Of Capes and Cinema

Marvel  vs. DC.

To some, this argument is as inconsequential as “Chocolate vs. Vanilla.”  To others, this is as important as Republican vs. Democrat or Protestant vs. Catholic.

To us geeks, it is a very important argument. I have friends who are staunch Marvel fans, pointing to Marvel’s deeper characters and struggles with real-life problems as evidence that their title is superior. For DC supporters, the argument stands that without DC, there would be no Marvel, and that the DC pantheon of heroes reads more like the gods on Olympus than acrobats in tights.

But, this is a movie blog, so, I’m going to discuss Comic Book Movies, which is a whole other ball of wax.

Schlock Therapy

For three years now, my day job (that is, the one I get paid for) has been in Behavioral Health.

Mental Heatlh.

A psych ward.

Now, at my previous facility (I have since moved halfway across the country), I worked first and second shifts, which meant that I had a lot of interaction with patients, something I kind of miss now that I’m a third-shifter. Anyway, on Tuesdays from three to four in the afternoon, there was a group scheduled, but there was no one to lead said group, which resulted in the patients simply sitting in the dayroom and watching a video. There were two problems with this: one, we only had two videos that actually worked and two, any patient who had been there before (and there were a few) or had been there for more than a week had probably already seen both of them. I felt bad for the patients, having to sit through the same two depressing videos over and over again, so I asked if there was something else we could do.

Legendary Awfulness: Edward D. Wood, Jr.

There are those in cinema who are remembered and celebrated because of their genius: Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Truffaut, Fellini, Wilder, and so on. But only one filmmaker is remembered and celebrated for his lack of talent: Edward D. Wood, Jr., the mind behind such “classics” as Plan 9 From Outer Space, Glen or Glenda and Bride of the Monster. He was the Orson Welles of bad movies, writer, director, producer and actor, but if Welles is one end of the spectrum, then Wood is the other.

Icon. Cinema Icon.

It’s hard to find a person alive who doesn’t know who James Bond is. He has so permeated our society, that every spy movie made since his debut has compared itself to the franchise. He is the spy, while Jason Bourne, Jack Ryan and others are just spies. His name is also a genre unto itself; it’s easy to describe a movie as being “a James Bond film.” The only other character I can think of that has this distinction is Godzilla. (“It’s a Godzilla movie.” No further synopsis required.)

We can argue about what the best Bond movie is (Goldfinger) or the worst (Die Another Day), but in the end, we keep coming back to our gentleman spy, whether he is Connery, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan, Craig or (god forbid) Lazenby. What is the attraction? Is it the old cliché that “women want him and men want to be him”? Or is there something deeper? Is the James Bond series popcorn entertainment personified, or is there something about the alcoholic, womanizing assassin that speaks to our deeper subconscious?

Or is it simply that, while there are many imitators, there is only one Bond? As Carly Simon sang: “Nobody does it better.”

Requiem for the Theater

 

They say that the movie theater is dead, that within a few years, the Cineplex will be a dinosaur; its insides scooped out and turned into a bargain bookstore or a church. In this age of wide-screen, hi-def TVs, Blu-Ray players, surround sound and bathroom breaks a mere pause button away, why bother going out and fighting crowds, paying exorbitant prices for snacks, sitting through twenty minutes of previews and having to deal with people who don’t understand that “turn off your cell phone” means TURN OFF YOUR CELL PHONE!

                They say that, and I don’t entirely disagree. It costs a lot to go to the movies. Tickets where I live are $7.50 apiece for a matinee. So, if the wife and I go to an early show, that’s $15. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but remember, that same movie is going to be available for purchase in a few months for about $20, or rent for as little as $1 (less if you’re a regular Netflix user like me). So, you could see it now for fifteen, or wait a little bit and see it for a buck.

                Not exactly brain surgery, is it?

                And yet…

The Art House Strikes Back

Over the past week, I’ve enjoyed a little “staycation” (that is, a vacation where you don’t actually go anywhere) from my job at the Rainbow Factory. I decided to take advantage of this by catching up on my movie watching. To my surprise and delight, Hulu Plus offers a ton of Criterion films commercial-free and unedited.

                For those of you unfamiliar, the Criterion Collection is a video label that specializes in art-house foreign films, as well as American films with a unique vision or voice, films like Rashomon, Wild Strawberries, 8 ½ and Harold and Maude. These DVDs/Blu-Rays tend to be higher in price, difficult to find in brick and mortar stores and (lately) even hard to get to on Netflix.  Thus, finding a lot of them right at my fingertips, available to watch whenever I want (for a low monthly fee of $7.99) was a godsend.

                Oh, and they have TV shows to, if you’re into that sort of thing.

                So, what did I watch?

Movies I Dragged My Mother To

Kids are strange, particularly when it comes to movies. Anyone who has spent any amount of time around a child will tell you that they can watch the same movies over and over and over again, and never get tired of them.

We, the current generation of film geeks, were also guilty of this as children. As a young child, every time we went to the video store (itself a novelty in 1985), we had to rent The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. As much as my family hoped I would, I never got tired of heffalumps, blustery days, or Tigger getting stuck in a tree. Remember, this was before buying a video was an option (my generation still remembers commercials advertising movies that were now “affordably priced to own,” which meant about $19.99).

Ah, Pooh Bear.