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smokeybrand · 4 years ago

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Welcome Back

I am a card carrying geek. I was that nerd in grade school, reading comics, watching anime, and larping with his friends during recess. I’ve always loved things like books and film, mostly because my ma had a penchant for the sci-fi and we would share in her hobbies. I’ve been a fan of Doctor Who since i was a wee lil’ Smokey and had a particular fondness for Max Headroom’s shenanigans. My chosen proclivities lend themselves to alternate universes, divergent timeless, and the interdenominational doppelganger or two. What i am trying to convey, here, is that i am not stranger to the revisit of a franchise. For me, rebooting an established work or expanding a loved lore is not a transgression. I am a fan of narrative. If you can tell a unique story, it really doesn’t even have to be that good, but something creativity and compelling, i am totally on board. This isn't as difficult a feat as you'd think considering how well Hollywood can adapt international films. The Ring and The Departed are effectively remakes of their original Asian fare and those films are spectacular. Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is the best example of this i can give. His deconstruction of the Batman mythos was one of the best cinematic and storytelling experiences I ever had. If you can take an established narrative, an established universe, and inject your own flavor into it, i am down for that, too. The Kelvin Star Trek timeline immediately comes to mind. Again, comic book guy, specifically a Spider-Man shill.

While i have years worth of alternate Spider-Men in the books to pull from, i think the most concise example i can give for a layman is to think Into the Spider-Verse, only with thousands more Spider-Men and Spider-Women. That’s the world I'm broaching this subject from, where there are decades worth of stories and reboots and remakes and reimagings, basically revisits, of a character that i absolutely love. Some are great like the Ultimate Spider-Man or the world of Renew Your Vows, and some are not so great, like that version Abrams’ kid came up with. That whole story was the worst. We have actually seen a little bit of this narrative reincarnation in the Spider-Man film franchise, itself, both good and bad. If we take the very first Spider-Man films, those campy, Raimi classics, as a starting point, then we had a terrible reboot in the Amazing franchise and a rather brilliant reimagining in the MCU outings. I really like the MCU retool. Tom Holland is THE onscreen Peter Parker and you can fight me about it all day.

Jurassic World and The Force Awakens are an interesting situation in the whole Revisit discourse. Both of these films are effectively reboots of the entire franchise and a whole ass remake of their initial entries. Beat for beat, theme for theme, these two films are basically the same as Jurassic Park and Episode IV, just less than they are in every conceivable fashion. Now, on paper, i should hate this but i don’t. There is a reason both of the imitations made billions for their respective franchise and that is simply nostalgia. We. as a culture, were starved for a Jurassic sequel and new Star War. When we got these movies in earnest, no one cared they were rehashes of the films that made them so important to the cultural zeitgeist. It was like seeing A New Hope and that initial outing to Isla Nublar for the first time, for a second time, but with much better effects. It had been decades since either of these movies had a proper release so we all just accepted that these were refresher courses in the lore. It was with the sequels that these things sh*t the bed so hard.

Fallen Kingdom and The Last Jedi skewed so far from what these franchises were, from the rules that had been established in the preceding films, including the first in their new trilogies, that they were offensive. Legitimately offensive. Jurassic World and The Force Awakens, as flawed as they were, left their worlds in respectable places. The narratives that could be built from those starting point were incredible. That potential was palpable. Lucas, himself, said that the stories should rhyme and you see that in his six films. Familiar yet different. Nostalgic yet original. Respectful yet original. None of that was recognized in the follow-ups and that is why these two franchises are on life support. It’s sad because there was potential there. Characters introduced were compelling and narrative threads left unties, could have become something great. Instead, expectations were subverted and the world completely sh*t on in an effort to be edgy, to distance itself from the established lore. That sh*t is whack. It’s not about being a fan of the franchise or a zealous istaphobe or whatever else the Twatter mob wants to accuse people of being. It’s about bad story telling. it’s abut a complete betrayal of a decades old franchise. It’s a bout being disingenuous with the property for personal gain.

I said at the beginning of this essay that i love a revisit. That’s why i went to see these sh*tty films. I also made very clear that i love storytelling. Fallen Kingdom and The Last Jedi lack in that fundamental aspect, that’s why they suck. They’ve done irreparable damage to the entire franchise and canon of these worlds that were so meticulously crafted by proper visionaries. Michael Crichton is rolling in his grave at what became of his Dinosaur Westworld and Lucas effectively bogarded his way into running Lucasfilm again after they sh*t on his legacy and that’s the thing; Legacy. These two franchises are part of American culture. They’re as revered as Apple Pie and Institutional Racism here. They’re not cash grabs or vehicles to push your politics. They’re modern fairy tales, myths, and should be respected as such. The thing is, though, i don’t believe there are actual creatives out there that have the vision to create like Crichton or Lucas anymore. Or, at least, Creatives that are willing to work within the constraints of this ridiculous studio system.

Modern film studios are disgustingly risk averse. That is a problem with anything making entertainment media nowadays but it’s most egregious in Hollywood. Films like Star Wars and Alien were made in a time when budgets didn’t swell to hundreds of millions of dollars so directors had to do what he could, with what they had, and that level of imagination birthed classics. It’s rare that creators get a blank check to deliver their vision nowadays, and even rarer that what they get to make if they receive that loot, is actually good. Zack Snyder and the train wreck that is Sucker Punch demonstrates my point perfectly. the new Lucases and Camerons are rare but there are a handful of directors who carry that torch. Denis Villeneuve is an incredible visual storyteller. He has a distinct vision for the grand and manages to craft proper worlds. Blade Runner 2049 is one of the best films i have ever seen in my life but it didn’t make money because people have been conditioned to ignore great storytelling for great effects. That sh*t is why people can say to me, with a straight face, that they think Batman v. Superman is better than The Dark Knight rises. That sh*t is stupid, shut the f*ck up. Deni was given the reigns to the Dune reboot and i think this might be the film that breaks him through to the mainstream.

Dune is a reboot. It looks like a revisit to the old David Lynch flick but with Deni’s penchant for the epic. This movie feels like what Jurassic World and The Force Awakens wanted to do; A respectful acknowledgment of what came before but an original take going forward. Dune is one of the greatest sci-fi novels ever written and Deni is one of the most profound visionaries in the game right now. I have no doubt the new film is going to be fantastic. This combination is a match made in heaven, similar to Alex Garland with Annihilation or, more accurately i think, Luca Guadagnino and Suspiria. Those two films are f*cking incredible and they adapt the source material in a very, specific, manner. Annihilation is a reimagining of the book and carries its own themes and tones while the new Suspiria is a complete reinterpretation of what came before, that i believe eclipses the original. Dune looks excellent but i don’t know that it will be well received. Deni has his work cut out for him because the world of revisits is riddle with the corpses of films that couldn’t care the weight of what came before or what could have been. Still, i don’t want Hollywood to stop. As unoriginal as remaking things is, i adore a fresh set of eyes on familiar fare. There are infinite ways to tell the same story and that’s the fun of revisiting an old tale.

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cryptidandwren · 5 years ago

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MY FETISHES ARE REAL AND SO CAN YOU

Let’s talk about porn, but really let’s talk about literary realism. Coming up with a practical definition of porn is famously difficult. Supreme Court lore holds that during the period in the Court’s history when a legal line between art and porn was sought, the Supreme Court would have viewing parties to read tea leaves to determine the difference between the two. Supreme Court Justice Brennan, who was going blind at this point in his life and had to have a clerk provide a play by play synopsis of the “films”, blurted out during one of these viewings “That’s it! I know it when I see it.”

After much time and ink the Supreme Court finally agreed that porn is art, but it’s not art that the First Amendment cares about as much. Porn is any art that highlights one emotional response at the expense of all others. Sexuality is of course a very complex topic and there is a lot of room for content under that umbrella, but porn in the conventional sense (big tiddies Anime gurl do sex stuff) does not make room for, let’s say, contemplation on the justifications, or lack thereof, for imperialism and colonization. Once you’re trying to make porn, you have a goal that might conflict with more nuanced narrative goals. Complex real world problems that leave most people feeling uncomfortable and a little hollow just don’t mesh well with porn. I mean if it works for you it works for you, and no shame. Just count your blessings and go into history, sociology, or some similar field. Papa always used to say you never work a day in your life as long as you do what turns you on. Porn is about meeting indulgent desires whether sexual or not.

Literary realism is a movement that takes the artifices of fiction and analyzes them. Let’s look at MCU “Civil War”. The general rule in the genre is that heroes are heroic, and people see them as heroic even if there is damage. Realism asks the question, but what if people held the heroes personally responsible for losses? For example, the woman who lost her son holds Iron Man personally responsible in “Civil War”. Now aside from the lazy worldbuilding that this employs (because were the face eating alien invasion force not going to eat your kids face?) realism as it has been practiced and illustrated in this scene is fundamentally flawed. Most people do not create contrived and twisted world views to lay blame at the feet of someone else that was doing the right thing. Yes it happens, but the set up has to be more complex than MCU ever gives us. There isn’t a moral grey area to be explored when one of the sides is Space-Hitler-eat-your-face-lately and the other is Iron Man. Reality isn’t a constant parade of one horrible event after the other - and I see you 2020. You don’t have to raise your hand. Ill get to you next.

Realism can far too often fall into a trap where it becomes misery porn. There is a lot of misery in the real world. Genocide, plague, racists, sexists, a forever war, and twitter trolls as far as the eye can see, if that’s where you are looking. There are also acts of incredible kindness. People using social media to keep up with each other and lend an ear in troubling times. The many, many people sewing and making masks for health care works in light of governmental failure. And to be honest, the people that are willing to sacrifice and stay home. Where art focuses on one aspect to the exclusion of any other it has a tendency to become pornographic. That’s not a judgement on the substance. I rather like hope porn. The speeches of real-world President Obama and fictional President Bartlett are some good shit. Like me some hope.

Now let’s look at another show that uses literary realism well: Avatar. Superman and Aang both come from a people who have been entirely wiped out. Superman is by and large unaffected by it, because he is superman. He has incredible strength, including the strength to just not feel bad things. (I am choosing to ignore modern DC Superman, because its bad). Aang doesn’t. When the sand benders take Appa, the last thing that he has to connect him to his people, he’s ready to enter the Avatar state and go full Anakin on their sand people asses. That’s real. That’s a trauma response -right there- if I’ve ever seen one. Aang only calms down when Katara reminds him that even if his old family is dead, he still has a family that loves and cares for him, and that he is safe. That’s real. A deeply problematic trauma response by a male presenting figure being mitigated by the continued and tiring emotional labor of a female presenting figure. Even the “good” to balance the “bad” has nuance and complexity to it, but Katara’s actions don’t just come from gender roles. She genuinely does care for Aang and his wellbeing, and it hurts her to see Aang in the grips of a trauma response. Which launches into a several show arc where Aang completely disassociates, because the last time he felt something he hurt the people he cared about, and he will not allow himself to do that again. (The Show is soo good. Watch it. Its on Netflix. You have no reason not to. I know you have time.)

Reality in literature has to be real in some way, and reality is complex. If your realism singles out one emotional reaction playing only that note, it’s as real as anything in conventional porn. See “Big tiddy anime gurl do sex 2 electric bougalu the re-cockining”. It can be a safe play space, but it important to contextualize and identify the play space. Literature informs our world views, and we have to respect what our media diet can do to us. Just as in conventional porn, feminist, anti-colonial, and queer theory remain helpful tools to help manage our relationship with the media. It is just as dangerous to thoughtlessly let porn inform your relationship expectations as it is to let multi-million-dollar corporations inform your view of reality, if not more so.

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Superman Reboot: Ta-Nehisi Coates Can Get Character Back to His Essence

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Ta-Nehisi Coates is writing the next Superman movie. That good news has come alongside an avalanche of rumor and speculation. THR, for one, reports that unnamed sources say “the project is being set up as a Black Superman story.” Meanwhile Shadow and Act, a website centered on studying African diaspora in the arts and media, confirmed Coates’ involvement while also noting this is a full-fledged reboot with the search for a new Kal-El having yet to begin. Social media predictably has already exploded with predicable reactions.

However, debates about who should play Superman run the risk of obscuring the full potential of a scribe like Ta-Nehisi Coates tackling such a character on a global stage. As a writer famous for his opinion journalism, including his essays for The Atlantic and his National Book Award for Nonfiction for Between the World and Me (2015), Coates has irrefutably demonstrated a brilliant mind—the kind the Superman character has long yearned for on the big screen.

“To be invited into the DC Extended Universe by Warner Bros., DC Films, and Bad Robot is an honor,” Coates said in an exclusive statement to Shadow and Act. “I look forward to meaningfully adding to the legacy of America’s most iconic mythic hero.”

And adding meaningfully to Superman’s legacy is something that’s been sorely absent for the character, at least in the cinema, for more than 40 years. Not since Richard Donner and Tom Mankiewicz broke down what became the first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies has Kal-El’s on screen persona been successfully explored and built upon. Admittedly, this wasn’t due to a lack of trying.

The ill-fated effort to make a “Death of Superman” movie in the 1990s—including with an iteration of the character audiences would have never seen before—was so sordied it proved to be great fodder for a documentary film decades later, or at least a Kevin Smith spiel on college campuses.

In the two following decades, we saw as many Superman reboots. One was so suffocated by nostalgia for the Donner era that it failed to have anything significant to say about the character’s place or image in the 21st century—to the point where it was even bashful to acknowledge his role in American pop culture. The other more recent attempt, which starred Henry Cavill, tried to offer a more mythic interpretation of the character, even as it fundamentally misunderstood the Superman mythos it was adapting.

Regarding the Man of Steel approach, director Zack Snyder said, “I was trying to grow up [your] character,” but his film failed to depict a particularly mature understanding of Superman or storytelling in general. Rather the film accepted the fallacy that there is something inherently childish or simplistic about Superman’s idealism, and the best way to depict that was to go in the complete opposite direction without much in the way of nuance. Hence scenes of Superman snapping a villain’s neck with his bare hands. Ostensibly the choice was meant to be a teachable moment for Superman about the value of life. But it was so poorly set-up within its film that audiences never never knew from anything depicted on screen that this Superman was loath to kill, nor that he afterward felt some great epiphany or shame. Indeed, in Snyder’s next movie Superman returns on screen with a smirk before slaughtering someone else.

However, the consistent lack of foresight toward how to handle the character over the last three decades might be best represented by Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice—a movie where the character’s psychology and composure is indistinguishable with an equally bloodthirsty and misanthropic Batman. In the third act of that movie, WB executives got what they wanted for the last 20 years with a rushed account of the “Death of Superman” storyline, even if the execution of it rang as hollow and meaningless after two cynical films.

This is not meant to simply criticize previous approaches to the Superman character, but to highlight how much welcome potential there is in Coates’ stewardship of the cinematic Superman.

As one of the most beautiful literary voices to emerge to prominence in the last decade, Coates’ achievements in both nonfiction and fiction show a deep consideration of American culture, both for its history and its lore, from a perspective that has been largely marginalized and ignored. Yes, that includes Coates’ most famous writings about the eternal role of race in American life, which brought him to national prominence with the seminal essay “The Case for Reparations” in 2014. It’s also present in Between the World and Me, a bestselling meditation that Coates frames as a letter written to his son about the intractable realities that come with being Black in America.

What shouldn’t be overlooked though is Coates’ full-range of talents which are used to often explore the full context of the American experience. He’s already made a habit of examining the symbols of American ideals in contrast with the often disappointing realities of American life—as seen with Superman’s Marvel comic book counterpoint, Captain America.

As one of the stronger writers to take a stab at Steve Rogers on the page, Coates made it a mission to explore the dichotomy and wonder of a character as morally altruistic as Captain America. He didn’t shy away from “all that stuff” about the American way, but he examined it from a vantage far more observant than the cynicism that comes with blithely settling for just “growing up” an earnest character.

“Dubbed Captain America, Rogers becomes the personification of his country’s egalitarian ideals—an anatomical Horatio Alger who through sheer grit and the wonders of science rises to become a national hero,” Coates wrote in 2018 for The Atlantic, explaining why he was tackling a character far removed from his previous literary work.

He continued, “And Captain America, the embodiment of a kind of Lincolnesque optimism, poses a direct question for me: Why would anyone believe in The Dream? What is exciting here is not some didactic act of putting my words in Captain America’s head, but attempting to put Captain America’s words in my head. What is exciting is the possibility of exploration, of avoiding the repetition of a voice I’ve tired of.”

The prospect of such an introspective exploration of America’s other great comic book ideal, especially if he is seen through the prism of a Black American in the 21st century, is a fascinating one. And fascination is something the Superman character has lacked on the big screen for a long, long time. Bring on the change.

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smokeybrandreviews · 4 years ago

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Welcome Back

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