Monthly Archives: March 2009

Ultimate X-Men: The Tempest

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I assume I liked the last Ultimate X-Men book, insofar as I’ve been liking them in general. Plus also, tragedy struck, and while I don’t automatically like that (depending on what happened), I definitely always like aftermath. And The Tempest is very much about aftermath, even though it’s in a quiet way, against the backdrop of a brand new villain and a mutant-assassin in his employ.

And, the book being short, that’s pretty much all that happened. I don’t want to elaborate on the aftermath, because, spoilers, and I can’t elaborate on the new villains, because I’m supposed to recognize them old school, and I did not get far enough to, I guess? But they made for a good story, and I can ask for little more than that! Except for being so deep into a series as to be pretty confusing, I could recommend the book unreservedly as an afternoon’s diversion.

So. That’s that, then!

Watchmen (2009)

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So my normal Mondays involve some beer, some bar food, and some zombie slaughter. It is a pretty sweet deal, y’know? This Monday had its differences, though, in that I skipped the beer and food alike in favor of a brief, ultimately successful struggle to get the media company to honor the passes they had sent out for a sneak preview of Watchmen. (Okay, technically, we relied upon the kindness of strangers. But the important part is, everybody had a seat!)

So I watched it for something like two hours and forty-five minutes, and I’ve spent the subsequent day or so trying to figure out what I can possibly say about it, that I haven’t already said. The layouts and scenery shift constantly between starkly beautiful and grimily seedy with almost dizzying regularity, as a perfect counterpoint to the characters and their actions and motivations and essential, almost unstoppable humanity.[1] It’s a highly political and moral tale set at the height of communist paranoia in an alternate, superhero-laden 1985, and the thing is, I really don’t want to say any more than that because it’s worth coming to fresh.

But if you’re one of the people who didn’t come fresh, because you’ve already read Alan Moore’s original book from which this movie was drawn, I’ll say this much more: it is very probably the most faithful and effective adaptation of a literary work I have ever seen.[2] Got anything going on Friday or maybe Saturday? At least, anything you can’t cancel? Because, go see this.

[1] I might be gushing. But the story and the characters really are that good.
[2] And I was pretty happy with almost all of Peter Jackson’s choices on the Lord of the Rings movies.

Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, Volume 1

I may have mentioned at one point my sudden realization that a lot of things I have read during my what, year-long now Ultimate Marvel kick, had backward-looking references to some books that came out right at the beginning and I had initially failed to be aware of. But I’ve found these, and they are now in the rotation. Which brings us inexorably to Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, in which various characters from the Ultimate universe, you know, team up with each other.

Or, to be more accurate, Spider-Man meets other characters in an explicit crossover format that comes from the late ’60s or early ’70s or somewhen, because Brian Michael Bendis mostly likes Spider-Man and wanted to revive that format for the new generation. The only problem is, brief historical curiosity aside, the stories weren’t that interesting. The strength of Marvel, past as well as present, has always been its ongoing storylines with long-term consequences. Yes, there’s a lot of soap-operaish returns to life and failed relationships, but they are at least consequential from moment to moment, instead of seen once and irrelevant ever after. Necessarily, one-shot stories are going to come off pretty cold in a world where everything else matters, quite a bit.

All that said, the stories themselves were about a conflict between Peter and the first appearance of the Hulk in this timeline, during which stuff got trashed, Spider-Man proved his own relative strength and durability to the audience, and any kind of climax was left completely by the wayside; about a meeting between the also-inaugural appearance of Iron Man (complete with origin story) and our good Mr. Parker, who actually do team up to stop some… high-tech Communists, I guess? And, best of all, a meeting between Peter and Wolverine in which they try to fight off Sabretooth (he’s an evil mutant who is basically the same as Logan, only, y’know, eviller) before lots of civilians get hurt. Unsurprisingly to me, that last story was the most compelling. I assume it has something to do with what mutually-sympathetic, outsider characters Wolverine and Spider-Man are within their respective worlds. So, yay inevitable chemistry.

The art, which I only tend to notice when it is particularly egregious or unusual, or when the story is boring me, was in this instance equally boring. I wonder if I just think most of the art is fantastic and forget to say so, or if I’m really picky about handing out praise, or if I think most of the art is workmanlike and that only bothers me because I’ve focused on it in search of something to hold my attention when the story is so-so. Probably it’s the first one, but the correlation in my (possibly faulty?) memory between iffy art and iffy plot has been high over time.

Yes Man

Return of the Wednesday dollar movie, yay. Less yay is that I still haven’t seen Friday the 13th’s remake yet. But that’s okay, because I will. What I did see was Yes Man, a very much by-the-numbers romantic comedy in which Jim Carrey meets the beautifully-voiced and pleasantly quirkily-featured Zooey Deschanel by virtue of saying yes to everything that comes his way.

Jim, you see, is this sad sack of a guy who got divorced several years ago and has pretty much given up. Whatever he does not commit to experiencing cannot disappoint him, so he commits to nothing. Except, he runs into an ex-coworker at an extremely low point and gets talked into a seminar about the power of “Yes!” From there forward, his life turns into a whirlwind of adventure and romance that has only one possible flaw. Well, okay, maybe two. I’d hate to spoil them, though.

Both the movie’s apparent message and especially its underlying actual message have a lot to recommend them, for anyone who is in shutdown mode. Pleasant though it would be, the world won’t come to you. (And I say that as someone for whom it actually did, once.) If you’re happy, that’s as far as it goes, and more power to you. But if you’re not, you pretty much have to stop waiting and get out there outside your numbed comfort zone and find the good things. And it will suck part of the time, but without the risk, you won’t ever get out of the hole. Also, though, you can swing too far in that direction. So don’t do that one either?

I guess my point is, if I didn’t think pretty highly of my present circumstances, I would find this movie inspiring instead of merely competently funny and exceedingly fun.