same, which is that it is a very enjoyable superhero movie, with a great story, some excellent writing, magnificent visuals, and a couple of sublime performances, but it is also significantly flawed in certain ways.

*** Spoilers after this point ***

The first of these is that it is far too much in love with violence, which leads it to undermine one of its story’s main points. From almost the first moment of the movie, characters are punching through solid walls and withstanding beatings that would stagger a rhino, not to mention performing phenomenal feats of strength and speed. Watching these fights, it is impossible to believe that these people are not somehow enhanced, and the fact that the so-called superheroes are not enhanced (with the notable exception of Dr. Manhattan) is supposed to be crucial to the story. In addition, some of those fights are gratuitously gory — I was really tired of seeing people’s bones broken by the end of this film. Another flaw, though one far less in director Zack Snyder’s control, is that the main source of tension in the narrative is the idea of impending nuclear war between the US and the USSR, an idea which has lost most of its emotional resonance today. Viewed as a period piece (despite the fact that it’s set in an alternate universe, it still operates as a period piece), it’s fine. Then again, as huskyscotsman points out, the Doomsday Clock is at five minutes to midnight now, so maybe I’m just far too complacent.

Some people have faulted Snyder for hewing too closely to the source material, but that’s actually one of the things I enjoyed the most about Watchmen. The movie lifts entire scenes, dialogue intact, from the comic, which means that much of its dialogue is quite a bit better than that of the average superhero movie. In addition, it was quite wonderful to see these characters and this world brought to life so faithfully. I don’t know whether somebody who hadn’t read the book would react adversely, but for me it was the thrill of seeing static images come to life. The entire visual atmosphere of the movie is outstanding. The color palette is exactly what it should be, Rorschach’s mask looks perfect, Dr. Manhattan’s glow is just right.

Oh, and I think the opening credits sequence is one of the best I’ve seen in any movie, ever. It manages to pack in an enormous amount of exposition about the characters and their world, all without any dialogue. It does this via a series of striking images which are both reference-heavy (Silk Spectre I’s retirement dinner as Last Supper; Silhouette taking the sailor’s place in the famous V-J day kiss) and highly interconnected (flashbulbs, historical recreations), something that captures the Alan Moore spirit exquisitely. It mixes humor and horror, often within moments of each other, and manages to tell a poignant story of forty-five years in just five minutes. Masterful.

Speaking of masterful, and of Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan, those two characters get the best performances of the film. Billy Crudup’s voice work captures his character’s not-quite-detachment completely, and Jackie Earle Haley is freaking phenomenal every moment he’s on screen as Rorschach. In some moments, he manages to convey enormous emotions from behind a mask, just using his body, his voice, and the shape of his face beneath the fabric. Once the mask is off, he’s even more powerful.

Then there’s Jeffrey Dean Morgan. He certainly nails the character of The Comedian, but that character has always puzzled me. Watchmaniacs, please be patient while I plod through my thought process, and keep in mind it’s been like 15 years since I read the book. So here you have a milieu of heightened, explicit symbolism. Doctor Manhattan is both a genius and a living nuclear weapon. Nite Owl has big goggles, and a bunch of owl-themed gadgets. Rorschach sees the world in black and white, and his “face” is made up of moving black blobs on a white field. And so on. In this world, you have a character called The Comedian, who is never funny, and never makes a joke. Sure, he laughs a lot, but it’s a bitter, cynical kind of laugh. In fact, he’d be more appropriately called The Cynic. It’s not because the story lacks for humor, either. I mean, yeah, it’s a dark story, but there are certainly plenty of comedic moments. Heck, even Rorschach gets off a bunch of good one-liners in the prison scenes. So the character whose theme is comedy is in fact the least funny, and the most horrifying, at least on a personal level.

Nobody seems to comment on this, except for Rorschach, who claims that The Comedian “saw the true face of the 20th century and chose to become a reflection of it, a parody of it.” Except, as I said, he’s not funny. Now, I know that comedy and horror are not strangers, and I understand that exaggeration is a comical tool, so is The Comedian’s over-the-top repulsiveness a comic exaggeration of human savagery? I would argue that it is not. Comedy, even brutal satire, works because it has a moral center, an oppositional point of view. It may shock, it may exaggerate, and it may distort, but it does not simply personify or repeat. It works toward healing, or at least toward tearing down the things it opposes, not amplifying them. The Comedian is more like a parody of a parody — where a parody would exaggerate in order to show ridiculousness, he exaggerates but without questioning. Where a parody would personify human savagery in order to decry it, he personifies human savagery because, well, he kinda digs it. In fact, it’s completely unclear why he’s even a superhero at all. The closest hint we get is when Hooded Justice is attacking him for his attempted rape of Silk Spectre I. “Is this what gets you off?” he asks, while receiving a beating. Maybe it takes one to know one.

That smiley face icon is strangely appropriate for him, if we take it as the ultimate symbol of empty cheer. If the smiley in culture is an attempt to pretend that the darkness doesn’t exist, it’s sledgehammer irony to put it on the darkest character in the book. In Watchmen, that illusion can’t sustain itself. It’s bloodstained. Just as it repudiates the emptiness of cheerful Golden Age superheroes, just as it takes an extremely dim view of human nature, arguing that the only cure for warfare is a common enemy, so must it mutilate the icon of simpleminded sunniness. In itself, I don’t know that this subversion of cheery fantasy is a bad thing, but I’m not sure I agree with the so-called reality that replaces it. In my real world, humor can be a healing force. In Watchmen, there aren’t many of those kind of laughs around, whether or not The Comedian is dead.

1893 review

It occurs to me, albeit many years later than it should have, that when I have some writing appear elsewhere on the net I should probably post a pointer to it here.

So, in that spirit: I’ve written a review of Peter Nepstad’s epic IF game 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery for IF-Review.

[Note from 2024: IF-Review is sadly long gone, but I’ve resurrected the review to live on >INVENTORY, the site that houses all my IF writing. I’ve switched the link in this post to point there.]

Angel Season 5

Oh, it’s a sad, sad day. It’s now official: I’ve seen every episode of every Joss Whedon show. I suppose it’s a happy day, really — it’s been a very satisfying journey since the day I saw Serenity (October 1, 2005, as it happens.) Still, I can’t help feeling a little grief at the fact that I’ll never watch another new episode of Buffy or Angel.

Well, at least I had a good sendoff. I was quite pleased with this season of Angel. Like season 7 of Buffy, the show found its feet again after a dreary and depressing previous season. It was both funny and thrilling, with a solid premise that was low on the endless angst and high on the superheroics of old. Not only that, it had a lovely elegiac quality, bringing back moments and characters from previous seasons like some kind of victory lap, or maybe a greatest hits album.

*** Spoilers after this point for all seasons of Angel, and lots of Buffy as well. ***

The Magnetic Fields in Boulder, 10/15/08

The crowd at the Boulder Theater on Wednesday night was largely composed of a) hipsters and b) young gay men. There is a fair amount of overlap between these groups. Thick glasses, retro fashions, and big sideburns were much in evidence.

The show was a lot more like a recital than a rock and roll concert. All acoustic instruments, all players seated. From house left to house right they were:

Shirley Simms (vocals only)
Claudia Gonson (piano & vocals)
John Woo (guitar)
Sam Davol (cello)
Stephin Merritt (bouzouki & vocals)

Gonson did most of the talking, and she did it in this very spacey, random, funny persona, which she blamed on lack of oxygen. Merritt threw in the occasional deadpan remark. There was quite a bit of talking between the songs, which I enjoyed very much. A dominant theme was the invention of narrative connections among the songs in the setlist — for instance, after “The Nun’s Litany”: “And why did she enter the abbey? Well, you see, one year earlier…” leading to “All My Little Words.” There was also quite a bit of comedy interplay, like so:

GONSON: This next song is about Stephin’s dog, whose ears are… huge. They’re like… they’re as big as his head. Would you agree, Stephin?
MERRITT: His ears are *part* of his head.
GONSON: Yeah, but… you know what I… well anyway, it’s called “Walking My Gargoyle.” One, two, three, four…

For the rest of the show, chihuahua references ensued. “Let’s pretend the narrator of this song is also a chihuahua! All the characters are chihuahuas — then it could be made into a number one movie. Maybe if they remade Pieces Of April with an all-chihuahua cast…” (Merritt did the soundtrack for Pieces Of April, the mention of which also led to much musing on what Oliver Platt is doing these days. Quoth Merritt: “One of the worst things about being on tour is that sometimes you want to look something up on IMDb, but you can’t, because you’re on stage!”)

Even though their new album is all heavy distortion (hence its title) and fuzz, everything sounded totally clean at the concert. It was beautiful. All the cleverness was out there to shine, and the sad and lovely parts were heart-piercing. Apparently Merritt suffers from hyperacuity in his left ear, meaning he’s quite sensitive to certain frequencies, including applause. I could see him hold his ear whenever the clapping began, and he kept slipping a silver earplug in and out, including the time when Gonson was rambling to him about some topic, and after a couple of minutes he pulled out his earplug and said, “What?”

The set list was great too — a healthy mix of old and new, Mag Fields and side bands (Gothic Archies, 6ths, etc). I was thrilled to have some of my all-time favorites included — “No One Will Ever Love You”; “Yeah! Oh Yeah!”; “Drive On, Driver”; “Grand Canyon”; “The Book Of Love.”

All in all, a very good time was had by me. Too bad I had to go to work the next day when I should really have been sleeping!

Fish in Boulder, 6/12/08

My first exposure to Marillion came in 1985, when a local radio station started playing “Kayleigh” semi-regularly. I adored that song, and my friend Kevin was a fan of the band, so I taped the Misplaced Childhood album from him. Well, I liked that album enough that when its sequel Clutching At Straws came out in 1987, I bought it right away. I even had a big poster of the album cover in my room, thanks to my job-at-the-time with a record store. Both those albums stayed on heavy rotation throughout my high school years. The driving, Who-ish music was great, but what I loved the most were the poetic lyrics, passionate intensity, and thrilling voice of the lead singer, a chap who went by the handle “Fish”. (His real name is Derek Dick — I guess I’d pick a pseudonym too.)

Sadly, after Clutching, Fish left the band, and I stopped paying attention. Marillion released more stuff with a new singer, but it didn’t captivate me, and as far as I knew, Fish disappeared completely. If only the Internet had been around in those days, I’d have learned soon enough that he’d done no such thing. Instead, he came out with a solo album a mere 3 years later, but I never saw that album — Fish is Scottish, and I guess as a solo artist he didn’t have a big US distribution deal the way Marillion did. He then went on to release eight more solo albums, the latest of which, 13th Star, came out earlier this year. I never bought any of these, even once I knew they existed, because as imports, they all carried high price tags. Since post-band solo work is often inferior, it felt like too much money to spend for the risk involved. However, when I saw he was touring the US for the first time in 10 years and playing a lot of late Marillion material, I decided I needed to go. Even better, I figured out that I could download 13th Star from iTunes for almost half of what Amazon wants for it. Thanks, Internet!

The Incredible Hulk

The Hulk isn’t a superhero. He exists in a world of superheroes, and he was created second (just after the Fantastic Four) during the most legendary superhero-creation-spree of all time, Stan Lee’s run at re-envisioning costumed crusaders for the 1960s. But he’s not a superhero, any more than Godzilla, Frankenstein’s creature, or the Wolfman are superheroes. (Though they, too, were all adapted into comics form by Marvel.) He’s a monster. He comes out of the tradition of monster comics that Lee was writing just before he invented the FF, and although the Green Goliath was constantly encountering Spider-Man, the X-Men, Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, and so forth, as a character he has very little in common with any of them. He was one of the original Avengers, but there’s a reason why his membership only lasted two issues.

Superheroes are people (or entities who might as well be people) with extraordinary abilities, trying to do good. The Hulk, at least in his most famous incarnation, lacks the mental capacity to form such an intention. Although superpowered (what with being the strongest individual in the world), he is no hero. He’s a pure destructive force, extremely dangerous to anyone and anything he encounters. Sure, he’s misunderstood, and he’s constantly trying, unsuccessfully, to be left alone, but the Army is right to try to neutralize him. He’s like an unstoppable, indestructible, infinitely strong, emotionally abused toddler who lacks any sort of parental figure. The only control on him is his alter ego, who (understandably) is constantly trying to eliminate his greenish tendencies, but of course, if that happened, there would be no story. So it’s never going to happen in any permanent way.

All this presents quite a problem when you’re making a Hulk movie. You’re stuck with a monster movie that you have to somehow sell as a superhero movie, because in the mistaken public mind, the Hulk is a superhero. So what do you do? You make him sympathetic (not hard given his misunderstood quality.) You make Banner really likeable and tie the two together so that it’s clear that the Hulk, dangerous as he is, is a cage that’s wrongfully imprisoning a good person. You taint the intentions of the Army, who really ought to be the heroes of this story, so that they turn from protectors of humanity to destroyers of it. Finally, you provide a villain who’s as powerful as the Hulk but is genuinely evil rather than just rampant, so that we must root for the Hulk to emerge, because he’s the only thing that has a chance of stopping this other force.

Louis Leterrier does all these things successfully in The Incredible Hulk, but he does one more thing too: he stuffs the movie with so many sly references to comic and TV lore that it firmly establishes itself, especially in the wake of Iron Man, as a clear attempt at putting the Marvel Universe on screen. For me, at least, that was where the fun really came alive.

Angel Season 4

Season three of Angel had a great arc, and a cliffhanger ending. Season four resolved the cliffhanger well enough and managed a couple of strong episodes, only to descend into a disappointing spiral, full of bewildering choices, shredded continuity, and the same kind of personal disintegration that characterized season 6 of Buffy. As a whole, these episodes had less humor and fewer highs than ever before. The show recovered some ground for the final third of its season, luckily, and wound up in a head-scratcher of an ending that certainly piques my interest in the beginning of season 5.

*** Turgid, supernatural spoilers below ***

Page 3 of 7

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén