Bleary-eyed 2008 Best-Of, Blurst-Of…

This list has no arbitrary number, and no real parameters other than I’m trying (dimly) to recall all that resonated with me the most, for better or worse, in the bygone year. Plot-related SPOILERS will be discussed, because it’s hard to be specific in praise/critique without acknowledging details. Here’s my not-so-thin-line between love and hate.

LOVED:

• All-Star Superman was perfect in almost every way. Grant Morrison embraced everything Superman inspired, assembling cluttered continuity and archetypical resonances into a heroic ideal distilled to its essence. Frank Quitely continues to be my favorite of Morrison’s recurring collaborators. While there are other artists whom I might prefer in general, Quitely’s unique style and sense of pacing just seems to fit ineffably better.

• The Death of Captain America managed to turn what could’ve been a cheap stunt, into one of the most compelling espionage stories I’ve ever read. As a lefty and contrarian, I’ve never been a fan of the unabashed patriotism and jingoism Captain America’s represented, but Ed Brubaker helped carve out a character I cared about– before shooting him dead and replacing him with his long-lost sidekick. And of course he made me like the resurrected sidekick too, taking the new Captain America into murkier and doubt-ridden places that a stalwart, Hitler-punching Steve Rogers may not have been able to go. Brubaker’s Criminal has consistently been one of the best reads in any given month and his new series Incognito is off to a great start for the best of 2009.
• Fallout 3 destroyed my social life by being 2008’s most absorbing video game experience. GTA IV was good, and even great at times,  and Fable 2 was fun in its own right– but nothing beat the bombed-out post-apocalyptic wastes of Fallout’s immense world. Fallout’s mix of humor, nostalgia, cold-war paranoia, and engaging game-play has kept me glued to my 360 for the last third of the year.
• The Dark Knight was among the best movies I saw in 2008, regardless of genre and my own geekiness. Heath Ledger’s electric performance, the epic cinematography, overarching themes of dodgy morality, and complex plotting made TDK one of the year’s best (especially in IMAX intensity).  Iron Man was fun too, because hanging out with Robert Downey Jr. would be fun, but it just didn’t put all the pieces together the way TDK did.
• Let The Right One In was my favorite movie of the year, its frosty Swedish setting sealing the tension within its story of nascent desire and adolescent violence. The fact that it was a teen vampire movie of sorts, puts it into immediate comparison with Twilight and Anne Rice’s libidinous stories, but LTROI distinguishes itself by its emotional naturalism and the fact that in many ways it was a purer and more loyal exploration of the vampire myth.

HATED:

• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was dumber than even I expected it to be. Steven Spielberg managed to crowbar in all his pet obsessions (daddy issues, alien life, and the irrepressibility of youth!) into one of the densest disappointments of the year. Even if the story wasn’t totally inane, the performances were uniformly horrible. Harrison Ford may as well have phoned it in from Spielberg’s favorite alien planet, Cate Blanchett’s horrendous Soviet accent and phallus-envy sword play were a constant irritation, and Karen Allen seemed to be reprising a role as a heretofore unknown and unhinged cat-lady. And of course, one can’t ignore that the story itself was inane. Indy 4 suffered from constant credulity-straining suspensions of disbelief (even the jungle monkeys hate Socialists!) to forehead-slapping thematic platitudes (“knowledge was their treasure!!”), resulting in a multi-million dollar turd that only Spielberg could’ve directed.
• Detective Comics: Heart of Hush by Paul Dini was a story I can’t believe I even bothered to read. I’d generally been enjoying Dini’s run on Detective, but this storyline was a pathetic attempt to bring some gravitas to the character of Hush. Riddled with cliche’s and cheap flashbacks that attempted to give Hush some depth, this absolutely airless ugh-fest compared all the more unfavorably to Grant Morrison’s convoluted but inspired BATMAN R.I.P.
• Mark Millar used to be a writer I enjoyed (The Ultimates, Ultimate Fantastic Four, etc.), but thanks to its big-screen adaptation, I finally read Wanted, and I truly wish I could unread the ugly, hateful, and ultimately pathetic power-fantasy in its pages. Everything of Millar’s I’ve read (or re-read) since has been colored by that story’s shallow characterizations, puerile attempts at humor, and general bigotry.
• Guy Fieri’s frosted douche-itude and ubiquity is quickly making the often unbearable Food Network, completely unwatchable. I can stomach Bobby Flay’s overwhelming smarminess, deal with Iron Chef America’s tepid imitation of the Japanese original, and Alton Brown’s cornball moments in return for glimpses of culinary inspiration and opinion rendered smartly and pointedly by folks like Brown, Mario Batali, Masahiro Morimoto, and Jeffrey Steingarten. But Fieri and his chicken-fried personality represent what’s wrong with how our culture relates to food. I’m not saying we need to populate the TV with granola-fed back-to-the-landers, but I’d take anything over his constant shilling of fried mediocrity and quarter-pound diabetes burgers available at TGIFridays.
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was yet another example of overblown cinematic stupidity. Probably the worst film I saw all year (even after I saw a stop-motion bat try to rape his college sweetheart). Worse because of its attempts to appear profound, shoe-horning Forrest Gump’s treacly sentimentality onto a creepy, ultimately hollow love story. For something so incredibly overwrought The Curious Case… is amazingly careless. The film doesn’t even follow its own internal logic relating to Brad Pitt’s de-aging (starts normal sized baby that’s old, so it should end with man-sized geezer that’s a baby?), and Cate Blanchett gives another overwhelmingly obnoxious performance in a high-profile movie. Adding to its insipidness, the film fails to do anything meaningful with Hurricane Katrina in its backdrop, insulting the hurricane’s victims and its audience.

Ultimate Assasin-ine

Taking place in a universe where super-villains have killed all the heroes and divvied up the world amongst themselves, Mark Millar’s Wanted is a problematic power fantasy, even if one ignores the seemingly sanitized Hollywood adaptation starring Angelina Jolie’s tattoos and blimp lips. Violent and prurient in increasingly dull ways, Wanted’s problems are largely in the lack of meaningful details. The main character Wesley Gibson feels emasculated, hates his boring office job, attempts to express his unique identity through bourgeois consumer choices, and is paralyzed by confrontation. He’s a mess because his father left his mother while he was still an infant– the sort of cliché that is supposed to neatly explain the miseries of Wesley’s clichéd life, but does so only in the most unsatisfactory way. Wanted wants you to identify with the “quiet desperation” of Wesley’s life, and concludes with mixed messages about those whose desires resonate with Wesley’s rise to infamy.

Other than the dropping of brand names and off-hand references to food that he likes, the first real sense of Wesley we get is that he’s “more than a little afraid of the scary fucking bitch,” that is his “African-American boss.” This is also the first place where I started to realize that I might have some serious problems with this book. Wesley, in his internal monologue continually refers to his “African-American boss,” a figure never given a name, but who torments him as a cipher threatening in both her blackness and lack of femininity (she’s butch in both physical appearance and character).

But before we’re able to absorb the latent racism and Wesley’s white-man-as-victim-complex, the Fox, a tarted-up stand-in for Hally Barry (in an outfit that echoes both the fiasco of Catwoman and the promise of nudity in Swordfish) crashes into Wesley’s life. The Fox reveals that Wesley’s father was, “The Killer,” essentially the baddest ass hitman slash super-villain that ever was and that Wesley’s just inherited his fortune. Soon, the Fox promises that she’ll be whisking Wesley away to Hogwarts where he can finally achieve his magical destiny and confront his father’s killer “He-who-must-not-be-named” in a climactic duel to the death! Sarcasm aside any similarity to Harry Potter are only those which manifest in all adolescent power fantasies of inheritance and destiny. But Wanted’s manifestation of that fantasy is particularly ugly and I’m still wondering how much of it is by design and how much of its repugnance is inherent.

After a training montage where once ineffectual Wesley actualizes his hidden super-human ability to shoot a gaping hole into any target he sets his eyes on, the character is transformed into an Eminem look-alike in a ninja-ish black leather combat suit. JG Jones’ art is sharp throughout, but in utilizing Eminem as a reference point we get more indicators that Wanted is a white boy’s fantasy world. A white boy’s fantasy wherein he gets to work out all the racism and misogyny (we’re thankfully spared homophobia for the most part) that is his birthright, otherwise denied by political correctness and whatever other leveling forces have impacted white entitlement. It’s much like Falling Down for the iPod generation, or rather the Columbine generation where power fantasy has mixed interminably with real life violence.

Some might say I’m not getting the point of Wanted. It’s not supposed to reflect the good but the bad in a world where the villains have claimed victory. And if Millar gets to pepper that villainous world with his stock references and reinterpolations of classic comic book characters, then all the violence and hate is really pointing towards a post-modern critique of our own popular culture. Brian K. Vaughn, an author whom I admire and respect greatly writes in the book’s introduction that Millar,

“perfectly [subverts] the classic hero’s journey familiar to every comic fan… [challenging] us to think about the mundane world we’re all a part of, and the hidden price of entering the hidden special world we all one day dream of joining… Those of you who refuse to see what the conclusion is really saying will probably want to burn this beautiful collection the second you put it down… I think Wanted has the bravest, most interesting finale to a comic ever.”

And I can almost see where one might be convinced that Wanted’s bile has targets and intentions much different from those that I am reading– but I can also flatly disagree with Vaughn’s assessment of its ending. It’s not a life-shattering plot spoiler to tell you that after all the bullets, boobs, and wah-wah-white-boy-who-never-knew-his-dad, that the final two pages are a metatextual indictment of consumerism and passivity pointed directly at the reader.

Comic collectors obsessed with gadgets and collecting artifacts of their youth being particularly guilty of ignoring the political reality that surrounds them; where real villains rig elections, ignore and inflict suffering upon the poor, and generally get away with murder. A worthy message that deserves greater exploration in most media. But ending the story like this is telling not showing, and it’s two pages in almost two-hundred pages of ugliness in which consequences only effect those with the slowest drawn gun.

-chris

p.s. Why the fuck does “The Killer” look like Tommy Lee Jones?