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.

Superman III (Richard Lester)

Superman v Superman
 
Trying to get the bad taste of Zack Snyder's latest out of my mouth I took a peek at arguably one of the worst if not the worst entry in the franchise, Superman III--y'know, the one with Richard Pryor on skis flapping a pink cape.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder)

Bruce and Clark's excellent adventure 

Let's get a minor issue out of the way first: Zack Snyder's latest atrocity is, well, atrocious--basically an adaptation (the fourth if you include Christopher Nolan's trilogy) of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, to the point of quoting images (pearl necklace pulling apart*), lines of dialogue ("I believe you"), entire sequences (the famed faceoff between our eponymous crimefighter and the Big Blue Schoolboy).

Man of Steel (Zack Snyder); This is the End (Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogen); Stoker (Park Chan wook)

Man and superman

If Zack Snyder's Man of Steel taught me anything it's to appreciate the Richard Donner/Richard Lester/Christopher Reeve Superman movies more. Especially Reeve--you know everything you need to know about his performance, you learn the key to his interpretation of Superman, from his stance.  

Reeve is tall; don't know if it's just his stature, or if the filmmakers built the sets/angled the camera to emphasize his prominence, or if fellow actors were cast to be markedly shorter than he is, but he's tall. When talking to someone (Lois, or Perry, or even the run-of-the-mill evil Kryptonian) he seems to look down from a position of moral authority--he's that tall.

It's more than just height, though--Reeve's performance works;  works at a glance, works for the length of the film, and the secret to the performance is, irreducibly, that aforementioned stance. You see Superman standing there, you're bewildered by the bright red-and-blue suit and intimidating height, you notice the slight stoop--and relax. He's  one of us (or if not exactly one of us at least believably on our side), and it's that stoop (he never seems comfortable in a room; his head bows forward, as if to avoid scraping the ceiling) that marks him as okay, the humanizing flaw in his godlike demeanor.  

Reeve's Superman is impressive and reassuring at the same time, but his Kent is a comic wonder--with those ridiculously thick plastic-frame spectacles for a disguise Reeves really comes into his own. He looks about helplessly, as if seeking directions; he sticks his limbs out stiffly at awkward angles as if unsure what to do with them, afraid he'll hurt someone (conversely he's constantly jostled by others, even if his elbows are nearly level with their faces); he stutters like Woody Allen on steroids, his handsomeness obviated by his harmlessness (perhaps a tribute to the character's Jewish creators?).

That's the character at a glance--or stance, if you like: Jerry Seigel and Joe Schuster in combining the qualities of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and Harold Lloyd for their hero hit upon the essential magic formula, a mix of the quotidian and quixotic. Without the Fairbanks Kent would be just another adult Jughead; without the Lloyd Superman would be emotionally remote (if unfailingly noble) and dull. It's a balancing act that must be--but isn't always--maintained.

The Fleischer animated shorts hinted at this, though there was more Superman than Kent onscreen (their main virtues were the clean graphic lines, the sleek futuristic '40s design, the almost limitless possibilities available to animation that haven't really been matched, much less surpassed, even in this digital age). The George Reeve live-action TV show betrayed a glimmer of Kent's affability, set in low-budget surroundings (his foes were mainly gangsters and crime lords). In 1978 Alexander and Ilya Salkind managed to hire the perfect incarnation, an ubermensch with curvature of the spine, a hero with a built-in sense of humor. More than the grandiose John Williams score or (largely outdated though still impressive) special effects or huge production budget, Christopher Reeve got Superman to speak to us, made the Kryptonian superhero connect with our weak, imperfect selves.

Coming to the remake you see the problem right off. Superman Returns tried to make do with the unfunny Brandon Routh; Man of Steel has to settle for the even more muscular (and even less funny) Henry Cavill and, just to emphasize the break from Reeve, plays the young Kent as angry rebel, wandering the outskirts of America in search for meaning in his life. 

The results are kind of, well, eh. First time Kent is pushed to the ground and forced to swallow his anger it's compelling, but Snyder has to shove the allegory at our faces again and again and again. This isn't the Kent we know or love--it's a James Dean youth visibly apart from society, struggling to find his role in it. Speaking for myself if I wanted to see James Dean I'd watch James Dean; if I wanted to see Clark Kent, I'd watch Reeve shuffle two left feet. Cavill's painfully solemn transformation from disaffected youth to transcendent hero is about as interesting to watch as drying concrete.

A word on the rest of the movie, special effects, whatever: not a big fan of Richard Donner who, in spite of Reeve, creates your standard-issue Hollywood superproduction. Still Donner had his moments: when Superman takes leave of Lois Lane (Margot Kidder, a funnier and harder-edged Lois than either Kate Bosworth or Amy Adams) on her outdoor patio he floats away to the left; a pause of maybe a minute, then a knock on the front door--it's Clark in suit and tie, clutching an armful of flowers. Nowadays you just push a button and any number of Kents pop up onscreen beside their super alter-ego; back then you either failed to notice or scratched your head and asked "how did they do that?"

Likewise with Richard Lester, who with the second (and even, I'd argue, third film) brings a sly sense of fun to the proceedings. When Superman and General Zod (the inimitable Terence Stamp, who looks like he could take Michael Shannon out from between his teeth with dental floss) squared off entire buses are flung about, and we see those buses, the flash of their chrome trimmings as they fly across the huge sets. When Superman faces Zod in this installment the vehicles being tossed are ostensibly more photorealistic but there's a weightlessness, an insubstantiality to them that is, to be frank, depressing.

Mind you, I'm not saying the Donner/Lester Superman movies are great films--give me Del Toro's Hellboy or Altman's Popeye or Burton's Batman Returns any day (or even, if you like, Whedon's The Avengers or (better yet) Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog). But they're not bad, with Lester's Superman 2 as the character's big-screen apotheosis--an earthbound god with comfortingly clay feet.

As for the movie's ending (please skip the next three paragraphs if you plan to watch the movie, which I don't recommend doing): thousands maybe millions of people have just died and Superman cries over one cranky psychopath? True he's a fellow Kryptonian and our hero had just snapped his neck and likely feels all broken up for doing it...but it also feels wrong. 

Of course people have died; it would be complete idiocy for the movie to pretend otherwise, though what they do here is more interesting, a trend we've been seeing since Heath Ledger made a pencil disappear in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, continuing over to a starship plowing into San Francisco in Star Trek Into Darkness: they glide over the fact, with Superman ostensibly too busy to feel grief (or so we're supposed to think). 

Actually we're not supposed to be thinking at all--we see the pencil go up the man's eye socket in Nolan's Batman movie, we see the hurtling ship crush thousands of bystanders in Abrams' Star Trek movie, we watch thousands maybe millions more flattened by falling debris in this movie (which Nolan produced) and the act happens too fast to register properly or the camera cuts away at the last second or the steel and rock and glass fall out of frame, snuffing out innocent bystanders safely offscreen. No blood, no mess hey, no consequences, at least none you need worry about.

Getting back to the ending--so Kal-El kills, and he's upset about it? He should've been shocked at the first mangled dead body that fell to his feet (and shame on the filmmakers for not including that bit), numbed beyond emotion by the time he's up to his eyeballs in (indirectly, inadvertently shed) innocent blood. That he isn't, that despite his super hearing and super vision he reacts as if this is the first death in this whole borderline coherent affair is the single most dishonest moment in the movie. It's the new aesthetic, violence without the viciousness, having your R-rated cake and eating it in the PG-approved manner and I don't like it; it feels like I'm being pandered to and censored at the same time.

The End of the World News

Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen's This is the End is possibly the greatest twenty minute comedy ever made and what makes it great is a shot early in the movie: James Franco and his houseguests rush out of his multimilliondollar home, cut to reverse shot and all of Hollywood is in flames. I'd pay good money to see that.

Problem with the picture is that it isn't twenty minutes long; it goes on for another eighty-seven wearying minutes. And we get into the venality and cluelessness of the Hollywood elite (hold on--celebrities venal and clueless? Stop the presses!), we get Satan with a hilariously large phallus (well, that much was funny), we get Franco and Danny McBride threatening to spray their spunk all over the residence (that's funny too, and that's it, I promise). In between we get a lot of brotherly love (which you may or may not like, depending on how much you like Rogen and I don't), and cheap jabs at Rogen's phoned-in performance in Michel Gondry's The Green Hornet (which I actually liked, maybe precisely because he phoned it in and Gondry ran with it).

Otherwise--why does this movie even exist? I don't know; still trying to figure why Rogen has a career. Maybe Goldberg and Rogen felt the need to make some kind of meta-statement, their ultimate declaration of what really matters in life (your bro, and perhaps some quality weed); perhaps Rogen sensed the cold wind of mortality breathing down the back of his neck, and felt he had to stray a little into surreal comedy, toss a sop to those who polish the statues of cinematic greats. It's not much of a stretch (I'll probably be more likely to remember him for Pineapple Express); time and time again at the picture's grossest and most outrageous, I kept thinking "Monty Python did this better." Get back to me when Rogen is served his after-dinner mint.

Family ties

Park Chan-wook is off and on for me; didn't like his Vengeance trilogy much and particularly disliked Oldboy (despite moments of bravura directing), but did think Thirst was one of the better vampire movies out there.

And now this, his first English-language feature--basically Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt transplanted to Nashville, Tennessee (Matthew Goode's character is actually named Uncle Charlie). Scriptwriter Wentworth Miller improves on Hitchcock's film a little, adding that element of incestuous frisson that I felt the original needed (and probably wasn't ready to deliver at the time).

It's not Hitchcock or anywhere near as good as that; I wouldn't go that far. But Park yoked to a script that actually takes the effort to convey psychological realism or at least plausibility (whether or not it succeeds is a whole other issue) seems freer, more able to do bits of visual mischief (see photo above; the first shot of the film, of India (Mia Wasikowska) silhouetted in the horizon, in an apparently ecstatic moment; an all-too-brief glimpse of the contents of a freezer) while he trusts the storyline to make more and more sense as it unravels.

Wasikowska is wonderful; she sleepwalks her way through the picture (not necessarily a bad thing in a film that feels like a waking nightmare) and you read your own dawning comprehension of her and the film's true nature on her face as the story progresses. Matching her look for deadpan look is Matthew Goode. He made for an overobvious Ozymandias in Zack Snyder's wretched Watchmen (yet another comic book classic ruined by the man); here his creepiness is nicely balanced by a quiet charisma, and a sense of play about his role that you never got from Snyder's solemn train wreck, a hell of a lot more enticing than any mere act of seduction ("c'mon, try this--it'll be fun"). Only Nicole Kidman as India's mother is disappointing--she's basically playing Gertrude to India's feminine Hamlet, and you badly need a scene between them that clarifies or develops their relationship or at least India's feelings about her mother further (incestuous attraction don't seem right in this case--perhaps weary contempt? Patience stretched to the point of snapping?).

Some folks complain of predictability--I like to think what the picture has is inevitability, that sense that things will come into fruition and there's nothing you can do about it (which again reinforces that sense of nightmare). Will India fall under the spell of her uncle's homicidal influence? This is a Park Chan-wook film; take a wild freaking guess. 

Love the restraint--how Park withholds the crucial moment and keeps withholding it like a practiced onanist (see the aforementioned first shot, and later and even better, the shower sequence--which evokes Hitchcock, then trumps him for outrageousness). Love the gorgeous camerawork, which manages to be luscious and austere both. I'm almost wishing Park directed his own remake to Oldboy; he seems to do just fine this side of the Pacific Ocean. 

6.20.13 
 

Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009)

Moore, not less

(Warning: story discussed in close and explicit detail)

There's no two ways about it--the opening credits to Zack Snyder's Watchmen is impressive as hell, evoking as it does both the stillness of comic books and the solidity and depth of the film frame; for about two or three minutes a perfect fusion of both mediums is achieved.

Then the rest of the movie starts. The picture is two hours and forty-two minutes long, which I think is roughly a hundred and sixty minutes too long. It's an overproduced, ploddingly literal yet at the same time flagrantly unfaithful adaptation of Moore's comic book.

Most of the plot points and main characters are here. Richard Nixon and John Kennedy put in an appearance; so do airships and electric cars. The Tales of the Black Freighter comic book and the friendship between the two Nite Owls are gone, and I can see how they needed to be set aside, to reduce the running time (that said, Owl's reaction to his mentor's fate summarizes in a single scene the core of vigilante psychology--and how this kind of thinking will subtly if inevitably lead to abuse).

But if Snyder knows the words to Moore's masterwork, he seems to have missed the melody--nuances have been lost, entire concepts turned upside-down, or simplified to an appalling degree. The '80s United States shown here is more stylized than accurately captured--yes, this is supposed to be an alternate reality, but a recognizable alternate reality. To emphasize dark seductiveness (glossy clothes, bright metal, smooth stonework, yard after yard of sheet glass) over a familiar and recent time period is to throw that aspect of Moore's work out of whack.

Same goes for the fight sequences--instead of quick and dirty scuffles, onscreen they become slow-motion ballets; instead of realistic staging, we have elaborate moves, even some fancy martial-arts choreography. We don't get the sense of ordinary people wearing masks and beating the crap out of each other; we get super-heroes, and Moore's comic wasn't (with only one notable exception) about super-heroes.

Along the way Snyder has jiggered with the characters, not necessarily for the better. Adrian (Ozymandias) in the comic had a more thoughtful, more apparently compassionate presence (he actually looked despondent when Ed Blake (The Comedian) set him straight about the fate of the world); here his chilly visage screams "Masterminding sociopath! Do not trust!" Dan (Nite Owl) and Laurie (Silk Spectre) bloodied noses and perhaps broke a finger or two on paper, but they did not snap limbs, and at no point were they seen using criminals as human shields, to be shot to death. Making Dan and Laurie killers makes no sense--they would in effect be no different from sociopaths like Rorschach, or Ed Blake, and Moore's overall moral scheme would collapse into seething nihilism.

Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach does a decent job as Walter Kovacs--as Rorschach unmasked. When he has his 'true face' on, Rorschach tends to nod with every syllable, as if afraid audiences will think his voice comes from out of the thin air (he looks like a sock puppet nodding at every syllable); Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Edward Blake chews scenery with scraggly gusto, but fails to get at the humanity Moore suggests can be found at the bottom. Malin Akerman as Laurie defines woodenness--she only looks good when compared to Carla Gugino as Laurie's mom, Sally Juspeczyk, who seems both stiff and annoying at the same time.

I usually don't look to the performances to either sink or redeem a movie nowadays, but the characters Moore drew are so rich and meaty it's a shame not to take advantage of what he had accomplished. I think it's a measure of how misguided this movie is that the comic's emotional climax, the confrontation between Sally and Laurie over Sally's past, goes over like a collapsing Vegas hotel--two undoubtedly pretty but talentless actresses, mouthing lines too emotionally complex for them to comprehend, much less deliver with the proper nuance and subtlety.

Of course we knew where Snyder's priorities were much earlier. The crucial debate between Jon and Laurie on Mars about the importance of saving the Earth, which comically keeps turning into a therapy session on Laurie's messed-up life is turned onscreen into some kind of Vulcan mind meld, with Jon sucking the images out of Laurie's head--presumably to save on running time, so Snyder can have Laurie and Dan cross a prison hallway in glorious slow motion, bashing criminals right and left (a sequence Moore and Gibbons pretty much disposed of in a few panels on paper).

Tellingly the film's most successful character is its least human. As Jon Osterman, Billy Crudup manages to suggest the otherworldliness of a man literally above humankind's relatively petty concerns--but you have to figure Snyder would score with him. His thinking is alien, hence no interpretation artistic or otherwise is needed to make him fascinating. He's mainly a super-powered plot function, meant to get the narrative going and solve certain story structure problems.

Finally, there's the story structure. I'm actually not a big fan of Alan Moore's Watchmen; I think the text supplements that follow eleven of the twelve issues are largely unreadable (there are exceptions--Sally Jupiter's clippings and Ozymandias' (Adrian's) interview are minor character-sketch masterpieces), the basic plot too absurd and unwieldy to take seriously (it figures that a masked hero would think of saving the world that way). Moore's best work is possibly From Hell, his epic meditation on Jack the Ripper and 19th century England (with breathtaking art from Eddie Campbell--rare case where the artist's work fully matches the beauty and subtlety of the writer's prose).

But Moore's comic is an impressive achievement mainly for its intricate plot, divided into twelve segments. Snyder has to dispose of the twelve-chapter structure, certainly, but doesn't replace it with anything that would at least suggest the source material's level of complexity. Snyder could have picked from Moore and Gibbon's staggeringly extensive library of symbols and repeated motifs to construct some kind of visual parallel and commentary on the story (on those terms alone Moore and Gibbons' work stands above Snyder's).

Take the motif of sphere and spatter. We first see it on Ed's smiley button, the blood splat an affront to the button's yellow smoothness. We see that bubble motif repeated again and again, in various forms, for every main character--Laurie (the perfume bottle/snow dome); Dan (his dusty goggles, the Owl Ship's windshields); Adrian (his domed tropical garden). Even Sally has her own bubble, of sorts (Moloch's solar mirror weapon).

I think Moore's treatment of the bubble motif in Laurie's story gives us an idea of what the recurring image means--a memory, in effect, an encapsulated emotion or idea (or illusion, if you will), waiting to be burst. In Laurie's case it's the memory of her childhood, relatively happy if fatherless (when she learns who her father really is, the perfume bottle/snow dome shatters). The goggles/windshield represent Dan's memories of his adventures as Nite Owl, safely put away under a layer of dust and nostalgia (Laurie's finger--and later, hand--disturb that layer of dust). Adrian's dome represents the extent of his scientific powers (a tropical paradise in Antarctica); a random gap in the surrounding snowdrift reveals the life living beneath that dome. When Adrian opens the dome, he's bursting his own bubble, his own created empire, to make way for a new world.

Later a triumphant Adrian faces an orrery, representing his New World (Solar System?) Order. Jon stands half-inside, half-outside the large sphere; he vanishes, leaving blue smoke and the fateful words "nothing ever ends," the mist of his vanishing filling sphere and surrounding air--implying, perhaps, that life (random chaos, willful action) persists in marring celestial perfection. That forces are at play that even now will bring down Adrian's masterwork.

Each time we see a bubble, a glass dome, a lens, a smiley face, some portion of encapsulated space or air (or innocence) is variously burst, or opened, or smeared, or stained with blood, or violated in some way. Each tries to keep his or her memories/ emotions/illusions pure and intact, but everything from epiphany to murder keeps intruding and time, however delayed or suspended, flows once again.

Even Jon has his illusion, in this case an entire world. While Laurie talks to him of the urgency of the situation and primacy of human life, Jon drones on and on about the red planet (I personally found his little lectures on the grandeur of Mar's landscape fascinating). It takes Laurie's own example to remind him of an even greater wonder, the infinite variety and unlikeliness of human life--when Jon's crystal palace crumbles, it isn't just Laurie's illusions collapsing, but Jon's as well.

Ed's smiley button is an interesting case--a crucial one, I think. It's basically the face Ed presents to the world as The Comedian--a face that, knowing Ed's personality, relentlessly responds to the world's madness and despair with the same bright, cynical smile. When confronted by a massive but workable plan to save the world from that madness and despair, Ed's practiced cynicism cracks, the crack represented by the bloodstain on his smiley button. The comic's final image is that of Ed's smiley face making its final bow, tying its marred circular image with Adrian's foggy orrery, and reminding us of the failure of Ed's cynicism. Of the impossibility of any kind of certainty ("nothing ever ends") with regards to anything and everything that has happened before. The only certainty is change and flow.

Significantly, the one major character without a sphere or bubble or illusion to burst is Rorschach. Faced with ultimate answers to imponderable questions, he doesn't hesitate; he knows what to do and does it. "What would you call that, I wonder," Adrian muses. "'Blotting out reality,' perhaps?" Rorschach's view of the world is dark enough and flexible enough to take the secret master plan in stride; you might also say his insanity--which I'm guessing in Moore's mind reflects the world's insanity--is bigger than any mere plot to kill millions of people.

Cute theory, no? It's something you can piece together little by little, gazing down on a copy of Watchmen; I'm not sure you can do the same with the movie (for one Snyder doesn't bother to re-create Adrian's domed garden, or the snow-spatter on the dome's surface that ties it to the blood spatter on Ed's smiley-face button).

Maybe the saddest aspect to all this are the fanboys saying "I don't want to read the book, it might spoil me for the movie." "What?" I want to exclaim. "You have it all backwards. The movie will spoil the book for you; the movie is nothing compared to the book." The movie is a poor substitute for Moore and Gibbon's comic, maybe not the greatest ever made, but certainly one of the more intelligent ones, towering high over Snyder's multimillion dollar stumble. I urge anyone who hasn't read or seen either and is planning to do both (or just one of the two) to go for Moore, not less.