Yeah, nice slogan, Harvey.

For those who haven't heard, I went and wrote a scene-by-scene analysis of a little film called The Dark Knight. Would you be interested in an in-depth thematic discussion backed up by thorough research and third-party quotations? In that case, The Faces of Gotham: Myth and Morality in The Dark Knight is available exclusively as an ebook, and can be purchased at Amazon and Barnes & Noble for an all-too-affordable $7.49.

And don't forget--if you don't own a physical e-reader, both Amazon and B&N have free programs for download on the computer/phone/iMachine of your choice.

So give it a read! And hey, if you liked it, spread the word, and write a review on the book's storefront page, whydoncha.

Hanna and Her Brothers

Hanna was raised in the woods by her beloved Papa, a hunter and woodcutter (both trades undertaken for the simple matter of survival). Her nemesis is also her Grandma, in a sense, with an oral hygiene compulsion so fierce she scrubs her teeth till they bleed. (She's sharpening them, see?) When the green-slippered foe confronts Hanna, she steps forth from the maw of a wolf. (Nor is this the last transformation she'll undergo before the end.)

Joe Wright's Hanna is an espionage quest which, like all such riffs post-Bourne, is really a search for identity. Hanna — no ordinary girl, but a Chosen One just as surely as Harry Potter is — has been shaped one way, but her emerging individuality demands she sculpt herself anew. It's at just such points that our forebears turned to the folktales of their culture, like those collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, to illustrate the perils of straying from the path or trusting in the wrong authority figure. The root wisdom of these tales, we are told, have resonance for the ages, and we do well to heed them.

The film's own distributor tried hard to make such a point, publishing an interview with highly-paid fairytale inverter Gregory Maguire. But just as Hanna sets out to refashion those myths to its own ends, I'm not convinced there's anything more to be done with Grimm-era fairytales but invert them. We don't read them to our kids nowadays, but we all know their gist — at least their bastardized versions, filtered once by the Grimms, once by Disney. So they remain a kind of irrelevant background hum of easy reference and surface psychology.

Yet how often they're employed when filmmakers turn their lenses on young female heroines! Catherine Hardwicke's recent Red Riding Hood, Matthew Bright's 1996 Freeway — have we no other overlay to apply when making a film about a young woman's transition to sexual maturity or worldly wisdom? Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves remains the best contemporary application of childhood myths to the passage into womanhood, and it won that mantle by developing its own allusive, symbolic vocabulary.

Most commonly, the palimpsest of a childhood myth is held up in order to be overwritten. The movies believe they're striking a feminist blow in this way. Riding Hood will not be eaten (read: raped). The princess will escape the tower, with minimal assistance at most. And when it comes time to kill the wolf, she don't need no stinking huntsman to do it for her. There's no instruction taken from these stories anymore, just an opportunity for postmodern mockery.

Comic books saw the opportunity long ago. After Alan Moore deconstructed the superhero, Neil Gaiman did similar for the fairytale — gently, because he respects the power of story, but his groundbreaking Sandman opened the door for future creators to get it wholly wrong. After Sandman and Bill Willingham's Fables, it's very hard to look a classical myth straight in the eye without smirking. Much easier for our young people to learn life lessons from the troubled, downtrodden Marvel heroes, who teach us that no matter how nobly endowed we might be, we're easily pricked by debt (Spider-Man), addiction (Iron Man), anger (The Hulk) and all the other ills of the modern day. But where the fairytale-derived femme flick has to do with transcending boundaries, the comic book movie has a lot of interest in reinforcing them.

Thor, by way of Marvel, is both a superhero comic and a folktale — a rough gloss on Norse myth that remains "classical" in the sense that pride is at the root of Thor's fall to Midgard. Once there, of course, he becomes its defender, all the while trying to live up to the standards of his distant, powerful father Odin. He can regain his status only by defending the status quo, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

In comics, superheroes are bound by their archetype to be defenders of the norm, not transformers. This goes for female superheroes too (unless they're named Promethea, and there's Alan Moore again). They spring forth fully formed and go punch stuff alongside the boys. This is why Wonder Woman may never get a movie treatment, and why her latest TV show may founder before it even airs: There's nothing at stake when you start out perfect.

To this end, if my choice of Germanic heroes come down to Thor or Hanna, give me the ice-blond girl-assassin. Hanna is made to be one thing and becomes something else; she's slotted into a design — actually two designs: that of her foes and that of her father — and then outgrows it. Thor was born to break shit with his hammer, and that's what he does, for pretty much one purpose, no matter where you put him. Hanna is a superheroine, but not in the limiting comic-book sense. She's something older than superhero tales, older even than Stan Lee.

But why must it be either/or? Surely there are other lenses through which to view film heroes, and particularly film heroines. Not every male hero needs to be a tortured Bruce Wayne, nor every female a sheltered princess awakened by a kiss. Close the book of fairytales. Put the comics back on the store rack. Think of what makes boys and girls into men and women now, today, and then tell me that story. I'm sitting comfortably, here in the dark, waiting to see it.

Scott Pilgrim vs. Your Face

Not pictured: giant sandwich board labeled "Remember this?" and "Get it?"

Edgar Wright is easily one of the smartest pop-culture mavens working in the movie industry today, which is why his latest film feels like such a betrayal: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (hereafter Scott Pilgrim) is perfectly content to drown itself in 16-bit graphics and comic book flash-bang because, the movie happily concludes, it never had all that much to say in the first place. Shy, mumbling Torontoan Scott (Michael Cera, natch) is a bassist in a shitty garage band who falls head over heels for American delivery girl Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). However, before they can commit to a serious relationship, Scott must fight and defeat seven of Ramona's former sweethearts, a super-powered "League of Evil Exes" organized by record producer/final boss Gideon Graves (Jason Schwartzman). It's supposed to be a coming-of-age story as told within the context of an arcade game, but it can only make one statement to that end: fifteen years ago, you were much younger than you are now, and you played video games that were much less sophisticated than they are now. Struggling to articulate the synchronicity between youthful immaturity and pixilated graphics, Scott Pilgrim defaults to hipster detachment--so endlessly amused by its central metaphor (the difficulties of life and romance re-imagined as a linear, Capcom-esque fighting tournament) that it doesn't care to explore what that metaphor means for this new generation or its hopes and desires.

The popular joke around the Internet is that most gamer-geek humor revolves around one tired concept--"video games are not like real life"--and Scott Pilgrim rehashes that tired concept with stunning fidelity. It really, really wants you to see it as ridiculous and absurd: time and again, we are reminded that people do not actually burst into coins after they've been defeated in a fight; that people do not actually "level up" after they've learned an important life lesson; that Michael Cera probably cannot leap twenty feet in the air and perform "64-hit combos." The problem is that this is all weightless navel-gazing--the movie doesn't see anything worth examining in these aesthetic signifiers beyond simple recognition. (Worse still is when it simply lists off a series of pop culture icons: Scott's band, Sex Bob-Omb, features two musicians named after members of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and they sing a song that may or may not be called "Launchpad McQuack." Taken from the graphic novel, you say? That doesn't make it any less jarring.) Even Sin City--the epitome of style-as-substance and Scott Pilgrim's closest antecedent--amplified popular noir elements (guns, dames, monochrome) to emphasize the relevant themes (sex, machismo, heartbreak). So when can we discuss video games as elaborate, dream-like fantasies? Or, say, as the only appropriate outlet for a number of colorful, larger-than-life personalities? Never, as far as Scott Pilgrim is concerned. Want to know why Roger Ebert gives video games such a hard time? It's because of juvenile, masturbatory fan-crap like this--lauding the medium not for its aesthetic/thematic content, but for the popular conventions. It's only "fun" in the sense that you can name the game from which a specific sound effect originates.

That's precisely what Wright tried so hard to avoid with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz--in those films, he was always interested in figuring out why zombie/action flicks affected us so deeply. Scott Pilgrim merely congratulates its target audience for playing video games and being all meta about it, and, even worse, those congratulations come at the cost of any human element. You'll notice I have yet to mention that Scott has a few ex-girlfriends of his own (teenaged naïf Knives Chau (Ellen Wong) and Envy Adams (Brie Larson))--but that's because Scott Pilgrim isn't really about anyone or anything, except the feeling that you're part of some exclusive club. This movie is a rebel without a cause in the truest sense of the phrase: a vague collection of culture-fed images, so desperate to draw a line between "them" and "us" that it has no idea what enemy it's supposed to be fighting. * (out of four)

Assembled

Geoff Johns is younger than you'd expect, for a guy in charge of steering DC Comics' superheroes into new incarnations on the movie screen. Back in March I sat at his feet, almost literally — the "chief creative officer" of DC Comics was up on a conference-room dais at Seattle's Emerald City ComiCon, and I was in the front row.

Naturally, the 2011 Green Lantern movie with Ryan Reynolds came up. Johns, who by now had turned the galactic policeman into just one color on a spectrum of highly marketable power rings, assured the crowd that he'd be hands-on with that project, just as he'd been with recent arcs on "Smallville." "You'll see the stuff start to represent the comics a lot more than it has been in the past," Johns promised, to general applause.

It's what we all want, of course, if we've geeked out over four-color champions and dreamed of seeing them filmed. Just make the comic book, we pray. The comic book is perfect. Why mess with perfection? Like the consumers who demanded a Starbucks or Starbucks-like coffee at every corner, we're getting our wish. And what a monkey's-paw wish it's turning out to be.

The media companies that own these characters are finally getting their acts together, decades after Richard Donner's Superman showed them how much the public would shell out for superheroes in the cinema. They're consolidating and streamlining, building pipes that run direct from Editorial through Marketing to Merchandising to the film studio. Marvel has its own studio, of course, and now its riches can be bankrolled and harvested by Disney. DC has its own entertainment division, which Johns also heads -- Johns, who got his start as an assistant to Richard Donner. In their film adaptations, both companies promise faithfulness to the original vision of the comics, to their characters and continuity (whatever that last term means). They're inviting us into their "universes," where, we're told, Batman will protect Gotham under Christopher Nolan at least once more, Spider-Man will be a teenager again, and Iron Man will soon take his seat in Avengers Mansion.

It would be naive to think that film franchise possibilities, with literally hundreds of millions of dollars to be earned, have no effect on the creative end of this pipeline. Both Marvel and DC have tightened control over their stables of characters, always focused on the next crossover and its potential to spotlight saleable heroes. Spider-Man had too much romantic angst for either print or film versions, so now he'll be unattached in both. Johns was personally in charge of resurrecting Hal Jordan, dead since 1994, as Green Lantern, and Barry Allen, 1956-1986, as the Flash. They're just being populist, giving the readers what they want: the fantastic married to the familiar. It just so happens that that's how you write a successful movie script too.

They're giving us what we want, more's the pity, and we will never fail to be unfulfilled by it. We wanted to know everything about how Wolverine became Wolverine, so they gave us that ... first as a comic, then as a shitty, shitty shitball of a movie. We wanted Rachel Dawes, the only character in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight who had no basis in the comics, to go kablooie. We wanted to see Galactus try to eat the planet, so ... oh God, the tears burn. And we wanted the Black Widow to work her curvy leather-clad magic on Tony Stark's joystick, and we wanted War Machine to bust shit up, and we wanted Samuel L. Jackson -- who was the artist's model for Ultimate Nick Fury long before he was actually cast as Nick Fury -- to be motherfucking Nick Fury. This is pop, eating itself.

So ... what impressions of this latest stab toward an onscreen Marvel Universe? Does Iron Man 2 measure up to Iron Man? Surpass it? Merit Walter's review? Give your thoughts.