If Captain America and Green Lanter suck, at least Thor got it right (mostly!).

As for the film, I agree with you that none of the actors had much to do, but they all did it pretty well.

He was Oscar-nominated for directing his first Shakespeare film \”Henry V\”, \”Much Ado About Nothing\” is 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, \”Love\’s Labour\’s Lost\” was apparently pretty bad, but \”As You Like It\” scored a 75 on metacritic.

Branagh\’s definitely going to go down in history as \”that guy who was obsessed with Shakespeare\”, but I don\’t think he did too bad by the bard, after all.

Or, look at it this way: would Africans and African-Americans have a right to disagree if Brad Pitt was going to play Papa Legba, and Angelina Jolie play Anansie?

I suspect this view is the very reason you end up with terrible comic book films like those listed here. All of these films were made from the point of view that comics are essentially silly, poorly written and ridiculous, and the filmmakers wrap that commentary into the execution (and then, in these cases execute THAT poorly). Comics and comic films have been wrestling with this problem since the campy 60\’s batman show. These are comic films made by people who don\’t like comics very much.

As bad as many early comics were, it wasn\’t there intention to be bad; they weren\’t being drawn with a sense of self-commentary, they were being drawn to be as entertaining as possible to their audience. They were made to be cool, not to be an ironic commentary on the fact that the audience has no taste.

By the same standard, I could say Miller\’s Crossing was a bad example of a gangster film, because it didn\’t have all the overwrought, stagey acting of The Glass Key. Or Star Wars is a failed sci fi film, because you can\’t see any strings holding up the spaceships.

There are plenty of examples of self-conscious jokes, or meta commentary in old comics (Dick Tracy for instance), but they were intentionally written that way. And what\’s more, I see nothing wrong with making a joke out of our nostalgiac view of things (Galaxy Quest with Star Trek fans). But that is parody of the genre, which is only an aspect of the genre itself.