Doctor Doom is, without a doubt, one of the best villains in comic book history. Arguably, he’s the best; he has menace, style, wit, flair, power, and even when you defeat him, he’s still the ruler of an entire country and untouchable by the law. (Even better, when he loses control of Latveria, the writer gets to do a story where he crushes his enemies and regains power. Nothing keeps a villain menacing like a story where he wins.)

But like all comic book characters, he’s been handled by literally dozens of writers over the decades, and some of those writers have dealt with him better than others. Doom is actually the poster boy for the TV Tropes “Actually a Doombot” trope, where all of his more embarrassing stories are explained away as being the work of Doombots masquerading imperfectly as him. Some writers, on the other hand, have developed a reputation as handling the character so well that he almost becomes a second protagonist…but in a fandom that comments obsessively on the best writers and the best runs for heroes, the best writers of recurring villains often go overlooked. This essay attempts to rectify that by answering the question, “Who are the best Doom writers?”

5. Steve Englehart. Englehart’s main Doom credentials are his long run on ‘Super-Villain Team-Up’ and his slightly less-well remembered, but still interesting run on ‘Fantastic Four’ (he had the bad luck to be in between John Byrne and Walt Simonson, both of whom will be on this list.) His SVTU run showed Doom going toe-to-toe with Namor, the FF, and the Avengers, and coming out on top more often than not; in addition, Englehart’s Doom goes into battle directly, something that isn’t often seen even among the other writers on this list. When Englehart writes Doom, you remember that he built a suit of battle armor every bit as tough as Iron Man.

He also wrote the story where Doom was deposed by his own adoptive son, which was interesting and showed a side of Doom we hadn’t seen, but is also the reason he’s #5 on the list; Walt Simonson elegantly showed that a man smart enough to plan for his own death by brainwashing his adoptive son to replace him is smart enough to have countermeasures for that, too. A Doom that has problems with a ten-year-old kid is a Doom that gets bumped a few notches down on the list.

4. Walt Simonson. He’s #4 because he only wrote one Doom story in his brief-but-spectacular FF run, but it was a doozy. In the span of two short issues (okay, one double-sized issue and one short issue) Doom retakes Latveria from Kristoff, brainwashes Ms Marvel into fighting the Thing, imprisons the FF in perfectly-designed traps, and then battles Mister Fantastic in one of the most innovative issues ever written. (It’s a time-travel story, with a clock at the bottom showing the progression of “real time” and time-teleportation effects showing when Reed and Doom are traveling to each time they leap through time. So you can read it front-to-back to experience the story in real time, or jump around from page to page to experience it as Reed and Doom do.)

Simonson’s Doom is slightly different from all the others, almost an older and wiser Doom. (Some have speculated that this is Doom after returning from the “Doom 2099” series, a speculation supported by his altered armor.) He’s calmer, almost melancholy at times, but no less intimidating and powerful. Definitely worth reading, and it’ll make you wish Simonson wrote the character more often.

3. Jim Shooter. A surprising choice, as he never wrote an issue of ‘Fantastic Four’, but Doom’s appearances in the Shooter-written ‘Secret Wars’ and ‘Superman vs. Spider-Man’ are truly wonderful. Shooter writes a bombastic, almost-comic Doom who’s utterly megalomaniac, so convinced of his greatness that he literally tape-records his every utterance for posterity. (That’s right. You ever wonder who Doom is talking to when he delivers all those monologues? Motherfucker’s talking to history, bitches.)

And yet for all that his egotism is played for laughs, Shooter’s Doom is a character of terrifying intellect and deadly cunning, winning not just the Beyonder’s prize but the Beyonder’s power as he outwits an omnipotent god. In the end, the only thing that can defeat Shooter’s version of Doom is his own fatal imperfections. That’s a pretty deep take on a kid’s character.

2. Stan Lee. He created Doom, of course he’s getting a high spot on the list. Sure, there were some cheesy elements in the early Doom stories; in retrospect, it’s a little silly that he invented a time machine to force the Fantastic Four to steal Blackbeard’s treasure. But it was a sillier time, and it’s not like Lee and Jack Kirby (who deserves just as much credit as Lee) didn’t give us some of the iconic Doom moments, like the “Battle of the Baxter Building” (Doom vs the Thing in an absolutely unforgettable sequence.)

Also, they developed Doom’s unique aspects; his code of honor (there’s a wonderful scene where Doom has the FF trapped in his castle, but he lets them pass through the art gallery unscathed because it would be barbaric to risk damage to the paintings) and his downright mythic origin story. And, of course, Stan Lee’s dialoguing style is so distinct that even decades later, you can still tell when Doom is speaking without needing tails on the word balloons. Really, he’d almost be #1 worthy…

1. John Byrne. Except that Byrne didn’t just write half the classic, definitive Doom stories, he practically cared more about the character than he did about the FF. When Byrne wrote Doctor Doom, you could tell he was fully able to understand that in Doom’s world, he is the hero of the story and Reed Richards is the villain. It’s Reed who has to admit that Doom rules Latveria better than his successor, and that he is sincerely beloved by its people. It’s Sue who’s able to detect a Doombot by realizing that Victor would never be so uncouth as to strike a woman. And it’s Byrne who gave Doom his own issue without the FF even appearing, to show what the world is like from behind Doom’s metal mask. John Byrne “got” Victor von Doom, and after reading his comics, you will too.

Those are my top five. Anyone else got opinions? Feel free to put them in the comments!

After taking a look at Jenna Jemma Salume’s absolutely gorgeous Dr. Strange villain redesigns, I was reminded, oddly enough, of Websnark’s post about Dan Didio’s response to that Batgirl fan (the story of which has been making its way around the internets lately). Not so much for the content (which is an excellent essay), but more because in its argument it makes the point that change of this sort is DC’s responsibility, rather than the fans’, in many ways.

Mostly, though, what it comes down to is this: when Dan Didio asks comic fans who say they want to see more female creators working at DC ‘who should I hire?” he’s effectively asking them to do part of his job for him. It’s not my job, as a comics fan, to scout out talent that should be working at DC. Sure, sometimes it’ll become obvious to fans that Indie Creator should – if they are so inclined – be working on a title at the Big Two. But all too often I won’t even know that creator’s name (or gender) offhand because I’ll read a brief work of genius and then forget to read more by them, because there’s only so many hours in the day that I can judge content. But judging content is basically what editors do, and I would expect DC to specifically keep an eye open for talent in the same way that Marvel does. Or in the way that any publishing company does, really. Talent scouting is part of the gig when you’re an editor working for a publishing company, and I would expect Dan Didio could name me a dozen female indie creators he’d like to see working for DC. And if he isn’t able to do that, he should be able to do that.

I mean, by the standard Didio presents, apparently the reason J.T. Krul has a job is because we all demanded it.

The problem with the Spectre is that he is shackled down by continuity.

This wasn’t how it used to be. It used to be that the Spectre was sort of awesome because you could do anything you wanted to do with him. Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson had him fight demon lords using whole planets as weapons and travel through time to fight pirate ghosts in a dozen reincarnations. Neal Adams kept that high adventure, but started telling stories where the Spectre fought more horrific evils. Michael Fleisher and Jim Aparo had him straight-up murdering criminals in cruel ways and telling pure horror stories. Doug Moench made him an occult detective again. John Ostrander went to the Christian theology well, again and again. Not for nothing in The Books of Magic does John Constantine snark about how the Spectre’s power levels change all the time.

But it’s that Ostrander run that nailed things in. Prior to the Ostrander run, what the Spectre did and was – these were flexible and mutable things. He was a ghost. No, he was a spirit possessing a dead man. No, he was a spirit working in context with a dead man. No, he was all of that at the same time. However, Ostrander’s take – that the Spectre was God’s Angel of Vengeance possessing a dead human as its avatar – has become the standard.

The problem is that Ostrander’s Spectre worked wonderfully for Ostrander because Ostrander wanted to write a specific set of stories about human belief and the inherent problems that the idea of a vengeful God poses with Christian dogma. That was great when he was playing off in his own corner of the DC Universe and just letting everybody else do their thing. It’s not so great when his rules for the Spectre have become unbending canon because the Ostrander Spectre is ridiculously powerful and becomes an obstacle or menace rather than a character when used by writers not as skilled as Ostrander, which is to say most people.

And this is disappointing because there’s no reason one should feel constrained to keep doing with the Spectre what Ostrander did. After all, one of Ostrander’s plot points was that the Spectre replaced Eclipso as the Angel of Vengeance, which is a reminder that God is basically arbitrary from a mortal standpoint. You can take that as far as you want. Any writer working on a Spectre comic should feel completely empowered to do anything they want to the Spectre and just say “well, because God did it.” Hell, bring back Percival Popp the Super-Cop if you like. All that should be a Spectre writer’s goal is to avoid doing rehashed Ostrander stories, because you can’t really improve on them.

(And although I like Crispus Allen as a character, the Spectre looks stupid with a goatee.)

Your guest judges this week are Lady Gaga and also some dude who is not Lady Gaga. Okay, it’s Rob Marshall, who on any other night would be the Real Guest Judge, but… Lady Gaga. Come on. (They were both, unsurprisingly, much better at judging than Nigel and Mary.)

Sasha and All-Star Pasha: quickstep. There have been many worse quicksteps on this show, but this was the first time all season that I saw Sasha and thought “…eh.” This dance is one of the reasons I don’t like the All-Star concept: All-Stars only show up to dance in their genre and are usually the best the show’s ever had, and they can make otherwise perfectly-competent-for-out-of-technique dancing look bland or even bad. Sasha wasn’t bad, but her missteps and slightly less-than-ideal carriage were highlighted by Pasha being dead cert.

Caitlynn and All-Star Ivan: hip-hop. See my comments re: All-Stars outshining contestants. Again, Caitlynn danced this perfectly decently: she wasn’t dancing contemporary to beats, she was actually trying to dance with resistance and proper freezes and everything. But she’s nowhere near as good at it as Ivan is – obviously – and Ivan’s so good that it just highlights how she’s not quite managing to do what he does effortlessly, and it makes her look like less when she doesn’t deserve to do.

Jordan and All-Star Ade: jazz. I see Ade and I decide the over/under on lifts is 6: this time around, he only had to perform five! Granted, one of them lasted for like ten seconds, but stil: Ade gets to be less than 50 percent forklift for once. Anyway, the choreo was so boring that counting the lifts was basically the best part of it. Jordan and Ade were game, but Jordan just bores me as a dancer to begin with – she is blandly competent with the emphasis on bland – so she has to excel for me to care and this was just good dancing of a boring piece.

Melanie and All-Star Neil: contemporary. Has any dancer in the history of this show ever been as protected as Melanie? This is, what, the seventeenth contemporary or jazz piece she’s had to dance now? Anyway, yes, it was good (Mandy Moore going to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” aside). Possibly even great. On the verge, shall we say. But every time Melanie dances in genre now, it just irks me more and more.

All-Star Anya and Ricky: jive. Iffy. I mean, we joke about how Anya can get a quality dance out of a broom, but even Anya has an off night, I suppose, because this was messy and jittery and still somehow felt slow.

All-Star Lauren and Jess: hip-hop. Man, I was sure that if they were going to bring anybody other than Comfort as a hip-hop girl All-Star, it would be Sara from season 3, but I guess Lauren is the bottom of that well. (Not that she’s bad, but Lauren’s always been sort of… generic.) Anyway, it’s worth comparing this to Jess’ last hip-hop, because Mary was actually really perceptive in her judging when she discussed how Jess was progressing. (Granted, last time she lost her shit and proclaimed him amazing, but whatever, one out of two.) Last time, Jess wasn’t dancing hip-hop: this time, there were obvious attempts at proper technique, and he looked actually decent. (Also, as an aside, how many Tabbynaps routines are about couples who cheat on each other? Maybe they should start doing routines about open marriages or something at this rate?)

All-Star The Other Lauren and Tadd: jazz. Some might complain that Tadd got a lot of time in the routine to B-boy it up, and… well, at this point I’ve given up on stylistic purity and all I have to say is that when he wasn’t B-boying he was fine. This was Perfectly Acceptable Dancing.

All-Star Allison and Marko: contemporary. This was both a beautiful piece and wildly derivative of Sonya’s Allison/Alex routine from last season, right down to the Jeff Buckley accompaniment. If it had been more original I would have been more impressed, but I spent the whole thing thinking “was that in the last one?” (I know, I know, Sonya repeating her own work, what are the odds?) Also, Marko made Lady Gaga cry! And he said he loved his mom! And then Nigel needed to explain to everybody how amazing it was that he said he loved his mom in television! SHUT UP NIGEL.

Caitlynn and Tadd: foxtrot. Nobody will remember this in a month’s time, but it was good. Not great. But good.

Marko and Ricky: hip-hop. Now this is interesting, because this was the first Nappytabs routine in a while where they dropped all the emo bullshit and just decided to let the dancers rip it, and traditionally that produces great stuff from them, and their choreo this time was really awesome. Unfortunately, Ricky and Marko aren’t, say, Twitch and Alex – or Comfort and Mark – or… well, you get the idea. They comitted and gave it their very mostest, there’s no question about that, but I have to classify it as a noble failure. Nigel does his best to tell America to dump Ricky for him. Shut up, Nigel.

Jordan and Jess: rhumba. This was basically a mess: Jason Gilkison’s choreo was already very contemporary-friendly and Jordan in particular didn’t have any rhumba technique at all (and Jess only some), and she didn’t even have the “contemporary dancer in heels” excuse. This could have been really good and wasn’t.

Sasha and Melanie: jazz. See, here’s the thing. I agree that this was excellent choreo from Sonya and I agree that both Sasha and Melanie danced it very well, but I don’t think they danced it very well together – their unison moments weren’t in sync and their styles felt disparate: Melanie dances very heavily and powerfully, which is not a bad thing by any means but is definitely a stylistic quirk, whereas Sasha’s dancing is much lighter and quicker, and it felt like two people dancing the same routine but apart to me. Not that it wasn’t thrilling; this is my minor critique of something that I thought was otherwise wholly excellent.

Bottom four: Ricky, Tadd, Jordan, Caitlynn.
Should go home: Ricky and Jordan.
Will go home: Ricky and Caitlynn.

(Warning: mild spoilers for later books in the Song of Ice and Fire series.)

Well, technically I suppose this is also an open letter to David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the producers of Game of Thrones. But if I said this was an open letter to them, everybody would just say “huh?” So it’s an open letter to George R. R. Martin instead. After all, he is The Man in this regard, I should think.

So: Game of Thrones. It’s wildly successful, a show that’s both extremely popular and critically acclaimed. HBO greenlit the second season while the first was just really starting to get going, and that’s good. I’ve got high hopes for seeing what you guys do with the big battle in A Clash of Kings, and I’m pleased to see who you’ve cast in the various major players showing up in book two. Really, I have no complaints with the show so far.

But right now, I’m thinking about your third season, when you’re more or less done with A Clash of Kings and have to move on to A Storm of Swords. I know what you’re thinking: “Oh, come on. We’re working on season two right now. We don’t even know if there’s going to be a season three. Look what happened to Rome.” And yes, this is true. But I feel that someone has to bring up something about book three well in advance. Just so you can keep it in mind if and when it comes time to start working on season three, you see. It makes sense to start laying the groundwork now.

So. The show. It’s a great show. But, if there is one criticism you can make (other than the fact that Roz, while hot, is really kinda pointless other than being hot), it’s the fact that it’s… well…

…It’s a very white show, isn’t it?

Don’t get me wrong: I know that there are conventions and expectations of the genre. I know that people, when you tell them this is a show about knights and castles and swords, think that all of that equals white people. I don’t think the fact that your cast is almost entirely white is some kind of sin at all: far from it. Westeros is one culture within the world you’ve created, and it is a culture that is mostly white people. And that’s fine. It’s maybe a little irksome that the one distinctly non-white culture you’ve introduced to us so far is the Dothraki, and the problem of television needing visual shortcuts means you had to cut down a lot of the complexities in Dothraki culture when adapting from book to screen, but it’s understandable. The Dothraki are mostly off to one side now anyway. A Game of Thrones being a white-ass show is perfectly understandable in this context.

But in A Storm of Swords, you introduce Dorne to the world stage. Allow me to quote:

The salty Dornishmen were lithe and dark, with smooth olive skin and long black hair streaming in the wind. The sandy Dornishmen were even darker, their faces burned brown by the hot Dornish sun. They wound long scarfs around their helms to ward off sunstroke. The stony Dornishmen were biggest and fairest, sons of the Andals and the First Men, brown haired or blond, with faces that freckled or burned in the sun instead of browning.

If you took out the names and replaced them appropriately, this would describe the population of Iran well enough. Or most Arabic countries, for that matter, or northern African, or… well, you get the point. I’m sure I didn’t need to make it, G.R.R.M. After all, you wrote it. The point being: the Dornishmen are brown people. You describe Oberyn Martell as “saturnine, with thin arched brows above large eyes as black and shiny as pools of coal oil,” and later explicitly mention that his skin is dark. So that’s the point of this letter: when you’re casting season three, bear in mind that Dornishmen are, for the most part, brown folks. Cast accordingly.

And you might say “well, why do you need to tell me that? After all, I wrote the damn books. I know what Oberyn Martell looks like.” And that’s fair. But Hollywood has a track record in these sorts of affairs, and the track record is not good. Let us remember the debacle that was the live-action adaptation of Avatar, where white kids were hired to play characters that were distinctly not-at-all-white? (Worse, they were white kids of middling to little talent, which was just insulting to anybody who gives a damn about this sort of thing.) It’s common knowledge that nonwhite people other than Will Smith need not apply to be heroic protagonists in Hollywood these days.

And really, asking to let Dorne be Dorne isn’t pushing too hard against those preconceptions. The series is not called A Song of Ice and Dorne. House Martell may be pretty awesome, but they’re minor players in the story and we all know that. I’m just saying that you wisely decided that in your books, some of the noble houses of Westeros would be non-white. It would be a valuable thing, then, to extend that to the HBO series, and let people see that knights can be brown too.

Also, most importantly, it would let this dude be the Red Viper:

Right? Right? Of course I’m right.

Didn’t have time to blog last week’s USA show, mostly because I saw it two days late and other than Sasha and Twitch’s UNBELIEVABLE hiphop I was largely apathetic to it. At some point, Nigel is going to realize that the All-Star concept fundamentally hurts his show by making the current group of performers look like the junior league – and the fact that the vast majority of All-Stars are from the earlier seasons doesn’t help. (Hint: the reason Pasha keeps performing all the All-Star ballroom routines is because they’ve only had one other high-quality male ballroom dancer since season 3 – Ryan in 6 – and that’s the same reason Comfort is the only female hip-hop dancer they keep bringing back.)

Anyway. Tonight’s twist: new partners! Your special guest judges are Luther, Nico Archambeault, and Mary Murphy, who has been a special guest judge every week so far. She’s so special!

Jordan and Christian: paso doble. Francis and Natalli are, incidentally, an example of what former dancers on the show should be doing: choreographing to help promote and extend their careers in dance. The choreo was exceptional in this: that last lift was just a complete “holy shit” moment, and the judges were right to applaud it as Jordan and Christian did it perfectly and it was obviously crazy difficult. That having been said, Jordan did bobble a couple of times in her footwork (that double promenade looked particularly shaky), but these were not major flaws and complaining about them is purely minor quibbling. This was an excellent start to the night.

Denitsa and Matt: contemporary. This routine felt very… adolescent. That’s not a criticism of it, really: I’m trying to characterize the emotion that it was danced with and how it was designed, and on that level it was very flaily and aggressive and wild. But it was also exciting and felt honest, so I think on balance Sabrina Matthews (who is having a very good season so far) has a winner here. Denitsa danced this really, really well – she really threw herself into it, and her lack of technique was simply overcome by her passion for the dance. Matt… still not feeling it, to be honest. He’s a Perfectly Acceptable Dancer but I don’t see him winning, you know? But this was good enough that they should be safe.

Carlena and Kevin: hip-hop. Okay, on the one hand Carlena has danced hip-hop or related every single week so far, and it is past time that she danced something other than that. On the other hand, this was a fabulous routine from Sho-Tyme, who was hit this week rather than miss (seriously, with Sho-Tyme it’s almost always a 50/50 chance that the choreo will be amazing or cheeseball), and Carlena danced it perfectly. Kevin did not, but at least his failure wasn’t “I’m going to dance contemporary to hip-hop music,” but instead trying to dance hip-hop properly and only succeeding for about half of the routine, which is much, much more respectable: at times he was carrying the beat in his bones just dead-on, and other times he got a bit lost and needed a second to get back into his groove.

Lindsay and Shane: disco. Melissa Williams breaks her four-year-long streak of mediocrity and delivers choreography that is not half bad! MY WORLD IS COMING APART. Okay, maybe it wasn’t superb, but it was decent and that’s enough for me to applaud. Shane and Lindsay danced this well enough: they were into it and having fun, and if at times they felt a bit flaily and offbeat, they always got themselves back into sync quickly enough. This was surprisingly good! I like being surprised! Probably the best disco on any SYTYCD since season three of the US show (Sara/Neil), which admittedly is not a high bar to pass, but there you go.

Geisha and Adam: jazz/funk. …..ehhhhhhhh. Geisha tried and only partially succeeded. Adam was just sort of there, and Blake’s choreo really requires 100 percent commitment or else it just ends up looking sort of dorky, and that wasn’t there from either dancer tonight. This was not really very good.

Yuliya and Francois: mambo. Two ballroomers in their element – granted, doing street mambo rather than classical competition mambo, but outside of that slightly bobbled last lift you wouldn’t tell – and speaking of dancers being protected, Yuliya has gotten two ballroom routines and a Broadway that was ninety percent jive, so put her on the “time to dance something else” list along with Carlena. But it was fun to see two ballroom dancers doing what they do at peak performance, which is something you practically never get to see on SYTYCD (I think the last time it happened was, what, Benji/Heidi in season two USA?), so that was fun.

Shelaina and JP: Bollywood. I am pretty sure that the choreographer’s full name is “Longinus Fernandes Choreographer Of Slumdog Millionaire” because Leah Miller says that every single time she mentions him. This was perfectly all right. Could it have been better? Yes, a bit: JP in particular was a bit sloppy in his movement. But their unison was dead-on and their performance quality was decent enough.

Teya and Boneless: krump. I can count the number of krump routines I have liked on SYTYCD on the fingers of one hand and have several fingers left over, so this was handicapped going in and didn’t really surpass the handicap, unfortunately. Lil C made the… interesting choice of choosing musical accompaniment where it was actively difficult to find the beat, and that just made the dancing more awkward-looking even when they were on-time (which they were, almost entirely). Neither Boneless nor Teya krumped badly, but krump just doesn’t translate to the SYTYCD stage well, never has, and it’s a bottom-three dance almost by default. Shame.

Melissa and Joey: contemporary. Judges called this the routine of the night, but it didn’t really do anything for me. I concede its technical excellence, certainly, but it felt empty – a bunch of moves for the sake of doing pretty moves. And again: protected dancers, as neither Melissa nor Joey has had to dance once in a style where their technical training was not a specific asset.

Probable bottom three: Teya and Boneless, Geisha and Adam, Carlena and Kevin.
Should go home: Teya and Adam.
Will go home: Teya and Boneless.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Lately, we’ve been hearing a lot about how important it is to keep taxes low on the rich. Not, as we all might suspect, because all the Congressmen saying it have taken somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred grand in “campaign contributions” from very rich people who generally don’t tend to part with money unless they think they’ll get something out of it; instead, it is because these people are the “job creators” who drive the economy and if they have to spend all their money in taxes then they won’t be able to spend any on creating jobs.

Now, one might…one just might…point out that we’ve been cutting taxes on the rich for the last decade and all we’ve gotten to show for it is a net loss of five million jobs and a small group of very rich people who have gotten much, much richer…but instead, I think we should take all these people at their word. I think that we should treat these people as the job creators they really are, just like the Republicans in Congress say. And to that end, I think we should do exactly what the Republicans insist is the best solution for the economy, the best solution for just about anything. Let’s let the free market handle it.

Specifically, I think we should tie the top income tax rate to the unemployment rate. Say, a baseline tax rate of twenty-five percent, with a baseline unemployment rate of five percent. Every percentage point below that, the top tax rate decreases by thirteen percent (down to a minimum of one percent, a purely token rate.) And of course, every percentage point the unemployment rate goes up above five, the top tax rate increases by thirteen percent (up to a maximum of ninety-nine percent; after all, nobody should be denied the right to make a living.)

Naturally, the specific numbers could be haggled a bit, the tax loopholes closed here and there to make sure that they’re not shirking their duties as job creators, the exact unemployment figures that we use to calculate this tax rate precisely detailed to avoid fraud. But in theory, this should be exactly what the nation’s captains of industry want. They have an incentive to put the nation’s unemployed back to work, we have a way to balance the budget in times of economic stress, and the Republicans get to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to free-market economics and their worship of America’s ultra-wealthy as the people who make America great.

I don’t know why, but something tells me they won’t go for it…

…is very, very good. I am not sure if it is the best of the “Avengers Generation” of Marvel movies, but I am quite sure that it is my favourite, because Joe Johnston did exactly what I wanted him to do in making a Captain America movie, which was basically take the tone of the old Republic serials, pump up the action and drama, and update it into a modern, adult film which kids can still enjoy. The fact that it ends on a melancholy note (and if you know Captain America at all, you know that his origin story has to end that way) gives it a tone that no other superhero movie really has had over the last decade.

Of note: Chris Evans is a magnificent Captain America, and I think that is high praise because we generally recognize that of all the Marvel characters, Cap is probably the hardest to play: it’s very easy to turn his idealism into self-righteousness or priggishness and make him unlikeable (I’m looking at you, Mark Millar), but Evans simply emphasizes Cap’s basic decency, which is the core of the character, and the overriding theme of Cap in the movie is “a weak but noble man becomes strong,” which is what Cap’s theme should be. The supporting cast is likewise excellent: Hugo Weaving is a predictably fantastic Red Skull, Tommy Lee Jones’ colonel gets all the good lines, the Howling Commandos don’t get much screen time but are all good (special bonuses: Neal McDonough as Dum Dum Dugan and Kenneth Choi playing Jim Morita, which was unexpected but appreciated), Dominic Cooper’s Howard Stark is a clever 40s-influenced riff on RDJ’s Tony Stark, and Stanley Tucci’s Erskine gives the film heart and purpose. The only weak link is Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter, who is not bad but not on par with everybody else.

My only other note is to avoid seeing it in 3D – unlike Thor, where the 3D was unnecessary but not really an issue, Captain America is less enjoyable in 3D – not because of the 3D itself, which is again unnecessary but not bad or anything, but because wearing the glasses dims the movie. In Thor, which was loaded with bright colours and lots of light, this wasn’t so much an issue, but in Captain America, where Joe Johnston is again working with the lush, dark colour palette he’s used so often for his period work, it makes the film look drab when it is not that thing. So go 2D for this one.

I realize “Rehab” is the more predictable choice here, but A) it would still be sort of tasteless and B) I always liked this song better.

My obituary for Torontoist is here.

The trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man has once again rung the bell and the internet is debating whether or not we truly, truly need another Spider-Man movie:

Now, ASM will come out a mere five years after Spider-Man 3came out. This has been deemed a short stretch of time, but it’s only four years shorter than the stretch between Batman and Robin and Batman Begins, and nobody seemed to mind then. Is the timeframe really the difference? Is it the fact that Spider-Man 3 only sort of sucked, while Batman and Robin is really, really terrible (despite Chris Sims and David Uzimeri’s noble efforts to reclaim it as the spiritual heir of the Adam West Batman)? Is it the stark difference in tone between the Nolan Batman and the Schumacher Batman, whereas Andrew Garfield seems to be working the same Peter Parker mold that Tobey Maguire did, right down to being somebody trying to play a teenager while actually being in their late twenties?

I actually think that last one has some merit to it, because the Raimi Spider-Man trilogy has its strong points, but its overriding failure is that Spider-Man doesn’t wisecrack, mostly because Tobey Maguire is not the sort of person you imagine quipping in battle. Like, at all. He’s so achingly sincere. If Spider-Man spent the trailer making fun of baddies while beating them up, I’m sure comic fans would be jizzing in their pants over the new Spider-franchise. That having been said, I’m not entirely convinced that what works on the page for Spider-Man will work in a film: in a comic you can see Spidey’s thoughts and in a movie you have to rely on the actor portraying him to give you a sense of Peter’s inner self behind the lines. Also see Brian Michael Bendis’ probably correct assertion that Spider-Man’s constant running commentary drives everybody else around him insane and I can see where it might actually turn off audiences. But who knows?

But I digress, because what I really wanted to say is that a filmic reboot isn’t the same thing as a comic book reboot. James Bond was effectively rebooted every time a new actor played Bond, regardless of Desmond Llewellyn always being present as Q (or, nowadays, Judi Dench always being M) because there is no greater continuity to Bond films beyond “Bond is a badass, repeat” when it comes time for a new Bond. And this is sensible, because Connery’s Bond isn’t Moore’s Bond isn’t Brosnan’s Bond isn’t Craig’s Bond – they each have their own distinct style of playing the character and each man’s Bond has his own quirks and works in his own filmic universe. Moore is Bond in a wackier world than Connery is Bond, who is Bond in a far more romantic world than the one where Craig is Bond.

Indeed, if we go back to Batman again, one of the failures of the first franchise was the belief that Batman, like Bond, could be played by different actors while maintaining essentially the same narrative strands for the character, which is one of the reasons Batman Forever is so achingly bad: Kilmer isn’t Keaton. (But only one of them.) For the same reason I think that the current Batman producers made the right call by not finding a new actor to play the Joker in the Batman films but are staying away from it. An actor in a role is not unlike a new writer on a comic book: he uses his tools to tell the story of the character in the way he sees fit, with the help of his artistic collaborators (other actors/director/writer vs. artist/editor/letterer). Just as Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol isn’t anything like Arnold Drake’s Doom Patrol (or, if you like, Dan Slott and Roger Stern’s respective runs on Amazing Spider-Man, which have tonal similarities but are often wildly different), so, even with the obvious similarities, will Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man be nothing like Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man. And that’s why the reboot is a good idea.

EDIT TO ADD: In comments, Entertained Organizer writes:

It’s safe to assume that most actor/director pairings aren’t making it past three movies, so does that mean until the end of time every fourth movie in a superhero franchise needs to be the origin again?

Not necessarily, but complaining that the same story gets told over and over again doesn’t seem to be a criticism of, say, productions of Hamlet. Why, then, should it apply to the origin story of Spider-Man?

YES I JUST COMPARED STAN LEE TO SHAKESPEARE! AND DID SO NON-IRONICALLY!

NOTE: This was the second of these, written back for my Livejournal back when I was still on Livejournal. However, it does not appear to have been web-archived, and besides, I might as well rewrite it now. So this is a revamped version of the original article.

Loser was just further evidence that Jason Biggs’ career was over before it even started, which is kind of a shame because Jason Biggs has always been one of those actors who deserved better than he got: what he got, sadly, was “hey, it’s that guy who had sex with the pie in American Pie.” It didn’t help that beyond the Pie franchise he made some truly wretched choices: Boys and Girls and Saving Silverman is a one-two punch of horrible that could kayo most careers, but then Biggs made the poor decision to go ahead and appear in Jay and Silent Bob as himself and let Kevin Smith mock his only real achievement. And American Pie was an achievement for Biggs, because he played a dorky character without a shred of self-consciousness and thus made said dork a hero. It’s not something to be ashamed of, or run away from – it is something to be owned.

Loser follows suit as Biggs plays to his strength: he is the title character, a giant dork from the sticks named Paul who’s going to NYU and who just doesn’t fit in with mean big city life. Of course, in his native environment, he is widely admired by friends and family who think he’s just the greatest guy ever (Dan Aykroyd makes a brief cameo as his dad, giving him advice: “remember, son, interested is interesting“). But in New York City, he is just another schmoe, and unfortunately for him, he truly is a massive dork. Of course, the film goes in a farcical direction by having his roommates be wholly awful human beings: roofie-using date-rapist trust-fund babies who, while amusing, might as well be wearing HATE ME signs around their necks. Similarly terrible as a person is his professor, played by Greg Kinnear in full-on smarm mode, and who is dating the girl he likes, Dora, played by Mena Suvari. (Who is another “whatever happened to…” actor, having last appeared that I can remember in the not-very-good Day of the Dead remake, which was only notable for having Ving Rhames star in a second Romero-remake after Dawn of the Dead but as a totally different character.)

What makes Loser work, for me at least, is that it is honest about New York, which means being honest about great cities generally. It acknowledges that New York is an exciting place, filled with culture and vitality and unpredictability in a way that Paul’s hometown will never qute have. But it does this at the same time as it acknowledges that part and parcel of that vibrancy that cities have is a nasty streak, and by that I don’t mean to refer to Paul’s horrible roommates or teacher, who are stock villains; instead I refer to the fact that, when Paul and Dora go about town on their date, they are flat broke and have to figure out how to do things for free – sneaking into theatres at intermission, tooling around art galleries without paying, snagging a loaf of bread without paying (how very Les Miserables). The city might let them abide, but it is not greatly sympathetic to them, and this is an honest thing to say about any city, let alone one as romanticized as New York.

Loser doesn’t play up Paul’s decency to mirror off of his foils’ worthlessness; it doesn’t have to do that. All Loser does is present two reasonably nice people in a not-nice world, and have at it with them without pandering, and treat them generally with respect while surrounding them with a cynical, cruel world. They survive, of course – this is a comedy. But it has grit to it which I like.