22 RHINO TIMES | Thursday, June 9, 2016 | www.rhinotimes.com
uncle orson (continued from page 15)
end, I was moved. I cared. Plus, there were enough bright lights and simulated violent acts that my eyes were continually engaged with the screen. This is the crudest definition of entertainment, but the CGI did its job. The spectacle was there, even if the premise was fundamentally incoherent. The prime silliness was that the whole story rested on having a super-mutant from ancient times assassinated just as he’s transferring himself to a new, unkillable body. The transfer is completed via the sacrifices of his four mutant assistants, but he is buried under tons of stone and he’s in a coma for 4,000 years. When a worshipful cult, plus a CIA operative, expose his resting place to sunlight, he wakes up and immediately has the power to push the stones out of his way and rise to the surface, where he plans to resume his role as a god. How many movie and book plots have depended on the persistence of a secret cult through thousands of years, waiting for the return of a powerful being? Yes, I know perfectly well that there are real analogues to this – but (a) they aren’t secret and (b) they have a lot of activities beyond mere chanting, wearing funny hats and waiting for godot ... or elvis, depending. Think of the stupidity of Nicolas Cage’s grandfather’s cult in Peggy Sue Got Married. Or the stupid secret societies in various Sherlock Holmes and The Mummy movies. But at least when this demongod (Oscar Isaac) arises, X-Men: Apocalypse plays him with earnestness rather than campiness (though the campiness is there, because it can’t help but be). My friend and I were entertained and, as I said, were even moved by the characters’ storylines. But at the end of the movie, when I said, “I’m so done with comic book movies,” my friend agreed. It’s possible for a popular genre to run its course, the way mafia novels did during the years after The Godfather. Yes, the diehard comic book fans will still love their comic books — that’s not at issue. It’s the willingness of the general public to plunk down their money and put their bums in theater seats to watch random special effects that’s in question. Westerns followed this trajectory. In the 1930s, some of the hugest stars in cinema history specialized in oaters, and if you couldn’t or wouldn’t ride a horse, you cut yourself out of a
significant percentage of Hollywood roles. When television came along, every network had a full stable – literally – of western series. And some of them, maybe even a lot of them, had good human stories told within the tropes and cliches. Shane had every cliche in the book, I think – but if you don’t feel at least wistful for the boy calling out Shane’s name as he rides away, you have no heart. Likewise, the fact that some of the comic-book movies are good stories does not mean we’re going to keep watching them forever. Westerns lasted a long time, despite such fantasy tropes as the hero never needing to kill anybody because, firing a pistol from his hip, he shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand. But along about 1970, westerns went away. It was partly a decision of television network executives to go a different direction, but nobody wept, because those execs had sensed something true: The American public was done with westerns. Maybe it was even simpler than that. Maybe it had become impossible for television writers to come up with new western series ideas to pitch. Maybe it was the growing shame of the fashionable Left about American history. Maybe it was the death of the myth of the Good Guy ... and it took comic book movies to resurrect it. As for movies, the comic book franchises are so expensive to film, partly because of the huge casts of actors able to be convincing in front of a green screen, and partly because of computer effects that require a dozen different CGI companies and a year of post-production, that they have to earn a lot of money to repay the costs. Poor DC Comics seems to be on the cutting edge of the death of the comic-book movie franchise, especially because the Justice League is even stupider than the X-Men, who at least have a coherent premise to work from. But Marvel isn’t immune. How many times are they going to try to make us believe in and care about the Fantastic Four? How can we possibly take the Avengers seriously when we have Norse gods commingling with a World War II-era action hero who uses a shield that can deflect, well, everything? It took us exactly one movie to be done with Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland “franchise”; the sequel
was made because nobody realized that even the general public can only be pushed so far when it comes to obnoxious, unfunny “comedy” that includes nobody we care about. All Tim Burton movies star Tim Burton, and maybe, to my great relief, we’re done with his pretentious ain’t-I-cool style. The movie studios are generally led by executives who have no clue what a story is, so if they can slap a numeral on the end of a previous hit title and be sure of making money, they know they won’t lose their jobs. That’s why we see travesties like movie series based on books, where they split the (usually weak) last volume in two so that they can eke two more guaranteed moneymaking films out of the franchise. The extreme example is, of course, The Hobbit, an embarrassing “trilogy” reconceived as a prequel to all the stupid mistakes Peter Jackson made in wrecking the storyline of Lord of the Rings. But this year seems to be showing that sequels aren’t such a sure thing, even when they’re pretty well written and very well performed by living actors and computer graphics artists alike. I didn’t feel like I wasted my time watching X-Men: Apocalypse. It was better written than it deserved to be; I cared about some of the characters. But if Jennifer Lawrence never has to paint on that blue body suit again, and instead gets to play characters who are commensurate with her talents, we movie-goers will be better off, and so will the actors. When modern movie-goers dip into the black-and-white westerns of the past, they quickly learn that, even when the writing and acting are good and they are certified as “classics,” if you’ve seen a half-dozen great westerns, you’ve seen them all. Twenty years from now, or even sooner, I think younger movie-goers will watch a few comic book movies from our time and say, “Millions of people paid money to watch this? How did they stay awake?” We already feel this way about the original Christopher Reeve Superman franchise, and the constantly rebooted Batman and Spider-Man franchises hit the point of sadness long ago – though the kid they’ve got playing Spider-Man in the latest Avengers movie is so promising that, yeah, I’ll probably watch the third reboot of Spider-Man since 2002. Has any other franchise been rebooted so rapidly? At least the Fantastic Four movies have all stunk the great stink, so we probably won’t see a third reboot of that mess.
Is there any comic book series so stupid and awful that it doesn’t have a legion of diehard fans pushing for a live-action movie? Maybe we’ve still got 20 years of mostly-computer-generated comic book movies ahead of us. Or maybe, mercifully, X-Men: Apocalypse is helping to lead us out of such nonsense franchises at a decent level.
.... Because some of them are very good, I tend to pick up books about fairly commonplace aspects of our world. Salt, pencils, the sea, seeds, rust ... they have all provided me with informative and, usually, entertaining treatments of a broad subject that touches on many aspects of history and contemporary life. It’s hard to think of a more ubiquitous, familiar and not-thoughtmuch-about subject than rain. Cynthia Barnett, in Rain: A Natural and Cultural History, does a very good job of making rain seem like an unknown phenomenon that deserves our rapt attention, even when it’s not falling. I had just finished listening to Rain (read by Christina Traister, from Audible.com) a few days before I drove up US 29 to visit a friend in Potomac Falls, Virginia, this past Saturday. In the early evening, with plenty of light in the sky, I ran into one of the worst gullywashers I’ve every experienced. On the hilly, winding four-lane between Charlottesville and Culpeper, the wind gusts were so powerful that the rain was truly sideways for many seconds at a time. During such gusts, there was so much water in the air that I not only couldn’t see the white stripes at the side of the highway, I couldn’t even see the hood of my car. My only guide was the taillights of cars ahead of me, which happened to be at enough of a distance that there might have been some curves that I wouldn’t see. Fortunately, the gusts were intermittent, so a second at a time I could see the stripes on the road very faintly, allowing me to continue – at a speed somewhere between 10 and 15 miles an hour. Cars behind me, following the guidance of my taillights, became impatient, and some of them whipped past me at a speed I thought very unsafe. So did they, since they always braked very quickly when they passed me and no longer had my taillights to guide them. Oh, they were thinking. That’s why that old coot in the Hyundai Santa Fe was going so slow. I can reassure them: Their (continued on page 27)