Wolverine Revisited

I began this non-project of a blog with a review of Wolverine some years ago, which I am not going to link to because lame. But I had the fortunate opportunidad to see Wolverine again on Arab tv the other night. I thought that maybe the stretch of time between its original release and now would allow me to more objectively experience it. What a horrible movie. But there was something interesting that happened during it, and that I will recount.

In a crucial scene, Wolverine decides to undergo an experimental procedure by a secret military group, without which we would have no such thing as the superhero genre (by the way, I often wonder if Mary Shelley is to blame for all this secret body procedure stuff. If she is, I hate her). I think he decides to go through with it because he is deeply angry at the injustice of the world. The noble kind of angry, which means the intolerable kind, or at least the kind that makes brooding cool. And when did brooding get cool? I am not sure, but I am guessing that it was when anger became noble. Everyone broods these days, except for Tony Stark, but he talks too much. Even James Bond broods, but that is only because Jason Bourne brooded first, and he copies whatever Jason Bourne did, which was mostly brood.

One time when I was in seventh grade, I found myself with mostly different friends than I had in sixth grade, and we were trying to make our way in the darkness that is middle school. I chose to meet that darkness with an attempt at brooding, which lasted about 33 minutes during Mrs. Vice's class. It ended when Amanda came back from her group work to sit by me again and I immediately started serenading her with Boston's "Amanda": "I'm gonna say it like a man, and make you understand, Amanda. I'm gonna say it right away, I can't wait another day, Amanda. I'm gonna take you by surprise and make you realize, Amanda." Hard to brood when Boston's most brilliant lyrics have got your tongue. So I ended my brooding, deciding that reciting bad rock lyrics offered me better prospects with the ladies. I thankfully didn't know any Morrissey or Depeche Mode at the time. I still thank my lucky stars for the early ignorance, and latter-day apathy, of Morrissey. I tried to brood once again when I was a sophomore in high school, but once I got to cross country practice, I realized that a true brooder would be the kind to run for a really long time without explaining himself, and that wasn't my style of practice. I was more into extroverted running: the kind that likes to talk on the long runs and get in trouble for hiding with friends on the short runs, so I found brooding to be anathema to not trying.

This is all to say that either 1) I am not made of superhero material, or 2) the movies are lying--superheroes wouldn't really brood because, dude, that is so fake. And Wolverine just broods and broods and broods with an occasional growl. Speaking of growling, I also saw the Brendan Fraser-Harrison Ford movie Extraordinary Measures recently, and it was worth it just to witness the greatest angry growling performance of all time in Harrison Ford. It was amazing. He was so mad, so often. He didn't brood, he just yelled and growled. It was a performance that ranks up there with Regarding Henry for sheer Harrison Ford bad-acting craziness. If he was as prolific as Nic Cage, he would be more of a living legend of hilarious acting.

So Wolverine broods, goes for the secret military experimental thing where they fill his bones with nitranium fitrate, the hardest metal outside of Go Into Your Brains and Eat Your Heart Out (a band I created with my brother Mark that only played, on tennis rackets, in my grandparents' basement), and then Wolverine wakes up, almost dead, and makes a big splash with his retractable claws. The scene, a fixture from the ads on tv, reminds me of Calvin getting up out of the bath when I show him the towell. And then Wolverine yells, . . . looks around, . . . sees shooting and distressed people's faces, and . . . shooting and . . . now he is in a barn, brooding, all in seven second flat.

I soon realized what had happened: Wolverine wakes up from his secret experimental bath naked, because he is getting new bone structures and because he is Hugh Jackman, so the big fight that takes place after he wakes up, the chase and all that, were done in the beastly nude. This, I guess, didn't make it past the censors that be. Kathryn recalled that in the movie you occasionally see his Jackman butt during the scene, which I didn't recall, probably because it made my overgrown baby butt seem melancholy in comparison, and so I just put it out of my mind. Kathryn, fortunate for her, did not put it out of her mind.

At any rate, the Arab world censors wouldn't even let it in our minds. Not only that, but what was once, I am assuming, a 7 minute scene and the climax of the movie (isn't the breakout of the glass case always the climax of the experimental body altering procedure movie?) was whittled down to seven seconds. We didn't even get his upper torso, the highlight of so many Hugh Jackman films, to grace our eyes. The scene was totally confusing in every way. Why did he need to get out of the experiment he opted in for? Why did he go to a barn in the middle of farmland? Why did the men in suits want to shoot him? How did he even get out of the glass case? What does Hugh Jackman look like naked from behind? Does he have the same weird man thigh lines as I have? Do his sideburns go all the way down?

It all turned out okay, though, because the movie is completely incoherent to begin with, and I am assuming the Arab censors understood that, which gave them total creative censoring license. After it was over, I thought about writing in to MBC Persia to tell them that they needed to edit out all of the scenes of Hugh Jackman's hairy brooding face and definitely all the scenes of him walking away unfazed from an explosion he created, so that the movie would consist of a fifteen minute montage of his nitrate filtrium claws coming out of his hands and close ups of Liev Schriber grinning.

This is all to say that sometimes the worst blog posts are the ones worth revisiting, only this time with censors.