* Above you’ll find the image I meant to put at the top of my review of Henry & Glenn Forever this morning. Attentiondeficitdisorderly regrets the error.
* This was a blast: Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, Brian Hibbs, Abhay Khosla, Douglas Wolk, David Uzumeri, Chris Eckert and I discuss Daniel Clowes’s Wilson. I tried to go to bat for the thing; let me know how I did.
* Today on Robot 6: a quick look at several recent pieces on superheroes and race.
* Tom Spurgeon joins Matt Zoller Seitz in kicking superhero movies around, more or less, and like Seitz he does so from the position of someone who’d like to see something that even remotely approximates Jack Kirby on his worst day. Where Spurge diverges from Seitz, if I’m reading him correctly, is in saying that the tendency of the better superhero movies to be seen (even rightly seen) as such based on the strength of a single strong performance or small number of visually memorable moments is a feature, not a bug. This despite the fact that I believe Spurgeon has much less use for superheroes overall than does Seitz, though my hoped-for Sean/Spurge/Seitz slumber party has yet to materialize for me to gauge this first-hand. Spurgeon docks points for Seitz’s theoretical wider range for the genre, which Tom sees as crazytalk given not just Hollywood’s tried-and-true template for making money from superheroes, but the shallowness of the genre itself.
* I particularly liked this bit:
I think Iron Man 2‘s step back from record opening box office and the mediocre US box-office performance for Kick-Ass indicate the end of the genre’s initial, immense grace period, a new act in their development that was probably instigated by the 1-2 punch of the first Iron Man movie and Dark Knight. Those two movies were immense pleasures for their respective, gigantic audiences; it’s hard to imagine success for too many movies that don’t provide at least a rough equivalent of their thrills — or movies that don’t seem to work that way not being viewed as something most people can see six months later at home.
In other words, we’ve reached Peak Nerd. My personal spin on this is that given the failure of Watchmen to convincingly carve out a space in the superhero movie genre akin to what The Godfather did for gangster movies–a failure of both interest and ability on Zack Snyder’s part–The Dark Knight and Iron Man 1 are going to be seen to be as good as it gets–the perfect excuse not to go see some movie you’re interested in but suspect will offer you diminishing returns by comparison. (For what it’s worth, no, I haven’t seen Iron Man 2 yet, but it’s family circumstances that are to blame, not a lack of interest–though given the choice I’d probably first go see an entirely different movie about an iron person, the restored Metropolis.)
* This news is both exciting and depressing: Did you have any idea that the Alvin Buenaventura-edited comics section in The Believer is now up to its fifth installment? I didn’t remember that the first had come out!
* I already linked to this, but you really should take whatever amount of time it takes you to read Tom Spurgeon’s interview with Brian Hibbs. Even aside from the subjective but/and/and-therefore fascinating portrait it paints of comics retail circa 2010, I just think that in general, more people should agree to do interviews in which the stated goal of one of the participants is to cordially poke holes in the positions of the other. This is particularly true in comics, where that virtually never happens. Good on Brian and Tom both for doing this.
* Grant Morrison, Batman, interview, you know the drill. I have to say, I re-read the last six issues of Batman and Robin this morning for an assignment, and they are simply delightful–a buoyantly, brightly dark series of mysteries filled with weird villains and exciting action scenes. It’s the ongoing Batman comic you always wanted to read if you ever were interested in reading an ongoing Batman comic.
* Zak Smith’s alphabetical rundown of the D&D Monster Manual is over. Heartbreaking.
* I’m always up for someone pointing out how poorly written Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis was. The flamethrower thing amazes me with its awfulness every time I think about it.
* Bizarro Supergirl? Sure, I’ll eat it. I really do believe that Bizarro is a top-ten-of-all-time idea from the superhero genre.
* A John Williams blog-a-thon? Sure, I’ll eat it. (Via The House Next Door.)
* I have no idea what these hugely impractical giant robot-monster things from something called Mazinga Z are, but they’re gorgeous.
* Ta-Nehisi Coates slaps President Obama around a bit for being a luddite scold at a recent commencement speech. Hey Mr. President, maybe if you weren’t so busy trying to find a “sensible middle ground” on fucking Miranda rights, we wouldn’t need to be entertained or distracted or diverted so much!
I’m going to be really disappointed when Morrison finally leaves Batman, and some hack like Jeph Loeb “fixes” all the cool stuff that Morrison broke.
All I was trying to say is that when Daredevil came out, I sat behind a group of guys at a theater in Pasadena who were there at the insistence of one of dudes in the group; they had nothing to go on except this guy’s word it was based on a really good story. Now most people have a useful context for these sorts of things, which I think is going to make a bad one a harder sell than it was for a while there.
I don’t think there’s been any super-hero movies that have hit the level of the best super-hero comics (except for Burton’s Batman Returns, which really belongs to a different cycle). The problem seems to be institutional: the best super-hero comics were products of singular visions and were (comparatively) unrestrained, but just about any big budget movie made in Hollywood is going to be first and foremost a product. To the extent that creative people are working on these movies, they tend to be operating a in a straightjacket (compare Nolan as a hired hand on the Batman movies to Nolan working on his “own” movies – Memento and The Prestige, or Raimi on the Spider-Man movies vs. Raimi on Drag Me to Hell).
That said, the super-hero movies strike me as being more enjoyable (in general) than other big budget Hollywood movies. Kick-Ass was livelier than anything Michael Bay has done recently, Robert Downey gives a better performance in Iron Man than any recent romatnic comedy lead that I can think of (Ryan Reynolds in The Proposal, for example, or, though I generally like him, Hugh Grant in that witness protection comedy). I’m not sure there have been too many big budget movies in the past few years that have been better than The Dark Knight.
To the extent that the super-hero movie has a problem as a genre, it isn’t (IMO) that it doesn’t have a Godfather, but rather that it doesn’t have a Stagecoach. But, again, that also seems to be rooted in institutional issues: if the “romantic comedy” genre was judged on Hollywood product over the last ten years, it would come up pretty short, too.
COOP: Yeah, me too. When you look at how badly Marvel appeared to understand what Morrison was doing, and then how badly they erased what he did…yikes. Although I’m told a lot of his concepts are making a comeback over there.
Tom: I think you’re right.
Jon: I’ve got no problem judging the romantic comedy on that standard too. I think that’s Seitz’s point, that this is what Hollywood as an institution has done with this genre, and it stinks. If the best you can say is that these things are better than Michael Bay movies or Did You Hear About the Morgans, that’s not very good.
Well, I was trying to compare like-to-like there (big budget movies vs. big budget movies), not make the strongest possible case for The Dark Knight. I think The Dark Knight is an ambitious movie that has a lot going for it (Heath Ledger’s performance, a Fritz Lang-like approach to mobilizing its symbol-heavy characters and setting, some solid action-adventure set pieces) with flaws (a certain lack of elegance/coherence on both a spatial level and a symbolic level), and I’d rank it alongside other movies that are similarly mixed: stuff like Gran Torino, Rachel Getting Married, Appaloosa, Paranoid Park, Techine’s The Witnesses, Mamet’s Redbelt, Public Enemies, A Perfect Getaway, Beeswax, The Boss of It All, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, etc., etc. That’s still quite a few steps down from The Godfather, not to mention Stagecoach (a movie that is almost mind-bogglingly infinitely better than anything from Hollywood in the last 20 years or so), but my point was that out of all these big budget “product” movies – the Michael Bay stuff, the lame romantic comedies – super-hero movies can at least compete with auteur-driven indie films, more sophisticated European entertainments, and looser, fringier genre work. I’d rank Iron Man about the same (for different reasons).
More importantly:
I don’t think Wilson is being patronizing/a dick when he asks about Iron Man. I think the joke is that after his little rant, he’s still genuinely interested in some level in Iron Man. It reminded me of certain internet people who seem to really hate super-hero stories, but still want to keep up with “what’s going on” in them.
Haha, Jon, in retrospect I think you’re totally right about that Iron Man gag. It’s even funnier if he’s just obliviously trying to shift back into “I’m interested in what you have to say, sir” mode after brutally insulting him. Good call!