You're The Voice

A fabulous peek-a-boo moment last week on NBC's Community, a new comedy that is continuing to pick up steam as it moves through its first season. In the Halloween episode, Abed comes dressed as Batman, entering an early scene with a flawless imitation of Christian Bale's increasingly irritating Batman whisper/growl. But what brings the episode home at several levels is his climactic reappearance at the end of the episode, which currently stands as the finest parody/homage/reappropriation of Nolan's Batman universe.

Watchmen Extras

Since receiving the movie version of Watchmen on Blu-ray, I've been going through the extras slowly but surely. The moderately hyped, ridiculously titled 'Maximum Movie Mode' is pretty nifty, even if it fails to say anything interesting about the movie in three hours of audio-visual commentary, image galleries, text overlays, and picture-in-picture videos. Like the movie, the technique is far more impressive than the ultimately shapeless content it provides.

The second-disc featurettes are unsurprisingly superficial as well. The best one is probably a half-hour documentary-lite titled "The Phenomenon: The Comic that changed Comics," which briefly introduces some of the most obvious points of the book while singing its praises in nonstop hyperbole. This may be considered an easily palatable introduction to the book for people who haven't read it (and honestly: how many people buying this Blu-ray are unfamiliar with the comic book?). But in drawing its commentary on the film from the likes of Malin Akerman, Zack Snyder, Dave Gibbons, and a parade of DC Comics executives, it's not exactly providing the kind of insight that would make this stuff interesting to the fans for whom this was most likely intended. Some of the most cringe-worthy sound bites actually come from Time magazine book critic Lev Grossman, who proudly proclaims that Watchmen showed us the underbelly of superhero archetypes, and that we "loved them all the more fore it" (???). The whole thing suffers badly from the absence, both in body and in spirit, of Alan Moore, whose fundamental authorship is consistently undervalued, while a constant source of annoyance is the frequent use of the god-awful 'motion comic' version of the book (a DVD release that stupidly animates the panels from the book, supplemented by some absolutely terrible voice casting).

Unfortunately, it's all downhill from there, as the 26-minute "Real Superheroes: Real Vigilantes" combines endless scenes from the film with Discovery Channel-type reportage on real-world vigilante, again with commentary from the film's cast and crew, along with pretentious-as-hell Grossman offering this kind of insight: "They didn't really have superpowers; they were just dudes wearing costumes. And it makes you think really, really hard about questions of ethics and morality in a way we're sort of not used to, but Watchmen forced us to." Wow. I guess Richard Schickel isn't the only idiot working as a critic for Time magazine...

Red Dawn and America's obsession with Insurgents

Watching Red Dawn, that astonishingly up-front Reagan-era bit of violent Cold War paranoia fused with teenage NRA wish-fulfillment, I was struck once again by how strongly the narratives of American pop culture emphasize underdog insurgency fantasies in which the heroes (i.e. the Americans) find themselves either literally or metaphorically under the dirty boot-heel of a technologically superior invader/conqueror. From Star Wars to The Matrix and from Rambo III to 300, the protagonists with whom the (implicitly American) audience is made to identify face enemies that for all intents and purposes have more in common with the United States as a geopolitical, economic, and cultural superpower than any other real-world entity. Is this desire to indulge in fantasies of identifying one's national identity as that of the underdog an ancient remnant of the American Revolution? Or perhaps the remainders of Southern frustrations resulting from the Civil War?

It is in any case noteworthy that this 'insurgency fable' seems to reappear most prominently under (neo-)conservative White House administrations. The list of popular Reagan-era films in which American heroes triumphed over forces that were both superior in numbers and in technological advantage, either in Vietnam or elsewhere, are many, while the 21st-century list continues to grow even now - the long-rumored Red Dawn remake is finally going to happen, and apparently in a way that is 'very intense, very much keeping in mind the post-9/11 world that we’re in' (according to screenwriter Carl Ellsworth. Who knows? They might get Harry Dean Stanton to return in a similar small role. And whether or not he is avenged this time, perhaps he can at least get the principals to keep from blubbing every other scene this time...

Green Lantern - fan trailer

The already famous fan-made trailer shows just how little it takes to connect the dots and imagine a full-length generic blockbuster simply by creatively repurposing spectacular moments from existing features...

Classic Colbert: Superhero Stamps

"But the real injustice: out of ten stamps, no Captain America. Ridiculous. He's a real hero. Every lick of his sticky backside would taste like democracy. Plus: your tongue would be greeted as a liberator."

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Wolverine, Schmolverine

Loath as I am to lavish any kind of attention on the atrocious X-Men Origins: Wolverine, I somehow feel obliged to comment on this most recent entry in the ongoing line of superhero blockbuster embarrassments. One would think somehow that no matter how bad Wolverine was, it couldn't possibly be any worse than Brett Ratner's abortion of a movie X-Men: The Last Stand. But although a comprehensive point-by-point comparison would require more attention spent on both films than I can reasonably summon, sufficed to say that Wolverine certainly isn't better in any noticeable way.

Shallowly hyperbolic in every department, the film has been described as something written and produced by a group of eighth-graders, though one might actually suspect that today's eighth-graders would on average probably be capable of an end product a good deal more sophisticated than the collection of visual clichés and narrative non-sequiturs on display here (not to mention the fact that off-the-shelf software packages are able to conjure up better-looking visual effects than pretty much anything in Wolverine...).

From Three Kings to Generation Kill

Having recently watched the Generation Kill mini-series a second time (after recently finishing the excellent book by Evan Wright), the time seemed right to revisit the only American film about the first Gulf War of any interest: David O. Russell's still-astonishing Three Kings. Both the similarities and the differences between these two pop-culture comments on American policy in Iraq are telling.

Ten years ago, when Three Kings was first released, it was already remarkable for a major studio to have somehow produced and distributed a high-profile picture starring heartthrobs George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg that served as a scathing critique of America's abandonment of the Iraqi people after the 'liberation' of Kuwait. And although the film ultimately loses its way and descends into rank sentimentality, it remains truly remarkable for at least two things: fist, its depiction of American soldiers as clueless, uneducated trash shooting video footage of themselves in front of American flags and freaking out to loud hiphop music; and second, a scene in which an Iraqi torturer (Saïd Taghmagoui) manages to make clear to his victim (Mark Wahlberg) what this was has meant to him. Both elements seem to point both to how much has changed, and to how much has stayed the same in just a little over a decade.

When comparing Three Kings to the semi-nonfictional Generation Kill, what may be most striking about Russell's depiction of the military in Iraq is that this is clearly a world where independent spirits like Clooney and cohorts have retained some degree of latitude within which they can undertake action and ultimately realign their own moral compass. This postwar landscape is still one where the American independent spirit, which may be initially inspired to seek out a profit by going after Saddam's stash of gold bullion, but which is ultimately redeemed by its own (reluctant) altruistic instinct, has the freedom to go out adventuring. And not only are the three surviving heroes' better impulses ultimately rewarded by a traditional Hollywood happy ending, but the mass media (represented in the film by reporter Nora Dunn) even prove instrumental in getting them their final just rewards.

In Generation Kill, all our desires to see goodness and nobility rewarded seem to be thwarted by endless levels of stifling bureaucracy and rampant incompetence. As in Three Kings, we easily recognize and appreciate charismatic, instantly sympathetic characters like Brad Colbert and Lt. Nate Fick: both are presented as good, professional soldiers who recognize injustice when they see it. Due to its serial nature and longer running time, Generation Kill is able to present a wide and diverse range of characters within its cast of soldiers, running the gamut from 'Whiskey Tango' ('white trash') Trombley to noble warriors like Eric Kocher. As such, its depiction of the American army is -unsurprisingly- far more nuanced than the cavorting rabble pictured briefly in Three Kings's opening scenes, from whom only a select foursome are singled out for enlightenment.

Generation Kill present numerous moments where opportunities are raised for these soldiers to 'do the right thing' and help the population rather than antagonizing it, or even killing indiscriminately. But at every turn, the combined forces of stupidity (in the form of commanding officers 'Captain America' and 'Encino Man') and bureaucratic, politically-minded leadership (Col. Ferrando, aka 'Godfather') seem to crush all hopes of actually doing anything about it. Unlike the deliberately fabulist Three Kings, the viewer here is left with no way out of this nightmare, and feels stuck in this eight-hour audiovisual quagmire - much like reporter Evan Wright must have felt at the time.

But of course the most striking thing about Three Kings from a post-Iraq II perspective is neither its unusual level of political involvement nor its striking imagery: it is its torture scene, which becomes almost unbearable to watch in the aftermath of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. The first disquieting moment comes when our heroes accidentally discover a dungeon that is being used by the Iraqi army to torture prisoners, and the three soldiers are noticeably shocked. This single moment illustrates uncannily how much has changed since 1999, when the idea that the American military would use torture was all but inconceivable. It becomes even more unsettling when Wahlberg's character is subsequently abused, and through this process comes to identify with his Iraqi torturer, imagining his own suburban home being attacked and losing his wife and child from within the supposed safety of American soil.

Contrast this sequence with any of several moments in Generation Kill where blatantly incompetent commanding officers regularly abuse prisoners, needlessly attempt to bayonet Iraqi soldiers who have already surrendered, and take degrading pictures of Iraqis as take-home mementoes, and one becomes aware of what a different kind of world this has become. Ten years ago, even the most politically involved popular American narratives maintained a belief in the innate benevolence of the American individual, and his ability to overcome adversity, temptation, and the military chain of command. Generation Kill illustrates how cynical our perception of this myth has now become, and how futile it is to even imagine an escape from it.