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.

Iron Manners, Summer Blockblusters, & Boys Behaving Badly

“My whole thing is that that I saw ‘The Dark Knight’. I feel like I’m dumb because I feel like I don’t get how many things that are so smart. It’s like a Ferrari engine of storytelling and script writing and I’m like, ‘That’s not my idea of what I want to see in a movie.’ I loved ‘The Prestige’ but didn’t understand ‘The Dark Knight’. Didn’t get it, still can’t tell you what happened in the movie, what happened to the character and in the end they need him to be a bad guy. I’m like, ‘I get it. This is so high brow and so fucking smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie.’ You know what? Fuck DC comics. That’s all I have to say and that’s where I’m really coming from.” -Robert Downey Jr. in this Moviehole interview

With The Dark Knight on its way to usurping Star Wars (but probably not Titanic) for box office sales, the heat on Marvel’s most successful superhero movie has cooled considerably. Some folks have gone so far as to refer to Iron Man, as the “Platonic ideal of the superhero movie,”  (while still saying Dark Knight was better!) but for me it was just a case of ingenious casting in a perfectly workman-like action movie. Robert Downey Jr.’s charisma held the entire movie together, and in it’s best moments it felt like paying $10 to hang out with him for a couple hours. And $10 for a couple hours of hanging out and bullshitting with Robert Downey Jr.? That my friend, is a bargain. The CGI action sequences were probably the least interesting part of this purported action movie, which is something Marvel should take note of if they really want to make that Avengers movie they’re talking about. (And an even more valuable lesson if they ever want to make Hulk movie that people like). And so what if Robert Downey Jr. seems to be petulantly baiting a Marvel/DC nerd feud? I mean, a major Hollywood actor with a million dollar salary is basically trolling for a flame war, isn’t that just, adorable?

And while it’s all still rumors and general tabloid idiocy, I just want to come out and say that Angelina Jolie as Catwoman is among the shittiest ideas ever committed to type. At this point in her illustrious career, Jolie is little more than a pair of pouty, bloated lips that favor holding a gun sideways, you know gangsta style. And any nerds who would favor Kate Beckinsale (ugh, don’t even want to bother linking to those threads) in the hypothetical role (or any acting role for that matter) are immediately asked to stop reading anything I write ever again, and consider better spending their time and opinions elsewhere, or rather in Elseworlds. Speculation can be fun (and surely it’s the foundation of fiction in a general sense,) but I find speculation of this sort about as enjoyable as a speculum.

Aaand speaking of man-children groping at fantasy, The ISB among other great comic blogs have posted commentary from John DiBello of Bully Says about sexual harassment at the recent San Diego Comic-Con [emphasis is mine]:

Overheard at San Diego Comic-Con while I was having lunch on the balcony of the Convention Center on Sunday July 27: a bunch of guys looking at the digital photos on the camera of another, while he narrated: “These were the Ghostbusters girls. That one, I grabbed her ass, ’cause I wanted to see what her reaction was.” This was only one example of several instances of harassment, stalking or assault that I saw at San Diego this time.

1. One of my friends was working at a con booth selling books. She was stalked by a man who came to her booth several times, pestering her to get together for a date that night. One of her co-workers chased him off the final time.

2. On Friday, just before the show closed, this same woman was closing up her tables when a group of four men came to her booth, started taking photographs of her, telling her she was the “prettiest girl at the con.” They [then] entered the booth, started hugging and kissing her and taking photographs of themselves doing so. She was confused and scared, but they left quickly after doing that.

3. Another friend of mine, a woman running her own booth: on Friday a man came to her booth and openly criticized her drawing ability and sense of design. Reports from others in the same section of the floor confirmed he’d targeted several women with the same sort of abuse and criticism.

Quite simply, this behavior has got to stop at Comic-Con. It should never be a sort of place where anyone, man or woman, feels unsafe or attacked either verbally or physically in any shape or form. There are those, sadly, who get off on this sort of behavior and assault, whether it’s to professional booth models, cosplayers or costumed women, or women who are just there to work. This is not acceptable behavior under any circumstance, no matter what you look like or how you’re dressed, whether you are in a Princess Leia slave girl outfit or business casual for running your booth.

On Saturday, the day after the second event I described above, I pulled out my convention book to investigate what you can do and who you can speak to after such an occurrence. On page two of the book there is a large grey box outlining “Convention Policies,” which contain rules against smoking, live animals, wheeled handcarts, recording at video presentations, drawing or aiming your replica weapon, and giving your badge to others. There is nothing about attendee-to-attendee personal behavior.

Page three of the book contains a “Where Is It?” guide to specific Comic-Con events and services. There’s no general information room or desk listed, nor is there a contact location for security, so I go to the Guest Relations Desk. I speak to a volunteer manning the desk; she’s sympathetic to the situation but who doesn’t have a clear answer to my question: “What’s Comic-Con’s policy and method of dealing with complaints about harassment?” She directs me to the nearest security guard, who is also sympathetic listening to my reports, but short of the women wanting to report the incidents with the names of their harassers, there’s little that can be done.

“I understand that,” I tell them both, “but what I’m asking is more hypothetical and informational: if there is a set Comic-Con policy on harassment and physical and verbal abuse on Con attendees and exhibitors, and if so, what’s the specific procedure by which someone should report it, and specifically where should they go?” But this wasn’t a question either could answer.

So, according to published con policy, there is no tolerance for smoking, drawn weapons, personal pages or selling bootleg videos on the floor, and these rules are written down in black and white in the con booklet. There is not a word in the written rules about harassment or the like. I would like to see something like “Comic-Con has zero tolerance for harassment or violence against any of our attendees or exhibitors. Please report instances to a security guard or the Con Office in room XXX.”

The first step to preventing such harassment is giving its victims the knowledge that they can safely and swiftly report such instances to someone in authority. Having no published guideline, and indeed being unable to give a clear answer to questions about it, gives harassment and violence one more rep-tape loophole to hide behind.

I enjoyed Comic-Con. I’m looking forward to coming back next year. So, in fact, are the two women whose experiences I’ve retold above. Aside from those instances, they had a good time at the show. But those instances of harassment shouldn’t have happened at all, and that they did under no clear-cut instructions about what to do sadly invites the continuation of such behavior, or even worse.

I don’t understand why there’s no such written policy about what is not tolerated and what to do when this happens. Is there anyone at Comic-Con able to explain this? Does a similar written policy exist in the booklets for other conventions (SF, comics or otherwise) that could be used as a model? Can it be adapted or adapted, and enforced, for Comic-Con? As the leading event of the comics and pop culture world, Comic-Con should work to make everyone who attends feel comfortable and safe.

Maybe it’s because I’m socially acculturated to norms born in the aggressively liberal D.I.Y. punk scene (wherein house-meetings might discuss how a roommate may or may not contribute to the anti-oppression atmosphere and ethos of the house,) or maybe it’s because I’m a sane human being who has a basic conception of respect for others’ personal boundaries– but it’s fucking revolting to hear about grown men who feel entitled to abuse and harass anyone in this way. Of course nerds aren’t the only ones guilty of sexual harrassment and objectifying women, and while one could create an extensive website that catalogues examples of comic book misogyny, perhaps it’s better to address Comic-Con as an institution and tell its organizers that individuals need to be protected from harassment. One might even send them an email saying such.

In summary: my fellow nerds, I beseech thee to be better behaved so that I might not be so embarassed to be your friend and count myself as one of ye. Maybe if you/we weren’t all such assholes, we wouldn’t have to pay Robert Downey Jr. to hang out with us.