According to Twitter, today is International Superheroes day! So let’s talk about a guy who doesn’t actually have powers, has even less self-esteem, claims not to be the family type despite having 5+ kids running around, and probably could use a hug.
In this video, the vlogbrothers duo Hank and John Green argue about Batman in one of the best songs to dance to that also has the lyric “Crime is caused by systemic disenfranchisement”. It’s an auto-tuned mash up of two videos that they each did– one where John asserts that he “kind-of hates Batman” and one where Hank asserts that “we are all Bat-People”. They both have very interesting points (which I’ll get to in a second), but first, we must air our biases. I’ll admit, I’m a bit of a DCAU (that’s DC Animated Universe) stan– my first real introduction to some of DC’s characters was through the 2003 Teen Titans tv show, Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill are my favorite iterations of Batman and the Joker, and I find that the DCAU does generally good work in terms of their writing and character development– not to mention the animation and everything else that goes into making a cartoon show, but I’m really talking about the writing here. The DCAU gave us such iconic lines as “I am vengeance, I am the night, I! AM! BATMAN!” and “I feel like I live in a world made of cardboard…” just to name a few. The DCAU gets down to the essence of its characters and even manages to make Superman and Martian Manhunter, two of the most powerful beings in the DC universe, relatable and interesting.
That being said, I heavily dislike Man of Steel and Dawn of Justice (though the latter less than the former). I am also not looking forward to Suicide Squad, and think Jared Leto needs to stop. Though Viola Davis is a great choice for Amanda Waller. So there’s that. The comics are on their way to a brand-new “not-a-reboot-but-totally-a-reboot-because-everyone-hated-the-New-52”, and some of the choices they’ve made in their books are just baffling (the Superman/Wonder Woman ship, that Harley Quinn contest, the entirety of Red Hood and the Outlaws). They are doing some good stuff– what I’ve seen of Arrow, The Flash, and Supergirl is great– but overall, I feel like DC needs an enema to get rid of all that Miller left over from the 80’s. It won’t solve everything, but it’s a start.
That being said, let’s talk about Batman.
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04/13/2018
R for Ratatouille
valeriemclean1919 Brad Bird, criticism, F for Fake, Film, Kyle Kallgren, literary criticism, Orson Wells, Ratatouille About Film, About Other Art, About Writing 0 Comments
F for Fake and Ratatouille are kind of the same movie.
I mean, no, they’re not exactly the same. But they’re both mostly about someone taking credit for another person’s art, with strong critiques of the commercial business of art and a subplot deconstructing the relationship that art critics and other art experts have with artists and their creations. They’re even both directed by highly respected auteurs trying to salvage a project that the original director couldn’t complete. It’s just that one of those auteurs is Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles) and the other is Orson Welles (Citizen freaking Kane). The conclusions that both of the films come to are disparate, but contradictory.
First, a bit of plot summary. Ratatouille is a film about a rat that manages to become the head chef at a Parisian restaurant that somehow used to have 5 stars despite the Michelin rating system only going up to three stars. He achieves this by pulling the hair of his hapless human companion, which controls the human like a marionette. It’s my favorite PIXAR film of all time. F for Fake is an Orson Welles mostly-non-fiction film that is about two of the most notorious fakers of the 20th century. The first is Elmyr de Horay, an art forger that specialized in the post-impressionists, particularly Picasso and Modigliani. The second, and more famous of the two, is Elmyr’s biographer Clifford Irving, who also wrote a best-selling, but fake, autobiography of an even more famous man– a business tycoon by the name of Howard Hughes.
The things to unpack in these films are mostly the questions that they raise about the nature of art and art criticism. Kyle Kallgren’s review of F for Fake begins with the question “Is there such a thing as fake art?” I would posit that both films say the answer is “no”, but for different reasons.
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