SUPERGIRL: The Pilot

I've long been a mouthy advocate for getting--finally getting--comic book heroines on the screen and Supergirl has always seemed to me a character with a lot of potential for adaptation. Her one feature appearance, 1984's SUPERGIRL, became a bit of a fiasco and, in turn, became something of a camp classic. She was later introduced into SMALLVILLE, which did hint at all that potential but she was still just a supporting character. I was pleased when Greg Berlanti, a creator of CW's ARROW and THE FLASH, announced he was working on a Supergirl series. Eventually, CBS picked it up and last night, it made its big debut. The pilot is slapdash at times, dramatically confused at others but it left me at least willing to see more.

The series eschews the original--and convoluted and bad--origin of the character in favor of a sort of mucked-up version of one introduced in the comics about a decade ago. In the tv telling, after baby Kal El--Superman--was launched to Earth from a dying Krypton, his cousin Kara Zor El, then 13 years old, was dispatched to look after him. The blast-wave from the explosion of Krypton knocked her ship off course and into the Phantom Zone. When it finally made its way out and to Earth, twenty-four years had passed, though she, preserved in suspended animation, hadn't aged.

Given Superman's own story, the nature of the Phantom Zone, etc., very little of this makes much sense but as quick and dirty as it seems to a comic vet, it effectively sets up everything.

When Kara arrives on Earth, Superman finds her and places her with an adoptive family. It's a long tradition in Superman adaptations to recruit for cameos actors and actresses from previous screen incarnations and here, Kara's adoptive mother is played by Helen Slater, the original screen Supergirl, and her adoptive father by Dean Cain, Superman from LOIS & CLARK. Kara grows up and goes to work as the assistant for media mogul Cat Grant but all the while, she keeps her powers and her real identity secret. When the plane in which her adoptive sister is flying nearly crashes, she's forced into action. She saves the plane but she's photographed, becomes a media sensation and gets hero fever--decides she'll just burst if she doesn't take up the cape and the family business. Supergirl is born.

Melissa Benoist plays Kara in an overly-bright-eyed and maybe way-too-enthusiastic manner that is, at first, rather endearing--the vibe is straight "it's cool that a girl can do this stuff"--but carried too far and too long, it could make her look flighty and stupid. Benoist is basically doing a 15-year-old Supergirl. That would be great if the show featured a teen Supergirl. The character in this series is supposed to be 24 years old.[1] How this will play out is something only time will.

A significant plot point--because it will provide the series' villains--is a Kryptonian prison ship that apparently followed Kara's ship out of the Phantom Zone and to Earth. It seems pretty unlikely a whole prison full of inmates--hardened criminals with the Earth-shattering powers of Kryptonians--have been hiding out on Earth for over a decade without drawing the attention of, say, Superman. There may be a larger plot at work here. Something else to watch. In the pilot's biggest error, the identity of "the General," the central villain revealed at the end, was quite confusing. It's Kara's Kryptonian mother, who, up to that point, hadn't be shown to have a villainous bone in her body, to say nothing of the fact that she's supposed to have been dead for years. In the brief preview for next week's ep, Kara calls her "aunt," so I'm assuming Kara's mother had a twin sister but there's no mention in the pilot of any twin sister.

When it was announced earlier this year, the casting of Mehcad Brooks as Superman's longtime pal Jimmy Olsen caused a bit of an internet stir. Jimmy Olsen is, of course, a very young, short, wimpy, freckle-faced redheaded white guy, whereas Brooks is a 35-year-old, 6'5', 230-or-so-pound muclebound bald black guy with a deep voice--a guy who could, himself, be playing a superhero. And, indeed, he is, in practice, as bizarre a Jimmy Olsen as he looked on paper, a guy who commands nearly every room he's in. While the comic vet in me just can't seem to accept him as a Jimmy Olsen, his Olsen is a very good character--my favorite, in fact, of the supporting roles so far. As it turns out, he knows all about Kara; her cousin filled him in.

Nearly everyone knows about Kara. Olsen knows. Her adoptive sister knows. Her adoptive sister's employer--a secret agency charged with monitoring and countering potential extraterrestrial threats--knows. She even tells a friend at work. The only regular among the  so-far-introduced supporting cast who doesn't know is Kara's boss Cat Grant. This exposure could come back to bite our heroine in the future.

The pilot's biggest shortcoming is that nearly all of the performances are carried out in an over-the-top, anti-naturalistic manner that perpetually borders on camp yet they're so contrary to one another they never cohere as a unified dramatic universe. One sees all of these sorts of performances pretty regularly with genre properties (though, mercifully, not as often as was once the case). With Kara, this sort of characterization can seem charming. With Calista Flockhart as Cat Grant, it's full-blown caricature. And at the other end, Kara's mother/the "General" is insanely over the top, spouting ridiculous, stilted, ever-so-serious dialogue as melodramatically as possible. One could break down each of these by their relative merits but whatever conclusion such an evaluation may yield, few of them seem as if they belong in the same show.

Still, while this wasn't a great pilot--it certainly wasn't up to that of either ARROW or THE FLASH--it was, rough edges aside, a pretty good one. I'm pleased to have Supergirl back on the screen and interested to see where this incarnation goes.

--j.

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[1] When Kara's boss Cat Grant dubs the mysterious new hero "Supergirl," Kara objects, arguing for "Super Woman," but not only is it a ridiculous objection given how Benoist is playing the character, Benoist is also playing the very scene in which she's making this objection as if she was 15.

Bob Haney & the Bat-Spank

Here's an image much circulated on the internet:

It comes from the Brave & the Bold #64 (March, 1966), drawn by Win Mortimer and written by longtime B&B scribe Bob Haney. "Batman versus Eclipso" is a free-flowing and frenetic tale, as Haney's could often be, a 12-cent epic of adventure, romance, sin and silliness with more twists than a neurotic pretzel on a bad-hair day.

I'm a big fan of Haney. As the image suggests, his Batman is like no other. In context, bratty rich-chick Marcia Monroe is out one night making a very public spectacle of herself, apparently inebriated and tottering across a catwalk on a suspension bridge high above a river while police risk their lives to try to save her. The Batman appears, disapproves and her antics and administers a much-needed corrective to the wealthy and wayward playgirl. She, of course, falls madly in love and after a whirlwind romance, the two are soon engaged. Marcia and the Batman, that is; while he's prepared to make a wife of her, he never reveals his dual identity. She eventually breaks his heart--sends a him a "Dear John" and skips town for Euro-Parts-Unknown. "I guess the 'cure' didn't take," he laments, and with a forlorn look and perhaps a mental note about the need for a more severe disciplinary regimen with future potential mates, he returns to his life of crimefighting.

Years go by and the Batman, patrolling the docks one night, finds a dishy dame about to be dusted by a well-dressed gangster using a bow! As surreal as that seems, the Caped Crusader then manages to lasso the arrow in mid-flight! And the assassin's target turns out to be none other than Marcia herself.

"But," asks the Batman, "why was that bow buzzard trying to ventilate your beautiful torso?" Marcia's story is that Cyclops, a powerful crime syndicate, is out to get her because her latest fiancee filched the priceless Cat Emerald. The no-goodniks have already blown the boyfriend to oblivion but his dying wish is that Marcia return the emerald to the museum from which he stole it to make up for what he'd done. She tasks the Batman with the job and he goes along.

...which, of course, results in his being framed for having stolen it in the first place.

An indication of how much plot Haney could stuff into a book: everything I've just described only gets us to page 8.

Heartbroken at the apparent betrayal, the Batman is arrested and from his jail cell, he gets on the trail of the Queen Bee, girl boss of the Hive, a crime syndicate moving into town. He learns she's arranged his capture in order to get him out of the way for some big operation.

Allying herself with Eclipso, the Queen Bee launches a crimewave. The Batman escapes and pursues the beautiful bug but ends up waylaid by knock-out gas and, dumped in the river for dead, fired upon by some of Gotham's finest, who think they've killed him.

At the Hive, a hooded fellow turns up and announces he's a representative of Cyclops and is taking over their operation. Eclipso is unimpressed and sets out to kill the fellow, who, it's quickly revealed, is the Batman in disguise. The Queen Bee rescues him and confesses the obvious, that she's really Marcia. But now, her story is that her father had gotten mixed up with Cyclops and she's only doing her Queen Bee schtick for the org to save the old boy from their assassins. She aids the Batman in his escape, a complicated piece of business down the side of a building while pursued by flying bee drones with jet-packs and Eclipso on a window-washing rig.

In the end, the Batman is cleared and both Eclipso and "Queen Bee' Marcia disappear. "Some day, she'll have to pay for her crimes," says the Batman. "And when that day comes, she'll need all my help! Until then -- farewell, honey." And yeah, I laughed at the line.

All of it began with that spanking...

Earlier this year, I started a Facebook group to celebrate Bob Haney's work. If, dear reader, it interests you, "Haneyverse: The Brave & Bold Worlds of Bob Haney" is here--come by and join in.

--j.

MAN OF STEEL (2013) & Dumb Darkness

[Cross-posted to my movie blog]

Perusing Facebook tonight, my eye plucked from the plentiful geeky puffery that perpetually passes through my feed a brief op-ed piece from Uproxx that purports to explain "Why the DC Universe is Dark and Gritty." Released alongside the first substantial trailer for BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE and authored by a Dan Seitz, it makes a show of tackling criticism that has been leveled at the tone of DC's cinematic offerings but mostly manages to rather spectacularly miss the point of that criticism. It seems a good hook on which to hang my long-delayed review of MAN OF STEEL.

Seitz begins by beating up a straw man, "the implied idea that nobody wants to see dark and gritty superhero movies." If anyone had ever seriously pursued that line the box-office figures Seitz cites are sufficient to refute it but of course that hasn't been the argument. That a movie featuring some species of dark tone can make lots of money says nothing about whether a particular project should have that tone. Obviously, the Batman should usually be dark but if one is true to the character--the crucial element--one could do lighter stories with him too. BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES sometimes did this. If one has the Superman character down cold, one can go dark with him as well, but what critics in the fan community have noted--and what Seitz entirely sidesteps while in defense of darkness--was that the version of "dark" adopted by MAN OF STEEL, the film that launched DC's new cinematic universe, was entirely inappropriate to the material and, in fact, a deliberate defacement of the character.

And those critics are correct. MOS's "Superman" is born of contempt for the basic nature of the character, and is, in fact, an attack on it.

The key to Superman is the "man" part, not the "super." Though an alien, he was raised as Clark Kent--as one of us. He's a good man, the Midwestern farmboy whose parents instilled in him strong values that guide him through life and who just happens to be able to juggle mountains, powers he uses to help others in need. Over the years, some writers have taken this to an extreme, presenting him as a "big blue boyscout" and even something akin to a saint but such treatments are an exaggeration of the existing character, not any sort of revision of it. Superman's creators conceived their original printed version as a sort of anarchistic super political activist, tackling social ills like corrupt politicians, domestic abuse and inhumane prison conditions. Whatever the variant, Superman is a fighter for truth and justice, sometimes "the American way," sometimes offered with a stern rebuff or full-blown smackdown to those who would cause harm, other times with a wink and a wave from a friend who is here to help. In another aspect that can sometimes be exaggerated, he's a character of hope and of light whose powers are literally derived from the sun itself. That sort of thing may be frowned upon in some quarters today but that's Superman. Superman is not a brooding, alienated, alien anti-hero/god-among-ants and if, as happens in MOS, you chuck what I've just described and turn him into one, you may be trendy and real kewl and all but you aren't doing Superman anymore.[1]

Part of the Superman mythos everyone knows: Sent to Earth from a dying world, the infant who will become Superman is adopted by the Kents, who raise the child they name Clark and shape him into the good man he becomes. The quality of the sense of moral purpose imparted to the MOS version of Clark, on the other hand, is evinced after he, as a boy, saves an entire bus full of his schoolmates from drowning but, in the process, nearly exposes his powers and his adoptive father Jonathan tells him it may have been better to simply let them all drown.[2] Later, an older Clark does just that, when he finds himself in a situation in which Jonathan is menaced by a tornado. It would be child's play to save the man but because doing so may expose Clark's powers to onlookers, Clark chooses to simply stand around and let his adoptive father be killed, self-concern and fear overruling all else, everything that even could be called "Superman" viscerally disposed of.[3] The movie only gets worse from there. The superbeing from MOS who wallows in angst, who chooses to let his father die for nothing and who, in the film's interminable finale, zips around battling Kryptonian villains amidst falling skyscrapers utterly indifferent to the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of deaths he's helping cause[4] is no more Superman than he is Justin Bieber. He's the anti-Superman, a fundamental negation of the character. It's almost impossible to overstate this: No one involved in the production of MAN OF STEEL had the slightest interest in making a Superman movie and they didn't.

For whatever reason, director Zack Snyder and the film's other creators introduce a theme of freedom of choice vs. predetermination, with their alleged central character purported to represent the former but in everything they put on the screen that doesn't involve characters giving speeches on this matter, their "Superman" isn't even the protagonist. Their story, rather, is about a civil conflict on a long-dead world being continued on Earth, a fight between an exiled criminal and the ghost of his long dead enemy. While Superman is the title character in what's supposed to be the beginning of a franchise built around him, he's virtually irrelevant to any of this. He merely shows up, the alleged representative of this freedom, to act as the proxy of a dead father he never even knew in the final act of a battle that happened before he was born.

"Superman's" killing Zod at the end of the film created some controversy in the fan community, where many hold that Superman should never kill at all. My own objection to that moment was his immediate and over-acted, depth-of-his-soul grief at having taken out a  genocidal monster who had just committed mass murder against helpless innocents on the scale of a world war, was promising more and was in the process of carrying out that promise. To kill someone is a terrible thing, in the abstract, but the film had done nothing to establish any aversion on the part of its central character to killing anyone--indeed, a sociopathic indifference to the lives of those around him was front-and-center throughout the film's never-ending climax--and this kind of totally unbalanced reaction after the massacre just inflicted, a massacre that didn't draw any real reaction from "Superman" at all, suggests a rather profound moral deformity. Whine later, hero; there are people dying in the rubble--the rubble you just helped make of the world--who need your help.

Seitz argues that "the entire point of these movies" is that "the good guy wins against all odds. All we're really talking about here is how brightly lit his path happens to be as he gets to his inevitable destination." Even setting aside the question of this truncated notion of what the films should be, one can't escape (even though Seitz doesn't address) the fact that the hero's triumphant "win" at the end of MOS occurs over that almost indescribable excess of carnage and death, horrors which, in the movie, are, for all intents and purposes, entirely without consequence. Put on the screen before one's eyes then not even touched upon.[5] Elsewhere, in reply to critics who had slammed the film for its humorlessness and, more broadly, joylessness, Seitz asserts that the film "just wants you to take the idea of a man who can fly and bend steel with his bare hands seriously," as if a complete lack of humor or joy are required for any such project. And is it really necessary to point out that the consequence-free destruction on display hardly bespeaks a serious, mature engagement with the material?

The rest of the film doesn't fare any better on that score.

For decades, comic Superman's extraordinary powers have been said to come from the reaction of his Kryptonian physiology to Earth's yellow sun. MOS alters this equation--they're now the result of a combination of Earth's sun and atmosphere. Appropriately, given this, when Superman goes on the villains' ship and breathes its Kryptonian atmosphere, he loses his powers. But throughout the film, the Kryptonian villains walk around on Earth in spacesuits that pump Kryptonian air for them to breathe yet have all the godlike powers of Superman anyway. Zod, their leader, wants to terraform Earth, giving it a Kryptonian atmosphere, which would presumably take away their powers. Why in hell would anyone who could live as a demi-god want to do that? It gets better too, because he also asserts that merely living on Earth as it is, sans terraforming, would require years of pain to adjust to its atmosphere then when his suit is damaged, he adjusts to the Earth atmosphere almost immediately. Zod has a world engine that can make over the Earth into a clone of Krypton but the process will destroy its inhabitants. This same world engine could presumably make over any planet in exactly the same way but he wants to use it on the already-populated Earth because, well, because he's the designated villain and that's just the sort of evil stuff villains do. To defeat the villains at the end, Superman opens a black hole within the Earth's atmosphere!

That--just the tip of the iceberg--is how "seriously" MOS takes its premise. For Seitz, though, humorlessness and "darkness" equal "seriously." It's a view one encountered with depressing regularity in the early '90s, when the mad proliferation of the sort of badly-crafted "dark" comics being aped by this film helped to very nearly run the entire industry into the ground. Seitz doesn't stop short of implying the inverse either, that because THE AVENGERS has humor, it doesn't take itself at all seriously, another unfortunate manifestation of that same constipated early-'90s attitude.

In reality, the "serious" MOS is nothing more than a big, stupid, noisy, explosion-filled special effects show aimed straight at the lowest common denominator, a perfect example of the absolute worst breed of Hollywood tentpole spectacle[6] that is utterly off-putting to anyone with any respect for the character--or anyone who gives any aspect of the film any thought at all.. Awash in muted colors, mindless video-game violence,[7] trendy brooding and consequence-free disaster porn, it's a 2+-hour insult, a $225 million rape of a venerable American classic and a black mark on its 77-year history, one Warner Brothers now aims to use as the foundation of its big DC cinematic universe. Pity these iconic characters that they find themselves in the hands of such creatures.[8]

--j.

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[1] The inappropriately bleak characterization and its accompanying tone are accompanied by inappropriately bleak, shitty, washed-out, near-black-and-white cinematography--lifted, without alteration, straight from the Nolan bat-flicks. But, hey, at least Jon Peters got his Superman-in-black battling a giant robot spider at the end, eh?

[2] John Schneider, who essayed Jonathan Kent for years on SMALLVILLE, recently registered the outrage every fan of the Superman mythos owes that moment.

[3] In Richard Donner's excellent SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE--a great screen adaptation of the Silver/Bronze Age comic version of Superman that revised the character in various ways while still staying true to it--Jonathan's death by heart attack when Clark is a teenager is presented as a lesson in humility; with all his powers, all the things Clark can do, he couldn't save his father. The parallel scene in MAN OF STEEL is an assault on the basic premise of the character: Clark prioritizes his own convenience over the life of his father, an obscenity rendered even more abominable by the fact that Jonathan died because he put himself in danger to rescue a dog from the same tornado.

[4] Not only does this "Superman" never even try to take the fight with the Kryptonians out of populated areas, he repeatedly drags it back into populated areas when it strays from them, a move that seems motivated by nothing more than the director's desire to see buildings, streets, etc. blown up and destroyed on the screen.

[5] Thursday, Joss Whedon revealed he had designed his upcoming AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON as a refutation of this sort of thing.

[6] That such movies have been a dime-a-dozen for a few decades gives some wider context to Seitz's effort to argue in favor of such films on the grounds that "it's nice to have a little variety."

[7] Also mind-numbing. The movie turns into a CGI cartoon for what feels like about 40 minutes in which big sections of the world are being completely destroyed by battling superbeings yet the computer-generated images are so divorced from any semblance of humanity that it becomes boring, like watching a video game demo you can't skip.

[8] Though to be fair, Warner Brothers' tv-based DC products have fared much better. DC doesn't have a cohesive universe sewn between its tv and feature productions like Marvel and this has made a mess of the various projects, which feature or will soon feature two Flashes, two Supermen, two Deadshots, two Deathstrokes, two Bruce Waynes (both set in the present but one being a 40-something adult hero and the other being a young, pre-Batman teen), and on and on.

The Big, Fat Disappointment: SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR (2014)

Took me a while but I finally saw A DAME TO KILL FOR. Loved SIN CITY (2005). Really wanted to see this one. Bad word of mouth made me shelve it for a bit--didn't want my heart broken--but some mechanical troubles last night left me with some time on my hand--my computer has a condition--so I popped it in and gave it a once-over.

SIN CITY cost forty-million bucks and made a nice pile of green for an R-rated pic. Creators Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller managed to spend $25 million more on this one and couldn't even make back their budget.  A DAME TO KILL FOR is mostly empty and uninspired--not worth killing for at all and trying to thrill on autopilot on her last call after a long night. The pieces are all there--tough guys, beautiful dames, grifters, grafters, mugs, pugs, thugs, gore, cynicism and darkness--but it's all just style without much of the fun. Few sparks. Nothing holding it all together. The extra dough (for a lot shorter show) seems to have bought a lot more computer graphics than the original had but little else. The near-decade of technological advances between them sure as hell isn't apparent--everything looks way cheaper than it did before. Mickey Rourke's Franken-Marv makeup is slapped-on and crude this time around and not in any good way. Jessica Alba is still playing what's supposed to be the hottest number in town as a stripper who makes it a point to never strip. There are no less than three assaults on the heavily armed compounds of rich assholes, two featuring Marv and two as the climactic setpieces of two of the film's three longer stories. The graphics are on overload, to the point of becoming quite overbearing. Badly CGI'd cars go up CGI'd winding roads over and over again. Bodies and parts of them fly through the ether. While the violence in the original was gleefully profuse and over-the-top, it always had a point; here, it's even more over the top but the glee is most definitely gone, and a lot of it--maybe even most--is just gratuitous. There for its own sake. And even with all its blood and thunder, A DAME TO KILL FOR manages to be pretty damn dull. Not boring, just mostly uninteresting. Quite a trick.

Eva Green one-sheet
banned by the MPAA.

It ain't all bad though. A lot of what I've just been bitching about gets in the way of what are, at heart, some pretty good stories. "Just Another Saturday Night" is a throwaway piece that doesn't really go anywhere, and "Nancy's Last Dance" is pretty forgettable--more like a highlight reel of a bunch of stuff we've already seen--but "The Long, Bad Night," about a gambler who earns immortality by showing up the most powerful man in Basin City, is a keeper, and the title story "A Dame To Kill For" is definitely the highlight. Its pacing often sucks--the style fucking up the substance--and all the other shit weighs it down but it has a killer cast--as does the entire picture--and most importantly, it has Eva Green. Manute, her maniacal, superhuman manservant, describes her character (Ava) as a goddess who enslaves men to her will. Robert Rodriguez reportedly wanted Angelina Jolie to play the part and she was the obvious model for the comic original but for whatever reason that didn't work out, which is just as well. When it comes to goddesses who could enslave men to her will, Eva Green will do just fine. Gotta' fess up, I'm a big fan, and of all the Sin City comic tales, "A Dame To Kill For" is probably my favorite. The screen version doesn't live up to it and yeah, that's disappointing after how well the first film's adaptations were handled, but it's far from terrible.

For that matter, the movie isn't really terrible. A lot of critics burned it all to hell like it was something personal with them. Maybe with some of them it was--they didn't like the first one and it was great and made a pile of dough anyway, so they doubled down on this one. Can't say it doesn't earn some abuse. It should have been a lot better. As it is, it's, Eva excepted, depressingly middling. An overpriced monument to the declining powers of its creators. Not a complete failure but no getting around it, it was the Big Fat Disappointment.

--j.

The Many Devils of DAREDEVIL (2003)

Earlier today, Netflix released the first substantial trailer--a glorified teaser, really--for their upcoming series based on the Marvel comic Daredevil. The initial reaction from online fandom seems to be one of excitement and even glee of a most giddy character. I've been a DD fan myself since I was but a wee lad, but in general, I tend to be more cautious in my optimism for such projects. Still, I'll readily concede that I'm quite pleased with what I saw. If the tone of the trailer reflects that of the series, we may have a winner on our hands.

This will be DD's second screen adaptation and after what happened with the first, that he's getting a second chance is something akin to a  miracle. The release of the new trailer seems as good an opportunity as any to conduct an autopsy on the corpse that is that previous outing. And "corpse" is the right word for it. DAREDEVIL (2003) was a spectacular failure, a near-complete creative abortion. The comic on which it was based is packed with literally years of great--and wonderfully cinematic--plot material that could have been adapted to the screen. Where did a film with so much potential go so terribly wrong?

One place it didn't fail was at the box office. The studio, which had tried to shape the film into a Summer blockbuster tentpole, eventually assigned it a Febrary release, a traditional dead-zone for moviegoing where big films are exiled when the moneymen have no confidence in them.[1] The idea is to allow a movie the chance to become the king of a substantially smaller hill rather than quickly wash out and disappear in the torrent of a more competitive season. Sometimes it works. DAREDEVIL was one of those times. On a budget of $78 million, it managed to draw nearly $180 million, a victory due less to its merits than to the fact there was little else showing.[2]

It would be the film's only success.

When DAREDEVIL was in development, Mark Steven Johnson reportedly lobbied hard to get the directing assignment. That he eventually landed it is still baffling. His only previous directing experience was an insipid children's movie he'd ground out 5 years earlier (SIMON BIRCH). He is, by his own description, a comic fanboy and perhaps it was felt a fanboy could understand the material. Johnson succeeded only in proving that being a fanboy doesn't translate into talent as a cinematic storyteller.[3] It did, however, contribute to the royal mess he made of this film. I could unlimber my rhetorical arsenal and be quite extensively unkind in my assessment of Johnson but his film speaks to that louder than any tirade I could unleash. His shortcomings are painfully obvious in every frame. DAREDEVIL was doomed from the moment he landed the director's chair.

Johnson also wrote the screenplay for the film, which went over about as well as his direction. Instead of trying to tell a single story well, Johnson the fanboy tried to cram in years worth of material from the comics featuring the rather complicated central character, whose origin and later m.o. had to be established, Elektra, DD's college love who becomes his adversary, the Kingpin, the ultimate crime-boss of New York who becomes DD's greatest enemy, Ben Urich, a reporter who learns DD's real identity and becomes an ally, Bullseye, DD's mutant arch-nemesis, and so on. The result is an unfocused mess, a virtually plotless, completely illogical spectacle of would-be colorful characters crashing into one another.

The direction of the actors shows the same lack of focus. Ben Affleck, essaying the title character, has, in the years since the film's release, gotten a lot of abuse for his performance but I'm inclined to be a lot less critical. Actors can only do so much; beyond a certain point they're at the mercy of the script and of those behind the camera. The performances of Affleck and the other cast members are all over the board, veering wildly from entirely naturalistic to absurdist camp melodrama with no effort at a consistent tone. Joe Pantoliano as Urich and Colin Farrell as Bullseye offer the only two performances that are internally consistent from beginning to end, but they're at opposite poles that represent the film's extremes. Pantoliano is a down-to-earth guy who plays his relatively small part straight and to the point. Colin Farrell mugs, spouts ridiculous dialogue in a way-over-the-top-of-the-top manner, bounces around on wires--his character seems as if he's come in from an entirely different movie and every second he spends on screen is a painful embarrassment.

The studio suits made all of this much worse. In the wake of SPIDER-MAN's phenomenal success in 2002 they wanted to ape that film by piling on the CGI and filling the movie with lots of ludicrous wirebound action scenes--things Spider-Man could probably do but that DD most certainly could not. So instead of a Jet Li in a red suit--the only thing you really need to do Daredevil--we get DD the super-grasshopper who can leap tall buildings in a single bound and drop 40 stories off the side of a building, land on his feet and just keep going.

DAREDEVIL is another one of those productions about which I'm loath to say anything particularly positive merely because doing so risks leaving the false impression that there's any significant merit in it. In its favor, I will allow that the film's visualization of DD's "radar" is well done; there is an undercurrent of violence and nihilism in portions of the film that is appropriate to the material, some awareness of the romanticism of the Daredevil character; some of the music, particularly the two Evanescence turnes ("Bring Me To Life" and "My Immortal"), suit Daredevil--at least considered generically--remarkably well.

After the film's release, Johnson prepared a significantly longer director's cut. This second release is undeniably a better film but its merits have been absurdly overstated in some quarters. It's not the vast improvement some will assert. Comparing it to the theatrical cut is like making the argument that this pile stinks a bit less than that pile over there--it may be true, but you don't really want to step in either. After Johnson's film (and the even-worse follow-up ELEKTRA), Daredevil is extremely lucky to be getting another chance. It took 12 years and Marvel finally reacquring the screen rights to see it through but if today's teaser is any indication, the new series seems to be on the right track. Hopefully, it will be as good as it feels right now and will leave this film, at the moment the title character's greatest exposure to the larger public, a fading memory.

--j.

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[1] The current-in-the-works Batman/Superman film was recently moved back to this same period--read into that what you will.

[2] And even at that, it was only the 2nd biggest February release that year.

[3] He hasn't developed any of that in the years since DAREDEVIL either.

Supergals & Bob Haney

Self-Promotion Dept. - I was a fan of the great American art of the comic book before I could even read the books myself (and I could read before most kids my age could even identify all of their letters). Frustrated by a string of setbacks with my movie projects--the story of my life--I've launched a pair of comic-related Facebook groups in the last few days.

Prolific and pulpy, unapologetically eccentric, wildly imaginative and, frequently, gloriously mad is the work of Bob Haney, writer of comic books. In a career that spanned over 50 years, Haney wrote an astonishing array of tales in nearly every genre, their quality ranging from madcap masterpieces to hacked-out-for-pay mush. He put in a very long run on "The Brave & The Bold," including the bulk of its particularly fine incarnation as a team-up-with-the-Batman book, when it was a key work in returning the Caped Crusader to his darker crime-fighter roots. He's a co-creator of the Teen Titans, Metamorpho the Element Man and many others. His work touched nearly every major DC Comics character. And he is spectacularly underappreciated for all of this. So I've set up "Haneyverse: The Brave & Bold Worlds of Bob Haney," something of an effort to give the Haney his due.

Last week, Marvel launched AGENT CARTER, their first female-led screen adaptation. In the midst of the current boom in comic book movies, I've frequently griped about the sparcity of superheroines who have made the leap from page to screen (including here), and parallel with the new show, I launched "Supergals: Heroines & Villainesses of Page & Screen." Not just those who go from page to screen, by any means. Besides just being a great, rich subject and a place people can use to rave about it, I have some more personal reasons for starting it--nieces, cousins, girls and women in general and others in particular.

If either interest you, come by and join in. The more the merrier.

--j.

Revisiting BATMAN BEGINS And Ends

Shared in various internet forums, my article on "Comic Book Movies & What Ails 'Em" drew a variety of responses. One item of marginal significance to the overall piece that nevertheless persistently elicited a strong reaction was my identification of BATMAN BEGINS as one of the stinkers in the current comic movie boom. This wasn't any surprise, of course. The cult of the Christopher Nolan bat-flicks has always been strong, and I've been the subject of its criticism ever since I first suggested that the original film is significantly less than the greatest thing since sliced bread and that its director doesn't walk on water. Every time I've ever raised the issue I've gotten pushback, and looking over it now, my original article on BATMAN BEGINS is rather sketchy, more like a series of impressions of the film assembled immediately after having watched it the first time. I've seen it again since then. The subsequent viewing only hardened my initial impression of it--I think I was originally too kind to it. I've also seen most of the third Nolan bat-flick, which is even worse than BEGINS.[1] The reaction to the comic movie article seems an opportune moment to revisit and expand upon my original evaluation.

Adam West's uber-campy '60s television Batman casts a very long shadow over both the character and comic-based productions in general. Its popularity catapulted it from an amusingly stupid diversion to a thing that, in far too many quarters, defined a screen adaptation of a comic book as some cheap, way-over-the-top, insultingly stupid piece of shit that was not to be treated seriously as drama or, indeed, regarded as anything more than dumb, shallow, entirely disposable fun for those who find such things fun--a coffin-shaped box for the genre. Even the appearance, years later, of quality items like SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE and the INCREDIBLE HULK tv series couldn't exorcise this particular demon, which stood as an obstacle to quality comic adaptations--to comic adaptations, period--for decades, and, in fact, continues to haunt them to this day.

The Batman was particularly haunted by it. Tim Burton's BATMAN (1989), which was based on the original Golden Age comics, was very good, still the definitive live-action treatment of the character, but the franchise it touched off immediately collapsed into full-blown, full groan Adam West-ism with BATMAN RETURNS and never looked back. Every entry went further in this direction than the last, every entry was far worse than the last. I've always believed a lot of the accolades poured over BATMAN BEGINS were a consequence of its moving away from this. It didn't quite move as far from it as its fans pretend though.

Conceptually speaking, Marvel's major characters have always been much stronger than those of DC Comics. The Batman is the exception. As a child, Bruce Wayne sees his parents gunned down by a mugger in a bad section of town and from that moment forward dedicates his life to an endless crusade against crime. He is the avatar of vengeance--crime had created what would become its greatest scourge. His years to adulthood are spent singlemindedly honing his mind and body to the task. To strike fear into his enemies, he becomes a bat, and the bat, rather than Bruce Wayne, is his true identity. With the fortune inherited from his parents, he launches his private war. From here, his tale takes a new turn. Over the years, he encounters an entire rogue's gallery of villains who are like twisted reflections of himself, also obsessively devoted to making over the world in their own image. The question is raised as to how much their appearances are a consequence of his own. It's simple and brilliant; a powerful modern myth and a goldmine for any storyteller.[2]

And, of course, BATMAN BEGINS pretty much abandons all of it. The film is as entirely uninterested in and unengaged with the source material as was the later (and also dreadful) MAN OF STEEL. BEGINS was released after the first two SPIDER-MAN films had become successful, and it tried to ape those pictures by making Bruce himself somewhat responsible for his parents' death and having him blame himself, rather than the criminal element. Instead of dedicating his life to a crusade, Bruce seems to entirely waste his youth. He's directionless, overly emotional, and goofs off enough to be kicked out of half a dozen colleges. In the comics, the murderer of his parents was unknown until years into his crusade as the Batman, which was a significant part of the myth--the murderer's anonymity meant that crime, rather than just a man, had killed them. In BEGINS, the killer--a hood named Joe Chill--is apprehended immediately after the murder and sent to prison. He's killed in a mob hit when Bruce is 23, at a time before Bruce has even started down the path that will lead him to becoming the Batman. The film's central character is entirely severed from his origin myth by that point--it's a completely different story about a completely different character, not the Batman. For five years, Bruce takes to wandering around the world, lost and without purpose, studying crime and "fear" for reasons he, himself, says he doesn't even understand. In my original piece, I wrote that the babbling about "fear" never comes across as overly pretentious; upon rewatch, I feel as if I understated the pretension factor, but my real objection to it, then as now, was that it's used to fill the vacuum created by abandoning the character's backstory. If one can come up with something better, one can sort of justify this kind of thing. The creators of BEGINS couldn't come up with anything better--they just abandoned the story of the Batman and threw out a cloud of pretentious squid's ink to try to cover that fact. The result is a "Batman" with no core, lost in a production as unfocused as the character.

In the film, Bruce is eventually recruited into the League of Shadows, a secret society of ninja with a hazy anti-city ideology headed by the mysterious Ra's Al Ghul. He spends two years in extremely rigorous training with the League without, apparently, ever even bothering to ask what the League is all about. His time with it abruptly ends when the man he takes to be Ra's Al Ghul looks him in the face and says the order's goal is to "destroy" Gotham and other cities. The reason offered is that cities are "corrupt," which is, of course, no real motive at all. The real reason is because those in the League are the designated villains in the film and designated villains need something villainous to do, whether it makes any sense or not. Delivered deadpan, this big "reveal"--if it can be called that--is the sort of thing one immediately expects to be followed by one of the dramatic "shock" music cues from the old Adam West Batman. Upon first watch, I laughed and shook my head in utter disbelief that the film had gone in this direction. It didn't improve upon rewatch.

As with a lot of old films of camp value, BEGINS wasn't in on the joke--it presented that moment as something we're supposed to take entirely seriously. In explaining the film before its release, Nolan was ever so serious about how ever so serious his movie was to be. From Variety (8 Feb., 2004):

"Batman will be more realistic and less cartoonish. There are no campy villains... Humanity and realism, says Nolan, is the crux of the new pic. 'The world of Batman is that of grounded reality,' he says... 'Ours will be a recognizable, contemporary reality against which an extraordinary heroic figure arises.'"

After the film's release, this sentiment was dutifully picked up and parroted by many reviewers (which can't help but make one wonder if they ever even saw the picture). Holding to this as a goal is another way in which Nolan's project was fundamentally misguided, and had the director rigorously pursued that path, one could legitimately say it was yet another way in which the film is fundamentally at odds with the source material. The Batman is a blatantly romantic fantasy awash in heaping helpings of glorious expressionism. What Nolan actually did, though, was, as I noted in my original review, try to paste together two diametrically opposed strains of story, great and solidly grounded Batman material like Frank Miller's "Batman: Year One" and the sort of shallow, overcooked, and silly kid's stuff one got from DC comics--and Adam West Batman--decades ago. The two destroy one another; every element of the latter in the film is ludicrous, yet it's treated with the same humorless gravity as the rest of the story.

"Year One" had presented a dark and utterly corrupt Gotham. Throughout, there was the theme that this was a town that badly needed a Batman. In its first act, BEGINS taps into that again and again. The film is missing a Bruce that needs to be a Batman though. After leaving the League, Bruce doesn't really have any reason for becoming the Batman. Rather than following an urgent psychological need to wage a war on crime after a childhood trauma led to a lifetime spent preparing for it, BEGINS' Bruce takes up the fight idealistically, simply deciding Gotham needs him. That this radical change renders extraneous and irrelevant everything leading up to that point never seemed to occur to the filmmakers. Following "Year One" and "The Long Halloween" (another tale of the early Batman), the film sets up Carmine "The Roman" Falcone as Gotham's biggest crime boss, a guy with a massive criminal empire, with his fingers in every crooked pie and protected on all sides by corrupt officialdom. Invincible to everyone but a costumed vigilante who doesn't play by the rules. Unfortunately, having spent a lot of time setting up Falcone in this way, the film immediately disposes of him. The Batman roughs up some thugs (in an exceptionally poorly directed action sequence),[3] ties up Falcone, hands over to officialdom some evidence that wouldn't be admissible in any court in the U.S., and that's the end of the Roman. It takes only a few minutes of screentime. So much for Gotham's profound corruption and its need for a Batman.

This, of course, entirely discredits what little motive there was behind the big villain plot, to which the film then returns. Gotham was said to be irretrievably corrupt, yet the Batman decimates its central crime figure with near-effortless ease (Falcone is only ever seen again in one brief scene). As that central villain plot plays out, it proves to be an incredibly elaborate, impossible, completely ridiculous motive-free scheme--a meaner, more dour version of the sorts of things the giggling no-goodniks of the Adam West Batman used to do twice a week.

Ra's Al Ghul's plan to "destroy" Gotham is to fill the city's water supply with a chemical that, whenever vaporized, drives people insane and makes them kill one another. He isn't introducing it by poisoning the reservoirs; he's having it poured from drums into a pipe leading into the city. No, that's no joke. Not an intentional one, that is. His henchmen have been pouring it in for weeks. To note the obvious, water in such a system doesn't sit in a pipe; it's constantly rushing into the city in the way we're shown because it's being used. New York, the comic model for Gotham, uses a billion gallons of water a day. Even if some idiot could introduce enough of a chemical into the system in this way to matter--and he couldn't--everyone who has a hot shower or who boils water should have been going insane for weeks. To activate the chemical, which has magically stayed in the lines all that time, the villains have stolen a microwave device that, when placed on a hijacked train, will, we're told, vaporize the city's entire water supply. No one apparently informed BEGINS' creators what makes up most of the human body. No one apparently informed Ra's Al Ghul that the easiest way to destroy a city would be to simply set off a big bomb or a few big bombs.

BEGINS, like so many other comic adaptations, suffers from epic-itis. The Batman has been through as many versions and permutations as any character in comics, but while in various forms, he's certainly tackled his share of population-threatening menaces, his finest moments tend to come as a street-level crimefighter. It's hardwired into the character by virtue of his origin. In that respect--as in so many other respects--the BEGINS project was fundamentally at odds with the nature of the character. The Batman isn't just some ninja. He's a scientist, a criminologist, a master detective, among the many core facets of the character entirely excluded from BEGINS. To the others in his world, he's a very mysterious figure, which is impossible to portray on film if, as happens with BEGINS, we're constantly following his every move, in on his every trick. And for all the talk of "fear" in BEGINS, we're never allowed any sense that the criminal underworld ever develops any real fear of him--the point of his becoming a bat in the first place.[4]

As a Batman film, BEGINS is an utter failure. As a standalone film, it's insultingly idiotic. Like the event that makes up its climax, it's a train-wreck. Like MAN OF STEEL, it's a film whose creators had no real interest in the character or his world and who didn't show the material any respect. Like train-wrecks, MAN OF STEEL and most adaptations-in-name-only, it sucks.

--j.

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[1] I still haven't seen THE DARK KNIGHT, the most hyped film of the run. The first film left me with no desire to see it, and the third did absolutely nothing to spur my interest either.

[2] It must be said that DC Comics, the Batman's owners, have often been terrible stewards of this myth. In the Batman's earliest days, he was entirely unconcerned with preserving the lives of the scum with which he tangled. As his primary readers were children, DC editorially imposed a mandate that the character wouldn't kill anyone anymore (the same as happened with Superman). Initially, this was carried out by simply not putting the character in a position where such a thing was necessary. Later writers, unfortunately, grafted the no-killing parameter on to the personality of the character itself, which simply can't be done in any logical manner. Worse, they made the Batman very self-righteous about this, then made a regular practice of rubbing readers' noses in it in such a way as to make a joke of the character. Several years ago, there was a story in "Action Comics" (#719, "Hazard's Choice") about the Joker poisoning Lois Lane. She's dying. Superman and Batman go to see the Joker and ask how they can save her and he tells them that they can inject him with a chemical that will mix with one already in his blood and provide an antidote. The rub? Injecting him will kill him. Back in the good ol' days of the early Golden Age, the only question that would arise next is whether the two of them would have injected the Joker before they killed him. The meek, pathetic characters DC has made of them, though, won't even consider it--they simply slink away, returning to Metropolis to watch Lois (Superman's wife at the time) slowly die while mouthing self-righteous platitudes. The writer then chose a cop-out ending wherein the Joker's joke was that the poison wouldn't kill Lois after all, but even that helps make the point. Characters who think that decision amounts to a "moral" one are pathetic and useless, and bereft of any real sense of morality.

A Batman who, when placed in such situations, becomes a principled advocate of the health-and-safety-at-all-costs of mass-murdering animals like the Joker and self-righteously denounces anyone who doesn't share his enthusiasm for their continued-existence-at-all-costs--and this happens all the time in the books--is violating one of the most basic rules of the archetype. Given the circumstances of his creation, it's literally impossible to imagine the Batman making the argument that the lives of Thomas and Martha Wayne (his parents) are no more valuable than that of the thug who shot them down in cold blood. If he really believed that, he wouldn't be the Batman. Yet that's exactly the argument his writers routinely have him make.

[3] All of the action sequences in the film are poorly shot.

[4] Underscoring the terribly unfocused nature of the production, the film spends a great deal of time on the theme of "fear," includes the Scarecrow, a villain primarily associated with fear, then does basically nothing with him. He's given almost no screentime and no opportunity to do much of anything.