Throwback Thursday: Captain America: The First Avenger

Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.

What I wrote about Captain America: The First Avenger here on the AFOS blog back in 2012:

I remember watching the Marvel Comics float during NBC's coverage of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade as a kid and thinking, "This fake battle between the Marvel heroes and villains looks so cheesy, and the music from Back to the Future's not really helping."



That was back when the Marvel characters had a lousy track record on both the big and small screens, outside of animation. (Sure, The Incredible Hulk landed a few Emmy nominations back in the day and actually won one of them, but have you watched it lately? Its formulaic and Fugitive-inspired premise wears thin quickly, despite showrunner Kenneth Johnson's mostly serious treatment of the material and Bill Bixby's best efforts as the renamed-due-to-homophobia David Banner in standout episodes like "Dark Side," where both Banner and his Hulk self turn evil and pervy due to a serum experiment gone wrong.) In the years between the Marvel Thanksgiving Parade float and the breakout success of the first Blade movie, the first Marvel-inspired feature film that both the mainstream and the comics crowd liked, I thought, "Having the Marvel heroes run around and strike a pose to Alan Silvestri's Back to the Future theme was corny as hell, but wouldn't it be sweet if someday, someone like Silvestri wrote music for a Marvel character that was on a par with something like Silvestri's work for Back to the Future and Predator? Oh yeah, and a quality screenplay for that character would be dope too."

In 2011, both those things actually happened after Silvestri got recruited for a Marvel Studios project where screenwriting partners Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely skillfully brought to life one of Marvel's oldest properties--a character I never really cared for, even when one of my favorite comics authors, Ed Brubaker, gave him an ambitious relaunch in print.

The first things that would come to mind whenever I'd hear the name "Captain America" were Glenn Miller, LaSalles, bobby socks and Japanese internment camps. Even though a comic shop owner who knew I was a fan of the Brubaker titles Gotham Central and Sleeper insisted that Brubaker was doing a bang-up job and making Captain America more of an espionage comic than a superhero comic, I still couldn't get past issue 1 and see the appeal of this whitebread Boy Scout in the silly jingoistic costume, the star of the lame Thanksgiving Parade production number above. He was never as interesting to me as the prejudice-fighting X-Men, Spider-Man the angsty and quippy New Yorker or Spidey's West Coast counterparts, the younger and much more anti-establishment Runaways.

In Captain America: The First Avenger, Markus, McFeely, an uncredited Joss Whedon and director Joe Johnston, armed with the same sense of style he brought to The Rocketeer, all found ways to keep Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) from coming off as antiquated and banal while still confining his character to a period setting. One of those ways was to say "Screw it" and embrace Steve's do-gooder nature, but to make that eagerness to do good relatable and appealing (with the help of a subdued performance by Evans, removing all traces of his one-note, probably-bathes-his-dick-in-Axe-body-spray Johnny Storm character from the Fantastic Four movies and his smarmy action movie star character from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World). That's best embodied in the frail but courageous Steve's response when a scientist (a German-accented Stanley Tucci) asks him if he wants to kill Nazis: "I don't want to kill anyone. I don't like bullies. I don't care where they're from."

The First Avenger supplies this guy who doesn't like bullies with two outstanding original marches. "Star Spangled Man," penned by Disney musical songsmiths Alan Menken and David Zippel, is an amusing fake '40s show tune that accompanies the newly buffed-up Steve when the military doesn't consider him experienced enough for combat, so they sideline him to performing at a USO tour as a war bonds-promoting mascot, clad in a costume as shabby-looking as the tights worn by the stuntman who played Captain America on the '80s Marvel float. The USO tour is a clever device that helps make Steve's offstage heroism pay off beautifully in the film's second act.

The other march, which is much less comedic than "Star Spangled Man," is provided by Silvestri, who, while writing the First Avenger score, found time to give a concert with the Video Game Orchestra at his alma mater, Boston's Berklee College of Music, where he told an interviewer from Berklee that Steve's humble quality was what particularly appealed to him about The First Avenger. Silvestri tapped into that quality throughout his First Avenger themes, which is a reason why they work so well.



Silvestri's suitably old-school First Avenger score is truly on a par with his work for the Back to the Future and Predator films. It's like the score that should have accompanied that cheesy Marvel float back in the '80s. (Like Steve during the USO montage, the vigorous end title rendition of the "Captain America March" got sidelined, specifically to bonus track status on the iTunes edition of the First Avenger soundtrack album, which frustrated consumers who already bought the end title theme-less First Avenger CD.)

Man, I would love to hear Cap's march in a live setting, but this will do.



What I think about The First Avenger in 2015:

It holds up. Hayley Atwell's breakout performance as Agent Carter is one of the highlights of The First Avenger, and I'm glad for the continual presence of Atwell's character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (this week's solid two-hour premiere of Atwell's Agent Carter miniseries on ABC makes me wish for Agent Carter to become a regular series, although I'd prefer it to be in the eight-episodes-per-season format that's closer to British TV, instead of the increasingly outdated and unwieldy 22-a-season format). But the Winter Soldier sequel, which drew inspiration from much of the acclaimed Brubaker revamp of the Captain America comics, is even more impressive than The First Avenger as a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, showing "some surprising depth in its depiction of an unchecked intelligence agency and a U.S. government that executes enemies without trial," as Jamelle Bouie wrote in Slate. Hail HYDRA fighta.

Selections from the Captain America: The First Avenger score can be heard during the AFOS blocks "AFOS Prime" and "Hall H."

The underrated Femme Fatale slinked into American theaters 12 years ago today

The Brian De Palma flick Femme Fatale, which opened on November 6, 2002 in America, is like a heist movie in reverse. The big set piece that's usually the second act or the climax takes place first, and the 20-minute sequence--a jewel heist at the Cannes Film Festival--is on a par with De Palma's classic CIA headquarters break-in sequence from the first Mission: Impossible film.

Femme Fatale's Cannes heist involves steamy girl-on-girl action between Rebecca Romijn and Rie Rasmussen in the ladies' room and the impeccably timed disruption of a screening of an actual film, director Régis Wargnier's soapy and not-so-great 1999 epic East-West (Wargnier makes a cameo as himself at the festival, along with East-West star Sandrine Bonnaire). Both De Palma's masterful direction of the Cannes heist and the impressive bolero cue Ryuichi Sakamoto composed for the sequence--"Bolerish," which lasts about 14 minutes long on the Femme Fatale score album--are why I added "Bolerish" to "AFOS Prime" rotation on AFOS last year. (It's still in rotation.)

What De Palma does with the story after the Cannes heist remains brilliant and bold, and it hasn't lost the ability to surprise, even while watching Femme Fatale for the second time, which I recently did--about 11 years after first viewing it--while embarking on another one of my many heist movie DVD marathons. Femme Fatale is also the best Catwoman movie that doesn't feature Catwoman in costume. Just pretend that Romijn--who, as Slant's Ed Gonzalez once wrote of her performance in Femme Fatale, challenges the way men perceive women and uses that awareness to devour and spit out her men--is playing Selina Kyle without the cat-eared aviator helmet and under a different name to throw off Interpol. It's as if De Palma brought to the screen one of Ed Brubaker's beloved Catwoman comics. Retcon the Halle Berry Catwoman fiasco from your memory and act as if this was the Catwoman spinoff movie Warner Bros. released instead.

Before Gotham, there was Gotham Central

One of the most anticipated hour-long dramas of 2014 is Gotham, which premieres tonight on Fox and takes place in a Gotham City where Bruce Wayne, the millionaire who fights crime as Batman, is only a boy whose parents have just been murdered, and the supervillains he'll later face aren't quite supervillains yet. Yep, it's another prequel, and any time there's a prequel on the big screen or the small one, Patton Oswalt's old bit about the pointlessness of prequels comes to mind ("I don't give a shit where the stuff I love comes from! I just love the stuff I love! Hey, do you like Angelina Jolie? Does she give you a big boner? Well, here's Jon Voight's ballsack! That's right! The pink, glistening ballsack she swam out of!").

But Gotham appears to be far from pointless, inconsequential and Jon Voight ballsack-y because it's neither about Batman nor yet another origin story about his early days as a crimefighter, for now, that is--why beat that dead horse again after Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and Batman Begins?--plus lil' Wayne is only a minor character (David Mazouz plays Bruce). One promising sign about the new show--developed by Rome and Mentalist creator Bruno Heller and visualized by Danny Cannon, who directed the Gotham pilot and is best known for shaping the distinctive look of the original CSI--is that it's taking narrative and stylistic cues (as well as a few characters) from the now-defunct DC Comics procedural Gotham Central. That crime comic proved that a risky concept like a series that takes place in the Batman universe but doesn't center on Batman or another costumed hero--which sounds an awful lot like what Heller wants to accomplish with Gotham--can work.

In Gotham Central, the protagonists were detectives from the Gotham City Police Department's Major Crimes Unit, while Batman was a peripheral character, and Batman's cop ally Jim Gordon, who, at the time of Gotham Central's run, had retired from his job as police commissioner, made very few appearances. But on Gotham, the cast of cop characters is a lot smaller, and Gordon is the central character. Instead of the more familiar-looking authority figure in the pornstache, the Gordon we see on Gotham is a pornstache-less and much younger detective who hasn't risen in the GCPD ranks yet and is played by Ben McKenzie from both Southland and--before the cop show phase--The O.C., bitch. (McKenzie also previously voiced Batman in Batman: Year One, an animated 2011 adaptation of DC's 1987 "Batman: Year One" storyline.)

Like in Gotham Central, the entry points into the twisted, grandiose and operatic world of Gotham are detectives: in this case, Gordon and his older partner Harvey Bullock (Donal Logue from the much-missed Terriers). While watching Gotham (which, by the way, is scored by Graeme Revell, whose previous comic book adaptation scoring credits include The Crow and Sin City) doesn't require reading any issues of Gotham Central to understand what's going on, it's always a good time to discover Gotham Central in digital form or trade paperback (TPB) form.

Gotham Central was one of DC's most underrated titles of the '00s, despite winning an Eisner Award and a Harvey Award, the two most coveted awards in the comics industry. It's also a great standalone crime comic that's perfect for either crime genre fans who have never gotten into comics; readers who grew frustrated with superhero comics because of their overly convoluted mythologies (or the lousy quality of much of the writing, especially material written for characters of color) and quit reading comics for a while; or readers who simply don't care for either superhero comics or the character of Batman himself.

"Yo, what could possibly be racist about a white billionaire running around at night exacting vigilante violence?," said Yo, Is This Racist? wisecracker Andrew Ti, when he responded on Tumblr to a reader's question about whether Batman is a racist franchise or not (Ti thinks it is and doesn't care if he pisses off Batman nerds, whom he finds to be racist too). Whether their dislike for Batman is because racist fanboys worship him or because he's an overexposed character, readers who don't care for him will likely find Gotham Central to be up their alley because Batman isn't the hero of the series--the detectives are--and Gotham Central's view of the Dark Knight is interesting and complicated (and even more so than the Rashomon-inspired 1992 Batman: The Animated Series episode "P.O.V.," which looks like a rough draft for Gotham Central).

Just like the detectives who have to compete with Batman's presence on the streets or tolerate it, Gotham Central is split between siding with him and finding his brand of justice to be either flawed or an interference in the MCU's work, like when a criminal winds up not getting convicted because Batman arrested him (Batman is basically Captain Freedom from Hill Street Blues, except he's not a joke, he barely speaks and he's as much of an imposing force on the streets as the Latino and Irish gangs Captain Furillo frequently had to make deals with). Drama-wise, alternating between both sides is a more compelling position to take than simply viewing Batman as a dark knight in shining armor.

Gotham Central is one of the few comics I have every single issue of because of the consistent quality of the writing (aside from a couple of annoying tie-ins to DC crossover events) and illustrator Michael Lark's suitably noirish and--to borrow a word from Gotham Central co-writer Greg Rucka regarding Lark's steez, "photojournalistic"--artwork. All 40 Gotham Central issues are available digitally from DC or as TPB collections. The following five Gotham Central arcs are must-reads, because of either the writing or substantial appearances by characters who are featured on Gotham.

"In the Line of Duty" (issues 1 to 2)

"We take it all from the regular person's POV, much like Marvels did," said Gotham Central co-writer Ed Brubaker about how his series' approach mirrored the acclaimed 1994 Kurt Busiek/Alex Ross miniseries' approach in a 2003 Comic Book Resources interview. Brubaker, who transformed the Captain America superhero comic into an espionage series and writes terrific crime comics like Criminal, and Rucka, who created the espionage comic Queen & Country and the P.I. comic Stumptown, kicked off Gotham Central's run with a relentlessly paced two-issue storyline in which the MCU must figure out how to take down a cop-killing Mr. Freeze. In keeping with the regular person's POV, Freeze is only shown when he comes into contact with any cops (as is Batman). Brubaker and Rucka's version of Freeze is more sadistic and vicious than the acclaimed reimagining of Freeze as a vengeful victim of corporate cruelty on Batman: The Animated Series, the show that remains the best screen version of the Batverse (sorry, Christopher Nolan trilogy), unless Gotham exceeds expectations.

"Conan the Barbarian on a loop": Which film or TV score albums have helped us to get our work done?

Film score music-wise, novelist Junot Díaz is all about Team Coco--the barbarian Coco, not the string-dancing Coco.

In a recent interview, Junot Díaz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and This Is How You Lose Her, was asked by The Daily Beast if his writing process entails any rituals, and he replied that he puts on movie soundtrack albums. "I can't listen to any music that has words in it, so soundtracks are good for this," said Díaz. "I wrote my first book listening to the soundtrack to the movie Conan the Barbarian on a loop. That's how I ride."

That must be how Ed Brubaker rides as well. A few days after The Daily Beast posted the Díaz Q&A, the creator and author of the Criminal and Fatale comics tweeted that the minimalist and moody score albums for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Brick are good soundtracks to write to, while Jerry Goldsmith's score from Planet of the Apes--a film Díaz has cited as an influence on his work, by the way--isn't such a good one to write to. Brubaker added, "It's a fantastic soundtrack, but it's like trying to write to Ornette Coleman."

True. I can understand why when you need to concentrate on writing something, ram's horn calls, cuíca riffs and dissonant chords aren't exactly helpful when you need to concentrate, and neither is avant-garde saxophone noodling.

Brick (Photo source: DVD Beaver)

I wouldn't be surprised if "Emily's Theme" or some other Nathan Johnson score cue from Brick provided Brubaker with inspiration for how to pace a moment of tension or mayhem in Criminal or if he scripted dialogue between two Criminal characters while the Brick score played in his earbuds. These recent comments about film score albums from two respected authors have got me thinking about score albums I used as study music or term paper writing music when I was a university student (I also started wondering about what one of my listeners from AFOS' earlier years, Ginger Ludden, co-creator of the Brothers Grant webcomic, listens to when she draws; she simply told me, "Seeds in Pandora based upon fantasy and video game soundtracks" and "Jeremy Soule").

Back then, I lived in an apartment building on a busy downtown city street, so to block the outside noise when I needed to concentrate and finish typing up a term paper or a newspaper article, I'd bump either one of my hip-hop CDs, some local R&B or alt-rock station or a score album. As study music, score albums were especially effective because like Díaz said, they often don't contain words, so they don't distract you too much from whatever you're reading (the amount of soundtracks I used as study music led to me launch an early incarnation of AFOS at the local campus station). While Díaz prefers the orchestral bombast of the late Basil Poledouris, I preferred score music that's not too bombastic or dissonant, but not too dull either. I guess that would make me more like Brubaker.

But ever since the emergence of SoundCloud, Mixcloud and Mixcrate, which are sites where DJs post one-to-two-hour-long hip-hop, soul or house mixtapes that can be streamed or sometimes downloaded for free, those lengthy mixes have supplanted score music as my writing-time music of choice. Score albums just don't do it for me anymore as writing-time music. I play them only when I'm picking out selections to add to AFOS playlists. The following are the score albums I used to study to or finish assignments to when I was a student.

Blade Runner (Vangelis)
Below Brubaker's tweet about score albums, Abhimanyu Das of Slant Magazine tweeted that "the Blade Runner soundtrack fires my imagination like nothing else." I hope he's not referring to the Blade Runner "New American Orchestra" re-recording that Full Moon Records tried to trick moviegoers into thinking was the film's official soundtrack back in 1982. That re-recording is, as Edward James Olmos would put it, lófaszt.

Desperado (Los Lobos and Tito & Tarantula)
Los Lobos won a Best Pop Instrumental Grammy for "Mariachi Suite," the Desperado album's closing track. The East L.A. quintet's musical contributions to Desperado were solid (their score music for the 1993 Showtime movie The Wrong Man is pretty enjoyable too). But Tito & Tarantula's contributions (Tito's "White Train [Showdown]" is what's featured in the Desperado clip below) and existing songs like Dire Straits' "Six Blade Knife" and Roger and the Gypsies' "Pass the Hatchet" stole both the film and the album, which I remember playing a lot during the first semester of my first year as a university student. That album and the Pharcyde's Labcabincalifornia dominated my headphones that semester, and so did the next soundtrack.



Get Shorty (John Lurie)
Featured during the cameo-laden final scene of Get Shorty that's below, the easygoing original score Lurie wrote for the 1995 screen adaptation of the late Elmore Leonard's 1990 potshot at Hollywood holds up pretty well outside the context of the movie. The existing songs in the movie are even better. Booker T. & the M.G.'s "Can't Be Still" is the track John Travolta punches the late Dennis Farina in the nose to. Greyboy's "Panacea"--the main reason why I bought the Get Shorty cassette in the first place and the Get Shorty track I remember studying to the most--is what Travolta struts to when he tosses the late James Gandolfini down the stairs. ("Jimmy, what's a cassette? Daddy, what's Vietnam?")

Malcolm X (Terence Blanchard)
If you needed music while typing up a paper about racist moments in history for a class like an Asian American Experience course and you were feeling especially militant and pissed off about white people that day, you'd put on an album by either KRS-One, Paris, the Coup or Grand Puba, who frequently refers to white men as the Devil in his verses. If you were feeling militant but you wanted Blanchard's trumpet to inspire you, then you opted for Blanchard's Malcolm X score CD to set the mood.

More Mondo Morricone: More Mindblowing Film Themes by Ennio Morricone from Italian Cult Movies
While on a trip in Italy, my big sister copped the 1996 German compilation More Mondo Morricone. She gave it to me as a gift, and it's been an inseparable part of my AFOS playlists ever since. More Mondo Morricone got me to notice that there's more to Morricone than just the spaghetti western genre, and I've ended up digging the lesser-known scores that are represented on More Mondo Morricone slightly more than his spaghetti western material. I wouldn't be surprised if Adrian Younge possesses all the soundtrack LPs that are excerpted on the Mondo Morricone CDs, which work great as study music if you prefer it to be on the loungey tip.

Waynestrumentals: And now, a different theme from every screen incarnation of Batman, including the crappy or racist versions

(Editor's note: Before we begin, here's what past Batverse comics writer Ed Brubaker tweeted about a certain senseless act in Colorado:

My thoughts exactly. Now on to the post.)

(Additional editor's note: The themes are in reverse chronological order as a nod to Dark Knight trilogy director Christopher Nolan's 2000 breakout film Memento, starting with a new score cue from The Dark Knight Rises as the track that represents the Nolan version of Batman on this post and concluding with music from a delightfully racist '40s Batman serial.)

Brittany Wakefield

(One more editor's note: Here on Blogger, I don't like to publish posts that don't contain a lot of text. That's what Tumblr is for. But I haven't had time to write so much text to accompany a Bat-load of Spotify and YouTube embeds, so Brittany Wakefield, a neighbor of mine who's a part-time beautician, volunteered to step in and provide the accompanying text to get more writing experience as preparation for the essay-writing portion of her GED test, even though she'd rather write about something called The Bad Girls Club, which she tells me is her favorite show. By the way, unlike a certain beautician who went on to become one of the modern-day Batverse comics' best writers, Brittany isn't familiar at all with Batman.)

In 1932, DC Comics began publishing the adventures of the world's first openly Jewish superhero, Ira Batman. By day, he was rich nightclub comedian Bruce Bruce, who played all the black rooms and some white rooms. By night, he suited up as Ira Batman (or The Batman, which is much less Jewish, or in later years, simply Batman). He chased after criminals to avenge the double murder of his Uncle Ben and Aunt Bernice. Ira's popularity in the funny books led to lots of screen versions of the Caped Crucifier, including the Christian Bale movies, which have come to an end with The Dark Knight Rises.

I'm sure I'll be texting during The Dark Knight Rises when I see it, but if there are at least two or three action scenes that aren't boring, then I'll totes take a break from my texts to look up at the screen and peep what's going on. In the Bale movies, Ira is referred to by other peeps as the Dark Knight because he could barely move around in his armor and had trouble removing it when he had to pee, just like a knight:

I don't know what Justice League: Doom is. Jim, do you know what that is?

(Editor's note: No, I've never watched it. I'm behind on the DC animated movies because I quit Netflix about a year ago. Netflix, wha happen?):


Batman: Year One flashed back to Ira's first year as a crimefighter. OMG, Ryan from The O.C. voiced Ira! I lurve him!:


Okay, I've seen Young Justice a few times, but only because Superboy's cute. Ira shows up sometimes in this cartoon, just to deliver buttloads of exposition to Robin and his peeps:


In Batman: Under the Red Hood, Ira fights someone named the Red Hood. If it's anything like that time Christina kicked Julie's booty on TBGC, then I'm on board:


In 2010, Ira appeared in Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths. Again, I don't know what that is. Jim?

(Editor's note: No clue either, Brittany.):

Ira teamed up with Superman in the cartoon movie Superman/Batman: Public Enemies and its sequel Superman/Batman: Apocalypse. In the clips I FF'd through, Superman sounded a lot like Pete, that cute but really old doc on Private Practice:

A few months after The Dark Knight ruled the summer, Cartoon Network premiered Batman: The Bold and the Beautiful, in which Batman was the CEO of a high-powered fashion house:

A week before the release of The Dark Knight, Warner Bros. Animation dropped Batman: Gotham Knight as a straight-to-DVD cartoon tie-in. Instead of a dark knight, in this movie, he was a Gotham knight, which meant he could barely move around while wearing a buttload of mascara like Criss Angel:

The cartoon movie Justice League: The New Frontier imagined Ira in the '50s, just like how J-Biebs dressed like a '50s dude at the NRJ Awards. OMG, J-Biebs was so cute when he slicked back his hair that night!:

March Madness March of the Day: "Captain America March" from Captain America: The First Avenger by Alan Silvestri

I remember watching the Marvel Comics float during NBC's coverage of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade as a kid and thinking, "This fake battle between the Marvel heroes and villains looks so cheesy, and the music from Back to the Future's not really helping."



That was back when the Marvel characters had a lousy track record on both the big and small screens, outside of animation. (Sure, The Incredible Hulk landed a few Emmy nominations back in the day and actually won one of them, but have you watched it lately? Its formulaic and Fugitive-inspired premise wears thin quickly, despite showrunner Kenneth Johnson's mostly serious treatment of the material and Bill Bixby's best efforts as the renamed-due-to-homophobia David Banner in standout episodes like "Dark Side," where both Banner and his Hulk self turn evil and pervy due to a serum experiment gone wrong.) In the years between the Marvel Thanksgiving Parade float and the breakout success of the first Blade movie, the first Marvel-inspired feature film that both the mainstream and the comics crowd liked, I thought, "Having the Marvel heroes run around and strike a pose to Alan Silvestri's Back to the Future theme was corny as hell, but wouldn't it be sweet if someday, someone like Silvestri wrote music for a Marvel character that was on a par with something like Silvestri's work for Back to the Future and Predator? Oh yeah, and a quality screenplay for that character would be dope too."

In 2011, both those things actually happened after Silvestri got recruited for a Marvel Studios project where screenwriting partners Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely skillfully brought to life one of Marvel's oldest properties--a character I never really cared for, even when one of my favorite comics authors, Ed Brubaker, gave him an ambitious relaunch in print.

The first things that would come to mind whenever I'd hear the name "Captain America" were Glenn Miller, LaSalles, bobby socks and Japanese internment camps. Even though a comic shop owner who knew I was a fan of the Brubaker titles Gotham Central and Sleeper insisted that Brubaker was doing a bang-up job and making Captain America more of an espionage comic than a superhero comic, I still couldn't get past issue 1 and see the appeal of this whitebread Boy Scout in the silly jingoistic costume, the star of the lame Thanksgiving Parade production number above. He was never as interesting to me as the prejudice-fighting X-Men, Spider-Man the angsty and quippy New Yorker or Spidey's West Coast counterparts, the younger and much more anti-establishment Runaways.

In Captain America: The First Avenger, Markus, McFeely, an uncredited Joss Whedon and director Joe Johnston, armed with the same sense of style he brought to The Rocketeer, all found ways to keep Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) from coming off as antiquated and banal while still confining his character to a period setting. One of those ways was to say "Screw it" and embrace Steve's do-gooder nature, but to make that eagerness to do good relatable and appealing (with the help of a subdued performance by Evans, removing all traces of his one-note, probably-bathes-his-dick-in-Axe-body-spray Johnny Storm character from the Fantastic Four movies and his smarmy action movie star character from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World). That's best embodied in the frail but courageous Steve's response when a scientist (a German-accented Stanley Tucci) asks him if he wants to kill Nazis: "I don't want to kill anyone. I don't like bullies. I don't care where they're from."

The First Avenger supplies this guy who doesn't like bullies with two outstanding original marches. "Star Spangled Man," penned by Disney musical songsmiths Alan Menken and David Zippel, is an amusing fake '40s show tune that accompanies the newly buffed-up Steve when the military doesn't consider him experienced enough for combat, so they sideline him to performing at a USO tour as a war bonds-promoting mascot, clad in a costume as shabby-looking as the tights worn by the stuntman who played Captain America on the '80s Marvel float. The USO tour is a clever device that helps make Steve's offstage heroism pay off beautifully in the film's second act.

The other march, which is much less comedic than "Star Spangled Man," is provided by Silvestri, who, while writing the First Avenger score, found time to give a concert with the Video Game Orchestra at his alma mater, Boston's Berklee College of Music, where he told an interviewer from Berklee that Steve's humble quality was what particularly appealed to him about The First Avenger. Silvestri tapped into that quality throughout his First Avenger themes, which is a reason why they work so well.



Silvestri's suitably old-school First Avenger score is truly on a par with his work for the Back to the Future and Predator films. It's like the score that should have accompanied that cheesy Marvel float back in the '80s. (Like Steve during the USO montage, the vigorous end title rendition of the "Captain America March" got sidelined, specifically to bonus track status on the iTunes edition of the First Avenger soundtrack album, which frustrated consumers who already bought the end title theme-less First Avenger CD.)

Man, I would love to hear Cap's march in a live setting, but this will do.

BBC's Luther may be as close as we can get to that TV version of Gotham Central some of us GC readers always wanted to see

The BBC One cops-vs.-serial killers procedural Luther, which concludes its second season on BBC America tonight, isn't a perfect show, but it's more enjoyable than most procedurals, due to an imposing and lively but never hammy turn by former Wire star Idris Elba (an actual lead of color who still has his show!) and a distinctive, not-so-generic look.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The '60s Batman had the Dutch angles and Homicide: Life on the Street had the jump cuts and washed-out color scheme (something Homicide phased out in its later and less interesting seasons). Luther likes to take its actors and place them at the bottom left and right corners of the screen so that they're surrounded by lots of negative space. If I recall correctly, a Luther crew member said the crew favored this framing effect because it makes it appear as if comic book-style thought bubbles are about to surface above the actors' heads.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The framing effect, which was more prominent in Luther's first season (did some Beeb higher-up put NBC exec-vs.-Homicide-style pressure on the Luther crew to do less of it?), also enhances the show's sense of dread and unease. It dwarfs the actors and manages to make the tall Elba look as small as the runty white psychos he's been chasing this season (at times, Luther feels like a serious version of Chris Rock's post-Columbine stand-up routine about crazy white kids who scare the shit out of him, like the goofily named Trenchcoat Mafia).

Luther evokes dread and unease more effectively than most shows. The mute, hammer-wielding LARP-er who terrorized working folk in the penultimate episode of Luther's second season is scarier and more menacing than anything during Luther's American ratings competition, FX's trying-way-too-hard-to-be-scary American Horror Story. The LARP-er's muteness and the episode's preference for filming his killings from a distance or having them take place off-screen--we're subjected only to gruesome hammer-to-skull sound effects--both make his acts of violence more disturbing. And though it's resorted to the tired and annoying device of children in peril that's been used by torture-porn procedurals like Criminal Minds, Luther rarely feels as sadistic as that show (below an A.V. Club piece about Criminal Minds and its short-lived spinoff Suspect Behavior, a commenter astutely noted that "Middle America eat [sic] this crap up with a spoon. It genuinely baffles me that middle aged and conservative Americans have made this show such a mainstream hit.").

That quality of being unnerving without getting sadistic or graphic recalls Gotham Central, the much-missed DC Comics crime title that writers Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka told from the point of view of Gotham City homicide detectives who resent Batman (Gotham Central was a bleak book, but it wasn't as sadistic as most of DC's puerile attempts at edginess, perhaps because Brubaker and Rucka write like grown-ups instead of horny and torture-porn-obsessed adolescents). From "the operatic theatricality" that crime novelist and Luther creator Neil Cross once said he's brought to DCI John Luther's adversaries to that aforementioned framing effect that creates the illusion of thought bubbles, the larger-than-life Luther is basically a comic book--or as John's teenage charge Jenny Jones (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) would prefer, graphic novel--but it's a very good one, which Gotham Central was.

WonderCon! Fighting evil as it comes!

I'm attending this weekend's WonderCon, where the lead actors from Chuck and Sit Down, Shut Up (Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz's upcoming animated sitcom) will plug their shows and attempt to make sense of strange and awkward questions from creepy fans and microphone hogs. In San Francisco, you know it's WonderCon time when you see Stormtroopers and Sailor Moon try to cross Howard Street. The cosplayers and their cool costumes are always a highlight of any con. At WonderCon, I'll be going as an unemployed loser who's trying to jumpstart his scriptwriting career.

Above is a snapshot of a cosplayer at the 2007 WonderCon, which is the first--and last--WonderCon I attended. The Team Misaki Studios site snapped this photo of Wonder Woman doing the "up yours" gesture or blocking bullets or something. WonderCon '09 will feature the West Coast premiere of next week's DVD release of the badass Wonder Woman animated movie, which I saw at the New York Comic Con.

I'm looking forward to the Star Trek and Ed Brubaker panels and the overpriced Costco-quality pizza.