Superhero Movie, or not

So the plan was to go to Superhero Movie tonight. I know it's going to be a bad, mass-produced comedy full of cheap laughs and physical humor. I saw the hero throw the old lady out of the path of a bus and into a chipper-shredder. But I've seen one of the more recent Scary Movie flicks on TV and it was entertaining in a cheap laughs and slapstick way. I also just wanted to see a movie. Maybe it would make for a review.

Yeah, that was going to happen. I was going to go to the first evening show, by which time it should be dark and my pasty skin would thus not burst into horrific flames. I would not have to scream and pinwheel my arms as I staggered, flames trailing behind, over to the point where the camera could cut away for a second and then a dummy wearing the same clothes could be knocked into the river. I can take a little pain, but I don't think I have two of the exact same outfit so I would have to set myself on fire in the clothes that go into the river, then strip naked in front of everybody, dress the dummy in the still-burning clothes, and then shove it into the river and go home naked. Maybe I'm just lazy, but that seems like a lot of hassle.

That was the plan until I got on my email and saw that my City of Heroes friends had a planned event and their guy with radiation powers had to back out at the last minute. Others could substitute, but it would have meant that the group was still missing a key component. Plus I'm a sucker. No problem. I'll go to the early showing and be home by 7:30 for the event.

I went on the internet and the internet told me that Superhero Movie is showing at 5:00 and has a running time of about 85 minutes. Once you lop off the commercials at the beginning and embedded in the movie as product placement, we'll be left with Leslie Nielsen and an interchangeable teenage boy in spandex having a five minute conversation about gladiator movies. The scheduling works out.

It's spring now, almost kind of if it wasn't where I actually live. I live by Lake Huron. The warmer seasons all drop back about a month and a half or two months. It can be pretty cold here through June because the prevailing winds come off the still-cold lake. We start to get spring in April and May before they shift, then they do and it's all cold again. When I was little it snowed in late June. Fall trails on and it can be pretty warm during the day up through the middle of October, even into November in a good year, but the nights cool off very fast. Evenings are chilly in mid-August most of the time.

So late March in town usually means it's very bright outside and not quite as cold as February. I haven't braved full daylight in quite a while and I know if I put off seeing the movie I'll probably forget all about it until it's gone. Films do not last long in the two local theaters with their one owner. I've missed some because they were only in town for a single weekend. I got all my layers together, got my Unabomber look going on, and hopped in the car.

I passed a police car headed the other direction and the cop gave me a funny look, but it's bright out. I'm allowed to wear shades in this level of illumination. Drove to the theater with no parking lot except the public lot down by the river half a block away and got out of the car sweating like crazy, ten minutes in advance of the showtime. I walked across the two busy streets, one with a bad blind corner that I try to avoid, and came up on the theater. There's my film's poster, with a guy that's supposed to look like Hugh Jackman in the one corner. Above it are the showtimes: 4:25, 7:00, 9:30.

Thanks, internet. I glanced ahead and saw on the door that they opened at 3:45, which sounds about right for a showing at 4:25. Yeah, it's not a mistake. So much for that plan. Maybe tomorrow. It can't be Sunday evening. I have an event I signed up for in the first place to attend.

Movies I Did Watch

I went to the evening showing of National Treasure 2 today. Like the first one, it was a perfectly good silly film. I think that we see more of these is a good thing. I don't want to see films that never give what's going on in them a second thought, but a lot of genre films especially get bogged down in explaining themselves or apologizing for themselves. Enough of that and I wonder why someone who actually likes the genre would bother.

So National Treasure is about a historian/treasure hunter who, this time, is out to clear his grandfather's name after that grandfather is implicated in the conspiracy to kill Lincoln. The ads here focused around a Book of Secrets, making it seem like that was the treasure. In this case it was the City of Gold and the book is just a plot point. Like the first movie, our heroes break into national historic sites and in this one they kidnap the President.

It's fun. It's not deep; it's goofy. The characters are cartoons running from anecdote to trivia point. Nick Cage's love interest from last film is back, but she's less of a focus. His geek friend and his parents take much larger roles, which I thought was a good choice. These movies turn into sappy romances very easily. Cage and his designated gal reconcile as the movie rolls along, but it's safely in subplot territory. You're not going to learn anything from it, but it's not wasted time either if you can accept it for what it is.

The Goofy (as in the dog) short at the front is something else. If I knew about that going in, I might have waited for the DVD. The whole thing amounts to a slapstick love letter to home entertainment systems. The laughs are predictable. I don't know; I guess I just hate the old Disney characters. It added nothing to the experience except runtime. Worse, it reminded me of the awful Disney live action movies of a few decades ago that always opened with an animated short and went downhill from there.

Then I got home and watched V for Vendetta. It's great. It's a romantic treatment of revolutionary violence in the face of fascism. It's fairly easy to see what the screenwriters were referencing aside from the 1980s comic book too. The Dear Leader is a right-wing Christian that successfully soft-pedaled his beliefs until a national disaster gave him the chance to clamp down and make his Fourth Reich.

V is a terrorist. I guess I don't know what to think about that. The movie casts him as the heroic martyr for the cause of freedom and I kind of buy into it, but V is really, really messed-up. The movie doesn't really examine this at all. V becomes the designated hero, and his worst deed gets ratified by his victim. You can feel really good about him killing the bad guys, but should you? I guess the justice system is obviously corrupt, but I wish they found a way to have him at least imprison them until a good system was in place.

It's the same dilemma from superhero movies. Is vigilantism ok? In the real world, not really. The best you can say is that it's the system of extreme last resort and it usually gets way out of control very fast. The KKK were vigilantes and terrorists. So were Hitler's SA. Those are the brownshirts that got killed off in exchange for Hitler getting the support of the military and business. I guess I'm ok with it in a clear superhero context because that's obviously a fantasy. V is meant to be mostly realistic so I have to take it in a more real world way.

That aside, V is a wonderful, evocative movie. If you can get past the issues around vigilante terrorism, it's got a lot to like. The fights are well done, giving V enough superhumanity to sell his schemes but not enough to take him completely out of the real world until the very end. I didn't quite buy at the climax when the military loses touch with its political controllers and decides, with no previous indication, that it's not going to open fire on non-violent protesters when every flashback in the movie had them and the police doing just that without hesitation.