Christopher Lee, himself born into the Carandini family, one of the oldest noble families in Europe, once said:
To be born a gentleman is an accident; to die a gentleman is an achievement.
Today we learned that he has died, and from what I have read both of him and by him, I have no doubt he died having achieved just that.
A truly great man. May he rest in peace.
So the turbines on a Quinjet are powerful enough to give it VTOL capability (like the Harrier Pegasus engine, only cooler cos you get to see the huge fans) and they can pivot to allow for awesome manoeuvring scenes, which in turn gives that epic look when the jet comes in to land, turning the force of the fans down and forwards to dramatically reduce the speed and bring the plane down safely – like this…
So how is that guy standing? Given that he currently has the thrust of a military jet fighter pointed at his lower body? He should be airborne, heading for the nearest unlucky camera crew like the police car in Casino Royale…
Just a thought.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – specifically how do they go into phase 4?
Robert Downey jr is quitting the series after Avengers 3 and won’t be doing another Iron Man in between. Chris Evans is giving up acting – or taking a break – after his Avengers contract is up. That leaves Marvel with only one name hero still active for Phase 4.
Kevin Fiege says he’ll recast Tony Stark like Bond or Batman.
Alternatively there have been rumours about a long-lost cousin called Arno Stark. I don’t think any of that will work, I think the fans and the critics simply wouldn’t accept it. Besides, aside from bringing Spidey into the fold or trying to make a Hulk solo outing work (for a third time) there’s a few other ideas they could go with:
1) I’m pretty sure Bucky is gonna survive TWS and be reconditioned, so straight away we can replace Steve Rogers as Cap and still have the man-out-of-time angle, but now with added angst/self loathing. Rumour has it Sebastian Stan was auditioning for the role of Rogers when he was cast as Barnes, I can see him in the role. This also leaves the field open to Evans to come back after he’s done with whatever he’s doing that beats ‘being a massive movie star’, and we can explore the Nomad storyline before having him take up the shield again.
2) We already have a replacement Iron Man – he’s called War Machine. Yes, I’m seriously suggesting a superhero movie with a black guy in the lead role, not just as a sidekick. Ordinarily the question would arise of whether Don Cheadle can open a movie by himself, but both Thor and TFA prove that not only is that unnecessary, but that Marvel Studios aren’t afraid of putting an unproven star in a lead role.
3) Much of the talk around TWS has been praise both of Scarlett Johansson and the development of the character of Black Widow, building on the work Joss Whedon did with her in The Avengers. Also, in the absence of RDj, Johansson is the closest thing in the existing line up Marvel have to a bona fide movie star, and she’s expressed an interest in a stand alone film.
Traditionally movies based solely on female superheroes (superheroines? Does anybody say that?) have been less than stellar, and some have given this as a reason not to make any more. I disagree – it’s the quality of those movies that caused them to flop rather than any inherent problem with the premise. A talented director (let’s say Whedon, because when you’re dealing with a female protagonist, why wouldn’t you?) working from a good script, taken seriously by the studio, and a Black Widow movie could be epic – following the ‘insert-a-superhero’ policy, we could have a serious espionage thriller which happens to have a superhero in it.
Better yet, given Jeremy Renner’s keenness to play Hawkeye the way he should be played, and we’ve got the makings of an espionage team movie.
So, for Phase 4 we have individual movies for Spidey, Thor, Cap and Widow/Hawkeye, and possibly for War Machine, the separately whatever becomes of Guardians of the Galaxy, all leading up to Avengers 4…
I’m not in the habit of making predictions, I figure that’s the easiest way of never being humiliated by being proven wrong, but on this one I’m gonna go out on a limb.
Here it is:
Once they’ve finished their Amazing Spider Man trilogy[1], Sony will find a way to make Spidey appear in MCU movies. Which means potentially a standalone MCU/Sony SpiderMan origin movie[2] as a part of Phase 3 and WebHead assembling up with the other Avengers for Avengers 3: This Time Thanos Is Actually In It[4].
This actually makes sense for all concerned. After the $1bn haul each for The Avengers and Iron Man 3 everyone, Sony included, is desperate for a slice of MCU pie. Equally, with both Robert Downey jr and Chris Evans bowing out after their contracts expire, with Avengers 3, Marvel must be desperate for some big name heroes to fill up the roster. All that stands in their way is the lawyers, and Shakespeare had the answer to that 400 years ago[5]…
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[1] Because everything has to be a trilogy nowadays. I can find no logical explanation for this beyond the fact that Hugo Weaving once said that he only did trilogies, and everyone wants to work with him? I’m kinda reaching here.
[2] Which will be entirely different and original and not at all like[3] both SpiderMan (2002) and The Amazing Spider Man (2012)
[3] …absolutely identical to and almost indistinguishable from…
[4] Working title
[5] Henry VI part 2[6], Act 4, Scene 2:
“The first thing we’ll do, let’s kill all the lawyers”
I’m particularly fond of the fact that this line is spoken by a character called Dick.
[6] ‘This Tyme Yt’s Personal’. Also a working title.
1) Sequels almost inevitably undermine their progenitors.
Movies are an art form. Stories are an art form. What makes great art is not just the positive space – in movies, what’s shown on screen, in stories, the words used to convey the narrative, but also the negative space – those things unseen, hinted at, the spaces between the words. Movies depend on these negative spaces for their power – the mystery of the Space Jockey in Alien; what he was doing, how he came to fall victim to the Alien in the first place. All of those things are obscure in the film, but it is that obscurity that makes the movie great – not knowing has far more power than any explanation could possibly manage.
The problem with a sequel is that it almost inevitably tries to fill those negative spaces. Does anyone think that the explanation given about The One in Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions enhances the original movie? Does A New Hope benefit from our discovering that the power of the Force is just a blood borne virus, and that you have to inherit it from your parents as we discovered in The Phantom Menace? In each instance, by explaining away some of the mystery of the original, the sequel diminishes rather than enhancing it. It’s the mystery that makes the story work, whatever explanation the filmmaker thinks is going to work, it will never have the elemental power of that mystery.
2) Blade Runner doesn’t need a sequel.
A story is defined by the narrative arc – the challenges, external, internal or both, that force the protagonist to reexamine their existence and change as a result. Blade a Runner contains two complete story arcs – Roy Batty’s quest for absolution, which becomes his enlightenment, and Deckard‘s shifting attitudes towards replicants, making him more like them and consequently and paradoxically more human.
Contrary to what this article suggests, once the story arc concludes the story is over – that is the difference between stories and life, stories come to an end. Anything beyond that is beyond the scope of the story – it doesn’t matter whether Rick and Renault do go on to have a beautiful friendship or not – what matters is the journey each of them went through to get to that airstrip. Indeed, exploring that runs the risk of destroying the story that went before.
So to pick up the story and continue with it brings no benefits – the story is complete and needs no further elaboration – and at the same time risks unpicking the fabric of the complex tapestry that is Blade Runner.
3) Blade Runner already has a sequel.
Soldier was released in 1998 to not much acclaim [1]. Kurt Russel starred as Todd, a veteran soldier, trained from birth to be a living weapon but superseded by new, genetically engineered soldiers. Now obsolete and literally thrown on the scrapheap, Todd must adjust to life among civilians and rediscover his humanity.
That may not sound much like a Blade Runner sequel, but it was written by Hampton Fancher, whose first pass at the script was the basis for Blade Runner. The ‘genetically engineered’ new breed of soldier are suspiciously similar to Roy Batty’s replicants, “superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them”. Beyond that is Todd’s offhand reference to the Tannhauser Gate.
Soldier covers different ground from Blade Runner – it is about growing old, the loss of purpose, and more specifically the struggle to return to a life of peace after being at war. But both films deal with the protagonist’s struggle to regain his humanity – both Deckard and Todd feel violated by the violence they have perpetrated. Realistically, a sequel should address different issues than its predecessor – think The Dark Knight vs Batman Begins – otherwise, like the first 3 Terminator films, it just becomes a remake.
It may not have been the masterpiece that Blade Runner was, hell, it may not even be very good, but at least Soldier managed not to trample on its progenitor’s legacy, as so many sequels manage to do. On which note:
4) In a word: Prometheus
Prometheus was a disaster, a car crash of a movie which, by attempting to explain some of the mystery behind Alien, merely diminished it, and at the same time contained moments of such breathtaking stupidity (on the part of the characters) and ineptness (on the part of the filmmakers) that it beggars belief that the same Ridley Scott who created Alien, Gladiator and Blade Runner could be responsible for it. And the plot holes – so many, so egregious, so stupid, it’s easier for me to just direct your attention here than raise my own blood pressure by rehearsing them. The more I see of the work of Abrams, Lindeloff and Orci, the more I think of the tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Prometheus was a bad movie. Bad in a very bad way. If this is the standard that Ridley Scott intends to bring to his Blade Runner follow up I may have to look for another masterpiece to obsess about.
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[1] Neither was Blade Runner, in fairness. Some movies take time to find their fan base. Some just vanish without trace.
In spite of every second review predicting its demise, the superhero genre is showing no sign of slowing down. Those who complain about it need to accept that superhero movies are this generation’s overarching übergenre [1] – as dirty cops were in the ’70s, or westerns before that. Originally a minor form of cheap B movie, the superhero movie was first taken seriously by Richard Donner‘s insistence on verisimilitude in Superman (1978). It wasn’t until Tim Burton‘s Batman in 1989 that the form would again be treated with that kind of respect. Following on from there, most commentators would point to Singer‘s X-Men (2000), or Raimi‘s Spider-Man (2002), however I would argue the following 5 movies played at least as much role in laying the groundwork for the übergenre that followed:
Darkman (1990) –
Spider-Man may have caught the public attention and inspired Marvel to venture into movie production for themselves, paving the way for a cinema juggernaut [2] to rival Pixar, but almost everything Raimi brought to Peter Parker he first experimented with in this brilliantly dark movie. Inspired by the ’20s pulp hero The Shadow, Darkman was a disturbed, violently aggressive anti-hero – the type to out Batman Batman – and free from studio or proprietor interference Raimi let his pitch-black humour and gross-out sensibility have full reign. As such the film is more reminiscent of his original Evil Dead movies than the more recent populist films he is now renowned for, and although it may not have busted any blocks, Darkman showed how being the good guy didn’t necessarily mean being a good guy.
Best scene – “Take the fucking elephant!!”
The Shadow (1994) –
The dark avenger of 1920s pulp magazines and radio shows turns up again, and this film is a personal favourite of mine. Russel Mulcahy took this little known (or remembered) character and successfully constructed a stylised jazz-age world, successfully created and sustained the ‘power to cloud men’s minds’ which drives the plot and created a perfect ‘dark reflection’ hero/villain pair. Alec Baldwin‘s Lamont Cranston is another in a line of tortured heroes: here he is desperately trying to atone for his previous life as the ruthless opium warlord Ying-ko. The special effects available were used effectively[3] – far more effectively than in the roughly contemporary The Rocketeer (1991) – and the story contains enough heart, energy and fun to make for a decent watch. The reception however was not favourable – it received a 36% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a worldwide gross of $48m against a $40m budget. Perhaps the world wasn’t ready for superhero movies based on heroes beyond the big 2 DC titans.
Best scene:
Margo Lane: Oh, God I dreamed.
Lamont Cranston: So did I. What did you dream?
Margo Lane: I was lying naked on a beach in the South Seas. The tide was coming up to my toes. The sun was beating down. My skin hot and cool at the same time. It was wonderful. What was yours?
Lamont Cranston: I dreamed I tore all the skin off my face and was somebody else underneath.
Margo Lane: You have problems.
Lamont Cranston: I’m aware of that.
Blade (1998) –
Following the titanic disaster that was Batman and Robin (1997) – a cataclysm severe enough to destroy not only the Batman franchise but the whole superhero genre – there was only one superhero movie released in 1998. But that movie was Blade, and that, in my opinion, is where the übergenre really got started.
Showing what a loss to the world Steven Norrington was after LXG, Blade was a revelation – combining the gritty realism of Nolan‘s Dark Knight movies with a marriage of actor to character rivalled only by Ron Perlman as Hellboy or Robert Downey jr as Iron Man. Blade not only redrew its own hero [4] but brought a darkness to superhero movies unparalleled even by Darkman. Less recognised however is how the movie introduced a level of social commentary seldom matched since. In the hands of Norrington/Goyer, Blade becomes a working class hero pitted against the aggressive, predatory extremely wealthy – the 1%, nearly a decade before the world recognised them for the threat they are. Blade is the perfect deployment of the vampire trope as modern moral parable, arriving 8 years early.
Best scene:
Has to be the Bloodbath Club opening, although I love the badassery of the exchange:
Blade: There’s worse things out there than vampires
Dr Karen Jensen: Like what?
Blade: Like me.
Unbreakable (2000) –
The only evidence, Sixth Sense notwithstanding, that M. Night Shyamalan had any discerable talent before his black-hole-alike ego and hubris swallowed it up. Unbreakable was the first true exploration of how an average Joe – welcome, world’s greatest average Joe, Bruce Willis – deals with the gradual realisation that he is a superhero[5]; followed by the crushing but brilliant realisation that his friend and mentor is a supervillain.
The movie brought to the genre aspects of art cinema such as a slow, deliberate plot and beautiful photography and the result is utterly compelling and remains the most naturalistic exploration of the soul of a hero committed to film – so much so that most don’t even recognise it for being a superhero movie.
Really not a ‘best scene’ kind of movie, it really needs to watched and savoured from beginning to end.
Hellboy (2004) –
Having brought his dark, twisted, beautiful sensibility to Blade 2 (2002) – an imperfect fit in my opinion, and a waste given the near perfection of Norrington’s Blade – Guillermo Del Toro was able to bring Mike Mignola‘s paranormal investigator to life. Del Toro was a huge fan of the character and fought hard to be able to do it right – he tells how the studio wanted a man who turned into Hellboy, Superman style, or to make the right hand of doom into a left.
Del Toro found not only Hellboy’s character arc – that a person’s character comes from the choices they make, not the origins forced on them – but by giving him an unrequited love for Liz Sherman made him the most human of heroes.
Hellboy showed that viewing audiences were ready for more creative visions of superheroes and keen to accept more complex characters.
Best scene – Hellboy stalking Liz and Myers across rooftops, showing that even the best of the apocalypse can be petulant, jealous and childish when there’s a girl at stake.
Then, the following year, Christopher Nolan released Batman Begins, and the übergenre was born…
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[1] Yes I just created that word and dammit I’m gonna use it. Lots.
[2] No pun intended, but I couldn’t resist that clip…
[3] For the most part: the false nose imposed on Cranston when he becomes The Shadow is unforgivable.
[4] Before Snipes got his teeth into the role, Blade was another Luke Cage-alike embarrassment of what skinny, nerdy white guys thought black people spoke like. And no, that pun was unintended too.
[5] For a less compelling, less convincing and altogether less plausible exploration of the same territory, watch all Die Hard movies with a value greater than 3.
So, Empire Magazine have done a trailer breakdown on the new Days of Future Past trailer.
Let me try to simplify this… a character played by Patrick Stewart has to marshall the forces of his crew across different time periods in order to prevent a catastrophe occurring in the future…
That doesn’t sound familiar at all…
On the other hand, Bryan Singer back at the helm of an X-Men movie, and with the cast of First Class thrown into the mix…
Yeah. This is gonna be legendary.
Iron Man 3 pulled off one of the greatest slights-of-hand of modern movie history. Having taken the classic Iron Man villain, the Mandarin, and built him up as the in-universe Osama bin Laden, the movie then completely wrong-foots the audience: this ultimate terrorist is in fact a tiny, clueless actor hired to play the part by Aldrich Killian, head of defence contractor AIM, as part of a plot to maintain a state of war which will indefinitely enrich his company.
This was a substantial change to the character from the comics, and to understand that change we must understand what the character in the comics is, how he relates to Iron Man, what it is that has made Iron Man so successful a character so long after his creation and what message the movie is trying to provide.
Origins
Iron Man and the Mandarin both came into being in the early 1960s – America was deeply involved in both the cold war and the Vietnam war. Both characters are – or were – a product of those times. Iron Man was created as a remedy to the ‘red-scare’ threat that America – or at least those in power in America – was obsessed with in 1963. Based on Howard Hughes, he was an allegory to show the people how the terror of communism could be overcome by good old American capitalism. The Mandarin, introduced in 1964, was the natural flip-side to that – the villain who would stand in for the ‘yellow peril’ threat from the far east.
But as society changes, so its superheroes have to evolve. Iron Man evolved quickly – Stan Lee was wise enough to realise that toeing the party line on the need for war in Vietnam was unlikely to play well with the buyers of comic books, who were more likely to want to give peace a chance than to kill a commie – and so the comics moved away from the overt politics, considering instead Tony Stark’s character, his weaknesses and vulnerabilities. The Mandarin, not so much. So for long periods of the history of Iron Man, Mandarin, described by so many as his arch-enemy, simply does not appear.
So the character as presented in the comics, like Fu Manchu or Ming the Merciless before him, is a relic of a time now long-since past, and is now hopelessly irrelevant. A direct page-to-screen transfer in 2013 would be rightly decried as a racist caricature and would have no place in modern storytelling or in the Marvel Cinematic Universe[1]. Many have suggested this could be overcome simply by rewriting his history – I disagree. The very name ‘Mandarin’ inextricably ties the character to negative associations with the Far East in general and specifically China. No backstory whitewash could cover that, and an evil Mandarin would always equate with an evil China – whether that was the intention of the filmmakers or not. So the character, like all comic book villains and heroes alike, had to evolve to remain relevant.
Iron Man on screen
Iron Man’s latest evolution into the box-office god he currently represents was for two reasons – the first, obviously, is Robert Downey jr[2].
The second is the modern day relevance that Jon Favreau managed to find in this product of the darkest aspects of the ‘60s. The conflict between Tony Stark and Obadiah Stane in Iron Man was in some ways a reference back to the Howard Hughes origins of the story, particularly his legal battles with the US government in the aftermath of World War 2. This is made even clearer in the Senate commission scenes of Iron Man 2. Stark, then, becomes the libertarian poster-boy, the embodiment of the struggle of the individual entrepreneur against the state[3].
This presentation would have had limited appeal in 2008[4], but Favreau managed to find a rich seam of relevance in Iron Man’s character – his betrayal by Stane in selling weapons ‘under the carpet’ gives Stark a shuddering appreciation of how the military industrial complex works, and sets him diametrically against it. In the era of dodgy dossiers, illegal and seemingly endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and now mass unregulated surveillance of civilians, it seems there is no greater threat to the western world than its own military industrial complex.
It is this antithesis to the military industrial complex that makes Iron Man relevant, and it is no accident that all three of his ‘solo’ villains are drawn from it – for all that some criticise this aspect of the movies. It is this critical relevance that allows good filmmakers to make points about contemporary politics and culture in the way only good science fiction can[5].
The Mandarin on screen
Having explored the immorality of military industrial in Iron Man and its susceptibility to corruption[6] in Iron Man 2, the next necessary target was the misuse of intelligence and the exaggeration of the threat of terrorism. Shane Black made no secret of the fact that he wanted to say something of use in his portrayal of the Mandarin. By making him into nothing more than a figurehead, controlled by another avatar for military industrial, Black was able to illustrate the dangers of believing what we are told by the politicians, how the threat of terrorism is used to distract us from the real threat – those who benefit from our fear and the perpetuation of warfare, regardless of the cost.
Had the Mandarin been the mythic terrorist we were initially promised the movie would have lost the message it not only relied on but had inherited from its two predecessors, and perhaps worse have been open to criticism of naivety – to attack military industrial but to swallow its fictions about terrorism would ring hollow.
The fact that the portrayal gave the movie a critical end-of-second-act sting, and was hilarious in a Shane-Blacky way to boot, did no harm either.
So I do not accept that the portrayal on screen of the Mandarin was a betrayal of the character, rather in retrospect it seems this was the only way the character could be presented that kept him relevant and allowed the movie to make its political points.
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[1] That’s before you consider that he would be box office poison in China, a market so valuable that a special cut of this movie was released specifically to target it and which Joss Wheedon has said: “”China is on my radar. It can’t not be at this point,”
[2] Who combines a charisma and screen presence matched only by Harrison Ford or Chow Yun Fat, with a range and breadth of acting talent comparable with Peter O’Toole Geoffrey Rush or Robert DeNiro.
[3] And, on another reading, that of the NRAs declaration that “you can have my guns when you take them from my cold dead hands“.
[4] As can be seen from the declining fortunes of the Republican Party and the total failure of the movie adaptation of arch libertarian Ayn Rand‘s ‘masterpiece’ Atlas Shrugged.
[5] The way that Star Trek managed back in the ’60s.
[6] Less successfully in my opinion.
I remain optimistic about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., I can see the potential behind the shortcomings[1] and, as I keep repeating, almost mantra-like, I trust Joss Wheedon in making this kind of character driven, ensemble comedy/action/mystery thing. It may be taking a few goes, but most of the cast seem to be finding their respective feet – Ward and Skye both seem to be developing, and even Fitz and Simmonds have found a workable level for their technobabble-comedy, even if they have still yet to come up with any definable character.
And yet…
I have one serious reservation, and that reservation is Melinda May. I like the notion behind the character – the strong, silent badass archetype, essentially Wolverine in high heels. I like the fact that the ultimate badass on the team, the legendary fighter, happens to be female – a classic Wheedon touch[2]. I love the fact that a woman in this role gets to be above 29 years old and still be useful – not often in this kind of show you’ll find that.
My problem is with Ming-na Wen. I don’t know much of her past work, but I don’t see what she is bringing to this role. No it’s not easy to be interesting when you’re projecting resentment, disapproval, disinterest, but then both David Boreanaz and James Marsters managed. In Wen’s hands, May is just plain boring. And that is unforgivable.
So my single wish? I wish they’d cast Kelly Hu instead.
In fairness, I’d cast Kelly Hu in pretty much everything every time, but when you consider that she protrayed more personality in X2 than Wen has managed in 3 weeks so far, and in that she was an automaton, you see why in this case it’s valid. You keep the racial diversity, you keep the age range, but you get an actor who not only has the charisma to make this character work, but when the time for the ass-kicking arrives, actually has the chops to carry it off.
Too late now, I guess, but I’ll always reflect on what could have been.
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[1] See previous posts
[2] Kitty Pride, Buffy, Kendra, Faith, Echo, River Tam, Zoe, etc etc.
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