A Good Time To Be A Geek
It's been an interesting summer, particularly if one is a geek, particularly if one is a comics geek who really loves movies.
THE INCREDIBLE HULK would be the best superhero movie I'd ever seen, except that this was the same summer that IRON MAN came out. And IRON MAN would the best superhero movie I'd ever seen, except that this was the same summer that THE DARK KNIGHT came out.
Enough has been written about these movies already, and I don't need to add more wank. I just want to point out that this autumn finds me coming off a summer where, whatever else has gone on, the comics movies I dreamed of as a boy have finally, after Christ knows how many half-assed false starts, come to life. And yes, I know that the half-assed false starts are necessary, they're what lays the groundwork for the great stuff. Just as BATMAN BEGINS had to spend much of the movie explaining how there can be a Batman, freeing up THE DARK KNIGHT to just be about Batman and his world. And that brings me to something else.
I recently saw a movie that won't be out until next year. A test screening for a much-anticipated geek film, one that many of my tribe have grave doubts about. Thing is, it's good. It's not perfect, but it's really, really good. It excited me, it moved me, it did what I wished to god it would do and pulled off things I didn't think were possible. Most of all, it does what its source did: it takes the visual and conceptual vocabulary of previous work in the genre, the tropes that the audience has been trained to accept, and uses them to tell a new kind of story that the tropes haven't been used to tell before.
That is one of the kinds of storytelling that I find most exciting. I hadn't dared hope that the movie would get it, would understand why it was important. I've been disappointed too many times--we all have. Instead, I see the movie version of this particular genre starting to take some of the steps that its antecedent did, and that's thrilling to me. I want more stories, I want different stories, I want ALL the stories, dammit.
I want to go into more detail about media feeding of geek desires, about the Drought and the Conquest and so on, but right now I haven't time, so I'll leave you, my (at this point only the) loyal readers, with this awesome reading of the current presidential campaign as mythology: the Obamadammerung,.
THE INCREDIBLE HULK would be the best superhero movie I'd ever seen, except that this was the same summer that IRON MAN came out. And IRON MAN would the best superhero movie I'd ever seen, except that this was the same summer that THE DARK KNIGHT came out.
Enough has been written about these movies already, and I don't need to add more wank. I just want to point out that this autumn finds me coming off a summer where, whatever else has gone on, the comics movies I dreamed of as a boy have finally, after Christ knows how many half-assed false starts, come to life. And yes, I know that the half-assed false starts are necessary, they're what lays the groundwork for the great stuff. Just as BATMAN BEGINS had to spend much of the movie explaining how there can be a Batman, freeing up THE DARK KNIGHT to just be about Batman and his world. And that brings me to something else.
I recently saw a movie that won't be out until next year. A test screening for a much-anticipated geek film, one that many of my tribe have grave doubts about. Thing is, it's good. It's not perfect, but it's really, really good. It excited me, it moved me, it did what I wished to god it would do and pulled off things I didn't think were possible. Most of all, it does what its source did: it takes the visual and conceptual vocabulary of previous work in the genre, the tropes that the audience has been trained to accept, and uses them to tell a new kind of story that the tropes haven't been used to tell before.
That is one of the kinds of storytelling that I find most exciting. I hadn't dared hope that the movie would get it, would understand why it was important. I've been disappointed too many times--we all have. Instead, I see the movie version of this particular genre starting to take some of the steps that its antecedent did, and that's thrilling to me. I want more stories, I want different stories, I want ALL the stories, dammit.
I want to go into more detail about media feeding of geek desires, about the Drought and the Conquest and so on, but right now I haven't time, so I'll leave you, my (at this point only the) loyal readers, with this awesome reading of the current presidential campaign as mythology: the Obamadammerung,.
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