Fans Have the Right to Be Hypocrites

by Gabriel Valdez

Fans have the right to be hypocrites. Michael Jackson shows us that.

I won’t watch a Roman Polanski movie, but I’m occasionally intrigued by what Mel Gibson’s up to. I’ve certainly forgiven American football a hell of a lot of dubious actions over the years. I can pretend these decisions are justified by moral absolutes, but they have more to do with my personal tastes.

I was never much of a fan of Polanski to start with. To me, he’s famous for a handful of good shots and a number of Hollywood friendships, which all adds up to critics overlooking his complete lack of narrative invention and inability to control pace. It’s easier for me to take a stand against him because I never liked him much to start.

Gibson, on the other hand, I grew up watching. I made my dad take me to see Braveheart three or four times in the theater. Even now, I find Gibson an absurdly intriguing lab experiment. Roles I thought had been acted one way as a child I can now see are acted in a completely different manner. I can see how he (and his directors) harness his sociopathy to make disturbing and fanatical characters feel charming and heroic.

Remember, we’re not arguing about whether what these people did was wrong (Polanski fled the U.S. to avoid a statutory rape conviction, Gibson abused his wife and has slandered Jews.) Their actions were awful and inexcusable. What I’m talking about is whether it’s right or wrong to continue watching their movies.

So you’ll listen to Michael Jackson and I’ll re-watch Mad Max and someone else will write about why Polanski’s such a great director, and we’ll debate the 80 things we don’t know about Woody Allen until the sun comes up the next morning.

Here’s what I want to say: it’s OK. Fans have the right to be hypocrites. For one thing, very few movies, albums, or photographs are ever created by a single person. Art, especially mass-market art, is the creative act of teams of people.

One thing I’ve enjoyed that Sony’s done is that they’ve added a line after the credits of their big-budget movies that specifies how many people the film employed. X-Men: Days of Future Past, for instance, employed 15,000 people.

After the film, I read news reports in which Bryan Singer was accused of having sex with a 17 year-old boy. It later turned out the boy was a model who accused a number of Hollywood figures of the same thing, so it appears to have been a hoax, blackmail, or a publicity scheme.

But in the moment, I was faced with a quandary – do I not see the sequel in opposition to Singer, or do I see it because Patrick Stewart is so outspoken about addressing domestic violence, and Ian McKellen and Ellen Page represent such milestones in normalizing LGBTQ acceptance? There was no wrong or right answer.

So, for the sake of our sanity, fans – and critics – have to be hypocrites. We can’t possibly go research the history of 15,000 people involved in a film, or even the few dozen most visible personalities, and weigh each person’s crimes or lack thereof.

At the same time, it’s important to voice your opinion and maintain your stands. When a friend asks me if I want to watch Rosemary’s Baby, I explain why I really don’t want to, and I expect that to be respected. When they ask me to flip away from a Mel Gibson movie, I’ll do so and, more importantly, listen to why.

It’s important to take stands, but it’s also important to recognize our own inconsistencies and hypocrisies. It’s in discussing our most passionate inconsistencies that we’re best able to understand the emotional perspectives of others.

So keep being fans of whomsoever you like, but don’t shut down someone who wants to tell you why they aren’t. Conversely, talk about the stands you take on art and viewership, and why. Understand when someone holds a different opinion. We all have our hypocrisies, the lines in the sand we can’t abide being crossed and the ones we’re willing to sweep away.

It’s not wrong for us to have these, but it is important that we recognize and discuss them.

I’d say the same holds true for politics and religion, but that’s for another article.

Wednesday Collective — Ghost in the Cruise

This week, we’re talking about Ghost in the Shell, Tom Cruise, singing cowboys, the X-Men, Steven Soderbergh, and Indiana Jones. We’ve focused some Wednesday Collectives lately about specific interests, so we’re playing some catch-up – we’ll have even more articles in tomorrow’s Thursday’s Child.

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
There is No Ghost in the Shell
LogosSteve

The thing about science-fiction is that the world catches up to it in short order. We may not have the spaceships of early 90s Star Trek, for instance, but we’ve certainly surpassed their clunky data devices and equaled their communication abilities. Star Wars movies made 15 years ago present us with dated, impractical visions of technology (oddly enough, the 30-year old films still feel more futuristic).

In the 80s, cyberpunk sprang to the fore of science-fiction. If nothing else, it was a reaction to Reaganism and the growing power of the corporation. Yet the subgenre’s originator, William Gibson, left his own genre a decade ago, saying that reality had caught up, and it was a far more insidious one than he could have imagined.

So it’s impressive that an anime film made 20 years ago looks like a grim vision of the future and asks us questions we’re still at the beginning stages of contemplating. Above is a staggeringly complete video essay on the questions about the soul, human consciousness, and the increasingly cybernetic nature of our lives that Ghost in the Shell raises.

The Fall of Tom Cruise
Amy Nicholson

I can’t understand people’s reasoning behind hating Tom Cruise. He stood on a couch at Oprah’s behest and he has a crazy religion. You know, unlike all those perfectly reasonable religions the rest of us have.

I know people who hate Tom Cruise but will geek out over Mel Gibson being in The Expendables, or who will gladly sit down for a Roman Polanski or Woody Allen movie. I know people who hate Tom Cruise who get upset when I turn off a Michael Jackson song.

Yes, he’s kind of crazy and his personality caused Katie Holmes to leave, but to lump him as somehow worse than that bunch and less deserving of our viewership based purely on personality is mind-boggling to me. He started out dirt poor. There are countless examples of his going out of his way and taking big financial risks to help directors and stars just getting their start. Directors come away saying he’s a workaholic on-set. Cast and crew come away saying he’s generous with his time, and pitches in with menial on-set tasks that other actors won’t. When he sues tabloids, he’s always given the entire proceeds to charity. Why don’t those things hold value?

Amy Nicholson answers a few of these questions for me in painting a picture of Cruise’s infamous Oprah appearance. Nobody could have known how badly timed it was – YouTube was a week old, Perez Hilton and Huffington Post just a month. It was a perfect storm of the Internet’s as-yet-untested viral tabloid ability and a breakdown in PR.

Her article also reminds us of Cruise’s early years, spent turning down tens of millions of dollars in action franchises so that he could instead play second fiddle roles to actors like Dustin Hoffman and Paul Newman, and work with directors like Ridley Scott and Oliver Stone.

I hope there comes a time when we’re able to remember Cruise as one of our most iconic movie actors, and not for an Oprah interview that – by the way – her attending audience that day was cheering. Well, until they got home and checked their e-mail, that is.

“Hollywood’s First Black Singing Cowboy”
Dennis McLellan

I’m not one to run obituaries. If someone dies, I don’t need a recap – I’d rather celebrate their life by discussing one of their films, or by sharing how their work affected me personally.

That said, history is riddled with important figures who we leave forgotten. Herb Jeffries is one of those figures. Before Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef took apart the Western there were straight-laced cowboys played by Gregory Peck and John Wayne. But before they saddled up, cowboys merrily sang their hearts out. In an age of crooning, white cowboys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, Jeffries was the premier black one. He provided a counter during an age when African-American heroes were simply not seen on-screen.

Interviewing Lauren Shuler Donner
Diane Panosian

Lauren Shuler Donner is one of Hollywood’s most successful producers, famed for being the woman responsible for getting X-Men onto the screen and, by extension, making the comic book movie genre viable.

I like this interview because it’s short, to the point, and all about Shuler Donner’s development process. Many producers toe the studio line and keep everyone on-schedule. There’s nothing wrong with that, but she’s known as a very hands-on producer. Her strength is her adaptability – she’s one of the few executives who regularly talks about viewing a project from the perspectives and needs of writers, directors, and actors. She gives some good advice about how to produce to the strengths of each of these jobs.

Steven Soderbergh is Terrible at Retirement
Alex Suskind

Steven Soderbergh retired from filmmaking because it was becoming nearly impossible to fund his style of modestly-budgeted narrative-heavy filmmaking. Nevermind that 15 of his 18 theatrically released films were profitable – even domestic underperformers like The Girlfriend Experience and Che made money for their studios because Soderbergh abandoned blanket overseas distributorship in favor of nuanced, sometimes individually-designed releasing contracts in foreign countries.

The thing about Soderbergh is that he can’t keep still. He’s recut two classic movies while developing and directing TV series The Knick with Clive Owen for Cinemax. He’s directed off-Broadway while starting an import business for Bolivian liquor…I know, it sounds like I’m just making up new David Mamet plots now, but Soderbergh’s a weird cat. I said a long time ago that if TV was smart, they would capitalize on the studio system’s failure by investing to keep Soderbergh employed behind the small-screen. It looks like they’re doing exactly that.

Fortune, Glory, and Evil Indiana Jones
Quint

I feel a bit dirty linking to a website like Ain’t It Cool News, but I really did enjoy this personal essay about Quint’s watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as a kid. I like folding personal experiences into these kinds of essays – artistic analysis is nothing without being honest about how our own personal biases fit into them – and it makes me think of Temple of Doom in a light I hadn’t considered before now.

SHORT FILM OF THE WEEK
“More”
dir. Mark Osborne

Vanessa ran a short film a few weeks ago and I liked the idea. We’re going to try closing each week’s Wednesday Collective with a short film of the week. I’ll start with one of my favorites – a stop-motion animation from Mark Osborne called “More.” It was nominated for an Oscar and won best short at Sundance way back in 1999, when I was just a 16-year old twinkle in a college admission department’s eye. Ah, those were the days. The awful, awful days. “More” remains one of the most moving and effective short films I’ve seen.

The Profound Journey of “X-Men: Days of Future Past”

The X-Men are mutant superheroes who each boast different abilities. In the world of X-Men: Days of Future Past, mutants are discriminated against and hunted relentlessly by robots called Sentinels. It is in this future that the few remaining survivors invent a desperate method to send one of their own back through time to try and change history.

The X-Men were created in a 1963 comic as a reflection of Martin Luther King’s and Malcolm X’s struggle to end the segregation of African-Americans in the U.S. The wheelchair-bound Professor X was the MLK figure who favored peace and passive resistance, while Magneto was the Malcolm X analogue who believed equality would only be earned through more violent means.

John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, Robert Kennedy and King in 1968. We may look at civil rights now as a story of achievement removed from its images of suffering and struggle, we may be told by commentators with airtime to fill that it was a bloodless progression that ended racism in America, but such is the neglect of history that 50 years’ time can lend our worst moments.

Days of Future Past understands that cycles of violence are how history is defined and, as we become more efficient at killing each other, moving beyond this infinite downward spiral may be the only way we survive as a species. In the past Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is sent to change, Magneto (Michael Fassbender) is imprisoned deep underneath the Pentagon, accused of the assassination of JFK. Wolverine’s mission is to stop sometimes-villain Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from a botched assassination attempt on a mutant hunter name Trask (Peter Dinklage), who invents the Sentinels. Even the climax involves the potential assassination of Richard Nixon, and the risk of an even worse future than the one from which Wolverine is sent.

It’s a complex plot handled deftly, based on one of the original comics and fusing the X-Men trilogy’s cast with the rebooted X-Men: First Class cast. Days of Future Past has a lot of story to tell, but it strikes a fine balance – its action scenes each twist the screws on the plot tighter, while its dialogue scenes subtly hint at characters growing into the decisions that will effect the plot later.

The past and future timelines also allow a style of simultaneous action that is often forgotten in today’s movies. In the service of realism, we usually see one action sequence at a time. This can be important in a movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark, when Indiana Jones leaps from truck to truck. All the tension is in the physical performance and choreography. On the other hand, consider the climax of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. Three very different battles take place simultaneously: a ground war on Endor; a fleet battle in space; and an intimate duel between the hero and villain. The tension is in the hands of the editor. In Raiders, we have to believe Indiana Jones can do everything he’s doing, that every punch is connecting, so we never cut away. In Jedi, the outcome of every individual battle relies upon the next. Cutting away ratchets up the tension.

Days of Future Past uses the latter approach, taking advantage of its dual timelines beautifully. Because Wolverine’s consciousness travels through time, and not his entire body, in order for Wolverine to save the world in the past, his friends have to keep him alive in the future. In order for his friends to stay alive in the future, Wolverine has to change the past. From an action standpoint, it’s an emotionally charged choice – some characters die more than once and, for the first time in a long time, I saw a superhero movie in which I couldn’t be sure who would survive.

That timeline cycle is built from if-then relationships. If one situation worsens, so does the other, which worsens the former, and so on. From a conceptual standpoint, it’s an emotionally challenging choice. It confronts the viewer with yet another infinite downward spiral, a narrative one, and the only way to break it is to break the cycle of violence that started it. In the end, we’re not rooting for any hero to save the day. We’re rooting for humanity to be better than we have been, to improve and make a far better choice than we have before, to let the cycle of violence go.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is rated PG-13 for violence, brief nudity, and language.

Ranking Every Superhero Movie Since 2000

by Vanessa Tottle

I want to rank every live-action superhero movie made since 2000 through this year. The movie has to have had a theatrical release to qualify. It’s an ambitious goal, so I broke things down into categories to make it easier.

Films Based Around a Male Superhero
51. Jonah Hex
50. Zoom
49. The Crow: Wicked Prayer
48. Son of the Mask
47. Thor: The Dark World
46. Green Lantern
45. Man-Thing
44. The Green Hornet
43. The Incredible Hulk
42. Superman Returns
41. The Crow: Salvation
40. The Spirit
39. Ghost Rider
38. Kick-Ass 2
37. Daredevil
36. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
35. Iron Man 2
34. R.I.P.D.
33. Super
32. Spider-Man 3
31. Punisher: War Zone
30. The Legend of Zorro
29. Ghost Rider: The Spirit of Vengeance
28. The Punisher
27. Iron Man 3
26. Blade: Trinity
25. Wanted
24. Iron Man
23. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
22. Captain America: The First Avenger
21 .The Amazing Spider-Man
20. Kick-Ass
19. Jumper
18. Spider-Man
17. The Dark Knight
16. Blade 2
15. Spider-Man 2
14. The Wolverine
13. Thor
12. Man of Steel
11. Hulk
10. Hancock
9. Hellboy 2: The Golden Army
8. Batman Begins
7. Hellboy
6. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
5. V for Vendetta
4. Constantine
3. Dredd
2. Unbreakable
1. The Dark Knight Rises

Ensembles Dominated by Male Superheroes
12. Fantastic Four
11. X-Men: The Last Stand
10. Sky High
9. Push
8. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
7. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
6. X-Men
5. X-Men: First Class
4. The Avengers
3. Chronicle
2. X2: X-Men United
1. Watchmen

Ensembles Dominated by Female Superheroes
no entries yet

Films Based Around a Dog Superhero
2. Super Buddies
1. Underdog

Films Based Around a Female Superhero
2. Catwoman
1. Elektra

If Black Widow gets a solo movie, we’ll be one ahead of dogs, you guys!