Groovers Recommended Comic Book Movies

The release of The Dark Knight Rises has got me thinking about comic book movies. With that in mind I give you my five favourite comic book based movies released since I started blogging in February 2009.

The Dark Knight Rises: I’m still holding off on an actual review of this movie but here are a few thoughts: it is the best movie I have seen so far this year. I don’t think it is as good or as complete as The Dark Knight but it is a more than fitting conclusion to what is possibly the best trilogy of all time. The use of Bane and Catwoman (never actually referred to as catwoman) is perfectly handled and end is measured thoughtful and fitting.

Watchmen: Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel set in an alternate version of our reality on the verger of nuclear war circa 1985 has a unusual place in comic book movies. It was met with relatively positive reviews and word of mouth but very quickly had a backlash. The film looks amazing and is faithful to the comic book (except the end that achieves the same end with a tweak to the story) but more importantly, more than twenty years after the publication of its source novel it is still relevant. And like Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy it deals with flawed and imperfect heroes and complicated villains.

The Avengers: Possibly jumping up the list as I had low expectations of this movie. I liked most of the movies leading up to The Avengers without loving any of them the way I love The Dark Knight. The big problem is how you bring the disparate group together in a movie with just the right blend of action and comedy. The biggest problem is how to utilise Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark/Iron Man (the funniest, most entertaining character and has the best movie behind him) without marginalising the other avengers. Not only has Joss Whedon done the seemingly impossible but he also made the two least significant characters (Black Widow and Hawkeye) the best.

Kick-Ass: What would happen if an ordinary everyday person decided to become a supper hero? Not billionaire Bruce Wayne, but an ordinary kid. Haven’t we seen this one before, it was called Watchmen and it failed to find the audience it deserved. Kick-Ass has a lot in common with Watchmen but is also very different from it, it is these contradictions that make it so good. It isn’t really a superhero movies and it isn’t a spoof of superhero movies either. It isn’t a comedy and but it is extremely funny at times. It is a coming of age drama, a satire on human nature and modern society and a violent bloody action movie.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: On the surface Scott Pilgrim is a similar movie to Kick-Ass but it is very different. Lighter in tone but with a very dark side. Less grounded in reality but more directly concerned with everyday issues. Depending on your point of view it is either the very cool and hip (except cool and hip probably aren’t cool or hip terns to use) or a flimsy, flashy over edited mess that is trying too hard. The casting is spot on and the action brilliantly choreographed, the script is cutting and funny but above all it is great fun.

The other comic book movies I have enjoyed in the last three and half years but didn’t quite make the list are: X-Men First Class, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger and The Amazing Spider-Man. The worst comic book movies of the time are Green Lantern, X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Jonah Hex.

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The Avengers

Already the most talked about movie of the year so far, the one thing we don’t need is another review of The Avengers. Therefore I am going to try and avoid reviewing the movie other than to say I have seen it, and I loved it. So what follows are just a ramblings and thoughts on the franchise and where it is going. To begin with, lets get one thing straight, the new UK title Marvel Avengers Assemble is a bit of a mouthful and is frankly crap so from this moment on I will refer to the movie as The Avengers.

Making a movie of The Avengers must have seemed like a good idea, but how do you bring together a disparate group of characters in a coherent story? By starting with a series of movies involving the individual characters gives a strong base and also solves the problem of protracted introductions of multiple characters. The problem, it builds expectations of the fans and risks alienating the uninitiated. The greatest challenge is probably containing Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark / Iron Man who could run away with the whole movie, but there is even more to it than that. How do you use Bruce Banner and The Hulk within the team? To add to this problem Mark Ruffalo is the third Bruce Banner in less than a decade, do you introduce him again or go with an assumed back story? Then you have Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Clint Barton / Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) who have made fleeting appearances but have not had their own movies, they also seem to lack any supper abilities. Slotting the two fish out of water character, Steve Rogers / Captain America (Chris Evans) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) into the mix also has its challenges. If you can solve all these problems you then need a suitable villain. The X-Men movies accomplish this by using multiple villains to pair off against the heroes, this works for them but The Avengers are a very different group to The X-Men. Loki (Tom Hiddleston) was a great choice, having already been introduced in Thor we already know his back story. He is also an interesting villain with a typically comic book agenda.

Where do you start a project like this? The director. It would have been easy to pick one of the successful directors of the earlier films: Jon Favreau (Iron Man), Joe Johnston (Captain America: The First Avenger), Kenneth Branagh (Thor), but the avengers needs to be its own movie not an Iron Man or Thor sequel. My interest certainly increased when Joss Whedon’s name was attached to the project. To put it simply, Whedon just gets it. Treating the group as a dysfunctional family whose personalities get in the way whenever they are put in a room together. This clash is what makes the movie funny, but it is also the basis that makes the team work as just that, a team. The key to the success is the relationships, as a group of individuals they are defined by the way they interact. Tony Stark and Steve Rogers are like bickering siblings, but Iron Man and Captain America are a proficient team. The biggest beneficiary of the Whedon effect is Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow who is promoted from little more than eye candy in Iron Man 2. She is funny and sexy and is a surprisingly deep character. There has to be some mileage in giving Black Widow an origin movie of her own or possible one shared with Hawkeye. Given his background of ass kicking female characters (Buffy/River/Echo), Joss Whedon would be the perfect director to take it on.

One of the first things I noticed about the film was the unusually narrow aspect ratio (1.85:1), the fact that I completely forgot this within a few minutes suggests it wasn’t important and the chosen format worked. I have read that Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey chose the ratio to help frame the unusually tall characters like The Hulk along side normal and short characters. It has also been mentioned that Joss Whedon favoured this ratio of the more normal wider ratios with his climatic Manhattan, sequence in mind.

Given the least back-story I wondered where Clint Barton / Hawkeye would fit in to the story. He is actually really important to the plot and along with Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow give the team and the movie a grounding. It all helps in the meteoric rise of Jeremy Renner, I had little idea who he was a few years ago, I vaguely remember him in 28 Weeks Later and S.W.A.T. and have no recollection of him in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. His breakthrough performance came in The Hurt Locker where he received a much deserved Oscar nomination. Clearly Hollywood was just as impressed as I was, he has found his way into three big franchises. As well as Hawkeye in The Avengers he also landed a part in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol that is rumoured as a future replacement for Tom Cruise as the main star of the franchise. Later this year he will appear in The Bourne Legacy, possibly the first part of a new trilogy.

With a positive response from critics and a strong box-office this will not be the only time we see the Avengers assemble, but here dose the franchise go from here? Avengers 2, Iron Man 3, Captain America 2, Thor 2, The Hulk 3 (or rebooted)? Probably all of the above. As mentioned above I would also like to see a Black Widow and/or a Hawkeye prequel/origin. There is also space for a Nick Fury stand alone movie. Not to mention all the other Marvel Characters who could appear. The most obvious would be Spider-Man, this probably isn’t possible at them moment as Sony currently own the rights (along with Ghost Rider). A similar problem exists with Fox who hold: The X-Men, Daredevil and The Fantastic Four. This isn’t a bad thing as I am happy to see the Avengers and X-Men universes kept apart.

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2011 Films

All the films I saw at the cinema in 2011 ranked in order of preference:

1. Hugo
2. Drive
3. The Guard
4. Black Swan
5. Senna
6. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
7. True Grit
8. We Need to Talk About Kevin
9. Midnight In Paris
10. The Skin I live in
11. The King’s Speech
12. Moneyball
13. Stake Land
14. Kill List
15. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
16. Another Earth
17. Melancholia
18. Warrior
19. 127 Hours
20. The Way
21. Julia’s Eyes
22. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
23. Troll Hunter
24. 50/50
25. Source Code
26. Submarine
27. Super 8
28. 13 Assassins
29. A Lonely Place To Die
30. The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec
31. The Adjustment Bureau
32. X-Men: First Class
33. Thor
34. Captain America: The First Avenger
35. Limitless
36. My Week With Marilyn
37. The Inbetweeners Movie
38. Take Shelter
39. The Rum Diary
40. Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 2
41. The Ides Of March
42. Real Steel
43. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
44. Fair Game
45. Never Let Me Go
46. Blue Valentine
47. Tree Of Life
48. The Lincoln Lawyer
49. The Help
50. In Time
51. The Awakening
52. Sucker Punch
53. Fast Five
54. Hanna
55. Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark
56. Wuthering Heights
57. Contagion
58. The Fighter
59. Paul
60. Animal Kingdom
61. NEDS
62. Rabbit Hole
63. One Day
64. John Carpenter’s The Ward
65. Drive Angry
66. The Beaver
67. Beginners
68. Bridesmaids
69. Red State
70. Cowboys and Aliens
71. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
72. The Conspirator
73. The Art of Getting By
74. I am Number Four
75. Fright Night
76. Henry’s Crime
77. Blitz
78. Priest
79. Red Riding Hood
80. Oranges and Sunshine
81. Faster
82. 1920 The Battle of Warsaw
83. Win Win
84. Colombiana
85. Water for Elephants
86. Immortals
87. Battle: Los Angeles
88. 30 Minutes or Less
89. Hereafter
90. Biutiful
91. The Mechanic
92. The Thing
93. The Three Musketeers
94. Anonymous
95. Tomorrow, When The War Began
96. The Debt
97. Green Lantern
98. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1
99. Footlose
100. Justice
101. Attack the Block
102. Apollo 18
103. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
104. Unkown
105. Scream 4
106. The Silent House
107. The Eagle
108. The Resident
109. Season of the Witch
110. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
111. The Hangover: Part II
112. Sanctum

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Movie of the Month: July 2011

As reported last month the summer blockbuster season plays havoc with the release (or screening to be more precise) of other movies, therefore I have only seen five in the past month. All five films are very good but flawed in some way that prevents them form being great.

The Conspirator: Part of the agenda of Robert Redford’s civil war drama is to tell an historically accurate story, it certainly does this, however it is all wrapped up with a subplot involving a modern and surprisingly overt political message.

Tree Of Life: I still can’t make my mind up about Terrence Malick’s latest offering. Is it a profound, existential, allegorical movie or an esoteric rant? Its probably a bit of both but it is also supremely well made and fantastically acted.

Bridesmaids: After The Hangover Part II left a bad taste I wasn’t keen to see the comedy billed as “The Female Hangover”. Following good word of mouth and the amazing Kristen Wiig present as both star and writer I decided to give it a go and was impressed. Far funnier and very different than the trailer led me to expect.

Beginners: Writers/director Mike Mills’ semi autobiographical movie is well written and extremely well acted if a little slight. It has been described as self indulgent, and in a way it is however this does somewhat go with the territory of a movie of this type.

Captain America: The First Avenger: The name says it all, the origin of the first Avenger in preparation for next years Avengers movie. Perfectly cast, well structured and the period setting is spot on. The balance between action and narrative is about right, all in all it as good a film as it could have been allowing for its role as a setup for The Avengers, this is also the reason for the movies only real problem, the modern day sections are conspicuous and could have been handled better or even omitted.

In a close run battle the movie of the month is:

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