The Batman: Pics, Videos, and Other Awesomeness

[NIGHTBRINGER]

Absolutely yes…. but the first 2 movies were OT in this thread.

True... but a victory is a victory. Gillette was another one!

 

[Scalenex]

Do we wanna talk about Batwoman and the possible cancellation of the show?

They have a contract to do twenty episodes (or some other unreasonably large number). It might be cheaper for them to continue the dumpster fire because if they stop the show suddenly they will still have to pay the actors, director, and whatnot. I doubt it's getting renewed though.

The CW, despite being famous for Arrow which pushed the Arrowverse into the mainstream, is largely a niche channel. They can survive with fairly low ratings. Batwoman is cheap to make, especially compared to Supergirl and The Flash where they regularly have to simulate superpowers. One of the many complaints about the show is the special effects and fight scene choreography is often subpar.

Anyway, I hope Hollywood gets the message after Terminator, Batwoman, Charlie's Angels, Batwoman, and Watchmen. Get woke go broke. My understanding is Charlie's Angels is bombing so hard a mushroom cloud can be seen. I didn't like the the early 2000s movies that much. I just watched it because I liked Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu. I didn't watch the sequel.

I also understand that the newest Charlie's Angels movie managed to offend some woke people by pushing girly stereotypes. They flip out over closets and shoes and the like.

I did recently say in another thread that it is possible to push a political message without sacrificing the story but I cannot come up with anything recent along those lines.

Generally I noticed "Get woke, go broke" means "Push feminism to the point where it's misandric, go broke."

The most recent woke-ish movie that didn't flock was the all-female Oceans Eleven franchise movie. It got reasonably positive reviews from fans as well as critics and it made money. It didn't make a lot of money, but it made an adequate amount of money to justify the producers bank rolling the movie.

I didn't watch it. Woke or not, I do not like heist movies, but my understanding is that despite having all female leads they didn't dump on men the whole movie.

 

[Killer Angel]

I did recently say in another thread that it is possible to push a political message without sacrificing the story but I cannot come up with anything recent along those lines.

Albeit difficult, it is absolutely possible to push political and social messages within great stories.
Mississipi Burning, Green Book, American History X.
The company of strangers (if we wanna talk about women).

People that promotes the kind of garbage products that are failing hard, forget (or decide to ignore) that audience don't care about gender or messages, they usually care about quality, story and characters.

And regarding the Whole BS of "you don't like it because you're afraid by strong women", we tend to remind that exist strong and appreciated women characters as Sarah Connors or Ellen Ripley, but we should also remember that this is true even for recent films / shows: one of the most beloved character of GoT was Arya Stark, and Wonder Woman was not exactly a great movie, but it was still well received.
So stop blaming someone else for your own fault.

 

[Scalenex]

And regarding the Whole BS of "you don't like it because you're afraid by strong women", we tend to remind that exist strong and appreciated women characters as Sarah Connors or Ellen Ripley, but we should also remember that this is true even for recent films / shows: one of the most beloved character of GoT was Arya Stark, and Wonder Woman was not exactly a great movie, but it was still well received.
So stop blaming someone else for your own fault.

There is a very very simple way to make a strong female character compelling instead of annoying. She needs to fail early on, so her latter successes have meeting. She needs to have shortcomings and flaws to overcome, so she can grow as a character.

Arya Stark was blinded and beaten before she became a badass. Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley both were non-combatants who had to learn how to fight. Wonder Woman, didn't fail a whole lot, but she did have a general naivete she needed to overcome and she also misdiagnosed who her true enemy was several time.

Alita's first fight was a victory but she still lost a fair bit early on. At the very least when she went into the hunters' bar and demanded they help her and everyone laughed at her. That's a defeat of sorts.

That goes for male protagonists. If they never struggle, they are not very compelling characters. Unless they are Saitama, aka One Punch Man. But that's a show that breaks all the rules in a good way.

 

[ravagekitteh]

Wonder Woman, didn't fail a whole lot, but she did have a general naivete she needed to overcome and she also misdiagnosed who her true enemy was several time.

I have to say, I actually just watched Wonder Woman last night, and that was my biggest criticism of it. She basically spends the entire film unfairly judging everyone for things she doesn’t understand, and is never once taken to task for it or made to regret it in any way. With the exception of a couple of moments on Themyscira and the final battle, she doesn’t actually seem go through to or seem to have ever gone through any sort of hardship at all, but she still spends almost the entire movie (mostly) unfairly criticising people who actually have.

The trench scene, (which to be fair was pretty badass when she actually got to the fighting) is a good example. Before she actually does have her badass moment, she goes round criticising all of the soldiers for not going over the top and carrying on the chase, with the implication being that they’re cowards for it. Personally I think them not doing that is pretty reasonable, given that they’d be absolutely slaughtered because they aren’t magic Amazon goddesses or whatever. Yet instead of addressing that, the film has her go on her rampage and acts as if she’s morally superior to them for it - they were all cowards and she had to inspire them to move forwards. There are loads of moments like that and even the one time she is presented as wrong (the reveal of the true villain and humanity’s nature), when she does correct herself it’s presented as something she comes by herself more or less rather than something she’s learnt as a result of her mistakes.

Don’t get me wrong, it was still a perfectly good film and I did enjoy it, but that, combined with the fact that once she leaves Themyscira she seems to lose all common sense (which given it was obviously done for comedy reasons is somewhat more forgivable) means if I were in the film itself I would likely spend a lot of it wanting to punch her in the face

 

[Scalenex]

My problem with Wonderwoman was the supporting character with PTSD. He didn't power through his psychosis when his friends needed and none of his friends compassionately pulled him out of the fray. It was a subplot that went nowhere.

Maybe WW deserves her own thread.

 

[NIGHTBRINGER]

 

[ravagekitteh]

My problem with Wonderwoman was the supporting character with PTSD. He didn't power through his psychosis when his friends needed and none of his friends compassionately pulled him out of the fray. It was a subplot that went nowhere.

Maybe WW deserves her own thread.

That would probably be my other main criticism of the film. I was expecting some sort of badass or heartwarming moment from him, or at least for his character to actually do something, but to be honest with pretty much all the supporting characters they all more or less went nowhere

 

[Scalenex]

That would probably be my other main criticism of the film. I was expecting some sort of badass or heartwarming moment from him, or at least for his character to actually do something, but to be honest with pretty much all the supporting characters they all more or less went nowhere

I think the WW movie creators copied Captain America's multi-ethnic bunch of sidekicks.

Wonder Woman was still a good movie, but it was not a great movie. It was initially treated as a great movie because it followed a succession of turds that DC Studios made.

So transitioning from girl power to Batman.

Thanks to my subscription from DC Universe I have access to a lot of PDFs of back issues of comic books. I enjoy Birds of Prey. I haven't read any of the recent releases of Birds of Prey where Harley Quinn joins the team. Traditionally the Birds of Prey are Batgirl/Oracle, Huntress, and Black Canary. The comic series has a lot of cameos which include both male and female heroes or anti-heroes who join the team on a temporary basis to serve short-term temporary goals. Batman doesn't show up much, but he's often sending Batgirl equipment upgrades or pulling strings on things as Bruce Wayne. Nightwing shows up directly a fair bit. They also worked with Catwoman, Blue Beetle, Superman, Supergirl, individual members of the Teen Titans, among others. If Barbara Gordon is Oracle instead of Batgirl, it's highly likely that the Birds of Prey receive aid from ordinary heroes such as Gotham PD and the military which is a nice change of pace.

The comics I read showcased strong women and all that but they didn't deingrate all male supporting characters to prop up the female protagonists. Apart from the villains, most of the male supporting characters are good, honorable, and brave.

The Birds of Prey comics are usually ensemble driven rather than character driven. This trailer clearly seems to be about Harley Quinn. It's possible the trailer is misleading, that's happened before but i'm guessing Quinn is going to overshadow the other characters.

At this point I have no reason to believe this movie is going to be good and I have no reason to believe this movie is going to bad. Now the guy Warner Brothers put in charge of DC Studios who greenlit Joker (2019) also greenlit Birds of Prey, so in theory he has good judgement. He didn't greenlight Joker because he saw the hidden genius in it. His rationale seemed to be "It's low budget, so I can afford to give the director autonomy to do as he sees fit, if it doesn't work, no big deal." Bird of Prey has a much larger production budget so it probably has more studio meddling.

 

[NIGHTBRINGER]

 

[NIGHTBRINGER]

 

[NIGHTBRINGER]

 

[NIGHTBRINGER]

 

[NIGHTBRINGER]

 

[Tk'ya'pyk]

Huh. A new movie? Why don't they just reboot the TV series from 2002-3? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_of_Prey_(TV_series)

 

[Scalenex]

Huh. A new movie? Why don't they just reboot the TV series from 2002-3? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_of_Prey_(TV_series)

The old TV series was not bad it was not particularly well known. Also, even though viewership in movie theaters is trending down and TV viewership is trending up, actors, writers and directors often view television as less prestigious than television series.

Harley Quinn's R rated television series debuts on November 29th. I've been getting nonstop ads for it since early September. It's reached the point where the ads have become annoying.

I hope lives up to the hype. It's got a lot of voice actors I like, but that's not enough in and of itself to make a animated comedy work.

 

[Scalenex]

So I'm away from little kids, so I could watch episode 1 of Harley Quinn. It is extremely not kid friendly by the way.

It's a good show. I don't know if it's for everyone. There is a good chance that the show might grow stale, but for now I enjoy it.

It's got good dialogue, good animation, good voice actors. The humor is a mix of gallows humor, situation comedy, gallows humor, affectionate parody of the Batman franchise, gallows humor, general absurdism, and gallows humor.

Would I pay money to watch it if it wasn't attached to Young Justice (the show that is single handedly the reason I signed up for DC Universe)? No, but it's a fine addition to the other stuff DC Universe offers me.

This show would certainly fit on adult swims late night comedy block. I would say if you like Dethklock style humor and you like Batman, then you would probably like this show.

It's anti-SJW if that's important to you. Well they do bring up SJW talking points a lot but they do it in very over the top strawman fashion.

 

[NIGHTBRINGER]

good voice actors.

Some of the voices really bugged me. I wasn't a fan of Joker's voice at all and Harley Quinn's felt sub par too. Poison Ivy's and the Riddler's voices were okay.

Overall it was... strange. I'll watch a few more to see how it settles. So far though: Mandalorian > Harley Quinn

What was up with that

Spoiler: very minor spoiler

talking plant

?

 

[Scalenex]

Some of the voices really bugged me. I wasn't a fan of Joker's voice at all and Harley Quinn's felt sub par too. Poison Ivy's and the Riddler's voices were okay.

I am a big fan of Alan Tudyk. Maybe I have blind loyalty but I cannot diss him as Joker. Also, I'm not in the Mark Hamil for life camp. I like Mark Hamil's Joker, but I have never seen an animated Joker I didn't like. I'm not going to dump on a Joker actor just for the crime of not being Mark Hamil or Heath Ledger. I wlll dump on a Joker actor for the crime of being Jared Leto.

Overall it was... strange. I'll watch a few more to see how it settles. So far though: Mandalorian > Harley Quinn

What was up with that

Spoiler: very minor spoiler

talking plant

?

It's not a spoiler because the talking plant is a part of the promo commercials.

Sometimes Poison Ivy's plant powers are overtly supernatural, sometimes they are not. This version of Poison Ivy is extremely powerful. Anyway, she has a talking plant on this show so he can spout one liners.

I laughed a lot when she was lecturing Harley on being more independent and bragging about how independent she was while plants in the background were tending her every need. The talking plant was sarcastically quipping that "Your independence is inspiring really."

I should probably get around to watching the Mandalorian. The reviewers I trust said the Mandalorian is enjoyable but not a masterpiece. Probably watch the first few episodes once Nightbringer watches Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

 

[Aginor]

the Mandalorian is enjoyable but not a masterpiece.

I agree with that.