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Guest DVD Review: "Comic Book: The Movie"
A good friend of mine, Ryan Steans, is a movie lover and displaced Texan
living in Arizona. He maintains a blog site called the League
of Melbotis (Melbotis is his dog). Anyhow, when he posted a
review of this film on his website, I asked him if I could use it on our page.
Ryan: I watched all of "Comic
Book: The Movie" this weekend. And I am surprised to find out what
a huge dork director and star Mark Hamill (Star Wars) is in real life. Wow. What
a colossal nerd. But that's okay. He must actually LOVE being Luke Skywalker,
because I cannot believe how dedicated to nerd-life he actually is. Comic Book:
the Movie (hereafter referred to as CBTM) is about a guy hitting middle age who
loves comics and has been brought on board the pre-production team for a film
adaptation of his favorite character, Captain Courage. Captain Courage has been
changed to Codename: C.O.U.R.A.G.E., and is set to begin production as an
ultra-violent revenge fantasy, intended to appeal to a modern audience.
Anyway,
Mark Hamill's character decides he doesn't like the updated version of the
character, and while at the San Diego ComicCon, he goes about trying to persuade
the producers that they should stay true to the original (if dated) premise. It
attempts to follow the semi-improvised "documentaries" of the
Christopher Guest genre, but only occasionally does it seem to work.
What follows is less than hilarious, and probably best to be avoided by anyone
who doesn't have at least one long box in his or her closet. The movie is so
full of inside jokes, I was stunned the release was wide enough that I was able
to find the DVD at Target. Even casual readers of comics would probably miss a
lot of the jokes and references.
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Melbotis with his copy of
Comic Book: the Movie
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The production values are TERRIBLE. Audio is often messy, for some reason, we
constantly see the cameraman, and the whole thing is shot on DV cameras (no,
there's no film transfer here at all). I do give them credit for being able to
tape at all in the infamously chaotic lanes of the San Diego ComicCon. But one
feels that an actual documentary would have far better served the intended
purpose of the film.
What was really strange was how many celebrities do appear in CBTM, including
Hugh Hefner, Sid Caesar, Bruce Campbell, Stan Lee, and a host of comic creators
(who are all uniformly chubby). It was cool to see some creators I am familiar
with, and it was interesting to see them improvising their own personal
recollections of Captain Courage (a mish mash of Shazam!, Superman and Captain
America).
For some reason they also decided to add in a character of "the
cameraman," who is pretty much some guy playing "Otto" from The
Simpsons. I don't know who this guy is, but he wasn't funny. And when your movie
is improvised, that ain't good. There's a particularly irritating scene, in
which we are reminded that these are all L.A. folks, in which Otto the cameraman
tells a girl in a cowboy hat that "Austin, Texas was named after
"Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man." Wow. That's hilarious.
These are the jokes that didn't end up on the cutting room floor.
In the end, CBTM may serve one terrific purpose, and that's to send a
forewarning to producers everywhere. Producers can learn that as they option the
rights to comic characters, they don't own the characters. Hell, the comic
companies which do own them barely have any control. These characters belong to
the fans. Changing the characters, altering them and adding a "hip
factor" is not going to add anything to the character, it's just going to
water down what made the character popular for 50+ years. There's a correlation
between the success of comic-based movies and how close they stay to the source
material.
Unfortunately, I don't think CBTM is going to hold any producer's attention long
enough that it's going to sway their opinions too much. And one wonders if the
movie itself, with it's low budget look and feel, and it's wacky,
wish-fulfillment ending, wouldn't end up doing more harm than good.
Nathan's note: Thanks, Ryan! And keep up the good work at The
League.
3/1/04
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