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First, I want to be clear on one thing: this was a terrible movie. Despite liking Wesley Snipes (and I do!), the script was perfunctory, it was shot like a horror movie, not a comic-book or an action movie, and the alleged romantic theme was laughable.
That said, like the first film, there was one aspect of this movie that was ahead of its time. I remember watching it for the first time and thinking that the CG spliced into the fight scenes was distracting and stupid, not to mention that they used a liberal dose of pro-wrestling moves in the choreography (I don't have to tell you how much that bored the crap out of me). But on a second viewing I realise that, despite an only mediocre execution, the F/X department actually used a lot of the same techniques of animation that made Spider-Man 2 so good. Specifically, in Blade II they started thinking outside the box, or perhaps outside the lense. They stopped animating the CG bits as if they had a camera on set and a couple of performers who were capable of, shall we say, a "ridiculous aerobatic display." They actually allowed the camera to travel around the CG figures and freely slowed down the shots and sped them up again without 'cutting' back to normal speed. It's as if they applied the concept of morphing to camera speed.
The action movie benefit of CG is that they no longer need to worry about th1e logistics of getting shots or getting actors to execute choreography. It's no accident that superhero movies are using this to their advantage in excess of some others. After all, a comic-book panel can capture any angle of any scene, and the characters' actions are limited only by what the artists can conceive of and draw. I konw it's not 'in style' with current artistic theory (the post-structuralists would have my balls for this... if they weren't constantly with ideological indecision), butt he more I examine different artistic media, the more I think that the technology and the creativity are holistically joined. In art, there are no coincidences, though there are certainly a lot of accidents.
This is, oddly, the one that started it all. Although it's not a great film, it was the film in the 90s that showed us that comic-book superheroes could be extremely fun on the big screen. Sure, we'd had some Batman movies in that same decade, but by the time they were playing "Musical Bruce Waynes" the franchise had died. In fact, this happened long before George Clooney got involved, and he's quite open about the fact that he did it for the money.
Blade not only ushered in going on a decade of superhero movies, but it also paved the way for the Hong Kong action cinema craze we're currently experiencing. I know that this seems like a big claim, but think about it. The Wachowskis must have seen this movie, and regardless of whether they already had the premise and style of The Matrix mapped out in their minds, they must have realised that the success of Blade would bolster their chances of getting their movie produced at all. Look at some of the cinematic elements: long black leather coats, martial arts combined with heavy gun-play, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, heroes and villains dodging computer-animated bullets, the use of techno music to enhance the fight scenes... the list goes on. The talent that went into created The Matrix was greater than what went into Blade, I think, but the individual elements were all there.
The irony of the whole thing is that nobody saw it coming. Wesley Snipes has never quite managed to work his way into the top-grade of action stars (his movies are hit and miss at best), and Blade himself was an obscure character. Created by Marv Wolfman, one of the gods of comics in the 80s, he was all but unknown, and therefore it was cheap to buy the rights to make a movie of him. Shaquil O'Niel tried to do the same thing with an utterly unremarkable character named Steele, but Shaq and his managers have always had no taste, so the movie sucked from beginning to end.
Blade was certainly not the only movie to combine superheroes with Hong Kong-style action; Jet Li's Black Mask was released in Canada in 1996, two years before Blade and three years before The Matrix. The film was nothing more than dressing Jet Li up like Kato from The Green Hornet (which in itself is a nod to Bruce Lee more than anything else), and didn't feature a particularly compelling plot or action sequences that fully used Li's talents. (However, it did feature Francois Yip, a local Vancouver action starlet who also appeared with Jackie Chan in a movie called Rumble in the Bronx, was briefly a recurring character on Jerimiah, and did a small promotional video featuring my ex-roommate, Rod Williams, which was itself a parody of a lot of the kinds of effects we saw in The Matrix!).
The point is, Blade was the one that took, like the coat of paint on your bedroom wall that finally covers up the dark purple you slapped on when you were 15 and perpetually depressed. As such, it (the movie, not your bedroom wall) effected everything that came after in that it prepared the audience to buy into certain cinematic elements. We no longer really need an explanation for people performing complex kung fu fights at the drop of a hat, or even performing gymnastic feats that are nigh-impossible for the human body. Hell, even Charlie's Angels used wire work. Without Blade we might never have had the chance to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or the upcoming films Hero and Zatoichi. Someone needed to get the Western (read: American) audience used to the extremes of Wuxia cinema. Blade was that someone.
Oh my dear lords on Mount Olympus, what a waste of time. This title's been around for some time and it's recieved some attention. When I heard the premise, I was not anticipating sterling work. When a few people assured me it was fascinating, and even witty, I repressed my instincts and gave it a look.
The premise, by the way, is that all animals with a Y chromasome die, except one man and his monkey. Not to get inflamatory, but this one man is, of course, American, and white. Anyway... I read the first few issues and I'm not impressed. The concept of the comic is something out of lame on-line porn. The last man on Earth surrounded by women forced, forced!, to find affection in each other's arms, but who desperately long for the strong touch of a man. The comic isn't quite that bad, but it's similarly half-baked and pointless.
The first plot element is political. The American government, because it's mostly comprised of men, all but collapses. The wives of dead Republican senators claim a hereditary right to their dead husbands' seats, and the Army is severely understaffed for pretty much the same reason. But Israel is doing just fine because all women between the age of 18 and 24 have to serve in the military. Uh huh. Whatever. By issue four we have the oh so very predictable man-hating lesbian biker chicks who've decided that all the men dying wasn't such a bad thing. They even burn off their left breasts to emulate the ancient Amazons.
I'm not sure what Brian Vaughan was going for when he came up with the concept of the title, but I can only hope that it wasn't what he actually came up with, because what he came up with is boring, pointless, and utterly generic.
I read this series on the recommendation of my thesis supervisor, Doug Barbour. He and I seem to have the same taste (which is damn lucky, because he's the only comics nut in the department aside from me).
The series, written by Garth Ennis and pencilled by Steve Dillon, is not for the faint of heart. It's wierd. Really, really wierd. The basic premise is that a pure life-force escapes from Heaven and joins with a seriously screwed up Texan preacher, Jesse Custer, whose past is so far beyond checkered that the board is pretty much black. I won't go deep into the plot. Suffice it to say that there's an Irish vampire and a sharp-shooting, would be assassin girlfriend, and those are some of the more normal characters.
The aspect of the series that really intrigues me is its conception of masculinity. To backtrack for a second, "masculinities" has become a hot subject in lit. studies in the last few years. It started in post-colonialism, basically seeking to answer the question "What happens to men's conception of themselves as men when they live in cultures that were colonised?" It's spread out since then and become a viable subject area. So if someone asks you why there should be 'feminism' when there's not 'masculanism,' then tell him that there is, now!
Anyway, this series is, itself, a fascinating study of masculinity. The protagonist is an obviously intelligent and, we find out mid-way through the series, surprisingly well-read man. He's read feminist theories that most people outside of academia have never heard of. This is a comic-book that references Judith Butler. Trouble is, he was raised in rural Texas and has to fight ingrained sexist, homophobic, and macho attitudes the entire time.
What results is Ennis', I believe sincere, attempt to accurately represent the internal struggle of the intelligent man who, never the less, has prejudices that he can't quite control. The series involves a creature so dangerous that he shot Satan in the face, coke-snorting angels, and a fist-fight with God himself, so the logistic climax, the culmination of the central conflict, is Biblical in proportion. But to me, the emotional climaxes are much more importan in terms of what the series actually does conceptually. The ultimate culmination of Custer's character involves him learning to have and accept his own emotional responses without shame or embarassement.
For all that, one of the lessons demonstrated in this series is that, much like in movies were anyone who knows martial arts beats anyone who doesn't, the character with the most testosterone always wins. Spending too much time tending to your hair, or bothering to shave, or preferring wine to beer guarantees defeat in Ennis' world. This explain how Custer is able to actually look God in the eye and tell him to fuck off. Custer is, somehow, more masculine. This dominance of macho is such a strong motif that it needed an equally strong narrative element to account for it. I don't like to fault a writer for he or she didn't write, but in this case I see Ennis clearly trying to do a particular thing, perform a certain symbolic act, but not managing to fully play out his own themes.
As an attempt to demonstrate that there are a lot of men who want to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem, but aren't sure how to do that, the series works, beautifully. If Jesse's emotional climax doesn't bring tears to your eyes, then you're a cold, heartless bastard. However, the series is not without its own gender-related problems. It enacts the very prejudices it rails against. Whether this is on purpose or not is up for grabs, but in the end it doesn't quite account for all of its own ideological movements. It's a fascinating series, worth the read, and worth thinking about, but not entirely without ideological flaws.
First, I'd like to thank Jay "Third-Person DM" Garcia for making me aware of this title. Powers is written by Brian Michael Bendis whose Ultimate Spider-man was the de facto shooting script for the first Spider-man movie, as far as I can tell. Powers is one of a long tradition of "What if superheroes were real?" comics that have been steadily gaining in sophistication and popularity at least since Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen (which you should all go out and read right now).
The book sets itself up as the little used genre of cop-mystery-drama. It just happens to take place in a world where heroes and villains (referred to collectively as 'powers') are common. The former are supported by law and a great deal of corporate sponshership in large part because they're the only people who can stand up to the later. On a structural level, Bendis' brilliance is that all the details of his world logically follow from a few simple premises. He gives us a mirror image of our own world (or at least of America), but with an added element, powers, that makes it more intense. I already said that Raimi's Spide-man movies have done this very, very well. I'll now say that Bendis does it better than I think I've seen anywhere else, and I keep track (I'll have more to say about the other comics that have taken on similar tasks at a later time).
Bendis constructs extremely believable characters, primarily through dialogue that positively sings in its fluidity, a factor that contributes to the feeling that you're watching a cop show like NYPD Blue or Da Vinci's Inquest. You get to know how his characters speak, how they joke with each other. You could almost read the words without the balloons and know who's talking. The interesting thing, though, is that he's by no means married to his two main characters (a pair of cops who end up handling power-related cases on a regular basis). We meet dozens of other people and sometimes spend several issues with them because what they have to do or say is simply more important to the plot. Bendis has, in the tradition of writers like Tolkien or Gibson, made his world the main character. I can't help but think of Eisenstein's early Soviet propaganda films in that they didn't have characters because it is the collective and not the individual that is important. Instead, he told stories about events of importance that effected large numbers of people (I'm thinking of Strike! specifically). It's an extremely insightful move to do this in a book that's all about examining and re-examining the nature of the superhero genre, as opposed to focusing on individual characters as if they were movie stars (and doubly ironic since the heroes in Bendis' world are like movie stars).
A last word about art. It's not my speciality, so I tend to have less to say about it, but Mike Avon Oeming's minimalist (and Bruce Timm-inspired) art is the perfect compliment to Bendis' writing. Though his figures and panels are low on detail, his page-layout philosophy is complex and daring. His panel structure varies greatly in structure, but he favours a few specific techniques, such as small panels jumbled over top of a large image that is both the 'establishing shot' of the scene, and the background on which the other panels float. This allows him to plant one, dominant image in the reader's field of view, while still having dialogue and action take place around it. We can never take our eye off of that central image, even as we read through the scene. This is one of the places were comics can do things that film can't. The establishing shot of a film must leave an impression. The central image on a page can remain for as long as it takes to view that page. He also makes frequent use of the 9-panel page, which can get boring, but he's willing to use several small images to focus in on a particular action as it unfolds slowly. He'll sacrifice three entire panels to show one facial expression, or a bit of body language, thus forcing us to slow down and contemplate the page and the moment. Finally, he uses negative space with more sheer chutzpah than any artist I've ever seen. Sometimes barely half of the page actually has panels on it, while the rest is filled with an ominous blackness. Oeming is clearly aware that the panel is not the only source of visual focus. He can make the same image look smaller, less significant, more isolated, weaker, more frail, etc., by surrounding by darkness.
Sam Raimi is like unto a god. I mean, we knew that, but still. He really knocked this one out of the park. I was in a hurry to watch this movie. I had 8 minutes to get to the theatre (which is conveniently 12 minutes from my house), and as I ran in, I thought to myself, if I'm late, all I'll miss is the inevitable 'watch the main credits while POV flying through a CGI world' opening that every comic-book movie has done for the last four years.
I was pleasantly surprised not only by the fact that they didn't do this (instead opting for a series of water-colour shots of moments from the first film, a great way to get us all up to speed) but that they did the 'CGI flying' bit for about 45 seconds, and then stopped. Not only is Raimi aware that it has become cliché, but he uses it to his advantage by playing it up and then abandonding it.
I won't ruin the rest of the movie for you, but I will say that the CGI is way better this time around, primarily because the animators and directors didn't try to over-reach themselves again. There is a combination of more live-action, more believable CGI animation, and less demand that the animation look deliberately inhuman, thus making it look worse.
The thing that I really appreciate is that the plot was actually unified. Every narrative thread contained the seads of its own conflict and its own resolution. Not only that, but all the of the character development is seemlessly interwoven with the action elements.
The film is about 'Peter Parker' struggling to live in the same world as 'Spider-man,' but the story ends up being about Peter himself. This isn't exactly a radical concept, but Raimi and his writers (Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, Michael Chabon, and Alvin Sargent) do it well. They seem to understand that fantasy, science-fiction, and to a great degree, superhero stories work wonderfully as media through which to explore the 'everyman' mind. All comics do is turn the drama up to 11 while leaving the basic elements the same. SF and fantasy writers who want to explore basic human experiences know this and use it.
I hate for my first review to be about this particular movie, but we can't control fate. In a way, it's inversly appropriate. The whole point of this site is to find those gems of creativity, intelligence, beauty, and even occasionally subversion, within the mainstream. Comics, movies, TV, novels, anything. I'm not as much concerned about the medium as I am about the message (take that McLuhan!).
This movie, on the other hand, is the most generic flick I've seen in a while. It's not that it was bad (though it was). It's that it was predictable. It was like someone watched all the McBain clips from The Simpsons and thought, "This could work."
It isn't much of a superhero movie (I never found Punisher to be very heroic, and he's decidedly unsuper), it isn't much of an action movie (why start using a bow and arrows in the middle?), and it isn't much of a cop movie (he's a cop for about three minutes in the whole thing). And can we please stop doing the "hero's symbol in flames across the pavement" gag? It has thus far featured exclusively in movies that sucked (The Crow and Daredevil). Why keep using it?
The producers wanted to make something that would stand next to Death Wish and other 70s, hard-action movies, and that's related to the one thing I respect about it: it a lower budget production than, say, Spider-man or Star War XXL. Which is to say, they didn't try to replace all the people with CGI action figures. It saddens me, though (to get back to the invective), that comicbook-to-movie franchises are now so common place that we've reached the saturation point of making run-of-the-mill crap. Granted, we reached that point with Daredevil last year, but it saddens me none the less.
Don't bother spending money on this movie. It is the most boring form of the revenge tragedy I have ever seen. I mean, he doesn't even die at the end. Have these people watched Renaissance English drama?
This is Four-Colour Commentary. It's way to encourage myself to actively make notes as I watch TV, see movies, and most importantly, read comics. This will be a collection of unformulated thoughts (read: dumping ground) regarding my thesis, my interests, and my on-again, off-again musings about popular entertainment and how it effects us as people.
Enjoy.