When I started reading this page I knew Alan Moore would come up, but what about Frank Miller, Mike Baron or los brothers Hernandez?
I mentioned Allison Bechdel (god do I love Fun Home), Chris Ware (ditto Jimmy Corrigan), Sam Keith (The Maxx was often great and could make a hell of an adaptation), etc. Alan Moore is (rightfully) the go-to name when it comes to superheroes (even though he clearly hates them). I’m surprised nobody mentioned Gaiman but his Sandman was quite good if possibly unadaptable.
I can’t speak for Mike Baron but Frank Miller is the single most overrated comic book author of the past 50 years. He is a one-trick pony (Batman: Year One is The Dark Knight Rises is Daredevil: Born Again), clearly has a problem with women (he turned Catwoman, one of DC’s strongest female characters, into a prostitute in Year One and a helpless Madam in The Dark Knight Returns, his Karen Page was a junkie porn star who sold out Matt Murdock for a fix and eventually got AIDS, Matt Murdock’s mother was a nun, the vast majority of women in Sin City are prostitutes…) and he has only gotten worse during the past 15 years. He got a lot of (deserved) credit for rescuing Batman from the blue and gray kid-friendly spandex and making him into a gritty, urban vigilante again but all he did was, not unlike Christopher Nolan, change the scenery. There is very little going on beneath the surface other than a terrible case of madonna-whore complex.
t wouldn’t, but it places some of the same constraints upon a film adaptation. You still have predefined characters that you can’t depart from too much without angering fans, you still have to do an origin component, you still have to show some degree of crime fighting, you have to spend time and money on f/x, etc.
Except that’s part of what the film got wrong. It knew the words but not the music.. Alan Moore pretty explicitly avoided any kind of origin story (except in the case of Dr. Manhattan where it was handled beautifully and had a specific reason to be there), crime fighting (maybe 4 panels in the entire 12 issues are dedicated to that and each of them are there to serve a larger purpose) and it is certainly devoid of the idea that a superhero can make any kind of difference in the real (or hyper-real) world. Watchmen is a spoilers comic where not only are our heroes all suffering from some form of sexual dysfunction (the reason they became costumed adventurers to begin with) but they are completely useless. They were 3 steps behind the entire way and were never even close to stopping the big plan from being executed. As Ozymandias said: failing to prevent the world’s salvation is [their] only triumph.It used preexisting knowledge of the convetions of the medium in order to criticize it (golden age, silver age, Frank Miller-inspired nihilism…), as well as the subgenre. There is no possible way to do this on screen unless you make it about superhero films and there haven’t been nearly enough to make that a worthy proposition.
I had never really realized the extent of Miller’s misogyny but when you list it like that it’s pretty unavoidable.
Still, Karen Page’s return from the failed movie in order to make up for her mistake I thought was brilliant.
Hadn’t she been last seen as Johnny Blaze’s girlfriend?
On the other hand, I did hate what he did to Catwoman. And he still has to answer for Robocop 2. .
Watchmen is a spoilers comic where not only are our heroes all suffering from some form of sexual dysfunction (the reason they became costumed adventurers to begin with) but they are completely useless.
Another reason to have done it as a twelve episode cable series. The texts at the end of each issue could have been added as interviews, excerpts from documentaries etc. Not having the sad tales of the golden age heroes pretty much robbed most of the points Moore was trying to make.
Edit:
I’ve been wondering if Cronenberg could do a movie about a superhero whose flesh keeps betraying him.
I like Cronenberg, but I sort of took everything with a grain of salt once he said Christopher Nolan was shooting in 3D. Nolan hasn’t released any films in 3D right? It reminded me of myself when I talk about politics I don’t understand. I just lump people together.
I do think that Nolan moved the superhero movie up from something the audience could find cool and entertaining to something the audience could actually be moved by.
It’s really unfortunate that someone with such a unique view for the potential in film could so quickly dismiss another medium with just as much potential.
Super Hero movies are not a genre- they are adaptations of very very famous stories. So they are very restrictive, which is the opposite of the inherent freedom within a genre.
I’ve been wondering if Cronenberg could do a movie about a superhero whose flesh keeps betraying him.
Hmmm. Cable from Marvel Comics was infected with a techno-organic virus that was slowly but surely consuming his body. If he got his hands on the property though he would probably insits on an R rating, set it outside the marvel universe, get rid of Apocalypse, drop the superpowers, change all the names and turn it into the Canadian version of Tetsuo. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I like Cronenberg, but I sort of took everything with a grain of salt once he said Christopher Nolan was shooting in 3D.
Yeah I noticed that too. Nolan was pretty adamant in avoiding 3D altogether. And as I said before, has Cronenberg forgotten that “A History of Violence” was a comic book before he made it into a film? Dismissing Nolan is one thing (and not something I would disagree with) but dismissing an entire medium, past, present and future, is something else entirely.
Super Hero movies are not a genre- they are adaptations of very very famous stories. So they are very restrictive, which is the opposite of the inherent freedom within a genre.
You’re thinking of Batman, Spider-Man and the like. There are plenty of superhero films that are original cinematic properties (Darkman, Mr. Freedom, Defendor, Super and quite a few others come to mind). There is also quite a bit of freedom when handling famous properties (Adam West – Tim Burton – Christopher Nolan all tailored the same character to suit their specific needs). The best comic book writers use existing properties as a launching pad and make them their own. Just take a look at Gaiman’s Sandman. He wasn’t an original character. Moore’s firstl idea for Watchmen, which he wasn’t able to develop because of rights issues, was to use oscure comic book characters from the 60s (The Question, for example, who eventually became Roarshach).
Genres themselves are by their nature restrictive if you consciously chooe to work within them. If you don’t, and the genre is simply how folks classify it once they’ve seen it, not so much.
I agree in as much that while not impossible, very unlikely to do anything legitimate in the superhero world, I think Nolan is trying pretty hard and (debatably) without success. Certainly you could throw horror right back in Cronenberg’s face which is completely fair, but I think for a lot of reasons Matt mentioned it’s a lot easier to do something in horror than it is in a summer blockbusting superhero film.
That said, I think it all comes down to freedom and money restrictions, so the “superhero genre” has about as much to do with it as the “horror genre”. It all comes down to the studio and the money, I agree with him in that with as much “relative” power that Nolan had leveraged for himself, I imagine he was still heavily “chained” as it were.
Or, in other words, I think it’s easy to beat the “chains” of a genre…. it is hard to beat the “chains” of being something that well known and that big of a budget, with so much at stake financially.
Jerry’s right about the not being a genre per se.
And to be fair to Cronenberg, it’s a totally stupid question in the context of an interview about Cosmopolis. It’s like asking DeLillo if he’d like to take over writing one of the Batman comic books for a year. What do you think he’s going to say?
You’re thinking of Batman, Spider-Man and the like. There are plenty of superhero films that are original cinematic properties (Darkman, Mr. Freedom, Defendor, Super and quite a few others come to mind).
Well there you go- I probably know as much about super hero films as Cronenberg, which is only the famous ones, so I shouldn’t have shot off at the mouth.
Genres themselves are by their nature restrictive if you consciously chooe to work within them
Just the opposite if a big budget is not involved. As long as the genre filmmaker crosses the T’s and dots the I’s, he can do anything else he wants.
Well big budgets are most definitely restrictive. That wonderful paradox: the more you have to work with the less you are allowed to do.
Seriously though, A Dangerous Method was pretty “blah” so far be it from “the Cronenburger” to pass too harsh a judgement, hopefully he bounces back Cosmopolis does indeed look promising…
Hahah, I love this.
Being a fan of both Cronenberg and Nolan, I wonder where I can draw the lines of conceptual reconciliation…not the “I’m sorry” type but where the two ideations can come together in a unifying way….
This is what one finds in having somewhat diverse tastes: if you got all your favorite filmmakers in the same room, they most likely would try to beat the shit out of each other – physically or with words – more often than not…
Well, he did seem to say he liked Memento, and that he would play Batman. so . . .
One thing that is tying me up is the connection Cronenberg ties between the movies and the comic books they are based on. The filmmaker would be restricted in the sense that he is adapting. But the comic book artist/story writer (what’s the word for that person?) is not restricted in their medium. I feel like since the comic book would be the base for the film, and since the comic book is unrestricted, the film would essentially be unrestricted.
the greatest of any films don’t fit into genres, but rather a genre must be contorted to fit the description of that film.
Somewhere in my top 25 are a couple of westerns, but not really because they are westerns.
When you start off with a film that is so deeply rooted in a genre, it makes it that much harder to elevate it above that genre, and out of mediocrity-which is what genre is, mediocrity.
“This is what one finds in having somewhat diverse tastes: if you got all your favorite filmmakers in the same room, they most likely would try to beat the shit out of each other – physically or with words – more often than not…”
That awkward moment you realize that Ingmar Bergman has nasty things to say about basically all of your favorite Bergman contemporaries…
…followed by when you discover how much shit the French New Wave filmmakers slung.
Nah, I’m not too concerned about Cronenberg’s lack of interest in superheroes. He made The Fly and eXistenZ, worked for me on that level regardless of what he thinks.
—PolarisDiB
agree Pol. most of those great old directors engaged in childish mud slinging. i love Fellini and Godard and neither one liked each others work apparently but so what? Makes no difference to me.
and id still say that The.Fly is more sophisticated than Nolans Batman films, if only because it is.less obvious.
Wow.
DARKMAN / MR. FREEDOM double feature for the WIN, Hellshocked!
Not to mention that Cronenberg’s own THE FLY would make a totally appropriate (perhaps even killer) double feature with DARKMAN.
I don’t think there’s anything hypocritical about him criticizing super-hero movies while having done A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE since I would consider that adaptation totally distinct from a super hero tale. Perhaps what Cronenberg takes issue with is grown men dressing up in costumes which I personally don’t, if done well. Case in point, I find Burton’s BATMAN a very charming and entertaining tale about Bruce Wayne being challenged to reconsider if he needs grow the fug up upon meeting the life-affirming Vicky Vale while I find BATMAN BEGINS (at least during the most recent viewing) to be an embarrassingly Emo display of juvenalia every time Bale is framed squatting on a ledge, grumbling to Katie Holmes, coyly shrouding his true identity behind a flip of his cape in a way that makes it seem like his pain should actually be kind of cool.
@LINDEN_WATTERSON
I think that Alan Moore’s “Miracleman” (what if a fat married middle aged Billy Batson suddenly remembered that he was Captain Marvel) could make a good flick. It’s not as complete as the other story he did for Warrior Magazine, “V for Vendetta”, but some of the themes are fairly adult.
That’s a great graphic novel, the first time Moore articulated his themes of morally questionable superheroes and what would realistically happen to society if superhuman beings appeared.
@TERRORBIRD
This is disappointing to hear from Cronenberg – it’s never the “what” of the film that’s art, it’s the “how”.
That’s true IF there are no creative limitations imposed on you, which is definitely not the case of a hollywood blockbuster about an established character.
I think the main point to be glossed from Cronenberg(and which is being glossed over in this topic) is that the Superhero genre has become a studio affair, and one that makes them too much money; and this is totally stifling any artistic expression. The vision is lost when the director has to split the pie a with a dozen studio hands.
Sure Cronenbergs films may hit or miss, but I think his point is that HE is the reason for them working or not working. It’s an issue of creative control. He has more creative control. While Superhero movies are always going to have a dozen hands pointing in different directions.
While Superhero movies are always going to have a dozen hands pointing in different directions.
That’s not particular to superhero films though. It’s the nature of any studio film that costs more than X to make.
“That’s not particular to superhero films though. It’s the nature of any studio film that costs more than X to make.”
Of course—but what Superhero films are being made that don’t cost huge amounts of money?
I think a big part Cronenberg’s statement is that this is the state of nearly all Superhero films. That is why there aren’t any great superhero films. The amount of money to make one is stifling them, the fact that they require an IP stifles them, the fan expectations, the ready made world and characters. Where can a director find creativity or a unique voice in that? I imagine it is very difficult if not completely impossible.
what Superhero films are being made that don’t cost huge amounts of money?
Animated films.
“Dark Knight Rises” – 250,000,000
Kick Ass – 28,000,000
Nearly nine times the difference.
And Kick Ass was good.
the “superhero genre” is pretty lame and juvenile in concept (someone with ‘super powers’, “saving the day”, some miser in a costume, and other such nonsense), that much I agree with. Uh, so is typical horror though?
And Cronenberg is one of the usual counters to the argument that horror is a lame genre, so…
I think anything can be done well, and while being a “superhero” film IMO isn’t exactly helping a film on its path to becoming high art, it’s the money and the “fan expectations” and the need to allow room for sequelz ect. that ultimately hold the film back.
Like in most cases of adaptation, you can’t be too faithful to your source material or to your “fans”. It’s weird, but you kinda have to be willing to say “fuck the fans” in order to really take something, make it your own and elevate it, which of course (ideally) would ultimately please most “fans” in the end.
Case and Point: Heath Ledger being cast as the joker. I recall quite an outcry from the “fans” upon this little news of “interesting” casting… now this is considered one of the all time great performances, superhero film or otherwise. What people think they want and what they actually want are very often times completely different things.
Anyone who thinks you can’t make art with a superhero concept is being narrow minded. The notion of an extraordinarily talented person who takes on a secret identity to be a benevolent vigilante has such rich possibilities besides just an exciting adventure.
Just, the people who would pay to see a superhero film only want the exciting adventure.
I do not get it. Scanners IS a Superhero movie! One of the best ones, in fact.
That’s true.
Only hinted at so far…
Spandex and a utility belt need not necessarily a superhero make.
Nor a superhero spandex and a utility belt need.
Matt Parks
" But why would this disqualify it from a superhero movie? "
It wouldn’t, but it places some of the same constraints upon a film adaptation. You still have predefined characters that you can’t depart from too much without angering fans, you still have to do an origin component, you still have to show some degree of crime fighting, you have to spend time and money on f/x, etc. (and in Moore’s case, you can pretty much take it to the bank that Moore is going to very publicly trash anything you do with his material).