Super Movies!!

Okay so this whole idea of superhero movies was brought on by a commercial I saw last week advertising Green Lantern coming to DVD last Friday.  It also reminded me of how much I felt dirty for enjoying Green Lantern, as a stand alone movie it was good, however calling it Green Lantern is like slapping DC across the face with sweaty jock-strap while riding off into the sunset upon a Nazi tank.  Needless to say some superhero movies aren't exactly a good thing.  But with that little tangent out of the way lets get on with the show.

In 1978 Richard Donner shocked the world with the first major motion picture superhero movie: Superman.  Yes that classic movie staring none other than Christopher Reeve as the wondrous man of steel.  Movie going audiences everywhere were shocked, wowed and otherwise overly excited about his dawning on the big screen.  And thus launched a flurry of carefully created superhero movies, that until the year 2000, had a good heart but were ultimately underfunded, with a few minor exceptions.

In the dawning of the new millennium, fresh off the shoulders of movies such as Blade and Mystery Men we see the dawning of a new era of superhero movies.  This new era was designed to include all generations from getting the younger kids involved in superheros and comic books, to giving the older generations nostalgia from their child hood of trading cards and $.05 comic books (you know that the value of things has gone up when you can't even find a cents key on your keyboard).  The thing is: it worked, mostly.  The 21st century hit the ground running with movies like X-Men and Spiderman.  So it should be no surprise that Marvel had control of the first big time superhero sensation and Stan Lee spared no expense to capitalize on this.

I'm sure we all remember this.

The times it seemed were going well, however as fate would have it there were sharks in the water.  For every good movie that came out there was at least one bad.  With such travesties as Hulk, X-Men: The Last Stand, and Blade: Trinity lurking in the midst, its no surprise that the genre had gotten such a bad rap from A LOT of film critics.

But in 2005 a light was turned on at the end of the tunnel with the dawning of Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan's reboot of Batman movies with Christian Bale as the caped crusader.  This light only got brighter with titles like Watchmen, Kick-Ass, and Iron Man 2, which, despite being a superhero sequel, was quite good.

Now this year, 2011 we see such movies as Thor, Captain America, X-Men: First Class and the debauchery that was called Green Lantern, 3 of 4 are good which for superhero movies is a win in my book.  That and all the buzz about next years movie based on The Avengers and the third of the new generation of Batman movies the future only looks better.

Stan Lee makes all the pain of bad superhero movies go away.

But lets get into what we all want to hear about: my opinion.  Now if you ask me letting big name Hollywood directors and Actors just romp on and make superhero movies is a mistake, but if that never happened then we would never have even the good ones.  However a good idea would be to get the creators of such superheroes involved in the making of the movies, oh wait, Stan Lee, riiiigggghhhhttttt (ever notice how Marvel movies tend to be just better). 

Back to the whole Green Lantern thing, sorry I know I said I was done by I just can't get the horror out of my head.  It's a classic example of a movie that if it was a purely unique idea would have been great but it wasn't so it was bad.  And when things like this happen its not necessarily the fault of one person every time, but it does boil down to three major categories: Actors, Directors, and Writers.  For Green Lantern it was a combination of all three.  The execution wasn't very good and with all the cheesy one-liners you could tell that they spilled Ryan Reynolds all over the script.  Ryan Reynolds couldn't decide if he was playing a fun loving Hal Jordan, or a Hal Jordan who was so pissy about everything going wrong in his life that he came over as being way too serious, and Martin Campbell gave him no help, quite literally NO HELP (probably because he was too busy counting his presale money and planning what size of yacht to buy next).

What Green Lantern made me do

You know an even better option to making these movies better would be for big time movie studios to make an open contest taking in fans concepts and screenplays (if they have them) and choose 15 they like the best and have a fan vote to, wait for it, GIVE THE VIEWERS WHAT THEY WANT.  Because ultimately that is who is paying the bills for the movie, the viewers and a lot of Hollywood tends to forget this.  Also we could go ahead and throw in an open casting call to fill these roles, because its not that big and well known names are a bad thing, but they're not the best thing to use when trying to fill a character that was a major part of our childhood, i.e. Nicholas Cage in Ghost Rider.  Yea, a few people like Robert Downy Jr. can get away with it.  But I can't be the only person who thought of Steve Rogers as being portrayed by The Human Torch, or the guy from Push.

Oh hey look Captain America, or better know as The Human Torch.

Now I'm all for Hollywood making these movies, but if you go by everything that I say they need to have a severe leash on some parts of them, thats right  Ghost Rider, looking at you, and give more freedom to the intellectual property holders because, here's an idea, they're the ones who made it good in the beginning.  So long and short when you go out next Tuesday and buy your Blu-Ray/DVD combo packs of Captain America: The First Avenger, just like I will, enjoy it, but remember to think about which superhero movies are worth the money you spend, and which ones just leave your DVD/Blu-Ray player with a swanky after funk that you just can't get out of your house.