SolarPlexus

I managed to watch Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer last night.

I’m not terribly impressed by superhero movies. Oh, I can appreciate the yarncraft of something like Superman (the Donner version) but I’m always a little uncomfortable with blokes in tights running around on screen - even if the tights are clad in leather armour (X-Men). Without wanting to (or being able to!) analyse it too much it seems to me that the stories and situations sit better at another layer removed - ie. on the comic page, in a boxed panel. Sticking them on screen brings it all uncomfortably close to real-life, and too close to the novelty Spiderman who opens village festivals. But perhaps that’s the nerd in me squirming - I mean, there may be folk in the audience who laugh at superhero comics, oh the shame.

Back to FF: ROTSS - on my scale of 1 to 10 for superhero movies, where 10 denotes Blade, and 1 denotes the mooted Antman movie (I mean, Antman? That’s got to be crap from the outset.), I’d pitch the FF sequel at a very average 5. It’s enjoyable enough to maintain interest for 90 minutes but I can’t help but view it with the lens of insider knowledge, and that, unfortunately, means I hated their vision of the world-eating Galactus…

Forgive me if this topic has already been done to death, but as the movie is still fresh in my mind I’ve got to let off some steam.

If you buy into the charm of the comic FF, you must be using the original Stan Lee / Jack Kirby stories as your guide. There was an inherent wackiness to their adventures, driven from the oddball team itself and their oddball adversaries. To NOT have Galactus as a 100-metre tall, purple-clad humanoid with square irises just flies in the face of the Lee / Kirby vision. Moreover, not having the guts to use this version, and instead opting for an interstellar cloud of fog smacks of a cop-out.

We could explain this away as the cloud being the carrier for our planet-smashing Galactus - in other words, he’s cloaked in a shroud of debris surrounding his vessel, and by removing him as a sentient character we simplify the story. But that’s as boring as this blog.

I note that several reviewers offer the phrase, “…using the comic Galactus would never have worked on film…”, and they singularly miss the point. Have they not seen Transformers yet?

An opportunity, missed.

Mate Greg P went to see the third Spidey movie a few days ago. He commented on in a casual fashion in an email to me. It struck me as a lucid and balanced piece so I thought I’d present it here. Be warned - a couple of spoilers have slipped in!

“Spiderman 3 is an enjoyable movie but it fails to ignite fully - suffering from…

• too many supervillains and supporting characters, a-la ‘Batman & Robin’
• a slow start (after all the fuss made about the black suit, he doesn’t even put it on until about an hour in). Whilst most big budget blockbusters fall down by not having enough story, this stumbles for the opposite reason.
• a couple of contrived plot points (without dropping too many spoilers) concerning the deaths of both Peter’s Uncle Ben and Norman Osborne. These events may well have been lifted from the pages of the comics, however they are ’shoehorned’ into the storyline with a hefty agenda and little finesse.

However, some favourite moments are…

• the opening title sequence which offers a concise and stylish reminder of the previous two movies
• a mean and moody Peter Parker - watch out for his funky strut
• cameos from Bruce Campbell, Ted Raimi and the now obligatory appearance by Stan Lee
• JJJ being JJJ
• Venom! Whilst this particular story thread is a bit rushed (well, there are two and a half films worth of plotlines to fit in) it’s great to see Spidey and Venom duking it out.

Overall - an entertaining film. Some good humour and exciting action sequences, but let down by including too much. The irony is that Sam Raimi may have expected this to be the last in the franchise, and packed it out with all the things he wanted to show us before bowing out. If he’d held back a little it would have made for a better movie that would have undoubtedly secured a fourth outing. As it is I think its touch and go, I’m sure the box office will have the final say.”

I’ve heard rumours that Spidey 4,5 and 6 are on the cards, if not actually in the bag. With record box office takings a feature of recent news, it’s a dead cert there will be a third sequel.

Being of the graphic-design bent, I viewed the opening title sequence of the new Casino Royale with some interest. Gone were the fancy effects of recent years, gone was the traditional black backdrop and, shock horror, gone were the lithe, sinuous silhouettes of naked ladies cavorting against guns and missiles. No, instead we have a flat, colourful heavily-stylised animation that could’ve been produced using Macromedia Flash, albeit with some smooth figure rotoscoping.

The unifying items are images and patterns taken from a deck of playing cards - hearts, diamonds, swirls and knaves etc. In the foreground we have flat, blocky male characters in dinner suits battering each other into showers of hearts and diamonds. Different, and very good so far.

I wasn’t overly impressed with the overlaid figure of Dan Craig created by posterising a normal filmed image of the actor. Posterisation is where the normal palette of colours is cut down to a handful of shades. The effect makes a live image look like a cartoon rendering. However, it runs against the flat style of the rest of the work, and it looks cheap.

This, on its own, had me mentally knocking the work down to the category of “flawed” but the designers compounded this flaw by occasionally fading in real images of Mr Craig. Sorry, but this reminded me too much of the opening to the 1980’s TV drama Poirot.

What about the film itself? I thoroughly enjoyed it, and relished this astonishing reboot of the Bond experience. At no point did I question Dan Craig as Bond. Having said that I always thought that poor old Lazenby was given a lot of bad press, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service has a special place in my heart. For me, everything that Roger Moore did post-Live and Let Die should be wiped from the Bondian universe.

Of course, being aware of the entire Bond continuum from Connery to Craig does leave me feeling uneasy at how we are expected to overlook the fact that Casino Royale is a contemporary movie, replete with mobile phones and laptops, and Bond has not yet travelled From Russia With Love, been Oddjobbed, or had Pussy Galore.

We have two choices: wipe the mental slate and view this as Brand New Bond, and as such non-canonical (until its progeny creates a new canon), or take the cultist view that “James Bond 007″ is a codename much like M or Q. There’s no harm in believing the latter - and I didn’t see anything in the new movie that would go against the codename theory. Makes me sleep easier ;)

Go and see Casino Royale. Buy the DVD when it comes out. Force your teenage kids to watch it, then go back and watch OHMSS with George Lazenby. Go on, I dare you.