The Gloves Are Off

Know my problem? No not that stockings thing. Or that shoe sniffing bit. My problem is I tend to find most movies entertaining to the point where I generally won't have a bad word to say about them. If I don't enjoy it then I simply think it is okay rather than actually bad. With the exceptions of The Golden Compass and The Last Airbender (geez what train-wrecks they were). The latter of which I still can't bring myself to finish even after 5 separate attempts. The past year though has seen a change in this attitude and it all starts with a crazy billionaire in a cowl.

The Dark Knight is without doubt a rather spectacular piece of cinema, one some friends and I had the pleasure of seeing in IMAX scale of awesome. Heath Ledger (rest well) easily made cinema history with his portrayal of the Clown Prince of Crime, evident by the unimaginative many who tried to imitate him for Halloween. Throw in the new dark and troubled Two-Face and the moving picture was a spectacle of the comic book industry on the silver screen, one that made me walk from the screen room post credits with a look of awe, wonder, and braindead-ness; IMAX TDK having left my brains scattered on the back wall.

That disappearing pencil scene. THAT SCENE!

Time went by. We lost a wonderful actor. The new Joker was no more. Suddenly Christopher Nolan's vision for the ultimate Batman movie trilogy was thrown into turmoil with no real life Caped Crusader to right things. Until Bane.

Bane is a wonderful villain notorious on the page for "breaking the bat" yet a laughing stock on screen thanks to that nipple-suited Batman flick. But maybe this time it would be different. So time went by once more until finally it was released; The Dark Knight Rises. Crowds were wowed. Bane retook his place as a true enemy of the Bat. Hidden energy projects. Betrayals. Secrets revealed. Hostages. A bright flash. A nod to a little bird. Credits roll. The same friends I witnessed the splendour of TDK with emerged from the screen room.

"That was fucking awesome."

"Brilliant. What did you think, Liam?"

Hesitantly, "...I got kinda bored. Almost fell asleep at one point."

Don't get me wrong on this, it is not a bad movie, not by a long shot. It's a good movie. But it just didn't wow me. It didn't draw me in. Had it been on TV it may have a warranted a channel surf and a casual "What else is on?"

How could a film based on a comic book (a favourite medium), on a superhero (a favourite character type), done to a blockbuster standard not have impressed me? A question I still cannot answer. Perhaps I just wasn't in the mood. But it happened again. Only this time the hero wasn't wearing tights and a cape, instead he wore a suit and a licence to kill.

James' ADD was acting up again.

James Bond, in his many movie incarnations, has been watched since I was a kid. The back of my skull has a white scar beneath the curls after a shoving incident by a sister; refusing to give up the remote to a bigger and shark-scared sister during an underwater scene is a bad idea in case you wondered. No one could doubt that 007 has been slowly declining in quality over the past few years. Tomorrow Never Dies was the last great Bond flick in my opinion, with Casino Royale having some great scenes but not wowing me overall. Quantum of Solace (I actually couldn't remember the name of it for a moment) was forgettable at best. Actually forgettable. I have no idea what happens in that movie and I know I've seen it. So Skyfall seemed like it could fix things for me, after all, Q was in it. Fucking Q! Spy nerd and gadget-maker extraordinaire!

People saw it and everyone got all excited and said how amazing it was and how you just had to see it. I saw it. It sucked. Most of the first act was nigh on useless and didn't even register with the shiny-thing part of my brain let alone the part that actually thinks. It wasn't until Javier Bardem sauntered in, being a real Bond villain with intelligence, willpower, and a deformity to rival how we feel the morning after a night on the sauce, that things really got interesting. But even then it was like sitting in traffic; fluctuating between "YAY, were moving!" and "I am gonna cut some fool!" at uneven intervals. The epilogue hits and suddenly, for all of 30 seconds, you're watching a James Bond movie. Credits roll. I annoyed more than one person that night with my pseudo-narration of how sorry I was to have watched it.

There it was, two of the biggest blockbusters within 12 months and I probably had more fun scratching myself in the shower that one time than in the collective hours of watching them. Please understand that the shower in question was incredible and I really had to itch. Plus I like putting that thought into your heads...perverts.

Suddenly there were bad things to be said about movies. Movies that had entertained me yet somehow deserved my verbal thrashing. Why, most of this post is just that. So what had changed? Do I feel the films hadn't done justice to the source material? Had they been over-hyped in the media and my mind? Yet it didn't stop at movies, for books and TV shows were now open to my judgement. A switch in me has flipped and with it the critic, scourge of the creative types, has awoken from his 25 year slumber.

It is a rather freeing thing. For much how a brighter light makes a darker shadow, those things that give me joy are now so much more wonderful with my ire and judgement here to balance the equation.

It is a brave new world, my reading friends.

And I am going love and hate it more than ever.