Comics and the movies - uneasy bedfellows?

Brian Michael Bendis got a book out of his adventure getting something filmed, didn't he? And the siren call killed Bone's momentum stone dead. Also perfidous Hollywood keeps stealing away fine writers, simply because it can afford to pay their mortgage.

IMHO, the wave of Nu-Marvel films span the quality range: X-Men 2 and Daredevil are about as good and bad as the (superhero) genre is likely to get. Ghost World (and American Splendour!) are great in their own way, and LXG's crapulence punches through to a whole new dimension, a world man shall call: pants!

I haven't actually seem Hellboy, that's something to do this evening.

It's funny, I finally saw Alien vs. Predator last night and I was thinking of it the whole time like a comic book movie. I think it was both the crossover/fanboy aspect itself and the fact that they took some of the better plot points from the AvP comics I remember reading years ago (i.e. the Rastas releasing the aliens to hunt them, the one surviving human woman becoming a bad-ass one-of-the-boys warrior, etc.). I loved it WAY more than I expected to.

There's two great articles about this on FT: one by Tom about character continuity and Magneto, but the even more interesting one (if you have infinite time) is the one linked to here, which is the behind the scenes story of the Clone Saga in Spiderman. It was a godawful mess, and it doesn't sound more enticing the more I read (I'm not quite over half-way through), but it was done out of a pure desire for sales a return to the classic Spiderman, without a marriage and a kid and all the rest of that. Except once they got started, it turns out that married settled down Spiderman was the classic Spiderman to the rest of the writers, and a blank slate was an unlooked-for freedom.

X-Men's even stranger, as its classic period is a mutation (on a mutation?) on the original (Does anyone think of Cyclops + Jean Grey + Angel + Beast + Iceman as The X-Men?), and a period which was mostly marked by lineup change. I imagine the spread on a random sample of fans' All-time POX would be quite large.

Which is one of the reasons that Batman has endured, that he does not have much to mark the years other than the turning of the Robins. Superman endures because he's Superman.

Taking sides: Judge Dredd one-part stories where he ends up arresting everyone vs. Judge Child bollocks for months on end. (at the time, I preferred the bollocks, I admit).

I also failed to mention Grant Morrison in the last post: one of the benefits of the state of the X-Men is that there's room for people such as himself to cherry pick the bits that actually worked, or could have, and no-one can complain that he's ignoring large chunks of continuity, because everyone does that, it's the only way to write most of the stories (as he would admit, he's only following where the first film started hooray I'm on topic again). One of the disadvantages of the state of the X-Men is that they have a lot of characters that have some following but they don't know how much, or how to keep them in circulation in a way that makes money sense. So it was only a matter of time before X-Force slipped through the net again.

Oh wait, I just remembered the cutemeet/kung fu fight in the playground in broad daylight with Elektra, THAT was embarassing.

(x-posts)

I would also like to say that the reason I thought Hellboy was so much better than, say, The Hulk was that del Toro was true to the story and made the film into a story with the Hellboy characters, etc etc. Lee make the movie Hulk still look like a comic (with the split screens, etc etc). I liked all that at first but... not anymore. It was an interesting move to make but it ultimately didn't work in the end (I thought). Do you agree? The Hulk just tried too hard?

In film, as in all art, faithfullness can kiss my ass.

Haha now I see why that other thread started!

Geeky X-Fandom to thread! (The simple answer is "YES" but the X-Men are ALSO Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, Banshee, Phoenix, Shadowcat AND Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Iceman, Beast, Archangel, Psylocke, Rogue, Bishop, Gambit, Jubilee, Colossus, Storm.)

For some reason Hollywood decided not to put Eric Bana in front of a GIANT UNTESTED BOMB and then BLOW HIM UP WITH IT - an operation that would have been VERY SIMPLE TO UNDERSTAND and VERY EXCITING TO WATCH. But no! Ang Lee wants to pretend this is a voyage deep into the soul of man. THE FOOL.

Not to mention the amazing end battle in pitch darkness. Yeah, NICE DIRECTING WORK Ang Lee, I'm sure your audience of cats and owls loved it.

Hellboy - is a classy little piece of pulp. It works on its own terms, its fun, some of it is quite cool. DelToro is capable of much much more. But, though it captures the main character, it has an utterly different tone to the comic - not quite as moody, far schlockier, a lot more energetic.

The Hulk - is an attempt to make an Art Film out of a pop icon. Ang Lee plainly is not interested in the Hulk as he is in the comics, so he tailors him to his own interests. As such, its flawed but much more interesting than most superhero movies. The setpieces - the Hulk versus the gamma dogs, the Hulk versus the Army - are great for geeks, but there aren't enough of them. The rest you either go with or you hate.

Daredevil - how can a film get so many of the details so right and yet miss out on the appeal of a character by so much? This Daredevil may be called Daredevil and wear Daredevil's costume, but he ain't the DD I love...I still can't figure out what crucial element was missing...apart from a decent script and a good director...

I think the fact that he was played by Ben Affleck is a factor...

(xpost EXACTLY)

Hahahahaha...

I never saw Daredevil... Should I? I've never read any of the comics so I don't really know what it's meant to be about, I just know I hate Jennifer Garner.