When I wrote last week’s post, about how it it’s okay to form opinions on things you haven’t seen yet, and even to not change those opinions in the face of opposition from people who have seen those things, many people pointed out the perilous downside to this. Which is that, just as we have all (or most of us have) been faced by an angry fan snarling out, “How can you judge it if you haven’t even seen it?”…we have also all been on the receiving end of dripping disdain wielded by someone who read about a casting rumor on io9 that shows that the movie is totally going to suck because the gay cowboy from ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is playing the Joker and there’s no point in even watching it now.

Those people are absolutely right. (The people who point out the perilous downside, not the people who refused to watch ‘The Dark Knight’ because Heath Ledger was in it.) There’s no question that fans can be obnoxious, and that any creative decision that’s daring and unconventional will attract a crowd of people not just ready but eager to jump on it with hobnailed boots before they have a chance to really judge it. The impulse to see a truly spectacular failure in progress is an old one, and there are many who will say that it resulted in a lot of brilliant stories never getting a fair shake. (Even now, ‘Heaven’s Gate’ has its defenders, and I’ve met someone who will insist that ‘Sucker Punch’ is a Brechtian masterpiece.)

We all have a responsibility not to be that fan. It is okay not to like things. It is even okay to not like things irrationally, based on little to no evidence. If you are wrong, the only thing you’re hurting is you, after all. And yes, it is okay to tell people that you’re not interested in something when it comes up in conversation (like, say, a discussion of “Things You Irrationally Dislike Based On Almost No Evidence”.) But what isn’t okay is to be aggressive. Going into a comics forum to tell everyone that you’re not even going to pick up ‘Avengers Vs. X-Men’ because it’s s obvious it’s going to suck…not cool. Sitting in on a DC panel just so you can tell everyone that ‘Flashpoint’ was the last DC comic you’re ever reading…why bother? Clearly nobody there will agree with you, because they’re all there to hear about the new comics coming out of DC, so why do you want to start an argument? It’s okay to let people disagree with you. That doesn’t mean you can’t ever say you didn’t like something, or even to have a friendly argument about the relative merits of a film/book/TV show/comic/play. It’s good to discuss things, and and even to have wildly differing opinions. The point at which you start getting upset at people for liking things you have no interest in, though, is the point at which you need to just take a step back, relax, and remember that just as nobody can make you watch ‘Green Lantern’, you don’t have to make a pre-emptive strike on their enjoyment in order to stop them from forcing it down your throat.

If for no other reason than someday, you might change your mind. And when you do, the last thing you want is for all your friends to remind you of the time you said you wouldn’t watch ‘Buffy’ because you weren’t a thirteen-year-old girl.

I really wish Django Unchained hadn’t been sold out because really, This Is 40 When You Are Stupidly Well-Off would have been a much better title for the latest from Judd Apatow’s Wildly Uneven Movie Factory.

Liked it well enough (caveat: saw it in non-3D, non-48-frames-per-second-vision), but I have no idea how they think they get three movies out of this when the movie ends, unsurprisingly, about halfway through the damn book, and that is with all the extra stuff from the Indexes to LOTR thrown in and more besides.

Quick question: Am I the only one who wants to see Star Trek Into Darkness that doesn’t care what villain Benedict Cumberbatch is playing?  Because sometimes it feels like I am.

More and more it seems to me like the rebooted Trek franchise is being treated like a superhero movie series, where fandom thinks the goal of the fandom is to try to guess what pre-existing material will be adapted next, and the point is to recognize said material and go “Ooooooooooooooooooh I know what that is!”  I am not above doing this (I enjoyed the Project: Pegasus sign in Avengers a bit more than I should have), but it’s not exactly the intended purpose of the movies, or the primary source of entertainment.  Do people do this with other franchises?  Do they eagerly anticipate news that Galvatron will be in the next Transformers, or that they’re bringing back Ernst Blofeld to fight Daniel Craig?

As soon as 2009’s Star Trek ended, people began speculating as to what the sequel would be about, and it’s only natural that this speculation is limited to bringing back X or revisiting Y.  However, the difficulty in doing that with Star Trek is that the franchise has so few prominent recurring villains.  Everybody immediately remembered Khan, and then promptly ran out of ideas.

Of course, Trek has many recurring villainous organizations–the Klingons, the Borg, the Maquis, Section 31, the Orion Synidcate, and so on.  With continuity rebooted you can easily finagle it so that any of those groups are available to tangle with Kirk and Spock.  But that doesn’t satisfy this primal fandom urge to see a singular archnemesis, looming just beyond the horizon and threatening to be ten times worse than the last villain.  Fans want that moment where Batman’s finally gotten past the first movie and now he has to contend with a new fellow named…the Joker!!!  But the Klingons, as an entire race, cannot be Star Trek’s Joker.  Star Trek arguably does not have a Joker. 1

And so the fandom is left with the unenviable task of scouring the original Star Trek TV series to pick the best one-off anatognist that happens to line up with the plot and the casting of Cumberbatch.  To date, Khan Singh (unfrozen 1990s ubermensch) and Gary Mitchell (Captain Kirk’s buddy corrupted by godlike power) are the leading candidates.   Comic Book Resources put up an interesting list of suspects here, and I must admit that Ben Finney (Kirk’s buddy who went postal) and Garth of Izar (Kirk’s hero who went mad) are intriguing possibilities.  But the fact I feel I must remind you who these characters are indicates that none of them are iconic enough to jusify all the hullaballoo about bringing them back.  I find Garth particularly fascinating, but I can’t say he’d be substantially more fascinating than introducing a brand new character. 2

Therefore I see no point in trying to guess what the name of Cumberbatch’s character is.  His identity doesn’t appear to be a plot point, and I have a rough idea of what the character’s motivations are, so his name is about as important to me as that of Eric Bana’s character in the last movie, which I frequently forget.  If his name is “Gary Mitchell,” then I applaud the old school callback, but that doesn’t really tell me anything I’d like to know about the character.  Frankly, I wouldn’t expect Cumberbatch’s Mitchell to be substantially different from Cumberbatch’s Khan–I’m pretty sure either way he’s going to be BBC’s Sherlock but evil and with more rayguns.

1. Q, Lore, and Gul Dukat probably come closest, but I assume everyone accepts that they’re out of the running. [↩]
2. Note that if Cumberbatch is a ruthless intergalactic warlord who just happens to be named “Cyrano Jones,” I still consider that a new character. [↩]

Contemplation on the responsibility of power, check. Massive earth-shattering action, check. Superman’s faith in the common man, check. About the only thing I’m not sold on is Lois Lane as a non-brunette, but other than that, yeah, I’ll be lining up like fuck for this one.

So this teaser poster for Man of Steel is making the rounds:

And of course there is nerd rage because nerds are all “why is Superman letting them put him in cuffs” and “this is so stupid, Superman can bust out of the handcuffs whenever he wants” and “this better not be some stupid thing where they have Kryptonite bullets.”

This happens because so many nerds fundamentally do not get Superman, because Superman, when written properly, is not your traditional power fantasy. Instead, Superman is an ongoing morality play, where every question he must pose himself is “is this the right thing for me to do?” Of course Superman lets himself be put in handcuffs, even if he can snap the handcuffs at any time, because Superman understands that the rule of law must be respected in order to protect everybody less powerful than him (e.g. everybody ever). He is not allowing himself to be cuffed because he is weak or he is afraid. He is allowing himself to be cuffed because he is strong.

This is why Superman is such a great hero. It also gives me more confidence in Zack Snyder’s film than I have previously had, even if Superman is wearing the awful no-red-briefs costume variant.

MGK’S BROTHER JEFF: Hey, did you watch Saturday Night Live last night?
MGK: No, I was out.
JEFF: I meant “did you watch it later, like Sunday afternoon or something.”
MGK: Oh. No.
JEFF: I wouldn’t want to suggest you aren’t a social dervish.
MGK: Of course not.
JEFF: Out at the clubs. Working the lines. Making connections.
MGK: You can stop now.
JEFF: Hitting the dance floor. Getting digits. Exploding the pass.
MGK: I’m pretty sure that last expression is just something you made up.
JEFF: I’m ten years younger than you. I know all the hip new things you don’t. I bet you don’t even know about flanging.
MGK: Now I’m sure you’re making stuff up.
JEFF: Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, it will be something you wonder about, late at night. You know, when you think about death.
MGK: What does all of this have to do with Saturday Night Live, anyway?
JEFF: Oh. Jeremy Renner hosted.
MGK: And?
JEFF: He sucked.
MGK: That’s too bad.
JEFF: No, I mean he really sucked. Like, Lindsay Lohan levels of sucked.
MGK: That’s surprising. I mean, I like him in action movies well enough. He does a good sort of quip.
JEFF: I think nerds just like him because he looks like a young Nathan Fillion before Nathan Fillion got all fat.
MGK: Well, he does fight people really nicely too.
JEFF: But getting back to my point. He sucked.
MGK: Well, not everybody is Anne Hathaway.
JEFF: …no, but I don’t see your point.
MGK: Anne Hathway is like a switch-hitter –
JEFF: – maybe in your fantasies.
MGK: Nice, but let me finish. She is like an acting switch-hitter – do you want that one?
JEFF: Nah. Not in the mood to expand on a theme.
MGK: Okay. So she is like an acting switch-hitter in that she can go all “actual acting” and be good at it, or alternately switch into wacky sketch comedienne mode and not miss a beat. Not everybody can do this. Hugh Jackman can do it. James Franco, not so much.
JEFF: I get your point. But this was not just a failure to be Anne Hathaway. Jeremy Renner was bad. Like, during his monologue, it was like he actively did not want to be there. I felt bad for him. But also I felt scorn, because he was being paid a lot of money to be there.
MGK: Well, maybe he was totally hyped to do it and then got there and started work and was all “wait, I am not meant to be doing this at all.” That happens. And then he can’t just bail out.
JEFF: Sure he could. They’d call up Alec Baldwin or John Goodman and be all “save us” and they would do it because they are SNL gods.
MGK: True dat.
JEFF: Anyway. For the first time in my life, I appreciated Matt Damon. Because the more I see Jeremy Renner, the less I like him. I mean, I saw one Bourne movie with Renner in it and it made Avengers, like, retroactively worse. Matt Damon never did that.
MGK: Wait, you don’t appreciate Matt Damon?
JEFF: Come on. He’s just sort of there.
MGK: But he’s always good. At everything. I mean, at worst, your argument against Matt Damon is that he’s not flashy in how he’s good at everything.
JEFF: Name three movies that Matt Damon made that are not Bourne movies, which he didn’t really make anyway because he was just sort of there.
MGK: Rounders.
JEFF: Just sort of there. Just because he’s the lead doesn’t make him not just sort of there, you know.
MGK: Good Will Hunting.
JEFF: It sucking was totally his fault. It was his fault. It was his fault.
MGK: Saving Private Ryan.
JEFF: Tom Hanks’ movie. Adam Goldberg and Barry Pepper and Jeremy Davies were all more memorable than Damon. And don’t even bother saying Ocean’s Eleven.
MGK: The Adjustment Bureau. The Informant! The Departed. Contagion.
JEFF: See, I didn’t see any of those, so your argument is irrelevant.
MGK: That’s not terribly fair.
JEFF: Matt Damon has a net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars. I think he can handle it.
MGK: Fair enough.

With the purchase of Lucasfilm by Disney (which I discussed last week, of course) the Internet has gone pretty damn crazy about the possibilities of the already-announced Episode VII. Some people are even looking past that to VIII and IX, since those are virtually a given in the post-Lucas, post-Lord of the Rings cinematic landscape. Let’s face it, why greenlight one movie at a time when you already know they’ll line up for the sequels? But something that nobody’s discussing, probably because nobody really wants to think about it, is the possibility that we’ll see a remake of the original trilogy.

Surprisingly, I’m all for it.

Look, whether I’m for it or not, it’s going to happen. The original ‘Star Wars’ came out in 1977, approximately 35 years ago. Since that time, we’ve seen remakes of ‘Dawn of the Dead’, ‘Halloween’, ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’, ‘Clash of the Titans’, ‘The Fog’, ‘Friday the 13th’, ‘Fright Night’, ‘The Hills Have Eyes’, ‘The Karate Kid’, ‘Piranha’, ‘The Punisher’, ‘Judge Dredd’, ‘Red Dawn’, and we’re staring down the barrel of remakes of ‘The Evil Dead’ and ‘Robocop’. Clearly, the 70s and 80s have moved out of the realm of “recent past” and into the realm of “nostalgia”. That means that someone’s going to remake ‘Star Wars’. (It also means we’ll see another ‘Jaws’, but that’s another story altogether.)

And that’s okay. Because despite the commercial intention that lurks at the back of remakes, they have a real and useful purpose beyond just keeping some studio executive from freaking out. (Making remakes and sequels is the movie industry of blowing on the dice before you roll them. It might not do any good, but given how much you’re gambling, it helps keep you sane if you believe in it. To quote John Rogers, showrunner of Leverage: “If you are an executive, this is your day: a scruffy man in a Hawaiian shirt walks into your office and says, “I need you to be personally responsible for giving me one hundred million dollars so I can go to Ireland and have people who pretend for a living act like they’re fighting imaginary dragons.” “Will I get to see the dragons first?” you ask hopefully. “Oh, no the dragons won’t exist until after we’re done shooting. The professional pretending people will be yelling at sticks. Occasionally, they will flee from a mop.”  And your job, as the exec, is to write him the check. Any sane man would break.”)

The purpose is simple: Any good movie is going to be about something more than it is about. It’s going to be a reflection of the culture it was created in. And even though a good movie will be relatively timeless, there’s no such thing as a truly timeless film. Everything comes out of the zeitgeist. ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ is a film about identity, memory, the fear and horror of not knowing who you really are…but that doesn’t mean it’s not key to the original film that the brainwashing was done by evil Communists, and that it’s not just as important in the remake that the brainwashing was done by an evil multinational corporation. The grand thrust of a film is about the elements of the human condition that never change, while the details are expressions of our particular fears and tensions.

This is why I fully expect to see a remake of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ every twenty years for the rest of time. The paranoia, the conspiracy, the main plot all speak to something deep within the human condition; but the details come out differently with each generation and each adaptation. We feared Communism, we feared urban alienation, we fear authority…and each time the story is told, it’s worth telling. (Another good example would be ‘Dawn of the Dead’. The original, a polemic about mindless consumerism creeping over the idealism of the 70s. The remake, a harrowing evocation of the events of 9/11. Every generation finds something new to say with the same story.)

So yes, despite the fact that it could be awful, I’d welcome a ‘Star Wars’ remake. Because I think that while Lucas made the best ‘Star Wars’ he could make, that doesn’t mean we could never come out of the creative process with something else just as good.

For those of you who have only just discovered the Internet today, perhaps after emerging from a years-long coma, Disney bought Lucasfilm a few weeks ago. And unsurprisingly for a company that just spent four billion dollars to pick up what amounts to two worthwhile intellectual properties and the rights to ‘Willow’, they’ve said that they’re going to start work on ‘Star Wars: Episode VII’. Because with the rights to the Indiana Jones series tied up with Paramount, it’s either that or do a ‘Howard the Duck’ reboot, really.

All that sounds like a deeply cynical disdain for what is, at heart, a thoroughly mercenary sequel with two strikes already against it: One, there hasn’t been a good Star Wars movie produced in almost thirty years, and it’s not for lack of trying; and two, the general track record of revisiting iconic projects after decades of inactivity has been mixed, at best. (The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Tron: Legacy, Prometheus, Before Watchmen, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and yes, Episodes I-III.) And yet…and yet, despite the fact that there is as yet no cast and no director and no script, I am tentatively interested in the upcoming sequel to ‘Star Wars’. Why?

Honestly, I wish I knew. My wife suggests that it’s because I’m a masochist on the level of TV’s Frank, but I don’t think so. I’m not looking forward to it in the sense of it being a complete trainwreck that I can point and laugh at…I’m thinking it actually has the potential to be genuinely good. Part of it, I think, is that at some point I believe the change of creative hands to be a good thing for any long-running series; eventually, we all run out of good ideas and can be persuaded by the people around us that it’s worth trying the bad ones just to see what happens. It has been a long time since Lucas received any kind of serious editorial scrutiny, and a long time since he had to do the kind of feverish rewriting that marked the original ‘Star Wars’. Handing the series off to Disney (which, whatever else you may think of it, has a pretty good track record of taking care of its intellectual properties…there’s never been an equivalent to ‘Identity Crisis’ for Mickey Mouse…) might reinvigorate the stale ideas of the franchise.

Which is, actually, another point…I’ve never been a big fan of the Expanded Universe. The Thrawn trilogy was pretty good, and the X-Wing series was fun in an action-movie sort of way, but after a while I feel like it really devolved into an endless slog of book after book after book of “A new Dark Jedi/Imperial general holdover/Dark Sun crime boss rears its ugly head, and the fledgling Republic has to deal with this menace or else!” Which always seemed to translate to me as, “Let’s bring back the Emperor/Tarkin/Jabba with the serial numbers filed off!” Combine that with the militaristic insistence that this was the True Canon, the Word of Lucas, and I’m about ready for someone to stick a potato up that particular tailpipe.

And I think I’m up for it because I never stopped loving the original trilogy. ‘Star Wars’ is, I insist and will continue to insist, one of the most important and influential pieces of art in the 20th century. Anyone who doesn’t see that is missing just how big its impact was…it’s like someone telling you that a giant monster walked by, and you not noticing it because you can’t see out of this weird foot-shaped canyon you’re in. Lucas transformed the entire idea of what science-fiction could be on film, with a meticulous, shot-by-shot devotion to creating a universe so immersive that it feels at times (quite intentionally) like a documentary. The sequels, while arguably less good (and I’m sure there will be arguing) were also amazing, immersive glimpses into a world the viewer was invited to inhabit. I’m interested in going back there. I can’t help it. Maybe it’s masochistic of me…but the goodwill left over from 1977 is still enough to buy them at least an interested look from this fan.

Unless you really, really need to know what a plot-by-numbers Very Special Lifetime Channel Movie About Alcoholism would be if it starred heavyweight acting talent (answer: better, but still not actually good), you can leave after the first thirty minutes because after that there is no more planecrashing, and the planecrashing is really the only reason to bother seeing this.

Although some have criticized the film’s choice to have white actors portray nonwhite characters in various eras (and, in fairness, nonwhite actors as white characters) as unnecessary given the lack of thematic links between the characters each actor portrays, that was never the point – instead, the point of using the same actors repeatedly, I think, is to provide a grounding sense of unity between the six timeframes the movie is set in, as the storytelling of the editing choices (and I think shifting from the book’s “nested” stories was necessary to make it work on film at all) is jarring as it is; in any case, I have said before I will take a dozen ambitious failures over one unambitious, repetitive “success,” and so this movie gets my support for if it is indeed a failure, it is only barely one, and I do not think I concede even that (and yes, this may be a run-on sentence, but it is a run-on movie, so there).

FLAPJACKS: Hey, did you ever see Junior? That movie where Arnold Schwarzenegger gets pregnant?
ME: No.
FLAPJACKS: I didn’t either. Did they ever explain how the hell he was able to get pregnant without a uterus? I mean, I know he took Miracle Drugs which let him get pregnant even though he was a man, that’s the point of the movie. But he has no uterus. Do the Miracle Drugs like, give him a temporary uterus?
ME: I have no idea.
FLAPJACKS: Maybe they make the placenta into a temporary uterus. But in the movie Arnold is visibly pregnant. Maybe the temporary uterus is inside his stomach lining? The baby obviously can’t be in the stomach because of the acid, though, so that doesn’t work.
ME: I still have no idea.
FLAPJACKS: …aha! The appendix!
ME: Aha?
FLAPJACKS: The appendix does nothing, right? So maybe that is where the baby ends up. In a vestigial organ! My god, I’m brilliant.
ME: But the appendix is connected to the beginning of the large intestine. I don’t think your plan works unless you are going to drown the fetus in poop.
FLAPJACKS: The super-placenta theory takes care of that. It creates a poop-barrier. Not a barrier made of poop, a barrier against poop. +5 versus poop, if you will. Also, if you think about it, the appendix being the man-uterus makes sense because it’s connected to the intestine and therefore provides a natural birthing route for the baby.
ME: …wait, you’re saying that male natural childbirth as in Junior is to shit the baby out?
FLAPJACKS: Well, where else is the baby gonna come out?
ME: Putting aside the question of whether a baby could pass through one’s intestines without A) suffocating or B) rupturing the intestines –
FLAPJACKS: Ahem: Miracle Drugs. Done. Next question.
ME: – okay, whatever, but you’re still talking about a labour that would be at least a twenty-hour shit, basically. Probably much longer, because the baby would be bigger and therefore proceed more slowly.
FLAPJACKS: Well, it is only proper that childbirth take a long time and be somewhat painful. Men should not get out of that. Plus, after you finally gave birth –
ME: I hope to god that is a general “you” and not a specific one.
FLAPJACKS: Okay, wimp, after one gave birth, it would be euphoric in the way that only a truly great bowel movement can be. Except you also get a baby.
ME: I think this is the most awful conversation we have ever had.
FLAPJACKS: How did they deal with the birthing issue in Junior, anyway?
ME: Wikipedia says Arnold had a Caesarean.
FLAPJACKS: Wimp.

If anybody starts complaining to you that this movie is bad because of [insert complaint about movie’s use of time travel here] it is your moral duty to punch them in their stupid face.

Gets Judge Dredd mostly right – which is to say that as a consequence of getting it mostly right (e.g. brutally violent and extremely dark), this movie is definitely not going to be for everybody.

When The Golden Girls debuted in 1985, Bea Arthur and Betty White were both 63, Estelle Getty 62 and Rue McLanahan 51.

Accordingly, were there to be a big-screen remake: Meryl Streep is currently 63, as is Sigourney Weaver. Cybill Shepherd is 62. And Bonnie Hunt is 51.

Alternately: Jessica Lange, Pam Grier, Julie Walters and Meg Ryan.

SOMEBODY NEEDS TO GET ON THIS, PEOPLE.