Lazy Sunday afternoon. Whacked. Wrote too many words this week. Will probably write too many next week as well but for now I'm at the crossroads.
After posting about
Brian Clemens' talk at the special screening of
'A Touch Of Brimstone' it was ironic to see that very episode of The Avengers
cited as a source for the new movie
X-Men: First Class. As Harry Knowles noted in an interview with the movie's producer Bryan Singer:
With January Jones and Kevin Bacon playing Emma Frost and Sebastian Shaw - we will be getting the HELLFIRE CLUB. I commented that the HELLFIRE CLUB has always felt like something that it would be wrong to modernize, as it felt as though it were something specific to the swinging Hefner era of the 60s... and Bryan said that's exactly why they're making use of the HELLFIRE CLUB... the dress and the costumes associated with that glorious period of the X-MEN... belong in the 60s.
Because I don't read comics anymore I turned wide-eyed to the online version of everyone's nerdy older brother, Wikipedia, and asked it if that fictional "1960s" Hellfire Club was connected to one infiltrated by Steed and Emma (Peel).
It is. So now Marvel comics writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne's tip o' the hat to Brian Clemens and
The Avengers writer Philip Levene - themselves inspired by earlier
facts and legends (here's a
recent book on it) - has now become Marvel's intellectual property, and will make them lots of money.
At Clemens' talk he waved away Lara Croft and similar modern female action characters with the comment that they were
all Emma Peel - all
Avengers girls. That, in his mind, was that. He sounded almost weary about it.
The influence of the writers' original creations put me in mind of what Brian Eno said about The Velvet Underground in an interview with
Mary Harron in 1976:
Punk (Mary Harron): You said once that music, or any other cultural form, wasn't a straight line of development, that the most interesting things were often the ones people didn't notice at the time...
Eno: I think there are a lot of things like that. Well, the Velvet Underground was an example. When they came out very very few people were interested in them, whatever they claim now... And for a certainty I knew that they were going to become one of the most interesting groups, y'know, and that there would be a time when it wouldn't be the Beatles up there and the all these other groups down there, it would be a question of attempting to assess the relative values of the Beatles and the Velvet Underground as equals. And this is just beginning to happen now.
I think that there are certain artists who speak to other artists more than a public, alright? So they go through two stages. They are received by other artists and then diffused, right? Now unfortunately there isn't a very efficient royalty system for dealing with this situation.
Copying, lifting, diffusing: it's how art works, and discovering those sources is part of it. The
IMDB listing for
X-Men: First Class credits six people with the screenplay, but not the strip artists, and not writer
Philip Levene, born 1926.
Addendum: X2: X-Men United reviewed in 2003:
The screening of X2: X-Men United we saw last week was dimmer than it ought to have been. There wasn't much detail in the dark tones of the image and the white highlights were distinctly grey. Sitting in the back row of the Hoyts Village Force cinema, I mentally kept reaching for the remote so I could adjust the contrast.
It cost $18 each to book our "smart seats" over the phone and another $8 for the privilege of parking in our own city. That's a lot of money if you plan on making phone calls during the movie. Three-quarters of the way through the shiny, sexy, action-packed sequel - specifically, when Yuriko Oyama revealed her own adamantine claws, became Lady Deathstryke and started beating the crap out of Wolverine - the sweaty chap beside me yanked out his mobile and started texting. He was offended when I glanced over at his very bright cell phone screen because this is like private stuff, dude, but I figured it was an open venue and his calls were therefore in the public domain.
And there was no need to fidget. X2 is a pretty good movie. It's hardly Knife in the Water, but Wolverine's talons click and snap as if referencing Polanski's knife-tapping game, and the story is gallant and satisfying, and everyone's jumping around to telegraph significant moments and maintain your attention at maximum warp.
Nearly all the frames - even the close ups of the actors - have been digitally enhanced or constructed. The dominance of digital effects nowadays mean that sets and camera angles are dictated by computer nerds instead of production designers, lighting technicians and cinematographers, with the result that movies don't look like movies any more: they look like designer storyboards or games (or, like The Phantom Menace, children's Bible illustrations). This put me off cinema for a long time - it's the visual equivalent of eating too much sugar - but it suits something like X-Men. The effect of the digital cut and paste (the softened edges, the flattened backgrounds, the superreal focus) becomes the film's visual style. It looks like a comic book but it works. Either the director has got it right, or we as viewers have finally succumbed to the idea of every shot in a film being kinda funky.
X-2 is in the modern tradition of sequels that take a sidestep from the original in order to develop the characters and end on a dissatisfying "to be continued" note, in this case Jean Grey disappearing into yellow light to be reborn as Phoenix in the inevitable X-3. The direction is a little stiff: when Anna Paquin crash-lands a jet and slumps over the controls it's unclear whether the moment is intended to be impassioned or humorous. Hugh Jackman has a whale of a time as Wolverine, killing many people and often. Mystique gets to do a lot more in this one: hacking keyboards and faking it as nearly every other character. At one point she even appears as Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, spiking a prison guard with iron to effect a terrific jail break. There's a great moment when she and Magneto (Ian McKellan) are sniggering in the back seat like the bad kids in class: mutants as ADD over-achievers, bored with their surroundings.
The people in front of us - three guys and a girl in their twenties - were laughing and whooping and cheering through the whole thing. I enjoyed their enjoyment, and it reminded me why I will always go and see franchise blockbusters. Even the trailer for The Hulk looked tiresomely impressive.
Why so many comic books have become important and entertaining to us would take more space and time to unpack than is available [here]. Maybe it's because po-faced adolescent tales take themselves seriously in an era when other genres are winking at their audience. It may also have something to do with women like Halle Berry and Famke Janssen wearing really very tight, shiny clothes. It's the style, as critic Max Kozloff said angrily of Pop art, of "gum-chewers, bobby-soxers and, worse, delinquents."
--- Muse Lounge, May 7, 2003
Hacking into the second draft. Small, global changes: when I'm finished this will really be draft 2.1. But sneakily I'm hoping it will be draft three and the second to last. This one's going like a forest fire.
