Thirtysomething someone living in Orlando, FL with my awesome wife and two great kids.
I have two books, Unconventional (fiction about three geeks and an eventful weekend at a sci-fi con) and Poodoo (commentary on the Star Wars films and geek culture). I also tweet incessantly.
By day, I do marketing, public relations, social media, and copywriting. By night, I sleep.
This does not seem like an organically created project; it seems like the kind of thing that emerges when you put “male geek,” “skanks,” and “CGI” into the Bat-Computer and then make a movie based on the punch card it spits out. That makes me pretty angry because geek culture and the entertainment we enjoy have really made some big strides in the past decade or two…and I say that not as a fanboy desperately in need of validation from the jocks who used to beat me up in high school but now stand in front of me in line for Iron Man 2. I say that as a fanboy who just wants to see as much cool shit make it to the screen as possible. And as such, it’s a little sad that geek culture has already become decipherable by Hollywood scumbag math.
I felt my anger slowly dissipating as I wrote this, so I kept it simple and short. I had used some of my best gags already on Twitter anyway. Twitter acts as sort of a great rant-killer in that way.
This morning I spent a few hours yakking on yon Twitter about the upcoming slate of films from Marvel Studios: Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, and The Avengers.
At the same time, I was listening to Matt Fraction's brilliant performance at w00tstock of "The Batman Dreams of Hieronymus Machines." (Okay, so I was also doing ACTUAL WORK, since I have an ACTUAL JOB. I multitask; it's how I do.)
It made for an interesting collision. Fraction's speech is about a great many things, and deserves to be listened to instead of just reading my shitty half-sentence summary, but it deals primarily with the unique alchmey of comics as a storytelling device--words, pictures, and whatever you bring to the table.
I think that's amplified by the fact that they're always a personal experience; you can see a movie with 1,000 of your closest friends, and you can go to a concert and get beer spilled down your shirt while you listen to your favorite song. But there's ultimately nothing communal about a comic; it's you and the work.
Except that often the second you're done, when you can log on and find dozens of places where your opinions, ideas, theories, and lame gags can get mixed into the meaty, frequently pungent stew commonly known as "online discourse."
I kid, I kid. It's good stuff, mostly. And sometimes, it brings the magical to a level that is fully mundane.
I'm having this chat about The Avengers, which I am enjoying even though it's frequently frustraing me, and I'm listening to one of my favorite comic book writers talk about the fucking magic of stories, especially those told in comics form. (As opposed to the fucking magic of fucking magnets; for more on that, see here.)
There's this fine line geeks tap-dance upon, and it's the one between the possible and the all-too-real. The ambitions we have for the stories we love must often be reconciled with the disappointing actualizations of those stories. I want a $150 million three-hour feature film adaptation of Infinity Gauntlet, directed by Bill Condon and starring James Gandolfini as Thanos; it will not happen.
So I start immediately reconciling in my brain, tap dancing along the line, thinking about what could be and what will be, excited and disappointed by both. It's probably gonna be an Ultimates adaptation, that's cool, I like those comics...but what about the Cosmic Cube? And Loki? That's awesome sauce to stir into the mix. And Janet and Hank Pym, I'd love to see them in the film, but Whedon's probably already told us it won't happen...but what if he's being obtuse, and when he says "Ant-Man," he doesn't necessarily mean Hank Pym?
Or the other ideas floated by my pals...Janet Pym on her own in a romance with Steve Rogers...the "death" of Bucky Barnes and the rise of the Winter Soldier somehow folded into the storyline...a Hulk that's still crazy but has just enough Banner to be dangerous...
The possible, the probable, banging heads incessantly until the movie is out, and we all go, and we all judge it.
The second part of the panel was to introduce "Thor," and they wisely included Natalie Portman in the panel. The audible response to her entrance in the section of Hall H where I was seated made me cackle quietly. Seriously... fanboys loooooooooove her. She is the ideal girl for them. There's a generation that's grown up hopelessly head over heels for her. She was fascinating in talking about her motivation for making this movie, using careful language to make her feelings about "Star Wars" very clear once again. She kept repeating, emphatically, that she decided to do this film because she wanted the experience of working on a big FX driven summer blockbuster pop culture machine, but one directed this time by someone who was interested in both character and in really taking apart the text. She kept referring to Kenneth Branagh's particular background in stage and Shakespeare and how that informs the sort of work he does as a director and the priorities he has in the film. It was very revealing.
Very revealing, indeed. It's fascinating to me how George Lucas is just sort of commonly accepted as an awful director by everyone who's worked with him.
By my count there are about three declarative statements in this entire piece that are not categorically inaccurate. The rest is a seething tissue of factual errors, self-negating examples, glaring elisions, logical inconsistencies, specious industrial analysis, mystifying rhetorical constructions and basic grammatical errors. It speaks for itself. As White's critical hero and much invoked "mentor" Pauline Kael once said in an interview, "No one should trust any critic who does not take the art form he is writing about seriously enough to write a decent paragraph. I simply do not trust the observations of people who write sloppily or in illiterate hyperbole."
This is exactly the kind of precise, clinical evisceration White has deserved for a long time. It should be bookmarked and simply trotted out every time White publishes another screed.
In providing sheer moviegoing satisfaction — plot, characters, verbal wit and visual delight, cheap laughs and honest sentiment — “Toy Story 3” is wondrously generous and inventive. It is also, by the time it reaches a quiet denouement that balances its noisy beginning, moving in the way that parts of “Up” were. That is, this film — this whole three-part, 15-year epic — about the adventures of a bunch of silly plastic junk turns out also to be a long, melancholy meditation on loss, impermanence and that noble, stubborn, foolish thing called love. We all know money can’t buy it, except sometimes, for the price of a plastic figurine or a movie ticket.
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