The Best:
GHOST WORLD (2001)
Forget best comic book movies...Terry Zwigoff’s deadpan adaptation of Dan Clowes’ cool blue-black graphic novel (distilled from the bizarre alt-comic Eightball) is one of the best movies of ANY genre to emerge in the past decade. While most of the films on this list are super-powered adolescent wish fulfillment fantasies, Ghost World is a dead-on portrayal of life as it really is for many American teens (as well as the aging misfits some of them...okay, some of us...grow into). Recent high school grads Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson, peaking early in her best role ever) slouch through a dystopic Los Angeles, floating on attitude to keep from drowning in a world of suck...add cranky Steve Buscemi as a hapless, lonely object of affection and you've got a near-perfect black comedy about alienation and the slow death of individualism in America, from the blissful escapism of Enid's private "Jaan Pehechan Ho" Bollywood dance party curtain raiser to her bitter, existential fade-out on a literal road to nowhere.
THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)
By the time the second of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies came around, no one was seriously questioning the idea that a movie based on a comic book could actually be good. But nobody suspected how good until they’d managed to live through The Dark Knight. Nolan and his brother Jonathan tried to cram a huge amount of story into the movie’s heavy running time, but while it didn’t always work out – the Two-Face plot sagged a bit at the end, and there were moments that would have been better placed in a lesser movie – it justified its length and left you wishing there was even more. A great deal of attention is heaped on Heath Ledger’s terrifying, hypnotic (and Oscar-winning) performance as the Joker, and rightly so; but there’s so much more to the movie than that. The Nolans are always willing to sidestep the traditional conflicts of superhero stories and introduce powerful shades of moral ambiguity, which comes across in spades in The Dark Knight; and while Batman himself is left alone and lost at the edge of right and wrong, Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon provides the movie’s true moral center. And, given the numerous ways it manages to transcend simplistic blockbuster-movie tropes, it’s also an amazing-looking movie, with brutal fights, set pieces, and that rarest of things, an exciting and interesting chase scene, all of which helped make it one of the most successful motion pictures in the history of the world.
The Worst:
GHOST RIDER (2007)
I understand why Nic Cage took the lead role in Ghost Rider. It’s because Nic Cage is a hack who will pretty much do anything for money, as evidenced by, oh, let’s say Bangkok Dangerous or any other movie he’s made in the last half-decade. He’s also a major comic book geek (his son’s name is Kal-El, for Christ’s sake), and he probably sized up the script, counted the number of zeroes after the initial digit, realized he’d be performing most of the movie under layers of CGI anyway, and went shopping for a new boat. What’s less easy to understand is why anyone bothered to make Ghost Rider in the first place. The character was always pretty absurd, even by the bong-rattled standards of the 1970s Marvel Bullpen that produced him: a motorcycle stunt rider who gets possessed by the Devil and fights crime for some reason. He was never really that popular, even by the standards of juveniles who find that description totally bad-ass, and was mostly remembered until this movie came out as the only character based on a tattoo to star in his own title. Still, in the right hands, a decent movie could have been made of Ghost Rider, but the right hands are not those of the disgraceful Mark Steven Johnson. The biggest mystery of all is why anyone in Hollywood would give this guy a job doing anything after he made the horrible Daredevil and wrote the even more horrible Elektra, and yet, here he is again, screwing up another comic book character. The sole consolation of Ghost Rider is that nobody appears to have seen it, so maybe my bad memories of it are just a nightmare.
THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN (2003)
This big-budget belly flop marked a true historic moment in the twinned histories of both movies and comics; never before had a major studio release been widely criticized for having dumbed-down a comic book. The illustrator Kevin O'Neill gave a deliciously perverse period look to Alan Moore's parodic adventure serial about a Victorian era Super Friends team comprised of Alan Quartermain, Captain Nemo, Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man, and Dracula's old flame, Mina Harker. The director, Stephen Norrington, began work on the project by casting Sean Connery as Quartermain, apparently a sadistic act designed to get fans' hopes up by giving a false impression that he knew what he was doing. Elsewhere, Norrington and his screenwriter, James Dale Robinson (a comics scribe best known for his work on DC's Starman and the miniseries The Golden Age), coarsened and blunted the comic's sly edge, altering its characters for the worse (such as in the wrong call of making Mina Harker explicitly vampiric, even though the starchy proto-feminist of the comic was much more intimidating than any mere bloodsucker) and added new personnel, including a twentyish Tom Sawyer, presumably intended as a sop to the American market, and Dorian Gray, apparently included so that Norrington could hire, and then not fire, Stuart Townsend, just to show that he was stupider than Peter Jackson. The movie provided news for gossip columnists throughout its production, thanks to the battles between Connery and the director. When it was finally over, Connery announced that the experience had inspired him to retire from acting, and it didn't do anybody else's career any favors either.
THE NINE LIVES OF FRITZ THE CAT (1974)
Ralph Bakshi's 1972 Fritz the Cat, an adults-only feature animation based on a Robert Crumb character, helped attract Crumb's work a lot of attention, and the cartoonist has been bitching about it ever since; he can be seen early in the documentary Crumb complaining about how Bakshi browbeat him into giving him the rights and then debased his work. Bakshi's film wasn't very good, but the sequel, which he had nothing to do with, makes Bakshi's work look like the second coming of Winsor McKay. Most of the film, which includes Fritz's encounters with Hitler and various stereotypical mid-'70s "street" characters, settles for being ugly-looking and obnoxious, but it goes for broke in the last section, a mess of racist and anti-Semitic cariactures in which President Henry Kissinger sends Fritz on a mission to New Jersey, which has fallen under black rule and changed its name to "New Africa." If the actual Crumb's work was twice as offensive as his most hard-assed detractors claim that it is, and not funny or aesthetically pleasing at all, it would still be better than this.
Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four & Five
Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent