With money being tight, it’s difficult for me to get out and see as many movies as I’d like. Public Enemies was just released, and I still haven’t been able to go and see Up. I have, however, been introduced to several new television shows, and they can be just as interesting as the latest cinematic blockbuster, not to mention being reasonably priced. So, here we have the beginning of a new Monday feature (falling into the same category as movies in terms of reviews), discussing what I’m watching on the tube.

I’ve been introduced to NCIS, which I understand is a spin-off of JAG but that’s a show I’ve never watched so I don’t think it bears further mention. NCIS stands alone, and apart from the similarly titled CSI. I’ve seen a very few episodes of CSI but have not become a regular watcher, although I admit I find pretty much every line David Caruso growls in the Miami version of the show to be hilarious. More than once my apartment has erupted in laughter at the cheesiness of the opening. CSI: Miami tries very hard to take itself seriously and wants us to take it seriously too, and in doing so it almost becomes a parody of itself.

NCIS doesn’t have that problem. While I find the ridiculously-empowered CSIs in Miami to be somewhat one-note and interchangeable in my opinion, the NCIS team is full of multi-faceted well-characterized individuals who all have roles on the team and work well with one another, like people do in an actual workplace. The feel of the show would be closer to the realistic and dramatic bent of Law & Order if it weren’t for the counter-intelligence, para-military or covert operations elements that rival The Unit in terms of pulse-pounding military television action-adventure. Balancing out the drama and explosions is some genuine light-hearted humor, which often relies more on character interaction and development than gross-out or slapstick laughs – although I can’t deny I chuckle every single time Gibbs smacks one of his team upside the head.

Which leads me neatly back to what I feel is the strongest part of NCIS: the characters. Balancing out the direct and undeniable professionalism of team leader Gibbs and the calculated coolness and precision of Mossad assassin liaison Ziva David are the pop-culture obsessed DiNozzo and tech-headed McGee, whom DiNozzo often calls “Probie” or “McNerd,” if that tells you anything about their relationship. And then there’s the perky goth forensics analyst Abby, who’s always playing rather loud music in her lab, and “Ducky” the Scots medical examiner, who classes the place up by referring to people by their full names. I don’t know if anybody else on the entire show calls Gibbs “Jethro.” There’s a realism to these fictional characters that seems lacking in most other dramas of this type, save perhaps Law & Order, in that there’s no one person on the team who’s good at everything, and everybody has a vital role to play in dealing with the mystery or operation at hand.

In short, I enjoy NCIS immensely, and I think that anybody reading these words should give it a try if you haven’t already.

Oh, and never mess with a Marine’s coffee.

The real world is a chaotic and disheartening place. Once again a steady stream of work has kept me from being able to get my thoughts out as expediently as I would like. The major flaw in establishing a schedule is the feeling one gets when falling behind. However, rather than allowing that feeling to defeat me, here’s a little something that combines Wednesday’s comic content with Thursday’s thoughts on writing.

Let’s talk about Iron Man and Batman.

It’s undeniable that there are similarities between the Armored Avenger and the Dark Knight, so allow me to get those out of the way. Both characters dress up in self-designed suits to punch out bad guys, act like your typical celebutard to rival any of the Kardashian sisters whenever anybody’s looking, and actually use their fortunes to undermine the more dastardly uses of their companies’ resources. Oh, and both maintain disturbingly large amounts of data about the other superheroes around them, just in case one of them does a face heel turn and decides that reducing the nearest city to rubble is more fun than saving the various kittens stuck in its trees.

This is where the similarities end, however, and while Batman is one of my favorite superheroes of either major universe, I’m still a Marvel True Believer at heart. The reason I prefer Iron Man to Batman has to do with the depth of Tony Stark. It’s something that’s existed for quite a while and only recently exploded into the mainstream, and it’s based on a different foundation than Batman.

Bruce as a young boy sees his parents get shot and killed, and as a result is driven to become a force of vengeance and natural justice. His wounds are internal ones, deep mental scars that border on psychosis. He’s badass, to be certain, but he’s also not quite right in the head. As the Christian Bale version says in Batman Begins, he “clearly has issues,” a funny observation coming from the same person who played Patrick Bateman.

Tony, on the other hand, grows up knowing his father and instead of being vengeful from a young age is genius-level smart. He carries on the family business of making things that blow up for the men & women who carry such things around at the behest of tax-paying conservatives, and it’s only after a brush with the dark and bloody world he helped create that he snaps himself out of a haze of booze, broads and Bentleys to do something about it. So instead of being a driven character that is motivated by the loss of family, we see a man who is struggling to change not only the world around him, but himself as well.

Batman has only ever been Batman. While this by no means makes him a shallow character, it does necessitate a certain single-mindedness in his character. His quest for justice in Gotham City may weary him at times, as he is only human, but as he doesn’t let a personal life or much of anything short of severe injury stand between him and his goals, he’s never out of action for long. There’s also the fact that according to some authors, Batman’s had ninja training, and we all know what unstoppable killing machines ninja are, even if Batman refuses to kill.

Iron Man isn’t made of iron. When he removes his suit, it’s difficult for him to be seen as heroic or even admirable. He’s an alcoholic, a womanizer, and something of an arrogant, selfish prick. And unlike Bruce Wayne’s public face, it’s less of an act and more of who he really is. He wants to be heroic, to live up to the deeds and accolades associated with Iron Man, but outside of the armor it’s all to easy for him to fall short of those high expectations. He’s a study in duality, even moreso than Batman, and that, to me, is what makes him so compelling.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the goddamn Batman. But Iron Man, to me, is a more interesting character and keeps me coming back to the Matt Fraction-penned ‘Invincible Iron Man’ title every month. There is, essentially, more to write when it comes to Tony Stark, and that’s without even mentioning his association with the Avengers or his own dark pantheon of villains.

There’s also the fact that his name is the cue for a Black Sabbath song. This is awesome.

Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, John Turturro, Ramon Rodriguez, Isabel Lucas, Peter Cullen, Hugo Weaving and Frank Welker.

More than meets the critics’ eyes.

Continuing where The Jovian Flight ended.

Rated PG for thematic elements and adult themes

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Zero Punctuation and the above entry has a particularly good point about originality and creativeness around 1:00 in that applies to entertainment other than gaming. It seems to me that an increasing number of films, tv series and novels are falling into somewhat disturbing if not self-destructive patterns that I’d like to discuss, if only to remind myself of things not to do when trying to write something creative and original that might see the light of day outside of this blog.

Trying To Do Everything

An action movie nowadays can’t satisfy itself with just being an action movie. There has to be humor and romance, too. Sometimes it can be pulled off with snappy writing and interesting, well-rounded characters – Star Trek comes to mind – but more often than not the explosions, laughs and heartstring-tugging live in separate cubicles in the same creative space. The first Transformers film wasn’t necessarily bad, in that there are impressive action sequences and a fresh perspective on beloved characters that offend just as many people as they delight, but that’s a point I’ll revisit later. Here we see the problem I’m discussing at the moment, in that the mood of the film is rather schizophrenic. We’re jolted from mysterious to heartwarming to pulse-pounding to funny and back again without any sort of warning that there’s a track change imminent. The end result is that the overall experience isn’t as good as it could have been, and tends to feel more mediocre than innovative. This isn’t to say that Transformers is necessarily a bad film, it just suffers from some of the problems that are beginning to permeate the entire entertainment industry.

Dropping Plot Threads

This is related to trying to do everything or please everybody. As a story grows and develops, it’s possible that an aspect of the story might fall by the wayside. It’s possible to become fixated on one aspect of your creation, or be told that a storyline is more important than another, and focus all of your energy on that while other plot threads which may or may not be more interesting wither and die. More often than not in a film, a character will make a reference to something ominous or foreboding, and either the terrible thing never occurs or we catch a glimpse of it and it’s never seen again, like the skeletal hand we see for just a moment in Van Helsing.

Watering Down Themes & Characters

Here I’d like to bring up Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Indiana Jones is a nearly mythic figure of adventure and machismo, whose escapades into the fables and stories of various faiths made for classic examples of good cinematic storytelling. He’d been in three films that featured artifacts of untold power with long, storied histories, all of which were terrestrial in nature. Then he jumps into a fridge. It’s not a bad analogy, in point of fact. The character I remember from my childhood is in here, but he’s surrounded on all sides by face-melting agony that rivals the Ark of the Covenant’s power, and what’s worse is that this horror is indiscriminate, targeting more than just Nazi’s. Maybe my taste for what can laughably be considered George Lucas’ writing skills has been dulled by the utter banality of the Star Wars prequels, and maybe Indy simply hasn’t aged well despite Harrison Ford being in great shape. But in order to appeal to a mainstream audience with little time or interest in “older” movies, a character who used to drive an entire film on his own now has to share the screen with sub-par CGI sequences, hot young male action star du jour, and the aforementioned schizophrenic shifts in mood and theme. Despite the mythological and supernatural touches here and there in the first three films, for the most part they feel like pure high adventure and nothing else. The latest entry tries to recapture that magic while heading into science fiction territory and reminding us how devastating and horrible nuclear weapons are. Apart from the viewer, the biggest victim is Indiana Jones himself.

The Fan Problem

I know that my last paragraph began to ramble a bit because I’m a fan of the original Indiana Jones movies. I can admit that there were things I liked about Crystal Skull, in that there are glimpses of the old sparkle behind the haggard appearance of an aging Indy, but there are some who decry it as the rape of their childhoods. A lot of people see the Transformers films in a similar light because they bear no resemblance whatsoever to the original cartoon. The offended parties are the same kind of people who live in their mothers’ basements whining on Conan forums how “the depiction of Daisy McSwordboobs from page 74 paragraph 3 in Conan Gets A Fixed-Rate Mortgage” isn’t the same as it is within the MMOG Age of Conan, to paraphrase Yahtzee again. You’re not going to please the most hardcore of hardcore fans no matter what you do. There are some who consider Star Trek to be an utter pile of excrement painted in gold, blue and red and shaped like the USS Enterprise, and they tend to whine on and on like an under-oiled ceiling fan about how it messes up the canon or violates this or that. It’s important to keep in mind that entertainment is a form of art and art is utterly and completely subjective. True, there is good art and there is bad art, but opinions on which is which are going to vary from person to person, sometimes wildly. I think most people can agree, however, that trying something new and different regardless of its quality is a tad more respectable than simply rehashing the same ideas over and over again just to appease a fan base or appeal to a certain demographic or keep the flow of cocaine and hookers going.

In short, it seems best to focus on one thing and try to do it better than everybody else than trying to do everything at once. Don’t be afraid to try something new and different even if the experiment blows up in your face. And no matter what some money-grubbing executive might say, telling a good story has little or nothing to do with what surveys or sales figures have to say. Go somewhere nobody’s ever been before, even if it’s slightly to one side or another.

I might be seeing Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen this weekend, and if I do, I’m going to do my utmost to judge it for myself, without preconceived notions from either those who loved it or those who hated it. We are all entitled to our own opinions. And if we all thought the same about this sort of thing, the Internet would be a lot less entertaining. If nothing else, it will be another opportunity for me to mentally not how to write, or perhaps how not to write, in order to avoid swimming in that filth-infested body of water people call the mainstream.