"Super" Heroes

Recently I caught Woody Harrelson’s “superhero” film, “Defendor”.  Add that to the other three films featuring a “superhero” who has NO super powers.

First:  Batman and Iron Man.  Unlike Superman, Spiderman, Wonder Woman, the Fantastic 4, the Avengers, etc., these two have no intrinsic super powers.  Really, their “super powers” are “so f**king rich they can buy Batmobiles and flying armor”.  What’s funny is that we’ve yet to see a real billionaire, like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, do anything like this.  Jeff Bezos, where is your Bezomobile?  Anyhow.  So what does a would-be superhero without any huge amount of money – a regular guy – do?

Defendor (2009).  Woody Harrelson becomes Defendor (spelled with an “o”).  He puts on a black costume with a duct taped D and paints a black mask over his face – not even a cloth mask he can take off.  Kat Dennings, the hotter of the Two Broke Girls, plays a hooker who befriends him.   Defendor is a bit “not there” and isn’t particularly good at fighting.  He believes “Captain Industry” is the bad guy who needs to be taken down.  There is a corrupt cop, Dooney (Elias Koteas), and his sometime boss (Michael Kelly, who we recognize from “House of Cards”) helps him out.  Overall I found it mostly frustrating and “when will this be over”?  Dennings is eye candy but Harrelson getting his ass kicked in Toronto doesn’t really make for a compelling story.

Watch it once and then go back to a regular Marvel or DC superhero movie.

Super (2010).  Rainn Wilson becomes the Crimson Bolt.  He’s trying to save his wife (Liv Tyler) from the clutches of an evil drug dealer (Kevin Bacon – in another film) while assisted by Libby (Ellen Page) who becomes his sidekick.  He’s inspired by Holy Avenger (Nathan Fillion).   He’s remarkably effective notwithstanding his complete lack of superpowers or even special skills. 

Watch it once and then go back to a regular Marvel or DC superhero movie.

Kick-Ass (2010).  I reviewed these two earlier (1/24/14) so I'll keep the reviews brief.  Refer back to the prior blog post for more detail on these.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson becomes Kick-Ass.  And does so again in the sequel, Kick-Ass 2 (2013).  In the first film he’s up against legitimate bad guy Mafia boss Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong), and allied with Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), a former cop turned Batman without much in the way of actual super powers or gadgets.  Big Daddy has been training his daughter as his sidekick, Hit Girl (Chloe Grace-Moretz).   Things get very nasty and violent.

There’s an equally nasty and violent sequel, Kick-Ass 2, in which D’Amico’s son (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) becomes the Motherf**ker to avenge his father.  This was the film which got publicity when Jim Carrey, who plays Colonel Stars & Stripes, heavily bad-mouthed the film after it came out.  Hit Girl retired to focus on a normal social life at school, leaving KA to recruit another team of nobodies to help him.  For his part, Motherf**ker recruits his own team, including the remarkably impressive Mother Russia.  

Like the first one, it has a heavy dose of violence.  I’d say it’s rare sequel which equals or exceeds the quality of the original.  I have NOT read the source material comic books, so I can’t comment on how faithful the movies are to the books, nor on their relative merit or lack thereof.

Unlike the other two, I got these two on DVD, and as you might imagine, I can recommend them, IF you can tolerate a “Scarface” level of violence.   

Trump Is NOT Hitler

Thank GOD.   Now we’ve had about one year of our new President, and Alec Baldwin remains a free man.   As do I, and I’ve made my own share of jokes at Trump’s expense – publicly, on Facebook - though obviously with a considerably smaller audience than Baldwin.

As Bill Maher complained, the problem with incessantly comparing anyone you dislike to Hitler is that when someone rolls by who IS Austrian, has a small mustache, and is bent on world domination and hatred of Jews, no one takes you seriously.  It’s the Fraudulent Lupine Outcry by Pre-Adult Male.  

The Dolfmeister realized in November 1923 that his potential subjects were sticklers for law and order, so a Putsch wouldn’t do.  He bided his time, and in January 1933, despite having lost the prior year election to the Blimp, succeeded at getting appointed Chancellor by a cabal of clowns who should have known better.

This didn’t give him full control, however.  It took the Reichtag Fire of March 1933 to result in emergency powers, which then wound up with socialists, communists, and everyone else who didn’t like Hitler round up and put in the fresh, new camp known as Dachau. 

So where’s our Reichtag Fire?   It’s been a year and we’re still waiting.  Is the NSA that lazy?

The closest we’ve seen to this was 9/11 >> Patriot Act >> Gitmo.  But on January 20, 2009, Bush Jr. voluntarily relinquished power, without the Red Army above his bunker.  Come on – Gitmo couldn’t hold all the people who badmouthed Bush. 

Trump is definitely self-centered, egomaniac, narcissistic, etc.  The world revolves around him.  He’s definitely full of himself – I would argue, even MORE than Hitler.  But he’s also lazy.   I don’t think he wants to be Fuhrer.  That’s TOO MUCH WORK.  When’s the last time you saw a picture of Hitler playing golf?  

Then there’s the Night of the Long Knives (June 1934), in which Hitler purged the SA and Party of any and all party rivals, notably Ernst Roehm and Gregor Strasser, anyone who might pose a threat from within.  What we’ve seen with Trump is a piecemeal purge, ad hoc, including his erstwhile Goebbels, Steve Bannon – not a swift, comprehensive purge of his administration.  It smacks more of incompetence than consolidation of power.   

If I were Hitler, I’d be offended by the comparison.  Hitler worked his butt off to be Fuhrer.  He took it seriously.  He wrote a book, raised a movement, etc etc. and didn’t play golf.  He didn’t inherit millions from his father – or anyone else.  Nor was he a nepotist.   In fact, he gave his nephew such a hard time – no handouts and a threat to involuntarily join the Wehrmacht – that the boy went to America, joined the US Navy, and settled on Long Island. 

Whenever I see complaints that the President is playing golf, instead of invading Poland or nuking North Korea, I say, “Thank GOD.”   The less he’s in the White House, the less we have to worry.

Finally, I’ve discovered the closest analogy to Trump, aside from Trump himself:  He’s CARTMAN.

Aldous Huxley

Yet again, I check my blog records only to find that I haven’t actually commented on this writer.  Here goes.

He’s best known for two major works:  Brave New World, and The Doors of Perception.   The latter was used by the famous L.A. band to name themselves, although little of their material really has much to do with the subject matter of that book.  It’s typically paired with Heaven & Hell (likewise, no content connection with the Black Sabbath album of 1980), as they both tend to focus on altering consciousness.

Before I get into his two major works, a brief biography.

Born in England in 1894, he suffered blindness for awhile which prevented him from pursuing a career in science like his grandfather.  Instead, he became a prolific writer.  In the 1950s he moved to the US.  He died on November 22, 1963, along with C.S. Lewis, and a more famous person, who died under more notable circumstances, John F. Kennedy.  Per his request, his wife gave him an injection of 100 mikes of LSD on his death bed.

Huxley actually wrote a lot:  in addition to many essays, he wrote no less than 11 novels, most if not all overshadowed by his two major works; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley.

Brave New World.   A dystopian saga, written in 1931, about a totalitarian society in the future (2540 AD), which remarkably coexists with a free, anarchic society.  Peace is kept by “soma”, a mysterious (fictional) hallucinogen.  A “savage”, John, is brought to the society, becomes somewhat of a celebrity, but ultimately decides he’s not a fan of the dictatorship.

The most obvious comparison is with 1984, by Orwell, and Huxley was an admirer of Orwell and even wrote to him complimenting him on that novel.  Between the two, I find Orwell’s book much better, but Huxley deserves credit for recognizing that such a society might well rely upon drugs to keep its subjects docile and obedient.  Orwell seemed to assume that after years of misinformation, people would simply accept the government’s story and doubt their own experience and judgment. 

Christopher Hitchens wrote a comparison between the two, Why Americans Are Not Taught History.  [Perhaps a blog about Hitchens would be appropriate... maybe later.]

The book was made into a movie twice: first in 1980, then later in 1998.  I’ve only seen the 1998 version, which features Peter Gallagher and Leonard Nimoy. 

The Doors of Perception/Heaven & Hell.   Non-fiction, and fairly short:  Doors (1954) is about his experience with mescaline.  Most of his observations have to do with flowers and classical music.  In that regard it’s considerably less interesting than the subject matter would imply.  I found Albert Hofmann’s book (LSD: My Problem Child) to be far more intriguing, even though it’s written by a scientist and not a novelist.  As noted above, Huxley died in 1963, well before Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and other psychedelic bands came around; in 1963 the Beatles were still in their pop phase and 5 years before “Revolution #9”.  Add him to Fitzhugh Ludlow, another “trip-writer” (1860s) denied the privilege of the appropriate music to accompany his adventures, Ludlow’s being highly concentrated hashish, which was legal in New York state back then.

Heaven & Hell (1956) offers the remarkable assertion:  medieval peasants were effectively tripping in their everyday lives.  Huxley argues that their highly substandard diets with vitamin deficiencies, plus the Church’s omnipresent obsession with death and the afterlife, essentially gave these poor people a continuous bad trip.  I’m not aware that anyone took up the experiment of flirting with scurvy to emulate psychedelics:  Huxley himself apparently didn’t bother, as mescaline, LSD, etc. made such an attempt pointless.

   

He also claims that you can trip off breathing a mixture of seven parts oxygen, three parts carbon dioxide.  Never heard that before. 

Overall I found his nonfiction writing to be somewhere in between Orwell (crystal clear) and Hitchens (oppressively pedantic and obtuse) with the fiction being unobjectionable.  I’ll have to read Brave New World Revisited, his nonfiction analysis of his story, in 1958, after several decades, the rise of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and Orwell’s 1984 (1949).   

Clueless Heathers

Recently I caught two older movies I’d neglected over the years because the subject matter wasn’t really my “cup of Lipton Diet Green Tea with Mixed Berries”.   They turned out to be entertaining notwithstanding the foregoing assessment, which also remained accurate.

Clueless (1995).   Alicia Silverstone’s major role, from 1995.   She plays a ditzy high school girl (Cher, named after the famous singer/actress) who is the head of her clique.   Actually she’s fairly bright, the clever part about this being that her intelligence is hidden behind her ostensible vapidness and almost exclusive focus on contemporary pop culture.   Paul Rudd plays her step-brother, Dan Hedaya plays her father (an overworked but powerful attorney), and Jeremy Sisto is here in an early role as a heart-throb.   Brittany Murphy plays a fashion-challenged new arrival who Cher takes under her wing.  The clever part of the film is that it’s like a macrocosm of Cher herself:  witty and intelligent despite an otherwise non-special subject matter and lead character.  The early appearance of cell phones and reference to Mark Wahlberg as “Marky Mark” (back when he was a rap artist and not a serious actor) are amusing elements dating this to the mid-1990s.  

Heathers (1985).   With Winona Ryder acting as the worried mom in “Stranger Things”, it’s fun to see her so young here, even looking like a well-coiffed and dressed predecessor to Eleven herself.

Shannon Doherty is one of three abusive Heathers at a high school in Ohio.  A much-younger Winona Ryder is the girl, Veronica, trying to fit in with them, which means she has to do whatever mean things they ask her to do.  She befriends fellow student J.D. (Christian Slater) who is somewhat strange and off-balance, but nonetheless handsome and charming in his own way.  They engineer the deaths of the Heathers – and an abusive pair of jocks - but make them look like accidents or suicide.   Eventually Veronica reaches a point where she no longer agrees with J.D.’s agenda.  Overall a kind of dark and cynical “high school revenge” story, somewhat entertaining.  I can’t say that was the case at ASP (1982-86) but I can understand if others going to high school at the same time might sympathize with Veronica more than I did.  Though as dark and cynical as this film is, the subject matter doesn’t come close to “Stranger Things”.