Wednesday, May 20, 2015

The strange convergence of comics and movies.

We currently live in the movie age I only dared dream of as a child:  all my favorite heroes rendered big as life on the big screen.  It's only kind of a shame I've outgrown it to some degree.  But nostaliga is a hell of a drug, so I dutifully watch the majority of them anyway, from the clunkers to the keepers.  And while I'm not so interested in seeing spider-man's origin story for the umpteenth time anymore, I am interested in the broader phenomenon of the comic book industries shift in focus from print to cinema.

To be sure, both DC and Marvel and printing books and promoting the hell out of them, but sometime since Iron Man and Iron Man busted into the screen, it seems the central canon of their myth-making has shifted quite rapidly from the print universe to the MCU.  With that, the movies themselves have begun to resemble comics books in editing an execution in a way that really hinders the story-telling, imo.

It used to be you'd watch more or less a complete movie, more or less contained with itself, with only Agent Coulson and the little bits at the end hinting at a broader lead-in to the Avengers movie.  Since the Avengers, however, the movies themselves seem more like summer comic book events, with all the positives and negatives that go along with it.  All your favorite heroes in one place?  Check.  Broader tie-ins to spin-off stories?  Check.  Epic-scope action but so many moving pieces there's no time to actually focus on any one character or idea with any depth?  Check, check, a thousand times check.

I was addicted to comic books for quite a while.   The main culprit was an addictive personality and the teaser at the end of ever issue.  It didn't matter how tidily an individual issue was at the end, there'd always be some sort of non-sequitor] leading into the next plot.  For me, it was just enough of a hook to get me into the next issue "What does mister sinister have planned!!!?", even if it made no sense in the context of the current issue.  It was aesthetically damaging to the story of the issue, while completely functional in giving me a reason to tune in next week too.  I found it and my inability to not check the next week out completely annoying.

Unfortunately, the MCU movies are turning into this type of story-telling almost exclusively.  Avengers 2 was so busy setting up all the spin-offs and sequels it almost didn't have time to tell the story it was actually there to tell.  It felt much more like comic book editing and storytelling, especially in the worst sort of pulpy, "I promise the real pay-off is in the next issue" kind of way.

It took me a long time to figure this out, but the primary motive of the storyteller plays an important part of the storytelling experience.  There's stories that an artist has to tell because they are truth, beauty and wonder and there are stories a corporation tells because it's building a franchise and it matters less that the stories express the truth, beauty and wonder of the world, which they might, than viewers buy the next installment.  They're trying to run a business here after all.

I'm not saying the latter style of storytelling is evil or anything, but I prefer the former, which generally only occurs in a utopian ideal where whether the story makes enough money to feed the artist isn't really a factor.  If you write to eat you write to please others more than yourself, and that's not wrong.  That said, it feels like the current editorship at the MCU in particular, (the complete bro-run clusterfuck that is the DCCU is better left untouched for my current purposes) has lost a certain sense of subtlety in weaving it's universe together.

GotG was delightful in part, I believe, because it had so little connection to the MCU at the time, and no reason to include material irrelevant to the proceedings at hand.  In fact, I'd argue that the parts of the movie that dragged the most were the bits with Thanos, precisely because they were there as a placeholder to tie it in to the larger MCU, with the implicit promise of a pay-off down the road.  Avengers 2, on the other hand, was all the more insufferable because it felt like the action occasionally got paused, and an editor walked out from behind the screen, coughed into a mic and said, "See this?  This has nothing to do with the movie, be sure to watch Thor 3 to get the rest of the story!"  In a comic book this kind of asterisk is skippable, in a movie it grinds momentum to a halt.

All of which is to say, in terms of tying all the MCU movies together, less would be so much more.  It WAS so much more pre-avengers.  I feel like the editors and producers have lost sight of the fact that ALL that is necessary to get my ass in a seat for the next installment, is to make this one so good I'll leave the theater hungry for more.  This was my experience with Fury Road, and I didn't even know a sequel was in the works until after.  The movie itself certainly didn't waste time horning that in.  I'm hoping someone above my paygrade can gently remind the folks in the Disney story-telling empire of the beauty of simplicity.

When I was young and dumb, among my greatest wishes was that before the end of the world, Lucas would get around to making the Star Wars prequels he'd always hinted at and special effects would get good enough to bring all my favorite superheroes to life.  I never imagined that so many of these movies would so unnecessarily leaving me feeling so hollow.  Be careful what you wish for kids.

Monday, May 18, 2015

So I lied about not writing more about Fury Road.

So let's take it as a given that I don't have anything more intelligent to say than any of the legions of people who wrote about Mad Max:  Fury Road so far.  I complained last week that the proliferation of think pieces of every good thing threatens to destroy my enjoyment of good things before I have the chance to see them, but really that is a silly thought.  If the necessary consequence of good art is getting people to think, and then those people go on to actually express what they think using words, I can't be against it.  Telling stories to each other and talking about the kinds of stories we tell to each other is very important to me, after all.

My favorite commentary so far comes from Warren Ellis, whose work I adore.  He likens the film to a scream from the last century, a doomsday time capsule telling us the same stories of apocalyptic collapse that weighed heavily on everyone's mind in the 80s.  I like that theory.  I have no good counter-narrative.  I would suggest, as an aside, however, that the collapse of Mad Max's world has never really gone away, we've just gotten used to the possibility and think about it less.  The nuclear arsenals remain, in what level of maintenance and upkeep I don't know.  I trust the system to maintain those systems indefinitely not at all.  I can imagine a future where nuclear war happens because we maintain the necessary infrastructure so poorly that accidents happen and we unleash nuclear hell more or less by accident and incompetence.  This is the scenario that actively concerns me.

Beyond the nuclear danger, little else has changed either.  Profit is still at war with the environment, women still fight an intractable war against men who believe it is their heritage to dominate, war itself is still a very profitable business for arms makers.  In the aftermath of a really stupid misfire of thermonuclear armament, we would still be dealing with the societal poisons currently kept at bay by our more civilized impulses.  All of which is why Mad Max is still strangely relevant and thought-provoking.

Fury Road shies from these ideas not at all, although I wouldn't say it beats you over the head with them.  In fact, any think pieces beating readers over the head with the politics of the film run the risk of diminishing the beautiful minimalism of the plot.  The film is, first and foremost, capital-A Art and should be appreciated as such.  The themes are poignant, yes, but first and foremost it is goddamn beautiful.  The cinematography, the wide shots, the costuming, the characters, all completely, 100% mesmerizing from start to finish.  Just when you think you're getting bored with the aesthetic novelty of the shot a new wonder pops into frame.  Just when you think you might have time to catch your breath it shifts back into gear again.  Just a spectacle from start to finish, one made all the more delightful by actual character development and heart with absolutely no fat left to trim.

Very few movies seem to come along like this anymore.  It almost seems like we're ecstatic when a movie comes along that has even a basic competence in telling a clean, engaging story.  Which isn't to diminish Fury Road as merely competent, but to say that basic competence, and dare I say some actual heartfelt soul, is part of what I think has people going gaga over it for.  I think maybe we're all currently kind of drowning in a flood of nostalgic, corporate creations, in a maybe we should be careful what we wish for kind of way.  Movies like the Avengers are nice, but they seem less works of art, and more carefully tested and pruned franchises, where every scene exists in service of leveraging the franchise as a whole for maximum profit.  The percentage of time in Avengers 2 devoted purely and exclusively to setting up other characters and franchises for content in future movies is not inconsequential, as others have noted, and it has a real, detrimental impact to the story-telling.

Mad Max has none of that bullshit and that is part of what makes it wonderful.  I'm still thinking about scenes a day later, not for the political statement, not for the franchise potential, purely because they were just gorgeous moments in time.  The blind leader of bullet-town riding astride his car-tank in the marshlands, firing his guns defiantly.  Immortan Joe's completely mesmerizing look as he drove his big-boy big-wheeled truck to get back "his property."  Max and his insane visions.  The craziest, most beautiful dust storm you've ever seen, the completely bonkers vehicles (porcupine sedan, people fishing platforms, a truck solely devoted to a guitarist whose axe breathes fire, complete with giant drum section in the back).  The war boys.  The grizzled women of the desert biker gang.  It is an experience, and it stays with you.

The violence, while always my least favorite part, while occasionally disturbing in implication, especially for new parents I would think, was probably just right in that it was enough to instill a sense of danger , one that starts very quickly and never really lets up, but not reveled in to the point of distracting from the film.  It also serves as a indicator of just how mad everyone has gone in the aftermath of societal collapse, much like every other Mad Max movie.  Everyone seems a little gone to one degree or another, and the brutal violence is just one facet of that new reality.

The politics and themes are themselves beautiful.  The redemption themes are far and away my favorite part.  Furiosa's drive to redeem herself for her part in the system she perpetuated, Nux's redemption by women who refuse to hate him, and insist on kindness in the fact of madness.  The seeds of civilization (literally and figuratively) are essentially carried exclusively by the women of the film in a way that felt honest to me.  While the women are indeed protected by an extremely violent man and woman, I love that they never flinch from the ideal that maybe more killing is not the path to a better future.  Idealistic or not, someone has to carry that torch to the other side of madness.  Max is not so much hero here, as survivor.  Grappling with his demons, struggling to maintain a grip on the here and now, even as it threatens to destroy him.  Furiosa is on the real hero's journey.  It was her arc and Nux's redemption that really grabbed me the most.  Max is mostly there to witness and survive it, as usual.

Fury Road is gorgeous.  It is a provocative work of art.  If you can stomach the violence I can't recommend it enough.  Yes, it's a little bonkers, but let's be honest:  we're all mad here.  Max's world is a warning of just how mad we can get.