The Rabbit Hole

Zach Snyder's Superman reboot has finally produced a promo image. (There are also set photos of Henry Cavil as Clark. With the curl. Go figure.) It really bothers me that they're adding all this texture to superhero outfits. The Spider-Man reboot is doing the same thing. It just looks dumb and not at all shiny like I kind of imagine and love Superman for being. It's in awful contrast with his cape, which is as voluminously large and lush as any comic has ever drawn it. I just hate the texture on the suit. I hate it. I hated it in Superman Returns (though that suit had so much else going wrong with it besides that it wasn't the worst part). I hate the color scheme, but I get it, I suppose. You can't make a man run around in a bright blue suit any more. (Not even Captain America's USO costume was bright blue.) I still don't like it. I also don't like that, in close up, Supes looks like Martin Sheen. That's weirding me out. A lot.

I also know that Zach Snyder is typically great at making stunning images and trailers for mediocre-to-awful movies, and to be fair to him, it is a dramatic shot. But if this much is already going wrong in the visuals before you get to the movie of questionable quality....ouch. Sorry DC. Better luck next time. Maybe you can hope that the questionable costume changes to Thor and the Cap (as caught in these screencaps from the post-Captain America bump for The Avengers) will soon dwarf your own concerns? Naaaah. Whom am I kidding? Thor's costume features ARMS. It automatically wins at life. (Dear Chris Hemsworth and Chris Hemsworth's smoking-hot wife: please tell me you are polyamorous. It's not fair to keep all that hotness to yourselves.)

Another fun feature I found on the internet: Empire magazine explains (with spoiler warnings, bless 'em) who the F are all the dwarfs in The Hobbit. Thank you, Jebus. I got confused as to who they were when I was reading The Hobbit, so I couldn't tell you Ori from Dori now. Things this magazine, alas, cannot explain? How come Aidan Turner's character looks like an elf. I mean, the rest of the character look like goddamned dwarfs. I get that Aidan Turner is fucking hot, and it's damn shame to cover that up with layers of dwarf makeup, but come on. The man signed up to play a dwarf. Either you make him a freakin' dwarf and put the same squat nose and lumpy features on him as everyone else or you hire someone who doesn't look like a model. I mean, Richard Armitage is just as gorgeous, and they...well, okay, they made him into a Klingon, but still! He's not fabulously attractive! It's a start!

I did find out that James Nesbitt, who is absolutely fabulous in Jekyll, which WATCH WATCH WATCH if you've not seen, is in this, which, is a reason to watch. Too bad he's not a villain. (His Jekyll was chilling. And all that without any crazy monster makeup. It's almost all just him.) I'm not the hugest fan of The Hobbit, but I'm in. Hell, I'd be in for Andy Serkis as Gollum again. I saw a clip of him doing motion-capture for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and whatever the merits of that remake, Andy Serkis, ridiculous in costume, is a resplendent physical actor. You don't need the CGI monkey face to see the monkey. He's amazing.

Oh my. Oh, oh, oh, this made me splutter at work. Um, it's probably not safe for anyone's work but mine, where, because I laughed out loud, I then got to show it around to my other coworkers. Who laughed, probably mostly at me for finding this so funny. But it was.

Ooh, look what's coming to Netflix! I was kindly given the X-Men cartoon on DVD at Christmas, but I'd be so interested to watch the old Spider-Man cartoon (from the 1990s, not the old-old one from the 1960s). I bet it is even worse than I remember it.

In a stunning bit of thinking, a judge rules that people are not their IP addresses. Or vice-versa, whichever. This is still of the good. I'm all for stopping the kiddie porn watchers, but I still believe you should have to do a liiiiittle more actual investigation than assuming that because something was downloaded to a given IP address that it must be the person residing at that address' fault. People are far too lazy about securing their wireless or patrolling their friends'/roommates' habits. Use the IP link to start a proper investigation, fine. Use it to smear someone FOREVER with a link to kiddie porn? Not so much.

I'm collecting a lot of links for posts.

1) Proof positive that outlawing a thing doesn't make it go away. (ETA: TRIGGER WARNING) For fuck's sake, abortion isn't illegal now, and this is what's happening because it's become so goddamned shameful and fucking difficult to obtain for anyone who isn't rich. You tell me what's more offensive to your God, anti-choicers: a woman scraping some insensate cells out of her uterus or a man forcibly delivering viable** fetuses and stabbing them with scissors? Pro-life my goddamned ass.

2) This isn't a totally accurate list, which makes it all the more aggravating when it gets things right. I agree with all the points about emotional attachment to a franchise. Spider-Man isn't James Bond. Hell, he's not Batman. We've had pretty much the one guy. (Okay, Tobey Maguire was the guy and that was an up-and-down relationship, but he's still the guy.) The story still resonates where the films were any good. And the best villains were already used, including, despite how shittily he was used, Venom.

However, the cast wasn't perfect, and the acting was occasionally too embarrassed/embarrassing for its own good. (Dunnnssssssssst!) Raimi did something amazing with Spider-Man, and I'll fight anyone who'll take that credit from him. He overcame hurdles that had banished Spider-Man to development hell for some 20 years. The problem was that Spider-Man, for all the general awareness of him in pop culture, was still kind of an unknown. He's not Superman and he's not Batman, the binary twins of screen superheroism. Once Raimi made Spider-Man, the dam burst and we were able to accept other people's visions of superheroes. (Or, in the case of The Hulk, reject them.) There's no one guy who can do Spider-Man, just one guy who did it well (until the studio meddled and sabotaged him). There's room for more there.

Just, you know, not right now. Sony's not doing this for revenge, by the way. This is purely to keep the rights and make the most of them. Yes, okay, fine, maybe they're spiting Marvel Studios a little. But this is 90% financial interest.

3) Never trust a movie that films today and will be showing tomorrow. If I'd followed that rule for Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned, I might have that hour back to waste on this movie. Alas, I do not. (No, really, they're filming it now to show in two months. You stay classy, SyFy.)

4) Wow, I didn't know John Cusack had been drinking that much. Kidding! He's still not hang-dog looking enough to play Edgar Allen Poe without a lot of makeup, but I'm sure he'll manage. Hey, today was Poe's birthday and his biggest secret fan didn't show up. Sadness :(

GOOD NEWS EVERYONE. I NO LONGER HAVE ANY ANGST ABOUT CAPTAIN AMERICA.

IT IS ALSO POSSIBLE THAT I COULD BE COMING AROUND ON THIS SPIDER-MAN REMAKE.

Okay, so, in less capslock-y analysis, I like these pictures. A lot. I am sure most people will look at the Captain America one in particular and give me the big o.O face from behind their compu-machines. But I'm digging it. It is kind of outrageous and yet perfect. I think the suit does an impossibly good job at being everything all at once. It's period-appropriate and still future-forward as fashion. As in, I know someone in the 1940s could have made this outfit, but since real life is not a comic book, no one ever did. It manages to conform to Chris Evans' body shape (which, as I may have mentioned before, is pretty much my sole reason for seeing this movie, humminah humminah humminah) without being ridiculously stiff looking, like the X-Men movie uniforms or the Batsuits of the Burton era. It also manages to capture the spirit of the Cap's spandex suit while not being entirely faithful to it.

The Spider-Man photo is impressive in its own right, too. Most significantly, they don't try to buff up Andrew Garfield in it. It remains to be seen if he'll be as impressive without the muscle suit when he's moving around and not strategically posed in the shadows. But I dig a lean Spidey. He's pretty much always been a beanpole, especially compared to the over-muscled among the other Avengers and what not. (Which, because Sony has the rights to Spider-Man for the foreseeable future, I doubt he'll be joining onscreen.) One of my favorite interpretations of Spider-Man is Ultimate Spider-Man, and this feels like that's where they're taking this. I am still not entirely cool with a reboot of a movie that came out eight-nine years ago and whose sequels ended three years ago, but this is definitely a step in the right direction. Well played, Spider-Man reboot!

(Hmm, will they call it The Amazing Spider-Man to differentiate it from Raimi's trilogy, do you think? Or Spectacular Spider-Man? Or would they just do a fangirl some service and name it Ultimate Spider-Man?)

A serious article about film criticism and its decline.

vs.

ZOMG COMIC BOOK MOVIES R OVR.

The criticism of online reviewers in the first link seemed especially prescient this morning when I went from it to the second link. Of course, the problem with the io9 criticism is that the cyclical nature of genre popularity is just that: it is only popularity that waxes/wanes, not actual production. There will be some stepping off of making superhero movies, say, when a few superhero movies have failed to make big bank or have failed critically (either with fans or reviewers or both). But the movies will still be around. After Watchmen did less well than hoped, and after Wolverine was so boring even fanboys didn't bother watching the leaked movie, we are still looking at a slew of movies that were pushed into action regardless of those films failures.

This year, we get Iron Man 2. Next year, Thor and The Avengers. DC is pushing a new Superman movie and another in the Nolan Bat-films. Kick-Ass is already rumored to have a sequel in the works. It is not that we'll tire of superhero movies. We only tire of some superheroes. That's what I mean about popularity. As the Burton-Schumacher Batman franchise started to wane, Blade stepped in, as did X-Men. (The former informed upon The Matrix; the latter took a few cues from it.) Within a couple of years, we had Spider-Man. All around them were the also-rans: The Hulk, The Punisher, Fantastic Four. Then we came back to Batman again.

To the internet's credit, most of this was pointed out to the io9 OP. Perhaps we aren't all the anti-education film reactionaries that that first link assumes many of to be?