Superheroes are starting to bug me
By Mark Steyn - Thursday, May 14, 2009 - 118 Comments
All those Sharpie-bright spandex boys have helped Hollywood off an awkward hook
No disrespect to Wolverine, who’s the hottest Canadian at the box office since Mary Pickford (even if they do need an Australian to play him), but I wonder about this superhero business. They’ve been cleaning up at the multiplex ever since the dawn of the millennium: Spider-Man. X-Men. Batman. Iron Man. The mid-20th-century long-underwear guys are bigger than ever in the 21st. Truly this is the Age of the Superhero. And it’s beginning to bother me.
Don’t get me wrong. I love comic books. Meeting Stan Lee was one of the great moments of my life. Read a zillion of his masterpieces as a kid—although my grasp of the details decades later is generally frozen circa issue No. 22: Jean Grey will always be Marvel Girl to me. Please, no need to write to point out that she subsequently became Phoenix, and then Dark Phoenix, and then died, and then turned up in a pod at the bottom of Jamaica Bay, which was given to Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four, and then she died again but implanted her psyche in the body of the comatose Emma Frost . . . I’m just skimming the CliffsNotes here, so, alternatively, don’t write if my précis has omitted many fascinating plot twists over the decades. My point is that keeping up with these guys is a full-time job. And even the fellows whose basic bio doesn’t change much get “reinvented.” The reinventions are invariably the same: out with the breezy guy swinging through the streets of Gotham to a ring-a-ding-ding Neal Hefti theme tune; in with some morose misanthrope hunched on the rooftops brooding and riddled with self-doubt. In the sixties, the TV Batman was camp. Then he got dark in the eighties movie. But then by the nineties sequels the dark Batman had mysteriously camped up again. So now he’s darker than ever. I think the concept of reinvention could do with reinventing.
-
Wolverine: Generic X-Man
By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 7:53 AM - 8 Comments
Hugh Jackman emerges from a brutal baptism in 'X-Men Origins: Wolverine'
If you’re a massive fan of X-Men, or happen to worship the ground that Hugh Jackman walks, claws, growls, sings and dances on, you might want to stop reading right now. I’ve never taken more than a distant interest in this franchise, and never really understood its appeal. I realize that Jackman has his charms, and he vanquished a lot of skepticism (mine included) by proving to be an entertaining Oscar host. He’s quite the showman. But I still find his personality lacks the dimensional definition of his physique. As an actor, he’s a solid technician, able to muster brooding intensity and malevolent rage as if pumping emotional iron without breaking a sweat. But there’s no there there. Jackman’s like a 21st-century male beefcake version of Raquel Welch. He wears his body like a costume. And any actress who bared her breasts on film as consistently as he flashes his pecs would never get taken seriously.
But he does seem to be the closest thing to a movie star in this franchise of mutant superheroes. And with X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the multi-taloned Hugh Scissorhands really gets to strut his stuff. Not only that, he gets to be a Canadian lumberjack.
The story spins a Cain-and-Abel saga of two feral brothers, Logan/Wolverine (Jackman) and Victor/Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber), who slash their way through history with retractable claws. Even before the opening credits have finished, they’ve gouged a bloody trail through the American Civil War, the Second World War and Vietnam. Led by Stryker (Danny Huston), a sinister colonel, they’re on a covert U.S. mission in Nigeria when Logan finally loses his taste for mutant special ops. Leaving behind the bloodthirsty Victor, he tries to make a new life as a lumberjack in the Canadian Rockies, where he shacks up with a vaguely aboriginal babe (Texan Lynn Collins) and tries to keep his claws retracted while wielding a chain saw and and axe—until the bad guys, led by Stryker and Sabretooth, track him down and force him back into the fray. Which prompts an exchange that’s sure to get a laugh from local audiences:
“Your country needs you,” says the colonel.
“I’m a Canadian,” replies Logan. Continue…
