Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!

My favorite villain motivation is still Gene Hackman’s Luthor in the first Superman movie…he was going to sink California and make a killing in real estate anyway, even before Superman made his debut. Superman was just an obstacle that showed up.

My example of worst villain motivation is the Green Goblin in the first Spider-Man film. The moment he kills all of his ex-business pals on that balcony in Times Square, his reason for being a supervillain is over. It seemed a stretch for me to keep him antagonizing Spidey for the rest of the movie. (Though, like IRON MAN, I did like a lot of the first Spider-Man movie.)

I want to say that Jack Nicholson’s Joker had a similar problem in Burton’s Batman film, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen it, so I can’t speak definitively on it.

But then he wouldn’t be a Jesus Analog, just a generic wise man. The flaw of Christian storytelling is that it starts with the basic assumption that people are helpless dupes waiting to be told what to do by a cosmic leader. And any leader will do, but you’d better hope he’s the good leader, not one of the many evil leaders. But all you can really do is hope because you’ll do whatever anyone in authority tells you.

Conflict arises only because the evil cosmic leader always shows up first to tell people to do bad things, requiring the good leader to then put in an appearance and steer all the lemmings away from the cliff edge. The resolution occurs when the lemmings realize they’re dupes and then are grateful for the good leader saving some of the ones who hoped correctly. But the important part is that no one ever decides to try and save themselves.

It’s maddeningly inhumane story telling.

…did you like working on it enough to do the sequel if offered? :)

To John (#41) – I guess I’m not explaining myself well. People didn’t have to hate Happy Days for the term “Jump the Shark” to acquire its meaning, but I think people WOULD have to hate KotCS to replace a popular idiom by agreement (why else agree?). And I promise you, and Mr. August, that’s absolutely the last I will say about this completely ridiculous point of argument. Cheers.

I’m a fan of the PG rating, too. Charlie and Corpse Bride were PG.

@Johnny (#23):

Comment editing will come back. Just doing some infrastructure changes.

@Keith (#43):

Yet I wonder if the Jesus-analog could work as an advisor rather than outright savior. In Star Wars, that’s the Wise Old Man (Obi Wan, Yoda) who shows the way without doing the work.

Aslan’s explanation about why he didn’t intervene earlier was so unsatisfactory that it raised the classic Problem of Evil: if a god figure allows evil, is he evil himself?

Are you talking about Narnia? I think it’s great when studios make PG movies for families and kids (at least when they make good ones). But it’s even worse when studios make movies that should be PG-13 but they get rated just PG, it gives the false impression that the movie is OK for little kids.

“most ‘violent’ family movie everâ€?? dude – i know some families with kids as young as five who watch “The Passion of the Christâ€? every Easter.”

The point is that Narnia may be the most violent movie promoted as a family movie. Sure, there are tons of idiot parents who let their kids watch anything, but that doesn’t make those movies “family movies”.

I’m really surprised about people not liking Iron Man, while there will always be minor quibbles about superhero movies, I thought it was excellent and that the setup was one of the best parts. People complain that action movies have bad dialogue, characters, and plot (see INDY), and here’s one that did all those well.

And I do like the phrase “nuke the fridge”, it is a nice alternative to “jump the shark” which has been way overused.

I always thought of Indy as a truly vulnerable, flawed hero (the mining car race, and life boat drop, being small exceptions), but surviving an A-bomb blast in a fridge pushed him into cartoon character land. What happened to the Indy that had to have Marion nurse his many wounds? And that wasn’t the only problem I had with the characterization of Indy in this flick. It’s like they’d forgotten who he was in the previous films. How come he’s all of a sudden a government op? I always read him as a rogue archaeologist, willing to work with the bureaucracy if it suits his needs. Never in a million years would I think he would be at the beck and call of the “top men” that would end up boxing away all the treasures he sought.

It’s the current MO for action movie stars I guess. They all have to perform, or survive, superhuman events. John McClane has to surf a jet instead of simply running across broken glass, etc etc etc