One Actor, Two Superheroes
By Dan Brown They’ve made a ton of superhero movies. How many, exactly? Here's one measure: There are now multiple actors who have played at least two different comic-book characters in their careers. When Supergirl debuts in theatres on June 26, the list will grow even longer because it features Jason Momoa in a supporting role. You might be thinking, I see, Supergirl will be teaming up with Aquaman – the underseas hero who Momoa has played in movies like Justice League and the Lost Kingdom. Nope. Momoa now stars as Lobo, the interstellar mercenary, not the dude who can command whales to do his bidding. The DC movie universe rebooted with last summer’s Superman, so Momoa has in front of him a new acting challenge, if that’s the right word. Nor is he the only one. Perhaps the most famous example is Ben Affleck. In 2003, he appeared as brooding Marvel crime-fighter Daredevil. Thirteen years later, he donned the cape and cowl belonging to brooding DC crime-fighter Batman. In acting, they call that range. Ryan Reynolds has technically appeared as three different comic characters: Green Lantern, an early version of Deadpool (in X-Men Origins: Wolverine), and the actual Deadpool we all recognize now. In fact, in the latest Deadpool movie, there’s even a joke about the trend of performers appearing as more than one hero when the merc with a mouth mistakes the Human Torch for Captain America, who were both brought to life by Chris Evans. Other examples of the trend are Karl Urban and Elliot Page. If you include both heroes and supervillains, you can also add Michael B. Jordan and Michael Keaton. If you’re asking yourself, “So what?” there is a relevant point to be made here. What the growing list shows is fickle movie audiences are more than willing to give an actor a second chance. They don’t hold a stinky performance against them. Fans of superhero flicks are more than willing to embrace a performer who takes on a new persona. Green Lantern was a notorious bomb in 2011. Reynolds appearing in that role was clearly a career miscue, yet to this day theatregoers are more than happy to buy tickets to see him as Deadpool. Same with Affleck – although the Daredevil motion picture was aggressively mediocre, that failure didn’t stop fans from supporting him as the Dark Knight in multiple adventures. Heck, how many superhero/actor portmanteau nicknames are there? I’m talking about “Batfleck.” No one should be surprised how some actors are making a living by playing “the superhero type.” Exactly how many cowboy roles does Clint Eastwood have on his filmography? Along the same lines, Robert De Niro is the eternal gangster and Noah Wyle has played two different Emergency Room doctors, and has plenty of time left in his career for more. But perhaps the riskiest comic-book recasting is to come at the end of this year when Avengers: Doomsday arrives in theatres on December 18. You likely know by now that Robert Downey Jr. – formerly Iron Man — will appear as the titular bad guy, Victor Von Doom. However, no one knows how the creative team making the movie is going to handle his return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe after Tony Stark's death. Is this Doom a Stark variant from another reality? Will they even acknowledge that Doom has the same face as Stark? Will the other Avengers recognize him? Presumably he’s going to take his mask off at some point in the upcoming film, so stay tuned to see how Marvel diehards react to whatever plot device the filmmakers decide to use. As for the inverse of this trend – the Hollywood tradition of superheroes who have been played by more than one thespian – there’s not enough space here to name all of them. Superman alone has been played by, like, a kazillion different guys! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
POP-CULTURE COLUMN: Disclosure Day better be a CE3K sequel
By Dan Brown They say there are too damn many sequels. I don’t agree – in at least one case. If Disclosure Day isn’t a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I’m gonna be pissed. The new Steven Spielberg-directed motion picture about aliens is set to land in theatres on June 12, and I so want it to be the second part of 1977’s Close Encounters. CE3K was the first Spielberg movie I saw in a movie theatre. It blew my nine-year-old brain. Although UFOs were a big deal in the 1970s, it was about more than that: The mystery of the unknown, obsession, belonging, asserting the right of the individual to leave their family. I was sold. So I’ll take a Close Encounters sequel any way I can get it. It doesn’t even have to be a particularly great movie! You may be wondering: How come Dan doesn’t know if Disclosure Day is a sequel or not? You would think, since its debut is only a few days away, I – along with the general public – would understand that much about the plot. But the team behind Disclosure Day is being cagey. No one has said it’s a direct sequel to Close Encounters. However, we do know from the trailers it’s about aliens coming to Earth in flying saucers. And some people connected with the film have been dropping enticing hints. “There are definitely questions posed by Close Encounters that are answered in Disclosure Day,” Emily Blunt told the movie magazine Empire. Blunt, by the way, has been getting positive advance notices for her performance as a TV weather girl who gets up in an unraveling conspiracy. Also, there’s at least two shots in the Disclosure Day trailer that evoke Close Encounters. One has a UFO emerging from a bank of clouds hat, to me, looks like an homage to the climax of CE3K, when the giant mothership descends in full view on Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. There’s also a white house in the woods that looks an awful lot like the one where the little boy gets abducted in Close Encounters. Some are speculating that Disclosure Day is a spiritual sequel – in the same way 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was a spiritual sequel to Close Encounters itself. But that’s not enough for me. You may recall how Star Wars hit theatres about six months before Close Encounters back in the 1970s. I was so jazzed by the combination of these two event movies in close proximity, the combined impact literally changed my life. But looking back, I realize just CE3K on its own would have been a game-changer for me. It sparked my imagination. The characters were so compelling. It made me fall deeper in love with movies. It felt plausible. And it made me . . . optimistic. The message that aliens were here to help us, not hurt us, ran counter to every other alien flick I’d seen by that point. I see more movies at home these days than in the theatres. But a Spielberg film about aliens is a premise I'm not able to resist – and if it’s a sequel, my prayers will have been answered. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
POP-CULTURE COLUMN: I Hate To Say It, But Spaceballs Isn’t Funny
By Dan Brown As you may have heard, there’s going to be a sequel to Spaceballs, the Mel Brooks Star Wars parody that debuted a long time ago in 1987. Brooks and the cast (a mix of old hands and newcomers) have been doing publicity to drum up interest in the upcoming film, dubbed The New One, which will land in theatres April 23 next year. Providing movie theatres still exist. I suppose, as a sci-fi fan, I should be eagerly anticipating The New One, which promises to bring more Star Wars jokes and new pop-culture references to the big screen. But can I let you in on a secret? I don’t find Spaceballs funny. It might be familiar. It might even be fun to watch. But it ain’t funny. You likely have fuzzy memories of the gags written into the Spaceballs script. For instance: *Pizza the Hutt, the alien glutton who finds himself delicious.. *Barf, a half-human, half-dog alien hybrid who is his own best friend. *Dark Helmet . . . a villain played by Rick Moranis who has a giant helmet. *Daphne Zuniga’s Vespa is a Druish princess. *The Yoda figure is called Yogurt. *The Schwartz is a mystical power derived from merchandising dollars. And so on. Jokes like these are fine. Some of them even bring a half-smile to my face. But not a one of them is hilarious. Spaceballs has certainly achieved a kind of cultural staying power. Somewhere on this planet, on some channel or network, Spaceballs is playing right now. And by dint of ubiquity, it is one of those so-so motion pictures that we convince ourselves is remarkable. Like the Austin Powers films, it achieves influence just by enduring. But it’s not a comedy that achieves greatness. It’s not even the greatest Mel Brooks comedy. It doesn’t break new comedic ground like, say, Blazing Saddles. There’s nothing in Spaceballs to compare to the Blazing Saddles campfire scene where cowboy after cowboy farts until the joke is beaten into the ground, then they let more farts rip and it becomes funny all over again. Talk about audacious for the times! The Star Wars spoof also lacks a weirdly intense lead character, like Gene Wildern, who turned in such a great performance in Young Frankenstein. Besides, if Brooks had been itching to take on Star Wars, he wouldn’t have waited until four years after Return of the Jedi appeared in theatres. By then, the George Lucas trilogy was already retreating from the public consciousness. (Spoiler for younger readers: Star Wars came back!) It’s certainly not the greatest Star Wars parody, either. In fact, you could argue that the definitive comic spin on Star Wars still has yet to be made. There’s been a long history of attempts. The 1978 short film Hardware Wars was the first try, followed when the internet was in its infancy by the 1997 online short Troops. The slam against Lucas is that he takes his space opera too seriously. Look at the fact he never mocked his own creation the way the Star Trek brain trust does with its animated series Lower Decks. At least Trek’s producers realized the comedy potential of poking fun at themselves. (Granted, Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville beat Lower Decks to the punch by three years) Of course, some crusty Star Wars fans would likely say the Book of Boba Fett itself was an inadvertent self-parody! There’s no shortage of Star Wars material to work with, so how about it, Hollywood? Just mocking The Phantom Menace on its own could inspire so many laughs! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
POP CULTURE: The Oscars Recognize Drew Struzan
By Dan Brown Drew Struzan’s name cropped up at the Oscars on Sunday. He’s a guy who never got a nomination in his 78 years, but surely deserved an award for his lifetime of service to Hollywood. Struzan – who was mentioned during the ever-expanding In Memoriam segment – defined movie imagery for a generation of film fans like me, even though he never made or appeared in a motion picture himself. He died last October in Pasadena. We may never see another cinema artist who has as vast an influence as Struzan did. If you grew up geeky in the 1970s or 1980s, you knew his work — even if you had never met him or didn’t know what he looked like. He was billed at the Academy Awards telecast as a poster artist, which doesn’t sit well with diehard movie enthusiasts who considered him a visionary genius. As a kid, I thought the right word to describe his work was “photorealistic,” but his trademark style was actually the result of airbrushing, which was much in vogue in the 1970s. Especially if you owned a Chevy van. Perhaps the first work of his I came across wasn’t on a poster, but the cover of a paperback edition of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The publisher took Struzan art from Blade Runner and used it as the front, since the Dick novel was the source material for Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi feature. I remember looking at that cover, eyeing the likeness of Harrison Ford closely, and thinking, “This can’t be a drawing or a painting, it’s too detailed. This must be a photo.” That was my first awareness of Drew Struzan. I was 13 years old. I was already in love with movies, and movie posters. Struzan began his career with one-sheets for such drive-in fare as Empire of the Ants and Food of the Gods, then caught a lucky break helping a fellow artist with a poster to announce the re-release in 1978 of Star Wars. The result of their collaboration was a meta-poster: The painted composition looks like an old circus poster plastered on the plywood fence around a construction site. It was also the beginning of his long partnership with George Lucas. Even after Struzan ended his career, he would come out of retirement to help the Star Wars creator with art for such movies as The Phantom Menace. His other posters included E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Risky Business, Coming to America, the Goonies and the Muppet Movie. He could produce intricately crafted images, and he could so on a tight deadline: He painted the poster for John Carpenter’s The Thing remake literally overnight. For a generation of geeks like yours truly, Struzan’s posters defined the look of motion pictures. He brought aliens, adventurers, weirdos, muppets and Tom Cruise to life when young people weren’t sitting in a theatre. To understand his influence, you have to remember the context he was working in: VCRs were scarce back then, so you could see movies only in theatres, or occasionally on network TV. Posters were the main representation in the public’s mind of any given film because trailers weren’t as omnipresent as they are now. We had no YouTube to watch them on. Believe it or not, there was a time when people decided to see one film over another based solely on the posters outside the theatre, and Struzan deserves a golden statuette simply for the fact he sold countless movie tickets in his decades-long career. (For all I know, the Oscar folks may have tried to give him an honorary Oscar, but his family turned them down; Struzan suffered from Alzheimer’s in his later years.) Drew Struzan was one of the all-time greats, and is a personal favourite of mine, along with Nick Cardy. We may never see Struzan’s like again. All these decades later, I’m amazed Hollywood is still using movie posters to advertise their products. The artistry of posters persists, but this form of art could be living on borrowed time, along with movie houses themselves. We can only hope future generations of film fans recognize the artistry that’s involved, and keep demanding posters rendered exclusively by human hands. Our responsibility is to help educate those future geeks, making sure the names of creators like Drew Struzan don’t pass entirely from the collective memory. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Wither Star Wars?
By Dan Brown As you may have heard, Star Wars is at a crossroads. Lucasfilm, the company that produces the venerable franchise, recently got a new boss. Or rather bosses. Kathleen Kennedy is stepping down as president of the Disney subsidiary, and a two-headed monster is taking her place. Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan, two old hands at Lucasfilm, were announced last month as the venture’s new co-presidents – which sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. More on that in a moment. Depending on which social-media posts you read, Kennedy was either the very best or very worst thing that ever happened to the space-fantasy franchise. She was promoted to president in 2012, when Disney bought Lucasfilm and all its properties from namesake founder George Lucas. Since then, her record as leader has been . . . mixed at best. There have been high points, like the two seasons of Tony Gilroy’s Andor streaming series, as well as low points, like 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker, a movie even diehard fans admit is a chaotic mess. How bad is the sequel trilogy-concluding film? One line from Rise of Skywalker – “Somehow, Palpatine returned” – has since become shorthand for lazy moviemaking. Meanwhile, Andor has been lauded as a prescient fictional roadmap to the current political situation in the U.S. Kennedy wisely decided to let Gilroy have free reign to bring his vision to the small screen. She has greenlit other projects, including Rogue One, The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Solo: A Star Wars Story (which I will defend to the death!). She has been blamed, unfairly in my eyes, for every misstep Lucasfilm has made along the way, and rarely gets any credit for keeping Star Wars alive in the public imagination. But I think we can all agree we’re happy she tried. Let’s face it, Star Wars has never been more ubiquitous. Lucas himself was not exactly a prolific filmmaker, seeming hesitant to exploit the storytelling possibilities of the universe he invented. In the seven years between 2005’s Revenge of the Sith and the Disney purchase, Lucas focused on the Clone Wars and didn’t put out enough other Star Wars product to satisfy fans. He had run out of gas. Now, about the management structure that’s taking Kennedy’s place. I don’t see how it can work. My firm belief is that committees can’t provide vision or leadership. And at this uncertain moment Lucasfilm needs more of both. Having two presidents, even if one is responsible for creative decisions and the other is in charge of operations, can lead only to heartache. My prediction is that, within a few short years, one of them will be forced out. It’s just not a sustainable model that can lead to success over a long period. I think what corporate history teaches us is that executives have an innate desire to build and protect their own empires. But at least it will give the fanboys something to complain about online! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Welcome to the Age of the Spiritual Sequel
Welcome to the age of the spiritual sequel By Dan Brown There’s been much discussion in recent days about the trailer for the new Steven Spielberg film Disclosure Day. Spielberg is being cagey about the new film’s relationship to his 1977 UFO classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Is Disclosure Day a sequel to Close Encounters? Is it a standalone film? The online debate rages on. Of course, there is one other possibility: It could be set in the same world, but not directly follow the events of Close Encounters. In other words, it could be a spiritual sequel. Which wouldn’t be surprising, since this is the age of the spiritual sequel. There appear to be more and more of them all the time. When the mockumentary series The Paper debuted last year, many reviewers pointed out how it was set in the same world as The Office. It even shared at least one character with its predecessor series. The Creed trilogy follows the six Rocky movies, but the central character is not Balboa himself, but the son of his frenemy Apollo Creed. The Texas college comedy Everybody Wants Some takes place in 1980, four years after Dazed and Confused, which is set in 1976 on the last day of high school. But EWS focuses on a different set of students; you don’t need to have seen the original to understand it. And the Exorcist, which stars Scarlett Johannson, is set for release a year from this March and is not a remake of or direct sequel to the 1973 horror classic, although it is set in the same imaginative universe. Spiritual sequels – which in television were always called spinoffs – make a lot of sense. Pretty much every sequel you can think of has already been made, so billing a movie as a spiritual successor gives studio marketing departments a way to promote a motion picture while also giving directors and producers creative room to manoeuvre. Are they better than direct sequels or prequels? There may be too little information at this point to make a definitive conclusion on that question. It’s probably much harder for filmmakers to capture the “flavour” of a popular motion picture while also creating a story that can stand on its own for those viewers who have no knowledge or memory of the first one. One suspects we are going to see even more of them – look at the Star Wars movies and shows all set in the same galaxy. Having a consistent milieu makes it easier for storytellers to find a launching point they can exploit, a logical entry point into a setting that already feels familiar to fans. Me, I have reason to believe Disclosure Day may be more of a direct sequel to Close Encounters than we’ve been led to believe. When a new trailer dropped during the Super Bowl, there were at least two images that look mighty familiar to me, including a spaceship shrouded in clouds and an isolated white house situated perfectly for an alien abduction. We’ll all find out for sure on June 12, when Spielberg's latest lands in theatres. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
