Before we get to addressing the modified greeting today, I want to first thank everyone that has come out to support me on this page. My posts have collectively gathered over 4,000 reads, and to be able to reach such a wide audience on my own feet with you to support me has been a truly humbling experience. However, I feel like I have been unfair to you. This pages mission statement was to give my readers the low down on all things going on in the nerd community and in that regard I have utterly failed. It's not a failure that truly weighs on me as it was an impossible task for me to achieve on my own, and even though I had offers to help run the page, life proves to be a gargantuan obstacle that gets in the way of small hobbies like writing a blog. This will be my final entry, FOR NOW. Within the next 6 days or perhaps even the next few hours I am going to witness the birth of my son: James Scott Oden. Between my wife's pregnancy, and my hours at my new job, writing these posts have been very hard to do, and now with my first kid being on the horizon, I feel that the amount of times I'll be able to open a web browser, let alone write a post will be few in number. So this is a close in the chapter of writing for me in Comic Relief! and while there is a lot I would love to talk about (Black Panther's great opening reception, the god awful Venom and Solo trailers, or the AMAZING Deadpool 2 or Avengers: Infinity War spots), there has been an issue that I have very much wanted to discuss, James Mangold's scrutiny over the super hero genre and whether or not Logan is a testament prove the worth of his words.
Over the past few months Director and Screenwriter of Hugh Jackman's final hurrah as the Wolverine has made some very public displays in interviews on his opinion of the superhero genre. To save you a lot of time drudging through a lot of explicit remarks that to a degree are downright distasteful, we'll just say that he doesn't like anything about them. He feels that they are super saturating the medium of film, that they lack any emotional weight, and most recently that he despises post credit scenes with a venom reserved by most people for things of actual detriment like terrorists or rapists. With Mangold's Logan being nominated by the academy for best original screen play, it begs to question by many: does he have a point? and while there is certainly glimmers of truth in what he says, the short answer of it is: no, and furthermore it should be noted that James Mangold additionally doesn't have a particularly great platform to stand on as, well, James Mangold has yet to make a good, TRUE superhero film.
If you made it to this paragraph without foaming at the mouth and rage quitting before I get to explain myself, I want to thank you for taking the time to actually hear out an opinion that may heavily differ from your own, please give yourself a pat on the back from me in thanks. Anyways, there are a lot of elements to creating a good super hero film. However, there is one thing that surmounts all others in that regard: respect of source material, of legacy, and of characters. All it takes is for you to watch Logan closely, and it is very clear that James Mangold holds none of these things sacred. One scene in particular stands out in support of this. There is a scene where Daphne Keene's X-23 is reading a comic book. It's an X men book and the characters are dressed in the iconic garb that you'd see in a Jim Lee book from the 80's & 90s. Logan takes the book and says "Look at this, this is all a bunch of bullshit - it wasn't like this!" Now to the plain observer this is trying to show the exaggeration of the truth that goes behind building a legend, but if you look behind the scenes of it all, it's very clear that Jame Mangold incorporated this scene for one reason: he HATES super heroes. Hugh Jackman has petitioned countless times over the years to adopt his iconic costume in film, and Logan was no different. However, this scene was a way for Mangold to give fans the middle finger and say: THIS IS MY MOVIE I DO WHAT I WANT! Ultimately, what he wanted was to make a good movie, and a good western at that. In these aspects he succeeded. Logan was a brilliant film, and a gritty homage to the spaghetti Western with love notes to films like Shane and The Magnificent Seven, however, delivering a good super hero movie requires the one thing Mangold didn't have, nor was he interested in bringing to play: love for the character and the universe that surrounds him.
However that's not to say that Mangold didn't have his points. The success of the film does speak volumes to it in fact. It's interesting to see that the thing that so hindered the original X men films, an inability to commit wholly to the story's super hero routes, is the thing that made Logan so well received. Several critics lauded Logan because it did not feel at all like a superhero film, and since its release many have clamored for more films like it. It's sad really because this film is literally a step backward for the genre, so why does it seem that everyone sees this as a pioneering film in the genre? The answer is that Manigold is right about one thing, the genre has become super saturated. Super hero films are almost getting to a point where the might as well be a completely different medium to critique by. After the negative reviews by critics of Justice League, but the fairly positive fan reception, many have begun to question if Super hero movies should actually be critiqued in the same fashion as other films because the audience that goes to see them has entirely different expectations from a film like that. I don't have a solution to that problem, but I do know that while a film like Logan may be a breath of fresh air, the grass always looks greener from the other side, and having seen both sides of this fence, I much prefer the shade of green we have now to then.
I hope you have enjoyed this article and the content I have provided over the past year or so. Hopefully I will be able to post again sooner rather than later, but until then, this has been Comic Relief! stay nerdy and TTFN
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