labingi

Logan does what big, established franchise films should: it uses its built-in budget and audience to do high quality, authentic storytelling rather than safe-bet replication of the usual action-hero(es) formula. Imagine: the entire movie—employing 15,000 people, the end credits tell us—has not one youthful action hero-protagonist at the height of (or discovering) his powers. Instead, it has a run-down guy who looks fifty, a guy in his nineties, and a kid. My God, it's a breath of fresh air.

Logan is a story about getting old. And superhero movie though it is, its exploration of aging could hardly be more down to earth. It has introduced me to an entirely new experience: personally identifying with Wolverine! He's in a position that many of us are in, myself included: feeling the wear and tear of age sapping our physical strength and energy at the very time we find ourselves caught between caring for aged parents and raising still young and needy children. We find ourselves Aeneas, carrying our father on our backs, holding our son by the hand, and hoping to survive whatever ordeal a difficult world has thrust us into.( Read more... )

The latest X-Men film, The Wolverine, has recently opened in theaters. As you might guess, it’s about Wolverine–but I need to talk about the women. As gender fail goes, The Wolverine is by no means an egregious offender. In some ways, it handles its female characters well, but this is all the more reason to critique it: its gender fail not a fluke. It’s not a movie that just happened to be penned by a sexist writer. If anything, its handling of women is better than the norm for a Hollywood superhero flick. Yet it’s still offensive, and we have to do better. Now.

Spoiler-lite summary: the film is set after X-Men: The Last Stand, in which Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) killed an insane Jean-Grey-as-the-Phoenix (Famke Janssen) to stop her wreaking destruction. We catch up with him haunted by dreams of her and trying to put his identity as “Wolverine” behind him. But his past finds him in the form of an old Japanese acquaintance (Haruhiko Yamanouchi) he saved from the bombing of Nagasaki.* This old man wants to see Wolverine before he dies. Thus, Wolverine is whisked off to Japan where adventure ensues, including romance with his old friend’s granddaughter, Mariko (Tao Okamoto). The story is based on one of Wolverine’s more famous comic book plotlines, but I’m going to address the movieverse as a standalone.

The film does some redeeming gender work. One enjoyable character is Yukio (Rila Fukushima), a multitalented mutant sidekick with amazing fighting skills, wit, charm, courage, and culturally plausible Japanese cuteness. (But note the word “sidekick.”) Mariko is also updated from the traditional damsel in distress. Though not a mutant, she has some decent fighting skills of her own and is courageous, proactive, and intelligent.

Read the rest at The Geek Girl Project.

Title: "Paint Job"
Fandom: X-Men (movieverse)
Length: about 180 words
Ratings/Warnings: PG for angst
Characters: Erik, Raven
Summary: How come Erik's helmet is a different color from Shaw's?

( Paint Job )

Wherein I gripe about one song and praise another, with X-Men: First Class as a common thread (with a brief digression into Mirage of Blaze).

This Charles/Erik vid, by KaseytheJudge, was one of the early XM:FC vid recs I came across, and it remains one of the better Charles/Erik vids I've seen. The song, "Losing Your Memory" (Ryan Star) has a elegiac feel perfect for the arc of the Charles/Erik relationship in XM:FC. When I first saw the vid, however, I was jarred by its abrupt stop, in the middle of Star beginning the wail the next verse. Having acquainted myself with the song, I have a much more sympathy for the vidder's difficulty here.

( It is close to being a good song... )

On a happier note, I have found the quintessential Charles/Erik song, and it is Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." Now, this is a very famous song precisely because it speaks broadly to many people's experience of love. There's no shortage of stories it could apply to. But I truly have never encountered a story it fits so perfectly as it fits the trajectory of Charles and Erik.

Finding a really good version of this song with more than the original four verses is frustrating in the manner of looking for a Hamlet fan vid that is not a re-enactment filmed for someone's Shakespeare class. But after much listening, I have settled on Jeff Buckley's cover as the best version I've come across. It cuts two verses, including (happily) the one fits Charles/Erik least ("You say I took the name in vain..."). It also cuts the verse that is usually last ("I did my best; it wasn't much..."). This is a bit of shame but no great impediment.

I'm not going to bother to gloss this one for Charles and Erik because it's obvious, isn't it? Here are the lyrics.. I will love forever someone who would vid this... but I suspect there's not currently enough material. Maybe if they get another movie or two out of the XM:FC franchise?

"The X-Men, Evolution, and Non-Allegorical Interpretation"

In her commentary on X-Men: First Class, Abigail Nussbaum argues that the film unintentionally downplays Nazi atrocities and promotes anti-Israeli sentiment by equating dominant Western culture's fear of the Jewish "other" with non-mutant humanity's arguably justifiable fear of dangerously powerful mutants, the unfortunate implication being that fear of the Jewish other may be justified. Nussbaum, oaktree89, and others make important observations about the problematic linking of Jewishness, villainy, and the dangers of mutation in the plotline of Erik Lehnsherr. However, Nussbaum's reading of The X-Men as a "parable" for social issues such as homosexuality and Jewishness oversimplifies its symbolic structure. I would argue that The X-Men (the franchise and its specific iterations) is most sociologically useful when it is read not an as allegory for real-world issues but rather as applicable to them.

( Read more... )

Title: "A Dash of Truth Spread Thinly"
Fandom: X-Men (movieverse)
Characters/Pairings: Erik, Raven, Charles
Word Count:~5700
Rating: PG-13 for sex, language, and themes
Summary: Who is Mystique if not Magneto's follower? A reinterpretation of the end of X2 in the light of Raven as Charles's sister; implied AU for X3.
A/N: This is a heavy revision of a story of the same title I posted earlier. The title is from Tori Amos's "Pancake," my new X2 Erik and Raven song.

( A Dash of Truth Spread Thinly )

Title: "A Dash of Truth Spread Thinly"
Fandom: X-Men (movieverse)
Characters/Pairings: Erik/Raven, Charles
Word Count: 3500
Rating: PG-13 for sex and themes
Summary: Set after X-Men: First Class and after X2, implied AU for X3. Erik and Raven: Forty years together, and it does seem a day too much.
A/N: The title is from Tori Amos's "Pancake," my new X2 Erik and Raven song.

( A Dash of Truth Spread Thinly )

More A/N: I am not best pleased with this fic, maybe it wanted to be in Raven's POV. Or maybe it just covers so much territory, touching on so many characters' lives that it needed to be a novel. Or maybe I've come up against the fundamental ideological conundrum that drives The X-Men: there is no easy solution and thus no real space for narrative closure. Or maybe I just need to revise more...

"X-Men: First Class as a Love Story"

The Trope of Falling in Love

"Falling in love" has been the dominant trope in our literary landscape several hundred years, and as with any such overriding cultural construction, one need merely nod at it to claim one has created a sufficient story. This descent into narrative laziness is succinctly invoked in Avril Lavigne's exceptionally grating song, "Skater Boy," which opens, "He was a boy. She was a girl. / Can I make it any more obvious?" No. In eight words, every one of us instantly understands; that's how thoroughly embedded the cliché is.

In the majority of narratives, nodding at the cliché largely stands in for developing a compelling relationship between two individuals. The highest literary example of this may be Romeo and Juliet, in which two teens have sexual chemistry at a dance, spend a few days obsessing over each other due to hormones and reverse psychology, and end up killing themselves for the love of someone they scarcely had a chance to get to know. It's sad, and it works as a story because it's about the sadness of the social situation rather than Romeo and Juliet. It's not, however, about falling in love.

Like most every cliché, "falling in love" gained its stature because it has real power. People really do fall in love, and it's amazing. And in those rare instances where this narrative is executed as a natural, dynamic building of relationship between two people who genuinely "click," it can create an extremely compelling story.

( Read on: this will be about Charles and Erik eventually )

In previous X-Men meta, lyonesse, goodbyemyfancy, and I shared some confusion over Charles's backstory in X-Men: FC. This led me to ponderings...

Why is Charles not utterly screwed up?

There's a Twilight Zone episode in which a little boy has the power to make people disappear at will. Understandably, everyone who knows him is terrified of him and, thus, caters to his every whim, lest he get testy and zap them. As a result, the boy is a petulant brat with a sense of entitlement the size of Texas. Why was Charles Xavier not this boy?

( Read more... )

I am still exorcising the X-Men bug. More fic...

Title: "Scenes from a Love Affair"
Fandom: X-Men (movies)
Characters: Charles, Erik
Rating/Warnings: R-ish for tame sex and infrequent swearing
Spoilers: X-Men: First Class
Summary: Young and in love and recruiting in Mexico.
A/N: Songs courtesy of Tom Lehrer and the Kingston Trio. There is political incorrectness in this story, particularly in Lehrer's humor, in defense of which I can only say it was 1962, and I don't mean to say it's not problematic.

( Scenes from a Love Affair )