Listmania! The Films of 2008, Part 3

As I had feared, it's not three posts about the movies of the year, anymore. This one got so big I've split it in sort-of half. The other will be up tomorrow, if you can bear the wait.

Best Hero: Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr. - Iron Man)


Honourable Mentions:
Racer X (Matthew Fox - Speed Racer)
Po (Jack Black - Kung Fu Panda)
Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor - Redbelt)
Zen (Yanin Vismitananda – Chocolate)
James Bond (Daniel Craig – Quantum of Solace)

Best Villain: The Joker (Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight)


Honourable Mentions:

Brett (Jack O'Connell - Eden Lake)
Roland Cox (Samuel L. Jackson – Jumper)
Tai Lung (Ian McShane - Kung Fu Panda)
Prime Minister Cao Cao (Fengyi Zhang - Red Cliff: Part One)
Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons - Appaloosa)

Worst Hero: D’Leh (Stephen Strait - 10000 B.C.)


Dishonourable Mentions:
Rick O’ Connell (Brendan Fraser - The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor)
Dr. Jack Gramm (Al Pacino - 88 Minutes)
Major Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra - Doomsday)
David Rice (Hayden Christensen – Jumper)
Joe the Depressed Assassin (Nicolas Cage - Bangkok Dangerous)

Worst Villain: Jon Forster (Neal McDonough – 88 Minutes)


Dishonourable Mentions:
Gallian (Ray Liotta – In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale)
Marriage and the restrictions placed on the human soul by societal conventions (The 1950s – Revolutionary Road)
Man’s inhumanity to his fellow man (Humankind at its worst – Blindness)
The cynicism of people in modern Britain (Happy-Go-Lucky)
Random vaguely Arabic looking Warlord ZOMG Fear of the Other!!! (Affif Ben Badra – 10000 B.C.)

Most Tragic Villain: Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart - The Dark Knight)


Honourable Mention: Prince Nuada (Luke Goss - Hellboy II: The Golden Army)

Most Lovable Character: Master Oogway (Randall Duk Kim - Kung Fu Panda)



Character Who Is An Affront To Humanity And Logic And Must Never Be Emulated: Poppy (Sally Hawkins - Happy-Go-Lucky)

Most Annoyingly Passive Character: Jamal Malik (Dev Patel - Slumdog Millionaire)


Dishonourable Mention: Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)

Most Thought-Out Character of the Year: Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf - Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull)


It was a hell of a tough sell, making the audience care about and accept the young turk who would, if rumour was to be believed, take over the whip and fedora in future Indiana Jones movies. That's less likely now, but even so, Spielberg, Lucas, David Koepp (and Frank Darabont from his previous draft) took great care in crafting the character of Mutt Williams, and Shia LaBeouf brought him to life beautifully. Sadly, all involved should have spent as much time getting the final half of the film right as well.

Character We Want To See Suddenly Appear In Every Movie Ever Made Just To Insult Everyone With His Piercing Insights Into The Hypocrisy Of Bourgeois Middle-Class Life: John Givings (Michael Shannon - Revolutionary Road)


Gupta of the Year: Jack Lira (Diego Luna – Milk)


Dishonourable Mentions: Professor Harold 'Ox' Oxley (John Hurt - Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), Ashley Kowalski (Dreama Walker - Gran Torino)

Most Lovable Cranky Hardass of the Year: Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood – Gran Torino)


Honourable Mention: The Chief (Alan Arkin - Get Smart)

Badass of the Year: Zen (Yanin Vismistananda - Chocolate) If you don’t believe me, check out the stunt at 3:14.



What a woman. Can we make her the Queen or something?

Best Scene: Scary prisoner Tiny Lister makes a fateful decision in The Dark Knight.


Honourable Mentions:

Philippe Petit completes his high-wire walk between the Two Towers in Man on Wire.
The twenty minute single take conversation in Hunger.
Tony Stark bickers with his enthusiastic robot helper in Iron Man.
The BPRD enter the troll market in Hellboy II.
Po's kung fu dream in Kung Fu Panda.

Best Action Scene: The various mini-battles within the Eight Trigrams Formation in Red Cliff: Part One.


Honourable Mentions:

Tai Lung escapes from prison in Kung Fu Panda.
The mid-movie blowout chase sequence in The Dark Knight.
The first stage of the Casa Cristo 5000 from Speed Racer.
The eighteen minute showdown at the end of Chocolate.
The mental car chase at the end of Vantage Point.
Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor) defends the honour of himself and his training academy against thoughtless corporate exploitation in the final few minutes of Redbelt.
General Ma Xinyi (Jet Li) takes on a line of cannons in The Warlords.

Most Upsetting Sight of the Year: Whatever the hell that thing was that terrorised poor Manuela Velasco in the apartment penthouse at the end of [Rec].


Honourable Mentions:

A topless Robert De Niro having rough sex with Carla Gugino in Righteous Kill.
Mickey Rourke getting stapled in The Wrestler.
Tim Roth getting kicked across a campus into a tree in The Incredible Hulk.
Jeff Anderson discovering the downside of filming anal in Zack and Miri Make A Porno.
Stephen Rea trapped in a windshield for several hours in Stuck.

Long-Awaited Showdown Between Action Icons of the Year: Jet Li versus Jackie Chan in The Forbidden Kingdom.



Not-So Long Awaited Showdown Between Action Icons of the Year: Jason Statham versus Craig Fairbrass in The Bank Job.

Scene I Cried At Most This Year: Matthew Fox's final scene in Speed Racer. And I'm not ashamed to admit it.


Honourable Mention: Mutt Williams picks up his father's hat in the final scene of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Most Satisfying Finale of the Year: The Dark Knight


Honourable Mentions: The Wrestler, Speed Racer, The Orphanage, Step Brothers

Worst Garbled and Re-Edited Ending of the Year: Babylon A.D.


Dishonourable Mentions: Dante 01, Jumper

Most WTF OMG Brain-Altering Applause-Inducing Moment of the Year: Batman brings the Batpod to a very abrupt stop during the bravura chase sequence from The Dark Knight.

Best Bad Guy Death: Random Burmese soldier shot in the head with an arrow prior to falling onto a landmine in Rambo (It's at the two minute mark.)



Honourable Mentions:
Rosie Perez crushed by an exploding car in the pitch-perfect action-homage finale to Pineapple Express.
No. 8 (Pongpat Wachirabunjong) plunges several floors to a very painful death (see also several of his cronies who suffer a similar bone-crunching fate) in the demented finale of Chocolate.
The tragic fall of Prince Nuada in Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

Best Location Shooting: The Dark Knight

As silly as it sounds, filming almost entirely in Chicago is one of the things that makes The Dark Knight such a distinctive movie. Even though Chicago has been used many times before as a location, Christopher Nolan and his crew made it feel like a new place, somewhere that doesn't exist in our world. Here's a feature showing the locations, which is making me want to visit and do a big tour. Nolan's attempt to show as much of "Gotham" as he can, making it a character in the movie, means he also films a lot of interiors in corner offices with large windows looking out over the city. Especially in IMAX, the effect is breathtaking.

Honourable Mentions:
The Incredible Hulk - Judicious use of New York locations make the big FX finale shot in Canada look more convincing, and the early scenes in Brazil, with astonishingly long shots of the huge favelas, are fantastic.
In Bruges - Obviously.
Slumdog Millionaire - When you can tell what the hell is going on.

Right, the next one will be the last one, I hope. It'll be even more miscellaneous than this one, if you can believe that.

Who Could Care About Hellboy With Batman And Iron Man Around?

Another poll ends, but this time there's a tie between a psychotic billionaire and a murderous academic who doesn't believe in a lot of superstitious hocus-pocus (though really he probably should).

Batman Agains - 6 (30%)

Indiana Jones And The Inevitable Joke About His Age - 6 (30%)

It's The Baby Mama Starring Tina Awesome Fey - 4 (20%)

Wall*E Robot Film - 2 (10%)

Man Of Iron - 2 (10%)

The Wachowski Siblings Present: ANIME - 0 (0%)

James McAvoy Is Wanted! - 0 (0%)

An Incredible Hunk - 0 (0%)

Hellboy II: The Golden Zzzzzzz - 0 (0%)

Jumpier - 0 (0%)

M. Night Shyamalan's The Hopefully-Not-Suckening - 0 (0%)

Narnia II: Narnier and Narniarer - 0 (0%)

Will Smith And The Amazing $85m Opening Weekend - 0 (0%)

Tom Cruise Vs. Hitler - 0 (0%)

Producer Director Writer Wunderkind J.J. Abrams' Trek Through Space And Time - 0 (0%)

I'm not surprised it came down to a dead heat between Indy and Bats. At least, I'm not surprised after seeing the trailer for the former, which turned out to be infinitely better than I thought it would be (to the extent that the shot of Indy's shadow as he puts his hat on made me cry like the big sentimental idiot I am). That said, if The Dark Knight is even a tenth as good as Batman Begins (which was my favourite film that year, and stands up to repeated viewings) then Indy is screwed, alien skulls and Commie Cate Blanchett notwithstanding. Check out this article on Chris Nolan, possibly the best thing to come out of England since Thom Yorke or Adam Curtis.

Next in line, with a jawdropping four votes, is Baby Mama. To be honest I hadn't heard of the movie until Canyon pointed it out to me a couple of hours after I started the poll, which led me to amend it pronto. The trailer's funny enough, but does it have a bigger profile than I thought? Or are people so besotted with Poehler and Fey that they would go all bonkers with excitement over the thought of seeing them all enlargened at the cinema? Actually, this is understandable.

Next up, two votes for Wall*E, with one of those votes coming from me, which is odd only in that the film is directed by the one director at Pixar that I find sub-par. Try though I have to love it, Andrew Stanton's Finding Nemo annoys me no end, being mechanical, cloying, and not particularly funny (though gorgeous to look at). That it is the studio's most successful film keeps me up at nights, as I try to understand why that slab of pretty whimsy has all the dollars while the masterpiece that is Ratatouille fared so poorly (in comparison), and why something as clever and unique as Monsters Inc. gets treated like Pixar's redheaded stepchild.

I know sentimentality sells to families, but it still irks me. However, everything I've seen and heard about Wall*E has astonished me, in terms of the scope of Stanton's vision and his bold choices. Plus, of course, it's the last movie Pixar have on their roster that bears the fingerprints of Joe Ranft, who was so instrumental in creating Pixar's storytelling factory. There's only one other movie vying for my Most Anticipated Movie designation, and that comes later. This isn't a trailer, just a quick clip of Wall*E interacting with a vacuum cleaner, and it is pure joyous brilliance.



Also with two votes, Iron Man! I'm not the biggest fan of the character (especially in his current role as the Marvel Universe's Head Douchebag), and I worry that Favreau won't be able to pull it off, but my God, the baiting of the fanboy section of the audience has been nothing short of incredible. Every con appearance, every clip, every trailer; each has been better than the last, and the one below is the armour-plated cherry on top.



Though there are movies I'm looking forward to more, this is the one I want to succeed the most. It's got a lot going against it. Robert Downey Jr. might be one of the most charismatic and entertaining actors around, but a box office draw he is not, plus his blackface appearance in Tropic Thunder is bound to annoy a lot of people and that could turn public opinion against him. The character of Tony Stark isn't that well known outside nerd circles, and some people might just think it's a film about Ghostface Killah, though I'd pay to see that too. There are a lot of other movies coming out that could do better. Gwyneth Paltrow seems to generate a negative knee-jerk response a lot of the time (I don't get it, but I'm not the majority of the hatey internets).

However, if a shitty heap of wretched, pointless nonsense like Ghost Rider can make over $100m then, going on the quality of that trailer, this can knock a box office record or two into orbit. I hope so. If this is a success, it bodes well for Marvel Entertainment's roster of forthcoming movies, and will pave the way for an Avengers movie, which must happen or I will run out of the room crying and blaming the cinema-going public for ruining my dreams.

That could also work for The Incredible Hulk, though interest in it has been much more muted, perhaps because we've already seen an adaptation of it recently, and it left people underwhelmed. Actually, everyone seemed to like the crazy editing and hate the Hulk effects, and I was the other way around, for the most part. I still maintain the digital performance of the Hulk was superb, even if the effects weren't as photo-real as some really really really demanding viewers wanted. Will NortonHulk be accepted in a way BanaHulk wasn't? Who knows? The trailer hasn't even come out yet. Perhaps that's why I find it hard to muster any enthusiasm about it.


Iron Man, Incredible Hulk, and The Dark Knight are not the only superhero movies vying for the nerd dollar/pound/Tögrög. Also included was Timur Bekmambetov's adaptation of Mark Millar's supervillain epic Wanted, now with 100% less superpowers. As fun as the movie looks, for a start it's directed by someone with nothing more than a great eye for the visuals but a life-threatening allergic response to story structure. I hate when directors get criticised for not understanding how to tell a story, as even the worst filmmakers can crank out something that can be mentally ordered into some semblance of a narrative by any viewer who has seen a film before. Not Bekmambetov. Night Watch was a series of startling images glued onto cards and then shuffled for an hour before being presented as a finished movie. I'm not an idiot, seriously, but that film was incomprehensible. If he can pull this off I will be very surprised. That's before we get to the part where all of the cool supervillainy of the comic is replaced with sexy assassins sexily shooting people in sexronic slow motion ZOMG! Call me crazy, but that's been done before, right? James "Digi-Pecs" McAvoy could be this year's Bald Timothy Olyphant. And who wants that?

The other straight comic adaptation on there is Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. For the record, as much as I appreciate Guillermo Del Toro's knack for creating great visuals (not as impressive as Bekmambetov's, though), and though I respect his ability to create coherent stories (way way WAY better than Bekmambetov), his movies kinda bore me. Not so much that I won't ever watch them. Pan's Labyrinth was very good, and I still love Blade II though I do tune out once they go into the sewers. It's just that Hellboy is utterly lifeless. Plus, Selma Blair's death voice makes me want to fill my ears with caulk. Next!


The only other superhero film I'm looking forward to is Hancock. I'll watch Will Smith in anything, though when I heard this tale of a useless hero coming back from the depths of depression was being directed by Jonathan Mostow, whose films have failed to impress thus far, I figured it would be a minor distraction. But I was wrong! And so was IMDb for a while! Turns out the film has had a complicated history, but ended up being directed by Peter Berg. Shades of Caruso loves Peter Berg (even though Very Bad Things is among the ten worst films ever made and The Kingdom was less than perfect)! We now officially endorse this movie, and hope that it is the success that Berg deserves, considering the insane fact that Friday Night Lights and The Rundown/Welcome to The Jungle didn't make $1bn between them.

Also gathering no votes is M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, possibly because the name is stupid, possibly because most people who sat through The Village and The Lady In The Water have washed their hands of him, and understandably so. I hated both movies (and thought the latter was such a pissy little rattle-throwing rant that he should be banned from making films until he gets some perspective), but loved the idea for this movie, and thought the teaser trailer was very effective. Then I saw this one.



Now, there's some great moments in that, and it looks like there will be some terrific set pieces, but right in the middle there's that seemingly endless shot of Marky Mark looking horrified and confused, and every drop of awe generated by the trailer evaporates.


Shyamalan's one of the most infuriating directors in the world, because he keeps shooting himself in the foot. In The Lady In The Water he shot himself with Freddy Rodriguez's rubber arm. This time, he's shot himself with Mark Wahlberg's perplexed face. And the movie isn't even out yet! He truly is his own worst enemy.

So out of all the movies on that list that aren't Wall*E, and considering I've seen Jumper, hated the first Narnia film enough for seven sequels, am keeping my fingers crossed for Star Trek but am expecting some pain, and have had my interest in Tom Cruise films damaged to such an extent by his shenanigans that I can't even watch trailers for Valkyrie without wincing, the one that I'm looking forward to most seems to be a garish CGI showreel based on an anime I've never seen, featuring Roger "Peter Mannion from The Thick Of It" Allam as the bad guy, John Goodman (who I've never really warmed to) as Speed's dad, and starring some guy from a Sean "Is that my daugh-dah in they-ah?!?!" Penn film I only heard of last year. But my God, just look at this beautiful trailer.



The moment I saw that, I fell totally in love. The Wachowskis made my favourite ever movie, so I'm always going to see their movies no matter what they make, but this incredible vision, this unique visual wash, this incredibly ambitious attempt to rewrite the rules of cinema! I had no idea they would be presenting my eyes this wondrous present. Just look at these screencaps.

The astonishing colours!


The stunning visual imagination!


The crazy cartoony concepts!


Anime-faced Christina Ricci in a short skirt for the fellas!


Foxy Matthew Fox in a leather jumpsuit for the ladies!


Car chases and crashes and incredible dynamism!


I expect to watch this 80 times this summer. Truly we do not deserve to be breathing the same air as these geniuses. ::prostrates himself before sibling masters of cinema::

In Defence of Howard the Duck

The AV Club, touchstone of US pop culture criticism for hipsters everywhere, is currently running an excellent feature called My Year of Flops, where Nathan Rabin reappraises movies that failed miserably at the box office and didn't even get to have a cult following afterwards. It's been very entertaining, and I will miss it when his year is up, though I reckon he's stretched the parameters where necessary. I'm sure 1941, Mystery Men, Wicker Man, and Hudson Hawk have some kind of a following, and The Fountain surely will as time goes by and people realise what a fascinating, beautifully crafted film it is. I sometimes disagree with some of his conclusions (especially Hudson Hawk, and the haters can bite it right now), but he can often enlighten. This week he discussed the hyper-violent roller-skating classic Heaven's Gate, and though it's been years since I've seen it (back in the day I loved it and watched it repeatedly, which means I lost a lot of days to it), I reckon he might have nailed it.


However, there is one film I'm certain he will tackle soon that will annoy me no matter what, because I just know he will give it a Failure rating. That movie is Howard the Duck, or, as it was called in the UK following its miserable showing at the US box office, Howard: A New Breed Of Hero. Just a quick explanation of his rating system; Failure is a film that has little ambition and fails so badly it doesn't even achieve those minor ambitions, Fiasco is a movie that aims high and sadly falls short, and Secret Success is a movie that has a terrible reputation that is undeserved. Like Hudson Hawk. (Keep biting it, hater nation!) Now, I can safely say he will think HTD a Failure (though I will come back and edit this if he surprises me), and even though I watched it again recently and was saddened by how badly it has dated, I still think it has merits as a movie (though not as an adaptation; I'll get back to that later).

Yes, the slapstick is annoying, and yes, Tim Robbins' big movie debut is pretty terrible too, and the tone is all over the place, and the duck costume looks risible, and Lea Thompson is pretty annoying too, and the parts of the soundtrack that are performed and written by Sylvester (Airwolf theme) Levay and Thomas (Blinded Me With Science) Dolby sound like a medley of all that was wrong with 80s pop music, and a lot of the jokes hit the floor with the splat of a dropped duck egg, but still, I cannot hate on it. Mostly because I was so invested in it when I was a kid, as invested as I am now with Lost, and that's all down to the wonderful comic by Steve Gerber.

Sadly, most people's knowledge of Steve Gerber's bizarre creation is restricted to having heard that that George Lucas movie was a big flop ha ha ha, and as a result they're missing out on one of the funniest satirical creations of the 70s. When I were a nipper who had been fortunate enough to stumble across the character, I may have missed the majority of the jokes about, for example, Reverend Jun Moon Yuc (his followers are the Yuccies), and the evil accountant-wizard Pro-Rata and his castle made of credit cards (not to mention the arc where Howard runs for President), but even so, there were enough spoofs of superhero conventions that even I could get at that age, such as the introduction of Turnip-Man.


As silly as it all sounds, there is a palpable air of melancholy running through it, partially due to Gene Colan's oddly apt art, which manages to be both absurd and dramatic at the same time. Mostly it's down to the central conceit of the character; who better to point out how ridiculous our society is than an alien. I can imagine Gerber was influenced by Walter Tevis and Nicolas Roeg's versions of The Man Who Fell To Earth, another bleak satire.

Whereas that was unleavened by humour, Howard the Duck is often hilarious, but at times it still manages to be unusually dour. Though Howard is lucky enough to find a companion in Beverly Switzler, he is otherwise utterly alone. Already a depressive individual, his accidental exile on earth makes him even more forlorn. For every joke the comic had, and for every absurd character like failed journalist turned super-villain Doctor Bong, there was usually some interlude with Howard having a nervous breakdown or furiously falling out with everyone and sending himself off on long dark nights of the soul. It's a much more affecting read than you would imagine, considering the high levels of wacky. I mean, seriously. Look at Doctor Bong. He's a magnificent bastard!


My love of the character meant I was primed to be thrilled by the existence of a movie, especially one produced by Lucas. Of course, that means little when it's actually written and directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. Okay, so they wrote American Graffiti, and that's a stone-classic, but they also wrote Indiana Jones and The Almost Franchise-Killing Broad Comedy Nonsense (aka Temple of Doom), and they were solely responsible for Best Defense, which was a true soul-sullying nightmare. Howard the Duck is nowhere near as bad as that abomination, but it does its level best to ignore the potential of the character, eschewing the satire and gloominess and concentrating simply on the heelarryus reactions of humans to, get this, a talking duck! They also get rid of his hat, which is unforgivable.

So why do I still defend it? A lot of the soundtrack is terrible, but musical genius and trip-hop hero John Barry provides some excellent themes that give the film a lot more gravitas than it deserves, especially considering the performances. Huyck seemingly said to everyone that the broader the performance the better, which means most of the characters shriek and gurn and gesticulate as if their arms are on fire. It's hard going, sometimes. Only Jeffrey Jones comes out of it with any credit, at first playing things as deadpan as possible and then going all out when his character, Dr. Jenning, becomes possessed by a Dark Overlord of the Universe. He's very very good. I guess you'll have to take my word for it.


However, it does feature some of the best pre-digital effects work in ILM's history, filled with bizarre animation, cutting edge rotoscoping, and a truly remarkable go-motion monster by Phil Tippett, not to mention the first use of digital wire removal. I'm a whore for good effects, which is possibly one of the reasons I will watch any old sci-fi crap; i.e. just to see what crazy shit those guys get up to. All of those B-roll documentaries about the making of movies that got shown on ITV on Sunday afternoons would be taped and watched and rewatched ad infinitum. As a result I would get excited by FX technician names turning up in credits: Dennis Muren, Hoyt Yeatman, Joe Johnston (now a director of middling-to-good movies), Ken Ralston, John Dykstra (creator of the DykstraFlex), Richard Edlund...


I also sought out various stop/go-motion animators: the great Ray Harryhausen, Randall William Cook, David Allen, Tom St. Anand. My favourite, though was Tippett, who animated the AT-AT Walkers in The Empire Strikes Back, Vermithrax Pejorative in Dragonslayer, and thousands of bugs for Starship Troopers. His best pre-digital monster, though, had to be the Dark Overlord. Pictures don't do it justice.


Considering who silly the rest of the movie is, when it turns up it's genuinely shocking, although Tippett has to have it do dumb things to keep the tone light. Otherwise kids would freak out. Part crab, part scorpion, part God-knows-what, it steals the film with ease. It has such personality, and moves with such speed and grace, that you totally buy into it. Post-CGI I can imagine people would think it looks clunky, but to me it's a thing of beauty. It's one of the best movie monsters, and yet it's stuck in a movie no one cares about. Unless you count the Furries. [ETA: From that page I note that the failure of the movie forced Lucas to sell ILM's fledgling CGI arm to Steve Jobs. They later became Pixar. Thanks, Howard the Duck!]


Perhaps the worst thing that could be said about the effects are that it seems like they belong to a different, better movie, but somehow I think the team were trying to emulate the crazy over-the-top art of the comics. In fact they manage to create something completely new and different; the energy animations are totally out there. In addition, some of the scenes, especially those set in a diner full of murderous rednecks, it seems Jenning has been matted into a shot with different lighting, which gives him an even more otherworldy quality than the make-up effects and rotoscoped electricity. It all added up. My little child brain was blown to smithereens by the invention of the animation team.


Of the many indignities visited upon the movies, most egregious is the Razzie Award for Worst Special Effects. Bullshit. That gets me madder than Crash winning Best Picture at the Oscars a couple of years ago. ILM's work on Howard the Duck was just phenomenal, but got overshadowed by the poor reputation of the rest of the movie and then disrespected by a bunch of snotty jerks with stunted senses-of-humour. ::seethe:: I'll be honest, a lot of the opprobrium heaped upon it is deserved, but it's different, filled with bravura effects sequences, and is often quite imaginative. Which, I'm fully aware, seems like the faintest praise possible, until you watch most of the cookie-cutter sci-fi/fantasy movies coming out at the time, many of which are less ridiculous but are horribly derivative and display none of the bravery Lucas, Huyck and Katz exhibited in making a movie about a talking duck saving the world.


I guess the main reason I get upset about it is that the character of Howard is a marvellous creation when handled right, and still has the potential to be used brilliantly, especially in a crazed modern era like the one we're attempting to survive. Marvel have recently started rehabilitating the character, firstly with a Max mini-series a few years back, and now again with Ty Templeton and Juan Bobillo setting him in the modern era, with all of its attendant satirical fodder. Sadly, Templeton is a good writer, but doesn't have the anger that Gerber had, so the first issue of the latest mini is certainly brash but not quite as biting as it could have been. That said, it does feature the best couple of panels I've seen in a long time, with Howard imagining he's playing poker with a series of Marvel grotesques, including Man-Thing, whose touch burns if you feel fear.


Let's hope the character can shake off the crap surrounding it and be used as an astute commentator on the nonsense of modern life, especially since Warren Ellis stopped writing Spider Jerusalem.