Sorry for not writing a blog last week but some idiot forgot to pay my internet bill. 

Yeah, it was me.

I didn’t actually give my yay or nay on Kick-Ass2 so I wanted to do that right quick.

The quick version is that it’s pretty good but not great. I know that unforgivably ambiguous but honestly it’s so in the middle I can’t really give a definitive answer.

 My main problem is that the movie changes certain things from the comic but those things don’t make sense with what they kept.

The biggest problem is with the hit girl character that gets a whole new story added to her arc which makes sense, seeing how she’s the most interesting thing in the series. Here’s my problem though. She has a beginning and an end but the middle is still the same. So her beginning is changed in that she gets this wole new arc that basically is just a cut and paste of Mean Girls into the story. Then the movie just kind of cuts back to the comic without mentioning anything that happened before. Then the movie cuts back to get a final twist at the end. Its… weird and doesn’t really work for me.

Which basically sums up my feelings on the movie. It feels like a Frankenstein where they added parts but didn’t really think about what they added then kind of let the monster wander around until it was finally shot.

For example mother fucker is given a backstory where he actually killed his own mother accidentally. That’s good. But then we never see a scene that settles on the emotional trauma that would cause. That’s bad. Then he’s given a best friend who is killed by his criminal uncle. That’s interesting. Unfortunately this uncle is straight up never mentioned again so he feels like a throw away character. That’s dumb. Then at the end he’s killed which is weird but he gives this nice line about being famous which isn’t that well developed as far as motivation because I thought he was more about revenge and….That’s confusing.

This might sounds like a case of the “I liked the comic better” buts it’s not. In fact there was one part of the comic I thought should have been changed and thought they missed out in not changing it. Stars and Stripes still dies after one scene which is bizarre because we are supposed to care about the character. He really should have died after hitmans dad. That way we could have gotten to know the character. They could have developed a family bond, we could have connected him to the uncle character through their mafia roots. There was a lot to play with there but for some reason he still dies like at the beginning of the second act which just seems like a waste of a good character and a great actor.

All in all its pretty good but doesn’t feel cohesive. Take the end where they decide they can’t be superheros anymore. Why? I mean this would have made sense in the comic because they just got their asses handed to them by the police after a major terrorist event. But here its like, “Hey we just beat the bad guys, stopped them before they did anything bad and totally got away scott free. Guess we can’t do this anymore.”

I think the problem is that they wanted to add some things but didn’t really know what to do with the tone of the story. Like the diahera scene (you’ll know it when you see it) and mother russia ripping a door off its hinges, these all seem like scenes designed to make the universe more fun and “comic-booky”. But the problem is that the comic used scenes of violence to establish a tone which actually required a more “realistic” depiction of events. All in all the movie feels, hate to say it, campy. And disjointed.

Trust me, if you’ve read the comic, every time it switches from cannon to non cannon material you’ll feel the ‘thunk’ as the whole movie shifts.

Which is too bad because all in all I want to like the movie so much. After Millar’s comments I wanted this to come along and show him how to do it right but this doesn’t do that. Its got some great humor, some cool scenes and some great fucking ass acting so its not a waste of time. But if I wanted to staple Mean Girls to my copy of Kick Ass 2 I could do that for less than eight bucks. 

Millar you dumb, dumb, dumb motherfucker

Alright so I was supposed to do a short review on Kick Ass 2 and be about my business but Mark Millar opened his fat stupid, stupid-stupid fat mouth and it looks like I’m in for a long article and the movie review comes next week.

(I swear someday these will get down to the five hundred word limit I set for myself.)

Here’s what he said, “The ultimate [act] that would be the taboo, to show how bad some villain is, was to have somebody being raped, you know? I don’t really think it matters. It’s the same as, like, a decapitation. It’s just a horrible act to show that somebody’s a bad guy”

Yeah.

But if that wasn’t bad enough when people criticized this admittedly tone deaf statement his response was to kindly listen, he asked some questions because he knew that he was engaging in a conversation about something he had never nor will never experience, and then rationally engaged the criticism. Wait that came out wrong, what I meant to say is he acted like a total dickhead and said, “I think it’s meaningless. A tiny storm in a tea-cup. And in ten years time I’ll copy and paste this again when the argument raises it’s head like it did a decade ago. The fact is that more women are reading comics right now than at any point in my life and they’re not picking them up because they feel they’re demeaning in any way.”

Editors note: I am being informed that he actually said those words years earlier. I am too lazy to change them and I think the point is still somewhat valid even if it wasn’t in direct response to the first statement.

Additional editors note: I don’t actually have an editor I’m just supes lazy and I thought the joke before the quote was too funny to cut.  

Alright, so I figured the best thing we could do is instead of hashing out how exactly to go about engaging in a conversation like this between feminists and Mark Millar.

First things first, Mark Millar is a conservative. I don’t know by what degree and I’ve never heard him say so but lets look at Kickass 1 for evidence. It’s not exactly the most culturally sensitive body of work. I mean let’s just call it what it is. It’s a white conservative power fantasy. It name checks prominent republican politicians like Rudy Giuliani in a way that praises him. It’s about a white male beating up people of color and receiving fame for his individualistic hard work. And features panels like this…

 Not that the views of your characters are your views they can indicate an ideological leaning.

So yeah pretty conservative, at least if his work is any indication.

So am I saying that conservatives are pro-rape? Hell no. But the fact is that if you subscribe to a political ideology that emphasizes personal responsibility then you are going to look at the world in a specific way. You are more likely to look at women and wonder how they are responsible for their hardships then look towards society. Ditto for people of color. So conservatives are probably going to be less empathetic to the idea that comic books affect a “rape culture”. And if we hope to engage with this kind of artists who think this way, starting with statistics about the number of raped women probably isn’t going to hold a lot of water because again, these people emphasize individuals affecting culture, not so much vice versa.

So where do we start then if “rape-culture” is off the table for artists like Frank Millar.

Well we can talk about capitalism. Sales, that kind of thing.  

One statement that caught less flak but bothered me more his line, “The fact is that more women are reading comics right now than at any point in my life and they’re not picking them up because they feel they’re demeaning in any way.”

The fact is when prominent women are telling you that basically they buy comics “despite” the current trends of women's depiction, you should probably listen to what they are saying. I mean the idea of, 'More women are buying comics thus that somehow shows comics shouldn't change to embrace the new audience,' isn't just offensive, its bad business.

No one is saying you can’t feature rape in comics. That’s just silly. There is nothing inherently wrong with the medium that it can’t support the weight of any one issue. The problem arises when we don’t treat women with respect in comics.

Who does this make a more developed character?

I mean when you disrespect anything in a story it can flatten the work so we should especially be careful with how we touch events that are supposed to be important in the story line.

My problem with the rape scene in Kick Ass 2 is less, “You showed rape and that's bad because we can’t show rape in comics without influencing men to become rapists.” I don’t believe that and I don’t think you do either. The question is, “How is the rape functioning in this work?” Is it comparable to a decapitation as Millar asserts?

(spoilers coming)

Let me compare the rape of the girl to the death of the father in Kick Ass 2.

So the death of the father is shown to be the end of a character arc. The dad starts off in a certain place (more or less a slub; dead wife, can’t keep a girlfriend, etc..), grows (fights with his son after learning he’s KickAss), and eventually has a finishing climax of his story (Gives himself over to the police, pretending to be KickAss so his son can get away but is tragically killed in prison). After his story he is remembered and affects the main character in psychological ways that have implications for how the main character continues on his journey. 

In this case it’s fine that the dad died basically to support the growth of the main character because he had his own character arc. He was respected, developed and thus not “refrigerated.”

The girl doesn’t. She basically pops in, gets raped and is never mentioned again. Really go ahead and check if you don’t believe me. Sure, her rape is mentioned, but her as a person is never mentioned again.  That’s fucked up. She’s not a developed character and the experience that women have to deal with is brought in as a cheap stunt exclusively to affect Kick Ass and not to express anything about the girl. She makes no choices and disappears into the background. This kind of representation, a version of reality which dispossess of women as victims without a real “face” or “background” or “emotions” is scary and dangerous because it is exactly how a rapist looks at a woman; without background emotions or a face.

Now you might be thinking that that is kind of the point. She didn’t really have a relationship with the character which makes the scene that more tragic that essentially a random woman is brought into this tragedy through no fault of her own. And I get where that might make sense but you know who else had that character arc?

The dog.

The dog was innocent, had nothing to do with the situation and died. So basically in Millarworld a woman and pet are on the same level of emotional importance.

Brings new meaning to the term “Bitch,” eh?

 Lastly my main problem with Millar’s statement, my personal beef is that, as a writer, I would have defended Millar if not for his own words. If, previous to his comments, someone had told me that they found the rape scene unnecessary and pointless I would have argued in favor of the scene. I would have said that while demeaning to women, the rape itself revealed a lot about the villain. It revealed his goal was to shame KickAss because killing the girl, (say by decapitation) would have been fundamentally different. The MotherFucker wanted to bring KickAss low by shaming him and stealing what “belonged to him.” And most importantly it would have shown us that the Mother Fucker was had the mental equivalent of an idiot pre-pubescent 14 year old and what they think is “bad-ass” or “hardcore”.

But now I don’t know. I think the above comments apply more to Millar than his character after what he said.

Because if you are going to say rape doesn’t matter, it just to show he’s bad, it creates such a lazy image of your writing style. I conjures images of Millar throwing darts at a dartboard, “Bad guy is created by (tragic past/aliens/its just fun) and he wants to fight the good guy at (the park/in space/ at his home) so he goes to his girlfriends house and (rapes/murders/holds her hostage) and the good guy solves the problem with (violence/violence/ultra gory violence).

You’re a writer everything you write should be important to you and to what you want to convey to your audience. You wrote Kick Ass, don't write half assed. 

The The Wolverine review (that sounds stupid but that’s what it is)

The The Wolverine review (that sounds stupid but that’s what it is)

So apparently this site is turning into a movie review blog and I promise I’m going to actually talk about comics in the next blog but I just saw The Wolverine and I feel like I should review it. Just be glad I’m not going off for a couple thousand words about Elysium because I could do just that!!

*Ahem*

Wolverine. Yeah. It’s alright.

If your hopes were high well then first you are a special kind of optimist but I’m going to advise you to go ahead and calm right down because it’s nothing special. Decent but not great. Or even good really.

Hugh Jackman does an awesome job as Wolverine again but then you knew that. This being his sixth reprisal of the character anything less would be kind of a disappointment. The action scenes are interesting but nothing new. If you are paying attention you can probably guess the ending.

Chances are if a guy has been obsessing over you for fifty years and everyone keeps mentioning how crazy he is about you, you just might end up in a fight scene with him

The most exciting thing in this movie was the end. And no that’s not a tongue in cheek insult. I’m saying the most memorable/exciting part of the entire film was the teaser for the next movie after the credits. So yeah.

So you might be asking why even talk about this movie then if it’s so...meh? Well I kind of wanted to do an autopsy on a certain problem in this movie that prevented it from having the impression it should have. I mean I want to be clear, this movie is competent but has a huge problem. That problem is women.

So let’s examine the three female cast members and see if we can find out what was done wrong with them.

First there is Yukio played by Rila Fukushima and whom I’m going to call Sailor Venus because I can’t remember her name all the time and I’m pretty sure Sailor Venus was the badass one.

I don’t really remember this show. For some reason I was always um… “distracted” during it.

Sailor Venus’ main problem is that she doesn’t have a lot going on. In the beginning we are told that she is picked up off the street by some rich business men to be friends with the big bosses daughter.

You know like you do.

And some hints are dropped off that she there might be more to that story as another character calls her just a toy. So I’m thinking, ‘Is she a robot? A werewolf? A sexy Japanese werewolf robot?’ But alas, no. She’s really is just some girl that they picked up to be friends with another character who she never talks to throughout the entire movie. Okay I’m fibbing a little bit on that one. But it’s one crappy scene and I’m not even sure they pass the Bechtel test.

I mean she’s a psychic which is kind of cool even its basically just used to create artificial tension in scenes where there really isn’t real tension.

You know, ‘I had a vision a bomb is going to blow go off and kill everyone’  so when Hugh Jackman saves everyone we’re “surprised.”

But even her psychic powers really don’t come of anything. She never uses them to prevent anything or affect the future…so yeah… somehow they managed to take a hot samurai chick with psychic powers and a pretty forgettable character. That takes a bit of work. I’d be willing to be ten dollars that she’s not even in the next X-men movie and no one will even remember she stayed with Wolverine after the end.

Yeah, that’s fine you guys just go on ahead and make more movies without me. It’s not like I’m self-mutilating mutant who shouldn’t be left alone

Moving on we have Mariko played by Tao Okamato. I know you’re impressed by both my professionalism and Imdb skills. I’m going to call her Sailor Mars. Sailor Mars is suicidal, which starts off as interesting. Well that’s overselling it. That makes her a character; an emotionally distant woman attacked by kidnappers who we find out is in line to become head of the company from her grandfather created. Because apparently 21^st century Japanese companies still subscribe to the fucking feudal system.

                But she runs into the Zelda in Windwaker syndrome mixed with Star Wars 2 syndrome.

“I’m sorry you’ve got Lucas.” “Lupas?” “If only. George Lucas syndrome, it’s not fatal but you’ll, you'll probably wish it was.”

The Windwaker problem is she starts off as a fairly interesting character but all that slips away and soon as the romance starts. Why can’t she still be emotionally hardened in some other ways? She just kind of becomes nothing the moment they “fall for each other”.  And Do they end up together? No. Does she end up with her estranged husband? No he just kind of dies and is never mentioned again. She’s the romantic lead with no romance and a story that leads to nothing.

My theory for why these first two characters suck so much is because I believe they were originally the same character. I have absolutely no way reason to believe this is true and I refuse to even google it and you can’t make me! But, my writers intuition is telling me originally they were supposed to be the same person. For evidence I submit the scene at the end where Wolverine falls down after killing the bad guy.

(Oh yeah spoiler the good guy beats the bad guy in case you didn’t know).

It’s the classic scene where after the battle the hero falls down and the woman rushes to his side and says his name. Only there is this weirdness because there are two of them. So first Sailor Mars says, “Wolverine,” and rushes to his side while the other girl just kind of stands right behind her. Then sailor Venus does pretty much the same exact thing. My guess is in the original script this only happened once but no one really felt like changing it after the redraft.  I can’t say why they split these characters up. Probably because sailor Mars had to go play damsel in distress while doing something else so they split her up.

Finally let’s talk about the villain. And I want to start off by saying that I love a good fem fatal. There’s something so intriguing about a woman getting by on her wits alone. Wrapping men around her finger and killing anyone in her way. It’s great. And I actually really like this one.  Svetlana Khodchenkova (totally had to copy paste that one) plays the viper and to her credence pulls off a really interesting character.

She’s interesting. She seems to have complex motivations that aren’t really explained. She even admits to being a nihilist which I like because it steps away from the whole “Event A caused me to be evil” and lets her choice stand as evidence of character. But her power set does bother me.

We are never ever, ever, ever, ever, going to see the male version of this.

Her powers are annoyingly gender specific and I would be fine with it if not for one thing. The fight scene at the end. She is one of three mutants in the movie and the only other mutant with powers worth diddly squat. And the whole time the movie builds her up as not just manipulative but genuinely powerful. She spits a kind of acid that just fucks your day up and is even shown to be effective against wolverine’s healing powers. I knew that the silver samurai was going to show up for the climax but I expected the wolverine to have some kind of interaction with her. But instead we get a girl on girl fight “cat fight”  which strikes me as kind of hokey and demeaning. And not just because watching two women fight is “inherently” objectifying.

This makes us fully developed characters!

We’re waaaaay past that getting upset by something as trivial as a cat fight when your character goes from looking like this…

…to a bald headed snake woman to show that she’s evil. Because obviously if she was pretty she’d have to be the good one!

No it’s just demeaning because it would be like if there was a black character hanging out with the wolverine so they brought out the only black villain to make them fight. Or a Canadian to, I don’t know, be polite to each other. Why couldn’t Wolverine fight her? It would have been interesting. Certainly more interesting than watching Hugh Jackman body slam a machine for the millionth time and lose his claws.

(Which I wasn’t going to mention but really he losses his claws. That’s just weird. Even weirder that they didn’t clean it up by the end of the movie. Like you know he’s going to get his claws back by the next x-men movie and now we are going to have to waste time in that movie fixing bullshit from this movie.)

And yeah that pretty much sums it up. Three women with unclear motivations and uninteresting story arcs that go nowhere. An honorable mention for Jean Grey  for being the ghost of the main characters conscious.

Oh sorry somehow I got these mixed up

Another woman used by writers to just literally say the internal turmoil of a character rather than showing it through action in the movie.  

My problem with all of this is less, women aren’t represented well in movies and men should feel bad. And more this is why we can’t have nice things! If you don’t care enough to characterize and flush out your women then you are effectively ruining half of your cast and if you are going to have three prominent women you better make sure one of them ends up with some kind of climactic action which expresses their desires too.

Man of Steel Review

Alright so I waited to say anything because I didn't have anything to say about it but here it is. Let’s just start off with the pithy-non-spoiler blurb to let you know what I think of “Man of Steel”.

If you are a long-time fan who still loves Superman, this movie will absolutely kill him for you. If you are someone who doesn't like Superman and thinks he desperately needs an “update” this movie might be the long awaited revival you've always wanted.

                                                                                                 Superman is dead. Long live Superman.

Alright so let’s get to the spoiler-y bits that you almost absolutely already know about because of the aforementioned time delay. Superman kills General Zod at the end of Man of Steel by snapping his neck in order to save some civilians. Now some have argued that this is acceptable for the character and others disagree and I honestly don’t want to throw my hat into that ring because better writers than me have discussed it better than I could. (Source)( source)

My question is less, ‘Is it within the rules of a Superman story to allow Superman to kill people?’ and more ‘why would you ever want Superman to kill someone?’

See the problem for years with Superman according to his detractors is that he is a boring one dimensional character. Basically just a big old goody two shoes.

How is this image not relevant to your life?

 I always figured the way to fix this problem was to give Supes more dimensions; make sure he has a supporting cast of well rounded characters and a plot that works so as to prove whatever morality he has is  relevant again. Superman may have been a one note character but in Man of Steel he is a zero note character. Almost everything he does is motivated entirely by other people. 

He chooses not to become a hero because his adopted father doesn't want him to become a hero. Then he becomes Superman because his original  father basically hands him a cape and costume saying, “here go be Superman.” 

                                                                        

                                  You will be an inspiration to literally no one

Even his name comes from another person, Lois Lane just kind of pulls it out of her ass. He’s kind of a nothing man, inputting other peoples morals and then acting on them. Even the idea to kill Zod has to be told, directly to him, by Zod because you know, he couldn't have decided himself killed Zod was a good idea before they smashed through half of Metropolis.

I get everyone has external forces that affect their life but part of being a hero is making hard decisions for yourself. What is heroic about this character who doesn't seem to decide anything on his own?

The single most heroic thing Superman does; sacrificing himself to General Zod so Zod won’t kill everyone, is ultimately still someone else’s idea because he only gives himself up to the army. They decide to give him to Zod.

I mean if you like this version of the character, that’s fine, we all have our opinions. I even get wanting to take away from the goody-goody nature of the character and give him a little edge. But what absolutely confounds me is how people think this is a better version because of a little violence.

I mean if you take away the one note a one note character has and replace it with violence how is he any different from any other action star? 

Iron Man 3 review

Iron Man 3 is freaking awesome.  Yes, it looks like the first Marvel movie after the hit ‘The Avengers’ and the third installment of Marvel studios flagship movie series, is actually pretty damn great.

And you know what I’m most glad about?

 The third movie curse has finally been broken. And don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.

Basically Hollywood has figured out how to make the first two movies work for the superhero genre but hasn’t understood what to do after the sequel. So for the first movie they basically just follow the comic book and introduce the characters, fine. The second movie features “the denial of the hero” as seen in Spiderman 2, Dark Night Rises, etc… where the hero wrestles with whether or not they want to be a hero now that they have experienced what that entails. And then the third one comes along and just fucks everything up.

                In Spiderman 3 they fucked it up by introducing too many villains to actually give interesting character arcs. Then, they didn’t follow through on the threads hinted at in the second movie. So Harry, who realized Spider-man’s true identity in the last movie, is forced into the usual plot spackle of “amnesia” because they didn’t want to finish the story they already started. Plus not following through on their fan service by finally putting Venom in a movie but only for like twenty seconds.

The third x-men movie had more problems in development than my cousin with three x chromosomes. They tried to combine two different story lines and three different directors, killed off main characters off-screen, had characters act totally out of character because certain actors left and generally couldn’t have missed the point harder if they were trying to turn the whole thing into a romantic comedy.

 And Dark Night Rises tried to kill Batman without killing Batman which just ended up being terrible and hokey. It had Batman not being Batman so that other characters could develop, which could be fine, but none of them were doing anything interesting. And finally, had not one, but two villains turned into lackeys for some other already-very-dead-guys dream when each one on their own could have been an interesting character.

So basically the third movie in each sucks. If not just generally speaking then certainly in comparison to the other movies in the Trilogy. (I’m not even going to bring up how bad Return of the Jedi for fear someone feels the need to turn that into a prequel debate even though it sucks on its own right).

                Iron man went a different route, and I for one am rather surprised. I came in expecting to see more crossover Avengers 2 setup. I assumed there would be more cameos from S.H.I.E.L.D., other Avengers making appearances, and maybe even an introduction to another hero in order to set up any characters they are going to use in the next avengers movie. I at least expected some mention of Thanos who was hinted at in the Avengers movie (for those good girls and boys who know to stay and watch after the credits).

 But instead we get none of that. Almost no shared continuity.

The movie is ostensibly about Tony Stark and the world after the Avengers battle with aliens in New York, but focuses on Stark’s world exclusively. I think this does three things effectively. One it allows a great character piece and growth from a wonderful actor. Two, it allows potential viewers to not get bogged up in the same problem that comic books have, where you have to have seen every movie previous, plus the other guys movies to know what’s going on.

I think you can almost use this as a lesson plan to studio execs for what to do after the sequel. First, let the writers do what they want to do. If you force them to do other crap it will come off like an unenthused hand job and no one wants that.  

Second, if you are going to have the main character lose his powers, (I’m looking at you Batman 3) he should still be doing the thing he is popular for. You want to take Iron Man’s armor away for half the movie? Sure, as long as he walks talks and acts like Iron Man then we can enjoy it. But don’t sell me a batman ticket, cut him out of half the damn movie, and then have him distinctly NOT be batman for the other two fifths.

Third, if you have a large cast of characters built up around the character, use them. I like that Rhodes came back and had a nice arc and story line. He wasn't central to the plot but he wasn't peripheral. Good job. Ben Kingsly is an awesome new addition to the universe and I hope he comes back. And Pepper Pots actually carry’s a lot of weight throughout the film.  

And another thing, wait just a sec…

SPOILER WARNING

There we go, And another thing, the main bad guy is a political terrorist who uses media to gain power. Since that’s what joker did and now Bain did it so let’s just ride that train. But if you are going to reveal that he has been a puppet the whole time, make him MORE interesting after that reveal, not less. And please for the love of god make sure that the puppet master behind the man is actually someone we give two shits about and isn’t going to be killed in an unsatisfying way.

Are there problems with the movie? Sure. A lot of the plot points make less sense the more you think about them (why are they pulling shrapnel out of his heart now? Couldn't he have done that forever ago, especially when it was killing him last movie?) And Iron man kills a couple people which I kind of don’t really dig in someone who is supposed to be a hero (but maybe I’m just being old fashioned). And of course the climax of the move is almost scientifically designed to make a toy line that will sell off the shelves but kind of makes the final fight seem to make a little less sense because the swarm of Iron Men should really be able to take out the main boss first.

But all in all it works and you should go see it. Anyway, this is officially my first blog post and I hope to be here each Wednesday to help you get into comics. Ciao. 

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