Posts Tagged adaptation
Muppets Now and Forever
Everyone knows there’s a new Muppet movie in cinemas now. The tagline is “MUPPET DOMINATION”, after all. They’re obviously taking no prisoners where publicity’s concerned. It’s the plot of James Bobbin and Jason Segel’s new film The Muppets, too: how to best return these characters from pop cultural obscurity to their rightful position as entertainment icons?
The good news: the movie’s very enjoyable. The concept used to introduce brothers Gary and Walter – one human, one muppet – is a clever one; the songs are mostly great; Jason Segel’s excitement at being surrounded by these puppets is palpable. I laughed, I cried. And yet…
The bad news: the voices are wrong. For the first hour of the movie I cringed every time Fozzie or Piggy spoke. It’s like seeing your favourite band play but hearing a cover song boom out of the speakers. It made me feel a little bit like I was going mad.
This isn’t the first time. When Jim Henson died, and Kermit’s voice changed forever, I remember thinking that maybe the character should’ve been retired. But that’s a selfish thought – why shouldn’t new generations enjoy Kermit, just to spare my feelings? New voices won’t matter to the kids who see the film. That’s how it should be.
It’s harder to take in The Muppets because Frank Oz – the man who gave life to Fozzie and Piggy – is still alive. The fact that Oz was unhappy with the script and worried it didn’t “respect the characters” did affect my viewing experience. Couldn’t they find some way to allay his concerns and get him on board?
It doesn’t always serve art to give creators the final say over their creations. Everyone alive agrees the Star Wars universe would be much improved if someone had found a way to ignore George Lucas’ whims. Everyone except Lucas, anyway.
It comes down to this: what is a muppet? Is it a character that should stay an extension of its creator or creators? Or is a muppet a Robin Hood or a Sherlock Holmes or a Batman, kept alive by dozens and dozens of different interpretations by artists good and bad?
(Or, as Homer Simpson once said, a muppet might be “not quite a mop and it’s not quite a puppet… but man! So to answer your question, I don’t know.”)
My favourite new Muppet story isn’t the film. It’s the muppet comic book by Roger Langridge from a few years ago. They mimic the format of the 1970s Muppet Show, keeping its anarchic humour while managing some beautiful character moments. His muppets are pencil-and-ink abstractions of already abstracted foam-and-felt, but they’re absolutely alive.
Ignore the funk revelations of the decade-old Muppets in Space movie. Langridge provides the definitive answer to Gonzo the Great’s true identity, completing an emotional journey that began in 1979’s The Muppet Movie as he sang ‘I’m Going To Go Back There Someday’.
Scooter asks Gonzo: “Tell me… please… what the heck are you??”
And Gonzo replies: “Oh, Scooter. I thought you knew. I’m an artist.”
To Look Like Superman
Every week, the internet selects a zany news report to pass around like an infectious yawn, and this week it was Herbert Chavez. He loves Superman so much he’s had multiple plastic surgeries in order to look more like his hero.
Buzzfeed summed it up like this: “So this is Herbert Chavez, who looks normal and not at all creepy. Strike that. Reverse it.” (Bizarro would be proud.) Andy Khouri, much more sympathetically, described it as an “unsettling quest” symptomatic of Body Dysmorphic Disorder. “It is of course within this man’s rights to alter his body in any way he sees fit,” he writes, “but it’s not hard to imagine the Man of Steel disapproving of Chavez’s actions.”
Ignoring empathy for a moment – sorry, Superman – this makes me think about Superman’s face. All the faces of comic book superheroes look wildly different depending on which artist happens to be drawing them. And I asked last year if we were willing to accept the ever-changing facial features of superheroes “because we instinctually think they’re only different artistic interpretations of the one, concrete, real-world face? A ‘secret identity’ that we’ll never actually get to see?”
But Superman isn’t a human being with a human face, caricatured onto the comic book page. The page is where he was born. Pencil and ink are his origin story; his planet Krypton. So what, in essence, does this Superman look like? He has a square jaw. A cleft chin. A spit-curl. Dark hair, white skin. That’s about it. Everything else can change on whim.
I’ve always wondered why Hollywood’s obsession with plastic surgery is only ever used to look young. One day, an actor will go under the knife to give themselves new emotive abilities: anime-sized eyes for augmented empathy, or expanded tear ducts to better gush during tragic third acts…
Writer Peter Milligan and artist Duncan Fegredo explored this idea in their fantastic mid-90s horror comic Face. It’s the story of David, a plastic surgeon who is summoned to perform surgery on an aged, reclusive artist named Andrew Sphinx. But Sphinx, who was a personal friend of Picasso, wants something different from the surgery. Something a little more… cubist.
If someone wants to look like Christopher Reeve or Dean Cain or Brandon Routh – sure, that’s one thing. Truly resembling the comic book Superman, though, is something else. You’d need to make your nose into two quick strokes, like an upside down seven, and abstract your eyes into featureless circles attached to the eyebrows above.
Otherwise, like Andrew Sphinx says to his surgeon: “You’re still stuck in classical realism, and you’re not even aware of it.”
X-Men First Class: Mutant TV
After I saw Wolverine: Origins, I actually defended it. Kind of. I said that it was so haphazard, nonsensical, and oddly-shaped it provided perhaps the most accurate recreation of what it’s like read mainstream superhero comics. In two hours, it made me feel like I’d read a year’s worth of issues in one sitting – with a few different writers, some rushed fill-in art, and a helping of editorial interference.
Now X-Men: First Class achieves something similar, only much more successfully. A 1960s-set prequel to Bryan Singer’s first two X-Men movies – with Singer back on board with a story credit and as producer – this is a welcome return to the thematic material that makes mutant stories interesting.
Admittedly the characters are sometimes forced to announce these themes out loud, but that’s a small price to pay.
Director Matthew Vaughn (Kick Ass) does very well in some smaller moments, especially in the striking reverse-angle transformation of an innocuous office to a torture chamber; he also knows that the movie’s power comes from James McAvoy’s Charles and Michael Fassbender’s Erik, and the scenes they share are the movie’s highlights. If only the same could be said for January Jones as Emma Frost, who is embarrassingly lifeless here. The comic book version of Emma would be appalled by this pretender wearing her lingerie.
Vaughn struggles in the movie’s special effects-heavy sequences, though. Towards the end, things take on the look of a big-budget Smallville finale. That’s not a compliment. (I know fans, situated both in and out of Hollywood, can easily become obsessed with fidelity to their source material. I maybe just fell prey to it talking about Emma Frost, above. But including Banshee’s flying-with-flappy-wings-and-screaming-towards-the-ground? Yeah, that was never going to work.)
In fact, the whole movie looks a little cheap. A little made-for-TV. And that got me thinking: why not?
In some ways, First Class does mimic the structure and feel of comic books. For example, it begins with the same sequence that brutally kicked off Singer’s first X-Men film, and then adds another twist to it. This is common practice in comics as new writers pick apart heroes’ origin stories, always returning to embroider them with new, painful details. But with its small-screen spectacle, cast of thousands, and overstuffed plot – this ends up feeling less like comic books and more like mutant television.
As critic Paul Verhoeven wrote in his review: “Really, what they should have done was give it the Game of Thrones treatment and make a big, detailed, character-driven story all about the early Academy days.”
I couldn’t agree more. Charles and Erik, travelling the globe, recruiting mutants! Having zany adventures and philosophical disagreements on their ideological differences! Killing an occasional nazi along the way! That’s a season’s worth of entertainment even before they begin their mutant academy and lifelong rivalry. As enjoyable as this movie is, its second half feels like a clipshow of episode highlights to come.
Watching First Class also made me realise something has shifted in what I want from TV and what I want from film. It’s now television that seems to give me stories with truly epic scope. At the cinema, I’m leaning towards more singular spaces, driven less by narrative and more by a character’s subjectivity or particular mood.
It also made me realise, as so much television now looks so ‘cinematic’, I should probably stop saying ‘made-for-TV’. Then again, ‘straight-to-video’ is still in my vocabulary…
The Superhero Curse
There is no Superman Curse.
Yes, TV Superman George Reeves was found dead by gunshot in 1959, whether from suicide or murder. And okay, fine, movie Superman Christopher Reeve was paralysed from the neck down after being thrown from a horse in 1995. But a curse? In his book Our Hero: Superman on Earth, Tom De Haven puts it like this:
For terrifying examples of the Curse of Superman, though, that’s about it. A lot of different actors have played the character over the past seventy-plus years, including Bud Collyer, who played him more often and longer than anyone, on radio and several different animated cartoon series, and he did just fine, becoming a famously affable network game-show host, died at a ripe old age.
There is no Batman Curse, either, no matter what the Daily Mail might’ve said during the filming of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight – even though many happily implied it was his role as the psychotic Joker that resulted in Heath Ledger’s death.
Cue ambiguous quote from an earlier Joker, Jack Nicholson: “I warned him.”
And now we have the ongoing parade of accidents in Broadway’s Spider-Man musical, awkwardly titled Turn Off the Dark. One performer was rushed to hospital after a thirty foot fall; the lead actress portraying the villain quit with the show still in previews; and other Broadway actors have made online statements like “DOES SOMEONE HAVE TO DIE?” Of course, there is no Spider-Man Curse. It’s ridiculous.
And yet.
And yet I can’t stop thinking of these accidents as modern echoes of ancient stories; myths of mortals impersonating gods and facing tragic consequences.
In comic books, ordinary mortals embodying superheroic abilities often ends badly. Taking the illegal, power-granting drug Mutant Growth Hormone can make your heart explode. In the collected manga Batman: Child of Dreams, ordinary people are transformed into Batman’s greatest foes like the Joker and the Penguin, but they can’t handle the strain. They burn out from the inside, weeping, physical falling to pieces. The “basic elevator pitch” of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents? “You get kickass superpowers for 365 days, and then you die.”
When super-team The Authority crashed into our reality – in Grant Morrison and Gene Ha’s short-lived, two-issue run of 2007 – the heroes were shocked to find that no one here had powers. What’s worse was they worried just being here would be too much for our fragile earth. As their team shaman explained: “Even in our weakened state, we’re still too strong for this place. We may as well be monsters, trampling over the laws of nature until they break.”
We can wear the costumes, and strike the poses, and say the lines. We can hope our CGI doppelgangers do most of the spectacular stuntwork for us and that we aren’t left, terrified, tangled high over the orchestra pit. There is no Superhero Curse.
But what if Spider-Man’s skill, Superman’s strength, or the Joker’s psychosis are too much, too big, to be safely captured in mortal bodies and brains? What if comic book characters are described as ‘larger than life’ for a reason?