Contradicting Popular Opinion :
An Enquiry Concerning Why Your Favorite Movie Sucks
When talking about Spider-Man, Sam Raimi has quite a few interesting things to say. I feel that one thing in particular is worth noting and examining for today’s column. To paraphrase, Raimi feels that in some sense, Super-hero movies are easy. You show the actor wearing the costume, have the music swell, and most of the work is done for you. The kids know that this guy is a hero. He adds that a lot of his making Spider-Man was trying to earn that thing which came so easily. He wanted to provide a hero worth looking up to, and the audience already admires the hero by simple virtue of costume and music.
I would consider this thing to be a noble cause. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man is constantly struggling to be all the hero he can be. He gives of himself to help others. He denies himself sleep, free time, a love life, etc. In each movie, he saves a kid from a burning building. You see, post 9/11, being a firefighter in the NYC area has been deemed the most heroic thing possible. This contrasts with being a firefighter in Chicagoland, which pretty much just means that you’ll be busted for having Nazi memorabilia.
At any rate, work has been done to make Spider-Man worthy of his hero status. Have other film-makers accepted this great responsibility which comes with great power?
The first film that strikes me with a resounding “no” is Ben Affleck vehicle, Daredevil. Daredevil is a fairly lousy movie made from fairly strong source material. What big, heroic thing do I remember Daredevil doing in that movie? Pushing a low level crook under a subway train. What a horrible thing for our pill-popping hero to do. (Did I mention that Daredevil was also a drug addict in this flick?)
Daredevil is a mess of a film, a waste of a fine character. It’s like an angst-y early Image Comics version of the character. It misunderstands Daredevil’s driving forces, which consist mostly of an obsession with “the rules” (creating an interesting paradox of a character who enforces the rules by working outside of them).
Perhaps our attention should be turned to our horned hero’s more popular DC counter-part: The Batman. Tim Burton’s largely over-appreciated Batman seems to have no problem killing folk. The same goes for Batman Returns wherein our hero straps explosives onto an unarmed criminal’s chest, and more or less kills the Penguin with rockets.
Shit, we would’ve been better off facing Dirty Harry.
What does Batman really accomplish in the Burton films? In the first movie, he starts out by beating up criminals well after they committed their crime, he intervenes in an attempted robbery where nothing is actually stolen, and manages to save his girlfriend a couple of times. In the second movie he ‘splodes some bad guys, f*cks Catwoman, and protects the status quo.
To be fair, Batman does manage to prevent the Joker from poisoning the populace a couple of times. The first time through the magic of SCIENCE! Although he does seem to let quite a few people get poisoned in the first place.
Perhaps we should then turn our attention to the latest, largely over-appreciated Batman film, Batman Begins. In the climax of this film, our hero pretty much kills his mentor by means of a loophole in his moral code. I guess the this Batman is pro-passive euthanasia, but anti-active euthanasia. This distinction is a valid one, morally and ethically. But I can’t help but feel that a super-hero should want to save everybody he can, even the bad guy.
So, who else do we have? The Punisher? The latest movie is another example of a crappy movie from good source material, but the Punisher is, was, and always shall be an anti-hero. Hell, he doesn’t even have a proper costume.
What about the X-Men, and the X-Men trilogy? Well, we have the music and costumes, sort of, but again we aren’t dealing with super-heroes. The X-Men don’t stop bank robbers, nor purse snatchers. They don’t solve murders. The X-Men are a counter-terrorist group specializing in the mutant variety. Wolverine has more in common with Jack Bauer than Spider-Man.
Blade is in the same boat as X-Men, just replace “mutant” with “vampire”.
Hulk? No. More of a werewolf movie than a super-hero one.
The Fantastic Four? Well, in their movie, what happens? They get their powers, do damage control on an accident for which they were responsible, and save themselves from Doctor Doom whose plan mostly involves “getting them!” It isn’t so much a film about heroism, as it is a film about coming to grips with adolescence via coming to grips with super-powers. (All four lose control of their changing bodies, can’t quite cope with their romantic lives, are prone to mood swings, and so forth. Really the Thing is just suffering from the history’s worst case of acne.)
What gives? So many comic book movies have come out, but we have so few heroes. It seems odd to me. Apart from the Spider-Man films, the only recent comic book film with a worthy super-hero would be Superman Returns, which is considered a failure by many. Is it that we demand our heroes to be dark? Is it merely that we have seen a lot of Superman movies and television already?
Perhaps it is an internal vs. external thing. To be blunt, Spider-Man is one of us; Superman is not. Spider-Man was beat up in high school. The city is always against him. He’s always low on money, with a sick aunt and a girl that won’t return his calls. Sometimes he gets the flu. He’s one of us. Superman is an alien. He can squeeze coal into diamonds; he is never going to hurt for money. He’s not going to get sick. He’s not going to cut himself shaving. He’s not going to have any worries apart from the worries of being a super-powered alien.
I think it’s a interesting subject, but not the reason for Superman relatively poor box office.
But we’ve been off topic for long enough. Perhaps our heroic cinematic figures are the ones without costumes and secret identities. What about Star Wars? Let’s look at the protagonists of this latest Star Wars trilogy. We have Anakin, who mercilessly slaughters children in the second film, but isn’t part of the “dark side” of the force until he slaughters more children in the third. Mind you, this is some one set up in the child-centric first film as the one to whom the little kids should relate. Then we have Padme, who spends most of the trilogy brushing her hair. So our defacto protagonist for the trilogy becomes Obi-wan, who in Episode 3 dismembers his young pupil, and leaves him to burn alive. It’s almost enough to make you wanna become a Trekker, isn’t it?
In the end, I’m not trying to moralize. I don’t think Gary Cooper is any less heroic for killing Frank Miller at the end of High Noon. (I realize that I switched from naming an actor to naming a character; I feel that it is appropriate for the example.)I’m not on a soapbox about the decline of culture.
I’m only observing, and taking notes.
Off topic quickies.
Hoodwinked was quite a disappointment, although admittedly I’ve high hopes for anything Patrick Warburton does. It was quite a let down to experience this uneven mix of adult humor and jokes that even toddlers will find old, full of lousy songs, ugly animation, half-baked ideas, and cringe worthy moments. Honestly, the whole thing played like cut-scenes from a poorly conceived N64 game.
My three year old gave up on it within 5 minutes.
AND
Wow, is Derailed a bad movie. Just all over the place bad. We’ve got horrible miscasting with Clive Owen and Jennifer Aniston. We’ve got a bad guy with an accent that changes from scene to scene. We’ve got a bad guy plot, so intricate that it has a 1:3,400,149 chance of working. We’ve got an indecisive wuss as our lead. We’ve got a script with an utterly bleak and hopeless view of humanity. We’ve got a story that has a stranger understanding of diabetes than Con Air. We’ve got a movie, filmed IN CHICAGO, that doesn’t seem to understand Chicago in the slightest.
But, the film does feature: MEDICI MATCHES! A pack of matches from The Medici on 57th has now appeared in Derailed and Proof. They should get their own imdb credit. You can’t smoke at the Med anymore, but dangit you can still get a book of their matches “AS SEEN ON DVD!”
PIMPS
Make sure you do that thing I asked you to do in last week’s AHA! C’mon, I’ll be your best friend.
