Superhero movies

Ubermensch

You could start a discussion on superhero movies at any point-- from the first Zorro movie in the '20s to Marvel Studios' 2011 Captain America-- but in my book the genre properly began in 1933, with a superpowered vegetarian.

Popeye the Sailor could stop train engines with a single punch, pummel warriors into pacifists, hurl traditional adversary Bluto into low Earth orbit. As produced by brothers Max and Dave Fleischer, his adventures were not fairy tales from some European neverland but realist melodramas set in Depression-era shacks and alleyways, revolving round the sailor's love life (or total lack of). When he pops open a can of spinach the movie kicks into high gear, sometimes turning surreal sometimes acquiring color, on occasion sprouting a third dimension (thanks to the stereo-optical process, a Rube Goldberg contraption that combines tabletop dioramas with a multiplane camera decades before Pixar, or Fleischer's old rival Disney came up with the digital equivalent). This while insisting on an existential individualism that cuts through conventional notions of beauty and social class ("I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam!" declares the one-eyed near-bald bandy-legged mariner with bulging arms).

The Fleischer brothers would in the early '40s go on to realize the first Superman adventures on the big screen: gorgeously rendered eight-minute shorts that added to the hero's legend (where in the comic book he leaped 'tall buildings in a single bound' in the films he flew) but more conventionally told, with a more straightforward animation style.

Superheroes played it mostly straight through the '40s and '50s in low-budget live-action serials that avoid attempting the large-scale effects of the Fleischer shorts-- this would include a popular TV show that aired through most of the '50s, the most interesting aspect of which was the tragic life and career of lead actor George Reeves. In the '60s producer William Dozier (with Lorenzo Semple Jr. as head writer) achieved popularity by turning the adventures of one of DC Comics' most popular characters into camp-- rat poison for serious Batfans but fairly inventive verbal fun for the casual viewer ("Holy Human Pressure Cookers, Batman!" "Holy Priceless Collection of Etruscan Snoods!").

Of course Filipinos weren't about to let that kind of foolishness pass without a response of some kind. Artemio Marquez's brilliant no-budget conceit was to mash together two pop icons-- James Bond and Batman-- for the price of one (any opportunity to save cash-strapped audiences money) in 1966's James Batman. More bizarre than witty, the film explicitly presents a rapaciously misogynist Bond (Dolphy)-- arguably the most honest onscreen take on the character-- and a regular if inept Juan de la Cruz of a Batman (Dolphy again, in a dual performance) who takes his lunch (boiled rice, tomatoes, salted fish) seasoned with a touch of Batlab-produced vinegar like everyone else.

Towards decade's end Dino de Laurentiis offered Italian horror master Mario Bava three million dollars for a comic-book adaptation; the filmmaker did it for $400,000. Unlike the Batman TV series Danger: Diabolik! (1968) isn't camp but a dead-serious thriller with scenes of unabashedly adult sensuality (mostly the magnificently underdressed Marisa Mell), a gaudy palette (from mandarin orange gowns to deep purple 'exhilaration' gas to-- literally-- a burst of molten gold for the finale), and the wit to infuse sleek futurist sets with European decadence (a vast revolving bed papered with dollar bills). 

Diabolik himself (John Philip Law) is a cipher with steely Rorschach glare who's either society's terminal hedonist or its last romantic rebel; the film plays deftly to either interpretation. Barely super-- like Bruce Wayne a skilled amateur armed with extravagant gadgets-- his abilities involve less ultrahuman strength, more ultrahuman cool.

The next major interpretation would be Warner Brothers' 1978 Superman-- less for the filmmaking (by journeyman Richard Donner) than for the casting of Christopher Reeve in the eponymous role. Reeve was presumably picked for his good looks but proved a deft comedian, lending the holier-than-thou hero ("I'm here to fight for truth and justice and the American way") an appealing modesty, a winning sense of humor.

The movie's success allowed for an altogether more interesting sequel. Superman 2 (1980) paired Reeve with a real filmmaker: Richard Lester, who gave the Kryptonian a sex life, a bittersweet relationship ("Have you any idea what it's like...not be able to talk normally to you, or show how I feel about you, or speak to anybody else about you?"), a series of inventive superpowered battles punctuated by the odd comic touch (a man loses a toupee, another a scoop of ice cream). The humor is integral to Lester's absurdist vision: he sees the Man of Steel as a victim of circumstance, as helpless as the rest of us against a silly senseless world (a wandering H-bomb releases his worst enemies; a cosmic tragedy drives him into exile and into the arms of his love-- who happens to be human, and hence out-of-bounds). When outnumbered and outpowered three-to-one, what saves him? An accidentally dropped crystal shard. If God the Father (Marlon Brando in the banal Richard Donner's Cut) were a sadistic prankster he'd favor Lester with a reluctantly admiring eye.

Meantime that same year our favorite brawling vegan returned to the big screen as interpreted by wayward poet of '70s American cinema Robert Altman. Popeye didn't win much respect from critics then, has not inspired much licensed merchandise (or even a spike in the sales of canned spinach) since. But once in a while a discerning critic comes up with a thoughtful appreciation, and Paul Thomas Anderson went so far as to appropriate its most yearning song ("He Needs Me") for his most openly romantic work Punch Drunk Love. 

Popeye (eponymous character played by comedian Robin Williams) is remembered for the ramshackle sprawl of Sweethaven (designed by Wolf Kroeger, shot in Malta by Giuseppe Rotunno), for the diverse demeanor of the townfolks (from Linda Hunt's diminutive Mrs. Oxheart to Bill Irwin's contorted Ham Gravy to Shelley Duvall's tottering Olive Oyl), for the visual and aural lyricism (half-heard melodies and mumbled lyrics by Harry Nilsson). The film lacks the high-calorie gleam of today's multimilliondollar adaptations announced with enough orchestration to bring on The Second Coming, but its lilting wayward beauty haunts you; it lingers long after everything bigger louder brawnier has since faded from memory.

Donner cast the perfect Superman in Reeve; Lester reconceived Reeve as the emotionally stable center to his own idiosyncratic universe (he would push the idiosyncrasy further with stand-up comic Richard Pryor in Superman III (1983) only critics and audiences failed to follow, alas-- some sequences were Lester at his most surreal). Comics fluttered one way movies another; neither would collide creatively again till six years later, when Tim Burton chose Michael Keaton to play the Caped Crusader.

Another comedian? Holy Blasphemous Stunt Casting! Protest mail flooded the Warner offices; hordes of Batfans howled at the prospect of another camped-up parody (see TV show above). But Burton drew on Fritz Lang's Metropolis and F.W. Murnau's Faust among other masterpieces of German Expressionism to create not comedy but comic nightmare, not superhero drama but Gothic opera peppered with low slapstick. Keaton's Batman doesn't bracket his performance with quotation marks; his arch nemesis The Joker (Jack Nicholson) acts the buffoon and suddenly the psychopath-- it's the uncertainty that's unsettling. Add Anton Furst's cathedrallike designs and Danny Elfman's swooning heroic score and millions of Batfans became instant converts, to the tune of $251 million boxoffice gross ($550 million when adjusted for inflation).

Batman's success meant Burton could do whatever he pleases and what pleased him was a sequel done his way; Batman Returns (1992) I'd consider Burton's oddball best-- Lang at his most megalomanic, with generous helpings of Charles Dickens and early Walt Disney. Danny Devito's The Penguin is the archetypal Dickens hero, orphaned and abandoned and swollen with bile to monstrous proportions; Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman is the female psyche shattered by a hundred story fall then stitched together like Frankenstein's (Francinestein's?) creature. Daniel Waters' sharp dialogue is spoken in odd truncated cadences ("Somebody mention fish? I haven't been fed all day!" "Eat floor; high fiber.") as if everyone onscreen had developed a practiced comic patter to hide their inner pain. The film (thanks to Stefan Czapsky's metallic cinematography) sports a dark gleam, and manages (thanks to a combination of towering miniatures and massive enclosed sets) to be vertiginous and claustrophobic both-- you're always in danger of plunging to your death same time you can barely breathe.

By film's end Burton achieves comedy horror pathos; you giggle helplessly or stare aghast, either reaction being equally valid. There's a perverse audacity to the way Burton both trashes and transforms the character-- our 'hero' is a massive brooder who without hesitation hooks explosives to henchmen's belts, or roasts them alive with his vehicle's rocket exhaust. At the same time you catch glimpses of hidden humanity-- the orphaned boy who can't help but respond to a fellow (admittedly psychopathic) orphan boy; the lost soul who yearns for and suddenly finds, unmasked and emotionally naked, his fellow lost soul (appropriately, in a masked ball).

Compare and contrast Burton's Dark Knight with Christopher Nolan's (2005 - 2012): Nolan's conforms to comic-book canon, a dark upholder of justice who scrupulously avoids guns and killing, a serious brooder with no sense of humor or compensating comic foil-- in short a crashing bore. Instead of Anton Furst's brilliant designs, Pittsburgh (and not even the more interesting parts of Pittsburgh); instead of Stefan Czapsky's (or Roger Pratt's) dark carnival glow, Wally Pfister's gray verite. Heath Ledger's Joker-- admittedly an improvement over Nicholson's, though I much prefer DeVito and above all Pfeiffer-- pointedly asks: "Why so serious?" Nolan doesn't know how to mix emotional tones, doesn't know how to use laughter to queer the edge of horror, horror to sharpen the edge of laughter; he's all about straight drama. Naturally Batfans were ecstatic.

The over twenty years since Batman Returns far as I'm concerned has been a barren howling wilderness, punctuated here and there by bright patches. 

Kinka Usher stepped out of his role as director of television commercials to do Mystery Men (1999) an eccentric (to put it mildly) parody of the genre written by Neil Cuthbert and based on characters created by Bob Burden (one hero throws forks; another wields a shovel; yet another called The Spleen emits deadly gag-inducing gas). The film isn't as funny as it wants to be, yet has a persistent off-kilter charm ("We're not the heroes," The Shoveller (William Macy) admits; "we're the other guys"). After the film's box-office failure (it earned $33 million on a budget of $68 million) Usher stepped back into commercials and hasn't been heard from since.  

Bryan Singer's X-Men movies (2000 - 2016) play on the subtext of mutants as social outsiders, the highlight of the series being a mutant coming out to his family in X-2: X-Men United (2003) and their witheringly hostile response. Sam Raimi's Spiderman movies (2002 - 2007) cleverly kept the action cartoony, the soap opera soapy. Tim Miller's Deadpool (2016) took Spidey's schtick into rated R territory, at the same time granting the hero superswift healing powers that made the violence more than a little pointless. 

Ang Lee's Hulk (2003) is weighed down by dark psychodrama involving Bruce Banner's supervillain father-- love it. Lee divides the action into panels and slides them across the screen, a comic book page come literally to life. Never been a fan of the man-- think Lee's best work are low-key melodramas about the middle class-- but here he jiu-jitsus all expectations to reveal a distinct visual sensibility, a bonkers deadpan humor.

Guillermo del Toro's Blade 2 (2002) took ideas from his early masterpiece Cronos and blew them up to Hollywood proportions; his Hellboy movies (2004, 2008) turn on the conceit that Hellboy isn't so much a spawn of the Devil as he is an average working Joe, subject to petty jealousies and adolescent yearnings like any other schmuck (it helps that Del Toro has a visual style few contemporary Hollywood directors can touch, and an excellent approximation if not direct translation of Mike Mignola's glorious graphic line).

Erik Matti's Gagamboy (Spiderboy, 2004) has Junie (Vhong Navarro, whose performance is key to the movie's fun quotient) bitten by a spider dunked in toxic wastes (the Philippines can't really afford to produce radioactive waste); the result is a small triumph whose biggest virtue is in taking the absurd notion of a man wearing his colored underwear out in the open and parading them proudly, like a pair of colored underwear worn out in the open.
 
First-time director Peter Stebbings' Defendor (2009) takes Mark Millar's conceit in the Kick-Ass comics (what is pulling on a costume and fighting crime really like?) and splays it on the big screen; where Millar quickly escalates (degenerates?) into less credible characters (Big Daddy and Hit Girl) and excessively gratuitous violence (electrocuted testicles, whole neighborhoods massacred) Stebbings keeps his film grounded thanks to the essentially sweet-natured hero (Woody Harrelson, channeling his 'Woody Boyd' persona in Cheers). Cinematographer David Greene gives the picture a darkly gilded look; Stebbings' script (unlike Millar's comic) keeps the action blessedly small. If anything the film's a bit too modest; you feel that it needs a touch of crazy to distinguish it from all the other masked crimefighters crawling out of the woodwork.

Enter James Gunn. Mostly known today for grafting quirky humor on the usual superhero shenanigans (Guardians of the Galaxy, 2014), Gunn's Super (2010) is his far more demented take, about a patty-flipping loser named Frank Darbo (Rainn Wilson) who pulls on a cowl and bashes evil on the skull. 

The picture has been compared to Defendor but I don't buy it-- the latter is a straight-arrow drama trudging inevitably to its grim conclusion. Super is glorious satire, from Frank's origin story (hentai tentacles cut open his skull to allow the Finger of God to nudge his cerebral cortex) to his bluntly effective weapon of choice (a pipe wrench) to his enthusiastic sidekick and insatiable nymphomaniac Libby (Ellen Page, hilariously unhinged).   

The picture has also been compared to Matthew Vaughn's Kick-Ass (made the same year) which I don't buy either-- Vaughn's violence is cartoonish and slickly produced, ultimately comforting in its stylization. Gunn's has a carefully cultivated cinema verite look such that when Frank brings his wrench down on someone's cranium the crunch! can make you flinch in your seat.  

Joss Whedon I'd call a better writer than director. For his Avengers movies (2012 - 2015) he doesn't present heroes struggling for acceptance but recognizably human folks (who only happen to have abilities) struggling under the burden of damaged psyches-- a subtle difference that wins my sympathies more readily than the entirety of Zack Snyder's Man of Steel (2013) with its insufferably noble hero ("You just have to decide what kind of a man you want to grow up to be"). Snyder's follow-up Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) kicks things up a notch with a largely contrived showdown between The Dark Knight and the aforementioned Man of Steel, full of sound and fury signifying not very much. The Russo Brothers' Captain America: Civil War) does a marginally better job at pitting noble superhero against his more cynical equivalent-- but maybe my biggest problem with the lot is that none of them have a look, a distinct and personal visual style able to lift the movie beyond its fugly steel-and-concrete color palette, its shakily shot frenetically edited filmmaking.

A note on costs and profits: with all the digital effects superhero movies don't come cheap-- the Avengers movies average $250 million each while Spiderman 3 sets the record (so far) at $258 million. Whedon's can justify their size through boxoffice, but Raimi's third webslinger adventure (which I happen to like) and Snyder's pair of steel duds (which I happen to despise) have struggled to recoup their sizable investment. 

Not that keeping the budget low is any guarantee. Defendor and Super's budgets are $3.5 and $2.5 million respectively, and their ticket sales add up to less than a million combined (DVD and other residual sales contribute a little; it helps to be considered a cult classic).

Arguably superheroes are doing better on the small screen: Whedon's Agents of Shield has an interesting storyline about betrayal and deceit (tho I wish they'd move away from the sheet metal color scheme); Gotham has a look (taking its cue from Burton's updated German Expressionism) but needs to come up with a more convincing storyline; what I've seen of Arrow and The Flash seem okay, but suggest nothing particularly special. Marvel is doing better with its Netflix series-- Daredevil has some of the grittiness of The Wire (high praise in my book), but sadly lapses into comicbook simplemindedness towards the end; its second season is more interesting, with the introduction of Jon Bernthal's The Punisher as a darker far more tormented version of our horny superhero. Jessica Jones proposes an 'enhanced human' (as they're now called) with PTSD and her equally enhanced monstrously self-entitled abuser-- it's easily the most compelling of the small screen dramas found in the MCU (Marvel Comics Universe).

I do still have hopes for Whedon, who happened to direct the in my book best superhero movie in recent years: forty instead of a hundred and forty minutes long, a budget of $200,000 instead of two hundred and fifty million, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (2008) has all the pathos and comedy of the Dark Knight and Man of Steel and every Marvel movie combined, only expressed in rhyme and accompanied by music. If reports are true and Whedon has finally freed himself from the evil influence of Marvel Studios (subsidiary of the larger and even more insidious Walt Disney Studios) then maybe he can start doing inventive small-scale projects again. A musical of course; nothing makes 'small' seem more special than a collection of clever songs.

First published in High Life 1.23.16