pop culture miscellany
Jul. 12th, 2012 01:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kate_nepveuThis baby is refusing to be put down and I am very tired, so while I wait for a reasonable next-feeding time, some pop culture miscellany.
The AV Club had an interview with Mark Waid about various comics projects of his, which reminded me "oh yeah, he and John Rogers (Leverage) were working on this digital comics thing, I should take a look."
So far it has two titles up, an apparent one-shot about zombie roadkill which is not something I want to look at, and a serial called Insufferable which has the tagline, What happens when you’re a crimefighter and your sidekick grows up to be an arrogant, ungrateful douchebag? What on Earth could draw the two of you back together again?
Well, okay, I'll give that a try. The physical experience of reading is nice, but the story . . . in the first week, we learn that the crimefighter and sidekick are father and son. I'll give you three guesses whose death precipitates their final break from each other, and the first two don't count.
I don't remember what week of the comic that was—it was early, but our Internet is being grindingly slow right now so I can't check—but whichever it was, was when I closed the browser tab. Because, even if it's a soft launch, starting your "let's broaden readership!" project with another fridged woman does not impress.
(Speaking of which, the essay Natasha Walks Out of a Refrigerator may spoil the plot of Marjorie Liu's run on Black Widow, but it does so in a way that made me put the collection in my Amazon cart.)
Anyway. I was reminded of this by the first ten minutes of The Losers, which starts out as all banter-y action, silly but engaging and with an actual majority of non-white characters on the team, and then the fucking thing blows twenty-five just-rescued brown children out of the sky to motivate our heroes. At which point I carefully closed VLC and decided to write this, because seriously, fuck all of that sideways with a chainsaw.
Finally, in less egregious movie-dom, I half-watched The Incredible Hulk (the prior Marvel movie with the Hulk, the one with Edward Norton and Liv Tyler). I say "half" because I mostly skipped the smashing-things-up sequences and most of the General Ross stuff as boring.
Spoilers.
This did not get off to a good start, because I did not believe in the least that Bruce wouldn't check all the surrounding bottles for his blood (which stray drop is how the plot gets kicked off). And I find Tim Roth a really odd choice as the Abomination. (Tim Blake Nelson, on the other hand, was nicely creepy as creepy lab guy, though if he was being set up as a future villain by getting contaminated with Bruce's blood products, that feels oddly repetitive.)
The first time the pulse-counting appeared I was immediately glad that The Avengers dropped it, because it felt very boring and mechanistic. On the other hand, there's something to be said for specific defined limits to shape stories around, otherwise things can get very hand-wavy and plot-convenient. I think on balance I prefer the idea of the Hulk as triggered by emotional states rather than (or in addition to) simple physical conditions, because of the stories it makes possible, but I'm not sure it is as clear-cut as I thought at first.
A thing I am still thinking about: from Bruce's POV, the Hulk being triggered by a particular pulse rate seems akin to a physical illness or disability; making the trigger emotional moves it more into the realm of mental illness. Literalizing either of these things into an enormous green rage monster obviously has the potential to go lots of bad places; how I think the movies handled this is a step I haven't gotten to yet. (The Hulk himself probably has a boatload of non-metaphorical DSM diagnoses. Also I don't know what the various comics have done with his intelligence level; I think in both Marvel movies he is pretty intelligent.)
Sleep dep makes me ramble and it's about time for me to poke this baby awake. Anyway: the movie did body horror very effectively with Bruce's transformation while strapped down on creepy-guy's table, and stepping off the helicopter was a great moment. Edward Norton was fine. Liv Tyler . . . probably doesn't deserve my knee-jerk "oh no it's breathy Arwen!" reaction. The Avengers really felt like a re-set of the entire situation while the same time being perfectly consistent with this movie (I think), which is really odd.
I presume they're going to re-cast Betty Ross, since I just can't see Liv Tyler and Mark Ruffalo in the same movie (she looks a lot younger than him, just for one thing). Who do you all think they should cast as Betty?
no subject
Date: 2012-07-12 05:24 am (UTC)Interesting. I haven't seen any of the Hulk movies, but I always thought the Hulk was a metaphor for rage (specifically) and the sheer primal force of emotion (generally), not a metaphor for disability or mental illness. Bruce Banner gets angry (emotional trigger), his anger manifests as the Hulk.
Do you think unwanted transformation is inherently a disability metaphor?
no subject
Date: 2012-07-12 05:46 am (UTC)Reconstructed:
Umm, I don't know?
I mean, yes, obviously one level of the Hulk is rage/id monster. But the specific physical triggers of the Norton movie gave me this "body, why you gotta do this to me?" vibe, which started me down this path. Which may be clueless and offensive, and if so I would like to know.
When your comment came in, I was coming back to edit the post with a link to this fic that came across my RSS feed while I was writing the post:
The author's note reads in part, "This began about two months ago as a piece of meta on how the Hulk was analogous to my personal mental illnesses, expanded into a conversation with a friend of mine about how people react to her physical disability, and then sprang, fully formed, onto the screen."
Which then reminded me of another short fic which posits Tony as bipolar and has Bruce make a black-humor joke about their perceived parallels:
Okay, if I can get this to post I am going to bed, or at least trying.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-12 05:46 pm (UTC)But the specific physical triggers of the Norton movie gave me this "body, why you gotta do this to me?" vibe, which started me down this path. Which may be clueless and offensive, and if so I would like to know.
I can't see how an interpretation, which is inherently subjective, could be offensive. But stories seen in that light might all start reading as offensive in themselves, unless they were explicitly intended that way, as in the ones you link.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-12 05:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-12 06:11 am (UTC)....holy fuck I don't even really _like_ comics, and that was amazing.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-12 01:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-12 07:25 am (UTC)Of course, my dream casting would be Claudia Black, but that ain't never gonna happen.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-12 01:47 pm (UTC)Well. I'm glad she's working, but she was so effortlessly commanding of the screen in late SG-1 (I haven't seen _Farscape_ yet) that it does seem rather a shame.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-12 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-12 02:32 pm (UTC)Should be interesting!
Re: breathy Arwen
Date: 2012-07-12 04:11 pm (UTC)(Sorry to derail; I haven't seen the Norton or the Ruffalo Hulks yet, but the girl and I recently watched Fellowship and man, Liv Tyler and the writing of Arwen's role... ouch. I mean, I'm 100% behind a critique of the Problem of Women in Tolkien, but movie Arwen didn't do anything to solve it. Liv Tyler as Arwen has had the unfortunate effect (on me, at least) of causing me to reflexively not want to see anything else with Liv Tyler, which is probably unfair to her (ditto David Wenham, but that's outside the scope of even this digression)).
Re: breathy Arwen
Date: 2012-07-12 04:15 pm (UTC)Movie!Arwen is such, such a mess. I'm not sure any actor could have redeemed that morass the writers inflicted on her, but Tyler wasn't the one to make even a bit of lemonade out of it.
(How old is your daughter now, and what did she think? Oh, and has she finished the last Kane Chronicle book yet?)
Re: breathy Arwen
Date: 2012-07-12 04:50 pm (UTC)We read the Serpent's Shadow (last Kane Chronicle) together for bedtime reading a month or so ago, and she's since listened to the audiobook, too. I think she liked it, although from what I can gauge, she's not quite as passionate about it as the earlier books? She's still into Egyptian stuff, though. We got her some of the Egyptian Playmobile sets (Sphinx, desert oasis, war chariot, etc.), and she has a whole Egyptian town set up on the floor now. I personally wasn't that impressed/interested with it (particularly the whole dual-identity merge thing? how's that work out?), but then I didn't really follow the two earlier books, so didn't really know where everyone was coming from.
We just recently finished Howl's Moving Castle, and are about a 100 pages into The Golden Compass.
Re: breathy Arwen
Date: 2012-07-12 05:48 pm (UTC)So . . . I gather you are not in the camp that loathes the end of His Dark Materials?
Re: His Dark Materials
Date: 2012-07-12 06:50 pm (UTC)To be honest, it's been at least a decade since I read the Pullman, and I don't remember a lot of the details of the story that well (I made the mistake of mentioning that I'd read this--actually, I'm the one that picked it up, because there was a fairly pristine copy at the library sale a few months back--so I've been fielding a steady stream of "what happens next? what's Lyra going to do? who is this character?" questions, to all of which I reply "I don't remember; if you'll just be patient and listen, we'll find out, hmmm?").
I do recall that the third volume dips in quality (nyy gubfr qernel fbhyf va qernel yvzob, nf V erpnyy), and have an impression that the ending was disappointing (gur fnivat bs gur havirefr erdhverf gung Jvyy naq Ylen frcnengr sberire, evtug?), but I don't recall being thrown into a throw-book-against-wall rage, either.
Re: His Dark Materials
Date: 2012-07-12 07:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-12 06:15 pm (UTC)I just finished reading this and IT IS SO GOOD. A little dark in spots, as it should be - Natasha is an unquestionable badass and also a really solid, grounded character. I probably ought to write a post about it, because I keep thinking about it. There's a lot going on, and I wish I were better versed in comics in general because I'm pretty sure I missed some meta embedded in the book itself.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-12 07:14 pm (UTC)