I, like so many humans in America, over the weekend, ran out to see the new X-Men: Wolverine movie. As usual, though I certainly have an opinion about the thing (it was about as bad as I imagined it could possibly be), I am hoping to avoid anything of a "review" here, instead hoping to find signs of any deeper trends lurking in the murky swill of the nearly unquaffable beverage that was Wolverine.
Well... are there?
The main question that I have is how many movies like this one Marvel will be able to make before the mystique runs out. I, and most other people as well, have plenty of reason to root for Marvel, since they're the little guy, and independent, and fully committed to making all these movies (DC being less concerned since they've got Time Warner behind them). It's hard to imagine anything like a general collapse of Marvel studios happening any time soon--or ever... maybe I, personally, fail to understand the demographic for, not Wolverine, but the inevitable (no matter how precipitous the drop in Box Office figures from this past weekend to next weekend) Wolverine 2, and any other X-Men: Origins stories. Since the movie-makers so obviously stuffed this thing to the gills with mutants, hoping for anything to stick well enough to be a spin-off, how many of these mutants are really all that popular out there in the real world that people would bother going to a movie about them?
Take Gambit, for instance. Cool character, cool powers. But the dude they cast as Gambit couldn't maintain his accent for a whole scene, let alone the whole movie. I can't help but feel like the idea was to plug Gambit in there in order to have him show up in more movies, possibly headlining one eventually. Otherwise, it's just, what? for the nerds who like to play spot the mutant? Not that nerds have ever been a viable demographic; they aren't. But if they were a market, I think the mangling of Deadpool and similar crimes-against-nerds pretty well eradicates the market for a while.
But that's it right? Marvel gets a marketshare so long as its got characters that will bring out the normals, as Wolverine is obviously capable of doing. And its not like formulaic movies aren't successful. So, again, since I'm generally pro-Marvel, I have hard time being that pissed off by the fact that Wolverine: The Movie was not very good. It's a bit harder to wrap my head around the fact that it looked so cheaply made (the CG looked decades old, certainly not up to the standard of the first two X-Men movies). But this is why I end up being so hopeful for non-comic-book superhero movies, since they have to work harder to get noticed, which I think would tend to lead to more ambitious (Push was definitely way more enjoyable than Wolverine).
Nor do I really think that it's bad thing if Marvel Studios churn out a couple of mediocre or bad comic book movies every year (I mean, they already are, and have been for a while). Gotta make money. And it's always inappropriate, in the realm of popular culture, to expect people to make good products. Goodness happens occasionally (the first two X-Men movies, Iron Man), but the norm will still be bad (X-Men 3, Wolverine, Daredevil, Ghost Rider, Hulk, etcetera). And these movies don't effect the quality of the books, so so long as that's the case, everything should be hunky dory.
Speaking of books...
Culturology Summer of Booklove Bookclub #1: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz
So I thought this was pretty good book. The tone is set immediately, with those epigraphs from Fantastic Four and Derek Walcott, and I think especially the first 80-90 pages were really compelling. The narrator's--Yunior's--voice is one that I don't think I would always like, in terms of its colloquialisms and informality, but it seems to crucial to this, since without the voice, Oscar would go from a GhettoNerd to just a plain old Nerd, which would've lost the entire book's project. So maybe it's wrong to point out some obvious lynch-pin to the thing like that, but it's what makes it good, worthwhile, etc.
One thing which stuns me about the book is that Oscar is basically an unlikable character. It's easy to feel bad for him, certainly, but in terms of actually caring about him, its more of a stretch. But his being so utterly out of place makes for compelling fiction. I suppose there's some amount of allegorizing that people might do in terms of contextualizing Oscar's "story" and his uprootedness, and maybe that's the right thing to do. I dunno. There's obviously some thematic connection to be made between being an immigrant and failing to belong socially in school and all that. Maybe I just feel unqualified to go into it.
But this is, like, a club, right? So what do you all want to talk about? I know at least Neal read it.
And, in terms of future books, let's do some brainstorming. I read a lot, so I'll probably just plug in whatever's next for me personally any given week, so we can plan ahead to stay more current than that. My reading list is currently stuff that I should have read by now but haven't. For next week: Slaughterhouse Five by Vonnegut. It's true, I've never read it before now. And I wanna read Blindness at some point this summer. And Neal wants to do Sharp Teeth; that's fine too.
Pete, I thought you would actually like this one! It was very 90s action movie in a lot of ways. I had a lot of fun watching it. So much so that I might go back again. And I disagree that the CG was worse than X-Men 1 - I think that movie had some seriously shitty looking CG. However, this new one was definitely worse than X2. Still, in a way, I think the raw CG worked, because that makes this movie feel like it actually takes place before the first X-Men movie. In that sense, I like that it was a bit raw.
I should fill you in on something important here: this movie wasn't made by Marvel. It was made by Fox. Marvel produced the film to a degree (they have certain producers that they consult although they don't have full creative control), but the approvals and marketing and most of production was handled by Fox (they currently have the rights to make any movies featuring the X-Men characters). That makes this a whole other beast from Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk.
I tried to read S5, but couldn't do it. I did read Cat's Cradle though (sweet as hell!!!).
wow, a cultorology column i can actually get behind. way to go pete. i agree on >70% of your points - especially regarding gambit and potential for saturation.
regarding Oscar. you're right, at times Yunior's vernacular can get in the way, but overall I got it. I do plan on calling coochie toto from now on.
What got me is the footnotes. In David Foster Wallace style (concession: i've only read like half of one DFW book, so my knowledge of his style is slim) the footnotes were fun at first, but quickly became distracting.
This is the second book I have read that uses the novel as a pretty clear foil for something more didactic. The first was The Goal, a 'business novel' that marries narrative with operations and organizational behavior theory. It's a textbook - but it's also a great story that illustrates the concepts and keeps you flipping pages.
Here, Junot spins us a tale about Oscar Wao and the Fuku upon his family - but the book is as much a history lesson about the D.R. as it a great story. And even though he writes with prejudice to the military regime, the research is obvious. The lessons generally reside in the footnotes, which makes the book a cool sort of inversion.
Sorry about conflating Fox and Marvel there. Should've known that (I feel like I kind of did). And everyone knows Fox is terrible.
As for Oscar Wao: I liked the footnotes, in terms of the "didactic" aspect you're talking about, Neal. To me, it joins the short-list of modern novels with footnotes that are actually quite good, each of them: Infinite Jest (is this the DFW novel you only read half of? that would still count for what? like 450 pages?), and House of Leaves (by Mark (I think his name is Mark) Danieleski), a very cool novel that starts out amazingly, gets crazy, then gets melodramatic and let-down-ish. Infinite Jest I have problems with, with the same kind of didacticity as you identify in Oscar Wao; I think House of Leaves, since its so much more concerned with its genre-fucking probably plays it the best (though when the footnotes start to travel through the middle of several pages, that might lose the crowd somewhat--the typographical "labyrinth" section of the book is cool, but the book never really recovers afterwards.
Foster Wallace is generally fun as hell; the footnotes thing gets annoying though. The worst example, to my mind, is his book about infinity was unreadably annoying (I got through maybe the first 100 pages or so; pretty far, really, I guess). When he was alive, DFW was the author I most loved to hate, but since his death I've softened considerably, pushover that I am.
To me, the footnotes in the Diaz book provide an interesting tension, in that, especially since Oscar is such an unempathetic character (that is, since we only feel bad for him, not with him), my impulse as a reader was to make the stuff about the DR really important, in terms also just of character and motivation etc. but relegating the historical stuff to the footnotes seems to say that the novel is really about Oscar and his family, not the country itself. So it ends up striking a balance where, however didactic, the book is about both things, if not equally, then with some amount of backandforth.
Nick, I'm with you. Cat's Cradle is better than S-5 to me as well. I like 'em both, and a couple of Vonnegut's other books too. I guess S-5 is more ambitious and has a "better" message, but I feel like its also kind of grab-baggy once it leaves the core conceits of its premise. Cat's Cradle just hits its marks, one after another.
And making your effects shittier doesn't make a movie look "earlier"--that's a silly logic. Back in the day, his claws were totally lo-def!!! Nonsense. Another of my friend's was similarly shocked that I didn't like Wolverine, given my enjoyment of 80s and (some) 90s action movies. I guess, to me the issue is the general attitude conveyed by it--maybe I just missed it on this one, or was distracted by the look, or was distracted by comparing it to the first two X-Men movies, or maybe I just need some more time and I'll come around to its cheesiness. Part of it is this: Wolverine usually says snippy, sarcastic things, and has a generally cool, gruff attitude with one liners, but in the movie, I didn't notice any one-liners at all, or any real sense of personality coming out of Wolverine. So it made me blind to the parts that should have just been awesome, like him walking away from a totally out of proportion exploding helicopter.
If they make a Deadpool movie, and it seems like they might, they'd better fix his back story.
AudioShocker Shoutouts!
i just saw the Wolverine movie again last night and liked it just as much the second time. it's really growing on me. i totally agree about inconsistencies within the story, but for some reason these inconsistencies don't rub me the wrong way. maybe it's timing or maybe it's because some of the actors put in, my opinion, strong performances. i thought the guy who played Blob/Fred Dukes was great. i thought that will.i.am was great. i even thought Gambit was good once you disregard his sloppy accent (he was more Britney Spears Louisiana than Creole Louisiana). also, since i've off-and-on read Wolvie stories set in the past, his emotional turmoil meets less sarcasm style actually fit for me. in rewatching it, i was struck by Jackman's effort to make the shocker scenes really seems emotionally devastating for the character. i think the filming/editing just may have downplayed his performance a bit.