Meanwhile, the news media (also known as the “entertainment media”) was abuzz with the Supreme Court’s hearing of arguments for and against the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Prop 8, both of which call for gay and lesbian couples to be fired out of cannons into a pit of scorpions.

The penalty for asking or telling in the Armed Services is similar but more dignified.

But after exhaustive coverage, and figuring the Supremes likely wouldn’t rule on the issue until after they’d seen the new Wolverine movie this July, the only really interesting thing about the story was that all the homophobes in Congress were keeping surprisingly mum about it. Almost like they were embarrassed to hate on gays now. Oh, if every high school bully could be as pragmatic as the United States Congress!

Anyway, I got tired of trying to figure which story was more historic, so I got the dogs in the car and drove out to our favorite park.

I know I’ve talked about my dogs before, at least the older one, Anya. Six months ago, we adopted another, Lily. I never had dogs growing up and I didn’t know what I was missing until they came into my life. Now I’m one of those people who flutters around the internet looking at slideshows of cute animals and dogs dressed like Star Wars creatures.

Yeah, I’m one of those who treat my pets like my children in that I coddle them, dress them in clothes, and hold them responsible for the ruin of both my sex life and personal finances.

Alvin, Naked Simon and Theodore — Photo by Denise Scavitto

I treat Anya and Lily like my children, because, well, because I can’t have children of my own.

About two years ago I was having some pain all around my face. Sometimes it hurt in my jaw, sometimes in my nose, sometimes above my eyes. I went to the emergency room twice for it, but they couldn’t do much because doctors don’t really know what pain is (until they’re out on the golf course, nomsayin‘?) I consulted my dentist twice, but they didn’t see anything wrong. Finally, I went to an ear, nose and throat specialist to see if the crayons I inserted into my ear, nose and throat as a baby were having some kind of adverse effect. The ENT numbed my face with liquid cocaine, which is easily one of the two best kinds of cocaine, and came up with a big ol’ “no idea” for what was wrong. He wanted to do a CAT Scan to see if I had a tumor, at which point I said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if I needed root canal surgery and all you doctors are $@#%ing idiots?” Turns out, that’s exactly what it was.

Anyway, after my root canal I asked the wife if we should have kids and she said no.

So now we have these two dogs.

Every day I take them to this place a few miles outside town called Dog Mountain, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Like this only a thousand times bigger and more Rottweilery.

As often as not, the three of us are alone at Dog Mountain, hiking through the woods for an hour or playing fetch or swimming in the pond. Given that it’s Winter, of course, the swimming portion generally involves Lily breaking through the thin film of ice covering the pond and losing her mind while I dump my wallet and cell phone on the bank before trudging into the water after her.

When we’re lucky, though, I meet other dog owners there and the girls get a chance to play. I say we are lucky because the dogs get to cut loose and expend tons of energy, which means they’ll go home and sleep instead of eating my books and DVDs when I go to work.

So this time I’m coming down the trail toward the front of the park when Anya and Lily meet a new dog. They run around, serpentine between trees, sniff each other like crazy, and I see the other dog’s owner about two-hundred feet away. It doesn’t look like he can see them from where he is so I shout to him that my dogs are friendly, his dog is fine, and they’re all just playing. Most people are fairly protective when they bring their dogs here, so I hoped this would alleviate any concerns he had. But he didn’t respond.

I continued heading down the hill toward him while the dogs ran around. He stopped by a picnic table and waved. I returned the gestured, while noting how calm, even aloof, he seemed compared to the other dog owners I typically encounter. I got closer and saw that he was a tall man, younger than I thought, probably around my age.

“How’s it going?” I called to him, attempting small talk. Again, he didn’t really respond, merely watched the dogs. I tried another conversation starter. “My little one has to go to the vet today,” I said, “so it’s nice for her to run around like this so she’s tired out later.”

Then, at last, he responded. He gestured to his ear and mouthed something soundlessly in a manner unmistakable. He was deaf.

A deaf dog owner. Weird, right?

My surprise was only overshadowed by my excitement. I hadn’t had a deaf friend since my Little League soccer team, and I had so many questions for this man. First and foremost was how the deaf felt about “Gangnam Style”.

I mean, they must assume he’s like a fat baby with epilepsy, right?

I stopped next to him and mouthed the words my name is Ryan, but he shook his head to indicate he didn’t understand. Sonofabitch, why couldn’t I remember any of the sign language I used to know? I was never great at math and science, but I downright sucked at languages, including ASL. Maybe it was better that I didn’t attempt to sign a friendly greeting and inadvertently tell him to suck part of me.

He reached into his pocket and took out a cellphone. A deaf man with a cellphone and a dog, I can hear you wondering, how peculiar? Then, duh, it hit me–texting! Technology! And he must have thought so, too, because I watched him type away at the keypad on his phone. Then he showed me the screen.

He pointed to his dog which was zigzagging around Anya while Lily chased him. Balto. His dog was Balto. Okay, not terribly original but maybe this guy hadn’t seen the movie. I mean, why would he?

I decided not to critique his companion’s name, and instead motioned to his phone and asked if I could respond by wiggling my fingers. I guess he got the point.

He smiled and nodded, then he typed another question asking me if I lived in town. I nodded in the affirmative. Then we exchanged names.

Zach started typing out something else, something longer, and at this point I remembered I had my own phone and didn’t need to keep borrowing his and scuffing up his touchscreen. I quickly tapped out the first question I could think of, but there seemed to be some communication problem. Maybe he couldn’t read my screen as well.

Zach wanted to tell me more about Balto.

I nodded understanding, and we shared the sentiment that the dogs were having a blast chasing each other.

I typed my statement from earlier that he hadn’t heard, about taking Lily to the vet. Having another dog to chase her for ten minutes and exhaust her would make the afternoon a lot easier and calm for all of us. Zach nodded very enthusiastically to that.

I gave Zach a thumbs up–or possibly the sign for “s”–and typed:

By this point, Lily was panting heavily by my feet and Anya and Balto were pretty aggressively making out with each other. I checked the time and Zach grabbed Balto’s leash from the picnic table. We both kind of decided at the same moment that it was time to go.

In retrospect, it was good that we decided to call it an afternoon when we did, because there was an awkward moment where only one question came to me.

I’m glad I didn’t show him that one.

As we got into our separate cars with our separate dogs, I thought that Zach was a nice guy, and the Supreme Court willing, I could marry him someday. We may have our differences, but we also have love for our dogs. And being deaf doesn’t make him a bad person, or even a lesser person, just a quieter one. And that’s okay, because I know he loves Balto as much as I love Anya and Lily. If you can find real love in your heart for another living thing, then you cannot condemn that feeling in others.

That got me thinking about the case for gay marriage and why sooner or later it will be legal across the nation. There’s simply no argument you can make against it without defining homosexual love as inferior to heterosexual love, and that’s preposterous. Love is love is love. I see that now *.

Today is Good Friday, where Christians observe the horrible, horrible death of their savior, Jesus Christ. I encourage everyone to spend this holiday weekend doing what I think Jesus would do if he were around: embrace love and compassion. Don’t wait for the Supreme Court’s ruling. Find love for yourself and celebrate it. Love your family no matter how many legs they have. Love your team no matter if it’s just one victory two weeks before the playoffs. Love the woman or man you can’t live without no matter how you sex each other.

Love. Love big. Love long. Love a lot.

* Actually, I’ve believed that for as long as I can remember, but for the purposes of this story, I “finally learned that gay marriage is tolerable”.

Then the experimenter shows the child a large stuffed doll of Snoopy, the beloved dog from Peanuts, as well as much smaller scale Snoopy figurine.  The experimenter shows the child both Snoopys, big and little, and then hides Little Snoopy somewhere in the model room.  Behind a couch, under a chair, or beneath a pillow on the couch, it doesn’t matter where the experimenter hides Little Snoopy; the point is that the experimenter shows the child where the toy is being hidden.  The child sees, and understands, that Little Snoopy is hidden behind the couch, or under the chair, or beneath a pillow on the couch in that little model room.

After that, the experimenter shows the child Big Snoopy again and takes the doll into that first room represented by the model.  The child is left in the room with the model, while the experimenter hides Big Snoopy in the first room, unseen by the child.  The experimenter returns and tells the child that Big Snoopy is hidden in the same place in the room as Little Snoopy is hidden in the model.

The child’s level of concrete and symbolic development will determine whether or not he or she can find where Big Snoopy is hidden in the room.  A child operating at a lower developmental level will wander around the room looking for Big Snoopy; she might check under the chair even though she saw the experimenter hide Little Snoopy under the pillow.  She does not make the symbolic connection between the real room and the model room.  Conversely, a child functioning at a higher level, will see the experimenter hide Little Snoopy behind the couch and immediately check behind the couch when he enters the first room because he understands that the model represents the room and objects and Snoopys should be in the same place.

When I was three years old, my parents took me to a child psychologist.  She performed this Big Snoopy/Little Snoopy experiment with me.  She hid Little Snoopy under the pillow on the couch, but when she took Big Snoopy into the first room to hide it, I moved Little Snoopy to behind the chair in the model room.  When the experimenter took me into the first room to find Big Snoopy, I checked behind the chair.  It wasn’t there, and I began to cry.  The experimenter showed me that Big Snoopy was hidden under the pillow, and then I screamed that she lied, she was tricking me.  We argued and I took the experimenter back into the room to show her that, no, Little Snoopy had been behind the chair, the same place I checked first in the big room.  The experimenter looked justifiably confused, and I asked her if she got off on fucking with people’s emotions.

She hanged herself that night.

GO BEARS!!!

Buds for life!

Batman is my favorite character in all of fiction.  Tim Burton’s Batman from 1989 was the first movie I saw on opening night in a sold-out house, and after that I managed to see it seven more times while it was in theaters.  And that was the summer before I entered second grade, so you figure out how I did that because I don’t even know!  After the movie, I started following the Caped Crusader’s exploits in Detective Comics and graphic novels like The Dark Knight Returns and The Killing Joke.   Comics are what got me into reading, and reading got me into writing, and writing got me into… whatever the hell this is.

Batman: The Animated Series is one of my all-time favorite TV shows, and even the most wretched Joel Schumacher-directed Bat-nipple extravaganza got my money.  If it’s a Batman movie, I’ll be there, and if you pay attention to the world, you know that a new one just opened nation wide yesterday.

If you haven’t seen it yet, you will, since it’s projected to take the third biggest box-office of all time.

Twenty minutes before midnight on Thursday, I entered the movie theater with my pre-purchased ticket for The Dark Knight Rises.  Thankfully, I was one of the countless people who had an uninterrupted experience and went home safely the next morning, not one of the dozens who faced inexplicable horror and violence at the hands of an evil domestic terrorist.  I considered not writing about the actual experience of sitting in the theater for this entry, not mentioning the cavalier, almost whimsical references to injury and death that I and some of my fellow movie-goers tossed around while waiting in the lobby.  Like how, when the usher opened the doors, I cupped my hand over my mouth and shouted “BUM RUSH!”  Like how, when my friends and I, as well as a bunch of teenagers, and a lot of drunks who’d just sauntered in from the house of sleaze and crabs across the street known as The Dawg House, raced to our seats, I may have called out, “If someone falls, leave ‘em behind!”  Like how the frantic yelling, chattering and occasional slapping from the audience waiting for the lights to dim reminded me of the scene in Gremlins when the creatures watch Snow White.  I thought bringing up any of these moments from the movie experience would be in poor taste.  Not NRA-tweet poor taste, but poor.

Then I decided the death toll was high enough and that this dickless psychopath wasn’t going to shame me from telling my jokes.  Only my wife can do that!

When I bought three tickets for The Dark Knight Rises last Tuesday, the sweet, elderly woman in the ticket booth said, “Now, you know the rules, right?”  The rules?  What rules could she mean?  Did I have to show up at a certain time in order to get a specific seat?  Was I supposed to dress up in character?  Was I not supposed to bring a digital camera and bootleg the entire film?

“What rules?” I asked.

“You have to bring these tickets back when you come to see the movie,” she said.

Oh, she meant the rule about needing a ticket to get in.  The rule that was the exact same reason I went there in the first place.  I guess it wasn’t obvious to anyone born since 1590.  And I guess I must have looked pretty stupefied because she went on to explain:

“I won’t remember you, see?  I’m not going to be here Thursday at midnight, so you need to show the girl your ticket.”

Apparently, the Star Cinema movie theater has had a spree of movie-crashers who come without tickets and just say, “Hey, c’mon, it’s me!  You know I got a ticket, I just didn’t bring it!  C’mon, look at my face!  You know me!”  Thus, the management created the rule: No Ticket, No Movie.  A bit harsh, sure, but I guess that’s the price you pay for… not paying a price…?

Okay, moving right along.

Christopher Nolan is as good an illusionist as the dueling stage magicians he directed in The Prestige (2006).  He keeps managing to lower my expectations for these Batman films to the point of ambivalence going into the theater, and then slamming me in the face with a masterpiece that is not only respectful to the comic book source material I adore, but thrilling and artful at the same time.  In the summer of 2005, I looked forward to Batman Begins if only to see a version of the costume that didn’t have embossed genitalia made of rubber.  Then I saw publicity photos of the Batmobile and damn near had a rage-stroke.

I’m pretty sure this is what Megatron transformed into back on Cybertron.

That’s how Batman is supposed to get around town while striking at the heart of villainy from the shadows?  I really thought Batman Begins might include a monster truck rally to replace the soul-crushing ice-hockey battle from Batman & Robin.  And then there was the pre-release Scarecrow action figure that came with a fire-breathing horse.  Holy fuckballs, did this movie look horrible from the previews and merchandise!  But Nolan proved how bad Warner Bros.’ marketing division could be and how good his vision of the Batman was at the same time.  Batman Begins blew me away.  It instantly became my favorite movie in the superhero/comic book genre, which, for my tastes, put it very high on my list of all time favorite movies total.

So going into 2008 I was pretty pumped up for the sequel, The Dark Knight… Until I found out that young heartthrob Heath Ledger was playing the Joker.  Wait, Heath Ledger, wasn’t he the kid from that remake of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew that didn’t call itself that because if teenagers knew it was based on a play they’d never go watch it?  Wasn’t Heath Ledger like, ten years too young for this part?  And this was the guy who had to contend with Jack “Jack Fucking Nicholson” Nicholson?  And then there were the onset photos of the new Bat-costume and Bat-motorcycle that just looked silly… as silly as the idea of a billionaire dressing up in this costume.

I think I used this machine in physical therapy when I blew out my knee.

But all of these pictures and casting decisions made sense in the context of the film.  Batman’s knightly armor, as well as the behemoth Bat-mobile and stripped Bat-pod motorcycle work in the films by taking the subtlety out of Batman’s war on crime and embracing a doctrine of shock and awe.  They’re some of the most visceral, eye-catching and downright fun action sequences of any major blockbuster movie.

Thank god he never played the Devil in a remake of “The Witches of Eastwick”

And there’s really nothing that can be said about Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker that hasn’t already been said (though far too little is said of the performances of Gary Oldman and Aaron Eckhart, the movie’s unsung heroes).  I mean, Ledger walked right up and pimp slapped Nicholson and took the character from him.  That such a young actor had the cojones to even try is amazing; that he won an Oscar for it is incredible!  And deserved.

I came out of the midnight screening of The Dark Knight believing it had trumped the immortal Casablanca as my favorite movie of all time.  It still might be today; the two films alternate depending on how I’m feeling at any given time.

Needless to say, the stakes were immensely–perhaps impossibly–high for the next chapter.  How could they top Ledger’s Joker in this film?  Short answer: they couldn’t.  Nolan and his writing team didn’t follow Joker and Two-Face with another beloved rogue older viewers might remember from the television series, like the Riddler or Penguin or Mister Freeze.  They chose Bane, a character with less than twenty years of history in the comic books, whose only notable contribution to Bat-lore was breaking Batman’s back in a story line called “Knightfall” in the mid-1990s.

All Batman’s training never prepared him for Lucha libre!!!

Comics in the ’90s were a lot like music in the ’80s: soulless.  Lots of flash, little substance.  ”Knightfall” was entertaining, but less enduring than other stories, and the villainous Bane devolved into a brute who challenged Batman physically but not mentally or emotionally.

This was the follow-up to the Joker and Two-Face and Ra’s al Ghul?  The threat to Batman in The Dark Knight was more existential, even spiritual in its menace.  Joker didn’t want Batman dead; he wanted to break his intractable spirit, he wanted to corrupt him, and he came damn close at times.  What was Bane going to do in The Dark Knight Rises?  Beat Batman up, maybe paralyze him, maybe even kill him?  Okay… boring.

Then they cast Anne Hathaway as Catwoman.  The Princess Diaries girl?  Wait, seriously?!?!    Granted, any depiction of Catwoman was bound to be better than the Halle Berry version, but still… this girl?

NO! No way! Never!

Okay, I’ll give her a chance.

On top of all of this, the trailers for the movie gave me nothing to work with.  Warner Bros. released four official trailers and I watched them all multiple times and I still got no sense of the structure, tone, themes or plot of this movie.  There are movies whose trailers I think far, far exceed the actual films.  I could watch the previews for Prometheus and Watchmen all day long, but god knows I never want to see those movies again!  The trailers for The Dark Knight Rises, on the other hand, were incoherent and weird.  All I had to cling to was In Nolan I Trust.  The man hadn’t directed a movie I didn’t like, but surely that couldn’t last forever.

I went to the theater Thursday night full of caution and a willful distance to protect myself from the likelihood of it bombing.  I might as well have been going into the movie with no knowledge of the franchise.

This looked about right.

And that is why Chris Nolan is a magician!  All of the poor marketing and all of my caution leading into The Dark Knight Rises lowered my expectations so that they had nowhere to go but up… and up… and up…

To Be Continued

Returning to the house I grew up in, and the family who acquired me from a slovenly banker from Texas in exchange for the pink slip to a 1980 Citroen, but raised me as their own nonetheless, is a bit of a concession.  I go home to see my family twice a year so they don’t have to come to me.  It may seem like a one-sided, terribly inconvenient compromise, but when it comes to visiting… anybody, I prefer the freedom of mobility–to up and leave at the first sign of danger or talk of grandchildren.

The wedding ring pictured was part of the Citroen trade. It symbolized my real father’s “divorce from banking” and his new life as a journalist and lunatic.

Before I proceed allow me to clarify something.  I don’t consider my parents’ house my home anymore.  DeKalb may be the town I grew up in but it’s not where I live now, so it ain’t my home.  The old saying home is where the heart is…?  I’ve always taken that literally.  Wherever I go, wherever I sleep, assuming my heart is with me, is my home, be it my parents’ house of twenty-five years, a college dorm room, a hotel, an apartment, drunk tank, whatever.  When I moved out DeKalb–when I left home, it stopped being home.

However, for the purposes of this post and the romance of its connotation, I’ll refer to going back to that house in DeKalb as going home.

And when I think of “going home”, I think of–strangely–going off to college, and the song “Midnight Train to George”.

Gladys Knight & The Pips – Midnight Train to Georgia

The song, performed by Gladys Knight and The Pips in 1973, became the Motown/soul group’s biggest hit, featured in movies, television, and two amazing musical parodies.  In 1977, The Pips sans Gladys Knight appeared on The Richard Pryor Show where they performed background vocals to the group’s hit songs.  Meanwhile, the lead vocals, and lead vocalist, were noticeably absent.  Three decades later, Gladys Knight appeared on American Idol, only this time, standing in for The Pips were Jack Black and Robert Downey, Jr. (stars of the action comedy Tropic Thunder), along with Ben Stiller, son of legendary comedian Jerry Stiller.

When I first heard “Midnight Train”… really heard it… paid attention to it, in 2000, it rocketed up my personal Billboard chart to place in my Top 5 All-Time Favorite Songs, where it has stayed ever since.

Wikipedia has a nice write-up of the song’s genesis, narrative, and legacy.  It describes a failed artist and the narrator’s decision to uproot her life, possibly sacrificing all of her own dreams, in order to be with him:

The theme of the song is how romantic love can conquer differences in background. The boyfriend of the song’s narrator is a failed musician who left his native Georgia to move to Los Angeles to become a “superstar, but he didn’t get far”. He decides to give up, and “go back to the life he once knew.” Despite the fact that she’s settled and secure in herself, the narrator decides to move to Georgia with him: ”And I’ll be with him / On that midnight train to Georgia / I’d rather live in his world / Than live without him in mine.”

I was a freshman in college the first time I really listened to this song.  At the time I was feeling a bit like a failed artist, myself.  (What am I saying, “at the time”?)

See, I was one of those arrogant, angry teenagers who couldn’t wait to graduate high school and get out of his “dead end town”.  I was Luke Skywalker staring off at the twin suns of Tatooine, pining for a more meaningful place in the vast universe I was doomed never to see.  Except my parents weren’t dirt farmers barely scraping out a living well below the poverty line.  They were educated, middle-class workers, willing and able to pay my college tuition.  So maybe I wasn’t like Luke Skywalker; I was more like that asshole Imperial admiral who makes fun of Darth Vader until Vader Force-chokes him.

Assuming everyone else was stupid in the most dickish way possible, yeah, that sounds like me at eighteen.

After high school I wanted to get as far away from DeKalb as possible.  So I headed out west…

And got roughly 150 miles, then settled into college at the University of Iowa.  Like the boyfriend in “Midnight Train”, I considered myself a superstar on the come, but I didn’t get far.  L.A. wasn’t too much, just too far.  So every holiday break I’d go home to DeKalb (except for that one Easter when they forgot me), and in the car I’d play this song and dwell on the humbling reality that instant fame and celebrity would not be mine.

The tune reminds me of failure, but not in a somber, depressing way.  There’s a line from a movie about a train whistle being one of the three most romantic sounds, and one of the loneliest.  ”Midnight Train to Georgia” reminds me a little of both.  There’s a romance to leaving home and making a life somewhere bigger, somewhere closer to Luke Skywalker’s perceived “bright center of the universe”.  There’s a romance to taking that chance.  It doesn’t always work out.  It didn’t for me for almost ten years.  It took the added propulsion of marriage to help me escape DeKalb’s gravity, and when I did, I still didn’t get any closer to Los Angeles.

If you’ve never heard the song before–and that’s probably, since my core readership is mostly pre-teen boys and Cambodian immigrants–click on the player above and give it a whirl.  If you haven’t heard it in a while, treat yourself to a listen and enjoy that sweet, soul music.  The drive back “home” is twenty-something hours long.  Count on me playing this song at least five times along the way.

There’s a game my wife likes to play where she talks to me from another room and complains that I don’t listen to her.  Despite the TV playing or a podcast streaming on my computer, despite the turns in the long hallway or the as-often-as not closed door between us, it’s my fault I didn’t hear her say, “Would you grab hold of this before it shatters?”

The other fun thing she does is ask if I heard her phone go off when it’s either A) in the bedroom, B) on silent, or C) all of the above.  And I’ll answer honestly, no, I didn’t hear the phone vibrate over the sound of Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey arguing whether Puerto Rican is a racial slur on 30 Rock (the consensus seems to be that it is).  And yes, I turned the volume up on the TV because we don’t have a decent speaker system, so I didn’t hear her say she was taking her motorcycle out for a ride.

When we sit together reading or watching Chopped, Angie starts talking and I have to interrupt and ask her to repeat herself.  What? and Start from the beginning have replaced Sorry and I’m pretty sure I paid that bill as the most frequent words and phrases I utter in a week.

Each of these examples end with Angie shaking her head and asking me quite pointedly if I need to get my hearing checked.

The reason I didn’t help this little boy when he started to choke on that graham cracker is NOT because I didn’t hear him; it’s because he didn’t share.

It’s true I don’t usually hear what Angie says the first time she says it.  In my defense, though, the first time she says something I’m usually doing something that monopolizes my attention.  If I’m reading or watching a movie or making a mental list of why the sport of baseball is dying for a future blog post, and the wife says, “Look at the size of this spider!” you bet I’m going to stare off into space for a moment and then look up and say, “Huh?”

I’m not deaf, I’m just a shitty multi-tasker.  It takes that extra second for my brain to hit the brakes, do a three-point-turn, and change direction.  That’s why I don’t cook for myself.

This looks natural to me. Also, faster.

A few days ago in the car, Angie asked if I heard a buzzing noise coming from the stereo.  We thought there might be a problem with the auxiliary cable running from the iPod to the outlet in the console between the front seats.  See, my dog constantly steps on the AUX input jack in her attempt to climb up front with us (I’ve tried explaining the rules of “shotgun” to her, but she doesn’t get it; the concept, I think, isn’t socialist enough for her).  Anyway, I listened for the buzz but didn’t hear it.  More than that, the music coming out of the speakers seemed weak, like certain instruments weren’t being picked up.  I took this as evidence that the AUX jack was busted, maybe the whole outlet.  Angie took this as evidence of another problem.

I tried plugging the AUX cable in my ear canal but the only song that sounded better was “Alejandro”.

Last night, as I listened to some of my favorite rock songs of the ’90s, I noticed the sound was awfully quiet.  I have a pretty diverse appreciation for music and my library ranges from the Afghan Whigs to Warren Zevon; from Elton John and Radiohead to Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj; Simon & Garfunkle to Hall & Oates; Lou Reed and Iggy Pop to Common and Kanye West; from the Chi-Lites to Tony! Toni! Tone! to the Roots; the trumpet stylings of Chris Botti to the soundtrack to The Little Mermaid; the Godfather of Soul to the King of Pop to the artist-once-again-known-as-Prince.  You name it, I’ve heard it, and if I don’t have it, it’s because I hate it.

The point is I love music and I’ll tolerate pretty much any form of it short of a Toby Keith freedom rock anthem.  But when the music starts to sound bad–not Ke$ha bad, but like the DJ died on the turntable bad–when it sounds off, incomplete, like parts are missing, then something is very wrong.

It occurred to me that I was hearing Kurt Cobain scream “Rape Me!” but wasn’t hearing much of the guitar accompanying it.  This realization supported three possible conclusions.  Either 1) I was about to start the next phase of my life as a Son-of-Sam-style serial killer, 2) I was losing my hearing, or 3) my computer’s sound settings were off.  I prayed for the third option, but I’d settle for the first.

As I stood outside on that crisp Christmas morning, I first became aware that I could no longer hear the cries of the Salvation Army Santa as he bled to death at my feet.

When I was a kid my parents sent me to a speech pathologist because I had trouble vocalizing certain words and sounds.  I remember rolling sounds like R’s and L’s and W’s gave me trouble, so any time I had to say the word world, for example, I would substitute it with planet, because I knew they meant the same thing and planet was easier.   Also, I would replace word itself with letter-thing-that-means-stuff.  Somehow my parents and teachers saw through this ploy.

The speech therapist played word games with me, had me hum and sing songs, and most likely fondled my genitals because that’s what they do.  She told my parents the reason I wasn’t making good talky sounds was because I couldn’t hear what I sounded like.  As my brother put it at the time, “I couldn’t know that I didn’t know that I was retarded.”

I was often sick as a baby.  I had more ear infections in the ’80s than the Lakers had championships.  They put tubes in my ears when I was three–”they” being a cabal of short old men in brown cloaks.  All of this accounted for my hearing problems when I started school, like why I asked, “What?” after anything anyone said to me.  This in turn explained my speech problems, like how during the spelling bee, when I was asked to spell rural I said, “Bum-fuck-nowhere. R-U-R-A-L. Bum-fuck-nowhere.”

The idea of losing my hearing to any significant degree terrifies me.  First, I don’t want to learn sign language.  I never took Spanish in high school; I took Latin in college specifically because I wouldn’t have to ever use it later in life.  ASL looks hard–turning words and thoughts into hand gestures?  I already said I’m horrible at multi-tasking!

Why can’t you just hold up seven fingers for the number seven? Does being deaf mean one of your hands falls off, too?

The other reason I fear going deaf is my aforementioned love of music.  So, for as long as I can still hear them, I’m going to spend the summer re-listening to my favorite songs and albums.  And I’m going to share them here with you.

Why I Cry, for the foreseeable future, is changing focus (if it ever had one) to the soundtrack of my life.  The songs I love.  The songs that influenced me.  The songs that encapsulated momentous times in my life, like first loves, first losses, growing pains, independence, losing my virginity, and getting it back again years later.

Keep barking, bitch, I can barely hear you anymore.

So check in regularly to find out which Springsteen song reminds me of driving through the night in a stolen car.  (HINT: they all do!)

Oh, by the way, the sound settings were off on my computer the other night.  Somehow the output was set so only the left speakers were playing.  Blame the dog.

This, instead, is going to be a character review for all of the principal characters in the film, based on order of appearance in the movie, and treated as a response to the observations, criticism and questions I addressed in my overviews of the heroes in the movies leading up to this.  These comments are preliminary impressions from a viewer who has not slept much, so I’m going to try and keep it simple.  Because I’m so good at that.

Nick Fury

When you lift his eye-patch, a tiny, third hand comes out and slap's you!

Up to this point, Nick Fury, Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., has been more of an orchestrator, pulling strings from behind the curtains and dishing out plot devices as dramatic reveals and fanboy easter eggs.  You’d hardly think of him as a man of action.  Until now.  The first twenty minutes of the film is all S.H.I.E.L.D., and we see exactly how Nick Fury could rise to his still-shadowy place of unfathomable power.  He’s a master manipulator, but he can also jump out of a helicopter before it crashes, stand toe-to-toe with the God of Menace, and–because he’s Samuel L. Jackson–he can fire the $#@% out of a bazooka.

Fury’s job is to put all of the disparate personalities of the Avengers on one functioning team so they can save the day.  It takes a lot of chaos, a lot of collateral damage, and a heartbreaking loss, as well as a bit of cold, shrewd manipulation, but he makes it happen.  The problem is, now that the Avengers are assembled, what is Nick Fury’s role?  There’s plenty of buzz about a Nick Fury or S.H.I.E.L.D.-centric solo movie to follow.  Honestly, that and Captain America 2 are the only places I can really see Nick Fury working well without feeling forced.  He brought the team together: mission accomplished.  Now he’s a man without a mission.

Hawkeye

Agent Barton, the S.H.I.E.L.D. operative known as Hawkeye, had the least screen time and character development leading into The Avengers.  With all of the other higher profile characters we’ve come to love, I expected Hawkeye to be pretty thinly drawn and underutilized.  Well, he definitely didn’t lack for screen time in this go-around.  By “compromising” Barton, effectively making him a villain for the first two-thirds of the movie, writer/director Joss Whedon found a brilliant way to make the character relevant and present without having him vie for attention in a room with Iron Man and Thor.

He's not falling. He's in "Inception" and the street is folding over behind him.

We still don’t get a lot of character development from Barton, and what we do learn of him (as my wife pointed out to me while I was drooling over the Hulk) we learn from other characters, specifically Black Widow.  Her connection to and concern for Hawkeye makes him a character we want to follow and root for.  What’s more, Hawkeye gets to exploit some rather unconventional aspects of archery and marksmanship so that his character doesn’t feel like a low-rent Legolas.  More importantly, in the climactic showdown during the last half hour that ravages New York as the Avengers fight off an alien invasion, Hawkeye never feels like an afterthought.  It never feels like he’s not in the same league as Thor and Hulk.

Black Widow

She would have my bank PIN, passwords, and the pink slip to my car in six seconds via this method of interrogation.

By a wide margin, Natasha Romanoff is the biggest surprise of the film.  In my previous post, I commented on how the Black Widow was offensively mishandled in Iron Man 2.  Everything the character should have been was absent in that movie, but it’s all present and accounted for in The Avengers.  Her roots as a foreign assassin with buckets o’ blood on her hands before defecting to S.H.I.E.L.D. is referenced multiple times, not so much it becomes distracting, but enough to tell us what Natasha’s driving motivation is and why she’s involved with this group of gods-among-men.  She even speaks Russian!

Black Widow gets plenty to do in this movie already crowded with Alpha males, and that owes a great deal to Whedon, whose track record for sculpting powerful female heroes is well established in TV and film.  Widow is the most focused, objective-oriented character in the film, more so even than Captain America and Nick Fury.  But she never feels as coldly out of place or even bored as she did in Iron Man 2.  Whedon gets a lot of untraveled miles from Scarlett Johansson, letting her play vulnerable and wounded in two different “interrogation” scenes, only to have her flip roles in each scene.  But the contrived fear she shows Loki and some Russian mobsters has nothing on the genuine terror that all-but swallows her whenever she’s near Bruce Banner in one of his bad moods.

The Hulk

Hulk channeling his inner-Keanu.

The Hulk is my favorite Marvel superhero, if you can even call him a superhero.  He’s been the star of two well-intentioned but extremely flawed movies, and a lot of critics and viewers considered the character unworkable on the big screen.  The Avengers proves them wrong.  Proved me wrong, too.  I thought Edward Norton was the perfect Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk.  He had the lanky–scrawny almost–frame of a bookworm physicist that contrasts so well against the hulking monster that comes out when he loses his temper.  Norton’s Banner was tortured, haunted, obsessed with ending his wretched existence, either through cure or death.  It’s an engrossing portrayal, yes, but it’s also really damn depressing.  And maybe that has been the fatal mistake of Hulk movies past, that Banner is too sad to be likable for two hours.

Joss Whedon and actor Mark Ruffalo take a different approach in The Avengers.  Ruffalo’s Banner has, for all intents and purposes, accepted his fate.  He’s not trying to kill the Hulk, he’s just trying to live with him.  And it’s clearly a struggle.  Throughout the film Banner looks like he’s clenched up; his hands clasped together, or arms folded over his chest, as if he has to physically hold himself together.  Like if he’s not constantly squeezing, his dark brother will rip through his skin and destroy everything.  It’s an incredible take on the character, and for the purposes of the movie, it works terrifically.  This is how the Hulk should be done in movies, and it’s a testament that the Jade Giant gets not only some of the biggest shock-and-awe action beats of the film, but some of the biggest laughs, too.

Captain America

Cap's costume looks better when it's been dragged under a semi for ten miles. There's a metaphor there, I know it.

My biggest fear about Captain America going into this movie was that he would look small compared to some of the other characters, that Chris Evans simply didn’t have the star power to stand with Robert Downey, Jr. and not be totally eclipsed.  Well, those fears were justified somewhat.  First, I do give Evans credit for his performance; he’s got a better handle on the character than writer/director Joss Whedon does.  I think Whedon tried to force some old-fashioned-sounding lines out of Cap that just felt corny.  Cap’s loneliness about being a man-out-of-time is never more than teased, possibly to allow for more exploration in a Captain America sequel movie.  Evans does his best work in the smaller scenes with characters like Fury, Banner, and Agent Coulson.  There’s a sense of him wanting to be the big brother that people can depend on that feels very natural for the character.  It shows how central the concepts of service and duty is to the character without making him a S.H.I.E.L.D. soldier following every order he’s given.

But in the scenes with Downey, Jr., he’s just in over his head.  It’s not even fair.  They don’t have a lot of chemistry on screen, and unfortunately, it makes the Living Legend of WWII look like a slow, lumbering dinosaur.  From the beginning, you never believe the Avengers is anyone’s team other than Tony’s.  He makes or breaks the team; the story is quite clear on that.  And during the final apocalyptic confrontation, Iron Man defers to Cap’s strategic judgement.  Captain America doesn’t take leadership of the team; he’s given a hand-off.  Of all of the Avengers, Cap was the biggest disappointment for me.  Also, his costume sucked.  It’s a thin needle to thread to make his costume not look preposterous, but they made it work in his solo movie last year.  The changes they made are stupid and he looks silly.

Iron Man

Stigmata is a serious condition for the Killbot6000.

Hulk and Black Widow were the happiest surprises of The Avengers.  Iron Man was just a surprise.  It makes sense that the movie would emphasize his character considering he’s the most successful and popular character of the franchise, but I figured they would use him more strategically for humor and cool visual effects, considering he’ll be in a third solo movie next year.  I figured much of the screen time would go to Cap and Thor, but that is not the case.  I don’t know why this should surprise me, I mean, it’s Robert Downey, Jr. playing Tony Stark.  If you can’t make a good movie with that formula then filmmaking is not your true calling.  Joss Whedon knows what he’s doing and plays to the strengths shared by Downey, Jr. and Stark.

In many ways, Tony Stark is the emotional center of the movie.  His romantic interest from the Iron Man films is not only revisited in this film but expanded upon in both funny and touching ways.  Tony’s journey through the film is learning to trust and finding strength in numbers.  The Avengers team does not come together without him, making him really the star of the movie.  Downey, Jr. didn’t just get top billing because of his contract.  He is the star of The Avengers.

Thor

Thor, like Captain America, was another mild disappointment.  I expected him to have a much more significant role, both dramatically and emotionally, in The Avengers.  His little brother, Loki, is the villain of the movie.  All of the mischief, menace and mayhem caused by Loki’s machinations, Thor must feel deeply, intensely guilty about to some degree, but we don’t get a whole lot of that.  At the center of Thor’s conflict is the question: what is more important, protecting his brother out of family obligation, or saving the lives of a human race he has come to care about.  In the context of who Loki is, this question is a no-brainer, and the fact that Thor seems to struggle with it doesn’t do his character any favors.

More than that, though, the conflict between Thor and Loki feels incidental.  Loki makes this conflict personal for all of the Avengers.  The grudge Black Widow, Hawkeye, Nick Fury and Iron Man hold towards Loki is more immediate and relatable than the sibling rivalry.  If Thor has a stake in the movie’s outcome, it’s negligible.  If he has a character arc, it is brief.  But he does get a ton of frenzied and fun action beats, and that forgives a lot of the limits of his character.  Also, his sleeveless costume in the first two-thirds of the movie is sooo much tougher-looking than the faux-chain-mail armor that covers his arms in the final battle.

Did I leave those tickets TO THE GUN SHOW back in Asgard?

Cliff’s Notes Recap

The Hulk and Black Widow are both redeemed by this movie.  The Avengers shows what these characters can and should be.  I look forward to a Hulk movie staring Ruffalo and a Black Widow movie could be as awesome as any of the Bourne movies, or that Angelina Jolie movie, Salt, which I think was like Bourne with a vagina.

Nick Fury and Hawkeye benefit from pure added exposure.  These guys finally get a chance to do something, and they do it well.

Iron Man didn’t need any additional screen time, but he gets plenty of it.  This movie feels a little like Iron Man 2.5, in the way Tony becomes the heart of the team.

Captain America and Thor are sadly underutilized.  They don’t lack for action or dialogue or heartfelt moments with the other characters, but neither do they seem to gain anything from appearing in this movie.  I don’t know more about Cap at the end of The Avengers than I did at the end of his own movie.  Ditto Thor.

Sigh…

Okay, this movie is out of my system.  I can start writing about important shit again.

When does the next Batman come out?

Not all the heroes starring in The Avengers premiered in their own self-titled films.  In fact, Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and the Hulk comprise only half of the world’s mightiest heroes who’ll save the world from utter destruction this coming Friday.  The rest, including Black Widow and Hawkeye, who pull double-duty as Avengers and covert agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., as well as Nick Fury, director of the global peacekeeping task force, have been showing up in various capacities across the five Marvel Studios films leading up to this mash-up.

The seeds of this event were planted in Iron Man, where viewers first heard mention of the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division, eventually (mercifully) abbreviated as S.H.I.E.L.D.  Think the CIA, FBI and Seal Team Six, all together but working for the United Nations in an attempt to police the entire world and keep tabs on crises of the superhero and supervillain variety.  Starting with the ubiquitous and scene-stealing Agent Coulson (played to a comedic tee by Clark Gregg), the Marvel films have slowly but steadily rolled out an ever expanding cast of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and operators.  The Avengers, though, is where they make the Big Time!

The Cat That Won’t Cop Out When There’s Danger All About

You'll know John Shaft's evil twin from his eye patch.

After the credits rolled for the first Iron Man film, comic fans were treated to a scene that would drive them batshit insane.  Tony Stark is greeted by Nick Fury, Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., played by Mr. Bad M***** F***** himself, Samuel L. Jackson.  I got a contact high just from writing that sentence.

This wasn’t the first time Nick Fury appeared in film, but it was the first time his appearance didn’t make viewers ashamed of humanity.  What’s more, putting Jackson in the role served as a acknowledgment not just to genre fans, but fans of the character.  While Nick Fury historically had been a white character who looked more or less like David Hasselhoff, a more recent, alternate universe depiction of the character was modeled specifically after Jackson.  I don’t know how many fans walked out of Iron Man and immediately committed seppuku in the parking lot, believing nothing in life could be greater than what they’d just experienced, but I bet it was in the tens-of-millions.

So far, Fury’s biggest presence has been in Iron Man 2, where he dangles some revealing truths about the Avengers Initiative concept to put people with extraordinary abilities and super powers together to fight the threats no single person or army can fight.  In the comics, Fury is a cynical, reactionary warhorse with enough excess testosterone and intensity to make George C. Scott’s Patton say, “Dude, calm the hell down!”  We haven’t seen much of that in the movies yet.  We know he’s a schemer with far-reaching big picture ideas about security, but definitely less hands-on with day-to-day operations and some of the budding Avengers.

She Moves in Mysterious Ways

After a shockingly successful Iron Man, expectations were sky high for Iron Man 2.  Sadly, the sequel missed the greatness of the first film by overreaching.  I mean, it unhinged its shoulder joints reaching; lost its balance and toppled over in an embarrassing heap, reaching.  Iron Man 2 tried to do too much.  The result is a bit of a mess of a film that feels like it shifts tone, genre and even story every half hour.  Because it’s still Robert Downey, Jr. playing Tony Stark it’s at least an entertaining mess, but the faults of the movie are big and loud…

Except, perhaps, where it counts most, and that is the introduction of new character, Natalie Rushman, aka Natalia Romanova, aka Natasha Romanoff, aka the Black Widow.  Her role is dramatically, almost criminally underdeveloped.  And that’s a shame, because when you’ve got Scarlett Johansson playing the character, you want to spend as much time with her as possible.

Getting our ass handed to us is still quality time.

We meet Black Widow in the film when she takes over the job of Tony’s assistant, previously occupied by Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts.  Out of loyalty to Pepper, though, we never quite know if we should like Natalie/Natasha.  Her brains, brawn, and bust trigger suspicion that she may have another agenda, but none of her actions confirm this suspicion.  She doesn’t try to seduce Tony.  She even rebukes his advances.  She’s beautiful to watch, but so completely emotionally detached from the people around her that when the film reveals she’s a government spy working for S.H.I.E.L.D., it feels disappointing.  Like, I kind of wanted her to be a robot or an alien.

In the comics, the Black Widow debuted in the 1960s as an enemy of Iron Man, a KGB spy trying to steal tech-specs from Tony’s company.  Her history is rich and textured with the history of Soviet revolution and Cold War paranoia.  An orphan of war, Natasha was taken into a cruel, clandestine intelligence community that trained her to be the ultimate assassin, before she defected to join S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers.  She’s an expert hand-to-hand combatant, sharpshooter, and–no joke–ballerina.  Of course, we get none of this in the film, besides an obligatory (and slightly humorous) fight scene at the end.  As a spy, she doesn’t unearth any groundbreaking intel, or any boring intel, for that matter.  We never even really see her paying attention to the kind of exchanges that might seem important.  Agent Coulson is a thousand times more charismatic and watch-able in his few brief scenes, and if your movie has me more captivated by Clark Gregg than Scarlett Johansson, you’re doing something wrong.

The Black Widow could have been the villain of Iron Man 2.  She could have at least acted shady enough to make us think she’s a threat before hitting us with the twist that she works for S.H.I.E.L.D.  Damnit, they didn’t even give her a sexy Russian accent!  The filmmakers took one of the few complex female superheroes in Marvel’s stable and reduced her to a flat, uninteresting distraction.

Maybe "flat" isn't the right word.

I have no problem with Scarlett Johansson.  Lady is nice to look at and she does a decent-enough job in this movie with what she’s given (which is a big ol’ bucket o’ nothing), but I was a lot happier when the studio was in negotiations with Emily Blunt to play the role.  According to some reports which I may be making up, Blunt backed out at the last minute because she didn’t want to commit to a multi-picture deal that would include Iron Man 2, The Avengers, and Iron Man 3.  Other sources say the studio pursued Johansson as she was the bigger, more bankable star.  I don’t care.  I have to imagine that Blunt could do a better Russian accent than Cate Blanchett’s cringe-inducing attempt in Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars.

The least-scene member of the Avengers is Hawkeye, the world’s greatest marksman, who specializes in… bow-and-arrow.  Hooo-kay.  I’m not going to make fun of the fact that a guy with a bow-and-arrow is supposed to be a worthy compliment to a team with a giant rage monster, a flying robot-man, a super soldier, and the god of thunder, because, well, because the god of thunder wields a hammer and the super soldier dresses like the flag and throws an enlarged discuss.  They’re all a little preposterous.  That’s the conceit of the whole superhero genre.

The true archer knows the arrow is all in the mind.

Hawkeye is played by Jeremy Renner.  I have no idea who Jeremy Renner is.  Somebody told me he’s in the new Mission Impossible and he’s going to be the new Jason Bourne.  I still don’t know who Jeremy Renner is, because I haven’t seen any of those movies.

Like Black Widow, Hawkeye has no “super powers”.  He’s a normal human being, albeit one at peak physical fitness, with the agility of a circus acrobat and the instincts of a special forces sharpshooter.  Hawkeye debuted as “Agent Barton” of S.H.I.E.L.D. in a glorified cameo halfway through Thor.  His one-and-done scene served to establish his face and his archery motif prior to a more elevated place in The Avengers.  Unfortunately, the cameo only muddled the pace of the Thor flick which was already overcrowded with side-plots and supporting characters.

If this dude was in The Avengers I would buy out every seat in the movie theater.

In the comics, Hawkeye distinguished himself as an Errol Flynn-style, swashbuckling adventurer, dressed in a purple hand-me-down costume that could have originated at a Renaissance Fair.  He’s a wisecracking, womanizing malcontent who constantly butts heads with the more powerful and reputable members of the Avengers like Captain America and Iron Man.  But he is as much a staple of the franchise as Cap or Iron Man; Hawkeye’s even led the team on multiple occasions.

Hawkeye in the films, however, seems more or less an afterthought, like they shoehorned him in The Avengers because he’s popular enough to bump up merchandize.  He barely has a line in Thor, and in all the trailers and TV spots for the new movie, I ain’t seen him talk at all.  Instead of an anti-authority rogue with a shady criminal past, Hawkeye in the movies feels like a one-dimensional, by-the-numbers soldier with a penchant for archaic weaponry.  The Hawkeye we’ve seen on screen to date is less Robin Hood than Rainbow Six.

What They Bring to the Table

There’s one thing we can expect and hope for from all of these characters when we see The Avengers, and that is MORE!  Hopefully Hawkeye will have more to do, and maybe he’ll even get some dialogue.  I assume he’ll actually get to knock an arrow this time, which he didn’t do in Thor, but it would be great to learn a little something about him besides his archery gimmick.  Still, with so many characters to juggle and explore, I won’t be super disappointed if Hawkeye gets the shaft.

Black Widow, on the other hand, must step up her game.  Writer/director Joss Whedon (creator of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series) is known for crafting strong female characters.  If he doesn’t make Natasha a formidable presence on the male dominated, powerhouse Avengers team, and at least hint at some of her complicated back story, then, well, I will do something bad… with rocks…

Nick Fury isn’t part of the team, strictly speaking, so we can expect him to operate mostly as a handler for the Avengers.  Will S.H.I.E.L.D. act as a resource for the Avengers, or will the heroes serve as an arm of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s agenda?  Unknown, but expect Samuel L. Jackson to take a bite of the scenery and just chow down as often as possible.

Of all the Marvel movies released in the lead-up to The Avengers, including Iron Man and its sequel, Thor, and The Incredible Hulk, it was Captain America that made me the most nervous.  In most incarnations of the team, Captain America is generally depicted as the team leader, the field captain, anyway.  While the Avengers may get financial and technical support from Tony Stark’s company or the global peace-keeping agency known as S.H.I.E.L.D., only Captain America has the weight of experience and military genius to call the play on the battlefield.  His movie was also the last to come out before everyone assembles this year.  If the movie flopped… If the filmmakers failed to capture the grandeur, the magnetism, the fundamental heroism of the character… If you don’t buy into Captain America, you can’t buy the Avengers.

And leading into the movie, all of the information I was hearing, from the casting of the lead actor (I’ve already said I thought Chris Hemsworth, the star of Thor, would have made a better Cap) to the recent pedigree of the director (Joe Johnson, the visionary behind the unwatchable Wolfman in 2010, and the man who shot Jurassic Park III with only a third of the script), to the less-than historically accurate aspects of WWII (a substitute for the Nazis, and an interracial, international military unit that looks like Hogan’s Heroes meets The Real World), everything made me nervous.  I thought this movie was going to bomb.

… Oh me of little faith…

The First of Many

That old adage about how some men are born great and some have greatness thrust upon them, well, both apply to Steve Rogers, the man who would be Captain America.  We spend the first act of the movie realizing that Steve was a great man long before he was a super-man.  Time and again he throws himself against impossible foes; from the draft board of a dozen cities that refuse to register him for active military duty on account of his pitifully frail body and its shopping list of maladies, to the loudmouth jackass in the movie theater who pummels Steve in the alley.  He won’t surrender to spare himself a beating, and he won’t accept the army’s refusal to train him.  Steve Rogers will not back down from a fight, least of all a war.  When asked directly if he wants to kill Nazis, he says, “I don’t want to kill anybody.  I don’t like bullies.  I don’t care where they’re from.”  His heart is twice the size of an average man’s, thrice as big as his scrawny frame should allow.

Is is for his indomitable spirit and righteous sense of duty rather than some Olympian physique that Steve is selected for the Super Soldier Program.  The program’s inventor and lead scientist, Doctor Abraham Erskine, recognizes that “a strong man, who has known power all his life, may lose respect for that power.  But a weak man knows the value of strength and knows compassion.”

I had a joke for these before-and-after shots about Mark McGwire and steroid use in Major League Baseball but I can't think of it. Trust me, though, it was funny. Like, you'd laugh so hard you'd fart.

I was worried that the filmmakers wouldn’t be able to capture the magnitude of Captain America’s greatness.  They did.  They knocked it out of the park (and that analogy would’ve gone smashingly with my baseball-infused caption above).  By the time Steve undergoes the Super Soldier process, which grants him strength, speed and stamina beyond normal human ability as well as a Herculean set of abs and pecs, the audience has fully bought into this character.  He’s a hero before he becomes a superhero and we get it.

Ironically, though Steve Rogers was great, it’s actually as Captain America that greatness is thrust upon him.  See, Cap was never supposed to be unique.  Steve Rogers was the test subject; he was never meant to be the only subject.  The tragic assassination of Prof. Erskine, however, all but “kills” the project, as the Super Soldier formula is presumably dies with the inventor (until it is administered to Tim Roth’s character in The Incredible Hulk).

Steve was meant to be the beta for an entire force of super soldiers that would end Hitler’s Reich faster than conventional troops fighting a ground war.  Erskine’s death makes Steve special; now he’s the super soldier.  A lesser man would buckle under the weight of such responsibility.  Steve Rogers never buckles for anything.

And that’s all the filmmakers needed to do to win, but they pile on with a fantastic and roaring USO montage before jumping into the typical superheroic action sequences as Captain America fights the good fight.  Iron Man might be the tightest and most critically and financially successful of the Marvel movies, and The Incredible Hulk has a place in my heart for sentimental reasons, but I think Captain America is the best overall.

A Living Legend

This is what Tom Brokaw is always talking about!

Within the shared universe of Marvel Comics, Captain America is more than a superhero, more than an Avenger.  He’s a living legend who fought and supposedly died at the end of WWII, only to wake from suspended animation in present day.  Now he’s a symbol of the greatest generation’s commitment to honor and freedom for all people.  He’s as iconic as the Statue of Liberty.  Imagine George Washington, Michael Jordan, and the Beatles all in one man and you’ve got Captain America.

Portraying that role in film would be a daunting task for even the most seasoned actor.  Anyone other than the genetic offspring of Steve McQueen and Frank Sinatra would be insane to try.  So I was more than a little disappointed when they cast Chris Evans in the lead.  Marvel had already miscast the perfect Captain America as Thor, but now they were filling the role with an actor known mostly for roles in dumb action movies, dumb romantic comedies, and dumb other superhero movies.  I readied myself for disaster.

So, as is often the case, I was pleasantly surprised.  Evans does a solid job in the role that is made easier for him with a stellar cast of supporting actors  Stanley Tucci as Erskine, Dominic Cooper as Iron Man’s father, Howard Stark, and Tommy Lee Jones as Colonel Tommy Lee Jones get all the best lines.  Tucci is the moral conscious of not just the movie but the generation.  Cooper is Robert Downey, Jr.’s Tony Stark in proto-form, basically Howard Hues before insanity and mormonism turned him into a punch line on The Simpsons.  And Jones, well… He walked on that set wearing the costume he brought from home and started barking orders because he’s f***ing Tommy Lee Jones.  Even money he didn’t even know they were filming a movie the whole time he was on set.

The ensemble helps Evans carry the load of Captain America, but the actor truly shines in the first half hour–those same scenes when Steve Rogers is at his most heroic–before the change.  The special effects that render him a ninety pound stick figure complement but don’t overshadow the pain and longing and conviction in the actor’s eyes.  I kind of wish he had stayed that small for the entire movie.  I would have followed him into war [movie] even then.

Why We Fight

There is one flaw common to all five of the Marvel Studios films so far.  The third act tends to devolve into a fairly formulaic scuffle between the hero and villain, be it Iron Man fighting warmongers in even bigger armored suits, the Hulk fighting an Abomination, or Thor fighting his little brother.  In this case, Captain America squares off against his nemesis, Hitler’s own Ubermensch, the Red Skull.

There's skinheads and then there's HOLY $#@%!

What’s great about the Red Skull is there is nothing, no redeeming qualities, no shred of goodness in him.  So when Captain America fights the Red Skull, it’s more than a contest of national champions, and it’s more than a war of ideologies.  It’s fundamental good versus evil.  Their final battle tries to be bigger than fisticuffs by having the Skull consumed by his own power lust.  However, there’s a moment before this when the Skull is taunting Captain America that is jarring in how awkward and out of character it sounds.  Red Skull says, “You could have the power of the gods, yet you wear a flag on your chest and fight a battle of nations.  I have seen the future, Captain.  There are no flags!”  To this, Cap shoots back, “Not my future!”

What?  That‘s your response to a fascist maniac calling you a hollow symbol, a shill for politicians?  Did you not hear what he said?  I get that Cap talking about his future is supposed to be prophetic since part of his schtick is that he gets frozen in time and wakes up in our present–his future–but the way he just avoids the Skull’s statements is the one time in the film where Captain America looks small and weak.  This is the moment where he needs to rise up and declare what he stands for.  Why he fights.  (Hint: It’s not a flag, and it’s not the country the flag represents.)

The filmmakers do their best to salvage this moment by giving Steve Rogers the ultimate victory.  While Captain America defeats Red Skull in combat, it is Steve’s courage and goodness that lead him to sacrifice himself to protect the innocent.  Unfortunately, the scene with Steve piloting a ship to its destruction as he speaks to his girlfriend over the radio evokes a similar scene from the 2009 remake of Star Trek.  That same scene, starring the actor who should have played Captain America, plays a trillion times more genuinely, romantically and tragically.

What He Brings to the Party

What can a man-out-of-time bring to a volatile team-up in The Avengers?  How will Steve Rogers’ sense of righteousness and honor gel with Tony Stark’s sardonic pessimism and Thor’s otherworldly aloofness?  It should make for tension, mockery, and more than a few laughs.

The other trick that actor Chris Evans and the filmmakers will need to pull off is maintaining the Captain’s iconic stature amongst all of these other (sometimes literal) giants.  My concern, when I heard that Evans was cast as Captain America, was that the character ought to be able to stand in the room with Robert Downey, Jr. and Samuel L. Jackson and absolutely command their attention, and I really don’t know if Evans has the chops for that.  Hell, I’m not sure any actor in Hollywood could do it.

Which is why I think the role should have been recast with Tim Tebow.

George Washington, Michael Jordan, and the Beatles: I think you've met your match!

Comics were never bigger or more bankable than they were in the early ’90s, and, either as a direct result or a maddening coincidence, they achieved this success by eschewing story and substance in favor of big, bombastic and utterly soulless art.  A comic book artist name Rob Liefeld actually starred in a commercial for Levis directed by Spike Lee during this era.

Being a teenager in the early ’90s was about hating “the System”, the status quo, and everything that appeared clean or corporate.  Like being a hipster without irony (Meta-Hipsterism).  I listened to gangsta rappers rage against a brutish legal authority and grunge rockers wail against… honestly, I don’t know what they were mad about anymore, laundry?  The comics I read were equally violent and anti-establishment, like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, where the Caped Crusader must rid the streets of Gotham not just from the dangerous, psychotic supervillains, but from the equally dangerous, psychotic police force.  From there I graduated to The Uncanny X-Men, those extraordinary symbols of counterculture youth and discrimination, and a whole lot of stupid comics about big men with bigger guns.

Know what I never, ever read in the ’90s?  What comic I would never even debase myself to even consider picking up at the store or the newsstand?  Captain America.  Captain America was “the System”, he was the status quo, he was clean and corporate; he represented the government, the greatest sin of all because the government was lame.  Captain America was LAME!

Or so I thought.

It might also have helped that Rob Liefeld–the same artist I mentioned earlier, the guy in a blue jeans ad with Spike Lee, yeah, that guy–drew Captain America like this:

The symbol of America, indeed. Also, f*** you, Rob Liefeld!

But let me show you another image of the captain.

"This is what you get for grabbing my boobs, Hitler!"

That image is by Captain America co-creator Jack Kirby, who, believe it or not, is widely considered the greatest comic book artist of all time, and who, along with Stan Lee, created the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man (sort-of), and Nick Fury, all of whom will be starring in The Avengers.  The first time I saw this picture of Captain America punching out Adolph Hitler, long after my angst-ridden, hormone-crazed teen years, I realized how wrong I had been about the captain.

The image above is the cover to Captain America issue #1, cover dated March 1941, which means it probably hit newsstands in December 1940.  In case you spaced out in school and you never watch the History Channel, that’s a full year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. formal declaration of war.  I was wrong to think Cap was lame not because he punched Hitler, but because he punched Hitler three and a half years before the invasion of Normandy!

Captain America isn’t a tool for the White House and Congress, or even the Pentagon.  He doesn’t represent the government.  He represents the people!  Not the American Way but the American Dream–that idea that we can all be better, that we should all be better.  America wasn’t at war with Germany yet in 1940.  Cap wasn’t acting as an agent of anything other than a person’s right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness when he punched Hiter.  He punched him because f*** Hitler!  I assume, at least, that was justification enough for Jack Kirby, whose real name was Jacob Kurtzberg, and who, like scores of other writers and artists of the time, changed his name to something less Jewish-sounding in order to find mainstream commercial success.

Fifteen years ago, the idea of reading Captain America held about as much appeal for me as getting braces.  Today, Captain America is one of the handful of Marvel comics I continue to read every month.  In the post-911 era, when America has been pimp-slapped off its moral high horse, at first by its enemies and then by itself… when the sheer cynicism of our political discourse is more disparaging than any foreign propaganda… when the Vice President shooting a buddy in the face during a drunken hunting trip and gets away scot free can be viewed as a metaphor for what his administration did to the entire world in eight years… Well, for me anyway, it’s hard to feel patriotic without being a little self-conscious.  Strange then, that during this same era, the stories in Captain America–pure action adventure and escapist fantasy though they be–have never felt more thrilling, more romantic, or more comforting.

Art by Bryan Hitch. Seriously, f*** Rob Liefeld!

Come back soon.  Next time I’ll actually talk about the Captain America movie!

After taking everyone by surprise with their debut outing, Marvel Studios released a sequel to the wildly successful Iron Man in 2010.  I’ll touch on Iron Man 2 a little next week when I discuss Black Widow and S.H.I.E.L.D., but not much because, well, because it wasn’t a great movie.  In short, Iron Man 2 got lost in its own pizzazz and forgot what it was even about.  The third act introduces new plot elements and wraps up ideas that were never introduced earlier in the movie.  It has some fun moments, but the action sequences in the middle of the film are both thrilling and hilarious, while the battle at the end is mostly forgettable.

But a year later, Marvel would return to introduce two new characters (who’re actually quite old, comparatively) in theaters.  2011 was the first year comic book fans and casual viewers got to experience Marvel’s mighty thunder god on the big screen, that is, unless you count Vincent D’Onofrio’s scene-obliterating turn as the mighty Norse-like auto-mechanic in Adventures in Babysitting.

And seriously, if you don't remember this scene, you are not the target audience for this blog.

Are You There, God-With-a-Small ‘G’? It’s Me, Pragmatist

Bringing Thor to the big screen should, in theory, be no easier or harder than making any other genre film.  As the first son of Odin, King of Asgard, a heavenly realm of immortal warriors, Thor is perfectly at home in epic fantasies: Shakespeare meets Dungeons & Dragons.  Want the recipe for nearly every Thor story?  A dash of palace intrigue, sprinkled with the sins of the father, mixed with legions of screaming fire demons and rock trolls, then panfried by a big ass hammer and ball lightning.  Or you can cast him as an otherwordly outsider in a more conventional superhero flick.  The danger is trying to do both, which is exactly what Marvel Studios did–what they had to do–in order to integrate him into the shared-world they created leading into The Avengers.

Thor is a god, a version, anyway, of the Norse god of thunder and storms, worshipped by the Northern Europeans of a thousand years ago as devoutly as the Greeks worshipped Zeus a thousand years before that.  He is immortal and possessed of such near-infinite power that the laws and principles governing our reality do not apply to him.  He is a creature of myth that humankind stopped believing in ages ago.  How do you rationalize that kind of entity in the serious, physical sciences-based universe of Iron Man and the Hulk?  Thor has to cheat a bit to pull it off by putting a qualifier on his godhood.

“Your ancestors called it magic,” the titular character explains, “and you call it science.  I come from a land where they are one and the same.”  Thor and the Asgardians are not so much gods in the Judeo-Christian way we define and understand the word today as they are beings from a different plane of existence.  They might as well be aliens who look like human beings, or people from an alternate dimension where laws of physics allow for increased vitality and longevity.

It’s a cheat, but it works.  It eases the viewers suspension of disbelief for when Thor will eventually have to throw down and brawl with people whose physical powers are augmented by technology or genetic experiments.

Unfortunately, the film tries to straddle the genre line and ends up doing… something uncomfortable to its crotch, I guess.  (I’m tired, dude, there’s only so many analogies I can come up with in a day for a blog that’ll only be read by two people.)  Thor doesn’t quite know what kind of movie it is: epic fantasy or superhero origin.  It tries to be both and ends up being too much and not enough of either.  There are about ten supporting characters with enough development to make one-and-a-half of them intriguing.  There’s a twenty-minute confrontation with S.H.I.E.L.D. that’s supposed to set up Thor’s immersion into the Avengers universe but completely kills the film’s momentum.  Just when events in Asgard start getting interesting, Thor is banished to Earth, where the movie basically starts over from a new character’s perspective.  And just when we’re getting comfortable with these characters, Thor goes back to Asgard.  I know there are ways to tell an epic Thor story that brings him down to Earth and establishes him in “our world” of human heroes, and the story we got was not the way to do it.

Rockstar Supernova

Add seven naked ladies to this picture and you've got a Poison album cover!

I took note of Chris Hemsworth in the gripping and surprisingly romantic prologue to JJ Abrams’ Star Trek, where he played the doomed father of the franchise’s main character.  With his chiseled looks, strong jaw, slicked blond hair and icy blue eyes, I instantly wanted him to play Captain America.  Alas, the studios as well as the petulant, vocal fanboys crowding the interwebs would not abide a non-American actor playing the Sentinel of Liberty.  Those fans have no problem, though, with Korean-born actor John Cho playing the Japanese Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu in the aforementioned Star Trek, since those races look close enough to the same, and anyway it’s not like Koreans have any problems with the Japanese.

Marvel chose not to cast True Blood‘s Norse god of hot vampirism, Alexander Skarsgard, over doubts the actor could bulk up enough to play the muscular Thor, and for fear that being in the same room with him would get them pregnant all the time.  Instead, they took the perfect Captain America, gave him the rockstar hair treatment, and turned him into a passable Thor.  At least as good as D’Onofrio.

The faults in Hemsworth’s performance owe more to an unfocused story.  As an invincible, super-warrior god-prince, Thor is justifiably dominated by his passions and appetites for most of the film, and Hemsworth embraces it, selling some pretty lackluster dialogue, and making a spoiled brat a genuinely fun character to watch.  Which is great, because stoicism and aloofness will have no part in The Avengers.  Motley Crue here has to spar with Robert Downey, Jr.’s Iron Man and at least present a strong showing.

Nobody Hits My Brother but Me

Thor has another glaring deficiency besides the unfocused story and boring characters–man, that sounds harsh, considering I do like the movie, but I’m not going to pretend it’s something better than it is–not like I do with The Incredible Hulk, I mean.  Larger than life heroes need larger than life villains.  Twice now the Joker has stolen Batman’s theatrical thunder, and to date the best part of every X-Men movie has been Magneto.

Thor’s nemesis certainly had that potential.  After all, we’re talking about his half-brother, Loki, the god of mischief and lies!  Are you kidding me?  A #@%$ing trickster god!  Think of the Joker with unlimited power and resources and an eternity of experience, then add a charismatic performance from Tom Hiddleston, and you’ve got a slam dunk, right?

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me after a thousand years of knowing you're the god of lies, shame on me. And also you.

No.  Loki is the biggest flaw in the movie because his actions and motivations don’t make sense.  It ain’t because he’s acting secretive and conspiratorial, either, it’s because the writers dropped the ball.  Loki’s deceits are pitifully obvious and not even that clever.  He trumps his older brother to usurp the throne of Asgard by having Thor exiled for instigating a war with the Frost Giants, and then by shaming his father, Odin, into a heart attack.

But Thor didn’t need much deceiving or provocation to fight the Frost Giants; chances are he would have gone to Jotunheim (don’t ask) and punched out Laufey (really, don’t) whether Loki “encouraged” him to or not, so he can hardly take credit for that grand bit of “mischief”.  And Loki only takes the throne, something he couldn’t obtain normally as the second son, because Odin falls into the “Odinsleep” during their heated argument.  The goal of any second born prince who can never become king through legal means is attained by Loki through luck and other people’s stupidity.  Quite the impressive villain is he!

(By the way, anytime the wife is yelling at me, I just “go into the Odinsleep” until she walks away in disgust!)

And there’s even more nonsensical behavior.  Loki discovers that he’s adopted, that the Frost Giants were his family–that the king of the Frost Giants was Loki’s father, making him heir to all of Jotunheim.  But Odin kidnapped him as a baby and raised him in Asgard to be overlooked and out-shined by Thor.  And when Loki discovers this horrible, monstrous deception, he hatches a vengeful scheme to punish… the Frost Giants!  Yep, he decides to kill the entire race of his biological parents… so that his adoptive family will love him more!

And scene!

What They Bring to the Party

Thor and Loki will both return in The Avengers.  It’ll be interesting to see how the thunderer views mere mortals like Tony Stark and Nick Fury, but more so it should be awesome to watch him fight Iron Man and the Hulk, because the hallmark of every Marvel superhero team-up is that first the heroes have to beat the crap out of each other for a while before they go hunting for bad guys.  Honestly, I’m not worried about Thor.  It’s Loki that has to cover lost ground.  That is, writer/director Joss Whedon has to redeem this character.  That is, Whedon has to make Loki so vile, so unrelentingly evil and dangerous that it’ll take not only Thor, but all of the Avengers combined to save the day.