Here it is – my look at the decade that was. Log off of XBox Live, secure your 12-sided dice, and make sure all comics are sealed in bags and boards. It’s going to be a geeky ride.
CULTURE
Best Allegorical Monster of the Decade – The Zombie
There is no question in my mind that the 00s (or as I’ve heard them called once or twice: “the oughties”) was the decade of the zombie. Undead pestilential mindless flesh eaters were EVERYWHERE this decade, scoring hit after hit in movies, video games and on bestseller lists. In traditional zombie fashion, they started off in smaller numbers, but have continually multiplied to become an epidemic. No other monster has been as ubiquitous, as timely, or as diverse-zombies can even shuffle between genres. The Zom-Com has begun to flourish; sure, it can be argued that the sub-genre goes as far back as the Evil Dead series, but in the 00s movies like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland became mainstream hits.
If every decade gets the monsters it deserves, then, what does the zombie say about this one? Well, if anything, the 00s were the decade of big fear here in the U.S. We had 9/11, color coded terror alerts, foreign bad guys out to get us (so we better get them first, on their turf), corporate downsizing, mortgage foreclosures, health insurance and credit card companies basically carjacking middle America, and financial institutions all going Three Mile Island on us. Y2K may not have happened, the Rapture may not have happened, but God damn if all the shit going down didn’t make us feel as if the world could come crashing to an end any second anyway. Seeing how fragile and transitory all life could be brings home our fear of death in spectacular fashion, and that’s all a zombie is, distilled down to a flawless metaphor. In a decade that had many of us looking at the clock wondering just how much time was left, the zombie shambled in to remind us what happens when the buzzer rings.
Most Misused Allegorical Monster of the Decade – The Vampire
The vampire started off the decade fairly well. Buffy, Angel, and the Blade franchise all had badass bloodsuckers and a certain amount of soul. But even when we felt for the vampire, it was still a monster. Vamps like Angel and Spike, benevolent though they were, had centuries-long body counts that could have been in the low five-figures, to say nothing of going all pointy-toothed and bumpy-headed. But towards the second half of the 00s, the vamp got co-opted by the tween and teen crowd, and all the bite went out of him. The vamp became Sonny to the zombie’s Cher.
How did this happen? It happened because savvy corporate types saw a marketing opportunity. The more appropriate thing to ask is WHY it happened. What makes the vampire such a suitable target to defang and wrap in polyethylene to mall-market to high school freshmen? Well, if there’s a time in one’s life when even the best of us are narcissists, it’s adolescence. And there’s no better narcissistic fantasy than looking good, living forever, being sexually irresistible, and treating other people like cattle. But because the vampire is being marketed to children, this last part gets left by the wayside. What parent wants their children to fantasize about drinking blood? Well, outside of maybe a Goldman-Sachs executive? Hence the reinvention of the vampire as a world-weary, anemic lightweight to star in romance novels. He can’t drink blood and still be an appropriate object of desire to sell to children. But for those of us above the age of consent, the new vampire is about as much fun as a straight-edge seminary student at a frat house kegger. I for one want the monster back. This new guy SUCKS.
Still Waiting For His/Its Moment To Shine – The Werewolf
As Buffy’s Giles ably pointed out in one episode, among monsters, the werewolf is in a special echelon with the other classics. The myth is perfect in its simplicity: every full moon, an ordinary person, maybe even a nice person, turns into a bloodthirsty monster that will disembowel and gorge itself on anyone unlucky enough to be nearby. The myth is ripe for metaphor, be it sexual tension and aggression, social hostility, cliqueishness and exclusion (come run with the pack!), or the primal urge we all sublimate to choke the living shit out of someone we think needs it.
But even though this is an archetype that’s so ripe with dramatic potential, why is the best werewolf film from before the mid-80s? Will anything ever measure up to American Werewolf in London? Ginger Snaps has many laudable qualities, sure, but on an effects level, the monster is by and large unbelievable, and it takes me out of the story every time, and diminishes the horror. Cursed is a bad joke, Van Helsing was a film that couldn’t end soon enough for me, and the wolf-boys in the Twilight saga are gay slash fiction waiting to happen. Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films and other CG character creations have proven for years the new effects possibilities before us, so how is it the best werewolf venture the 00s could offer was Dog Soldiers? I’m vaguely hopeful for next year’s Wolfman, but if it usurps American Werewolf in London’s place as leader of the pack, I’ll be more than a little surprised.
Sign That The Internet MIGHT Actually Be the Future– Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
When I was in film school, a few of my instructors regularly talked about the advances in technology that would revolutionize on-demand video distribution. The past decade saw the technology catch up, between internet downloading and on-demand service from cable providers, online video services like Netflix, and game console manufacturers. But so far, the video content distributed by this new technology is driven mainly by pre-existing theatrical and broadcast television properties. Online distribution as the source for new visual content has been limited; it’s a platform for new filmmakers to test smaller products, where shorter run-times and simpler stories can be more easily produced, like Felicia Day’s The Guild. Proof of real viability for an on-line distribution platform needed a test run by a high-profile creative talent; if someone with a following could bring fans and download fees along with them, the idea of first-run entertainment debuting on download or on-demand would be that much closer to reality. That opportunity came in 2008, with Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.
During a period when the WGA writers strike effectively shut down production, Whedon, co-writing with Maurissa Tancharoen and his brothers Zack and Jed, came up with a 45-minute, three act musical about a nerdy supervillain, the girl he pined for, and his alpha-male heroic nemesis. It didn’t hurt that they cast Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day amd Nathan Fillion in those three respective roles. While the production values are a little slim (at least by feature film and episodic television standards), all the creative folks involved brought their A-game. Download demand crashed their website in the opening hours, and accolades (including an Emmy) followed. Dr. Horrible was so well-loved, that subsequent DVD sales on Amazon were robust (especially considering many of those same customers most likely had previously downloaded or viewed the episodes).
Dr. Horrible and arch-nemesis Captain Hammer continue to live on, with sing-along screenings, college and high school stage productions, and a recent comic-book prequel. Talk about a follow-up video project remains enthusiastic but loose, given the numerous commitments of the cast and creators, but nonetheless a sequel seems inevitable. If you need further proof that Dr. Horrible has permeated geek consciousness, you can find fanboys at conventions dressed in his signature tunic, gloves and goggles. Dr. Horrible may not be the first, but it’s one of the biggest and best creations of the internet to assimilate into popular culture, and it may be a harbinger of bigger things yet to come.
Sign That The Internet Is Still For Porn – 2 Girls, 1 Cup
But for every step forward, sometimes the internet takes two steps back. And occasionally those steps result in it slipping on (and subsequently soiling itself with) bodily fluids best left unmentioned. With the improvements in video players and download speeds in the 00s, the advent of sites like YouTube meant that you could suddenly find video clips of just about anything. On the surface, this might sound like a positive thing, but stop and consider that ‘anything’ could include explicit video of fetishistic sex acts for kinks the average person might never dream existed. This means that googling an innocuous word like ‘pumpkin’ could net you decorative carving designs for next Halloween, or a video clip of some dude skull-fucking a jack-o-lantern.
2 Girls 1 Cup started off as a trailer for the Brazilian fetish video Hungry Bitches, a full length video featuring, well, two girls, who use the eponymous cup to perform acts of coprohagia and Roman showers. I’d be more explicit in describing it, but the video is in fact so disgusting that I’m only comfortable talking about it in the most clinical terms-and yes, this is coming from a man who earlier this passage used the phrase ‘skull-fucking a jack-o-lantern.’
The clip is revolting, sure, but hardly novel or unprecedented. The truly remarkable thing was the its transition from hardcore porn clip to viral meme, the kind of thing linked to in blogs and passed around via email. And from there, the meme evolved to creating videos of first-time viewers (who are clearly NOT the trailer’s intended audience) reacting to its explicit content. And damn if there isn’t something inherently funny in seeing the flabbergasted disgust the video evokes. Even celebrity muppet Kermit the Frog became part of the joke in an unauthorized reaction clip, although after his friend left the room Kermit’s response became decidedly more…enthusiastic. While part of the 2 Girls 1 Cup phenomena is the sheer depths of bizarre smut the internet has helped to proliferate, the other is in how nonplussed we get (well, MOST of us, anyway) at witnessing the unthinkable acts that somehow turn other people on.
COMICS
Best Superhero Resurrection – Green Lantern/Hal Jordan
There was no hero more tarnished by the 90s than Green Lantern Hal Jordan. In a controversial storyline that completely changed the DC universe, Jordan not only went nuts from grief and loss, he attacked his fellow Lanterns, stole their rings, consumed the central power battery, and killed the Guardians, ultimately destroying the entire corps. He re-christened himself Parallax, and became a villain out to remake the universe to satisfy his own desires. Stricken by pangs of conscience, he eventually sacrificed his own life to save Earth, and took on the unenviable mantle of the Spectre.
Mired in years of bad decisions and corrosive guilt, the idea that Hal could ever be the hero he once was seemed improbable, and giving him his life and his ring back would be like trying to shoehorn Sabretooth into the Power Pack. Fortunately Geoff Johns was up to the task. In an inspired ret-con, the Parallax persona became a villain unto itself who had possessed Jordan, and it had ties to the beginning of the Green Lantern Corps; it was in fact the source of the yellow weakness the rings had prior to the destruction of the central battery. Jordan was no longer the destructor of the corps, but the pawn of a larger, nastier entity that no one knew existed – mainly because the Guardians had hidden its existence.
Conevenient? Sure, but also not one iota out of character, and the perfect plausible door through which to usher Jordan back into the DCU as the hero he was for decades prior to Parallax. While all was not forgiven nor forgotten by the other heroes, Jordan was back, and he became the cornerstone of a resurgence for the Green Lanterns that has continued up to Blackest Night today.
Worst Superhero Resurrection – Jason Todd
Truly, not all ret-cons are created equal-just look at Jason Todd. First, a little history: Jason Todd became Robin after Dick Grayson moved out of Wayne Manor and established himself as Nightwing, circa 1983. Unlike Dick or Tim Drake, Jason’s roots firmly came from the wrong side of the tracks; Batman met him while he was trying to jack hubcaps off the Batmobile. Jason’s father was a mobster murdered by Two-Face, and he was a much more rebellious, resentful Robin, prone to being argumentative and headstrong. And he smoked. Not popular with the fans, the final verdict came in the form of a notorious phone poll in which DC readers voted by a narrow margin to have him killed. Editor Dennis O’Neill later admitted that some readers may have stacked the votes with up to a few hundred calls, casting doubt on the legitimacy of the results. But what happened, happened; Joker caved in Jason’s skull with a crowbar, then blew him up for good measure.
For two decades, Jason’s costume hung in the Batcave, a continual grim reminder to Batman of a life he failed to save, and one he helped put in the line of fire in the first place. Jeph Loeb’s ‘Hush’ storyline seemingly resurrected him, only to recant the next issue and write it off to Hush using Clayface to impersonate him as an elaborate mind fuck. And then Judd Winick brought him back officially in his 2005 storyline, ‘Under the Hood.’ And what does Jason do? Commits crimes, stalks Batman, plays mindgames with Batman and Robin, and acts as a general pain in ass. But for months, no explanation as to HOW he had come back, which was a low priority:
‘…I was less interested in the how and the why and the what of Jason Todd returning from the dead than I am about what Jason’s return will do to Batman.’ – Judd Winick
And to prove this, when it came time to finally reveal exactly why Jason wasn’t worm food, the explanation given was that Superboy-Prime, punching on the walls of an alternate reality (as shown in Infinite Crisis), warped and damaged the DC Universe and inadvertently caused Jason’s resurrection years prior. Kind of like how the Fonz could hit a jukebox to make it play music, only, you know, lame. When he said he didn’t care how, Winick wasn’t kidding. Ret-cons don’t come any cheaper or more contrived than this, with little dramatic gains to boot.
Best Superhero Death – Captain America/Steve Rogers
I’ll confess, I was not a fan of Mark Millar’s Civil War. While the core concept of enacting laws to unmask and register superhumans was intriguing, the divisions it fostered amongst Marvel’s heroes felt really contrived to me. As flawed as Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic and Hank Pym have been in the past, it felt like a Hulk-sized leap to see them act the way they did in Civil War. Cloning Thor in order to stack the deck? Pardoning murderous supervillains? Imprisoning heroes in the Negative Zone version of Gitmo? Complicit participation in the murder of another hero? Granted, Millar clearly wrote Giant Man into the story solely for the purpose of killing him, but still… Millar unquestionably painted Cap very much in the right, and while Iron Man and his allies had a point, the lengths they went to in order to win the fight subverted the ideals for which they claimed to fight.
So when all the promos asked ’Whose side are you on?’, on principle, I had to side with Cap. And I honestly thought Cap was going to win. He’s not the strongest or most powerful guy in the Marvel U., not by a longshot, but Cap’s always been a great leader, a brilliant tactician, and the most dedicated soldier and hero you could imagine. But as good as he is, maybe his greatest strength as a hero is the inspiration he brings to everyone around him. Cap is the hero other heroes look up to, who inspires faith and loyalty not only through his prowess, but through his integrity. So when Cap decided to surrender at the end of the Civil War, I was pretty let down. It made a certain amount of sense; rather than continue the fighting, hurting his former friends and any civilians caught in the crossfire, he decided to put an end to it. Given how Iron Man and his allies had acted, it was questionable that public support would come down so firmly on their side, but still, ok.
But when Cap was assassinated in the aftermath, as he was led off in handcuffs, it was a pretty bitter pill to swallow, and one that seemed to very much reflect the modern political landscape. Corporatism and political cronies ruled the day, and the independent idealist was ignominiously shot down after being branded a traitor. Tough stuff, but compelling and rife with dramatic potential for the future. Things only got worse in the Marvel U. without Cap. His allies went on the run, the Skrulls invaded, Norman Osborn got respectable, then took over, and then ran Tony Stark out of SHIELD on a rail. It’s hard to imagine any of that transpiring with Cap still around.
Most Pointless Superhero Death – Bart Allen/The Flash
Infinite Crisis was meant to be a game changer for several characters in the DCU, most notably the Flash. Wally West and his family went into the speed force, never to be seen again, supposedly, and a newly adult Bart Allen was installed to take over his legacy. It was a formula DC had tried before after the original Crisis on Infinite Earths. Barry Allen died during the crisis and Kid Flash Wally West stepped in to fill his boots. Unfortunately, the creative team tapped for the new book, Flash: The Fastest Man Alive, was not up to speed. For example, in the series, Bart Allen initially resisted the responsibility of being the Flash; unless you’re Spider-Man and your superhero life is destroying your personal life, that’s the kind of thing that makes you look decidedly UNheroic.
After a dismal first storyline, DC editorial made the decision to scrap the book, kill Bart, and bring Wally back to be the Flash. Bart went out in brutal fashion, dog-piled by nemesis Inertia and the other Flash rogues who collectively murdered him in cold blood. For someone who genuinely liked Bart, seeing a publisher treat a character in such calculated fashion left a seriously bad taste in my mouth. I’d been reading the character since Mark Waid created him as Impulse back in the 90s, and I followed his evolution from fish out of water ADD-style speedfreak to the speed-reading prodigy in Geoff Johns’ Teen Titans. His death has been mitigated by his subsequent resurrection and return to the Kid Flash role at the hands of Geoff Johns, but its clear that if the only way out DC editorial could come up with was to kill him, then aging him and putting him into the Flash suit was a mistake that should have never been made in the first place.
Best Hero – Yorick Brown, Y, The Last Man
‘Do you ever think about destiny? Why does fate choose one man over another, that sorta thing…?’ – Yorick Brown
Alas, poor Yorick (sorry, I had to). But seriously, you’d think being the only man left alive after a ‘gendercide’ mysteriously wiped out every living mammal with a y-chromosome would be the thing of which fantasy porno stories are written. But for Yorick Brown, it was the starting gun for a grueling adventure that took him around the world, and in his own words, forced him to ‘man up.’ Before the gendercide, Yorick was definitely the last man (pun intended) upon whom you would pin the collective hope for the future of the human race. Over-educated, snarky, highly insecure and completely unemployable, the best he could manage was to hone his magic/escape act and ineffectively train a helper monkey who would rather pelt him with its own feces than fetch him a can from the top shelf of the cupboard. His personal life wasn’t much better, as he desperately clung to a college girlfriend who had steadily grown further and further removed from him, both geographically and romantically.
But to his credit, in a world that was on the verge of imploding, he stepped up and shouldered the responsibility that being the last man on Earth required. With more than a little help from his friends Dr. Mann and Agent 355, Yorick helped solve the mystery of the gendercide, preserved his own life (for the good of the species as well as himself), and ensured the possibility of future generations living through the crisis. In a truly impossible situation, Yorick pushed himself beyond his limits, which were numerous, and became a far different, more confident and capable man than he was at the start. His love life still never ran smooth, but one of the greatest lessons he took away from his experiences was that in life, there still are things that will forever remain beyond your control to shape. And at the series’ conclusion, we can see he’s made peace with that fact, something his earlier self could never have achieved.
Best Villain, Utterly Ruthless Bastard – The Governor, The Walking Dead
‘Saw my chance and took it.’ – The Governor
In a world consumed by a zombie apocalypse, you’d think things couldn’t possibly get any worse. The crumbling of civilization and the desperate measures you’d resort to in order to keep yourself and your loved ones alive would be nightmarish enough. But then you’d meet an unrepentant scumbag like the Governor, and you’d realize just how much higher the bar for suffering could be raised. When the main cast of The Walking Dead first meets him, he seems like an answer to a prayer. The Governor has established a safe haven in the town of Woodbury, a walled off community of survivors organized under his protection. He’s clearly taken good care of his citizens and organized the place well. But the power he’s gained has very much gone to his head. In order to keep his citizens docile and content, he stages gladiator style fights on an athletic field, where the peril for the fighters is increased by the chained zombies ringing the perimeter. Far worse, he keeps said zombies fed with the remains of strangers luckless enough to come across Woodbury.
In exchange for giving his citizens their bread and circuses, the Governor literally has the power to do anything he wants, and upon discovering other survivors, he wants only two things: to take what they have, and to make them suffer. He mutilates one, rapes and tortures another, and conspires to find their own safe haven which he intends to take as his own. Our heroes escape, and the Governor pays a steep price for his transgressions, ending up mutilated and tortured by the woman he violated. Unfortunately for the core cast, he survives the assault. He then uses his injuries as justification to his citizens to eradicate our heroes, leading a massive assault to their very doorstep. We’re never given a pat explanation for the Governor’s sadistic power lust, though the zombie daughter he keeps chained in his apartment out of nostalgia is quite telling. Whoever he was before the dead began to walk is long gone, and the shell that remains is far more bloodthirsty and dangerous than any zombie.
Best Team – Secret Six, Secret Six/Villains United
‘I don’t feel like picking up the Justice League’s mess for them today.’ – Catman
Super teams can be an unwieldy business; take a look at the current state of DC’s flagship team the JLA and you’ll see what I mean. Mired in decades of continuity, as well as bound by the continuity of its members in their own solo books, coming up with compelling characterizations and plots for their myriad of members is no easy task. Spilling out of the events of Infinite Crisis, the Secret Six, as penned brilliantly by Gail Simone, assembled a rag-tag group of villains purely out for themselves. Too cynical to be good, still too moral to be downright evil, the Six ostensibly exist only to get paid, but have evolved into a tenuous support system for each other as well. Even when the team members are at each other’s throats (which pretty much happens once per storyline, minimum), a group this disreputable somehow can still rely on each other.
While Lex Luthor and Joker bluster about conquering the world or destroying their nemeses, the Six are there to just muddle through and do a job, though they may come to blows about how or why or if they even should do it at all. With a core membership it would be kind to call unstable, the Six are clearly on the bottom rung of DC hero/villain society, but they, and we, wouldn’t have it any other way. Sometimes there’s nothing cooler or more compelling than being completely disrespectable. In her run, Simone has revitalized the likes of former scrubs including Deadshot, Knockout, Bane (yes, THAT Bane), Mad Hatter, and Catman. For God’s sakes, this book is so good, it makes even a former Wikipedia entry like Catman into a compelling character!
I would be remiss not to mention the team’s most twisted member (both literally and figuratively): Ragdoll, a badly scarred, unnaturally limber eunuch in a mime costume who provides most of the comic relief. Whether he’s contorting himself up through the bowl of a toilet to surprise a foe, or trying on Wonder Woman’s boots and tiara, laughs are pretty much guaranteed when Ragdoll graces the page with his floppy deranged self. Simone pulls out all the stops with each new storyline; in the team’s second outing, founding member Scandal Savage (daughter of DCU villain mainstay Vandal Savage) had to fend off her father’s attempt to sire a grandson on her using telepathic midget Dr. Psycho. THAT’S what kind of book this is. If you’re not reading it, you’re denying yourself some wicked action and laughs.
Colossal Comics Crossover Gamble of the Decade – 52
After Infinite Crisis, DC editorial shook things up substantially: all their titles jumped one year ahead in story continuity. But this was just the preamble to the real dice-roller; they unveiled a new title, a weekly book that would chronicle this ‘lost year,’ a year in which their crème-de-la-crème, Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, were MIA. And who were they getting to be their stars? Flash, Green Lantern, the Titans, the JLA? No, this book would be built around the likes of Black Adam, Booster Gold, Steel, Elongated Man, Renee Montoya, the Question, Batwoman, Animal Man, Adam Strange, Starfire, Will Magnus, and Rip Hunter. Everybody else was just a walk-on. But before you can say ‘who cares?’ remember that the book was written by Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Greg Rucka, and Geoff Johns working in tandem.
The results? 52 was often the first book I read out of my stack every week, and for good reason. Expertly plotted and well characterized, 52 turned its would-be second fiddles into justifiable stars, and could be equal parts chilling and fun, depending on which character was in the saddle that week. As much as DC saturates the stands with Batman and Superman books, I remain infinitely more interested to see them come up with new takes on Adam Strange or Will Magnus and the Metal Men. So long as Rucka continues to work for DC, if he’s writing Batwoman and Renee Montoya/The Question, I’m buying it. 52 also turned second rate jokey villains like Egg Fu and Mister Mind into blood-curdling monsters. Despite four writers and 52 issues, this was a book that never felt like the sum of disparate parts, and had a strong framework that held everything together, right until the end. Sometimes the bit players in the margins can truly be more fascinating than the stars in the spotlight.
Squandered Follow-Up Crossover Opportunity of the Decade – Countdown to Final Crisis
As good as 52 was, no one can blame DC for upping the ante and producing a sequel weekly series to cash in on their success. When it launched, Countdown promised similar dividends; a look at the marginal players of the DCU, this time including Holly Robinson, Harley Quinn, Trickster, Piper, Jimmy Olsen, Donna Troy, Jason Todd, Kyle Rayner, Mary Marvel, Karate Kid, and Triplicate Girl. Their storylines would build to the finale, Final Crisis. Unfortunately, 52 weeks and 150-odd dollars later, Countdown failed in nearly all respects. Why? For starters, given hindsight, it seems that the editorial direction had no clear mandate on where to go. Unlike in 52, the architecture and structure imposed by the writers and the editors just was not in place. In fact, events in Countdown ultimately contradicted story elements that Grant Morrison wrote for Final Crisis.
So much of the story was a jumbled mess, with little characterization and convoluted plotting. Jimmy Olsen somehow is randomly developing super powers? The New Gods are being killed off? Kyle, Donna and Jason are trying to find Ray Palmer by searching the multiverse? Superboy-Prime (excuse me, Superman-Prime) and Monarch are battling to see which of them is the bigger bastard? Karate Kid and Triplicate Girl are dying of a mysterious otherworldy virus? Mary Marvel is acting like a psycho hose-beast? My answer to all of it was a resounding ‘WHO CARES?’ In a short span of time, Countdown went from being the first book in my pile to read every week to dead last. When DC renewed the weekly comics gambit with Trinity the following year, remembering Countdown made me say a resounding ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’
Branching Out – Warren Ellis, for Crooked Little Vein
‘It was one of those rare moments where I couldn’t think of a swearword bad enough.’ – Mike McGill
Warren Ellis has been writing comics since the 90s, and I’ve been reading him most of that time. My first exposure to the man was Doom 2099, a series set in the alternate future Marvel U. of 2099, where a resurgent Doctor Doom successfully conquered the U.S. After installing himself as dictator, Doom gathers the most powerful heads of corporate America in the White House. In order to clarify to them he will no longer tolerate their abuses, he’s going to kill one of them. And they collectively will decide whose neck goes on the block. I pretty much made a point of reading everything of his I could after that.
Ellis’ comics are a fascinating and often brutal place, filled with vicious bastards, bleeding edge technological ideas, and social deviancy both cringe-worthy and laugh inducing. His comics opus, Transmetropolitain, is a personal favorite of mine, mainly because it depicts a future, that, while mired in excess, corruption and the proliferation of strange tech and wrong ideas, still isn’t dystopian. The future is as vibrant and thriving as the present only with newly evolved slang, fashion styles and gizmos. The people inhabiting it are wholly familiar and human, even the bastards. So when I first heard that he had written a prose novel, it was a very easy sell for me.
Crooked Little Vein combines two of Ellis’ favorite materials, detective yarns and depraved perversion. The story’s hero, Mike McGill, is a down-on-his-luck P.I. who’s also a ‘shit-magnet.’ For Mike, a seemingly regular investigation into a husband’s marital infidelity leads him to a cult of men who break into ostrich farms to have tantric sex with the birds. The story begins with Mike being handed the biggest case of his career by the White House Chief of Staff, an emaciated heroin addict who likes to shoot up and watch the Fashion Channel while listening to Enya. According to the Chief of Staff, there’s an original copy of the U.S. Constitution he’d like Mike to find. A copy that’s bound in the skin of an alien that sodomized Ben Franklin for several nights before the founding father beat it to death. The copy was given to a Chinese hooker by Richard Nixon in payment for trade during the 50s, and has been circulating in the pervert underground ever since.
So armed with a tenuous lead and half a million dollars in taxpayer money, Mike sets off to find the document with the aid of his newfound bisexual polyamorous assistant (and later quasi-girlfriend) Trix. The journey takes them from one end of the country to the other, where they meet people and witness things both best left to the imagination. The book is riotously profane and profoundly soulful. While it’s always been a pleasure to read Ellis in comics, in Crooked Little Vein a thousand of his prose words are more than equivalent to any picture that Darick Robertson or John Cassaday could draw for him.
Shut Up and Draw – Frank Miller, for The Spirit movie and All-Star Batman and Robin
I’ve been a Frank Miller fan for a long time. When I began really getting into comics, I bought and read as much of his work as I could get my hands on, and I considered it money well spent. His work on Daredevil, Elektra: Assassin, Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns are some of the most canonical examples of what comics can accomplish as a storytelling medium. I followed him through the 90s, eagerly scooping up his current work on books like Sin City and the Martha Washington series. So when I first heard that he was returning to Batman with a sequel to Dark Knight, I was thrilled. I enjoyed the series, but as far as living up to the original, it truly didn’t measure up for me. Without Klaus Janson’s inks, the artwork felt sloppy and rushed. And while it was a kick to see him write and draw DC icons like Captain Marvel, Ray Palmer and Barry Allen, the writing also failed to live up. Where his satirical touchstones on 80s culture in the original Dark Knight were funny and topical, his attempts at the same in Dark Knight Strikes Again were out of sync, dull and detracted from the overall story.
His follow up book All Star Batman and Robin was even more problematic. Permanently behind schedule, ridiculously caricatured and overwritten, my interest in reading declined sharply with each successive issue. Jim Lee’s art had previously been a no-brainer for me to pick up, but even his gorgeous renderings couldn’t help. Endless digressions of Vicki Vale strutting in her lingerie or Batman spending an entire two issues to kidnap Dick Grayson plodded on interminably. While the series was meant to depict the formative era of the Batman/Robin relationship, All Star Batman and Robin made the whole relationship feel implausible. After reading it, I couldn’t imagine Robin wanting to spend five minutes with such an abusive jerk, let alone becoming his ward and partner. The issue which depicted Black Canary as a bar bouncer beating up drunks was my limit, and I did something I had previously never imagined: I stopped picking up a Frank Miller book.
The Sin City movie, however, renewed my faith in him just by the trailers alone. It was his work come to cinematic life; every image, every line, every splash of color was ripped straight from the page, and the joy I felt in first reading those stories was renewed in seeing them on the screen. So when I heard he was writing and directing an adaptation of Will Eisner’s The Spirit, Sin City left me cautiously optimistic. Even though the latter film had Robert Rodriguez sharing (and no doubt leading) the director’s duties, I hoped that Miller had learned from his more experienced collaborator. But on watching The Spirit this proved not to be the case.
This was still Frank Miller’s vision, all right, but run amok, indulging in its most prurient and puerile impulses. Incoherently scripted and woodenly acted, the only minor redemptive enjoyment came from Samuel Jackson’s hyperbolically violent Octopus character, and the gratuitous acres of nubile female flesh on display. Sadder still, for a creator who publicly revered Eisner, this was a film that, frankly, lacked the spirit of Eisner’s creation. Watching The Spirit has made me question Miller’s judgment, though not his talent; can it be that the sum of his previous works owes no small share of credit to being under tighter editorial control, which limited the influence of his instincts? Maybe all Miller needs again is a more rigid editor. If he makes the choice himself, though, said editor will be wearing a pop-out leather bustier and matching thigh-high stiletto boots.
VIDEO GAMES
We got the tools, we got the talent! – Game Developer of the Decade – Valve
Everybody knows that Id pretty much invented the first-person shooter back in 1992 with Wolfenstein 3D. But with the original Half-Life in 1998, Valve advanced the shooter into the next century and set the groundwork for pretty much every shooter game that’s followed. Half-Life relied on scripted in-game sequences rather than cinematics, built boss challenges that relied on the environment rather than firepower, and inserted NPCs to advance the story and help you along. It had an amazing setting; the Black Mesa Research facility was an endless repository of scientific progress, fractured by both an extradimensional invasion and a subsequent military intervention. Most importantly, Half-Life told one continuous story from beginning to end, and has been a model for more games since than you could probably count. Their subsequent release of Team Fortress Classic in 1999 also had a lasting impact on multiplayer games through today.
In 2004, with Half-Life 2, Valve raised the bar even higher. With the gravity gun, players could now interact with environmental objects to a degree never before attempted in a shooter, picking up and moving items, throwing them to kill enemies, and using them to negotiate obstacles. The scale of the game world increased exponentially; environments were now so large that some levels could only be traversed with vehicles. Granted, Bungie did this first with Halo in 2001, but Half-Life’s level design is, for my money, way better, especially as unlike in Halo you remain in first-person perspective. And the vehicle is an essential tool for survival; crossing those wide open spaces with your dune buggy turns out to be the only way to avoid getting filleted by ant-lions; without it you’re bug-bait. The settings of City 17, Ravenholm, Nova Prospekt and the Combine Citadel are amazing to behold, and worth multiple play-throughs to catch details you may have missed the first time. The two sequel chapters, Episode 1 and Episode 2, advanced the story and further evolved the game world. And as a capper, Valve packaged all three games, along with the multiplayer Team Fortress 2 and the brand-spanking new Portal (more on that game below) in the Orange Box in 2007, giving gamers a staggering amount of content in one package.
Even with all that, Valve still had more to offer the decade before it was through. 2008 saw the release of Left 4 Dead, a cooperative zombie shooter that stuck you in an FPS world straight out of a zombie epic. A great game in and of itself, but unique in the emphasis on and importance of cooperation. If you’ve played it, you know: nothing’s better than having an on-line buddy save your ass while a zombie is trying to tear chunks out of it. And nothing’s sadder than that same buddy leaving you to bleed to death on the pavement while he high-tails it for a rescue chopper. This fall saw the release of Left 4 Dead 2, a sequel that saw many fans initially skeptical about laying out full price for a new game so soon after the original. Valve answered them with five campaigns, new hero characters, new zombies, a more defined contextual setting in the Southeastern U.S., new play modes, and new weapons and items to more than justify the price tag. This is Valve in a nutshell; always innovative, and everything new is most definitely improved upon. Now if only they’d finally release Half-Life Episode 3…
Best Villain, Lonely & Misunderstood – GLaDOS, Portal
‘As part of a previously mentioned required test protocol, we can no longer lie to you. When the testing is over, you will be… missed.’ – GLaDOS
She starts off as a digital voice not much more than an alarm clock, turns into the game equivalent of in-flight safety equipment instructions, and then she becomes much more. Mainly because she starts trying to kill you. When you start playing Portal, clearly things at the Aperture Science Enrichment Center are not the norm, even for a place that makes teleport guns. As you navigate through your obstacle course, the AI/testing apparatus GLaDOS is your only contact, offering you hints to teach you how to get around, and praise when you succeed. But clearly she has more than a few wires crossed, and any human authority has left the building. She teases and lies to you, throwing you in harm’s way then writing it off to defects in the obstacle course. And while her artificial voice is hard to read, I’ll be damned if it doesn’t sound like she’s enjoying herself. She promises you cake at the end of your test, but if the graffiti scrawled on the walls is right, the cake is a lie.
After 19 chambers of jumping through her hoops, GLaDOS lowers the boom; or to be more precise, she lowers your conveyor platform into an incinerator, with you on it. You escape, naturally, using your portal gun to duck into her clockworks. While GLaDOS can’t see where you are, she knows you can hear her. In a tone alternating between apologetic and outright belligerent, she taunts, insults, pleads, and tries to trick you into giving up, in addition to stepping up her attempts to kill you. What it all boils down to is this: she’s been a very bad computer, and she knows you’re on your way to pull her plug.
We learn that GLaDOS killed everyone working at Aperture prior to her cat and mouse game with you, but whose fault this was is unclear. Did GLaDOS annihilate them all in a fit of pique, or in self-defense from shutdown/unwanted modifications to her hardware? Either way, she knows her days are numbered, and that any human with a sense of self-preservation will put her down like a mad dog. But GLaDOS isn’t without feelings. She’s clearly terrified for her own life, even if she has no empathy for you. Her final breakdown in the face of imminent death is both funny and sad; she hurls insults and epithets that make you glad to throw her components into the incinerator, but at the same time, you can’t help but feel a little sorry for her.
My Thesis Adviser Said I Could! – Bioshock
‘We all make choices, but in the end our choices make us.’ – Andrew Ryan
*SPOILER WARNING-if you haven’t played Bioshock, story elements will be discussed in detail below*
There couldn’t be a better summation for the complicated world of Bioshock than the above quote, but I’ll try and synopsize anyway. You awake from a fiery ocean plane crash and make your way to the only shelter available, the fantastically realized underwater city of Rapture. On your submersible ride below, a propaganda film fills in some of the blanks: business magnate Andrew Ryan, tired of government interference (and let’s be honest, tired of paying his taxes as well) founded Rapture on the ocean floor as a Randian utopia where business, science and art could flourish unhindered by government authority and obligation to the rest of society. But there were cracks deep in the foundation of this art-deco metropolis, which widened into fissures of social dissolution, crime, excessive body modification and gene splicing, insanity, and finally, anarchy. As you enter the city, Atlas, the opposition leader fighting Ryan, helpfully guides you through the rubble while recruiting you to his cause. Everywhere you look, you see details of not only the ruins, but of the grandeur the city once held. It’s in the architecture, the billboards and vending machines, the sporadic public address announcements, and even the residents, all hideously mutated, but still vainly hiding behind their costume ball masques as they mutter to themselves. This is game design as a work of art, as meticulously crafted and as rich in detail as any movie.
As good as the design is, though, Bioshock’s story is where the real innovation comes from. In order to survive, you have to begin splicing yourself, adding genetic modifications to your body that shoot lightning and fire from your fingertips in addition to the weapons you can pick up. In order to do this, you have to gather Adam, a unique substance which makes splicing possible. Problem is, all the Adam is held by the Little Sisters, pre-adolescent girls mutated to soak up the stuff from the corpses littering the streets. Little Sisters, in turn, are guarded by Big Daddies, formidable monstrosities in diving suits with drill bits mounted on one arm. As fearsome as they are, they can be overcome, which leaves you with a conundrum: harvest the Adam from the Little Sister, killing her? Or free her from the parasite bonded to her system, netting you some Adam, but less than if you turn the girl into a corpse? Your choice will have consequences.
However, the real kick in the teeth comes about three quarters of the way through the game. It turns out that you’ve been post-hypnotically manipulated the entire time. Atlas, who was ostensibly helping you, has been using you for his own nefarious ends. You’ve been little more than a puppet, and every objective you’ve been given has been spoon-fed to you by someone who’s lied to you with every breath. This, in itself, is an uncanny comment on the idea of playing a game. When we play, what else do we do but follow objectives and rules laid out for us by the designers and programmers? What goals do we have that are not given to us by them, what tools do we use that they do not provide us? When we play, do we not tacitly agree to do what they say, and place our trust in them? Heady stuff for a game, the kind of material for which thesis papers could be written. If Buffy can be studied for course credit, perhaps Bioshock will be among the vanguard of games that you play and write papers on for three credits a semester.
Pathologically Rebellious – Bully, Rockstar Games
Being a teenager sucks. But the license to rebel you get with adolescence has an expiration date, so indulging that side of your personality was always one of the best perks. Bully is a video game very much aware of this, so it works overtime to give you opportunities to wreak havoc and unleash anarchy. The sandbox approach is well-suited to a kid’s world, even an adolescent kid. The school grounds of Bullworth Academy and the nearby town are rife with destructive and constructive potential. Want some skills to better get you out of scrapes or fortify your arsenal? Head to class. Need extra cash for a haircut, tattoo or clothing accessory? Do some odd jobs around the town. Or you could just go on a crime spree, committing assault, wrecking whatever crosses your path, or pinching girls’ bottoms. At least until you get caught. Bully isn’t just a sandbox, it’s a playground, one where you can indulge yourself in more ways than you can easily count. Rockstar may have created a fuller world in GTA IV, but they refined the formula to perfection in Bully, one of the few games where I ever made it a point to earn 100% completion. Niko Bellic’s arsenal is very impressive, sure. But I want another game with Jimmy Hopkins and the slingshot, spud gun, and bottle rocket launcher.
TV
It Just Won’t Die! – Futurama
At a time when The Simpsons had just begun to stagnate, Futurama was a geeky blast of sci-fi comedy fresh air. Set in the next millennium (just as we began to enter our own), its misfit crew of outer-space delivery people riffed on sci-fi and other pop culture, hitting the bad, good, classic, contemporary, popular and obscure. It was encyclopedic, taking major plot lines and grace notes from everything, from Isaac Asimov to H.G. Wells. A science fiction writer whose name ends in Y or Z currently eludes me, but if there are any of note, they probably earned at least a throwaway gag.
Futurama’s characters are cut from the same cloth as The Simpsons, and possess similar warmth and earnest desires in addition to being the same kind of obtuse doofuses. But the similarities between the people of Springfield and the crew of the Planet Express end there. What show unleashed the dangerously erotic Captain Zapp Brannigan in his form-fitting velour uniform? Futurama did. What show pulled together a Star Trek cast reunion including every surviving member, minus James Doohan, who they replaced with their own Red Shirt, the quickly dispatched Welshie? Futurama did. Who upgraded Napster into a venture profiting off the illegal download of celebrities into robots for personal use? Futurama did. Who turned the Harlem Globetrotters into an intergalactic dynasty so strong that only a team of atomic super-men could challenge them on the court? Futurama did. Fresher and wilder than King of the Hill, more grounded and less crass than Family Guy, the only thing I could routinely predict about Futurama was how much more I liked it than both those shows combined.
Fox, however, could never seem to figure out quite what to do with the show. It eventually got backburnered to a dreadful Sunday 7 PM time slot, where it spent half the year getting pre-empted by pro football, mirroring the kind of real life ignominy that sci-fi geeks were used to receiving from athletes. It floundered there for its last two seasons, and its untimely cancellation was a deeply felt loss. Thankfully, I wasn’t alone in my regard for the show; fans showed their love in significant DVD sales, which remained strong well after cancellation. A second life in syndication on Cartoon Network followed, and then, most surprisingly, four new two-hour specials were released on DVD. But the real vindication is still yet to come. Futurama will return in 2010, with 25 new episodes set to air on Comedy Central. Despite a minor hiccup involving salary negotiations for the original cast, Billy West, John DiMaggio, Katey Sagal and company will be back. All the naysayers are invited to bite Bender’s shiny metal ass.
Most Likely to Exceed Expectations – Battlestar Galactica
I have a serious confession to make. Upon learning that the Sci Fi channel was airing a new Battlestar Galactica, my reaction was ‘They remade THAT?’ Partially it was the lackluster trend in quality of most 70s/80s remakes. Still, a fair amount of credit goes to the original show. I’d seen it as a kid, and while I’d enjoyed it then, the years had not been kind. The Cylons were bad guys so inept they made Stormtroopers look like dead-eyed sharpshooters. But how much could you expect from soldiers with one osciallating eye that never held still? The show recycled the same spaceship footage episode after episode, and the less said about ‘Muffey,’ the robotic googly-eyed dog played by a chimp in a bodysuit, the better. The show was still a reasonably decent actioner despite these shortcomings, and for its time, but nothing I felt a need to revisit.
But the new BSG was a spectacular re-imagining. It held on to the core story of survivors fleeing a genocide, and gave it the weight and resonance of such a desperate situation. It delved into politics and ethics, challenging the surviving humans with dilemmas and peril from which there were no easy answers. It asked primal questions of faith and rationality, and on the interdependence between the two. It made the Cylons into a powerhouse war machine, and the Centurions into whirring clockwork automatons designed to finish the job that nuclear warheads started. It turned the one-note Gaius Baltar into a fascinating character study of ego, delusion, and ultimately, redemption. It even found a great recurring role for original cast member Richard Hatch!
But the single best innovation the show offered was by making some of the Cylons look like humans. It was a notion that initially made me think that by not using Centurions, the show was attempting to shave down production costs. But by making its antagonists human, it brought the Cylons a level of depth, character and pathos that the original show never even attempted. The Cylons were built very much in the philosophical mold of Frankenstein’s monster. Filled with hatred for creators whose abuses they catalogued, their rage was fueled as much by the confusion of their existence as about their former enslavement. The new BSG was not the show that I expected, and in an era where most network television lives below expectations, that makes it a keeper.
Best Villain, Conniving Bastard – Benjamin Linus, Lost
Jack Shephard: How can you read?
Ben Linus: My mother taught me.
The above question and answer may seem like a standard smart ass response; at the moment Jack is tense, waiting anxiously for something to happen, and Ben is reading passively. Ben takes the question as an opportunity to needle him. But it’s rather telling that even in such a simple exchange, Ben can’t stop lying; Ben’s mother didn’t teach him anything, mainly due to the fact that she died shortly after giving birth to him.
What do you do with someone who can lie to you as easily as breathing? Well, as a friend of mine has postulated, you shoot him before he opens his mouth. The problem with Benjamin Linus, though, is that he’s already prepared for that possibility. And to prove it he produces a walkie talkie. And sure, you can still go ahead and shoot him, but if you do, there will be consequences. You may be all right, but that person you love, who happens to not be here where you can see them right now, has a gun to their head on the other end of the walkie talkie, and hurting Ben guarantees a bullet in their brain. Of course, there’s an equally good chance he’s lying about all of that, but if you want to roll those dice, go ahead, it suits him fine either way.
Ben lies so ably and easily, that there’s no way to tell when he’s being truthful or not. Without being able to nail down actual facts from him, there’s no way to judge what he’s doing at face value. Clearly he knows things of importance, and has access to information and resources that the rest of the characters do not, but how much and what value is uncertain at best. And in a place shrouded in as much mystery and intrigue as the island, this makes him even more dangerous. Ben always has a plan, and lies and manipulation are his stock and trade, but as we’ve seen in some of the objective snippets of his personal history, he may simply be a pretender to the throne; a skilled deceiver so good at misleading everyone around him that no one sees him for the sad, weak little shell of a person he actually is. If that’s really the case, it would easily be the single best trick he’s ever pulled.
Grudge Match of the Decade – Peter Griffin vs. the Giant Chicken, Family Guy
It all began with a fateful expired coupon the Chicken passed on to Peter. After that, it was no quarter given, none asked. The formula is a simple one, and can be inserted into any Family Guy episode at any point in time. Giant Chicken and Peter make eye contact, fists and feathers fly, massive property damage and chaos ensues, Giant Chicken is maimed, grudge match ends, and resume regular story. Wash, rinse, repeat. Broad physical comedy doesn’t get more violent, or any funnier, than this. Sublime idiocy.
MOVIES
The Third Time Is NOT the Charm – Marvel Comics
It’s irrefutable that without the spate of Marvel Comics based films of the late 90’s and early 00’s, the bigger, better superhero epics we’ve been enjoying in the past few years would NOT have come to pass-so full credit to Marvel on that score. With Blade and X-Men, Hollywood opened up to Marvel, and to comics in general, in a big way. Spider-Man followed, and once it set box-office records the feeding frenzy began. But it wasn’t just those singular movies that did it: it was because, like in the comics, there’s ALWAYS room for more stories. There’s no greater truism than Hollywood loving a sequel, and superheroes are made for sequels. They don’t die (and if they do, it’s rarely permanent) and with a lengthy rogues gallery, there’s always somebody new to fight, and always another story that can be told. And for a while, it looked like Blade 2, X2, and Spider-Man 2 were setting a bold new trend – franchise sequels that were not only as good as, but in all three cases, BETTER THAN their originals.
I remember walking out of X2 in particular so astonished and happy by what I had seen. With the rules and setting of the story established by the first film, the filmmakers were free to go in new directions and introduce new characters, and they balanced those new components well with the originals. With a storyline based off of God Loves, Man Kills, they threw in Nightcrawler and Lady Deathstrike, and cameos for Colussus and Kitty Pryde, as well as hints as to the larger world the characters inhabited. All of it very well balanced, no one given short shrift. Ditto for the Blade and Spider-Man second installments; it seemed that the directors, writers and producers had a great handle on their characters, and had refined a storytelling formula guaranteed to build successful future installments.
However, this notion I had was destroyed effectively by the third film in each franchise. It’s hard to count the number of ways that each of those three movies went wrong, but the one thread they had in common: introducing too many new elements. X3 had more mutants than it knew what to do with; new director Ratner added Angel, Beast, Kitty Pryde, Colussus, Callisto, Juggernaut, Multiple Man, PLUS Joss Whedon’s cure storyline PLUS the Dark Phoenix storyline. All this AND the writers had to accommodate Halle Berry’s demands for more screen time. Blade: Trinity had similar problems; it added Dracula and a gaggle of other vampire baddies, plus new allies the Nightstalkers, whom director Goyer had designs on spinning off to a franchise of their own, to the detriment of screen time for Blade himself. Spider-Man 3 was in some ways the most egregious example; it piggybacked the alien costume and Venom onto a somewhat contrived story ret-conning Sandman as Uncle Ben’s murderer, had Harry Osborn picking up where the original Green Goblin left off, AND featured romantic subplots with both Mary-Jane and a newly introduced Gwen Stacy. You’d think that after the Schumacher Bat-debacles of the late 90s, the one lesson filmmakers would glean is that more characters does not equal better story. In fact, more characters per film means less characterization for each one of them, and a weaker story altogether.
The System Works – Film Studio of The Decade – Pixar
It’s very apt that Pixar made its home in Northern California, several hours’ drive away from the greater L.A. area. Because in terms of storytelling quality, there’s Pixar, and then there’s everyone else. A cut above and a breed apart, the consistent high quality of their product is the film industry’s current longest-running commercial and critical hot streak. After emerging in the 1990s as the cutting edge of CG animation, Pixar could have turned into a factory for well-made kiddie fare, and if they had been fully owned and run by Disney, it’s very likely they would have. But from the top down, Pixar has always been about storytelling. They always push the envelope technically with each new film, but that’s with the intent of expanding the range of filmmaking tools available to tell their stories.
While those stories continue to remain kid friendly, it seems with each new film there are always strong adult themes carrying the story. Finding Nemo is about the sacrifices of being a parent, and the need to let go of your child in order that he can experience the world. The Incredibles contrasts the idea of individual achievement against conformist mediocrity, and looks at balancing the needs of self with family unity. Ratatouille uses a rat to explore the idea of what it means to be an artist. Wall-E meditates on loneliness, the need for love, and the consequences of finding it. And Up deals with death, grief, and forging a new life after losing a loved one. The cream of the crop at the top of its game, Pixar does something no other production entity can accomplish: if they release a film, it’s guaranteed that I will buy a ticket.
Can’t Stop the Signal – Serenity
‘We’ve done the impossible. And that makes us mighty.’ – Malcolm Reynolds
2002 was a great time to be a Joss Whedon fan. Two established shows on the air, and a new one coming out of the gate. It was a Whedon show, so great characters, stories and dialogue are par for the course. But as great as it was, Firefly was mishandled by Fox from the get-go. Under-promoted and aired out of sequence, it was a great product that Fox simply didn’t know how to sell. Airing it in what’s come to be known as the Friday-night death-slot didn’t help matters, and the show was gone before all the produced episodes could air.
But the show inspired a serious love in those who had seen it, and if you’re one of them, you know there’s a lot to love. Imagining outer space as one big frontier still licking its wounds a few years after a civil war, its setting roughened the smooth edges seen on most future sci-fi programs, the equivalent of an anti-Trek. Firefly’s core cast of nine characters all brought something great to the table and played well off of each other. They were all fringe people in their way; a mercenary, a prostitute (albeit a highly coveted and respectable one), two talented prodigies who kept them flying, two fugitives, two civil war vets (from the losing side), and a kindly preacher with one big question mark of a past, all living together on the ship Serenity, an unarmed cargo vessel held together by spit, chewing gum, and luck. Their jobs often had them robbing from the rich in order to sell to the not-so-rich, and nothing ever came easily for them. The series’ lead, Mal, was a veteran who’d seen the government grind his hopes to dust; but it turned out that his rage against the system wasn’t purely sour grapes; the government was, in fact, responsible for some truly appalling things.
In particular what made the series’ cancellation so sad to me, as a fan, was all the unanswered questions left about these characters and the world they lived in. And I was not alone in wanting to know; adopting Mal’s former uniform, a new fan movement, the Browncoats, was born. Whedon himself, meanwhile, managed a miracle of his own with longer odds than the Hail Marys performed by Serenity’s crew. He sold the show as a feature film to Universal. Then Whedon performed another; he got the film made with the entirety of the original cast – and the film was fantastic! Sadly, the box office receipts weren’t at the level to turn Serenity into a franchise, but as a fan, that’s pretty much the only way in which it disappointed. Serenity was a stunner, upping the ante in terms of scale, effects work, and story. Some of the bigger mysteries at the heart of its universe came to light, and a formidable new villain, the Operative, made things much harder than usual for Mal and company. What more could a fan ask for?
Maybe We Should Have Rebooted…? – Warner Brothers for Superman Returns
There is no hero bigger than Superman. The costumed superhero probably wouldn’t exist without him. So when everybody who wore tights started appearing on studio development slates, its only natural that Warner Brothers would want its biggest gun back in theaters. After languishing in development hell for all of the 1990s, Warners undertook a massive effort to make big blue fly again. They lured Bryan Singer away from the X-Men and spent a fortune to produce, market and release a new Superman movie.
Rather than give the property a narrative reboot as they did with Batman a year prior, Superman Returns was a quasi-sequel to the original Superman franchise films from back in the 1980s (hence the title). It re-used Marlon Brando’s original performance as Superman’s father Jor-El from the first film, as well as many of the themes from John Williams’ score. It also reuses the production design for Krypton and the Fortress of Solitude. In terms of plot, Superman has been MIA for five years, journeying through space to look for survivors of Krypton. He returns to Earth to find that in his absence, the world has gone on without incident, and that without his testimony his nemesis Lex Luthor has been acquitted for prior misdeeds. Former love interest Lois Lane has married Perry White’s nephew Richard, and the two have a son. He reinserts himself into his former life as Clark Kent, and Lex Luthor attempts to amass a fortune and kill him using Kryptonite and stolen Kryptonian technology. Superman still saves the day, and learns that Lois’ son is in fact his.
Probably not the worst plot they could have come up with, under the circumstances, but being so beholden to the earlier films is the biggest single problem in Superman Returns, to the point where it misses the boat on what makes Superman such an iconic character. Rather than reboot and tell an origin story, the film contrives a way to make him absent from the world. His departure from Earth is unmotivated; while it would be nice to find another Kryptonian, what exactly made him think he would? Didn’t Jor-El’s recordings make it emphatically clear that he was the ONLY survivor of Krypton? If he was running away from relationship troubles with Lois, just what happened between the two of them to make him go? And is either of those things more important than the responsibility he has as a hero? No, most emphatically not. In my estimation, a five year absence over nebulous personal issues is pretty UNheroic. If he needed time alone to mope and ponder, that’s precisely WHY he has the Fortress of Solitude.
When Superman returns and finds that Lois has moved on, he uses his x-ray vision and super-hearing to spy on her, an act more befitting a creepy stalker than the world’s greatest hero. The love child between Superman and Lois casts both of them in an unflattering light; him for skipping out on her and the kid, and her for marrying another guy and passing off the kid as his. Lex Luthor’s plot is also regurgitated from the first film, where he attempts to destroy part of America in order to create valuable real estate for himself. This is the world’s most brilliant criminal mind, and rather than dazzle us with how smart he is, the film retreads a plot from 1978.
The casting of the leads didn’t help matters. Routh may look a lot like Christopher Reeve, but other than that, he doesn’t bring much to the role. Kate Bosworth made an anemic Lois Lane, far too young and too dull to be a convincing prize-winning journalist. As a romantic pairing, they generated all the heat of a book of wet matches. Beholden to the past and with no strong direction for the present, this is a film that goes nowhere, and I was very happy when it became clear that Warners wasn’t going to throw more money into the furnace in order to keep it lit.
The Man in the Iron Mask – Robert Downey Jr., Iron Man
‘The truth is…I am Iron Man.’ – Tony Stark
If you go to film school, one of the first things they’ll teach you is that 90% (or possibly more) of directing actors is casting. Pick the wrong actor and the film goes down like a lead balloon. Pick the right one and you look like a genius. Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to call Jon Favreau a genius, but casting Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark/Iron Man definitely increased my estimate of his I.Q. by several points. Tony Stark was originally made in the mold of Howard Hughes and other magnates. The character’s roots are steeped in big business, booze and babes. He’s a scientific genius, sure, but unlike a lot of other heroes, he freely indulges his materialistic side, ignoring that all his largesse comes from building things that kill people. This makes his injury at the hands of one of his own weapons poetic, and his ultimate transformation into a walking weapon to save himself downright ironic. Getting someone with a square jaw and a sense of moral authority to play Stark would never work; the character is too layered and compromised. Stark is a financial success and a scientific whiz, but an unqualified failure pretty much everywhere else.
Favreau and Downey not only understood all this, but they brought a charisma and sense of fun to Stark that proved refreshing. Despite his many flaws and priveleged status, you like him, and when he gets in trouble, you root for him. He’s still arrogant, but if you had a 200 I.Q. and a vast personal fortune, wouldn’t you be? On a personal note, Downey and Favreau did one more thing to prove how well they understood who Stark was: they kept his damn helmet on! Unlike other Tobey Maguires who shall not be named, they weren’t lifting the faceplate to show off that it was still Robert Downey Jr. in the suit every five minutes. They had the inside-the helmet-cam during action sequences, but for the public, and the people shooting at him, the mask wisely stayed on. Credibility over showing the audience an actor’s face? Now that’s sacrificing for your art.
Keeping It Old School – Nick Park, Henry Selick & Wes Anderson
With more and more movies relying on computer generated images, both for effects work and for animation, it’s refreshing to see films that don’t entirely fabricate their images. The past decade, though, has seen a trend in animation where older techniques have steadily fallen into disuse. Disney, the bulwark of traditional two dimensional cel animation, actually stopped producing films in that fashion. But in a decade where more and more animation went digital, there were three standout feature films that relied on the older labor-intensive technique of stop-motion. The feel of stop motion is pretty unique in cinema; it’s rough and sometimes a little jerky, but that creakiness creates character and atmosphere. The wide-eyed expressive birds in Chicken Run, the stoic Gromit and oblivious Wallace in Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and the eerie world of Coraline would all be quite different if animated any other way. While those films still needed all the zeroes and ones to clean up the margins, their soul came from the handcrafted puppets, sets, props and movement.
Best Villain, Existential Menace – The Joker, The Dark Knight
‘I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair.’ – The Joker
The Nolans may not have used Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke as a blueprint for plot, but the diseased misanthropic soul in Moore’s story is up there on screen for all to see. We never get a pat ‘origin’ moment for the Joker in Dark Knight; when he does talk about how his face was scarred, he tells contradictory stories, neither of which is probably the truth. Ultimately, how he got scarred isn’t what’s important; it’s how the injuries made him FEEL that’s the problem. Something wrecked his outlook on life, very likely the same something that carved his cheeks into a permanent smile. Whatever it was, it deprived him of the ability to function within the confines of normal society; to hold a job, obey the rules, set goals, make plans, and live his life. None of those acts held any meaning for him any more. But far, far worse, he became unable to tolerate everyone else who COULD do those things. Seeing ordinary people going about their lives enrages the Joker; to him, they’re sheep, or cattle, contentedly marching toward meaningless goals, oblivious to how unimportant everything they work for is. And they’re also oblivious to just how fragile and tenuous the support systems that make their lives possible really are. But he’s very happy to enlighten them. And like in Killing Joke, the Nolans’ Joker won’t be happy until he brings this particular enlightenment to one very special soul who stubbornly holds onto his belief system no matter how many slings and arrows you throw his way: Batman. Scary and profund, The Dark Knight’s Joker is a real breakthrough in comic book films, a villain who’s both thoughtful and menacing, out to make a point using philosophical punchlines. To him, existence is arbitrary and pointless; the fact that so many people think otherwise, that’s the real joke.
The Geek Shall Inherit The Earth – Return of The King wins Best Picture
You can’t rule the world without a little respectability. In order for the 00s to be the decade of the geek, we needed that cultural and critical clout first. Peter Jackson gave that to us in 2004, when Return of the King won the Oscar for Best Picture. Why was this important? Well, as anyone knows, geeks love genre. But traditionally, Oscar has not. History backs it up: The French Connection beat A Clockwork Orange, The Sting beat The Exorcist, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest beat Jaws, and Annie Hall beat Star Wars. In the 80s and 90s, genre films gradually became squeezed out of the running for Hollywood’s biggest prize. And when they did show up, they never won. So when the first two Lord of the Rings films were nominated, the fact that they didn’t win shocked virtually no one. But the buzz surrounding Return of the King was different, and the film had an insane amount of momentum. And then it won, and holy shit, geeks everywhere knew it – one of US had won Best Picture. One of our equivalent holy grail stories was BEST FRAKKING PICTURE. Box office successes were sweet, sure, but if you want prestige and legitimacy, nothing beats the little golden bald man.