The Avengers movie: worth not sneaking into

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I think Marvel Entertainment has done a reasonably good job on the more recent releases I've seen, namely Thor, the first Iron Man, and (going back a way), the first Spider-Man. This pleases me, because my first two boyhood favorites---Fantastic Four and Daredevil---were so mishandled that, based on reviews alone, I refused to go near them. Not even worth sneaking in to see.

A contemporaneous reader of 1960s Marvel Comics should enjoy The Avengers. My standard of excellence for movies based on comics I read as a kid is not Art, but a port from pulp paper to cinema that is faithful to the original in tone and atmosphere while using digital effects to make the exercise of superpowers seem feasible and naturalistic. Avengers succeeds at both of these "metrics" through excellent casting of the principal characters (with one exception) and very good battle choreography.

Each of the main heroes captures what an adult reader of '60s superhero literature would expect of the characters. Captain America is not that far on the good-looking side of average, and his personality is pretty wooden. That is good; lesser directors would have made the mistake of infusing him with glamor and wit, the same formula used to cast every male protagonist in a film aimed at a teenage audience. What makes him Captain America is that he's an operational wizard, commander-wise. Tony Stark is, as you would expect, a brilliant, arrogant asshole. Thor is a little bit dumb. And Bruce Banner was both entirely original yet correct in original spirit as a somewhat distracted, slightly disheveled scientist who is terrified of and addicted to his own capacity for rage.

The Hulk, incidentally, is one of the most problematic characters in this genre to portray, and all previous attempts I've seen (both live action and animated cartoon) miss the mark either somewhat or by a very wide margin. This one succeeds. For more on the subject, I'll commend your attention to a recent analysis in The New Yorker by a newfangled reviewer who goes by the monicker of Film Crit Hulk. He (she, or it) nails the topic for the most part, except that I disagree with his assessment of Bill Bixby's Bruce Banner.

Unfortunately, I feel strongly that Sam Jackson was miscast as Nick Fury. This is both a '60s fanboy thing and a matter of comics history. Originally created by Jack Kirby as a WWII commando squad leader, Fury was one of Kirby's two self-ascribed alter-egos within the literal universes of characters he created in his career (which he spent largely as an exploited piecework artist by Marvel). Fury had no superpowers, either as a sergeant or as a secret agent for SHIELD. We kids knew him as the cigar-chompin' tough guy with a Bronx accent who was much smarter than he sounded. A very similar personality, but much more insecure and alienated (not to mention having an epidermis of orange rocks) was Ben Grimm, who mutated into The Thing in 1961. Kirby has identified both of those characters as versions of himself, with Thing reflecting how he felt about himself and Fury reflecting how he would like to have been seen by the world. (Kirby wrote their dialog, and much more, but was never given writer credits by Stan Lee.) So, out of respect both to the original creation and to Kirby, I think that the producers should have passed on Sam Jackson's star power (and anyone else's star power as well) and cast an actor who could portray Fury as being instantly recognizable to geezer fanboys. But since Kirby---co-creator of all the principal Avengers characters plus Fury---was almost passed over in the end credits, thanks in large measure to decades of bad faith by Stan Lee, maybe it's no wonder that Fury's authentic character is nowhere to be found in the movie. It's not that Jackson does a bad job; it's just that he's nothing like Agent Fury or his barking, hard-fisted homunculus.

About the combat choreography: a trouble I always have with CG battles in superhero movies is that they're very hard to parse, visually. Everything happens too close and too fast for my eyebones to sort out. In the Avengers, things happen as loud and fast as you would expect, but somehow it was much easier for me to perceive the action taking place in a fixed landscape. The raw power exchanged between Thor and Iron Man, trying to kick each other's ass due to a misunderstanding in the Mighty Marvel Tradition, feels plausible as they fling each other into heavy, unmovable objects without restraint. However, the one thing I think we're always going to have to suspend our disbelief about is the dynamics of mass, momentum, and inertia: we just can't escape many incidents where the low-power and no-power humans such as Fury, Hawkeye, Black Widow, and even Cap should be liquified, decapitated, amputated, or blunt-force-trauma-ed by a sudden acceleration from zero to, say, 100 g (or the converse). These things occur when being swatted by the Hulk, or thrown by an explosion, or grabbing ahold of an alien flying motorscooter moving at about Mach 1. Deal with it, ya yardbirds!

Big Rock Head criticized the movie's style of humor as being too Scrubs. My reaction was that he may be correct in making the connection, but that the humor used in The Avengers was very much in the spirit of the original Marvel scripts, and even Mad Comics---simultaneously witty and corny---and predates Scrubs by decades if not centuries. We can see similar formulations in The Three Stooges, for example. At the root of BRH's observation (I'm assuming, here, because I've never seen an episode of Scrubs) is that the modern sitcom form has become so dilute that it builds entire teleplays on a series of round-robin quips that try to serve as substance instead of periodic punctuation. So the humor in The Avengers is not high comedy, but that's because it doesn't have to be. It serves the same purpose in the movie that it did on the newsprint pages 45 years ago---to lighten the violent action and humanize the characters.

All things considered, the director and producers deserve lots of credit. The Avengers is a movie worth paying to see. But reflexive cynicism tells me that it's probably not too early to start worrying about how The Corporation will do its best to lower the common denominator for the next installment by 30 IQ points or so.

James Fenimore Cooper: hack literary prophet (featuring Samuel Langhorne Clemens)

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Apropos of nothing, my good pal Highly Osmotic Salami recently sent me the link to a rollicking 1895 critique, penned by Mark Twain, regarding the literary contributions of James Fenimore Cooper. You can read Twain's highly informative and entertaining essay here. Even if 19th century criticism is not your cup of tea or it runs too long for your tastes, I highly recommend that you scan the first few sentences, at least, and then sample some of the text after the numbered list, or else try the five paragraphs starting at the sentence that begins, "If Cooper had been an observer his inventive faculty...." Not only is Twain's use of humor devastating, as usual, but his application of language is at once both princely and accessible. There's barely a hint of old-fashioned rhetoric or vocabulary; mainly just the power of plainly written English, authored with craft and intent. I would be honored and amazed if I were able to roughly approximate Twain's elegant economy with words and discipline of tone. His late-life essays, which I devoured over 30 years ago but haven't much revisited, are never far from from the back of my mind.

That said, I think Twain was indulging in a bit of blood sport with the legacy of the late Cooper, who was considered a literary giant throughout 19th century America and also overseas. For example, although the point about Cooper's "singularly dull" word sense may be well taken, Twain's extensive catalog of the author's specific transgressions seems somewhat petty and academic, especially to postmodern citizens who have been forced to accept some unlovely aspects of rapidly evolving vocabulary and usage.

Having only once tried to read Cooper as 4th grader and becoming bored stupid within about 21 pages of The Last of the Mohicans, I can't claim any first-hand knowledge of Cooper's work or his career. But the absurd heroics that Twain amusingly deconstructs, such as the forest shoot-off where bullets hit bulls-eyes and then other bullets hit the earlier bullets, may have been intended less to withstand critical analysis and more to excite the minds and imaginations of young boys whose families were building new towns at the edges of frontier territories. If Cooper was a hack, then maybe he knew it and didn't care. Or maybe he even relished his role as a hack popular entertainer, endowing his canny woodmen and noble savages with the prowess of Olympians for pure diversion value just like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby did in the 1960s with their own lovable and highly significant hack creations like Spider-Man, The Thing, the X-Men, and even the mythology-inspired Thor. Perhaps Cooper became a literary force mostly because the cultural elites said he was rather than by his own pretense. You know: just like John Irving.

Anyway, I'll probably never read Fenimore Cooper, in large part because of Twain's critique, which I can't help but to honor even given the churlish* undertone of it. But one of Twain's most devastating observations about Cooper's incompetence at writing dialog attracted my own postmodern interest, not only as the literary insult intended but also as a possible hint that Cooper may at the same time have been 150 years ahead of his peers in this regard. Says Twain:

The conversations in the Cooper books have a curious sound in our modern ears. To believe that such talk really ever came out of people's mouths would be to believe that there was a time when time was of no value to a person who thought he had something to say; when it was the custom to spread a two-minute remark out to ten; when a man's mouth was a rolling-mill, and busied itself all day long in turning four-foot pigs of thought into thirty-foot bars of conversational railroad iron by attenuation; when subjects were seldom faithfully stuck to, but the talk wandered all around and arrived nowhere; when conversations consisted mainly of irrelevancies, with here and there a relevancy, a relevancy with an embarrassed look, as not being able to explain how it got there.

In the bemused mind of Twain, who presumably had not traveled a century into the future and attended various Lynn Street happy hours, Cooper's dialog was surreal and insufferable. But if Twain's characterization is accurate, then Fenimore Cooper's dialog may have amounted to literary prophecy. Sometime soon, sit unobtrusively in a bar or coffee shop sometime, or maybe your own neighborhood gathering, and listen. Try the break room at work, or the weekly staff meeting. Or the Sunday morning infotainment shows. Listen intently for the "relevancy with an embarrassed look."
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* I learned the term churl in 1965 when Lee-and-Kirby creation Dr. Doom back-knuckled a hapless lackey with his iron gauntlet as punishment for some offense, real or imagined by the supreme despot of Latveria, and publicly denounced the poor sap as a "WITLESS CHURL!"

What I learned from the Bible this week

I have been working my way through the Book of Genesis, words by God Almighty with pictures by Robert Crumb. It is interesting to read reputable translations, unexpurgated and basically unedited except where Crumb jumped between different translations to restore a "Behold!" or select a more scholarly and precise choice of words than King James's crew provided. I say interesting because Judeo-Christian ideas and references so permeate Western Civilization that many of us don't recognize the full extent. Irrespective of any literal or allegorical truth found in the text, reading this book is to me a very similar experience to reading a good history.

I found the story of Noah and the Ark to be intriguing. This adventure was much more of an ordeal for Noah and his stalwart family than I ever received in Sunday School. The narrative is vivid and it plays out over a time scale that makes the flood and its rescission almost seem plausible. The three gentlemen pictured at upper left are Noah's three sons, Shem, Japheth, and Ham. I immediately noticed that Ham appears to have an anger problem, as if about to exclaim "Get busy, Porkypine, we got a job to do!" as a prelude to a smack in the kisser. And Shem seems to be cooking up a wisecrack, apparently vulnerable to the same lapses of judgment that plagued his distant descendant, Samuel Horwitz.

I claim "discovery" of this charming coincidence in the same way I claim "discovery" of Saturn about 25 years ago in my backyard telescope after returning from the fridge with my third beer, after the earth had revolved a few degrees through the ecliptic. I performed a quick google search to discover that, sadly, comics publisher Dan Nadel had made the same connection back in October, shortly after publication. (Schmuck probably got a free review copy, but I had to save my hard-earned shekels to purchase mine.)

As far as I can tell, this is the only "gag" Crumb embedded into his Old Testament illustrations. Somehow, this works for me and I think it might not offend me even if I had a long-nurtured reverence for the text. When you look at Crumb's drawings of the ark, sealed with hot pitch, it's easy to see these three lunkheads tripping over each other and bonking each other on the noggin with 8-cubit two-by-fours.

Editor's note: fair use is claimed for the image of Shem, Japheth, and Ham, which is reproduced here for purposes of literary critique and education. The art panel is copyright 2009 by R. Crumb; the text is in the public domain as previously furnished by The Lord and His earthly designees.