X-Men: Fan Service Apocalypse

It's finally happened! We as a Geek Community have won. We got the movie we always envisioned in our heads. Can we stop now?

Full disclosure; I've never been a fan of the X-Men in comics.

Besides being a DC guy, I could still read stories about Spidey or Cap and enjoy them. The X-Men though always struck me as whiny and unprofessional. They'd stop in the middle of a fight to discuss their feelings and whether they should be fighting for the other side and on and on and on . . .

Superman would have been done already, filed the story with Perry White and be inventing a cure for cancer in the Fortress while they were still deciding to fight.

The X-Men movies have left me similarly cold. The first three seemed to be saying "Don't tell anybody we're a comic book movie."  I liked First Class just fine and thought Days of Future Past was a good way to kill a Saturday afternoon.

X-Men Apocalypse is what happens when you give comic book fans way too much power in the moviemaking process. I don't know how someone who hasn't read X-Men comics for the past 30 years would even understand this movie. Every scene and plot point seems to be put there simply for a theatre full of comic book fans to scream in recognition.

"Here's your favorite X-Man in the movie for five minutes for no other reason than that you want to see him!"

"Here's a convoluted explanation for why Prof. X is bald, even though we could've just said he lost his hair!"

"Here's a tease that we're going to do that legendary comic book storyline that we tried to do 4 movies ago but screwed up so badly we're hoping you won't remember! And now Sansa Stark is in it too!"

It must be great to do one of these X-Men movies if you're Michael Fassbender or Jennifer Lawrence.  You just show up at a green screen studio for like two weeks, grimace and then walk home with several million bucks!

Not a terrible movie, but just empty.

Still better than Batman V Superman though.

The Color Purple

My mother didn't go to the movies very much. She was blessed, or cursed, depending on your  perspective, with a house full of boys who lived and died with the movies. Anything we could get our hands on we watched, especially after we were lucky enough to get a VCR. Being a particularly religious household, anything rated R was off the menu and being not especially wealthy we lived in the 99 cent area of the video store or more often, what was available at the library. In hindsight that meant a steady diet of Disney Movies and classic Hollywood pictures like Casablanca or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

For whatever reason, when the Color Purple was released in 1985, my mother went to see it. Now my mother never went to a movie of her own volition in the entire 28 years I had her. She saw plenty of movies with us kids (especially me). She sat threw multiple iterations of Superman and Star Wars because that's what we wanted to go see. But I have no memory of her deciding to go to a movie that she wanted to see for herself. Except this once.

Not only did she see it, she went back and saw it, in the theatre, multiple times. If you didn't know my mother, believe this. This was an extraordinary circumstance.

In the years after, she would tell me how much the movie reminded her of her own life. Without sharing stories that aren't mine to share, my mothers childhood was filled with experiences that most people would think of as a horror show. She shared with me only a fraction of her experiences and it was enough to convince me of the cruelty and outright evil that some people are capable of.

My mother's experience of the Color Purple was more than just cathartic. She, quite literally, fell into the movie and became for the time she was watching it. She adored this movie in a way that I as a lifelong movie nut, could never fully appreciate. It mattered to her on a deeply cellular level.

So when I got home today and my sister was watching it, I sat down and caught the last bit. Right about from when Ms. Sofia has just been put in jail, through the end. I hadn't seen it in a while, and it really holds up as a film. But beyond that . . .

I saw the pain on Celie's face when being subjected to a lifetime of servitude to a man who can easily be defined as the personification of misogynistic evil. I felt the catharsis of watching Celie discover the connection with the only person in the world who loved her through decades of letters. And I felt the joy of Celie reuniting with a family that she never thought she'd see again in her lifetime.

And it mattered to me. On a deeply cellular level.

Musical Theatre

Lest the readers of this blog think my nerdiness only extends to comic books, allow me to disabuse you of that notion. I also have an absolute love and affection for musical theatre. Can't get enough of it. Ask me about Oklahoma!

If I'm to be honest, my entry into the world of musical theatre has less than noble origins. They're actually dependent on teenage hormone overload. When my brother and I visited my Dad's house in Los Angeles we had access to cable television, more specifically premium channels. As such, I would often look through the TV guide listings hoping to find two very specific things. First, looking for movies that were on late at night. Second, movies that were listed to have either nudity or sexual situations. I submit this as explanation, not excuse.

One night I happened upon a movie called Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. In my limited experience I really didn't know exactly what a whorehouse was, but this was as good a time as any to find out.

While, yes, there was some nudity, what really caught me off guard was the combination of song and story that moved me in ways I didn't quite get at that age. By the time we hit Hard Candy Christmas, I was a crying mess and barely remembered the naked women.

In the intervening years, being in a small town, I had little access to stage musicals, but I began to pay attention to films like Singin' In the Rain or Disney Movies or how music helps to tell a story. I've never been a huge popular music fan, but I would always check out a movie like Streets of Fire because music in service of a story always seemed to appeal to me.

As an adult I've developed a deep love and affection for live theatre, both seeing and performing. I can't imagine my life without it.

And all because I wanted to see some boobs.

Humanity's Greatest Idea

“We've always known we'd eventually be called upon to open our shirts and save the day, and the superhero was a crude, hopeful attempt to talk about how we all might feel on that day of great power, and great responsibility.” 
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

There's a reason I love Superman.

First off, let's acknowledge that Batman is cooler. He's rich. He has an awesome car. His house has a basement with a robot dinosaur and a crime lab. Batman is the straight adolescent  boys idea of the perfect life. Rich, powerful and gorgeous women come after you so you don't have to go after them.

These days, Batman is inarguably the more popular of the two. Which is a darn shame. Because as much as I love Batman, I think Superman, may just be the most important fictional character ever created.

While Batman is an adolescent's idea of what a great life is, Superman is a whole different thing.

Superman is a child's idea of what being good is.

He's selfless. He's friendly. He's the most powerful thing walking the planet, but he'll stop and help you get your cat out of your tree.

He has power, but uses it to help those without it. He was brought up to believe that the innate privilege brought by the conditions of his birth (yellow sun radiation giving him limitless powers and abilities) don't inherently make him more valuable than anybody else on the planet.

It's a complex world and that complex world requires complex responses. It's because of that complexity that I hold to the purity of the simple ideas that have never been proven untrue by life's difficult experiences.

Other people are as important as you are.

Being kind is it's own reward.

Unearned privilege can be used on behalf of others.

Hope is one of the most powerful forces in the world.

I know where I learned those things.

Old Towne Mall and the origin of my obsessions

"I've tried to avoid all this, but I can't" - Bruce Wayne, Batman (1989)

My life was changed because my mother liked Donald Duck.

I was a poor, black kid in the 70's living in Compton, California. I have no memory of where it started, but it's likeliest that I either saw Adam West Batman and George Reeves  Superon on TV and then found the comics, or found the comics first and then saw the shows on TV. Either way, by the time my conscious memories kick in I was a fan of DC Comics.

While I'm not sure how I found out about it (in those days, I seem to remember looking through the yellow pages for any mention of the word Comic Book), but there was a comic book shop inside a mall in nearby Torrance. I begged enough that one Saturday, my mom gave in and took me.

The memory of walking into that place is both vivid, and clouded by about 40 years of nostalgia. Up to that point, I had only seen comics on the spinner rack at the grocery store across the street. Walking in and seeing this long, narrow room filled with comics from top to bottom took my breath away. I couldn't have been older than 7 or 8 years old, but I knew somewhere inside that this was where I belonged.

I remember some specifics about the place. There were treasury sized books on the racks, reprints of some of the key Golden Age books like Action Comics #1 or Detective Comics #27, so that places it in the mid to late 70's. In the back room I found back issues of the Steve Ditko Hawk and Dove run, which amazed me because it never occurred to me that there were comics printed before I was born!

My mom patiently waited for me to completely freak out, pick out a couple of things and check out.  While we were checking out she looked at the wall (Wall books, way back then!) and saw an issue of, if I'm right, Walt Disney's Comics & Stories with Donald Duck on the cover, likely a Carl Barks issue. Again, my recollection is spotty, but as I put together the rest of the details after a lifetime of collecting, it makes sense based on the rest of the conversation.

My mom noticed the book and said, "Oh! I used to have that book when I was a kid!"

My reaction to finding out my Mom read comics when she was a kid was silent amazement.

"How much is it?" she asked the clerk.

I don't know exactly what amount the clerk mentioned, but it was clearly a lot more than my mother expected. She reacted, as my mother often did, with a distinct tone that indicated in no uncertain terms that she had diagnosed the clerk as clinically insane.

"What? Why is it so much?"

The clerk explained to my mother and I that, older comics were often valuable to collectors. That, yes, she had only paid a dime for it in the 50's, but that now it was worth much, much more.

My mother looked down at me, and said the words that would save me a lifetime of heartache.

"If they're gonna be worth that much, I'm never throwing any of yours out!"

And with one notable exception, she never did.