Kaze tachinu (The Wind Rises)

Ghibli's had a productive couple of years, and now they're taking a little break, I read.  We're still catching up.  Kaze tachinu (The Wind Rises) came out just after we left Japan last summer, and I hadn't seen it in the States.  I've been looking forward to seeing it with a mixture of anticipation and dread.

The dread came as soon as I learned what it's about:  the early life of Horikoshi Jirō, the guy who designed the Zero fighter plane for Mitsubishi, the one that became so notorious during WWII.  I'll note here that I'm not at all familiar with Horikoshi's life story;  but the theme alone made me worry that in his old age (he's announced that this is his last film, but didn't he say that about Ponyo? I'm not actually too sure he's totally retiring) Miyazaki was going to turn to nationalism.  Under the Abe administration Japan has been swerving to the right to a worrisome degree, and a rightward, nostalgic turn in old age is a known issue with Japanese artists, so I half expected this;  but Miyazaki has always had such a multicultural, all-embracing aesthetic that I particularly didn't want to see him go in that direction.

On that score, the film isn't nearly as bad as I'd expected.  It makes Horikoshi into practically a saint in his personal life:  impossibly virtuous, in a Traditional Values sort of way, which is a typical strategy for rehabilitating right wing nasties ("but he loved dogs and cherry blossoms, so how could he be evil?").  But the movie resolutely avoids the political issues surrounding the war.  It's not an apology for Japan's actions.  It doesn't condemn them either, and that's a problem if you're looking for one. 

But it seems that what Miyazaki's aiming for is a portrait of a guy who's essentially apolitical, who just wants to make airplanes, and not think about what they'll be used for.  Jiro in the film is actually disturbed by the knowledge that his planes will be used for war (which is a certainty, given that his company is working on military contracts).  This comes up a couple of times.  I wish it had come up more.  That's the theme this film could have centered on:  the conscience of an artist or inventor who can't control the uses to which his work will be put.  Or who can control them, but only at the expense of the work itself.  There's a deep ethical issue there, but Miyazaki raises it only to essentially shrug it off.  So while the film isn't the nationalist thing I was afraid it would be, it does mostly dodge the moral issues raised by its subject matter.

On the other hand, it's not as good as I'd expected either.  It's a film about airplanes, about flying, intended (ostensibly) as a final statement by an animator who has made fantastic films about flying in the past.  Think of how integral the imagination of flight is to Nausicaa, Laputa, Spirited Away.  Think of Porco Rosso (my favorite Miyazaki film of all), which isn't just about flight but, like The Wind Rises, about airplanes as machines.  Think of all that flying and you're bound to expect this film to be, if nothing else, a triumph of glorious visuals.  But it's not.  It's pretty enough, and there are certainly some wonderful moments.  But really nothing we haven't seen Miyazaki do before, and often better. 

Third thoughts on Terrence Malick

So there we are.  Rewatched The Tree of Life and watched To the Wonder.  My opinion on the former hasn't changed at all;  and I'm sorry to say that I'm not even sure that watching the rest of his films deepened my understanding of that one any.  Having seen anything by Malick (in my case, The Thin Red Line) is probably advisable, just so you don't go in expecting anything conventional.  But too many probably would have blunted the impact.  It certainly did with To the Wonder.  It felt like self-parody in places.  I laughed out loud, rolled my eyes, and snorted as often as I nodded my head in appreciation.

To the Wonder is a puzzling film.  A lot of critics seem to be taking from it the same thing they took from Tree of Life, but I see it as trying, at least in part, to do something different.  That film was largely about an ecstasy (embodied/accessed by/through the mother) that can never be effaced - the light that never goes out.  This one is at least sometimes trying to be about what happens when that light does go out.  Loss of faith, God, joy, love, beauty, what-have-you.  That's a bold enough departure that I was swayed, sometimes.  Parts of the film are undeniably there.

But I suspect (and Malick's such an auteur that you almost can't help but judge his films based on the personality they present, even if it's not real) that Malick hasn't ever actually felt what his fallen priest Javier Bardem feels.  There's too much angelic twirling in the fields in this film:  too much of the Wonder seeps in.  So it feels like he's gesturing toward a depression that the mortals who surround him assure him exists, and that he feels he should probably try to address if he wants to get everybody to tune into the Wonder, but that in the end he's clueless about.

And again, I think it's because he's clueless about actual people.  The Real Oklahoma People that Javier Bardem encounters are not presented as anything but grotesques.  They speak, but just like the rest of the actors their words are drowned out by Emotive Music and whispered voiceovers by other people.  They're not individuals, and in the end they're hardly human.  We're certainly not invited to empathize with them as we are with Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, and Rachel McAdams.  And there's no in-between.  In Malick's universe there are Beautiful People and then there are grotesques. 

I'm starting to find myself puzzled by the cult of Terrence Malick.  His films are dazzlingly shot, provocatively edited, exquisitely scored, and in so many ways different from typical film that I can understand the initial excitement.  But so far he's only demonstrated an ability to do one thing, and it's not the kind of thing that lends itself to reiteration.  His themes are almost childishly naïve, and his spirituality is a combination of New Age facileness and old-style Catholic mysticism.  And his characters - okay, granted he's trying to deal in human archetypes, not individual characters.  But what are those archetypes?  Man goes out and works upon the world.  Woman stays home and waxes maternal.  I mean, he's utterly regressive. 

I imagine Terrence Malick as the cinematic equivalent of Sarah McLachlan singing "It's A Man's Man's Man's World."

Mystery Men (1999)

One measure of a genre's maturity is when it starts inspiring spoofs.  And yes, I guess those count for the project.  So:  Mystery Men. 

Good premise.  Some good gags.  I don't know, though.  I had the same reaction to this that I usually have when I watch American comedies:  I started wondering whether I really have become just another humorless leftwing academic. 

I mean, I can't stand Saturday Night Live and most of its spawn, and unfortunately SNL has defined the American comedic mainstream for, like, my whole life.  The basic SNL mode is class-clown obnoxious: bullying, smug, high-fiving, cruel, lazy, dumb.  I was about fourteen when I realized that the SNL strategy was entirely built around trying to find the next inane catchphrase that all the kids would be parroting on the bus next Monday morning.

TV sitcoms I avoid like the plague.

And it's no better with the other culture whose filmed production I'm familiar with.  I hate Japanese TV comedians, too.  Manzai acts, "variety" shows, all that shit.  Repulses me when it doesn't bore me, bores me when it doesn't repulse me.

So maybe I am a dour kind of guy.  And yet I can laugh hysterically, without restraint, at things I do find funny.  Coen Brothers.  Mitani Kōki.  Joss Whedon.  So I don't think I lack a sense of humor...

Anyway.  I didn't really laugh at this movie.  Chuckled occasionally.  I wanted to like it.  I like the premise.  I like the idea of sad-sack working-class superheroes.  Superheroes with weird, perhaps embarrassing powers.  I mean, it picks up on something central to the X-Men mythos, the idea that the superhero story is a story about physical or mental difference, and in the real world difference is not celebrated but denigrated.

But it just wasn't funny.

Second thoughts on Terrence Malick

I'm two-thirds of the way through a Terrence Malick project:  to see all of his films in a concentrated period.  In the last week I've watched Badlands and Days of Heaven, both for the first time, The Thin Red Line for the second, and The New World for the first.  By this time next week I expect to have rewatched Tree of Life and seen To the Wonder, which I somehow missed even hearing about when it came out.  I guess there's something to this ivory tower thing.

I expect I'll have more to say then, but for the moment, here's where I'm at.

I think I like Malick when he's at his most untethered.  He's not particularly interested in character or story, so he's at his weakest when he tries to stick closest to those things.  Conversely he's at his best when his material is so mundane that he's able to leap freely into the realm of what he is particularly interested in.  Accordingly, so far I think Tree of Life and Days of Heaven are his best.

I can follow him into the mystic.  Communion with nature, film as religious experience, the epiphany, the world infused with the glory of God.  All okay.  To be honest I'm not there right now in my life, but I was once, and the memory of it is still vivid enough that I will argue for it as an important human experience, and a valid subject for artistic creation.  I never want to get far enough into the material that I stop being able to appreciate Van Morrison or Gerard Manley Hopkins.  And that's the kind of vision Malick has, essentially:  "the world is charged with the grandeur of God."

That being said, I'm not sure that's the proper response to everything.  Proper isn't the word I'm looking for there, though.  I'm not sure that every occasion is created equal as an occasion for that sort of visionmongering.  There are some stories, some subjects, that perhaps might ask (in a polite, querulous tone) for a more conventional treatment.  Even if it might dictate different conclusions.

That's why The Thin Red Line and The New World leave me nonplussed.  The New World is a triumph of technique and feeling, but in the end it repeats the same old myths with the same old noble-savage rhetoric at heart.  The story demands more.  The history demands more.  The Thin Red Line is more promising - the bloodshed-in-Eden irony is rich with possibility - but the actual experience of guys in combat demands a little more respectful hearing than Malick gives it.  Both movies are notoriously filled with actors who are underutilized or even eliminated in the editing, and I think that indicates more than just an inefficient technique:  it indicates that stories are being considered and then discarded.  Suppressed.

Saying that Malick is uninterested in story and character is another way of saying that he's uninterested in people, at least as individuals.  As flesh and blood.  He's only interested in humans in the abstract, or in his own vision, which in the end is the same thing.  His mystic vision is the kind of religion that cannot allow for the messiness of real people.  It's antihumanist.  In a way that makes his films perfect for a particular kind of postmodernist:  a lot of us these days are very comfortable with the idea of humanity's perspective being decentered in favor of something else.  But this is also how the left wraps around and becomes the right:  Malick's diminution of human individuality in favor of the Big Truth isn't so different, in the end, from that behind an overtly religious epic like The Passion of the Christ.  Right?  There's no point in telling John Smith's story, or Private Witt's, really, because the only story that matters is the One Story.

Which is why I find Malick most satisfying when he's not pretending to do anything else.  Tree of Life and Days of Heaven are about nothing but themselves and the vision.  The Thin Red Line and The New World feel, especially the former, like they were supposed to be something else, something altogether more engaged with humanity, before the director gave up and retreated into his private world.

Badlands is the odd one out at this point, which is no surprise since it was his first.  I wish I could have known what it was like to see that without knowing what he'd go on to do.  It feels at first blush much more character-focused, much more invested in its people as people, actually interacting with each other and their environment, then his later movies.  But the archetypal aspects (retreat from man's world into the natural, yearning for the transcendent) are obvious.  And the nods toward a pop-culture-savvy cynicism, which might have seemed quite bracing in the early '70s when this was his only film, are now barely perceptible, and easily neglected because they're clearly not where Malick's heart lies.  Maybe they were then, though. 

Spawn (1997)

I've been putting off blogging about this film, because I hated it.  But I set out to do this, and I've always thought Bobby Bland's was good advice... 

So I think Spawn sets kind of a lower bound for what superhero films are capable of.  I set out to do this because I felt that as the best of the superhero films had achieved something pretty close to sublime in a pop culture way, and even the better-but-not-the-best of them had done some damn interesting things.  So I wanted to understand the whole genre.

But of course I never expected that all the superhero films would be good - I'd already seen enough losers, and furthermore I'm also a believer in Sturgeon's Law.  Here we see it in action.

The lower bound of superhero films is essentially mindless action.  Possessing superpowers presents the possessor with the temptation to use them to satisfy his or her desires:  with great power comes great responsibility is a line that's been used explicitly in at least one superhero film, but it's like the secret moral of most of them.  But some of them don't care, or perhaps set out to cater to the preadolescent in all of us who would rather not have to recognize adult responsibilities.  The infant who just wants to smash things.  Fair enough:  indulging in that fantasy is also part of the genre.  But when that's all the story does, and when it does it badly, then you have...Spawn.  'Nuff said.

Oddly, that was my impression of the comic too.  My only real period of intense, loyal reading of American comics came in the mid-'90s.  I was in my last couple of years of college, there was a comic book store within walking distance of my apartment, I was bored stiff in Utah, my eyes had already been opened to the possibilities of the comics form by my encounter with manga (in Japanese - hardly anything had been translated at this point), and I discovered that American comics were in something of a rebirth.  This was a big era for indie comics, when several big artists and writers were breaking away from DC and Marvel and starting their own companies.  I had maybe a dozen or more titles I followed loyally, and read fairly widely beyond that.  But Spawn was not one of them.  It was pretty clear to me that the new artistic room created by the indie boom could be used for two things.  You could (a) tell stories that the majors would never touch, because they were too weird, experimental, abstract, uncommercial, whatever, or (b) you could tell exactly the same kinds of stories that the majors told, but with more sex and violence.  Spawn was the latter, obvs.  I had no use for it.

Blade (1998)

I'll admit I had never heard of this character until I saw the film.  I'm aware now that it has a respectable comic book pedigree, but to be honest, watching the film there's no indication that it's anything other than what it feels like:  an attempt to quickly and easily capitalize on current trends in blockbusters, the action-horror film and the superhero film.  A hybrid born of lust for lucre.  In fact, coming after The Crow, this seems like an unoriginal hybrid born of lust for lucre.  Like, "Can we remake The Crow with more video-game violence and less intelligence?"

Yes, we can.

Godzilla (2014)

It wouldn't be quite accurate to say I went into this film with low expectations.  I had very high expectations that it would suck.  Last time Hollywood got its hands on G, it sucked.  At the time I recall I was the one who would always defend Hollywood against my friends who would dismiss standard Hollywood fare as overmoneyed and underthought.  I saw myself as an intellectual populist standing up against elite hipsters.  But Roland Emmerich's Godzilla sucked, and it sucked in all the ways that my friends always said Hollywood sucked.  I felt betrayed.  My eyes were opened.

The new one, I figured, would suck just as bad, but in an up-to-date way.  I was wrong.  It's brilliant.  It does right everything that the '98 version does wrong.  In fact it's an argument for why one might want Hollywood to get its hands on something like this in the first place. 

It's a smart movie.  It's full of ideas and it can't wait to share them with you.  This starts in the opening credits, which show you tantalizing bits of information about the post-WWII nuclear program, then redact it before you can really read it.  Note that the '98 version used the credit sequence to set up its version of the monster, too, and that's where the sucking began, because the '98 version's big steaming pile was that it Blamed It On The French, right?  This one places the blame squarely where the Godzilla mythos says it belongs:  on the Americans.  And that starts with the opening credits.

Let's reiterate:  Godzilla was the Americans' fault.  That's the whole point of the original movie.  Every later incarnation in Japan was built on that, even when G became a hero.  This is why the original and its first-series sequels are such primally important documents in Japanese popular culture:  they capture the country's ambivalence about America's nukes, about having them dropped on Japan (first and only), and then becoming America's ally, about responsibility and looking-forward and all that stuff that was clumsily suppressed when the first movie was shown in the U.S.  The '98 film saw itself as a complete reboot (G was arising for the first time in that story), and therefore it needed recently-headlined scary nuclear testing to blame, and that was the French.  But that presented viewers with a moral calculus that said America's decades of nuclear testing, and that whole Cold War thing, weren't enough to wake the monster - weren't in fact monstrous - but that French testing was.  Talk about missing the point.

The new movie gets all that right.  The awakening of G was the Americans' fault, way back in the '50s, and when the current monster surfaces in response to a nuclear power plant crisis in Japan, an American is on the scene, fucking things up.  In fact, this movie is extraordinarily focused on nuclear power as the bogeyman:  Yucca Mountain, transport of missiles, nuclear subs, it's all there.  It's a movie that not only understands the Godzilla myth, but that truly understands why disaster and monster movies of the classic era worked in the first place. 

It's a movie that gives Godzilla credit for the potential to actually scare audiences in 2014.  And so, for the first time (despite many years of seeing and teaching and thinking about Godzilla), I really got a visceral, real-time, in-the-moment sense of how it worked.  When they go into Yucca Mountain and throw open that nuclear-waste vault and see, not tidily contained waste matter, but wide open outdoor spaces:  that's a little scary.  That Should Not Be.  That can't help but make you start to think about maybe nuclear power is dangerous.  And so when the monsters are slugging it out in the heart of San Francisco and people are dying by the score around them, you never forget that this is an allegory of how we can't control nuclear power.  What would it look like if there was a nuclear accident in SF?  This is what it would look like.  But worse.

And that's one reason why one might want a Hollywood version of Godzilla in the first place.  If one is not Japanese in the '50s but American in the '10s, one can understand the first G intellectually, but not viscerally:  seeing him stomp on a Tokyo that one only knows from photos and old movies (this is true even for contemporary Japanese, of course - only a couple of the city's landmarks from that movie remain, and the skyline that surrounds them is utterly changed) is cool.  But seeing him stomp on things much closer to you in space as well as time is different.  It brings it home.  Nuclear power threatens us, too.

And it's not Japan's fault.

The Crow (1994)

So let's recap.  Superman comes out in 1978 and invents the modern superhero film.  But its sequels nearly kill the genre.  Batman comes out in 1989 and rejuvenates the superhero film, establishing it as one of the pillars of Hollywood blockbusting.  Ever since then, superheroes have ruled our world.

But it's a little more complicated than that.  The '90s saw quite a few superhero movies, but precious few were about the real gods.  It wasn't really until the 2000s that the real, old-school, iconic characters started to make it to the screen - your Spidermans, your Fantastic Fours, your X-Men.  Instead, in the '90s we had a studio rush, not to the classics, but to the contemporary comics.  '90s alternaheroes were better represented in theaters than their more famous predecessors.  I don't know why that is.  And I certainly don't begrudge them or their fans the jollies this phenomenon offered.  But it does give the superhero film a somewhat odd generic trajectory.  The Image and Dark Horse heroes of the '90s, and even some of the Marvel and DC print titles, were in large measure responses to, critiques of, the canonical heroes of previous decades.  Taking the films in isolation, what that means is that we get the deconstruction of the superhero film almost before it's fully constructed as a genre. 

The Crow is a perfect example.  The concept is perfect for the '90s.  It's a blank-meets-blank genre-mixer:  superhero story meets horror story.  Pure pulp joy, that.  And as an action movie that goes all in on goth atmospherics and doomy aesthetics, it both flatters the alternative aspirations of its audience while satisfying their very mainstream needs.

Is the Crow a superhero?  Good question.  He kicks ass like a superhero - the movie's rhythms are those of a superhero movie, its action sequences are those of a superhero movie.  The horror trappings can't disguise this.  And as a superhero, he's one of the greats - great origin story, great powers, great weaknesses, great mythic overtones.

With one problem.  Unlike all the others, he's a single-serving superhero.  Once he has avenged the death of his girlfriend, he's done.  He goes to meet her.  His is a story with a definite beginning, middle, and end.  Which makes his story that much more satisfying.  But it of course created problems for the filmmakers - sequels essentially had to make Crowness a transferrable quality.  Which is not a bad idea for a superhero...but which was clearly not a concept that was contemplated for this movie. 

Which means that in this movie we get to see the superhero stop being a superhero.  The god dies.  This takes us out of superhero territory - when Superman abdicates, we know he has to come back.  But the Crow, at least as Eric Draven, won't.  I think that's where a lot of this film's power lies.  It has an ending.  It's not about immortality, strange as that may seem in a film about a guy who comes back from the dead.  It's about death.  There's the horror, and more than that the goth, sensibility for you.  It's fundamentally at odds with the superhero sensibility, which is, body counts aside, about immortality and invincibility.  Superheroes are about being.  But the Crow is about doing.  And once he's done, he's done.

The Shadow (1994)

I think the emblematic moment for The Shadow is the first scene in the nightclub, where Lamont Cranston meets Margot Lane.  It's a nicely designed set, art deco like much of the movie, and Alec

Baldwin is pulling off the mysterious-playboy thing reasonably well, and Penelope Anne Miller likewise with the femme fatale.  But as their Scene begins, the music, which up to this point had been a pleasantly old-fashioned big-strings score, switches to sub-David Sanborn smooth jazz.  Typical cheesy romance soundtrack circa 1994.

If the Shadow is a superhero, he's a very old-fashioned one - a generation before Superman and Batman, two or three before Spiderman.  Does he even have superpowers?  In some versions he can "cloud men's minds," achieving not just a degree of mind control but also invisibility;  that's the version the film follows, which certainly qualifies him.  But remember:  Batman doesn't have any superpowers.  Just a willingness to pose as a superhero, and the strength, tech, and craziness to pull it off.  Even if that's all the Shadow has, he still qualifies - but barely, because he's doing it in a pop-culture world that's just barely conceiving the superhero.  The Shadow is half superhero and half ordinary (extraordinary) crimefighter.  He's the pulp roots of the superhero.  With a nice touch of the noir - it's his own personal acquaintance with "the evil that lurks in the hearts of men" that gives him his power.  He's a reformed sinner, and so he knows how to deal with sinners.

Does the film get that?  Not really.  It's light and frothy and superficial, and it only barely nods in the direction of the evil that lurks in the hearts of men.  It's not interested in really plumbing the depths, really exploring the darkness.  It's content to give us a twinkly-eyed head-fake in the direction of the darkness, while really putting its energy into the shiny surfaces of the pulp's action orientation.

Rather than bring the "evil that lurks in the hearts of men" to life in a way that would feel evil in the '90s, they make it a period piece, playing up the roaring-'20s style.  Giving jaundiced '90s viewers a look at darkness as imagined in a less cynical age - or darkness as a cynical age imagined a less cynical age imagined it.  In other words, I think the various holes and absurdities in the plot are meant to suggest a certain gonzo naīvete in the pulps, too:  if this is Genghis Khan's grandson (i.e., Mongolian, by way of a China-based empire), why is he in a sarcophagus sent from Tibet?  And why does it have a Latin inscription?  Et cetera.  The film is full of ridiculousness like that (another fave:  why does the Tim Curry character just happen to have a big tank handy that he can fill with water at a moment's notice to drown Alec Baldwin?  I mean, what other reason does he have for owning such a thing?), but I think we're supposed to enjoy all that as being evocative of the adventure-at-all-costs mentality of the pulps.

But you know, I can go along with that.  A movie that took the Shadow seriously would have been interesting, but a committed, well-done throwback could have been interesting too.  In fact, my gripe is that the movie doesn't go far enough.  It's not ready to go full-on weird period-piece - it also wants to be a big mainstream mid-'90s superhero blockbuster franchise-building film with the Slurpee cups and the Happy Meal toys and all that shit.  So it's not going to risk having Alec Baldwin and Penelope Anne Miller flirting to, say, "Begin the Beguine."  They're going to give us smoove jazz. 

So it's too '90s steroidal to satisfy the pop-culture-antiquarian crowd, but of course, the popcorn-munching 15-year-old boy is just mystified.  Who the hell's the Shadow and why should I care? says he.

Inside Llewyn Davis

So here's a thing.  Sometimes people who are very competent in one art form are clueless about

another.  I've seen it a lot in my professional life (and in the mirror):  people who are tremendously sensitive and supple in their thinking about literature who use images, paintings or photos, without the slightest wariness, as if what you see is just what you get.  People whose understanding of the visual arts is as multifaceted and textured as you can get who treat text like fluff.  Filmmakers who treat music as nothing but plot or atmosphere; the Coen Brothers are not among their number, however.

So now we get musicians treating the latest Coen Brothers movie as if it were not art.  As if it could aspire to be nothing but a movie "about" a real person or place or time.  As if any deviations from what these musicians remember or imagine are breaches of faith, rather than artistic choices.

Which is not to say that Inside Llewyn Davis doesn't have things to say about Dave Van Ronk, or Greenwich Village in the early '60s, or the Folk Revival.  Just that these things will be said in the context of the movie's true aims, whatever those are.  And that if you expected this to be a Van Ronk biopic you were ignorant, pure and simple. 

*

And while I'm thinking about critics of the Coen Brothers, let me say I've had it up to fucking here with this idea that the Coens hate their characters.  I have no idea what this is supposed to even mean, even though it's been part of the critical rap on them from the very beginning.  Go back to reviews of Blood Simple and you'll see it there.  Sure they laugh at their characters, but you don't think they have a deep and abiding love, empathy, and even respect for Ulysses Everett McGill?  For Barton Fink?  For Larry Gopnik, and sure for Llewyn Davis?  The fact is that human beings are idiots, every one of them, silly and vain and flatulent and oddly shaped;  and that comes through in a Coen Brothers movie.  But saying that doesn't mean you hate them.

*

The Coen Brothers think more deeply about music than most filmmakers.  Their scores are employed with as much thought and care as everything else in their films (which is to say:  a hell of a lot).  And when they use pre-existing records, or new recordings of old songs, it's always with a deep knowledge of them that speaks (like all the odd details of character and setting in their films) of a delight in them for their own sake.  A humanism of music.

So it is with the music in this film.  And it helps that they know their Dylan pretty damn well - they've always been properly appreciative of their fellow Minnesotan Jewish artist.

Which is why their choice of Dylan's derivative-original "Fare Thee Well" to close the movie is so dead-on.  Like, the more you know about Dylan the more sense this makes.  If you know your early Dylan then when Davis is told that "the New York Times will be there" at the Gaslight that night, not to see you but this other new act in town, you immediately think of Robert Shelton's career-launching NYT review of Dylan.  And so it's entirely right that as Young Bob is up there on stage doing just what Llewyn Davis has been doing for the whole movie (sing personally twisted versions of old folk songs), but doing it with more charisma and more instinctive songcraft, as presumably a secret Shelton is in the audience about to make him a star, Davis himself is out in the alley getting the shit kicked out of him.  By all accounts Dylan's impact on the folk revival scene was just that violent.  Not all at once, but over a period of years.  Dylan joined the scene, then without necessarily meaning to he destroyed the scene.  Not overnight, but quickly enough, he made what Llewyn Davis was doing irrelevant.

*

What about the claim that Inside Llewyn Davis neglects the Civil Rights Movement?  Well, it's true.  If this were, say, Cadillac Records or Walk the Line or any other music biopic, it would have an obligation to reflect the importance of political concerns to the musicians who drove the folk revival scene.  This movie doesn't do that.  Obviously because it doesn't choose to do that, and this should surprise no one who knows the Coens' movies, since they always have only an oblique and suggestive relationship to the politics of the periods in which they're set.

My read of it is this.  The movie is called Inside Llewyn Davis, and that's what it's about.  Not the world outside Llewyn Davis - not the real Greenwich Village, the real early '60s, but the emotional and mental and artistic landscape found inside him.  Inside this fictional character.  Obvs.

But more than that.  I've always thought of O Brother as being about, not the South that produced the songs in it, but the South that the songs in it produce:  the Depression-era South as you'd imagine it based on nothing but old Carter Family and Robert Johnson records, and maybe their covers.  The South inside the music.  In just that way, Inside Llewyn Davis is about the Greenwich Village evoked by the music.  And by the cover of Inside Dave Van Ronk.  (That cat, for example.)

And the thing is, until Dylan came along and started writing the protest songs, you wouldn't know from the music what these people cared about, politically.  For these usually well-off usually-white usually-young usually-Northern usually-urban people, singing the songs of the black rural old poor Other was a gesture in support of the Civil Rights movement.  But the songs weren't about that.  Mostly.  Dylan of course wasn't the first to write protest songs, or explicitly political songs.  But look at what Van Ronk, Joan Baez, and others were recording on their pre-Dylan albums:  songs about other things:  suffering, pain, parting, hope, love, etc.  Eternal verities which demanded, ultimately, Civil Rights as a recognition of the common humanity of the people who had first spoken these eternal verities in this way - but which transcended any particular political goal.

To say this may sound like it's belittling the importance of the Movement.  And that's precisely the controversy Dylan sparked - not when he plugged in, but before that, when at the height of his fame as a prophet of protest he recorded an album of personal songs.  Love songs, hate songs, humor songs, rambling songs about himself, not the Movement.  And called it Another Side Of (although he hated the title).  To indulge in the personal is, by some lights, to resist progress.  Or at least to stop contributing to it.  A counter-revolutionary act, in some circles.

For better or worse, I think that's where this movie lives.  I think it's trying to reflect the world you get from listening to Dave Van Ronk, early pre-protest Dylan, even Tommy Clancy and the Makem Brothers - a world that's largely introspective, weighed down by its own feelings, and by the difficulty of expressing them through songs and styles borrowed from the Other.  The results are often beautiful, but strangely inarticulate, like Davis himself, for all their fluency; and this gives rise to not a little frustration.  Thus the moment when Davis heckles the Jean Ritchie analog, the one singer in the film who comes by her music authentically - and Davis can't handle it, and he calls her fake.  In many ways it's the realest moment in the film. 

Batman & Robin (1997)

I got through a whole review of Batman Forever without once mentioning Robin.

No great loss, though.  I confess that I have little use for Robin as a character, at least in the movies.  As written he seems meant to be just what the comics character was meant as: an audience surrogate for adolescents, and a way to lighten up the Batman.  But I'm definitely of the camp that says Batman is at his best when he's at his darkest:  he needs no lightening up.  And the third movie didn't need an adolescent surrogate:  every character was one already.

Plus, the film was hopelessly confused as to what Robin was supposed to be anyway.  As written he was an adolescent, but Chris O'Donnell looked every day of his 25 years when he played the part.  Nobody - not a single person - bought him as a teenager.  I mean the very next year he'd play a lawyer, right?  And so the chemistry between Batman and Robin - hell, let's leave chemistry out of it:  the story makes no sense.  ...Of course, leaving chemistry out of it was probably exactly why a grown man was cast as Robin:  fear of the skeevy overtones that the once-(probably-)innocent pairing would inevitably take on in 1995.  Especially when the suits have nipples.

There was a potential there for an interesting deepening of the Batman character, though.  I mean, even as Val Kilmer's playing him, he's the definitive loner, but the entry of Robin demands that he become part of a team.  And it's clearly against his will:  what Bruce Wayne is having to deal with is the inevitable consequence of his success.  He's breeding imitators.  They're his responsibility whether he likes it or not.  The vigilante inspires other vigilantes - is he okay with that?  I don't say that this theme was handled with any more subtlety than the others, but it could have been.

Okay, I've delayed long enough:  we have to get to the fourth movie now.  And in the fourth movie, they've stopped even trying to put in any interesting subtext.  They've completely dropped any shadow at all from the Batman character.  Now he's the dad in The Brady Bunch - a harried pater whose familias is growing in unexpected ways.  Batman is a mildly reluctant team player here.  And so he has no meaning whatsoever.

In its own way, Batman & Robin is as big a disaster as Superman IV was.  The production values are infinitely higher, which means it does provide some intermittent cheap thrills, but it quite intentionally reduces Batman and the whole enterprise to a joke.  And not a very good one.

What's happening here is what happened 'round about the third or fourth Roger Moore 007 film:  everybody involved decided they could no longer take seriously this thing they were doing, and assumed audiences felt the same.  They disrespected it.  And the result is just pointless.  It's an unthrilling action movie, and an unfunny comedy.

It's not the fault of the casting.  It's the fault of the writing and directing.  To be sure, the casting has some real problems.  Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl is a mistake;  she was clearly cast because she was that girl in that Aerosmith video, so the kids must like her.  Meanwhile that very year Sarah Michelle Gellar was showing how you create a girl-power hero, putting Silverstone to shame.  But Batgirl is not as big a problem as Ahnold is.  I'll own up to having less use for Schwarzenegger than I have for Robin - his appeal is just as lost on me, and always has been.  But even if you liked him in Terminator or Total Recall it's just painful to watch him here, barking out oversimplified punch lines like they were marching orders.  He's a big sucking sore in this movie.

And the thing of it is...I actually like George Clooney as Batman.  Let me qualify that.  Of all the actors who have played Batman he looks most like Batman, with his square jaw and his easy mastery.  Now, he's a comic actor, and I'm not sure how he would have done with the darker scripts his predecessors were given.  But he does the best he can with what he has, and almost pulls it off.  It's not his fault the movie around him is what it is.

Then again, I like George Lazenby, too.

Batman Forever (1995)

The superhero genre has a complicated relationship with the sequel.  From a comic-book standpoint,  

it's natural that any movie about a given superhero will be followed by another, and then another, and then another.  Superhero comics, after all, go on forever - there's no end, just the occasional decision to reboot.  From a Hollywood standpoint, too, the sequel is a no-brainer, but for a different reason:  a superhero movie is an action movie, and ever since Rocky, Jaws, and Star Wars, Hollywood has been addicted to action-movie sequels.  The business model is predicated on them.

So why is it that no superhero movie series to date has lasted for more than four films?  (The only exception, I believe, is the X-Men movies;  the original series only lasted three films, but the spin-offs take place in the same continuity.)  The James Bond series lasted forty years and twenty movies without a reboot, proving that movie audiences would accept a comic-book style endless continuity.  But superhero films don't do that. 

Maybe someday I'll set about seriously watching all the TV superhero things;  I suspect the superhero model might be more suited to the medium of television, which (in America, at least) is similarly open-ended.  In modern big-budget filmmaking, with only one installment every three years, there's too much riding on any one installment to risk failure, so there's more pressure to stick to proven formulas, meaning proven villains.  And so we've had two modern film Two-Faces, two Jokers, two Lex Luthors (in a total of four films);  and the hero's origin story gets told again and again. 

Batman Forever represented an attempt to take the superhero movie in the direction of the Bond films.  It adopted the theory that you could change the director and lead actor, and audiences would still buy it as long as there were enough other, smaller continuities to sell it.  Q and Moneypenny, Alfred and the Commissioner, stay the same, and we accept it as still the same Batman.  Doesn't matter if Batman himself is different.

In real time, this worked with Batman Forever.  It made a lot of money.  But of course Batman and Robin didn't, and in fact it stunk up the joint badly enough to retroactively erase Batman Forever's success:  ever since, every time the lead actor has changed in a superhero franchise, the whole thing has been rebooted.  I'm not in favor of this.  I think this film and its sequel are flawed, but I don't think it has anything to do with Val Kilmer and George Clooney not being allowed to face the Joker, or have their own origin stories.  The flaws like elsewhere.  But Hollywood, like America, always wants to pretend that history started today...

The problem with this movie is just that it's big, loud, and dumb.  The next one would be bigger, louder, and dumber, though, and much worse.  This one (with Tim Burton producing) has just enough of an artistic conscience to keep it acceptable. 

For example, the all-important subtext.  It tries.  Or maybe it doesn't try, but it at least pays lip-service to the idea that Batman should be about something more than just stomping baddies.  It looks deeper into Bruce Wayne's past, explaining things that the first two films had left unexplained - things that maybe never occurred to you as needing explaining, but that's the point.  It at least tries to develop the character further.  The traumatic childhood encounter with the giant bat:  that's good.  It locates Bruce's motivation somewhere deeper than in just a desire for revenge, or justice.  He's a little bit disturbed. 

The problem with this film, in comparison to the first two, is how it handles this subtext.  I mean, it's all laid out for us in the first scene, the first conversation between Batman and Chase Meridian.  The dialogue, here and throughout the film, is painfully, brutally on-the-nose.  You can sense the director's (or somebody's) impatience with the whole notion of subtext here in how gracelessly and inelegantly it's handled.  I mean, this is what is meant by the phrase "dumbing-down," right?  This is that principle in action.

That's not the only problem.  As a Hollywood style, as opposed to a comic-book style, sequel, it's preoccupied with mimicking the original with as little difference as it can get away with, with predictably diminishing returns.  The Nolan series proved how much potential there is in the Two-Face character;  here he's just a cheap knockoff of the Joker.  In fact, put the Riddler and Two-Face together and you just about have the Joker.  Similarly, the idea of a lovers' triangle between Batman, Bruce Wayne, and the Girl had been done twice already;  definitively with Vicki Vale in the first film, and with intriguing variation in the second one (because Catwoman/Selina Kyle made it actually a lovers' quadrangle, or a bit of perverse and schizoid partner-swapping).  

The movie's not a total loss.  It's effective at being a big, loud, dumb movie.  Which is to say it's fun.  In true Hollywood sequel fashion you're never unaware that it's an inferior imitation of the original, but it's not so inferior that it bothers you;  the increase in bigness and loudness distracts you from the increase in dumbness.

And it does a few things very right.  The casting, for the most part, is excellent.  Tommy Lee Jones was quite a meta choice to play the ruined D.A. Harvey Dent, since Schumacher had directed him playing a U.S. Attorney just the previous year in The Client;  the meta-ness was probably lost on most people in 1995 (I certainly didn't notice it), but Jones proves suprisingly capable as a raging villain.  He manages, through sheer physical violence, to hold the screen against Jim Carrey's Riddler, surely the most jaw-droppingly over-the-top performance of the decade.  And Nicole Kidman, as dumb as the lines she's given are, is incandescent as the femme fatale.

But again, they're all written as imitations of earlier characters.  Two-Face as presented retains almost nothing of the former crusader for justice that the character is supposed to be;  he's just Jack Nicholson's Joker's violent side revisited.  And while the Riddler character is promising at first, as an enraged science geek, Jim Carrey's physicality transforms the character into into Jack Nicholson's Joker's theatrical side personified.  And more is less:  put them together and they're still not as charismatic as Jack.

What about Batman?  Val Kilmer brings nothing to the role that I can see.  Out of costume he's too heroic-looking (or acting) to sell the character as a nerd-in-body-armor like Keaton did, but he's not heroic-looking (or acting) enough to reinvent the character as a square-jawed cool Daddy-figure like Clooney would.  He's a placeholder.

Tim Burton's Batman Returns (1992)

I've already written about this movie, but that was before I started writing about All the Superhero

Movies.  I may have more to say.

But yeah, this is more of a Tim Burton movie.  With the first one, Burton proved he could make a big blockbuster on his own terms, but he did so by ensuring that it was just far enough out of the mainstream to feel edgy, but not so far as to alienate anybody.  With Batman Returns he went farther.  It's still a respectful adaptation - Burton's still taking it seriously - in fact he's taking it seriously enough to take it personally.  This is Superhero Movie as Art Movie, if there ever was one.

*

Part of what Burton does is weird is to destroy the classical symmetry of the Hero vs. Villain setup.  His first Batman had observed that symmetry:  Batman vs. Joker was a classic matchup, inviting us to consider Good vs. Evil in the way any ancient epic might.  This movie gives Batman two antagonists, the Penguin and Catwoman.   

One way to look at this (which is how I looked at it for the longest time) is the cynical way:  Jack Nicholson was so charismatic that it took two actors to follow him up.  Anything less would have felt like a letdown.  And I'm not sure that's a wrong conclusion to jump to:  clearly the doubling up of celebrity foes fits in with standard Hollywood sequel practice.  More is better.

Another way to look at it (which never occurred to me until this project) is that this film is just doing what the second Superman movie did.  After all, that one brought Lex Luthor back to aid and abet General Zod's team;  that, too, can be seen as destroying the hero/villain symmetry.  That is, there's precedent (not to mention pressure from the fans to bring as much of the comic book world into the film world as possible).

But now I think the best way to look at it is as Burton intentionally destabilizing the superhero narrative.  Penguin is the antagonist in the classic mold, and he functions as we'd expect him to, as a (funhouse-) mirror image of the hero, setting the hero's strengths and weaknesses in starker relief.  Burton gives us, in the Penguin, what Batman might have been, had things gone slightly differently in Bruce Wayne's life - they're both orphans, both child-men who overidentify with strange animals, both renegades who insist on living secretive lives in subterranean lairs outside of society.  But whereas Bruce Wayne was deprived of loving parents by external violence, Oswald Cobblepot was violently rejected by his parents.  And that, as they say, makes all the difference.  As adults both men have their maladjustments, but whereas Bruce has learned to manage his with severe repression (and sublimation?), Oswald has nursed his, and indulges them at every turn.  If this was all the story Burton had to tell, it would already be a sneaky, queasy subversion of the superhero narrative:  Batman isn't better than the Penguin out of choice or moral strength but simply because his mommy loved him.  And so we feel Penguin's end as tragedy (as well as being comic as all hell), which is not what we feel about Joker.

But that's too simple for Tim Burton this time around.  And so he introduces Catwoman as a kind of trickster figure.  By rights Joker should be the trickster figure of the Burton films, because that's how he presents himself - that's the source of his dark charisma - but this front is belied by the depth of his evil.  Catwoman isn't as outwardly mischievous (although she's mischievous enough), but she does come at the hero/villain duality from a decidedly sideways direction, as a trickster should.  She's not interested in Good or Evil triumphing, Justice or Self-Advancement;  she rejects the whole thing as a game between boys.  She's feminist as trickster, girl power as the ultimate destabilizer of traditional narratives.

Make no mistake, her presence deforms the narrative.  It does it in ways anyone can notice.  Every scene devoted to establishing this second antagonist (deuteragonist?) as a character is a scene not devoted to advancing the Batman vs. Penguin plot.  When we begin to see her as an enemy our focus on Penguin is blurred;  when we begin to see her as a hero our sympathies for Batman attenuate. 

Let's put it even more simply:  the film doesn't spend a lot of time on Batman's character.  It forgets about Penguin for long stretches.  It feels long and sags in the wrong places.  It doesn't have the undiluted force of the first movie.  It's a little shapeless.

But that's what makes it so deep.  Catwoman's presence exposes the boyishness of the other two characters in such a playful, winning, and gleeful way that this deconstruction (and I use that word carefully) makes it a better movie.  At first we see her as a character caught in the middle, wanting to be seduced by both sides;  but gradually we see Batman as being in that position, no less than her.  And then we're back in the first movie's territory, the hero with the dark heart, but with bonus sexual undercurrents.  We begin to get a sense of just how twisted Bruce Wayne must be to do what he does. 

All this, and kamikaze penguins.  This is a perverse movie, in that oh-my-God-I-can't-believe-what-I'm-seeing way that Tim Burton delivers, at his best and most characteristic.  Gloriously perverse.  Twisted, indeed.

Tim Burton's Batman (1989)

The historical importance of the first modern Batman film is well understood.  After the Superman

series had been run into the ground it may have appeared that superhero films were doomed after all, but then Tim Burton comes along and proves otherwise.  With a vengeance - his Batman was the pop culture event of 1989. 

The artistic successes of this film have been just as widely expounded-upon, so here too I'm not sure I'm going to be able to add anything.  But I'll write what I think anyway.

*

Side note:  as I've mentioned before, I first arrived in Japan during the Uno administration (and how many of us can claim that?), which happened to be the height of Batmania in Japan.  I'd left an America where that fucking logo was everywhere, where that Prince non-soundtrack was everywhere, and arrived in a Japan where everything was exactly the same.  I mean, I had no problem finding Exotic Olde Japan if I looked for it, but even there, there was the Bat.  A few days after we arrived we went to a neighborhood festival in the upscale Azabu Jūban neighborhood of Minato-ku (lots of expats like us), and somebody was handing out fans with that fucking logo on it.  My first lesson in globalization.

So, yeah, it was real easy to recognize that this was a hype machine in overdrive, and that there were millions upon millions of people getting excited about something that had precious little to do with anything more than bangs and bucks.  And that, of course, has been the story of every superhero movie since then (I'm too young to remember if Superman was similarly ubiquitous, but it probably was).  So I can understand the resistance many feel toward these things.  My own feelings about pop culture are nothing if not self-contradictory, though, so in I plunge.

*

I thought at the time, and still think, that Burton's greatest achievement in this film is Gotham City itself.  And here's where, despite all the obvious major-studio marketing, I'm going to insist on an auteurist reading of this film.  Without Tim Burton, there's no way Gotham City looks like it does in this film.  Sure, another director might have made it dark and foreboding, but nobody else would have made it feel as malevolently baroque, as exaggeratedly malevolent, as Burton.  It's comic-book-y in the absolute best possible sense:  a creative deformation of reality.  A reflection in a fun-house mirror.

And this is something that's particularly right, not just for Batman, but for the DC Comics world he comes from.  Famously - i.e., it's something that even a non-superhero-comics-reading dilettante like myself knows - DC comics take place in made-up allegorically-named cities in a made-up version of America, while Marvel comics take place in real-life, real-named cities.  Superman lives in Metropolis, while Spiderman lives in New York.  This means that the very settings of DC comics are commentaries on America in a way that is not true in Marvel comics (although you could say the exact opposite and it would be true, too). 

But the first Superman franchise basically ignored that.  It paid lip service to the idea of Metropolis, but it was a Metropolis with a Times Square and a Statue of Liberty.  They weren't really trying.  They didn't really know what to do with it.  But Burton did.  His Gotham City is not New York, not Chicago, but every decaying late-20th century American city.  It makes the film more universal as well as more fantastic.  His successors wouldn't get this.  (Nolan tries in his first Batman film, but goes the opposite direction in his last two.)

*

I'm not going to talk about what a skilfully made movie this is, how it confirms Burton's abilities as a storyteller, abilities that tend to get overshadowed by his brilliance in atmosphere and design.  (Yes, I'm a fanboy.)  I'll just note that in my mind this film always looms as the definitive superhero origin-story movie.  So much so that watching it again I'm always astounded at how little time Burton spends on that.  The movie starts in medias res, with Batman already doing his thing, and we only learn how he got that way gradually, in passing, while we're following other action.  And yet it's all made clear in the viewer's mind.  That's some careful storytelling.

*

Michael Keaton is the one caveat I've always had about this film.  I'm one of those who was never totally convinced by him.  Not that his performance is bad.  Rather, I think he's probably doing exactly what Burton cast him to do.  So I guess what I'm saying is that the whole thing adds up to a perfect artistic whole that is, in its entire effect, still slightly disturbing to me.

Superman has all the powers.  That's his gig.  Batman has no powers.  That's his gig.  He's just a rich guy who's gone vigilante, who can buy the gadgets he needs to make him look like a superhero.  But he's no superhero.  And that's what Burton realized, I think.  And so he casts Keaton, and has Keaton act, not larger than life, but smaller than life.  He shrinks before our eyes.  He's not quite a nebbish, but he's an underwhelming, almost anticharismatic presence for most of the film.  And when he puts on the suit it's obvious that it's body armor:  not muscle.  So he looks fake.  Because he is fake:  that's the essence of Tim Burton's Batman.

And on one level it's brilliant, because it forces us to turn our attention to the guy who's doing all this fake stuff.  Why would Bruce Wayne act like this?  Isn't there something a little off about a guy who'd choose to dress in tights and live in a cave and spy on his guests and jump off rooftops?  A lot of what I love about Nolan's series is that it takes these questions and follows them to their logical conclusions:  isn't Batman just as problematic as any of the villains he fights?  Burton doesn't go quite that far;  he's content for us to realize that, essentially, Wayne's a weirdo. 

But of course he's a weirdo paired up with the Joker, who's also a weirdo.  But, partly because of the way the character is written and partly because of who's playing him, the Joker in this film is a hypercharismatic weirdo.  Jack Nicholson is larger than life.  And so the Joker dominates this film.  This much was obvious at the time, and that's what's always made it faintly disturbing to me.  Everybody watching this film loved the Joker better than Batman, and not in the love-to-hate-him way people loved Darth Vader.  I always got the feeling that people were more or less rooting for the Joker.  Hell, I wanted to root for him.  He was having more fun.  He was Partyman:  Prince knew what this movie was about.

It was about daring to suggest (recognize?) that the supervillains were more glamorous, more charismatic, than the superheroes.  That evil is more fun than good.  Which fits in perfectly with Burton's ouevre.  But as a Burton fan I have to admit that it's one thing to suggest (recognize?) that within the safe confines of a hermetic fandom, where we're all adults and literate and versed in irony.  When it spills out into the world of invincible corporate logos and becomes a truly mass phenomenon, it makes me nervous.  Millions upon millions of people grooving on the exploits of a gleeful, fun-loving mass murderer:  this is not just a little creepy?

And so began the 1990s.

Superman IV (1987)

When I started on this series of posts I had confidence that I'd finish it having come up with

something worthwhile.  Maybe not worth your while, but at least something that I'd enjoy going back and reading.  (Part of why I blog is because I forget things.  I think my way down a particular road to a certain distance, then get distracted and forget, so that next time I go down that road I end up retracing my steps, and usually not getting any farther than I did the last time.  A good blog post for me is when I can go back and read it and find myself exactly at that same spot on the road  So that maybe I can get a little farther this time.) (I still don't know that I ever do.  But anyway.)

I'm not sure I have.  Busy, distracted, etc.  It's on me.  But to some small degree I think it's also on the films themselves.  What I've realized is that the original Superman series was kind of a botched job start to finish.  Even the first one, which I think is one of the great superhero movies, one that I'd point to as a reason this genre deserves to be taken, occasionally, seriously, is full of compromises that ruin, not it, but the second movie.  (I can't get over the fact that the Donner versions of both films have to end with the reverse-time trick because he used it in the first film.  There's no perfect opening one-two punch to be had, even in the imagination.  The myth is marred.)

They get worse from there, steadily and unswervingly.  But it's not until the fourth movie that they lose the plot altogether.  Up through III there's still some sense that these things have a subtext, must have a subtext.  I think it happens to be the same subtext each time:  the tension between power and responsibility, the idea that Superman's superhumanness precludes human happiness.  He can't indulge himself.  He can't love one woman because he must love all mankind.  That's there in the first movie, but sort of in the breach:  he chooses to break the rules to save Lois Lane.  And if the series had ended there it would have been a really interesting statement - Superman's so powerful he can break even the universe's moral rules and get away with it.  Ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy.

But that was never Donner's vision:  he always intended, it seems, that the first film's triumph turn to ashes in Supe's mouth.  His vision for The Superman Story was for Superman to learn that he can't have it all - in order to save humanity he must give up his own humanity.  Self-sacrifice.  The Jesus thing.

Lester may have never taken the series seriously, but he was a serious enough filmmaker to understand subtext, and the only reason III works at all is because Lester works in the Superman-vs.-Clark Kent subplot.  Superman divided against himself.  But in terms of the myth it's really just a rehash of II.  Superman is tempted (okay, poisoned) into using his power for his own pleasure.  And this strikes everybody as Wrong, and so Clark Kent has to knock some sense into him.  It advances the thinking on this theme a little, in that this time it's Superman's humanity that has to come to the rescue, rather than be sacrificed - we're allowed to think that his moral perfection is divisible from his physical perfection, and that his moral perfection is embodied in his human self rather than his Kryptonian.  But still it's about loving the one vs. loving the many - it's just that the one in this case is himself.  (And this is why the Lana Lang subplot, while fun, doesn't work - Superman is supposed to have learned that he can't fall in love.  By endorsing a Superman-human relationship in this film Lester turns Superman's rejection of Lois Lane into a rejection of the city girl for the heartland girl, which is yet another very-'80s distasteful aspect of this film.)

So:  it's not great subtext, it's not new subtext, but it is subtext.  It is, in other words, a brain.  An effort to at least pay lip service to the idea that Superman might mean something.  It's there in Supergirl as well:  we can see Supergirl and Selena undergoing parallel female awakenings, learning the potential of their own power, and deciding how to use it.  Power vs. responsibility again, but cast in typically '80s gender-retro terms:  the responsible use of power for a woman turns out to be protecting hearth and home (Argo City), and the selfish use turns out to be controlling men, both sexually and perhaps politically.  Not cool.  But not totally brain-dead.

Superman IV is totally brain-dead.  Not only does it lack interesting subtext of its own, but it completely misunderstands the subtext of the films that come before it.  It doesn't just fail to get Superman right, it gets him wrong.  It desecrates Superman.

F'rexample.  Perhaps the most famous sequence in the original movie is when Superman takes Lois flying.  The unmistakeable erotic overtones of this were one of the things that marked the film as, at long last, a superhero movie for grown-ups.  And it was also pure poetry, a great romantic moment.  (Supergirl echoes this neatly by, effectively, combining Superman and Lois Lane into Supergirl, a girl taking joy in her own flight - fumbling towards her own ecstasy, as it were.)

But the romanticness of it is what leads to trouble:  Superman falls in love with Lois, and that leads him to shirk his responsibilities, and so he has to undo it.  Erase Lois's memory of his loving her, in Lester's version;  in Donner's erase the fact that it ever happened.

In IV, Superman gets depressed, so when Lois comes over he takes her flying.  And this time he drops her - tosses her - always catches her, but still.  It's not like he can give her the power of flight - all he can do is throw her.  Anyway, it cheers him up, although at times it seems to scare her.  And then when it's all done, he kisses her and erases her memory of it.  Do you see what's wrong with this?  He uses her for his own pleasure, and then escapes accountability for it by toying with her mind. Superman rufies Lois Lane.

'Nuff said.

Supergirl (1984)

This one I'd never even heard of.  Evidently it never got a US release.  But of the five films in the

original Superman series, it's not the worst.  It's not even the second-worst.  On the other hand, it is the third-worst...

What it does badly is pretty easy to identify.  It's borderline incoherent a lot of the time - like, on a basic narrative level, it's just hard to figure out who's doing what or why.  Or maybe it's just so poorly thought out that you don't want to figure out what's going on.  Why does it take us until near the end of the movie to realize that the villain's strangely decorated lair is actually a carnival haunted house?  What's the purpose of delaying that information?  It's not much of a payoff when it arrives;  more of a "huh." 

But plot holes aren't, in and of themselves, a real problem for me in superhero movies.  The bigger problem in this film is that the midwestern town it's mostly set in is undoubtedly the ugliest slice of America ever committed to celluloid.  Dirty, drab suburban sprawl, full of random power lines and no trees,  fast-food joints and strip malls, all crammed together in a shallow frame so we can make out all the corporate logos (product placement is always everywhere in this series), just before they get squashed by a not-terribly-fast-moving tractor.  Watching it I half wondered if the whole thing was a clever and hard-edged satire on American consumerism.  I almost wish it was.

The tone of this movie, at every turn, is just off.  Weird.  Sometimes it's weird in a good way, like Supergirl's first flight.  It's so wide-eyed and airbrushed that you expect unicorns to pop up, or Shaun Cassidy, but it works in a strange way.  A Girl's First Flight.  Similarly, the opening Argo City stuff with Peter O'Toole is bad, bad, bad, but strangely enjoyable - vaguely reminiscent, for sheer vervaciousness, of such Gallic s-f masterpieces as Barbarella or Fifth Element. 

The best part of it, the one really good thing, is the villains.  Faye Dunaway, Brenda Vaccaro, and Peter Cook as a trio of backbiting, not-too-imaginative witches.  The parts are underwritten - like I say, they're given a great lair but the filmmakers forget to explain it until it's too late to care - but all three of the actors camp it up marvelously. There's an opportunity for some kind of mythic resonance here - contrasting types of Girl Power - and it gets lost in the mess of the script.  But Dunaway and Vaccaro's chemistry almost delivers it anyway.

Superman III (1983)

My take on this movie is pretty much the same as everybody's, I think.  It's not great - in fact it's really
awful in parts - but then again it's not as bad as the fourth film.

The awful parts - where to begin?  Richard Lester is still directing it as if he's embarrassed by the whole thing.  Not too embarrassed to cash the checks, I guess, but certainly not willing to invest the thing with any dignity.   And while my particular subject-position on all the superhero movies is that I'm not a superhero-comic reader, still I can tell that the villain here is not an integral part of the myth.  It doesn't surprise me to learn that he was written precisely as a not-Lex Luthor when Gene Hackman's services couldn't be procured.

Then there's Richard Pryor.  Now, I don't have a problem with the idea of putting Richard Pryor in a Superman movie.  I mean, I could probably accept him if the part was written right.  But the racial attitudes that underlie the writing of this part are just odious.  It's wrong on so many levels.  But that was the Reagan era for you.

But then there's the extended sequence with Clark Kent vs. Superman, or good Supe vs. bad Supe.  This is the scenic part of the Uncanny Valley. We're seeing things that just shouldn't be, and they're wonderful.  It works on all the levels that the rest of the movie fails on.  Visually, thematically, narratively.  The film is worth seeing for that.

Superman II (1980)

Writing seems to be the only area where my morbid persistence fails me.  I'll watch all the superhero movies, even the ones everybody knows stink - I can't stop myself - but as soon as I set myself the task of writing about them all, it's all over.  I can't get started.  If I totaled up all the pages I've written

on unfinished novels since high school I'd have...well, a lot.

I start with the Superman movies because they're the first superhero movies I can personally remember, but also because they're usually accepted as starting a new era in superhero movies.  Once Hollywood could make you believe a man can fly, it could do anything, and any superhero story was possible. 

I've long realized this, but as I think I hinted before, Superman is such a problematic myth for me (how do you make perfection interesting?) that I never revisited the movies until now.  So I'm only now coming to the realization that, for all their historical importance, they're really a botched job.  Even the first one - and in many ways, I love it - is less than what it could have been.  The story of why is well told here, so I'll just summarize.  Richard Donner was hired to make two Superman movies at once:  he was doing the Peter Jackson thing of filming it all at more or less the same time, but finishing the first one first to make the money to finish the second one.  But Donner's bosses lost their nerve and wouldn't guarantee the second one until they saw that the first one was a hit.  So to hedge bets Donner put the second movie's ending at the end of the first one.  It was a hit, but the bosses sacked Donner anyway and brought in Richard Lester to finish up the second film. 

Decades later Donner went back and put together his own version of Superman II, and really, if you're at all interested in the character, you have to see both of them.  Which is kind of sad, because the Lester version really is bad.

It's bad because it doesn't take the character, the story, the mythos seriously.  His Superman does what so many of the Bonds around this period did, treat the whole thing as an excuse for a romp.  It's a fun movie, and very much in tune with the times, but it mostly fails to make anything of its materials.  It's as if Lester was embarrassed to be making a movie about a guy in tights.

Donner wasn't embarrassed:  his first Superman movie succeeded because he (and his team) believed.  Respected the material, and brought it to the screen with a conviction that poetry out of it.  So one might expect his Superman II to be better than Lester's and it is - there's hardly any comparison.  I only have one objection:  it's incomplete.  I understand the desire to minimize the amount of Lester-shot footage in the final Donner product, but so much is cut out that unless you've seen the Lester version you don't really understand what the villains are up to.  The Donner version depends on the viewer having seen the Lester version. 

I guess I have one other objection, although there's not much that could be done about this.  The Donner version of SII ends the way Donner had originally meant the film to end - meant it, that is, way back at the beginning of the project.  The problem is, Donner used that ending for the first movie;  it really wasn't available for the second movie.  In other words, both Superman: The Movie and Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut end with Superman turning back time.  What needs to happen is for somebody to go back and cut a version of the first movie that ends the way the original project meant for it to end, so that the two films match up as the big two-part epic they were meant to be...

Unless/until that happens, what we're left with in these first two movies, and two versions of the second, is kind of a mess.  A noble, promising, at times glorious mess, but still a mess of loose ends, inconsistencies, and half-realized ideas.  Which, in an odd way, fits:  since Superman is about perfection, it's kind of right that it was unrealizable, at least in this first go-round.  I think one perfect Superman movie did get made, and maybe I'll get around to explaining why I think it's perfect someday, but for the moment I'll just observe that it embraces incompleteness - it starts as if in the middle of a story, rejecting the idea that it can achieve perfection in itself.  Maybe the best way to glimpse completeness is through incompleteness?  Not a new idea, certainly, but a nifty innovation for a superhero movie.

So what does Donner do in his version of the second movie that's worth doing?  Present The Last Temptation of Christ - in tights.  I.e., he argues that if Superman is perfect, then part of his perfection is to recognize that he belongs to everybody, and therefore to nobody in particular - and to accept that, he has to deny himself happiness, or at least whatever happiness he thinks a normal human relationship would bring him.  Superman must be self-denying.  And that's the only way we mere mortals can even begin to identify with him as a hero.  Without that he's just a child's fantasy.

Family Plot (1976)

Have I mentioned how much I love repertory cinema?  It's one of the things we don't have in Eugene, although the Bijou is currently experimenting with the concept.  Personally I don't understand why it's not more popular.  We seem to be in a golden age of cinephilia, though not of cinema, and I feel
like in any small city there should be enough people willing to pay to see classic old films on the big screen, with good sound, in the dark.  But no, not so much.

So since we're back in Cambridge, Mass., for most of September we've been hitting the Harvard Film Archive pretty regularly (the Brattle is on our list, too, but their offerings this month are a little disappointing).  Right now they're at the tail end of a summer-long Complete Hitchcock series, and Lord wouldn't that have been fun to do.  As is we're managing to catch a few, some we've seen and some we haven't.

Like Saturday, when we went and saw Family Plot, his last film.  We'd seen Frenzy, but hadn't even heard of this one, to be honest.  Had no idea what to expect.  And when it was done we still had little idea what we'd just seen.

It's a thoroughly delightful film, just weird as all hell.  It feels curiously dislocated in time, for one thing.  The fashions, the language (surprisingly racy for Hitchcock), and the cars all feel like the mid-'70s, and so do most of the actors' deliveries and mannerisms, but the rhythms of the film, the classical shape of the plot and the blithe unnaturalism of the presentation, make it clear that the director's sensibility was shaped long before.  But this all works for the film, I think:  Bruce Dern's seedy gangliness makes him seem in step with any number of '70s stoner films, allowing the movie to feel much more off-beat than it otherwise might have.  Similarly, William Devane's Snidely Whiplash-style villain works largely because Devane plays him cool, with a dead look in his eyes, even while his lips are smirking.

It's the car chase that'll really get you.  Maybe it is, as some say, a parody of the car chases so prevalent in '70s action flicks, but it actually works.  You feel that the technology is dated, and was even for 1976, but it's so fast, so effectively edited, and puts you in the driver's seat so unhesitantly, that it still works - most of the full theater I saw it in jumped.  And yet even while Hitchcock's making you bite your nails with the car careening down the mountainside, he's inviting you to laugh, with Barbara Harris climbing all over Bruce Dern, so insistently that it goes beyond funny into surreal.  You don't know whether to laugh, until they crash, and they crawl out of the wreckage unharmed - but he squeezes out in the most ridiculously awkward fashion, seemingly just for the hell of it.  It's one weird movie, and a great way to go out.

Runaway Bride (1999)

Mrs. Sgt. T likes the romantic comedies.  So do I, but not as much as her.  She loves them enough to want to own them.  But not all of them.  And I can't figure out why she likes some but not others.  I'll think I have it figured out, and in a store sometime I'll point to one that, in my mind, is just like one

we own, and she'll say, no, you don't get it at all.  And I don't. 

So we have a lot to talk about whenever we watch one.  Like, we just watched Runaway Bride, which I'd never seen all the way through, even though I've walked through the room several times, it feels like, while she was watching it.  This time I watched it all, and when it was over I asked her why she liked it.  Like, doesn't the misogyny bother her?  I mean, the Richard Gere character starts out by saying these heinous things about women in general, and about the Julia Roberts character in particular, and sure he loses his job, but on the level of the movie where it counts he never has to pay for it.  He's never humiliated, never has to apologize or say he was wrong.  Sure he gets away with it because Richard Gere's so damned charming, but meanwhile the Julia Roberts character basically has to go through this long bout of self-searching where she realizes that, yes, she has caused all her lovers, and even friends, to suffer because of her lack of self-awareness - that basically everything the Richard Gere character said about her was true except for the malice.  He never has to humble himself to find happiness and true love, but she does.

To which Mrs. Sgt T said, you're making the mistake of assuming he has anything to do with it.  He's irrelevant.  The story isn't about him.  It's a story about her - about the female viewer, if you will - and her own self-searching;  he's basically just an externalization of her own self-critical voice.  The only journey that matters in the film is hers.  It's not that the man gets off scot-free, it's that he doesn't have any meaningful existence beyond her.

I never thought of that.