I’m right that this is a thing, aren’t I? First, there’s the awesome-looking trailer for X-Men: First Class, which, like Mad Men, appears to be a movie about people with secret identities living in Westchester County in the 1960s:

Now, we’ve got the World War II awesomeness of Captain America: The First Avenger, which looks terrific and cartoony-but-not-cheap in the way the beginning of Hellboy was:

I sort of wonder if this is all due to Pirates of the Caribbean, which is getting back to its period roots (I actually think part of what made the first movie effective was the sense of English gentility badly transplanted into a world where the line between natural hazards of a new colony and the supernatural were delicately shaded) by looping in Edward Teach in the fourth installment in the franchise:

Jack Sparrow legitimately counts as sort of a superhero, right? Particularly when they remember to make him competent and crazy, instead of fey and annoying?

Anyway, I’ll be curious to see if this becomes a genuine trend (Watchmen obviously has the opening credits, but the movie does take place in contemporary times, even if they’re not precisely our own). I don’t know if we’re reaching back into the past for trials that seem to require sufficiently superheroic response, or if we want the world around our human cartoons to be exaggerated and stylish as well.

I don’t actually have it yet. But I feel a twinge of disappointment on learning that SyFy’s development slate is so heavily stacked with stories about people with extraordinary abilities. If we’re really thinking about what’s going to happen in the future, it doesn’t just involve changes in what it means to be human, a category of change of which superpowers are really only subset. It betrays a lack of ambition, or perhaps an extreme narcissism, that those appear to be the only themes we can think of.

We need a Red Mars adaptation.We need a great Ender’s Game adaptation. We need an awesome, weird, movie series based on Mary Doria Russell’s Rakhat novels. I would also really like adaptations of Steel Beach and Brothers. And this is just the adaptations. Stories about exploration of other planets, about encounters with aliens that don’t just involve blowing up downtown Los Angeles, stories about environmental degradation, about the advancements of medicine and their costs—there is so much we have to do with science and speculative fiction. I hate the lack of ambition people have for the genre. Romantic comedies are about fulfilling specific urges and cliched narratives. Science fiction ought to be part of the way we dream ourselves into our own future.

This looks unfortunate:

Or rather, Kim Cattrall looks like she gives pretty good performance in what is otherwise a fairly obvious-looking movie that pretends to be daring by combining sex and the countryside.

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by my frequent Twitter interlocutor Dirk Lester. I asked him to give this a shot after we had a conversation about some of these topics online. All of which is to say if you grab me on Twitter, I will talk back. I’m @alyssarosenberg. But back to the post…

This is a good example of a project that appears to have an appropriate sense of its proper scope. More, please. Though less overwrought disasters and more original stories.

I’ve been trying to come up with something to say about Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All other than that they make me feel kind of antiquated. But mostly I just think they’re a smart collective. If I hadn’t felt compelled to root around them a bit in the first place, I probably never would have stumbled upon Frank Ocean, who I think is just divine:

This may sound like an odd comparison but “Novacane” sort of reminds me of early Everclear, at least in the juxtaposition of the material and the slightly off optimism:

I like the idea of a lot of things about Odd Future. I like the idea of a woman doing a bunch of a hip-hop collective’s beats, and I like some of Tyler, the Creator’s rhymes, even if he’s not really my ideal technical MC, and I’m not really going to put myself through listening to some of the group’s darker material because I find it emotionally exhausting. But having someone like Frank gives me my own way to like Odd Future, which even if the group doesn’t stick together (as I sort of suspect they might not), getting me on the train if not in the same car with everyone else.

Pop-punk? I ask this in all sincerity, mostly because someone sent me Bowling For Soup’s “High School Never Ends” during an instant message conversation:

I wouldn’t say I felt the pale flame of nostalgia or anything, but it did make me go huh, and remember how much fun the video for “1985,” was, and how good the band was at contributing to at pop culture if not at actually contributing to it:

The same was much more aggressively true of blink-182, of course, about whom I feel much more strongly:

So what happened? Did pop culture just get so shamelessly ridiculous that there wasn’t room for this kind of internal critique? Did it seem unnecessary coming from dudes with unapologetically terrible and intense emotional awareness of how absurdly they were behaving? I don’t kid myself that the music was great, but I kind of miss this kind of thing:

It’s a lot more honest in its fear and foolishness than Judd Apatow movies, anyway.

Heh:

I think it’s time for my annual watching of Fever Pitch in preparation for the True Arrival of Spring. It has been a long winter.

I hope there never comes a day when a new Britney Spears album makes me feel anything less than happy. It’s not that Britney is anything close to a great musician, but she’s well-engineered, and sometimes you need music that’s emotionally uncomplicated, where the emotional crescendo is never ecstatic, but the lows aren’t too bad either. To my mind, the standout song on Femme Fatale, which drops today, is the pleasantly eccentric, low-key “How I Roll”:

It took me a couple of listens to decide that, and now I sort of can’t stop listening to it. The song’s profoundly silly: its got these bubbly, poppy sounds setting the pace. Britney actually declares at one point that she’s got “nine lives, like a kitty cat.” But it’s playful without being outrageously, desperately sexy, exactly the right tempo to bop your head along to in the car on a sunny day. Which is of course what it’s intended for. Sometimes there’s virtue in just hitting the hell out of your mark, however modest that mark might be. The whole album’s streaming here.

I’m not sure why the number surprised me, but I was kind of shocked to find out that during the heyday of the procedure, 40,000 Americans underwent lobotomies. 40,000 people had parts of their brains cut away because they were diagnosably mentally ill, or because they had crushing headaches, or because they made their stepmother uncomfortable, or because they didn’t fit in with an overachieving family. The main proponent of the transorbital lobotomy did double lobotomies two-handed just to show off that he could. I say all of this before actually discussing Sucker Punch, because however baroque and terrible you think Zack Snyder’s first movie based on original material is, the thing that catalyzes the sailor suits and the clockwork zombies and dragons, the moment when a girl becomes a prisoner of the psychiatric system that will eventually rob her of her brain? That kind of thing was true. It happened.


Sucker Punch is a bad movie, but it’s not as bad as most people think it is, and it will probably never get credit for its virtues, which include the following. There are spoilers if you care:


1) Snyder started working on Sucker Punch seven months before Warner Brothers declared that they just weren’t doing movies with female leads. As Nikki Finke put it at the time, “I’m told [Jeff Robinov] doesn’t even want to see a script with a woman in the primary position (which now is apparently missionary at WB).” He set the project aside for a while to make Watchmen, but the success of that movie got him the go-ahead to make Sucker Punch, and to subvert the No Girls Allowed rule. There are a lot of potential counters to this argument: it’s ensemble picture, it’s a male fantasy so it doesn’t count, etc. I don’t buy it. Snyder’s ideas about women may be weird, and messed up, and objectifying (and I don’t think they always are, but that’s another discussion), but at the end of the day, he wants them in his lens. When he got the chance to tell an original story, he chose to tell one about women.


2) The only major credible female action star in Hollywood today is Angelina Jolie. When Katherine Heigl holds a gun, it’s supposed to be cute and dippy and a little risky. When Sandra Bullock carries a pistol, it’s supposed to be in her lingerie. Gabrielle Anwar is reasonably effectively triggerwoman, but she remains on the small screen at present, and it remains to be seen if she’ll make the jump beyond Burn Notice. No matter how much of a mess Sucker Punch is, at minimum Abbie Cornish, the marvelous Jenna Malone, and Emily Browning are now women whom directors and producers can imagine plausibly bearing arms (I thought the two other women were less convincing). Credentialing is important. Sndyer has given three women their spurs. It’s up to them, and to the rest of Hollywood, what horses they decide to use them on.


3) This is a movie with six major female characters and nobody has to decide between a job and a man. There are multiple attempted sexual assaults in the movie, and avoiding those assaults is of course critically important to the characters and a driver of the plot. But these women don’t want to break out of a creepy Vermont mental institution to like, meet guys. Their role as a superhero is not complicated by whether they’re going to bang the blue irradiated dude or the nerd with a flying owl car. The only moment of sexual heat comes near the beginning when Abbie Cornish locks eyes with Emily Browning across a bleak, emptied out theater, a glance that goes on a bit too long, that becomes the basis for the world Browning’s character builds in her mind. They want to be free, with all the white-hot blankness that implies, where the purity and power of your choice is stimulating and terrifying. This is a different kind of story about women, and even if it’s stumbling and stupid and sometimes ugly, it’s a relief.


4) This is a distinctly female story. And I’m surprised no one’s discussing the ending, and the complicated themes of self-sacrifice at its core. Going into the movie, I expected a bunch of sexy asskicking. I didn’t really expect Snyder to pull a Joss Whedon. In the course of this movie, three of the main characters die, and their deaths are genuinely shocking. Malone throws herself in front of a knife to save Cornish, playing her sister. Vanessa Hudgens’ and Jamie Chung’s characters are murdered. And, that moment between Abbie Cornish and Emily Browning? At the end of the movie, Babydoll sacrifices herself to save Sweet Pea, gives herself up to Jon Hamm’s lobotomist as a distraction so another woman can run away. They all choose collaboration. The price of getting just one woman to freedom is so high. And while that’s less dramatically true in the world at large, I think it’s still true.


That’s not uncomplicated. It’s not a straightforward feminist message, or a feminist message at all. But something about Babydoll’s decision reminds me a little bit of another New England crazy woman, Anne Sexton, who is less read than Sylvia Plath, who raged towards the dying of the light at enormous cost to those around her. “Suicides have a special language,” she wrote in “Wanting to Die,” “Like carpenters they want to know which tools. / They never ask why build.” At the end of Sucker Punch, Babydoll understands herself to be the tool. She chooses to be it.


And of course we’re uncomfortable with the idea that she chooses surrender, mental death. We should be! We should be outraged that the Kennedys destroyed their daughter’s brain, and when Jack ran for president, the family lied and said she was a schoolteacher living in Wisconsin and she wanted to stay out of public life, and they got away with it. We should be deeply freaked out by the fact that smart women felt, that they sometimes still feel, that there is no option other than oblivion. Sure, it would be nice to live in a world where we have a plethora of female action stars, where we have figured out the superheroine costume conundrum, where women are safe from rape and coercion. But that freedom is as much a fantasy as dragons, as magic swords. I think Zack Snyder doesn’t understand a lot of things, but he understands that. 

I know I’m supposed to be excited about Larry Crowne because it’s Julia Roberts! And Tom Hanks! And it’s uplifiting and redemptive and junk!

But really, I’m mostly excited that Malcolm Barrett, who was so fantastic as half of the Nerd Duo in Better Off Ted, is in the class that Hanks takes with Roberts. It’s been a totally decent couple of months for veterans of that gone-too-soon sitcom, actually. Andrea Anders is just fine on Mr. Sunshine, John Slavin’s hanging out with Better With You. I sort of can’t believe that Portia di Rossi doesn’t have another regular gig yet, but at least we’ll get her in the Arrested Development movie. Now, we just need to get Jay Harrington scheduled into something that will make use of his slight off-kilter wholesomeness, and I’ll feel better about the industry, even if it couldn’t keep the gang together.

So, turns out Neal Stephenson’s next novel is going to be about gold farming. Have any of you read Cory Doctorow’s For the Win? I feel like I ought to give that a shot before Stephenson’s Remade comes out.

But in any case, I’m optimistic. One of the things I thought Stephenson did very well in Cryptonomicon was to capture the absurdities of emerging economies. Obviously, the data haven business Randy and Avi were standing up in that book was just an enormous red herring. But Stephenson’s sketches of the various characters involved in the enterprise are deft and funny (even if the book doesn’t necessarily need them). Similarly, his description of the parking-lot standoff is tense, funny, and evocative. It’s vastly less important for the outcome than for the description of a whole society mobilized on a tiny scale.

I’ll be curious if he takes on gold mining for the purposes of social critique, as Doctorow did, or if he’s going to dive into it as a big, freewheeling, consequential international story. This might be a good basis for it. Or knowing Stephenson, he’ll come up with something entirely new.

Spoilers through chapter sixteen of Chasm City appear below the jump, but as usual, please don’t spoil beyond that. The first installment of the book club appears here. Let’s go through chapter 26 for next week.

Noir’s an interesting genre, with its basis in the assumption that the main characters are denying emotions that the readers are quicker to realize they have than the characters are to acknowledge that they’re experiencing them. Successful noir may take a complicated path to that acknowledgement, and it may be momentary, but that wellspring absolutely has to be there for the story to work.

I think much of the trouble I’m having with Chasm City comes from the fact that I can’t find the wellspring here. Our nun, Amelia, doesn’t want much more than to be left alone. Tanner wants revenge for the death of a woman who is a sort of depressingly passive and semi-incompetent version of a manic pixie dream girl. The person he’s trying to kill obviously experiences profound emotions of revenge, but we don’t even have a glimpse of him yet. And there’s not a lot about this society that feels terrifically compelling. As Tanner says at one point:

We knew what could be achieved, but we lacked the time or resources to duplicate what had been achieved elsewhere, or the planetary finances to buy off-the-shelf miracles from passing traders. Teh only occasions when we bought any new technologies was when they had some direct military application, and even then it almost bankrupted us. Instead, we fought centuries-long wars with infantry, tanks, jet fighters, chemical bombs and crude nuclear devices; only rarely graduating to such giddy heights as particle-weapons or nanotech-inspired gadetry. No wonder the Ultras had treated us with such ill-concealed contempt. We were savages compared to them, and the hardest thing of all was the fact that we knew it to be true.

As cynical as it is, it’s not actually cynical enough. It’s not time or resources that’s stunted this society—it’s will and priorities. I don’t know why I’m supposed to care about about these brutish people. I’d like to spend more time with the Ultras, but that’s not what I’m getting.

Much of the rest of the society we’re spending time with feels similarly tired. The mist-jumpers take horrendous risks because they’re bored. The other residents of the Canopy hunt people from the Mulch in increasingly complicated games, but they seem sort of lackidasical about it. There’s nothing exceptional noble about the folks we encounter down in the Mulch: the kid who drives the rickshaw is reasonably nice, but there’s nothing so compelling about that society that it feels worth defending against the depradations of the Canopy.

I think part of the problem with the shallowness of these depictions is that the alternate narrative we’re getting suggests something enormously momentous. Sky Haussmann’s supposed to be some sort of villain, but at this point, he’s the only person who’s connected to higher-level emotions and events. If there’s going to be a spectacular downfall, there has to be some sense of spectacular promise, right? But I don’t understand what’s so fraught about this mission that the saboteur would be planted in the ship, and from what we see of the world that Haussmann’s mission gave us, it’s hard to retain any sense of hope that their mission was ever worth it.

Welp, we get Megan Fox in a Judd Apatow movie. Fox has had a terrible, terrible run of movies lately—Jonah Hex really should be the kind of project that gets someone sent to the Career Naughty Corner, and I count Josh Brolin as in for chastizement (John Malkovich exists in his own universe of merit and hilarity, so he’s sort of exempt). But I’ve always got the sense that she wants to do something meaningful, she just doesn’t really know what that means, and her body’s such an asset that she’s never really found a director who works his or her way around to her mind, whatever that might be like.

But really, I’m more interested in what this casting choice means for how Apatow intends to expand the universe in which his stories take place. I love the idea of Apatow doing something like what Beverly Cleary did in her young adult novels, or Nick Hornby did with his London in High Fidelity and About a Boy and creating a coherent look at a broad community through his movies. If he picks Los Angeles, women like Megan Fox are part of the scenery. It’s what he does with them that matters. Apatow has yet to surprise me with a portrait of a lady, but I’d like to see him try.

I wanted to pull this comment from William up onto the main page, because I think it essentially subsumes everything I wrote about superheroes and crime, and is the kind of systemic analysis I reach for on my best days:

It’s not necessarily that urban crime is no longer worth the time of a fully realized superhero. What usually happens is that the moment a hero becomes familiar with his/her powers, they also realize the true scope of the system. 

When you’re a little guy, being hassled by the drug dealers on the corner, you see them as the biggest problem threatening your existence. Later on, once you’re enhanced by gamma radiation, you realize that someone is supplying that drug dealer on the corner. In a comic like Daredevil, that leads all the way up to The Kingpin – which still keeps things local and gritty. However, if the same thing happened in a DC comic, you’d find that all roads eventually lead to some corporate mastermind like Lex Luthor or Vandal Savage. Not only is the hero now powerful enough to take things to that level, but he/she also realizes that they can’t really permanently clean up the streets until they clean up the entire hierarchy. 

Marvel has always been better with the street level crime, as the battles rarely leave Manhattan. With so many heroes to protect such a limited area, some are going to be relegated to the slums.

I think there’s something interesting going on in our superhero movies at large that I haven’t quite figured out. This attention to crime coincides with a rise in superhero movies as period pieces, about which more last week; in other words, comic books are returning to their origins, even though the context for their origins no longer exists. 

I get the objections to Sucker Punch, though I think people seem to forget that Zack Snyder’s wife, Deborah, is producing the movie—this gets to be her fantasy as well as his. But more to the point, Amber is exactly right about this: it can be a feminist fantasy to look however you want while you’re kicking ass and solving quests. I will buy the popcorn, and the leather bustier.

At least, that seems to be the plot of the next Transformers movie, in which the Decepticons are apparently going to try to undermine the American government by revealing official secrets. Anything has to be better than the nonsense Michael Bay fed audiences in the last Transformers flick, a movie so bad that Bay’s actually apologized for it, so dreadful that it’s inspired some of the great outrage criticism of the last decade. But I’m not sure how juiced audiences are going to get over this plot.

Sure, there’s Fox News polling that suggests that two-thirds of Americans would like to see Julian Assange in jail. But I don’t know how high up Wikileaks and government leaks rank on anybody’s priority list. The furor over the major document dumps seems to have mostly subsided. The secrets Wikileaks revealed say important things about trends in American military and diplomatic culture, but the only person in government Assange is even close to bringing down is Bradley Manning.

When you’re not restricted by facts, though, I’m sure it’s possible to come up with something more explosive than world dictators’ taste in hot nurses, something more genuinely damaging than the helicopter attack on civilians in Iraq. I’m just not sure Michael Bay is the person with the imagination and the appropriate sense of the gravely serious to do it. Unless he’s gone through a profound aesthetic renewal that leaves him wanting to do actual creative things with giant robots, I’m not sure WikiLeaks will still be significantly resonant to hang an enormous, clanking plot on come summer.

Superheroes may have their origins in America’s urban centers, but our recent superhero movie revival has tended to take a broader perspective on supervillains. Whether plots are driven by international arms deals in Iron Man, space goo in Spider-Man 3, or forces of anarchy in The Dark Knight, urban crime tends to get treated like small potatoes, a catalyst for someone to become a hero, but an unworthy foe once they’ve fully grown into their powers. I don’t think that’s particularly surprising: crime’s been receding as both an actual phenomenon and as a political concern since the Clinton administration, and terrorism is the kind of intractable, unpredictable problem it takes unusual forces to defeat.

But crime seems to be making a bit of a comeback. Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s been cast as Albert Falcone, the heir to classic crime boss Carmine Falcone, in the next Batman movie. And Marvel’s rebooting Daredevil, another superhero franchise that’s rooted in the problems of the American city rather than in international concerns. I’m not sure if that’s a reaction to how baroque superhero plots have become—as Marvel’s creating a multi-movie storyline that will reintroduce some of the science fiction elements that are a core part of many comics stories but that have been largely absent from our current crop of superhero movies, does that mean there’s room opened up for grittier, small-scale stories that still demand people with special powers? Is there something else that’s making crime and city life more compelling as a scale for action? I’ll be curious to see what aesthetic tack the Daredevil remake chooses. Given that last time out they went for leather jumpsuits and bullseye tattoos, it’s hard to imagine the series could get less gritty and realistic.

As I’ve expressed a couple of times here, I had high hopes for Catherine Hardwicke’s adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood. Bad reviews and warnings from a friend daunted me a bit, but I needed some amiable fluff, so a girlfriend and I manned up, bought tickets, and snuck a bunch of rum and candy into the theater. And I have to tell you: Red Riding Hood may be the worst movie I’ve seen in theaters in several years, and I have seen Clash of the Titans and Twilight: Eclipse in theaters. Spoilers below the jump for those who care about the identity of werewolves and various and sundry other sillinesses.

One thing I’ll give Red Riding Hood credit for is having trailers that are artful as all hell. Remember that venomous ”you’re going to get what you deserve” warning that I called out as indication that our heroine might be a tad more interesting than her pretty, bland exterior suggests? That line’s spoken to her, not by her in the movie at a moment when she’s accused of being a witch. The trailer also makes the movie look visually richer than it is. It’s actually a slightly-elevated ripoff of a SyFy creature feature: the village is made out of Lincoln Logs, the outfits stolen from a moderate-quality Renaissance Faire. The dialogue is risibly stilted, and delivered with only moderate skill by a group of generally strong actors who are almost unable to contain their dismay.

But really, the worst part of Red Riding Hood is the story. There are almost infinite ways to make an interesting decision about the identity of a werewolf who is menacing a village. It could be, as I’d so hoped, Red Riding Hood herself. It could be her mother, stuck in poverty because of her marriage to a local woodcutter, who she grew to love but didn’t love at first. It could be her witchy grandmother, who lives in isolation from the community at larger. It could be the (comparatively) wealthy boy Red is set to marry, revealing a monstrous interior below his polished exterior. It would be the poor but young man Red actually loves, and in choosing him anyway, she could be choosing sexual and personal freedom. It could be the priest who comes to the village with the ostensible goal of ridding it from the werewolf, a savage commentary on religion and profit-seeking in the priesthood.

The wolf, of course, is none of these reasonably interesting options. It turns out to be her father who is a werewolf, and who wants to take her away from the monotony of the village, and turn her into a wolf like him. This might have been a powerful course if we saw any sort of rapport between father and daughter, if the two actors had any of the pop of Nic Cage and Chloe Moretz in Kick-Ass. Instead, Billy Burke is sort of a dud: he plays Amanda Seyfried’s father as a village drunk, a man without the ambition to match the savagery he shows as the wolf. I get some of his rage at being cuckolded, which turns out to be a significant plot point, but he doesn’t really have any chemistry with Virginia Madsen (whose post-Sideways career, may I say, has been deeply disappointing) as his wife, either, so it’s hard to feel the impact of that rage. It’s the most boring possible choice, circumventing any interesting exploration of feminist rage or sexual awakening, and it’s executed in a way that’s totally leaden.

I honestly don’t understand how Hardwicke, who shows signs of being a reasonably interesting, intelligent director, ended up making a movie this sloppy and stupid. It’s a great story, with great potential. You have to make an effort to turn out something this dreadful.

I think it’s utterly fascinating that the American Pie movies have persisted the way they have, even to the extent of us getting a reunion that might bring back someone other than Eugene Levy from the original cast.

I liked the first movie just fine, for what it was. But it’s striking how, for a Young Hollywood showcase in that particular moment, almost no one from that movie has attained their potential. Alyson Hannigan is without a doubt the most successful actress from that cast, and while How I Met Your Mother is good work if you can get it, it’s not exactly major stardom. Chris Klein was supposed to be huge, and was very good in Election, but has since utterly washed out. Shannon Elizabeth still acts, but in junk. Ditto for Tara Reid, whose struggles with sobriety and really awful plastic surgery have been pretty sad to watch. Both Factory Girl and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh failed to be the career stepping stones for Mena Suvari that they should have been. The last remotely serious project Natasha Lyonne was in was Blade: Trinity in 2004. Sean William Scott’s sort of muddled along, but he’s never quite broken out, and he just entered a rehabilitation facility. It’s kind of sad, actually. The reason American Pie was reasonably compelling was because these actors lifted absurd premises above themselves. It’s hard to think their batting average since has been this mediocre.