Remembering 2011's Thor

I remember that when I saw Iron Man I did not expect much (and was not surprised there), with Iron Man 2 making an even less favorable impression (though I think that opinion was more widely shared).

I was more optimistic watching Thor, partly because of the involvement of Kenneth Branagh and Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski.

The result was that where Iron Man lived down to my expectations, Thor was a disappointment.

In fairness the film worked well enough as CGI-packed action movie spectacle.

The problem arose when it tried to be something else--to tell a story of the Arrogant Prince who Needed to Find a Heart, in which of course a romantic subplot would feature, while we also got a Fish-Out-of-Water comedy about an alien on Earth. Alas, it all fell flat for me, with the Earthbound middle act on the whole being of the same quality as those movies from the Asylum that SyFy would screen on Saturday nights back then. And when the music surged at the close over the shots of the starcrossed lovers--well, it was a reminder of where the term "melodrama" came from, a show that relies on the music to make us feel what the drama was supposed to make us feel (but didn't).

It was a reminder, too, of the perils of action movies trying to interest us in their characters "because that's what storytellers are supposed to do" when the characters really aren't that interesting--and indeed, it seems to me that Hiram Lee was broadly right when he said that "Branagh and his collaborators" took the tale "far too seriously" as they produced a film that, whatever the talents of those involved and the good intentions they may have had, was "so thin, one can almost see through it."

In fact Thor: The Dark World, for all its limitations, struck me as a significant improvement over the original as, if nothing else, mindless entertainment.

The MCU Had the Claqueurs on its Side From the Beginning

There has been a tendency to depict the successes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) as the triumph of some underdog over the sneers of critical and industry opinion, but what I remember is that the entertainment press was fully on board with the project as claqueurs from the start, certainly to go by the rapturous response to the first Iron Man back in 2008.* Indeed, Hiram Lee was an extreme rarity in not just calling the film "dreadful and dishonest" but remarking the hyperbolic cheer-leading of his colleagues, naming and quoting several of them (from A.O. Scott to David Ansen to Peter Travers) as testimony not just to the political sensibility of the profession's mainstream, but "the wretched state of so-called film criticism with which we are presently plagued" where its artistic standards are concerned. "It is remarkable to observe a critic praising filmmakers for creating generic and two-dimensional characters," Lee wrote in regard to one of these.

Fifteen summers later nothing has changed there.

* For what it is worth Iron Man's Rotten Tomatoes score is 94 percent, making it clear that Lee's remarks testify quite accurately to the critics' enthusiasm (whether one agrees with Lee's appraisal of the film or not).

The New Yorker On the Marvel Cinematic Universe

This month the New Yorker published a long article by Michael Schulman on the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The item is, for much of its length, a puff piece singing Hollywood Suits as gods ("Let there be Marvel"), while I doubt very much of the gossip, or the commentary, it retails will surprise anyone who has paid much attention to the phenomena. Still, the New Yorker's readers, for the most part, are a different demographic from the fan site readers who would ordinarily be attentive to the gossip--while it is notable that the piece essentially admits that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a triumph of shrewd marketing rather than artistic genius (emphasizing its use of cross-overs to connect one franchise to another, and hints to arouse interest in subsequent films, so as to help lure the audience from one film to another to another).

Indeed, it invites the reader to admire it as such.

When that is the case, can anyone really blame the public for thinking like movie executives when they look at new releases?

On the Unmade Howard Hawks-Cary Grant Casino Royale

The number of James Bond movies made to date is staggering, with these numbering twenty-five "official" Everything Or Nothing (EON) productions, as well as the Charles Feldman-produced Casino Royale and Kevin McClory-produced Never Say Never Again, all while film history is littered with such relevant oddities as Operation Kid Brother (starring Sean Connery's actual kid brother Neil in a movie full of faces from the '60s-era Bond films, which is today most likely to be known to fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000).

The number of "unmade" Bond films--of ideas for Bond movies that an established filmmaker made a serious attempt to pursue--is larger still, with the more curious ranging from an Alfred Hitchcock-helmed film starring Jimmy Stewart as 007, to EON's famous unfilmed scripts for The Spy Who Loved Me by Anthony Burgess and John Landis(!), to Quentin Tarantino's Casino Royale.

Even some of the less well-known are quite enough to fire the imaginations of Bond trivia aficionados--like Charles Feldman's idea of going with Howard Hawks for a director and Cary Grant for a star for his own rather "hard-boiled" Casino Royale before he went the gag comedy route with that film. Still, had Hawks and Grant made the movie, whatever the quality of the result, it would not have been the milestone of cinematic history that the Bond movies we actually got in the '60s (which led to Feldman's ultimately going the comedy route after they beat him to the punch) have proven to be.

"Make it New" or Go Retro? (The Experience of the Bond Continuation Novels)

Working through the history of the James Bond franchise one point of interest for me has been the ways in which that history anticipated the problems of other franchises that likewise just keep going and going and going in the course of its doing just that before many of them had even hit the market.

One of them is the dilemma of whether to forget the past and try to make the new installment in the series as contemporary in tone as possible; or to cleave to the past, evoking it ceaselessly and hewing to the old pattern and giving the audience "more of the same" as much as the need to avoid intolerable repetition or the appearance of being ridiculous or offensive will allow.

If the franchise goes on long enough, as the Bond franchise has, not least in print, one is likely to see the series swing back and forth between these extremes, and maybe stop at every detectable point in between. Indeed, both John Gardner and Raymond Benson displayed the pattern within just their own phases of the continuation books.

John Gardner's Licence Renewed was an attempt at making James Bond over as an entirely contemporary figure, the agent of a thoroughly post-imperial Britain fighting a Carlos the Jackal type against the backdrop of the energy crisis, while the follow-up For Special Services went in the other direction of an attempt at "Ian Fleming for the '80s." Icebreaker ended up in somewhere in the middle, and so did it generally go ever since, if with particular books tacking this way, others that.

Raymond Benson had much less room to attempt anything like For Special Services, but in his first, Zero Minus Ten, it was clear that he wanted to keep something of Fleming (in the long gaming sequence, in the torture scene, etc.), but then went as contemporary as could be with Never Dream of Dying reading like a Pierce Brosnan-era Bond movie on paper.

Some of the results were more entertaining, others less so--but the task was ultimately impossible. There could be no going back to Fleming, really, while there could also be no 100 percent update that would leave anything of Bond intact--with the problem underlined both by the works which tried to take Bond all the way back to his '50s-era point of origin (at its most extreme in Anthony Horowitz's Goldfinger "sequel" Trigger Mortis, and Jeffrey Deaver's giving us a James Bond born in 1979 in Carte Blanche). Still, especially considering the failure of these later efforts to register on the bestseller lists it seems to me that the intent of these books is less to "get it right" than to help keep James Bond in the zeitgeist in the ever-longer spells between the Bond films that are the real backbone of the franchise.

"Make it New" or Go Retro? (The Disney-Lucasfilm Star Wars Movies)

A little while ago I remarked the swing of the pendulum between fealty to the original and the attempt to go all-out in "contemporizing" a franchise as it gets on in years demonstrated by the Bond continuation novels. So, one can see, did it go with the latest Star Wars trilogy. Cowed by the reaction to the prequels J.J. Abrams played it very safe in Episode VII, hewing very closely to the pattern of the original, while Episode VIII went in a different direction--and now, well, now we have a flummoxed Disney-Lucasfilm not quite sure what to do, but as part of its dilemma doubtless wondering how to balance the old with the new.

The End of Succession

The series Succession has drawn to a close, and received the tributes commonly offered a piece of prestige TV at its close--though it may be that it is more deserving than others of such tribute, certainly if what James Martin--about as far as critics get from being a claqueur--had to say of it is true (in which case, it is a wonder in itself that the show ever made it to air, especially on so high-profile a network as HBO).

You can read his commemoration of the series here.

Of "Blue-Collar Actors"

When I first heard Chris Pine speak of his family as a "blue collar acting family" he was being interviewed by William Shatner for the latter's documentary, The Captains.

The word choice jarred--so much so that one might suspect a Josiah Bounderby-like downplaying of personal advantages on the part of someone who became about as close as any twenty-first century person does to being a "movie star," while in the process also trivializing the difficulties of a genuinely blue collar existence (to all evidences, a thing quite remote from his experience).

All the same, he called attention to a reality oft-overlooked, namely the reality that while we think of actors as either waiting tables in anticipation of their big break, or huge stars, with little thought given to those who are working, and maybe even making quite a decent living, but not quite so visible or so lavishly rewarded. Actors who, if they land a regular spot on a show may see it canceled after a mere few episodes, and not get anything like it again; and maybe rely on a lot of guest appearances on shows and bit parts in movies; and do not get ten figure paydays and have their own production companies, and may have to go on working in old age for inability to retire financially. They, too, are part of that world, the bigger part of it, just like their counterparts all across the arts--even as they, in relation to the vast number of people whose ultimate choice will be to give up or go on waiting tables until they are retirement age, can seem to constitute the fortunate few who got to have such a career, whatever the terms.

The Marvels' Trailer: A Reaction

The trailer for The Marvels has me anticipating a movie that places the accent on goofy comedy.

Think Thor 4.

Except, to go by the visuals, a lot cheaper looking.

Granted, we have heard a lot about Marvel taking the time to get the CGI right on this one after the criticism of Ant-Man 3, but all the same one might have hoped for somewhat more dazzle--at least, in comparison with the contemporaneous trailer for the originally straight-to-streaming Blue Beetle.

My gut reaction: what it shows of the movie makes me more, not less, confident of my expectation of a significant drop in gross from the 2019 Captain Marvel (while, as it happens, my expectations for Blue Beetle moved up at least a couple of notches on the basis of its flashy, action-packed trailer).

What a Society's Conventional Wisdom Says About It

Some time ago I devoted a post to the concept of the "conventional wisdom." Most of the time people speak of it with respect--but as John Kenneth Galbraith discussed it, when actually coining the phrase, he assumed a critical standpoint. He presented an essentially pragmatic case for the value of a conventional wisdom, specifically saving people the time and trouble of figuring every little thing out for themselves, and arguing over it every time they dealt with another person. But that did not mean that a particular piece of conventional wisdom was sound--and indeed the whole reason for the discussion was that, as he saw it, the conventional wisdom with which he was concerned was simply wrong (as he sought to demonstrate in the relevant book).

Looking back it seems worth acknowledging that the reliance on conventional wisdom is probably unavoidable in social life--because no one has enough time to have a genuinely well-considered opinion on everything. But in a society in a healthy state--where those who take the lead in figuring things out are willing and able to face up to the task, where the "marketplace of ideas" is genuinely operative because of a free flow of information and debate rather dogma--that conventional wisdom is apt to decently, usefully, approximate reality.

In a society in an unhealthy one it is otherwise, perhaps to the point that looking at the conventional wisdom in area after area of life an intelligent person sees little but idiocy.

Few, I think, from any point of the ideological spectrum, would care to insist that the state of things today is healthy.

The Fate of the Unread Writer in the Digital Age

I suppose that down to the '90s the problem of the unread author was little different from that of Jack London's Martin Eden. They toiled at their work, toiled at sending it out--and they collected form rejection letters from people as they went unread.

I imagine that many still follow this routine. But now they have the option of self-publishing. Thus they toil at their work, toil at publishing it themselves--and as the counters indicating page views and downloads and sales fail to tick up, still goes unread.

After all the sound and fury of technological change, the evolution of the Market and the effort to capitalize on it, where it really counted--finding an audience, making a living--the "aspiring" writer of today is no better off than they were before, and maybe even worse off, because collecting form rejection letters was a cheaper activity than producing a publishable book, because the wages for all writers are crashing in a world where PEOPLE DON'T READ, and now, we are told, the chatbots are coming for what little opportunity was left to them, eliminating the hope that they might make it someday because it looks as if there will no someday for anyone.

Demolition Man's Attempt at Satire and the Tenor of the '90s

After Rambo III Sylvester Stallone's career was in clear decline, but he went on headlining major action films for some time after, returning to the form with 1993's summer tentpole Cliffhanger--and that same autumn, Demolition Man.

I remember first seeing Demolition Man and being pleasantly surprised by its attempt at satire--I suppose, the fact that it tried at all rather than its being very good at it. After all, consider the subject matter so satirists have taken up over the years--the terms of daily survival at work and elsewhere, social hierarchy, religions, prejudice.

By contrast what do we have here? It seems here and there that there are hints of aspiration to something bigger, like its allusions to Aldous Huxley (as in its naming Sandra Bullock's character "Lenina Huxley") but mostly what we see is a heavy-handed attempt to impose "lameness" on society, identified with healthy diets, safe sex, clean language, "soothing" aesthetics, and the "mavericks" who won't have it, all too tellingly led by Denis Leary playing . . . well, his character's name was "Edgar Friendly," but really it seemed like it was just the already well-known Denis Leary persona.

It ends up very slight stuff indeed--and in that characteristically '90s, when the conventional wisdom held that all the big issues were decided, leaving us little to debt argue over little ones in the manner that made "What is the deal with that?" a catchphrase.

"Game-Changer"

In contrast with a lot of the words and phrases I discuss here (like the appalling "lifestyle") the term is not inherently annoying to me. I accept that a thing may well be a "game-changer."

My annoyance with the term has to do with how ridiculously low people set the bar for something being "game-changing."

I recall, for instance, a certain science fiction "fan site" that offered its list of twenty "game-changing" science fiction novels of the decade of the '00s.

The books in question did indeed each make a splash when they came out (mostly in the very small pond that is contemporary print science fiction, but some of them in larger pop cultural bodies of water as well).

But were they game-changers? Did they leave us unable to read or write in the ways we had before, the way that, for example, E.E. Smith's space operas or Isaac Asimov's Robot stories were arguably game-changers?

Even before the passage of the years made this even more starkly clear it was clear that they were not. After all, how dynamic would a fairly limited corner of the publishing world have to be for it to see twenty "game-changers" in a mere decade? Especially when the genre in question is, as I have said so many times, fairly old and stagnant by any such standard?

The term's use was just poptimist hype--as is generally the case when we hear words like "game-changer" trotted out.

"It Is What It Is."

"It Is What It Is" has long been high on the list of phrases that get on my nerves.

The reason, I think, is its combination of an air of

1. Pseudo-profundity (the repetitiveness, the circularity that leaves us right exactly where we started in the manner that impresses the gullible with utter meaninglessness) with

2. Callous dismissiveness passed off as tough-minded "realism."

This is the way the world is, they tell you, deal with it or don't, I don't care--with the "I don't care" the part that matters most.

It is a myth that the Inuit have fifty words for snow--but we seem to have fifty thousand ways of telling people right to their faces that we don't care about their problems, or about them, and the richness of our vocabulary in that particular area of communication would seem to me to say a great deal about us.

"Hard Work"

People speak--often, snarl--incessantly about "hard work," which is supposed to be held in respect.

Of course, if hard work were really respected in itself the hard work of the poor would be respected just as much as the hard work of the rich; the hard work of the so-called "failure" as much as that of the "success," the "loser" as of the "winner."

No reasonable person would pretend that this is the case--and so the snarling about "hard work" ends up another hypocritical rationalization of inequality. Those who have prospered are assumed to have "earned" what they have gained through "hard work," those who have not prospered to have failed not only to gain, but to work--all as no one dares ask if the poverty of the latter has anything to do with the riches of the former.