I’m excited for Lee Daniels The Paperboy, which explores a wrongful conviction in Florida, and I was intrigued by this little tidbit from The Hollywood Reporter’s Cannes review of the movie: “Working from the well-received 1995 novel by Pete Dexter (Deadwood, Paris Trout), Daniels and Dexter have stuck closely to the book’s storyline in their adaptation but have amped up the racial element by making one major character and two secondary ones black rather than white. This doesn’t create any fundamental differences but does thicken the deck with extra tensions and innuendo.” The value of black directors isn’t just their authority to speak about race in certain ways, but the fact that they can present challenges to default whiteness in a way that white writers or directors may be unable to see. Default whiteness isn’t just lazy. It can flatten a story, or remove opportunities for tension and conversation. If white directors turn characters of color white because they want to cast a certain actor, they may end up with movies that don’t just look more generic but are less powerful.

Won’t Back Down is careful not to speak the words in the trailer, but it’s clear from the decisions the characters make and the protest signs they’re waving that these moms are setting up a charter school:

This is the kind of movie that always give me pause about how well popular entertainment, particularly popular entertainment that’ll clock in at under two hours, can lay out policy solutions instead of articulating policy problems. Narrative fiction can be very, very good at the former. The Wire handled Baltimore public schools well over the course of a season. Brooklyn Castle, my favorite documentary from SXSW uses the jeweler’s lens of a competitive middle school chess team to examine New York City public school budget cuts and the city’s high school exam system. But the solutions it presents are all temporary, individual fixes rather than system-wide reforms. One student wins a scholarship through a chess competition, but that means of achieving escape velocity isn’t available to all students. The school manages to do some stop-gap fundraising, but not everyone has the extremely dedicated parent base and an extracurricular program that can be a massive rallying point.

I’ll be curious how much Won’t Back Down presents setting up a charter school as a difficult endeavor, and if and how meaningfully it acknowledges charter schools’ closure rates. Triumphal narratives feel good, and I’m all for movies that push back against stereotypes of poor parents as uninvested in their childrens’ education. But if you actually want to mobilize people, you have to valorize the effort, not just the end result. And promising outcomes that are far from guaranteed is a recipe for disappointment.

I will admit to a serious soft spot for Baz Luhrmann’s pop-music drenched spectacles—I wrote last year that I think there’s something marvelous about the fact that we got Moulin Rouge and the iPod in the same year, the movie anticipating how much we’d come to love accentuating and heightening our lives by adding carefully curated soundtracks to them. I also quite liked OutKast’s underrated Idlewild, a visually gorgeous marriage of jazz age and hip-hop, and I’m happy to revisit that union, even in a movie that puts black music at the service of white characters in the same way white audiences once consumed jazz.

That said, I’ve always been left, perhaps heretically, a trifle cold by The Great Gatsby, and I’m curious as to how it’ll play when the movie is released in December.

The movie’s class politics are probably best described as universally disgusted. Gatsby makes the error of assuming that wealth can purchase him respect and love, falling into gauche error as a result, while the old monied Buchanans are revealed to be repulsive, crude people. But it’s a lot easier to shudder away from money as a source of happiness in favor of a more refined sensibility in a boom era than it is in a recession. This is neither a revenge fantasy nor a pure escape. But certainly, Leonardo DiCaprio’s exactly the right person to play Gatsby, even leaving aside that he was Luhrmann’s muse before he was Martin Scorsese’s. He’s achieved a kind of profound remoteness. And these days, the idea that someone could lever themselves from one class to another by sheer force of will is a more remote dream than ever.

The strangest possible reminder that conservative John Aglialoro is continuing his quixotic quest to produce an Atlas Shrugged film trilogy? Learning that Grover Norquist has just filmed a cameo as a street wino in Atlas Shrugged: Part 2 – Either-Or, a sequel that manages to have an even more unwieldy name than its 2011 predecessor, Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 (if only the word “squeakquel” wasn’t already taken).

At least the Norquist cameo promises a few seconds of oddball entertainment. If only the same could be said for the film’s predecessor. Though I see bad movies all the time, I’ve had a particular fascination with Atlas Shrugged: Part I since its release in April of last year. There’s so much to analyze, from its original, failed attempt to stoke the Tea Party fires with a tax-day release date to fact that its original DVD case was pulled from stores after angering fans by making a very un-Randian reference to “self-sacrifice.” (What I wouldn’t give for the Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 equivalent of Hearts of Darkness, in which a documentarian chronicled every behind-the-scenes misstep during the Atlas Shrugged’s bizarre production and promotional blitz).

But the sequel fascinates me even more, because its very existence represents everything the filmmakers of Atlas Shrugged: Part I were railing against: the failure of individuals to bow to the will of the free market, which, it must be noted, resoundingly rejected the first film. There is a “teaser trailer” for Atlas Shrugged: Part 2 – Either-Or. But it’s one of the dumbest teasers I’ve ever seen:

Newscasters. A clip of Rand from 1959, railing about “welfare states” and “destruction all around you.” It doesn’t even feature the name of the movie; just the Roman numeral columns of the number II, as if the first film was such a massive hit that we’ll all recognize its sequel on sight.

But more than anything, the Atlas Shrugged: Part 2 – Either-Or trailer confirms something I’ve suspected for a long time: conservative filmmakers have no idea how to market a movie. With both politics and pretensions aside, let’s acknowledge the real reason most people go to movies: to be entertained. And by comparison, let’s review the most successful liberal movie of all-time: Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, which won the Palme D’Or and grossed $120 million on a $6 million budget. I have many problems with Michael Moore’s gotcha-documentarian tactics, but there’s no denying his skill as a filmmaker. If you haven’t seen it since 2003, watch Fahrenheit 9/11’s theatrical trailer again:

The jaunty music, the stunt journalism, the wacky George Bush clips, the seductive promise of “the year’s most controversial film.” It doesn’t bill itself as a liberal screed; it bills itself as comedy. And it worked.

I was actually one of the few Americans who paid to see Atlas Shrugged: Part I in theaters, owing to both a misplaced sense of film-critic duty and my own perverse curiosity. I expected to disagree with the film’s objectivist politics (and was not disappointed). But I didn’t expect it to be so toothless, so poorly produced, and so ineffective at preaching to its own choir. Conservative or liberal, movies can be political and still succeed – but they also have to remember be movies.

The great genius of Will Ferrell is his capacity for embodying pompous, privileged blowhards in movies that critique them and gives them opportunities to grow—his actorly portfolio is one in which almost no one is irredeemable. In the past, he’s done this with sexist news anchors in the 1970s and NASCAR drivers in our own day. And now he’s taking on some of the most cosseted, self-important people in America: our politicians. What looks great about The Campaign is how squarely it’s aimed at the practices of the modern election, rather than at voters or democracy itself:

It’s all there: the John Edwards-like obsession with looks, the conviction that the candidate must be at the center of attention even in the aftermath of his own gaffe (or, okay, baby-punching), the pablum of pander. To my knowledge, no existing American politician has declared that “Filipino Tilt-a-Whirl Operators are this nation’s backbone,” but I eagerly await the day when one does. The Campaign looks to be the inverse of Parks and Recreation—hopefully it’ll help us bide time until that noble pean to the best in American politics returns to the air.

“Why The Avengers was so exciting to watch,” Ben Kuchera wrote in his review of the movie at Penny Arcade, “was that once you have every character set up and properly introduced by their previous films you can do anything. The script doesn’t have to spend time and dialog explaining who everyone is and where they came from…They each arrive on the screen fully formed, without the dullness of a well-worn origin story weighing them down.”

I think he’s right, and he’s nailed something important about where we are in the development of comic book movies. Some, if not all, movie franchise are finally fully behaving like comic books, giving us extended explorations of individual characters that intersect with and then diverge from other characters we’re spending time with in parallel, and examining new iterations of characters before the memory of the last version of the same figure has faded. To some critics, that means we’ve succumbed to an efficient, corporatized entertainment system that hits the same beats over and over again. Certainly, one of the reasons Spider-Man is rebooting is so Sony keeps its rights to the character and doesn’t let them revert back to Marvel. And if the lesson Marvel takes from the massive success of The Avengers is that pure repetition is a gold mine, that would be too bad. But I also think that the willingness by Marvel to give us more than six-odd hours over three movies with a set of characters presents an opportunity to demand richer, more unusual, deeper explorations of characters, to turn action movies into the kind of meditations we’re more accustomed to getting from television.

Previously, we’ve been used to superhero movies that come in three parts: a rise, a challenge, and a fall or a redemption. That’s a fine, sturdy structure for storytelling, and I fully expect The Dark Knight Rises to be a powerful deployment of that very reliable format. Previously, when a franchise has been kept alive past three installments, as with the Alien movies, it’s often less because the people involved have an overarching story to tell or set of ideas to explore than because a character is popular and profitable.

Marvel, on the other hand, has planned from the beginning to use these characters for a long time. Samuel L. Jackson’s contract with the company ties him to nine films so they can use Nick Fury as a through line in The Avengers franchise even if only in cameos. Even though at the time he came on board as The Hulk, Marvel didn’t plan to make more stand-alone movies based on the character, Mark Ruffalo was locked up for six movies, and now that his version of the character has become so definitive, the studio has him to work with.
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It begins with Sunnydale. Joss Whedon will probably never escape the legacy of his genre-subverting feminist masterpiece Buffy the Vampire Slayer, about a Valley Girl who fights the forces of darkness, and as writer and director of The Avengers, the movie that ties together the threads begun in a series of other superhero movies, that’s an excellent thing. A grand, funny action picture, The Avengers is also fundamentally if subtly about our reaction to superheroes: it manufactures joy (sometimes to slight excess—it clocks in at almost two and a half hours) even as it argues for the importance of that reaction and that belief in great power and great responsibility. And fittingly for a movie that’s a continuation of the project he began in Buffy, Whedon’s The Avengers begins as Buffy ended: with a group of wildly talented people escaping from a town that’s collapsing into the ground.

It helps to have seen the previous movies Marvel’s released to enjoy The Avengers—each entry in the franchise builds on the other in terms of plot development and characterization—but it’s not strictly necessary. The town that’s collapsing in this case turns out to be a massive government research facility run by an agency called S.H.I.E.L.D. that’s dedicated to studying a mysterious artifact: the tesseract. In previous films we’ve learned that the U.S. came into possession of that object, which it sees as a source of cheap renewable energy (and maybe other things as well) after they defrost Captain America, who stole it from the Nazis and crash landed the tesseract and himself in the Arctic. It turns out, however, that the Nazis pinched it from Asgard, the celestial kingdom of Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Loki (a terrific Tom Hiddleston), demi-gods and brothers who have had a significant falling out, leaving Thor with a human sweetheart and a fondness for earth, and Loki with a hankering for revenge. The Avengers kicks off when Loki shows up, pinches the tesseract along with several government workers, and in the process, collapses the facility. After he gets away, S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), his assistant Maria Hill (a largely wasted Cobie Smulders), and S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) regroup on a carrier ship and proceed to recruit the help they need to get it back.

Much of the band they pull together’s in fine, previously-established fettle. Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) may be in the clean energy business and faithful to Pepper Potts these days, but he’s still an arrogant quip machine. “What’s your secret? Mellow jazz? Bongo drums? Great big bag of weed?” Tony snarks at Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), eager first to figure out how the brilliant scientist maintains his hard-won calm, and second to convince Banner that he might enjoy taking the Hulk out for a spin. Captain America (Chris Evans), now that he’s thawed out, seems awfully depressed and displaced. “When I went to sleep, we were at war,” he tells Fury glumly, taking a break from obliterating punching bags as a form of therapy. “I wake up, they say we’ve won. They didn’t say what we’ve lost.” Thor’s still speaking in Shakespearean text—something Tony doesn’t heistate to ding him for—and getting huffy over family honor, though when Black Widow points out that his brother Loki, on a quest to conquer the world, has killed 80 people in a mere 48 hours, Thor notes quickly “He’s adopted.”

The two characters least-well served by their previous incarnations in Marvel movies, the Hulk and Black Widow, are the ones best served by Whedon’s greatest gifts and strongest tendencies. Previous incarnations have tended to reduce Bruce Banner to something of a victim—his movie depictions haven’t bothered to make the case that the good doctor is worthwhile company in and of himself, interesting not merely because of his struggle to contain what Ruffalo’s Banner ominously refers to as “the other guy.” Whedon’s gifted Banner with a mordant wit and the obligation to point out the downside to situations his more optimistically superheroic colleagues regard as alternately awesome or a piece of cake (to a certain extent, he’s Xander Harris before he gets his hands on a wrecking ball). “Last time I was in New York, I kind of broke Harlem,” he warns them in one moment. When he makes his belated arrival at a battle that’s going poorly, Banner tells his beseiged allies “So, this all seems horrible.” We have a sense of the self Banner loses when he transforms into the Hulk, an understanding that he is valuable, and in peril of losing not just his reason temporarily but his soul permanently.
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I’m literally hopping up and down with excitement to talk to y’all about The Avengers—I’ll have a review on Friday that can act as an open thread for discussion over the weekend and spoilerific post about the movie on Monday. But to pass the hours until the movie hits theaters, and to continue our conversation from yesterday about The Avengers and The Dark Knight it’s worth checking out Adam Rogers’ long piece on Joss Whedon and the process of making The Avengers, perhaps the first time Whedon’s been able and allowed to relax into a well-oiled machine that had no interest in letting him hoist himself on his own petard. He also has an overarching theory of why Marvel movies are working, while DC Comics movies, with the exception of Batman, have had such trouble:

Not incidentally, these were all characters from comics published by Marvel. The characters from competing comics company DC—Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the rest of the Superfriends—were lying fallow, even though the corporation that owns DC also owns Warner Bros. Pictures. Marvel, on the other hand, was doing so well with its A-list characters that in 2005 the company took the bold step of financing its own theatrical releases. It would translate its characters its own way.

Spider-Man had been indentured to Sony, and the X-Men and Fantastic Four were already at Fox, but the remaining roster of potential movie heroes was still plenty deep. First up: Iron Man, an alcoholic gazillionaire playboy who builds his own rocket-powered exoskeleton. Then there’s the Hulk, a brilliant scientist who turns into a massively strong, uncontrollable green monster. Oh, and Captain America—a supersoldier from World War II brought into the present—and Thor, a hammer-wielding Norse god with superpowers and family drama that makes the real housewives of Atlanta look like the Osmonds. Unlike the gleaming, godlike DC heroes, Marvel characters are more likely to regard their powers as a curse than a blessing; great power has a pesky tendency to come with great responsibility. And that makes for pretty good movie plots.

I think there’s something to that. But of course, Marvel movies do have gods in the form of Asgardians, and some of the pleasure of watching Thor and Loki duke it comes from seeing gods behaving badly, of seeing these brawls play out on the largest possible scale. I wonder if the secret overall is that, on-screen at least, the Marvel heroes have tended to be funnier and more self-deprecating than the DC heroes, which is not precisely the same thing as angsty. There’s something inherently ridiculous about a god in a pet store, or a rich kid reacting in amazement and pleasure to his new toys, to the fact that he can fly. Acknowledging that absurdity is a useful nod to people who aren’t lifelong geeks, but are letting themselves be talked into drinking the Kool-Aid. And the transmutation of anxiety and darkness into comedic gold is basically Joss Whedon’s sweet spot.

Batman’s owned the flip side of that joyful ridiculousness, a sense of deviance: Gotham residents may not be right about the precise ways in which Bruce Wayne’s head isn’t right, but they’re not wrong that there’s something wrong with him. That comfort with painting the hero as a bit too dedicated, acknowledging our unease, may be why it’s worked better than say, Green Lantern or Green Hornet. One way or the other, the movies seem to require a deep tonal commitment to work.

We’ve finally got a trailer that gives us a real sense of what ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ will look like, and golly is it gorgeous and melancholy:

More to the point, I’m excited to see an intellectual debate between this movie and The Avengers. Christopher Nolan’s Batman’s movies have always had an element of monkish sacrifice to them: to be an impactful superhero, Bruce Wayne’s had to surrender his true public image (in the first film, he acts the playboy to disguise his intentions), the love of his life and of the populace, and now, it’s implied, either his life or his physical health. Bane’s declaration that “your punishment must be more severe” is a looking-glass version of how Nolan’s understood the only way for superheroes to make a difference, to self-abnegate, to foreswear their own happiness, to separate themselves from the people they are sacrificing themselves for.

The Marvel franchise, and The Avengers in particular (without spoiling anything), take the opposite tack. Its superheroes become better individuals more closely drawn to their communities for their experiences as superheroes. Tony Stark stops cackling over his power to kill and begins craving the approval of those around him, a selfish motivation that ultimately teaches him to engage with their needs. Thor falls in love with Jane Foster, and with Earth, a process of attachment that turns him from self-involved Asgardian prince into an admirable man. Captain America, in life and in death, gives the American people something to rally around, not to unify in their disgust at his perceived actions. The great tragedy of the Hulk has been that he’s cut off from reason and attachment precisely at the moment that he could provide the greatest amount of strength to protect people or causes. These two movies are going to make serious bank for their studios. But taken together, they’re also a vigorous argument about superheroism. That’s an exciting debate to have, and I’m looking forward to it.

In preparation for Prometheus, which looks just ridiculously awesome, I’ve been watching the movies in the Alien franchise I hadn’t seen before. And in the course of that, and related futzing around the web, I realized how striking the per-movie numbers were as an illustration of how the economics of blockbusters have changed:

Alien (1979)
Budget: $11 million ($34.8 million in 2012 dollars)
Domestic and International Box Office: $104,931,801 ($331.5 million in 2012 dollars)
Sigourney Weaver’s Salary: Approximately $33,333 ($105,321 in 2012 dollars)

Aliens (1986)
Budget: $18.5 million ($38.72 million in 2012 dollars)
Domestic and International Box Office: $131,060,248 ($274.3 million in 2012 dollars)
Sigourney Weaver’s Salary: $1 million ($2.1 million in 2012 dollars)

Alien 3 (1992)
Budget: $50 million ($81.8 million in 2012 dollars)
Domestic and International Box Office: $159,773,545 ($261.2 million in 2012 dollars)
Sigourney Weaver’s Salary: $4 million plus a share of box office ($6.5 million in 2012 dollars)

Alien Resurrection (1997)
Budget: $70 million ($100 million in 2012 dollars)
Domestic and International Box Office: $161,295,658 ($230.5 million in 2012 dollars)
Sigourney Weaver’s Salary: $11 million ($15.7 million in 2012 dollars)

Prometheus
Budget: Estimated at $100-$150 million

I don’t think there’s a direct relationship between expensiveness and badness—The Avengers cost $220 million, which doesn’t count the expensive advertising campaign around it, and is just jaw-droppingly great (it is killing me not to be able to talk to you guys about it yet. Friday cannot be here soon enough). But at the same time, you can afford to do weirder things if there’s less money sunk into them. The Avengers kind of earns back some of that freedom—and I think Prometheus does, too—to be funny and weird and interesting and frightening because it’s guaranteed to make all of the money even if it was wretched. But a lot of the time when someone like, say, Michael Bay is in that position, they take precisely zero advantage of it. It’s one thing to be creative because you have to be to have a prayer of getting noticed and loved. It’s another to be creative because you have the luxury to be. On bad days, it seems like everyone else is just checking boxes. But this year feels to me like a time when the movies are new and exciting. I could be proven wrong. But it’s been fun so far.