AFTERTHOUGHTS (96)
EMPIRE’S! 50! GREATEST! COMIC! BOOK! CHARACTERS! [2 of 5]
THE X-MEN EDITION

Though I’m pretty much a DC fanboy (and always have been), the one Marvel title that I loved way back when was ­The Uncanny X-Men, back in the classic Chris Claremont era.
And naturally, I was rabid over Grant Morrison’s New X-Men.
Filmwise, I wasn’t bowled over by Bryan Singer’s first pass on the material, though I love X2. Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand was, like Spider-Man 3, a mess that had too much going on in it.
Hopefully, next year’s Wolverine spin-off will have learned from past X-film mistakes…
I also loved Sir Ian McKellen’s Magneto, more so than Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, who is already, let’s face it, a pretty good fit. (Though I do think Magneto’s helmet in the film looks terrible…)


30 Emma Frost (aka: The White Queen)
Bad girls in comics are always so useful that they tend to reform and become at least semi-goodies (cf: Catwoman, Elektra).
Emma Frost was introduced as an exceptionally nasty—and explicitly perverse—villainess, running a school for evil mutants in competition with Professor Xavier and high in the councils of the nefarious Hellfire Club (in homage to the famous ‘Touch of Brimstone’ episode of The Avengers).
Marvel made her a qualified goodie in the X-Men spin-off Generation X, and writer Grant Morrison reinvented the character when he took over New X-Men and wasn’t allowed to use his original choice, Storm.
Now an actual X-Man, Emma remained the manipulative slut fans loved to hate—and caused a minor kerfuffle when she began a ‘telepathic’ affair with Cyclops, long-term partner of Jean Grey.


Despite strong competition, Emma has consistently worn the most striking lingerie (and little else) in comics—the covers for her brief solo series Emma Frost are basically porn star poses.
FIRST APPEARED IN UNCANNY X-MEN #129 (1980)
CREATED BY CHRIS CLAREMONT AND JOHN BYRNE


9 Magneto (aka: Erik Magnus Lehnsherr, The Master of Magnetism)
Magneto is... complicated.
A Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who is determined to save his fellow homo superior from the fate of his fellow Jew, he sometimes seems fated to repeat some of the Nazis' mistakes, pursuing the subjugation of homo sapiens in favour of homo superior.
He is—as producer Tom DeSanto told Bryan Singer when he was trying to persuade him to make the first X-Men movie—Malcolm X to Professor X’s Martin Luther King.
His ‘by any means necessary’ approach has seen him commit hideous atrocities in the past, including the sinking of a submarine full of sailors, and yet he’s not evil—not in the traditional sense of the word, anyway.
Even though he’s traditionally their number one nemesis, he has been known to actively align with the X-Men, even taking over as the team’s leader/teacher in the absence of Charles Xavier, while he’s previously had a relationship with Rogue.


Currently in the films, he’s depowered, and living life as a human—which, for him, is purgatory. But we’re sure his powerless state won’t last for long.
FIRST APPEARED IN X-MEN #1 (1963)
CREATED BY STAN LEE AND JACK KIRBY


4 Wolverine (aka: Logan, James Howlett, Patch, Weapon X)
Originally conceived as a villainous means of giving Hulk a bit of a workout, but swiftly retooled as a conflicted hero, Wolverine’s always been a character comfortable with shades of grey, and it’s his contradictions and complications that enable him to be all things to all geeks.
So he has an unmatched capacity for violence (even berserkery) and finely honed animal instinct, but is capable of tempering his highly emotional reactions with cold-blooded calculation where required.


And he’s no mere thug: his studies in Japan and long history of travel, espionage and trouble-finding have given him a knowledge of differing cultures, he speaks a number of languages, and has a deep appreciation of ice-cold beer (see, for example, Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, where beer brings Wolverine back from a hypnotised state).
Also, he has the sort of facial hair that generations of young men have grown up aspiring to.
FIRST APPEARED IN HULK #181 (1974)
CREATED BY LEN WEIN, JOHN ROMITA SR


The above write-ups are from Empire’s list.
For more on the above characters (including who Singer saw as his potential White Queen), just click on their names; the entire list will be accessible from there.

In Part 3—Afterthoughts (97)—we note some characters from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

(Images courtesy of greghornjudge.com [Emma Frost and Wolverine, art by Greg Horn]; artofhagan.com [Magneto, art by Brian Hagan]; about.com [Sir Ian McKellen as Magneto; photo by Nels Israelson]; and marvel.com [Emma Frost, New X-Men cover art by Frank Quitely, Wolverine, and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine].)

THE GOLDEN COMPASS
(Review)

I’ve read the first two installments of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (been looking for quite a while now, but have yet to find The Amber Spyglass in the bargain bins), and enjoyed both tremendously.
Pullman understands—as do the likes of directors Peter Jackson and Guillermo Del Toro—that fantasy should also possess a certain sense of horror for it to be informed with substance, a darkness to give everything else (not the least of which, the light and the wisdom that accompanies it) a proper weight.
Obviously, I didn’t expect the film adaptation of The Golden Compass (originally titled Northern Lights) to be as substantial as the source material.
Sadly though, it feels like a child who’s suffered a botched intercision.

Now, on the plus side, let me just say that The Golden Compass looks fabulous, like Nicole Kidman the first time we see her in the film: the divinely sinister Mrs. Coulter, in that dress.
Like Coulter at the university banquet, the film that contains her is visually stunning, and has resulted in Oscar nominations for Best Art Direction and Best Visual Effects. Here is a fantasy world that is amazingly realized, courtesy of a hefty budget (reportedly $180 million).
As much as I love Matthew Vaughn’s Stardust, The Golden Compass certainly looks a damn sight better. Compass, however, lacks not just the disarming charm of Stardust, it also lacks—as Mrs. Coulter apparently does—a certain sense of humanity.

For the most part, Compass feels like the ride Lyra (newcomer Dakota Blue Richards) takes atop warrior ice bear Iorek Byrnison (voiced by the brilliant Sir Ian McKellen). And though this sequence is one of the Compass bits that work, my comparison isn’t meant to be a flattering one.
In trying to fit all of the novel into the film’s 113-minute running time, director Chris Weitz (who also penned the script) treats us to a cavalcade of scenes that aren’t allowed to breathe, that aren’t given the time for the narrative (and the audience) to discover who these characters are and why they should warrant any attention or sympathy. The scenes only seem to take as long as is needed to get packets of information and heady concepts to the audience, before we’re whisked off to another locale and another handful of plot points.
Which is sad since Richards actually does a decent job at playing Lyra, the tale’s young heroine, and in a film like this, the young protagonist is always the key to fully enjoying and appreciating the material. If the child actor isn’t any good, chances are, the film falls apart.

In this case though, it’s the script that fails Richards, and most of the cast as well. 007 Daniel Craig is good as Lyra’s explorer uncle, Lord Asriel, as is Craig’s co-star in Casino Royale, Eva Green, as witch queen Serafina Pekkala (though Green does lack the gravity required for the film’s opening voice-over). Jim Carter also gamely gives his best shot at John Rhys-Davies, as Gyptian king, Lord John Faa.
But as good as these performers are, the truly exceptional ones are Sam Elliott as aeronaut Lee Scoresby, and the bears, Sir Ian, whose magnificently resonant vocal delivery captures the regal and fierce pride that informs Iorek, and Deadwood’s Ian McShane, who voices the bear king, Ragnar Sturlusson (renamed from Northern Lights’ Iofur Raknison so as to avoid confusion with Iorek).
Sadly though, there just isn’t enough Scoresby in The Golden Compass, and Ragnar has hardly been introduced to us, before he’s swept off the narrative’s board, and we’re off gallivanting towards the next plot point. Sir Ian at least, gets to unleash his inner ice bear, and it’s to Richard’s credit that she pulls off the scene where Lyra first meets Iorek rather admirably. Considering she was an inexperienced actress playing off a special effect made her performance all the more impressive.

When I first heard who The Golden Compass’ director was going to be, I couldn’t quite see why the choice was a proper fit. Yes, I loved Weitz’s screenplay for Antz, but the films Weitz actually had directing duties on were titles like the Hugh Grant-starrer About A Boy, the Chris Rock-starrer Down To Earth, and American Pie (though Weitz was uncredited for the last). Hardly the stuff of big budget fantasy films.
And if anything has been learned from some of the more recent cinematic entries in the genre, the director has to have a certain mindset where the special effects and the fantastic elements of the production are used as tools to enhance the narrative, the means to an end and not as the end itself.
Tragically (and despite the fact that Weitz first came on board as writer/director, then walked away from directing duties, only to return after Shopgirl director Anand Tucker came and went), Weitz seems to have gotten himself lost in both the story and the means by which the story is being told.

Even flawed as it is though, Weitz’s effort is possibly still one of the most substantive fantasy films yet, which is, of course, part of why it doesn’t work quite as well as it ought to.
The concepts are complex and weightier than your average wizards and warlocks fare, what, with souls externalized in the form of daemons, parallel worlds, and cosmic particles called “Dust,” the witches and ice bears seem like the terribly antiquated part of the equation.
Thus, much of The Golden Compass is exposition at the expense of character. And though Weitz has expressed a desire for an extended cut on DVD (which would have a running time of about two and a half hours), the theatrical cut sorely lacks a warmth it so desperately needs.
It also lacks that sense of horror I mentioned at the top of this review. There are just some scenes (particularly the reveal involving poor little Gyptian boy, Billy Costa, played by Charlie Rowe) that miss the mark, that fail to convey the inherent wrongness of the situation, given the norms of Lyra’s world.
And in a slightly similar vein, there is also a distinct lack of flourish in presenting us with the on-screen wonders we see. Yes, airships and the like are commonplace to that world, but they’re new to us (and to young Lyra as well, who is the audience’s proxy, after all), and yet most everything is treated as if it’s something we see everyday, as if it were as pedestrian as an apple in a dining table centerpiece.
Our first view of Scoresby’s ride is one such missed opportunity for a stirring money shot. And the climactic battle is frankly a disappointing sight as well.

Another shortcoming that bothers me is that Weitz never truly captures the deep ramifications of a life where one’s soul has a physical form outside of one’s own body. The intricate and intimate link between character and daemon doesn’t come across in any real and vital way. All we know for sure is that daemon and person feel the same thing, so if one dies, so does the other one (in the daemon’s case, in a burst of glittery CGI fairy dust).
Save for Lyra and Mrs. Coulter, we never quite get a proper sense of other characters’ daemons; if memory serves me right, Scoresby’s daemon Hester—voiced by Kathy Bates—actually only gets one line in the film, maybe two. Which seems like a terrible waste of Kathy Bates.
It’s also a terrible waste of the whole concept, when a person’s soul is reduced to a mere bunch of morphing pixels…

Clearly New Line’s shot at kick starting another fantasy franchise, by January 27, 2008, The Golden Compass had grossed a disappointing US total of just over $68 million. Its foreign box office though was a surprising $256 million, fully 78.8% of the film’s total cumulative box office of $325 million.
And though $325 million is a lot, so was that $180 million budget. Which puts a question mark over how New Line will approach the intended sequel, The Subtle Knife. Hossein Amini (who wrote the screenplays for Shekhar Kapur’s The Four Feathers and Iain Softley’s The Wings of the Dove) had already been tasked to adapt the novel even before Compass hit cinemas, but given that it didn’t perform as well as the studio had hoped, there’s a sense of hesitancy on New Line’s part now.
In light of the recent kiss-and-make up with Peter Jackson, giving a green light for two new Tolkien films (The Hobbit and a bridging film between The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy), New Line may feel even less charitable towards producing the second and third installments of His Dark Materials. Or at the very least be reluctant to throw as much money at it as they did at Compass.
Tolkien, after all, is already an established brand name for the studio, certainly a more reliable cash cow than Pullman (and without all that religious controversy hoo-hah on its coattails).

Still, I do hope New Line pushes through with completing the trilogy, giving them two more opportunities to get the material right. If they could only make more of an effort to get to the emotions and themes that inform the narrative, instead of the surface events that comprise the narrative, they would go a long way to justifying—and ultimately humanizing—all that expensive CGI so proudly on display.
That’s what His Dark Materials needs: more of its daemon back.

Parting shot: Third Dodgiest Cinematic ‘Do for 2007 (after Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men and Sacha Baron Cohen in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, both of which have reviews in the Archive): Simon McBurney, whose Magisterium meany Fra Pavel has a mop that looks like the hideous collision between a Trump comb-over and a Third Reich ‘cut.
See, kids? Bad guy = bad hair.
Thus endeth the lesson.

(The Golden Compass OS and images courtesy of aintitcool.com.)

STARDUST
(Review)

Being a Neil Gaiman admirer of long standing (since Black Orchid and Sandman first hit the comic book shelves oh-so-long-ago), I’ve been patiently waiting for his work in film to catch up.
His English translation of Hayao Miyazaki’s Mononoke-hime (Princess Mononoke) didn’t have enough of a Gaimanesque feel to satisfy (and thus, I’ve always preferred watching it in the original Japanese), and Dave McKean’s Mirrormask was one of those films I wish I loved more than I actually do.
Now though, there’s Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of Stardust, and I’m quite happy now, thank you very much.

For what Stardust, in a not-so-small nutshell, is all about, I turn to Neil Gaiman himself, from his Guardian article, “Happily Ever After”:

“I wanted a young man who would set out on a quest - in this case a romantic quest, for the heart of Victoria Forester, the loveliest girl in his village. The village was somewhere in England, and was called Wall, after the wall that runs beside it, a dull-looking wall in a normal-looking meadow. And on the other side of the wall was Faerie - Faerie as a place or as a quality, rather than as a posh way of spelling fairy. Our hero would promise to bring back a fallen star, one that had fallen on the far side of the wall.

"And the star, I knew, would not, when he found it, be a lump of metallic rock. It would be a young woman with a broken leg, in a poor temper, with no desire to be dragged halfway across the world and presented to anyone’s girlfriend.

"On the way, we would encounter wicked witches, who would seek the star's heart to give back their youth, and seven lords (some living, some ghosts) who seek the star to confirm their inheritance. There would be obstacles of all kinds, and assistance from odd quarters. And the hero would win through, in the manner of heroes, not because he was especially wise or strong or brave, but because he had a good heart, and because it was his story.”

For anyone familiar with his writing, this should sound like vintage Gaiman, and Vaughn manages to capture a brilliant mixture of enchantment, humour, and suspense, to highlight Stardust’s traditional narrative of a boy’s passage into adulthood, of his coming into the man he was always meant to be.
Though it admittedly lacks some of Gaiman’s poetic language, the script by Jane Goldman and Vaughn nonetheless targets Stardust’s heart spot-on, giving modern audiences the sort of fairy tale even adults shouldn’t be ashamed to adore.

It’s all here, from the black nastiness of the ancient witch Lamia (Michelle Pfeiffer), to the transformation of Tristan (Dot The I’s Charlie Cox) from lovestruck fool to honourable, upstanding hero, to the narration by none other than genre icon Sir Ian McKellen.
The story is then ably supported by some fine performances, particularly from Cox, whose innocent and quiet exuberance gives us a Tristan who is never less than convincing, and constantly identifiable. His brash professions of love for Victoria (tabloid regular Sienna Miller, who’d worked previously with Vaughn on his directorial debut Layer Cake, and with Cox in Lasse Hallstrom’s Casanova) early in the tale play off quite nicely against his later actions to defend the star Yvaine (Claire Danes) from the sinister forces that hound her.
It’s clear this is still the same Tristan as before, and yet, it isn’t.
And it’s not just the wardrobe change. That’s the exterior mirroring the internal growth the character has experienced, and Cox conveys that well.

If there’s anywhere that Stardust may not quite hold up though, it’s in Dane’s performance, which may lack a certain level of enchantment for some; it’s not bad by any means, but save for one particular scene where she professes her own feelings for Tristan after she’s fed him some cheese, her Yvaine isn’t quite the blindingly glowing star the character is meant to be.
And then there’s the frankly repetitive score by Ilan Eshkeri (Vaughn’s composer on Layer Cake). Yes, it gets the job done, but does it have to sound so uniform?

Thankfully, Stardust makes up for some of its shortcomings by boasting the added treat of having actors like Robert De Niro (as notorious pirate of the skies Captain Shakespeare), Ricky Gervais of Seona Dancing and The Office fame (as Ferdy The Fence), Vaughn/Guy Ritchie cohort Jason Flemyng, and Madonna cohort Rupert Everett (as two of the lords, now princes in the film), picking up some of the slack.
Vaughn and company are also wise enough to know that good supporting performances should never steal the show, so we see just enough of the actors to want some more, while keeping the focus squarely on the narrative.

With Peter Jackson having wrapped up his epic Lord of the Rings trilogy in 2003, it’s been nearly four years since anything this earnest and magickal has hit the cinemas. The unabashed respect Stardust has for this kind of storytelling, the principal trait it shares with Jackson’s Rings (definitely no snarky, postmodern winks here), bodes well for the future of the fantasy film.
I can only hope Chris Weitz‘s adaptation of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass—not to mention Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf, whose script Gaiman co-wrote, and Vaughn’s next project, a film adaptation of Marvel’s Thor—continues in this vein.

(Stardust OS courtesy of wildaboutmovies.com; images courtesy of aintitcool.com.)