Alternately, XX-Men: First Class

So I talked already about how I'd be game for an X-Men: First Class sequel that tied into the ancient astronauts/Bermuda Triangle/UFO craze of the 70s and brought in the Shi'ar and the Brood, if just as a crashed spaceship and freaky monsters, but I can see how that might be too Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for the norms. (But Fox owns both X-Men and Aliens. What if they just dispensed with the formalities and made an X-Men Vs. Aliens movie? WHAT. IF.)

Here's the other thing, which keeps with the grounded social justice angle of the films. I wasn't kidding about including Dazzler in the movie. One of the things that has always weirded me out about the X-Men concept is that they're fighting for tolerance, not by protests or diversity, but by dressing up in spandex and fighting ancient Egyptian mutants. I realize that's Marvel's bread and butter, but I always thought there's some interesting story to be had in the X-Men trying to get a mutant character into NBC's Fall line-up and such.

Going back to the movies, the 70s was just as socially turbulent as the 60s, but for homosexuality. You had the Stonewall Riots, Queen and other glam rock bands... basically, what I want is X-Men: Studio 54. Dazzler is this openly mutant performer who the X-Men at least interact with, Magneto is trying to instigate the equivalent of Stonewall (maybe with a villain hoping to use that as an excuse to crackdown on mutants), someone is dancing like John Travolta. I would not be amiss to Mr. Sinister as a Disco Godfather nightclub owner villain, as that would be considerably less ridiculous than, well, someone calling himself Mr. Sinister.


Cast Geoffrey Rush and pave the way for the greatest crossover of all time.

I'm picturing a Hellfire Club riot in the third act that's both cathartic, as mutants overrun the streets and show off their powers in public, and frightening, as some of them terrorize the Muggles and cause wanton destruction.

Correct me if I'm wrong

But it seems like the DCnU can be sorted into three categories.

1. The actual reboot. Your Batman, Superman, and Justice League. Completely different characters, origin stories.

2. Direct carryovers from the old continuity with new costumes. Animal Man, Hawk & Dove, Batwing.

3. The same stuff as before, but with arbitrary changes. For instance, Teen Titans is still about Kon, Tim, Bart, and Cassie, but now Tim is the Swan Queen.

So, my thinking is, wouldn't it be simpler to take category 1 and launch it in a separate imprint? Half those titles seem to take place in the same "Year One" time period that you just know will be impossible to coordinate with "present day," so why not start a new universe from scratch, Ultimates style, with as much a cue as possible taken from the Nolanverse and Man of Steel. With only a dozen or so titles, it would be really easy for the average consumer to keep up on the entire universe.

Plus, you could go the manga route, bundle them all into cheap black and white magazine format, and release them aimed at younger customers. Sort of a "This week in the DC universe" thing, with a rotating selection of titles based on one-shots. So if Batman that month is a done-in-one issue, that goes in the magazine.

Let's call it, say, DC Iconic as a little in-joke. People who might like Batman but not want nine comic books about him and his buddies could still afford to keep up with Batman Iconic and Batgirl Iconic. Two purchases and they'd have the entire Batverse covered. And it would be very easy to keep the DC Iconic line in step with the cartoons, even ones as continuity-fucked as Young Justice. You could advertise it right during the cartoon. Kids, want more of the adventures of Dick Grayson Robin, Wally West Flash, and Kon-El Superboy? Ask your parents for Young Justice Iconic and get downloaded it straight to your computer.

Meanwhile, mainstream continuity can keep going on with titles like Birds of Prey that just wouldn't fly in a "younger" DC universe. If it worked for Marvel Adventures, it can work for DC Comics.

BTW, Heroes For Hire

As long as I'm on the subject of Marvel movies, I was thinking about Heroes For Hire. It's a great concept for a movie--superhero buddy comedy. The thing is, I don't think it should be some 150 million dollar tentpole summer action flick. It's two guys with low-level superpowers fighting crime. They don't even have costumes (well, Iron Fist does, but you could ditch everything but the mask and people would understand).

I say take thirty million dollars or so, get the Old Spice guy to play Cage (you might as well), hire Scott Adkins for Danny Rand, get a bunch of stunt guys dressed up as ninjas, and make a Direct to DVD movie. Because c'mon, the Old Spice guy can't open a movie, but you could definitely turn a profit on a movie where the action is more about stuntwork and kung-fu than CGI. If you look at some of the action in stuff like Undisputed 2 or the latest Universal Soldier movie, they have action scenes that go on for forty minutes whereas with Iron Man, you have to pay fifty mil just to show Tony Stark blowing up robots for five minutes. This is a case where you can be Marvel-friendly cost-effective, and still get your money's worth.

Then maybe have the characters cameo in Avengers 2 or whatever as prospective recruits. "Yeah, okay, you want us to join, great... how much does it pay?" You might even be able to get a little TV series going.

ETA: And with a B-movie, you could make it a period piece in the swinging seventies. Include Misty Knight and Colleen Wing, as played by, say, Gina Torres and Gina Carone. And how great a gag would it be for Samuel L. Jackson to show up as a young Nick Fury, with a Pulp Fiction afro? Good stuff, good stuff.

Is it racist if I just saw The Help to write femslash?

Okay, so I'm not black, I pretty much can't have an opinion on whether The Help is racist or appropriative or what. My opinion pretty much, and this is hedged between a failure at a filmmaking level and a failure at a social justice level, is that it's sort of Racism 101. They're just sort of showing a racist situation and the reaction of African-Americans to it (they don't care for it) without making much of a point or showing much insight. Like, one thing that struck me is that there are a bunch of nice white people who aren't racist at all, and then there are the complete bitches who hate black people. Well, not hate, the biggest real insight here is that the villain says "You'll be in trouble if a real racist finds out about this" and not "Oh, I hate black people." Racists don't think they're racist, is the idea. Skeeter's mother is the closest thing to the banality of evil that I was looking for, where she seems nice but acts racist, but then kinda makes up for it later and it doesn't seem like she learned anything, just that she wiggled out of getting any comeuppance for her actions.

It just seems to me that racism would be much more endemic. You'd have cute Emma Stone being really nice and considerate, as long as you were white, and then being a bitch to black people, instead of just being a bitch all around. Since treating people different based on their skin color seems like the essence, one might say the definition, of racism.

On a filmmaking level, the filmmakers were really going for Sandra Bullock kinda fluff (for instance, racism seems to have primarily been fought with wacky shenanigans and all the scenes of the maids telling Skeeter their stories end with warm belly laughs, so you can tell they're doing A Good Thing, even though they're recounting the poor circumstances of their lives, which you'd think would be pretty depressing), so they include a lot of stuff about Emma Stone's character--she has this romance subplot that literally has nothing to do with the plot, so at the end her boyfriend walks out on her over her being a Nice White Lady, and it's like "RACISM!"--and for as many scenes as they give Emma Stone of her protesting that it's not about her (seriously, there are one or two scenes where they could've flashed a caption that said "NOT APPROPRIATION" and it would be more subtle), she's clearly the heroine. And she doesn't need to be. Imagine if Interview With A Vampire had included Christian Slater's mother and girlfriend... no one cares!

And all this really important character stuff happens entirely off-screen. There's a white woman whose husband wants children and she's secretly been pregnant multiple times and had miscarriages, and one scene we just cut to the husband and he's like "Oh, she told me all about it, we worked it out, OFF-SCREEN!" And the woman has a maid who is being beaten by her husband, who is completely off-screen, and she leaves him, OFF-SCREEN. Really, Emma Stone's publishing career is more important than that?

That's another thing, the movie is really Oscar baity. They have miscarriages and cancer and abusive husbands... it's like a soap opera, because a lot of it doesn't register. It just drops in. At the end of the day, I think this movie isn't so much about the black maids as it is about letting audiences say "Oh, I would've been one of the nice white people." And there's money in that, but it seems pretty disingenuous as the message in a message movie.

Oh, and I don't know if this movie counts as having a Mystical Negro, but being able to bake your shit into a chocolate pie and have someone eat it without at all being able to detect it, that's pretty mystical.

Right, now can I write Skeeter/Hilly hatesex in good conscience? Because you can't tell me there wasn't something there.