AudioShocker

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.