I find the use of hot, Hollywood sexpots in Superhero roles interesting.
Generally, I'm thinking of Halle Berry, Scarlett Johansson and Jessica Boobface when I'm talking on this matter.
What I mean is, when you look at comic book culture, the first thing that pops into most people is the archetypal nerd. The 35-year-old man in the XXXL T-Shirt, probably sporting some wacky internet reference that only the people in his WoW guild would understand, lives in his mom's basement, and can name all 50,000 current pokemon types but can't list more than one date he's been on. Now you take this guy, the (stereotypical) representative of ultra-lameness, and then on the opposite end of the scale, on the ultra-coolness side, we have it being represented by the lovely starlettes and success types such as the aforementioned Hollywood Hotties.
Obviously, a lot wrong with that idea. The comic book culture is not soley defined by such couch potato luggabouts. I'm a big comic book fan and I will guarantee you I do not fit that mold, and I actually don't know any other comic fans that do fit it (I can see some as that guy in a couple years, but at the moment, not a chance). But let's pretend we're not trying to be politically correct, and the point I'm making is that generally hot chicks + comic books = nerd's dream fantasty aka not realistic.
And so now here we have the super hero movie, which has been enjoying a successful run recently, and we see that it's employed its fair share of eye candy, and here I'm talking of the variety possessing breasts (not that there aren't breastless ones; I will not argue that Ryan Reynolds is something to be ignored - but I digress). And to me, it sometimes feels like a betrayal of the genre, of the story - and lemme tell ya, comics can really have story. Comics can be deep, thoughtful, provoking. It is not all men with rippling biceps and off-the-charts testosterone levels or women with astronomical tit-sizes that threaten to break free of their sexy spandex costumes that must be super glued to their body.
But anyway, I'm having some trouble staying on track, so here's an example. Halle Berry in the X-Men franchise (one of my personal favorites). Now, in my opinion, she does a less that stellar performance in this series. In fact, I'm going to go so far as to say she does a relatively shittastic job, actually. The character she plays, Storm, is one of the most quintessential X-Men characters, and, in addition to being strong as a major player in the X-Men universe, she's played a powerful role as being one of the first strong, black, female leads in the Marvel comic world. Her character in itself is generally one to be admired; Storm is driven by a heavy moral compass, seeks to protect the weak from the bullish strong, is powerful but not corrupt, and has been party to saving the world any number of times. Halle Berry's Storm? Yeah, she throws around some cool CGI weather effects, gets a haircut between X2 and X-Men 3 and probably stops traffic in her leathertight outfit, but other than that she's nothing. You could put some legs on a plastic waterbottle and have it act out Storm and I'd be more interested.
Not to say attractive woman can't play superhero roles. Because look at Katie Holmes and Gwyneth Paltrow; they play excellent roles. But there's the thing! Surely Hollywood can find some attractive ladies (since you can't be in Hollywood without being attractive in most cases, it seems) that also have talent, instead of thinking "I know! We'll really hook the nerds by getting the chick with the biggest rack we can find to act out this role!" I mean, Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow. I'm sure there were plenty of Natasha fans getting hot and pleasantly bothered at the news when it first came out. But when I watched her in Iron Man 2 (which had a couple of flaws in itself but ANYWAY) I was mostly disappointed. I mean come on, didn't even get a Russian accent from her. And that's all I really wanted.
I think what this boils down to is: Attractive people who can't act for shit generally make me an unhappy camper, and when they are in a movie that is otherwise excellent, they make me an even unhappier camper, like one who's stuck in the rain and a bear came and ate my food and is in my tent looking for more and so I'm stuck up a tree and accidentally sat on a pinecone so now I've got this terribly uncomfortable thing shoved up my ass and it's just an all around bad situation. Superhero movies are great! I love them. I think a lot of them have done a lot to really expose the genre for what it can be, which is more than what people may think it is at the moment. But falling back on the idea that all people really want to see is hotties in spandex takes away from it. Not to say it isn't present in hundreds of genres of films, but it's the superhero genre I'm talking about here.
This has been a wandering post, and that's because my mind tends to wander on the issue. I can't really pinpoint what it is that really bothers me about this. Maybe it's that you cast someone who is so obviously so removed from their role, who is so opposite of the culture they're mostly appealing to, who doesn't have talent and can just walk into a storyline as a character that maybe I happen to care deeply about, and then just stomp all over it in their killer four-inch-heels.
*Check the inconsistent capitalization of Superhero throughout this post that I was too lazy to change.
No comments:
Post a Comment