Month: May 2012

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Avengers assemble!!! (no spoilers)

Heavens, what a movie.

I mean, really. Heavens, what a movie.

The Avengers doesn’t quite take the top prize as my favorite superhero movie of all time, but at this point, I just don’t think that Superman is likely to be dislodged from that spot in my heart, ever. But the spot for number two? I think that Spiderman 2 is in that spot…but I’m not sure if The Avengers didn’t just take it over. Or at least tied it.

I loved this movie. It’s thrilling and exciting. Its story is epic in scale, but fairly simple in its particulars. Its characters are all well-drawn and sharply written. Its dialogue crackles. Its action sequences are full of effects that look amazing even in this day and age, and the sequences are not impossible to follow. The Avengers is pretty much a joy from start to finish.

I’m a fan of Joss Whedon’s, although I’m not an obsessive one (I have yet to watch much of Buffy the Vampire Slayer at all), nor one who believes he is infallible (I watched four or five episodes of Dollhouse before I gave up). I do rank Whedon above the other great God Emperor of Geekstuff, JJ Abrams, though; Abrams is a fine director, but his writing just leaves me wanting. I was never a big fan of the Avengers during my own comics reading days, but when I learned that Whedon was writing and directing the film toward which all the Marvel superhero movies of recent years had been building toward, I was terribly excited. And I’m glad to report that this excitement has paid off.

The films leading up to this have, admittedly, been a mixed bag…but a generally likable mixed bag. Iron Man  was a lot of fun; Iron Man 2 a bit less fun, but enjoyable. Thor was a blast, although its blend of New Mexico desert and an Asgard that looked made of freshly-painted plastic felt odd. Captain America was probably the best of all these; I enjoyed the hell out of that one. (Did I ever blog about it? Oh noes, I didn’t! Especially since I didn’t see it until just a month or so ago.)

So, along comes The Avengers. This movie has to reintroduce all these heroes, and do it in such a way that it reminds those of us who saw their individual movies what went on, but doesn’t bog down in reminders for people who didn’t see them. It also has to set up the villain (Loki) and explain what he’s up to. Whedon gets all these various pots boiling, and he does it with flair and confidence. Where lots of superhero movies falter is in their various first acts, but Whedon is able to keep all this pretty interesting. He doesn’t spend too much time in explanations, and gives pretty much exactly as much information as you need to make sense of what’s going on. (And, frankly, he honors the longstanding tradition of superhero comics that everything makes sense as long as you don’t really think about it too closely.)

This isn’t a perfect movie. The pacing is pretty relaxed in the first act, but each act picks up steam, until by the end of the movie, I was left pretty breathless. Whedon is able to make the film large in scale; this feels like a genuine epic, and it doesn’t feel artificially inflated. Here are some great things that Whedon does along the way:

  • He raises the stakes a little at a time. Early on, in the first skirmishes, a given fight might need one hero, maybe two. This changes as the nature of the threats becomes greater and greater.
  • He establishes that in any battle worth fighting, a price will be paid. Anyone familiar with Whedon’s work over the years will know that he definitely likes to do this, and there are moments in this film where I found myself wondering if the price had just been paid, because I know Whedon and his lack of fear when it comes to putting his characters through hell.
  • The battles take their toll on our heroes. Whedon makes them work for it. This is a hallmark of all the great Marvel Comics team battles over the years. Sometimes the team — any team, whether it’s the Avengers, the X-Men, whomever — even loses. And the battles themselves have acts! It’s just classic Marvel Comics storytelling that our heroes have to work to exhaustion just to beat the first wave of attackers, and just as you’re wondering how they can ever defeat what’s next…what’s next comes upon the scene.
  • Whedon gets that superhero teams are not inherently given to teamwork. He knows that there are egos at work, and he shows this. Best of all, he’s able to show all these clashing egos without making us think that any one of them is a complete jerk. I loved that.
I love the acting in the film, as well. All the leads are superb, just as they were in their respective films before. Chris Evans is still able to portray Captain America’s earnest goodness without making him an insufferable boor to be around; Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man gets all manner of great lines. The best part of the cast may be Mark Ruffalo as Dr. Bruce Banner, who also has to turn into the Hulk on occasion. He’s able to portray Banner as brilliant and cursed, a man who is wounded by his inabilities to always control who he is.
As I mention above, the action sequences are filmed perfectly. Despite the fact that New York City is exploding left and right, Whedon establishes what’s going on and shows it without filling his frame with so much mayhem as to make the shots impossible to follow. And I liked that he engages in minimal cross-cutting, so that when he takes us to see what, say, Black Widow is up to, he stays with her long enough that we know what’s happening.
No, The Avengers is not perfect. It does have moments of slowness, and the motivations of the villains aren’t always obvious. And as much as I’ve enjoyed Alan Silvestri’s music in the past, I don’t think he turned in the best score here; I’d hoped for one big, memorable theme for this film, but it just wasn’t there. In a very real way, if forced to choose one factor that keeps this film (and Spiderman 2) behind Superman in my heart is that Superman boasts a score by John Williams at the height of his powers. But to my mind, there is no flaw in The Avengers that keeps it from being what it is: one of the most entertaining films I’ve seen in years.
A couple of random notes:
::  Yes, Stan Lee has a cameo. But my favorite cameo was from character actor Kenneth Tigar as the “German Old Man”, who talks back to Loki. I’ve always liked Tigar (he was the bomb squad guy in the Lethal Weapon movies, and he was one of the more notable killers against whom Thomas Magnum matched wits on Magnum PI) , and I’m glad to see that he’s still active and acting!
::  Reportedly, Joss Whedon wanted Cobie Smulders as Wonder Woman, back when he was attached to whatever Wonder Woman movie was in development. I’m glad that he managed to get her into the superhero movie world here, as a SHIELD agent.
::  A lot of reviews I’ve seen accuse Samuel L. Jackson of just doing his standard glower through the movie. It’s not like his role didn’t really call for him to do much else, but he did allow his Nick Fury to show what little vulnerability he would.
::  There’s an airplane in this movie that bears a small design similarity to the Serenity. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of thing, but I sure saw it.
::  If you see it, stay for the very, very end. All the way to the end of the credits. Trust me.
::  Bring on The Avengers II! (And while we’re at it, let’s get the Serenity out of mothballs, shall we?)

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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!!!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Dungeons and Dragons was created almost 40 years ago by Gary Gygax and David Arneson. Both men have passed on, but Arneson’s personal collection of materials comprising his creative work on the game was recently found in, of all places, an abandoned storage locker. Now it’s all going to be auctioned. Wow! I’m glad that the new owner of the locker wasn’t a putz like that guy on Storage Wars who is always searching for ‘collectibles’, and just tosses stuff aside if he has no idea what it is.

:: How in God’s name have I gone this long without learning about Blue Milk Special? This is a webcomic that is retelling the Original Trilogy of Star Wars, as a parody. And it is awesome. I spent some time this morning reading it, getting up to the Millennium Falcon blasting its way out of Mos Eisley. I think that this one is my favorite thus far…but it’s got some competition.

:: Some recent stuff pertaining to that goofball fascination of mine, the pie in the face:

I saw this on Tumblr. I guess I’d agree on the first two, but I’m befuddled that a chicken pot pie has a ‘positive’ rating as a potential pie for someone’s face. I don’t think I’d like that at all. Especially if it’s still fairly fresh from the oven.

A reader e-mailed me this helpful bit of advice:

See? Pot pie is not recommended. (I wouldn’t recommend shaving cream either, because it tastes like, well, shaving cream. And meringue doesn’t stick, at all.) As for the delivery techniques, I have zero experience in this regard myself, but I recall from gym classes in school that throwing things isn’t my wheelhouse, as it were. Best stick with the push, I suppose.

Comics readers from the 1970s (on which I was a young one) may recall a DC Comics superheroine named The Mighty Isis, whose powers and mythology was derived from Ancient Egyptian mythology. (Hmmm…I wonder if her creation was inspired by things like the tour of King Tut’s treasures around the US….) She had a teevee show that was paired with the Shazam! show, along with her short-lived comic. In one of the issues of the comic, one of Isis’s fellow Egyptian gods, Set, shows up to try to force humans to worship him, and he works all manner of mischief, which Isis can’t stop because she’s not as powerful as he is. So she hatches a plan to show Set that he doesn’t really want to rule humans anyway, because they’re not sufficiently reverent of the gods. How does Isis demonstrate this? By letting some kid (from her schoolteacher alter-ego’s class) throw a pie in her face.

Spl-lat

It’s a weird story (I posted the whole thing on my Tumblr), but kind of funny and even ‘wholesome’ in that “Hey, I can triumph over my foes without resorting to violence!’ way. And as comic-book pies in the face go, this one’s fairly nicely drawn. (Not that I have a huge sample size of such things to meditate upon…I remembered this one from when I was a kid, and I spotted the issue in an ‘Old Comics for Ten Cents Each’ box at a local comics store, and the cover jogged my memory.)

::  Finally, I note the passing last week of Adam Yauch, one of the founding members of the Beastie Boys. In truth, I wasn’t a fan, but that’s more because I just don’t grok rap in general. Not my cup of tea, although I do grant the artistry involved. The Beastie Boys’ popularity and influence can’t be ignored, but for me, their best thing was their famous video that included a pretty spiffy pie fight.

OK, that’s it. More Weirdness and Awesome next week!

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Sorry for the radio silence….

…but the latter part of last week got really busy for me. Nothing bad, but wow, did the schedule ever pack itself full of stuff. (Like seeing The Avengers…review post forthcoming….)

I should be able to get some blogging mojo going again, but for now, here’s a cute Persian kitten being fed with chopsticks.

There are people in the world who don’t think Persian kittens are cute. These people lead sad, lonely, desperate lives from which they have no escape.

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Say ‘Ow’

Former NFL linebacker Junior Seau is dead, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

I learned this earlier today, when I went online at work just to check my e-mail one last time before coming home. I had a few Facebook updates, a blog comment to approve, and a ‘breaking news’ message from WGR. I figured the WGR thing would be something about the fact that the Bills had a workout with quarterback Vince Young today. Instead, I read that Junior Seau had been found dead.

Seau was a great, great player. He truly was. He came to prominence in the early to mid 1990s, and he played most of his career with the San Diego Chargers, including that teams one and only Super Bowl team in 1994 (which would lose, 49-26, to a juggernaut of a San Francisco 49ers team). I always liked Seau, and his physically athletic (or athletically physical) play. He was one of the good guys, having done a great deal of charity work in San Diego during his career there. I really didn’t want to hate him in 2007, when he came out of retirement to try for the elusive championship ring with the Patriots, but a football fan has his priorities, so for one year, hate Seau I did. Although not really. You couldn’t hate Junior Seau.

Why did he apparently kill himself? I honestly don’t know, although speculation is sure leaning strongly toward side effects of concussions being a factor. Seau wouldn’t be the first formerly concussed player to commit suicide. We do know more and more these days, though, about the effects of concussions — particularly repeated concussions, on the brains of athletes, and the effects those concussions can have many years later, once the athletes have stopped playing.

I’m once again struck by the degree to which physical things affect our mental states, and I continue to wonder just to what degree we really have control over the things we think. Not everything is choice. I’m reminded of recent research that suggests a strong correlation between the decline of violent crime in America over the last few decades and the reduction of lead exposure over the same period. We don’t always have the power to think what we will. And that can be a somewhat grim realization.

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Delusions of Electibility

Seen on Facebook earlier:

AT LAST!!! Newt Gingrich drops out, so now it’s down to Romney versus RON PAUL! Let the Revolution begin!!!!!

Of course, this same fellow is a 9-11 Truther, a JFK assassination conspiracy theorist, and apparently a believer that you can somehow declare yourself a ‘sovereign citizen’ in order to get yourself out of various legal troubles. In short, your typical Ron Paul supporter!

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Sentential Links

Linkage!

:: If Bull Durham is the Casablanca of baseball movies – filled with a love triangle, passion, battle (on the baseball field) and countless quotable lines – Annie is this movie’s Rick, the local legend who everyone knows and who has seen everything and who walks to the beat of her own drum. (Wonderful post on Bull Durham. Here’s an old post of mine on the movie, which I love dearly!)

:: I had to stop, turn off the music, and take a second to appreciate everything and everyone that has been thrown my way. After a minute, I kept going, and nearly stumbled over a baseball, lost in the grass. Picked it up, and it was heavy with rain. So I threw it into the trees surrounding the field. (My friend Kerry is going to write a heckuva book someday. And when she does, she’ll write it so well that it won’t bother me one bit that it won’t have a single space princess in it.)

:: Today’s comics remind me of Chuck Klosterman’s comment about how my generation is “The Cool Generation,” because that’s all this generation aspires to or is capable of. This is the Cool Era of comics, and I pretty much hate it. (I read Geoff Johns’s Blackest Night Green Lantern epic a while back, and it’s supposed to be a neoclassic of some sort…and yet, I didn’t like it. It was endless violence, art that crammed so much into the panel that it was impossible to make sense of what was going on, and no sense of any characters at all. Not a fan.)

:: For her, the only shuttle that never flew in space, it was a sort of homecoming, one last day in the sun, one last chance to stretch her wings. I almost expected her to cast free of the jet and glide into JFK on her own, just as she did during the approach and landing tests she performed over Edwards Air Force Base back in the late ’70s. How cool would that have been? Impractical fancy, of course. Her systems were long ago frozen in place, I’m sure. But I enjoyed imagining it.

:: I know there’s a marketing blitz behind this, but I can’t help but enjoy the idea of a tool that survives without major functional changes for most of a century. Think about it: Since 1937, mankind went from early aviation to jet flight to the moon. Certainly the Model 77 has seen a bit of innovation over the years in terms of motor and material technology, but it remains essentially the same in shape and function — and it’s still a pretty popular model, despite lots of heavy competition. (My circular saw is a Ryobi one, just a cheap model, that I bought at Home Depot (for work, so they footed the bill). It’s a nice enough saw, not awesome, but it gets my cuts done when I need them. I ditched the original blade, though. I have a 24-tooth blade for rough work and a 60-tooth blade for finish cuts.)

:: I only started with three little goats when we moved here…to the farm. It was supposed to be two, but then I got to thinking…what if something happened to one?

:: One of the things I learned in my first year in library school was that information disappears over time for a number of reasons, but that three are foremost: war, when the other side wins; commerce, when there is not enough of a perceived market for the cost; and technology, when the newer methodology renders a previous iteration obsolete. (I have a couple of books around here that deal with precisely these kinds of issues. I should re-read them….)

More next week! (Unless there aren’t. Duh!)

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A to Z: Zany!

Hey, I made it! It’s the end of the A-to-Z Challenge. Let’s look at some Zaniness, shall we?

According to this site, the word ‘zany’ was first used in English by none other than William Shakespeare, although its origins are apparently Italian:

Somebody zany is amusingly crazy or clownish. If you object to my definition, then you may be in the company of the compilers of several current dictionaries. It’s a hard word to pin down — we all think we know what we mean by it, but we may find describing it in plain English surprisingly hard.

That may have something to do with the way the word has evolved. It was first a noun, to describe a performer in the commedia dell’arte, an improvised Italian comic form of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The zany was a foolish servant, a buffoon, who attempted to mimic the actions of his master, himself a clown. The servant was given the generic name Giovanni (the Italian equivalent of John), much as English servants of the same period were frequently called Andrew (indeed, one English equivalent to the zany was a merry-andrew), or as a Glaswegian might call someone Jimmy as an all-purpose name. In time Giovanni turned into zannie and we imported it in that form.

. We tend to think of zany as meaning a special kind of madcap comedy, one in which questions of sanity are best left at the door. Here’s Merriam Webster on the case:

1: being or having the characteristics of a zany

2: fantastically or absurdly ludicrous (a zany movie)

However, looking at definition number one under zany as adjective, I see that zany can also be a noun. This, I did not know! y interesting word, actually. Merriam-Webster defines it thusly (same link as above, toggle a link there to switch from noun to adjective):

1: a subordinate clown or acrobat in old comedies who mimics ludicrously the tricks of the principal

2: a slavish follower

3a : one who acts the buffoon to amuse others

The noun use of zany seems to have dropped out of usage, in favor of the adjective. I’ve never, to my knowledge, heard of someone refer to a ‘zany’, but I have heard, many times, someone or something described as ‘zany’. So how about some zaniness in fantasy and SF?

Well, there’s quite a lot of comedy to be found in both genres. Fantasy isn’t all long, wordy, and ponderous tales involving plucky rural heroes making their way across a vast continent to the very stronghold of evil; there’s plenty of funny stuff be found. But not everything that is funny is also zany. I’d definitely file the books of Christopher Moore in the ‘zany’ category, and they are cheerfully zany, full of wild leaps in logic and loaded with highly eccentric characters; his books are, in the words of Merriam-Webster, “fantastically or absurdly ludicrous”. That’s part of their charm. Moore writes the kinds of books where two women in a rubber raft at sea find themselves in between two whales who are about to engage in the physical act of whale-love, or where a six-year-old Jesus causes a stir in his hometown when he makes his own face appear in the Passover bread.

Interestingly, Moore has also written a book that fits the noun use of zany, the wonderful Foole, in which Moore tells the story of King Lear from the viewpoint of the Fool…the zany, you might call it.

Lois McMaster Bujold’s “Miles Vorkosigan” books aren’t really zany, per se, but they do have moments when the humor rises to a certain level that’s almost zany. Ditto Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard Sequence (comprising The Lies of Locke Lamora and Red Seas Under Red Skies. I suspect that the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series is pretty zany…but I wouldn’t know. I haven’t read them. (I’ll hang my head in shame.)

Fantasy and SF in the movies? There, it’s easier to find zaniness on display. Ghostbusters is pure zaniness, through and through. So is Back to the Future, Galaxy Quest, and most of Star Trek IV. Men in Black is zany, and amongst animated films, The Emperor’s New Groove is as zany a film as I can remember. And you have to include the films of Monty Python, which are as zany as it gets and which are often filled with fantastical content.

I’m sure it comes as no surprise that I’m a fan of zaniness, both in life and in fiction. Serious things are good, but zaniness is a part of life, is it not? Life should be a little bit zany…or a lot zany, if you can manage it. The trick is to find your preferred versions of it and incorporate them into your life. Don’t be afraid to, as Merriam-Webster defines it, “act the buffoon to amuse others”…even if it means the occasional pie in the face.

And with that, I come to a successful close of the A to Z Challenge for 2012, Huzzah! Maybe I’ll do this again next year….

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