The Dark Knight - Truth in Advertising

I just got done watching the Dark Knight, the latest Batman movie. Before the movie started, amongst the commercials that were shown before the previews, was one for a new SUV.

Aside: For whatever reason, there have been a shitload of vehicles over the years with Spanish or Spanish-sounding names. Some of them like the Hyundai Tiburon were actual words. Tiburon (tee-bu-rone) means shark. (However, they said it as tih-ber-on). Others like the Oldsmobile Bravada may be fun to say (BRAH-VAH-thA – say that loud. It’s fun) but don’t mean anything.

I learned that Kia has a new SUV – the Borrego. Now to my friend, Doug and me, that might bring up memories – possibly bad – of a high school English teacher named Mrs. Borrego. I never had a problem with her. Maybe Doug did. My brother certainly did. He called her a bitch at a scholar bowl tournament which got him suspended. I, however, freaked her out once by being able to sing along with, "Shake, Rattle, and Roll," by Bill Halley and His Comets – even the, "I’m like a one-eyed cat, peeping in a seafood store," line.

Anyway…

Borrego also means lamb or sheep. That’s… rather fitting in some ways. I looked borrego up in my large Spanish dictionary to make sure my first instinct was right, and it was, but it can also mean a slang term meaning simpleton or dope.

"What car are you going to get Bob?"
"Well, Dave, I was thinking of getting an SUV even though gas prices are sky-high now. Maybe the Kia Dope."
"That’s nice. I was looking at the Chevy Asshole myself."

This is an encouraging trend in car naming I think.

What I most admire about the German language is the ability to combine different parts of their language to come up a single word that expresses a complex concept like farfignuten means "driving pleasure" and schadenfreude means the happiness one might get from the suffering of another person or group.

I really hope in the near future a German car company puts out a sports car whose name in German means, "Extension of My Manhood."

Superhero Movies - Part Two: The Stinkness

Just as there are good superhero movies, there are also the stinkburgers.

1. Batman and Robin - Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze, Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl, and George Clooney in a batsuit with nipples. Uma Thurman was a sexy enough Poison Ivy but underused. The dynamic duo presiding over a grand opening (Holy Shades of the 1960s Batman TV show) before launching skate blades out of their boots to take on Freeze's minions in a fight was also a no-no. The whole point of Batman is both good and bad people think he's a dangerous psychopath. Making him cut a ribbon with his giant bat-ceremonial scissors is too Adam West.

2. Captain America - just about all live incarnations. I've never seen the serials from the 1940s, but I remember the TV movies from the 1970s (where technically Cap was the original Captain's surfer-dude son who was genetically close enough to dad to get the super-soldier serum), and being the nerd I am, I subjected myself to the pain of a 1991 direct-to-video of Captain America. There were talks of a Captain America Broadway musical at one point in the late 80s/early 90s. Thank God that was scrapped. Hopefully, the upcoming movie will help ease the pain.

3. Superman III - Richard Pryor discovers a natural talent for computer programming and is used by a poor man's Lex Luthor to hack a satellite to discover how to make Kryptonite. Pryor's analysis shows an unknown substance makes up part of Superman's greatest weakness so he substitutes in tar. The tar Kryptonite, once given to Supes, turns him into a boozy, sex-hound of a bum. Then there's a fight against a super-computer, yada yada yada...

4. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace - Supes decides to rid the world of nuclear weapons; Lex Luthor returns and using a strand of Superman's hair creates Nuclear Man who... They fight; Nuclear Man wins; Superman wins, but then he doesn't, and they fight again, and Superman wins. Jon Cryer is Lex's nephew, taking over for Ned Beatty as Luthor's bumbling assistant.

5. Supergirl - As bad as Superman III and IV were, they couldn't compare to the black hole level of suck delivered by Supergirl. Just avoid it... in fact, forget I even mentioned it.

6. Spawn - My hatred of Todd McFarlane's artistic style (as well as just McFarlane himself) made it impossible for me to get through all of Spawn so this may not be the fairest entry.

7. The Fantastic Four - Not the 2005 release (although that one wasn't that hot) but the unreleased 1994 version produced by crap movie maker, Roger Corman, which no one who hasn't bought a bootleg from a sci-fi convention has seen. So bad it's fun to watch. My favorite part is when the character of Alicia Masters (the Thing's girlfriend) is subdued by chloroform and kidnapped. As she's passing out, the camera switches to Alicia's point of view to show everything going fuzzy and then black. The only problem with that is the character of Alicia Masters is blind. Wizard Magazine actually ranked this film higher than Batman and Robin, Steel, and Red Sonja.

8. The Hulk - Ang Lee's horrible rendition. The computer graphics for the Hulk made his face look flat if not enraged, had his height change from 8 to 15 feet depending on how mad he got, and used Nick Nolte as Bruce Banner's hateful dad who, when exposed to gamma radiation, essentially becomes the Absorbing Man and then minor (and stupid) Hulk foe, Zzaxx the Living Dynamo, when dear old dad decides to absorb electricity.

9. Steel - Just offhand, I can't think of any good movie that stars a real life sports hero as a lead. Shaquille O'Neil should have stuck to breaking backboards instead of this adaptation of what is an actually interesting comic book character that's part of the "Superman Family."

10. The Legend of the Lone Ranger - The superhero of the Old West. The actor playing the masked man was dubbed over which never lends itself well to creating a good movie. Give me Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels any day. Clayton Moore had legal action brought against him to keep him from appearing as the Lone Ranger at public events (he changed his costume slightly and took to wearing wraparound sunglasses instead of a mask) before the movie started filming. Moore counter-sued and regained the rights to appear as the Lone Ranger after the movie bombed.

The Incredible Hulk

Thought I would post this email I wrote into my blog since I'm going to be talking about superhero movies in a post or two. This is just my geeking out over the latest Hulk movie.

Clever/Interesting bits. Possibly some spoilers:

The serum originally given to Blonsky (who becomes the Abomination) is taken out of a deep freeze security vault from a canister with the name Dr. Reinstein on it. That was the original name of the doctor (later changed to Erskine) who created the Super-Soldier Serum that created Captain America. The serum required a precise kind of exposure to radiation, which is unknown (explained next) which is why Blonsky mutates into the Abomination.

The army kept it but apparently never used it until the events in the movie because after Captain America was created, a Nazi spy murdered Reinstein/Erskine, who had not written down the entire Super-Soldier creation process leaving Captain America as the only Super Soldier.

This is the second film that Ed Norton and Paul Soles have been in together (the other one being, “The Score”). Soles’ character’s name is Stanley. Stan Lee (who is in the film like he is in most Marvel films) created or co-created many of Marvel’s most famous superheroes: Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, X-Men, etc.

Soles was the voice of Hermy the Elf in the original Rudolph cartoon. He was the one that wanted to be a dentist. He also provided voices for many Marvel cartoons in the 1960s including Bruce Banner’s in the Hulk cartoon, Peter Parker’s in the Spider-Man cartoon, and various voices in the Captain America cartoon and the Iron Man cartoon. He also lives in the same Toronto retirement home that the voice of Rudolph, Billie Mae Richards, lives in.

The Leader, a gamma-ray created super-genius in the comics, has his origins in this one. In the comics, gamma rays mutate people differently, bringing out different aspects of a person’s personality – Banner’s repressed rage, the Leader’s egotistical superiority complex, etc.

One of the college students witnessing the battle between the Hulk and the army is a black guy named Jim Wilson, who in the comics was the Hulk’s sidekick for a while (and was one of the first major cartoon characters to die of AIDS). He is accompanied by a fellow student named Jack McGee, who in the Hulk TV show, was a tabloid reporter constantly tracking Banner/Hulk.

The theme to the 1970s Incredible Hulk series is heard during the movie.

Like in the 2003 Hulk movie, Lou Ferrigno, the 1970s Hulk, plays a security guard as well as provided the voice to the Hulk. Ted Cassidy, Lurch from the Addams Family, provided the snarls of the 1970s Hulk.

Tony Stark (Iron Man) makes an appearance at the end of the film hinting at the creation of a superhero team (Avengers), which Marvel is planning on pushing out after a few more single superhero movies like Captain America and Thor. Nick Fury's name is also seen in the opening montage of the movie (the character appeared at the end of the Iron Man movie to recruit Stark to work for SHIELD/the government.

The reason why this film is so much better than the 2003 movie is that it captures the angst of Bruce Banner from the classic comics (and even the 1970s show) of the Hulk – where Banner is constantly on the run from the government, trying to keep his temper under control so he won’t change and waking up and having to restart a semblance of a life in strange new places when he does change, and the Hulk takes him someplace new. I wasn’t sure that Norton would be able to pull off the role of Banner, but he came through with the geekiness.

Superhero Movies

I think we're truly in the Golden Age of superhero movies, and being a nerd, I'm as happy as a nerd could be unless he time-traveled back to the 1960s and got to have sex with Nichelle Nichols while she was wearing her Star Trek Uhuru outfit. Well, initially wearing it... oh, you get what I'm saying.

Even the weaker ones - like Spider-Man 3 or X-Men 3 - put in solid performances, and I'm including Will Smith's, "Hancock," on this. I just got done watching this, and I don't get the complaints of the critics except maybe unlike some of the other recent superhero films, Hancock wasn't made to try and appeal to everyone - the casual movie-goer and the hardcore fanboy. Most of them seem to hate the twist that comes about halfway through the movie, but I liked it. Maybe because like most comic book fans my age, I came of age when the whole X-Men/Jean Grey/Phoenix storyline played out and was at its most confusing (and we're talking about playing out over more than a decade and could possibly still be going on now).

To sum that up very quickly: Jean Grey exerts too much of her mutant power trying to save her fellow X-Men during a space mission and unlocks a darker and incredibly powerful side of herself called Phoenix, but it's not really Jean; it's a universal force called the Phoenix Force who was drawn to Jean and took over her identity, sealing her in a pod and dropping her in a lake and eventually became corrupted by human emotions, going crazy before killing itself, until it then corrupted Madeline Pryor, an exact twin of Jean but not really corrupting Madeline (who was a clone of Jean), who became instead the Goblin Queen, meaning Jean was really dead, but oh, wait, they discovered her body in the pod at the bottom of that lake (remember the lake?), and she killed J.R., which was just a dream or not, and during this whole time, just before four different Supermen showed up, Bruce Willis was dead, but we didn't know.

I really don't know too much after all that as I gave up reading X-Men when it started making the plot of the movie, "Naked Lunch," look normal and straight-forward.

So, Hancock - good movie and an excellent twist, I thought. I'm worried about it having a sequel because much like in some previous posts, I think sometimes it's more fun to leave "post-movie" events (or maybe in Hancock's case, pre-movie events) to the imagination like when Neo flies off to flee people from the Matrix at the end of the first movie, or think about all the different adventures the cast of Pirates of the Caribbean get into instead of dealing out crap sequels to capitalize on the hype and popularity of the first installments.

In fact, I have to put Hancock into my top ten of superhero movies, which are in no particular order...

1. Hancock

2. Spider-Man - Tobey Maguire is Peter Parker as far as I'm concerned. Kirsten Dunst, on the other hand, I can take or leave. Honestly, I don't get what's the big deal with her.

3. The Rocketeer - A pilot preparing for an air race in the late 1930s/early 1940s finds a rocket pack that the mob, the Nazis, the Feds, and Howard Hughes all want back. Features Jennifer Connelly at just about her hottest as well as Jan from, "The Office," as a nightclub performer singing, "Begin the Beguine."

4. V for Vendetta - Yes, I include this one. V is as much an anti-hero as Wolverine, and the loss of freedoms and rise of propaganda eerily echo what's happening in the world today.

5. The Incredible Hulk - successfully ignored while still building on Ang Lee's horrible rendition from five years previous, coining the term, "requel." This Hulk takes its cues from the comics when Bruce Banner was on the run from the military, changing his identity and trying to keep his anger under control, failing and finding his gamma-powered alter-ego has taken him hundreds if not thousands of miles away from where he last lived, having to start over again. Plus it had lots of little in-jokes for comic book geeks like the Super-Soldier serum, Tony Stark, etc.

6. Iron Man - Robert Downey, Jr. is the perfect jerk that you just can't help but like, and let's face it, the armor was just too cool.

7. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace - Ha ha. Just kidding.

7. The first Christopher Reeves' Superman. Two words, "MISS TESSMAAAAAAACHERRRRRRRRRRR!"

8. The first Michael Keaton Batman. It will be 20-years-old in 2009. Holy shit, I'm old.

9. X-Men 2 - Takes its cue from the classic X-Men comic, "God Loves; Man Kills," of a reverend who begins a religion-based anti-mutant crusade and attempts to use Charles Xavier to kill other mutants. In the movie, Stryker is a military scientist with a mutant son instead of a reverend, and he and Wolverine share a past, but it's all good. Just like the comic used mutant-human relations as an allegory for race relations and then later hetero-homosexual relations, the movie has a very good scene of a mutant "coming out" to his family. Solid character performances from Wolverine (the mansion fight is great), Magneto, Mystique, and Nightcrawler (although, they made him more tragic instead of the flamboyant Errol Flynn type he is in the comics).

10. The Incredibles - What happens when being a superhero is outlawed? You settle down, have super-powered kids, and wish for the old days. Great animation and humor and three characters that you wished got more screen-time - Edna Mode (fashion designer to the superhero community), Syndrome (the villain, voiced by Jason Lee), and Kari the baby-sitter, who we do get to see more of in a Pixar short showing what was happening to her as she baby-sat the Incredible's youngest son, Jack-Jack, while the rest of them were off on their mission (her personality, at the breaking point after taking care of Jack-Jack, even gave Syndrome pause in dealing with her).

Honorable Mentions: Batman Begins, Hellboy, The Phantom, Superman Returns, Unbreakable.