Nick's Café Canadien

One of the films I will mention in my forthcoming mega-post on the films to watch out for in 2005 – when it comes – is the adaptation of the graphic novel V For Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. If you have never read the original work, I highly recommend that you do so. While it’s no Watchmen – and let’s be honest, what comic book is? – it’s definitely a cut above the norm, and deviates enough from the typical Orwellian future-fascist clichés to be interesting. It has, with good reason, inspired many a serious academic study of its aesthetic and literary content – here, for instance, or here.

As much of a neat little gimmick as it is to target the release of the film for the weekend of Guy Fawkes Day (“Remember, remember the Fifth of November”), I do wonder if it is really that wise an idea to rush the production schedule to meet it. It has a lineup to dream of, with Natalie Portman as Evey Hammond and James McTeigue in the director’s chair. McTeigue is untried, but given his background as an Assistant Director under both the Wachowskis in The Matrix and George Lucas in the Prequels, I have faith in the guy, so long as he doesn’t let too many Wachowski fingerprints get all over his work. That is appropriate for some dystopian movies about post-apocalyptic fascists that rule over a complacent populace, but it would not necessarily be a good fit here.

My big concern – and the major question mark that hovers over the otherwise perfect casting of Natalie Portman – is that the film may lose some of the Britishness of the original source, which I think needs to be retained. Alan Moore is arguably the best living scriptwriter in the comics business, and his work is long overdue for some cinematic respect, especially after the disaster that was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Hopefully the film captures some of the more ingenious motifs, both visual and poetic, that lie in Moore’s book. The commodification of Fate and Justice as artificial feminine personifications that cheat on society and the powers that be is of particular note, as is the marvelous sequence in the third act when V, the anarchistic Guy Fawkes figure around whom the story revolves, conducts the destruction of the fascist regime’s power structures to the cannon-fire of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. As Robert Rodriguez will hopefully demonstrate with Sin City, which looks incredible, why reinvent the wheel when the original comic has already provided so much in the way of aesthetic guidance?

On the other side of the literary world lies Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, which is an almost entirely linguistic experience aside from the great Helquist illustrations and the tag that follows every book offering clues as to the next one. I have now finished all eleven published books, and the series is due to conclude in the thirteenth volume. My original impression after reading the first three, if you will recollect, was that this was a series that dropped plot and story in favour of being very clever about the telling thereof. Well, that changes quite significantly as one progresses, and from about the fifth or sixth volume onwards, it becomes masterful episodic fiction in the serial tradition, with each successive adventure posing riddles that are answered with even more baffling oddities in the next one, capitalizing on everything that has come before. Even given how the author continues to unify each book with a set of idioms or literary devices that he deconstructs with scalpel precision, the series has shifted to the point where the unanswered mysteries in the plot are what generate anticipation for the next entry to come.

I must also admit a total agreement with the axis of good and evil that emerges as the series progresses. Every book has a library motif, and one of the characters in The Slippery Slope (whose identity I will not reveal) comes right out and says that well-read individuals are bound to be the good guys. All the decent people in the books respect knowledge, and amidst all the sobering melancholy in the series, one that explicitly deals with terrible things happening to undeserving innocent children, we see the promotion of what I think is a critical, yet oft-ignored value.

The antithesis of the printed page, and the mark of the enemy, is fire. When the villains employ fire, the tragic loss is always not so much material as it is a loss of knowledge. It’s an axis of conflict you don’t see every day, and certainly not in something promoted as children’s fiction.

Fiction is created, marketed and sold in a way that is completely different from the movie business. Book launches, Harry Potter aside, don’t have anything approaching the opening-weekend culture of movies that saw a revival after The Phantom Menace and reached its peak in the summer of 2001. It should really come as no surprise, then, that my most anticipated works of fiction to be published this calendar year are almost entirely sequels. Couple that with the fact that I have enough classic literature from years past to discover, and this list pales in comparison to what I can say about movies.

With that said, I want to make special mention of the four books coming out in 2005 that I intend to buy the moment they hit stores. Book the Twelfth of the Lemony Snicket series is one. Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception, which arrives 3 May, is another; I much enjoyed the first three, and this one promises to build on the dangling threads of the second whilst balancing them with the bittersweet ending of the third. Then there’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and its inclusion here should be obvious.

Not so obvious is the one non-sequel I already have marked down on my calendar, even considering that it does not have a hard release date beyond a vague promise of delivery in October (though its Amazon.co.uk entry now indicates a delay until 6 March, 2006). This would be Michael Chabon’s next novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, his first big piece since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay after having taken a break with the children’s baseball fantasy Summerland and the Sherlock Holmes tribute The Final Solution.

Chabon, as longtime devotees of this journal should be aware, is a literary wunderkind and one of my favourite novelists of all time. Not only does he write prose that can only be described as beautiful, he somehow never manages to let it overpower the stories underneath; and oh, what amazing stories he tells. All I know about The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is that it is apparently an alternate-history novel about a Jewish state established in what we know as Alaska, and I’m already dying to see where he goes with this.

I will finish this post with yet another empty promise of a detailed, extended orgasmic reaction to the new footage of Revenge of the Sith, and pop in an unrelated link or two. The first is an excellent Jim Hill feature article on Eric Idle’s new Broadway production, Spamalot. The second is an obscure, but surreal recording that fittingly, you can only order on the Internet; you know the sort. Or do you? I speak, after all, of The Rap Canterbury Tales. Its inclusion in one of my classes today made that particular course (English 300, “Social and Cultural History of the English Language”) all the more fun in a strange, delightful way. It is, after all, the same course where a recommended reading for an upcoming paper is Going Nucular, a book by Geoff Nunberg of Language Log fame.

As a subscriber to The Economist, and a satisfied customer at that, every now and then I feel a need to point out how cool they are. While I maintain that their Christmas edition last month was probably the best issue I’ve seen in the few years I’ve followed the magazine – what, with a year-end summary in verse, discourse analysis, jazz record reviews, the DS/PSP wars and a board game feature – most of what I want to acknowledge, as you probably realized if you clicked on any of those links that just passed you by, is subscriber content in the online edition. If you are a subscriber, you are aware of these pieces already. If you aren’t, then change.

But every now and then, my favourite periodical pumps out an excellent article that anyone can access. Such is the case with this article on the Web as a linguistic corpus, a piece that cites my favourite blog.

And how cool is this: in last week’s print edition, their weekly Obituary page was a feature on Will Eisner (again, subscriber content, but you should really sign up). The Eisner Awards – the comic book industry’s equivalent of the Oscars – are named after the late Will, and not Disney’s resident evil clown.

Curiously, while the otherwise rigorous obituary goes at length about Eisner’s own projects and his influence on the maturing of comic storytelling (indeed, The Economist concurs with the view that he practically invented the graphic novel), it has nary a mention of his masterwork Comics & Sequential Art, which everyone, everyone, recommends as the definitive textbook on how to make a comic book, and with good reason. Eisner literally wrote the book on graphic storytelling. Comics & Sequential Art is highly technical in its focus, but presents itself as introductory in the way it boils everything down to simple design principles. To comics, this book is what The Animator’s Survival Kit is to animation: all the basic principles collected in one place. The true artist doesn’t just stop there – he works his way upwards – but this is where to start.

The definitive book on reading comics is a beast of a different nature, and its name is Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Between McCloud and Eisner, we have the foundations of what is a theoretical canon of the medium.

Needless to say, theoretical texts only go so far, and it’s the experience of reading the works of fiction themselves where you see them applied.

The other day I dropped by Wizards Comics & Collectibles across the street and down the road apiece from the Garneau Theatre. It isn’t a great shop for blokes like yours truly who prefer to catch up on the seminal graphic novels and mini-series in the form of a durable trade paperback – in fact, they don’t have much in the way of TPBs at all – but from what I can tell (from my limited experience in such matters), it’s definitely a store meant for single-issue collectors.

In one of the racks, I found several original issues of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, including multiple copies of the remarkable fifth chapter, “Fearful Symmetry”, which shares its title with Canadian literary theorist Northrop Frye‘s study of William Blake. It makes sense, since they both take their names from Blake’s poem “The Tyger” – which, if you think about it in the context of Watchmen, is an entirely appropriate allusion.

The thing that makes “Fearful Symmetry” (Watchmen #5, that is) so remarkable is that, well, it’s symmetric. In the 28-page chapter, pages 1 and 28 have mirroring panel layouts, down to the colour coordination of alternating reds and blues. The same goes for pages 2 and 27, 3 and 26, and so on until you get to the pivotal assassination attempt bridging pages 14 and 15. Moreover, each of these symmetric pairs follow the same characters. You see the same juxtaposition of the newsstand and the fictitious Tales of the Black Freighter on page 12 as you do on page 17, and a parallel shipwreck on pages 9 and 20. It opens with Rorschach, and it closes with Rorschach.

A gimmick? Far from it. It doesn’t just preserve the flow of the story, it adds to it. Like the other visual motifs that characterize every chapter of Watchmen, the layout is at the service of the story – and to its credit, this is a prime example of something comics can do that other formats simply can’t. At the end of the chapter, the question at the end of Blake’s poem – “What immortal hand or eye, / Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” is turned on its head and directed to the reader as a riddle to be answered.

If you’ve read Watchmen and know the solution, look at the question again. The answer lies in that very chapter, embedded in the symmetry itself.

And while on the subject of fearful symmetry – you didn’t think this post was over, did you? – I want to mention the cover of Tuesday’s Gateway, which, for reasons intrinsic to what you can do in print that you can’t on the Web, has not been reproduced in the Web edition.

While I typically keep this weblog text-only aside from attaching the occasional Scrabble post-mortem photograph for illustrative purposes, I feel like saving a thousand words:

Maybe I missed a few issues, but I can’t recall this ever having been done in the three years I have been on campus, and it’s going to take a historian or editor armed with a few bound editions to tell me if it’s ever been done. As with Watchmen, at first glance it’s a simple trick anybody could devise, a gimmick. Here we see two cover stories instead of the usual one, but the real kicker that makes it worthwhile is that they are two opposed cover stories. In this corner, Blatz – in this corner, Amrhein. It’s nice to see a paper take some risks every once in a while – real risks, not just your standard old Transformer blowjobs.

One thing, though: the cover would have been cooler if it were really symmetric.

There’s one more thing I want to mention about this issue, and it has to do with Kristine Owram’s piece in the Opinion section, “English really isn’t teaching English anyway.” To quote:

I couldn’t agree with their arguments more, but I must admit that I find these views of the English department more than a little ironic. After all, this is the same department that completely overhauled its course guide last year to offer a much more theory-based approach to the study of literature. Yep, nothing’s going to teach me how to communicate better than a course called “Textualities: Signs and Texts,” in which students will be introduced to “the structural study of sign-systems and discourses.” Take heart, though, for it will not be “an exercise in structuralism alone”! No, my friends, instead it will provide us with a “comprehensive historical review of the principles of semiotics and the analysis of discourses.”

Now, as someone who actually took ENGL 217 (“Textualities, Signs and Texts”) last semester, I find it rather amusing that Owram pinpointed it as her example. Naturally, this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it is arguably the best and most intellectually exciting course I have taken at this fine institution, and alongside the MATH 117/118 Honours Calculus route, the one I am readiest to recommend to every student who thinks he has the wits, bowels and overall academic machismo to handle it.

See, here’s the thing – the English department’s restructuring last year wasn’t moving in a more theoretical direction. The creation of the Textualities series, that being the 217/218 pair, was a direct result of axing ENGL 216 from the course catalogue. 216, a full-year course in literary theory exclusive to English majors, was effectively split in two.

This entailed two consequences. The first is that now, non-English majors can get their fill of the foundations of sign theory. Of course, according to Owram, critical theory is “only important to someone interested in a career in the humanities, like an aspiring English professor.” You’d never have, say, a Computing Science major take a course like that, so why let them? Everybody knows sciences and humanities don’t mix.

The second consequence is that the two courses no longer go hand in hand – you can take one, but not the other. Unless you take both 217 and 218, you can’t compare and contrast across different intellectual traditions. Moreover, without 216, there is no integrated alternative.

You will also notice that the 300-level catalogue is about as bold a move away from theory as it gets. Take a look: “Postcolonial Literature and Culture.” “Medieval Literature and Culture.” “Early Modern Literature and Culture.” What are cultural studies, if not literature placed in context? What are cultural studies, if not literature applied?

Actually, what’s really interesting is that the 217/218 professor, in his introduction to either course, stated his personal conviction that they should be properly offered at the 400-level, and in fact are at most other universities. That’s an assessment of relative difficulty, really. I think the courses are fine where they belong.

My reasoning here is that an introduction to critical theory is purely that – an introduction. These courses consist of readings that are foundational, and more importantly, interdisciplinary. By cataloguing them in the 200s, you encourage students to take them earlier – which means they can apply those theoretical concepts elsewhere instead of acquiring them at the end of their educational careers, when the theoretical rudiments are but a footnote.

Mathematics courses are analogous, and that’s why I so highly recommend the 117/118 route to entering students. The standard 114/115 path (or for Engineers, 100/101) will give you what you need to proceed along your merry way and work with rates of falling objects, basic electrical circuits and all the other fun stuff calculus is good for. But it’s one thing to have the tools, and it’s another to understand the tools and have an upper hand later on. That’s why theoretical foundations, particularly those that come early in your education, are a good thing.

As it stands right now, if the English department encounters further cuts, it’s actually the theoretical disciplines that you can expect to wither away. It’s a crying shame, because theory is exactly the direction in which university-level English should be moving, but isn’t. Owram states that the common defense of English courses is that everybody needs competent writing skills and a background in major works of literature. If that is really the case – and it probably is, given the department’s reorganization in favour of an easily defensible attachment to culture – it really is a pity.

I posit that it is a defect in K-12 education that students enter university without basic skills in composition and critical reading. Higher education isn’t just about vocational preparation, and certainly shouldn’t be. Theory is only relevant to aspiring English professors? Preposterous. Theory should be what the Department of English exists to offer.

I conclude my discussion of the matter with this morsel of advice: take the Textualities courses. They are, in a word, rewarding.

Among the required readings for 217 was Northrop Frye, whom you may recall from earlier in this post as being the author of Fearful Symmetry. The book that was covered was a more theoretical text, Anatomy of Criticism, which is such an essential addition to your bookshelf (even if you don’t care much for structuralism) that suggestions to keep this material away from casual passersby, lest we scare them away, is really quite unbelievable.

Also on the reading list last term was The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man by the Patron Saint of Wired Magazine and my second choice for the Greatest Canadian. Interestingly enough, much of the book is a critique of print media and layout design. McLuhan would have loved Watchmen.

We come full circle back to comic books as I leave you with this piece of trivia: The Mechanical Bride makes a cameo appearance in The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #4, nestled in a pile of books that a killer robot from the far future studies in his quest to destroy the Escapist once and for all. Industrial Man, indeed.

Two screenings, three weeks and $300 million later, my recollection of everything I wanted to say about Spider-Man 2 is admittedly spotty. Given that virtually everybody who wanted to see the film already has, this will be less of a review in the sense of a recommendation than it is a reflection.

Before I proceed, it is probably beneficial to establish where I sit with respect to comic superhero movies – my value system, as it may be. Of the standard DC and Marvel stables, there is not one superhero movie that I would proclaim to be the hallmark of the filmic subgenre of the comic adaptation. A good many of them make a decent stab at it and grind to a halt halfway through. Take Superman, for example – an epic journey of self-discovery for the most part, then it hits a brick wall with that “Can You Read My Mind?” nonsense. X-Men had some nice character setups going on, then stops and says, “Oh, crap – we need an evil plot in order to lead to a final fight. Bring on the United Nations!”

And speaking of the United Nations, while the campy Adam West Batman and the television series from which it protruded were a pretty close approximation of the colourful, tongue-in-cheek comics of the sixties (and a great deal of fun), it would be a stretch to call the feature film a shining example of cinematic storytelling. Batman – now that’s a character that has never truly been done justice – not even by Tim Burton, even though he was on the right track. With a powerful backstory and the best dramatis personae of supervillainy in any franchise at the disposal of a given filmmaker, I expect better.

The most honest effort I have seen to take a comics franchise to the next level is Ang Lee’s Hulk, which was an example of phenomenal storytelling technique, only it lacked an involving and coherent story to tell. In trying to bridge the occasional gap between art and entertainment, this well-made and underrated character drama veered just a tad far from its prerogative to the audience, but stopped short of living up to its intellectual promise. What was admirable was what Hulk wanted to be. This will become important.

Settling on an answer to what sits at the pinnacle of superhero movies is something to be done begrudgingly, as the best of them are still short of being five-star instant classics in the pantheon of all films, not just the ones derived from panels and text bubbles. By the best of them I refer to X2 and the first Spider-Man, two very different films in terms of what works and what does not. X2 is a very difficult film to complain about, because identifying specific flaws in such a thoroughly enjoyable thrill ride is no easy task. It wrangled a large cast of characters and somehow gave them depth and individuality, means and motives. Unlike its predecessor, it had a plot – a match of wits in which even our chessmasters, Magneto and Xavier, proved fallible. There is so much to like about the movie, what keeps it back is hardly a specific complaint as much as it is a desire to have seen it go further and be iconic in all respects instead of merely very good. It built real-world character dynamics on the foundation of superheroic powers, and left unspecified room for improvement.

Spider-Man, instead of being all-round very good, had its fair share of both milestones and annoyances. Without a doubt it laid claim to the most interesting protagonist, and the presentation of the origin story was beyond compare. However, as a movie not entitled Peter Parker (or even Pavitr Prabhakar), there was a certain imperative to include a few superheroics. Enter a second half with a schizophrenic evil corporate executive with a green helmet and a hoverboard as a thoroughly insufficient villain in a thoroughly insufficient hero-villain conflict.

So with all that said, it should be easy to extrapolate what it was I wanted to get out of Spider-Man 2: cinematically-conscious storytelling that takes advantage of the motion picture medium while remaining true to the comic book aesthetic, complex characters delivering complex lines, the continuation of the insofar compelling Peter Parker story, and a much better handling of “Spider-Man versus the bad guy” – lofty demands, but not impossible.

Lo and behold, I got my wish.

The film begins with a thrilling opening titles sequence. One thing you cannot fault the Marvel films for is their brilliant opening titles, regardless of the quality of the rest of the film – the Braille in Daredevil is a fine example; even The Punisher started with a bang. (Shame about the rest of the movie, though.) Spider-Man 2 outdoes them all with a dynamic sequence of panels that evoke some moments in Hulk and emulate pages of art being flipped in all directions. The panels contain still paintings of the first film’s most pivotal moments, particularly the inverted kiss, in a two-minute recap of the story thus far. It is a fine and innovative example of how to get an audience to sit through a lot of names, and the first of many little things that stack up to make an intruiging whole.

The Peter Parker story is once again the highlight of the movie, and cements him once again as the most human protagonist out of all the movie superheroes, the ordinary boy charged with living under extraordinary circumstances. Time and again, Spider-Man 2 reminds us that these extraordinary circumstances do not absolve him of the trials and tribulations that come with being a fresh-faced, sleep-deprived college kid. Playing the web-slinging good guy does not pay the rent, get the girl or deliver the pizza on time. It’s a realist’s approach to a world governed by the fantastic; no film does it better, and in no film is it more appropriate.

If there was any doubt after the first movie that Tobey Maguire was perfect for the role, the sequel erases it. He demonstrates resolve, sadness, longing, innocence, confusion, reluctance in the face of responsibility, self-conflicted concealment in the face of unspoken truths – it’s all there. In one sequence in the middle of the film that hearkens back to a certain musical interlude from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where Peter tries to crawl back into the warm and comfy shell of an ordinary life, Maguire has all the same nerdilicious charm as Ewan McGregor’s scenes in Down With Love when he is masquerading as the astronaut Zip Martin.

Kirsten Dunst, reprising the role of Mary-Jane Watson, evolves with her character. In this movie, Mary-Jane gets a little further in achieving her ambitions of modeling and acting, but what happens at the funeral in the end of the first movie has some personal ramifications that are not forgotten, and serve as the basis for her relations with Peter Parker throughout the movie. She displays a touch of bitterness on her own search for happiness, and there are few complaints to be had about how Dunst handles this. James Franco as Harry Osborn is perhaps the weak link of the trio; Harry has some very strong scenes where his ambitions of being a tycoon like his father show through, and a particularly memorable one at a reception where he is quite intoxicated and takes it out on Peter, but some of the later scenes that require fear, confusion and moral uncertainty are not quite there.

Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina) is one of the highlights of Spider-Man 2, and addresses exactly the biggest problem with the first movie, which was an uninteresting and unchallenging villain that the rest of the work was above. (No offense to Willem Dafoe, so much as the material he had to work with, or lack thereof.) In film journalism one often sees the term “comic book villain” used in a perjorative sense, to describe soulless evil clowns written and played in as over-the-top a fashion as is manageable. This is not the case with Doc Ock, who may be the most satisfying megalomaniacal villain in any superhero movie. The Green Goblin, in contrast, was a soulless evil clown on drugs who conveniently murdered Oscorp’s board of directors and still got away with his secret identity intact, with the occasional bout of talking to himself that everybody forgot about as soon as they saw Gollum do it right in The Two Towers. He’s an evil corporate executive who wants his government contract, damnit – oh, and let’s fight Spider-Man since he’s a good guy, and we shan’t have any of those getting in the way.

Doctor Octopus – now there’s a villain: someone whose characterization actually has something to say about mad science, which is by movie standards a really novel idea. He begins as the groundbreaking fusion scientist Otto Octavius, a happily married and well-mannered genius who is secure in his precautionary measures – until the technology goes awry and his sentient robo-tentacles take over. Even then, his motivation is not to destroy the world with his great ball of fire, but a desire to finish his life’s work and show the world that said great ball of fire is harmless, furry and energy-efficient. He fights Spider-Man because the titular arachnid pulls the plug on his invention early in the film – with good intentions, naturally. Best of all, when it comes down to the effects-heavy fight scenes, he is enough of a match for our hero that the combat is interesting. The strategic employment of super power against super power breathes life into the extended, show-stopping action sequences in a way that was never once present in the first movie, where the Goblin hovered around a lot and chucked a few radioactive snowglobes here and there without so much as a “Rosebud”.

Spider-Man 2 is rife with visual symbolism both picturesque and subtle, from a pivotal moment when Peter’s rimmed spectacles shatter on the ashphalt to him standing across the street from an unnoticing Mary-Jane under a theatrical marquee reading “The Importance of Being Earnest”. Oscar Wilde’s text is woven into the film in a way that refrains from being overbearing, but hints at the subliminal relevance of the excerpts in question. There are some genuinely funny moments where the humour is clean, situational and completely derived from the timing of a given shot, like a scene where Spider-Man ascends an elevator in full costume and fuller awkwardness.

Danny Elfman’s score to the first Spider-Man gave the initial impression that it was less memorable than his work on the likes of Batman, without an instantly recognizable theme to trumpet around – but as an audience we have had plenty of time to get used to it over the past two years, and to hear it reprised in all the right spots here is refreshing. Unfortunately, it does not carve out an identity for Spider-Man 2 like John Williams did for The Empire Strikes Back with the Imperial March or for Attack of the Clones with “Across the Stars”, but like the score to the first, perhaps this will sink in.

Does Spider-Man 2 have problems? Well, yes – but that depends on the weight you put on these specific logical gaffes. Spider-Man’s mask comes off quite frequently, though it provides an opportunity to see some expressive facial exertion, without which climactic sequences like the scene with the runaway train would not be the same. He survives some fairly impossible falls without so much as a scratch, which is ambitious by Jackie Chan standards and pushing it even for a comic book. To paraphrase Aunt May (who also makes a welcome return), he’s not Superman, you know.

I do have an issue with how far the stories of the respective characters go in this movie; namely, it may seriously undercut the potential of future sequels, especially if Sam Raimi wants to do another one after the third, which is currently in the germinal stages. I refer specifically to Mary-Jane’s decision at the end of the film, a temporary resolution of the romantic arc just as unsatisfying as the end of the last one, only this time around, the choice is really asking for trouble. In that sense, the ending stretches a bit long, especially because it goes a few scenes beyond my favourite shot in the movie, the one of Peter and Mary-Jane suspended on a web side by side, a scene that has a poetic finality of its own. Still, it can be argued that reasonable choices have no place in dealings pertaining to love, and the choice can still be validated by its consequences, which is something to look for in Spider-Man 3.

Perhaps the most telling observation about Spider-Man 2 is that the set pieces and super powers are but accessories to the weapons with which the real battles are won or lost: individual choices and the determination of one’s own destiny. This is the dramatic ideal, a story pulled along by a chain of dilemmas, actions and consequences instead of web-shooters and robotic claws – just as how the best science-fiction stories are never truly about spaceships and time machines, but ethics and social responsibility in a world where anything is possible. At long last, here is something to point to as the exemplar of everything a superhero movie should aspire to be.

Ken Jennings update: Not only has he won twenty-six consecutive episodes of Jeopardy!, tonight he swept the “Marvel Comics Heroes” category. I am suitably impressed.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have plenty of time to mull over all the facets of Spider-Man 2 in terms of its content, since the ever-shortening summer movie season is effectively over barring a surprise success on the part of I, Robot. Today, I will instead act like a Comic Book Guy poseur and talk about a few of the mice and men behind the movie.

First of all, Apple has a fantastic article featuring Nels Israelson, a professional one-sheet photographer (“poster boy”?) who designed the outstanding promotional material for the movie. A must-read for any photography buffs out there, it covers how he creates and shoots the superhero poses in a digital format. Naturally, he uses a Macintosh.

Those of you who have seen the film will remember the stunning opening credits sequence, which re-created memorable images from the first Spider-Man (such as its most iconic moment, the upside-down kiss) in dynamic comic-book panels. The art in those panels was by award-winning painter Alex Ross, who rose to fame in the mid-nineties with his distinct romantic-yet-realist tapestries of costumed superheroes in two all-star graphic novels. The first was the Marvel project Marvels, written by Kurt Busiek, which re-created select famous events in the Marvel universe in the eyes of an ordinary civilian, which was a pretty decent concept, but was better as an Alex Ross art book than it was a story, especially to this here reader who was only casually acquainted with such calamitous crises as Gwen Stacy being dropped off a bridge after having seen it happen to Mary-Jane Watson in the movie. (I still don’t know what all that hocus-pocus about the Sentinel robots in that X-Men chapter was about.) His second big hit was a project for DC Comics entitled Kingdom Come, which took your Superman, Batman, Green Arrow, Flash, Sandman and a few hundred others, aged them a few decades and made them fight each other. Again, I imagine it would be more fun for seasoned comics fans who actually recognize all the cameos, but the painting was great. All in all, though, while you will never find as detailed and lifelike portrayals of your favourite superheroes as those in the Alex Ross portfolio, I find his art to be much better suited for stand-alone epic imagery than sequential storytelling. In the opening credits to the Spider-Man sequel, however, it is a perfect fit.

Novelist Michael Chabon receives partial credit for the screenplay to Spider-Man 2, which was a significant improvement over Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp’s work on its predecessor. It is hard to discern the extent to which Chabon’s contribution remains in the final cut, but holistically speaking, the impact is noticeable.

Michael Chabon, as I continually inform anyone who will listen, is the guy who got me interested in comic books. (Note that by comic books I don’t mean comic strips – I was weaned on Peanuts from birth – but full-fledged comics, often of the superhero variety, sometimes not; graphic novels and their shorter, monthly kin.) The culprit is that Pulitzer-winner of his, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which is a tremendously enjoyable read and alongside J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, my favourite work of literature published in recent years. It is indeed a rarity to find a writer of his calibre who respects the mythology of comics the way he does. If you turn at the last chapter of Kill Bill, Vol. 2 and examine Bill’s monologue about Superman’s critique of the human condition, you can see just what an impact comics had on Quentin Tarantino, and how he longed to express it to a larger audience in a medium that was more firmly entrenched in the mainstream – in his case, film. With Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon pulls off an equivalent in print, weaving a six-hundred-page adventure full of that same reverence for superhero mythology, that same implicit desire to share it with everyone else.

It so happens that back in 1996, before he really exploded on the scene with the likes of Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon was one of many writers approached to tackle the then-in-development-hell X-Men film. His (rejected) proposal, which can be found on his website, is not just your run-of-the-mill screen story treatment; it begins with a full-blown treatise that delineates the appeal of the X-Men into four elements – I particularly like the last one: “Stuff exploding, wild technology, cool powers, fighting. I have this stuff too.” Now that X-Men has actually been made into a film by which I was generally unimpressed, but spawned a surprisingly exhilirating sequel, one looks back and imagines what might have been – but considering that he went on to give us Kavalier & Clay instead, who am I to complain? Happily, it all worked out in the end, and he got to pen a little bit of Marvel’s other A-list franchise, and with admirable results.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay itself spawned a byproduct in the form of a quarterly eighty-page comic paperback, The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist – a realization of the fictitious comic that our titular heroes Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay create in Chabon’s novel. Those of you with long memories or a predilection for digging around in the archives may recall that one of this weblog’s first posts was about that very announcement. After months of hunting around comic book retailers in Alberta in vain, I ordered the first two issues from Things From Another World a little while ago; they arrived at the end of May, but other circumstances have precluded me from reviewing them in full… until now.

To be honest, after the trials and tribulations of publication delays and the small problem of retailers not stocking the series, all the hype for Escapist #1 culminated in a bit of a letdown, perhaps because it was almost too conventional. The book is an anthology of six stories, with a few written segments of invented history interspersed throughout to continue the masquerade that the Escapist is or ever was a real comic book hero that has now been rediscovered by the “history” recounted in Kavalier & Clay. The first one, “The Passing of the Key”, is an origin story that faithfully visualizes Part I, Chapter 8 of the novel – one of the best parts of the original text, a breathtaking encapsulation of comic book panels in the power of prose written in the present tense, a passage that made one wish the comic was real. Well, now the comic is real, and this may sound harsher than I intend, but the book was better.

Make no mistake – the story as it unfolds in twenty pages of full colour is still a fun read – but the scene that stood as originally written in words and words alone made you believe that the art, the story, and the sheer thrill of escapism in that twenty pages were revolutionary. Perhaps this is a consequence of being desensitized to the present-day quality of comic book art now that every budding penciller has had ample time to idolize the visionary Jack Kirby, but the one thing the Escapist cannot escape here is the feeling of being a little ordinary. Part of it is that outside the context of the novel, the thematic significance of various elements are lost – Tom Mayflower’s crutch an expression of Sammy’s battle with polio, the entire concept of the character founded on Joe’s escape artistry and flight from the Nazis, the very idea of escapism as a human necessity.

See, this is what happens when the first two comic books you ever read are Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s Watchmen, which are generally agreed to be the two greatest works of comic art of all time and all time yet to come (a claim that, in my brief experience with comics, remains to my knowledge entirely true): you set your standards too high.

Also in Escapist #1 are “Reckonings”, a very contemporary-style and almost dialogue-free retelling of Luna Moth’s own origin story; “Sequestered”, a lighthearted read where the Escapist fights for justice in the form of jury duty, and the best entry in the volume; “Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been…”, a mediocre allegory of Joseph McCarthy that never quite connects; “The Escapegoat”, an interesting two-page foray into kids’ comics by way of animal personification; and “Prison Break”, a darker sort of story where the Escapist goes undercover in a maximum-security prison, which features the Saboteur, another character from the novel. The entire project is an enjoyable adaptation, but is unlikely to entice anyone who has not read Chabon’s magnum opus. Of course, in my humble opinion, anyone who has not read Chabon’s magnum opus should remedy that with the utmost immediacy.

The big payoff, however, is in Escapist #2. Part of the original concept of the Escapist comic anthologies was to parallel the evolution of the comic as depicted in Kavalier & Clay, and thus capture a stylistic history of comic books in general. While the first volume hints at this – “The Passing of the Key” has the angular simplicity of the 1930s, the cornball atmosphere in “Sequestered” is reminiscent of the ’60s Batman television series starring Adam West, and “The Escapegoat” is a conceptual children’s work – it is in Escapist #2 that we really see the art branch out into wildly divergent aesthetics, a postmodern collage that finally distinguishes this series from the other comics on the market. The quality of the stories also shows improvement, some of them tackling the motives of heroes and villains in the same abstract, conceptual fashion as the symbolic conflicts in the book.

This collection begins with a Luna Moth story, “The Mechanist!”, the highlight of which is the chaotic pencil work by Bill Sienkiewicz, partially sprayed with colours that run all over the place. The approach is fresh, unconventional, and welcome. But what follows it is the best story in either Escapist volume, “The Lady or the Tiger”, by Glen David Gold (who authored the immensely entertaining novel Carter Beats The Devil). With fine pencilling by Gene Colan underlining a dark and solemn colour palette, it is a moody superhero love story that touches on many of the same ideas of personal desires and responsibility that we see in the two Spider-Man films. The writing is characteristic of an established and respected author, whose one novel to date has very similar appeal to Chabon’s own work.

Then comes “Divine Wind”, a story done in Japanese manga, which is by itself fairly standard but a decent take on the cultural cross-pollination we have already seen with Japanese comics, and which is still quite relevant considering projects such as the Indian Spider-Man. “300 Fathoms Down”, in the style of the Modern Era, brings an aging Escapist out of retirement for a Cold War mission; it is the most conventional of the lot. Escapist #2 concludes with “Old Flame”, a Luna Moth story that does the most we have yet seen with her out-of-costume alter-ego, the librarian Judy Dark.

On the strength of the second volume, I will very likely order The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #3 when it is released next week. This one features the cover art that is a source of controversy and a key element in the novel, the Joe Kavalier drawing of the Escapist decking Adolf Hitler – only drawn by Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy. Hopefully it exhibits the same kind of creative daring that made Escapist #2 worthwhile; of all the styles of sequential art out there, many have yet to be explored.

Oh, right… Spider-Man 2. Next post, I promise.

There are two separate items I want to discuss in this post, and the way they relate to each other will be quite immediately evident. The first is, of the two, the more direct example of cross-pollination between the mythologies of America and Asia. The second, and altogether lengthier subject about which I will write the usual thousand-worder about the “storytelling potential of the cinematic medium” and related jargon, concerns a cultural legend of Japan that sports a new look and is worth a trip to the silver screen.

This article on Comic Book Resources speaks for itself:

Eastern Swing: Sharad Devarajan Talks Indian Spider-Man

What’s the hottest comic book topic right now?

If you said Spider-Man, you’d only be half right.

As officially announced by various East Indian newspapers last week and confirmed online this week, the South Asian comics distribution company “Gotham Entertainment” has reached a historic deal with Marvel Comics to publish a new version of Spider-Man in an upcoming four issue mini-series. No, it isn’t just a new continuity: Spider-Man is now an East Indian by the name of Pavitr Prabhakar and the Green Goblin is tied to Hindu mythology. To tell CBR News and its readers a bit more about the project, Gotham’s President & CEO Sharad Devarajan spoke with CBR News.

…

“Though we will remain true to the underlining mythos of Spider-Man, which is epitomized in the phrase ‘With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility,’ the character will be reinvented so his powers, problems and costume are more integrated with Indian culture. Unlike the US origin, which is deeply rooted in science, the Indian version is more rooted in magic and mythology. This version of Spider-Man will gain his powers from ancient mystic in order to combat the evil threat of the Green Goblin, who will also be reinvented as a modern day Indian demon from myth.”

Yes, the article has pictures – and yes, an English-translated American edition will also come at some point, though of course, that will lose some of the authenticity. Now, forget for a moment the irony of a company called Gotham doing a Marvel title, and take a minute to let the genius of this idea sink in. I will not claim to be anything less than generally oblivious to Indian mythology, but this sounds like a brilliantly-conceived take on the universality of mythical heroes, which I mention in case I’m not the only one currently reading too much Joseph Campbell for his own good.

Oh, and “Pavitr Prabhakar”? Gold.

Now let’s move on to the more easterly nation of Japan, a country about which I am somewhat less qualified to speak than say, Adam Pauls. I venture a guess that the vast majority of my readership is not too familiar with the Japanese television and film character Zatoichi. If that is the case, go catch up on your readings, and I’ll see you next class. The capsule summary runs thus: Zatoichi is a blind man, a masseuse by day, with a distinctive sword sheathed in a cane, and the sharpened senses to use it. Sounds very much like a certain man without fear, if you ask me. The extent of intentional mutual influence between Daredevil and Zatoichi is unclear; the former first appeared in 1964, the latter in 1962.

The reason I bring him up now is because of ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano’s update of the character in the film Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman, wherein he both directs and stars. The new Zatoichi is now making the rounds in Canada, having played at the Uptown Stage and Screen in Calgary this week, and currently at South Common for you Edmontonians. It draws Marvel comparisons right off the bat, having initially hit the festival circuit last year on the heels of Ben Affleck bringing Matt Murdock into the mainstream consciousness, but also because Zatoichi’s cane sword in the film is a blood-red cylinder, which is apparently something new – understandable, given that the Zatoichi films of old were in monochrome. But beyond the shared basis of a blind superhero with a cane, and the aforementioned bit about the universality of heroes or whatever, the similarities are few.

Nowadays you see people take the word “postmodern” and spread it like margarine everywhere they go, but the new Zatoichi is where it actually applies. For the most part, it is a throwback to an older age in filmmaking, one of patient, stationary but conscientious shots, and minimal scoring in the musical department. Kitano’s stark blond hair aside, the majority of the film would not look out of place in the sixties. It’s a refreshing break from the over-edited muddle of Matrix imitators that are so excessive in cutting and camera movement that the action is impossible to follow, but casual audiences will find it to plod for stretches between the swift and gory swordfights. It feels like a movie with a sense of first-hand cultural authenticity, unlike the recent crop of American samurai movies, such as Quentin Tarantino’s unabashedly reverent Kill Bill and the faux importance of The Last Samurai.

Occasionally, though, Kitano’s approach is one of experimentation. Early on in the film there is a brief scene of farmers tilling a field, cut in such a way that the sounds develop into almost a techno beat – never mind the tap-dancing festival at the conclusion that stops just short of The Matrix Reloaded, to everyone’s relief. It is almost as if he is asking us to listen to the sounds associated with the images in the same manner a blind man would, without ever bringing us into pitch darkness or superhero sonar-vision. Watching Kitano perform the lead role himself is a delight; he alternates between staggering gambling addict and legendary blademaster with comfort and conviction.

The fights are remarkable given how short they are, forsaking extended clashes of katana-on-katana for a brief swell of anticipation-resolution as the participants strategize, then execute. After all, Zatoichi would hardly be a master swordsman if he took his time slicing and dicing the local goons. If you contrast this with the likes of Hong Kong cinema and its own folk heroes like the martial arts master Wong Fei-Hung (in more films than any character in history, and played by Jet Li in the now-classic Once Upon A Time In China), the difference in style is very representative of how Japanese and Chinese martial arts traditions diverged in their own developmental paths. Hong Kong cinema has the ten-minute fights with fancier flourishes of cloth and blade; Japanese cinema demonstrates the gutting of enemies with a stroke or two apiece.

Now, I do not claim to be too well-versed in Zatoichi lore myself, but where the film is a little lacking is focus; not in the visual sense, but in its focus on the main character. To put it briefly, a lot of time is spent elsewhere. Those of you who have trouble discerning names and faces right off the bat will have a doozy following the tangled web of concealed identities in the plot, which concerns two geisha assassins exacting revenge on the gang bosses who murdered their parents. It does make sense by the time the credits roll, but not so much until then. As I mentioned earlier, Zatoichi is also what one would apologetically call patient, and may not hold the attention of those weaned on the speed of the standard twenty-first century Hollywood action movie. Nor does it ever tread on the literary seriousness of the average arthouse foreign film. In a category-defying self-contradiction, it is both conventional and avant-garde, but thankfully succeeds at both.

On a final note, time to break professionalism and be a complete geek. I just about flipped out when I saw the end credits – specifically, the name associated with the music in the film: Keiichi Suzuki. This is the same Keiichi Suzuki who composed for one of the greatest RPGs in the short history of video games, namely, EarthBound for the Super Nintendo. His versatile soundtrack for that game featured everything from weepy melodies on tinny piano evoking the sentiment of homesickness, to the Blues Brothers stylings of the Runaway Five, to the harmonic distortions of enemies from outer space. While his work for Zatoichi is minimal, it is significant, and just as diverse, covering everything from traditional Japanese folk music to the pseudo-techno breakbeats I mentioned earlier.

But never mind the score for Zatoichi – there is just something inherently cool about seeing a name from a phenomenal element of the Nintendo experience appear onscreen. If only somebody could get Nobuo Uematsu on a movie, we’re set.

Back in October I wrote about my concerns on the subject of adapting Watchmen to film, particularly if David Hayter was going to direct.

Chuck those out the window. Ain’t It Cool News finally lives up to its name and reports that the director attached to the project is none other than Darren Aronofsky. Hayter is still on board from the writing aspect, which is encouraging, but bringing an established independent-film veteran with a proven record behind the camera is even moreso. This is, in as few words as possible, a step in the right direction.

It’s clear what has to happen from this point onwards. David Hayter, do what you did with X2 and not what you did with X-Men – polish a script that doesn’t get lost in a forest of some of the most well-defined costumed heroes in the entire comics medium. Darren Aronofsky, work the same kind of chilling visual magic and style you brought to Requiem for a Dream. The potential here is nothing short of doing justice to the paragon of comic-book literature in the same way Peter Jackson did justice to the paragon of fantasy literature; you can either beeline straight to the Oscars, or screw it up completely. I would prefer the former.

I know, I know. I still haven’t written up my detailed analyses of how The Passion of the Christ can or cannot be approached objectively, the gall of bathing Omar Sharif in the two hours of mediocrity that is Hidalgo, and a valiant attempt at deciphering the villain-side plot of the otherwise entertaining Hellboy – but a man’s got to have priorities.

Step up to the witness stand, Jonathan Hensleigh: you have to answer for The Punisher.

Let’s get this out of the way, first of all: The Punisher is not the sudden and untimely demise of Marvel’s cinematic renaissance, nor is it the coming of the apocalypse with respect to comics on film, as a lot of websites out there would have you believe. It has some pretty bad moments, but by no means are they, say, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen bad. Unlike that particular “movie”, I will not be making fun of The Punisher in every subsequent weblog entry I write concerning comic book adaptations. It has some very serious problems, but is not without merit.

In the spirit of being critical, let us first examine the problems.

The biggest issue with The Punisher is tonal inconsistency. To frame it more comprehensibly, it is in all likelihood impossible for anyone to enjoy the entire movie, given how certain sections of the film are diametrically opposed in their ideological approach. The first act of the film, which sets up the revenge tragedy with the obligatory family-killing that happens in every piece of this sort, does everything in its power to avoid being a comic book. The destruction of Frank Castle (Thomas Jane), played straight-up, comprises some of the work’s most brutal and genuine moments of high tension. There is some good filmmaking going on for a few patches here, completely removed from the costumed heroics of the Marvel Universe.

Within minutes, we are suddenly an intederminate period of time ahead of ourselves, when Hensleigh and co-writer Michael France suddenly decided to fast-forward and reveal that like this here reviewer, yes indeed, they have read a Punisher comic – specifically, the Marvel Knights Punisher #1: Welcome Back, Frank by Garth Ennis, complete with Castle’s new neighbours Joan the Mouse (a very miscast Rebecca Romjin-Stamos), Spacker Dave (Ben Foster), and Mr. Bumpo (John Pinette). Without interruption, at this point the hitherto decidedly un-comical film places itself in the midst of three individuals straight from a two-dimensional arrangement of inked and coloured panels – which, incidentally, are the three most human characters in the whole 123-minute sittting. That should not be mistaken for saying much. The worst is when The Punisher exists in a void where it is unsure of whether it should be comic-like or not, and softens itself up to ostensibly be less offensive; for instance, there is no “death by Bumpo” in sight. That’s a minor adaptation complaint that this here author is unqualified to make, but the inconsistent waffling is more than fair game.

Then there’s the matter of story construction, which is, for lack of a better descriptor, illogical. Without spoiling too many of the details, here’s how it goes: Castle makes his intentions of vengeance known to chief villain Howard Saint (John Travolta) via standing around, throwing money out a window and mouthing off to the cops. This results in a death toll of roundabout two. Before you know it, Saint is in a rage about Castle ruining his life and immediately sends out heavy-hitters such as a guitarist who fails to be sufficiently ominous and a hulkster known as “The Russian” (Kevin Nash) – the latter straight from Ennis, minus the superhero obsession and the “suffocating” demise. Then after a lot of sneaking around and double-crossing not really characteristic of an angry guy with a white skull on his shirt out for blood, Castle starts gunning down trivial henchmen in nontrivial quantities.

There is a problem here. The proper order for a back-from-the-dead revenge story is: raise a lot of hell to make yourself known, then reap the hard-earned ire of the chief villain, then start fighting the minibosses and getting really nasty. It’s called a “linear progression”. Case studies: Maximus Decimus Meridius in Gladiator fighting, nay, earning his way up to the bout with Tigris of Gaul. Mike Sullivan in Road to Perdition having a properly ominous miniboss meeting with Jude Law’s crooked photographer. The Bride slicing her way through the Crazy 88s at the House of Blue Leaves before taking on O-Ren Ishii – but let’s save the Kill Bill discussion for later, shall we.

So we are left with a weak and inconsequential villain whose closest associates dress like the Men in Black, but act like they have no idea they are in a comic book adaptation. You can’t have it both ways, folks. We have a story that suffers from what is quickly becoming something that can be termed “Marvel Syndrome” – a severe imbalance between the origin story and the pilot-episode story, and with an unclear dividing line between the two, to boot. By having no secrecy of identity in place, a lot of conventional assertions about the hero mystique fall flat.

But I think I’ve punished this movie enough; time to look at its better aspects. Thomas Jane is a well-cast Frank Castle. He plays the role with the composure of a broken man and the voice to match his ruthlessness. As was mentioned earlier, the first act of the movie has some terrifying moments; there is a very real sense of fear for the lives of doomed characters in the critical scenes where they meet their ends. One would think that of all the overdone revenge-flick conventions, the inciting incident that triggers everything – particularly when it involves the deaths of a wife and child – would be the most stale. Here, the opposite is true. While Joan, Dave and Bumpo seem very out of place in the context of much of the rest of the movie, the interaction between the three and their relationship to Castle are an enthralling dynamic to observe.

The end product: a wishy-washy adaptation of an already trashy comic that intermittently tries not to be so trashy, and instead ends up without a clear sense of identity. It is far from disastrous, but considering its position at the nexus of several subgenres that have been done far better, The Punisher has nothing new to add.

Kill Bill, Vol. 2, on the other hand, is a different story.