AudioShocker

Figuring that the rest of Audioshocker would have Street Fighter covered, rather than running out to see it over the weekend, I finally got around to seeing Push, which really wasn't too bad. In fact, it was just about as good as it needed to be in order to sustain any amount of comment-worthiness. Push, along with the other recent movies that have copped the style of comic book movies without actually being based on comic books, represents an important niche in Hollywood movies.

As much as we here at Audioshocker are ever mindful of comics-related enterprises, I tend to take a cynical slant towards the recent boom in comic book movies, with its charge obviously being led by the movie-making wing of Marvel; namely, that there's no way the comic book movie fad will last. The ever-approaching Watchmen movie is an obvious point of discussion here: perhaps more than any other comic book (or graphic novel), Watchmen comes with a sizable built-in audience. Obviously, it's not the size of the audience for the Harry Potter movies, but it's well-known enough to appeal to the kinds of studios that make comic book based blockbuster movies. But I'm sort of backing towards the point here: there are very few comic books that large audiences care about. They're easy to list:

Superman
Batman
X-Men
Spider-Man
Hulk

and that's about it. Hulk almost doesn't make the list, since, eventually, bungling all the movies that they make with him will kill the fanbase. Iron Man isn't on that list because I argue that it was the movie that made him popular--Robery Downey Jr., really, and not anything having to do with the comic books itself.

So, the popularity of the other sundry comic book movies coming out has to do with a wide-audience interest that was built on the success of the movies about characters that the larger audience cared about. So, people will continue to come out in droves to see Marvel movies, but only because they currently associate Marvel's movie-making machinery with solid entertainment, not because they give a shit about Ant-Man or Nick Fury or even Captain America. Unless there are millions more closet comic book readers in America than I'm estimating that there are. Which means that any given studio which can make a movie which looks and sounds like a comic book movie should be able to meet with similar success as Marvel. Currently, Marvel is at the advantage because they've got decades of stories and characters to draw on, and have aggressively stream-lined their movie-making process (I think, once we get some distance on all these movies, it will be very easy to talk about the movies they make as an aesthetic whole--many stylistic features, such as the soundtracks are already being assimilated into a palpable "Marvel style"). It's only a matter of time before non-comic book derived entities close the gap to get a bigger piece of the market share.

Which is fine with me; I'm mostly concerned for the best movies possible being made, so if a movie is "good" while copping the whole comic book or superhero thing, that's good enough for me. Push is already a step closer to that goodness. It's got a decent premise, with perhaps too familiar powers involved (a spectrum of psychic abilities, with the different characters each having different abilities, requiring them to work in teams), but it's major plus is that it was ambitious as a movie. It didn't shoot low and it didn't wink at the camera. In fact, for the first two-thirds of the movie I thought it was really doing quite a good job. The major problem with it is that it didn't feel like it was planned out as well as it needed to be, so had a couple slightly strange continuity issues and more noticeably, some problems with its pacing. The ambition is a big thing; it really shows that these non-comic book movies really could catch up with the comic book movies.

There's a kind of movie which is bad in a way that makes it fun to try and make it better. Push also meets this criteria, which is nice, since my bias against "ironic enjoyment" of bad movies is well documented. I much prefer talking about an almost-good movie and how to make it better than to try and laugh at a movie which is a failure. But, of course, that kind of discussion isn't something I'd necessarily want to have "in public" since it's really nerdy to talk about how to make sci-fi movies better. Even though my ideas are good ones. They should hire me to write the sequel.

In other movie news, two of the trailers that played before Push were for movies called, respectively, "Fighting" and "Knowing." The both look incredibly terrible, but it cracks me up that such similar gerund-titled movies are coming out at the same time. It reminds me of the many instances of studio competition around given movies, where one studio hears that another is making an airplane disaster movie so it rushes to make one as well. I've always thought the best example of this is when David Lynch's Mulholland Drive came out at the same time as Arlington Road. Mulholland Drive being, of course, one of Lynch's true masterpieces, and Arlington Road being completely terrible. And the plots weren't similar at all--one is only left assuming that some studio wanted to compete with Mulholland Drive, so picked a road name for their movie too. This makes Fighting versus Knowing that much funnier, since they generally represent opposite ends of the spectrum of behaviors.