Epic Default Productions

So before you click the witty link below this summary, let me preface this rant by stating, truthfully, I wasn’t expecting much from this comic. And don’t worry about any spoilers, because trust me, this will blow your mind. Not in the “OMGTHISISSOAWESOME!” kind of way, but more the Kurt-Cobain-suicide-but-not-really-because-it-was-Courtney-Fucking-Whore-Love-the-whole-time kind of way. There… That’s your summary, now let’s talk shittiness, as Yahtzee would say.

BTW, the link is sung to the tune of the original Spiderman TV series.

(-Obama, Obama, does what ever Obama does-)

So I’m over in Cleveland right now, going to a risk assessment conference NASA is holding, when I came to a revelation about a subject that is near to me that I wanted to write about. This is a subject that has given me joy about movies that have come out recently and gives me hope about movies to come.

When the comic book movie surge first started in the early part of this decade, there really wasn’t a push to have too many decent actors and actresses in the films. The general push came from the want to fill in a large gap that was growing with the internet and widening connection of nerds around the world. This gap was in the film industry. The problem with it though was that Hollywood thought what most people would think at the time period. You just fill in the spots at the director chair and in front of the camera with whomever is available and isn’t too expensive, get a bunch of action and explosions, and then you have a good enough comic book movie that people will all watch. This was a huge flaw in logical thinking though for two parts: the quality of comic books isn’t what it used to be and nerds aren’t the type of people to go quietly out of that that dark theater.

At first, comic books were created purely for children. And that was fine and worked well. Where this really came to cause problems was when those children grew up and really couldn’t let go of those comic books. Suddenly you had comic books wanted by adults. Of course the logical leap for this was to start adapting quality and adult themes into comic books to work in line with the culture. They didn’t have to do it at first because it was a niche. The group consisted of closet nerds. Once those nerds came out of the closet… so to speak, the genre of comic books grew and became what it is now and has been solidly for a while: an art form of it’s own. New comic books characters have been created to fit into this concept and older characters, particularly Batman, have been reshaped into this mold. Writers have been creating stories and character development and plot twists that lay on par with other good written works. To try to create a reflection of this genre without taking into account the nuances and the expectations is an effort of futility.

A contributing factor that also should be noted is that if there is one thing that nerds love to do, it’s to nit-pick these movies and compare them to their expectations. I’m going to put a lot of blame for this nerdy habit on the internet and the continuous need for people online to tear things apart with a viciousness known only by savage animals and psychotic serial killers. This, in combination with the need to be as idiotic and anti-personal as possible, really is not conducive to being able to “enjoy a movie”.

But at the same token it has been helpful. This is the very nature that created a backlash amongst nerds towards “nerdy” movies that were of such terrible quality. Nerds began to demand that the quality of these movies improve and realized that the way to actually relay this message properly to Hollywood was to not monetarily support them. What we get to see now is the by-product of this work through movies that are coming out.

In particular, this has been proven very strongly in movies that have recently come out and will be coming out over the summer. I think we can all agree that Iron Man was a well-done movie with solid acting. Then you have The Hulk, which I’m interested in seeing now that they have Edward Norton and Tim Roth in it. You have to also mention Dark Knight with Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart, etc. I’m really excited about Hellboy 2, with the great directing and creativity of Guillermo Del Toro. Hell, even Wanted could possibly have some solid acting on the part of Morgan Freeman and James McAvoy and good directing on the part of Timur Bekmambetov, the same man that wrote and directed Night Watch and Day Watch for those that are completely confused by the Russian name. All in all, this leads me to believe that this could become a regular occurrence and the quality of nerd films will dramatically increase.

I think that for me where this really hits home though are in the middle two films mentioned: The Hulk and the Dark Knight. The reason for this is because of the recasting that was done in both of those films. With The Hulk, it was a tragedy of a film, and I’m not talking Shakespearean tragedy. It was horrendous and a large part certainly had to do with the acting. Their solution was to recast with quality actors. With Batman, you already had a slew of good actors, but you also had a sore spot in the place of Katie Holmes. After such a huge and completely justifiable response of distaste for Katie Holmes, they decided to recast her for Maggie Gyllenhaal. For anybody that thinks this is a step down, please watch Secretary and tell me to my face that is what you think. I only say that because I’d like to meet you and tell you that you are a moron and have terrible taste in women.

Where this all eventually leads to, though, is me saying this. I enjoy good movies. QUALITY FILMS. I also am a huge nerd and can enjoy quality and artistic nature brought to comic books and the stories they create. The comic book industry got off their asses and did that a few decades ago. Now we get to see the film industry follow suit. I don’t expect every film of this nature to fit this mold, but it certainly is getting me more interested and excited about the genre. It’s a whole new ball game and I like it. I hope you guys can sit back and enjoy it too.

Because of errors with the digg system, please digg here instead. Thank you.