Rogue and the Need to Fix

When I wrote down my thoughts on Wonder Woman and finally got my head around the idea that the key to her character is her confidence, I mentioned how attractive an attribute that is.

But in an ironic, dysfunctional way, so is its opposite: neediness.

Off and on throughout my pre-married life I found myself unbelievably attracted to some really needy women. Sometimes it was emotional neediness, sometimes there was something even more seriously wrong in her life, but I kept falling for these women with major problems that needed fixing.

Looking back on it, it's easy to see what the attraction was. I wanted to be the Knight in Shining Armor that rode in and fixed everything. Of course I never could, but man, the idea was addictive. Ever since I've figured that out, I've never criticized women who always seem to fall for Bad Boys. Most people want to be able to be the hero and fix someone. At its root, its a symptom of poor self-esteem (we get to ignore our own problems in order to work on someone else's, plus there's always the remote possibility of an esteem-building success), but it would be awfully hypocritical of me to point fingers at women who do it when I've been guilty so often myself.

And if I'm honest, the desire to fix broken people is still there. It's just hidden by the fact that I married a well-adjusted woman who doesn't need fixing. But I think about my attraction to Rogue and realize that I'm still susceptible.

Rogue is sometimes portrayed as a voluptuous hottie, but not always, and that's not what I dig about her. What attracts me to her is how broken she is; how needy. How opposite she is from Wonder Woman. She's a vivacious, physical woman, but she can't touch anyone. She's tragic. And I love that she's tragic.

I used to like Gambit when he was just flirting with Rogue and she wasn't having any of it. I thought he was charming as hell when she could see through him and had her defenses up. I hated it though when they actually started falling for each other. Part of that's the Sam and Diane Syndrome, but a big part of it was that I lost the fantasy that Rogue was still available for fixing. Yeah, I fantasized about being able to fix a fictional character. The Need to Fix is strong in this one.

Rogue's a dangerous character precisely because the tragedy of her story is such an integral part of who she is. Or, at least who she always has been. It seems like most writers have equated curing her to getting Gilligan off the island or letting Galactica find Earth. Once you do that, do you still have a story? I think maybe you do, it's just a different story from the one you had before.

I wonder how important Rogue's inability to touch needs to be. I think she could be completely cured and still be an interesting character. Not only has her mutation dominated the stories told about her; it's also dominated her personality. If she loses that aspect of herself, who is she really? Maybe it's just me, but I think that a thoughtful, planned exploration of that question would be a fascinating story to read. And once she's figured that out about herself, she's "fixed" and has a new status quo.

Not that she'd be perfect. Not that she'd be Wonder Woman. But she'd be a few steps closer on the journey rather than stalled at the beginning, which is where she's been since her introduction. Personally, I'm ready to see her move on to the next stage of her life. And I don't even care that I'm not the one helping her do it.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

This isn't going to be a real review in the sense that I'm not going to pull the movie apart and look at its individual pieces. In fact, all I'm really going to do is tell you the overall effect it had on me, which was strong. This'll all be spoiler-free, by the way.

I thought the first couple of Potter films were charming and interesting, but nothing that would inspire me to join the obsessive ranks of Potter fandom. My wife likes the books and she has good taste, so I've always assumed that I'd want to eventually read the series, but I haven't been in a rush to do it. After all, I figured, I might as well see the movies first so that I can enjoy them for what they are instead of comparing them to the books.

When the Prisoner of Azkaban movie came out, I thought it was a lot cooler than the first two, but then I don't usually enjoy Chris Columbus films, so that was no big surprise. I liked how Azkaban grounded Hogwarts and turned it into a real place. I also liked Sirius Black and Professor Lupin. And the Dementors were cool and the time travel angle was well played.

I didn't care so much for Goblet of Fire. I'd heard that the series took a darker turn and thought I was prepared for it, but it hurt to watch Ron grow so sullen and all of them get their hearts broken. Because of that, I was a bit nervous about seeing The Order of the Phoenix. I wasn't sure if I wanted to follow the series into deeper darkness, but I'm too much a fan of pop culture to be able to jump out now.

The Order of the Phoenix certainly is a darker movie, but it's also the most complex plotwise and made me think, "Holy crap, there's a lot going on here." That might also be due to my having been spoiled on the Big Event from Half-Blood Prince so that I'm really anxious to experience it for myself and form my own opinion about it. At any rate, for the first time I'm truly intrigued by the mythos and want to know what's going to happen next. Actually, "intrigued" is an understatement. I'm drawn in. I'm compelled. I'm captivated by Harry's world and want to explore it more right now.

I don't want to wait for the rest of the movies. As soon as I finish The Fencing Master, I'm starting The Sorceror's Stone and reading straight through to the end of the series. It's going to be nasty trying to avoid spoilers for the next year or however long it takes me to finish (I'm a slow, lazy reader), but that's what I get for coming late to the party.

So, yeah. I liked the movie.

The new Supergirl, John McClane beats Optimus Prime, and Dalek cupcakes.

Westerns

Clint Eastwood's "Man with No Name" character is getting his own comic book series. I've been itching for a good Western comic, so I'll be giving it a look.

Horror

The absolutely least interesting part of the Dracula story for me is his origin, so a Dracula Year Zero movie sounds like a really awful idea to me. Until you tell me that Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City) is directing it.

I'm not really confident about sticking this under "Horror," but since the very funny Doug Jones plays Abe Sapien in the Hellboy movies, I'll tell you here about his blog.

Fantasy

Kerwin Mathews, the guy who played Sinbad in The 7th Voyage of, died July 5th. He was 81.

Movie studios are looking for the next Harry Potter success. So of course they're snatching up the rights to any book series that remotely features wizards and spells. I guess as long as you're looking to rip off the Potter movies, you might as well go to the Potter rip-off books, but I'm thinking that this is going to get old real fast.

I'm a nerd for historical movies and I've wanted to see one for a while that covers the period between cave men and the first civilizations. Prayer answered. And it looks good too.

Science Fiction

Make your own Dalek cupcakes. (Thanks for the link, Kelly Sue!)

10 Reasons Why John McClane is More Badass than Optimus Prime.

Superheroes

Smallville watchers, meet your Supergirl.

Writing is Apparently Not That Hard

At least, Joe Mathlete makes it look easy with this excerpt from a fictional book (as in, it doesn't actually exist) that I would totally buy. I want to give you a best line, but the whole damn thing's awesome, so I'll just feed you the first in order to entice you to reading the whole thing: "Jameson P. Greeley sipped his glass of milk through a straw, savoring each drop like a kitten would vodka, if the kitten were an alcoholic and/or Russian."

Stuff Nobody Cares About But Me

I thought Meredith's half-sister Lizzie was completely charming in her Grey's Anatomy appearances. Apparently I was in the minority because focus groups didn't like her. Fortunately, the show's producers told the focus groups what to do with themselves and made her a regular character. Just one of the many reasons I love the creators of that show.

Fantastic Four, et al.

I'm a lazy blogger this week. Mainly I've been spending my free time (what little there's been of it) trying to catch up on news from last week as well as keeping up with my responsibilities to Comic World News and Newsarama.
Couple of things you might be interested in though, as far as those sites are concerned. I did an interview with comics writer/inker Jimmy Palmiotti for CWN. He's one of the creators of the Painkiller Jane comic that's now become a TV series at the Sci Fi Channel, and he also wrote tomorrow night's episode (titled "The League") of the show. So, we talked about that and a ton of other stuff. Fun interview.

If you're into adventure comics at all, I wrote a review of Graphic Classics, Vol. 13: Rafael Sabatini for Newsarama. There's even some art from it for you to look at.

What else? I've deliberately spared you my thoughts on the Fantastic Four movie, but no longer. Like I said, I'm feeling lazy and this'll be easy to write about, if not particularly insightful.

SPOILERS FOLLOW.

My hopes for it went from "high" after seeing the trailers to "dashed" after hearing the initial reviews and learning how Galactus was going to be portrayed. Even with dashed hopes though, I still managed to end up disappointed thanks to several factors. Like the movie's heroes not contributing to the resolution of the plot in any meaningful way. Or Doctor Doom's squeaky-voiced reappearance, the incredibly annoying general, and the general's inexplicable desire to let Doom do whatever the hell he wanted even though he didn't help out the least little bit. "You're not producing results, Dr. Richards, so we're bringing in Doom. No, he's not going to actually help or even appear in any scenes with you. He's just going to disappear for a while until he needs access to a deadly weapon that he shouldn't be allowed in the same country with and we're going to let him have it out of gratitude for his -- I dunno -- just hanging around, I guess."

And, oh yeah, Jessica Alba's generally looking creepy.

If you want to make Sue Storm Latina, make her Latina. I don't care. You can even make her a Latina who dyes her hair blonde. That's cool too. But they went way out of their way to hide her ethnicity with those unnaturally blue eyes and it didn't work. It makes Sue look either fake or really ashamed of her heritage. I mean, they didn't try to make up Michael Clarke Duncan to look white in Daredevil, so why is Sue Storm any different? (And don't tell me it was because the actor who plays her brother is white. There's all sorts of ways around that.)

But I could have overlooked all of that for a shot of something that looked like this. Actually, I'd have even settled for this. (Thanks to Jamie Baker for those.)

But, no. We got the freakin' Weather Channel.

Busy. Busy. Frightfully busy.

Today has been too busy to post. Sorry about that.

Frankly, I'm surprised I sneaked out posts Monday and yesterday.

Tomorrow's looking better though.

Links: Disney and Star Wars, JJ Abrams tease, and White Christmas: The Stage Musical

Mystery

As Bookgasm says, "Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai doesn’t just publish great crime fiction – he writes it." Actually, I haven't read any of it yet, so I'm taking their word for it on the "great" part, but the set up to both of his books (so far) certainly sound great. In Little Girl Lost, "John Blake, an NYU dropout turned PI, is stunned to learn that his high school girlfriend, Miranda, who he thought went to medical school and then on to lead a tame life in the Midwest, actually became a stripper. Even more shocking—she's been murdered."

In the sequel, Songs of Innocence, Blake gets involved with another girl with a seedy occupation, and she winds up dead. According to Bookgasm, "it looks like a suicide, but Blake knows better. Her mother doesn’t believe she offed herself, either, and she wants Blake to look into it. He refuses to take her money, referring her to someone else, but only so he can follow leads without her meddling." Maybe it's the great reviews about the writing style; maybe it's that Blake sounds like just the kind of pathetic hero I'd like to see catch a break, but I'm looking forward to checking this series out.

Horror

My favorite ghost story is A Christmas Carol and I'm always excited to hear about a new version of it. And I'd expect to be extra excited to hear that Disney is doing an animated feature based on it. I already watch Mickey's Christmas Carol every December as part of a massive Christmas Carol marathon and I'm willing to add another version to the list. Unfortunately, it's going to be a Robert Zemeckis-directed, motion-capture, CGI movie like The Polar Express. Even more unfortunately, it's going to star Jim Carrey as Scrooge and all the ghosts. The only way this could work is for Carrey to pull off the acting job of his life and give each character distinctive personalities rather than play them as the goofy caricatures that I expect he will. And even then Zemeckis is going to have to work equally as hard to have the characters not be as creepy as the ones in The Polar Express.

The teaser trailer that ran before Transformers for the J.J. Abrams movie is causing quite a stir. IMDB isn't at all helpful, revealing only that the fake working title is Cloverfield. A couple of websites have sprung up that folks thought might be related to it, but Abrams denies that, saying that the real movie site is 1-18-08.com.

Science Fiction

I love the steampunk, and Jay Lake's novel Mainspring about the world's being run by a gigantic clockwork that's about to run down is just begging to be made into a movie that I want to see on opening night.

This is rumor, but The Disney Blog is linking to supposed details about an upgraded film for Disney-MGM's Star Tours attraction. TDB's John Frost says he's also "hearing rumblings of improved relations between George Lucas and the Walt Disney Company" and speculates that that could possibly mean a whole Star Wars land at the Disney-MGM park. How cool would that be?

Stuff Nobody Cares About But Me

Besides A Christmas Carol, my two favorite Christmas movies are Ernest Saves Christmas and White Christmas. A while back, I heard about a theatrical version of White Christmas and wondered what force on Earth could possibly make me go see a version of it that didn't have Bing, Danny, Rosemary, and Vera-Ellen (not to mention Irving Berlin) to carry me through my annual anger over Betty Haynes' knee-jerk rejection of Bob Wallace. Mark Evanier let his curiosity get the better of him and paid the price. For which I'm thankful, because now my curiosity is sated too without my having had to endure it myself.

And we're back

Hi! Hope all my fellow United Statesians had a great Independence Day and my Canadian pals had an awesome Canada Day just a bit earlier than that.

I saw a few movies over the last week. I probably won't do full reviews of them, but the quick rundown is:

Ratatouille: Awesome. Funny and meaningful. Brad Bird retains his perfect record. I saw this one one-and-a-half times because David got freaked out the first time and needed to leave. He empathizes with animals and can't really handle when people are mean to them in movies. The second time I saw it though I was watching the other kids in the audience during the intense parts and no one seemed to be affected, so likely it's just an idiosyncracy of David's.

Live Free or Die Hard: Also awesome. Everything you want in a Die Hard movie, including quick, unobtrusive references to the first film. Lowering the rating to PG-13 didn't hurt it at all, though the trick they played to get the "Yipee Kai Yay" part past the MPAA won't work again if they do another one.

Transformers: There are movies that Michael Bay really shouldn't do, like Pearl Harbor. But Transformers? He was made for that. Nice mix of focus between the human ensemble and the robots. John Turturro not only stole all the scenes he was in; he ran away with them while giggling gleefully. My only complaint is that the final battle was so long that I actually got bored with it. And there were some big plot holes in order to give the less powerful characters a reason to stay on screen. Not one I'd buy, but lots of fun.

The best part of the long weekend was that we added a new member to our family yesterday. He's a bearded dragon and David's named him Qui-Gon. He's a cute little thing now, but in a year or so he's going to look like this. He'll still be cute, just not so little. But for now...

Happy Fourth of July!

And that's it for this week. I'm going offline for the next few days to celebrate the Fourth of July.

Happy Independence Day!

BOOM!

A little taste of Kill All Monsters!

Burn Notice, She Wrote

We watched USA's new show Burn Notice last night. It actually debuted on Thursday, but "Yay, TiVo!"

Really good show. Jeffrey Donovan has a ton of charisma and makes a fascinating lead as newly ex-CIA agent Mike Westin. He's a good-looking guy, but unconventional enough to be interesting. And he's got this smarmy kind of delivery that makes him funny and quickly likable. In that way, having Bruce Campbell in the supporting cast as another ex-CIA man is a great match. They play well together with neither upstaging the other.

It's also nice to see Gabrielle Anwar again. I had a crush on her back when she played Queen Anne in the Disney version of The Three Musketeers. Here, she's Mike's ex-girlfriend Fiona Glenanne, a former IRA member who's got a nasty violent streak, but also obviously cares about Mike. She'll be as fun to watch as Donovan and Campbell.

The only character I didn't care for was Mike's mom, played by Sharon Gless. We used to watch a lot of Cagney & Lacey when I was growing up, so it's great to see her again, but the character is a stereotypical, nagging mom. Maybe Gless can do something with her as we go along. This was just the pilot episode after all. And I do like what her character brings out in Mike. He tries hard not to have anything to do with her, but he can't help but worry about her. It adds a sweet element to him that makes him even more endearing.

The plot was good too. The meta plot involves Mike's trying to figure out why he's been blacklisted from the CIA and is now being followed around now by the FBI. There's some danger in a plot like that because it could take over the whole show, but the characters are all strong enough and -- if the pilot's a good example -- the weekly plots should be good enough to carry the show just fine whether or not Mike ever solves the larger mystery.

One of my favorite spooks is the Headless Horseman, so TiVo snagged an old episode of Murder, She Wrote that featured a Headless Horseman plot. Watched that last night too.

I was never a big fan of that show, but it was fun to watch and try to guess the murderer. I had it figured out about five minutes in, which reminded me why I was never a fan, but as a nostalgic experience, I had a good time. The nerdy dude from Riptide (now that was a good '80s show) played the Ichabod Crane character and Greg Brady played an unconvincing hoodlum/ladies' man a la Brom Van Brunt. Ubiquitous '80s TV guest-stars Doug McClure and Judy Landers played the sheriff and a tavern waitress. And Dr. Stanley Riverside II from Trapper John was the town dentist. Good times.

July theatrical releases

Man, there's just not that much that I'm interested in this month. Maybe I'm just jaded by summer-itis and can't get excited over anything but the big blockbusters, but the indie films, dumb comedies, nature documentaries, and teen horror flicks aren't doing anything for me. As usual, let me know in the comments what I missed (or shouldn't have included).

This Week

Transformers: I don't know a lot about the Transformers and don't have any nostalgia for them, but man those trailers look cool.

July 13

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: Haven't read the books (yet), but I love the movies. I've already pulled out the first four DVDs to rewatch before this comes out.

July 20

Sunshine: The only non-blockbuster to catch my interest this month, and since it's a scifi adventure from the director of 28 Days Later, it's "non-blockbuster" status is pretty iffy. Even then, its being about a mission to the sun doesn't thrill me at all. The only reason I want to see it is because it stars the creepily fascinating Cillian Murphy (Batman Begins, Red Eye).

July 27

The Simpsons Movie: It's been years since I've watched an episode of The Simpsons, but I don't expect that much has changed, including that I'll think it's hilarious. In fact, I suspect that I'll probably find it funnier than I would if I was still exposed to it on a weekly basis.