It's All on Sony

While there's never such thing as a sure thing, of the current crop of movies there are a couple of films that have been almost predestined to succeed. Disney's The Avengers, for example, with its unique marketing campaign that included five other movies of the individual characters as part of its strategy, was always going to be a hit, even though the eventual magnitude of its success came as a bit of surprise. Warner Bros' The Dark Knight Rises is another preordained success, and even if it doesn't end up the year's top-grossing movie it'll be all right because the franchise is scheduled for a reboot immediately afterwards.

20th Century Fox's Prometheus has long been expected to succeed as it is currently doing, and it'll take some ill fortune for the upcoming Brave to break Pixar's long running streak of movies that have grossed at least half a billion dollars at the global box-office.

For me, though, the biggest question mark of this season remains to be Sony Pictures' reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man, which marks the studio's attempt to revitalize the franchise following the widely perceived failure of the last installment, Spider-Man 3, to live up to the lofty standard laid down by the first two films of the series. The concern that's been raised by a number of online fans (including myself, actually) is that the reboot is coming too soon after the last movie. This is a two-edged sword; it could be too soon in that it's trying too early to supplant the still-beloved first two films, or too soon in that fans are still smarting from how bad the last film in the series was. Either way, reaction on the internet seems to be largely mixed to negative.

To Sony's credit, though, in deciding to reboot the series they've tried to fix what was missing from the first three movies and have added the two crucial "W"s to Peter Parker's arsenal, namely webshooters (mechanical as opposed to his biological ones) and wisecracks. Fans who have grown up with Spider-Man comics know that the webshooters are a key part of the mythology; they're testament to the fact that far from being just another musclebound lunkhead in spandex, Spider-Man is, in fact, brilliant, and one of the smartest people in the Marvel Universe. The wisecracks are similarly integral to Spider-Man's personality and have been since the very beginning. The whole dichotomy of Spider-Man is that when he's Peter Parker, he's shy and unassuming, but when he dons the mask and tights he assumes a confidence that otherwise isn't there. Raimi's first movie in the series featured Spidey mocking the wrestler played by the late Randy Savage, but they never really picked up on it beyond that, which was disappointing. Still, as the saying goes, haters gotta hate.

Between the Marvel fanatics who want Sony to lose their rights to Spidey to Disney/Marvel, the Raimi zombies who revere his original trilogy and want this new direction to fail, and the rabid fans of Christopher Nolan who want any movie that poses even the slightest threat to their beloved Batman to crash and burn, it's not entirely clear which demographic is going to actually go out and see this movie. Having laid relatively low with their advertising earlier in the year, in the wake of the success of The Avengers, Sony is going all out on its advertising campaigns for the web slinger, employing everything from viral videos to b-roll footage online. A few posts ago I questioned the wisdom of Disney's saturation-style advertising for The Avengers but given the breakout success of that film I have to concede it was a wise move and think that Sony is playing it safe by following this lead. They know they've got a lot to live up to, and that TASM has to make a lot of money in the two weeks before Nolan's next Batman movie hits theaters.

The good news for Sony and everyone wanting the new Spider-Man movie to succeed, however, is that as important as the internet has become, things posted on it are far from indicative of how a movie will eventually fare at the box office. In the months and weeks leading up to the release of The Avengers, rare was the internet pundit, whether a box-office analyst or a casual fanboy, who predicted that the film would do significantly better at the box-office than the first Iron Man film. Even boxofficemojo.com, my most trusted site for box-office numbers and forecasts, predicted only a $420 million U.S. gross for the film after its record breaking $207 million opening weekend. For those not in the know, The Avengers is now poised to become only the third film in history to gross $600 million in the United States alone (the only one not directed by James Cameron), and it's already grossed $1.4 billion around the world.

Of course, the bad news for Sony in the wake of the astonishing success of The Avengers is that the bar has now been set ridiculously high. I, for one, am already taking for granted that TASM will not scale the heights reached by Spidey's fellow Marvel heroes, but I'm holding out hope that, with its earnestness towards correcting the mistakes of the past series, this new movie can at least restore respectability to the franchise, the way Batman Begins did for the Batman series back in 2005, and make some money in the process, regardless of whether or not it ends up on top of the box-office charts by year's end.

R-Rated Tentpoles

I haven't done the statistics, but having been a fan of movies (and of their box-office numbers, which are available on several websites) for two decades now I think I can say with some certainty that as a general rule the most lucrative movies are the ones rated PG-13. The rating, which, as I understand it, was first devised in the United States by its film classification board as a way of rating movies that weren't quite suitable small children but which were suitable for young people. For some reason, films that receive this rating are quite often the perfect "four-quadrant" movies, i.e. movies that please men and women, old and young people alike, and therefore make the most money. There are exceptions to this rule but in general a PG-13 rating, whether by design or not, seems integral to the financial success of a commercially inclined movie. The problem is that not all action movies can be told within the parameters of a PG-13 rating. In fact, a lot of them shouldn't be. Ridley Scott's Gladiator, for example, would probably not have been able to adequately capture the peril of the arena had it been constrained by a PG-13 rating. The first Die Hard would not have been nearly as effective in planting the audience right in the nail-biting peril of the situation had it not shown how violent the criminals against whom Bruce Willis' character was facing off were. The PG-13 rated fourth installment of the Die Hard series was not that bad, but it felt distinctly neutered compared to its predecessors. R-rated comedies like The Hangover and American Pie are not uncommon because of how relatively cheap they are to produce and therefore how easy it is for studios to recover their investment, but in general studios seem leery of spending large amounts of money on R movies. It's refreshing, therefore, to see at least one movie studio, 20th Century Fox, infamous for creating a PG-13 Die Hard and for micro-managing their movies, is releasing not just one but TWO "R" rated big-budget action tentpoles this year,namely Prometheus and, in a couple of weeks, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. That Fox was willing to fork over a reported $120 million for Prometheus is particularly remarkable considering how badly their Alien vs. Predator sequel did back in 2007, but it's made even more remarkable by the fact that even though director Ridley Scott himself prepared a "PG-13 cut" for studio heads, Fox went ahead with the gorier, scarier "R" version, despite knowing that this could curtail potential box-office. Sure, I may have had issues with the actual quality of the film, but I have to commend Fox for their willingness to stick their necks out for a change and to spend some real money on what is effectively a bloody horror movie. Speaking of horror movies, it's similarly impressive that Fox has positioned the unabashedly bloody, R-rated Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter as one of its tentpoles for the summer of 2012. I haven't read the book (though I've been meaning to) but the premise and trailers alone promise a thoroughly blood-soaked affair. The gore isn't what's making me keen to see it (the historical fiction aspect is), but again, I find myself applauding a studio that's quite notorious for trimming out "adult content" to keep its movies box-office friendly for its decision to adapt a famously violent work and getting Timur Bekmambetov, a director famous for his violent movies like Wanted and Night Watch, to adapt it. Now I'm not saying violence, profanity, drug references, nudity, sexuality or whatever else qualifies a movie for an "R" rating make for a better film, but sometimes they're necessary for proper storytelling. Tom Hooper's Academy Award winning film The King's Speech, as I understand it, landed an "R" rating solely for the fact that King George, Colin Firth's character, uttered "fuck" and other colorful words several times over to help him conquer his speech impediment. There was no nudity, violence, or even drug reference; just a string of bad words which were integral not only to the story of the film but an actual part of the history on which it was based. So often the rating system (the American one, I should emphasize, which doesn't necessarily apply to the rest of us outside the United States of America), can be pretty stupid. But at the end of the day it's nice to see film executives, even notoriously profit-oriented ones, putting storytelling integrity over the bottom line.

Not Quite There: A Review of Prometheus

Arguably one of the most anticipated genre films of the year, Prometheus marks the return of British director Ridley Scott to the genre that basically launched his mainstream career. The film, set in the year 2093, tells the story of a scientific expedition into deep space to a planet where, it is believed, the origins of life on earth may be found. Leading this expedition, funded by aging tycoon Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) are archaeologists Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), who have discovered, by studying ancient carvings and murals from lost civilizations all around the world of people worshiping giant, human-like beings pointing to the stars, a map leading to a solar system with a planet that may well be capable of supporting life much like that on earth. There are skeptics among them, like the geologist (Sean Harris) and botanist(Rafe Spall) who form part of the expedition, those simply doing a job like Captain Janek (Idris Elba) and his pilots Chance (Emun Elliot) and Ravel (Benedict Wong), and finally there are those who seem to know a bit more about the expedition than they are willing to let on, like Weyland Corporation executive Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), and android David (a captivating performance by Michael Fassbender). They arrive on the mysterious planet hoping to find some clues as to the origins of mankind, and, as is usually the case with movies of this sort, find something altogether different and infinitely more terrifying. In marketing this film, Twentieth Century Fox was deliberately vague about its narrative connections to the Alien film franchise created by screenwriters Dan o' Bannon and Ronald Shusett, even though this film was initially announced as a "reboot" of that same franchise, and even though there are obvious connections between this film and those that came before it, presumably in order to allow this film to rise or fall on its own merits. The film starts out with a pretty heady brew of ideas, like the questions of creation, and delivers some pretty striking if not necessarily iconic visuals such as the titular ship itself, Prometheus, and the inside of what appears to be a very old complex of some sort, but as it kicks into horror mode, the filmmakers bring us, well, those of us who have seen at least one of the predecessors of this film, into overly familiar territory with not much new to write home about. One can almost predict the order of people dying in this movie (and that's not a spoiler, I assure you), though if it's any consolation, the film quite mercifully eschews the cliche of having the African-American guy (or the Asian guy) die first. Apart from that, however, the film, and apart from its visuals, which still echo the designs of Alien designer H.R. Giger, brings distressingly little to the table that is new. I've seen B-grade sci-fi horror movies on cable TV that take bigger narrative risks than this film did, which is depressing considering that the original Alien all but reinvented the genre thirty-three years ago. Another disappointment is the performance of Noomi Rapace as Shaw. Scott raised a lot of eyebrows with his unconventional choice of a lead in Sigourney Weaver in the original Alien, but ultimately Weaver's acting chops showed she was well-worth whatever risk Scott took in hiring her, and in fact she was able to get an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress when she reprised the role in the 1986 sequel. Rapace, while arguably delivering a competent performance, is no Weaver, and Scott's first mistake was casting her as an Englishwoman. Time and again she drops the ball on her English accent, and it's extremely distracting. There are plenty of actual Englishwomen who could have essayed the role more effectively, and if Scott had really wanted Rapace he could have easily made a script tweak or two for her to speak with her Swedish accent. Also, while other writers have lavished praise on what they describe as her unusual beauty, all I saw was a slightly younger, better looking-version of Frances McDormand. Sigourney Weaver, with her strong jaw, is admittedly an unconventionally beautiful woman, but with her short stature and constantly vanishing British accent, Rapace's performance comes across as thoroughly unimpressive. Fortunately, however, the film is saved by a rather riveting performance by Michael Fassbender as Weyland's pet android David. It's a fantastic turn; he manages to come across as childlike, extremely intelligent and menacing all at the same time. This isn't a regurgitation of what's come before, or even of Brent Spiner's Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's a wonderfully textured portrayal, with the added bonus that Fassbender has conquered his Irish accent a lot more handily than he did in X-Men: First Class. His acting speaks volumes even when he isn't saying a word; the scene where he activates a hologram of charted space was, for me, the highlight of the film. Fassbender doesn't spoil it by uttering so much as a word of dialogue, and the thought that he's basically acting against absolutely nothing underlines how brilliantly he played the scene. Fassbender's performance, while certainly the most outstanding, isn't the only noteworthy one here. Charlize Theron is pretty effective as a not-exactly-bad bad guy, Idris Elba makes the most out of a somewhat thankless role, giving Captain Janek some emotional heft, and the rest of the cast do a pretty good job of being scared. Guy Pearce is virtually unrecognizable in what is practically a cameo role, but he most certainly makes his presence felt in his limited time on the screen. As stated, the movie doesn't exactly reinvent the wheel, which is disappointing considering the expectations that have been riding on it. It's eye candy, that's for sure, and the earnestness with which the cast approaches the film certainly at least deserves mention, but even as a standalone sci-fi opus Prometheus falls well short of greatness. As part of a film series that features one of my favorite movies of all time, James Cameron's Aliens which featured taut, virtually airtight storytelling, this film is deeply, fundamentally disappointing. As strange as it may sound, I have now seen every film in the Alien series (not counting the ridiculous Alien vs. Predator movies) EXCEPT for the very first movie, Alien, so I have written this review without any intention of comparing Prometheus to its ground-breaking, Scott-directed progenitor. It simply isn't that good a movie. 3/5

Manila Goes Hollywood!

I'm sure if one looked, one could easily find a list of movies made in Hollywood that,in one fashion or another involved the Philippines as a location, whether these films were set or merely shot in the Philippines. Oliver Stone's Vietnam War epics Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July were shot here, though the Philippines doubled for Vietnam. Lately there have been some notable American movies featuring the Philippines as the Philippines, such as John Dahl's The Great Raid, starring Cesar Montano, James Franco and Benjamin Bratt, and John Sayles' Amigo, starring Joel Torre and Chris Cooper, but both of them were basically ignored by mainstream audiences around the world. So by and large, as far as Hollywood productions goes, the Philippines remains basically a double for other countries, or an obscure reference by one character or another. Universal Pictures' upcoming release The Bourne Legacy, however, looks to remedy that unfortunate lack of awareness. This is a movie which will actually be SET, albeit only partially, in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. In keeping with the Bourne series' globetrotting nature, the Philippines will serve as the latest exotic destination for the highly successful film franchise, which has, in the past, given ample exposure to countries which, to a Westerner, would be far off, like India in the second movie and Morocco in the third. It's a shame this installment this film won't star Matt Damon, but with Academy-Award-nominated director Tony Gilroy, screenwriter of all the previous Bourne movies, at the helm, the film is assured of narrative integrity, and with Jeremy Renner (who's been in a couple of major action tentpoles since his breakout role in The Hurt Locker) appearing in the lead, this film is assured of A-list pedigree, a first for a film featuring the Philippines as an integral part of its setting. It's not easy for me, a fan of the Bourne film series, to root for a film with "Bourne" in its title yet without Jason Bourne in it, but seeing the preview, Tony Gilroy's efforts to tie this movie to everything that came before it, and the wonderfully prominent role of Metro Manila, it's a pill that's just become that much easier to swallow.

21 Jump Street

I've been hard-pressed to find a movie that I wanted to see since the entire world got caught up in Avengersmania a month ago. Whether it was the dreary Transformers-at-sea dreck called Battleship or yet the sequel that no one asked for in Men in Black 3, to my mind, there was nothing in theaters that presented a compelling argument for trooping to the mall except, well, The Avengers.

Fortunately for me, that changed when I saw the previews for the remake of the 80s television show 21 Jump Street, starring Jonah (Superbad) Hill and Channing (G.I. Joe) Tatum from directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller whose last work, oddly enough, was the animated cartoon Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a film my family and I enjoyed immensely. The film, marketed as a raunchy action comedy with plenty of violence, swearing, drug use and nudity seemed like a marked departure for guys who had just done a family film (and who will do another one again as they are in the process of making the Cloudy sequel) but the trailers seemed to promise some belly laughs so I went for it, with my wife in tow, but left the kids at home this time. Boy, did we enjoy ourselves. I should clarify at the outset that I was not a fan of the original TV series. I was aware of it, and I may have even caught an episode or two, but I never followed it with any sort of regularity. I knew it was a lot more serious than this movie was, but not much else, so should anyone think to ask me if the film captured the spirit of the old TV show, I'd have to say I have no idea.

What I can say, though, is that this is hands down the funniest film I've seen all year. It's funnier than it has any business being, considering that a great chunk of the humor was extremely, unabashedly crude. High school students Morton Schmidt (Hill) and Greg Jenko (Tatum) couldn't be more different. Schmidt is brainy, shy and not particularly attractive. He is, in popular parlance, a nerd. Jenko, on the other hand, is, as high school students go, at the top of the food chain. He's handsome, a jock, and a complete ladies' man. For different reasons, however, neither of them gets to go to their senior prom. Jenko's grades are too bad, and Schmidt can't find anyone to go with him.

Years later, the two meet up again at the police academy and strike up an unlikely but genuine friendship, with Schmidt's brains helping Jenko hurdle the more cerebral aspects of the training and Jenko's athleticism helping Schmidt get in much-needed shape for the many physical challenge the pair of them must face. When the two of them graduate, however, they end up on bicycles pulling park duty. When they end up messing up an arrest of a drug dealer, however, due to Jenko's failure to read the perp his Miranda Rights, they are shuffled off to an undercover program shepherded by the foul-mouthed Captain Dickson (Ice Cube of Friday and Barbershop fame) in which they will pose as high school students in order to catch a drug dealer supplying a new, lethal synthetic drug to a local high school. Only when they get there, high school is not at all the place they remember it to be.

One of the most striking things about this completely over-the-top movie is how logic is one of its first casualties. Schmidt and Jenko are arguably two of the stupidest fictional policemen, the latter more than the former, I have ever encountered, and it completely mystified me that, after completely screwing the pooch with a simple arrest by failing to read a perp his rights during an arrest, Jenko at the very least wasn't busted to traffic cop duty or some kind of desk job. Why would the police department place a couple of morons like Schmidt and Jenko in a sensitive undercover assignment when their incompetence could well result in their cover being blown? The whole premise of the film makes next to no sense.

But that's one of the endearing things about this movie: by actually throwing logic out the window from the word go, the filmmakers set the stage for one bit of hilarity after another, and truth be told, by the time I realized how ridiculous the plot was I had laughed far too hard to care. Lord and Miller display, in highly stylized and utterly irreverent fashion, why they were the perfect choice for this project given their work on Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs; the movie actually plays out like a cartoon on amphetamines. Now, as good as they turn out to be, the directors could not have made this farce work without equally talented, and more importantly, game, actors, and in Hill (who helped write the script) and Tatum they have their muses. For Hill this kind of work is basically old hat considering the number of screwball comedies he's starred in practically since his career started, but Tatum is a revelation in his role as the dummy jock Jenko, whose failure to read the drug perp his Miranda rights is the reason the two of them get sent to the Jump Street program in the first place. To be honest, it's always fun to watch matinee-idol types play morons; I enjoyed Tatum's performance as Jenko the same way I enjoyed watching Brad Pitt play a dummy in The Mexican and Burn After Reading. It goes to show these guys know how to laugh at themselves even as they take the rest of us regular schmoes along for the ride.

Together, Hill's Schmidt and Tatum's Jenko are a perfect "odd couple" pairing, and in this film they manage to take the whole "bromance" concept to uncomfortable but nonetheless hilarious new depths. The rest of the cast provides the two ample support, from Dave Franco (James Franco's brother) as the smooth-talking hipster/drug dealer to Rob Riggle as the high school coach, to Ellie Kemper as a chemistry teacher with the hots for Jenko, although Brie Larson, cast as Schmidt's love interest, seems a tad old for a high school student. Fans of the original can look forward to cameos from the original cast as well, including its most prominent member. With the summer movie season in the U.S. beginning in earnest this coming week with films like Prometheus, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and a whole other slew of rather exciting movies coming to theaters I'll be glad to have something other than The Avengers to watch, but in the meantime it certainly was good to have this little confection to keep me occupied.

Score: 4/5

3-D

What I have to say on the topic of 3-D isn't exactly new, but having spent a small fortune watching The Avengers in 3-D, only to constantly take my glasses off during the first hour or so of screening to be able to see what was happening I felt the need to weigh in on a discussion that's been going for the last seven years or so, with the introduction of supposedly "new and improved" 3-D technology. Since the reintroduction of 3-D movie viewing within the last ten years or so, I've only seen a handful of 3-D films, and of that handful I've only truly enjoyed an even smaller handful, i.e. it was only in very few instances that my viewing experience was significantly enhanced by the additional viewing dimension. It's easy to say that 3-D should only be used when it can somehow enhance the experience, but considering that movie-making is obviously by and large a business it's pretty much a given that the extra revenue gained from a relatively cheap 3-D post-production conversion will always be a preferred option for filmmakers, as opposed to actually designing and shooting a film in 3-D or (gasp) not presenting the film in 3-D at all. That, of course, doesn't make it right. Fortunately, it seems that the folks with real integrity when it comes to 3-D seem to be rewarded the most richly, with James Cameron, who has effectively set the standard for truly excellent 3-D presentation with Avatar, sitting pretty at the top of the heap. Probably the best example of 3-D tacked on for extra cash is the global smash hit The Avengers. As much as I loved that movie (and anyone who's followed this blog knows that I do) the added on 3-D added absolutely nothing to the viewing experience save perhaps for the last fifteen to twenty minutes. In fact, it detracted from it by making about a quarter of the film so dark that I had to take off my glasses to determine what was going on, such as the chase at the beginning and the Thor/Iron Man fight scene. As far as 3-D viewing experiences go, it's not the worst I've ever had (that "honor" is reserved for the third Chronicles of Narnia film, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the post-production conversion of which was so obviously an afterthought that it's downright offensive), and clearly Marvel has spent a lot of money on this film, but even for a conversion they could have done much better; Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which came out two years ago and which was likewise converted to 3-D, made far better use of the format even though it was a far inferior film overall. Watching The Avengers in 3-D I honestly couldn't help but smell the decision-making of a bunch of suits rather than an actual creative choice by the filmmakers themselves. Ultimately I think it's up to audiences to reject poor 3-D switchovers in favor of 2-D and to reward good 3-D jobs. Pixar, for example, quite frankly deserves to be pilloried for the virtually non-existent 3-D of Toy Story 3, which, while shot in 3-D, is second only to Dawn Treader on my crappy-3-D-experience list (especially considering it's one of the two 3-D films I've seen to give me a headache). The 3-D of that film added next to nothing to the experience, and the following year, Pixar did not get my extra money for 3-D tickets for Cars 2, nor are they likely to ever get my extra money for a 3-D film again. For all my love for them, did not get a penny out of me for the 3-D presentation of Captain America last year, especially not after the awful experience I had with Thor. The good news is that for all of the cash it's making, The Avengers isn't making as much off its 3-D format as Avatar did, or a number of other 3-D films of the last year or three. Audiences seem to be learning to be a little more discriminating with their hard-earned money, and I would really encourage that. Avoid crappy 3-D, conversions or otherwise and reward the well-wrought 3-D. Not only that, but a number of films released in 3-D have tanked at the box-office in the last coupe of years or so, like Mars Needs Moms, Alpha and Omega, Wrath of the Titans, Happy Feet 2, Cats and Dogs 2, Gulliver's Travels, Conan the Barbarian, and so on and so forth, demonstrating to studios that 3-D is not a surefire, idiot-proof way to ensure the profitability of their films. It's up to us, then. Let's tell people we won't waste the money we practically bleed for every day on shoddy 3-D and force filmmakers to either put up decent 3-D or shut up.

No Longer "Just" a Comic Book Movie

"What would you prefer, yellow spandex?" This was a line uttered by Cyclops (played by James Marsden), a character in Bryan Singer's 2000 film The X-Men, to his fellow X-Man, Wolverine (played by Hugh Jackman), in reference to the latter's derogatory comment about their black leather costumes. The costumes, however garish-looking, were quite a departure from the colorful and sometime silly-looking spandex costumes the characters sported in the comic books on which the movie and eventual franchise were based. More than that, though, the line was a jab at how silly the thought of a direct, page-to-screen adaptation of Marvel's famous mutant team would have been, and how it was so much better to dress the X-Men like rejects from the 1999 smash-hit The Matrix. There could have been no more damning vote of no confidence in a truly faithful adaptation than a statement such as that. It's funny how, despite the overwhelming success of Richard Donner's Superman back in 1978, featuring a very colorfully-garbed Christopher Reeve, as well as a slew of successful and critically-acclaimed comic-book-based movies spanning the decades that have passed since then, the motion picture derived from a comic book has had a notably difficult time earning the respect in the pop culture landscape that it deserves. While the above-mentioned line of dialogue from X-Men is but one example, there are plenty of others ranging from the quips of studio execs to the fact that a major studio with several Marvel Comics properties in its roster continually treats these gems like second-class citizens. In general, when a comic-book movie has done well or has been received well by critics, for some reason a lot of writers have difficulty saying "it's a great movie" choosing almost invariably to qualify their statements with "it's great...for a comic book movie." There's something hurtful about this, as no one ever hears anyone describing Raiders of the Lost Ark as "great...for a movie derived from the trashy serials of the 30s" or the original Star Wars as "great...for a movie that's set in outer space." There's no qualification, no equivocation. To use a more recent example, The Lord of the Rings films are hailed as great milestones of cinema, not great examples of geek fodder. No one even judges Avatar, with its rather hackneyed plot, as being great for a genre film. These are films judged purely on their merit. Even worse, the handful of comic-book movies that have been described as great, like Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, are described as such "because they don't feel like comic book movies" as if that categorization inherently and necessarily drags the film's quality down a notch or three. Nolan himself, like Singer before him and other makers of comic-book-based films who visibly try to tone-down the four-color sensibility of their works, seems distinctly ashamed of the Batman's comic book roots. Someone commenting on a forum said that it was great because "it was no longer a comic-book film, but a crime drama" which, again, denigrates comic book films as a whole to suggest that the only way this film could be truly great was for it to be something else entirely. It's catchy; I'm ashamed to admit than in praising one comic book movie or another (I think it was the first Iron Man film), I used the phrase "transcends its comic book roots." Looking back that was such a hateful thing for me to say; why should comic book roots be something to transcend? There are many comic books of the latter half of the 20th century, namely the work of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Byrne, and Walt Simonson to name a very, very few, that, in terms of sheer inventiveness and visual verve, still far outstrip anything we see in modern cinema. Like one writer praising Joss Whedon's smash hit film The Avengers pointed out, movies are only just starting to catch up to comic books in terms of being imaginative. Which brings me to the point; I think The Avengers, with its massive, unprecedented popularity, is in a position to do what no other film has been able to do even as far back as the first Superman movie, which is definitively legitimize the comic-book film as an art form. A lot of films have had their shot at this and failed, even though many of them have come tantalizingly close. Unlike any of the Marvel movies, The Avengers is a marriage of four-color heritage with Joss Whedon's trademarked wit and razor-sharp storytelling, and with the very finest technology Hollywood has to offer. It's a heck of a three-way. There's no underlying sense of embarrassment that this movie came from "just" a comic book. The characters don't wear black leather or body armor, there's no attempt to present this film as anything other than what it is, a faithful but wonderfully updated adaptation of Stan Lee's and Jack Kirby's comic book creation. The Avengers could be the film that breaks the glass ceiling for comic-book movies, that shows that they are every bit the legitimate art form that silent movies starring French people are or British war dramas are...just a different kind of art form. It's a movie that's proud of what it is and where it came from, and which has been eagerly embraced by audiences everywhere. Hey, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, I hope you're paying attention. For me, success will come the day comic book films in general, and Marvel Films in particular, have the same cinematic pedigree as, say Pixar movies, which are hardly ever spoken of as "just cartoons." Perhaps it's fitting, therefore, that Marvel has found a home in Disney. Maybe the one sure sign that comic-book-based movies have shattered the glass ceiling is the when truly great comic-book based movies are spoken of by the public and the media alike as great movies, period.