Supah dupah

Five years ago, Hollywood’s henchmen released the third film in the Spider-Man trilogy, wrapping up Peter Parker’s whimsical tale and ensuring that there would never be another Spider-Man movie, ever.
Until they made another one.

With new actors, a new script, new director, and probably a new pastry cart, the vague entity that is Hollywood decided the Spider-Man franchise needed what’s called a “reboot.” That’s when a character or movie series is given a re-imagining, a fresh take with a fresh new approach and, yes, fresh pastries. (Never write a column before lunch.)

The movie industry has done this before with a superhero franchise, most notably with Batman. The original series, which started out marginally less than embarrassing, devolved into a hammy and pathetic costume party populated by hollow-eyed actors grimly collecting paychecks. The new series is a dramatic improvement, and unlike the Spider-Man reboot, has the benefit of occurring more than ten minutes after the release of the last.

Even so, you have wonder when it’ll all end.

Not just the incessant rebooting, which is getting annoying in its own right, but the superhero craze in general. I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily looking forward to the demise of the superhero film as a genre – I’ve seen more than a few, and I generally enjoy them – but realistically, they can’t go on forever. There’s only so many times you can tell Spider-Man’s origin story before audiences lose interest, and once you’ve exhausted the storytelling possibilities for the more popular characters (Iron Man, the X-Men, et al.), then which comic book heroes do you turn to for cinematic inspiration? The Red Bee? Squirrel Girl? Who would enjoy those movies? I don’t even enjoy admitting those characters are real.

Eventually, the superhero movie will go the way of that now-dormant genre from yesteryear: The western.
Westerns used to be all over the place, and for a simple reason: They were cheap to make. Grab a handful of character actors, give them giant hats and horses, and stage some shootouts on an inexpensive ghost-town lot in the California desert, and voila, you’ve got yourself a western. You can’t flip the channel to AMC these days without catching a glimpse of these remnants of cinema’s past, complete with scraggly beards and tobacco-drenched spittoons. Growing up, there was rarely a Saturday afternoon when I didn’t catch my father engrossed in one of these relics, dutifully following the exploits of Sonny the Hardscrabble Cattle Wrangler, or whoever was the gunslinger of the day. Forty years from now, I imagine film buffs of the current generation will be found similarly rapt, only instead of rooting for Clint Eastwood, they’ll be cheering on a sexually ambiguous vigilante who wears his underwear on the outside of his pants.

We have modern special effects to thank for the deluge of protagonists who look like they’re made of candy. Without computer-generated effects, there would have been no plausible way to do, say, Iron Man; Robert Downey, Jr. would basically have been playing an aerial version of RoboCop, and the rudimentary green-screen technology used for the flying sequences would have prompted theater owners to hand out a barf bag along with each ticket. Actually, considering the quality of the recent Green Lantern movie, that may not be a bad idea anyway.

The problem is that the newfound ability to depict these superheroes accurately is leaving the market saturated. And I say this as a huge fan of some of these characters.

Yeah, I was a comic book kid. With thick glasses and a body mass index that would have made Jonah Hill bow and call me god, I pretty much had to be. My pre-teen years were littered with dog-eared copies of Batman and Wolverine, and what appealed to me then still appeals to me now: The adolescent, flamboyant fantasies embodied in the grim scowls of dudes with masks and attitudes. This stuff still tickles the ten-year-old boy in me, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

But, as with anything that tickles, you can’t breathe if it doesn’t stop. I don’t want to see these movies come to an end; I just wish Hollywood would pace itself. Too much of a good thing leads to wistful nostalgia marathons on AMC. Just ask Clint Eastwood.

World wide wed

A little over a week ago, voters of all affiliations breathed a sigh of relief – even if their candidates lost, or referendum issues didn’t go their way. The relief was borne of a desire to see an end to the political bickering and bitterness that was a hallmark of the 2012 campaign, in which insults and accusations were flung more prolifically than those spouted by professional wrestlers and Celebrity Deathmatch contestants. The negative ads have ceased, the debate showdowns are over, and the country is in recovery mode, catching its breath after a headlong sprint toward closure and finality.

So you’d think the time for political analysis is over. Which is why I’m hesitant to talk about Question 1, the referendum in which Maine voters decided to allow gay and lesbian couples to marry. You’re sick of hearing about it, and I don’t blame you. I certainly don’t want to be accused of shooting after the buzzer, and besides, with the election season properly buried, resurrecting its corpse feels a bit like reanimating Frankenstein’s monster, only without the drooling and electroshock.

Indulge me, if you would.

For a news guy, Election Night is like the Olympics, minus the chlorine and speedos. I spent much of it with my attention split between news broadcasts and the Internet, monitoring progress as results trickled in. One of the web sites I tracked was Facebook – which is an interesting forum for debate in that it’s free of punditry and half-baked analysis from tired, over-caffeinated broadcasters in wrinkled suits. My feed was awash in opinions from friends and family, and their updates were an insight into the demographics comprising my little online circle – dominated, it seems, by moderate voters with an enthusiasm for the process, if not necessarily the results.

One woman shared a story that I feel bears repeating.

This woman – we’ll call her “Stacy” – was asked by her four-year-old daughter if she could accompany her mother to the polls on Election Day. Stacey agreed, and so brought the young one to her local polling place to give the toddler a peek into the voting process. Stacy told her daughter that, aside from voting for the nation’s president, she would also be voicing her opinion on a critical issue: Whether same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.

“What do you think?” she asked her daughter. “Should men be able to marry other men, and women marry other women?” The daughter asked if that meant a couple they knew would finally be able to tie the knot; Stacy said that, yes, it would. The child looked up at her mother with a delighted giggle and said, “Oh, I really hope other people pick ‘Yes!’”

“I have often thought how important it is to teach tolerance to my children,” said Stacey in her post, “but as you can see from this simple anecdote, children are intrinsically tolerant. They only learn to think otherwise from the role models in their lives. It did feel great, though, to nurture that inherent tolerance with which my beautiful daughter was born.”

That made me smile. And it allowed me to envision a future in which the next generation sees same-sex marriage as an immutable right, as unchangeable as the right of women to vote, blacks to marry whites, and speech to be free.

Opponents of same-sex marriage have repeatedly argued that such unions would somehow impinge on their own marriages, effectively devaluing them like a defunct currency. But here’s what happened to their marriages on the day after the election: Nothing. They woke up, kissed their spouses, ate buttery toast in their breakfast nooks, and plotted their days. Business as usual.

A marriage is a personal relationship. That is where its value lies. It is a bond that exists independent of the marriages of others, of widespread divorce, of politics and punditry. And now, in Maine, it exists independent of sexual orientation. When the Declaration of Independence established a person’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it did so without an asterisk. It did so without discrimination.

Stacey’s daughter has not read the country’s founding documents, and would not be able to articulate that sentiment. But children often know what is fair, and they know it with purity of heart. It is adulthood that sours that purity and turns it against itself, masquerading as maturity and wisdom.

That child deserves a country that is tolerant and free. Same-sex marriage isn’t the skeleton key that opens the door fully on that reality. But it’s a start.

Yule be sorry

Already, it feels like the home stretch.

It shouldn’t. There are two months left before the end of the year, and so it seems premature to be setting sights on Christmas and beyond; it’s a bit like looking forward to St. Patrick’s Day at the beginning of January. Of course, depending on your predilection for Irish whiskey and pummeling hangovers, that may be a moot analogy.

It’s hard to tell which came first: Advertisers’ early promotion of holiday sales, or our own early excitement over the holidays themselves. Did advertisers sense our eagerness, or did they cause it? Either way, the colorful hubbub that closes out each year feels like a rock band pummeling their instruments during an anthem’s violent finale, only the finale lasts for two months and leaves you broke and bloated on sugar cookies.

Ultimately, whether it’s due to the whims of ad executives or our own anticipation, advertising has extended the season into a marathon. This year, I saw my first holiday commercial, a pitch for a department store, days before trick-or-treaters started their neighborhood skulking. Hearing sleigh bells in the middle of a zombie movie is a disorienting experience, and borderline uncomfortable. Christmas ads aired before Thanksgiving are premature; Christmas ads aired before Halloween are an abomination, ranking up there on the Offend-O-Meter next to public flatulence and Joe Biden’s hair.

Aired during the right time of year, holiday ads can provide for some memorable moments, such as Santa Claus riding through the snow on a giant Norelco shaver, or polar bears finding comfort in an ice-cold bottle of Coke. Even though both of those ad campaigns have been off the air for years, people of certain generations remember them fondly, and speak about them each Christmas with a touch of nostalgia, as if the ads were friends who had moved away and no longer call. In a perfect world, these would be the only ads aired during the entire month of December, with exceptions granted to the embarrassing holiday-themed efforts of local car dealerships.

The problem with these ads, though, is timing, not content. If advertising and television executives adhered to a strict rule of not allowing holiday-themed spots to air before Thanksgiving, we would feel a lot less saturated with visions of sugarplums. Instead of rolling our eyes at the 847th airing of a Macy’s spot in which the same smiling girl wears the same sparkling coat that’s an astounding 40 percent off, we’d get an appropriate dose and move onto the next phase of our lives: Figuring out where and with whom we’ll get hammered on New Year’s.

There’s plenty to be said about the content, sure: The gross over-commercialization, the abuse of Santa’s reputation as a pitchman, the overall creepiness of elves. (Am I the only one who feels this way? I feel like hell would be making rocking horses on an assembly line sandwiched between two vacant-eyed elves. Maybe that’s just me.)

But we’re savvy. We’ve got our guard up for a commercialized holiday. We know that, for weeks leading up to Christmas, we’ll be assaulted with a panoply of jolly snowmen, glittery wrapping paper, and cherubic carolers singing about bargains.

What our guard isn’t equipped to handle is a holiday ad season that starts before Halloween. It offends sensibilities established through years of yuletide routines and rhythms. And it makes the holidays more exhausting than they already are. As it is, the day after Christmas feels like the first sweaty, air-gulping moments at the end of a three-legged sack race.

Plus, there’s the kicker: It makes time in general go by way too quickly. Five minutes ago it was Christmas 2011. Then I turned around to pick stray tinsel off my butt and boom, I was writing this rant.

And so I humbly fall to my knees, raise my hands to the sky, and beg advertisers not to get too eager this holiday season. I know you can’t wait to inform the public about killer deals on useless gadgets, but at least wait until the turkey gravy has had a chance to clog our veins.

This is that weird limbo before the storm hits us. Without the intrusion of squirm-inducing elves, we should at least have the chance to enjoy it.

The great vacation dilemma

My last vacation almost killed me.

Nothing dramatic happened; I didn’t go skydiving with a bum parachute, or get attacked by zebras on an African safari, or run with scissors through downtown Lewiston. I did, however, experience more than two consecutive days off, and in many lines of work, that’s akin to a rapidly ascending deep-sea diver getting the bends: You get used to a certain level of pressure, and when it’s released, your body doesn’t know how to handle it.

In the modern civilized era, vacations have become as important to human survival as water and back massages. Imagine a world without them – vacations, not back massages. Imagine going to your job on Monday, plowing through your work week, feeling euphoric as punch-out time on Friday draws near, and squeezing in all your living, your memories, your trips to Cancun, in the meager two days usually reserved for laziness and football. You’d spend a lot of your time hyperventilating, and Aunt Maude would never get to see her grandkids.

It’s a pretty common complaint among Americans that vacation time is not plentiful enough. That’s not a complaint you hear in most other civilized countries.

In France, workers are guaranteed 37 days off per year. That’s a guarantee because it’s the law. Give an employee a scant 36 days and you are beaten about the face with baguettes and wheels of bitter cheese.

In Germany, you get 35 days. In Brazil, 34. Even our neighbors to the north, those proud Canadians, get 26 days, which they need, because they commute to work in temperatures colder than the vacuum of space. That’s gotta take it out of you.

We Americans? We average 13 days.

Thirteen days to travel out to Oak Ridge, Tenn., to take a tour of their X-10 nuclear reactor. Thirteen days to check out the Superman Museum in Metropolis, Ill. Want to see the world’s largest ball of twine in Branson, Mo.? Better equip your car with some turbo and hope you don’t get caught.

In all fairness to American companies (and the lawmakers who regulate them), we’re not capped at 13 days. There are opportunities to earn more, although the requirements for doing so are often pretty steep – like having to work fifteen years straight without a sick day while constantly petting the boss’ cat. That might earn you an extra half-day and a gift cetificate to a pizza joint cited for code violations.

But imagine the feeling of starting a new job and knowing you won’t have to go through years of initiation to bank the necessary time to travel to Selkirk, Manitoba – home of a giant statue of Chuck the Channel Cat.

Now I don’t know about you, but the longer I go without a day off – and especially some extended time, even a long weekend – the more of a struggle it is to perform a job up to my own standards. A good analogy is physical exercise: When burning off cheesecake on a treadmill, you’re always running faster at the beginning of the workout than at the end. That’s because your workout muscles are rested and ready to roll. You attack the treadmill like Garfield attacks Odie.

Likewise, rested work muscles let a person attack their job harder, faster, and free of bizarre treadmill analogies. It can be argued that the work done fresh off a vacation is more efficient, and performed with a greater attention to detail.

And it doesn’t really matter what line of work you’re in. You could be completely in love with your job and still benefit from some prolonged hammock time. If your job is to lie on a bed of marshmallows and fig leaves and let fashion models rub your feet and fan you with palm fronds, you could still use a vacation – although at that point it might be hard to find a leisure activity that provides an adequate counterpoint. Maybe a trip to South Dakota to see the Mitchell Corn Palace.

Point being, Americans are in desperate need of more vacation time. So lawmakers, take note. Just look at some examples from around the world – Italy, for example, which tops the time-off list with a whopping 42 vacation days. Forty-two days! And have you ever seen an angry Italian?

Wait. Don’t answer that.