The Avengers

Last night, the whole family and a couple friends went and saw the Joss Whedon's AVENGERS.

But before I get into my thoughts on the film, let me fill you in on my feelings about Comic Book Movies and Joss Whedon.

I spent quite a bit of my youth extolling the merits of Comic Book as Art and hoping for a well done adaptation of comics to film.  As I've gotten older, I yearn for the days when comics were inexpensive and easy to get into.  I shudder at my younger self's need for mainstream acceptance of comics.  Most comics published today, aren't targeting me in their demographic, and I sell comics for a living.

You might also be surprised how few comics movies I've seen in the last few years.  I'd rather not see a comic book film, than to see a bad one.  And I've really grown to feel that many of the most important aspects of comics don't work on the big screen.  Most of the times costumes, which are paramount in comics, are ridiculous in a movie.  As much as I appreciate Christopher Nolan's work on his Batman trilogy, its still hard to see a man dressed like a bat.  To give you an idea, I still haven't seen V for Vendetta, Watchmen, Green Lantern, Thor, or Iron Man 2.

Unfortunately, it's also very expensive for a family of 4 or 5 to go to the movies.  And then there's popcorn.

Now we'll get to Mr. Whedon.  Toy Story was great, but let's all be honest, it would have been with or without him.  It was Pixar.  We'll just ignore the Buffy film, Titan AE and Alien Resurrection.  I came late to the Buffy television series, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, even if Spike was forced on us and it went 2 seasons too long.  Angel was pretty good and did suffer an untimely death.  I'm no browncoat, and didn't care for Firefly, but did like Serenity, but a western in space was Roddenberry's pitch for STAR TREK .  In short, I was really unsure of which Joss we'd get.

AVENGERS is the best movie I've seen as an adult.  It beats BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA.  It's definitely the best Action/Adventure and Comic Book film, ever made.  It's up there with STAR WARS.  Yes, A NEW HOPE, technically, but when I saw it we just called it STAR WARS.  I can't recommend it enough.  Mark Ruffalo is phenomenal.  Whedon understands the Hulk, probably better than Marvel does.  In fact, Marvel Comics needs to take lessons from Marvel Studios.  Josss embraces the Marvel comic universe without laughing at it.  He has fun with every trope without making fun of any of it.  It's a perfect movie.  I loved it as a diehard comics geek, my wife loved it as a woman working in comics, my 22 year old daughter has seen it twice and plans to see it again tonight, my 10 year old son desperately wants to know who the villain revealed at the end is and my 8 year old daughter was guffawing at all the right places.

Assemble to go see the AVENGERS.

Excelsior!