Calling my goddamn CAR the goddamn BATMOBILE.

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Blossom
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Re: Sex-IST. IST!

Postby Blossom » Mon May 26, 2014 1:09 pm

To be fair, that's what Wonder Woman actually was through much of the 70s.
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Re: Sex-IST. IST!

Postby Thad » Mon May 26, 2014 2:54 pm

TedBelmont wrote:Also they put him in a fucking maroon leather suit because NO BRIGHT COLORS EVER


That too, but I'm not sure we can lay that at the screenwriter's feet.

TedBelmont wrote:It's like DC's live action division is stuck in the X-Men/X-2/X-3 era of Marvel movies, when they were embarrassed to let their superheroes be, you know, superheroes.


Bears adding that the X-Men series are Fox films, not Marvel Studios.

But Marvel Studios still won't use words like "Skrull" or "Cosmic Cube". Because then they might look silly.

Mothra wrote:I like the new costume! Bright, undetailed comic-book designs work fine in bright, undetailed comic books, where it fits the style, but if you just dump those designs into real life, they look cartoony and cheap. That's all well and good if you want your superhero movie to be goofy, but there's a difference between staying true to the fun comic-bookyness of the original work, and slavishly keeping to elements that only work in a completely different medium.


The Reeve costume was friggin' excellent, though. And whatever was wrong with the Reeve movies, it wasn't the costume.

EDIT TO ADD: Besides, you're saying that like the costume was the only dull, desaturated, ugly thing in the movie. It's not. The entire fucking film has all the color sapped out of it. It's like Reverse Dick Tracy.

TA wrote:To be fair, that's what Wonder Woman actually was through much of the 70s.


And it sucked.

Come to that, "mopey guy with shitty overcomplicated costume" is an entirely accurate portrayal of modern Superman. I'm not saying the end goal should be accuracy to the comic books. I'm saying the end goal should be to make something that isn't terrible.

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Re: Sex-IST. IST!

Postby Classic » Mon May 26, 2014 5:51 pm

Thad wrote:But Marvel Studios still won't use words like "Skrull" or "Cosmic Cube". Because then they might look silly.

For what it's worth, I've been familiar with skrulls and cosmic cubes by steady introduction for over five years and it still sounds silly. Like people making up names in the laziest way possible.

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Re: Sex-IST. IST!

Postby Blossom » Mon May 26, 2014 6:11 pm

They really are terrible names, yeah. Chitauri actually sounds like something, instead of "ooh, let's put an r in skull, that's scary", and Cosmic Cube is just ridiculous.
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Re: Sex-IST. IST!

Postby patito » Mon May 26, 2014 6:14 pm

Cosmic Cube sounds amazing, I don't know where you get your ideas from.

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Re: Sex-IST. IST!

Postby IGNORE ME » Mon May 26, 2014 6:15 pm

The Cosmic Cube sounded perfectly awesome and full of gravity in its original psychadelic context, it just kind of sits awkwardly in any universe not comprised entirely of polka dots and exclamation points.

(Once Thanos actually starts showing up in stories though, you'll probably hear "Cosmic Cube" a lot more.)

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Re: Sex-IST. IST!

Postby Thad » Mon May 26, 2014 7:08 pm

TA wrote:They really are terrible names, yeah. Chitauri actually sounds like something,


No it doesn't. It sounds like a generic-sounding science fiction alien name from 2002. And "Tesseract" is cribbed from A Wrinkle in Time and divorced from its original meaning and context.

TA wrote:instead of "ooh, let's put an r in skull, that's scary",


I can't imagine "scary" is what Stan Lee was going for in a story about funny-looking aliens who get turned into cows. I think it's a generic-sounding science fiction alien name from 1962.

TA wrote:and Cosmic Cube is just ridiculous.


Of course it's ridiculous.

ALL this shit is ridiculous.

That's the point I'm making here. Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, Thor, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman -- they're all over-the-top, colorful characters created as children's entertainment. This shit where people want to run as far as they can from that essential truth is utterly tiresome. Yes, there's room for mature, multilayered stories in this genre -- of course there is. But we're now in a world where DC/Warner thinks every superhero needs to be Batman, and Batman can't even call his car the "Batmobile" anymore.

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If they're so damn worried that Stan Lee's goofy alliterative names are going to distract people and take them out of the OMG SRS BUSINESS movie they're watching, maybe they could quit sticking Stan Lee in increasingly lengthy and distracting cameos in every damn movie.

Oh hey by the way Edgar Wright's off Ant-Man. So yeah I'm standing by my theory that Marvel just hates fun.

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Re: Sex-IST. IST!

Postby Mothra » Mon May 26, 2014 7:27 pm

I mean, I agree that the way JLU and the Timmverse did it was pretty much perfect, as far as balancing decent storylines with fun comic book wackiness. If they made the new Flash show into something similar to any of the Flash-centric JLU episodes, it would be fun and delightful and I might actually watch it.

But I also really enjoyed the way Captain America: First Avenger placed an idealistic child-like comic book superhero into a real-world war zone and made him strike a balance between who he wanted to be and what he had to do. I also loved the setup for that Power Girl comic a while back, where she had a playful edge that boarded on nativity, and refused to let her every day life change that. I feel like there's some decent potential in the notion of having super heroes struggle to live up to their unrealistic ideals, and succeed, by being super human.

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Re: Sex-IST. IST!

Postby Thad » Mon May 26, 2014 7:44 pm

Mothra wrote:But I also really enjoyed the way Captain America: First Avenger placed an idealistic child-like comic book superhero into a real-world war zone and made him strike a balance between who he wanted to be and what he had to do.


I think, like most of the Marvel movies, the first act that told the origin story was pretty much perfect and then it started to meander a bit after that. I think the USO stuff (complete with the punching-Hitler cover) was a fantastic way of combining the comic book wackiness with the idea that hey this IS WWII we're talking about here.

I think the movie, like a lot of superhero movies, overcompensated in running away from the teen sidekick angle and gave us no fucking reason whatsoever to care about Bucky. His death was abrupt and by-the-numbers and didn't even succeed as shock value, let alone creating any kind of emotional attachment to Steve and his grief at losing his best friend.

Mothra wrote:I feel like there's some decent potential in the notion of having super heroes struggle to live up to their unrealistic ideals, and succeed, by being super human.


Absolutely. That's what Man of Steel should have been. Instead, it was whining and neck-snapping.

Arrow is, by and large, an eye-rolling soap opera, and its themes and morality are all over the place. But trying to build an arc around Ollie deciding not to kill is a good way to go. The execution isn't perfect -- they frequently exploit the "but what if somebody ELSE kills the bad guy and Ollie just scowls at them?" loophole (a la Batman: Earth One and Dark Knight Rises), and sometimes Ollie just straight up kills a dude anyway -- but season 2 gave us the ending Man of Steel didn't, where the hero lets the villain live because he's not playing his fucking game.

...we're way off the "people say stupid shit about female superheroes" premise of the thread. But I think it's worth exploring what happens when someone who doesn't like superheroes makes a superhero movie. And I think you can tell the difference between that and the work of someone who really loves the source material -- like Raimi or Whedon.

I think that, in a lot of cases, the movies succeed best where they DO copy things from the comics -- the Kirby aesthetics in Thor, the bickering in Avengers, the entire first act of Iron Man -- and falter when they decide something from the comics is too silly and needs to be changed into something SUPER BADASS.

The Green Goblin mask. 'Nuff said.

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Re: Sex-IST. IST!

Postby Mothra » Mon May 26, 2014 8:03 pm

See also: Every X-Men movie.

I really really like the first two-thirds of The Wolverine. Right up until he has to siege a fortress and battle a robot samurai in the most spectacularly out-of-place forced climax you can imagine.

TEASER SNEEK PEEK: MAGNETO AND THE GANG ARE BACK TUNE IN NEXT WEEK

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Re: Sex-IST. IST!

Postby IGNORE ME » Mon May 26, 2014 8:06 pm

I feel I should point out this minor spoiler from a movie that Thad won't watch: Cap steals his old bright-colored uniform from a museum for the final battle in The Winter Soldier.

Steve actually has a whole character thread about refusing to buy into the cynicism of the modern world.

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Re: Sex-IST. IST!

Postby Thad » Mon May 26, 2014 9:24 pm

Mothra wrote:See also: Every X-Men movie.


First Class ends with the straight-up cherry red OG Kirby Magneto outfit, though.

Brentai wrote:I feel I should point out this minor spoiler from a movie that Thad won't watch: Cap steals his old bright-colored uniform from a museum for the final battle in The Winter Soldier.


Main trouble is that this has become such a cliche at this point. The Steve Carell Get Smart pulled the same bit with Max stealing the shoe phone and the car from the TV show. Hell, the last two episodes of SHIELD had the grandson of one of the Howling Commandos break out a bunch of WWII-era sci-fi gadgets.

It's like the obligatory scene at the beginning of a movie where the hero shows up in a cheesy homemade costume -- on the one hand, I love it; on the other, it's gotten pretty damn repetetive at this point.

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Re: Sex-IST. IST!

Postby Bal » Tue May 27, 2014 12:44 am

One thing RE: The tesseract. It's not a cosmic cube, it's a power gem. So is the "Aether" from Thor 2, though I think they're calling them "stones of power" for now. Is it very Cosmic Cube-like in appearance? Sure is, but they're probably not even going to have cosmic cubes, and making it look that way kept comic fans from guessing instantly that it was actually the space gem. It's pretty obvious that by the time the third Avengers roles around enough of these things are going to have shown up to have an infinity gauntlet analog and movie centered around it, and I'm super OK with them never seeing or mentioning a cosmic cube.

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Re: Sex-IST. IST!

Postby Thad » Tue May 27, 2014 1:51 am

We could debate the likelihood of whether that was always the plan or if it's a retcon, or whether there's even a distinction between the Cosmic Cube and the Space Gem in the movie universe, but all that's pretty far afield of the question of whether WB and Marvel Studios seem entirely too concerned with treating the superhero genre as SERIOUS BUSINESS.

At least Marvel's got Whedon steering the ship, and he's no Goyer. But his concerns are still secondary (at best) to the corporate parent's -- he certainly hasn't created the impression that he's happy with Wright's departure:

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Then again, Marvel Studios IS making a movie with Rocket freakin' Raccoon in it, and I don't see WB trying anything like that anytime soon.

But only because Green Lantern was a failure.




(For values of "failure" with lifetime worldwide gross around $220 million. Granted, that's on a $200 million budget, but it still kinda makes me wish *I* could be a failure.)

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Re: Sex-IST. IST!

Postby Classic » Tue May 27, 2014 2:14 am

What I mean to say is, the significance of a "cosmic cube" needs a bit of context to make work. Like, if you don't have this idea that there's a "power cosmic" that's real hot shit already firmly in suspended disbelief it doesn't work.

For whatever reason, for me it's a "Why does no one recognize Clark Kent is Superman?" kind of thing, where say a Raccoon space privateer and a vin diesel tree man are like eye lasers and super-strength.

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Re: Sex-IST. IST!

Postby Lottel » Tue May 27, 2014 4:26 am

You'll always be a failure in my eyes, Thad.
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Re: Sex-IST. IST!

Postby Büge » Tue May 27, 2014 7:03 am

I thought Whedon wasn't going to do more than one, maybe two more Avengers movies.
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Re: Sex-IST. IST!

Postby Thad » Tue May 27, 2014 11:31 am

Classic wrote:What I mean to say is, the significance of a "cosmic cube" needs a bit of context to make work. Like, if you don't have this idea that there's a "power cosmic" that's real hot shit already firmly in suspended disbelief it doesn't work.


Oh, I don't know. Galactus only showed up a few months before the Cosmic Cube; it's one more magic MacGuffin with a '60's Stan Lee name. I think he just liked the word "cosmic".

Way I see it, all this stuff's potentially really simple -- sure, 50 years of continuity cruft have made it complicated, but the movies get to pick and choose what they keep. Samuel L Jackson as Fury is a nice nod and a great casting choice, but they can jettison elements they find problematic like Bucky's age without having to worry about contradicting established lore.

Hell, they've got an Ultron movie coming with no Hank Pym in it. That's pretty weird, right?

Büge wrote:I thought Whedon wasn't going to do more than one, maybe two more Avengers movies.


I don't know how many he's going to do, but he's consulting on all the rest (and on SHIELD and possibly the other upcoming TV/Netflix properties). I assume it's mostly a continuity thing, to make sure everything's lined up where he needs it for the big crossover movies, but I wouldn't be surprised if they paid attention to him on questions of theme and characterization too.

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Re: Calling my goddamn CAR the goddamn BATMOBILE.

Postby Thad » Tue May 27, 2014 3:28 pm

I retitled the thread since I thought it was about sexism when I started it but it turned into a general discussion of superhero movies and whether or not they should embrace the inherent silliness of the genre.

Sadly, we will have plenty of future opportunities to start other threads about sexism in the superhero genre and elsewhere.

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Re: Sex-IST. IST!

Postby IGNORE ME » Tue May 27, 2014 8:34 pm

Thad wrote:
Brentai wrote:I feel I should point out this minor spoiler from a movie that Thad won't watch: Cap steals his old bright-colored uniform from a museum for the final battle in The Winter Soldier.

Main trouble is that this has become such a cliche at this point. The Steve Carell Get Smart pulled the same bit with Max stealing the shoe phone and the car from the TV show. orange, the last two episodes of SHIELD had the grandson of one of the Howling Commandos break out a bunch of WWII-era sci-fi gadgets.


Fair enough, but as I pointed out, he's got a reason to go parading around in classic garb in this case other than "HEY EVERYONE REMEMBER THIS STUPID ASS ROBOT OWL?????"

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