GENTLEMEN GET SHOTS

Shy Guy

1 INT. DRAWING ROOM — DAY

CODY [60] sits, posed, in the sparse, Edwardian drawing room with that period’s appropriate furnishings, illuminated singly by a grand window. His posture is controlled, left ankle on right knee…

…The ankle persistently slips, which he corrects and holds until it slips again. His attire is wartime regal, in a ‘modern’ sort of way, a grey-patina and uninspired officer’s garb…

Hand shaking, he reaches for a book sitting on an adjacent table – and through the door comes GREGOR [40’s], a balding black man in similar military dress.

Gregor silently glances at the book in Cody’s hand , then to Cody, then…

GREGOR

Your vehicle, lord.

CODY

The helicopter or the car?

GREGOR

(off guard)

I’d called for the automobile, would you prefer I call for the helicopter?

CODY

No. I want to see the world from the ground today.

Cody rises and adjusts his pants like they’re tight on his balls… Upon exiting the room…

CODY

(affectionate)

You speak very well, you know, Gregor.

In light of Avengers coming out and proving the ongoing Marvel movie continuity to be something that amounted in a tight and hugely entertaining movie, I felt like putting together a list.

1. Hulk (2003); unusually beautiful and the highpoint of comics-to-film formalism. Comics are about sequentiality, but the good ones also recognize that panels that preceed and come after the one you’re currently taking in are recognized in the periphery… Comics have no real feeling of duration or time, all of which is implied by the white bars between panels. Hulk doesn’t only understand this superficially but uses it expressively in its filmmaking. It’s the movie that doesn’t just approach the source content in a psychologically mature way but interprets the capacities of both mediums in sometimes bizzare, sometimes astonishing ways.

2. RoboCop (1987); perfectly exemplifies the tendencies of mid-to-late 80’s comics. Frank Miller himself would come to develop sequels for Robocop, but Paul Verhoeven’s (best) film was an American adaptation of 2000AD comics - RoboCop, the movie itself a cyborg fusing the British right of Thatcherian dissidence with Reaganomic skepticism in Detroit fucking motor city… This was a hard science fiction and timely masterpiece that granted more insight on the far-right populist sentiment (“I’d buy that for a dollar!”) of the 80’s, arguably mature comics most celebrated era and topic of conversation.

3. The Dark Knight (2008); takes itself so fucking seriously that that very assuredness is half the entertainment value of the film - which itself is a tightly scripted Michael Mann-ian crime epic in its own right. Fusing a variety of cinematic approaches, its poetic realism is ironically closest to the Batman witnessed in his own series of comics - The gothic is courageously emphasized in a fairly obvious and unvarnished Chicago and even more impressively the stakes are not staged around damsels in distress or kiddies hanging from bridges, but whether the principles of an icon can be compromised - which of courses culminates in the famously repeated but still affecting Jim Gordon speech that closes out this recent bit of mastery.

4. Superman (1978); Celebratory of comics tone if not the complexity of its subjects, it’s fascinating and refreshing to experience such brilliantly executed escapism without constantly feeling condescended to. When did comics and movies keep needing to apologize to their audiences for their own absurdity? Long after Superman, that’s for fucking sure.

5. Ghost in the Shell (1995); It would be unfair to dismiss manga as a major force in comics imagery and influence on Western filmmaking itself. Ghost in the Shell, for me, is the most dramatic example of enriching the transient, quiet moments of images in comics and film. It is haunting, percussive, but decisively real, and its animation is a trippy median between the comics page and the photographically real.