Posts Tagged unreality
The Hulk as Hamlet
“I look at it as my generation’s Hamlet.”
That’s Mark Ruffalo on playing The Hulk. He’ll be the third actor to embody the character – or, more accurately, the Hulk’s puny alter ego Bruce Banner – in just three films. First there was Eric Bana in Ang Lee’s misunderstood masterpiece Hulk in 2003. (Yes. You heard me. “Masterpiece”.)
Bana was replaced five years later by Edward Norton in The Incredible Hulk, a fairly terrible film I once reviewed as resembling “a panto acted out by action figures”.
Now, in Joss Whedon’s upcoming Avengers movie, Mark Ruffalo will step into the role. He’s a great choice, I think, but that’s not really the point. Some fans are annoyed – there are even online petitions demanding Norton return to the role.
No one seems to be questioning Ruffalo’s acting. The objection is simply to changing an actor mid-franchise. (Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to apply to supporting casts. Poor Katie Holmes was replaced between Nolan’s Batman Begins and Dark Knight and no one seemed to mind.)
It comes down to this: Bruce Banner should look the same in each movie, right?
Frankly, I’m not sure why.
It expects a visual continuity that comic books don’t possess. Look at these random examples, above and below. Does Kelly Jones’ Bruce Wayne really look anything like Denys Cowan’s Bruce Wayne? We might feel a discontinuity if the art shifts mid-comic, but radically different styles sit quite closely in other issues, other series, and it goes unnoticed.
The rules do shift once human actors embody these characters. I’ve written before about what celebrity logic does to these heroic alter egos. It makes the secret identity as famous as the costumed one, and results in heroes whipping off their masks at the slightest provocation.
Nevertheless, I think Ruffalo is right. The Hulk is Hamlet – or, at least, he should be.
Masks, costumes, and an obsession with alternate identities mean that if any screen characters can be played by multiple actors, it’s these superheroes. It’s not like replacing Michael J. Fox between Back To The Future sequels.
And just like I’d prefer more radical, auteuristic movie adaptations – Burton’s Batman, Lee’s Hulk, whatever – instead of a generic ‘house style’, I’m happy to see different actors coming to these roles. The many faces of multiple actors don’t make the heroes’ interchangeable. They make them less human, and more mythic.
A weird question for you: are comic readers willing to accept shifting facial features 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?
Coppélia: Dolls Tired from Dancing
So The Australian Ballet’s latest is the rather bizarre ballet Coppélia, and they were nice enough to ask me to write for their programme about how modern special effects were leaking onto the stage in 1870s Paris. Primitive automatons! Magic shows! Uh… exclamation points!
Coppélia (Leanne Stojmenov) and Dr. Coppelius (Damien Welch). Photography by Branco Gaica.
Mostly, I focused on the ballet’s villain, Doctor Coppelius. He’s depicted as a sad and lonely inventor, surrounded by his odd mechanical creations – some half-finished, some almost human. In the original horror story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, though, he’s an alchemist suspected to be ‘The Sandman’, and is much more monstrous. (Like stealing-childrens’-eyes more monstrous.)
Yet he’s not the most horrific thing in the story. That role belongs to his beautiful, artificial faux-daughter, Coppélia. In the ballet’s programme, I write:
“The existence of a lifelike doll in Hoffmann’s original tale is not a charming curiosity. After the truth of his creation is revealed, Hoffmann describes lovers forcing one another to sing and dance off-key and out of time, just to prove they are human. Otherwise how can they be sure?”
Popular culture has provided us with more supposedly scientific ways to test if someone’s human, like the Voight-Kampff machine made famous by Blade Runner. The movie’s production designer described it like this: “Basically it was a lie-detector machine. The lie is, I am not a replicant.”
In fact, as I saw the frail Doctor Coppelius appear on stage, I was reminded of J. F. Sebastian, Blade Runner’s old inventor, living alone except for his toys. The nursery rhyme his toys sing to him – “Home again, home again, jiggety-jig” – still plays in my head with alarming regularity.
Blade Runner – and a gazillion other science fiction stories too, of course – are designed to make us wonder if we’re human after all. How can we really tell? Singing out of tune and moving off the beat? Close analysis of our pupil dilation at embarrassing questions? Maybe it’s just as the theme song ‘Coppélia’s Coffin’ from the anime series Noir says:
“People are dolls tired from dancing / Sheep on the altar / The mechanical dreams / Where are they headed?”
We’re all just dolls, tired from dancing. Coppélia tries to dismiss these question with the light-hearted farce and energetic dancing at its beginning and end – but they remain bubbling under the surface of the stage while we’re in Doctor Coppelius’ lair.
An odd postscript: Coppélia’s choreographer, Arthur Saint-Leon, isn’t only famous for his ballets; he also invented an early form of notation to record these all-important steps. Ironically, he failed to record his work on Coppélia, and it only survived as its popularity kept it in almost constant circulation – even though it was initially interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war. What if it hadn’t been so lucky?
And another: in 2007, Japanese scientists offered a strange solution: a human-sized robot that could mimic the steps of a human dancer. In this way, the specific movements of folk dances could be perfectly captured and replayed, even after its original performers were long dead. “My impression is that there would still be a human element lacking,” one English folk dancer is quoted as saying. “The robot would still look, for the want of a better word, robotic.”
We keep telling ourselves that – but I can’t help feeling like it’s just modernity’s equivalent of whistling past a graveyard.
Kick-Ass: Get Real
When I heard that a movie of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s comic Kick-Ass was on its way, I decided that – for once – I’d avoid reading the source material until I’d seen the film.
I had a theory that Mark Millar’s stories would benefit enormously from quick edits and pop music. That cinema would maybe boost the good qualities of his writing (great concepts, snappy one-liners, black comedy) and cover some of its flaws (the sometimes shoddy execution of those concepts, or the way he can seem to get bored halfway through his own stories).
My review? Well, you might have heard that Kick-Ass is the story of what happens when a powerless nobody decides to become a superhero in the real world. Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of Kick-Ass, however, isn’t. It’s actually about what happens when a powerless nobody decides to become a superhero… and then meets some real superheroes already out there.
The movie’s definitely a success – certainly more than Vaughn’s only fitfully charming version of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. The action scenes are smart and inventive, especially considering the film’s semi-limited budget; they recreate the sense of John Romita Jr.’s art without being slavishly faithful to it like Zack Snyder’s Watchmen worship. Bursts of violence wrung at least three bursts of spontaneous applause from my audience.
Having actual humans step into these roles gives them new life, too. Both Aaron Johnson’s Kick-Ass and Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s Red Mist are better characters than they are on the page, and a hilarious Nicolas Cage as Big Daddy proves – yet again – that he’s developing a new alien form of acting that might only be properly appreciated by future generations.
The movie, though, is entirely stolen by Chloe Moretz as the tween assassin Hit Girl – and that’s part of the problem. Mortez is perfect in the role, oozing charisma, and I can see her becoming a cult figure for young girls everywhere. I’m not the only one, either. Read the half-excited, half-concerned “Hit Girl Could Be Your New Favorite Tween”.
Her relationship with her Big Daddy is the best part of the film that, and one of the only parts that doesn’t feel like empty calories. I’m a sucker for proud parents in fiction, and Big Daddy just seems so damn giddy to watch her in action; their bond has the best parts of Father Knows Best and Lone Wolf and Cub. Thankfully, the movie ditches Millar’s more painful Republican-versus-Democrat zingers, too.
But in order to make Kick-Ass an over-the-top action movie, Vaughn makes Hit Girl a pint-size John Woo-style killer. She ends up undercutting the supposed point of Millar’s comic. Millar said that the story originally began with Big Daddy and Hit Girl, and Kick-Ass was later added to reframe it into something more human, more real. You can tell. Kick-Ass himself never suddenly develops super-ninja-moves (as tempting as that must’ve been for this big screen version) but Big Daddy and Hit Girl would be entirely comfortable in the Marvel Universe alongside Elektra, Hawkeye, and whoever else suits the movie’s tagline: “I can’t fly. But I can kick your ass.”
Kick-Ass’ high-school-loser realism and Hit Girl’s tween-ninja antics and angst never quite mesh together. It’s sometimes more like two movies sitting together side-by-side and occasionally intersecting, or, better still, two comic books that periodically cross over to boost sales. The movie’s hyped ‘realism’ is just an opening hook, not a high concept.
With my experiment in not reading the source material for once finally over, I came home from the screening and read them in a single sitting. I discovered that there’s a twist to Big Daddy’s character in the comics that didn’t make it into the film. It might’ve singlehanded short-circuited this logic glitch, and it’s a real shame the Kick-Ass movie decided not to keep it.
And you know what? The pop music did help. Everything’s better with The Banana Splits.
James Cameron’s Avatar: Was It Worth It?
I’ve been disappointed with most CGI-heavy films over the last few years. It started with Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake. I mean, how is it possible to watch a giant monkey fight a giant dinosaur and be so bored? Then Michael Bay’s Transformers movies managed to give clashing giant robots all the visual impact of differently coloured paints mixing together.
So despite a predictable childhood obsession with James Cameron’s Aliens and Terminator 2, I approached Avatar with a healthy dose of skepticism. With its maybe $300 million budget – and the swirling rumours of much, much more – I was afraid that no matter how good a film it might be, I’d be stuck staring at the price tag dangling invisibly from the corner of the screen and wondering if it was worth it.
But Avatar successfully stopped me thinking about its dollar signs. It’s a massive 160 minutes long and I didn’t once look at my watch. Yes, it trades in clichés – ‘naive scientists’, ‘evil corporations’, ‘noble savages at one with nature’, and (perhaps unfortunately) ‘white man saves the day’. Some are already complaining that the story’s too simple. Well, ‘complicated’ doesn’t equal ‘good’ – Matrix sequels anyone? – and Cameron’s simple story is masterfully told.
It’s far too deliberately paced for action fans, and barely a sci-fi at all. Cameron has little interest in exploring any ideas behind the projecting-human-minds-into-alien-bodies technology that provides the film’s title. It’s a deeply earnest and old-fashioned adventure story. If anything, Avatar is a conceptual, mirror-world sequel to his Aliens from 1986. Imagine if one of Aliens’ marines had a change of heart and decided to fight alongside the creatures with acid for blood. It even has a new Paul Reiseresque corporate stooge!
And here’s the ultimate compliment for Avatar’s special effects: they’re so good that I don’t feel much of a need to talk about them. Yes, the world of Pandora and its giant blue inhabitants is visually overwhelming at first. Too busy, too day-glow, too outdoor rave. Once you adjust, Avatar is completely immersive. The Uncanny Valley that turned films like The Polar Express into horrific parades of undead fleshbots is nowhere to be seen – thanks to being artfully subsumed into alien facial features.
I’m nervous about saying it in case Avatar completely falls apart on a second viewing, but there were brief flashes where I felt like a kid watching Star Wars for the first time.
All Avatar‘s above pleasures, however, depend on your ability to process this pair of facts: it’s about a noble indigenous population fighting corporate greed and American imperialism in defence of their world’s vibrant ecosystem… that also happens to be the most expensive film ever made.
As Alanis Morisette might say: that’s the black fly in your chardonnay.
Does the production of a film affect your enjoyment of it? Read this unmissable New Yorker piece about Cameron’s creative process on the set of Avatar, and wonder if we should dismiss all art made with money that could have been better spent. I think it’s only human to hear an obscene Hollywood budget like this and have a flicker of thought about starving third world children – but if you follow this logical path, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify the cost of any art at all.
Is the disjunction between Avatar’s moral message and its decadent production an unforgiveable hypocrisy? Or is the fact that Cameron convinced his backers to throw hundreds of millions at a film that’s so overtly anti-corporate and anti-America the ultimate act of insider subversion? Does it matter?
If it sounds like I’m making excuses, I don’t mean to be. It’s perfectly reasonable to think the amount of money spent of Avatar is repulsive, and avoid it for that reason alone. It’s to James Cameron’s credit, though, that I was so completely taken in by the movie that these questions didn’t even occur to me until after the credited rolled – and after the hideous Titanic-style ballad began.