Superheroes posts

“Oh no! Even though THR forgot how bad I was, EL is darkening my bad name again!”

The Hollywood Reporter put together a ranking of every Marvel movie ever made. I mean ever. Roger Corman is included. So is “Man-Thing,” a 2005 film I didn't even know existed. 

All in all, it's not a bad list. It was put together by John DeFore, Leslie Felperin, and Jordan Mintzer, and my main beefs, off the top of my head, would be:

• “Guardians of the Galaxy” should be higher
• “Spider-Man 3” should be much, much lower 

Aw, fuck it. Here's their ranking, and mine, sorted by the difference between us. (I've eliminated the seven or so Marvel movies I haven't seen: the “Blade” movies and the like.) Links go to my reviews.

The movies at the top are the ones THR ranked higher; at the bottom, the ones I ranked higher. Your results will vary. 

Yeah, that's right. I'll go out on a limb that FF2015 wasn't great but it's not nearly as bad as everyone's making it out to be. I think it's the best of the FFs. Low bar, I know. 

Mostly, though, I agree with THR.

Researching this post, I found myself reading the last issue of the 1950s Captain America series. At that time, superhero comics were on the outs and Timely/Marvel was down to Cap, who was in his “commie smasher” persona; but his run finally ended with issue #78 in Sept. 1954.

In the last story of that last issue, he battles Chuck Blayne, the idol of American boys everywhere, who counsels them to keep clean minds, strong bodies and “play to win.” Cap is suspicious.  

As he should be, since Blayne is really a Soviet spy. To be honest, Blayne's plot is lame. He tries to turn American boys against the U.N. by showing how weak it is, and, in this regard, plants a bomb and laughs that no one can do anything about it. It's a little over-the-top. Surely someone could've come up with a less maniacal plan. 

After Cap wins the day, he talks up who Blayne initially reminded him of. These are the last panels of Captain America until he was resurrected by Stan and Jack in Avengers #4 in March 1963:

Two things in particular struck me about this story:

• The U.N. is seen as a positive force, something our enemies are trying to undermine. I guess it would be a while before the whole “black helicopters” meme took a stronger hold in the right-wing mind. 
• Play to win vs. Good sportsmanship. Cf., any Donald Trump speech.

I don't remember where I got this photo, but it reminds me how much I miss the comic book spinner racks that used to be in every drug store, and quite a few supermarkets, when I was growing up in the 1970s. When did they disappear? Late '70s? I think specialty comic stores began to get better deals from the manufacturer/distributor, comic book geeks flocked there, boom. Another example of our social fragmentation.

The photo must be from around May 1956 since the Superman comic in the kid's hands is this one, which is May 1956. Other clues: The Action Comics on the rack is most likely this April 1956 one, while the real key is “Matt Slade, Gunfighter,” which only ran for four issues, all of them in, of course, 1956. The one on the rack appears to be Matt Slade #1. Collector's item!

For all the nostalgia of the photo, it was a bad time for comic books. The post-war comic bonfires of the late '40s were followed by Dr. Frederic Wertham's denunciations of how comics warped young minds (made us violent and/or gay); this was followed by U.S. Senate hearings. As a result we got the Comics Code Authority and a lot of westerns and kids comics (Little Lulu, Casper, Woody Woodpecker) as well as celebrity comics, such as “The Adventures of Bob Hope,” which ran from 1950 to 1968, believe it or not. What superheroes remained became toothless. Marvel/Timely was in fact out of the superhero biz: Its remaining hero, Capt. America, ended his run in Sept. 1954.

Kid seems happy enough, though.

How bad is the new “Fantastic Four”? Its director, Josh Trank, who directed the well-received “Chronicle” a few years ago, is already making excuses, blaming the movie studio in all but name in a tweet that was posted yesterday and then quickly removed, but not before it was archived. 

Which movie studio? Fox, of course. The studio that would give goddamned webshooters and a bat cape to Wolverine.  

Here's the list of superhero movies they've released since their own “X-Men” reinvented the genre back in 2000, along with Rotten Tomatoes ratings and IMDb ratings:

Essentially Bryan Singer started them off with two good “X-Men” movies, then they screwed up for the next decade with crappy, mind-numbing movies until they revived the “X-Men” series in a positive-ish way. Plus Josh Trank's “Chronicle.”

It could be that Trank's original vision wasn't that good. It could be that the Fantastic Four, Marvel's first superheroes, who are more or less updated versions of 1) Plastic Man, 2) The WWII-era Human Torch, 3) The Invisible Man and 4) every rock creature out of every crappy 1950s Marvel mag, just don't work in the 21st century.

But I'm betting there are idiot execs at Fox who ruined this thing with their dumb ideas. Or at least ruined it further.

Whatta revoltin' development. 

ADDENDUM: My friend Ciam pointed me to this Vulture piece on the long, tangled, gossip-ridden buzz for the new FF movie, and which mostly blames Trank and lets the studio off the hook. Maybe. But that doesn't explain all of the above. 

From the studio that brought You Elektra, Daredevil, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, X-Men: The Last Stand, and the first two shitty Fantastic Four movies.

Here's what I wrote in June 2013 at the end of my review of “Man of Steel”:

“Man of Steel” raises interesting questions only to abandon them to spectacle. ... One can hope, in the next movie, it’s not business as usual in Metropolis, that there are people still freaked by what happened, and that, even as some view Superman as a god-like figure, others blame him for bringing near destruction to the planet, for bringing the Kryptonian warriors here in the first place, and search for ways to destroy him or control him. There should be a vocal element again him. The more decent he is, the more vocal they should become. He should be perplexed by this. He should always look at us and wonder whether we’re worth saving.

It looks like I get my wish:

In this trailer, we finally get a sense of why the Batman animus toward Superman. One of those tall buildings that crumbled in Superman's battle with Zod in “Man of Steel” belonged to Wayne Enterprises, and people died, his people, and that's why Batman is pissed; that's why he comes back; that's why he fights Superman.

Better, the world is still freaked. Powerful forces (Holly Hunter, Lex Luthor, et al.) still want to control what they can't control. Those in need view Superman as a Godlike figure.

I still have causes for concern: 1) Why is Wonder Woman in this? 2) Zack Snyder, auteur for the doofus generation, is still directing it. 

But this trailer gives me hope. You know: hope. 

FOX News watchers protest the Man of Steel.

Superman's good deeds, about to go punished. 

This is pretty good although the “'78” is a bit of a misnomer. I'll give them the Hulk but the Thor episodes came about in, I believe, 1988, while the Captain America movie was from 1979. I know that one for sure because I suffered through it last year.

Anyone know the “Black Widow” or “Iron Man” or “Tony Stark” characters? I love the Hawkeye takeoff. But my favorite joke is probably “Paul Lynde as Loki.” You had to live through the '70s to truly appreciate that one. 

Good theme music, too. Yes, we were lame. 

Now these characters, who barely made it onto TV in the '70s in this watered-down form, gross $1.5 billion worldwide from one movie alone.

Add Melissa Benoist to the list of ... um ... Well, gee (and Great Scott), how many actresses have played Supergirl?

IMDb lists 21 appearances of Supergirl as character (cf.: 248 appearances for Superman, 301 for Batman, 54 for Aquaman), but many are duplicates, or cartoons, or essentially fan fiction. So who really counts? 

Helen Slater appears on the list twice, for example: from the abysmal 1984 theatrical movie, and in a 2010 documentary called “Heroic Ambition,” all about Metropolis, Ill., and its annual Superman celebration. The second actress to play Supergirl was Nicholle Tom, who voiced the Girl of Steel in five episodes of “Superman: The Animated Series,” one episode of “Batman: The New Adventures,” and seven episodes of “Justice League.” Other cartoon Supergirls include Nicole Sullivan (of “Mad TV” fame) in the short-lived “Super Best Friends Forever,” Summer Glau in “Superman/Batman: Apocalypse,” and Molly Quinn in “Superman: Unbound.”

For live-action Supergirls after Slater? There's Laura Vandervoort, who had a recurring role as Kara/Supergirl on “Smallville”; but IMDb also counts Michelle Prenez, who did a comic turn as the Girl of Steel on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” Lissy Smith in Max Landis' straight-to-YouTube hit “The Death and Return of Superman,” Kristen Bell as “Fake Supergirl” in “Movie 43,” and various forms of fan fiction (Briana Stancer; Jaclyn DeDoux). 

If you eliminate the fan fiction, short comic turns, and dupes, you wind up with only six previous Supergirls: Slater, Vandervoort, Tom, Sullivan, Glau and Quinn. 

If you eliminate the cartoons, you wind up with only two previous Supergirls: Slater and Vandervoort. 

But if you only count actresses who have played Supergirl in movies or TV shows about Supergirl? Then it only happened once before. And that one sucked. 

SLIDESHOW: A HISTORY OF SUPERGIRL ON SCREEN

In case you haven't seen this yet. It was tweeted by (who else?) Zack Snyder, director of the upcoming “Superman vs. Batman” movie:

A lot of fanboys were up in arms when Gal Gadot was cast, but she looks fine. But it's just a still photo. We'll see. 

(Imagine the whining, btw, if we were all online in 1987 when Warner Bros. chose Tim Burton to direct “Batman,” and Burton chose Michael Keaton to play Batman. There would've been bitching right up to the first trailer; then silence.)

So is she in a volcano or something there? I never quite got Wonder Woman. What were her powers again? She's not invulnerable so she should probably suit up a bit, particularly if she's in a volcano. Other thoughts about the character in my review of the 2012 documentary “Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines.”

After this shot was leaked, and coupled with the leaked photos of Affleck as Batman and Cavill as Superman, “DC Comics Talk” tweeted a shot of all three along with this challenge: “Your turn, Marvel.” To which I had to tweet back this. Because, I mean, c'mon. 

The first Batman movie came out in 1943 and we got the fifth one in 1992—49 years later.

The first Superman movie came out in 1948 and we got the fifth one in 1981—33 years later.

The first Spider-Man movie was released in 2002 and here we are with the fifth film—a mere 12 years later. Time keeps speeding up. Are we getting tired yet? Do we have franchise fatigue? A little. Speaking for myself anyway.

But, as I did with the Batman movies and the Superman movies, now I do with the Spider-Man movies: rank ’em from worst to best.

Worst (5) and best (1) are easy. But there’s a good debate to be had in the middle.

5. Spider-Man 3 (2007) 
One of the worst ideas in any superhero movie is the “evil” version of the main character, and “Spider-Man 3,” following the lead of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, goes that exact route. It also creates a pretty tepid version of evil. Superman in “Superman III,” you’ll remember, rights the Leaning Tower of Pisa, gets drunk in a bar, and sleeps with a blonde. That’s about it. Peter Parker? Kinda the same. He struts down the street like Travolta, styles his hair like Hitler, and makes an ass of himself at a bar. He also has the Russian girl across the hallway make him cookies. With milk. But that’s not nearly the worst part of this awful, awful movie. Spider-Man’s psychological motivation to fight crime—and it’s one of the best in comicdom—is based upon the fact that he let go the man who later killed his Uncle Ben; that if he’d cared enough to stop the dude in the first place, Uncle Ben would be alive. What does “3” do with that? It actually makes someone else responsible for the death of Uncle Ben. I can’t begin to state how incredibly wrong that is. It’s as if Bruce Wayne found out that all this time his parents have been alive and hanging out in the Bahamas.

4. The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
The point of most of our stories is this: What does the guy want and how does he get it? So what does Marc Webb’s Peter Parker want? In the beginning, he wants to find out about his parents but never does. Then he wants to bring Uncle Ben’s killer to justice but doesn’t do that, either. Then he wants a girl, particulary Gwen Stacy, and gets her, but she has to do most of the heavy lifting. Plus he promises a dying Capt. Stacy to stay away from her. Which he doesn’t do. But he does act like James Dean from time to time. As if that’s a thing.

3. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)
It’s not as bad as everyone is making it out to be, but it’s not quite good, either. It’s got great fight scenes and great smart-ass patter out of Spidey, but it’s overlong and unnecessarily convoluted. It’s as convoluted as the number of screenwriters it has: four. Was this movie fixable? Maybe. Lose the Richard Parker storyline, give us less Hamlet-like dithering on the Peter-Gwen romance, emphasize Harry more. Maybe lose Electro. Not only does his story not resonate, it pushes Green Goblin to the side. Which is like putting Baby in the corner.

2. Spider-Man (2002)
It’s a pretty faithful adaptation—one of the first. Tobey Maguire is your Steve Ditko-era Peter Parker, though a little sweeter, and with the ability to shoot webs out of his wrists rather than out of homemade web shooters. He calls the Green Goblin “Gobby” and M.J. calls him “Tiger.” Our hero is happy as Spider-Man and unhappy as Peter Parker, and that’s pretty much how it works. Hell, they even improve upon the origin. In Amazing Fantasy #15, when the petty thief runs past Spider-Man, we recognize that Spider-Man’s refusal to help is the act of a selfish jerk. Peter’s not us here; he’s other. In the movie, the petty thief rips off the wrestling promoter who has just ripped off Peter Parker. “I missed the part where that’s my problem,” the promoter tells Peter when Peter complains. This allows Peter, 30 seconds later, to throw the words back at him. “You coulda stopped that guy easy,” the promoter complains. “I missed the part where that’s my problem,” Peter tells him. Here’s how good that is: When I first saw “Spider-Man” in 2002, some moviegoers, who obviously didn’t know where the story was going, actually laughed. They’d been trained to expect put-down quips from their action heroes, and this was a better quip than most. The laughter is indicative. Peter’s not other here; he’s us. Thus when the horrible lesson is imparted, it’s imparted to us, too. With great power comes great responsibility. It’s a lesson our culture doesn’t deliver much.

1. Spider-Man 2 (2004)
It’s based upon one of the classics of the Silver Age of Comics, Spider-Man #50, “Spider-Man No More!,” written by Stan Lee and drawn by John Romita and published in July 1967, in which our hero, tired of losing as Peter Parker as often as he wins as Spider-Man, dumps the Spidey costume in a back alley and gets on with his life. The filmmakers internalize this dilemma—he doesn’t reject his powers, he’s losing them—but it’s all in his head, and it’s all because he’s denying the love he feels for Mary Jane Watson. So it goes. The movie’s battles up and down the skyscrapers of Manhattan are still thrilling 10 years later, the superhero pieta inside the elevated train is still touching, and we get one of the great reveals in superhero movies. From the Scarlet Pimpernel to Zorro to Superman to Spider-Man, there’s been a girl. The girl loves the hero but dislikes, or is disappointed in, or doesn’t even acknowledge, the hero in his secret form. It’s the classic love triangle of superherodom and a solace for unrequited lovers everywhere. I.e., she rejects the nerdy me (Clark) because she doesn’t see the real me (Superman). She rejects me because she fails to see what’s super in me. The superhero love triangle plays upon our deepest, saddest fantasies. And here, in one scene, the girl finally gets it. The disconnect is connected. The two men become one. 

What about you? How would you rank  them? 

Last week, in anticipation of “The Amazing Spider-Man 2,” I rewatched the second installment of Sam Raimi's “Spider-Man” trilogy (review up soon), and during the opening credits, as they panned in and out of actors' names, this flashed on the screen as a portion of lead actor Tobey Maguire's name:

Good thing I'm not a conspiracy theorist.

Reviews of “Amazing 2” are less than amazing—worst ever for the two franchises. Worse than “Spider-Man 3”? I'll believe that when I see it. Which I believe will be tonight. 

With “Amazing Spider-Man 2” on the way, is it time to ask the question that the first “Spider-Man 2” suggests? Namely: Do the Yankees suck?

Here’s the guy who finds Spidey’s outfit in a garbage can and brings it to J.  Jonah Jameson. He winds up selling it for a measly $100:

And here’s the guy on the elevated train who helps carry Spidey back, in pieta fashion, after his epic battle with Doc Ock. He’s also the one who says, “He’s ... just a kid. No older than my son.”

He’s also the last one to let go of Spidey when Doc Ock returns to finish him off.

So is it better to be a Mets fan than a Yankees fan in the Spider-Man universe? Do the Yankees suck according to Spider-Man? In the series, Yankee fans can always point to this in their favor. But Peter Parker did grow up in Queens, which is where Shea Stadium was and Citi Field is. And he is an underdog. 

One wonders how the rest of the Spider-Man universe divides itself up. Norman Osborne probably had a suite at Yankee Stadium. He probably gladhanded with George Steinbrenner. Kingpin? Yankees, totally. Flash Thompson? Yankees again. J.J.J. should be rooting for the Mets (Daily Bugle/Daily News) but the Yankees sell newspapers, so he's probably going there. Robbie's probably a Mets fan, though, if not an old Brooklyn Dodgers fan. Maybe he's still loyal to the Dodgers. Quietly, though, the way he's loyal to Spider-Man. 

We'll see how the baseball caps line up, if they line up, in “Amazing Spider-Man 2” in a few weeks. 

UPDATE FROM A COMICS FAN: “Spidey is canonically a Mets fan in the comics. Glad to see that the movie got that right!”

The cast for the Fantastic Four reboot was announced yesterday, and, looking at the picture below, it took me a while to piece together who was who.

Sure, Sue Storm. But initially I thought Jamie Bell, with the ears, was Mr. Fantastic. Maybe because he looks older? And if Kate Mara is Sue Storm and Michael B. Jordan is Johnny Storm, one of them has to be adopted, n'est-ce pas? Unless Mr. or Mrs. Storm remarried. Or we're all colorblind like Stephen Colbert.

Reed, Sue, Ben, Johnny.

But my main thought was everyone's main thought: Wow, they're young.

I know. It's Ultimate Fantastic Four, in which our heroes are young.

Even so, they're young. Kate Mara, at 31, is the oldest. She was was born in February 1983. Jamie Bell came three years later, in March 1986. Both Jordan and Miles Teller were born in 1987: Feb 9 and Feb. 20, respectively. Which means Mr. Fantastic is actually the youngest of the Fantastic Four. No gray temples for you, buddy. It also means we have another British actor, Bell, playing a quintessential American superhero, Ben Grimm, aka The Thing. Wotta revoltin' development.

But at least they're all good actors. And it's directed by Josh Trank (b. 1985), who didn't do poorly with “Chronicle.”

Besides, it couldn't be worse than the previous “Fantastic Four” movies, could it? Could it, Fox Studios?

Gal Gadot, Miss Israel 2004, and an actress best-known in the states for playing Gisele in the three most recent “Fast & Furious” movies, has been cast as Wonder Woman in Zack Snyder's upcoming “Batman vs. Superman” movie—the belated attempt by Warner Bros. and DC Comics to replicate the huge box-office success of “The Avengers” movie.

But better get those bullet-proof bracelets up, bubelah. It didn't take long before fanboys were taking potshots. These are simply comments on IMDb.com. Can't imagine what it's like over at Twitter:

• a skinny chick with not the hint of muscle tone... good choice
• i prefer megan fox to be the wonder woman
• was still hoping Gina Carano might get cast
• an Amazon Princess shouldn't look like she's starving to death...
• Crap choice ... and isn't that girl to [sic] skinny?

I believe “skinny” is code for something.

At least there was this response:

• The problem is that Zack Snyder is still going to direct it

Agreed. Oy. 

Gal pal, Amazonian princess.

The female Avengers via FanArtExhibit. Missing: Black Widow as a man.

This article by Alyssa Rosenberg, “Legendary Comics Creators Dismiss Sexism Critiques,” in which she confronted comic book creators Michael Kantor, Todd McFarlane, Len Wein and Gerry Conway about sexism in the industry, made the rounds among geeks last week.

Here's McFarlane's response to the charge of sexism within comic books:

As much as we stereotype the women, we do it with the guys. The guys are all good looking, not too many ugly superheroes. They’ve all got their hair gelled back. They have got perfect pecs on them. They have no hair on their chest. I mean, they are Ryan Gosling on steroids. Right? They are all beautiful. So we actually stereotype and do it to both sexes. We just happen to show a little more skin when we get to the ladies.

Here's Rosenberg's written response to that response:

It’s an ancient canard that male heroes are as idealized as women, an idea that ignores their costumes, the difference between a fantasy of power you want to inhabit and sexual ability you want to take advantage of, and the contrast between admiring what someone can do with their body, and what you can do to theirs.

It's a smart-enough response if a bit dismissive of the effect comic books and superheroes have on boys. Plus it's neither a canard nor ancient.

It also ignores the way power tends to be conveyed in our culture. For men, it's still about what you do; for women it's still about how you look. This has been changing during my lifetime, and unfortunately toward greater shallowness for both genders. The 1970s feminist critique of the objectification of women hasn't led to women being less objectified, but it has created more objectification of men in terms of their looks. (The idea that men were never objectified is incorrect. They were objectified by what they did, and how much they earned. That hasn't gone away.)

What's the endgame in the argument? That's what I'm curious about. Is Rosenberg suggesting that better female superheroes will create greater female readership? Or will empower that female readership? As it's done all these years with boys? Except, right, it hasn't empowered shit, has it? There's no correlation between reading fantasies of superhuman powers and being empowered in the real world. Judging from a typical comic convention, you might say it's the opposite. You might even say girls are better off without this particular superpowered fantasy to contend with.

You want empowerment? Here. Figuring out what's missing in a particular medium is, yes, a sign that there's something wrong with that medium. But if the medium is thriving, and has the attention of the marketplace, it's also a glorious opportunity.

Further reading on the subject: a review of the documentary “Women Women! The Untold Story of American Heroines.”