Review: Iron Man 3

It wasn't as bad as Iron Man 2 (2010) but not quite up to the original Iron Man (2008) film. Of course, it's trying to tell a more complicated story than the original film and it's trying to show us the humanity of Tony Stark. So who is Iron Man: man or machine...or both?

That's really the main question this film is asking and trying to answer, which is why we don't see Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) in his armor for most of the film. However, when this movie finally gets rolling, we have armor up the wazoo!

But first things first.

The movie starts in the dark with Stark's narration, "A wise man once said: we make our own demons." This is important but you don't realize it right away. I'll get to that.

Stark decides to start his story on New Year's Eve 1999 in Bern, Switzerland. He's trying to get a brilliant research scientist named Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall) into bed for a one-night stand and all she wants to do is talk about her latest experiment in reprogramming the human brain to amplify a person's ability to self-repair dramatically. Tony seems too drunk to notice or care, but he's brilliant enough to not let that stop him, either in his quest to get her into the sack (which he does) or to help her with her technical problem (which he also does, but we don't find out until later).

OK, she's interested in bedding Tony too, after they get rid of the overly attentive Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau). Tony's also promised to meet with the newly minted inventor of AIM (that's right, Advanced Idea Mechanics...the bad guys) Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce with a really bad haircut and a hopelessly fan boy attitude in the 1999 sequence) on the roof of the hotel, but that was a total lie. Booze and sex drive Tony Stark at this point in his life.

All this is to set the stage for the present where we pick up the loose threads left dangling on the morning of January 1st, 2000.

As a nice homage to the first film, we get to see the brief appearance of a very beloved character (at least to me) in the opening few minutes of the 1999 sequence. Watch for him.

Shift to the present or close to it: the Christmas season 2012 (presumably). Happy has been upgraded to Chief of Security at Stark International, Pepper is handling the day to day running of the empire, and Tony...Tony's a mess.

He has been ever since the end of The Avengers (2012), but then again, escorting a live nuke into another dimension and almost getting stranded there, and then, having gotten back out, almost falling to his death, all have a way of negatively impacting a person. In Tony's case, he's prone to panic attacks (they don't last long enough to qualify as anxiety attacks).

Pepper's moved into the Malibu mansion with him, but that only helps a little. Night after night he can hardly sleep and he spends most of his time building a wide variety of super-powered armor prototypes. The latest is Mark 42, which on command, will leap into the air in pieces and slap themselves onto Tony's body (it's not a perfect process).

But then he finds something to focus on besides the past, his anxiety, and his uncertainty. The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley). The Mandarin seems to have it in for America in general and the American President in particular. So much so that he needs to blow up lots of American stuff, including the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

Long story short, the formerly dweeby Aldrich (with a much better haircut and tons more confidence) visits Pepper at SI to pitch "his" technology for hacking into the human brain to enhance healing and performance (sound familiar). Pepper turns it down since it can all too easily be weaponized (something SI doesn't do anymore). Security Chief Hogan gets suspicious of Aldrich and his henchman Savin (James Badge Dale) and follows them to the aforementioned Chinese Theatre...

...where he discovers how the Mandarin blows up things...not with bombs but with genetically altered people...

...and ends up in a coma (don't worry, he gets better by the end of the movie).

This is where it becomes personal for Tony and he challenges the Mandarin on TV to a duel, giving out his home address (as if the entire world could miss that giant half factory/half work of art in Malibu hanging over the Pacific).

Big mistake. The long missing Maya Hansen shows up "coincidentally" to warn Tony about her boss as Pepper is trying to convince Tony to get out of the mansion...just minutes before three of the Mandarin's helicopters blows the whole thing into the ocean.  Tony "armorizes" Pepper just long enough for her to get Maya and herself out of harm's way, then pulls the armor onto himself just in time to go into the water with his house.

So begins Tony Stark's armorless journey to discover who the Mandarin is and the secret behind exploding people.

Cute relationship between Tony (AKA "the Mechanic") and eight-year old Harley Keener (Ty Simpkins). Nice and heartwarming, even though Tony is still a dick at heart. The relationship does buy Tony time to start unraveling the mystery and he makes a number of surprising discoveries.

Most aren't all that surprising to the audience but one came at me out of left field. I loved what Kingsley did with Trevor. I had no idea it would turn out this way but in retrospect, it was brilliant. It goes completely off canon which is probably good, since you can't do The Mandarin the way he originally appeared in the 1960s Marvel comic books. The Mandarin in the comics was actually a throwback to the 1930s pulp fiction stories and comic strips and in no way could that "Fu Manchu" character type ever play in the 21st century. Nice twist and kudos to the writers.

I was disappointed that the armored suits, including James Rhodes's (Don Cheadle) seemed to be taken out so easily by the "Lava people." Even though Rhodes inside Iron Patriot (the War Machine armor with a Captain America paint job) was taken by surprise, once Rhodes regained consciousness, none of the armor's toys were put into play to get him out of his mess. The best he could do was eject himself out of the armor and run like hell.

In fact, Rhodes was a far more effective fighter without the suit than he was in it. He could totally kick ass with nothing besides a sidearm and lots of athletic skill, which is how he manages to rescue the President.

Tony manages to do derring do, including saving about a dozen people in free fall who were forcibly blown out of a crippled Air Force One, but finally it's Rhodes who saves the Pres and it's Pepper who defeats the real bad guy and saves Tony's ass (never mind that she came just that close to buying the farm herself).

Good Stuff

What they did with the Mandarin. Ben Kingsley puts in a surprising performance once Tony comes face to face with who he thinks is the mastermind behind the international terrorist organization AIM.

The finale where thirty or forty remotely controlled suits of armor are all flying around fighting the bad guys. JARVIS is the main hero here, although Tony shows masterful coordination at getting into and out of different suits of armor literally on the fly. Pretty good for a guy who has panic attacks with very little provocation.

For once, the female lead saves the day. She kind of blows it by immediately being shocked at how violent she could be (having just blown the bad guy into millions of superheated pieces).

Tony finally gets rid of all of the shrapnel around his heart, eliminating the need for an electromagnet in his chest powered by a mini-arc reactor.

He blows up his armored suits. All of them. It's a way for Tony to grow up and realize that he is he hero behind Iron Man, not a bunch of technology.

Bad Stuff

For a guy who has panic attacks when you just mention "New York," he can do lots and lots of really risky, heroic stuff that should either have put him in a fetal position or sent him to an emergency room. Even without his armor, he's leaping  thirty feet to come down on precarious perches, dodging flying debris, explosions and one really super-heated and pissed off bad guy. If he was that prone to debilitating anxiety, she should have ended up dead.

The film seemed uneven. Yes, I know the point was to show Tony outside his armor and what he could and needed to do without depending on "the suit," but the name of the movie is "Iron Man," not "The Adventures of Tony Stark."

The armor was shockingly ineffective against a crew of super villains whose only real power was getting hot enough to melt metal and exploding. I can see where that could catch you by surprise the first time, but once you expect it, the armor and all its gadgets should just kick ass. I think the film makers tried too hard to make their "man over machine" point.

The worst disappointment though has to go to the after ending credits scene. Normally these scenes are meant to show secrets into the next Marvel films, little surprises, teasing easter eggs. This time it was a cheesy joke between Stark and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo). Totally not worth wasting seven minutes of my life sitting through the end of film credits. This is where we see that Tony's narration is part of a dialogue with Banner.

The movie is watchable. It leaves us with the feeling that Tony has outgrown Iron Man and is leaving the armor behind along with his blown up and sunken Malibu mansion (guess he's moving to New York). If I didn't know Downey had signed on to do two more Marvel films, I would have interpreted this movie's ending the way The Dark Knight Rises (2012) ended. Batman dies so Bruce Wayne can live.

I had thought that the after end credits "teaser" might have been used to introduce Ant Man (2015) or at least his alter ego Henry Pym. No such luck (unless he was in the scene but too small to see).

Yeah, I'll watch this movie again, but not until it's out on DVD. It was a nice ride, but not a fully satisfying one. The Avengers is still top of the heap of super hero movies...at least until I see Man of Steel (2013) next Sunday and then review it.

DVD Review: The Amazing Spider-Man

I suppose it was OK. The odd thing about The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) is that I neither really liked it or disliked it.

OK, I liked it. The film was watchable and entertaining. I enjoyed it and would watch it again, but it wasn't "amazing" or "spectacular" or anything like that. It was just another superhero movie. It had its good points and its flaws.

Warning! Warning! Major spoilers ahead. If you're like me and waited for this film to come out in DVD before watching it (and you haven't watched it yet), I will give away a ton of secrets in my review. You have been warned.

I like that there was a mystery. So many superheroes get their powers by accident and I guess Peter did in this film too, but not quite by accident. In a way, his father created him.

When Peter Parker is four-years old, his parents suffer a home break-in. Someone specifically was looking for something in his Dad's office. Fortunately, Richard Parker hid the really secret stuff in a false bottom of his desk drawer (a trick older than Stan Lee, but the thieves still didn't tumble to it). Pawning little Peter off on his Uncle Ben and Aunt May, Richard and Mary Parker disappear into the night, never to be seen again. Later, Peter learns they died in a plane crash, but no one ever talks about it.

Richard Parker's work had something to do with cross-species genetics...and spiders.

It's interesting that teenage Peter Parker was interested in photography before becoming Spider-Man. In the original, silver age version, he started taking news photos as a way to support himself and Aunt May after his uncle's death. I found it particularly confusing though, when Peter webbed his camera to a wall to take shots of Spider-Man's battle with the Lizard, that the film had never established why he did it in the first place. In this movie, he is never shown to have a relationship with the Daily Bugle or making plans to sell his photos to them or anyone else.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Andrew Garfield did a very good job playing the geeky, socially awkward (to put it mildly) teenage Peter Parker. Of course, the audience has to get past the fact that all of the actors depicting high school students are really twenty-somethings, but we should be used to that by now. In fact, Garfield's Parker is so awkward, I found it amazing that the beautiful and quite articulate Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) ever found him attractive in the first place. Sure, Peter had just heroically tried to save some kid from being bullied by "Flash" Thompson (Chris Zylka) and gotten pounded into the pavement for his troubles, but that should have just made him look like a loser to most high school girls.

In some ways, I was more interested in Garfield's Parker than in his Spider-Man. It was very easy to see how Peter, abandoned by his parents over a decade before, was an alienated, malcontented, loner sitting on a lot of rage. He wasn't the "nice kid" that Parker was originally created to be by Lee and Ditko 50 years ago. Yeah, Garfield's Parker will stand up for the underdog, but that's because he is the underdog, not because he's intrinsically a nice guy. After all, at various points in the film, he blows off both his aunt and uncle, humiliates Flash Thompson just because he can, and even ends up on the school principle's "bad boy" list (although performing community service isn't such a "bad boy").

So you take all of that and give it "spider powers." What happens?

Oh, but wait. The mystery.

A water leak in the Parker home's basement leads Peter to discover his father's old briefcase that had been left to gather dust in some forgotten corner. Infinitely curious and desperate to know more about what happened to his parents, he examines the filthy old thing and, perhaps remembering the false bottom of his Dad's desk drawer, discovers a hidden pocket with a "secret formula." He also discovers a photo of Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), his Dad's former lab partner at Oscorp, and he aims himself in that direction to try and learn more.

By amazing coincidence, the day Peter goes to visit Connors at Oscorp, Connors is supposed to be lecturing new interns who are being taken on a tour of the place by (another amazing coincidence) head intern Gwen Stacy. Peter takes another kid's pass to get in (getting that kid subsequently thrown out) and gets his first look at Connors...and impressing Connors with his knowledge of cross-species genetics. It's the first time that the audience sees Peter has a brain built for science. It's never mentioned before this, and Peter might just have been another angry high school kid for the first thirty minutes of the film.

Speaking of amazing coincidences, Peter just happens to run into (literally) Norman Osborne's top henchman Rajit Ratha (Irrfan Khan) and sees that the folder Ratha is carrying contains the same "secret formula" symbols that Pete found in his Dad's briefcase.

Even though Peter has a stolen intern pass and has left the rest of the intern tour, no one seems to question him as he follows Ratha through the corridors of a private corporate building with lots of trade secrets and watches him manipulate a touch pad to open a door to some secret room. Two guys come out and go with Ratha but for whatever reason, Peter decides to stop following Ratha and to get into that room.

I must say that it was lousy security that let Peter gain access. No smartcard, retina scan, or voice recognition software was required to open the door, just a series of finger movements across the pad, which Peter saw briefly and remembered. And what was in that room? Just a bunch of spiders on webs inside some sort of machine. Naturally, Peter decides to touch and spiders fall all over him. He manages to get out of the room again without setting off any alarms but takes an eight-legged hitchhiker with him, which manages to "put the bite" on Peter's neck right before Gwen catches him and kicks him out of the building.

I should mention at this point that Connors later tells Peter that no animal subject of cross-species genetic experiments has survived, yet, once bitten, Peter seems to do OK. (Should I mention that Peter actually gives Connors the secret of his father's formula at their first one-on-one meeting, making the Lizard possible?) But then, Connors also tells Peter that it was his father's breakthrough with the spiders over ten years ago, that enabled the project to survive. Maybe that's why there was a special room with spiders. They were the only ones who could pass on their genetic traits to another species without killing that species. But why were Richard Parker's spiders (or more likely their descendants) still around at Oscorp and if they were such a breakthrough (even if Parker Sr. took all his research with him when he disappeared ... apart from one briefcase), why in over a decade, were no experiments done with those spiders that would have ultimately created another Spider-Man?

The spiders were there for Peter to get spider powers, then that was that. Bad writing.

The film spends a lot of time showing us how Peter develops his powers. He doesn't immediately decide to become a hero or an entertainer or anything else. The fact that he gained new abilities is cool and a terrific clue as to what his father and Connors were up to, but he didn't decide to do anything with them at all (except mercilessly tease Flash Thompson and shatter a basketball backboard) until his Uncle Ben is killed.

And yes, Peter could have stopped the killer and no he didn't and yes, it pisses him off.

But he doesn't become a hero yet, he just becomes a guy looking for revenge. Ironically, he never finds it. He busts a bunch of guys who kind of look like the murderer, but he never finds the actually guy. Maybe the shooter blows town after he blows away Uncle Ben, but we never find out.

In the process of refining his vigilante role, Peter first develops a crude mask and finally the entire costume. Smart as he is, he can't actually create a "spider web formula" as in the original comics, but he "borrows" some from Oscorp after becoming chummy with Curt Connors.

Which brings up the question of what happens when Peter runs out of his supply? The only place he can get more is Oscorp. Once Connors is put away at the end of the film, his only other way in is his girlfriend. Sure, he invents the shooters, but he has no ability to independently create more webbing.

It's little details like this that kind of bugged me (yeah, that's a bad pun).

Peter finally becomes a hero, not while fighting a bad guy, but by rescuing a bunch of people who the Lizard endangers by throwing their cars off a bridge. Peter's webbing is strong enough to suspend the cards from the bridge, but he only rescues one kid from one car. I have no idea how the kid got stuck in the car when his Dad made it out just fine. I have no idea why Peter didn't rescue anyone else from any of the other cars (and if they were all empty, why did he stop them from falling into the water in the first place?).

But in saving the little kid and seeing the father's gratitude, he gives himself a name and a more noble purpose.

Gwen's father Police Captain George Stacy (Denis Leary) was a jerk for most of the film but he was supposed to be. Peter's dinner with the Stacy family was a total disaster, but what teenage boy hasn't been humiliated by his girlfriend's father at one point or another. It was kind of cool to see the face of "Diego" (Ice Age films), though.

And how the heck doesn't Aunt May know Peter is Spider-Man? Her first clue is right after she and Peter watch Captain Stacy issue a warrant for Spider-Man's arrest during a TV press conference, Peter storms out of the house. May looks at him like, "what they heck is that all about." Later, when Peter comes home all banged up after his last battle with the Lizard, she looks at him, doesn't ask why he looks like he went ten rounds in the ring with Mike Tyson, and just hugs him. I tell you, that woman was smart enough to put it all together. She has to know.

By the way, I really liked Martin Sheen's Uncle Ben, especially when he's teasing Peter in front of Gwen and calls himself Peter's probation officer. Everyone needs an uncle like that. I was also pleased that Sally Field's Aunt May wasn't constantly at death's door. In the Lee/Ditko version (and later), May always has one foot in the grave and the other on ice-coated Teflon. At least this Aunt May is a fighter (although I get the impression she's a lousy cook).

Another thing I liked was that Flash wasn't just a two-dimensional bully. After Uncle Ben dies (and everyone at school knows), Flash tries to make amends. Sure, Peter picks him up and slams him against some lockers, but everyone, including Flash, understands why Peter's so angry and hurt. Just a nice little bit of realism.

Another nice bit of realism was Gwen confessing to Peter how afraid she was growing up, watching her Dad leave for work as a police officer each day, and wondering if he'd ever come home that night. How could she stand being with Peter if he insisted on being Spider-Man and going after the Lizard?

This is a nice echo (though the filmmakers probably didn't intend it as such) to Betty Brant, Peter's first girlfriend in the Lee/Ditko comics. They eventually break up because Peter's job as a freelance crime photographer (Betty never finds out Peter is Spider-Man) is so dangerous. Her brother was also some sort of thrill seeker and was ultimately killed because of it (actually, he was in deep with some thugs and couldn't pay them back the money he took and they killed him). Peter finally left Betty because he knew she'd leave him if she ever found out what he really did every night.

Why did Peter put "Property of Peter Parker" on his camera? Who does that? It was a lame way for the Lizard to find out Spider-Man's secret identity.

Connors survives the film, saves Peter's life in the end (after killing George Stacy) and goes to jail. I'd love to see his defense attorney's strategy. Technically, Connors was under the influence of a mind and body altering substance when he committed his crimes, so can the court really convict Curt Connors for what he did when he was the Lizard? Well, probably, since Connors injected himself with that stuff in an attempt to regain his lost arm. If a junkie shoots up and is high when he kills someone, he's still libel for the murder after he stops being high.

Promises you can't keep are the best kind. OK, it would have been a lousy promise to try and keep, and I don't really remember Peter agreeing to stay away from Gwen as her dying father's last request, but Peter just plain blew off the seriousness of a father's genuine love for his daughter and desire to protect her.

Lots of little interesting developments. Stuff for the future. Supposedly Ratha was pressuring Connors to begin human trails on cross-species genetics because Norman Osborne (owner of Oscorp and usually the Green Goblin) is dying...but we get no details on what's killing him and how the Connors experiments are supposed to help.

Does Peter ever go after the guy who killed his uncle again?

If Aunt May knows Peter is Spider-Man, what will she do about?

It's strongly implied that the plane crash that killed Peter's parents was no accident and that it was arranged because Richard Parker refused to start human trails on his formula. Connors is alive at the end of the film and has this knowledge, but will he ever tell Peter? If Peter finds out, what will he do, go after Norman Osborne? If Osborne wanted the secret of Parker's cross-species formula, why kill him? Why not kidnap his wife and son and hold them hostage (or some other equally evil plot) and force Parker to give up the formula?

And if Osborne wants human trials to begin now because he's dying, was he dying ten years ago when Parker also refused to perform human experiments, or was there another reason (like lots and lots of money)?

I understand that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is in pre-production and scheduled for release sometime in 2014.

Maybe we'll find out some answers then, and get a look at Mary Jane Watson...and maybe Electro.

DVD Review: Thor, or How Sibling Rivalry Can Really Go Bad

Finally got around to viewing Thor (2011) which is the last film I needed to see before seeing The Avengers (2012). What can I say. It's OK. Not great. Not horrible. Just OK. Kind of like a bowl of lukewarm porridge. I felt almost exactly the same way after viewing Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). Oh well. Ho-hum.

By the way, this review contains a ton of spoilers. I figured it can't hurt that much, since the film's been out awhile and anyone interested in The Avengers movie must have seen it a bunch of times by now. Just warning you. Proceed at your own risk.

I know the film makers tried to successfully merge the doings in Asgard with those on Midgard (Earth) but it was always very jarring to go from one universe to another. Of course, you could say that was on purpose, since the Asgardian realm is so much different than plain ol' planet Earth, but after reading some of the film's trivia at IMDB, I saw that the film's look and feel were supposed to successfully merge the two worlds. Oh well.

I know Natalie Portman wanted to be in this film, and it's not exactly like her appearances in the various Star Wars movies were so high brow, but I felt her talent was rather wasted here. On the other hand, Anthony Hopkins played Odin and he's practically the nexus of all wonderful and classical acting experience in the universe embodied as a man. Marlon Brando played Jor-El in the first Superman film (1978) starring Christopher Reeve, so I guess I don't really have much of a point here. Just sayin'.

I know there had to be some way of explaining Thor, Asgard, Bifrost, and everything else without saying it's out and out magic, but it was a little hard to buy that the "Rainbow Bridge" that leads from Asgard to Earth was really something called an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, AKA a "wormhole." I guess you can call the Asgardians, Frost Giants and the like all super-dimensional beings who exist in domains outside of normal time-space...except Thor said you could see them all using the Hubble telescope. So Asgard is just something that exists in normal space, out there somewhere.

I think I like "super-dimensional" better.

I know everyone tried really hard, but the characterization wasn't all that great. Natalie Portman as astrophysicist Jane Foster was played like a dippy school girl with a crush on the high school football quarterback. I liked Chris Hemsworth. I think he looked the part. I just wasn't amazingly impressed with his performance, and I really wanted to be.

Clint Barton (played by Jeremy Renner). He has a brief appearance in the film as a SHIELD sniper who prefers a bow to a high-powered rifle and scope. It explains (sort of) how he'll end up in the Avengers but Barton was always a bad boy in the comic books, right on the edge of being a criminal and heading toward prison (he first appeared as a pawn of the communist agent the Black Widow in the early 1960s, manipulated into attacking Iron Man). Hard to believe he starts out as a government agent rather than a well-meaning but easily conned rogue.

Sif (played by Jaimie Alexander). Nada. She didn't even look like a goddess. Heck, she didn't even look convincingly like a mortal female warrior. I just didn't get the feeling she could kick anyone's ass. She wasn't regal. She wasn't a goddess.

I know Thor is supposed to be the most bad ass god of them all, but it seemed as if he was about a thousand times more powerful than any other Asgardian around him. In the initial fight sequence in Jotunheim, the other gods including Loki seemed no more powerful than some really tough human martial arts/sword and sorcery types, while Thor flew around like Superman, smashing everything in sight. You'd think if everyone in Asgard was considered a "god" and was nearly immortal (Odin seems to age so they can't *really* be immortal), the "warriors three," Loki, and Sif would have been closer to Thor's own abilities (especially Loki, since he fights Thor to a stand still in the film's climax).

Agent Coulson (played by Clark Gregg) was an asshole. In the first two Iron Man films, he was sort of likable if not entirely competent, but in Thor, he was an absolute jerk, especially when taking away all of Jane Foster's (and her fellow scientists) toys. Also, I always had the impression that SHIELD knew exactly who they were recruiting for the Avengers, but Coulson had no idea how Thor was connected to the hammer and he thought Thor was some sort of "Soldier of Fortune" merc. Coulson got on my nerves fairly early and stayed there throughout the film. At least he evoked an emotion in me. Most of the other characters didn't.

I know that in the 21st century, it would be considered poor form to create an entire race of white people, but I was a little surprised to see Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano playing Hogun and African-British actor Idris Elba playing Heimdall. The Asgardian legends are Nordic legends, so I thought I'd see a lot more blonds in Asgard. Of course, if we reverse causality (which we have to here) and say the Nordic people observing the Asgardians fighting the Frost Giants on Earth mistook these super-dimensional beings for gods, then it makes sense that they'd recreate the gods of Asgard in their own image, depicting them in their legends as racially unmixed (blond hair, blue eyes, all white). That means in real (movie) life, Asgardians could look like just about anyone, as long as the men were buff and the women were beautiful.

The one thing I didn't really anticipate and did like in the film was Loki's motivation. In the beginning, he wasn't such a bad guy. Sure, he was jealous of Thor, but I can see why he'd believe Odin favored Thor at Loki's expense. Loki liked to get into a bit of mischief every now and then (and he is the god of mischief after all) but nothing serious. He really did love his parents and wanted to be a good king of Asgard (as opposed to Thor who started out as an arrogant prick). Discovering that he was "adopted" and a Frost Giant to boot, really reset his clock. Adopted kids, especially those who are adults before they are told they're adopted (or find out by accident as in Loki's case) almost always are shocked and sometimes pissed off that mommy and daddy didn't tell them the truth. It just added to Loki's complexity and his desire to take Thor down a peg...actually a lot of pegs, since he tried to kill his older brother.

In the end, Thor has to destroy Bifrost to keep Loki from committing genocide, shattering the link between him and Jane. Loki is lost when he deliberately lets himself fall into space. No apparent connection to Thor's return to Earth or Loki's return as the villain in The Avengers is apparent (save for the "real" ending after the credits when we get a brief glimpse of Loki in some SHIELD labyrinth).

I'm glad I saw the movie if only because it's a set up for The Avengers film and to fill in any gaps in my knowledge base. That said, there are better films out there I could wasted a couple of hours on. I just hope The Avengers movie doesn't leave me feeling as "blah."

Oh well.

Loki's Next Battle!

In the Marvel movies, the villain from Asgard, Thor's half-brother Loki has appeared in Thor (2011) and will be appearing this coming May in The Avengers (2012). But before all that, he battled another, startling hero.

Dr. Strange?

That's right comic book fans. A little known battle between the god of mischief and the Master of the Mystic Arts, circa 1963.

DVD Review of X-Men First Class

X-Men: First Class (2011) is the classic example of how Hollywood gets its greedy little hands on a vast body of work and canon and completely screws it up. Really, the film wasn't totally horrible, but it was so muddled and overworked that I couldn't like it, and I really, really, wanted to like it.

No, I'm not bitching about how the film makers took excessive liberties with canon. I expect that films aren't going to stick lockstep with how the comic books portray a hero or group and that's to be expected. What works in a comic book almost never works the same way on TV or in film. But the X-Men have been around since Lee and Kirby introduced the original team (Cyclops, Angel, Beast, Marvel Girl, Iceman, and Professor X) to the world in 1963 and a lot of material has been accumulating.

The film's writers, director, and producers tried to cram damn near almost 50 years of history in to 132 minutes of running time. It's like they felt they have to jam pack the movie with all of the back story on the Professor and Magneto, plus many of the team members, starting with childhood and, even though set in 1962 (a year before the comic book team came together), also had to drag in material from the 1970s (the human-looking Hank McCoy turning into a real, furry Beast) and 1980s (the Hellfire club including Sebastian Shaw and Emma Frost).

They needed to scale back. If this is to be the first of many X-Men films based on the prequel/reboot, then they could have saved some story for later.

I have to admit, I liked the way McAvoy portrayed Charles Xavier (in real life, the "X" in "Xavier" is pronounced like the "X" in "Xylophone"). You just know that a young, male telepath would probably act like an asshole if he knew every thought of every mind around him. He certainly f*cked up "outing" McCoy as a mutant right in front of his CIA boss. Also, his telepathy sense must have stunted his common sense if he couldn't tell that Raven was head over heels for him right from jump street. He payed for that one dearly in the end.

I also liked the Xavier/Lehnsherr chemistry (I think everyone did). Erik (Magneto) Lehnsherr isn't power hungry and evil. He's a holocaust survivor who can see the world treating mutants the way they treated the Jews. This time, he plans to strike first and not wait for the humans to build the death camps. I don't blame him.

That's the part about Erik that Charles could never understand. As far as the movie presents, Charles was raised (although we never see his parents) in a safe and secure environment. Nothing ever threatened his world so he can afford to see the possibilities of a human/mutant friendship. Erik, on the other hand, learned from Shaw in the camps that anyone who claims to be your friend just wants to use your mutant powers for their own gain, and they'll even blow your mother away right in front of you if that's what it takes (I can't imagine why Erik killed the soldiers who murdered his mother, but didn't drive every sharp metal object in that chamber of horrors right through Shaw's black heart).

It's the billion inconsistencies in the film like the one I just cited that makes "First Class" feel like "low class" to me.

Other stuff.

They could have let Hank McCoy be like the Beast in the 1960s comic books. He didn't tragically cause his metamorphosis into the furry Beast for over a decade, after he joined the team, graduated, and left to pursue his own career (he eventually joined the Avengers).

OK, no Cyke, Angel, Iceman, or Marvel Girl. The original team is out. So we have Sean (Banshee) Cassidy, who in the comic books, was more Xavier's age and an ex-cop. Raven (Mystique) Darkholme, who really didn't make the scene until the early 1980s (same time frame as the Hellfire Club) as opposed to growing up with Charles in his huge Westchester mansion.

Um, wait!

Charles doesn't have any other X-Men by the end of the film except Sean, Alex (Havok) Summers, and Hank. Everybody else either dies (Darwin) or deserts him (Erik, Raven, Angel Salvador). Oh, and never mind that Alex is supposed to be Scott Summers' (Cyclops) younger brother.

Now that I read what I'm writing, maybe I am complaining about lack of adherence to at least some canon.

However, I do think it's more "realistic" for Charles to end up in a wheelchair due to a bullet (a la "Ironside") rather than having his legs crushed by a giant block of concrete by an alien being called Lucifer (see X-Men #20). But Charles lost his hair before he even got into high school as part of his mutation (see X-Men #12). I'm not even sure James McAvoy will look good with a shaved head (Patrick Stewart nailed it, however).

One interesting thing that I don't find in any of the other reviews of this film is the subtle comparison between mutants and the LGBT community. At least twice in the film, one of the mutants (Raven says it for the last time in the movie) says "mutant and proud." It referred to the struggle (especially in Raven's case) of feeling that you always had to hide who you really were because the world wouldn't accept you (blue, scaly skin and all) as you really were. That, coupled with the inadvertent "outting" of McCoy by Charles which I mentioned earlier, gave a whole new meaning to Lady Gaga's Born This Way sentiment.

What could have saved this film? A much less "everything and the kitchen sink" philosophy as far as details were concerned. I know that films go through a lot of rewrites, often while being actively filmed, but this movie really showed it. It was like a patchwork quilt of this bit of X-Men history or that. It's as if no one could make the hard decisions necessary to keep the movie on track, internally consistent, and able to tell a "clean" story that the audience doesn't need a scorecard to follow.

I've read every one of the original 1960s through 1980s X-Men comic books and there was a great deal of good history to draw from. Rather than carefully picking and choosing what to put in and leaving the rest for another day, someone randomly loaded a bunch of X-Men comic books into a cannon and blasted them at a movie screen.

The early X-Men stories are among my favorites. X-Men: First Class pretty much crapped on them.

DVD Review of Captain America: The First Avenger

It wasn't bad. It wasn't bad at all. I think Chris Evans turned in a pretty good performance as "Cap", allaying my fears that he'd play Steve Rogers in the same crappy manner as he did Johnny Storm in both lousy Fantastic Four movies (2005 and 2007 respectively).

By the way, if you haven't seen the film yet and want to be surprised, stop reading now. I'm jumping right into some major spoilers. Here we go.

I was initially dubious about changing Bucky from a teenage sidekick to a "big brother" character, but there'd be no way to realistically introduce a 14 year old onto a World War II European battlefield. The main point of Bucky anyway is to provide Cap with plenty of guilt and post-war angst over how he should have prevented Bucky's death, but didn't. In that sense though, the separation between the time of Bucky's death and Cap's going into deep freeze diminishes the impact (at least as far as I could tell). If Bucky had died just seconds before Cap crashed the plane, it would have been the last, horrible thought on Steve's mind when he was flash frozen and the very first when he woke up almost 70 years later. Oh well.

I thought the pre-Cap Steve Rogers was handled pretty well. The film was a little light on why Steve wanted to enlist so much or for that matter, why he was always so courageous, even when getting the living snot beaten out of him, though. After getting a brief look at his medical records early in the film and noticing he had heart problems, I'm a little surprised the repeated beatings he alluded to didn't put him in the hospital or even kill him. It's one thing to be a 98-pound weakling with asthma and another to be extremely medically fragile.

I know Director Joe Johnston wanted the character of Captain America to be less about being a patriotic symbol and more about how nice guys make better heroes, but Cap is all about being the American hero at a time when we are all about symbolic inspiration to help us endure the sacrifices of war. I found Steve, both before and after his transformation, to be a little too humble. Captain America is a decisive leader of men. His character started developing in that direction but Evans never took it quite far enough. To be fair though, it's a difficult balance to strike between being heroic and always being portrayed as a "nice guy" (as opposed to an arrogant ass like the guy Colonel Phillips [Tommy Lee Jones] wanted to put through the experiment).

I still can't believe that douche politician turned Cap into some sort of cheesy performer. How many millions of dollars were poured into the experiment to turn Steve into a Super Soldier and yet, his only options were being a lab rat or a USO actor? What a waste of resources. I'm stunned the military went along with it. I suppose this was the only way Johnston could figure out how to put Steve in a red, white, and blue outfit in the ETO (European Theater of Operations) and then get him into action. I still wish he'd have found another way to do this.

I loved how Dum Dum Dugan, Gabe Jones, and the rest of the Howling Commandos (minus Sgt. Fury for continuity reasons) became Cap's "team". In the 1960s Marvel comic books, Cap would sometimes team up with Fury and the "Howlers" for one mission or the other. I didn't expect this and it was a welcome addition to the film.

I did expect Howard Stark to be in the film and he was depicted in a way that it's easy to see why Tony ended up being such a womanizing, arrogant playboy. Like father, like son. I was a little surprised at a few of the "miniaturized" devices Stark was able to create in an age when vacuum tubes had yet to be replaced by transistors (which were still bulky but allowed Marvel to justify the comic book Tony Stark creating the Iron Man armor in 1963). I thought the levitating car (even if it didn't work) was a little over the top. It's much more "real" to imagine Howard being part of the Manhattan Project and creating "the bomb".

The whole Steve Rogers/Peggy Carter relationship was interesting if expected. They never really "hooked up" (and for that matter, never got to that dance Steve had promised her), but they were really hung up with each other (sometimes to Peggy's surprise), adding the required "romantic relationship" to movies like this. I found myself wondering that if Steve didn't know how to talk to a woman and had never danced with one (because he was so puny at first and then too busy as Cap later on), what else had he "never done" with a woman? Does this mean Steve Rogers wakes up in the 21st century still a virgin? Maybe the Black Widow would be able to help him out later on. Either that, or Peggy's granddaughter or great-granddaughter (Sharon Carter AKA Agent 13 is bound to make an appearance sometime or another) will finish what Peggy started.

There is one, really big plot hole (not the only one, but I can live with the others). Why did Steve have to "die" at the end of the film in order to save New York from the Red Skull's "doomsday" plane? He'd already exited and re-entered the plane in flight by using one of the on-board "mini-planes". Couldn't he have just set the big plane into a dive and then escaped using one of the smaller modules? This was pointed out with great panache by the gang at How It Should Have Ended.



When the Cosmic Cube "short circuited" or whatever it did when it "ate" the Red Skull (great job by Hugo Weaving, by the way), Cap should have "discovered" that the energy discharge destroyed the mini-planes or fused the controls that opened the bomb bay doors or something, but it was just overlooked by Johnston. Steve didn't have to die/get frozen at the end of the film.

In spite of my bitching, I really enjoyed the movie overall. It wasn't exactly what I would have expected out of Captain America, but it was still good. Musical score had a hard time trying to figure out if it wanted to be 1940s nostalgia or modern hero theme music. Credits at the end (none at the beginning of the film at all) were straight up lame. The end and then the real end (after all the final credits) were good, which brings me to my last point.

Captain America and the Avengers. In the 1960s Avengers comic books, there was no one, permanent leader. Each Avenger took a monthly rotation as far as leading the team. Having said that, whenever Cap was around (and always when he was leading Quicksilver, the Scarlet Witch, and Hawkeye), he ended up being the de facto leader and the unofficial "heart" of the Avengers. Nice guy aside, even when he was the weakest member of the team, having no "real" superpowers, he always had the soul and the vision of a leader. He was used to being obeyed instantly, not because he was some kind of dictator, but because he was just that good at taking command, sizing up every combat situation, and taking decisive action in deploying his "forces". In the Silver Age comics, this was pointed out again and again by the other team members. I hope that he gets to fulfill that destiny in the upcoming Avengers (2012) film as well.

Unfortunately, based on the trailers I've seen so far, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is more likely to dominate any screen time he shares with Rogers (Evans) and Cap will just be another guy in a costume, probably more spectacular than Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) but trailing behind the other Avengers (the Black Widow will attract more attention only because she's played by the very beautiful Scarlett Johansson - yowza!).

Back to the current review, I would definitely watch this film again...and again and again. It's not perfect, but it's still Captain America. In an age where we have no one to look up to anymore, we need an American hero like Cap.

Superhero Role Models, Part 2

Today's media superheroes -- including Batman in The Dark Knight and the Hulk in Planet Hulk -- as well as the ''slacker'' characters often portrayed in TV shows and movies offer boys poor role models, says a University of Massachusetts professor who polled hundreds of boys up to age 18 to find out their favorites.

The poll results suggest boys hear two ways to be masculine, says researcher Sharon Lamb, EdD, distinguished professor of mental health at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, who presented the findings Sunday at the American Psychological Association's annual meeting in San Diego.

"One was the superhero image, created as someone who shows their masculinity through power over other people, through exploiting women, showing their wealth, and through sarcasm and superiority," she says.

Superheroes: Bad Role Models for Boys?

It's been over a month since I posted part I of Superhero Role Models. I meant to get back to it sooner, but you wouldn't believe how busy I get with the jobs that actually pay me. Nevermind that, though. Right to work.

Batman

Bruce Wayne is the living embodiment of the phrase, "Don't get mad, get even." When Bruce was about 10 years old or so, his parents were gunned down right before his eyes during a robbery in an alley. The Waynes were rich, but apparently they didn't want to blow any of their dough on bodyguards and didn't believe in leaving the theatre by the front door. Bam! Bam! Mom and Dad are just dead.

There are variations on a theme, but generally, Bruce spends the rest of his childhood being raised by the family's kindly butler Alfred. All the while, something is slowly smoldering in the maturing Bruce and a plan takes form. Eventually, he sets himself on a path of education not typically offered by most Ivy League schools and acquires the skill sets and material to let him become the Batman!

This is more than a simple case of revenge. If revenge against one murderer were the answer, all Bruce would have to do is offer a few million to the person who could find and whack the guy who killed his parents and it would be over. No. For Bruce, it will never be over.

So what kind of role model does that make him?

Pretty awful, actually. He's obsessed and keeps on letting himself be obsessed. In a material sense, he's got everything a person could ever want: looks, money, power, and popularity. Other people manage to get past family tragedies. Another person would have channelled all his hurt and anger into developing programs for crime victims and their families, paying for therapy (which Bruce desperately needed as a child and no one seemed to recognize), and lobbying for harsher penalties for repeat offenders. What twists inside a person so badly, that he has to put on a black costume at night and beat the bad guys to a pulp with his fists?

Do you want your little boy to grow up like that? Most parents want their kids to be happy. Bruce is never happy.

What's worse, he spreads his obsession to a succession of young, impressionable teen boys. It would be one thing if Bruce were to contain his pain within himself, put on the costume alone, and take the risks as an individual, but he keeps bringing these kids into it. Depending on which version of the legend you look at, at least one Robin was killed by the Joker and, in a Batman Beyond episode, another Robin was captured, tortured, and brainwashed by the Joker. The poor kid ended up just barely avoiding capping Batman and finally finishing off the Joker. He needed and got years of therapy, but he never put on a cape and mask again. Lucky him.

Batman as a role model for young boys? Forget it. You might as well assign Dracula to run Boys Town (but only at night) or let the Joker himself adopt a few kiddies for fun and games in the chem lab. A freaking F- for Bruce.

Thor

He's big. He's strong. He talks like the King James version of the Bible. In the 1960s, the Haight-Ashbury hippies probably loved his hair. Everyone who even dreams of Gold's Gym probably loves his muscles. In next year's movie, Natalie Portman gets to be his girlfriend (Yowza!). But how is he as a role model for kids?

First, some background.

According to the original Marvel Comics canon, Dr Don Blake (with a limp and cane, decades before House) is vacationing in Norway when he falls down a big hole and ends up in a cave. I think this has something to do with him witnessing an alien invasion a few minutes before this incident and feeling kind of freaked out. He loses his cane but finds an old beat up stick to use. Banging it on the ground, it turns into this really big hammer and he turns into Thor.

Apparently, Thor had been a bad boy. Arrogant and snobby and all that (probably what Bruce Wayne would have turned into as a rich family's only child if his parents hadn't been gunned down). His father Odin decides to teach him humility by cursing Thor (minus a few memories) and placing him into the body of whatever hapless sap happened to come upon that stick in a cave. The sap would be Blake.

From this point on, Blake and Thor share a dual identity, with the nice, quiet Blake running his private practice in Manhattan, and Thor showing up whenever some big time menace made the scene.

Thor's history gets really long and complicated from here, but sticking to the basics, both Blake and Thor are really conservative good guys. Thor, with all his thees and thous, comes off like a cosmic cornball, but he's loyal to Daddy Odin, loyal to the Avengers, and believes in honor and justice. Blake, though not nearly as dynamic as his hammer-wielding alter ego, is also essentially a good guy. He's always tried to do the right thing by his girlfriend Jane Foster, even to the point of making her an immortal, but Odin didn't like the idea and stripped her of her immortality and memories of Asgard. Hardly Thor's fault.

You really can't blame the guy for anything. There are probably times when he lost his temper and flew off the handle, but if you ever wanted someone to have your back, it would be Thor.

Honor, justice, and fighting evil as Thor and helping the sick and injured and pulling down a six figure income as an M.D. in Manhattan as Don Blake. For role model material, he gets an A+.

Hulk

Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. I'm sure you recognized this tagline from the Incredible Hulk TV series. Starting with original canon, shy, withdrawn super-brainy Government scientist Dr. Robert Bruce Banner invents the Gamma Bomb and, back in the day when above-ground nuclear tests were legal, he arranges to have it test detonated out in the middle of some forsaken desert.

The problem is thick-headed Rick Jones, some footloose teenager with more time than sense, happened to drive out onto the test range on a bet and was just seconds away from being blasted into radioactive atoms. Bruce sees Rick outside and orders the countdown be stopped, but he didn't count on a lousy Commie spy being in the bunker, too. The spy, seeing an opportunity to get rid of Banner (moron..kidnap him for his secrets, don't kill him) and somehow access his research, makes sure the countdown doesn't stop.

Why Banner didn't think he had all the time in the world is beyond me, but he runs out onto the testing range, screaming like a madman, and manages to get Rick to safety just in time. The bomb does off and instead of killing Banner instantly or killing him by radiation poisoning or by inducing cancer, the gamma blast gives Banner the ability to turn into a raging green (gray on the cover of issue 1) behemoth called "the Hulk".

Again, lots and lots of history, but underneath it all, I say Banner has an authority problem. Think about it. Brainy, nerdy guy in the early 1960s when it certainly wasn't popular to be nerdy. Having tough Army officers with the collective IQ of a barrel cactus telling him what to do. I bet he couldn't wait to figure out a way to trash the nearest Army base and get his revenge. The Hulk was just a means to an end. Victim of radiation poisoning, my butt!

Whenever Banner gets in a jam he can't think his way out of, he turns into the Hulk and overcomes the problem by brute force. Want to teach that lesson to your 14 year old? Didn't think so.

To be fair, Banner didn't ask for what happened to him but, most scientists would have turned themselves over to the medical profession and had geniuses like Reed Richards, Henry Pym, and Tony Stark figure out a cure rather than going on the run (OK, he was probably afraid of a Government conspiracy...who wouldn't be?).

Role model material? I'll be generous and give him a D. You don't want kids yelling "Hulk Smash!" and then trying to break out of the house through a wall when they get mad because they don't want to do their homework.

The Flash

I know what you're thinking, but we're not talking about guys in cheap raincoats who don't wear pants. I'm talking about a police scientist (today, we'd call him a Crime Scene Investigator) who gets a ton of chemicals spilled all over him thanks to a freak lightning strike, resulting in Barry Allen gaining the ability to access something called the speed force, which enables him to, among other things, run faster than the speed of light.

Pretty cool.

1960s canon dictates that Barry Allen be squeaky clean, have a cool girlfriend named Iris (another reporter), a job, and be a nice guy. Heck, when Allen was first introduced, he even had a crewcut.

Barry started out as the classic nerd, always slow, methodical, and occasionally forgetful, but heck, he's a cop. When he discovers he has super powers, he does what anyone in his position would do (especially in the comic book world). He makes a costume with a mask and becomes a superhero.

In Barry's case, he had a little help. He was reading a comic book about the Golden Age Flash (Jay Garrick) right before the accident, so it's not like the idea to become a costumed hero was particularly inventive.

Flash remains a hero in the classic sense throughout his career and even gets to marry his girlfriend. All is well, until one of his arch villains, the Reverse Flash, kills Iris. Eventually the Flash (but not Barry) goes on trial for the murder of his wife's killer, but the whole thing is a setup by another villain named Abra Kadabra (some of these names are over the edge). Barry solves the mystery, clears his name, and even reunited with dead Iris, since her spirit ended up in the 30th century and was given a new body (Don't ask..it takes too long to explain).

The next problem was that the Flash ends up dead, but he dies heroically. It goes on and on, but the complicated history isn't the point of this analysis. What we see is a guy who never stops being a hero, even in the face of death. He never stops loving his wife, he takes her lonely nephew under his wing (a guy named Wally West), and..need I go on?

I can't find a problem with this guy. He's gone through hell and back and still comes out smelling like a rose. The Flash also gets an A+ as a role model.

That's it for this round. It seems, based on this group, that you're either a really good superhero role model or a really bad one.

If you have any suggestions or comments about future superhero role models or you think I've been unfair to the ones I've reviewed so far, let me know.

Misfit

Not a fan of reunions of either the class or family type. They tend to be opportunities for those who have achieved by society's standards to brag and those who have not to get to be the example of what not to do with your life. Guess which category I fit in?

One of the reasons I lean toward superhero fantasy is that the heroes are misfits, at least a lot of the time. For instance, while swave, cool, rich Bruce Wayne leads a life that's the envy of anyone in Gotham (or anyone in the world, for that matter), it's his tortured, driven alter ego who sheds the tuxedo by night to wear the cape of the bat, walking in the gutters and consorting with the sleeze of the city.

The X-Men, at least as originally conceived by Lee and Kirby, are also outcasts. Genetic freaks, hated and feared by "normal" humanity, have to hide behind masks and behind the walls of Xavier's school for "gifted youngers" to keep from either being lynched by mob justice or dissected in some government lab. While touted among other mutants as "homo superior", the next stage in human evolution, they also represent another marginalized segment of our culture: victims of birth defects.

Matt Murdock is blind. Yeah, his other senses are great, but he still can't see a sunset or watch a movie. Ben Grimm, though incredibly strong, was hideously disfigured by exposure to radiation. Cyborg, AKA Victor Stone, was also disfigured by an interdimensional massive gelatinous monster and only survived by having the damaged parts of his body replaced with experimental prostetics. The Doom Patrol's Cliff Steele, otherwise known as Robotman, had his body completely destroyed in a car crash and miraculously lives only because his brain was transplanted into a completely mechanical body.

Yeah, extreme examples compared to "real-life", but despite their heroic identities, they not only don't fit in to human society very easily, but are almost completely assured that they'll never have relationships the way most people have. If your body is robotic, will you ever have a spouse and children?

We have such "extremes" in our world too, but not of the superhero variety. People are injured and mutilated every day. How many people have prosthetic limbs (that don't make them as strong as the Terminator)? How many people are blind, in wheelchairs, disfigured, suffer from Downs Syndrome, are terminally ill, are chronically in pain? And Kermit the Frog says "it's not easy being green". Tell that to the Hulk.

That leads me back to my original statement about reunions. In the film Star Trek: Generations, Geordi is kidnapped and subsequently tortured by an Elorian scientist named Sorn. At one point, before the torture begins, Sorn queries Geordi about his visor, asking why he doesn't wear a prosthetic that makes him look more "normal". Georgi asks Sorn, what's normal. The reply is "Normal is what everyone else is and you're not"

Not sure normalicy is the currency by which acceptance is bought and sold at reunions, but I'm pretty sure compatency is. Example. I was once told by a very attractive lady that dancing is sexy. She implied that she'd probably hook up with a guy who was a good dancer. We got along in just about every other way, but guess who has two left feet?

I was reminded of this over the weekend. Hung out with some relatives. Uncle was there. Uncle's a nice guy. Very successful. A CEO type of guy, but not too hard to talk to. He also took dancing lessons, Very graceful. Says everyone should do it. I broke out in a cold sweat. Remembered the first and last jazz dance lesson I was talked into. Felt like a hippo among gazelles.

Uncle is successful, like I said. Very good money maker. Understands investments. Talked about the plan to take his company public. Everyone else in the conversation seemed to understand all of the strange words and phrases being tossed about like ancient sanskrit. Yeah, Uncle left his wife, moved out of his huge mansion digs into a more modest setting. Took up with a new woman. Says it's helped him relax a lot more. Still friends with the ex. She even showed up with one of the kids (grown). Everyone says he looks a lot better. Leads a charmed life. I hate reunions.

We're all more or less comfortable in our own wombs and cocoons. All by ourselves, we can be depressed, but we can be depressed and still safe, without the intrusion and judgment of the world around us, especially by those we are supposed to be closest to and safest with. A roomful of strangers would be safer than a gathering of relatives. Everyone wants to know what you're doing now and what your plans are. Socially acceptable activities and plans are rewarded. Socially unacceptable activities and plans are punished.

You can't dance. You can't make money. You aren't successful. Your car isn't a Porsche. You don't understand business or investing. Your house isn't big. You can't afford the latest iPhone. You suck.

Yeah. Being "outside the box" is supposed to be a good thing, but only if you can make money at it and it's a socially accepted and approved area outside the box. It's really still inside the box, just relabeled. If you're actually operating outside the norm, you're just a misfit. Unlike superheroes, being a misfit doesn't come with the benefit of being really strong or having wings. You're just ugly.

Not a fan of reunions of either the class or family type. Reunion is over. Time to crawl back in the cave, lick my wounds, and overcome enough intertia to get on with day-to-day life. Got to let the memories of other people's expectations fade. Time to put on the mask and hide behind the walls.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves...
Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)

Epilogue: The quote from Shakespeare's Cassius is a reminder that fate or circumstances aren't the final authors of what happens to us and how we think or feel about it. We are.

Underneath the Mask

It's not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me. -Wayne (as Batman)

You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for. -Ray Bradbury

Who am I? The person you see here isn't all that there is. This is a place where I can be all of the things people don't want me to be and I can say all the things people don't want me to say. I speak cynically but proceed hopefully. The rest of me lies elsewhere.

The above paragraph encloses the words I choose to define myself on my blog, yet as the quote from Batman Begins (2005) shows, it's behavior that defines a person, not anything they may be under the skin, or the mask.

I talk about masks on this blog. What is it that people see when they look at us, our face or our mask? Are we always transparent to our family, friends, and acquaintances, or do we put on a mask for their sakes or for our own? Chances are the latter. According to social role theory:

This is the principle that men and women behave differently in social situations and take different roles, due to the expectations that society puts upon them...

Wikipedia defines a role as:

...a set of connected behaviors, rights and obligations as conceptualized by actors in a social situation. It is an expected or free or continously changing behavior and may have a given individual social status or social position. It is vital to both functionalist and interactionist understandings of society.

Bruce Wayne took on the persona of Batman, not just to be something scary to the bad guys, but because as Bruce Wayne, he couldn't create the impact on his environment that was required to achieve his goals. Clark Kent took on the role of Superman in order to be able to compartmentalize the different ways he needed to express himself, with Clark as the "normal" human persona where he lives his day-to-day life, and Superman as the demonstration of his need and duty to use all of his abilities in the service of humanity.

While you and I are not such dramatic or nobel beings (at least for the most part), we too take on different roles, different masks, depending on the situation and circumstance.

I once had a police officer ask me why he was a confident public speaker while in uniform but such a total klutz at speaking to audiences when in plain clothes. The answer was immediately obvious to me and should be to you if you've been following along with my theme of Masks.

While our masks or our roles are built in for the most part, we do choose to use them or not use them. An extreme example is the character of House on the TV show of the same name, who will say and do just about anything that comes into his head without regard for social norms and expectation. He often reaps the consequences, but not as much as the rest of us might. I guess that's one of the benefits of being (at least in fiction) one of the world's top medical diagnotic experts. People have to put up with you.

Of course, the rest of us don't have to be accepted by anyone. There are those people who feel they should put up with you, regardless of your behavior, but they're usually family and beyond a certain point, even they will push you aside. Even if they do accept you after some completely amazing social gaffe, they are likely never to let you forget what you've done and how they suffered terribly as they "stuck by you" through the mess you caused. So much for "forgive and forget". Even if you're forgiven (provisionally), people, unlike elephants, never forget.

But if you dig around the edges of our social masks, isn't it really cowardace that keeps us hiding who we really are? Is it actually our behavior that defines us when we behave in a way that others expect, rather than the way we want? Are we sacrificing ourselves for the welfare of others or just making sure they'll keep being our acquaintances and friends (and family) by doing what they want and expect?

If the latter is true, then most of us are cowards most of the time. I fall into that category as well, which is why I maintain this blog, so I can write about what I want without the social barrier of my mask.

In the Star Trek: the Next Generation episode Masks it was indeed the masks that defined the characters. The story goes like this:

While the Enterprise makes an astronomical study of a 87 million year old rogue comet, it discovers a ship-like construction, possibly the nucleus, which contains alien artifacts constituting the 'archive' of an Ancient culture. From then on the aliens take over, 'possessing' Data's positronic network to give him several of their personalities, including the talkative Ehad and the feared queen Musaka. Alas they also transform matter and even genetics aboard, so as to turn the ship into a city their style. Picard resolves to stop that by understanding and playing the key alien characters. -Masks Plot Summary

Captain Picard resolves the problem and banishes the Masaka personality dominating Data by donning a mask and posing as Masaka's consort and counterpart Korgano, but it's the mask of Korgano that defines him so that he's no longer seen as Picard (who Masaka/Data would not be influenced by).

Another way then, to look at our social masks is as a means to be able to behave in necessary ways. If what we do, rather than who we are, is our true defining attribute, then the masks we wear are the costuming or armor we need in order to express that behavior.

We learn most of our masks as we grow up. Everytime children display "inappropriate" behavior, their parents (or some adult) usually says "No!" Hearing "no" enough times and really wanting to hear "yes", we modify our behavior, regardless of our internal desires, to elicit that "yes". In other words, we start making masks.

Our masks aren't perfect, because people aren't perfectly socially compliant. We don't always defer our internal wants and needs in the service of social requirements and occasionally, that causes pain and anguish. If the mask cracks or even shatters, we have to perform damage control, get out the paste and clay, form the mask again, or construct a new one.

However, I don't think of masks as cowardance. Sure, people say "honesty is the best policy", but "excessive honesty" comes at a high social price. That price isn't paid just by the individual but by everyone around him or her who's hurt by the "unmasking".

How many people would become vulnerable to Superman's enemies if Clark were to tell the world of his Kryptonian origins? Who would get hurt if Batman were to unmask? Who gets hurt if we unmask ourselves, even if we think it's in secret?

Life is a balance between our "secret" and "true" identities. No one survives or at least survives well by completely and totally suppressing their personal wants and needs, but unlike toddlers, we don't have the privilege of saying and doing everything we want all the time, expecting our "parents" to save us from the consequences.

The masks are necessary. The masks are important. If what we do defines us, then we need the masks in order to fulfill the definition. The Tony Stark of the movies blurred the lines between mask and face when he said "I am Iron Man" at the climax of the first Iron Man film, yet Stark and Iron Man remain separate "personas", each appearing when a particular role needs to be fulfilled.

That's probably the most real-to-life depiction of a super hero relative to us. We don't literally change identities (for the most part) when we take on a role. People still know who we are, regardless of the mask we happen to be wearing at the time, yet we can only behave as the situation requires when we wear the "matching" mask. Tony wears his Iron Man mask when he's battling some armored or robotic foe, but dons his "Tony mask" when dazzling an audience with his wit or trying to seduce a woman (the latter would be hard to do encased head to toe in a titanium alloy shell).

I sometimes don't like the demands of the mask, but I probably am still having trouble balancing the inner and outer person. I suspect we all encounter that issue from time to time. The masks aren't bad, as long as we don't let them rule us. It's how we manage our roles that defines us, giving us the ability to do what we need to do and what we must do when we are called upon.

Why did I write this today?

You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for. -Ray Bradbury