* Please stop reading this entry and immediately click over to film scholar David Bordwell’s analysis of the modern superhero-movie trend. It is so full of insight I hardly know where to begin quoting, but it was one of those rare pieces of analysis that actually made me laugh out loud at one point:
The blogosphere is already ablaze with discussions of whether the film supports or criticizes Bush’s White House. And the Editorial Board of the good, gray Times has noticed:
It does not take a lot of imagination to see the new Batman movie that is setting box office records, The Dark Knight, as something of a commentary on the war on terror.
You said it! Takes no imagination at all.
But it’s not simply an exercise in kicking around the Dana Stevens/Wall Street Journal “genre film as current events report” school of thought. It’s just a masterful look at everything from the changing nature of the star system and what constitutes “good acting” to advances in special effects to the rise and fall of disreputable genres to the relationship between superhero films and the comics from which they are adapted to the shortcomings of Christopher Nolan’s use of cinematography and editing and on and on and on, with insightful criticism of Iron Man, The Dark Knight and many other specific films besides. If you read one article about superhero movies this year, make it this one.
* Meanwhile, if you avoid one ill-informed, aesthetically barren post and comment thread about art comics, make it this one about Kramers Ergot 7. I’m with Chris Butcher on this one, man. How is this even a topic for heated debate in the first place? 1) Page count is deceiving when you consider both the size of the pages (16″ x 21″!) and the quality of the many, many, many contributors 2) It’s priced comparably to big art books 3) I can’t imagine an outfit like Buenaventura Press trying to rook people 4) if you can’t afford it, don’t buy it–the end!
* They’re going to remake Poltergeist. Maybe they’ll shake things up by making this one a good movie, though that will no doubt upset fans who demand that the remake remain true to the original. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)
* Bruce Baugh discusses of how he values the formation and maintenance of communities based on shared values in RPGs. It reminds me a lot of how appealing I find fiction in which the characters privilege cooperation, competence, and creativity.
* Ryuhei Kitamura briefly talks to Bloody Disgusting about Midnight Meat Train, his adaptation of the short story of the same name by his fellow Brotherhood of the Patchwork Pants member Clive Barker.
* In other other adaptation news, Sam Raimi and Tom Cruise will be teaming up to adapt Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips’s excellent superhero/espionage thriller Sleeper. Cruise would actually be good in this.
* Finally, (via Whitney Matheson) nooooooooooooooo
How do two guys in one photo have Patchwork Pants, but I can’t find ONE pair in Jersey?
They’re so practical cause they match ANY shirt in your closet. You could even put on ALL your shirts at once and still match.
The perks of being rich, you know?
Thanks for that link to Bordwell’s essay! You’re right, there are tons of slap-your-forehead nuggets of common sense in there. I may have enjoyed Iron Man and Dark Knight more than him, but one can’t fault someone for evaluating the actual film making at work. His breakdown of Nolan’s direction in particular was pretty scathing but hard to disagree with.
I also loved how he compared frame composition to panel composition, which is something we usually see in the reverse – panel and page layouts modelling themselves after film. But it’s true, you really can see alot of folks lately, particularly Snyder, trying to find ways to make the moving image capture some of the dynamics found in comics, dynamics that may have been unavailable to us in cinema just a few years ago. Foreshortening, exaggerated, hyper-stylized movement and time manipulation. I mean, how far off are we from seeing someone actually pull off Kirby or Ditko in the moving image? In the right film, in the right hands, it really could be pretty awesome (Jeeze, how fuckin’ incredible would a film version of Ditko’s early Dr. Strange tales be, if done with a visually faithful approach – those heavy shadows and claustrophobic close ups juxtaposed by the open psychedelia of the astral sequences?). IMO, there’s nothing wrong with the stylization of Sin City or 300, and I’m excited to see what Snyder does visually with Watchmen, even if I’m afraid what clicked in the comic may suffer in the translation much the same way Sin City did.
I just did my level best to blow down the guy’s house of cards with a blog-essay entitled, “David Bored? Well–”