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.