Dan at the Movies: Sin City: a Dame to Kill For

It was nearly ten years ago that Sin City swept into theatres, and man alive was it a sight to see at the time. From the way Robert Rodriguez took the exact images from Frank Miller’s original comics and brought them to stark, mostly black and white life, to the way the incredible cast made the pulp dialogue sing. I loved Sin City, and used to watch two of the four stories over and over again from the booth of the Moviedome. So naturally I was thrilled at the talk of a sequel, since there were still Sin City graphic novels very much worth adapting. Which meant that talk of Frank Miller writing new stories to include in the sequel was a little discouraging. First of all, because that lowered the odds of them using the stories I wanted to see on the screen, and second of all, because Frank Miller has lost it.

No, seriously, he’s lost it completely.

Frank Miller did some good comics work in the 80s, but these days he’s gone around the bend, and nothing proves that more than his attempts to revisit past glories. I would have thought that The Dark Knight Strikes Back would have proven that for everyone, but apparently we needed more evidence, and now we have it.

But instead of a fresh installment of what has always been an anthology series, what we got was a movie trying to remind us of the original, by re-using as many of the characters as possible.

Included in the movie are two stories from the comics: Just Another Saturday Night, a short featuring Mickey Rourke’s Marv, back from the first movie’s The Hard Goodbye (the very first Sin City story), and the titular A Dame to Kill For, featuring Dwight from the original’s The Big Fat Kill (played by Josh Brolin, as this story takes place before he had plastic surgery to instead resemble Clive Owen… no, really, that’s what happens). Added in are one new story featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a card shark targeting Senator Roark, who you may remember from the first film’s That Yellow Bastard, part of the Roark family which controls Sin City and keeps it the pit of crime and corruption that it is, and the long-discussed direct sequel to That Yellow Bastard in which Nancy the stripper (Jessica Alba) is out to avenge her savior/lover Detective Hartigan (Bruce Willis, back as a ghostly presence in Nancy’s life), who killed himself in the hopes that it would spare Nancy from Senator Roark’s anger over the death of his horrifying, serial killing, child molesting son at Hartigan’s hands.

Okay. Let’s break this down entry by entry.

Just Another Saturday Night

This is meant to be a quick intro back into the world of Sin City, as Marv goes after four frat boys for setting hobos on fire, ending with two of them being taken out by the army of prostitutes that rule Old Town (because Frank Miller loves him some whores).

What it actually does is underline the problem with this entire movie. Where the first film’s cold open, The Customer is Always Right, provided a perfect intro to the noir storytelling, visual style, and general lack of what you’d call happy endings that we the viewers could come to expect, Just Another Saturday Night shows us that Rodriguez and Miller don’t fully recall how the visual style worked last time while shouting “Hey everybody! It’s Marv! Remember Marv? We all liked Marv vengeance-murdering his way up the criminal ladder last time, right?”

In other words, it’s Marv without the thrills, occasional wit, and “I can’t believe they just did that” winces of The Hard Goodbye. They brought back the characters we loved, with none of the reasons why we loved them. Roll opening credits, and try to lower your expectations.

The Thing With Joseph Gordon-Levitt

I don’t know what this one’s called. I do know that I’ll watch Joseph Gordon-Levitt in practically anything, because he’s awesome.

Sadly the material doesn’t always rise to his level.

Johnny is an interesting character, and his motivations and methods for taking down Senator Roark are unexpected, but this story has the same issues as the rest: it’s a little too grim. I mean, they’re all grim. That’s the point. But the first film had lighter moments. This installment comes closest to recreating that, if only through Johnny’s undeniable charms, but there’s still not a lot of smiles or laughs to be had, and a lot of asking ourselves “Why are you showing this illicit poker game how good you are at manipulating cards, do you want them to know you’re cheating?”

It’s… okay. It would have been the worst if it had been part of the original, but here it’s almost a highlight.

Also Marv is in it. Because heaven forbid we have even one entry without Marv this time around.

A Dame to Kill For

Now this entry had every possible advantage it could. It’s a prequel to The Big Fat Kill, my favourite of the original entries, and (of course) also features Marv as Dwight’s emergency muscle. It has the most returning characters, featuring Rosario Dawson’s violent madam Gail, twin prostitutes Goldie and Wendy, and a re-cast deadly little Miho giving us our only taste of the blood-splattered “holy shit” action sequences of the first film, just with less charisma than when it was Devon Aoki (who had to bow out due to pregnancy). And it has the film’s real breakout performance, Eva Green as Eva Lord, the so-called dame to kill for that’s getting Dwight into more trouble than a trunk full of dismembered cops did last time around.

But it’s pretty clear this was a later entry in the Sin City graphic novels. The narration already feels forced and less engaging. Two minutes into the story and I was already getting tired of Dwight narrating about how hard it was to keep himself under control. And again, there’s less fun, less endlessly quotable moments, less to enjoy here than in its predecessor. It’s still the most fun, the most interesting, and the best written story of the entire movie, but you’re probably starting to get the impression that that isn’t a huge accomplishment.

As to Eva Lord. She might well be the most compelling and powerful female character either movie managed to present (even if her motives become a little cliche and two-dimensional), and Eva Green plays the hell out of her… but it’s hard to deny one little sticking point.

She is naked a lot. I mean, a lot. Which, depending on your perspective, could read as an endorsement rather than a condemnation, I suppose, but here’s the thing. I saw this with several female friends, and the fact that Eva might have been exposed more often than not really started to feel awkward. I could picture other women I know asking how necessary this was, and I didn’t have a good answer.

Now, a certain amount of nudity works well with this role: Eva Lord uses her sexuality to control men, it’s her primary tactic, and she’s adept at it. But I’m just going to admit… they could have dialed it down a touch. One could argue they were just sticking with the imagery from the comics, but if one were to argue that, I would ask one to recall how naked Nancy the stripper was supposed to be, and how many fucks Jessica Alba gave about that.

The answers are “Very naked” and “Zero fucks.” So there were other choices they could have made.

Still, if one were to watch this movie, A Dame to Kill For is going to be your one big highlight. It’s all downhill from there.

Fun fact: Clive Owen was going to reprise post-surgery Dwight, but he had a schedule conflict, so they used prosthetics to make Josh Brolin look like Clive Owen’s Dwight. Which, frankly, is probably better for the story. Less confusing for new people. Not there’ve been many of those.

Nancy’s revenge

And here, at the end, it all falls apart.

That Yellow Bastard wasn’t my favourite of the first film. It’s the one I rewatched the least. Well, after The Customer is Always Right. But it wasn’t bad, it was just bleak. The (possibly) one good cop in Basin City (get it?) goes to prison for lethally defending a young girl from a vicious predator, simply because said predator’s father was Senator Roark, who basically owned the police, and wanted his child-murdering son to be President some day. Roark uses freakish medical science to save his son’s life and regrow some bits that Hartigan shot off, son becomes That Yellow Bastard as a result, uses a released Hartigan to find the girl (Nancy, now a stripper, as I’ve mentioned), Hartigan and the Yellow Bastard face off one more time, Hartigan shoots himself in the hope that Senator Roark won’t go after Nancy if Hartigan’s already dead and unhurtable.

Like I said, bleak. Sin City isn’t a place where a grizzled ex-cop and the much younger woman who’s loved him for half her life get to ride off into any sort of sunset. But apparently that ending wasn’t good enough, so Frank Miller wrote an all-new story in which Nancy, four years later, is still filled with rage and despair, and is trying to work up the nerve to kill Roark for revenge.

And it serves as the final proof that Frank Miller has lost whatever talent he may have had, because it is terrible. Hartigan’s ghost wandering about in torment, Nancy’s narration, the general sluggishness of the plot, shoehorning in Marv to be Nancy’s backup, none of it really works. By the halfway point I found myself just picking apart the continuity issues that having Marv in this story created, as Marv’s presence puts this solidly before The Hard Goodbye. Examples:

  • By the end, Nancy’s lost her love of dancing, died her hair black, has several cuts on her face, and is a vicious killer. In The Hard Goodbye, she’s blonde, unscarred, dancing, and seems happy and well-adjusted. So I’m forced to assume she gets over everything, because no part of the Hard Goodbye could have happened before this story.
  • Also I assume that the Basin City police have zero luck finding either of the people who broke into stately Roark manner and left a trail of bodies in their wake. Nor the Secret Service, who are typically called in to this sort of thing. I know this because Marv and Nancy are just living their lives in relative peace by The Hard Goodbye, which once again, must logically take place after this.
  • Still, you’d think that after Senator Roark was killed in his own home, Cardinal Roark might have had better security.

All in all, having Marv in this story creates a huge pile of narrative problems, and the rest of the story just isn’t good enough to allow me not to notice them. Nancy turning from stripper to assassin and teaming up with a popular character to give the audience the justice-murder they were denied last time plays like bad Sin City fanfic, and the fact that it’s from the original author is just sad.

But what’s really sad, is that since this sequel was such a disappointment and, probably as a result, is tanking at the box office, I’m never going to see an adaption of the Sin City story Hell and Back, which at one point features the protagonist assaulting an enemy compound while high on powerful hallucinogens, meaning it would have been written like Sin City but shot like Spy Kids.

And I wanted to see that. Oh well. Maybe I’ll just find a way to rewatch the original Sin City this week. Or Guardians of the Galaxy. One of those.

Let’s talk geek controversy

People who know me know how closely I follow geek entertainment news. Mostly they know it from those meetings where everybody sits me down and tries to explain how my obsession with geek entertainment news has affected them, and then I yell “No, the showrunners of Agents of SHIELD need an intervention!” and then come the tears… We have fun.

Anyway, some geek news as of late has caused ripples of controversy. Allow me to explain a few of them, and why I think they’re kind of a big deal. Well, as much of a big deal as movies based on superheroes are capable of being.

Ant-man shenanigans

What’s the deal? For eight years, as long as there has been a Marvel Studios, filmmaker Edgar Wright was pitching a movie based on Ant-man, a character who couldn’t possibly have been at the top of anyone’s list to give his own movie.

Not that the list couldn't use an edit.
Not that the list couldn’t use an edit.

Edgar Wright is behind such cult favourite movies as Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, and The World’s End. He is a filmmaker of singular vision. He may not have the box office clout of a David Fincher, but damn he’s got the talent. And for nearly a decade he’s been asking for the chance to use those talents on a movie about Ant-Man. Only to pull out of the project right before it was due to start filming.

It’s now generally known that the reason for this split was that Marvel, late in the game, requested script changes Edgar Wright didn’t want to make. Whatever Wright had planned, it was too big a break from the Marvel model, and they wanted to correct that. A move not everyone on Team Marvel agrees was a great move.

Huh. Their other cult-favourite writer/director. Go figure.
Huh. Their other cult-favourite writer/director. Go figure.

Since then, other writers (three and counting) have been brought in to rewrite the movie, because nothing says “Quality movie” like four different screenwriters.

Why does this matter? A lot of the buzz following the split looked at what this might mean for future Marvel films. Are they anti-auteur? Why is a company that built its reputation being different and taking risks now pushing for safety and sameness? Were they worried that Guardians of the Galaxy might be their first failure? (Announcing a release date for the sequel before it was released says no, and their box office to date says they never needed to be) Will they have trouble attracting actors if they’re going to make a habit of changing the entire project (at least the script and director) after everyone’s already signed on? The cast committed to Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man, after all, not the version they’re ultimately shooting.

But that’s not why it matters.

First of all, those are questions thought up by a media that loves a good downfall story. Marvel’s on a winning streak on the big screen. Nine movies in, and eight are unqualified hits (Incredible Hulk didn’t bomb, but they’ve certainly been reluctant to talk sequel). Their movies have flaws, yes, mostly their inability (or unwillingness) to write good villains… fine, except for Loki that one time… but they’re reliably fun to watch and typically make a decent profit, and as long as that second thing is true, losing Edgar Wright will not hurt them as a company. Actors like being in blockbusters, so as long as the movies are hits, Marvel won’t have problems finding casts. It probably won’t even hurt Ant-Man’s box office much. More people were going to watch it based on “From the studio that brought you Avengers: Age of Ultron” than “From the director of Shaun of the Dead.” That’s just a fact.

It matters because it’s sad.

It’s sad that Edgar Wright chased this project for so long only to have it mutate into something else, something he couldn’t be a part of. It’s sad that Edgar Wright will never get to make his Ant-Man movie, and it’s sad that we won’t be able to see it. Because while I don’t know what the new writers are changing, or how much if any of Wright’s original story will still be there, I have seen every movie Wright has directed, and each and every one of them is amazing. So I cannot believe that this new Ant-Man movie will be anywhere as good as Wright’s would have been.

Doesn’t mean it won’t still be worth watching. Most of Marvel’s product is. But it could have been more. And it’s sad that the world’s most consistently successful film studio is now publicly against doing things differently.

Lady Stoneheart

What’s the deal? Game of Thrones is huge these days, but the fandom is split into two factions: those who read the books, and know it better as “A Song of Ice and Fire,” and those (like myself) who are just watching the TV show. As such, discussion of Game of Thrones (the show) is carefully divided, so that fans of A Song of Ice and Fire (the books) can discuss things without spoiling it for those of us who haven’t been reading ahead.

A covenant that was broken in the wake of the fourth season finale.

Now I’ll do what most websites didn’t and refrain from spoiling anything. Suffice to say, many of the book-reading fans expected the fourth series to end with a jaw-drop moment from the end of book three (which is approximately where they’ve gotten), that jaw-drop moment being the arrival of a character referred to as Lady Stoneheart. When the Lady didn’t appear, the internet went crazy, wondering why she wasn’t there and if we should expect her next season, spoiling who she is for the TV crowd all the way. Even the article headlines and choice of photos made it hard not to know what they were talking about.

As it stands, the producers are not claiming Lady Stoneheart will be turning up next year. They could just be lying in an attempt to preserve the surprise… which would be odd, given how badly that blew up in JJ Abrams’ face with Star Trek: Into Darkness (of course he was Khan, he was always going to be Khan, telling us he wasn’t was wasting everyone’s time). Maybe they’re hoping a few people remain unspoiled that they can shock in the fifth season premiere. Or maybe they’re authentically leaving her out. Which… seems problematic.

Why does this matter? Because this would mean one of two things, and they’re both bad signs.

Option one: they’re just skipping her. By and large, Game of Thrones has stayed pretty close to the source material. But they have left the odd thing out, and everyone from die-hard book fans to author George R.R. Martin has clucked their tongues at the showrunners over it. Some of what they’ve left out seems inconsequential (does it really matter whether someone’s death was called a suicide rather than framing some musician we haven’t seen since book one?), some of it less so (Rhaegar Targaryen might have been long dead when the series started, but he may have a larger impact than the show has suggested), but I’m not sure dropping an entire storyline is a good idea.

Especially since they might need to add stuff to fill the gap, and they do not have a strong track record. Season four, they invented a story involving the Night’s Watch mutineers in order to boost Bran Stark’s screen time, and all it brought to the series was a) yet more rape, right after they were (rightfully) accused of having too much rape as it was, and b) a near-miss where Bran and Jon Snow almost find each other but don’t, which we already did in the third season finale, and also almost finding family but then not has basically been Arya’s entire story for two seasons. The Caster’s Keep arc was pretty much pointless, so I’d kind of prefer they stick to the books rather than keep trying to add things.

Option two: they’re leaving out Lady Stoneheart because she’s ultimately not that big a deal. They’ve read book five, had some conversations with George R.R. Martin, and know that the Lady Stoneheart plot is short-lived and doesn’t impact anything, so they’re giving it a miss. In which case fuck you George R.R. Martin.

Which is apparently mutual.

I get wanting to subvert expectations. I get wanting to be unpredictable. But three times now, George Martin has taken a character I like, given them a plotline I want to see play out, and then ended it with a swift death for the guy I’m rooting for and a victory dance for Cersei goddamn Lannister. It’s getting old, and if it turns out Lady Stoneheart also ends in betrayal and swift, pointless death, then I will hold this over the head of every single person who tells me to read the books, because at that point I no longer consider the books worth reading. Because you can’t be “unpredictable” by doing the exact same thing over and over.

New look for Batgirl!

What’s the deal? Recently, DC announced a new look and a new direction for Batgirl, one which is seemingly directed towards teen girls. There was the usual wailing that comes whenever Gail Simone stops writing Barbara Gordon, but most of the reaction has been positive. Fan art of the new costume is already spreading.

It is pretty snazzy.
It is pretty snazzy.

In addition to the new look, Batgirl will be more immersed in youth culture. The most valid critique I’ve heard of this is that the new look and approach would have been better suited to Stephanie Brown, who briefly held the mantle of Batgirl prior to the New 52 reboot, than Barbara Gordon, who’s been through a bit too much to pull off the carefree youth angle. But you know what? Fair as that may be, I’m not certain I care.

Why does this matter? Because a Batgirl aimed at younger women is a bloody brilliant idea, that’s why.

I’ve accepted the fact that enough things are targeted at us 30-something (and up) white dudes as it is, and maybe other demographics could have a turn. Women like comics, women would like to be able to enjoy comics, so writing a comic with women, even girls, in mind is a good plan.

And yes, absolutely make it a major character like Batgirl.

Besides, I remember the last time DC tried this. Pre-New 52 they made Supergirl a book for younger female readers. They made her more relatable to teen girls, made her… proportions less exaggerated, her costume less form-fitting and her skirt a few inches longer (with the editorial mandate of “I never want to see Supergirl’s underwear again”), and not only did this not ruin the book, that was as good as Supergirl’s comic has been since Peter David stopped writing it over a decade ago. I still read Supergirl, but I miss her teen-girl-friendly days.

As incoming writer Cameron Stewart said, “One young girl being inspired by Batgirl is worth 20 dudes complaining that the costume looks ‘hipster.'” And that’s a sentiment I can get behind.

Just need to catch up on my comics so I can actually start reading it when it comes out…

Black Captian America and Girl Thor

What’s the deal? Meanwhile, over at Marvel, upcoming storylines will see Captain America lose his super-soldier-ness, and Thor no longer be worthy of Mjolnir, meaning they’ll both need replacements. Steve Rogers will pass his title and shield to Sam Wilson, aka the Falcon, recently seen in the Winter Soldier movie, while Thor will be replaced by a female Thor.

Which, well, is kind of weird. Marvel’s been shouting “No, she’ll BE Thor!” rather than a different character wielding the power of Thor but keeping their own name, like Beta Ray Bill, Thunderstrike, or anyone else who’s done that ever. This woman (not sure what her name was earlier) will be Thor in the same way Donald Blake was Thor way back when, a story mechanic that was dropped decades ago and retconned out of existence a few years back. So that’s… that’s weird, is what it is, but that’s not what really strikes me as uncomfortable about all the press Marvel has been seeking out around these stories.

Why does this matter? Because diversity in comics is important, and I’m not sure they’re doing it right.

I’m not saying making Thor a woman or Captain America a minority is the wrong move. Making Batman black or Doctor Who a woman or what have you will have far more impact than introducing a new minority superhero whose comic gets cancelled a year or two later then drifts into obscurity. But… well…

Every single thing I know about Marvel comics says one thing: this will not last. In recent years, Marvel had Bucky take over the title of Captain America, used a mind-swap to turn Dr. Octopus into the Superior Spider-man, killed major characters off… but almost none of it took. Most deaths lasted less than two years, in one case less than two months. Steve Rogers was back from the dead right around the time his first movie opened, and Peter Parker was Spider-man again right in time for Amazing Spider-man 2 to hit theatres.

Avengers: Age of Ultron is out next May, and if Steve Rogers and male Thor haven’t reclaimed their titles by then, it’ll be a small miracle given Marvel’s track record. And if Sam Wilson hasn’t stepped down by then, he will when Captain America 3 opens the year after.

And the thing is, Marvel is the only company to actually pull something like this off long-term. In their Ultimate line, Peter Parker’s been dead for years now, and half-black, half-Hispanic teenager Miles Morales has been in his place, and that book is thriving (Ultimate Spider-man has long been the best, and often only good book in that line). But it seems powerfully unlikely that that’s what’s happening here. This looks to be two short term stories that Marvel’s crowing about like they just re-wrote the rulebook or something.

And that’s ultimately the issue I have. A black guy taking over the role of Captain America for eight months would be a non-issue if they weren’t shouting from the rooftops about what a bold move it’s going to be. Crowing about how progressive they are for character changes that almost certainly won’t last just feels… tacky.

Five Sins of Decent Videogame Movies

It’s a good time to be a geek. Hollywood never stopped looking for fantasy epics to adapt after Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter each managed to earn more money than physically exists, we’re living in a golden age of comic book movies, Game of Thrones gets nominated for Emmys, and there is a TV show about Green Arrow of all people that isn’t just “kind of watchable” like Smallville at its peak but legitimately good with flashes of greatness.

And then there’s videogames.

I’m not going to get into a thing over which side is winning, games that push the medium to grow and expand and find new ways to tell stories, or Battlefield of Duty knockoffs so generic you can’t tell one brown and gunmetal grey cover-based first person shooter from another. I’m instead going to talk about how Hollywood continues to make movies based on videogames, but also insists on not trying very hard.

It’s been over twenty years since the first major Hollywood movie based on a videogame, 1993’s Super Mario Bros., and despite that, to put it mildly, shaky start to genre, there’ve been 27 more released theatrically since then. But they haven’t gotten much better. In fact, thanks to some loopholes in German tax law, Uwe Boll was able to make several far, far worse.

We could argue back and forth for hours about why, exactly, video game movies seem unable to compete with their comic book brethren. Maybe it’s like horror movies, where the rate of return is narrow yet good enough that they don’t need to make it a great movie, just a profitable one. Maybe video games, unlike comic books, just don’t have the Joss Whedons and Christopher Nolans of the world champing at the bit to tell a story of quality in that universe. Or maybe there is just an intrinsic problem in taking an inherently interactive medium and attempting to adapt it to a medium far more passive. By way of a for instance, when I play Mass Effect, I am Commander Shepard. I decide who Commander Shepard is, what he or she does, how he or she feels, who he or she loves. Why would I want to exchange that for watching Chris Pine play a Commander Shepard I didn’t help shape making decisions I didn’t choose? Even for something as linear as Legend of Zelda, you lose something in the transition from interactive to passive.

But whatever the reason, videogame movies seem to go out of their way to make some of the stupidest choices available. Even the ones that avoid the obvious stuff, like “hiring Uwe Boll,” or “Being as terrible and as Super Mario Bros.” make stupid little choices that ensure video game movies stay stupid. Here’s some examples.

Resident Evil: just how many zombies are in that crate?

It has to be said: the Resident Evil series are the most successful videogame movies out there. We know this because they’ve managed five sequels, one of which is expected this year, none of which have gone directly to video. And they’ve managed this despite completely throwing out the basic plots of any of the games. Sure, every now and then Jill Valentine or Claire Redfield will turn up so fans of the games can say “Hey I know that person, awesome,” but in general the blend of lateral thinking and extreme violence that defined the game series has been replaced with the ongoing adventures of Milla Jovovich’s Alice, the genetically engineered superwoman out to defeat her former masters, the Umbrella Corporation.

And why not? Frankly the only surprise is that they haven’t made a game based around Alice yet. Maybe her style of combat is just too divorced from the engine they typically used to make the games. So that’s not the sin I’m here to complain about. I’m complaining about how one action beat led me to identify an annoying trope.

The third film, Resident Evil: Extinction, is set after the zombie plague has ended society. Umbrella is experimenting with a method of domesticating the zombies. However, while they do regain a modicum of intelligence, they also become hyper aggressive. So an Umbrella executive decides to bundle a group of these super zombies into a shipping crate and use them to ambush Alice and company. A standard sized shipping crate. Regular readers will be familiar with my usual complaints against what I call “infinite respawn,” in which the heroes are gradually overwhelmed buy an unending wave of generic bad guys. This can work if you have, say, a portal leading to sufficient numbers Chitauri to invade and occupy the entire planet, but not if you only have one shipping crate.

Sure enough, dozens upon dozens of zombies pour out of that crate. No matter how many team Alice kills, there are enough left over to wipe out half the main characters.  Just how many super zombies did they actually have? And how exactly did they stuff dozens of hyper aggressive extra strong living dead soldiers into one crate? One crate that, to hold all of them, must have been packed tighter than a Tokyo train at rush hour? Did they put the crate on its end and drop the zombies in through a trap door? Was there a bulldozer? How many staff died getting this crate filled?

You want a huge obstacle for the protagonist? Fine. You want the high body count that comes with horror films? Sure. Do that. But when I was watching this scene, I did not feel horror or even anxiety. I felt annoyed that they were still this many zombies no matter how many they picked off. That sort of physics bending just drags you out of the moment. Stop doing it.

Tomb Raider: worst artifact ever

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider wasn’t particularly well reviewed, and isn’t exactly the crown jewel of anyone’s DVD collection, but it remains one of the few actual success stories in videogame movies. And by “success stories” I mean it made a lot money. It was the highest grossing videogame movie until Prince of Persia, and it’s still the highest grossing if you adjust for inflation.

And at its center is the stupidest artifact you could ask for.

Lara wakes up one night as she’s heard a clock start ticking somewhere in her vast, vast mansion. She tracks it to a secret room under a staircase (must be a hell of a tick for her to have heard it while asleep on a different floor), and breaks it open to reveal an artifact. Which is a little stupid, but there’s more. She senses that it’s supposed to fit into something (like maybe a clock?), and learns that it’s the key to finding the fabled Triangle of Time, which was split into two pieces after it destroyed the city it was last used in. But it can be reunited during the planetary convergence that happens once every five thousand years or so. Which is different than all those other times the planets line up. Yes this is exactly what I was making fun of in course of true love in person the Jade Monkey. No I’m not sorry.

So Lara races against and sometimes works alongside the fabled Illuminati, and her friend/rival Alex West (tomb raider for the ladies) to find both pieces of the triangle. Why is the triangle split into two pieces and not three? Don’t worry; there’s an explanation and it’s stupid.

When both pieces are found and the Illuminati inevitably turns on Lara and Alex, the Illuminati leader attempts to reunite the two pieces which, it should be pointed out, have the jagged edge indicative of being smashed over a rock, not split into two modular pieces meant to be reunited. It does not work. Because it wouldn’t. It’s broken, you’re not getting it back together without super glue.

He turns to Lara, asking why they won’t reunite, and she throws a piece of the puzzle through a little space-time portal (I do not have space to explain why that’s a thing that happens), and as the pieces tumble out in slow motion, she grabs a single grain of sand, which is the missing piece of the triangle.

ARE YOU SHITTING ME.

First of all, who told her that was the key? I don’t recall any mention of two pieces and a grain of freaking sand that need to be reunited! And how did it not get lost? How did anyone come up with the plan “We’ll let them reunite the Triangle once every 5,000 years, but only if they figure out that they need to throw the compass through a magical time/space hole that splits it into its component parts and then grab a fucking grain of sand out of the air, which is the third piece?”

Nothing about this tomb raiding plot isn’t stupid. If you’re going to make it that weirdly hard to rejoin the Triangle, just leave it god damn broken.

Street Fighter: That UN asshole

There was so, so much wrong with this movie. While they fit in nearly everyone from the first three Street Fighter 2 games (there were a great many Street Fighter 2s before they gave in and made Street Fighter 3), only a handful of them actually resembled their counterparts from the game. Instead of focusing on Ryu, the most popular player character (from what I could tell) and the central character of any Japanese adaptation of the game (such as the far superior anime that hit video around the same time), they instead made Guile the main character. Presumably this was to give the plot, which centered around UN forces attempting to oppose General Bison and his terrorist army in the rogue nation of Shadaloo, a noble American protagonist. Which was not aided by casting a Belgian with the thickest accent possible.

But that’s not what I’m here to bitch about. You know what? Make Guile the lead. Guile from the games was actually out to stop end-boss M.Bison, while Ryu from the games just roams the globe looking for fights. Ryu from the game is an asshole and the people who played him at arcades I visited game zero shits about plot anyway. What I’m complaining about is the set-up to the most mocked and/or ironically beloved moment in the whole awful movie. Specifically, this speech.

Jump to the thirty second mark if you want to skip to my point. Jump to the 30 second mark and look at that asshole. “The security council has just voted. They’ve decided to negotiate.” Right. Okay. “What an asshole” speed round, go.

1. Of course the jerk who’s been riding Guile this whole movie picks the douchiest way he can think of to pronounce the word negotiate. “They’ve decided to nego-see-ate.” Dick.
2. Look how fucking smug he is about this. “Sure, he’s a terrorist who has killed thousands, including several of our own troops, but we’re knuckling under! Aren’t I the goddamn best, you Belgian gun-nut.” I guess “We do not negotiate with terrorists” hadn’t come into vogue yet.
3. Of course he’s British. Why wouldn’t the stick-in-the-mud trying to prevent good ol’ American gun-style justice be British. Unless you read a history book.
4.  Guile’s troops were literally minutes away from deploying, which should mean the council had already voted and the result was “Okay, go get him.” Armies don’t mobilize without a go-order, and when they get one, there’s typically little wait time and an understanding of “No take-backs.”
5. We’re over an hour into this movie and the action beats have been few and far between. There was no circumstance in which this preening frumunda stain strolling casually up to announce his intention to nego-see-ate with the ruthless terrorist was actually going to prevent the Guile/Bison showdown, or even delay it.
6. And how was that even necessary to motivate a rousing speech to the troops? President Whitmore managed to give a speech to the troops in Independence Day without needing anyone to saunter up and say “forget this desperate counter-attack against the genocidal aliens, we think we can talk this out after all.”
7. Was it impossible for action heroes in the 80s and 90s to head off to the climax without some blustering authority figure showing up to demand their badge and gun and say they’re off the case? Because that is all this moment accomplishes. We’re supposed to believe that Guile’s charge is made more badass because some dickless bureaucrat told him not to do it.

In summary, this useless blob of taint-flesh made man was the worst, most ham-handed “But you guys, fighting is bad” strawman this side of the celebrity caricatures in Team America. All the honest-to-god hard-working diplomats in the world should have filed a class action suit for defamation of character the second this ponce opened his mouth.

Prince of Persia: now 100% Persian-free

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time managed the twin tricks of being the highest-grossing videogame movie (domestically and without inflation) and being sort of okay, which is sadly high praise for the genre. It wasn’t a thoroughly faithful adaptation of the game, as it barely used the time-reversing dagger that’s the game’s primary hook, and had no sand-infected zombies for the heroes to battle, but we can let that slide. There’s still a roguish Persian prince, a princess charged with protecting the Sands of Time, and a scheming Vizier out to control them.

Except I remember them being a lot less white in the game.

Prince of Persia is set in what we now consider the Middle East, and was one of the few North American videogames to have an entirely POC cast. Look. I don’t want to have to explain why taking some of the few roles available to non-white actors and casting white folk in them is stupid and regressive, so I’ll not. Instead, here’s a list of actors who could have played Prince Dastan and Princess Tamina other than the very white Jake Gyllenhaal and the uber-British Gemma Arterton.

Oded Fehr (The Mummy, Resident Evil: Apocalypse and Extinction), Freida Pinto (Slumdog Millionaire, Immortals), Naveen Andrews (Lost), Aishwarya Rai (The Last Legion, Bride and Prejudice), Kal Penn (Harold and Kumar, House), Preity Zinta (just Bollywood movies but she’s awesome), Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire, The Newsroom), Parminder Nagra (Bend it Like Beckham, ER, The Blacklist), Sendhil Ramamurthy (Heroes), Gal Gadot (The Fasts and the Furiosos, soon to be Wonder Woman).

There. And that’s just people from things I’ve watched (and Wonder Woman). And all but one of them are known to North American audiences. Would’ve been just that easy. If only major studios weren’t so convinced that white people are afraid of movies that don’t star white people.

Which I suppose would be easier if less white people were afraid of movies that don’t star white people.

Wing Commander: forgetting what kind of game they were adapting

The thing I remember most about the Wing Commander movie, other than being less interesting to watch than the Wing Commander full-video cut scenes, is that word had gotten out that it had the first trailer for Star Wars: Episode One, and when that wasn’t true, theaters actually had to put up disclaimers warning people. I guess people were demanding refunds, because without a Star Wars trailer there wasn’t anything worth the $10 ticket. Or whatever movies cost in 1998.

So, back then, I was powerfully fond of the Wing Commander games, even if my computer couldn’t reliably run the videos. Three and Four starred Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell, how can you go wrong with that? Well, some reviewers say “easily, as it turned out,” claiming the CGI in the cut scenes doesn’t hold up and that Hamill, McDowell, and Biff from Back to the Future aren’t exactly doing their best work, but all I know is that 15 years later I still recognize people as being from Wing Commander 4 when I see them in other, probably better paying projects.

But at the heart, this was a series based around outer space dogfights. Wing Commander the movie should have been Top Gun in space with cat aliens, but somehow they forgot about that, and instead made a submarine movie. They even had a scene where everyone on the cruiser had to stay quiet to avoid detection by the Kilrathi. Because, you know, sonar works exactly the same in the silent void of space as it does under water.

I do not remember a single decent dogfight in a movie that should have been 70% awesome space dogfights, but I remember that nonsense.

Hollywood is still determined to take some of that sweet, sweet gaming money and turn it into movie money. People are working on a new Tomb Raider (hopefully based on the new, more human Lara Croft), a new Mortal Kombat, an Assassin’s Creed movie set for next year, and possibly even a movie based on my beloved Mass Effect. I just hope even one of those screenwriters decides to put a little effort into the story. Because it would be a nice change of pace.

Are you even trying? Oscar edition

I love the Oscars. They’re my Superbowl, or Stanley Cup, or whatever big exciting sports event you prefer, and I’ve only missed them once in the last 27 years. I’ve been throwing Oscar parties for 14 years, with an annual betting pool I almost never win. And, on top of all that, I do my best to see all the best picture nominees before the ceremony. Since teaming with an even-more devoted friend, I haven’t missed a best picture nominee since 2008, when no power in the ‘verse could make me care enough to watch Atonement.

But they do not make it easy.

Every year the accusations of the Academy being out of touch with contemporary tastes fly, and every year the Academy does everything in its power to earn those complaints. Sure, now and then they’ll make a token attempt to seem “hip” or “with it,” like having Cirque du Soleil do a tribute to action sequences, or hiring someone with youth appeal to host and then immediately regretting it, but they’re still going to fill the nominee list with obscure art house movies that nobody saw.

Even after they hit a breaking point, and changed the best picture rules. They went from five nominees to up to ten, supposedly so they’d be able to sneak in some more popular films, but instead just nominate even more obscure movies nobody cares about.

Okay, fine, sometimes James Cameron slips a hit in.

And frankly, sometimes a movie makes the cut that just really shouldn’t have. A movie that makes one have to ask… Academy, are you even trying?

Examples, you ask? But of course.

2008: The Reader

2009 (the year they handed out trophies for 2008, in case you think I mistyped) was the breaking point. 2009 was the year the Academy had to stop and take stock. 2009 was the year that the North American (and, I assume, international) viewing public was pushed as far as they could by the obscurity of the nominees. And as such, 2009 was the year that the traditional “Oscar bump,” a surge in ticket sales that followed receiving a nomination, failed to materialize, at least not to the extent it typically had.

And the poster child for this? Not the bland, weirdly unambitious Curious Case of Benjamin Button (in which Brad Pitt ages backwards but nobody seems to care), but The Reader. Specifically, why nominate The Reader and not, say, The Dark Knight? One of the most highly reviewed movies of the year and a massive, massive hit. You’d think, said the populace, that a film that proved itself to be a favourite of critics and audiences alike on that scale would at least warrant a nomination. And some replied “Just because it made literally a billion dollars at the box office doesn’t mean it’s a best picture contender.”

APPARENTLY IT DOES.

But the real question, beyond “Why not the Dark Knight,” is “Why the fucking Reader?”

Why it didn’t deserve the nod: The Reader barely even knew what it was about. Was it about the Holocaust? Illiteracy? Injustice? Who knows. It’s all over the place.

Teenager Michael Berg has an affair with Hanna, an older woman (Kate Winslet), that supposedly affects every relationship he has for the rest of his life. Like, right away. He’s unable to connect with or commit to other women because of this three-month affair, due to… I don’t know. It’s not clear. Her only winning attribute seemed to be “Willing to have sex with him,” and while she may have been the first woman with that particular willingness she was not, by any stretch, unique.

But fine, she was his first great love and her disappearing at the end of the summer hurt him in a way that younger, blonder co-eds couldn’t cure. I’ll cede that for now. Ten years later, he sees her again… on trial for war crimes. She was part of a group of SS women that locked a bunch of Jewish prisoners in a burning church, and the other defendants are claiming she wrote out the orders and is therefore more responsible than they are. A claim which Michael knows to be untrue, because he knows her secret: she’s illiterate. She couldn’t possibly have written out the orders. She won’t admit it, because she’s been hiding her illiteracy her whole life (it’s the only reason she was even in the SS), and takes the fall. Michael, in shock over his love being a Nazi war criminal, remains silent and lets her go away.

And lets a group of other war criminals lie their way into reduced sentences. Let’s not forget that. In not defending Hanna he lets all the other defendants walk away. And that’s where I call bullshit. Either Hanna’s his one great love (again–they were together for three months when he was 17) that haunts him for the rest of his days, or she’s someone he cares so little for that he’ll let a gang of war criminals frame her and send her to prison for decades. Pick a side.

The plot makes no real sense. The characters’ motivations are fuzzy at best. On Rotten Tomatoes, it scored an anemic 61%, barely ahead of My Bloody Valentine 3D. But because it’s sort of about the Holocaust, sure, let’s make it a best picture nominee.

What should have replaced it: Even putting aside the Dark Knight, in 2008 we had the Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky’s heartbreaking story of a washed up pro-wrestler trying to find a purpose in life without the adoration of the crowds.

Not your thing? How about RocknRolla, Guy Ritchie’s urban crime masterpiece? After years of playing in the genre with Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, he was firing on all cylinders when he wrote and directed this complex story of criminals and would-be power-players all united by a purloined lucky painting.

No? How about Valkyrie, the true story of the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler? There’s an all star cast of British actors (and, yes, Tom Cruise, I know that’s a dealbreaker for some of you) playing the good Nazis. But no. Let’s nominate the movie about the guy who’s so conflicted about his country’s past he’s stuck in boring, pointless inaction rather than the movie about people who tried to do something.

2009: The Blind Side

A few big hits snuck into the nominees the year after Dark Knight was excluded. There’s Up, from Pixar… there’s Avatar, proving that the Oscars are a billion-dollar whore when it’s James Cameron making it rain… and there’s The Blind Side, in which Sandra Bullock plays a rich woman who takes in a homeless black youth in order to save him from gang life and insert him onto her alma mater’s football team. But mostly the first thing.

Why it didn’t deserve the nod: Maybe one day Hollywood will make an inspirational, Oscar nominated movie about a black person who accomplished something without the aid of a magical white person. It’s not The Help, and it’s not even 12 Years a Slave, but it’s most definitely not The Blind Side.

But I’m singling it out because it’s so aggressively empty. The movie does everything it can for the bulk of the running time to squash any conflict in the story. Michael is immediately accepted into his new home, there’s never a second thought, any resistance to him playing football for the college is quashed by Sandra Bullock’s southern sassiness, even the gang he used to run with is no match for her Kentucky-fried stubbornness… and then at the very end, it generates the most forced, unbelievable conflict it can to finally inject a little drama into the story. Too little, too late to save this tale of how rich white people can fix everything if they can be bothered to try.

What should have replaced it: I want to say Black Dynamite, the note-perfect parody of 70s blacksploitation films. I also want to say (500) Days of Summer, the amazing deconstruction of “manic pixie dream girl” love stories. But let’s talk A Single Man.

A Single Man is the story of a gay professor in the early 1960s, a time when it was even more difficult to live openly. His partner died in a car crash eight months earlier, and due to the times and his position, he can’t even grieve publicly. He can’t find solace in his best friend, for not even she believes that his one great love was a “real” relationship, and that he just hasn’t tried hard enough to like women (specifically, her). And so he set out to enjoy what he intends to be his last night on Earth.

It might not be as flashy as Milk, but it was an excellent examination of the subtler tragedies of being gay in a less tolerant time. Not that we’ve nailed tolerance today. Which if anything makes it even more worthwhile.

2010: …

Well I’m not a big fan of 127 Hours and had forgotten entirely about The Kids Are Alright, but I’ll give this year a pass. Nothing that was nominated really offended me. Not like the year after.

2011: The Tree of Life

Fuck this movie. Fuck this movie so hard.

Why it didn’t deserve the nod: Because it’s a two hour screensaver, that’s why! The story, if there even is a story, is incomprehensible. The characters have no depth because it’s impossible to learn anything about them when they’re just wandering around a series of images whose meaning is cloaked in bizarre and off-putting lurching camera work.

After opening with aged-up Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain receiving news that their son (I think?) is dead, and Sean Penn receiving the same news, we cut back to the origin of the universe. Followed by the time of the dinosaurs. Why? I still don’t know. How can this have added to the story when there basically isn’t any story to add to?

I don’t know what the point of this movie was. I hated all of it, every minute, every artistic choice. Nominating Tree of Life for best picture is like nominating the crazy guy screaming at traffic for a Tony.

I mean that was the weakest year for best picture nominees this century, but Jesus fuck.

What should have replaced it: The Muppets. Sure, it had no chance of being nominated for anything but best song (damn right it won that), but I’m saying the Muppets anyway. First of all, because the best picture nominees were a sorry lot that year. Midnight in Paris and The Descendants were good, and The Artist… sure had a neat gimmick, but after that there’s a big drop-off in quality. And second, because no movie in 2011 brought as much sheer, unadulterated joy as the magnificent return of Kermit and crew, and being a movie that fully and magnificently fun to watch has to be better than some piece of garbage that the Academy assumed was good because they didn’t understand it.

And it has Amy Adams. Awards folk love Amy Adams. Because Amy Adams is inherently lovable and nobody can be that out of touch.

2011 Bonus Round: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

2010 got let off the hook, so I have room to mention the second worst nominee from 2011, in which a young boy’s autism cures 9/11.

No, really. He wanders around New York being autistic and people magically get over 9/11, that is what happens. Oskar Schell’s father used to delight him with puzzles and mysteries, but when he’s killed on 9/11 Oskar decides there must be one great mystery left, and in seeking it out, he accidentally helps some other people with their problems. Not that he really cares about that. Or his mother, who is alive, also grieving, and trying to reach out to a son who couldn’t give a fuck about her from what I could tell. Instead, he works with the man who rents a room from his grandmother, who turns out to have (probably) been his grandfather.

It’s a load of wank that builds into basically nothing. Its attempts at emotional manipulation are so obvious they don’t even work. The only reason I can see for it being nominated at all is the 9/11 connection. And maybe the presence of Tom Hanks.

What should have replaced it: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a tense spy drama in which Gary Oldman (doing some of his best work, which is saying something) must figure out which of four British operatives is working for the Soviets. Or My Week With Marilyn, a truly charming movie about a PA who is assigned to keep an eye on Marilyn Monroe while she’s filming The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier, a famously doomed pairing. Or anything that doesn’t ask me to root for a kid who’s being unreasonable and unlikable because his father died a year earlier.

2012: Zero Dark Thirty

The nominees the following year weren’t nearly as bleak as the 2011 crowd. But the low point is probably the story of the ten-year search for Osama bin Laden, which makes you feel every minute of those ten years.

Why it didn’t deserve the nod: How do you make the search for the world’s most wanted terrorist so damned boring? Debate whether the film endorsed torture or revealed it didn’t provide good intel all you want, but once the torture sequence is done, we’re stuck with years upon years of nothing happening. Followed by a sequence in which bin Laden’s location is found… followed by about 15-20 minutes of the lead character (who, by the way, is a complete cipher, devoid of anything we as an audience can relate or connect to) being frustrated that months go by without action on her intel.

Months of the government doing nothing. Makes all the walking in the Lord of the Rings movies look like the battle of New York from The Avengers.

And when they finally do raid the house and kill bin Laden, it’s still boring. There’s no tension, no sense of danger. Say it’s because we know how the story ends if you like, but a quick trip to Wikipedia tells you how fellow nominee Argo ends and that one still had me on the edge of my seat.

What should have replaced it: Skyfall. Yeah, you heard me, Skyfall. An absolute triumph of a Bond movie, again beloved by critics and audiences, and the exact sort of thing they claimed they expanded the best picture category to include. Masterfully directed, tense and exciting in every way Zero Dark Thirty wasn’t, the pinnacle of its craft, with one of the best villain performances out there. The Oscars “honoured” the 50th Anniversary of James Bond with a montage and a performance of Goldfinger, but they should’ve given Skyfall a nomination.

And now we’re weeks away from the announcement of the best picture of 2013. The nominees aren’t quite as pathetic as 2011, with nothing as bad or undeserving as Tree of Life or Extremely Loud (they’d be hard pressed to screw up that hard again so soon), but there’s still a couple in there they could’ve skipped. But I’ll talk about that more soon, when I rank the nominees.

Adapting the Hobbit

So. Let’s talk about the Hobbit movies. And yes, if you haven’t seen the movies or read the book, there will be some mild spoilers.

The big issue is, of course, the fact that while Lord of the Rings was three long books that required a whole trilogy to adapt, the Hobbit is one short book. One short children’s book. Turning it into a three-film follow-up to Lord of the Rings requires some… acrobatics. They need to add plotlines that were just hinted at in the appendices, add action beats where before there was just “and then the dwarves floated down the river in barrels,” and generally try to make the whole tale feel a bit more epic than it was.

And this riles some Tolkien purists. They don’t care for all these extra scenes of dwarf daring-do, all these added subplots, and would rather they had stuck to a more faithful adaptation of the book, even if it meant there would only be one Hobbit movie and not three. Actually especially if it meant that. Stretching the book into to three movies was the source of the complaints.

Now in a few paragraphs I expect there will be Tolkien fans prepping to lynch me. Or so I was led to believe from that time after an advance screening of Fellowship of the Rings when I was nearly assaulted for saying “Of course they cut out Tom Bombadil, why wouldn’t they.” But believe me when I say I get it. Remember V For Vendetta? People tell me that movie’s actually pretty good. And I guess I can see their point. But I used to read that graphic novel once per year, and there were some changes I just hated. V’s not out to kill the Leader, he’s out to bring down the Leader’s whole society! Crash the system! And he didn’t fall in love with Evey, he chose her as his successor! Because once the fascist order of Norsefire was reduced to rubble and anarchy there was no place in whatever world came next for him! Sorry. Got distracted. Anyway, I get it. Just as I’d rather have had a miniseries that didn’t have to cut out so much of the full V For Vendetta story, you think that instead of this trilogy that stretches out a simple story and fluffs it full of extra subplots and fight scenes, you’d rather have had one movie that was faithful to the book.

There are just a couple of problems there.

First, and this one’s not a reason I expect you or anyone to see as valid, the studio didn’t want one Hobbit movie. They wanted a new Lord of the Rings trilogy. Studios spent years trying and failing to find the next Lord of the Rings before moving on and trying to find the new Twilight. Chronicles of Narnia was a qualified success at best, Golden Compass bombed, going back to Tolkien seemed the best strategy (other than realizing that people are drawn to stories, not genres, but the studio system is rigged against that sort of rational observation), and the Hobbit is the other famous book set in Middle Earth. Certainly the one that’s in any way filmable. So, yeah, feel free to complain about corporate greed stomping all over artistic validity if you like.

But second, and more problematic… A faithful adaptation with no extra stuff added? That movie would have had some flaws. Big, big flaws. Allow me to explain.

Gandalf was a lazy deus ex machina

Everyone loves Gandalf, right? And everyone super loves Ian McKellen as Gandalf. Balrog-fightin’, staff-swingin’, army-rallyin’, “You shall not pass” Gandalf. We love that guy. Excited to have him back.

But in an accurate adaptation of the book? Well. How to put this.

Imagine if in the first Avengers movie, Iron Man had shown up at the beginning, said to the other Avengers “We have to stop that Loki guy! But I gotta bounce. Iron Man stuff. I’ll catch up with you,” and then vanished. Maybe he shoots a few Chitauri somewhere around the middle, but otherwise you don’t see him until the last five minutes, when he turns up and says “Hey guys! Turns out Loki was working for this super-powerful alien named Thanos! Don’t worry, though, I took care of it.” People would have complained endlessly.

But that’s Gandalf in the Hobbit. He’s a deus ex machina. He gets the expedition to the lonely mountain going, then wanders off to do wizard stuff. Turns up when the dwarves are in enough trouble that Bilbo can’t luck their way out of it, then leaves again because he’s off dealing with the Necromancer.

The Necromancer, by the way, is freaking SAURON. The big flaming eye guy. Forger of the one ring. Biggest bad in all of Middle Earth. That is what Gandalf is doing while Bilbo and the dwarves are hanging out at Beorn’s house eating honey snacks. And if we stuck to the book, he’d be doing it off camera. That is the weakest of weak sauce.

So, yeah, we want to see that. Catch us up on what Gandalf and Radagast are doing. Go for it. Cutting away from Bilbo and the dwarves ain’t gonna hurt anything. Which brings me to my next point.

The dwarves suck. Seriously.

The whole story of the Hobbit hinges on this band of dwarves making it to the Lonely Mountain so that they can take back their homeland from Smaug the dragon. These 13 dwarves are our heroes, the people we’re here to root for.

But in the book, they suck. They suck so hard.

Here’s what the dwarves manage over the course of the book. They get captured by three trolls, until they’re saved by Gandalf, who employs a cunning tactic that’s one step away from throwing a bucket over their heads and telling them it’s night time. Not the most cunning foes. Then they get caught by goblins in the Misty Mountains, and have to be saved by Gandalf. They get to Mirkwood, walk down the road until they run out provisions (because Tolkien was convinced that being hungry or thirsty was riveting adventure narrative), wander into the woods, and get caught by spiders. Once Bilbo saves them, they immediately get captured by elves. Bilbo springs them again, they finally reach the mountain, only to wait outside while Bilbo checks things out and accidentally convinces Smaug to go torch Laketown. And while Bard the archer handles the dragon, Thorin saunters in and claims the throne and all the treasure.

Now, as a simple children’s story, that can work. You have to downplay the Battle of Five Armies a bit, but you can make a child-orientated adaptation of Bilbo and the dwarves constantly stumbling into danger then lucking their way out. But what you cannot make is a follow-up to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Because you are following in the footsteps of Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, and the greatest of them all, Samwise motherfuckin’ Gamgee, and that Rocky and Bullwinkle nonsense isn’t going to cut it.

Now, two films in, it’s all basically still happening. They got caught by the trolls, and the goblins, and the spiders, and the elves. But at least they put up a fight. They go down swinging half the time. They take a stab at killing Smaug, and they do some spectacular damage on their way out of the Misty Mountains. And good for them. I, for one, preferred the “fighting orcs from floating barrels” action beat more than I would have enjoyed “And then they float to Laketown, having done nothing of note since the Misty Mountains.”

And yes, Mirkwood is made quicker and creepier. Because the two things Lord of the Rings gets mocked for the most are the 20 minutes worth of endings in Return of the King and being nine hours of hobbits walking to Mordor, so the last thing the Hobbit movies needed was multiple days of walking down a path with nothing happening.

No girls allowed

I took a fantasy literature course in University. Twice, actually, because the first time the professor was lame and the reading list made other professors wince and apologize. The second time I took it, with the good prof, he would always note how early 20th century fantasy authors portrayed women. He was not impressed with C.S. Lewis, for one. But then one day he wrapped the lecture by saying “Next week we’ll look at J.R.R. Tolkien, who answered the question of women in fantasy by saying ‘Well, we just won’t have any.'”

Ain’t no women in the Hobbit book. The movies correct that by bringing Galadriel back for Unexpected Journey, then introducing a new character in Tauriel, captain of the guard of the elves of Mirkwood. Here’s what Evangeline Lily, who plays Tauriel, had to say about her:

“And in his defense, Tolkien was writing in 1937. The world is a different place today, and I keep repeatedly telling people that in this day and age, to put nine hours of cinema entertainment in theaters for young girls to go and watch, and not have one female character for them to watch is subliminally telling them, ‘you don’t count.’ You’re not important, and you’re not pivotal to story. And I just think they were very brave and very bright in saying, ‘We won’t do that to the young female audience who come and watch our film.’ And not just the young female audience, but even a woman of my own age, I think it’s time we stop making stories that are only about men – especially only about heroic men. And I love that they made Tauriel a hero.”

Tauriel kicks ass. She’s clever, she’s as good a fighter as Legolas (also, I like that they weren’t afraid to have fan-favourite Legolas be a tool in his pre-Fellowship days), and for those complaining about the love triangle with Kili and Legolas… the only person who thinks there’s a triangle is Legolas. Tauriel herself doesn’t seem bothered by the fact that her king has forbade her from getting close with his son, she just kind of likes that dwarf kid, and makes her own decisions about what she’s going to do about it. She’s a great character, and Evangeline Lily does a great job with her, and I’m sorry if you don’t agree.

I’ll admit. There was a time when I thought that Tiny Toons Adventures having both Buster AND Babs Bunny was pandering to girls, but in my defense I was 14 and it didn’t take me long to realize that maybe girls getting to have their own Bugs Bunny didn’t ruin anything. By the time Animaniacs came around, I was okay with the Warner Brothers being joined by the Warner Sister Dot. So welcome to the franchise, Tauriel. Hope you don’t die in the Battle of Five Armies. Oh hey. That reminds me.

The Battle of Five Armies just kind of happens

So at the end, Thorin has the throne, thanks to all of that being-rescued-by-Bilbo he did, and is refusing to share the massive piles of treasure with any of the humans or elves outside demanding a cut. Other dwarves turn up to back Thorin, and then Gandalf drags himself back into the story to shout “Hey, idiots, goblins are attacking.”

I guess they were still sore about the Misty Mountain incident? Maybe? That could be it. Anyway, everyone fights the goblins, including Beorn the bear-dude and the eagles, and some of the dwarves don’t make it, but everyone learns the true meaning of friendship and calls it a day.

Not sure that would play well in a movie. “Hooray! We beat the dragon! And by we I mean that Bard guy we met about fifteen minutes ago, not any of the protagonists we’ve been following since the beginning. Oh no! The goblins are back!” It’d be like if at the end of Ghostbusters, once Gozer’s been defeated, the ghost from the library comes back and they have to take her down as well. A weird little bonus climax that would just seem extraneous. So, instead, they gave Thorin a nemesis in Azog the Defiler. He hunts Thorin throughout the trilogy, and ends up running Sauron’s orc army, which I assume is going to be who the other four armies need to team up and fight to learn that friendship is the real Arkenstone. Which is good. Make the Battle of Five Armies something the whole story has clearly been building to. Personify the enemy. Give us a nemesis that needs defeating instead of just yet another endless wave of orcs.

Because seriously, the Lord of the Rings movies are bad for Infinite Respawn. Individual orcs are easy to kill. Legolas, Tauriel, Fili, Kili, Dwalin, even Bombur, they can all tear through individual orcs like tissue paper and look awesome doing it. But they never run out. There are always more, and if you don’t give us one particular badass leader orc, it just gets old. The Chitauri needed Loki, and the orcs need Azog.

Plus he’s played by Arrow’s Manu Bennett, so that endears him to me a little.

I have seen two stage adaptations of the Hobbit, both of which kept the kid-friendly tone and didn’t add anything. They worked fine. But that’s not what I’m looking for from the team that brought me the Lord of the Rings movies. The Hobbit films haven’t been perfect (why spend all that time setting up the pieces for Smaug attacking Laketown if it isn’t happening this movie? You’ll just have to remind us next year. It makes no sense), but I’ve enjoyed them so far. Hope they end well. And maybe less than seven times.

Good and bad lessons for children

Today’s post comes at a slight delay, as I lost faith in my ability to make a post about a TV show I enjoy entertaining for all. Short version: somebody start watching Person of Interest so I’ll have someone to talk about Person of Interest with, because it’s been brilliant this year.

That said, something else sunk into the back of my brain this week. Something that began stewing when I watched this video by Cracked.com’s Daniel O’Brien. You go ahead and watch it while I wait here and wonder why I thought referring you to a funnier, certainly not LESS handsome Dan was a good idea. Skip to the three-minute mark to catch the relevant questions.

And we’re back. Did you catch it? At the three–okay, I’m sure some of you are saying “I’m not watching the video, just tell us what your point is.” I’d do that. In your place. So the point Mr. O’Brien raises three minutes into this dissection of everything off-putting about Beauty and the Beast is how, precisely, is a 21-year-old who was turned into a beast at age 10 supposed to forge the complicated, messy, life-long challenge that is real love with the first girl his own age he ever meets? Daniel argues that most 21-year-olds aren’t emotionally mature enough to find real love under the best of circumstances, let alone orphans who went through puberty as giant hairy beast-monsters and have somehow forgotten how spoons work.

With this in the back of my head, I began taking a closer look at the messages cartoons are feeding to children, and which ones are good and which are messed up.

Bad lesson: “love is instant and easy”

Man, this one is ingrained deep into fairy tales, and I have begun to suspect it is damaging.

So we have the above example of Beauty and the Beast. Let’s throw in The Little Mermaid. Ariel sees Prince Eric, and swiftly falls in love with him. Eric, too, is instantly infatuated with the sound of Ariel’s singing. This is the sum total of their relationship before Ariel saves him from drowning, and a fairly accurate description of their relationship afterwards, as they have still not had what anyone would call a conversation. But it’s still enough for Ariel to decide she’s in love, and that this love is worth defying her father and making a Faustian deal with Ursula in order to abandon the only world she’s ever known to be with Eric. And for this, she sacrifices her voice so that she can trade her tail for legs. The catch? She has but three days to make Eric fall in love with her, and seal that love with a kiss, or she’ll lose her voice and soul to Ursula forever.

As Mr. O’Brien asked about the curse from Beauty and the Beast… what the fuck?

First off. I think, Little Mermaid, we’re putting a little too much emphasis on this kiss. I’m not trying to dump on the first kiss, I’m sure it’s usually great, but despite what Little Mermaid and Back to the Future are telling us, I’m not certain the first kiss is really the magic door to true love. If Eric was about to kiss Ariel because he may well love her, I don’t see how Ursula’s eels blocking that kiss attempt is going to magically undo those feelings. Couldn’t he have tried a second time? At the eel-proof castle? You could argue the moment has passed, but I’m pretty sure a young prince who’s been told he has to get married this week or else could get past one moment being ruined. Second, I’m pretty sure I could get a kiss at this year’s New Year’s Eve party, and I promise you nobody there is in love with me, or would be post-kiss.

And that thing about the prince needing to get married? That’s important. Because that’s the world fairy tales grew out of, where marriage wasn’t always (possibly even not often) about love and courtship. No, this is the world of traditional marriage: an exchange of property between parents of strangers. That’s the world that comes up with the narrative convention of true love at first sight, a world where marriage is a necessity to continue the family line and get dowries for all these maidens you have lying around, and love is just an optional extra. Like seat warmers in a car. Nice to have, but not essential.

Moving past that issue… Who the hell can fall in love, real love, in three damned days? Building that sort of a complex connection with another person is hard enough without some half-octopus sea witch playing beat the clock! But do you know who thinks that is possible? People who’ve never been in love. Like the kids watching Disney movies. Like me at age 15. When I was 15, and decided it might be time to stop liking girls in the abstract and start trying to like one directly, all I had at my disposal was a pop-culture upbringing that said 1) love at first sight is a real thing and; 2) wacky schemes are a great way to win a girl’s heart. What I needed was to be told the difference between infatuation and love, and that wacky schemes are goddamn stupid just talk to girls like they’re people you moron. But that doesn’t make for a good episode of Perfect Strangers, so it did not occur to me.

Sure, yes, a few years later “love at first sight,” which I now consider to be a particularly aggressive form of rapid-onset infatuation, did blossom into a real relationship, but it also turned into a painful life lesson about how what a person wants from the rest of their life can change drastically between the ages of 18 and 25, so maybe those aren’t the ages to decide who you want to spend the rest of your life with. Hey, maybe you’re right, and the person you love at 19 will be the person you love the rest of your life. That kind of love runs strong in my family. But there’s no harm in waiting a few years to see if what you thought was love turns out to be infatuation mixed with a cocktail of teenage hormones, which is a recipe for all kinds of stupid.

Sadly, “infatuation is great, but love is incredibly complicated” doesn’t make for a satisfying third act to a romantic comedy.

Better lesson: “Work hard, try your best, and you can accomplish… some things”

And since “Love and infatuation are about as similar as playing a real guitar and playing Rock Band on medium difficulty” makes for a shit romantic comedy, I don’t really have a kids’ movie with that lesson in mind, so here’s how Monsters University, the less-great prequel to Monsters Inc., taught something incredibly valuable.

Monsters University is about how the best-friend duo we met in Monsters Inc. came to be friends in the first place. Both Mike Wazowski and James “Sully” Sullivan are each studying to be scarers (I’m not explaining what that is. Monsters Inc. came out 12 years ago, if you haven’t seen it I have no sympathy). For Sully, it’s just following the family legacy, and leaning on the fact that he’s a giant beast-monster with a naturally terrifying roar. For Mike, on the other hand, working the scare floor is a lifelong dream, one people keep saying is impossible because, as he is small, round, and 80% eyeball, he isn’t scary. But Mike works and studies hard, learns every technique, every scrap of scare theory, everything there is to know about scaring, and in the end…

None of it works. Because he isn’t scary.

But what he does manage to do is combine his knowledge with Sully’s natural ability and coach his scarier friend into pulling off a scare the likes of which no one had seen before. And so they became the record-setting scare team we met in the first movie.

And that’s the lesson. There are some things in life that you can’t achieve, no matter how hard you work or how badly you want them… but it doesn’t mean you can’t still do great things. Just… maybe have a backup in mind. That’s an incredibly valuable thing to teach a child. Maybe you can’t be an astronaut because you get motion sickness super easily, but the other people who work at NASA are pretty cool too.

Bad lesson: CONFORM, YOU SON OF A BITCH

Breaking away from theatrical releases now. Every now and then, you say something you wish you hadn’t. Something like “Yes, Chris Munroe, I will watch the Smurfs with you so that we can live-tweet our disgust.” Or even “Hey, did you know that they did two Smurf holiday specials on DVD?”

And so did we come to watch The Legend of Smurfy Hollow and Smurfs: a Christmas Carol. And while we liked the fact that they abandoned the awkward CG animation and made specials that actually looked like old Smurfs episodes, there was something… unsettling about the latter special.

Grouchy Smurf wants to bail on Christmas this year. Every year, he asks for a hang glider, but every year Papa Smurf (the only person handing out gifts, apparently) just gives everyone a hat. Grouchy’s had enough, and refuses to light the star at the top of the tree like he usually does. So, Papa Smurf does the only thing he can…

He drugs Grouchy.

Specifically, he gives him a potion that makes him see visions of Christmas past, present and future: his former love for Christmas; the fact that Papa Smurf spends all year custom-making Smurf hats for the specific needs of each Smurf (just not well enough that they last more than a year), which is a little insane but there’s no time to go into it; and a vision of the next day, in which Grouchy Smurf skipping Christmas gets literally every Smurf killed by Gargamel.

Which frankly has more to do with getting Clumsy to light the star instead, which they should have known was the worst idea in recorded Smurf history, but the point, the point is that Grouchy Smurf just wanted to be left alone, and in response the other Smurfs roofied him and brainwashed him into loving Christmas again. That, frankly, is fucked up.

Also, come on. He asked for a hang glider and you gave him a hat that can function as a crude para-sail. You have a problem, Papa Smurf. Stop making hats and get help.

Better lesson: everyone leaves, nothing can stop this.

I think we can all agree that Toy Story 3 was pretty awesome, right? It provided a fitting end for Andy’s toys, gave Michael Keaton the best character he’s played in years (Ken), and only raised a few questions about why, if the toys must stay inanimate around humans, they think they actively contribute to their owners’ games.

And at the center of it all? The simple lesson, that no matter how much you love someone, eventually you will lose them. And that’s okay, even if it doesn’t feel that way for a while. Losing people hurts, it hurts a great deal, but it is inevitable, and all you can do is give yourself permission to move on.

Maybe if that had been clearer in my earliest 20s I wouldn’t have kept taking it so personally.

Join us next time when our topic will be… something where I don’t require Daniel O’Brien to make it entertaining.

Talkin’ ’bout Wonder Woman

So the word is out, and the word is “Wonder.”

Well that sentence didn’t help with anything. Off to a brilliant start here. I’ll elaborate. Warner Brothers has announced that yes, indeed, at long last, Diana of Themyscria, better known as Wonder Woman, First Lady of DC Comics, will be making her big-screen debut… as the second female lead in a movie about Superman and Batman.

I kid, Warner Brothers. I kid because until she has her own movie you’re not trying hard enough.

Furthermore, she’ll be played by Gal Gadot, an Israeli actress I know almost nothing about.

 

Ta-da.
Ta-da.

She’s mostly known for the Fast and the Furious franchise, but since I’ve only seen approximately 0.6 Fasts and Furiouses I can’t comment on her resume. Some people out there are already complaining based on her physicality. Some wonder if she’s tall enough. Apparently she’s 1.75 metres, or 5’9″ tall, which makes her three inches taller than this guy:

Cute lil’ fella.

Some complain she’s too slender, that Wonder Woman should be more muscular. Well. There’s nothing to be done about that. It’s not like actors have ever had to bulk up for a role ever. It’s not like anyone who had just finished playing an emaciated stick figure immediately went on to play the goddamn Batman.

CONSECUTIVE. MOVIES.

So no, I am not going to dump on Ms. Gadot. Frankly, I like the fact that she’s not American: Wonder Woman should seem a little foreign. Mediterranean would have been the preference, but Israeli is fine. I’m going to offer her the same courtesy I gave Ben Affleck and wait to actually see the movie before I judge.

Instead, let me explain why I care. Why I want to see a great Wonder Woman in the movies. Aside from the obvious answer suggested by the fact that I started this article while wearing my Green Lantern robe and watching the Flash make his debut on Arrow while statues of Wonder Woman and Zatanna gaze down from my nerd reliquary.

Wonder Woman is a warrior princess on a quest for peace. Her love for humanity is stronger than death itself, but she maintains a fierce opposition to the cruel and the merciless. She doesn’t start the fight, but always finishes it. And now, here’s some of my favourite stories about Wonder Woman.

The Greg Rucka years

Before Greg Rucka took over Wonder Woman, I hadn’t been reading her book for years. John Byrne had written and drawn it for a few years, and when he left, there was such a sudden drop in quality I had to leave. Then Greg Rucka took over, and it became a whole new thing.

Rucka brought a new spin to the idea of Diana being her people’s ambassador to Man’s World, by emphasizing the “ambassador” part. She got an embassy, and a staff. Rucka’s Wonder Woman spent as much time attending state dinners and promoting charities she believed in as she did battling villains: at one point her publicist, Mr. Garibaldi, explained to the new guy (and our POV character for life at the embassy) that “This charity is important to her. She’s not taking calls from the Justice League tonight, she’s certainly not taking calls from the media.”

In the collection Eyes of the Gorgon, Garibaldi’s children were turned to stone by Medusa. Diana took her on, blinding herself with snake venom to avoid Medusa’s gaze. She stayed blind for several issues, and showed why, in the right hands, her compassion is every bit as strong as her sword arm: granted a favour for winning a victory for Olympus, she rejects the offer to restore her vision and asks that the Garibaldi children be restored instead (Athena threw in the restored vision for free, she was cool like that).

He also gave Diana her own Lex Luthor in genius industrialist Veronica Cale, who explained herself with “I built myself up from nothing to corporate titan. If there is a Wonder Woman in the world, it’s ME.” Cale later went on to be the president of Oolong Island, a former Chinese facility turned independent nation populated exclusively with mad scientists.

Rucka courted controversy in the Infinite Crisis tie-in Sacrifice, which would take a whole second article to explain. He made it clear: Wonder Woman doesn’t want to kill anyone…

Doesn’t mean she won’t.

Max Lord has mind-controlled Superman in being his ultimate weapon.
Do not screw with Wonder Woman.

Lasting from issue 195-226 (of Vol. 2) it’s a sadly short run that I wish were easier to find in trade paperback.

Wonder Woman and Batman… good idea?

In Joe Kelley’s run on JLA, Wonder Woman and Batman ended up sharing an unexpected and passionate kiss right before launching a suicide mission (they died, but got better) that led to an awkward flirtation. After a few months of ducking around the cape-wearing elephant in the room, Wonder Woman uses a VR machine at their headquarters to try and figure out what might happen if she and Batman started a relationship. The machine provided many alternatives: in one possibility, Diana helped Bruce let go of his anger and broodishness, and together they made Gotham a utopia. In another, they dragged each other down the opposite path, and became thrill-killing vigilantes. And in one possible future, she arrived too late to save Batman from being horribly killed by the Joker. At which point this happened.

DO NOT. SCREW. WITH WONDER WOMAN.

At the issue’s end, they decided they probably shouldn’t be together. Now, as to contemporary Batman’s thoughts on Wonder Woman and Superman being a couple…

Batman is scared of Wonder Woman

Batman was not happy to learn Superman and Wonder Woman had been getting romantic recently, but not out of jealousy (Bruce Wayne’s dance card has been as full as he can manage lately, thanks).

A recurring story point is the idea that Batman has built contingency plans to take down each member of the Justice League if they go bad. It was first introduced in the Tower of Babel arc, in which Ra’s al Ghul steals his plans, which was adapted into the animated DVD “Doom.”

New 52 Batman also has contingency plans for the Justice League, which came to light when his Kryptonite was stolen from the Batcave.

One box per hero.

In explaining why he had Kryptonite in the first place, Batman shows Superman his collection of secret plans/weapons, including the contingency plan he developed to bring himself down if necessary. But the twist, and the reason why Batman was nervous about a Clark/Diana relationship? It’s in the box he made for Wonder Woman.

When Batman can’t come up with a plan, there is no plan.

Batman always wins because Batman always has a plan. People just assume Batman can take Superman in a fight because Batman knows how to exploit every weakness Superman has. But Wonder Woman has no weakness. And thus even Batman’s a little afraid of her.

Greek tragedies

And now a word on recent Wonder Woman stories. The word is “great.”

Current writer Brian Azzarello has been focusing on Wonder Woman’s screwed up family, otherwise known as the Greek gods. When a pregnant woman named Zola turns to Diana for help, Diana learns that she’s being targeted by a jealous Hera, queen of the gods, for unbeknownst to Zola her baby’s father is Zeus. Zeus himself has gone missing, and a power struggle breaks out amongst the gods, but a prophecy states that a child of Zeus will kill the king and conquer Olympus, meaning that everyone out to steal the throne is also out to kill Zola’s baby, just in case.

This run has been filled with great visual reinterpretations of the gods, the kind of soap opera theatrics that the Greek myths basically invented, and a great view of the differing aspects that make Wonder Woman a great character. Azzarello shows her compassion, her love for all mankind, her dedication to protect the innocent, her disdain for war. But he also reminds us to never, ever mistake that compassion for weakness. Because if you make her, she will drop you like third period French.

And that’s what I hope to see in the movies. A woman of strength, both physically and strength of character; a woman of peace who is unafraid of combat. A champion of the powerless capable of inspiring awe in the powerful.

So don’t let me down, Zack Snyder.

Media vs. Marketing

I watch a lot of things. I can’t hide that from you. Movies, TV series, comic books, webcomics, the occasional novel, I consume a lot of media, and when something really sticks out as worth talking about, such as the fact that everything Agents of SHIELD promised but failed to deliver is happening on Arrow, I mention it here. Weird intro. Finding my feet.

Here’s the thing. Every now and then, something about a movie or whatnot will strike an off chord with me. There’ll be something about the product that just feels off. And when this happens, I sometimes wonder… was it actually the product that was flawed, or is it because the marketing team sold me something else?

See, the marketers, more often than not, aren’t actually working on the movie. Or TV show. The thing. They’re just trying to sell it. And sometimes that means I’m judging something good or even great for not being the other thing the marketing team decided would sell better. Let’s start with a couple of examples of exactly that before I just jump on bad marketing moves in general.

Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds, for those unfamiliar, was Quentin Tarantino’s first volley into historical revenge fantasy, as a team of vicious American Jewish soldiers stage commando raids against German troops in Nazi-occupied France, leading to a conclusion that’s about as historically accurate as James Bond movies are an accurate depiction of the Cold War.

Or so the trailers and other advertising led us to believe. As far as we knew, this was an action-comedy starring Brad Pitt as the leader of the titular Basterds, who would go on a tear through the Nazis.

The thing is, that’s not actually what the movie’s about. Inglourious Basterds is about Shoshanna Dreyfuss, only survivor of a Jewish family slaughtered by the Nazis while hiding at a French farmhouse, and Hans Landa, the Nazi investigator who tracked her family down. It’s about Shoshanna’s quest for revenge and Hans’ growing dissatisfaction with his employers, and his title of “Jew Hunter.” It’s a suspense film, in which people desperately try to keep their secrets hidden from the Germans, despite the fact that their secret is known and the Germans just need that last piece of proof. And through all this is a comic relief subplot about the Basterds.

Perhaps part of the reason we thought the Basterds might be the main characters is that they were the title characters. But then, Tarantino didn’t even want to call it “Inglourious Basterds.” He was going to call it “Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France,” which both would have warned us that this wasn’t going to be history as we knew it, and wouldn’t have made us think Brad Pitt was going to be the main character. Because he really wasn’t.

So when we sat down to watch what we were told was an action-comedy, and got a tense suspense thriller, it was a little jarring. The movie’s still excellent, but you need to be aware what you’re going to get.

Star Trek: Into Darkness

I’m a big fan of Star Trek: Into Darkness. Both of the J.J. Abrams Trek movies, but Into Darkness in particular. It may not be perfect, but it’s my favourite action movie of the year, and the only one with a protagonist that fights to not kill the bad guy. Well, other than Lone Ranger, but in that case it’s played as a character flaw, not something noble. Into Darkness is the only movie to do it well. There is one flaw with Into Darkness, however, that’s difficult to defend.

The “surprise twist” is the least surprising thing they could have done. And I will be revealing it in the next paragraph, so if you somehow don’t know or are in denial that you’ve known all along, skip ahead. Like, to the next section.

As soon as the script was done, the J.J. Abrams marketing team got to work trying to hide who the villain was in the most obvious way possible. They didn’t just avoid saying who the villain was (like Iron Man 3), they shouted out as loud as possible that the villain’s identity was being kept a secret. Tried to build as much suspense as they could over who Benedict Cumberbatch was playing, even though it was blatantly clear from the word go that he was Khan. Of course he was Khan, he was always going to be Khan, there is nothing surprising about that. And I am doing you a favour by telling you.

But that hardly ruins the movie. It’s not like they’re telling you who Kaiser Soze really is. When Kirk and company finally catch up with “John Harrison,” as he’s been called up until then, he immediately identifies himself as Khan. And at that point there’s still over half the movie left. The movie itself never hinges on the identity of the villain being a secret, only the marketing campaigns. We wouldn’t even consider it a plot twist if nobody had told us to expect one, and we’d have been fine with it.

Next week, on…

Now, let’s look at how network and cable television tend to screw up their promos for future episodes. Because in these cases, I am sure that nobody involved in the production of the shows was responsible for these promos. Here’s three case studies representing three massive sins.

The worst “next week on” promo I’ve ever seen was a first season episode of Queer as Folk. Every single moment that they chose for the promo was taken from the last two minutes of the episode. And they were big moments. Big moments that I did not want to spend most of the episode knowing were coming. As Peter David once put it, these were not spoilers, they were ruiners. They straight up ruined that episode.

Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip has it’s detractors. I am not one of them. Sure, I have qualms with the fact that they devoted five of their last six episodes to a plotline that could have been done in, like, half of that, and why was a show about sketch comedy spending so long talking about the war in Afghanistan, but I love it to death. The promos, on the other hand, were clearly put together by people who weren’t actually watching the show. They’d pick random moments from the next episode and play them up as fifty times more dramatic than they were. They’d show two characters kissing and say “One kiss… changes EVERYTHING.” When you watched the episode, the kiss was a quick joke that had no impact on any plot, past or future.

And then there’s the “post-Thor” episode of Agents of SHIELD. They advertised an episode that would tie into Thor: the Dark World, and when it came? Thirty seconds of the main cast cleaning up after the movie’s climactic battle (which makes no sense. How did Coulson’s hand-picked team of elite globetrotting problem solvers get stuck on clean-up duty?) before they jumped into an unrelated plot about an unrelated Asgardian artifact with no connection at all to any Thor movie. And in this case… I really feel the corporate bosses are to blame. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that they’d made an episode with Asgardian stuff, and then were told to add a scene involving cleaning up Greenwich so that they could sell it as connected to the movie.

Three examples that I think comprise the major sins of network-edited promos. One case of utterly spoiling the next episode, once case of selling a show that wasn’t actually filmed (Star Trek: DS9 and Voyager were awful for this), and one blatant bait-and-switch in a transparent, if successful, attempt to stop their rating from slipping every week. And each of these can profoundly impact your enjoyment of the show, be it ruining that week’s stories, or making you expect a show you’re just not going to get.

It’s not really germane but now’s as good a time as any to mention that the “next time” promos for Mad Men are so breathtakingly vague that they’re teetering into self-parody. This video says it best.

I work in marketing every now and again myself, so I get the struggle involved in getting people excited without spelling out the whole story for them. But Iron Man 3 managed it, man. They managed it. They put out multiple trailers that basically said “What’s it about? It’s about two and a half hours, come watch it,” and by the gods we did.

I guess the moral is “Don’t try to sell us what you think we want to buy, sell us what you’re actually doing,” but trying to make corporations be less stupid is kind of an impossible quest. Still… there’s always hope.

Whew. Made it through the whole thing without mentioning how the trailer for Free Willy managed to sum up the movie so completely it’s amazing anyone actually paid to see it. Aw, son of a–

Assessing the exploitation of DC Comics

I’m a fan of DC Comics until the end of days. No getting around that. My first formative comics-reading experience, or at least the earliest one I remember, was Crisis on Infinite Earths, featuring every character in DC’s stable. I didn’t follow the Avengers or the X-Men, I read Justice League. I liked Batman, Superman, and even Blue Beetle and Booster Gold far more than Spider-man or Captain America.

Today I’m less exclusive. I read my fair share of Marvel books, just way, way less than DC. I’d still rather read an okay comic about Superman than a great comic about Wolverine.

Which is why it breaks my heart that when it comes to movies and other adaptations, Warner Bros. is getting their ass kicked so hard by Marvel Studios.

Let me explain. It’s not the success of Marvel Studios that bothers me. Well, not most days. There is a certain internet geek pundit who I shan’t name or link to who is so obsessed with slagging everything DC does, inventing flaws if necessary, while championing every single thing that Marvel Studios does, ignoring flaws as often as he has to, that I felt this weird need to resent Marvel properties to balance him out. But that is not healthy, and it’s why I’m giving up his videos and articles. Because I can’t stop him from being rigidly and unflinchingly biased (if you honestly think Agents of SHIELD is a better show than Arrow, you’re just wrong), but I can stop myself from sinking into the same swamp.

So, no, it’s not that I resent Marvel movies doing well. Super excited to see both Captain America: Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy. What kills me is that Warner Bros. is not keeping up. And when they do try and exploit DC’s properties, you just have to ask… are you even trying?

At the movies

I liked Man of Steel and I’m not sorry. As such, I refuse to be pessimistic about the upcoming sequel featuring Ben Affleck as Batman, especially since it means the next Batman movie won’t be an origin story. And if they do, in fact, try to follow that up with a Flash movie leading into Justice League, I am all for it. Hell, there’s still time to get Darkseid into a movie before Thanos finally makes a proper appearance in Avengers 3.

That sounded like slagging Marvel but it’s just that Thanos is a knockoff of Darkseid (no, really, look it up), and I’d rather people not claim it’s the opposite just because Thanos made it into a movie first. That’s all.

For decades now, Warner Bros. has been coasting on Batman. Since 1989, there have been eight theatrically-released movies about Batman, ranging from incredible (The Dark Knight) to great (Batman Begins, Mask of the Phantasm) to pretty okay (Batman, The Dark Knight Rises) to crimes against cinema (Batman and Robin). In the same 24 year time frame, there have only been two good-but-not-great Superman movies, one movie for Green Lantern that could charitably be called a misfire, and Shaquille O’Neal as Steel. I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate on that one.

No I do not count Catwoman. That movie has as much to do with the comic character Catwoman as the Karate Kid movies had to do with the Legion of Superheroes. Same name, no other connection or similarity.

Now consider what Marvel managed to do in half that time. Since just 2008, Marvel Studios alone has cranked out three Iron Man movies, two for Thor, one for Captain America (with another in the wings), one for the Hulk, and their crown jewel, the Avengers. And these range in quality from amaze-balls (Avengers) to merely mediocre (Iron Man 2, Thor), with most achieving a rank of “actually pretty damn good.” Throw in the characters they sold to other studios before forming their own, and in only 13 years we’ve had four movies for Spider-man and the X-Men, two for Ghost Rider, the Fantastic Four, Wolverine, and the Punisher, one for Daredevil, a spin-off for Elektra and another for Hulk. Now, these range in quality a bit more drastically, from great (Spiderman 2, X-2) to pretty bad (most of them) to downright excruciating (Ang Lee’s Hulk), so quantity doesn’t assure quality.

But in terms of numbers, Warner Bros. can’t really compete: Marvel Studios exists to crank out Marvel properties, whereas DC Entertainment is but a part of the larger Warner Bros. empire, which has other things going on and can’t commit to the same mass-production. But here’s my real problem.

By 2014, there will have been eight movies for Batman, six for Superman, three for Blade, and two movies starring freaking Ghost Rider, but zero movies starring Wonder Woman. The greatest female super-hero of all time, the third member of DC’s Big Three, and Rocket Raccoon is going to be in a movie before she is. Nobody at Warner Bros. should be proud of this, and whoever fired Joss Whedon when he was trying to write a movie for her should be banned from movie-making forever.

Maybe Warner Bros. can’t commit to more than one movie per year. But come on. Diana of Themyscria should be at the top of the list.

Now… the small screen.

On the teevee

I’m going to focus on DC’s shows here, because that’s my main point. Suffice to say I’m intrigued to see the four shows Marvel sold to Netflix and I sure hope Agents of SHIELD gets better.

Now, here is an area where DC is at least competitive. Sure, Birds of Prey tanked pretty hard, but Smallville lasted ten seasons and as many as six of them were pretty watchable*.

And now we have Arrow, which started out surprisingly good and is growing into the first truly great superhero show in a generation. In their second season, Arrow has made Oliver Queen an amazing and conflicted protagonist, given him a great supporting cast (even Thea Queen, season one’s weak link, has improved dramatically), and is doing unparalleled work at building the comic-based universe around its central characters.

Unparalleled. Looking at you, Agents of SHIELD. (Sorry, sorry, back to my point)

So between the cult hit of Arrow and the hype and moderate success surrounding Agents of SHIELD, it’s only natural that more shows based around superheroes start turning up. Given that comic books are a medium based around serial storytelling, TV has always been a better fit; 22 episodes a year allows for much better long-term storytelling than one movie every two to four years. So let’s see what DC has in the pipeline, shall we?

The Flash

Thus far, the Arrow-verse has held the line on super powers. Nobody has them. That’s set to change when Barry Allen makes his debut for the mid-season finale, leading to a planned Flash spin-off series next year. And I’m excited. Because while the showrunners did fail at producing a good Green Lantern movie, Arrow’s been knocking it out of the park this year, so I trust them to replicate that success with the Flash. Hey, I was a huge fan of the first Flash TV series, which actually holds up better than I thought it would.

My only qualm is that they’re making this Flash series at the same time that they’re prepping a Flash movie, and if they’re not connected? If Warner Bros. officially splits their movie universe apart from the TV universe while Marvel is maintaining one continuity across all of their endeavors? That’s worse than a missed opportunity. That’s grade-A dumb.

So here’s hoping that they do the smart thing and use Flash to link up Man of Steel and the Arrow-verse. I just wish that hope weren’t so fleeting.

Gotham

And now we hit grade-A stupid full-on.

Gotham is a rumoured pilot for the Fox network about Jim Gordon’s early police career in a pre-Batman Gotham City.

Does everyone see why this is a terrible idea? Do I need to go on? Well, the fact that this might be a real thing means someone doesn’t see the massive flaws, so I’ll elaborate.

First off. Splitting your properties across multiple networks is just throwing up barriers to building a shared universe, something that, once again, Marvel has proven works like gangbusters. It will be easy to do Arrow/Flash crossovers, since they’ll both be on the CW, but Fox isn’t known for playing well with others.

Second. It took Smallville several years to start having other proto-versions of DC’s heroes turn up, but it was always a big success. They got a massive ratings spike from having Aquaman show up, of all people. Adding Green Arrow to the cast salvaged the back half of the series. They added Flash (well, sort of), Cyborg, Hawkman, Stargirl, Doctor Fate, the Legion of Superheroes, even Booster Gold and Blue Beetle.

Notice a name missing from that list? Because the fans sure did.

Smallville was basically forbidden to use Bruce Wayne/Batman at any point. Rumour has it they brought in Green Arrow, ultimately making him a regular, because there was a role they wanted young Bruce Wayne to play in shaping Clark’s path but weren’t allowed to use him. Warner Bros. made the baffling decision to isolate Batman from everything else they were doing. Okay, sure, the larger DC universe wouldn’t have fit in Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, but I don’t see why that means Bruce Wayne couldn’t be on Smallville. And now Arrow is name-dropping Ra’s Al Ghul and rumours are flying that Nightwing will turn up, but again no mention of Batman.

And that is bad enough. Banning Batman from Smallville and Arrow is already a dumb move, but banning him from a series starring one of his supporting cast? A series set in Gotham but with no Batman? Who thinks there’s an audience for that? You want to replicate Agents of SHIELD? Fine. I get that. But there’s already a perfect template for that, and it was called Gotham Central. Gotham Central had a rich and fascinating cast of police detectives trying to solve crimes in a city where the drug dealer you’re planning to bust might turn out to be Mr. Freeze. Most importantly, a series where Batman was never a regular player, but did turn up from time to time. That is the Gotham-based cop show I would watch. The adventures of Jim Gordon before Batman began? No. No thank you. I watched Clark Kent refuse to become Superman for ten goddamn years, I’m not doing it again.

Constantine

Meanwhile, NBC is looking to develop a show based around John Constantine, the magician/con man who has grown from a linchpin of DC’s mature-readers Vertigo line to a key figure in the magical portion of DC’s main product line. As a solo operator or the defacto leader of the Justice League Dark, he takes on demons, monsters, and other magicians to maintain the balance and protect the world, but is generally a bastard about it and tends to get the people closest to him killed. He was already turned into a not-terrible movie starring Keanu Reeves, but is ripe for re-adaption. And possibly this time they’ll let him stay British.

I have two problems with this. First, again, being on a different network means that any Constantine show will again risk being a stand-alone, when all I want is for DC to embrace the shared universe as rabidly as Marvel has. Second, why haven’t they cast Mark Sheppard as Constantine yet? Sure, he’s not young anymore, but he’s a British actor who specializes in playing bastards you can’t help but love in geek-friendly shows. He’s a perfect fit, dagnabbit.

Hourman

Hourman was one of DC’s earliest characters, a chemist named Rex Tyler who developed a pill called Miraclo that gave him super-strength, speed and invulnerability for one hour. Sort of like a super-soldier serum you have to keep taking. There have been other attempts to make characters named Hourman, but the one that stood the test of time is, basically, the first superhero drug addict.

Seriously, the most interesting thing they’ve done with Hourman in the last twenty years is have Dr. Mid-nite, his JSA teammate who is also a physician, constantly berate him about how he’s clearly addicted to Miraclo and how unhealthy that is.

Not that any of this would be in the proposed TV series. No, they’re borrowing a much lesser-known power from a much lesser-known version of the character, the ability to see one hour into the future. Skipping over the costumed adventurer whose powers come from a troubling source, skipping over the time-travelling android from the far future trying to learn to be human, and focusing on the most obscure Hourman-related ability they could find.

Mm-hm.

Is it even a superhero show at this point? Because it feels like an utterly generic “protagonist must stop a tragedy before it happens” show. Early Edition with a tighter deadline. I’m not convinced they’d even give him a costume.

Wrapping up

So. While Marvel is building their universe through more Avengers movies and their ultra-ambitious Defenders project on Netflix, DC looks to be splitting up their universe more and more with redundant Flashes, unnecessary prequels, and farming their characters out to different studios, the exact strategy that is limiting Marvel to their B and C-list characters, because they sold their A-list to Sony and Fox.

And through all of this, nothing for Wonder Woman. If you’re desperate enough to turn to Hourman of all people, you should be desperate enough to finally make a Wonder Woman project that’s any good.

I want to see a DC cinematic universe. I do not want to continue to see DC characters existing in independent bubbles, with no crossing over allowed. Unless, of course, this is all building to the Netflix miniseries Crisis on Infinite Earths, in which Smallville, the Nolan-verse, Arrow-verse, and various other movie and TV universes collide… man, I’d watch the shit out of that. Shame that isn’t happening. Great. Somehow I’ve managed to depress myself even more.

But this is why you hurt me, Warner Bros. It’s not because Marvel is beating you. It’s because it doesn’t even seem like you’re stepping up to the plate. Please, do better.

*Not a recommendation. I stand by my policy of never officially recommending Smallville. Watch it if you want, but that’s your decision. I cannot guarantee your safety, nor will I be responsible for your fate.

How to ruin your sequel

And I’m back. The run of a play I was in and adjustment to a new work schedule have made posting difficult as of late. Real talk, society: 5:30 AM is no time to be awake. It’s unnatural. You know how I know? The sun isn’t up yet. If the sun isn’t up, it is not “early in the morning,” it is still night.

Anyway.

Last night, as a final Halloween celebration, I was at a horror movie marathon, the theme of which was “A Night at the Cabin,” horror films featuring cabins in the woods, ending of course with Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s excellent Cabin in the Woods. Cabin is a hilarious and thrilling deconstruction of horror films, whose ending always makes me a little conflicted, as it basically guarantees there will be no sequel ever (the box office helped assure that as well, but that’s neither here nor there). On the one hand, the premise of all the horror movie tropes being engineered by a mysterious organization in a bunker (personified hilariously by Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford) is so much fun that it’s a shame there can’t be more of it. On the other hand, I can’t imagine a sequel to this movie actually working on any level. It would surely end up a retread of all the popular jokes and scenes from its predecessors.

You know, like Austin Powers.

Sequels exist because giving audiences more of something they enjoyed is a relatively safe bet for movie executives. The problem is that “People liked that, let’s make another” isn’t the best way to begin a creative endeavor. There are good sequels, to be sure: Terminator 2, The Dark Knight, The Empire Strikes Back, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Sequels that build on what came before and manage to find new and great stories to tell with characters we’ve already come to love. Others… others screw up. Here’s some ways they do that.

“Let’s just do that again”

What might be the most common and laziest way to make a sequel: say “Hey, that worked, let’s just do it again.” And why not? Doesn’t that work for James Bond? That’s a franchise built around “And then James Bond foils another villain,” and Skyfall proved that after fifty years there’s still a surprising amount of gas in that tank, if you’re willing to try.

Sadly, not everyone is willing to make that kind of effort.

Witness Austin Powers. The first one was a delightful surprise, a breath of fresh air. The second one recycled all the popular jokes from the first movie and added some newer, less funny jokes. Goldmember did the same. And that’s why instead of being a trilogy of classic comedies with a best-selling special edition box set, they are instead our greatest case study of diminishing returns. See also the Hangover trilogy, which went from “surprise hit” to “surprise bomb” in just two movies.

The Ring 2 is another key example. The Ring was, in my opinion, an amazing horror film, replacing jump-scares with a remarkably consistent aura of dread and ending in a climax scary enough I hid in my coat rather than re-watch it on my second viewing. The Ring 2 was made by people trying to re-create the key beats of the movie based on a rough description, and was terrible.

Witness Batman and Robin, which began its many, many, many crimes against film making by kicking off the plot with Commissioner Gordon saying “There’s a new villain in town, please come stop him” and pretty much nothing else. More egregious? The Men in Black movies. Men in Black could have been a hell of a franchise, but instead of using the first movie to establish the world and then build on it in sequels and whatnot, they instead tried whatever they could to just re-do the basic story beats of the original. And they also bring us to my second sequel mis-step.

Frank the Pug Syndrome

If I accomplish one thing though blogging, let it be making “Frank the Pug Syndrome” a recognized trope. That or Infinite Respawn. You know, when the heroes have to fight a faceless horde of something, like zombies or henchmen or Chitauri, and they’re weak enough for the heroes to be able to stop while looking badass but since they never stop coming the heroes are gradually overwhelmed? Not my point. Right. Where was I.

Frank the Pug was a once-scene joke in the first Men in Black movie, and far from the best joke at that, but the makers of MIB2 thought that an alien disguised as a pug dog was intrinsically hilarious enough to make him a full-fledged member of the team in the sequel. He was not. All he did was serve as a piss-poor replacement for Linda Fiorentino (either not asked to return or not interested in doing so) and Patrick Warburton. Seriously, putting Patrick Warburton in your movie as Will Smith’s new partner and then ditching him after ten minutes in favour of a “wacky” talking dog? Bad writers. Zero points for you.

And so I came to coin “Frank the Pug Syndrome” as a term for any sequel who takes a minor character from the previous movie and inadvisably gives them a much bigger role in the sequel. Shrek 2 is another example, with bigger parts for previously one-joke characters like the Gingerbread Man, Pinocchio, and the Big Bad Wolf. I haven’t seen Shrek 2, maybe it worked okay, but I very much doubt anything the Gingerbread Man did was as funny as the Muffin Man bit from the first movie.

Or look at X-Men 3. That movie became immensely over-crowded, because they kept wanting to bring in new characters, but also wanted to give expanded roles to everyone from the first two (except Cyclops, who was killed off to punish James Marsden for following Bryan Singer to Superman Returns). It’s not that Iceman, Kitty Pryde and Colossus didn’t deserve bigger parts, it’s that there just wasn’t room to do that while introducing Beast, Angel, Juggernaut, and Jamie Madrox while giving Storm a more dominant role to appease Halle Berry and continuing to fetishize Wolverine because that’s what the X-Men empire appears to be built on.

Even just trying to bring back every single person of note from the previous movie can be a struggle. Looking at you, American Pie 2 and Ocean’s 12. But then, it is possible, very possible, to go too far in the other direction.

Throwing out too much

Sometimes people come along to make a sequel who seem to have no idea how or why the previous film worked. Now, sometimes a director will want to put his own stamp on a franchise, and good for him: Aliens was a worthy successor to Alien because James Cameron wasn’t trying to just re-do what Ridley Scott did in the first movie, he simply took the world it created and ran in his own direction. The Mission: Impossible movies, however, vary so wildly in tone and style that it’s hard to believe they actually take place in the same world.

A more obscure example: a 1990s Chinese kung-fu movie called the Heroic Trio, in which a vigilante named Wonder Woman (but not that Wonder Woman), a mercenary called Thief-Catcher and a thief called the Invisible Woman (not that Invisible Woman, but played by Michelle Yeoh!) eventually team up to fight evil. Eventually. Invisible Woman is on the wrong side for most of the movie and they don’t become a Heroic Trio until the climax of the movie. I had fun with it, so my friend the Video Vulture suggested watching the sequel. Which takes place decades later, in a post-apocalyptic society, years after the Heroic Trio have split up.

This was the second movie.

At one point one of the Trio says something along the lines of “Remember all those adventures we had as the Heroic Trio?” and I, as viewer, could only proclaim “WELL I SURE FUCKING DON’T!” Not only am I still baffled why they felt post-apocalyptic was a natural next step (there was no hint of the impending collapse of society in the first movie), they spent the entire first movie creating the Heroic Trio and then skipped over their entire existence as a unit. It would be like if Christopher Nolan had gone straight from Batman Begins to The Dark Knight Rises–no, to the second half of The Dark Knight Rises, when Bane already controls the city. The origin comes at the beginning, “years after retirement” comes at the end, but something is supposed to go in the middle.

That was a lot of time spent on an obscure Chinese film. Seem to be running out of room to also diss the Terminator franchise. Okay. Speed mode. The central premises of the first two Terminators were a) unstoppable robot assassins from the future trying to kill people in the present, aided by the heroes’ lack of access to futuristic weapons; and b) the idea that the War of the Machines can be won or even prevented through time travel. Sarah Connor clings to the belief that “There is no fate but what we make for ourselves,” while the entire time travel gambit was a hail-Mary desperation ploy by Skynet to avert its impending defeat at the hands of John Connor. Terminator 2 hammered this notion, and was the best of the franchise. Terminator 3 immediately threw it all out and declared the Judgement Day could not be prevented, only delayed.

Think about that for a moment. They’re not saying that man creating an AI is inevitable, or even that man and sentient machine going to war is inevitable; they’re saying that man creating a military AI named Skynet who nukes the planet and invents Terminators and time travel is inevitable. Is that not a weirdly specific turn of events to be unavoidable? And if Judgement Day can’t be prevented, than why can a successful human resistance be stopped by killing John Connor as a child? Either future events are set in stone or they’re not. If stopping Skynet’s inventor only means that someone else invents the exact same Skynet, then wouldn’t some other visionary warrior rise up in place of John Connor? If the future can’t be stopped, isn’t this entire time travel cold war between man and machine a gigantic waste of time? Like Terminator 3 turned out to be?

Sadly I’m out of time to talk about Terminator: Salvation, except to say that it threw out the franchise’s other premise by setting the movie post-Judgement Day and having regular, modern-day weapons work just fine against the previously bullet-proof Terminators. Bad writers, no cookie.

Sequels ruined horror movies

As a final note on sequels, here’s how I think they’ve mutated the slasher movie horror sub-genre into something I have a harder time enjoying than I used to. See, in order to have a franchise, you normally need a strong recurring character or characters to hang it off. James Bond, Indiana Jones, Michael Corleone, Ripley, etc. Someone we’re happy to root for time and time again. But for slasher flicks, your central, recurring character is your monster: Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees, Chucky, etc. They’re the ones who keep coming back to kill a fresh crop of victims, one of whom is a determined yet tormented heroine (or Tommy Jarvis) who despite losing friends, family, and/or potential lovers, is finally able to dispatch the fiend. Who inevitably comes back because they want to make another one.

The problem is that since the killers are typically the only or at least primary recurring characters, they eventually become the most interesting ones in order to keep the audience’s attention through fresh, new ways to kill teenagers for having premarital sex. The kills are, after all, the only variety the franchise is getting other than finding different locales for the carnage, be it Manhattan or, when they’re really desperate, space. This means that the struggle to stop the monster becomes depressingly futile. Jason had the decency to stalk a fresh new batch of teenagers each time (except for the above mentioned Tommy Jarvis, who killed Jason twice but went a little crazy in between), but Freddy Krueger usually kicked off his latest movie by finishing off the survivors from the last one. So their big triumph over Freddy lasted about a year, tops.

And that has become ingrained into contemporary slasher movies to the point where the villain’s inevitable return isn’t just hinted at any more. Now Freddy, Jason, and Victor Crowley‘s defeat at the hands of the Final Girl doesn’t even last until the end of the movie, as they’re back from the dead and killing again right as the credits start to roll. I’d call that an unsatisfying ending, but it isn’t even an ending! A four-minute lull in Jason trying to kill Jared Padalecki doesn’t mean the story is over if he’s just going to leap up and start again afterwards. Also, that’s Sam goddamn Winchester, Vorhees. Just stay down.

But to a certain audience, maybe that works. The audience that is down with rooting for the killer, not the victims. But that mentality leads to House of 1,000 Corpses, which from what I could tell was about glorifying the killers to the point that the victims make no effort to fight back, as they only exist to be creatively dispatched, and I honestly cannot think of a movie I’ve loathed more than that. I haven’t seen all of it, and I don’t intend to.

There are probably other ways to botch a sequel. Maybe you can name some. In fact, I encourage you to do so in the comments. But I’ve taken up enough of your time for now. Thanks for your time, I’ll try not to let day jobs keep me from posting for so long again.