Interlude Of The Bat

My attempt to solicit a pithy comment from one of my few and precious readers (by referencing her in laudatory fashion in a post that was tangentially related to a host of issues she's quite interested in) failed, but instead she wanted to know my thoughts on the Michael Keaton / Tim Burton Batman and how those two movies would rank in the ordering I provided below. The ranking is reproduced here:

Batman Begins
Iron Man
Spider-Man 2
X-Men 2
Spider-Man
Spider-Man 3
Hulk
The Incredible Hulk
X-Men

Based on memory of my responses to Batman and Batman Returns, I'd rate the former around X-Men 2 and the latter around Spider-Man 2 or Iron Man; reflection leads me to believe that if I were going to watch them right now, I'd probably knock each one a slot or two down. I'm not that big a fan of Tim Burton's schtick at the end of the day, and I'm pretty sure that if we're grabbing from childhood memories of Batman-on-screen, I'd take the acclaimed and semi-legendary animated series from the early 90s and probably put it up there with Iron Man. It was REALLY good.

Aside from thinking/remembering that I'd prefer the aesthetic of the Christopher Nolan movies to the Burton ones, by memory I also feel like Batman Begins is trying to push the concept as far as it can go within the confines of an origin story; unlike Iron Man, it's not simply passively suggesting questions by virtue of the subject matter, it's actively engaging with them. Because of his human scale - and the primarily human scale of his rogue's gallery - Batman is a lot easier to grapple with on an intellectual/philosophical/dramatic level than most other superheroes, because there's that much less to overcome in trying to take the concept seriously. I'm not putting this well; Iron Man took the concept fairly seriously while also having fun with it (and Batman Begins certainly had fun with itself) but it would be tonally difficult for most superheroes (I actually think Iron Man is an exception along the lines of Batman) to really engage with whatever latent philosophical or psychological material is available because they also have to sell you on the outsized fantasy of the whole thing. Batman Begins, to my mind, suggested an approach that was much more ambitious in terms of pushing the potential of the character-on-film to its limits, and I hope that The Dark Knight will make good on that promise.

I'm Really Not

Go watch the whole thing, folks, and let the truth wash over you like a wave.

And please understand: I might like some of you, but I'm not blogging here because I want to make friends. I'm not here to make friends, I'm here to be with Flav.

Music Is Free! (When It's Five Hundred Years Old!)

Hallelujah.

The re-opening of the Internet Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) isn't just important for my own selfish needs, but it's a necessary (if a small or limited audience) victory in the intellectual property struggles which I generally leave to my betters. (Or, specifically, one better in particular.) I'm not going to hash out the basis of the position on IP and copyright as filtered through my worldview, but briefly: the IMSLP was shut down under threat of lawsuit from certain (primarily European, if I recall) music publishers because some users had uploaded works which were still under copyright. Here I'm going to take a moment and say: Bad Users! Very Bad! What you were doing legally amounted to encouraging theft, doing so in a public place, and most importantly to me, wound up Ruining It For Everyone Else. The purpose of the IMSLP is to archive editions of music which are no longer under copyright.

Essentially, nobody owns the rights to publish editions of, say, Haydn's string quartets, which means that everyone is free to do so (and many publishers do offer such editions). If the IMSLP were scanning the Dover editions and presenting them as copyright free, that would be Wrong; what the IMSLP is about is putting up old editions which are themselves no longer in copyright. The open letter linked above heartily defends this position, just after a few paragraphs on how the IMSLP and publishers can work together to mutual benefit: "However, permit me to make one point clear here in no uncertain terms. IMSLP will continue to oppose organizations who attempt to limit and restrict the already much-shrunken public domain." The only people who benefit from keeping ostensibly public domain works like those of Bach or Haydn or Schumann or (I presume) Wagner out of the hands of the public unless forced to pay for them are the publishers offering their own editions. (Again, the ostensible purpose of the threatened suits which forced the site's closure regarded works which were under copyright, but I'm fairly certain that from the publishing industry's standpoint [or its most conservative standpoint] this is the greater concern.)

The ancillary point to the reopening of the IMSLP and the letter's invitation to music publishers to consider new models for distributing and promoting their products is that the current system for publishing the works of contemporary composers is broken. If I were interested, as I was some months ago, in perusing a score by a young and acclaimed composer like, say, Thomas Ades, some research would indicate that he has a deal as a house composer for the publisher Faber Music. Here are a listing of his scores which are for sale (many more are only available for rental), and please note that prices are in Pounds sterling, currently worth just less than $2. The cheapest non-libretto work here, is the Arcadiana string quartet, which would cost something like $20 before shipping and taxes. I know that Ades and his publishers would like to derive some income from the sale of his scores, but I bought pretty much the complete string quartets of Haydn online for about $80 total. And Haydn wrote a LOT of quartets. The score to arguably his most famous instrumental piece, the symphonic work Asyla, would be more like $60. Is it any wonder, then, that I could only find one score of his at my local library, or that I couldn't find (with, granted, a very brief search) any of his scores available on Amazon? This isn't a system that works very well insofar as serving the needs of a small but interested public is concerned, and the health of the score-publishing industry as well as notated music in general is dependent on, and should be solicitous of, said small but interested public.

Weird Presence

Working in the same office as my father (when he's in town) has created an unexpected new situation: we can run into each other in the men's room without knowing the other person was in there. At a movie theater or a restaurant or anywhere else where we happen to be in the same place, we're in that place as part of a group (often a group of two), and so we typically say things like "I need to use the men's room before we leave," or "Excuse me," and getting up from the table to walk in the relevant direction. The situation of walking into the men's room to find my father washing his hands without knowing he'd be there is actually pretty rare in my experience.

So: what I've realized that's kind of weird is that I can walk into the men's room, note that a stall is in use, select another stall, and then realize my father is in the adjacent stall. He doesn't say anything (nor do I), there's nothing overt to signal his presence. There also aren't any sort of unpleasant or squeam-inducing indicators - I don't mean that I'm sitting there thinking "hey, those are the sounds of my father's indigestion!" It's the overall aural vibe: the sound and rhythm of his breathing, the way I can hear him shift his weight slightly, a soft cough. (When he passed in front of my stall after washing his hands I could see him in the crack of my stall door, so I received confirmation.) There wasn't a particular tell or giveaway, either. I just sat down and then instantly realized: "Hey, that's my dad."

When I was a kid I could tell, with my door closed, which of my parents was walking down the hall. This didn't have anything to do with the weight of the person, since during the era in question both my father and my mother were in the vicinity of 215 pounds; I could pick them out by the rhythm of their walk and where they placed their steps in that hallway (and later on my dad's ankles started making funny noises), but that was distinguishing between a class of two; I never would've assumed that I could identify either of their walk-sounds out of fifty possibilities (ankle-noises aside). Maybe I was wrong.

I don't think this is some special acuity I've got; I just think it's cool because I've learned a slightly weird (and for me at least weirder because it involves the bathroom) thing about us: we can hear and recognize another person's presence without them making an intentional sound.

(Completely unscientific alternate theory: familial pheremones?)

Two Hulks Both Alike In Dignity...: The Incredible Hulk, More Or Less

[This was initially to be one post, but is now Part One of a projected Two.]

Hey, here's my impression of the film The Incredible Hulk:

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

Ahem.

Seriously, though. I haven't particularly read any Hulk comics so I don't know if that's really true to the source material, but if it is, it really didn't work on film; each time the Hulk took advantage of a lull in the action to unleash a lengthy roar in the direction of an antagonist (or, occasionally, the sky), I got a little more bored and the movie got a little more ridiculous.

Assuming you've seen both movies, it's impossible to watch the new Edward Norton / Louis Leterrier The Incredible Hulk without thinking a lot about the pre-owned Eric Bana / Ang Lee Hulk. The fact that I'm sitting there in the theater thinking about it is already a failure of the movie, in a sense; not to be harsh, but I judge a movie based on how successfully (in my estimation) it achieves its own goals, and one of the goals of The Incredible Hulk was to pretend that Hulk didn't exist. It didn't have to be that way; according to the unimpeachable source that is Wikipedia, Marvel intially intended to present The Incredible Hulk as a straightforward sequel that maybe asked you not to think too hard about its predecessor; supposedly Bana was offered another crack at the role and he declined. Once you're heavily (and then entirely) recasting the film ties get more tenuous, and when you bring a guy like Edward Norton on board, whose talents are equalled if not outweighed by his own estimation of same, he's gonna be inclined to do things like rewrite the script. Norton's rewrite was the difference between a sequel and a reboot, and the origin story which is (quite artfully) presented in the credits sequence is much simpler, much different, and much more true to the comics than what we saw in Hulk.

Cutting to the chase, I think both of these movies are failures; Hulk had the distinction of being a very interesting failure, and The Incredible Hulk is a reasonably entertaining failure. They're distinct, opposed takes on the idea of how one should undertake the making of a comic book movie, and neither really gets it right.

(Cards on the table: here's my rank ordering, in my opinion, of the movies I've seen [no Fantastic Four or Superman yet] in the recent Major Comic Character Movie boom:

Batman Begins
Iron Man
Spider-Man 2
X-Men 2
Spider-Man
Spider-Man 3
Hulk
The Incredible Hulk
X-Men

That's approximate, not absolute, although there's a big gap for me between the Batman and Iron Man films.)

So. The Incredible Hulk is by far the less ambitious of the two HulkFlicks. It wants to be a Rock-Em-Sock-Em Good Time Ride, Celluloid Fun, etc. It's serviceable for that purpose, but it's not remotely up to the standards of Iron Man in this regard. Look, Iron Man doesn't have creative/challenging aesthetic goals and it doesn't ask difficult questions.

(Important point here: Iron Man asks interesting questions of himself, and the movie passively suggests those questions. Which is to say that you can deposit onto the film a discussion of the ethics of violence and the corporatized manufacture of same and the role exporting such violence plays in promoting world peace. Tony Stark pithily presents his latest weapon design by modifying the bon mot that "the best weapon is the one you never need use" to his own ends: the best weapon [the Jericho missile] is the one you need fire only once. Stark seems to genuinely believe and defend the position that making weapons to strengthen the US military is, via the mechanism of deterrence, a positive contribution to the cause of peace. His experience in Afghanistan and the revelations about what his corporation has been doing behind his back profoundly alter Stark's ethic in this regard, but the result of his ethical realignment is to narrow his creative focus and turn it inward: now Stark designs and engineers himself as a weapon and exports himself as a violent solution to the problem of violence, up to and including the destruction of his own company's weapons. So something's changed, but what? And to what end? These are things you can discuss in light of Iron Man, and I'll roll my eyes at someone who thinks we shouldn't have these thoughts because "it's just a movie," but the movie itself isn't trying to investigate these issues, it's using these issues - with some care, I believe - as a jumping-off point for Celluloid Fun, a Rock-Em-Sock-Em Good Time Ride. There's a legitimate difference, and faulting Iron Man for not being more philosophically curious is like faulting Remains of the Day for not having superpowered exo-skeleton fighting suits.)

So, long parenthetical concluded, Iron Man doesn't have creative/challenging aesthetic goals and it doesn't ask difficult questions, but it does give you compelling acting, witty dialogue, humor, mild suspense, and pretty cool action sequences in a tightly wrapped package that's a lot of fun and had me grinning on my way out of the theater. I think it's a great movie because (a) I like that sort of movie, and (b) it executes its own goals to near perfection. The Incredible Hulk has the same outline but pales in execution; it offers fine acting, passable dialogue, disappointing humor (one scene excepted), no suspense, and serviceable action sequences. Essentially there are three separate failures (aside from having to cope with the unwanted specter of Hulk): of ambition, of tonal execution, and of technical capacity.

The ambition one is the easiest to plow through; The Incredible Hulk reads, inevitably, as a reaction to the so-called commercial and possibly aesthetic failure of its red-headed step-predecessor, a retrenchment where the powers that be said "Let's just make a fun movie." That "just" is everything: it doesn't define the boundaries of your goals so much as it limits the distance to which you will stretch yourself in pursuit of them. The most evident creative ambition in The Incredible Hulk is an aspiration to the adept deployment of bombast in its action sequences, but bombast is a suspect quailty of entertainment, and the film suffers from limited expectations of its characters and its plot.

Those same limitations are what hamper what I called the film's "tonal execution" - its ability to be funny and moving when it wants to be funny and moving. With two exceptions I'll list below, there's like one truly funny moment in the film: like Hulk, The Incredible Hulk doesn't want to just give us the character's great immortal catchphrase. The prior movie gave it as the last line (or started to?), in Spanish, while this one has Norton's Bruce Banner trying to say it in Portuguese but ineptly swapping "hungry" for "angry." Other moments of potential humor, like Norton's quest for pants that fit both him and his Hulk, are too muted to really work. I smiled, but I didn't laugh, because the film is too constrained to really go there. This is best exemplified by the abortive sex scene. Banner cuts off activities when he notices his heart rate escalating into dangerous territory, and fears that if he keeps going he'll turn into the Hulk. I can't stand Armond White, and I can't stand his review of the movie, but he's right that in its complete failure to try and get anything interesting out of the moment, the scene fails to add anything to "The Simpsons' Paul Bunyan episode where Marge cautioned, 'Just let me do a few more yoga lessons.'" I smiled in the theater because it's a funny idea, but what I saw onscreen wasn't pushed for laughs despite the rich comic possibilities. (And if you haven't read Larry Niven's immortal "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex", DO IT NOW.) The same idea in Ang Lee's movie (actually in Lee's movie, the transformation is triggered purely by anger, so Banner would've been fine as long as he didn't get into roleplaying and BDSM) probably would've been played for a pathos this movie equally won't let itself access. Instead the moment just lies there flat and limp. Ahem.

(This is the Listed Below: There are two scenes, one long and one brief, that are really funny and have a completely different energy, because they feel like they're actually from a somewhat different movie, powered by the performances of actors behaving like they're in a different movie. In the case of the film's last scene, a Robert Downey, Jr. cameo in character as Tony Stark, it feels that way because he literally is from another movie, and he's here to help set up yet another movie or five, and half the excitement and energy of the scene comes from the perpetuation of Marvel's ground-laying for the eventual Avengers movie. His performance also casts unfavorable light on Norton; I probably prefer Downey, Jr. as an actor anyway, but part of the charm of Iron Man is that they let a supremely talented actor completely absorb and commandeer the role, providing an honest to God interpretation that makes actual choices and charges the movie with Downey's own nervy energy. Tony Stark doesn't have to be played that way to be successful as a movie character, but the act of committing to really playing it (and Downey, Jr.'s particular bent helps) makes Stark pop off the screen with vitality. Norton's own script didn't really give him anything to do but competently execute the motions and dialogue required of him, and he doesn't invest the character with any of the life he brought even to such a bland cipher as his role in Fight Club. I don't rate Eric Bana as highly as Edward Norton, but his Banner is the more interesting and more accomplished performance. The longer scene-from-another-film is the set-piece with Tim Blake Nelson, who decides to completely gun for the humor of his situation, and becomes the movie's primary breath of fresh air amidst lot of dull reciting and occasional RRRRAAAAAWWWWRRRRing.)

And, finally, the Hulk just doesn't look that good, but I'm going to save that for another day, when I resume this mammoth overlong posting and wrap it around to a consideration of Hulk.